Andrea Canobbio - Three Light-Years

So maybe she would speak to him and tell him that he was wasting his time, that she was still getting over the divorce and too busy with the children to get involved in a relationship, that even if she could, it didn’t necessarily mean she wanted to.

It happened yesterday, on one of the hottest days of the year. An anonymous caller alerted the volunteers of ENPA, the National Board for Animal Protection, who immediately went to the scene and called the fire department .

She’d tell him that she was fond of him, but nothing more. She had to have the courage to give him up, not mislead him into thinking that something might happen in the future. After the declaration she’d been scared, because she didn’t want to give up their lunches, but now she had to do it quickly.

Mattia dashed off the correct order of the segments, 1-6-2-4-3-5, and started closing his notebook.

Cecilia insisted on checking, and it was right.

She told him he’d done well and quickly, too. The child looked at her then shook his head, dismissing the compliment: “It was a breeze, Mama.”

* * *

She wanted to talk to him, but she didn’t have the nerve. The next day she saw him at lunch and they spoke for an hour about the hospital administrator’s absurd, dangerous, unconstitutional initiatives, the chief surgeon’s stupidity, and a patient with malaria, the first of her career. She didn’t feel guilty and didn’t think she was leading him on. Claudio Viberti was not an inept bumbler, he was a forty-year-old doctor, in love with her, true, but old enough to make his own decisions without being led on a leash.

One afternoon, however, while she was trying to remember where she had parked her car, she saw him turn a corner and walk down the other side of the street. He hadn’t noticed her, and his curved back and hunched shoulders, the downcast eyes staring at the sidewalk, made her feel dejected again, as if his sadness were her fault.

She didn’t mean to spy, but her eyes couldn’t help following him. He was headed to a café that was not their usual one. She ran after him and caught up with him inside. She teased him a little for betraying their table so lightly, he accused her good-naturedly of having followed him. It occurred to her to ask him about his father; she’d thought about it one night, tracing back a thread of associations. It had started with the words of a patient who, shaking his head, had said that “to be a doctor you have to really be cut out for it.” Being cut out made her think of being scarred, and looking back, she hadn’t been able to find any suitable traumas in the first eighteen years of her life. She kept thinking she’d fallen into medicine by accident, yet the profession captivated her. Yes, she was cut out for the job, but maybe she was well suited for any job in which she had to constantly prove she was the best in the class and win the professors’ praise. The shy internist, on the other hand, had compelling reasons: a father who’d died of a malignant lymphogranuloma when he was a boy.

Viberti didn’t buy the explanation, and he seemed quite embarrassed to have to disappoint and contradict her. But the explanation he gave was exactly the same, though in disguise: there was a father figure involved, a well-known doctor (Cecilia had seen his name in a journal) who’d taken his father’s place, and who had inspired him. She thought of pointing out that the two interpretations were perfectly compatible, but she was afraid to stick her nose into matters that didn’t concern her. She was tempted to tell him about her own father’s illness and death, although that certainly didn’t explain anything — she’d actually already gotten her residency — so she dropped it. As soon as they parted, however, she felt a stab of longing in her chest, a feeling she’d never felt for him and that she hadn’t felt in a long time for any man, except her son. It was the wrench in her heart she felt in the morning when she watched Mattia go into school. She wanted to take Viberti by the hand and walk with him through his day. Maybe she wanted to hold him, too. For the first time since she’d known him, she thought she should invite him home some evening, let him see Mattia again; the boy might hardly remember him, but who knows.

* * *

The next night she began thinking about the shy internist and for four nights her sleepless hours were filled by images of sisterly embraces, innocent walks hand in hand, films watched together on an imaginary couch, her head resting on his shoulder. So it was a great surprise to her when, arriving at the café on Monday and finding Viberti already sitting there waiting for her — his skin sunburned, his hair a little disheveled, his white shirtsleeves rolled up — she realized she was actually attracted to the man, wanted to put her arms around him and kiss him and probably make love to him. She ate almost nothing while he told her about his weekend with the elderly Mercuri, about a walk in the countryside, amid the vegetable gardens, about a world in which you felt strange and far away from everything. She felt strange and too close to him, after a quarter of an hour she told him she had to go. She was worried she had bungled something in the ER, she wanted to go back and check.

Viberti suggested she call, and in fact it would have been the most sensible thing to do.

“I’d rather go see,” she said briefly, already on her feet.

“You shouldn’t take it so seriously,” Viberti said.

And how! Of course I should! she thought coming out of the café. She was going down the ambulance ramp by the time she remembered she didn’t really need to go back to the ER. Was she hoping someone would keep her there for another six hours? But if she hadn’t bungled anything, why had she gone back? She pretended she’d forgotten her cell phone, though it was safely in her handbag, and as she searched around, as a colleague helped her look for it, she imagined it ringing and making her look like a fool. So she fled from the ER, too, and as soon as she got outside she called her sister and asked her to go pick up Mattia and bring him to his grandmother’s, she had an emergency at the hospital. A specialist in emergency medicine, a specialist in emergencies, she didn’t want her children to see her in that state.

At that hour of the afternoon, in the park along the river, you met mothers out jogging with high-tech, three-wheeled strollers that in her day hadn’t existed. Not that she’d ever had time to go jogging with the stroller, she’d had to study. There were children two or three years old convinced they were in full control of their tricycles, actually guided by nannies through rear handlebars as long as exhaust pipes. You met elderly retirees who looked bewildered and men of various ages who sprang out of the bushes like the wolf in the fairy tale. You met dogs merrily running around and panting owners trying to catch them.

The trees bursting with leaves seemed immense, and she stopped and threw her head back to see how tall they were — how come she’d never noticed? How come she’d never noticed the heightened rustle of leaves stirred by a light breeze? She perceived everything more intensely, saw the colors as brighter and more brilliant, and in the park’s silence the slightest sound seemed to call to her. She saw the streetlamps stretching ahead of her and kept on walking as though she’d decided to return home on foot and wouldn’t sooner or later have to go back and retrieve her car. She walked for half an hour and sat down on a bench, she was tired and wanted to sit awhile. But a couple of old men began loitering nearby. Unless they’d figured out she was a doctor and wanted to ask her advice about their prostatectomy?

She walked back toward the hospital exhausted by the heat and by a sense of futility; she’d wasted two hours and also wasted her sister’s time, and Silvia would probably have to work until three in the morning to make up for it. But it was too late now to call her and change the plan. She went into the supermarket across from the hospital even though she had no urgent need to do any shopping; she loaded a cart to give some meaning to the day. Coffee was on sale, buy two, get a third one free. There were egg noodles at home and though it was the children’s favorite pasta, they weren’t about to run out. The tomatoes didn’t look particularly good, but she took a pound just the same. Aluminum foil would always come in handy.