Andrea Canobbio - Three Light-Years

Cecilia put a hand over her mouth: “I remember! They had just released Mattia … What was I doing?”

“You were bending down to pick it up and then it dropped again.”

“And it was all muddy, it must have rained…”

“Yes, it had rained.”

“More than two years ago. And how long did you stay and watch me?”

“Until you left.”

Cecilia nodded. The courtyard was full of parked cars, but the saplings hid them and it was hard to remember exactly where the car had been parked, which way Mattia had come with his father; the leaves obstructed the view and the foliage had perhaps grown more dense. Still, in their memory they saw the same scene again, Viberti the way he had seen her, Cecilia imagining what he had seen from that angle.

After a while Viberti said, “I have to tell you something. I’m not the man you think I am. I’m a very boring, self-centered person. I’m a man who lives alone. I’ve lived alone for years and I don’t think it’s by chance. Often, when I’m alone, I don’t think about anything. Nothing comes to me and so I sit on the balcony and look out at the courtyards.”

Cecilia raised a hand to her mouth again, then moved it to cover his mouth, shook her head to make him stop. “Ssh … Don’t.”

She stroked his cheek. “You’re not self-centered, you’re not boring. Don’t say anything more.”

They stood in silence, lowering their eyes then glancing at each other briefly. Then Cecilia asked him: “Will you eat with me tomorrow?”

* * *

Ten days go by and as Viberti comes out of the hospital he sees Silvia standing near a newsstand. I’d rather not have to describe her again with that black headband that makes her hair puff out like a mushroom, but I fear I have no choice. I could assume it’s a given, I know it isn’t nice to keep repeating it. Should I be more tactful, should I have more respect and reserve, or should I be indelicate? After all, I only said it makes her head look like a mushroom (there, I said it again).

At that moment, Silvia has her back to the entrance, and she’s facing across the street, but it’s her for sure. She can’t have seen him. Without stopping to think, Viberti finds himself running down the sidewalk in the opposite direction. Taking the long way around, he finally reaches the parked Passat and sits behind the wheel, feeling ashamed at having run away like that. But he couldn’t help it, his legs started moving before he could consider whether fleeing was the most sensible thing to do. The most sensible thing now would be to go back and look for her and talk to her. He doesn’t know why he’s running away. He only knows that he doesn’t want to see her. He sits in the car, not moving, until he realizes that he’s sweating profusely; the car was in the sun all day, it’s a furnace. He opens the windows. He’s better off going home, calling her and arranging to see her. He’s better off calling her later on.

He approaches his house and as he looks for a parking space he sees her in front of his building; this time he’s certain that she, too, has spotted him. He caught her look of surprise, her face brightening as she decided to get his attention. In the rearview mirror he thinks she started to raise her arm. How did she manage to get there before him? She must have taken a taxi, but when? She must have taken a taxi because she saw him running away in front of the hospital, it’s the only explanation. How shameful. So shameful, Viberti thinks, and without even deciding that he doesn’t want to see her, he remembers a way through the courtyards that will allow him to enter the building without going through the front door. To escape again? To prove that he was already home and therefore wasn’t the one who ran away in front of the hospital, in front of his building?

He parks down the block and hastily slips into the driveway that leads to the old garage that’s been converted into a gym. For twenty yards he hurries along the glass walls in sight of people running in place on treadmills, in the cool air-conditioning. He knows a little metal door that was never locked when he was a child, there might be a padlock on it now, it might also be walled up, it must be thirty years since he’s used it. But in the wall at the end of the courtyard the magic little door appears before him as in a fairy tale, intact, still unlocked, maybe a little creaky on its rusty hinges, maybe identical to his recollection.

Sweaty and euphoric, having made it through a narrow walkway between two vine-covered, redbrick walls, he comes out in the courtyard of his building. In a second he’s in the cool shade of the stairs. He presses the elevator button and hears voices on the first or second floor. There’s a woman’s voice, then another woman’s voice with a Spanish accent, and then a third woman’s voice, which is his mother’s voice. He can’t understand what they’re saying, but it’s not hard to figure out what’s happened. Silvia buzzed his mother, the other VIBERTI on the intercom. She went up to her apartment! What does she think she’s doing? Is she planning on camping out in front of his door?

And for the third time, instead of deciding to see Silvia and invite her up to his apartment to find out why she’s looking for him, he goes back to the courtyard and cuts across it diagonally, no longer headed toward the magic door but toward a ladder leaning against the wall in the opposite corner, the ladder that he’s seen Giulia’s husband use a couple of times to climb up to the roof of the supermarket. As soon as he reaches the roof, he turns around to glance at the building’s internal facade, an instinctive gesture to make sure no one is watching him. But then his gaze lingers and focuses on his empty balcony. There, on the wicker chair, a ghost returns his look and, astonished, seems to say: You went down to the courtyard; you used to be a spectator, now you’ve become the leading man, what’s gotten into you? And you didn’t even jump off the balcony, you didn’t shatter on the brick pavement. You went down to run, leap, scale the wall, scramble up. What do you think you’re doing? He looks toward his mother’s balcony, Giulia’s balcony, but the apartments on the left side of the building don’t have a good view of this area. That’s why Giulia’s husband climbs that slightly sloping, red-tiled roof and goes back down the other side. Looking for what? The warehouse roof juts out from the flat roof of the gym and creates a space in which you can hide, a kind of small urban cave for part-time hermits.

He crouches, taking cover in the shadows; he wants to think and prepare what he’s going to say, he wants to face Silvia — but right away he starts thinking about Giulia’s husband; what does he come down there to do? It’s certainly not a comfortable place, you’re sitting on the tarred roof of an old garage that’s been converted into a gym. Viberti remembers when, perhaps thirty-five years ago, workers had laid down black rolls of tar paper, securing them with molten tar, sealing the joints and stinking up all the houses on the block with noxious fumes. How odd to now see up close the material that he often imagined stepping on; he thought it would be gummier. The warehouse wall is peeling in many places, the bricks are peeking out beneath the plaster and between the bricks there are cracks two fingers wide where a small tin of Dutch cigars and a lighter can easily be stored.

So simple, so predictable, no mystery. Giulia’s husband doesn’t come here to phone a lover in privacy or enjoy half an hour of autistic solitude. He comes to smoke a cigar on the sly, like a boy of thirteen, because Giulia has forbidden it. So simple, so ridiculous. How he manages to hide the stink afterward, that’s a different story; smoke, tar, stink, and again Viberti thinks it’s none of his business.