Andrea Canobbio - Three Light-Years

She looks at him again: “What is Ceci like at work?”

“How do you mean?”

“Tense, nervous?”

“She’s a very good doctor.”

“Every so often I think it’s too stressful for her.”

Luckily the sushi arrives; Silvia appears to completely forget about her sister and begins explaining the names and characteristics of the fish, piece by piece, as if the poster hanging behind her door were there in front of her. Though Viberti doesn’t ask how she knows all these things, she tells him about a boyfriend who made her fall in love with sushi and green tea. He went to Japan a lot on business; she’s never been there, it’s too expensive, but she dreams of being able to afford it one day — though really it’s like she’s been there, like she’s visited it through her boyfriend’s stories, since he talked about it constantly, describing in detail the streets, the buildings, the parks, the shops and restaurants, especially the restaurants, the endless business lunches in Tokyo, Osaka, and Hiroshima, in restaurants that she’d be able to find with her eyes closed, almost — and in any case she has the map of Tokyo, for instance, imprinted in her brain, and she associates the areas with the photos that her boyfriend sent her and that she still uses as screen savers even now, images of neighborhoods that have become so familiar that they appear to her in her dreams, not just as exotic backdrops but as three-dimensional spaces full of life, including people talking and the noises of the city — or rather almost excluding them, because her boyfriend told her an incredible fact, that absolute silence reigns in Japan’s megalopolises, in the streets, on the subways, in the supermarkets, even the cars seem to make less noise, and the children don’t cry.

“The children never cry?” Viberti asks smiling.

“Never.”

They laugh. When she laughs, Silvia looks more like Cecilia. The two sisters are very much alike though there’s no real physical resemblance; what unites them is what Silvia can still be and what Cecilia will never again be, as if the younger one were a more carefree version of the older sister: a person who can still be happy.

Silvia stops abruptly and looks at Viberti: “I don’t believe it, I can’t believe you’ve never eaten sushi,” she says.

“It’s true.”

“I might know someone who’s never eaten pizza, but sushi, no, it’s not possible.”

Viberti smiles. He loves the hot sake, it seems like one of those things, like cider, on which it’s impossible to get drunk. “I swear.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“Take your sister,” Viberti says, “has she ever eaten sushi?”

“Of course, here, in this same restaurant. We came here a bunch of times, especially after the affair with the Japanese guy ended.”

“He was Japanese? I didn’t realize that.”

“His mother was Japanese, but he had always lived in Italy. I called him the Japanese guy. At one point he went back there.”

“And afterward, did you still feel like eating this stuff?”

“By then his memories were mine, and I didn’t want to give them back, it wasn’t right, and besides, raw fish is one of the few things that I can always digest, even at times of intense anxiety. For example, I would have starved to death when my father died, but Cecilia came here and bought sushi and brought it home to me.”

Viberti looks at her: “When did your father die?”

“Four years ago.”

“Of what?”

“A tumor.”

“A tumor?”

“Yes, why?”

Viberti takes a gulp of sake.

“It’s odd. We talked about my father, Cecilia and I. He died of a lymphogranuloma, many years ago. I don’t know. If she had mentioned her father’s illness, it would have been natural for me to tell her about my own father’s, I guess.”

“I told you, she doesn’t open up about anything , it’s awful.”

Well, maybe she’s reticent by nature, but maybe especially so with him. As if he were a stranger. But he doesn’t want Silvia to notice how his mood has changed.

“Were you very close to your father?” he asks, hoping to set off another monologue that will give him time to recover.

But Silvia just nods.

Viberti continues drinking hot sake, maybe that way he’ll manage to get a little drunk, at least. He feels a long surge of melancholy about to wash over him. All evening he’d tried to avoid it, coming up with that unlikely dinner with Cecilia’s long-winded sister, but sadness has caught up with him, it’s suddenly in front of him, around him, inside him. He sees the world as it truly is, and it’s the disorder of Silvia’s impossibly small house, the sheer volume of paper per square foot; it’s the deep, dark, cold lake in the film about reincarnation. He’s never liked lakes.

Poor Silvia starts talking again, telling him about a friend who lives in Barcelona. Behind that merciless conversational capacity, Viberti thinks, lies a heart more human than her sister’s unfathomable one.

At some point it’s clear to both of them that Viberti isn’t going to open his mouth again for the rest of the evening. Silvia says they’d better go, wait for her a moment, she’ll make a quick trip to the ladies’ room and be right back. The restaurant is still full, the Chinese cooks are cutting up the fish with the same flourish, but they seem less fascinating now that he’s been watching them for an hour. Viberti pays and goes out to the sidewalk. The evening air is not enough to restore him. He realizes that he’s had too much to drink, after all. He looks at his tennis shoes, his hairy calves, and smiles wistfully, not for the boy he was at fifteen, but for the ingenuous, enthusiastic man of a few hours ago. He has two options, to laugh or to cry. Start crying and confess to Silvia that he’s hopelessly ( hopelessly ) in love with Cecilia, tell her the whole story, disclose everything. And finally shut her up! Well, that would do it. He’d leave her speechless. He smiles. He chuckles to himself.

“So you’re not sad,” Silvia says, joining him outside. “I thought talking about my father had upset you, I’m sorry, I’m an idiot, I always notice things too late.”

Viberti shakes his head. “I drank too much,” he says, as he goes on chuckling.

Silvia smiles. “Are you drunk?” As if it were good news. “Then I’ll tell you something: when it’s time to pay the check I always get the urge to pee. By now it’s a Pavlovian reflex, you know? Because for years I used it as a trick not to pay, because I never had any money.”

“Now you do?”

“Have money? No, of course not.”

“So you didn’t want to pay. You went to the bathroom to avoid paying.”

They laugh uproariously. A Chinese man comes out of the place to see what’s going on.

And they go on like that, Viberti pretending or exaggerating his drunkenness to make Silvia laugh, Silvia pretending to believe that he’s drunk or drunker than he really is, while worrying about how he is and how he’ll make it home safe and sound. And so, when they get to her house it seems like the most natural thing in the world to both of them for Silvia to invite him to come up.

The excuse is to drink a cup of tea with cherry blossoms, sakura , to revive Viberti a little, but when they enter the small apartment Silvia says she wants to go through the whole tea ceremony with him. She boils water in the kitchenette and sets out a flower-shaped tray with a teapot and two hand-painted cups. Picking one up, Viberti recognizes Papa Smurf in his village of cheerful mushroom cottages and starts laughing again. “Now I’ll explain how it’s done,” says Silvia, taking the cup out of his hand. She spreads two rectangular straw mats between the sofa area and the work area, makes Viberti kneel down. “We’ll skip the preparation stage,” she says, “maybe another time I’ll tell you about that, too. Not that it isn’t interesting, but it’s rather long.”