Three Light-Years: A Novel

by Canobbio, Andrea

  * * *

  She can’t put it off any longer, so she goes to talk to Cecilia. Talking to Cecilia scares her. She gets to the ER entrance and her legs refuse to go down the ramp, so she continues walking along the sidewalk to the corner of the street. Then, very slowly, she manages to retrace her steps; she finds herself in front of the reception desk and asks for her sister.

  Cecilia reacts predictably, showering her with her anxiety; she becomes rigid and digs in her heels, so that Silvia suddenly remembers an expression her father used to describe a certain stance his older daughter displayed: “Tugging on the leash.” Certainly it’s hardly the time or place to recall those words. Cecilia has to be reassured: everyone is fine, nothing awful has happened, “I just want to talk to you about Michela.” Cecilia doesn’t believe her, but she realizes that she has no choice and leads her to a café across from the hospital, where they can talk and actually hear each other.

  But when they are sitting face-to-face, they seem glued to their chairs, she speaking as if someone were twisting her arm behind her back, her sister gradually leaning farther and farther over the table, like she’s laying her head on the block to await the blade. Then Silvia starts trembling.

  Cecilia notices it and now she’s the one reassuring her, she squeezes her hand, strokes it. Talking is good for you, God is it ever good. Silvia tells her everything, and the more she tells her the better she feels, until she almost feels good. She’s able to tell her everything! She even reminds Cecilia about the paranoid idea she had last summer. She’s so pleased with herself that she feels hungry.

  Then something unexpected happens: a coworker Cecilia had agreed to meet shows up and sits down to eat with them. A nondescript type, quiet, the kind of man who as a doctor infuriated her, one of those for whom your little bellyache is just a nuisance. But his arrival isn’t a problem. She’s said what she had to say. I’ll finish my sandwich and go, she thinks. But it seems her sister is trying to encourage her to make conversation with this Claudio Viberti, she can sense it; soon Cecilia will utter the fateful phrase, “Silvia works in publishing.”

  But no, what comes out instead is a very old story, which she’d nearly forgotten, the awful diet she’d come up with in her last year of high school, a kind of self-flagellation. Much better than talking about her work, however, and as she talks about it she’s almost happy, as if the earlier anguish had never been.

  She recalls a Swiss philosopher’s lecture she’d attended with Enrico Fermi. And it’s just at that point that Cecilia leaps up and announces that she has to leave. What’s wrong?

  She doesn’t have time to figure it out, her sister has already left the café. Even the nondescript Viberti seems surprised by the scene. They remain speechless. She let herself be fooled yet again. Cecilia is too shrewd for her. She let her think she wasn’t angry, she assured her she wasn’t mad at her. She seemed only mildly irritated with Michela. Instead, she was upset. She realized it the moment Cecilia grabbed her jacket, the way she put it on.

  But the oddest thing is that the nondescript Viberti continues the conversation, as if her bizarre diet and the Swiss lecturer really interested him. Given the fact that it’s a bunch of crap and not at all interesting, there must be something to it. He seems about to make a confession. Or a pass. Maybe this man interests her after all.

  And as she writes the script and directs this film in her head, she describes the virtues of green tea to amuse the nondescript Viberti, and then the plot of a novel she read centuries ago, one of her father’s books, though not exactly science fiction. She manages to get his e-mail address, with a promise to find the novel, and at that point, finally, the lunch can come to an end.

  * * *

  When a relationship ends badly people say it was wrong to begin with. They use phrases such as “the right man” and “the wrong man.” She’s the queen of correction, but her relationships are always wrong. The men are never the right ones. Correcting men and her relationships: impossible.

  In the end, her one great love, Enrico Fermi, was also the man who came closest to becoming the right man. If nothing else, by accretion: they broke up and got back together six times. The earliest Enrico Fermi, age seventeen, is part of ancient history, he’s become a myth, all the rancor softened into a mellifluous memory. The more recent Enrico Fermis are the worst from this standpoint, the wounds still raw and painful. As a gesture of love, or compassion, to salvage him or to salvage herself, to salvage the time they’ve spent together, when she speaks to someone about him she makes up alternative biographies: Enrico Fermi the archaeologist, Enrico Fermi the rare tea expert, Enrico Fermi part Japanese.

  She thinks back every so often to a particular time. The last Enrico Fermi had lasted one year; they’d been back together for a couple of months and had hit their first bad patch and she told him that maybe it was best to forget it. She’d told him that just before he left to accompany a class on a school trip (a little shitty of her). Then he came back and started to tell her about the trip. Enrico Fermi was a math teacher (he still is a math teacher). There was an awful kid in the group, not an idiot exactly, kind of a rowdy troublemaker, that’s what they would have called him once, the kind who jumped up on his desk in class, took off his T-shirt and waved it around (though maybe in the end there actually was something off about him), spoke loudly and insulted him, yelled “Communist, worthless do-nothing” at him … Who knows why he’d targeted him for harassment. He chased him through the halls of the hotel, throwing sopping wet toilet paper at him. He shouted: “You stink.” On the last day, Enrico Fermi’s tormentor had poured half a can of Red Bull in his shoe, while they were eating lunch at a fast-food place.

