Three Light-Years: A Novel (2 page)

Maybe because there’s only one thing worse than a lack of moderation and that’s its verbal expression. So never utter excessive words, never ask excessive questions (Does eternity exist? Does happiness exist?). Never reveal yourself.

*   *   *

But the next day he went back to visit the child and began chatting with him. The boy’s name was Mattia. He had a large notebook on his knees and he was sketching a parking lot on graph paper. He had drawn an elongated shape with a meandering outline and he was trying to fit as many parking spaces in it as possible: rectangles or parallelograms depending on whether they were straight or angled, whether they were for cars or special spots for motorcycles and bicycles. My father asked him why he liked parking lots so much. Did he have a lot of toy cars to park?

“No, I want to be a designer,” he said. He showed him other pages with irregular shapes and parking spaces inside them. My father immediately noticed that all the shapes were similar; they could be different attempts to reproduce a real place from memory. Beside each sketch Mattia had noted the number of spaces he had managed to fit in. Every now and then he also drew cars inside the grid, but in profile.

And which plan did he like best? Mattia showed him one. It looked like the outline of a goose, or a round mirror with a handle.

“What is this? Is it a place you know?”

“It’s the park near our house.”

“Why do you want to turn it into a parking lot?”

“For when I get big.”

“But then there will be other children who will want to go and play there.”

Mattia said no, there wouldn’t be any more children, his sister had told him so.

“Not even one?”

Mattia shook his head: “It’s because of something called
birthrate
, I think, but it’s not really a disease.”

My father ran a hand through his hair and murmured: “The declining birthrate, of course, there won’t be any more children … I’ve heard about it, too.” He’d heard about it and he thought about it continually, as if he were the person primarily responsible for the drop in the number of births. If he were to have a son at that moment, he would be fifty-six years old when the boy entered high school, sixty when he came of age, sixty-five when he got his college degree (unless he specialized in medicine or didn’t finish on time). In fact he might never see him graduate. Certainly he would never see him marry, and he would never know his grandchildren. Because his son would have inherited a certain difficulty when it came to procreating.

He was afraid it was too late.

*   *   *

The child’s presence gave my father one more reason to visit the ward. At least once a day he’d go and exchange a word or two with him. In school they had given him
Pinocchio
to read, one of the few books that my father remembered almost scene by scene. Here’s an idea that had always struck him: planting coins to make money grow. But that was something the Cat and the Fox made up, Mattia objected; money didn’t really grow on trees! Of course … still, it would have been wonderful. And waking up one morning with donkey ears? They laughed. They tried to feel if their ears were hairy. They really were! And the bogus funeral with the four coffin-bearing black Rabbits, what a sad sight; and the girl with the azure hair who appears at the window, she was so mysterious … Why did she say she was dead?

“I was always struck by it,” my father said, not noticing how much the boy was struck by that expression.

“Were you
struck
when he goes to the Field of Wonders?” Mattia asked.

“Yes, it always struck me.”

“And did the donkey’s ears
strike
you?”

“Oh yes, very much, they always scared me a little.”

“But
what
was it that
struck
you the most?”

Each time he would have to recall a new episode of the book that had truly struck him. Until the day came when my father, running out of things to say and not stopping to think, mentioned the pear skins and cores that Pinocchio ate out of desperate hunger. “That really struck me,” he said, and the moment he said it he was mortified. Mattia looked at him, rapt, motionless; my father could already imagine the boy’s outraged mother barging into the room to confront him, to throw him out. Why talk about a stubborn, bratty puppet? As if the child didn’t already feel guilty enough. But by then he couldn’t stop and he went on to explain all the extraordinary nutrients found in the skin and seeds of a pear; he described the strange things that are never eaten even though they’re good for you: skins, rinds, seeds, stems, flowers … Mattia nodded and for the first time said: “Yes, that really
struck
me, too,” and my father, unable to contain himself, hugged him. The other children in the room were watching them, but Mattia didn’t seem embarrassed.

