Three Light-Years: A Novel (9 page)

He didn’t seem at all jealous, actually. He had already replaced him with the dog and was using those animalistic expressions: acting like a dirty old goat; wrapped around her like a python.

“And you leave him in the house?”

“On the balcony, the house isn’t set up, it’s already a pigsty. I’m on my way to walk him now, gotta run.” He smiled at him again, but this time it wasn’t a mocking smile. It was an affectionate look. “You’ll tell me about it later,” he said, knowing full well that Viberti would never tell him anything. Viberti watched him walk away, thinking he couldn’t stand the idea that he’d been discovered, though he didn’t know why.

*   *   *

He would’ve liked to
talk politics
, at least occasionally, find someone to argue with, the way you look for someone to play tennis with, because playing in front of a wall is no fun. But arguing with Antonio, the only likely candidate, was impossible. Antonio was quick to lose his patience. No matter where you started from, he always ended up at the same old place: the idea that they were trying to turn hospitals into corporations, that no one could stop them and that everything else was just talk. Viberti then assumed his hangdog expression and mumbled that, even so, it was important to discuss things, and it was important to try to change things. Antonio would calm down, maybe worried that he’d offended his friend, or maybe he regretted what he had said, and would assure him that the hospital administrator wouldn’t have an easy time of it.

Years ago, when he really felt like talking politics, Viberti would take off for the coast, in search of Mercuri. He’d gone to see him the previous Saturday and they’d dined by themselves beneath a grapevine-covered pergola, watching the sea tossed by the vestiges of the previous few days’ mistral. Mercuri’s wife had prepared
trofie
pasta with pesto and batter-fried zucchini blossoms. Was it an accident that she’d gone off to visit a friend after cooking for them? Viberti had never managed to exchange more than a few words with her.

Mercuri asked him about recent films, concerts, exhibitions; they were the only things he missed from his old life. When curiosity won out over indolence or the needs of his vegetable garden, he rented a film. The last time, he’d seen one that had made him cry. He didn’t remember ever crying at the movies. In front of the television, sure, natural disasters, great tragedies had always moved him. On September 11, 2001, he’d cried thinking about the dead and their families. He’d cried thinking about the doctors waiting futilely at the hospitals for the injured. In general he felt like crying even when he saw children in war-torn countries.

But that particular film had moved him in a different way—less routine, more logical.

Viberti asked what he meant by being moved in “a more logical way.”

“I know it doesn’t make sense…”

“What film was it?”

“A film by that Spanish director,
Talk to Her
.”

“My God,” joked Viberti, who hadn’t seen it and was relying on Giulia’s opinion, “isn’t that about necrophilia?”

“No, no, not at all. It’s a love story—about an impossible love, but love nonetheless. And there’s a scene where someone sings a melancholy old song, it wouldn’t mean anything to you, but it was a song from before the war, ‘Cucurrucucú Paloma’; my father used to sing it languidly, with real soulfulness. Listening to it, the main character, Marco, starts crying, and out of sympathy, I started crying too.”

There was an awkward silence, then Viberti said, “So you watch a film and you’re moved…”

“Yes. Although watching a film by yourself makes you a little sad.”

“Why by yourself?”

“She doesn’t like them,” Mercuri said.

“She doesn’t like films?”

“She never even watches television, she says she can’t understand.”

“She’s not deaf, though.”

Mercuri chuckled. “No, she’s not deaf. She says they talk too fast … But it’s not true, you know, it’s that it just doesn’t interest her.”

What was Mercuri alluding to with that laugh? That his wife was such a simple soul she couldn’t even appreciate Italian television? Or that truly simple souls didn’t let themselves be contaminated by television? She was his wife, and it was best not to try to figure it out. He’d married her because they shared something—life in that town, the garden, the silence, the bed.

Viberti had drunk three glasses of wine; it was a gorgeous day, the food was excellent and the view fantastic. He wasn’t easily moved, no, he’d been brought up not to feel sorry for himself, but at that moment, all of a sudden, he felt a lump in his throat and had to rest his fork on the plate and turn around to face the rooftops of the town that stretched out between them and the sea, pretending to study the Saracen tower that he knew by heart, so that Mercuri wouldn’t notice what was happening to him. He pictured Cecilia sitting at the table with them. He imagined taking her there on a proper visit, to introduce her to his old friend. He wished she were there with him.

