Authors: Andrea Canobbio

Three Light-Years: A Novel (47 page)

BOOK: Three Light-Years: A Novel

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“It’s a small town, quiet,” Marta says. “It’s not fashionable. But you know, at my age, change is impossible. And I don’t travel anymore. I’m too old. Besides, I never traveled. My husband traveled alone, on business. But I never went with him. When we came here he would sit there at the edge of the lawn, and read. Then he’d come back and say he hadn’t read a word, because the view distracted him.”

They laugh. Silvia turns around, following Marta’s direction, and sees my father with his back still turned, his gaze perhaps lost in space or maybe with his eyes closed. She thinks of Stefania waiting for her in the car. She takes her cell phone and tries to write her a text message, but her hands are shaking too much. If it’s a girl she’ll call her Marta, if it’s a boy she’ll name him after her father.

“My father was a bit like that, too,” she says. “He was always reading. We never knew why. We never knew what he was thinking, what thoughts he had, what desires. He was a little boring, too.”

Marta shakes her head and Silvia has the feeling she doesn’t understand, that she’s no longer able to hear, even though she continues speaking.

“It was my husband’s grandfather who bought the house. I never met him, he was already dead. My husband barely remembered him. He must have been a boring man. The men in that family were all boring. I knew my husband’s father. He was completely senile, but it was obvious that as a young man he’d been
extremely
boring!”

They laugh again. Silvia realizes that she has her right hand on her belly. She realizes that her hand is caressing her belly with a circular motion, and wonders if this is the first time she’s doing that. Maybe she’s just trying to warm up, maybe it isn’t yet a maternal gesture.

Marta notices it, too. She looks at her and asks her with a smile: “Have you already told me what month you’re in?”

Then Silvia stands up abruptly, trembling, and says it’s really chilly, in that mid-mountain town. “I’ll just run and get a sweater from the car, I’ll be right back.” But she doesn’t move.

Marta keeps looking at her.

“I’m at the beginning,” Silvia said. “I’ve only just begun.”

ALSO BY ANDREA CANOBBIO

The Natural Disorder of Things

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Andrea Canobbio was born in Turin, Italy, where he currently lives. An editor at the publishing house Einaudi, where he has headed the foreign fiction department since 1995, he is the author of
The Natural Disorder of Things
(FSG, 2006).
Three Light-Years
won Italy’s prestigious Mondello Prize in 2013.

A NOTE ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

Anne Milano Appel, Ph.D., is an award-winning literary translator based in San Francisco. Her latest translations from the Italian include Claudio Magris’s
Blindly
, Goliarda Sapienza’s
The Art of Joy
, and Giovanni Arpino’s
Scent of a Woman
. A former library director and language teacher, has been translating professionally for more than fifteen years and is a member of ALTA, ATA, NCTA, and PEN. Many of her book-length translations have been published, and shorter works that she has authored or translated have appeared in other professional and literary venues.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux

18 West 18th Street, New York 10011

Originally published in 2013 by Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, Italy, as
Tre Anni Luce

English translation published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

First American edition, 2014

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Canobbio, Andrea, 1962–