Three Light-Years: A Novel (3 page)

He had a memory, incorrectly set in adolescence: his mother, Marta, distracted by something, worried or depressed for some reason, had stopped cooking, had stopped doing the grocery shopping. Incorrectly assigned to the period following his father’s death in order to explain the behavior, and because something like that had happened after his father’s death as well. He remembered a time of grim hunger, or thought he remembered it. He’d buy himself huge slices of pizza from the bakery before going home from school and eat them sitting on a bench with a classmate. But it hadn’t lasted, and perhaps it wasn’t a period of time but an episode or two, transformed by resentment into a recurring incident. He was familiar with those memories and continually tried to put them into perspective because they seemed improbable. What could his mother have done to him that was so terrible?

He thought about the child. Viberti was more and more drawn to foods that were white and bland. Ricotta, boiled fish, vegetable broths. He wanted to know what it was the child saw on his plate. He sat at the kitchen table with a packet of prosciutto in front of him and tried to imagine disgust or indifference. He rolled the ham into small cylinders and ate three or four slices plain, without bread. Or he cooked himself the kind of tasteless dishes the child must have had to eat in his first few days at the hospital; semolina porridge, thin soup with stelline pasta, applesauce. Circling around in the bowl, the spoon sketched a tangle of lines in the porridge which disappeared immediately and sank into the depths like a probe. It was possible to make the same whorl, but with more distinct lines, appear by dipping a piece of bread in a pool of olive oil, at the center of a blue plate.

*   *   *

He was tempted to buy the child a present, and one day he went into a toy store near his apartment. The toy shops from his childhood no longer existed; this one was a kind of warehouse where the merchandise was displayed like in a supermarket—long shelves and long aisles, a place where someone like my father was bound to be bewildered, worried as he was that someone might spot him. He had no children; he had no grandchildren; he was an impostor. After wandering around for twenty minutes he gave in and asked a salesclerk if they had any toy garages. The clerk led him to a garage that my father examined in detail for half an hour, reading all the labels on the box, then bought out of desperation. He knew that wasn’t the garage he was looking for, the garage he had been given when he was eight years old: that one was much more carefully made and more detailed, much more realistic. As soon as he got home he realized that the “3
+
” on the box meant that the model was suitable for children over three, and therefore probably meant for children no older than four or five. The rounded shapes and strictly primary colors should have made him suspect as much. Now the fact that it was intended for children much younger than Mattia seemed so crystal clear and glaringly obvious to him that he wondered how he could have made such a mistake. An elderly person like his mother could have bought that garage. He never considered taking it back and exchanging it. He tossed the box in a corner and tried to forget it existed.

*   *   *

They fell into the habit of eating together three or four times a week. At first, being unable or unwilling to ask about the specific times of her shifts, my father would arrive at the café around a quarter to two. If Cecilia was working the afternoon shift, she would already be there munching a sandwich; if she was coming off the morning shift, she would arrive half an hour later. They never stayed more than twenty minutes, sitting at the table behind the column. Regularity was important, eating at regular hours, even just a bite, but unhurriedly, chatting about relaxing topics. Maybe Cecilia simply had to get used to wanting a connection again, friendship or something more, accepting it a little more each day, just as her son was getting used to eating again. And my father’s situation, though his divorce went back more than ten years, wasn’t all that different.

Incredible that the woman came back day after day to the same café knowing that he, too, would be there. He’d heard from Antonio that Cecilia was separated or practically divorced, or maybe actually divorced. The news hadn’t surprised him, in fact he’d mumbled, “Yes, I know,” all the while aware that he hadn’t known it at all, no one could have told him. He reflected on the lie for an entire evening, and the next day, when he saw Cecilia again, he wondered what could have heightened his scant intuitive capacities. He wasn’t good at reading people, particularly their feelings; he specifically couldn’t tell if they were married or engaged or committed in some way. Maybe intuition had nothing to do with it, maybe it was only wishful thinking. She simply had to be free. She
was
free. Actually, now that he knew for sure, he didn’t feel any better. Now came the difficult part, his homeopathic plan to make her fall in love with him.

