Andrea Canobbio - Three Light-Years

“What do you mean?”

“You’ve always lived in this building, haven’t you?”

“Yes, Mama, I’ve always lived here. Always,” and he starts to get up.

“Because in the end who’s really lived?” his mother says, setting the magazine down beside her on the sofa.

Viberti looks at her blankly, sits back down on the edge of the chair.

“Yes, in the end who’s really lived? Think about my grandparents, or even my parents, did they live any less because they didn’t see certain places, because they didn’t have certain experiences? I’ve always wondered, because as a young girl, you know, I was fascinated by hermits”—she gives an amused little laugh—“never going anywhere, seeing the same things each day, the same scenery, going without television,” which is turned off, Viberti notices only now; did she turn it off? Did she think the voice that was out of control was coming from the TV? Or was she aware of everything? Had she really been asleep? “By now we’re used to seeing everything like that.”

He’d like to ask her “What do you mean ‘like that’? How are we used to seeing things?” Instead he smiles and says: “I can’t picture you as a hermit. In the old photos you seemed like a girl who was full of energy, who wanted to have a good time.”

“Well, let’s not exaggerate: having a good time is a tall order. If I’d wanted that, I wouldn’t have married your father!”

They laugh. Marta is worried about the confession that came to her so impulsively. “Did I say something bad?” she asks, blushing.

She had been a beautiful girl, but maybe she didn’t know it. Or at least Viberti has always thought his mother belonged to that class of women: unaware of and indifferent to her beauty. A woman who doesn’t know how to use her beauty, who has no interest in taking advantage of it. When he was little, and his father was away from home for weeks on end, they would sometimes go out to a restaurant. When they entered the room, the child noticed the men’s glances as they turned around to admire his mother, a young woman, beautiful and vital, and he thought they were all friends of his father, inhabitants of his father’s world, a world he and his mother were excluded from, messengers who had to deliver letters, bring news.

“Did I ever tell you about the trip to Trieste? For the Giochi Littoriali, the swimming competitions. I had such fun! But I didn’t like to travel, not even then. I remember there was a border with guards, and I was scared. And later a girl I met there wrote to me and drew a big gun in her letter, because each time the starting gun went off, it scared me! How silly…”

“You’ve had a wonderful life. Do you feel like you haven’t really lived?”

“Me? I’ve lived maybe too long! Remember Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard ? When you were in high school we had a theater subscription, once a month … you were so bored!”

Yes, Viberti remembers Chekhov, he’d been struck by the fact that he was a doctor, like Mercuri. But what does Chekhov have to do with anything now? Why the hell did he pop into her head? For a moment he’d been distracted and had stopped thinking about Cecilia and Silvia and now he has no desire to think about cherries, about sakura , about Japanese cuisine.

“There was that character, a nostalgic old man who was always whining, remember?”

“No, Mama, I don’t remember him.”

“Because he hadn’t lived enough, you know? He complained that he hadn’t lived enough. And I always thought he was such an idiot!”

He doesn’t remember, he doesn’t care. He stands up and says, “Mama, are we sure you have a memory problem? It seems to me you remember everything clearly.”

Marta reaches out her arm, as if to introduce herself, extends her open hand. Viberti shakes it. He will continue shaking hands with her as long as she lives, she clinging to him, and he clinging to her, in her few remaining years, until the day comes when, seeing a close-up of the Pope on television, she’ll ask softly: “Why is he looking at me?” until the day she scratches out people’s eyes in the old family photos, until she becomes convinced that her caregivers want to kill her, until she hurls insults at him, calling him a “little toad” because she doesn’t want him to give her an injection, until she no longer gets out of bed and she widens her blue eyes without speaking, and stares into his.

* * *

Some months ago Viberti had dreamed about Mercuri uttering the word “hypocomist.” No one answered him, nothing else happened. There was that word on Mercuri’s lips, and in the dream Viberti thought it was a synonym for “anesthetist” and was put out and amazed that he hadn’t learned it or even encountered it in his twenty-five years of medicine, from university to hospital. A brief dream, just before waking up, no anxiety or distress. It consisted almost entirely of amazement, of the resentful feeling of never being able to measure up to his role, of never being able to measure up to Mercuri (the idea that the doctors of the past were less specialized, but more capable). For a while, after opening his eyes, he continued to be certain that the word had a meaning and that it was precisely the one in the dream, then he woke up completely and admitted to himself that it didn’t mean anything. It was the first time he’d dreamed about a word.

“Hypocomist” bore no resemblance whatsoever to “anesthetist”; instead it made him think of someone who was hypo-communist, “not communist enough.” Or someone who ate too little (“ Vamos a comer ,” Angélica said to Marta). It could mean that Mercuri was asking him about an anesthetist, so as not to suffer too much when his time came, or it could mean that Mercuri was criticizing himself by saying, “I wasn’t communist enough.” Both made sense but it didn’t make sense for Mercuri to be accusing him of not eating enough.

He thought about it again when he went to visit Mercuri at the coast, on the third weekend in June. He hadn’t seen him in two months, and each time before he arrived he wondered: Will I find him changed? One day I’ll suddenly find him older, and resigned to old age, acquiescent and pliable. Mercuri immediately went to take his bag from him and Viberti said, “I’ll carry it. You always want to prove you’re in better shape than I am.”

“Around here, the day you’re no longer in perfect shape they take you up the hill and leave you there to wait,” Mercuri said, smiling.

The cemetery clung to the sides of the mountain, and each time Viberti visited, the old man found a way to make that joke, alluding to a family that convinces a dying relative to start up the hill on his own two feet, “Come on, the air is better up there,” both out of laziness — so they won’t have to carry a heavy coffin on their shoulders — and to save themselves the expense of a funeral; and that , the tightfistedness of the Ligurians, was certainly the main point of Mercuri’s irony. The repetition was a message from the older man to the younger one (“I have death on my mind”), but also a sign of senility, one of the few that Mercuri let slip.

“If you ask me, you’ll make a diagnosis and go there on your own, when you decide it’s time.”

By now Mercuri no longer bothered to explain his wife’s absence during Viberti’s visits; the house was, in any case, ready to welcome twelve guests. Eating under the trellised pergola they spoke almost exclusively of recent developments regarding Marta’s dementia. Compared with last year, Mercuri’s concern revealed no emotion, it was one doctor getting another’s advice. Viberti responded point by point, reporting even the smallest detail.

Bringing the coffee to the table, Mercuri said, “Stop looking at the sea like that.”