Three Light-Years: A Novel

by Canobbio, Andrea

  Cecilia laughed. “Since when do you notice men who look at her? Did you do that with me, too?”

  When she felt like she was being made fun of, her mother didn’t return her smile. “You always had very discreet admirers, I didn’t notice them.”

  “Tell me, did you notice boys watching us even when we were little girls?”

  She didn’t smile. “You always played with respectable children.”

  That is, as long as they’d been under her jurisdiction. Cecilia laughed but didn’t feel like pushing it. She wanted to feel good, and to feel good she had to make her mother feel good. “Do you also notice when men look at you?”

  Finally her mother smiled and told her to quit being silly. She was smiling, she wasn’t offended.

  Nevertheless she immediately resumed her plaintive litany: she’d made a mess of things, she knew it, she’d made a lot of mistakes with Silvia when she was a child, when she was a girl. “I was too strict, but I wasn’t ready for her, you spoiled me.”

  Cecilia laughed, though she was beginning to get irritated: “Well now, Mama, don’t tell me it’s my fault.” Then she quickly added: “I don’t think you were too strict, far from it, you always let her have her way. Still, the truth is I don’t remember.”

  And she really didn’t remember. But her tone was the same one she used with certain patients, to deny the obvious: “I don’t think you’re too fat,” as if she were trying to sell a suit.

  Now she had to set them off in another direction, to prevent her mother from falling back into the litany of “Silvia single, you divorced, me a widow.” A safer course was the latest news of their relatives, old furniture in need of restoration, household chores, fatigue, low blood pressure, quick medical advice, reassurances.

  “No, don’t worry about SARS. There’s no need to wear a protective mask.”

  It was nice sitting on the beach and chatting with her mother, nice to feel the sun on her face and arms, unbuttoning her blouse so her neck and breasts could tan, nice to take off her shoes and socks and get her feet wet, nice that her sister wouldn’t arrive until that evening, not because she didn’t want to see her, but because in Silvia’s presence her mother became much more difficult to handle. Especially nice to see the children playing in the distance, having fun and yelling excitedly. Even nicer when they ran back to her every now and then, taking turns. But that happened rarely now. At one time, when they were little, those return visits were the most delightful part of a day at the beach. Every twenty or thirty minutes, one of them would race back and collapse on top of her, clinging to her. And she’d pretend she was tired and that they were heavy, all the while smiling as she pretended to be impatient and somewhat irritated. Now she would give anything for one of those appearances, and when it happened she had to contain her joy. They arrived and demanded attention because they were thirsty, because they were hot, because they’d been mistreated, because they had something to tell her or because, like Mattia, they had to complete a thought begun an hour earlier: “But without chairs and umbrellas there’s room for fewer people, because they’re less orderly.” Yes, his grandmother was right, he was a very intelligent child, and she adored him.

  As usual, they disappeared when it was time to leave and she had to go looking for them. She couldn’t find them. All the other children had gone, where had hers ended up? She began searching near the cabanas; one row was made of stone and so hadn’t been dismantled like the wooden ones. She thought they might have gone off with her mother when she went up to the house to prepare lunch. She turned back to the water and saw them behind the rocks. She shouted to them; they didn’t hear her. So she walked over to them, approaching from behind. They hadn’t yet noticed her. Mattia was sitting cross-legged, facing the rock wall, being punished, at least that’s what it looked like. Michela was standing, looking toward the beach, keeping an eye out to make sure no one was coming. She had no idea what they were doing, if they were doing something. She called them. The girl turned to her, startled. Had she surprised them in a secret game? Mattia stood up somewhat wearily and passed his mother without taking his eyes off the rock.

