Three Light-Years: A Novel (7 page)

Often Viberti would update her on Stefano Mercuri’s latest. Marta wondered if the weather was nice on the coast, and Viberti always answered yes, though he never discussed the weather with his old friend. The conversations between them no longer followed the same patterns they had in the past: Viberti would talk solely about politics and medicine, Mercuri would describe the satisfaction he got from tending his vegetable garden.

“Can I offer you anything?”

A pigeon landed on the balcony railing, swiveled his head around his purple-and-emerald neck as though performing a relaxation exercise, and stared goggle-eyed at Viberti.

“No, thank you.”

“Pigeons are one of the world’s great mysteries,” Marta said, shaking her head. She gestured to shoo him away and the movement of her hand was so frail that she seemed to want to detain him, invite him into the house with them.

If Viberti mentioned an old acquaintance he’d accidentally run into at the hospital, Marta would speak up immediately. “I remember him perfectly,” she would gush with a triumphant smile, and begin telling her son everything the familiar memory had passed on about the man. It was a simple enough trick—all you had to do was steer her toward the most distant memories, because terra firma lay in the past, whereas the present meant stormy waters where nothing remained afloat for long.

That’s why Giulia was wrong; it was pointless to torment Marta by making her feel at fault, it wasn’t true that all conversation had become impossible, it was just a matter of finding a safe topic to explore.

“Can I offer you anything?”

The formula itself was strange, even more than its repetition. Never would his mother, in full possession of her faculties, have used the word “offer” with her son, so formal, so distant, as though the metamorphosis of the lexicon were an early sign of a more general metamorphosis by which all things, plants, animals, and human beings, would one day become new and unfamiliar, an entire planet of aliens, virgin territory to be classified, identified, treated with aloof politeness.

“A glass of water, thanks,” Viberti said.

“You didn’t come to eat, did you?”

“No, thank you, Mama, everything’s ready at home.” He drank a sip of water. “In fact, I’m going now.”

Marta went out onto the balcony and came back in with the watering can in her hand.

“I’ll come with you, that way I can water the plants on the landing.”

“All right,” Viberti said.

Going out ahead of her, he commented that the flowerpots seemed wet already, maybe Giulia had seen to it. Marta nodded, disappointed. She went back inside and closed the door, forgetting to say goodbye to him.

His mother’s world. Not yet an alien planet, actually, not yet a virgin land of new and unfamiliar objects. For now, familiar, battered objects that suddenly appeared where they shouldn’t be. The pots on the stove, for example, charred turnips and carrots, dried-up soup, evaporated water, red-hot metal. Who’d turned on those burners? She had, but in a parallel universe, which she’d left without retaining any memory of it. Standing outside the door, Viberti tried to imagine his mother’s mind, to envision the effect of those sudden apparitions. Of those sudden disappearances. Impossible to remember where she’d placed her glasses just a few moments ago. Impossible to find the money she’d hidden away in a safe spot. It was a world of objects with a life of their own. The life that little by little was slipping away from her.

Viberti went up the stairs, stopping at each landing to glance out the windows. In the courtyard the light had taken on the shade of spent embers. He looked at his watch; some evenings barely ten minutes would have passed since he’d gone down.

When I try to put myself in his shoes, that’s how I imagine him: standing between one floor and another, in a no-man’s-land, as if, having left his mother’s house, he doesn’t yet have the right to enter adult life. And I want to say to him, come on, hurry up, because I’m there waiting for you in that adult life, you have to turn your attention to me, don’t put it off. But he doesn’t move. Staring at his watch, he studies the hand’s blithe sweep between seven and nine, stubbornly, firmly indifferent to his mother’s fate, and to his.

*   *   *

Cecilia had a vital gift: her attentive gaze. Viberti’s stories really seemed to interest her. One day, he even managed to speak to her about his father. He didn’t remember ever having spoken to anyone about his father’s death.

Cecilia had walked into a café where he was having a cup of coffee. Not the usual café, and Viberti had immediately thought that she was looking for him, that she wanted to talk to him. But no, she had nothing in particular to say.

He asked her, “Did you follow me?”

“You betrayed our café.”

