Andrea Canobbio - Three Light-Years

Other characters? No. The boy, for example, is absent, in the background as always, unseen. Everyone talks about how much he suffered over his grandfather’s death (not caring about how much she suffered), but if he really had suffered, he didn’t show it.

And Luca’s look, for those ten seconds, a look from a black-and-white monitor, or from a futuristic hologram from the seventies.

* * *

Then there’s another recollection, distinct from the other but contiguous, a scene that took place at another time, which memory continues to associate with Michela’s First Communion. It’s a different room, crowded with silent presences, Cecilia and Luca’s bedroom with the metal stand where all the guests’ coats are hung, neat and tidy and silent while their owners, standing in the living room, talk and laugh with a plate and a glass in their hands. And for Silvia, of course, better the company of the coats. (At a family celebration a few years ago, she stole a fifty-thousand-lira note from a coat.)

There’s a girl with her, a relative of Luca’s who followed her in there despite numerous futile attempts to shake her, and now she won’t leave her alone. So instead of Luca asking to talk, recognizing that even a black sheep can be useful every now and then, there’s this idiot who won’t stop asking questions about her work and showers her with exclamations of infinite admiration. Difficult to admire her work, unless you’ve completely misunderstood it. Impossible to admire her.

Why does her mind continue to orbit around these two memories? The first might have some reasons to justify its gravitational pull: the intersection of past and present, the first party without her father, a herald of Luca’s revelation, a sign of trouble in her sister’s marriage (until then perfectly concealed), the end of the glorious era in which she was the black sheep of the family and the beginning of a period of dormancy or cryopreservation that shows no signs of ending. But the second memory, why does it keep coming back with such insistence? A parasitic memory, a rough draft of the first, from which the cloying taste of narcissism emanates; unjustified admiration is almost worse than unjustified disapproval. Only her father was entitled to admire her, only her mother was entitled to criticize her.

* * *

“You don’t get along with Grandma,” Michela suddenly says, as if confiding a great adult secret.

For some time, Michela has been sleeping at Silvia’s place at least once a week. It started by accident, Mattia’s flu compounded by Luca’s absence compounded by the usual problems created by Cecilia’s night shifts. It had been natural for Silvia to suggest that Michela stay with her. She was surprised at having suggested it so easily, almost joyfully. She’s so used to living alone, proud and protective of the independence she’s achieved. And she’d amply repaid her debts to her sister, even if she hadn’t technically settled them. So she didn’t suggest it because she feels indebted to her or because she feels lonely. Nor did she suggest it to usurp one of her mother’s privileges (for years now she had declared a unilateral truce with her mother), though her mother made it known that she was jealous. She wanted to help Cecilia.

But then two things happened.

The first is that Cecilia started behaving strangely, as if she wanted to keep Michela away from home. And this worried Silvia, because the year before, she’d told her a confused story about Michela’s alleged negative influence on Mattia’s appetite. As long as it’s just one night a week, she told herself, it was best to humor her sister’s paranoia. She pictured Cecilia and the boy having supper, like two secret lovers, her adoring, him distant and apathetic.

The second is that having Michela at her house made her happier than she’d been in years, maybe happier than she’d ever been. As happy as she’d dreamed of being when she still believed that sooner or later she’d be happy. As she may have been for brief periods on vacation with her girlfriends — except then she would always get into some argument or feel terribly restless or bored to death, and would be even happier to get back home.

She likes Michela. She’s always been the last adult to give in when confronted with the girl’s exuberance, on vacation or during the holidays. She would put up with it for hours before finally admitting that Michela was capable of being almost unbearable at times. She thinks she’s precocious, intelligent, and sensitive. Funny, outgoing. Too impulsive and generous to come up with complex strategies to annihilate her brother. Who, for that matter, is the type to annihilate himself.

Silvia is cooking; she thought Michela was finishing a literature assignment. “What did you say?” she asks, even though she understood her clearly.

“I noticed … that you don’t get along with Grandma.”

She searches for a suitable answer without raising her eyes from the minced onion she’s sautéing in olive oil.

“We have very different personalities.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning … I don’t know … you know how your grandmother is … she’s very orderly, her house is perfect, all neat and clean…”

Michela seems confused: “Your house is clean, too.”

“I mean … you see what a mess there is in here, I don’t care if something sits on the table for weeks, or if that stack of newspapers stays on the floor, or if the remote control is left between the couch cushions…”

“You’re messier .”

“Right, that’s it.”

“Did she yell at you a lot when you were little?”

“I’ll say … yeah, she was strict.”

“Mama is strict, too.”

“Oh, no.” She smiles. “You don’t know what a strict mother is.”

“Why, what did Grandma do to you?”

“I was always being punished.”

“What did you do?”

“I told her lots of lies, I disobeyed.”

“Why?”

“I was a little wild.”

Michela smiles. “Even when you got older?”

“Especially then.”

“You didn’t tell her where you were going?”

“I didn’t tell her whom I was going with.”

“With boys?”

Silvia laughs. “You sure are curious!”

“Tell me, come on…”

“I was a little rebellious, but your grandmother was wrong, because she used to lock me in my room.”

“She locked you in?!”

“Once she locked me out on the balcony!”

“Then what?”

“Your grandfather immediately came to let me back in. We both screamed and yelled and then we sat down at the table as if nothing had happened.”

“And what did my mother say?”

“She stood up for me. But she had other things to do, she had to study, then she got married, you were born.”

“Mama always has something else to do.”

Silvia pauses, looks at her: “Don’t say that. It’s not true.”

Michela blushes, lowers her eyes. She seems embarrassed.

And as if she hadn’t said it, she starts talking about a friend who goes shopping with her grandmother and makes her buy her whatever she wants. “She takes advantage of her, you know?”

Convenient, changing the subject. Period, new paragraph, full of energy and hope, she’s talking at the top of her lungs again, as if she has to be heard from across the street; she describes things as if they are happening for the first time in human history, as if her experiences were unique and unparalleled, and her friends one of a kind and exceptional; you can believe that only at that age. A few more years, and then the marks left by words and events fade more slowly each time, like bruises.

* * *

Later she thinks back to that time, and wonders how she could have missed the fact that the girl was asking her to do something. During those weeks Michela is always talking about her mother, even when she’s talking about school, even when she’s talking about her grandmother, especially when she talks about her brother. And since she’s not very eager to do what the child is asking of her, for weeks she refuses to understand, smiling about her mood swings and childish chatter. Because Michela is almost always in high spirits, or at least lets her think so, and she falls for it, she wants to believe it.