Andrea Canobbio - Three Light-Years

His business is Silvia right now and that’s the business he has to focus on. He ran away, he made a bad impression, but it’s not serious, it can be remedied. He’ll leave the cave and go home now, and if Silvia really is camped outside his door, he’ll let her in and find a way to explain that he didn’t mean to run away, and find a way to listen to what she has to say.

Silvia must want to tell him that she found out about his relationship with Cecilia, and doesn’t understand how he could have slept with her.

That’s what made him run away, that’s what he was ashamed of.

He starts to get up then, but it occurs to him that he’d like to smoke first, he’d like to stink a little, too. It’s been twenty years since he’s smoked a cigarette and he wants to inhale and feel the effect of tobacco in his lungs again. He takes the box — Giulia’s husband won’t notice if one cigar is missing. He lights up, inhales deeply. He coughs, but he doesn’t choke. He feels his throat burning. He takes another puff. He’s never understood why people smoke. He persists, turns the cigar between his fingers, coughs, goes through the motions so that the ash drops from the tip. Halfway through he stubs it out.

From the courtyard he reenters the lobby of the building, takes the elevator. Silvia is not waiting for him on the fifth-floor landing. He’ll call her later, for one thing because the moment he steps into the house he notices that his head is spinning and that he’s beginning to feel nauseated. He feels a little idiotic. The intercom buzzes. Who could it be? He doesn’t answer. Feeling queasy, he peeks out the window and sees Silvia in front of the building. She’s still here, why doesn’t she go away? What does she want from him? A crazy lady, a maniac, why doesn’t she give up, why doesn’t she go away? Why isn’t she put off, doesn’t she understand that she should be put off? There are some patients like that, people who are unwilling to understand, who won’t resign themselves to the worst. The nausea is almost turning into an urge to vomit; how can one small cigar cause such distress? He swallows two Plasil tablets and lies facedown on the bed, monitoring his distress. The intercom buzzes again. Maybe it will buzz again and again, that woman will never get it. He spends the evening drifting from bed to couch, the TV on and off, now at the kitchen table, now pacing back and forth in the hallway like a prisoner in the rec yard. The intercom doesn’t buzz again.

* * *

He woke up in the middle of the night. The open window framed a square of vertical and diagonal lines, flickering like the screen of an old television that needs tuning. It was pouring, pounding on the rooftops, rushing through the gutters; it smelled like rain; the storm outside was torrential. The fogs of the past were gone, and now instead of just rain there were monsoons. The nausea had passed, his mouth was sour. He went into the bathroom and brushed his teeth, scrubbing furiously until his gums bled, then undressed, leaving his clothes scattered in the bathroom and hallway. In the bedroom, he put on his pajamas and started to close the window. He opened it again, and looked out at the deserted street; for a moment he thought he saw her through a watery film of rain. He decided it was a shadow, that he’d dreamed her up. Then he glimpsed her again and now he was certain he’d seen her.

She sat huddled in the recess of a small doorway across the street, facing his building. From up there it was impossible for him to tell if she was alive, if she was sleeping, if she was keeping an eye on the street in her obsessive, paranoid way, if she was a madwoman who wanted to kill him. He tried going to bed and turning off the light, as if by ignoring her he could make her disappear, but his motions lacked conviction; he knew he was bluffing. He listened to the pounding rain for another ten minutes, then got up, put on the clothes he’d just taken off, drank a glass of water, took an umbrella and the car keys, and went down to the street.

But Silvia wasn’t there — either she was no longer there or she’d never been there. He crossed the street without opening the umbrella, getting drenched even though the rain was now letting up somewhat, and took cover in the doorway where he thought he’d seen her. He crouched down and in the faint glow of a streetlamp studied that patch of sidewalk as if he might find traces of Silvia’s former presence on the stone and concrete. He sat on the step and looked around. The rain had stopped, the temperature had fallen. The facade of the building was dark and dismal, no lights in the windows, just the streetlamp casting a dim glow from below. The fifth floor was enveloped by wispy trails of mist. It looked like pieces of cloth were flying out the windows of his house, like someone was tossing out garments, rags, sheets. Like the house was reaching its arms out to the night to seek help and refuge and protection. “That’s the house I’ve lived in all my life,” he said to himself, and heard the words with some irritation, as if it were an old uncle talking, telling a family story for the hundredth time. He sat on the step awhile longer, then went back upstairs.

The house empty, lights turned on, windows open, the air smelling of rain. He put his pajamas back on, but instead of going to bed, he sat down to write a letter to Cecilia. He hadn’t written a letter to a woman in twenty years, it had never been his specialty, but the style wasn’t important; there were things to say and they should be said. In the final version he copied from the rough draft more than an hour later, he told her that she was the first and only woman he had ever truly loved, because he had never loved anyone the way he loved her, and before he met her he had never known a love so great. He got tangled up in that adjective, “great,” for two or three paragraphs, and tried to modify it; great because it was fulfilling and great because it was mature. Laughable, because seen from outside their relationship didn’t seem at all fulfilling, let alone mature. But he wasn’t talking about the duration of the relationship or the type of rapport — it was the intensity and the quality that made it feel great. And never before had Viberti imagined that he could love with that intensity and that quality. Everything he wanted was bound up in her, coincided with her, the happiness he dreamed of enjoying he dreamed of enjoying with her, the trips he dreamed of taking (the ones Marta had urged him to take) he dreamed of taking with her, the house he dreamed of having he dreamed of having with her (he did not mention a child). The tone was softened so as to make it more credible, and Viberti ended by saying that he still didn’t understand why he had fallen so deeply in love with her, what was special about her. Well, this was one more reason to spend the remaining days of his life with her, to discover the basis for that love. I never talked with anyone like I have with you. No one has ever talked to me the way you have. Maybe we haven’t been together in the traditional sense of the word, but talking to you and listening to you has been the most wonderful love story of my life. He sealed the letter in a white envelope and wrote Cecilia on it. He left it on the desk and went to the bathroom. Before going to bed he picked it up again and stared at the name in the center of the white rectangle. He underlined it with his pen.

* * *

The following afternoon, the women who looked after his mother called him because Marta was upset; she wanted to leave, she was already packing her bags and had phoned a travel agent. Talking over each other excitedly, the two Peruvians tore the phone out of each other’s hands to add further alarming details: the signora had found an old ID card belonging to her dead sister, a sister who had died young, and realized that she had never visited her grave, she was determined to set off for the cemetery. Viberti told them to give her one of the tranquilizers that were on the credenza, marked with a note written by Giulia, but he saw that they were in a panic, that for some reason they couldn’t handle the situation and needed him to come home as soon as possible.