  * * *

  Silvia arrived very late Friday night after the children were already in bed and it was too bad, her mother said, because they’d been waiting all day for her. She explained that she hadn’t been able to get away any earlier, and her mother glanced at Cecilia, who avoided meeting her eyes. They spent Saturday morning at the beach, and despite a brisk exchange of repeated provocations, Silvia and her mother did not quarrel. The immense sky and sweeping sea quelled animosity, or maybe the setting had nothing to do with it; at other times the iodine-rich air and scorching sun had fueled their arguments. Michela casually managed to arrange a picnic lunch for Saturday afternoon, taking it upon herself to invite seven children over.

  They were staying in a small house divided into four apartments. Their father had bought one of the two ground-floor units with the idea of spending weekends there, though he’d rarely managed to. Together they moved two tables out into the garden and prepared plates of prosciutto sandwiches and slices of pizza and focaccia. The afternoon passed in a flash, what with parents or grandparents dropping off the children, and then parents or grandparents coming back to pick them up. Silvia and her mother were perfect at entertaining guests, and Cecilia was able to retreat to the house and almost take a real nap. She woke up after twenty minutes, but remained stretched out on the bed, staring at the white ceiling. She thought about her father.

  He was a man who was always cheerful and optimistic. Why he had married her mother was a mystery, but who was she to judge other people’s marriages? Anyway, she didn’t think they’d been unhappy together, maybe they didn’t have much to say to each other, maybe they’d already said everything there was to say. For Silvia, however, the situation was intolerable. It was intolerable that a man like her father should stay with a woman like her mother. Every two or three days Silvia would call to tell her that their mother was literally trying to kill their father. She made his life impossible, she tormented him, she tortured him. But what these torments may have consisted of, aside from the fact that their mother was in general a phenomenal pain in the ass, Cecilia really couldn’t say. If they were torments, they were venial ones. But at some point something happened: her father let himself get a tumor. He let himself get it, he got it. “I told you so,” Silvia had remarked.

  She lacked curiosity where her parents’ matrimonial mysteries were concerned. She was moderately more interested in another matter. Their father’s roots were in southern Italy and the family never talked about it. For one thing because there were no relatives to go and visit down there, no property. Their grandfather had been a postal worker who moved up north in the early fifties, when their father was nearly a teenager. A typical only child, idolized by his parents and eager to please them. All hopes pinned on him. And he hadn’t disappointed them. He’d become an engineer, he’d had a fine career, he’d forgotten he came from the south. There remained a trace of an accent, but you had to know about it to notice it. And his last name, Re, was a masterful camouflage, since it made him seem like he was native to his new area. He’d married a woman from the north, maybe he’d never loved her much or maybe he had quickly stopped loving her, and they’d had two daughters. And this must have seemed a perfectly executed plan to his southern parents who’d spent their lives trying to distinguish themselves from the southerners who had followed them, filling the city’s factories.

  The thing about her father that she recalled with greatest pleasure was the relationship he’d had with Mattia. He’d been his chief guide, his shaman. They’d had a lot of secrets. Her father adored cartoons, he adored the boy’s games, the child sensed it.

  Silvia had always been his favorite, Cecilia had never minded. She hardly ever knew what to say to him, and becoming a doctor had resolved the problem: they spoke about his health or her mother’s health. She had scarcely any memories of him from whe
n she was a child. It seemed she’d always been with her mother, as a little girl. When she became a teenager, and Silvia was still a child, the change seemed to make her father uncomfortable, and he stopped touching her. At the time she thought it was normal. When a girl grew up and became a woman, her father had to step aside. But then Silvia, too, became a teenager and her close relationship with their father hadn’t suffered, apparently.

  Her father had spent his free time playing cards with friends and reading science fiction novels (when her mother didn’t find something for him to do). Exposing the pretense that lay behind their parents’ marriage and verifying the extent of their unhappiness was an irrepressible passion of Silvia’s. As Cecilia saw it, her parents hadn’t been more unhappy than the average married couple of their generation. And that (taking the average into consideration) almost always ended the discussion. Being overly concerned with their parents’ past wasn’t a good sign, indeed it was bad, it was unhealthy if not downright sick.

