So she went further back. Mattia’s birth, imagining that Luca didn’t love his son as he loved his daughter, that he didn’t want to care for him, imagining that he saw him as a rival. But even that wasn’t enough. So she went further back. The fact that she worked, that she’d insisted on continuing to work: despite the fact that he pretended to be proud of her achievements, like all men, Luca would have preferred a wife who was a replica of his mother. No, that still wasn’t enough. It was all too insignificant. How could all these insignificant things produce so much? How could nothing produce all that?
“We can’t talk about it calmly, it’s something I need to decide quickly.” Luca looked bewildered, he continued touching her, turning her face toward his, putting his arm around her shoulders, searching her eyes as if he didn’t recognize her. “There’s something you’re not telling me—you’ve had tests done and there’s something wrong with the baby.” Always quick to suspect doctors of bad faith, of having black souls, not to be trusted given their innate ability to lie. “There is no baby, so there can’t be anything wrong with it. What’s wrong is me. I can’t keep it.” But he wanted time to talk about it calmly. How much time did he need? She wasn’t willing to give him any more. Sitting cross-legged on the bed, thinking about a rolling pin bashing in Luca’s smiling mouth, she’d already made her decision.
It had been almost three years ago, but she remembered it perfectly. The image she’d had of his shattered mouth, gums and teeth reduced to a bloody pulp. Something she’d seen at the hospital? Of course. Even though emergency surgery was separate and they never saw the injured accident victims when they arrived. But of course, no use denying it, she’d seen a young man whose face had been smashed by a hammer.
And she clearly remembered all the rest as well. She wouldn’t forget it, she wasn’t asking to forget it. But she’d have liked to talk to someone about it every now and then, not to ease her conscience, but just to talk about it, because if she didn’t tell it, the story made no sense. If she didn’t tell about the abortion, Luca’s reaction didn’t make sense, their divorce didn’t make sense. Not that the abortion was the cause of their divorce. It was a harbinger, but a cryptic harbinger. She’d aborted her love for him and no one knew it. Not her sister, much less her mother. She was certain that Luca had never told anyone, it was too momentous.
To her this momentous thing was an object with a form and shape, it was tangible and had a substance of its own. It was an object to be examined, observed from a suitable distance. How to talk about it was a mystery to her, as was how to think about it. Should she feel guilty, as Luca wanted her to, as he thought was natural? She couldn’t seem to. Should she feel like a monster? She couldn’t seem to. At a certain point, so that she could imagine at least a part of herself as readmitted to human society, she would have liked to view the other part as monstrous. Was there something wrong with her? And she’d go over the whole story from the beginning again.
She’d had two children, desired, adored, by a man she loved, children she cherished more than anything. She became pregnant again by a man she no longer loved (even though she didn’t yet know it at the time) and had had an abortion. Had she done something sinful? No. Had it been painful, devastating, violent? Yes, of course, for her, painful, devastating, violent. She still thought about it, in fact, in those dreaded morning hours. But she didn’t understand. She’d have liked to talk about it, talk to someone about it. When Mattia had been hospitalized, she’d been advised to speak to a psychologist. Therapy for the child wasn’t expected, it was expected for the parents. Luca wouldn’t hear of it. She’d been the one to go. And she’d burst into tears in front of the young woman who had just gotten her degree and who was five or six years younger than she. A child with a box of Kleenex ready on her desk. Prepared. Instead of talking about Mattia, she’d burst into tears during the first session and told her about the abortion.
Talk to someone about it, she wanted to talk about it. To the shy internist, naturally, because he knew how to listen. He was nervous about matters of his own, at that time. Not that he avoided her, he couldn’t, but he was anxious. He was in a state of anxiety again, like when he’d met her. She’d have liked to tell her whole life to the shy internist, so she could read it in his eyes. He was an open book, he wouldn’t be able to hide anything from her.
* * *
When the day of his declaration came, Cecilia thought about how blind she’d been, how strongly she wanted everything to remain as it was, for nothing more to happen in her life, for each day to be like every other, each action indistinguishable from that of the day before, for the children to always be children. The shy internist declared his love and she thought about the fact that Michela would soon have her first boyfriend.
That morning she’d started laughing when a patient looked at her, standing with a female colleague and a resident, and asked: “When will the doctor get here?” Later, distracted and preoccupied since the day before, she’d placed the stethoscope on a patient’s back and said, “ER,” as if answering the phone. All three women had had to leave the examining room so they wouldn’t be seen having a laughing fit. What was she doing now in that café, fortunately deserted, why hadn’t she come up with some excuse? She knew very well the reason for the meeting, and she’d gone to face the music without trying to avoid it. Before leaving the hospital she was about to quip to her colleague: “I’m heading out, there’s a guy who wants to hook up with me.” She’d stopped herself just in time, it wouldn’t have been nice to make fun of him like that.