After a while Mercuri asked about Marta. Viberti would rather discuss her situation calmly over coffee, show him the tests; he didn’t want it to become just so much talk—that would make it too easy for the elderly doctor to quickly withdraw into his usual fatalistic mind-set. But Mercuri’s influence over him was so strong that Viberti always ended up smoothing the way and making things easy for him, as though for a debt incurred long before and never settled. And so, by turning the conversation toward Giulia’s hard-line approach, and jokingly using the term “aggressive care,” he ended up giving Mercuri what he wanted: the chance to decree that harassing Marta was pointless, there was nothing to be done.

Then, with a drastic though futile gesture, sacrificing the best troops to an enemy who had already won, Viberti pulled the test results out of his briefcase. Mercuri looked at them, asked a few questions. What did the doctor who’d seen her most recently say?

“The geriatrician mentioned only annual checkups, to monitor the rate of decline—for that matter, it’s not a given that it will get worse.”

They discussed the advisability of mild antidepressants, and Viberti admitted that he hadn’t understood (or hadn’t wanted to understand) whether the geriatrician was recommending them or not, since in any case it was a matter to address with the psychiatrist, and Marta wasn’t necessarily depressed.

Who said she was?

Giulia said so. Because Marta shut herself up in the house, she didn’t want to go out.

Mercuri shook his head, muttered something. Instantly his eyes were brimming with tears (he wasn’t afraid to show emotion, not him) and, smiling sadly, suddenly showing all of his eighty years, he said: “But maybe it’s not the worst ending, you know, not remembering anything anymore.” The very words Viberti had dreaded hearing from him that day.

He felt a tinge of anger toward the old man. He immediately repressed it. He had thought about it during the entire train trip and he’d said to himself: “If I prepare him well, if I back him into a corner, he can’t brush me off in five minutes.” It was important that his mentor not show indifference to their profession, that he not be reluctant to talk about new treatments, new drugs, new developments. It was sad that he didn’t care about anything anymore. Still, he cared about Marta, and as Mercuri wiped his eyes Viberti squeezed his arm, placed a hand on his cheek, uncertain whether to extend the gesture into a caress, then put away the folder with the test results.

“Every so often,” Mercuri said, “I think back to what she used to say: ‘When the end comes, abandon me on the ice pack,’ remember? It always made me laugh.”

“Yes, and you know why she said it?”

“She always lived in holy terror of Alzheimer’s.”

“But the idea of the ice pack came from that film we saw,
The Red Tent
.”

“Did I see it with you?”

*   *   *

Viberti was fourteen when his father died. The family consisted of three people, but his father worked ten hours a day, and often he didn’t return for supper or was off traveling. In the rare moments when he was at home, he was barely noticeable, always sitting in a corner of the couch reading the newspaper, his tie loosened, the cuffs of his white shirt rolled up, a cigarette slowly burning itself out in the ashtray. He wore a black Chinese cap with a silk border, because he claimed that “the tip of his head” felt cold in the house. In general, he always claimed his “extremities” felt cold: “my fingertips are cold,” “my ears are cold,” even “my chin is cold.” Seeing him from behind in the hallway, in a cloud of bluish smoke, with that skullcap of sorts, he seemed out of place, transient, as if in a waiting room.

