Three Light-Years: A Novel

by Canobbio, Andrea

  She thought and thought about his constancy and his commitment, about the extraordinary attachment the man had for their table at the café. She went so far as to think that probably no one had ever loved her so much, but she immediately had second thoughts. It was ridiculous for two reasons: first, someone else had loved her, and second, an undeclared love doesn’t count. It counted only from the time of the declaration, before that it was mute adoration, infatuation. To worship someone for a year without telling her—it took constancy, but it was sheer madness. If he was mad, the internist’s madness was concentrated in a single symptom: her. Yet this was a further sign of absolute commitment.

  She thought and thought about the declaration while she had the children do their homework. Mattia had to reconstruct the chronological order of a newspaper article that the textbook authors had divided into six segments and mixed up.

  They left their dog alone on the balcony and went off while the summer heat hung over the city with a temperature of over 100 degrees.

  Whatever idea she may have formed about Viberti, he didn’t seem to her to be either an abandoned dog or the victim of a cruel master.

  Firemen quickly arrived on the scene and thanks to their vehicle, equipped with a ladder, they went up to the balcony and carried the dog to safety.

  It was a strange association of ideas: when the conversation became less strained, he’d said he sometimes felt like a dog and told her that she reminded him of a cat.

  The neighbors reported that it wasn’t the first time the dog had been left alone on the balcony for days.

  While the boy read the jumbled parts of the story, she imagined holding the shy internist on a leash.

  They then transported him to a veterinary clinic where he was examined and treated.

  But she had no intention of being his mistress.

  The dog owners were ultimately charged with cruelty to animals and the dog was turned over to the municipal dog pound.

  So maybe she would speak to him and tell him that he was wasting his time, that she was still getting over the divorce and too busy with the children to get involved in a relationship, that even if she could, it didn’t necessarily mean she wanted to.

  It happened yesterday, on one of the hottest days of the year. An anonymous caller alerted the volunteers of ENPA, the National Board for Animal Protection, who immediately went to the scene and called the fire department.

  She’d tell him that she was fond of him, but nothing more. She had to have the courage to give him up, not mislead him into thinking that something might happen in the future. After the declaration she’d been scared, because she didn’t want to give up their lunches, but now she had to do it quickly.

  Mattia dashed off the correct order of the segments, 1-6-2-4-3-5, and started closing his notebook.

  Cecilia insisted on checking, and it was right.

  She told him he’d done well and quickly, too. The child looked at her then shook his head, dismissing the compliment: “It was a breeze, Mama.”

  * * *

  She wanted to talk to him, but she didn’t have the nerve. The next day she saw him at lunch and they spoke for an hour about the hospital administrator’s absurd, dangerous, unconstitutional initiatives, the chief surgeon’s stupidity, and a patient with malaria, the first of her career. She didn’t feel guilty and didn’t think she was leading him on. Claudio Viberti was not an inept bumbler, he was a forty-year-old doctor, in love with her, true, but old enough to make his own decisions without being led on a leash.

  One afternoon, however, while she was trying to remember where she had parked her car, she saw him turn a corner and walk down the other side of the street. He hadn’t noticed her, and his curved back and hunched shoulders, the downcast eyes staring at the sidewalk, made her feel dejected again, as if his sadness were her fault.

  She didn’t mean to spy, but her eyes couldn’t help following him. He was headed to a café that was not their usual one. She ran after him and caught up with him inside. She teased him a little for betraying their table so lightly, he accused her good-naturedly of having followed him. It occurred to her to ask him about his father; she’d thought about it one night, tracing back a thread of associations. It had started with the words of a patient who, shaking his head, had said that “to be a doctor you have to really be cut out for it.” Being cut out made her think of being scarred, and looking back, she hadn’t been able to find any suitable traumas in the first eighteen years of her life. She kept thinking she’d fallen into medicine by accident, yet the profession captivated her. Yes, she was cut out for the job, but maybe she was well suited for any job in which she had to constantly prove she was the best in the class and win the professors’ praise. The shy internist, on the other hand, had compelling reasons: a father who’d died of a malignant lymphogranuloma when he was a boy.

