Three Light-Years: A Novel

by Canobbio, Andrea

  She would never have the courage.

  She wasn’t brave, she was timid and cowardly. Fear of being left alone drove her to delude a man who asked nothing of her and who loved her. She had to tell him that she loved him, too, and that it was best they not see each other anymore. That was what she urgently had to tell him.

  A damp tablecloth fell out of her hand, went plop on the floor. She left the laundry half-hung and went out into the hallway, not knowing where she was going. She found herself in the living room, sitting on the couch with her back straight, her legs together, her hands on her knees, like at a job interview. The moment she realized that she was frozen in that rigid, ridiculous position, she slumped back against the sofa. The living room was a mess from the night before: newspapers on the floor, games left unfinished, videos and DVDs scattered around, the battlefield after the surrender and after the children had agreed to go to bed. She felt like she was suffocating, but she wasn’t upset. Well, maybe she was. She wanted to talk to Viberti. Tell him over the phone? No. Wait until the next day? No. She pictured them at the café. Announcing that they should no longer see each other in the same café where he had confessed to being in love was pointlessly cruel. Among other things, she wasn’t sure he would agree not to see her anymore. He might insist. Was she hoping he would insist?

  She called him. He was at the hospital, she told him she had to see him at once. Right away, immediately. She couldn’t go too far from home because the boy was sick, and it wasn’t a complete lie, he’d been coughing for three days. Referring to Mattia continued to be a trump card with Viberti. She told him she had to go to pay the dentist and asked him to meet her halfway. Why it was so important to lie each time, she couldn’t say.

  The fact that Viberti agreed to all her conditions made her feel better. She went into the bedroom and instead of getting ready she slipped under the covers, dressed. She imagined what she would say to him, she imagined him nodding in silence. She couldn’t make herself move from the bed until five minutes before they were supposed to meet.

  Viberti’s cheeks were red from the cold and he looked a little comical; who knows why he’d left the hospital in his white coat. He looked very anxious, he had a solemn, regretful air, as if he had some bad news for her. Seeing him, sad or cheerful, serene or gloomy, put Cecilia in a good mood. They retreated to a café; it was their destiny. Instead of telling him they shouldn’t see each other anymore, she told him that she thought about him often and that maybe she was in love with him. He remained silent, waiting for the follow-up to those words (there was no follow-up), as if he hoped or feared that she had something more to say. But the admission, whether true or false, had drained her, the effort at sincerity or at imagination was exhausted. If their relationship had become a problem, she didn’t have any solutions. After a while she realized that she was clutching his hand like a fifteen-year-old girl (the age Michela would be in two years), but she didn’t loosen her grip. She confessed that she got up at night “to go and see if the children are breathing,” and to make sure they were covered by their blankets. Now she was the one who was uncovered, but Viberti wasn’t skillful enough to take advantage of it. He hadn’t had a sister to argue with, a mother to try to control.

  He didn’t know how to exploit other people’s moments of weakness. What relationship had he had with his mother? She imagined a cold, proud woman, who spoke little.

  She asked him to tell her the story that his mother had told him, the one with the protagonist named Cecilia. And as he was speaking, an idea occurred to her. Keep the children apart from time to time. Now, for example, with the excuse of Mattia’s cough. Now that Luca was away. Take Michela to her grandmother’s. See how Mattia does without his sister around. Or take her to Silvia’s. The girl would be fine at Silvia’s. How to explain it? She didn’t need to. Mattia’s cough was justification enough. She was the doctor, everyone would believe her. She felt a sudden joy, the urge to give it a try, right away. Could it really work? Will it really work? she wondered.

  Viberti finished telling the story and she told him she couldn’t picture what kind of woman his mother was. “She’s elegant,” he said with a sweet, sad smile. Cecilia, however, understood him to say “She’s arrogant” and without knowing exactly what he meant, sensed it was something that would require a lengthy explanation. She remained silent.

  * * *

  The boy proved to be a perfect accomplice. Leaving school, his eyes were feverish and he complained, “I’m tired.” Cecilia placed her lips on his forehead and said he felt hot. She took him by the hand and walked off hoping that none of the mothers would stop her as they made their way through the small crowd of children and parents. As if they could read the sick intention in her eyes, the desire to separate the children, and might try to dissuade her.

  She left Mattia at her mother’s house and went to pick up Michela. She told her that her brother was sick and that he was going to sleep over at their grandmother’s.

  The girl nodded. “He was coughing this morning.” She’d just left her piano lesson and was drumming on her knees, humming softly.

  That’s always the secret, Cecilia thought: children are like that, you have to present things as facts and they’re not surprised.

  “Do you want to hear how the new science teacher talks?”

  “How?”

  “And nooow take out your booooks and ooopen them to paaage six.”

  She said it was a family defect.

  “A family defect? What does that mean?”

  “Her sister is an Italian teacher and she speaks the same way.”

  “Yes, but you don’t say family defect. You say speech defect. But it isn’t, in this case. It must be an accent from somewhere. She speaks like that, you speak differently. It’s not important.”

  Michela nodded.

