Andrea Canobbio - Three Light-Years

In the last October of the millennium, the tests revealed that the cancer had returned. Her father underwent a second operation. Opened and closed, said Cecilia, who when she spoke as a doctor did not resort to euphemisms. Though maybe opened and closed actually was a euphemism. You open and close a closet, because it seems like a good idea to straighten things up, but then you can’t do it. You open a file and close it again, because in the end you don’t feel like working. You open and close a kitchen cabinet, because you’re not hungry anymore. You open and close your wallet and tell the salesclerk you’ll come back later because you realize you don’t have any money and maybe what you wanted to buy wasn’t really so essential. You open your mouth to smile and close it again because as you get closer the face of a friend turns out to be that of a stranger. You open and close the buttons on your blouse because maybe you don’t feel like having sex after all. You open and close the door of your parents’ old apartment because you don’t have the heart to go in and see your father dying, and you open and close the front door of the building and thank the heavens above that you’re outside, in the open air, alive, even if it’s snowing, even if you’re crying.

Her father was rushed to the ER and hospitalized at the end of January and died the following morning, unconscious because Ceci had made them pump him full of morphine.

She wasn’t able to say goodbye to him.

She had managed to argue with her mother even on the day of the funeral (she ordered her not to touch her father’s things, her father’s things didn’t belong only to her). So much snow had fallen in the small cemetery at the foot of the mountains that getting to the grave site was impossible, an arctic coating of fresh ice covered the tombstones. On top of everything else, she got her period that night, a few days late (this often happened to her, but she’d still thought she might be pregnant, she’d thought Enrico Fermi’s son might come to relieve his father). Her mother had moaned all the way, how awful to leave him in the columbarium with people who were strangers. “It’s just until spring,” Cecilia said, squeezing Silvia’s hand tight, out of grief, or to keep from harshly telling their mother to shut up, or to keep her from doing the same. At a certain point Silvia asked her to let go because she was literally digging her nails into her skin. Later on, she thought about the incident with the nails to try to pinpoint the precise moment when her sister had started to fall apart.

* * *

When the nondescript Viberti calls her two days later, thanking her for her e-mail, she’s not just surprised: she’d truly forgotten all about The Cook and Viberti himself. Surprised and at the same time mildly disappointed, because from the internist’s tone it’s clear that the phone call is a courtesy call and that he’ll never come to pick up the book. In fact he says he’ll think about it, maybe ; he’ll stop by, maybe .

But she’s even more surprised and astounded an hour later, when the buzzer sounds and it’s Viberti. He must be crazy. She doesn’t even have time to change, she welcomes him in her battle fatigues. The most ridiculous thing is that despite having come all that way and making it upstairs and into her house, Viberti seems no more interested in the book or in making conversation or in anything else than he was on the phone shortly before. He doesn’t seem interested in anything. He’s wearing tennis clothes, is he on his way to play? Apparently not. He came all the way there on foot. He leaves right away, with the book about the cook under his arm.

Silvia follows him from the window as he moves away down the sidewalk. A weirdo, not that she considers herself normal. Not that weirdos don’t interest her or that they frighten her, or that she doesn’t want anything to do with them. She attracts weirdos like honey draws bees. She attracts them and drives them away, evidently, because this one fled quickly.

She slumps down on the couch. It’s late by now, she no longer feels like going back to work. She stares at the dark TV screen and for half an hour lets her thoughts transport her through places in the distant past, populated by her own personal gallery of weirdos. First among them, Enrico Fermi. Or maybe not? Is it possible that Enrico Fermi wasn’t at all a weirdo, but the most normal and conventional of men? His dream, after all, was to spend his evenings at home watching old DVDs.

Then the phone rings again and Viberti invites her to dinner. Something devastating is eating at that man, if he has to call her, drop in unexpectedly, then call her again before making up his mind to invite her out. The most hesitant dinner invitation in the history of dating (but maybe it isn’t a date).

There are two possibilities, she thinks on her way to the restaurant where they’ve agreed to meet: He likes Cecilia and maybe doesn’t know her as well as it seemed. Or he likes me. Why couldn’t he like me?

She’d barely gotten a look at him, still, the nondescript Viberti’s physical features are so nondescript as to trigger an inordinate acceleration of the natural oblivion with which the physical features of strangers usually meet in her mind. She’s not sure she’s interested — when she saw him the other day at the café she wasn’t attracted to him, though maybe not repelled either. Since in her current condition of general lethargy almost no man attracts her instantly anymore, she wants to give him a second chance. There’s an eighty percent certainty that the nondescript internist is interested in Cecilia, but she has to know if he interests her and how much, just in case it’s the other twenty percent.

As soon as she sees him again, she decides no, he doesn’t interest her much at all. In particular, the tennis outfit remains a mystery. It reminds her of the game she had as a child in which you constructed figures by combining the heads, torsos, legs, and feet of different people; you could create a bearded man with buxom breasts, the legs of a soccer player, and a ballet dancer’s feet.

She tries to steer the conversation toward Cecilia, to see if she’s the crucial reason the internist has come this far after all. But nothing doing, she can’t get blood out of a stone, where blood is a revelation or a secret and the stone is Viberti, a rock that remains hard and impenetrable throughout dinner. This man eats sushi with pathetic suspicion, chewing each bite two hundred times. She’d like to take his hand and reassure him: “It won’t hurt you, go on, eat, don’t worry.” To pass the time, she begins telling him the Japanese version of Enrico Fermi’s life, and maybe Viberti believes it.

She’s asked herself many times what it is that compels her to fictionalize her relationship with Enrico Fermi that way. It’s a story in which there are no mother-of-all scenes, and even though she has problems with the concept of maternity, she likes climactic showdowns. The story with Enrico Fermi, at least in its latest versions, seems to be composed of nothing. When she thinks back, when she thinks about the time she spent with him, the first thing that comes to mind is the question: “What were we doing all that time?” What they did resurfaces in bits and pieces, darting, fishlike memories, intact and glistening, too wily to swallow the bait, only dynamite can catch them and in catching disintegrates them. The dynamite is the thought of having thrown away the best years of her life.

More than anything else, the nondescript Viberti appears to be very tired. Doctors are often very tired. On top of it, they tire easily of people. And at a certain point, while talking about dead fathers, Viberti seems to shut down completely. So she says they’d better go, she doesn’t want to stay up late. She gets up, goes to the ladies’ room: let him take care of paying.