Andrea Canobbio - Three Light-Years

“But it’s not a doctor visit, right?” she asked.

Giulia shook her head. “We just talked about this.”

“Even if it were, Mama, you’re perfect, with you we won’t make a bad impression,” Viberti said, taking her arm and squeezing it, then immediately letting go, worried that he might break a bone.

“We were taught from an early age that for a doctor’s visit…” Marta began telling them.

“But it isn’t,” Giulia interrupted her.

“It isn’t, you won’t have to undress, you won’t have to let everyone see your undies,” Viberti teased her.

“Silly, that wasn’t the reason, I’m spotless, what do you think … Where’s the entrance? Has it always been here?”

Giulia said goodbye when they reached the first corridor and was swallowed up by the crowd of patients in gowns and slippers and visitors shouting into their cell phones. Viberti led Marta, who was increasingly confused, to a side staircase past a vending machine that dispensed coffee and hot chocolate. A small elevator reserved for staff waited behind a frosted-glass door. From his coat pocket he pulled out a key that he’d had a nurse give him (he’d lost his) and inserted it into a lock that stood in place of a button.

Marta observed him: “You look very elegant, too, in that white coat.”

“Thank you, Mama.”

You look very elegant, too : she hadn’t forgotten the compliment he’d paid her earlier and wanted to return it.

Giulia had arranged everything so that they wouldn’t spend even a minute in the waiting room. As soon as they reached Geriatrics a nurse recognized Viberti and introduced herself warmly to Marta before leading her into the examining room. “Take care,” Viberti said. Marta disappeared behind the door without answering.

His phone rang immediately. It was Giulia.

“Did you see how frightened she was?”

“I saw.”

“I told you, she’s afraid to leave the house. I realized it this winter, when she insisted it was too cold to go out, and you know that’s a clear sign.”

“Maybe for an elderly person being afraid to go out is normal. If they snatch your purse and you end up on the ground…”

“Don’t be silly.”

“What is she afraid of, then?”

“Of not finding her way home!”

“Keep your voice down.”

“All right, we’ll talk about it later, but I promise you we’ll talk about it.”

“And what’s your solution?”

“She needs someone full time.”

“There’s Angélica.”

“Three full days and three mornings, but from Saturday afternoon to Monday morning Marta is alone. Not counting the time that Angélica is at your place. Couldn’t you have found another housekeeper? Did you have to take your mother’s?”

“She’s said over and over that she doesn’t want her at night.”

“You’re her son, you’re a doctor, order her to! It’s not all that hard: you say, ‘Listen, Mama, you have to have this person in your house…’”

“I’ll think about it, we’ll see how the examination goes.”

“The examination won’t tell us anything.”

“Then why are we doing it?”

“To make her see she needs help.”

As if a light had abruptly been turned off. “We’ll talk about it later,” he murmured, and hung up.

After twenty years at the hospital he still wasn’t used to people’s stares, to the effect the white coat had on nameless patients. He would have liked to hang a sign around his neck: I’M SORRY, I CAN’T HELP YOU. And he would feel the same way his whole life. I remember him nearing retirement, going around the hospital with that furtive, guilty look. In self-defense he kept his eyes lowered to the ground, specifically the bottom of the wall where the baseboard curved down and smoothly joined the floor. He thought about other things. Every now and then he got so absorbed that he walked right past the door or hallway he’d been heading toward. If you get lost in the woods, the first thing to remember is this: don’t give in to fear and panic instead of trying to find the way out, or you’ll make the situation even worse. What you should do is sit down, take a few deep breaths, and calmly attempt to mentally reconstruct the way you came, then get up and try to retrace the steps you took. Everyone leaves a trace, no one can make himself truly invisible, not even accidentally, even the prehistoric man who fell into a glacier was discovered eventually.

Cecilia hadn’t told him she had a sister, she had kept silent about the existence of a sister, she had treated him like a stranger. Not only had she kept him out of her life, not only had she kept him away from her children. He would have liked to see Mattia again; for two years he’d been wanting to see the boy again and she’d never let him see him. He would have liked to buy him another garage, at Christmas. He’d seen it in a toy store, a two-story garage with a gas pump and a lift for raising cars, that one was definitely suitable for a child her son’s age. But Cecilia had said that Mattia was too big for that kind of toy.

He went into the locker room to change before going back to get his mother and take her home.

“You see,” Marta said to him as they rode down in the elevator, “I always got a twenty-nine at the university, I was never good enough for a thirty, or maybe the professors were tougher than they are now, but here it’s an excellent mark, you know.”

“You scored a twenty-nine again on the Mini mental test? Really?”

“Does that seem so incredible to you? I’m not a moron, I just have memory issues.”

“Of course, Mama, I didn’t mean you’re a moron.”

* * *

Later he was supposed to have dinner with the whole family at Giulia’s place, but as soon as he got out of the shower he heard the doorbell ring. Through the peephole he saw a caricature of Giulia, an enormous head and an inverted cone for a body, even more irritable and mad at the world than she looked a moment later, in the flesh, once he’d opened the door.

She said she’d come up to speak with him alone and Viberti didn’t dare ask for even two minutes to get dressed; instead, he invited her into his spartan kitchen and sat down with her, his hair wet, in his bathrobe. She’d found someone to stay the night with Marta, she was Peruvian, a cousin of Angélica’s, or a friend, or niece, or goddaughter, “with these people you never know where the family begins and where it ends.” The same observation could be made about their family, but Viberti had no intention of pointing that out to her. Angélica’s cousin, Maria, could start right away, but they had to hire her at once, maybe give her an advance, not pass up the opportunity, start out with daytime assistance.

Marta was against it, she’d said it a thousand times, she didn’t want strangers in the house at night, she wouldn’t be able to sleep peacefully. One night in January, however, around three a.m., she had shown up at Giulia’s door wearing a coat with a fur collar and a woolen hat pulled down on her head, with a crocodile handbag dug out of the bottom of her closet: “I don’t know why Angélica hasn’t arrived yet, can you let her know that I had to go out on an errand?” Her clock had stopped at 9:20 the night before and not only hadn’t she noticed that the hands had not moved from that position, but she wasn’t even surprised to see that it was still pitch-dark outside. She thought it was nine in the morning. Which was more troubling: the fact that she didn’t remember being afraid to leave the house, or that she wanted to go visit her sister in the hospital, the sister who’d died ten years ago? The following evening Marta had laughed about it with Viberti. “Just think, last night I was sure your aunt Bruna was still alive. How silly.”