Andrea Canobbio - Three Light-Years

“Then you’re inviting me to dinner? When can I come?”

“Whenever you like, I’ll be waiting for you.”

“I’ll be there around eight.”

He hurried to take a shower, but when he was undressed, instead of getting under the stream of water, he ran naked into the kitchen and started pulling the ingredients for the sauce out of the fridge, setting the table with a nice white tablecloth and some elegant dishes, never used, that had been left to him after he and Giulia had divvied up the wedding gifts. The sauce was simmering, a bottle of white wine was in the refrigerator, he already had what he needed for a special salad, but there was no bread, he had to dash down and buy it. He realized that he was naked, that the French door was wide open, and glanced at the buildings across the way: no one was interested in an exhibitionist cook at that hour on a Friday in July.

He showered, changed his shirt, and ran out to buy bread. He bought several kinds of bread: whole wheat, raisin, sesame, small rolls to go with the salad. Two salads, he decided, one wouldn’t be enough: valerian lettuce with walnuts and parmesan cheese and fennel with oranges and anchovies, even though oranges weren’t in season, grapefruit might be better, where do citrus fruits come from in July? Remember the saying “You are what you eat”? That threat of sorts reminds me of another expression, “One day all this will be yours”: as a child I didn’t really understand it and thought the phrase was “One day all this will be you,” and I figured that sooner or later my father would take me aside and tell me, word by word, who I would become, as if he could know beforehand, as if his dreams could become my memories. He ran from the bakery to the fruit-and-vegetable stand and on the way he stopped to buy ice cream; Cecilia might bring something, wine or ice cream, it didn’t matter, better to have a spare in the refrigerator. When he returned home he prepared the salads and a fruit cocktail and in addition decided to make an omelet with marjoram, mint, and St. Peter’s herb. He showered again and threw on another shirt. He looked at his watch: it was just seven.

Cecilia appeared at the door at half past eight with a large bouquet of red roses. Viberti was speechless, breathless, without a vase to put the flowers in. He rummaged through the house, opening and closing cabinets, knowing full well he wouldn’t find anything appropriate. No one had ever given him flowers, he’d never bought himself any, the vases had probably ended up at Giulia’s. In the end Cecilia found an oval skillet, used for frying fish, in the pots and pans cabinet: it had been left to him, for some reason. She filled it with water and arranged the roses in it with their vermilion heads resting on the edge and the stems soaking. Back in the kitchen, Viberti didn’t ask her how she’d managed to find the cabinet with the pots and pans so quickly; he suspected it wasn’t a very intelligent question, and instead stared at the roses lying there in their voluptuous abandon, picturing Cecilia naked in his bathtub.

“Are we expecting anyone else?” she asked with a smile, pointing to all the food Viberti had laid out on the table, in addition to the pasta that he’d tossed into the boiling water as soon as he heard the intercom buzz. “Were you worried I’d starve to death?”

“I was worried, yes,” Viberti mumbled.

“Don’t tell me my sister is coming?” Cecilia added, laughing.

Viberti looked dismayed and she hugged him to cheer him up; she was only joking.

While the pasta was cooking, Cecilia asked to see the house, and the balcony overlooking the courtyards she’d heard so much about. Viberti had been hoping they’d sit down and sip the white wine that he had already poured into two glasses, but Cecilia picked hers up and went into the hallway.

The blue five-seat sofa sat in the center of the living room, facing the television. There were no armchairs, no table and chairs. There was a tall breakfront with lots of drawers, never organized, which held ten years of bills, receipts, tax returns, certificates, and other documents.

“What if you have guests, if you want someone to sit down?”

“We all face the same way, and the worst seat is the middle one.”

“And a table?”

“I eat in the kitchen.”

In the first bedroom the double bed had been left behind. One of the two nightstands was wrapped in protective padding, as if they’d decided to leave it at the last minute. A lamp and a stack of newspapers stood on its black marble top, the only part that had been unwrapped. The doors to a large, half-empty wardrobe were missing.

“She had them painted by a friend, a huge landscape with hills, trees, flowers, cars. I don’t know if I cared for it. In any case, she took them with her.”

Another room with no furniture, full of old magazines piled on the floor, against the walls. In a corner, a toy garage bought by mistake two years ago. “The children’s room.” Spoken without irony.

The study: a desk with a computer, a swivel chair, a stand with a printer, a stereo.

The bathroom, at least, didn’t lack for anything.

A room with a washing machine. Underwear hung out to dry.

Cecilia didn’t say a word, she didn’t ask why he hadn’t replaced the furniture, didn’t ask why he hadn’t bought new doors for the wardrobe, instead she held Viberti’s hand tightly throughout the tour, as if she were the one guiding him. They went out on the balcony. The balcony looked like a jungle, Cecilia said, it was crammed with plants and flowers, how did he find the time to care for them?

“I don’t, in fact, every week one of them dies, but I buy another one immediately.”

“You admit it.”

“Yes,” he laughed, “it’s a kind of terminal ward.”

“Silvia says we doctors are unbearably cynical.”

Viberti lowered his eyes. There was a silence.

“Okay, we won’t talk about her again,” Cecilia said.

A light breeze cooled the air.

“Why don’t we eat out here?”

“Out here? But what would we lean on?”

“We don’t need to lean on anything, come on. You sit here, on the stool, and I’ll take the wicker chair.”

Viberti looked at her, smiling.

“I want to sit in your chair.”

“All right. I’ll go drain the pasta.”

They ate with their plates on their laps, setting the glasses on the floor. Cecilia told him about some phone calls to the children, they were fine, they were big now and independent and they no longer needed her. She was struck by the fact that, for the first time, both of them had asked her, “And how are you, Mama?” She smiled. Then she said she didn’t like it when people said that Mattia was really okay now, she was afraid that talking about it would bring the problem on again. Then she said they would return from their summer camps tanned and in great shape and that they would spend some time with their grandmother. They were used to having everything planned so they wouldn’t get bored.

“Did you get bored?”

“As a boy? I went to the school of boredom.”

“They’re always saying, ‘What should we do now?’ Every now and then even my mother calls to ask me, ‘What should they do now?’ when the children are with her.” They laughed. Cecilia asked if he used to sit in the wicker chair and watch the courtyards when he got bored as a child.

No, Viberti said, the chair went back to high school and, especially, his university days, when he would study out on the balcony. He told her about the mnemonic system he’d used to remember the elements of a subject, assigning each to different areas of the courtyard. They talked about the various methods they’d used to memorize the more difficult subject matters; Cecilia had filled notebook after notebook with keywords. They talked about the anatomy exam, because all doctors sooner or later start talking about the anatomy exam. They talked about the mental foramen, the infraspinatous fossa, the round pronator and Penfield’s homunculus. And Viberti was able to name all the bones of the hand.