Three Light-Years: A Novel Read online

  When he said, “Besides, not everyone thinks Cecilia is so great,” it occurred to Viberti that he might be jealous.

  “Who thinks she isn’t?”

  “Her colleagues say that—”

  “Who?”

  “They say she’s overly meticulous, sometimes she argues with the nurses.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “She’s obsessed with rules.”

  “But that’s good.”

  “And she gets angry because some of the other doctors’ handwriting is illegible.”

  They both laughed. “She gets angry because doctors have bad handwriting?”

  “Apparently.”

  “Well, that makes her even more likable,” Viberti said.

  Antonio looked at him, smiling. “We’re getting old.”

  “I don’t feel old.”

  “This is your first senile infatuation.”

  “I’m forty, leave me alone.”

  “Forty-three. Don’t get upset. I have some good news for you.”

  “What?”

  “She’s separated from her husband again, this time for good, they say.”

  It was the end of February; he’d known her for almost a year.

  This time he didn’t pretend he already knew it—he hadn’t known and he was too stunned to lie. He didn’t recall having noticed anything different in Cecilia’s behavior recently. She didn’t seem more worried or more relieved than usual. He was annoyed that he didn’t know, disappointed to find out from Antonio, but then again, why on earth would Cecilia have told him?

  * * *

  The next day, when he meets her at their café, at their table, he’s concocted a perfect substitute speech: plausible, urgent, and innocuous. “I have to have my mother looked at, I don’t quite trust the geriatrician I made her visit, do you know anyone else?” But seeing her there in front of him, reading anxiety and discomfort in her eyes rather than expectation and curiosity, he realizes that the woman is worried because she knows exactly why he’s asked to meet her. She’s also had time to analyze and brood after the scene in the ER, and ruling out the less likely hypotheses, has arrived at the truth. It makes no sense to back off now, he doesn’t want to look like a coward; better to appear ridiculous. Better to make her uncomfortable than be vilified. He looks at her hair, her mouth; then he lowers his eyes. Today Cecilia is wearing a purple T-shirt with a pair of blue linen trousers, and the edge of the shirt’s neckline is a little ripped.

  He says, almost in one breath: “I don’t know how I could have let things get this far, it doesn’t make sense, and it’s my fault. I thought about the fact that we’ve been seeing each other for a year and I felt so anxious. I should have told you sooner, or decided not to eat with you anymore. I don’t know, is it normal for us to have lunch together every day?”

  Cecilia shakes her head: “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Viberti sighs, starts over again: “I don’t know how it happened, but I think one of the main reasons is the respect that I have for you as a doctor. I know you don’t feel the same attraction, I would have noticed, but in the last few months you’ve become a kind of torture, so I thought that if I told you maybe I’d be able to stand it, I don’t know, maybe it’s a stupid idea, I’d like to get over it.” He immediately regrets using the word “torture,” but he didn’t prepare the little speech he’s giving now. “Well, torture is an exaggeration, sorry, I meant fixation, obsession, in a positive sense…” He’s complicating his life, making things worse. He takes a sip of water.

  He can’t help glancing at her, if only briefly. Cecilia’s lips are parted, her chin is quivering a little, she’s wide-eyed. Viberti looks away, to the half-empty room of the café. He’s not sure he saw her right, maybe she doesn’t have that look of absolute astonishment. He glances at her again. She does.

  He lied when he said he knew she didn’t feel the same attraction—he doesn’t know that and indeed continues to hope that the opposite is true. “Look, I didn’t mean to make you so uncomfortable, please don’t think I want to saddle you with any kind of responsibility. Put it this way: you’re both the illness and the doctor, tell me there’s no hope, it’s better you tell me right away.”

  Cecilia doesn’t smile and Viberti thinks they’ll never leave that café. It’s a very hot day, not a breath of air, a false spring that’s already summer, and a sense of anticipation has hung over things since early afternoon; nothing will ever be resolved with all that light.

