Andrea Canobbio - Three Light-Years

Bumping into her one evening, he was disturbed by the attraction he felt. Staring at the freckle-dusted triangle of skin revealed by her neckline, he realized he wanted to touch her, right then and there, in the middle of the hall. But the specter of improperly putting his hands on a near stranger made him slip away without raising his eyes (studying the floor, the way he always did). After hugging the son, imagine embarrassing himself by hugging the mother, too.

After a couple of weeks they ran into each other at a café. My father was eating a plate of boiled vegetables, sitting at a table behind a column, the place where he had lunch every day, where he could keep an eye on the entrance without being seen. She appeared all of a sudden, nearly falling over him, as if she thought the chair would be empty, and burst out laughing. Later she would confess to him that she, too, always sat at out-of-the-way tables, she, too, preferred to be out of sight, but that day my father thought she was laughing at him: she was a young woman making fun of an antisocial, somewhat awkward man hiding behind a column. A young woman, beautiful and bursting with vitality. Surprised by seeing her suddenly materialize before him, surprised to see her laugh for the first time, not out of nervousness or to be polite but heartily and impulsively, my father was finally obliged — was finally permitted — to look at her. Obliged and permitted, he did not lower his eyes for a full two minutes. When he was able to face the world and look it in the eyes, for a moment it was like a miracle: his gaze saw through people and things, and the part of him that was hardest to bear was released, and he felt lighter.

Cecilia Re is thirty-four years old and the first thing you notice about her is the wavy brown hair that she keeps short, trying to restrain it in a stunted ponytail at the nape of her neck, until after a while the wisps come loose — first the strands over her eyes, then those twined behind her ears. Her eyes are light brown and big and almost always alarmed or darkened by a frown, so that when she relaxes and lets herself go she seems to light up with joy. With certain expressions her face seems childlike: beneath the adult woman you can still see the little girl she once was. As a child she wanted to become a champion swimmer, she spent hours in the pool (hence the habit of wearing her hair short), but she left that behind fifteen years ago.

She apologized, laughing, saying that he’d startled her, she hadn’t expected that … What, what hadn’t she expected? As if my father weren’t the most predictable man in the world. Was that what she meant, she hadn’t expected that he would surprise her?

She hadn’t expected the table to be occupied. Her purse had slipped off her shoulder; she had a roasted-pepper-and-anchovy sandwich in one hand and a glass of orangeade in the other. She set the glass down on the table and adjusted the bag on her shoulder. The smile, the laugh, were disappearing — how to make them linger? How to trigger them again? My father found the right moment to get a word in between the choppy phrases and invited her to sit down.

They started out talking about the boy, who was better and getting stronger. Cecilia was happy because that morning she’d caught him eating cookies on the sly. He’d made a small slit in the package so you couldn’t tell it had been opened. He was a clever child. My father said it was nice to see her smile. “Yes,” she said, “I think things will only get better now. And I never thanked you for that evening, you were really good with—” Her voice died in her throat.

To change the subject, my father confessed that at first he thought she worked at another hospital, then he discovered that she had recently started working in the ER. Cecilia told him that she didn’t have a spare coat and occasionally used her old ones. My father knew one of the chief surgeons in the hospital where she’d done her residency; he’d been his professor twenty years earlier. They smiled, imitating some of the man’s pompous expressions; he was the first extra to appear in the film of their conversations, the first excuse to talk and be together and joke.

They discussed various places to eat during the lunch break, which was not a real break for her, because she had six-hour shifts and usually ate around two. With surprising presence of mind, my father pretended that this was his routine as well, and in a way it was true because he kept to it unfailingly for the next two years. They remarked on the outrageous parking situation around the hospital, went over the most convenient transportation options for getting to work, and described the neighborhoods where they lived.

Cecilia lived behind a large church dedicated to Our Lady, built in the late nineteenth century as an absurd replica of a famous monument of ancient Rome. The windows of her house overlooked the circular piazza in whose center the monstrosity rose. You get used to anything.

“You get used to anything, it’s true,” my father agreed.

And before he realized what he was doing, he found himself telling her, with a naturalness that was unthinkable for him, about the bizarre living situation he’d been in for the past ten years. My father was not yet my father; he was a divorced man with no children (a man who thought of himself as a man with no children, destined to remain so, to end his life without children, secretly anguished by this seemingly inevitable fate, even though he didn’t believe in fate). He lived on the fifth floor of a building that housed his elderly mother, who lived on the second floor, and his ex-wife, Giulia, who lived on the third floor with her new husband and six-year-old son. Giulia loved her mother-in-law as a daughter would, perhaps even more so, and when she separated from my father after just three years, amicably, with no regrets, in perfect friendship, she had rented an apartment in the same building. She’d gone on living there with her new husband as well. Thanks to a short-circuiting of imaginary family relationships, Giulia’s son called my father “uncle” and called my grandmother Marta, “nonna.” (I did not yet exist to challenge and reclaim that title.)

My father couldn’t complain about the situation. He’d lived in that building for forty years, as a child, a young bachelor, a husband, and a divorcé; it was his home. It’s your choice, you have to decide whether to keep it all together or divide things up, money, ID card, driver’s license, credit card, ATM card, you can carry a wallet, a planner, a briefcase and spread out the risk, keeping it all together is riskier, if you lose your wallet you lose everything, but it’s an apparent risk, because you actually pay more attention and focus your attention and vigilance on one single object. But over time he’d begun to feel uncomfortable there among them, as if he were the real intruder. “It’s become difficult to have a private life,” he said, smiling, even as he realized, in telling the story to a practical stranger, that there was nothing very funny about it.

Cecilia listened to him, serious and attentive. Her eyes were her secret weapon; with those eyes she could conquer anyone willing to let himself be conquered. Eyes that waited, watchful and concerned, never evasive, following you to a diagnosis. They went back to talking about her, about the neighborhood where she lived, along the river, which, the church notwithstanding, was a lovely area. Perhaps my father expected Cecilia to immediately tell him all about her life as he just had. But time was up and she said she had to go, she was already late. My father’s eyes, orphaned by Cecilia’s as she turned away, followed her to the doorway of the café, then slid over the empty orangeade glass, the half-eaten plate of boiled vegetables; he stared at the abandoned chair in front of him. He hadn’t felt so alone in a long time.