“If I know you’re not there, I can’t bring myself to go in anymore.”

Cecilia smiled. “I didn’t follow you. I saw you from a distance and you looked sad.”

“I’m not sad.”

Did she feel guilty for making him miserable, was she troubled by not having noticed anything for a year? He didn’t want her pity. Maybe he should tell her, “Don’t feel guilty.”

But she changed the subject: “Sometimes I wonder why I studied medicine, why I chose this profession. Do you ever feel like that?”

“Always. Not every single day, but often.”

“Was it because of your father?”

“Because of my father?”

“You told me he died when you were little.”

“Not really little, I was fourteen … Why would you think I did it for him? He didn’t think very highly of doctors.”

“You told me he died of a malignant lymphogranuloma.”

“I don’t remember telling you that.”

“A few months ago, remember that man…”

“Sure, now I remember. But my father died in ’75.”

He began to feel a strange crawling sensation in the pit of his stomach.

“We talked about it because you told me that back then they were incurable, for the most part. Today they would have saved him.”

“I think so. But what does it have to do with my decision to study medicine?”

“To save him, to be able to save him in the future.” She broke off, gesturing as she tried to explain. “I mean, to save him in your mind.”

“Oh. Well, could be.”

The thing that surprised him—he realized later, on his way home—was that the woman had thought of him. That she had reflected on the matter for days, trying to find an explanation for him, to come up with a story that
explained
him.

Every so often he imagined his father dying in his parents’ old bedroom. The precise moment. Since that time he’d had occasion to witness the deaths of numerous patients. “Death rattle,” an appalling term, a frantic tumble down the final slope, “you’ve taken a turn for the worse.” He hadn’t been present when his father drew his last breath, because during the long months of the illness he’d been gone a lot, encouraged by his mother to stay away, to take his mind off things. Marta wanted the boy to remember his father healthy, but there wasn’t much to remember.

As if reading his mind, Cecilia asked, “Was it a long illness?”

“Yes, quite a few months, but I don’t remember it clearly, I must have repressed it.” He paused. “No, I don’t think I became a doctor because of that. I wanted to follow in someone else’s footsteps, a friend of my father’s I’m very close to.”

Cecilia had never met Stefano Mercuri, but she’d heard about him at the hospital, and had read some of his articles.

“And you, why did you become a doctor?”

“I don’t know. I really don’t know. When I was younger I wanted to swim.”

“Oh, yes, you told me.”

She stared at his coffee cup resting on the counter the way she’d stared at the Scénic’s fallen keys on the ground a year ago.

Viberti touched her shoulder lightly. “Thank you for following me to talk to me. I’m happy when you talk to me.”

Cecilia smiled. “I didn’t follow you.”

*   *   *

On the morning of Monday, June 3, Viberti wakes up drenched in the relentless light of day and feels an intense desire for fog. Still, he knows that even if it were November he’d have no hope of being satisfied, since these days the fog isn’t what it used to be. The climate has changed, the pollution level has changed, the city has changed. When he was a boy, on his way to school at eight in the morning, he would sometimes be afraid of getting lost. He couldn’t see a thing ten steps in front of him. Figures would emerge suddenly, as if out of the blue, hazy and featureless and chilled. He’d never again encounter such dismal figures, irritated and fearful, and not only because of the fog. Actually, fog and fear weren’t necessarily related in this memory, which was a reassuring, or maybe just nostalgic one; in the fog you could hide, pretend not to see anything and turn the corner. When he got home, Mercuri, the Communist, would often be there. You could discuss things with Mercuri and try to understand what was happening, partly because, unlike other adults, he had no ready-made answers he passed off as “experience,” and his misgivings made things easier to grasp. Reflecting on Mercuri’s misgivings and what politics were like in the seventies and on politics in general, he gets up and, standing in front of the mirror, remembers that he has to go to a critical union meeting that day: the hospital administrator is out of control, somebody has to stop him.

