Andrea Canobbio - Three Light-Years

Viberti smiles. “I sometimes feel like a dog.”

“Why?”

“Eager to obey, too faithful, in need of a master.”

“Every now and then it’s okay. Every now and then it’s all right to be an animal, but not all the time.”

“You’re a cat.”

“God, no. One of those obnoxious ones? Then we can’t get along.”

Now they’re bantering, complicit; he can’t let it die. “I’ll never forget your expression.”

“When?”

“Before. Your expression when you didn’t know what I was talking about, and then when you realized.”

“What was my expression like?”

“Your mouth was open.”

“Impossible, I never have my mouth open.”

“I swear, you were wide-eyed and gaping.”

“Come on!”

“You weren’t expecting it.”

“No, I wasn’t expecting it.”

“Not from such an important friend .”

“Actually, I was wrong. You’re the only one. I have no other friends. Really.” She pauses. “But no, I wasn’t expecting it. When did you decide to tell me?”

“I didn’t decide. Yesterday morning I thought, now I’ll tell her that I have to talk to her. And I told you.”

“You wrote it to me.”

“I wrote it to you.”

“Why?”

“I hadn’t yet made up my mind whether to really tell you everything.”

“But why did you write it?”

He shakes his head. “I don’t know.”

“And what were you thinking of telling me?”

“Instead of what I told you? I thought maybe I’d tell you something else. Something about my mother, maybe.”

“When did you decide to tell me the truth?”

“When you came in and sat down. I thought it was silly for things to keep going like this.”

“How long has this been going on?”

“From the beginning. More or less. Ever since I met you. But I didn’t know it. Then I had to admit it.”

“Had to?”

“I would rather have kept telling myself that I admired you.”

She smiles. “You admire me?”

“As a doctor.”

“How do you know what kind of doctor I am?”

“I know.”

“But it wasn’t admiration.”

“Not just admiration.”

“But do you admire me or not?”

“Very much.”

“So then it’s been going on for about a year now.”

“For a year.”

“And all of a sudden you decide to tell me.”

“I don’t know why. Last night my mother told me a crazy story. My mother is eighty-two. She probably has the beginnings of senile dementia.”

“What are her symptoms?”

“She doesn’t remember what she just said. She leaves stuff on the stove.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s hard to worry about her. Because she’s actually in very good health. Then, too, dementia is difficult to diagnose. She took the Mini mental test and scored twenty-nine out of thirty. She came out boasting, saying that even her university professors, the bastards, always gave her twenty-nine. The progression is so slow you tend to think it’s inevitable.”

“Isn’t it?”

“It is, but maybe we shouldn’t admit it.”

“And the crazy story?”

“The crazy story was by some writer or other, it was the first time she’d mentioned it to me, who knows, it may be that she actually read it, she was a big reader, although I got the impression that she was confusing it, mixing up two different stories. But the funny thing is that the main character’s name was Cecilia.”

“Did you talk to her about me?”

He smiles. “I don’t talk about women with my mother.”

When they get up to leave it’s as though they’d met to celebrate a birthday; they’re sorry that the party is over, but all in all everyone’s in a good mood. Viberti pays for the two mineral waters and puts the receipt in his wallet along with the extra passport photo from when he renewed his ID card. He says goodbye to Cecilia with a handshake, smiling. The passersby seem to be smiling also, as do the faces on the billboards, and the grilles of the cars.

I bet at home, cooking himself some pasta al ragù , he’s whistling. I bet he’s not depressed, he’s not disappointed, and he’s not embarrassed about having been rejected. I have no way of knowing that, I don’t know anything, but I’d swear that, for him, having declared his love was actually cause for euphoria; as though everything else, like experiencing it and hoping it might be returned, would follow as a result. Not least because deep down, very deep down, in the unexplored depths of his consciousness, he doesn’t for a minute believe that he’s been rejected. (Sixteen years later he would use the same blend of self-deception and premonition with me when, at the height of my adolescent rebellion, I told him I didn’t want to see him again. He went away whistling after grumbling that I couldn’t be serious, that I’d have second thoughts and that he’d always be ready to welcome me back.)

* * *

Between an ordinary May 8 and an equally ordinary June 3 they continued meeting at the café at lunchtime. Viberti pretended that the confession had cured him of a foolish infatuation, Cecilia seemed satisfied that he had been cured. But it didn’t add up. If they weren’t uncomfortable, why was it necessary to act like they weren’t? On some days appearing nonchalant became a contest.

They talked about the past year as if it were in the distant past, its memory confused, an Arcadia in which they had been young and innocent. Cecilia confessed that Viberti, with his boiled vegetables, shamed her, made her feel guilty, since she, on the other hand, liked rather peculiar sandwiches, peppers and anchovies, curried chicken, smoked salmon. Once, thinking he wouldn’t be there, she’d been caught with gorgonzola and walnut. Viberti confessed the system he had engineered to increase the probability of finding her at the café, always arriving at a quarter to two. He confessed that before he met her he went to eat at twelve thirty, one at the latest. By noon he was usually terribly hungry; he would chew on a piece of gauze to get over it.

They didn’t mention his declaration again, but it was as if his declaration enabled them to speak about new, more intimate things. Cecilia apparently felt freer to talk about what she really cared about — her children. Viberti spoke of his mother’s illness, voicing a sadness that previously he hadn’t wanted to admit he felt.

Meeting elsewhere was out of the question. During those weeks he tried inviting Cecilia to dinner, to the movies, but she told him she couldn’t: “Maybe in five or six years,” she explained. She smiled but she wasn’t joking. All of her time was devoted to her children, and when she spoke of them, when she talked about being locked up in the house with them, she seemed to be describing the valiant resistance of a city under siege or the life of a small community quarantined by the plague.

She said she had a strained but civil relationship with her husband, she said there were no scenes in front of the children when he came to take them for the weekend; it didn’t feel like an exchange of prisoners, no, everything was restrained and disciplined, just as the separation had been restrained and disciplined, after the initial phase. The pain shoved to the back of the closet like an unsightly dress. She said, at first, they went to the park along the river to argue. Viberti pictured them walking, free to raise their voices, hurling insults at each other, as he imagined couples did when they separated, quarreling violently. He imagined them far away from the children’s microscopic surveillance, like secret agents forced to be wary of confined spaces.

“After the initial phase” and “at first” meant that the separation had gone through different stages and only the first had been confrontational and violent. Viberti was too struck and confused by these confidences to wonder if they made sense. There seemed to be no motivating trigger that had prompted them, no betrayal or growing irritation, and Cecilia, on that subject, was silent. But what did he know about real separations, his hadn’t had a motivating trigger either, he hadn’t consummated, he hadn’t sullied himself with wrongs and recriminations, insults and accusations, words to regret and be ashamed of. He felt ashamed, every now and then, though he didn’t tell anyone: he didn’t remember why he had married Giulia, he didn’t remember why they’d split up.