  She didn’t want to think that Mattia’s problems could have distressed her father to the point of leading him to a premature death. It hadn’t been the boy’s problems, it hadn’t been the torments inflicted by his wife, it hadn’t been the ongoing discord between Silvia and her mother. He’d died because he died.

  Her father had died the same year in which Cecilia’s marriage began to fall apart. And those two events were certainly not related. But Cecilia had become accustomed to reading people’s minds at the hospital, and in her mother’s and sister’s minds she read that date, the year of her father’s death, as the origin of the misfortune that bonded them.

  * * *

  That evening they went into town for an ice cream; their mother wasn’t keen on the idea but Silvia had promised the children. Such a relaxed atmosphere, such carefree children, could only belong to some other person who didn’t have her past, or who perhaps had no past. She seemed to see Silvia and her mother from behind thick glass, in a soap opera like the one she used to watch fifteen years ago, every day after lunch before going back to studying. It was a story about three women; two of them didn’t get along and the third was always in the middle. Time passed slowly in soap operas but still more quickly than in real life. After ten episodes a newborn baby would be walking; you could observe half a lifetime in the blink of an eye and it always seemed to make sense. For the three women in real life, however, time was scattered and disjointed, like the figures who appeared and disappeared along the seafront promenade, ice cream in hand, moving in and out of the patches of lamplight.

  (If you think of them as frames of a film, you can imagine accelerating the projection to see how it ends or continues, if it continues. And in this case it continues: the seafront promenade continues, the strolling along with their ice cream continues. At some point the film slows down and the picture freezes. There I am, striped shirt, short pants, and flip-flops. Strutting along proudly, a little anxious, licking furiously but fighting a futile battle against the strawberry ice cream that melts down the cone and gets my hand sticky. Behind me, my mother and my grandmother, supervising.)

  * * *

  They were leafing through the notebooks, sitting at either end of the couch with their legs tucked up beneath them. Silvia was smaller and more petite, her legs were shorter and could fold more easily, she was more comfortable in the fetal position, in a tent, in the cramped berth of a train, in a bunk bed, around a fire on the beach: more at ease on vacation. They didn’t look like two peas in a pod, but you could tell they were sisters. As a child, Cecilia used to think that Silvia was a more compact version of her, not always with affection. Or maybe a part of her, as she thought now, affectionately.

  On that couch they’d argued and fought, set things straight and made up, they’d confided to each other and revealed secrets. They’d spent vital moments of their adolescence speaking in low tones so their parents, asleep or sleepless in the bedroom, wouldn’t overhear. They’d talked a lot more there than in the city, where they studied in their room or went out in the evening, rarely talking until two in the morning. A beach house smell from the couch’s upholstery rose up through the blue-and-white-striped slipcover, a musty smell of dampness and mold that had the power to make them happy. They needed to feel good, and leafing through Mattia’s and Michela’s notebooks was a way to enjoy their time together, after their walk, after putting the children and their grandmother to bed.

  It wasn’t the first time they’d looked through the notebooks together; a few years ago they’d accidentally discovered how much fun it was. Silvia, too, helped the children with their homework and she was curious to read the comments the teachers had written, as if they concerned her personally. In one of Mattia’s notebooks they found a class survey of sorts that had to do with odors. Beside each odor was the name of the student who had suggested it. They laughed because a certain Tommaso had come up with “breath,” “sweat,” and “feet.” They laughed because Lisa’s only contribution had been “fish.” Alessandro had mysteriously and poetically offered “tears,” and he must have pleaded his case very well. Mattia had written “hospital” and “minestrone.”