“I really like canned pears,” he said. “I like the delicious syrup that’s left at the bottom of the can. Pears or peaches, I ate them with my grandfather. Mama says the fresh ones are better.”

“Your mother is right,” my father confirmed.

*   *   *

He managed to see Cecilia again. At first it never seemed like the right time to strike up a conversation. She would be talking with the pediatricians or sitting on the bed, playing with her son, and my father didn’t have the nerve to approach her. Attributing his own difficulties to others was an old habit: maybe in his heart he knew the truth, but he preferred to think that Cecilia was embarrassed for not having even thanked him.

Bumping into her one evening, he was disturbed by the attraction he felt. Staring at the freckle-dusted triangle of skin revealed by her neckline, he realized he wanted to touch her, right then and there, in the middle of the hall. But the specter of improperly putting his hands on a near stranger made him slip away without raising his eyes (studying the floor, the way he always did). After hugging the son, imagine embarrassing himself by hugging the mother, too.

After a couple of weeks they ran into each other at a café. My father was eating a plate of boiled vegetables, sitting at a table behind a column, the place where he had lunch every day, where he could keep an eye on the entrance without being seen. She appeared all of a sudden, nearly falling over him, as if she thought the chair would be empty, and burst out laughing. Later she would confess to him that she, too, always sat at out-of-the-way tables, she, too, preferred to be out of sight, but that day my father thought she was laughing at him: she was a young woman making fun of an antisocial, somewhat awkward man hiding behind a column. A young woman, beautiful and bursting with vitality. Surprised by seeing her suddenly materialize before him, surprised to see her laugh for the first time, not out of nervousness or to be polite but heartily and impulsively, my father was finally obliged—was finally permitted—to look at her. Obliged and permitted, he did not lower his eyes for a full two minutes. When he was able to face the world and look it in the eyes, for a moment it was like a miracle: his gaze saw through people and things, and the part of him that was hardest to bear was released, and he felt lighter.

Cecilia Re is thirty-four years old and the first thing you notice about her is the wavy brown hair that she keeps short, trying to restrain it in a stunted ponytail at the nape of her neck, until after a while the wisps come loose—first the strands over her eyes, then those twined behind her ears. Her eyes are light brown and big and almost always alarmed or darkened by a frown, so that when she relaxes and lets herself go she seems to light up with joy. With certain expressions her face seems childlike: beneath the adult woman you can still see the little girl she once was. As a child she wanted to become a champion swimmer, she spent hours in the pool (hence the habit of wearing her hair short), but she left that behind fifteen years ago.

She apologized, laughing, saying that he’d startled her, she hadn’t expected that … What, what hadn’t she expected? As if my father weren’t the most predictable man in the world. Was that what she meant, she hadn’t expected that he would surprise her?

She hadn’t expected the table to be occupied. Her purse had slipped off her shoulder; she had a roasted-pepper-and-anchovy sandwich in one hand and a glass of orangeade in the other. She set the glass down on the table and adjusted the bag on her shoulder. The smile, the laugh, were disappearing—how to make them linger? How to trigger them again? My father found the right moment to get a word in between the choppy phrases and invited her to sit down.

They started out talking about the boy, who was better and getting stronger. Cecilia was happy because that morning she’d caught him eating cookies on the sly. He’d made a small slit in the package so you couldn’t tell it had been opened. He was a clever child. My father said it was nice to see her smile. “Yes,” she said, “I think things will only get better now. And I never thanked you for that evening, you were really good with—” Her voice died in her throat.

To change the subject, my father confessed that at first he thought she worked at another hospital, then he discovered that she had recently started working in the ER. Cecilia told him that she didn’t have a spare coat and occasionally used her old ones. My father knew one of the chief surgeons in the hospital where she’d done her residency; he’d been his professor twenty years earlier. They smiled, imitating some of the man’s pompous expressions; he was the first extra to appear in the film of their conversations, the first excuse to talk and be together and joke.

