Paolo Giordano - The Solitude of Prime Numbers

She pointed to a parked blue Seicento, as if to say that's it, and Fabio spread out his arms. A car passed along the road behind them. From nothing, its noise grew and then faded away again, until it finally disappeared.

"So, are you a photographer?" said the doctor, to buy some time as much as anything else.

"Yes," Alice replied instinctively. She immediately regretted it. For the moment she was a girl who had quit university and was wandering around the streets snapping photographs more or less at random. She wondered whether that was enough to make her a photographer; what was the boundary between being and not being someone?

She bit her thin lip. "More or less," she added.

"May I?" the doctor said, opening his hand for the camera.

"Of course."

Alice unwound the strap from her wrist and held it out to him. He turned it around in his hands. He took off the lens cap and aimed the lens first in front of him and then upward, toward the sky.

"Wow," he observed. "It looks professional."

She blushed and the doctor made as if to give her back the camera.

"You can take a picture if you like," said Alice.

"No, no, please. I don't know how. You do it."

"Of what?"

Fabio looked around. He turned his head from side to side, dubiously. Then he shrugged.

"Of me," he replied.

Alice looked at him suspiciously.

"Why should I?" she asked him, with a slightly malicious inflection that escaped from her involuntarily.

"Because then you'd have to see me again, at least to show it to me."

Alice hesitated for a moment. She looked into Fabio's eyes, carefully for the first time, and couldn't hold their gaze for more than a second. They were blue and shadowless, as clear as the sky behind him, and she felt lost inside them, as if she were naked in a huge empty room.

He's handsome, thought Alice. He's handsome in the way a boy should be handsome.

She aimed the viewfinder at the middle of his face. He smiled, without a hint of embarrassment. He didn't even tilt his head, as people often do in front of the lens. Alice adjusted the focus and then pressed down with her index finger. The air was shattered by a click.

Mattia presented himself in Niccoli's office a week after their first meeting. The professor recognized his knock, a fact that curiously disturbed him. Seeing Mattia come in, he took a deep breath, ready to fly into a fury as soon as the boy said something along the lines of there are things I don't understand or I wanted to ask you if you could explain a few passages to me. If I'm forceful enough, Niccoli thought, I might be able to get rid of him.

Mattia asked may I, and, without looking the professor in the face, set down on the edge of his desk the article that he had given him to study. Niccoli picked it up and a little stack of pages slid out, numbered and neatly written, appended to the stapled ones. He quickly gathered them up and realized they were the calculations of the article, perfectly executed and with precise reference to the text. He quickly flipped through them but didn't need to examine them thoroughly to determine that they were correct: the order of the pages was enough to reveal their exactness.

He was a little disappointed, his fit of fury stuck halfway down his throat, like a sneeze that refused to come. He kept nodding as he reviewed Mattia's work, trying in vain to suppress a jolt of envy for this boy who seemed so unfit for existence but was doubtless gifted in this subject, something he himself had never really felt.

"Very good," he said at last, more to himself than with the intention of paying a genuine compliment. Then, with apparent boredom, "A problem is raised in the final paragraphs. It concerns the moments of the zeta function to-"

"I've done it," Mattia cut in. "I think I've solved it."

Niccoli looked at him with suspicion and then with deliberate disdain.

"Oh, really?"

"In the last page of my notes."

The professor licked his index finger and flipped through to the end. Frowning, he quickly read Mattia's demonstration, not understanding much of it, but not finding anything to object to either. Then he started from the beginning, more slowly, and this time the reasoning struck him as clear, quite rigorous, in fact, although marred here and there by amateur pedantry. As he followed the steps, his forehead relaxed and he unconsciously began stroking his lower lip. He forgot about Mattia, who was still frozen in the same position since he first arrived, looking at his feet and repeating in his head let it be right, let it be right, as if the rest of his life depended on the professor's verdict. As he said that to himself he didn't imagine, however, that it really would be.

Niccoli rested the pages on the table again, carefully, and dropped back into his chair, once again crossing his hands behind his head, his favorite position.

"Well, I'd say you're all set," he said.

He was to graduate at the end of May. Mattia asked his parents not to come. What? was all his mother could say. He shook his head, looking toward the window. The glass gave onto a wall of darkness and reflected the image of the three of them sitting around a foursided table. In the reflection Mattia saw his father taking his mother's arm and gesturing to her to let it go. Then he saw the reflection of her getting up from the table with her hand over her mouth and turning on the tap to wash the dishes, even though they hadn't finished dinner yet.

Graduation day arrived just like any other, and Mattia got up before the alarm. His phantasms, which had filled his mind with scribbled sheets of paper during the night, took a few minutes to dissolve. No one was in the living room, just an elegant blue suit, brand-new, laid out beside a perfectly ironed pale pink shirt. On the shirt was a note with the words To our graduate and signed Mom and Dad, but in Dad's handwriting alone. Mattia put the clothes on and left the house without even looking at himself in the mirror.

He defended his thesis, looking the members of the committee straight in the eyes, devoting an equal amount of time to each of them and with a steady voice. Niccoli, sitting in the first row, nodded gravely and noted the growing amazement on the faces of his colleagues.

When the moment of the announcement came, Mattia arranged himself in a line with the other candidates. They were the only ones standing in the oversized space of the great hall. Mattia felt the eyes of the audience tingle on his back. He tried to distract himself by estimating the volume of the room, taking as his scale the height of the dean, but the tingle climbed up his neck and split in two directions, wrapping around to his temples. He imagined thousands of little insects pouring into his ears; thousands of hungry moths tunneling into his brain.

The words that the dean repeated identically for each candidate seemed longer each time, and were drowned out by a growing noise in his head, so loud that he couldn't make out his own name when the moment came. Something solid, like an ice cube, obstructed his throat. He shook the dean's hand and it was so dry to the touch that he instinctively sought the metal buckle of the belt that he wasn't wearing. The whole audience rose to its feet with the sound of a rising tide. Niccoli came over and clapped him twice on the shoulder, saying congratulations. Before the applause ended Mattia was out of the hall and walking hastily down the corridor, forgetting to put his toe down first to keep his footsteps from echoing on the way out.

I've done it, I've done it, he silently repeated to himself. But the closer he got to the door the more aware he became of an abyss opening up in his stomach. Outside, the sunlight overwhelmed him, along with the heat and the noise of the traffic. He staggered, as if from fear of falling from the concrete step. There was a group of people on the pavement; Mattia counted sixteen with a single glance. Many of them were holding flowers, almost certainly waiting for his fellow students. For a moment Mattia wished someone was there for him. He felt the need to abandon his own weight onto someone else's body, as if the contents of his head had suddenly become more than his two legs alone could bear. He looked for his parents, he looked for Alice and Denis, but there were only strangers looking nervously at their watches, fanning themselves with sheets of paper they'd picked up who knows where, smoking, talking loudly, and noticing nothing.