  “Oh my God, how did he do that?”

  Sneaking under the table behind his back. From the beginning the kid had made fun of his blue Clarks, Communist shoes, his ankles, too thin, and his pants, too short. And he’d gone around all afternoon with a wet foot. Then the kids had wanted to go to a music megastore. The other teachers took refuge in the café, while he holed up in the jazz section because it was the only area in the store that was completely deserted and he knew no one would follow him. He took off his shoe. A glass wall separated him from the other departments, the music was at an acceptable level, everything was suffused with a sense of great peace, and suddenly he was certain that she was in that room, hidden among the shelves, waiting for him.

  “I wasn’t there, trust me.”

  But something of her was there. And he’d felt much better. Soon afterward, he realized that he was not alone.

  “Because my spirit was hovering in the room.”

  No, there was a sales clerk. An elderly man, diminutive, a little hunchbacked, with thick glasses and a thatch of white hair. Bent over the shelves of CDs, he flipped through them with a swift flick of his fingers, like an obsessive-compulsive squirrel looking over its hoard of nuts. Now and then the clicking stopped and the clerk pulled out a case, studied it, put it back. Every so often he took a block of CDs from a plastic trolley and added them to the row. Aside from the clicking of the CDs knocking against one another and the whisper of the trolley’s wheels, he made no other sound.

  Enrico Fermi relaxed, looking at the CD covers. He was in no hurry to leave the jazz section, he knew that outside he would be plunged back into a nightmare of persecution. And he wanted to let his foot dry. Besides the sense of peace, besides the impression of being safe, he suspected that he had finally arrived in the foreign country where he naïvely thought he’d already landed three days ago, at Gatwick.

  “Foreign country?”

  “Far away from everything. It’s the same sensation I get when I’m with you.”

  And that idea made her very, very happy. To be the foreign country where someone could take refuge and seek political asylum. The foreign country someone comes to after a long journey, to rebuild a life. Telling a woman with whom you’ve reconciled for the sixth time that she’s like a foreign country, well, there was some
thing inspired about it.

  Enrico Fermi was silent for a while, then he resumed his story. He didn’t know what had come over him, he had to talk with the clerk, as if the little man held some secret. So he made up a story about having to buy a gift to cheer up a sick friend. And the clerk didn’t bat an eye; making recommendations was his job. He went straight to a shelf, chose a CD, and put it in his hand. With that one he couldn’t go wrong, he said, because the heart and soul of jazz was in that recording. It was a concert at which five of the best musicians of all time had played, brought together that night—by chance for the one and only time, brought together despite the fact that they hated one another and barely spoke to one another, that they were quite drunk and more interested in following a boxing match on the radio, and that the saxophone player had hocked his instrument at a pawn shop to buy heroin and was forced to play with a plastic sax. The magic of the music came about by chance, and as it unfolded the players hadn’t seemed to pay the slightest attention to it. Then, without another word, the clerk bowed slightly and went back to his work.

  “It was Yoda. You met Yoda.”

  “Yoda?”

  “The one from Star Wars, the tiny, wrinkled old wise man.”

  “I brought you a present.”

  Enrico Fermi pulled out the CD of that concert.

  “I don’t like jazz.”

  “It’s just the thought. It was the only time I found myself alone. I thought of you.”

  “I see. Thank you.”

  Enrico Fermi could no longer recognize a good sign. The appearance of Yoda was a fantastic sign.

  That time they’d made it through the bad patch. But instead of continuing to tell her Zen stories, or funny stories, or stories of any kind, instead of understanding how to win her, in time Enrico Fermi had begun acting like a teddy bear, like a stupid Ewok from the Forest Moon of Endor. When he was in trouble he tried to move her by telling her about his problems, as if other people didn’t have any, until eventually she just felt pity for him. And anger, a lot of anger.

  * * *

  When she goes to look for Harry Kressing’s The Cook in her parents’ attic, with the idea of using it to reconnect with Viberti, she experiences the surefire, mysterious satisfaction that always accompanies the rediscovery of a book. It happens with books she has at home as well, books she’s sure she owns, when she hasn’t touched them for some time, as if they might have escaped, as if someone might have stolen them. They have no legs and no one is interested in them, so the joy she feels is all the more inexplicable. As long as her books don’t disappear, as long as her books continue to reappear, like spirits invoked on Walpurgis Night, nothing bad will happen to her.

  She hasn’t been in that attic since the summer four years ago, the year her father died. She’d had a duplicate key made. At one point she had so many duplicates (building key, apartment key, key to the attic, basement key, key to the garage) that she could no longer remember which key opened which door.

