Andrea Canobbio - Three Light-Years

Finally her mother smiled and told her to quit being silly. She was smiling, she wasn’t offended.

Nevertheless she immediately resumed her plaintive litany: she’d made a mess of things, she knew it, she’d made a lot of mistakes with Silvia when she was a child, when she was a girl. “I was too strict, but I wasn’t ready for her, you spoiled me.”

Cecilia laughed, though she was beginning to get irritated: “Well now, Mama, don’t tell me it’s my fault.” Then she quickly added: “I don’t think you were too strict, far from it, you always let her have her way. Still, the truth is I don’t remember.”

And she really didn’t remember. But her tone was the same one she used with certain patients, to deny the obvious: “I don’t think you’re too fat,” as if she were trying to sell a suit.

Now she had to set them off in another direction, to prevent her mother from falling back into the litany of “Silvia single, you divorced, me a widow.” A safer course was the latest news of their relatives, old furniture in need of restoration, household chores, fatigue, low blood pressure, quick medical advice, reassurances.

“No, don’t worry about SARS. There’s no need to wear a protective mask.”

It was nice sitting on the beach and chatting with her mother, nice to feel the sun on her face and arms, unbuttoning her blouse so her neck and breasts could tan, nice to take off her shoes and socks and get her feet wet, nice that her sister wouldn’t arrive until that evening, not because she didn’t want to see her, but because in Silvia’s presence her mother became much more difficult to handle. Especially nice to see the children playing in the distance, having fun and yelling excitedly. Even nicer when they ran back to her every now and then, taking turns. But that happened rarely now. At one time, when they were little, those return visits were the most delightful part of a day at the beach. Every twenty or thirty minutes, one of them would race back and collapse on top of her, clinging to her. And she’d pretend she was tired and that they were heavy, all the while smiling as she pretended to be impatient and somewhat irritated. Now she would give anything for one of those appearances, and when it happened she had to contain her joy. They arrived and demanded attention because they were thirsty, because they were hot, because they’d been mistreated, because they had something to tell her or because, like Mattia, they had to complete a thought begun an hour earlier: “But without chairs and umbrellas there’s room for fewer people, because they’re less orderly.” Yes, his grandmother was right, he was a very intelligent child, and she adored him.

As usual, they disappeared when it was time to leave and she had to go looking for them. She couldn’t find them. All the other children had gone, where had hers ended up? She began searching near the cabanas; one row was made of stone and so hadn’t been dismantled like the wooden ones. She thought they might have gone off with her mother when she went up to the house to prepare lunch. She turned back to the water and saw them behind the rocks. She shouted to them; they didn’t hear her. So she walked over to them, approaching from behind. They hadn’t yet noticed her. Mattia was sitting cross-legged, facing the rock wall, being punished, at least that’s what it looked like. Michela was standing, looking toward the beach, keeping an eye out to make sure no one was coming. She had no idea what they were doing, if they were doing something. She called them. The girl turned to her, startled. Had she surprised them in a secret game? Mattia stood up somewhat wearily and passed his mother without taking his eyes off the rock.

* * *

Silvia arrived very late Friday night after the children were already in bed and it was too bad, her mother said, because they’d been waiting all day for her. She explained that she hadn’t been able to get away any earlier, and her mother glanced at Cecilia, who avoided meeting her eyes. They spent Saturday morning at the beach, and despite a brisk exchange of repeated provocations, Silvia and her mother did not quarrel. The immense sky and sweeping sea quelled animosity, or maybe the setting had nothing to do with it; at other times the iodine-rich air and scorching sun had fueled their arguments. Michela casually managed to arrange a picnic lunch for Saturday afternoon, taking it upon herself to invite seven children over.

They were staying in a small house divided into four apartments. Their father had bought one of the two ground-floor units with the idea of spending weekends there, though he’d rarely managed to. Together they moved two tables out into the garden and prepared plates of prosciutto sandwiches and slices of pizza and focaccia. The afternoon passed in a flash, what with parents or grandparents dropping off the children, and then parents or grandparents coming back to pick them up. Silvia and her mother were perfect at entertaining guests, and Cecilia was able to retreat to the house and almost take a real nap. She woke up after twenty minutes, but remained stretched out on the bed, staring at the white ceiling. She thought about her father.

He was a man who was always cheerful and optimistic. Why he had married her mother was a mystery, but who was she to judge other people’s marriages? Anyway, she didn’t think they’d been unhappy together, maybe they didn’t have much to say to each other, maybe they’d already said everything there was to say. For Silvia, however, the situation was intolerable. It was intolerable that a man like her father should stay with a woman like her mother. Every two or three days Silvia would call to tell her that their mother was literally trying to kill their father. She made his life impossible, she tormented him, she tortured him. But what these torments may have consisted of, aside from the fact that their mother was in general a phenomenal pain in the ass, Cecilia really couldn’t say. If they were torments, they were venial ones. But at some point something happened: her father let himself get a tumor. He let himself get it, he got it. “I told you so,” Silvia had remarked.

She lacked curiosity where her parents’ matrimonial mysteries were concerned. She was moderately more interested in another matter. Their father’s roots were in southern Italy and the family never talked about it. For one thing because there were no relatives to go and visit down there, no property. Their grandfather had been a postal worker who moved up north in the early fifties, when their father was nearly a teenager. A typical only child, idolized by his parents and eager to please them. All hopes pinned on him. And he hadn’t disappointed them. He’d become an engineer, he’d had a fine career, he’d forgotten he came from the south. There remained a trace of an accent, but you had to know about it to notice it. And his last name, Re, was a masterful camouflage, since it made him seem like he was native to his new area. He’d married a woman from the north, maybe he’d never loved her much or maybe he had quickly stopped loving her, and they’d had two daughters. And this must have seemed a perfectly executed plan to his southern parents who’d spent their lives trying to distinguish themselves from the southerners who had followed them, filling the city’s factories.

The thing about her father that she recalled with greatest pleasure was the relationship he’d had with Mattia. He’d been his chief guide, his shaman. They’d had a lot of secrets. Her father adored cartoons, he adored the boy’s games, the child sensed it.

Silvia had always been his favorite, Cecilia had never minded. She hardly ever knew what to say to him, and becoming a doctor had resolved the problem: they spoke about his health or her mother’s health. She had scarcely any memories of him from when she was a child. It seemed she’d always been with her mother, as a little girl. When she became a teenager, and Silvia was still a child, the change seemed to make her father uncomfortable, and he stopped touching her. At the time she thought it was normal. When a girl grew up and became a woman, her father had to step aside. But then Silvia, too, became a teenager and her close relationship with their father hadn’t suffered, apparently.