They discussed various places to eat during the lunch break, which was not a real break for her, because she had six-hour shifts and usually ate around two. With surprising presence of mind, my father pretended that this was his routine as well, and in a way it was true because he kept to it unfailingly for the next two years. They remarked on the outrageous parking situation around the hospital, went over the most convenient transportation options for getting to work, and described the neighborhoods where they lived.

Cecilia lived behind a large church dedicated to Our Lady, built in the late nineteenth century as an absurd replica of a famous monument of ancient Rome. The windows of her house overlooked the circular piazza in whose center the monstrosity rose. You get used to anything.

“You get used to anything, it’s true,” my father agreed.

And before he realized what he was doing, he found himself telling her, with a naturalness that was unthinkable for him, about the bizarre living situation he’d been in for the past ten years. My father was not yet my father; he was a divorced man with no children (a man who thought of himself as a man with no children, destined to remain so, to end his life without children, secretly anguished by this seemingly inevitable fate, even though he didn’t believe in fate). He lived on the fifth floor of a building that housed his elderly mother, who lived on the second floor, and his ex-wife, Giulia, who lived on the third floor with her new husband and six-year-old son. Giulia loved her mother-in-law as a daughter would, perhaps even more so, and when she separated from my father after just three years, amicably, with no regrets, in perfect friendship, she had rented an apartment in the same building. She’d gone on living there with her new husband as well. Thanks to a short-circuiting of imaginary family relationships, Giulia’s son called my father “uncle” and called
my
grandmother Marta, “nonna.” (I did not yet exist to challenge and reclaim that title.)

My father couldn’t complain about the situation. He’d lived in that building for forty years, as a child, a young bachelor, a husband, and a divorcé; it was his home.
It’s your choice, you have to decide whether to keep it all together or divide things up, money, ID card, driver’s license, credit card, ATM card, you can carry a wallet, a planner, a briefcase and spread out the risk, keeping it all together is riskier, if you lose your wallet you lose everything, but it’s an apparent risk, because you actually pay more attention and focus your attention and vigilance on one single object.
But over time he’d begun to feel uncomfortable there among them, as if he were the real intruder. “It’s become difficult to have a private life,” he said, smiling, even as he realized, in telling the story to a practical stranger, that there was nothing very funny about it.

Cecilia listened to him, serious and attentive. Her eyes were her secret weapon; with those eyes she could conquer anyone willing to let himself be conquered. Eyes that waited, watchful and concerned, never evasive, following you to a diagnosis. They went back to talking about her, about the neighborhood where she lived, along the river, which, the church notwithstanding, was a lovely area. Perhaps my father expected Cecilia to immediately tell him all about her life as he just had. But time was up and she said she had to go, she was already late. My father’s eyes, orphaned by Cecilia’s as she turned away, followed her to the doorway of the café, then slid over the empty orangeade glass, the half-eaten plate of boiled vegetables; he stared at the abandoned chair in front of him. He hadn’t felt so alone in a long time.

*   *   *

Beguiled,
struck
, captivated not only by the mother, but also by the child. Each captivating in different ways and for different though related reasons; clearly related, even to someone as dense in the area of family relations as he. Not that he had never heard of eating disorders in children, but he hadn’t seen a specific case. He wasn’t even sure it was an unusual case. And why should he have known more about it? He dealt almost exclusively with old people. Antonio, his pediatrician friend, would have been able to cite similar cases, but the topic had never come up. Antonio had two sons who ate like pigs, Omasum and Abomasum he called them. “You’re costing me a fortune!” he said to them, pleased and proud. Pride in a child who eats eagerly. As if the child were endorsing his parents. My father knew nothing about that. He didn’t even remember what it had been like to eat when he was eight years old. He remembered his mother’s words, though: “to enjoy a healthy appetite.”