  Viberti didn’t buy the explanation, and he seemed quite embarrassed to have to disappoint and contradict her. But the explanation he gave was exactly the same, though in disguise: there was a father figure involved, a well-known doctor (Cecilia had seen his name in a journal) who’d taken his father’s place, and who had inspired him. She thought of pointing out that the two interpretations were perfectly compatible, but she was afraid to stick her nose into matters that didn’t concern her. She was tempted to tell him about her own father’s illness and death, although that certainly didn’t explain anything—she’d actually already gotten her residency—so she dropped it. As soon as they parted, however, she felt a stab of longing in her chest, a feeling she’d never felt for him and that she hadn’t felt in a long time for any man, except her son. It was the wrench in her heart she felt in the morning when she watched Mattia go into school. She wanted to take Viberti by the hand and walk with him through his day. Maybe she wanted to hold him, too. For the first time since she’d known him, she thought she should invite him home some evening, let him see Mattia again; the boy might hardly remember him, but who knows.

  * * *

  The next night she began thinking about the shy internist and for four nights her sleepless hours were filled by images of sisterly embraces, innocent walks hand in hand, films watched together on an imaginary couch, her head resting on his shoulder. So it was a great surprise to her when, arriving at the café on Monday and finding Viberti already sitting there waiting for her—his skin sunburned, his hair a little disheveled, his white shirtsleeves rolled up—she realized she was actually attracted to the man, wanted to put her arms around him and kiss him and probably make love to him. She ate almost nothing while he told her about his weekend with the elderly Mercuri, about a walk in the countryside, amid the vegetable gardens, about a world in which you felt strange and far away from everything. She felt strange and too close to him, after a quarter of an hour she told him she had to go. She was worried she had bungled something in the ER, she wanted to go back and check.

  Viberti suggested she call, and in fact it would have been the most sensible thing to do.

  “I’d rather go see,” she said briefly, already on her feet.

  “You shouldn’t take it so seriously,” Viberti said.

  And how! Of course I should! she thought coming out of the café. She was going down the ambulance ramp by the time she remembered she didn’t really need to go back to the ER. Was she hoping someone would keep her there for another six hours? But if she hadn’t bungled anything, why had she gone back? She pretended she’d forgotten her cell phone, though it was safely in her handbag, and as she searched around, as a colleague helped her look for it, she imagined it ringing and making her look like a fool. So she fled from the ER, too, and as soon as she got outside she called her sister and asked her to go pick up Mattia and bring him to his grandmother’s, she had an emergency at the hospital. A specialist in emergency medicine, a specialist in emergencies, she didn’t want her children to see her in that state.

  At that hour of the afternoon, in the park along the river, you met mothers out jogging with h
igh-tech, three-wheeled strollers that in her day hadn’t existed. Not that she’d ever had time to go jogging with the stroller, she’d had to study. There were children two or three years old convinced they were in full control of their tricycles, actually guided by nannies through rear handlebars as long as exhaust pipes. You met elderly retirees who looked bewildered and men of various ages who sprang out of the bushes like the wolf in the fairy tale. You met dogs merrily running around and panting owners trying to catch them.

  The trees bursting with leaves seemed immense, and she stopped and threw her head back to see how tall they were—how come she’d never noticed? How come she’d never noticed the heightened rustle of leaves stirred by a light breeze? She perceived everything more intensely, saw the colors as brighter and more brilliant, and in the park’s silence the slightest sound seemed to call to her. She saw the streetlamps stretching ahead of her and kept on walking as though she’d decided to return home on foot and wouldn’t sooner or later have to go back and retrieve her car. She walked for half an hour and sat down on a bench, she was tired and wanted to sit awhile. But a couple of old men began loitering nearby. Unless they’d figured out she was a doctor and wanted to ask her advice about their prostatectomy?

