Andrea Canobbio - Three Light-Years

“Well, I couldn’t very well go and put my face up against the window, I’m not a Peeping Tom. Besides, the dog couldn’t make up his mind to take a crap. But tell me, is she who I think she is?”

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.