  “Please, don’t make that face,” he smiles. “You make me feel like I’m crazy.”

  “No, I don’t think you’re crazy,” she says at last. “It’s just that…” She breaks off, opens her hands in a gesture of helplessness.

  “You don’t know what to say to me, I expected it, you’re like me, if I were in your situation I would be afraid of hurting someone and making him suffer, too, but I, well … it’s what I’m asking you, it’s better to hear it directly from you.”

  Cecilia shakes her head. “It’s my fault. I should have told you more about what was going on with me. I’ve been through some tough months, that much you know. I separated from my husband, I think this time for good. And it was very painful. Now I’m completely drained. Even if there were attraction, I wouldn’t have the strength to act on it.”

  “But there isn’t.”

  “Well, I never thought about it … I guess I knew you liked me, but these lunches were too important for me, and I didn’t want to give them up.”

  Important, why? No one has ever insisted on eating with him, not even his mother.

  “I’m very confused right now, but you’re right, I don’t want to lead you on … I really never thought of you … that way … in those terms … But I think about you a lot.”

  “Of course, I realized that … I wasn’t hoping.”

  And the fact that he wasn’t hoping seems to make Cecilia feel much better and that at least is something Viberti actually does realize. He suddenly feels empty; he has nothing more to say and would like to get up and leave.

  They’re silent for a time that, to both, seems to stretch on and on.

  “I disappointed you.”

  “No, you didn’t disappoint me. I’m disappointed, but it’s not your fault.”

  “You won’t talk to me anymore.”

  “I’ll talk to you.”

  “Will we still be friends?”

  “Of course, what do you think?”

  “You’re a special person.”

  She’s recovered, her eyes are shining, her cheeks have their color back.

  “You’re very important to me, you know?”

  “Don’t feel like you have to say these things.”

  “No, I’m serious. You’re an important friend…”

  Viberti shakes his head, but Cecilia is undeterred and continues her speech. It seems more and more like a eulogy.

  “… you have no idea how many times a day I feel like I want to talk to you, want to tell you about something; I never talked so much with anyone in my life.”

  The pain he didn’t experience when she said no, he’s experiencing now. He has to stop her before she adds something else, something irrevocable, as if “friend” weren’t enough.

  “I’m not sure I like these compliments, you’re saying I’m a good listener, a kind of confessor…”

  “That’s not all I meant, and you know it.”

  “Okay, I exaggerated.”

  “I meant you’re one of the few human beings I’ve met in this hospital.”

  Viberti finally relaxes. Yes, he likes that. The real challenge for a physician is to continue treating patients as human beings year after year and not just as cases because, you see, after a while it’s natural for everyone to say things like “tonight a bad case of pneumonia came in” or “the angina in bed 5” or “number 20 is a refractory decompensation,” they’re formulas of self-defense to depersonalize the illness, but one must defend oneself from
this self-defense. He likes being a human being.

  “The others belong to a different species. They’re seals and walruses. Hens, barnyard chickens.”

  Viberti smiles. “I sometimes feel like a dog.”

  “Why?”

  “Eager to obey, too faithful, in need of a master.”

  “Every now and then it’s okay. Every now and then it’s all right to be an animal, but not all the time.”

  “You’re a cat.”

  “God, no. One of those obnoxious ones? Then we can’t get along.”

  Now they’re bantering, complicit; he can’t let it die. “I’ll never forget your expression.”

  “When?”

  “Before. Your expression when you didn’t know what I was talking about, and then when you realized.”

  “What was my expression like?”

  “Your mouth was open.”

  “Impossible, I never have my mouth open.”

  “I swear, you were wide-eyed and gaping.”

  “Come on!”

  “You weren’t expecting it.”

  “No, I wasn’t expecting it.”

  “Not from such an important friend.”

  “Actually, I was wrong. You’re the only one. I have no other friends. Really.” She pauses. “But no, I wasn’t expecting it. When did you decide to tell me?”