  Before going down to her mother’s place, she opens the big plastic bag she’s brought with her. She takes out three ceramic items wrapped in yellowed tissue paper and slips them into the only open carton, on which her mother had written NONNA RE’S CHINA SET with a ballpoint pen, puncturing the cardboard in several places. The tape has been torn off haphazardly and is hanging down the side of the box, like a loose shoulder strap. She strips it off altogether and seals the cardboard flaps with a fresh piece.

  She takes the book, goes down three flights of stairs, and stands in front of the door. She hesitates, then rings the bell. No sound filters from inside. Then a light step and the door opens. Surprised, her mother gives a little start and takes a small step back. She was expecting the visit, but seeing her younger daughter makes her anxious every time. The daughter, on the other hand, finds that her mother has aged, even though she saw her just a few days ago. This, too, is a customary reaction.

  She says she stopped by the attic (unconcerned that her mother might wonder where she got the key), shows her the book, “It’s for one of Cecilia’s coworkers, one of Papa’s books, see?” Her mother shakes her head slightly, perhaps unconsciously. Too much information, difficult to put it all together, and at the same time of almost zero interest. Why the attic? Why that book and not another one? Why one of Cecilia’s coworkers? Silly questions about things that don’t matter, Silvia will only disappoint her.

  But the days when being disappointed infuriated her are gone for good, and gone forever are the days when being disappointed really irritated her, and perhaps the days when being disappointed made her feel bitter were on their way out as well. Now her younger daughter disappoints her and that’s that. “Would you like to come in? I’ve just made coffee.”

  They settle in the kitchen, sitting on opposite sides of the table. “Are there still a lot of your father’s books in the attic? I haven’t been up there in a while.” Probably no one has been up there since she was last there, four years ago. Her mother, maybe, is afraid of the attic.

  “No, all that’s left are the Urania volumes and some other paperbacks … but Papa loved this one, I remember.”

  “Why don’t you take them all with you? Why leave them up there, collecting dust?”

  She tells her she saw the carton with her grandmother’s china.

  “Oh, that’s right, I’d forgotten I’d put it up there. Take it, you and Cecilia. It’s not doing any good there.”

  Silvia sips the coffee. It’s very good. She’d like to inherit her mother’s coffeemaker, that’s for sure.

  She smiles. “I remember when Nonna Re didn’t know what was what toward the end and was mean to you.”

  Her mother frowns at her. But then she, too, smiles, because it was so many years ago, because it’s funny, and even though her mother-in-law could never stand her, what does it matter now.

  “What was it she said to you?” Laughing, she mimics her grandmother’s regional pronunciation: “‘Get out of this house and leave my son alone.’”

  “Poor thing, she was completely demented. If I reach ninety like she did, I’ll get like that, too, you never know…”

  “Or maybe she said: ‘I don’t like my son bringing home a woman like you.’”

  Her mother snorts. “As it happened, I was one of the people she no longer recognized. The only thing left was hostility, and that she was finally able to express.”

  “Papa used to laugh…”

  “I don’t remember him laughing. It seems odd. He was afraid I’d be offended.”

  “Your mother didn’t lose her mind, why should you?”

  “My mother died at sixty-five, she didn’t have time to lose her mind.”

  “If you do, you’ll tell the whole truth then.”

  Her mother’s expression doesn’t change, as if she hasn’t heard the remark. After a moment she gets up, takes the empty cups, puts them in the sink, and begins rinsing them.

  * * *

  Back at home, Silvia writes an e-mail to the nondescript Viberti. She tells him she found the book she’d mentioned to him, quickly reread it, and remembered the reasons why she was so enthusiastic about it: it’s a fantastic story, both in that it’s improbable and in that it’s fabulous—the cook of the title transforms the members of the family he goes to work for into servants, the father into a butler, the mother into a maid, and the son into a cook, then he marries the daughter and lets them support him and serve him happily ever after. The plot isn’t even the most important thing, it’s not a mystery, so she’s not spoiling anything by revealing how it ends. It’s a book worth reading. And the ending is still surprising, colossal.

  She includes her cell phone number as well. She thinks she’s done everything appropriately, she’s been kind and she’s tossed out the bait.

  Then she plunges back into the book on Hindu mythology, picking up from where Agni reenters Prajapati, who has just given birth to him, Prajapati lying empty and disjointed, Agni filling him and restoring him to life and
vigor, re-creating his creator. And so on.

  * * *

  Occasionally, during the months when he was better, between one chemo treatment and another, her father arranged to see her at a nearby café. He would go out to buy a newspaper, he never ventured farther than the newsstand on the avenue. Silvia told him about a small publisher she’d begun working with, a publisher whose books were a little weird. Her father, amused, pretended to be concerned: weird in what sense? No, she replied, not obscene weird: strange weird, New Age weird. Like books about witches and shamans, or books on alternative medicine, prophecies, the Templars, or ethnic cookbooks. She didn’t tell her father that she’d read about an herbal treatment for cancer in one of those books, and that when she told Cecilia about it, her sister had given her a withering look, muttering, “Oh, please, give me a break.” She’d felt like an idiot.