If she’d asked him to postpone the talk, maybe he would have changed his mind; afraid of losing what they were able to share, he might have backed off. Instead, there he was in front of her, stammering. He said he’d kept quiet for a year, thinking everything would work itself out; he talked about it as if it were a health issue. For a year he’d been coming to look for her in that café, as if the fault of having dragged things out to that point were his alone, as if she had always ended up there against her will. For a while she wasn’t able to react, crushed by the weight of yet another mistake. Her life studded with mistakes that sparkled like the Virgin’s halo, the Virgin Mary, who for a year had appeared to the shy internist in the steamy café. “Holy Virgin Mary, you know I didn’t tell a lie,” Michela wept during her mystical crises. Under the illusion that she never made mistakes, she’d made another mistake.
Without doing anything to discourage him, she had soaked up that silent worship, had fed on his ever-deepening love. So when he seemed to have exhausted his speech (if it had been prepared, it was badly prepared and even more poorly delivered) Cecilia thought: What have I done? But given that she’d made a mistake, and that she was used to correcting her mistakes quickly, she thought that by this time it was too late to play the part of the innocent virgin, and also too late to play a virgin indifferent to the attentions and attractions of others, and that if she didn’t want to be a complete shit she had to save their friendship, or rather transform that relationship into friendship. She didn’t want to lose the man who sat in front of her, whatever he was to her. She felt the blood return to her face, she must have turned pale, she felt like she was blushing, but it was because she was recovering.
She thought lying was the lesser of two evils and told him she truly hadn’t been expecting it, that she’d been going through a difficult time and was worn out, maybe that’s why she hadn’t realized it (it wasn’t true that she’d been going through a difficult time, it was the most stress-free time in three years). She said she’d never thought of him in that way, but that she thought about him a lot. That little word game, which she would have been proud of on another occasion, seemed completely fatuous to her and sapped her of the strength to go on talking. She imagined standing up and saying, “I have to go now,” she thought of escaping. Instead she remained seated and started confessing part of the truth. She told him how important those lunches were to her. And gradually the tension melted. They started
talking as they never had before, with a pleasure and connection discovered at that moment. For that reason, when the time came to leave, Cecilia had the distinct feeling that she’d manage not to lose the shy internist’s friendship; in fact she thought she’d already managed it.
For a few days they talked a lot. Cecilia even told him something about the divorce. She was amazed at how everyone was used to those kinds of stories and no one seemed incredulous when they heard the predictable reasons which, for her, had constituted such an ordeal (“We started fighting”). Even adults accepted the excuse that had worked with the children, which the children hadn’t even dreamed of challenging, because in fact it was terrible enough to be acceptable: Mama and Papa don’t get along anymore, they still love each other but they can’t live together any longer. In the end everything was entirely plausible and she was the only one who thought about the real reason, who thought that was actually the root cause of all the consequences, rather than just a consequence like any other.
She was also amazed to find herself talking to Viberti about something she really never thought about: how her children judged her, what they thought of her, what they thought of the divorce. Maybe it was so she could find out what he thought of her and her divorce. But Viberti was too guarded to let anything slip.
Viberti talked about his mother, he talked about his ex-wife, and he talked about himself as though he were a prisoner in his apartment building. When he said to her one day, “You’re the first person who hasn’t immediately asked me ‘Why don’t you move?’ because though I actually should, maybe, I don’t like having everyone remind me of it,” she was so touched she felt like kissing him.
* * *
After their trip back on the highway, Mattia made up a new game. He lined his toy cars up along the hallway in the house and made them pass one by one through a barrier he’d built with Lego bricks, a tollbooth. Cecilia watched him as she went from the kitchen to the bedroom and stopped to listen to him from behind the partly closed door. Mattia mimicked the metallic voice of the automatic toll-taker: “Insert ticket,” “Insert card,” “Thank you, have a good trip.” He also said “Ticket expired” or “Card over the limit” or “Watch out for fog,” “Fasten children’s seat belts,” “If you’re tired, pull over and take a nap.”
He went on playing the game for more than two weeks, handing out tickets to speeders caught on the monitoring camera and stopping trucks with suspicious loads, stolen television sets or cats for vivisectioning. For a few days Cecilia pretended she hadn’t noticed, then she asked him: “What’s the name of that game?” Mattia shrugged without looking up and mumbled: “Tollbooth.” He didn’t just imitate the recorded voice of the automatic toll collector, he also made up conversations inside the cars. “Daddy, when are we going to get there?” a child complained. “I didn’t expect this backup” (a lower voice, the father’s). “Yes, there’s a lot of traffic” (the mother, a little irritable). “I want to go home,” the boy persisted. “Everybody wants to go home,” the father snapped.
Overnight the lineup of toy cars disappeared from the hallway. Cecilia thought Mattia must have gotten tired of the game and removed them on his own. Those were the days following the declaration and she had other things on her mind: the shy internist, his words, the complex feelings they’d aroused in her. So it was almost a week before it occurred to her to wonder what had happened, why had he tired of the game? She was curious, and, as usual, rather than ask him a direct question, worried about not worrying him, all she said was: “I noticed the traffic has cleared up in the hallway.” With a slight smile on her lips, waiting and hoping he’d know he should smile back. But the boy didn’t react; he busied himself looking for a notebook in his backpack and pretended he hadn’t heard. He had to finish his homework for Monday and Cecilia might have been better off letting it go, but she couldn’t help herself. “Hey, I asked you a question,” she said, no longer smiling, and the child stopped, taken aback, unsure whether to keep pretending he hadn’t heard, uncertain about the question he’d been asked, since in fact he hadn’t been asked a question.
