Andrea Canobbio - Three Light-Years

Her father had spent his free time playing cards with friends and reading science fiction novels (when her mother didn’t find something for him to do). Exposing the pretense that lay behind their parents’ marriage and verifying the extent of their unhappiness was an irrepressible passion of Silvia’s. As Cecilia saw it, her parents hadn’t been more unhappy than the average married couple of their generation. And that (taking the average into consideration) almost always ended the discussion. Being overly concerned with their parents’ past wasn’t a good sign, indeed it was bad, it was unhealthy if not downright sick.

She didn’t want to think that Mattia’s problems could have distressed her father to the point of leading him to a premature death. It hadn’t been the boy’s problems, it hadn’t been the torments inflicted by his wife, it hadn’t been the ongoing discord between Silvia and her mother. He’d died because he died.

Her father had died the same year in which Cecilia’s marriage began to fall apart. And those two events were certainly not related. But Cecilia had become accustomed to reading people’s minds at the hospital, and in her mother’s and sister’s minds she read that date, the year of her father’s death, as the origin of the misfortune that bonded them.

* * *

That evening they went into town for an ice cream; their mother wasn’t keen on the idea but Silvia had promised the children. Such a relaxed atmosphere, such carefree children, could only belong to some other person who didn’t have her past, or who perhaps had no past. She seemed to see Silvia and her mother from behind thick glass, in a soap opera like the one she used to watch fifteen years ago, every day after lunch before going back to studying. It was a story about three women; two of them didn’t get along and the third was always in the middle. Time passed slowly in soap operas but still more quickly than in real life. After ten episodes a newborn baby would be walking; you could observe half a lifetime in the blink of an eye and it always seemed to make sense. For the three women in real life, however, time was scattered and disjointed, like the figures who appeared and disappeared along the seafront promenade, ice cream in hand, moving in and out of the patches of lamplight.

(If you think of them as frames of a film, you can imagine accelerating the projection to see how it ends or continues, if it continues. And in this case it continues: the seafront promenade continues, the strolling along with their ice cream continues. At some point the film slows down and the picture freezes. There I am, striped shirt, short pants, and flip-flops. Strutting along proudly, a little anxious, licking furiously but fighting a futile battle against the strawberry ice cream that melts down the cone and gets my hand sticky. Behind me, my mother and my grandmother, supervising.)

* * *

They were leafing through the notebooks, sitting at either end of the couch with their legs tucked up beneath them. Silvia was smaller and more petite, her legs were shorter and could fold more easily, she was more comfortable in the fetal position, in a tent, in the cramped berth of a train, in a bunk bed, around a fire on the beach: more at ease on vacation. They didn’t look like two peas in a pod, but you could tell they were sisters. As a child, Cecilia used to think that Silvia was a more compact version of her, not always with affection. Or maybe a part of her, as she thought now, affectionately.

On that couch they’d argued and fought, set things straight and made up, they’d confided to each other and revealed secrets. They’d spent vital moments of their adolescence speaking in low tones so their parents, asleep or sleepless in the bedroom, wouldn’t overhear. They’d talked a lot more there than in the city, where they studied in their room or went out in the evening, rarely talking until two in the morning. A beach house smell from the couch’s upholstery rose up through the blue-and-white-striped slipcover, a musty smell of dampness and mold that had the power to make them happy. They needed to feel good, and leafing through Mattia’s and Michela’s notebooks was a way to enjoy their time together, after their walk, after putting the children and their grandmother to bed.

It wasn’t the first time they’d looked through the notebooks together; a few years ago they’d accidentally discovered how much fun it was. Silvia, too, helped the children with their homework and she was curious to read the comments the teachers had written, as if they concerned her personally. In one of Mattia’s notebooks they found a class survey of sorts that had to do with odors. Beside each odor was the name of the student who had suggested it. They laughed because a certain Tommaso had come up with “breath,” “sweat,” and “feet.” They laughed because Lisa’s only contribution had been “fish.” Alessandro had mysteriously and poetically offered “tears,” and he must have pleaded his case very well. Mattia had written “hospital” and “minestrone.”

Cecilia said she had no idea where he’d ever smelled minestrone; she never made it. So she’d asked him, in part because when it came to food she was always on the alert. And it seemed a strong odor lingered in the lobby and stairways of his father’s new house, and the two children had immediately noticed it. Luca had moved to an old building in the historic centro , where half the apartments were still in the process of being renovated. The super, according to Luca, spent her days cooking “a disgusting minestrone” and other tenants had complained about it, but the woman wouldn’t be intimidated. When the children told her about it, Cecilia contained her irritation toward Luca: What was wrong with cooking minestrone, and why associate food with negative feelings when he was well aware of his son’s history?

“Did you tell him that?” Silvia asked.

No, she hadn’t told him, she couldn’t afford to pick fights with her ex-husband over these details. But the children, yes, she’d told them: she said she found the smell of minestrone delicious, and if she didn’t make it, it was only because they were used to eating pasta. Ready-made packages didn’t appeal to her, but if they helped her with the vegetables they could make it together. So one Saturday afternoon all three of them sat down at the kitchen table and peeled, sliced, and diced string beans, zucchini, carrots, potatoes, onions, celery, white beans, peas, basil, and parsley, and had a lot of fun doing it. It had the very same odor and in the evening they’d eaten it.

“Did they like it?”

No, not too much. They told her she’d better not make it anymore.

Silvia laughed.

“Don’t laugh.”

“You shouldn’t be so touchy.”

“Tell me honestly, don’t you think it’s important? I can’t tell anymore.”

“I think it’s important for you to pay attention to food, but you shouldn’t become obsessive.”

“But if this isn’t something to obsess over, I don’t know what is.”

“Even if Mattia doesn’t like the smell of minestrone, he could still like the smell of food in general. And even if his father says the smell of minestrone is disgusting, Mattia could grow up to love minestrone.”

“You should see him holding the spoon, making the beans and carrot pieces cruise around the bowl.”

“It seems to me he’s started eating better recently.”

“Every now and then I think he could become a great chef.”

Silvia looked down at the notebook in her lap.

“Don’t treat me like there’s something wrong with me,” Cecilia said.

“I don’t think there’s something wrong with you, I was thinking about when I used to imagine what I’d be when I grew up. I would never have imagined doing the work I do, simply because I didn’t know it existed.”