Andrea Canobbio - Three Light-Years

Every now and then she gets up and goes to buzz the intercom, in case Viberti has come in through some other entrance. She can’t believe he doesn’t want to see her.

She waits in front of the door for an hour and a half. She exchanges a few text messages with her girlfriends, pretending to be at home watching Totoro .

The whole story seems so unlikely, she tries imagining that she’s seen it all wrong. She thought the man in the green Lacoste polo outside the hospital was him, she thought the man in the blue car was him, but she can’t be one hundred percent certain. It’s happened to her before — convinced that a stranger was someone she knew, she’s had to apologize for making a fool of herself. And if he’s not answering the phone, there must be a reason.

But no, she saw him, it was him, and he saw her. He must be frightened, who wouldn’t be.

She returns home because a storm is brewing. She’ll try again tomorrow.

As soon as she gets home she drinks three glasses of water, she pats the book of Hindu mythology, she feels as if she hasn’t opened it in months. Then she lies down on the couch and begins thinking about Signora Viberti. She wonders if she’ll ever be like her. Maybe not, in the future there won’t be elderly people as lovely as that any longer. She can’t seem to express the thought more clearly; she falls asleep.

* * *

As if she were on vacation, Friday morning she stays in bed until ten.

Looking in the mirror, trying to make herself presentable, she remembers all the times she’s asked herself whether men are scared off by her hair; that’s why she wears the black headband, to keep it under control — and that scares men even more. With that wide black headband she seems to be saying: You’re under my control now. You’ll end up as my prisoner. That’s what men seem to read in her, and they run away.

Still, it seems only right that Viberti find the courage to speak to her and share in the decision. She tries to reach him all day Friday, sends him an e-mail, leaves messages on the answering machine.

On Saturday she tries again, to no avail. She calls the hospital; the doctor isn’t in. She calls his cell phone and his home phone, alternating every five minutes, just so it’s clear she won’t stop. No answer. So she calls Cecilia, who is on her way to pick up Mattia. Cecilia is more evasive than usual; it’s obvious the question makes her uncomfortable. She says she thinks Viberti is actually out of town; he was supposed to take his elderly mother to the country, to get her out of the city’s heat. She adds that she’s sure to find him on Monday.

The moment her sister says the word “country,” Silvia sees before her the name of the place where Viberti went to hide out: San Colombano. The first night, over dinner at the Sino-Japanese restaurant, they’d talked about vacations, and Viberti told her he had a dreary house in a dismal place, a real morgue, which as a boy he used to call San Columbarium when his mother forced him to go there.

To get there, she soon discovers, she’d have to take a local train and then a bus: a half-day’s trip; by car it takes only two hours. She doesn’t own a car, but Stefania’s father does. She calls her.

Stefania resists a bit, then gives in. Half an hour later she comes to pick her up. The car is a metallic gold Lancia Delta that is nearly eleven years old. Her father takes it out of the garage only on Sundays. Stefania can barely reach the pedals, she has to drive right on top of the steering wheel and lean sideways when turning. To be even with her and keep her from craning her neck too much as she talks, Silvia slides her seat forward too. They look like two elderly spinsters on an excursion.

The day is hot, sunny. “San Colombano is just beyond the foothills, the ‘mid-elevation’ mountains,” Stefania says. They discuss this outmoded geographical designation, the mezza montagna , telling stories and constructing historical-sociological theories. The mid-mountain is a reassuring place, it doesn’t offer the extreme challenges of the mountain, but it’s at a higher altitude, more beneficial than the countryside. They’re capable of rambling on about any subject for hours on end. They’re used to buoying themselves up by talking. And so they arrive in San Colombano without having once mentioned Viberti or discussed what Silvia wants to tell him, or planned how they will find him once they reach the town.

Here it really is cooler than in the city. The town isn’t dismal at all. There’s a piazza, there’s an old café-restaurant. Silvia gets out of the car, enters the café. She asks the barista if he knows the Viberti family, if he knows where they live. The barista gives her directions. She gets back in the car. She says: “Just outside of town, a white house on the left, after the bend in the road.”

“How did you know they would know?”

“I didn’t know. I didn’t even know if this was the right place.”

“You mean we came all this way and you weren’t sure it was the right place?”

Silvia doesn’t answer. Stefania starts the engine again. In the car, silence falls. When they come to the specified spot, Stefania stops. She turns to her friend and asks: “Are you scared? What are you going to do? Do you want me to come with you?”

Silvia shakes her head slightly. No, she’s not scared. “I’ll get out, I’ll tell him, and I’ll come back. Wait for me here?”

They hug.

There’s a gray fence, a partly open wooden gate, a gravel driveway that crosses the front lawn. The house is two-storied and the upper story, with a mansard roof, has pale wood paneling. It’s a mezza montagna house that would be presentable in the mountains.

Viberti’s Passat is parked under a shed. There are no doorbells, chimes, knockers. She’s about to tap on the door, but she hears voices coming from around back.

She circles the house, passing under the shade of some pine trees, and comes out in the sun, to a more spacious lawn overlooking the valley. There’s a lovely view. The nondescript Viberti is sitting at a stone table with his mother. On the table are earthen pots of various sizes, some empty, others filled with soil and dry seedlings.

Viberti sees her, he gets up. Has he turned pale or is that just her impression? Is it the effect of the light that bleaches things for her, coming from the shade, or the contrast with the dark shirt he’s wearing? What’s certain is that Viberti is speechless.

Silvia apologizes for the intrusion, she apologizes for harassing him. She doesn’t mean to hound him. She asks if she could have just a few words with him, no more.

She isn’t wearing the black headband this morning, she tied her hair at the back of her neck like Cecilia does, in a stunted ponytail. Viberti still seems very frightened, though. He has no idea what to do.

His mother, however, seeing Silvia, makes a sudden decision. She gets up and without taking off her gardening gloves goes back into the house. The son follows her with his eyes, then he says to Silvia, “Of course, come,” and he walks with her to the outer edge of the lawn, where long spikes of blue flowers stick up amid the damp grass.

* * *

As I was writing this story I kept thinking about all the things I could have asked my three parents had they still been alive. But that, almost always, is the disadvantage of writing — you write in the future, and you end up being unjust, or maybe just imprecise. You use the few surviving traces, you stitch together remnants of conversations, all the rest is fabricated; and when you fabricate, perfectly plausible, or even probable, variants are discarded for narrative expediency, to avoid causing too much pain, to conceal inopportune details and reveal harmless ones. On the other hand, if I’d questioned my three elderly parents ten or twenty years ago, wouldn’t they have treated their memories the same way?