“How come you don’t play Tollbooth anymore?” Cecilia asked, pulling him to her.
“It made a mess.”
“It made a mess? No, that’s not true. Who told you it made a mess? You can play in the hallway as much as you want. Sometimes it’s fun to be messy.”
“Michela said that you said it made a mess.”
“Michela? Are you sure?”
“Yes, Michela said so. But it’s true, it made a mess.”
She told him to open his notebook and start his math exercises. Then she stood and walked out, her steps measured so as not to seem rushed, so she could slow down and have time to stop, if she decided to stop, if she hadn’t decided instead to go and find Michela, who was lying on the couch in the living room, studying her history book. She closed the door behind her, took a few steps toward her daughter, and before she could think rationally and restrain herself, gave her a slap on the head that landed between her forehead and her eye. She realized an instant later the enormity of what she had done, but her rage had not subsided. The girl put her hands to her head, incredulous; her book had fallen to the floor. She didn’t cry and she didn’t say anything because she still didn’t know what had happened. “Don’t you ever dare give your brother orders,” Cecilia hissed without raising her voice, “and don’t make up things I never said. If he wants to play in the hallway with his toy cars, he can, do you understand?”
The girl started sobbing and Cecilia collapsed on the couch, her legs trembling. She hugged Michela, who hugged her back as if the woman who’d slapped her a moment ago weren’t the same one who was now comforting her. There was a glazed earthenware pot on the cabinet behind the sofa. The writing said HÔTEL DES TILLEULS; they’d gotten it as a gift during a vacation in the South of France. On the way back they’d stopped at that aquarium, on the Côte d’Azur. In the depths of a tank, which visitors could view from underground, two dolphins had been mating in a frenzy of splashing. The children hadn’t understood, Luca had squeezed her hand, smiling. All this centuries ago, in another life, which would never return.
Despite the sound of Michela’s desperate weeping in her ears, she heard a creaking, and out of the corner of her eye she saw the door open and Mattia standing in the doorway.
* * *
There was no need to get over the incident or cause the children to see it as an incident or offer reasons that might excuse her action. There was no need to go back and talk about it or to ignore it. She was certain the children wouldn’t forget in any case, and she was equally certain that they didn’t want to talk about it anymore and that they were actually able to not think about it anymore, except unintentionally, briefly, quickly suppressing the thought. She was certain of it because that’s what she’d done as a child when faced with something disturbing or incomprehensible or violent.
Despite this certainty, she spoke to them. During supper, she explained that she had lost her temper because she didn’t want them being spiteful to each other (the offense reduced to “spitefulness”). Smiling, she asked Michela if seeing her mother angry had scared her, and Michela nodded, not at all sure it was something to smile about. Meanwhile, Cecilia checked Mattia’s plate without letting him notice. Worried that he might not eat that night, she hadn’t filled it as much, but there were no immediate consequences. For long-term ones, she’d have to wait and see.
Meanwhile, however, when she went to pick the kids up at Luca’s after his turn with them on Sunday, her husband came out on the landing, pulling the door closed behind him, and asked her what had happened, if it was true that she’d slapped Michela. He asked her, but not angrily; it was as if she had been the one slapped, with the solidarity of one parent talking over a problem with the other, in order to solve it. She nearly started crying, she was so moved; on the dimly lit landing, surrounded by the smell of minestrone, they were once again a couple, albeit part-time. She
confessed that she’d lost her head because she liked to see the boy play and she was disappointed that he’d stopped—the row of toy cars like a ray of hope, a matter of waiting and then the traffic jam would clear up.
Luca said: “Every now and then Michela deserves a slap. And we never gave her any.”
“Do you think I’ve became a violent parent?”
Luca hesitated, it was inevitable, and she regretted the question, even when he replied with a smile: “No, I really don’t think so.”
* * *
She thought often about the shy internist’s declaration. It must have cost him a lot, he must have thought about it for months, but perhaps he hadn’t expected a different result. So why declare himself? To free himself of an obsession, he’d stammered something like that. In fact, afterward, after delivering his little speech, it seemed like a great weight had been lifted off his shoulders. But within a couple of weeks all the benefits disappeared and their lunches became more strained. If there’d been any momentary relief, it soured quickly, like certain perishable substances delivered to the hospital. Expired, ineffective, it wasn’t an honest-to-goodness, effective relief, maybe because the underlying intention hadn’t been to free himself of that weight. She thought and thought about this possibility, and felt that the shy internist had inadvertently managed to find one of her weak points, a soft spot where she was easily moved. Yes, she’d been moved because that forty-year-old man had not only declared himself, but had begged her (almost immediately, anxiously) to discourage him, as if he himself were afraid of his own feelings. How hopelessly incompetent.
Three Light-Years: A Novel Page 12