Andrea Canobbio - Three Light-Years

But the oddest thing is that the nondescript Viberti continues the conversation, as if her bizarre diet and the Swiss lecturer really interested him. Given the fact that it’s a bunch of crap and not at all interesting, there must be something to it. He seems about to make a confession. Or a pass. Maybe this man interests her after all.

And as she writes the script and directs this film in her head, she describes the virtues of green tea to amuse the nondescript Viberti, and then the plot of a novel she read centuries ago, one of her father’s books, though not exactly science fiction. She manages to get his e-mail address, with a promise to find the novel, and at that point, finally, the lunch can come to an end.

* * *

When a relationship ends badly people say it was wrong to begin with. They use phrases such as “the right man” and “the wrong man.” She’s the queen of correction, but her relationships are always wrong. The men are never the right ones. Correcting men and her relationships: impossible.

In the end, her one great love, Enrico Fermi, was also the man who came closest to becoming the right man. If nothing else, by accretion: they broke up and got back together six times. The earliest Enrico Fermi, age seventeen, is part of ancient history, he’s become a myth, all the rancor softened into a mellifluous memory. The more recent Enrico Fermis are the worst from this standpoint, the wounds still raw and painful. As a gesture of love, or compassion, to salvage him or to salvage herself, to salvage the time they’ve spent together, when she speaks to someone about him she makes up alternative biographies: Enrico Fermi the archaeologist, Enrico Fermi the rare tea expert, Enrico Fermi part Japanese.

She thinks back every so often to a particular time. The last Enrico Fermi had lasted one year; they’d been back together for a couple of months and had hit their first bad patch and she told him that maybe it was best to forget it. She’d told him that just before he left to accompany a class on a school trip (a little shitty of her). Then he came back and started to tell her about the trip. Enrico Fermi was a math teacher (he still is a math teacher). There was an awful kid in the group, not an idiot exactly, kind of a rowdy troublemaker, that’s what they would have called him once, the kind who jumped up on his desk in class, took off his T-shirt and waved it around (though maybe in the end there actually was something off about him), spoke loudly and insulted him, yelled “Communist, worthless do-nothing” at him … Who knows why he’d targeted him for harassment. He chased him through the halls of the hotel, throwing sopping wet toilet paper at him. He shouted: “You stink.” On the last day, Enrico Fermi’s tormentor had poured half a can of Red Bull in his shoe, while they were eating lunch at a fast-food place.

“Oh my God, how did he do that?”

Sneaking under the table behind his back. From the beginning the kid had made fun of his blue Clarks, Communist shoes, his ankles, too thin, and his pants, too short. And he’d gone around all afternoon with a wet foot. Then the kids had wanted to go to a music megastore. The other teachers took refuge in the café, while he holed up in the jazz section because it was the only area in the store that was completely deserted and he knew no one would follow him. He took off his shoe. A glass wall separated him from the other departments, the music was at an acceptable level, everything was suffused with a sense of great peace, and suddenly he was certain that she was in that room, hidden among the shelves, waiting for him.

“I wasn’t there, trust me.”

But something of her was there. And he’d felt much better. Soon afterward, he realized that he was not alone.

“Because my spirit was hovering in the room.”

No, there was a sales clerk. An elderly man, diminutive, a little hunchbacked, with thick glasses and a thatch of white hair. Bent over the shelves of CDs, he flipped through them with a swift flick of his fingers, like an obsessive-compulsive squirrel looking over its hoard of nuts. Now and then the clicking stopped and the clerk pulled out a case, studied it, put it back. Every so often he took a block of CDs from a plastic trolley and added them to the row. Aside from the clicking of the CDs knocking against one another and the whisper of the trolley’s wheels, he made no other sound.

Enrico Fermi relaxed, looking at the CD covers. He was in no hurry to leave the jazz section, he knew that outside he would be plunged back into a nightmare of persecution. And he wanted to let his foot dry. Besides the sense of peace, besides the impression of being safe, he suspected that he had finally arrived in the foreign country where he naïvely thought he’d already landed three days ago, at Gatwick.

“Foreign country?”

“Far away from everything. It’s the same sensation I get when I’m with you.”

And that idea made her very, very happy. To be the foreign country where someone could take refuge and seek political asylum. The foreign country someone comes to after a long journey, to rebuild a life. Telling a woman with whom you’ve reconciled for the sixth time that she’s like a foreign country, well, there was something inspired about it.

Enrico Fermi was silent for a while, then he resumed his story. He didn’t know what had come over him, he had to talk with the clerk, as if the little man held some secret. So he made up a story about having to buy a gift to cheer up a sick friend. And the clerk didn’t bat an eye; making recommendations was his job. He went straight to a shelf, chose a CD, and put it in his hand. With that one he couldn’t go wrong, he said, because the heart and soul of jazz was in that recording. It was a concert at which five of the best musicians of all time had played, brought together that night — by chance for the one and only time, brought together despite the fact that they hated one another and barely spoke to one another, that they were quite drunk and more interested in following a boxing match on the radio, and that the saxophone player had hocked his instrument at a pawn shop to buy heroin and was forced to play with a plastic sax. The magic of the music came about by chance, and as it unfolded the players hadn’t seemed to pay the slightest attention to it. Then, without another word, the clerk bowed slightly and went back to his work.

“It was Yoda. You met Yoda.”

“Yoda?”

“The one from Star Wars , the tiny, wrinkled old wise man.”

“I brought you a present.”

Enrico Fermi pulled out the CD of that concert.

“I don’t like jazz.”

“It’s just the thought. It was the only time I found myself alone. I thought of you.”

“I see. Thank you.”

Enrico Fermi could no longer recognize a good sign. The appearance of Yoda was a fantastic sign.

That time they’d made it through the bad patch. But instead of continuing to tell her Zen stories, or funny stories, or stories of any kind, instead of understanding how to win her, in time Enrico Fermi had begun acting like a teddy bear, like a stupid Ewok from the Forest Moon of Endor. When he was in trouble he tried to move her by telling her about his problems, as if other people didn’t have any, until eventually she just felt pity for him. And anger, a lot of anger.

* * *

When she goes to look for Harry Kressing’s The Cook in her parents’ attic, with the idea of using it to reconnect with Viberti, she experiences the surefire, mysterious satisfaction that always accompanies the rediscovery of a book. It happens with books she has at home as well, books she’s sure she owns, when she hasn’t touched them for some time, as if they might have escaped, as if someone might have stolen them. They have no legs and no one is interested in them, so the joy she feels is all the more inexplicable. As long as her books don’t disappear, as long as her books continue to reappear, like spirits invoked on Walpurgis Night, nothing bad will happen to her.