  “I didn’t decide. Yesterday morning I thought, now I’ll tell her that I have to talk to her. And I told you.”

  “You wrote it to me.”

  “I wrote it to you.”

  “Why?”

  “I hadn’t yet made up my mind whether to really tell you everything.”

  “But why did you write it?”

  He shakes his head. “I don’t know.”

  “And what were you thinking of telling me?”

  “Instead of what I told you? I thought maybe I’d tell you something else. Something about my mother, maybe.”

  “When did you decide to tell me the truth?”

  “When you came in and sat down. I thought it was silly for things to keep going like this.”

  “How long has this been going on?”

  “From the beginning. More or less. Ever since I met you. But I didn’t know it. Then I had to admit it.”

  “Had to?”

  “I would rather have kept telling myself that I admired you.”

  She smiles. “You admire me?”

  “As a doctor.”

  “How do you know what kind of doctor I am?”

  “I know.”

  “But it wasn’t admiration.”

  “Not just admiration.”

  “But do you admire me or not?”

  “Very much.”

  “So then it’s been going on for about a year now.”

  “For a year.”

  “And all of a sudden you decide to tell me.”

  “I don’t know why. Last night my mother told me a crazy story. My mother is eighty-two. She probably has the beginnings of senile dementia.”

  “What are her symptoms?”

  “She doesn’t remember what she just said. She leaves stuff on the stove.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It’s hard to worry about her. Because she’s actually in very good health. Then, too, dementia is difficult to diagnose. She took the Mini mental test and scored twenty-nine out of thirty. She came out boasting, saying that even her university professors, the bastards, always gave her twenty-nine. The progression is so slow you tend to think it’s inevitable.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  “It is, but maybe we shouldn’t admit it.”

  “And the crazy story?”

  “The crazy story was by some writer or other, it was the first time she’d mentioned it to me, who knows, it may be that she actually read it, she was a big reader, although I got the impression that she was confusing it, mixing up two different stories. But the funny thing is that the main character’s name was Cecilia.”

  “Did you talk to her about me?”

  He smiles. “I don’t talk about women with my mother.”

  When they get up to leave it’s as though they’d met to celebrate a birthday; they’re sorry that the party is over, but all in all everyone’s in a good mood. Viberti pays for the two mineral waters and puts the receipt in his wallet along with the extra passport photo from when he renewed his ID card. He says goodbye to Cecilia with a handshake, smiling. The passersby seem to be smiling also, as do the faces on the billboards, and the grilles of the cars.

  I bet at home, cooking himself some pasta al ragù, he’s whistling. I bet he’s not depressed, he’s not disappointed, and he’s not embarrassed about having been rejected. I have no way of knowing that, I don’t know anything, but I’d swear that, for him, having declared his love was actually cause for euphoria; as though everything else, like experiencing it and hoping it might be returned, would follow as a result. Not least because deep down, very deep down, in the unexplored depths of his consciousness, he doesn’t for a minute believe that he’s been rejected. (Sixteen years later he would use the same blend of self-deception and premonition with me when, at the height of my adolescent rebellion, I told him I didn’t want to see him again. He went away whistling after grumbling that I couldn’t be serious, that I’d have second thoughts and that he’d always be ready to welcome me back.)

  * * *

  Between an ordinary May 8 and an equally ordinary June 3 they continued meeting at the café at lunchtime. Viberti pretended that the confession had cured him of a foolish infatuation, Cecilia seemed satisfied that he had been cured. But it didn’t add up. If they weren’t uncomfortable, why was it necessary to act like they weren’t? On some days appearing nonchalant became a contest.

  They talked about the past year as if it were in the distant past, its memory confused, an Arcadia in which they had been young and innocent. Cecilia confessed that Viberti, with his boiled vegetables, shamed her, made her feel guilty, since she, on the other hand, liked rather peculiar sandwiches, peppers and anchovies, curried chicken, smoked salmon. Once, thinking he wouldn’t be there, she’d been caught with gorgonzola and walnut. Viberti confessed the system he had engineered to increase the probability of finding her at the café, always arriving at a quarter to two. He confessed that before he met her he went to eat at twelve thirty, one at the latest. By noon he was usually terribly hungry; he would chew on a piece of gauze to get over it.