  “Try to imitate me.”

  “Huh?”

  “Imitate the way I talk.”

  “You talk normally.”

  “You’ve never done an imitation of me.”

  Michela made faces, glowering, then wide-eyed and frightened, then cross again, then scared again.

  Cecilia laughed. It was possible that the teacher came from a town not far from her father’s birthplace, which in turn wouldn’t be far from the town where the child who was starved to death had lived his brief life. And this, certainly, had upset her, though for a few days she hadn’t admitted it to herself. Because it didn’t actually mean anything. She sighed.

  And later on, sighing, she told Silvia that she had left Mattia to sleep over at their mother’s house.

  “She insisted so much that I couldn’t say no.”

  “Sure, I get it, when she acts like that she’s unbearable,” Silvia said, also somewhat distracted, also ready to be fooled by Cecilia’s smokescreens.

  “Listen, do you want me to bring Michela to sleep at my house for a night? I never offered, because I thought you might not like to be away from them, but if it might help you a little…”

  It seemed like her mother and sister were reading her mind, in which case there were two possibilities: maybe they could read only part of her thoughts, her anxiety and fatigue, and sincerely wanted to help her; or maybe they could read everything, including her intention to separate the children, and would rather not oppose her.

  At the start of her shift, at eight, she sent a text message to Viberti saying that she was at the hospital without a car and that she got off at midnight. The internist replied that he would be waiting for her outside the main gate. They went to the same area where they’d parked the last time and made love. Until she’d felt the urge to see him and sent the text message, she hadn’t thought of him for almost twenty-four hours. If someone had said, “Tonight you’re going to have sex with Viberti,” she’d have replied, “It’s more likely I’ll go to the moon.” As for the rest, it was just like the other times: she enjoyed it a lot and immediately afterward she was positive she would never do it again.

&n
bsp; * * *

  The next day, she asked Silvia to go and pick Michela up from volleyball at six and keep her for another night.

  When her shift ended she stopped by her mother’s to pick up Mattia and brought him back home. For a moment, as she opened the door, she pictured the dark, deserted interior of the house, the shadowy corridor that seemed cushioned with thick, soft felt padding. She turned on the lights in the hall and without taking off her coat walked into the kitchen, turned on the light, went into the living room and turned on the light, and went into the bedrooms and turned on the lights. She returned to the door and saw the boy standing in the doorway, watching her.

  For the first time in three days Mattia asked where Michela was.

  “Have you missed her?” Cecilia asked.

  Mattia nodded, but as usual it wasn’t clear what his true feelings were.

  The house didn’t seem to have missed them. Beds made, rooms neat, the kitchen clean and even the dishwasher emptied. Each time she came home after a short absence it occurred to her that maybe she should get out of that place, move like Luca had done, because the apartment would never forget their past life together.

  The child, however, was happy to retrieve his playthings; he immediately started rummaging in a box, looking for a toy car. They would be able to enjoy an evening by themselves. It had taken two days of long-distance discussions and phone calls and car trips from one house to another and talking about contingency plans to create that opportunity and get to that moment, even if the moment didn’t seem like anything special. Sitting at the table with Mattia, she wondered what she had hoped to achieve. He ate with his normal listless air, he had no more appetite than usual, he looked neither happier nor more unhappy. Despite Cecilia’s attempts to entertain him, he went back with stubborn determination to the one topic that seemed to matter to him: going to school the next day, not missing another day. He had phoned a classmate from his grandmother’s house to get the assignments from him.

  They had studied simple sentences, subject and verb. “Like: the cow moos, the dog barks, the lion roars.”

  “Only animal sounds?”

  “Mama!”

  He couldn’t stand her being silly.

  “Not just animal sounds. For example: the plane flies, the thief steals, the father works.”

  “For example: the boy finishes what he has on his plate.”

  “No! That’s not a simple sentence.”

  “The boy eats.”

  Finally he smiled, too, and took a forkful of pasta.

  Then Cecilia told him that it was fine, if he felt like it he could go back to school the next day.

  They watched television until ten, then Mattia got his schoolbag ready and went to bed. Cecilia took the cordless phone into her room, closed the door and phoned Silvia so she could talk to Michela.

  The girl was already in bed. “She was sleepy, she was exhausted when she came from volleyball.”

  “Was she hurt that I hadn’t called her?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  Cecilia said that when Mattia got sick, she always lost track. She assured her, however, that she would definitely bring Michela home the next day.

  Silvia told her not to worry, she hadn’t lost track, nothing awful had happened.

  But something awful had happened, Cecilia thought, she’d made love with Viberti again. She knew it wasn’t right, but she couldn’t remember why.

  She had never cheated on Luca, now she felt like she was cheating on the children. But cheating on the children was a weird idea. She fell asleep, not knowing what it meant.

