Andrea Canobbio - Three Light-Years

He kept walking briskly as if he were trying to run from the prospect of making a fool of himself, but in fact after two right turns he found himself returning to the ER via Radiology. That department must have been built or renovated in the fifties: the wooden moldings, baseboards, windows, and doors were pale, with shiny blue Formica panels, and the contrast between the two materials dated the work. For some reason that type of workmanship had become a mark of modernity and for a period of several years had been used extensively in schools and hospitals, only to later be replaced by metal and plastic. The work might have been done by the hospital’s on-site carpentry shop, which had existed until the early seventies, when Viberti, on a school trip to the hospital, had visited the workshop with his class to see how the lathe and milling machine worked. He had a clear recollection of the strong, pungent smell of the wood, the unbreathable air, the two carpenters who had been transplanted up north from Tuscany, craftsmen who in their spare time built inlaid furniture and bric-a-brac but who out of necessity had taken more practical jobs. When a classmate asked if they also made wooden legs for amputees there were several stifled laughs, and he, already quite shaken by their visit to the operating rooms, had fainted. When he came to, he found himself lying on the ground, his feet elevated on a low stool and his head resting on a soft bed of sawdust and wood chips. He’d never passed out like that again. And that might have been during the period when Marta was trying to starve him to death.

Seeing that he’d come back after just a few minutes, the nurse at the reception desk looked at him with surprise. Cecilia was showing a medical student how an EKG in the cardiology textbook looked like the one they had just performed on a patient. Her tone was playful. Trust me, she said, things are often simpler than they look. The student walked away, somewhat troubled and still skeptical, and Cecilia looked at Viberti, smiled at him, and said: “Sometimes they don’t believe us.” Viberti slid the book left open on the desk over to him, turned to the blank flyleaf, and in the space hidden beneath the jacket flap wrote: I need to talk to you. Let’s eat together. Then he shoved the book back to Cecilia.

She didn’t understand at first that it was a message, that she should read it, and when she read it she seemed uncertain and vaguely embarrassed. “What’s wrong?” she whispered, as if someone were spying on them, though the nurse nearby didn’t seem very interested in their business.

He hadn’t expected Cecilia to have any doubt about the nature of their talk — his blush, his uneasiness, his look gave him away. An overture like that, for him, was virtually the height of intimacy. He felt exposed, and though the clues were obvious, she was far from the answer and getting colder.

“Nothing,” Viberti stammered, “there’s no hurry…”

Cecilia looked at him, confused. She told him she had agreed to eat with two colleagues. “See you tomorrow, okay?”

He went to eat alone behind the usual column and brooded over the situation, hardly raising his eyes from his plate of boiled vegetables, analyzing and retracing each and every moment of the scene in the ER. What had he been thinking? Why that particular day, why not a month ago, or a year ago, or six months after he’d met her? For a year he’d acted as if nothing had happened, and then suddenly he’d realized that the woman had become irreplaceable.

He’d spent the long weekend of April 25, Liberation Day, with three friends and their families. Had it been the children who’d made him feel his failure more intensely?

Had it been the story by Chekhov or Maupassant or Tarchetti that pushed him over the edge? Or Marta’s condition, or the fear of growing old alone…? But if any of these were the case he would have been better off enrolling in a tango class or taking Spanish lessons, or bridge, or he could have taken a trip, a singles cruise. If he wanted to find a mate, anything would have been better. And besides, she might not even be his type (especially since Viberti had never really understood what the expression meant).

* * *

“She’s not your type,” Antonio Lorenzi, his pediatrician friend, had remarked a few months earlier, “why are you attracted to her?”

Viberti mumbled that he didn’t know. As if a person always knew why he did things.

“Yes, but there must be something about her that appeals to you.”

“At first I didn’t like her much,” he lied. “She’s one of those doctors who call you from the ER asking for a bed and won’t leave you alone until you give it to them. But then we became friends and I started to want to see her.”

“Do you talk about work?”

“That, too. She’s very good.”

“Good as a doctor?”

Viberti nodded.

“And what do you want from her, do you want to talk about medicine with her? You talked about medicine with Giulia, too.”

“I like her because there’s something about her that isn’t quite right … She dresses funny, her T-shirts are always tight and her pants baggy…”

“They all dress like that.”

“Yes, but she’ll put on a perfect white blouse, and then she’ll wear a shapeless sweater, full of holes, over it.”

Antonio burst out laughing and Viberti told him to go to hell.

They were a group of friends, old schoolmates, most married with children, Antonio separated with children, Viberti divorced with no children — though according to the others, Viberti’s divorce was an annulment in disguise, it didn’t count as a divorce and it didn’t count as a marriage. It hadn’t been like Antonio’s blood-sweat-and-tears separation, it hadn’t been a marriage with passion, bickering, long faces, joy, satisfaction, and frustration like the marriages of the other three. Every so often they played tennis together, and in the teasing that took place week after week, on the courts or in the locker room, in the endlessly repeated gibes and wisecracks that only they understood and were allowed to toss at one another, in the oral repertoire of their friendship, Viberti’s soubriquet was “Claudio, who didn’t consummate.”

Unconsciously, not ever having spoken to one another about it, let alone to him, the group preferred that he remain a bachelor. He was their mascot. When he went on vacation with them it was only for brief periods of time — any longer and it didn’t work. Whether or not their children came along, it didn’t work, they all knew it. His friends’ idea of his private life was nebulous. Yes, he’d had a couple of affairs after the divorce; one woman refused to sleep at his house because she said there was a “ghost” there. But they didn’t know much more.

Since his own divorce, Antonio took it for granted that he and Viberti would be a steady couple. Every Tuesday or Wednesday evening that winter, Antonio invited Viberti over to watch the game. Wednesday, Antonio had his two sons. The house was a mess; a housekeeper came three mornings a week — to “ward off the threat of disease”—but Antonio refused to run the dishwasher and washing machine, or do any cooking or cleaning. Every now and then it was Viberti who summarily tidied up the kitchen, during a break in the game. Maybe when he talked about Cecilia, Antonio was simply worried that his friend might remarry. Maybe he was jealous.

When he said, “Besides, not everyone thinks Cecilia is so great,” it occurred to Viberti that he might be jealous.

“Who thinks she isn’t?”

“Her colleagues say that—”

“Who?”

“They say she’s overly meticulous, sometimes she argues with the nurses.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“She’s obsessed with rules.”