Paolo Giordano - The Solitude of Prime Numbers

He didn't get a result with his mouth and felt completely hopeless. Then he used his hands, both of them, insistently. As the guy came he came too, in his pants. He almost ran from the toilet, without giving the stranger time to get his clothes back on. The same old sense of guilt took hold of him as soon as he was past the toilet door, and drenched him like a bucket of icy water.

Outside the bar he wandered about for half an hour in search of a fountain to wash the smell off him.

He went back to the bar on other occasions. Every time he talked to someone different and he always found an excuse not to give his real name. He never hooked up with anyone else. He collected the stories of people like himself, mostly keeping silent and listening. He slowly discovered that the stories were similar, that there was a process, and that the process involved immersion, putting your whole head under until you touched the bottom and only then coming up for air.

Every one of them had a love that had rotted alone in their heart, as his love for Mattia had done. Each of them had been afraid and many of them still were, but not when they were here, among others who could understand, protected by the "scene," as they put it. When he talked to those strangers Denis felt less alone and wondered when his moment would come, the day when he would touch bottom, resurface, and finally be able to breathe.

One evening someone told him about "the cemetery lamps." That's what they called the little path up behind the graveyard, where the only light, faint and trembling, was from the tombstone lamps filtering between the bars of the big cemetery gate. They would grope about there, it was the perfect place to empty themselves of desire without seeing or being seen, merely putting their bodies at the disposal of the dark.

It was at the lamps that Denis had touched bottom. He slammed into it with his face, chest, and knees, as though diving into shallow water. Afterward he never went back to the bar, locking himself away, more stubbornly than before, in his own denial.

Then, in his junior year at university, he went to study in Spain. There, far from the probing eyes of his family and friends, far from all the streets whose names he knew, love found him. His name was Valerio and he was Italian like him; young and scared to death like him. The months they spent together, in a little apartment a few blocks from the Ramblas, were quick and intense and they removed the useless cloak of suffering, as on the first clear evening after days of pouring rain.

Back in Italy they lost sight of each other, but Denis didn't suffer. With a completely new confidence, which he would never lose, he moved on to other affairs, which seemed to have been waiting for him for all that time, lined up in an orderly fashion just around the corner. The only old friendship he maintained was with Mattia. They spoke only rarely, mostly on the phone, and were capable of being silent for minutes at a time, each lost in his own thoughts, punctuated by the other's reassuring, rhythmical breathing at the other end of the line.

Denis was brushing his teeth when the call came. At his house they always answered after the second ring, the time it took to get to the nearest telephone from anywhere in the apartment.

His mother called Denis it's for you, and he took his time answering. He rinsed his mouth out well, passed the towel over it, and glanced once more at his two upper front incisors. Over the past few days he had had a sense that they were overlapping, because of his wisdom teeth pushing in from the sides.

"Hello?"

"Hi."

Mattia never introduced himself. He knew that his voice was unmistakable to his friend and anyway he didn't like saying his name.

"So, Mr. Graduate, how are you?" Denis said cheerfully. He wasn't upset about the graduation business. He had learned to respect the chasm that Mattia had dug around himself. Years previously he had tried to jump over that chasm, and had fallen into it. Now he contented himself with sitting on the edge, his legs dangling into the void. Mattia's voice no longer stirred anything in his stomach, but he was aware of the idea of him and always would be, as the only true benchmark for everything that had come afterward.

"Did I disturb you?" asked Mattia.

"No. Did I disturb you?" Denis teased.

"I was the one who called you."

"Of course, so tell me: I can tell from your voice that something's up."

Mattia remained silent. Something was up, it was there on the tip of his tongue.

"Well?" Denis pressed. "And this something would be?"

Mattia exhaled loudly into the receiver and Denis became aware that he was having difficulty breathing. He picked up a pen beside the telephone and started playing with it, passing it between the fingers of his right hand. Then he dropped it and he didn't bend down to pick it up. Mattia still wasn't speaking.

"Shall I start asking questions?" said Denis. "We could do it so that you-"

"I've been offered a position abroad," Mattia interrupted. "At a university. An important one."

"Wow," Denis observed, not surprised in the least. "That sounds fantastic. Are you going?"

"I don't know. Should I?"

Denis pretended to laugh.

"You're asking me that when I haven't even finished university? I'd go in a second. A change of air always does one good."

He thought of adding and what is there to keep you here? But he didn't say it.

"It's because something happened, the other day," Mattia ventured. "The day I graduated."

"Mmm."

"Alice was there and…"

"And?"

Mattia hesitated for a moment.

"Well, we kissed," he said at last.

Denis's fingers stiffened around the receiver. He was surprised by his reaction. He was no longer jealous of Alice, there was no point, but at that moment it was as if an undigested bit of the past had come back up his throat. For a moment he saw Mattia and Alice hand in hand in Viola's kitchen, and he felt Giulia Mirandi's invasive tongue forcing its way into his mouth like a rolled-up towel.

"Hallelujah," he remarked, trying to sound happy. "You two have finally done it."

"Yeah."

In the pause that followed both of them wanted to hang up.

"And now you don't know what to do," Denis struggled to say.

"Yeah."

"But you and she are now, what would you say…?"

"I don't know. I haven't seen her since."

"Ah."

Denis ran the nail of his index finger along the curled wire of the telephone. At the other end Mattia did the same and as always he thought of a DNA helix, missing its twin.

"Numbers are everywhere," said Denis. "They're always the same, aren't they?"

"Yes."

"But Alice is only here."

"Yes."

"So you've already made up your mind."

Denis heard his friend's breath easing and becoming more regular.

"Thank you," said Mattia.

"For what?"

Mattia hung up. Denis spent another few seconds with the receiver pressed to his ear, listening to the silence inside it. Something within him went out, like one last ember that had stayed lit for too long under the ashes.

I said the right thing, he thought.

The busy signal sounded. Denis hung up and went back into the bathroom to check on those wretched wisdom teeth.

"?Que pasa, mi amorcito?" Soledad asked Alice, tilting her head slightly to catch her eye. Ever since Fernanda had been in the hospital she had eaten at the dinner table with them, because father and daughter facing each other, alone, was unbearable for both of them.

Alice's father had developed the habit of not changing when he came home from work. He had dinner in his jacket and tie, slightly loosened, as if he were merely passing through. He held a newspaper open on the table and looked up only to make sure that his daughter was gulping down at least the occasional mouthful.