  She walked back toward the hospital exhausted by the heat and by a sense of futility; she’d wasted two hours and also wasted her sister’s time, and Silvia would probably have to work until three in the morning to make up for it. But it was too late now to call her and change the plan. She went into the supermarket across from the hospital even though she had no urgent need to do any shopping; she loaded a cart to give some meaning to the day. Coffee was on sale, buy two, get a third one free. There were egg noodles at home and though it was the children’s favorite pasta, they weren’t about to run out. The tomatoes didn’t look particularly good, but she took a pound just the same. Aluminum foil would always come in handy.

  With no more energy left, she dragged herself to the car, put the shopping bags in the trunk, opened all four windows, and waited in the shade until the temperature in the car came down a few degrees. All of a sudden it struck her that she had bungled something after all, because that morning she’d forgotten to fill out a report for a suspected TB case. Couldn’t she call? Yes, but she might as well go back inside.

  It was much cooler in the hospital’s basement, even though there was no air-conditioning. She filled out the form while her colleagues asked her why she had come back, why she hadn’t called. By the time she left the ER, her legs were moving of their own volition and they certainly weren’t headed out the hospital’s door. She didn’t want to stop, but even if she had wanted to, it was too late, because the moment she stepped out of the elevator and the moment she reached Pediatrics and the moment she knocked at the door, she knew very well that the doctors’ lounge was the place she wanted to go, to be, to stay. The shy internist was waiting for her, without knowing it, he never knew anything, that man, blessed in his innocence.

  * * *

  She awoke in the night seized by the darkest anxiety; she wasn’t in love with the shy internist, she didn’t want to begin a relationship, being with him that afternoon, kissing him, letting herself be undressed in the car like a teenager had been a mistake, a terribly selfish outburst, she was an irresponsible fool and instead of discouraging him, as she should have, she had led him on. Even more distressing because she knew very well that she’d enjoyed it. She couldn’t sleep anymore, sitting cross-legged in the middle of the bed; she got up an hour before the alarm went off, paced back and forth in the kitchen so as not to wake the children. She ate two packets of mascarpone spread on rice cakes.

  The anxiety continued throughout the morning, even working didn’t help, even throwing herself into examining patients, with a full waiting room and not a single moment to think. If a day like that didn’t do the trick, not even opium would save her. When she was able to speak with Viberti at lunch, as she apologized and told him there was no justification for it, as she asked him to forgive her and explained that it had been inexcusable, she felt a slight relief that consoled her until the afternoon. Later she pretended to be exhausted, putting on a little performance for her mother and the children. Her exhaustion was nothing new, even when she didn’t complain about it they could read it in her eyes.

  She went to bed early, and after dozing for less than an hour she woke up and began crying softly. Almost immediately, retracing the day’s events, she found a deep, dark well that swallowed her up. She remembered sitting on a bench, while wandering through the park like a sleepwalker. Sitting alone on a park bench was perhaps one of the saddest things a human being could do. She remembered thinking, as she sat on the bench, that if she continued walking along the river in the same direction, she would come to the circular clearing where, three years ago, she and Luca used to go when they needed privacy so they could argue, isolating their resentment and anger so it wouldn’t infect the children. She recalled Luca’s words to her, those expressing horror and contempt. She recalled them one by one. The way he shouted them at her. Then she took pity on herself and fell asleep.

  * * *

  (It’s nice to imagine her every now and then sunk in a deep, dreamless sleep. To imagine her in a state of unconsciousness, oblivious to herself, relaxed. Before resuming the story I’ll lower the volume of the outside world to a minimum, shut everything out, draw the curtains. Because Cecilia is always lit up, and she dazzles me.)

