Andrea Canobbio - Three Light-Years

“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.

From that day on, at least three or four times a week, Mercuri would ring the doorbell around seven o’clock: not that he needed an excuse, but one night he began telling them that a patient had given him two pounds of homemade pasta; the following evening it was a salami, then a jar of mustard, even a roast chicken. It became a game, to the point that patients occasionally brought him a full bag of groceries from the supermarket. But Mercuri didn’t only stock the pantry. He cooked, and kept mother and son amused with stories about patients and inept, uninformed physicians, a whole catalog of egregious blunders that years later would in fact end up in a joke book. Month after month he was a constant presence in their lives, even on weekends, when he played tennis with Viberti, even during the holidays, when they went skiing together. The dead father became a difficult subject to deal with, and was almost completely set aside. Mercuri, unlike Viberti’s father, had a wealth of anecdotes about the war, which he’d taken part in when he was sixteen, fighting on the right side, and which he’d won (so to speak). He was a born storyteller.