Andrea Canobbio - Three Light-Years

Before he could think twice about it, or at least before he could think more clearly about it — and imagine how the call might go — he dialed the cell phone number that Silvia had included in her e-mail and a moment later, unprepared and regretful, he was listening to an account of the extraordinarily bizarre circumstances in which the book, hidden in the recesses of her mother’s attic, had turned up while Silvia was looking for a volume she needed for work, the very day after their meeting. “So it was fate.” Claudio said again that she had been very kind to write to him, that the book sounded interesting though he was very busy with work just then and didn’t have time to read, maybe as summer reading, who knows, he might use it to avoid overeating while on vacation.

“I always lose weight on vacation,” she interrupted him, “how can you gain weight on vacation?”

He said he didn’t know, maybe he ate more, maybe he ate things that were fattening.

“Like what?”

“I eat a lot of pasta.”

“Yes, it’s true, on vacation there’s always someone who knows how to prepare a special sauce.”

Viberti said that even without special sauces pasta was the fastest thing to cook.

“One time I ate pasta without sauce. Awful. What about desserts? It’s desserts that are fattening.”

“I don’t eat many desserts.”

“You don’t eat desserts on vacation?”

“I don’t know, I don’t think so.”

He began to feel the weight of that idiotic conversation; their first interaction had been fun, but he shouldn’t take a chance by repeating it. A second time would turn Cecilia’s eccentric sister into a loquacious babbler.

Silvia seemed to sense his impatience and said she wasn’t using the book in any case, she would lend it to him or maybe give it to him, would he rather have Cecilia bring it to him at the hospital or did he want to stop by and pick it up? Come to think of it, there was no need for them to agree on a time, she could leave it in her mailbox, it was a paperback, small as a prayer book, the mailbox was big enough to hold it and it was always unlocked, so even if she wasn’t home Viberti could pick it up at any time, or even if she was home and he was in a hurry and had left his car double-parked, he could dash in quickly and grab the book from the mailbox, any day that week or the next, she would put it in the mailbox the next morning, because she wasn’t planning to go out that night.

“Yes,” Viberti said, “let’s do that.”

Maybe it was impossible to reach some baseline of clarity with that woman, who was vague in a way that was opposite yet complementary to her sister. Cecilia was more reticent than vague. But, all in all, in the end the effect was the same.

“Which?” she asked, not letting it go.

“I’ll come and pick it up in the next few days, where do you live?”

And so Viberti discovered that Silvia lived in an area north of the city center that wasn’t more than half an hour on foot from his neighborhood, an area he was familiar with because Stefano Mercuri had lived there for forty years before finally moving to the coast. A half hour’s walk when he was in his twenties. Viberti often met Mercuri at his house and from there they went to the tennis courts at a nearby club together. He would leave home in shorts and a T-shirt, his tennis shoes caked with red clay, the racket slung over his shoulder like a rifle.

“I know the area well, a family friend used to live there, it’s not far from my house,” he said.

They talked some more about the two adjoining neighborhoods. Silvia also had a friend who lived in Viberti’s area; she, too, was amazed at the coincidence and said so two or three times, until Viberti was certain that there was really nothing extraordinary about it, it wasn’t a sign, it meant nothing.

But the minute he hung up he genuinely dreaded the thought of the lonely night that lay ahead of him; he thought about the mild evening and the nice fresh air, he thought about the walk he used to take twenty years ago, proud to have people look at him, and also a bit worried that they might stop him and steal his racket or shoes (because in those years thefts of motorbikes and jackets and wallets were common). Now no one would notice a guy walking down the street in tennis clothes anymore, but at one time it had been different, in fact, his mother always used to say to him: “Are you going around dressed like that? Aren’t you ashamed?” It didn’t sound like a reproach, she was honestly surprised that her son wasn’t ashamed to go around in shorts (her son was ashamed of the fact that tennis wasn’t a sport of the Left since he’d decided to be a leftist like Mercuri, who on the other hand didn’t think twice about playing tennis).

He had everything he needed for dinner; he didn’t have to go out. He didn’t feel like cooking, however, and sitting alone at the table, and spending the evening on the balcony watching the courtyards until it got dark and then trying to find some game on television. He put on his tennis shoes, a green Lacoste polo shirt, and a pair of blue shorts. They weren’t as short as those he used to go out in when he was sixteen, no one wore those anymore. He took his keys, wallet, and phone and squeezed them uncomfortably into the less-than-roomy pockets. He went out hoping not to run into Giulia or his mother or one of her helpers on the stairs. The late-afternoon air was fresh and the temperature mild — things weren’t covered with a gray patina after all but seemed mellow and inviting instead, edges softened and lines blurred, as if everything were clothed in velvet or terry cloth, or a special rubber that would cushion the day’s falls.

Leaving the house with his shoes caked with red clay put him in a good mood. Not only that, he felt like laughing; he would have liked to laugh with Cecilia, dragging her along on that nostalgic stroll, happy together, down the crowded streets, then under the trees lining the boulevards, around the piazza with the equestrian statue, once streaked with bird droppings and now black and shiny, and then under more trees, dense with foliage and tapered clusters of white flowers, not yet weary of being so laden. March-April: they put out leaves; April-May: they put out more leaves; May-June, they put out too many leaves, or maybe the ones they put out got bigger, and you could tell they couldn’t handle it anymore, they went from florid to obese in just a few days. Right now, though, the trees weren’t yet corpulent, now, at the end of May, they were in full bloom, tall, sound and vigorous, some heavier, others more slender, and walking beneath their still young canopies, through clouds of downy pollen wafting in the air, Viberti reached Mercuri’s old neighborhood.

He turned onto a street where there’d been an old movie theater, now demolished, where he’d seen many films with his friend: on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, on rainy days or after playing tennis, agreeing to take a chance, as one normally did then, without discussing what they were going to see, because they weren’t actually going to see that movie , but whatever film happened to be playing in that theater . Viberti couldn’t think about that theater without remembering a movie rated unsuitable for those fourteen and under, his first R-rated film (and he was fifteen at the time). Mercuri hadn’t realized it was R-rated, he just took it for granted that they only showed films for everyone there, because that’s how it had always been. And he thought it was a mystery, “I thought it was an Agatha Christie — type mystery,” he later explained to Marta. “You seem upset, was there something upsetting?” his mother had asked him. Viberti replied that, yes, the part about reincarnation had scared him a little, but then he realized it was all a dream, and Mercuri had confirmed it. What had disturbed him (though he hadn’t told Marta) was the reason the film had been rated R: some rather explicit sex scenes (or so they’d seemed to him). He’d never seen a man and a woman making love, though even in the film you didn’t see their genitals, just two naked lovers embracing and moaning and panting like animals. Viberti was almost more embarrassed by Mercuri’s embarrassment, which he could easily sense from the man’s nervous fidgeting in the seat beside him. Emerging into the afternoon light, they hadn’t mentioned those scenes. Mercuri shook his head and repeated, mortified: “What a terrible movie. I thought it was a mystery because it’s called The Mystery of …”