Andrea Canobbio - Three Light-Years

* * *

Antonio had caught them at it. Antonio unpredictably disguised as a dog owner. Summoning up all four memory talismans associated with his father: anxiety (“Cecilia might find out she’d been recognized”); bad impression (“caught going at it in the car like a python”); politics (“I missed the union meeting”); sex (“necking”).

Antonio wasn’t a dog owner for long; he managed to find a colleague, a cardiologist, who accepted the gift, since he had a house with a yard. He turned up unexpectedly one evening at Viberti’s place quite depressed, or at least depressed enough to want his friend to see. And therefore very depressed. Viberti had rented Almodóvar’s Talk to Her and had just started watching it. Antonio buzzed the intercom and invited Viberti to come and have a drink; Viberti didn’t feel like going out and invited him to come up.

Antonio came in, spirits sagging, telling him about the dog and the cardiologist. Then, with a glass of wine in hand, he began complaining about his hopeless situation, perfectly illustrated by the dog’s inevitable fate. (A) His ex-wife’s brainless parents give their grandsons a Dalmatian puppy, using their mother and father’s histrionic, stormy separation as an excuse not to deny the boys anything. (B) His ex-wife refuses to let the dog inside the house and the kids hand it over to him, promising to walk it twice a week. (C) They keep their promise for half a week and don’t take care of it on the weekends they spend with him. (D) Antonio has a very serious talk with his sons, who nod and agree that he will give it away to a colleague, because they hadn’t expected it to end any differently, because they couldn’t care less about the dog, because they’re fourteen and thirteen years old and very unfocused. So the dog becomes a symbol of what the children can no longer have, the parents’ union, the all-embracing love, the cartoon-like polka-dotted mantle that protects the family, a piece of inane rhetoric. Viberti nodded. Yes, Antonio was extremely depressed. He’d never heard him talk that way. He tried to put it in concrete terms, spelling out objective, irrefutable justifications: “How would you take care of a dog, working all day?” But that evening Antonio wasn’t listening to justifications, least of all objective, irrefutable ones.

They sat in silence, staring at the bottom of their wineglasses. Antonio asked him if he was watching a game.

Viberti said no, there were no good matches on, and besides, he’d rented a film.

“I’ll stay and watch part of it.”

“I’m not sure you’ll like it.”

“What’s it about?”

“A woman in a coma.”

“Great.”

They often watched soccer together on television. Or they watched separately, calling each other to banter about the results, or after a goal, or even after a goal that had been narrowly missed. They watched with married friends when big games were on, and took in the Tuesday or Wednesday cup matches with Antonio’s sons. They watched soccer on other evenings as well, recorded matches, minor teams from the German Bundesliga or the English Premier League or the Spanish Liga.

Viberti restarted the DVD. After a while, Antonio asked if there really wasn’t a game. Viberti said he wanted to see the film, Mercuri had recommended it to him and it would be courteous on his part to call him and tell him what he thought of it.

“Can’t you lie to him?”

They began laughing at the characters’ expressions.

Marco, a journalist, was in love with a female bullfighter, Lydia.

“So you’re separated,” said Lydia.

“I’m single,” Marco corrected her.

Maybe it wasn’t a good idea to see that particular film that night.

Lydia was gored by a bull and ended up in the hospital, in a coma.

“In your opinion,” Viberti said, “did I become a doctor so I could cure my father?”

“How do you mean?”

“Because I felt guilty for not having saved him, as if I were responsible for his death.”

“Oh,” Antonio said. “Well, even if you did kill him, we’re past the statute of limitations by now.”

He added that he was beginning to like the film.

Viberti, on the other hand, was bored. He didn’t understand what Mercuri had seen in it. Caetano Veloso crooned “Cucurrucucú Paloma” accompanied by guitar, cello, and double bass. Marco started weeping, though actually, he wept only a single tear and anyway it looked fake. Viberti pictured Mercuri crying as he watched the actor cry.

“I wept when something moved me because I couldn’t share it with her,” Marco said.

At the hospital Marco met Benigno, a nurse in love with another young woman in a coma (Alicia, a ballet student).

“Alicia and I get along better than a lot of couples,” Benigno said.

“You talk to plants, but you don’t marry them,” Marco pointed out.

Antonio laughed. “This film is pretty interesting.”

“Are you kidding?”

“I’m dead serious.”

He said that at a certain age men preferred women that way, in a coma.

Viberti felt uneasy. True, maybe it was a good film, but he wasn’t in the right mood. His discomfort grew when Benigno ended up in prison, accused of having raped Alicia, and, later, committed suicide. And when Marco realized that Alicia had come out of the coma giving birth to Benigno’s (stillborn) child, when Marco saw her, recovered, at the dance school across the street, Viberti felt the same emotion he’d experienced sitting under Mercuri’s pergola. He leaped up, ran into the kitchen, and went out on the balcony through the open French door.

When he didn’t come back, Antonio followed him, embarrassed, lingering a few feet away in the kitchen. He asked him what was going on. What was wrong? Did he feel sick?

Viberti couldn’t calm down, he couldn’t answer. He didn’t understand why Cecilia didn’t want to be with him. It seemed unbearably unfair.

It lasted a few minutes. Antonio turned halfway around, as if to leave, and stood there staring at the refrigerator. They’d known each other for thirty years, but they’d never found themselves in this kind of situation.

Viberti got the idea of using his mother as an excuse. He said it was terrible to think that a person could vanish like that, into thin air.

Antonio nodded, pretending to believe it.

But that’s what a true friend was, Viberti thought later. A true friend pretends there’s nothing wrong and believes the first excuse that pops into your head.

* * *

After Giulia left the apartment and moved to the third floor, Viberti hadn’t replaced the furniture she’d taken with her. They had divided it up as equitably as possible, joking about it: “You get the couch, I get the armchairs.” He hadn’t even shifted the remaining pieces to disguise the gaps that had been created. The furniture Giulia had chosen or drawn by lot had left behind a paler mark on the walls after its brief stay in that house. Roaming through the apartment, absently entering a room, Viberti sometimes thought he saw those pieces again. A phantom chest of drawers. The skeleton of a wardrobe. The suggestion of a painting.

On many evenings, during the months of June and July, Viberti convinced himself that what had happened in the doctors’ lounge and later in the Passat had been a mistake, as Cecilia said, and though he didn’t speak to her about the matter again, he let her know (or rather he thought he let her know) that he’d accepted the verdict, however harsh and final.

He never went straight home, and would sometimes linger in his mother’s kitchen until ten or so. Lying, he’d tell her he’d already eaten, and he’d listen to Marta’s memories as they went further and further back in time, ever more complicated and far-fetched, forgetting he was hungry until he crossed the threshold of his own apartment, where he would open the refrigerator in a rush, eat something cold, and go straight to bed. Some evenings, though, he found himself alone, and after supper he would sit out on the balcony in an old wicker chair, watching the courtyards for hours. Evenings when it had rained, evenings when it couldn’t make up its mind to rain, oppressive evenings, the sky stainless steel, heat you could cut with a knife, a fresh breeze like an unexpected gift, the light impervious.