“Nothing. Absolutely nothing.”
They remained silent. Then Cecilia added: “I didn’t love him anymore. Maybe I wanted to punish him for that.”
Viberti kissed her hands again, he told her she’d had a few difficult years, but they were behind her now and it would all be better.
“Why would it get any better?”
But the question was too complicated and maybe Cecilia regretted it as soon as she said it, and told him it didn’t matter, he didn’t have to answer. She stood up, took him by the hand, said “Let’s go in now,” and led him inside.
* * *
The next day Viberti woke up very early and found himself on the left side of the bed. He lay there watching Cecilia for half an hour; during the night she’d wrapped herself in the sheet. He, too, had felt cold and woken up a couple of times, gone to the bathroom and come back to bed with his bathrobe. His pajamas were trapped under the pillow Cecilia was using. He studied the skin of Cecilia’s shoulder and arm closely, the downy blond fuzz, the constellations of moles. All those stars. If only he’d seen some flaw in her, if only falling in love hadn’t blinded him. But maybe it wasn’t falling in love that blinded him, maybe he’d been blind since birth and Cecilia was teaching him to see. It was the second time in a couple of days that he’d had occasion to change his perspective, looking up at the balcony from the courtyard, looking at the right side of the bed from the left, and he didn’t yet know if he liked all those changes, or whether he felt threatened by them. He got up to make coffee, but as soon as he set the pot on the burner he went back to the bedroom to look at her. He didn’t want to wake her. He drank the coffee in the kitchen, getting up every so often to gaze at her. That night they’d made love in a bed, and it didn’t seem real to him yet. Their first night together. Whereas before Cecilia’s body had been revealed in partial installments, he had now seen it whole, its parts reassembled. It was a lovely body. He went back to the kitchen where the two salads, the herb omelet, and the fruit cocktail had been left overnight, untouched, like sacrificial offerings. He began cleaning up without making any noise. He knew she was there, asleep in his bed, in his house, and it was a luxury, a gift, a privilege. It was like that film with the woman in a coma, in a sense. But it was better, because Cecilia would wake up. Even though there was a chance that when she woke up she might again tell him she’d made a mistake. In fact, not just a chance, a certainty: she would tell him it was all over, yet again.
THE DESIRE TO BE WITH HIM THE NEXT DAY, TOO
They say memory plays tricks, but memory doesn’t play tricks, it always knows what it’s doing. She remembered the moment she’d read about it in the newspaper. It happened in January after her first night on duty, back from a week’s vacation. A busy night, but without incident. She wasn’t tired despite the fact that the emergency room was full of stretchers thanks to the official start of flu season; she’d seen about forty people. In a period of uneventful calm, between six and seven, one of the paramedics had come inside bringing with him a blast of cold air, brioches, and a newspaper. She’d found the paper in front of her, and though she hardly ever read it, sitting at a desk, head propped on her hand, she started leafing through the pages as she answered questions from a colleague who was filling out the last case chart.
The headline CHILD STARVED TO DEATH was a flashing alarm, a wailing siren. She shouldn’t have paused to read the article. After a few lines, it became impossible to get it out of her mind. (Was it inevitable that she spot it? I went to see where it appeared. Bottom of the page, inconspicuous, competing with a story about a building destroyed by a gas leak. No, it wasn’t inevitable.)
Every day, from then on, she followed the story of the mother who had let her three-year-old son starve to death. At first there was only the child’s corpse at the morgue, along with a man, the mother’s partner, who had brought the child to the emergency room. The couple—the woman twenty-three years old, the man forty-five—lived in one room with two other children, without potable water or electricity. The woman was out of work and the man had a criminal record for selling heroin. Eight years before, when she was only fifteen, they’d tried to elope, but her family had opposed the marriage and kept them apart.
The third or fourth day, the results of the autopsy were released, detailing the appallingly emaciated state of the child’s body, traces of ecchymosis and probable assault. Then it came out that the other two kids living with the couple, a boy of six and a girl of five, weren’t the woman’s children, but those of the man’s former lover. Those two children were in good health (good physical health, that is). It was also discovered that though the one room lacked electricity they had access to power through a pirated connection, and that the couple had air-conditioning and satellite TV, but often no money to eat.
And finally the story of the woman and the child’s biological father was revealed. After the failed elopement, the woman had endured her patriarchal, violent family for two more years; at seventeen she fled and went into hiding in a nearby town, where she supported herself through prostitution. A client (a well-to-do businessman, married with three children) fell in love with her and for a year kept her in an apartment, promising to marry her, but then abandoned her soon after learning he’d gotten her pregnant. At nineteen she was homeless, unemployed, and expecting a child. She sought help from her old lover, who had never forgotten her and took her back. The baby was born. The mother and her lover hated him because as he grew up he looked more and more like her old client. They fed him only when the other children left something.
She would remember the details of that story forever. What did she learn from it? That you shouldn’t let children starve to death. That you shouldn’t nurture your own fears. That it’s better not to read the newspaper. That memory serves, among other things, to fill sleepless nights with troublesome thoughts. That you have to defend yourself against memory. That natural selection among memories is unpredictable. Beautiful memories survive, and they comfort and cheer us, and the reason is clear. And, of course, savage, harsh, merciless memories also survive, memories with bloodshot eyes, trained to snarl and bite (even if you try to tame them).
