Andrea Canobbio - Three Light-Years

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Stock phrases to reprimand them. Don’t make me repeat myself. But they wanted to hear her say it again, and ultimately she wanted to repeat herself — the day when all she had to do was ask or decree or forbid just once in order to be obeyed (or ignored, or obeyed and then ignored), they would be adults and the pleasure of repetition would find other outlets. Don’t make me repeat myself to the boy who should start doing his homework, Don’t make me repeat myself to the girl who should clean up her room. She thought they got along very well, they’d become friends. But putting it that way didn’t get the idea across; they had always pretty much gotten along. Now, though, they were friends in a different way. She noticed it because she felt excluded, she no longer had to mediate. Or maybe Michela had decided to change her attitude toward her brother. Because she’d grown up. Or because she was the one who gave the orders in any case. Though Cecilia didn’t actually believe it, the paranoid fear that it had been Michela who caused Mattia to stop eating continued to suggest itself. She was so afraid it would strike her unexpectedly that she led all her thoughts back to that particular thought so she could think about it and then stop thinking about it. Stop it. Now they usually stopped. But when they were younger they tested her endurance. Stop it, I said. And they persisted, looking straight at her and smiling defiantly (when they were very little) or looking sidelong at her to judge how angry she was (when they’d grown up a little). Are you going to stop it? She’d stopped buying the newspaper. The story of the child who’d died of starvation had vanished completely, relegated to general oblivion on the one hand and to her personal memory on the other.

Now, however, she searched the Internet for similar stories. There was little material on the subject, whereas murderous mothers, along with all kinds of discussions about them, abounded. Mothers in forums who wrote: “A mother who kills her own children deserves to die.” Mothers terrified of being tempted to kill their insufferable children. But the murderous mother was almost always a violent killer, it isn’t every day you come across the kind of cold-bloodedness or ignorance or stupidity that lets a child starve to death. She remembered the cat who pushed away the puniest kitten when she suckled. She found pages and pages on male hamsters who killed their young so that the females would be ready to mate immediately. They didn’t just kill them, they devoured them, leaving only the heads on the plate (so to speak). She turned off the computer, unplugging it. The air was sucked up by the dark screen, for a moment she couldn’t breathe.

Don’t make me mad . When she said it she was already pretty mad, on the way to getting good and mad. Don’t make me mad was a bad sign for the kids and worked much better than Stop it . She’d been sure she was a good mother, too permissive a mother, but one day, in third or fourth grade, Michela had come home with an essay in which she’d written: “When we’re good my mother is like a beautiful angel, but if we make her mad she swoops down on us like a crow.” Dr. Angel and Mother Crow. Swoops down on us. In the long run, the fear of being regarded as a creature with a long beak and long glossy feathers who punishes naughty children gave way to the fear of being viewed as a pure, angelic being with white, gauzy feathers, who protects and cares for good children only .

She remembered the shy internist’s dismay and rebellion, the day of the infamous declaration of love, at hearing himself described as a fine person and a good friend, a decent, amiable man. She also recalled his irritation at being called Dr. Anorexic and Mr. Bulimic. If anyone was incapable of having a split personality it was him. Instead of telling her to go to hell, he was stuck in his mute worship like a broken record. And she was in big trouble. Otherwise there’ll be trouble . There was trouble already. For a couple of months she’d been resisting the temptation to make love to him. She knew resisting was the right thing to do, she wanted to find out whether the attraction was really serious, whether it wasn’t just pent-up desire. Or rather, she thought it was pent-up desire and wanted to prove to herself that if she could just hold out, the attraction would go away. Serious trouble. The attraction wasn’t going away, and besides still wanting to make love with him (especially on sleepless nights, when the children were at their father’s and she found herself alone in the house), she felt a tightness in her chest. A tight chest wasn’t one of the known cardiological symptoms, nevertheless it existed, as the patients in the ER knew. It didn’t matter if it was a nervous contraction of the muscles at the pit of the stomach. In fact, with a tight chest you were never hungry. To bed without supper! The threat she could never use with her children.

* * *

Moments when she found herself alone in the house in the middle of the day, free because she’d finished her shift or free because she hadn’t yet started it. She’d close the door behind her and immediately be tempted to go back to bed. Instead she started straightening up. The deserted, silent house, even when it showed signs of the children’s presence, seemed like someone else’s. For some reason they had learned to put the milk back in the refrigerator. They didn’t put anything else back where it belonged, their rooms were a mess, yet they put the milk carton back. The house always needed straightening up and it was a more relaxing activity than hiding under the covers, provided that it was ultimately productive.

One morning Luca called to let her know about a business trip: three weeks in Rome and Sicily, he wouldn’t be back for the weekends.

“Almost a month away, how come?” she asked, surprised by her frightened tone, even before realizing that his departure really did frighten her.

“I know, I know, I’m sorry, if you want, when I get back I’ll take the kids two Sundays in a row, but I can’t do anything about this.”

She told him it wasn’t about the weekends, it was about the children, they would miss him.

“Well…” He seemed embarrassed. “It’s very sweet of you to tell me that, I’ll bring them back a nice gift, I’ll find a way to make them forgive me and, listen, if you need anything, there are always my parents.”

Cecilia giggled nervously and told him she hadn’t meant to be sweet, she’d only said the truth, the children adored him. They fell silent. The times when he used to insult her were so long ago. One day he’d told her that she was obviously in no position to raise children. How distant, that violence.

Then Luca suggested planning a dinner at his place before he left.

When she hung up, Cecilia thought she had every reason to be worried; she could solve the logistical problems without him, but his absence would have consequences for the children. She wondered if she was jealous: two weekends away, maybe it meant that Luca had someone else. But she decided that no, she wasn’t jealous, she never had been. Besides, if there was someone else, better that she was in another city.

They tried to make up for the distance with lengthy phone calls. During the first week Luca called every night. Michela described her days to him in detail, and because her father could never remember the previous installments, she yelled at him and made him listen to an even longer rundown of the news of the day. As she talked, she ran through her whole assortment of funny faces and expressions; listening to her, Cecilia and Mattia laughed and exchanged meaningful glances, though they’d already heard the stories. When it was his turn, Mattia answered in monosyllables. After a few days Michela completely dominated the conversation, while the boy ran off to the bathroom the moment it was time to take the phone and talk to his father. On Saturday, Luca phoned twice and the second time spoke with Michela for thirty minutes. The call took place in the kitchen, where Michela talked while looking out the glass door, one foot resting on top of the other, balancing. Seeing her come back to the living room, Cecilia assumed she was bringing the cordless phone with her to pass it to Mattia, but she had already hung up. “Papa says hello,” she told her brother. Cecilia kept silent on the couch, arms tightly folded, moving her eyes from the TV screen to the back of Mattia’s neck, as he lay motionless on the floor in front of her. She didn’t want to notice these things, but the boy’s indifference frightened her.