And he liked her more and more. He liked it when she tucked a strand of hair behind her ear, how it revealed that small, perfect pink conch. He liked it when they were eating and she touched her lips with two fingers, searching for a nonexistent crumb or indicating that she couldn’t speak at that moment, her mouth was full. He liked the way her eyes widened an instant before she laughed. She had a mole in the hollow at the base of her neck. She had a very lovely neck. She had a green spot in the iris of her right eye (did she know?).

*   *   *

They talked a lot about work. My father complained about having to spend a lot of his time chasing after his patients’ children, who were always and forever trying to put off the day of their elderly parent’s discharge. Daughters who hadn’t slept for weeks because their nonagenarian mothers cried out for help all night had them hospitalized for dubious bronchial asthmas and then claimed they couldn’t take them back home and couldn’t afford caregivers to look after them (sisters or brothers refused to contribute to the cost of assistance because the sibling in question lived in the parent’s house without paying rent). The greater the number of children and grandchildren, the greater the likelihood that no one wanted to take care of the elderly family member. At the other extreme, an unmarried son, an only child, living with his parent was dependable—until he became a threat: this was around the time my father had been accused of negligence by a seventy-two-year-old man following the death of his ninety-seven-year-old mother.
Dear Doctor,
the son had written in very large letters that slanted precariously forward, as though the words were about to drop off the right edge of the paper at any moment,
you killed my mother
.
I will never forget the grief you caused me. When I admitted my mother to the hospital I placed her in your hands and you did not take care of her. My mother entered the hospital to die and for this I will never forgive you.
And on and on for four pages. His six hours a week in the endocrinology outpatient clinic were an oasis of peace.

Cecilia described the strangest, most convoluted cases, both dramatic and comical; in the ER, anything could happen. There was a lot of boredom, a lot of drug addicts and drunks; but also, on the one hand, the inexhaustible list of howlers and absurdities made up by patients and their families, and on the other, the act of challenging death, that, too, never-ending. My father asked questions; he liked to hear her laugh and talk, not just because of the passion apparent in her stories, but because they showed her competence. Each time, he was amazed by the accuracy of her diagnoses, and by how sound and sensible her treatments were. He thought that sooner or later, at least once in a lifetime, a doctor like him (diligent, caring, mediocre) was bound to meet a true natural talent. There was no envy, it was pure admiration. Maybe he was deluding himself about his role in Cecilia’s bravura, deluding himself about being the first to discover it. The only resource he could claim, experience, could be measured by age; it was less mysterious than talent, but more bitter, because to a great extent you earned it by making mistakes.

*   *   *

One day Cecilia arrived at the café and said she wasn’t hungry; she needed to talk and felt like walking, did my father want to keep her company? They went out and he asked her what had happened, because it was clear that something had happened, something had upset her. Cecilia said she had just
laid out
a patient. “I laid him out” meant “he died in my hands,” a common expression among doctors, though a bit brutal, and one which perhaps implied an admission of guilt, even if no one was to blame. Coming from someone else, my father wouldn’t have thought anything of it, but “I laid him out” sounded strange and moving coming from her. Not that he didn’t lay out patients, frequently, constantly, one after another: it seemed to be his specialty.

A suspected recidivous ulcer had arrived in the emergency room. But the patient had intense chest pain, was pale and sweaty, and had a reading of 180 in one arm and 80 in the other. So Cecilia had sent him to have a CT scan, because she was thinking about the aorta. The man, a very tall, thin, elderly fellow with a bewildered look, was left lying on the stretcher until they came to take him. They had exchanged a few words. He was in pain and he was thirsty. “I’m dying of thirst” he kept saying. He remembered a fountain where he used to go to get water as a child, in the countryside, and he remembered the water was so cold that when he filled the bottle the glass fogged up. Ten minutes later they called her from Radiology: he had died while they were scanning him. “But I just sent him to you,” she told the radiologist. She didn’t think he would go so fast.