  Cecilia said she had no idea where he’d ever smelled minestrone; she never made it. So she’d asked him, in part because when it came to food she was always on the alert. And it seemed a strong odor lingered in the lobby and stairways of his father’s new house, and the two children had immediately noticed it. Luca had moved to an old building in the historic centro, where half the apartments were still in the process of being renovated. The super, according to Luca, spent her days cooking “a disgusting minestrone” and other tenants had complained about it, but the woman wouldn’t be intimidated. When the children told her about it, Cecilia contained her irritation toward Luca: What was wrong with cooking minestrone, and why associate food with negative feelings when he was well aware of his son’s history?

  “Did you tell him that?” Silvia asked.

  No, she hadn’t told him, she couldn’t afford to pick fights with her ex-husband over these details. But the children, yes, she’d told them: she said she found the smell of minestrone delicious, and if she didn’t make it, it was only because they were used to eating pasta. Ready-made packages didn’t appeal to her, but if they helped her with the vegetables they could make it together. So one Saturday afternoon all three of them sat down at the kitchen table and peeled, sliced, and diced string beans, zucchini, carrots, potatoes, onions, celery, white beans, peas, basil, and parsley, and had a lot of fun doing it. It had the very same odor and in the evening they’d eaten it.

  “Did they like it?”

  No, not too much. They told her she’d better not make it anymore.

  Silvia laughed.

  “Don’t laugh.”

  “You shouldn’t be so touchy.”

  “Tell me honestly, don’t you think it’s important? I can’t tell anymore.”

  “I think it’s important for you to pay attention to food, but you shouldn’t become obsessive.”

  “But if this isn’t something to obsess over, I don’t know what is.”

  “Even if Mattia doesn’t like the smell of minestrone, he could still like the smell of food in general. And even if his father says the smell of minestrone is disgusting, Mattia could grow up to love minestrone.”

  “You should see him holding the spoon, making the beans and carrot pieces cruise around the bowl.”

  “It seems to me he’s started eating better recently.”

  “Every now and then I think he could become a great chef.”

  Silvia looked down at the notebook in her lap.

  “Don’t treat me like there’s something wrong with me,” Cecilia said.

  “I don’t think there’s something wrong with you, I was thinking about when I used to imagine what I’d be when I grew up. I would never have imagined doing the work I do, simply because I didn’t know it existed.”

  “Just as I shouldn’t imagine the work Mattia might do. I’m actin
g like a child; it’s like saying, ‘When I grow up I want to be a fireman.’”

  “All I meant is that Mattia is fine, it’s been a year, in his own way he’s a calm little boy.”

  “I don’t keep after him about having to eat, I’m very careful.”

  “I know you don’t keep after him, I’m not criticizing you for anything, I’m saying it for your own sake, I’m telling you you can relax, maybe he’ll relax, too.”

  “No, you’re wrong, I’m not anxious around him, I’m very calm, I have no reason to be anxious, maybe I’m not relaxed, but I’m not tense either.”

  Silvia closed her eyes and was silent for a while. Then she said: “That thing you do where you tuck your hair behind both ears is uniquely yours, and you don’t do it when you’re relaxed.”

  Cecilia waited for her to open her eyes again. She didn’t want to get irritated, she didn’t want to irritate her sister. Yet she could find nothing more diplomatic to say than “Well, that’s a new one. Just the kind of thing Mama always says to me.”

  Silvia opened her eyes. “A new one?”

  “The fact that you and Mama agree.”

  Silvia threw a cushion at her. “Idiot. I spend a lot of time with your children.”

  Cecilia smiled. “Yes, and I’m really grateful.”

  “I owe you.”

  “You’ll pay me back.”

  “I wasn’t talking only about money.”

  “You’ll pay me back for the rest, too.”

  Silvia shook her head, opened Mattia’s notebook again.

  “Tell me about this coworker who called,” Cecilia said.

  “What coworker? There is no coworker … Mama really is a shit. A total piece of shit. I know of course I’m shitty to her sometimes. But every so often. Occasionally. She, on the other hand, never quits.”

  “But you get along pretty well now. Think about how things were a few years ago.”

  “It’s all thanks to me, she doesn’t make any effort.”