* * *
Stock phrases to reprimand them. Don’t make me repeat myself. But they wanted to hear her say it again, and ultimately she wanted to repeat herself—the day when all she had to do was ask or decree or forbid just once in order to be obeyed (or ignored, or obeyed and then ignored), they would be adults and the pleasure of repetition would find other outlets. Don’t make me repeat myself to the boy who should start doing his homework, Don’t make me repeat myself to the girl who should clean up her room. She thought they got along very well, they’d become friends. But putting it that way didn’t get the idea across; they had always pretty much gotten along. Now, though, they were friends in a different way. She noticed it because she felt excluded, she no longer had to mediate. Or maybe Michela had decided to change her attitude toward her brother. Because she’d grown up. Or because she was the one who gave the orders in any case. Though Cecilia didn’t actually believe it, the paranoid fear that it had been Michela who caused Mattia to stop eating continued to suggest itself. She was so afraid it would strike her unexpectedly that she led all her thoughts back to that particular thought so she could think about it and then stop thinking about it. Stop it. Now they usually stopped. But when they were younger they tested her endurance. Stop it, I said. And they persisted, looking straight at her and smiling defiantly (when they were very little) or looking sidelong at her to judge how angry she was (when they’d grown up a little). Are you going to stop it? She’d stopped buying the newspaper. The story of the child who’d died of starvation had vanished completely, relegated to general oblivion on the one hand and to her personal memory on the other.
Now, however, she searched the Internet for similar stories. There was little material on the subject, whereas murderous mothers, along with all kinds of discussions about them, abounded. Mothers in
forums who wrote: “A mother who kills her own children deserves to die.” Mothers terrified of being tempted to kill their insufferable children. But the murderous mother was almost always a violent killer, it isn’t every day you come across the kind of cold-bloodedness or ignorance or stupidity that lets a child starve to death. She remembered the cat who pushed away the puniest kitten when she suckled. She found pages and pages on male hamsters who killed their young so that the females would be ready to mate immediately. They didn’t just kill them, they devoured them, leaving only the heads on the plate (so to speak). She turned off the computer, unplugging it. The air was sucked up by the dark screen, for a moment she couldn’t breathe.
Don’t make me mad. When she said it she was already pretty mad, on the way to getting good and mad. Don’t make me mad was a bad sign for the kids and worked much better than Stop it. She’d been sure she was a good mother, too permissive a mother, but one day, in third or fourth grade, Michela had come home with an essay in which she’d written: “When we’re good my mother is like a beautiful angel, but if we make her mad she swoops down on us like a crow.” Dr. Angel and Mother Crow. Swoops down on us. In the long run, the fear of being regarded as a creature with a long beak and long glossy feathers who punishes naughty children gave way to the fear of being viewed as a pure, angelic being with white, gauzy feathers, who protects and cares for good children only.
She remembered the shy internist’s dismay and rebellion, the day of the infamous declaration of love, at hearing himself described as a fine person and a good friend, a decent, amiable man. She also recalled his irritation at being called Dr. Anorexic and Mr. Bulimic. If anyone was incapable of having a split personality it was him. Instead of telling her to go to hell, he was stuck in his mute worship like a broken record. And she was in big trouble. Otherwise there’ll be trouble. There was trouble already. For a couple of months she’d been resisting the temptation to make love to him. She knew resisting was the right thing to do, she wanted to find out whether the attraction was really serious, whether it wasn’t just pent-up desire. Or rather, she thought it was pent-up desire and wanted to prove to herself that if she could just hold out, the attraction would go away. Serious trouble. The attraction wasn’t going away, and besides still wanting to make love with him (especially on sleepless nights, when the children were at their father’s and she found herself alone in the house), she felt a tightness in her chest. A tight chest wasn’t one of the known cardiological symptoms, nevertheless it existed, as the patients in the ER knew. It didn’t matter if it was a nervous contraction of the muscles at the pit of the stomach. In fact, with a tight chest you were never hungry. To bed without supper! The threat she could never use with her children.
* * *
Moments when she found herself alone in the house in the middle of the day, free because she’d finished her shift or free because she hadn’t yet started it. She’d close the door behind her and immediately be tempted to go back to bed. Instead she started straightening up. The deserted, silent house, even when it showed signs of the children’s presence, seemed like someone else’s. For some reason they had learned to put the milk back in the refrigerator. They didn’t put anything else back where it belonged, their rooms were a mess, yet they put the milk carton back. The house always needed straightening up and it was a more relaxing activity than hiding under the covers, provided that it was ultimately productive.
One morning Luca called to let her know about a business trip: three weeks in Rome and Sicily, he wouldn’t be back for the weekends.
“Almost a month away, how come?” she asked, surprised by her frightened tone, even before realizing that his departure really did frighten her.
“I know, I know, I’m sorry, if you want, when I get back I’ll take the kids two Sundays in a row, but I can’t do anything about this.”
She told him it wasn’t about the weekends, it was about the children, they would miss him.