She was afraid she’d never forget that image, his final memory, the bottle fogged up by the icy water. My father listened in silence. He was ashamed of having once told her that he couldn’t stand his patients’ relatives, that until people got sick they didn’t learn anything from life. He’d said his department was full of unstable or inattentive relatives who expected the doctors to work miracles or perform some kind of undetectable euthanasia before the holidays. He told her that the living didn’t want to see dead bodies anymore, that rather than cure people, hospitals served to cover up death. He was ashamed of having told her that the old people in his care were treated like broken appliances. He was ashamed to have spoken only about the most grotesque side of his work, as if the rest didn’t exist. He’d left out all that was noble, left out himself as a doctor; by leaving himself out of the picture, except as a victim of the relatives’ stupidity, he’d meant to leave out illness and death. Was this, too, something he’d done out of reserve? He sensed that with her he would learn to be less reserved.

*   *   *

One evening in early May my father came out of the locker room on the ground floor. In the corridor he passed an elderly woman, out of breath, barefoot, carrying her shoes, one shoe in each hand. Two nurses had stopped to look at her, but her eyes were focused straight ahead and she wasn’t paying attention to what was going on around her. The large windows that overlooked the inner courtyard were open; it had just stopped raining and the air was awash with that hospital smell, usually imperceptible, now intensified by the dampness: a mixture of disinfectant, scented ammonia, and kitchen odors. In the courtyard was a parking area scattered with saplings with reddish leaves, the cars parked regularly between the tree trunks as if this, instead of white lines, were the natural system of marking the spaces, as if this had been planned from the beginning.

It looked like one of Mattia’s sketches, but blurry, badly drawn. And in the drawing, vibrant and unexpected, was Cecilia. Standing beside a Scénic, rummaging in her bag for the key. How had she managed to get in? To park inside? A privilege granted only to a few and never to the younger doctors—the woman definitely had hidden resources. To get a better look at her, to see what she was up to, my father had to lean over and peer through the new foliage of a tree. He didn’t want to expose himself too much because he’d noticed some people who’d stopped to talk on the other side of the courtyard. He didn’t want them to see him spying on a colleague, but he couldn’t tear himself away from the window. The people in the distance were mere shadows at the edge of his field of vision, but cautiousness and fear made them loom larger. Cecilia meanwhile activated the remote door opener, but the smart key fell to the ground, landing in a puddle. Leaning over even farther, my father saw that the cause of Cecilia’s difficulty was the couple of packages she was juggling in addition to her handbag. To free herself from the packages she set them on the roof of the car, then picked up the key and dried it off with a tissue. At that point, as if inspired by a spirit and will of its own, the key dropped a second time, into the same puddle.

She didn’t pick it up right away. She leaned against the Scénic and stared at it. And my father stared at her staring at the key. The ground floor was about five feet above the level of the courtyard, and from where he stood he could see her quite well. He tried to read the expression on her face. He couldn’t make it out. There was a trace of sadness in her eyes, but also something that simply didn’t make sense: tenderness, affection. Toward the key that had fallen? Toward herself? She didn’t seem like the type of person to feel sorry for herself, nor someone who would take an incident like that as a sign of bad luck. He would have liked to see a face like that every morning when he opened his eyes (my father thought for the first time). No, that wasn’t right. Not a face
like
that—
that
face. Sudden, overwhelming desire: he wanted to leap down from the windowsill—swoop down like an angel in an ex-voto—and wheel around her, glide down to grasp her and snatch her away, save her from an impending danger. What had come over him? Were a pair of tender, somewhat mournful eyes all it took for him to start having visions? Of all the faces in his life, why
that one
? As if the others had paled and dulled. Why such joy, such hope? It made no sense, any more than feeling sorry for an object made of plastic and metal that keeps falling.