Andrea Canobbio - Three Light-Years

Viberti smiled. “How was I looking at it?”

“Ah well, I wish I were still your age.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“When it comes to women, I would. That’s the only thing.”

“Was I thinking about a woman?”

“Two, at least.”

He was irritated that the old man had guessed the truth with a simple remark. In the last ten days Viberti hadn’t seen or heard from either Cecilia or Silvia. Cecilia didn’t answer the phone, she no longer showed up at their usual café. He didn’t have the courage to go and look for her in the ER. Maybe he’d come to see Mercuri to borrow some courage from him. But he would never talk to him about his romantic affairs, and he thought he knew why.

He didn’t want to see Silvia again. He wished it had never happened. In the past few months he’d convinced himself that he was no longer in love with Cecilia and now that he knew he still was, that he’d never stopped being in love with her, he was bewildered. How could he have fooled himself like that? Suddenly he seemed to remember exactly how he’d felt, at sixteen or twenty, when falling in love meant complete, unconditional surrender. Thinking constantly and exclusively about a person, feeling that that person opened the door onto a new season, gave birth to a new life.

Mercuri went to take a nap and Viberti stretched out on the iron bed in the guest room and stared at the white ceiling. He didn’t think he would fall asleep, but the exhaustion that had been building up weighed on his eyes like a firm, gentle hand. He sank deeper and deeper into sleep and awoke an hour later, disoriented and afraid of falling. He felt along the edges of the bed with his hands to make sure he wasn’t in any danger. At what age did you learn not to fall out of bed anymore? It didn’t mean you couldn’t lose that skill when you got old. Old people were always falling out of bed in the hospital; a sense of balance was merely part of a transitional phase.

Absurd thoughts; he never slept in the afternoon. When Mercuri came to call him for their usual walk to the vegetable garden, he was ready to go out and stretch his legs, get good and tired, be exhausted by nightfall. It took more than an hour’s walk inland to get to San Giorgio, twelve uninhabited stone houses where generations of Ligurian farmers had lived for centuries. The gardens were divided by dry-stone walls and they were all cultivated, all perfectly cared for. Voices could be heard from time to time; a head of white hair would peep out from the rows of tomatoes and an arm would pop up to wave hello. It looked like ghosts were tending the land.

“Have you ever stayed and slept out here?”

“Are you crazy?”

There was a green wooden chair in front of the toolshed (inside was a cot, in case anyone needed a nap), and Viberti usually sat there, as though outside a café, and spoke with Mercuri, who immediately disappeared among the plants. He talked, and the old man mumbled confused, clipped phrases, partly because he was distracted by his work, partly because he was out of breath from the exertion. Would Viberti be able to carry him back down if he collapsed? But Mercuri didn’t collapse.

Viberti, however, got bored after ten or twenty minutes and announced he was going for a walk. He continued climbing up the mountain until his legs hurt. Then he stopped, sat down on the rocks along the trail, amid the oaks and chestnut trees, and tried to empty his mind. Black or reddish rocks, natural steps or shaped over hundreds of years, polished and carved by footsteps.

Suddenly he remembered an incident or a conversation that he’d meant to tell Mercuri and returned to the garden, bounding down the slope. There was a young boy in his building, fourteen or fifteen years old, who always wore a belt with the words MANY ENEMIES, MUCH HONOR and the colors of a soccer team. The boy might not know that the phrase was Mussolini’s, but what about his parents: How could his parents let him wear that? At the end of the story, Mercuri raised his sweaty forehead from the row of tomatoes he was tying up, and said: “They must be Fascists.” As if it didn’t worry him that there were still Fascists around.

“They’re not Fascists, and that’s worse.”

Compared to Mercuri he felt like a hypocomist — confused, inept and superficial — but Mercuri was more of a hypocomist than he was. Did he have some justification that Viberti wasn’t entitled to? He was no longer able to engage Mercuri in discussion, and he felt he was to blame for that, too.

It turned out that Mercuri had never been a Communist. Viberti told him about an area where shopping centers, multiplexes, and university buildings had replaced the old abandoned industrial plants. In the sixties Mercuri had worked in a tire factory and continued to talk about how gloomy and dismal those places had been back then.

“But you did it because you were passionate about it, didn’t you?”

“A doctor in a factory because he’s passionate about it? Not likely, I’d say.”

“You told me it was difficult to give it up, in the end there was a feeling of great change in the air.”

“A great disaster.”

“Yes, but exciting.”

“Maybe. An office was better, though.”

“An office?”

“I left so I could open an office and set up a private practice.”

“You told me they were making life impossible for you because you were a leftist, they accused you of covering for the habitual absentees.”

“Could be. But I left to open an office.” He smiled. “I probably told you they fired me so I could brag about being persecuted by the bosses.”

That summer afternoon, sitting on the chair in the garden, watching the old man hold up miraculous specimens of various kinds of vegetables as if he were trying to sell them to him, Viberti thought that you had to be Mercuri to grow old like Mercuri and that he himself would have preferred a life like that.

* * *

That Monday, he sat down on a bench not far from the ER, like a patient waiting for a doctor. Cecilia would pass by, she couldn’t help but come that way and all he needed were a few seconds to let her know that nothing had changed, that they should resume their long, interrupted conversation. For a while all he saw were colleagues who recognized him and asked him, smiling, what he was doing sitting on that bench. He replied that he was waiting for Cecilia. A cardiologist pointed to him and said, “You’re waiting for Cecilia!” without even stopping. Because everyone knew they were friends. And there was no need to hide anything, there was nothing to hide anymore. He wasn’t completely at ease, sitting on the bench, for various reasons — people expected a doctor to always be on his feet, always on the run. To avoid their stares he took off his white coat, folded it, and set it beside him on the bench. He wasn’t really uncomfortable, he knew that everything would be fine as soon as the doctor he was waiting for appeared and examined him and reassured him by saying: “You’re in excellent health.”

And at the end of her shift Cecilia appeared outside the doors of the emergency room. She saw him, waved and smiled, forlorn and hurt, but not hostile, not guarded. She went over to him, said hello, and Viberti asked if he could walk her to the locker room. “All right, walk with me,” she said. They went up two flights of stairs in silence and in silence walked down a hallway. Then Viberti asked her how the boy was and Cecilia said he was fine.

“I really enjoyed seeing him again, I didn’t think he’d remember me.”

Cecilia smiled. They stopped outside the locker room door, in front of the window from which Viberti had watched her, two years ago.

“Once I saw you from here, down there in the parking lot, the car key kept slipping out of your hand.”