Yet after his death, the apartment took on an air of bleakness and desolation. In the evening, at the table, Marta and Viberti found themselves caught up in a different kind of solitude, which they couldn’t get used to: they weren’t expecting anyone, no one would ever come home. At fifty, Marta was a widow with a teenage son even less talkative than his not very talkative peers. Imperturbable, inscrutable, it wasn’t clear if his father’s death grieved him, it wasn’t clear if the mild hostility he’d shown his father when he was alive had become rooted in a deeper resentment. So Marta filled the silence of those first weeks of mourning by telling him everything she knew about her husband’s colorful family, scattered throughout the world and therefore rarely if ever seen, a lengthy serial novel that included: a cousin who was a doctor in that town of concertinas and accordions; a recluse aunt who lived in the country (the only time she’d come to visit them, she’d locked the cat in a chicken coop so he wouldn’t run away and had returned three days later to find him strangled in the wire mesh, the metal links painstakingly and cleverly spread apart after a struggle lasting several hours); another aunt who had a more or less secret passion for Johnnie Walker; a great-grandfather, a trumpet player, who died of Spanish flu after playing an infected instrument; a grandmother who knew three languages but had never traveled (she carried on an uninterrupted correspondence with perfect strangers around the world for the sole purpose of practicing, and had received two marriage proposals as a result); a great-uncle who died in battle on Mount San Michele in 1915; a cousin in America who had divorced and then remarried the same man years later. Characters whom you could better imagine with animal faces, like in a fable: the grandmother a turtledove, the great-uncle a bear, the cousin a rabbit, the aunts a cat and a fox. But there was no chance of hearing the only story that would have stirred Viberti’s interest, the one about the four years his father had spent in a POW camp, in India, during the war. Marta knew almost nothing about those years because her husband had never spoken to her about it (he’d told her only that he’d suffered greatly from the cold: in India?). He hadn’t wanted to talk about it, and Viberti deluded himself in thinking that, if he hadn’t died, his father would sooner or later have told him more. Under this delusion, he believed that if they’d been adults together his father would not have been able to keep those stories from him, as if adults always told each other everything.

What he especially remembered about his mother’s stories was the tone: anxious (Marta worried that her son would forget his father too quickly) and solemn (his father’s genealogy evoked to take the place of a living father).

And yet what did Viberti remember about his father? Almost always the same four incidents:

(1) at age five, to impress him, he’d asked Marta which hand was his right one, but before he got to that famous couch, he got confused, and when he raised his left hand, saying, “This is my right hand!” his father, without looking up from the newspaper, absently and rigorously shook his head no;

(2) at age seven, one of the rare times he’d found himself alone with his father, he’d spotted a sign at an intersection that pointed to the airport (they were in the car together and heading in that direction) and became afraid his father wouldn’t have time to bring him back home, a terror of having to follow him to the ends of the earth;

(3) at age ten, passing a car parked near the house, his father had exclaimed, “Necking!” and his mother, annoyed, had shushed him;

(4) at age eleven, Stefano Mercuri had been to dinner at their house and they’d discussed politics all night (Mercuri was a member of the PCI, the Italian Communist Party, Viberti’s father was a liberal); after seeing his friend to the door, his father had returned to the table, poured himself a final glass of wine, and exclaimed: “So, in the end, we protect them, too, from their stupid ideas!”

Other memories occasionally floated to the surface, but were quickly driven back into the depths by time. Those four incidents, however, returned regularly in circumstances related to: (1) making a bad impression; (2) anxiety; (3) sex; (4) politics. Ostensibly insignificant memory talismans, worn from use but still effective.

In any case, Marta’s family stories ended with Mercuri’s arrival. He’d met them one afternoon as they were leaving a movie theater: they’d been to see
The Red Tent
. Marta had thought that a story about a dirigible at the North Pole would be action packed enough to entertain her son, who, to be sure, would never forget the film for the rest of his life. He specifically recalled the scene where one of the survivors of the disaster stripped down to his woolen underwear and slid into a crack in the ice to end it more quickly.

Marta had apparently let herself go a bit and therefore her hair “was a mess” as she put it; and yet despite that—or perhaps because of it—she was even more attractive. The boy was emaciated, as if he hadn’t eaten for weeks, hadn’t his mother noticed? Mercuri didn’t let on how worried he was and how attracted, but insisted on going home to supper with them, acting like an intrusive friend, as if he were begging them to invite him, as if he were dying of loneliness. Only too happy to have a guest, mother and son welcomed him warmly. It didn’t occur to the son that Mercuri was certainly not the type of bachelor to eat a reheated dish alone in front of the television at night; if the mother thought that, she didn’t say so to her son.