Paolo Giordano - The Solitude of Prime Numbers

Alberto's wife came to the door. She ignored both Mattia's outstretched hand and the bag with the bottle. Instead she drew him to her and kissed him on the cheek.

"I don't know what you two have been up to, but I've never seen Alberto as happy as he is tonight," she whispered. "Come in."

Mattia resisted the temptation to rub his ear against his shoulder to get rid of an itch.

"Albi, Mattia's here," she called.

Instead of Alberto, his son Philip appeared from the hall. Mattia knew him from the photograph that his father kept on his desk, in which Philip was still only a few months old, and round and impersonal like all newborn babies. It had never occurred to him that he might have grown. Some of his parents' features were forcibly making their way beneath his skin: Alberto's long chin, his mother's not-quite-open eyelids. Mattia thought about the cruel mechanism of growth, the soft cartilages subject to imperceptible but inexorable changes, and, just for a moment, about Michela and her features, frozen forever since that day in the park.

Philip came over, pedaling his tricycle like a boy possessed. When he noticed Mattia, he braked suddenly and stared at him in astonishment, as if he had been caught doing something forbidden. Alberto's wife gathered him in her arms, lifting him from the tricycle.

"Here's the horrid little monster," she said, burying her nose in his cheek.

Mattia gave him a forced smile. Children made him uneasy.

"Let's go in. Nadia's here already," Alberto's wife went on.

"Nadia?" said Mattia.

Alberto's wife looked at him, confused.

"Yes, Nadia," she said. "Didn't Albi tell you?"

"No."

There was a moment of embarrassment. Mattia didn't know a Nadia. He wondered what was going on and feared he already knew.

"Anyway she's in there. Come on."

As they walked toward the kitchen, Philip studied Mattia suspiciously, hiding behind his mother's back, his index and middle fingers in his mouth and his knuckles gleaming with saliva. Mattia was forced to look elsewhere. He remembered the time he had followed Alice down a longer hall than this one. He looked at Philip's scribbles hanging on the walls instead of paintings and was careful not to trample his toys scattered on the floor. The whole house, its very walls, was impregnated with a smell of vitality that he was unused to. He thought about his own apartment, where it was so easy to decide simply not to exist. He already regretted accepting the invitation to dinner.

In the kitchen Alberto greeted him, shaking his hand affectionately, and he responded automatically. The woman sitting at the table stood up and held out her hand.

"This is Nadia," Alberto said. "And this is our next Fields Medal winner."

"Nice to meet you," said Mattia, embarrassed.

Nadia smiled at him. She made as if to lean forward, perhaps to kiss him on the cheeks, but Mattia's motionlessness held her back.

"A pleasure," she said, and nothing more.

For a few seconds he remained absorbed by one of the big earrings that dangled from her ears: a gold circle at least five centimeters in diameter, which when she moved began swinging in a complicated motion that Mattia tried to decompose into the three Cartesian axes. The size of the earring and its contrast with Nadia's jet-black hair made him think of something shameless, almost obscene, that frightened and aroused him at the same time.

They sat down at the table and Alberto poured red wine for everyone. He grandly toasted the article they would soon write and obliged Mattia to explain to Nadia, in simple terms, what it was about. She joined in with an uncertain smile, which betrayed thoughts of a different kind and made him lose the thread of the conversation more than once.

"It sounds interesting," she observed finally, and Mattia looked down.

"It's much more than interesting," said Alberto, waving his hands around as if imitating the shape of an ellipsoid, which Mattia pictured in his mind.

Alberto's wife came in holding a soup tureen, from which emanated a strong smell of cumin. The conversation turned to food, a more neutral territory. A tension that they hadn't previously been aware of dissipated. Everyone, apart from Mattia, expressed nostalgia for some kind of delicacy that they couldn't get here in northern Europe. Alberto talked about the ravioli his mother used to make. His wife remembered the seafood salad they used to eat together in their university days, in that restaurant facing the beach. Nadia described the cannoli filled with fresh ricotta and dotted with tiny chips of dark black chocolate that the only pastry shop in her little village made. As she described them she kept her eyes closed and sucked in her lips as if she could still taste a little of that flavor. She caught her lower lip with her teeth for a moment and then let it go. Mattia fixed on that detail without realizing it. He thought there was something exaggerated about Nadia's femininity, in the fluidity with which she rolled her hands around, and the southern inflection with which she pronounced her labial consonants, almost doubling them when there was no need. It was as if she possessed a dark power, which depressed him and at the same time made his cheeks burn.

"You just need the courage to go back," Nadia concluded.

All four of them remained in silence for a few seconds, as if each were thinking about what it was that kept them so far from home. Philip banged his toys against one another a few feet away from the table.

Alberto was able to keep a tottering conversation alive all through dinner, often embarking on long monologues, his hands waving above an increasingly untidy table.

After dessert, his wife got up to collect the plates. Nadia made as if to help her, but she told her to stay where she was and disappeared into the kitchen.

They sat in silence. Lost in thought, Mattia ran an index finger along the serrated edge of his knife.

"I'll just go and see what she's up to in there," said Alberto, getting up as well. From behind Nadia's back he darted a glance at Mattia, which meant do your best.

He and Nadia were left on their own with Philip. They looked up at the same time, because there was nothing else to look at, and they both laughed with embarrassment.

"What about you?" Nadia said to him after a while. "Why did you choose to stay here?"

She studied him with her eyes half closed, as if trying to guess his secret. She had long, thick eyelashes and Mattia thought they were too still to be real.

He finished lining up the crumbs with his index finger. He shrugged.

"I don't know," he said. "It's as if there's more oxygen here."

She nodded reflectively, as if she had understood. From the kitchen came the voices of Alberto and his wife talking about ordinary things, about the tap that was leaking again and who would put Philip to bed, things that at that moment seemed tremendously important to Mattia.

Silence fell again and he forced himself to think of something to say, something that seemed normal. Nadia entered his field of vision wherever he looked, an awkward presence. The dark color of her low-cut top distracted him, even as he was staring at his empty glass. Under the table, hidden by the tablecloth, were their legs and he imagined them down there, in the dark, forced into a strained intimacy.

Philip came over and put a toy car in front of him, right on his napkin. Mattia looked at the miniature Maserati, then looked at Philip, who observed him in turn, waiting for him to decide to do something.

Rather hesitantly he picked up the toy car and made it go back and forth on the tablecloth. He felt Nadia's dense gaze upon him, assessing his embarrassment. With his mouth he imitated a shy vroom. Then he stopped. Philip stared at him in silence, slightly annoyed. He stretched out his arm, took the car back, and returned to his toys.