  * * *

  Between late winter and early spring Michela’s nights at her aunt’s house became habitual, which perhaps only made her grandmother jealous. Cecilia remained alone with the boy more often, though he didn’t seem to notice his sister’s absence; he seemed to know that it was only one night every once in a while. He ate the way he’d become used to eating by then, enough not to worry his parents, without ever showing a particular appetite or any particular preference for one food or another. Eating was like doing homework. His teachers said he was polite, respectful, too proud to ask for help, and though he did only the bare minimum, it wasn’t because he was lazy, but because he lacked the energy. They thought all he needed was encouragement. Encouragement to make it through, to become an adult who was distant and aloof and indifferent? Cecilia didn’t agree and continued to try to cheer him up with her jokes, hoping he’d become a little more animated, more spirited, that he would learn to laugh or at least smile sometimes.

  One day Silvia showed up in the ER, toward the end of the morning shift. Having a family member turn up at the hospital was one of Cecilia’s recurring nightmares. She imagined it would happen like this, or something like it: She’d be examining a patient who had chest pain and a negative EKG; she would be asking if the pain was localized or radiating, like a pinch or like something pressing, if it stayed in one place or traveled up to the neck. She’d be concentrating on making her questions understood and concentrating on understanding the responses, when a colleague would come up and touch her arm: “Come with me, there’s a patient in Room Two you have to see.” “Right away,” she’d say, perhaps irritated by the “you have to,” and she’d ask the nurse to draw a blood sample to check the enzyme levels, still focused on the case in front of her. Beyond the door of Room Two, on the gurney, she would find Mattia unconscious or Michela crying or her mother with fear in her eyes. But mostly the boy, nine times out of ten it was the boy in the examining room. The malnourished boy, the boy who was starving to death while she wasn’t paying attention. Lying there defenseless and gaping, like an open mouth. The food he was waiting for was her.

  Silvia was fine though, she’d come to pick her up so they could go and get something to eat together.

  “Did we make a date to do that?” She was afraid she’d forgotten.

  But no, they hadn’t planned on lunch. Silvia had come unexpectedly because until the last minute she didn’t know if she really wanted to speak to her.

  “Is there something wrong? Are you all right? Is Mama all right?”

  Silvia patted her hand, told her not to get excited, everyone was all right.

  “Do you need money?”

  Silvia smiled slightly, shook her head. She wanted to talk to her about Michela, about something Michela had told her in confidence. But they should find a quiet place to sit.

  “Does she have a boyfriend?”

  “Is there someplace else where we can talk?”

  It was only one fifteen, but Cecilia asked her colleagues if she could leave early; the waiting room was empty and there were no ambulances on the way.

  When they were seated at the table behind the column, her sister told her that Michela had started crying one night. They were watching a two-part film about the life of Mother Teresa, “Awful,” Silvia said, but they agreed that they would watch only a half hour of it, because a teacher had talked about it and Michela had found out that she was the only one in the class who hadn’t seen the first part.

  Cecilia snorted: “She’s the one who always decides what we watch in the evening, Mattia and I, we can never have a say. Besides, I thought that problem at least…”

  Silvia said: “If you’re thinking about how for a while she wanted to become a saint, I don’t think that has anything to do with it. She just wanted to see it so she could talk about it. It wasn’t the film that made her cry.”

  It irritated her to no end when Silvia read her mind.

  “Then why was she crying?”

  Usually there was no need to insist in order to hear Michela’s thoughts, even her most secret ones. But this time she’d covered her face with her hands and didn’t want to talk, while Silvia stroked her hair and whispered not to worry. She’d started crying without warning; she wasn’t anxious or upset, she hadn’t been sad or troubled when they got home. At dinner they’d talked about school and Michela seemed like the same sun
ny child she always was.

  Finally the girl calmed down, and said, “Mama can’t stand me.”

  Cecilia looked down at the sandwich she hadn’t yet touched, a slice of mortadella peeking out between the slices of bread like a patch of bare skin revealed by an undone button or a lowered zipper.

  “Look, I’m not telling you this to make you feel bad,” Silvia said. “I thought about it for two weeks and I couldn’t figure out what to do.”

  Make her feel bad? But she didn’t feel bad at all, and she was afraid that if she raised her eyes from the sandwich, her sister would realize it. Or maybe she did feel bad, but not in the way Silvia meant.

  In any case, she looked up and saw that Silvia was feeling much worse. She took her hand, she seemed to be trembling, but maybe it was she who was trembling, her gaze wavered and she saw the table and the glass and the bottle of orangeade and the cup and teapot and the prosciutto sandwich and the mortadella sandwich waver, too. “I don’t think you’re telling me to make me feel bad. Not at all. Then what did she say?”

  “She told me she knows you can’t stand her, but she doesn’t know what to say to make you happy.”

  Cecilia lowered her eyes again. She knew she should at least be moved at that point, and if she’d been able to fake emotion she would have. To put an end to the matter, to put an end to their lunch.

  “Don’t look like that, don’t make me feel like a piece of shit.”

  “You did the right thing by telling me, really. But did she say anything about Mattia?”

  “She said you’re so worried about him you don’t notice anything else. She repeated that she can sense it, she senses that she annoys you.”

  “But that’s not true. You’re with us a lot: Does it seem to you I treat her as if I’m annoyed with her?”