  * * *

  She remembered every detail, the birth, the first days, the first months, and the memories were hers alone, no one would ever steal them from her. She was watching their heads close together, as they lay on their bellies in front of the TV, who knows what they were saying, they were giggling. She had seen those heads come out of her own belly (maybe she thought she’d seen them, maybe she had felt them so intensely that she was able to see them with every cell in her body, if not with her eyes), and she remembered every detail, and no one could ever erase those memories. The girl hadn’t had any hair, the boy a lot of dark fuzz which he’d lost in the first few months, but the heads were their heads and they had passed through her, how she didn’t know, they’d had to stitch her up. That’s how living things passed from one condition to another, that’s how living things split apart and one thing gave birth to another. Memories that were hers alone, that she preserved, even those that were ridiculous, grotesque, shameful. Why had she been so ashamed? While she was giving birth, she wasn’t at all ashamed to have the nurses and doctors see her vagina, but the fact that she felt like shitting and might really have shit in the labor room, that certainly was embarrassing. She’d said, “I’m very sorry,” and they’d all smiled reassuringly. She’d never spoken to Luca about it; during the birth he’d stood nearby, apparently nervous, but never on the verge of fainting. She didn’t say “apparently” nervous to be mean—all she remembered of him was a figure there by the bed, and she knew very well that the presence of a figure was important enough. Then she remembered him afterward, very happy, beaming.

  Fathers can afford to beam after the birth; mothers are a bit spent, though still happy about the baby and greatly relieved. That wasn’t being mean either; the fact that fathers don’t have to experience the pain of childbirth is written in the natural order of things. Because of this, the shy internist, for instance, would have fathered ten children if he could have. And that, on the other hand, really was being mean.

  But she wasn’t angry with him. It wasn’t Viberti’s fault that what had happened had happened. The fault was hers alone. She was glad she’d realized it right away and had told him so. She’d been the one to go looking for him, she’d turned him on, and that was inexcusable. She was extremely ashamed of what she’d done. She’d done it because she was unprepared, taken by surprise, she’d never wanted to admit to herself that she was attracted to him. On the whole, in those months, it hadn’t been easy to admit that she needed the opposite sex, or sex itself (the odd moments when she happe
ned to think about it). She’d needed to believe that she should and could do without it. Moments of that hour spent with Viberti came back to her that evening as well, sitting on the couch, watching the children watch a DVD. She’d lost control, she’d been attracted to him, but it wasn’t a solution to her problems. She cared about Viberti, she didn’t want to lose him, but they had to be just friends. If she had liked him a lot or if she had been crazy about him, or if he’d swept her off her feet—then there would be no question about it. That meant she wasn’t in love with him. She was attracted to him and was fond of him. Better to drop it.

  “How many months have you lived since you came on earth?”

  Michela giggled. “Listen to him! The expression is ‘come into the world.’”

  “Since you came into the world.”

  “Or ‘were born.’”

  “How many months?”

  “That’s easy,” Cecilia cut in, “just multiply twelve by twelve.”

  “A hundred and forty-four,” Mattia said instantly.

  “You already knew the answer,” Michela said.

  “No, it’s a trick, they taught it to us today. You have to think of the numbers as squares and rectangles.”

  She recalled every detail, especially the growing reasons to be proud, the gallery of maternal trophies. The smile when they recognized you. Holding their head erect. When their reflexes proved to be functioning (she’d tried out what she learned from books on them, the Moro reflex, the sucking reflex, the triple retraction). Having the pediatrician pronounce her healthy, pronounce him healthy (and before that, the rating at the moment of birth—she remembered a father who protested because his son hadn’t gotten 10/10—a 9/10 for Mattia and Michela, the perfect score, because in life there must always be room for improvement). Not fitful, sleeping at night (but if they wake up at night, calling out without being demanding, in a polite voice). In the early months, small feats: how the dog goes, bowwow; clapping their hands; playing peekaboo. And nodding yes and no, even if they have no idea what it means. And then, later on, managing to get dressed by themselves (but still needing a little help). Starting to remember things they’ve done with you, remembering things that you don’t remember but that for him or for her were important. Asking you to repeat stories always using the same words. And besides that, learning the text of Matilda the Fast Turtle by heart and surprising you one day by reciting it perfectly, pretending they’ve learned to read.