Andrea Canobbio - Three Light-Years

They emerged from the woods and came to the lodge, just below the top of the hill. The kids’ bags were already waiting in the yard, but the children barely greeted them; they went on playing, their attention elsewhere, as if they were staying at camp for another two months. They’d made a whole bunch of projects, displayed on the porch in front of the main building: plaster casts of leaves, wooden slingshots, antistress balls filled with flour.

It took half an hour to get Mattia away from his remaining companions and persuade him to leave. After the first sharp bend on the way down he let her hug and kiss him and started talking.

He was proud that he hadn’t been afraid during the night hike in the woods this time, not at all.

“Of course you’re not afraid anymore, you’re ten years old now,” Cecilia said.

She waved to the infant’s parents, who had picked up their other child and were driving off. She stopped next to the car to look for the keys and as she rummaged through the backpack she thought of Silvia, imagining what Viberti might have left there, and she felt a chill.

But it was only for an instant. She opened the door for the child, kissed him again, ignoring his protests, and said: “Now tell me everything from the beginning.”

Memory is a room that’s jam-packed. Four years ago but it seems like ten, her niece’s First Communion at Cecilia’s house, her father dead for three months; she’d lost four pounds, her mother had quickly assumed the widow’s role, in a sense she’d been a widow for years, and this should be probed and exposed, but no, it remains inevitably mysterious (how her father felt about her mother, how her mother felt about her father, what went on in bed, as long as they shared a bed, etc.). That day, the three women in the family, like fragments that will never again form a coherent whole, are making their first public appearance since the funeral, and it is Silvia’s personal opinion that they should avoid seeming unnecessarily grief-stricken, the manifestation of extreme, prolonged sorrow is ridiculous, she pointed this out to her mother, who got offended and nearly started crying. She didn’t press the issue, she stayed away from her mother so she wouldn’t spoil the party for Cecilia. But what could spoil the party for her sister? With broad, resounding steps, Cecilia strides down the hallway between the kitchen and the living room carrying bowls of potato salad, tuna and prosciutto mousse, minicutlets, caprese salad, gnocchi alla romana, lasagna, enough food for a legion of relatives, looking like a person possessed, a person determined to get through it at all costs. Sometimes, often, her sister frightens her: she could run over anyone in her way.

So then, memory is a living room flooded with light and full of smiling faces, mouths all talking at once, and she and Cecilia and their mother, assisted by an occasional woman from Luca’s family, see to the food, while Luca uncorks bottles of wine for the adults and pours sugary drinks into colorful plastic cups for the children. Her sister doesn’t simply walk down the hallway, she advances with a quick, vibrant gait; her mother has one shoulder lower than the other as if she were trying to shrink and disappear, her head tilted like the pointer on a scale to indicate to everyone the weight of her grief, and she actually looks like a servant, a maid who doesn’t want to be noticed. Silvia has survived her father’s death and she feels like standing on a chair and saying to everyone with great dignity: “Your attention, please: I wanted to let you know that I’m here with you thanks to the good heart of my sister who fed me for four weeks, otherwise I would have starved to death. I came through it, though, and now I’m stronger.”

She’s not so sure that’s true. For a few days now her hands have been trembling, maybe she has a degenerative disease. But who cares, she’s the black sheep of the family. Unless even the likelihood of being thought the black sheep is exaggerated. For instance, she always did well in school. Let’s just say she’s not as perfect as Cecilia, period. On the other hand, who’d want to be as perfect as Cecilia?

Memory is all those eyes that don’t see her, and if they do look at her, before really even seeing her they judge her through the lens of sincere compassion or distrust or indifference. Then all of a sudden a pair of eyes, Luca’s eyes, stare at her in a way they never have before, and because they’re looking for the black sheep in her, because they recognize her fragility and instability, and think they can find understanding and counsel, they lock on to hers for the first time in many years, maybe ever. Luca looks at her in that new, frightened way, and as she places a tray of minipizzas on the table, already half empty after the children rushed her in the hallway, he approaches and whispers, “I have to talk to you,” and his eyes are those of a desperate man, a man who is asking for help and who can’t be Luca. Eyes like that? They’re not like him. So Silvia smiles incredulously. Asking her for help? It doesn’t make sense. “I need to talk to someone.”

The strangeness of that look: Luca hopes to be seen, but can’t see her, he’s a black-and-white image on the monitor of an intercom, sad, frightened, unsure of finding her home. Or he’s Princess Leia: a very tiny hologram who launches his cry for help, and dissolves. Whenever her father rewatched all the Star Wars movies, which was at least once a year, Silvia was the one who kept him company in front of the television. She never had the heart to tell him she thought the story was trite if not downright dumb. Still, she identified quite a bit with the princess and years before had considered showing up for a film history exam with two large “cinnamon bun” coils on either side of her head, although her hair hadn’t been quite long enough. She should be the one to launch messages of alarm and requests for help, but instead in this film it’s Luke Skywalker, who seems elsewhere, yet is finally within reach; in another galaxy, but in the end a brother.

Memory is therefore a crowded room, a pair of eyes, a look, a feeling that something isn’t right, that something has been derailed: Luca and Cecilia’s life together was a silent, punctual train, pull the handle only in case of emergency, and things that seem like they would never emerge come to the surface, and the moment the tray is placed on the table, Silvia says, “Of course, whenever you want, but what’s happened?”

“Later. Don’t say anything to Cecilia.” And he walks off. Silvia smiles, still incredulous. Then she thinks: He has someone else, he’s going to leave Cecilia. And immediately afterward: Impossible. The look was her own fabrication, he wasn’t desperate at all. She’s desperate and she’s projecting her desperation onto other people’s eyes. Luca meant it as a joke: Save me, I can’t take any more of this, the house full of people, the screaming, rowdy kids.

Meanwhile Cecilia advances down the hall and her mother slips among the relatives like a servant. The kids scream and chase one another through the rooms. Memory is also the genuine silent panic that grips her in the midst of their noisy, make-believe panic. Despite the occasional temptation to grab one of them and hug him, the temptation, for a few seconds, to be a mother. Michela still hasn’t taken off her long white dress and is acting like a bride, even turning her back and tossing a bunch of flowers as if it were a bouquet, a surprising development since until recently she’d played the part of a novice on the eve of her vows.

Not just three forsaken women, in fact, but four. Michela has passed her rite of initiation and enters that caste, enters the family and enters mourning.