Paolo Giordano - The Solitude of Prime Numbers

He picked up his fork again, but was momentarily bewildered at the sight of the sliced zucchini on the plate, as if someone had made them appear there by surprise.

"It sounds like a wonderful opportunity," said Adele.

"Yeah."

"Do you want to go?"

As she spoke, Mattia's mother felt heat flashing in her face. She was aware that it had nothing to do with the fear of losing him. On the contrary, she hoped with all her might that he would accept, that he would leave this house and the place that he occupied opposite her every evening at dinner, his black head dangling over his plate and that contagious air of tragedy surrounding him.

"I don't know," Mattia replied to his plate.

"It's a wonderful opportunity," his mother repeated.

"Yeah."

Mattia's father broke the silence that followed with random thoughts about the efficiency of northern Europeans, about how clean their streets were, putting it all down to the severe climate and the lack of light for much of the year, which limited distractions. He had never been anywhere of the kind, but from what he had heard that was clearly how it was.

When, at the end of dinner, Mattia began stacking up the dishes, collecting them in the same order as he did every evening, his father put a hand on his shoulder and said under his breath go on, I'll finish up. Mattia picked up the envelope from the chair and went to his room.

He sat down on the bed and began turning the letter around in his hands. He folded it backward and forward a few times, making the thin paper of the envelope crack. Then he examined the logo beside the address more carefully. A bird of prey, probably an eagle, held its wings open and its head turned to one side so as to show its pointed beak in profile. Its wing tips and claws were inscribed in a circle, which a printing error had turned slightly oval. Another circle, larger and concentric with the preceding one, contained the name of the university that was offering Mattia a place. The Gothic characters, all those k' s and h' s in the name and the o' s with a diagonal line running through them, which in mathematics indicated a null set, made Mattia imagine a tall, dark building, with echoing corridors and high ceilings, surrounded by lawns with grass cut to a few millimeters from the ground, as silent and deserted as a cathedral at the end of the world.

In that unknown and far-off place lay his future as a mathematician. There was a promise of salvation, an uncontaminated place where nothing was yet compromised. Here, on the other hand, there was Alice, just Alice, and all around her a swamp.

It happened as it had on the day he graduated. Once again his breath caught halfway down his throat, where it acted as a stopper. He gasped as if the air in his room had suddenly liquefied. The days had grown longer, and the dusk was blue and wearying. Mattia would wait for the last trace of light to fade, his mind wandering along corridors that he hadn't yet seen, now and then bumping into Alice, who would look at him without a word, without so much as a smile.

You've just got to decide, he thought. Go or don't go. 1 or 0, like a binary code.

But the more he tried to simplify things, the more confused he became.

Someone knocked on the door of his room. The sound reached him as if from the bottom of a well.

"Yes?" he said.

The door opened slowly and his father poked his head in.

"Can I come in?" he asked.

"Uh-huh."

"Why are you sitting in the dark?"

Without waiting for an answer, Pietro flipped the switch and 100 watts of light exploded in Mattia's dilated pupils, which contracted with a pleasant pain.

His father sat down on the bed next to him. They had the same way of crossing their legs, the left calf balanced on the right heel, but neither of them had ever noticed.

"What's the name of that thing you studied?" Pietro asked after a while.

"What thing?"

"That thing you wrote your dissertation on. I can never remember what it's called."

"The Riemann zeta function."

"Right. The Riemann zeta function."

Mattia rubbed his thumbnail under the nail of his little finger, but the skin there had become so hard and calloused that he didn't feel a thing. His nails slipped noisily over each other.

"I wish I'd had your mind," Pietro went on. "But I never understand a thing about math. It just wasn't for me. You have to have a special sort of brain for some things."

Mattia thought there was nothing good about having his mind. That he would happily have unscrewed it and replaced it with a different one, or even with a package of biscotti, provided it was empty and light. He opened his mouth to reply that feeling special is the worst kind of cage that a person can build for himself, but he didn't say anything. He thought about the time his teacher had sat him in the middle of the classroom, with everyone else staring at him like some exotic beast, and it occurred to him that it was as if he'd never moved from there in all those years.

"Did Mom tell you to come?" he asked his father.

The muscles in Pietro's neck stiffened. He sucked in his lips and then nodded.

"Your future is the most important thing," he said in a vaguely embarrassed voice. "You need to think about yourself now. If you decide to go we'll support you. We haven't got a lot of money, but enough if you need it."

There was another lengthy silence, in which Mattia thought about Alice, and about the share of money that he had stolen from Michela.

"Dad?" he said at last.

"Yes?"

"Could you leave, please? I have to make a phone call."

Pietro gave a long sigh that also contained a certain amount of relief.

"Of course," he said.

He got up, and before turning around he stretched a hand toward Mattia's face. He was about to caress his cheek, but stopped a few inches from the unruly tufts of his son's beard. He redirected his hand to his hair, which he barely touched. After all, it had been quite a while since they had done such things.

Denis's love for Mattia had burned itself out, like a forgotten candle in an empty room, leaving behind a ravenous discontent. When he was nineteen, Denis found an advertisement for a gay bar on the last page of a local newspaper and tore it out, keeping the scrap of paper in his wallet for two whole months. From time to time he unrolled it and reread the address, even though he already knew it by heart.

All around him, guys his age were going out with girls and by now they were used to sex, so much so that they'd stopped talking about it all the time. Denis felt that his only escape route lay in that piece of newspaper; in that address that had faded from the sweat of his fingertips.

He went one rainy evening, without really having made his mind up to go. He put on the first thing he pulled out of his closet and headed out, giving a quick shout to his parents in the other room. I'm going to the movies, he said.

He walked past the bar two or three times, circling the block every time. Finally he went in with his hands in his pockets and a confidential wink to the bouncer. He sat down at the bar, ordered a lager, and sipped it slowly, staring at the bottles lined up along the wall, waiting.

A guy came over to him a moment later and Denis decided he'd be okay, even before he looked him properly in the face. The man started talking about himself, or maybe about some film that Denis hadn't seen. He shouted in his ear but Denis didn't listen to a word. He brusquely interrupted him saying let's go to the toilet. The other guy was struck dumb and then he smiled, revealing bad teeth. Denis thought he was horrible, that his eyebrows almost joined up and he was old, too old, but it didn't matter.

In the toilet the guy pulled his T-shirt up over his belly and bent forward to kiss him, but Denis pulled away. Instead he knelt down and unbuttoned the other man's pants. Damn, he said, you're in a hurry. But then he let him get on with it. Denis shut his eyes and tried to finish as quickly as possible.