Andrea Canobbio - Three Light-Years

Then Cecilia stared at him with a serious expression, and Viberti slid the stool away, knelt down and began kissing her. A long, passionate kiss. A few pauses to take a breath; he went on kissing her for ten minutes, even though his knees hurt.

Then she told him to sit back on the stool, she had something to tell him.

“I’m not saying it’s the reason we separated, Luca and I, but it’s something that happened, four years ago, and you should know about it.”

She told him she’d been expecting a third child, that she didn’t want it, she didn’t want another child and she didn’t want one with Luca, so she’d had an abortion. She told him in a few words and then fell silent and looked out over the rooftops of the houses across the way, toward the hill.

Viberti took her chapped, red hands, kissed them, rested his head on them like a pillow.

“What do you think of me?”

Viberti said he didn’t think anything; it must have been terrible for her, but he didn’t feel he could judge her, he didn’t know enough about it.

“You don’t think I’m a monster?”

He looked at her, confused. No, he didn’t think she was a monster.

“What if I did it to you. If I decided to abort your child.”

What troubled him the most was the way Cecilia spoke to him, with that contained anger.

“Why would you do that?”

“To hurt you.”

Viberti shook his head. For a moment he was afraid he hadn’t understood. Because in fact he hadn’t understood a thing, up until that moment. But it was possible that he had no hope of understanding, ever, not even when faced with the evidence. “Then I’d be worried about that, that you would want to hurt me. Did you want to hurt your husband? What did he do to you?”

“Nothing. Absolutely nothing.”

They remained silent. Then Cecilia added: “I didn’t love him anymore. Maybe I wanted to punish him for that.”

Viberti kissed her hands again, he told her she’d had a few difficult years, but they were behind her now and it would all be better.

“Why would it get any better?”

But the question was too complicated and maybe Cecilia regretted it as soon as she said it, and told him it didn’t matter, he didn’t have to answer. She stood up, took him by the hand, said “Let’s go in now,” and led him inside.

* * *

The next day Viberti woke up very early and found himself on the left side of the bed. He lay there watching Cecilia for half an hour; during the night she’d wrapped herself in the sheet. He, too, had felt cold and woken up a couple of times, gone to the bathroom and come back to bed with his bathrobe. His pajamas were trapped under the pillow Cecilia was using. He studied the skin of Cecilia’s shoulder and arm closely, the downy blond fuzz, the constellations of moles. All those stars. If only he’d seen some flaw in her, if only falling in love hadn’t blinded him. But maybe it wasn’t falling in love that blinded him, maybe he’d been blind since birth and Cecilia was teaching him to see. It was the second time in a couple of days that he’d had occasion to change his perspective, looking up at the balcony from the courtyard, looking at the right side of the bed from the left, and he didn’t yet know if he liked all those changes, or whether he felt threatened by them. He got up to make coffee, but as soon as he set the pot on the burner he went back to the bedroom to look at her. He didn’t want to wake her. He drank the coffee in the kitchen, getting up every so often to gaze at her. That night they’d made love in a bed, and it didn’t seem real to him yet. Their first night together. Whereas before Cecilia’s body had been revealed in partial installments, he had now seen it whole, its parts reassembled. It was a lovely body. He went back to the kitchen where the two salads, the herb omelet, and the fruit cocktail had been left overnight, untouched, like sacrificial offerings. He began cleaning up without making any noise. He knew she was there, asleep in his bed, in his house, and it was a luxury, a gift, a privilege. It was like that film with the woman in a coma, in a sense. But it was better, because Cecilia would wake up. Even though there was a chance that when she woke up she might again tell him she’d made a mistake. In fact, not just a chance, a certainty: she would tell him it was all over, yet again.

They say memory plays tricks, but memory doesn’t play tricks, it always knows what it’s doing. She remembered the moment she’d read about it in the newspaper. It happened in January after her first night on duty, back from a week’s vacation. A busy night, but without incident. She wasn’t tired despite the fact that the emergency room was full of stretchers thanks to the official start of flu season; she’d seen about forty people. In a period of uneventful calm, between six and seven, one of the paramedics had come inside bringing with him a blast of cold air, brioches, and a newspaper. She’d found the paper in front of her, and though she hardly ever read it, sitting at a desk, head propped on her hand, she started leafing through the pages as she answered questions from a colleague who was filling out the last case chart.

The headline CHILD STARVED TO DEATH was a flashing alarm, a wailing siren. She shouldn’t have paused to read the article. After a few lines, it became impossible to get it out of her mind. (Was it inevitable that she spot it? I went to see where it appeared. Bottom of the page, inconspicuous, competing with a story about a building destroyed by a gas leak. No, it wasn’t inevitable.)

Every day, from then on, she followed the story of the mother who had let her three-year-old son starve to death. At first there was only the child’s corpse at the morgue, along with a man, the mother’s partner, who had brought the child to the emergency room. The couple — the woman twenty-three years old, the man forty-five — lived in one room with two other children, without potable water or electricity. The woman was out of work and the man had a criminal record for selling heroin. Eight years before, when she was only fifteen, they’d tried to elope, but her family had opposed the marriage and kept them apart.

The third or fourth day, the results of the autopsy were released, detailing the appallingly emaciated state of the child’s body, traces of ecchymosis and probable assault. Then it came out that the other two kids living with the couple, a boy of six and a girl of five, weren’t the woman’s children, but those of the man’s former lover. Those two children were in good health (good physical health, that is). It was also discovered that though the one room lacked electricity they had access to power through a pirated connection, and that the couple had air-conditioning and satellite TV, but often no money to eat.

And finally the story of the woman and the child’s biological father was revealed. After the failed elopement, the woman had endured her patriarchal, violent family for two more years; at seventeen she fled and went into hiding in a nearby town, where she supported herself through prostitution. A client (a well-to-do businessman, married with three children) fell in love with her and for a year kept her in an apartment, promising to marry her, but then abandoned her soon after learning he’d gotten her pregnant. At nineteen she was homeless, unemployed, and expecting a child. She sought help from her old lover, who had never forgotten her and took her back. The baby was born. The mother and her lover hated him because as he grew up he looked more and more like her old client. They fed him only when the other children left something.

She would remember the details of that story forever. What did she learn from it? That you shouldn’t let children starve to death. That you shouldn’t nurture your own fears. That it’s better not to read the newspaper. That memory serves, among other things, to fill sleepless nights with troublesome thoughts. That you have to defend yourself against memory. That natural selection among memories is unpredictable. Beautiful memories survive, and they comfort and cheer us, and the reason is clear. And, of course, savage, harsh, merciless memories also survive, memories with bloodshot eyes, trained to snarl and bite (even if you try to tame them).