  They didn’t mention his declaration again, but it was as if his declaration enabled them to speak about new, more intimate things. Cecilia apparently felt freer to talk about what she really cared about—her children. Viberti spoke of his mother’s illness, voicing a sadness that previously he hadn’t wanted to admit he felt.

  Meeting elsewhere was out of the question. During those weeks he tried inviting Cecilia to dinner, to the movies, but she told him she couldn’t: “Maybe in five or six years,” she explained. She smiled but she wasn’t joking. All of her time was devoted to her children, and when she spoke of them, when she talked about being locked up in the house with them, she seemed to be describing the valiant resistance of a city under siege or the life of a small community quarantined by the plague.

  She said she had a strained but civil relationship with her husband, she said there were no scenes in front of the children when he came to take them for the weekend; it didn’t feel like an exchange of prisoners, no, everything was restrained and disciplined, just as the separation had been restrained and disciplined, after the initial phase. The pain shoved to the back of the closet like an unsightly dress. She said, at first, they went to the park along the river to argue. Viberti pictured them walking, free to raise their voices, hurling insults at each other, as he imagined couples did when they separated, quarreling violently. He imagined them far away from the children’s microscopic surveillance, like secret agents forced to be wary of confined spaces.

  “After the initial phase” and “at first” meant that the separation had gone
through different stages and only the first had been confrontational and violent. Viberti was too struck and confused by these confidences to wonder if they made sense. There seemed to be no motivating trigger that had prompted them, no betrayal or growing irritation, and Cecilia, on that subject, was silent. But what did he know about real separations, his hadn’t had a motivating trigger either, he hadn’t consummated, he hadn’t sullied himself with wrongs and recriminations, insults and accusations, words to regret and be ashamed of. He felt ashamed, every now and then, though he didn’t tell anyone: he didn’t remember why he had married Giulia, he didn’t remember why they’d split up.

  The motivating trigger was missing from Cecilia’s account, and Viberti had no desire to probe. All that mattered was that they had separated for good. He often lingered over another notion: replacing the husband, in the wife’s bed and in the children’s hearts; becoming a father to them. On the whole, though, since he’d never met the little girl, his fantasies revolved around Mattia. He imagined reading him books in the evening. On Sunday they would go to the stadium and he would explain the plays to him. They would bring a big notebook and sketch the actions and movements of the players on the field. Then he would feel dejected. He knew nothing about those children. He knew nothing about children, period.

  * * *

  It was difficult to picture the children, plus every time Cecilia described them she revised her description, upsetting the tentative image newly formed in Viberti’s head; she seemed to do it on purpose to derail him. The children had suffered a great deal on account of the separation and they reacted in different ways. The children had different temperaments and each had reacted in his own way, in the only way two children could react, by trying to forget. The children would never forget, it was impossible. The children had acted too much like adults, they had shown a maturity that their parents didn’t possess. The children had acted like children, they had denied and repressed so as not to suffer too much. The little girl had taken on the duty of raising her mother’s morale, the boy had become serious and conscientious, “the man of the house.” The girl was irresistibly appealing, but after wearing you out with her fussing she left you with only one wish: to strangle her. The girl was petulant and self-centered, she never stopped talking, but in the evening, at dinner, after listening to her for half an hour, pretending to be amused, a surge of tenderness would wring your heart. On the one hand the boy, silent, with no appetite, dignified and never capricious, on the other the sister, who tried so hard to submerge everything in a sea of words. On the one hand the obstinacy of the little ingrate who fought back using hunger as a weapon, on the other the mercilessness of the other little ingrate who wouldn’t forgive the mother for having made the father run off.