Andrea Canobbio - Three Light-Years

She did well in school, so in the end her father forgave her everything. Because he was proud of her, he was very proud of her. And it was in that kitchen that Silvia had found the whole family gathered when she came home from her thesis defense (she hadn’t wanted them to go, maybe her father had been offended): Cecilia with her big belly, pregnant with Mattia; Luca; little Michela running around the room; her father and mother. She couldn’t remember hugging her mother after that day, not even a few months ago, when her father died. She hugged the air four times, repeating the gesture she’d made. Everyone congratulated her; she’d received honors and her thesis had been recommended for publication.

Then she resumed her pacing around the house, passing the closed door of the master bedroom, each time putting off the act of placing her hand on the handle and turning it. Among the tacky objects her mother adored were two sconces that had cast a dull light in the entry hall from time immemorial: two arms of gilded, worm-eaten wood, the arms of an angel or an infant, which looked like hunting trophies and held the base of a flame bulb in their closed fists. So sweet and disturbing, they might have been cut off some naughty child. Or the child may have been walled up, except for the arms, to keep her still, so she wouldn’t leave the house anymore to go who knows where or with whom. Impossible to know what her father thought of that eyesore. She should have asked him and she hadn’t. Not that he would have said a word.

She walked resolutely toward the closed door, opened it with an angry gesture, and went inside. Overwhelmed by her father’s smell, which rose above the mustiness and the odor of illness, she raised the shutters and opened the window before her strength failed her. She lay down on the bed covered with a white sheet, rested her head on the pillow without a pillowcase, and closed her eyes. She wished she never had to get up again.

* * *

Her father’s worldly possessions weren’t many. The clothes in the closet. A boxful of his works in the attic. A library of science fiction volumes. A rolltop desk with three drawers full of odds and ends. On the bedside table, half buried by packages of medications, Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy. Her father had told her the story many times, from when she was little: the Galactic Empire is in decline, a dark age lasting millennia is in store for humanity, or at least that’s what Hari Seldon thinks, a mathematician who has developed a surefire system of equations to predict the future. Seldon establishes a colony on a distant planet, as far away as possible from the center of the galaxy (where the capital of the empire is located) and names it the Foundation. The Foundation must safeguard human knowledge through the dark age to come, and attempt to shorten its duration. Things go according to Seldon’s plan for several centuries, until the appearance of the Mule, a mutant endowed with higher psychic powers. The Mule is the unexpected, that which no future science will ever be able to anticipate. The Mule defeats the Foundation in battle and conquers what remains of the empire. The only hope for free men lies in an ancient prophecy: for centuries it had been rumored that Hari Seldon founded not one but two colonies, and that the Second Foundation, hidden away at the other end of the galaxy , would save the first one.

When she was a little girl she barely understood it and at the end she would regularly ask if the Mule was good or bad, and if he was bad, why? It wasn’t clear to her even now. But her father never answered. The Second Foundation was the high point of the story, for him. The important thing was that she understand clearly where the Second Foundation was. Why? That, too, continued to remain obscure. Her father would join the tips of his index fingers together and say: “If the galaxy is made like this,” and he twirled his fingers in the air in opposite directions, moving them apart as if following the thread of a large screw, “like a spiral staircase, see? And the First Foundation is here,” he had no fingers left to point with so he touched his left hand with his nose, “where will the Second be?” After a while, she’d learned to answer: “In the center.” That is, not on the other side, on the right hand. The opposite extreme was the center, the space between his hands (and yet in the galaxy that was where the old capital of the empire was). This story was very important, for some mysterious reason. Listening to her father always generated two conflicting sensations: a feeling of being unique, because he was telling her something he considered important and had chosen to tell it to her; and a feeling of embarrassment, because she was almost certain (not quite) that it was a bunch of crap. And so her anxiety grew, the pins and needles in her fingertips, the shortness of breath.

The same pins and needles, the same shortness of breath that she now felt lying on her father’s side of the bed, as the summer evening’s air mingled with the air in the room and caressed her bare legs. How many hours had her father stared at the same patch of blank ceiling? In that bed, too, like in the galaxy’s spiral, the location of only one of the Foundations was known. The Second was silent, its position was unknown, nobody knew if it really existed, or if it was just a legend.

* * *

In August, when her food ran out, she stole a ceramic centerpiece and six saucers decorated with a leaf-and-pomegranate motif from the attic; she also stole a fruit stand from the same set with a pomegranate split in two. They were pieces from her paternal grandmother’s lovely dinner service; she thought she’d sell them in the fall. It was unlikely that her mother would notice they were missing, she’d banished her mother-in-law’s legacy. Boxes and boxes of items that were nearly new or never unwrapped: a pair of women’s brown gloves in butter-soft leather, for example, or a full, sealed bottle of Ferro-China Bisleri liqueur.

In the attic she also found her father’s datebooks. Thirty years of appointments, business meetings, deadlines, never a personal note. How could he have resisted the temptation to jot down a thought, a hope, or a regret, or even just a comment on the weather, or the summary of a book. Every so often, an “x” or an asterisk. But there was no mystery: her father was only noting the recurrence of his headaches and when he took his painkillers. She spent hours shut up in the attic, in the acrid dusty heat, in the dim light, sweating profusely. It seemed to her that what was missing from the datebooks was everything that made a life worth living.

She found the Urania volume that her father had sent her to look for the year before. It was called The Resurrection of Warped Dismay , named after the protagonist, a cartoon producer who died in December 1966, like Walt Disney. She recalled that, according to urban legend, Disney had had himself frozen. And so in the novel, seven hundred years later, in 2666, technology enables the doctors to revive the body of the cryogenically preserved Warped Dismay and cure the cancer in his left lung. In the meantime, however, his cartoons have become the sacred texts of a bloodthirsty fundamentalist sect that has conquered the entire world, and Dismay, appalled and horrified by the cult of Dumbo, Cinderella , and Peter Pan , becomes a kind of Antichrist.

She remembered afternoons when her father watched tapes of the cartoons with Mattia and Michela, how spontaneous and genuine his enjoyment was. “Come on, Papa, don’t laugh like that,” Cecilia used to tell him. Cecilia had always treated him like a senile old man, which is why as he got older he always felt more comfortable with her.

* * *