Three Light-Years: A Novel (30 page)

“Are we expecting anyone else?” she asked with a smile, pointing to all the food Viberti had laid out on the table, in addition to the pasta that he’d tossed into the boiling water as soon as he heard the intercom buzz. “Were you worried I’d starve to death?”

“I was worried, yes,” Viberti mumbled.

“Don’t tell me my sister is coming?” Cecilia added, laughing.

Viberti looked dismayed and she hugged him to cheer him up; she was only joking.

While the pasta was cooking, Cecilia asked to see the house, and the balcony overlooking the courtyards she’d heard so much about. Viberti had been hoping they’d sit down and sip the white wine that he had already poured into two glasses, but Cecilia picked hers up and went into the hallway.

The blue five-seat sofa sat in the center of the living room, facing the television. There were no armchairs, no table and chairs. There was a tall breakfront with lots of drawers, never organized, which held ten years of bills, receipts, tax returns, certificates, and other documents.

“What if you have guests, if you want someone to sit down?”

“We all face the same way, and the worst seat is the middle one.”

“And a table?”

“I eat in the kitchen.”

In the first bedroom the double bed had been left behind. One of the two nightstands was wrapped in protective padding, as if they’d decided to leave it at the last minute. A lamp and a stack of newspapers stood on its black marble top, the only part that had been unwrapped. The doors to a large, half-empty wardrobe were missing.

“She had them painted by a friend, a huge landscape with hills, trees, flowers, cars. I don’t know if I cared for it. In any case, she took them with her.”

Another room with no furniture, full of old magazines piled on the floor, against the walls. In a corner, a toy garage bought by mistake two years ago. “The children’s room.” Spoken without irony.

The study: a desk with a computer, a swivel chair, a stand with a printer, a stereo.

The bathroom, at least, didn’t lack for anything.

A room with a washing machine. Underwear hung out to dry.

Cecilia didn’t say a word, she didn’t ask why he hadn’t replaced the furniture, didn’t ask why he hadn’t bought new doors for the wardrobe, instead she held Viberti’s hand tightly throughout the tour, as if she were the one guiding him. They went out on the balcony. The balcony looked like a jungle, Cecilia said, it was crammed with plants and flowers, how did he find the time to care for them?

“I don’t, in fact, every week one of them dies, but I buy another one immediately.”

“You admit it.”

“Yes,” he laughed, “it’s a kind of terminal ward.”

“Silvia says we doctors are unbearably cynical.”

Viberti lowered his eyes. There was a silence.

“Okay, we won’t talk about her again,” Cecilia said.

A light breeze cooled the air.

“Why don’t we eat out here?”

“Out here? But what would we lean on?”

“We don’t need to lean on anything, come on. You sit here, on the stool, and I’ll take the wicker chair.”

Viberti looked at her, smiling.

“I want to sit in your chair.”

“All right. I’ll go drain the pasta.”

They ate with their plates on their laps, setting the glasses on the floor. Cecilia told him about some phone calls to the children, they were fine, they were big now and independent and they no longer needed her. She was struck by the fact that, for the first time, both of them had asked her, “And how are you, Mama?” She smiled. Then she said she didn’t like it when people said that Mattia was really okay now, she was afraid that talking about it would bring the problem on again. Then she said they would return from their summer camps tanned and in great shape and that they would spend some time with their grandmother. They were used to having everything planned so they wouldn’t get bored.

“Did you get bored?”

“As a boy? I went to the school of boredom.”

“They’re always saying, ‘What should we do now?’ Every now and then even my mother calls to ask me, ‘What should they do now?’ when the children are with her.” They laughed. Cecilia asked if he used to sit in the wicker chair and watch the courtyards when he got bored as a child.

No, Viberti said, the chair went back to high school and, especially, his university days, when he would study out on the balcony. He told her about the mnemonic system he’d used to remember the elements of a subject, assigning each to different areas of the courtyard. They talked about the various methods they’d used to memorize the more difficult subject matters; Cecilia had filled notebook after notebook with keywords. They talked about the anatomy exam, because all doctors sooner or later start talking about the anatomy exam. They talked about the mental foramen, the infraspinatous fossa, the round pronator and Penfield’s homunculus. And Viberti was able to name all the bones of the hand.

Then Cecilia stared at him with a serious expression, and Viberti slid the stool away, knelt down and began kissing her. A long, passionate kiss. A few pauses to take a breath; he went on kissing her for ten minutes, even though his knees hurt.

Then she told him to sit back on the stool, she had something to tell him.

“I’m not saying it’s the reason we separated, Luca and I, but it’s something that happened, four years ago, and you should know about it.”

She told him she’d been expecting a third child, that she didn’t want it, she didn’t want another child and she didn’t want one with Luca, so she’d had an abortion. She told him in a few words and then fell silent and looked out over the rooftops of the houses across the way, toward the hill.

Viberti took her chapped, red hands, kissed them, rested his head on them like a pillow.

“What do you think of me?”

Viberti said he didn’t think anything; it must have been terrible for her, but he didn’t feel he could judge her, he didn’t know enough about it.

“You don’t think I’m a monster?”

He looked at her, confused. No, he didn’t think she was a monster.

“What if I did it to you. If I decided to abort your child.”

What troubled him the most was the way Cecilia spoke to him, with that contained anger.

“Why would you do that?”

“To hurt you.”

Viberti shook his head. For a moment he was afraid he hadn’t understood. Because in fact he hadn’t understood a thing, up until that moment. But it was possible that he had no hope of understanding, ever, not even when faced with the evidence. “Then I’d be worried about that, that you would want to hurt me. Did you want to hurt your husband? What did he do to you?”

“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.