Andrea Canobbio - Three Light-Years

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.

They leave the doctors’ lounge. Two nurses down the hall greet them with a nod and they respond by raising the same arm, as coordinated as a pair of synchronized swimmers.

“I screwed up?” Cecilia whispers, smiling, as Viberti takes off his white coat in the locker room. Right, he actually said “I screwed up.” What was he thinking? Why not “I have an appointment” or “I don’t feel well, I’m going home”? If he really wanted to make an excuse. But why does he need to make excuses?

He kisses her again, pushing her against the metal lockers. He wants her to feel how turned on he is, but her backpack is between them. Viberti thinks her mouth is exactly the right size, that their mouths were made to fit together. She pushes him away. “Let’s go.”

They leave the hospital. They walk quickly; they’re fleeing, or chasing something, they’re late, they have to make up for lost time. They look around. They don’t run into any of their colleagues, but if they had they wouldn’t have noticed.

“My car,” he says. He points to the other side of the boulevard like a military commander; neither of them smiles at the gesture.

On the opposite sidewalk they pass by their café. “I need something to drink,” Cecilia says.

“Yes, but not here.”

They get into Viberti’s Passat, stop after a couple of blocks, check out a café from the outside, it seems too dismal, they look for another one, they find one. Viberti double-parks alongside some green garbage bins, gets out and goes around the car, and only when he’s already on the sidewalk does he realize that Cecilia hasn’t gotten out, she’s jammed in, she can’t get the door open even though she’s slamming it rather persistently against a Dumpster. He gets back in the car, shifts into reverse, makes sure the door is clear so Cecilia can get out, then moves forward again, gets out, and locks the car. During all these maneuvers neither of them comments or jokes or smiles even for a second; they’re serious and focused as if they were about to rob the café instead of getting something to drink.

This time they don’t drink mineral water. Cecilia orders a Campari and, although he doesn’t particularly like the taste of Campari, Viberti has one, too. They’re sitting at a table in the back of the room, facing the wall. Viberti, leaning forward, strokes the inside of Cecilia’s thigh as she spreads her legs and slides toward him on the chair, looking at him languidly, her eyelids half-lowered and her lips parted. She is the picture of a woman who wants to fuck, Viberti thinks, he must have seen it in some film, then immediately corrects himself: no, not a picture, it’s she herself, she’s the woman who wants to fuck, in the flesh, and it’s him she wants to fuck. Can it be? It seems so, but it’s still strange. They stammer words of little importance and almost no meaning: “How did it dawn on you,” “I don’t know what’s the matter with me,” “All of a sudden like that.”

They drink the Campari quickly — as soon as they set their glasses down on the table they pick them back up to take another sip, they toss them down in five minutes. Their thoughts are very confused, not so much about what they want but about how to get it. They get back in the car. They come out on one of the streets bordering the hospital, they end up in a traffic circle, they make two complete turns around it, with no comment, not a smile, not even when the tires screech during too sharp a turn. Like with all spare parts, it’s not worth trying too hard to save money on tires, better to replace them at regular intervals, every year and a half, every two, every three years, depending on how much you use the car; there’s nothing worse than having to change a tire yourself, and it’s impossible to know when they’re worn through, you can’t trust the tire guys, obviously, just decide for yourself how long they’ll last and then don’t worry about it. Viberti then turns onto a bridge, crosses the river, and drives into a wooded area surrounding a school. Antonio lives not too far away, the neighborhood is familiar to him, and around the corner Viberti knows a dead-end street lined with plane trees, fairly quiet and secluded, where they can talk. Where they can calmly decide where to go to do what they want to do. They should go farther away from the hospital to make sure no one sees them, but what the hell, Viberti thinks, if she’s not worried about it why should he be worried? Besides, they’re only stopping to talk, that is, essentially to decide what to do and where to go, that is, Viberti is essentially going to try to persuade Cecilia to go straight to his house to have sex, even though getting into his building without running the risk of being seen by Giulia will be a whole other story, but they’ll face one problem at a time. But as soon as the Passat is safely parked on the dead-end street, deserted at that hour as it always is, as soon as the engine is turned off, the windows lowered to let in the cool air of late afternoon, as soon as they find themselves close and alone, seemingly alone, safe from prying eyes and unwelcome encounters, Cecilia and Viberti don’t start talking.

Without a word they cling to each other and kiss each other and suck each other’s lips and bite and touch, pressing and rubbing, they undo buttons and loosen belts and slip their hands under shirts and into jeans. Viberti grabs a breast and squeezes the erect nipple between his thumb and forefinger, Cecilia pulls out his dick and whips her hand up and down, scratching his stomach with her nails, Viberti (in thirty seconds, leaning out of the driver’s seat with a contortion that he’ll look back on for months with pride and disbelief) manages to lower her jeans and panties to mid-thigh and dives in to kiss and lick the triangle of brown fluff that looks like a stylized drawing of a cunt between closed legs, the drawing of a horny teenager, but this isn’t a drawing, down here there’s a real cunt, can it be? Yes, it seems it can, and although Viberti has seen a cunt or two in his life, it’s as if he were about to see one for the first time. It’s like the mythical first time he never had because he preferred to erase the real, disappointing first time from memory, if only the damn panties would come down lower so she could open her legs, if only the legs would open and let him see and kiss and lick what he wants to see and kiss and lick, if only she would slide down on the seat and raise her legs on the dashboard, if only they were in a bed instead of in a car, but suddenly Cecilia pushes him off and screams loudly, loudly enough to be heard at the hospital emergency room: “Stop!”