In the late afternoon he settles into the pediatricians’ lounge to fill out a self-evaluation form. The sun cuts diagonally across the long blue table and Viberti sits in the most shaded corner, away from the whitish glare. He spent the weekend at Mercuri’s and fell asleep on the beach, getting a sunburn. For three days he thought of nothing but Cecilia; the visit to his old friend made him feel his solitude more painfully (perhaps because Mercuri was alone all his life and has now solved the problem by marrying his housekeeper). He’d like to confess his tenacious obsession to the older man, or better yet he’d like to have him meet Cecilia, introduce her to him and receive his blessing. He’d like to hear him say: “She seems like an excellent doctor.” Why is it so important to him that Cecilia be an excellent doctor?

Today he saw her again at lunch and it calmed him. They joked about his sunburn. Seeing her every day is absurd and comforting. The self-evaluation poses a difficulty. There’s a question, the last one, which last year he wasn’t able to answer:
How do you rate the overall level of your performance?
It’s a bit like when you go to the United States and they make you fill out that green card where you have to declare that you are not a terrorist, a murderer, or a thief. The year before, Antonio and Giulia had suggested he write:
Fair, but I can always improve
. They were joking, but he took them seriously and responded in just those words. Then he regretted it, because the personnel office probably thought he was being sarcastic. So today he goes straight to the final question and without thinking twice writes
Fair
, the answer he’ll continue to give in the years to come, until the last self-evaluation before his retirement.

He turns the pages and starts the questionnaire from the beginning. The door opens and Cecilia comes in. The doctors’ lounge, as it did a year ago, now becomes the scene of future memories, at least as long as the minds in question are able to retain and recall them.

Cecilia isn’t wearing her doctor’s coat. Time shifts gear, all the moments spent with this woman race by too swiftly, she is too quick to appear and disappear.

“I thought you’d left.”

“I’d forgotten a TB case report.”

“And you came back specially?”

Cecilia goes over to the window. Outside, the wide tree-lined boulevard is teeming with rush-hour traffic, and beyond it lies the river with two solitary rowers paddling, and beyond the river the green woods of a hill that rises steeply, houses set among the trees.

“Is something wrong?”

Cecilia shrugs. Something’s wrong, but what? She turns, looks into his eyes, goes over to him, maybe it was him she was looking for, maybe she wants to talk to him.

She sits down beside him. The collar of her blouse is a little crooked, Viberti would like to straighten it but he restrains himself.

“The sunburn looks worse, you should put some lotion on it.”

“Yes, I can feel myself burning.”

Cecilia lifts her arm, straightens the collar of his white coat. What a coincidence! He’s about to tell her, “Your collar is a little crooked too, let me fix it for you,” but she doesn’t lower her arm. She slides her fingers to the lapel, just above the pocket. She seems to want to take one of his pens or maybe the stethoscope that Viberti still has around his neck. It’s unclear whether that arm is a bridge about to unite them or the measure of a distance keeping them apart.

Then Cecilia leans forward, pulls him to her, and kisses him on the mouth. Viberti is too stunned to part his lips; Cecilia breaks off, but doesn’t move away.

They remain close, their breaths mingling, hardly any space between their faces. Five seconds and Viberti recovers. He grabs Cecilia by the back of her neck and sticks his tongue in her mouth with a groan of relief, because this is the time and place to fulfill a desire that has traveled far, was presumed lost and mourned for dead. He kisses her with an impetus that would amaze or disconcert or amuse or excite those who know him, a determination to stay in that hot, moist mouth, to make it his permanent residence, because he has to punish her for making him wait so long, because he’s afraid she might change her mind, because he likes it and knows that no matter how long it lasts it will never be enough.

They break off suddenly, both looking toward the door. But the sound was only in their heads. There’s no one there.

“Let’s get out of here,” Viberti says.

Cecilia nods, looking at him as if she wants to kill him. This woman is scared, this woman scares him, this woman isn’t scared of anything.

He gathers his papers, gets up, and remembers that he’s supposed to go to the union meeting with Antonio. He takes out his cell phone, calls him: “I screwed up, sorry, I’ll see you tomorrow.” Antonio sighs: “I can’t make it either,” but he hadn’t thought of telling him. Maybe he wouldn’t have let him know either, if it weren’t
this
that was keeping him from going, but in any case he doesn’t have time to think about it now.