Andrea Canobbio - Three Light-Years

She spent her days spinning elaborate fantasies. Before dying, her father calls for her and asks her to deliver an envelope to someone. An envelope, a package, a small red velvet pouch. It contains a letter, a book, or Nonna Re’s engagement ring. The person is unknown, the address unfamiliar. A woman opens the door, the same age as her father, though she looks at least ten years younger. Behind her, a room full of books. Silvia doesn’t have to introduce herself, the woman was expecting her. They smile. She’d recognize that woman’s eyes anywhere. Because they recognize her, thanks to her father’s stories.

“I was sure you existed.”

“May I call you Silvia?”

Cecilia urged Silvia to look ahead. It was practically the same advice she’d given their father after the first operation, and considering how it had all ended up, it wasn’t a piece of advice that Silvia took well. Look ahead? Where? At what? But Cecilia was the last person she could afford to be angry with, since without her she would die of starvation.

Then her appetite returned, moderately, though little by little the shopping money petered out and there were no freelance assignments in sight; she had also run out of excuses for missed deadlines. Between February and March she reached a record low in productivity: she couldn’t manage to edit more than one sentence a day. She ate at Cecilia’s one evening a week, occasionally she skipped dinner, and in general she scrimped to the bone, the last of the money her father had secretly given her was almost all used up. She was so used to turning to him in her times of need, she was so sure she wasn’t in any danger, that she never checked to see what she had in the bank. They called her at home to tell her she was overdrawn. She couldn’t give up the rent, the heat, and her ADSL, she couldn’t give up the occasional night out with her girlfriends. She tried to reduce the rest to a minimum. The day came when she boiled a quarter pound of pasta one night and ate it without sauce, without even a drop of olive oil, and thought the simple flavor of the plain spaghetti was the tastiest in the world.

One sunny, windy spring afternoon she stationed herself behind the trunk of a chestnut tree in front of the building she’d lived in for twenty-two years, her parents’ house, the house where her mother now lived alone. She had to wait until her mother left to go and pick the children up at school; it was a day when Cecilia had the afternoon shift, and it was the only one of her mother’s errands whose duration she could calculate exactly. She watched her walk away, waited another five minutes, and then headed briskly toward the imposing cherrywood door whose reddish grain formed two large wide-open eyes.

She opened it with her old set of keys. The last few times she’d come to see her parents she hadn’t used them, buzzing the intercom to emphasize her position as an outsider. She took the elevator up to the fifth floor and didn’t run into anyone, but even if a neighbor had suddenly appeared in the dim vestibule, in the uncertain light of the landing, what would he have suspected? Her mother didn’t associate with anyone in the building, no one could report having seen her younger daughter enter the house (specifically, the one she argued with all the time, you could hear them on the ground floor).

The apartment hadn’t changed over the years. With two exceptions: when the first daughter had married, her old room was used by her mother on nights when their father would not stop his unbearable snoring (therefore every night; only by snoring could he express his rebellion); when the second daughter left home, her room had been set up for the grandchildren to nap and play in. But since these changes were confined to two inner rooms that were basically hidden, the rest of the house seemed even more changeless and eternal.

No sign of the husband and father’s death. It had been two months. Her father had been a drifter in a foreign land where he was barely tolerated, a migrant. With his illness he’d become a minority in a ghetto: assigned to his own cramped space. Her mother had no intention of repossessing the master bedroom where her husband had slept alone until the last night before the final trip to the hospital. The marriage was dead, the husband was dead, the room was dead. The door was closed, the room condemned, and Silvia had no desire to open it, enter it. She roamed around the rest of the deserted house without turning on the lights, without touching anything, careful not to leave any trace. Like a thief, she thought, but that wasn’t quite right, because she actually was a thief; she roamed through the house like a stranger, a person to whom those rooms meant nothing.

She’d brought plastic bags from home, to put the food in. From the fridge and pantry she took meat, vegetables, packets of pasta, biscuits, bread. Her mother would notice the theft, of course. She would immediately think of her and wouldn’t accuse anyone else. Maybe she would talk to Cecilia about it, and she and her older daughter would exchange a meaningful look, just a quick glance, and wouldn’t comment any further because it would be too ridiculous and painful. Or maybe not, maybe she was overestimating them. They would talk about it at length and her mother would make Cecilia look into it. Cecilia would look into it and she would confess immediately. Cecilia would say, Don’t be silly; she’d give her some money. And she would live on her sister’s charity until her next assignment. And she’d start working full-time again, and would at least have enough money to get by.

After filling the two plastic bags and setting them near the door, she lingered in the house. She tried to feel some emotion. She tried to cry, but it was no use. Maybe she thought the house itself would move her, that it wasn’t necessary to enter her father’s room. But she realized for the millionth time that her father had lived in that house as a guest. This was confirmation of it: she hadn’t been looking for it, but she’d found it.

She left the building with her shopping bags, without encountering a soul. She walked unhurriedly to the corner, turned it, and found a deserted street in front of her, the promise of a clean getaway, a successful venture, and thought maybe she wouldn’t do it again. It had been a childish thing to do.

Instead she continued doing it. She went shopping at her mother’s house at least once a week for several months, till autumn. If her mother noticed it (how could she not notice?), she hadn’t told anyone. She hadn’t told Cecilia, or if she had told her, Cecilia had suggested that she act as if nothing had happened (Cecilia often suggested acting as if nothing had happened, besides, it was better that Silvia steal from her mother than from a supermarket).

* * *

The horror and fascination of being late; she can’t remember the first time she felt that shiver, but she knows it’s by far the strongest emotion she can afford to feel these days. Motionless on the couch for weeks, after the death of her father, she went through a period of indulgence. On the phone with editors at the publishing houses, she engaged in orgies of excuses, hopelessly entangling herself in a web of lies. At that point being late had become a way like any other to get by, to let the world know she was still alive. As Cecilia fed her sashimi and yogurt and cooked broths and baby pastina and semolina soups for her, she went on accruing missed deadlines. She came up with the most improbable excuses to put off for hours or days the consignment of work that she wouldn’t be able to complete even in weeks or months. It’s taken her years of diligently meeting deadlines to make up for that month of madness and win back the publishers’ trust. When she misses a day of work and the specter of being late rises up in front of her, waving its white shroud and rattling its chains, she feels a stab of fear in the pit of her stomach. And she starts counting the number of pages again, updating the daily quota that will allow her to finish on schedule.