“Well…” He seemed embarrassed. “It’s very sweet of you to tell me that, I’ll bring them back a nice gift, I’ll find a way to make them forgive me and, listen, if you need anything, there are always my parents.”
Cecilia giggled nervously and told him she hadn’t meant to be sweet, she’d only said the truth, the children adored him. They fell silent. The times when he used to insult her were so long ago. One day he’d told her that she was obviously in no position to raise children. How distant, that violence.
Then Luca suggested planning a dinner at his place before he left.
When she hung up, Cecilia thought she had every reason to be worried; she could solve the logistical problems without him, but his absence would have consequences for the children. She wondered if she was jealous: two weekends away, maybe it meant that Luca had someone else. But she decided that no, she wasn’t jealous, she never had been. Besides, if there was someone else, better that she was in another city.
They tried to make up for the distance with lengthy phone calls. During the first week Luca called every night. Michela described her days to him in detail, and because her father could never remember the previous installments, she yelled at him and made him listen to an even longer rundown of the news of the day. As she talked, she ran through her whole assortment of funny faces and expressions; listening to her, Cecilia and Mattia laughed and exchanged meaningful glances, though they’d already heard the stories. When it was his turn, Mattia answered in monosyllables. After a few days Michela completely dominated the conversation, while the boy ran off to the bathroom the moment it was time to take the phone and talk to his father. On Saturday, Luca phoned twice and the second time spoke with Michela for thirty minutes. The call took place in the kitchen, where Michela talked while looking out the glass door, one foot resting on top of the other, balancing. Seeing her come back to the living room, Cecilia assumed she was bringing the cordless phone with her to pass it to Mattia, but she had already hung up. “Papa says hello,” she told her brother. Cecilia kept silent on the couch, arms tightly folded, moving her eyes from the TV screen to the back of Mattia’s neck, as he lay motionless on the floor in front of her. She didn’t want to notice these things, but the boy’s indifference frightened her.
That night she began to think that Luca was making a mistake. She would tell him so. He should talk to Mattia when he called, and even if Mattia didn’t seem interested in talking, he shouldn’t fall into the trap. Above all, he shouldn’t delegate his communication with Mattia to Michela, as if there were a pecking order between them. She began to think that the child would become one of those people who do nothing to bridge distances. The distance that separated him from his father existed, she wasn’t dreaming it up. He would always insist that others make the effort. He wanted to be loved for what he was. He was a perfect cat, an obese, furry cat in the body of an undernourished child, more catlike even than she was, and that’s why he beguiled and bewitched the shy internist. The whole world was captivated by the child’s silent power; everything always seemed to revolve around him (even Michela, of course, even Michela, precisely because she believed she controlled him).
The shy internist had been very fond of the child, then he’d become very fond of the child’s mother. And the child’s mother was very fond of the shy internist. She was enormously fond of him. She reached under the covers to her left and to her right, wondering how it would feel to hear someone asleep beside her again, breathing quietly or snoring loudly. And the thought flashed through her mind: maybe she was in love with Viberti, maybe those fantasies were a sign that she was no longer able to interpret. She had to talk to him, she had to make up her mind. The idea was disturbing, and to stop thinking about it she got up, with the excuse of checking to see if the children were tucked in.
She took the pasta that Mattia hadn’t eaten out of the refrigerator. She never knew what to do with leftovers, often she threw them out and sometimes she saved them. It was easier to throw away larger amounts, she saved the smaller, less-risky portio
ns, in case anyone wanted to check. She heated the pasta in the microwave, added a little oil, and ate it quickly.
* * *
The next day she was on the evening shift, four hours from eight to midnight. She took the children to school, did a little shopping, and prepared for the prospect of a whole day off ahead of her. At home she hung the wash out to dry, one of the household chores that made her by far the most irritable, or, in some cases, determined. She’d always hated extracting that intestine-like skein of clothes from the belly of the washing machine, the coils immediately unwinding as though contact with the air caused an instantaneous necrosis of the tissue. She hated the smell of laundry. She scattered socks and underwear from the bathroom to the drying rack in the room down the hall (since she always forgot to take the basket with her). After a while there was no more room on the drying rack, maybe she didn’t make the best use of it, or maybe she didn’t feel like rearranging the pieces that had already been hung. Often she abandoned a last tangle of clothes, hoping that someone (the housekeeper or Luca) would see to it. Since Luca no longer lived with them the loads to be washed had gotten smaller, his countless shirts, all identical, had disappeared, and there was always room on the rack now, and still the laundry wasn’t arranged properly.
Luca had always been better at loading the dishwasher, hanging clothes, and packing the trunk of the car. She had a vague idea of the reasons for this shortcoming of hers, something that had to do with being methodical, something that men seriously took to heart, that women didn’t have time to take to heart, or even (let’s admit it) something that women’s minds weren’t suited for. Who cares. Think of Viberti’s obsession with rules. She thought of asking him to write out rules for loading the dishwasher and rules for hanging the wash. She thought he would do it for her. She thought that no matter what she thought about, Viberti popped into her head. And it was too bad she didn’t have the courage to tell him so.
Three Light-Years: A Novel Page 24