Andrea Canobbio - Three Light-Years

Gathering his forces to ring the bell, he stood in front of his old door, his first door, the door par excellence, the mother of all doors. And magically, without his ringing the bell, the door opened and his mother appeared in the flesh, mainly bones, with a small watering can in her hand.

“Claudio.”

“Ciao, Mama.”

Then mother and son turned their gazes to the plants that adorned the light-filled hallway and together they saw the flowerpot saucers overflowing with water, the soil moist, drenched. Marta made an annoyed gesture with her free hand: “Giulia must have watered them,” she said. Viberti nodded.

They stayed in the doorway, and he began apologizing for not having come by to see her, even though they had actually seen each other two nights before. She said nothing, prudently, because by continuing the conversation she might be forced to try to remember when she’d last seen her son.

“You haven’t come to eat, have you?” she asked in alarm.

“No, Mama, thank you, I have everything ready at home. I just wanted to say hello.”

“Everything all right at work? Are the glands se-cre-ting? Dear God, what a difficult word.”

“They’re secreting, all right!” Viberti replied, smiling.

If they went into the house, by then he’d be sitting at the kitchen table while she went out on the balcony to get rid of the watering can. Though she didn’t cook anymore since Giulia had forbidden her to use the stove, the kitchen continued to be her command center.

“Can I offer you anything?” she asked when she returned.

“No, thank you,” Viberti replied.

“Have you heard from Giulia?”

“No, not since dinner Sunday evening.”

“Did you eat at their place Sunday night?”

She’d been there, too, but Viberti never pointed out her mistakes; he thought it wouldn’t do any good, would only humiliate her. Giulia, on the other hand, thought that continually correcting her would serve to stimulate her memory. Giulia was a gastroenterologist, Viberti an internist and endocrinologist, but since he dealt almost exclusively with old people he felt he was more qualified to speak about geriatrics.

Hanging in the kitchen (on the refrigerator, usually, with the same colored magnets that held up Giulia’s notes) were recent photos of the two children that Angélica, the caregiver, had left in Peru, and Viberti made some pleasant comment about how nicely they were growing up. For Marta, those were “grandchildren,” too.

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.”