Paolo Giordano - The Solitude of Prime Numbers

She was alerted to the presence of Fabio in the room by a series of small approaching noises. She froze, waiting for contact with his body.

Instead he sat down on the banquette and started distractedly flipping through a magazine.

"Fabio," she called to him, not really knowing what to say.

He didn't reply. He turned a page, making more noise than necessary. He gripped one corner between his fingers, uncertain whether to tear it or not.

"Fabio," she repeated at the same volume, but turning around.

"What is it?"

"Can you get me the rice, please? It's in the top cupboard. I can't reach."

It was just an excuse, they both knew that. It was just a way of saying come here.

Fabio threw the magazine on the table and it struck an ashtray carved from half a coconut, which began to spin. He sat there for a few seconds with his hands resting on his knees, as if he were thinking about it. Then he suddenly rose to his feet and walked over to the sink.

"Where?" he asked angrily, taking care not to look at Alice.

"There." She pointed.

Fabio pulled a chair over to the fridge, making it squeak on the ceramic tiles. He climbed up on it with bare feet. Alice looked at them as if she hadn't seen them before, and found them attractive, but in a vaguely frightening way.

He picked up the box of rice. It was already open. He shook it. Then he smiled in a way that Alice found sinister. He tilted the box and rice started spilling onto the floor, like thin white rain.

"What are you doing?" said Alice.

Fabio smiled.

"Here's your rice," he replied.

He shook the box harder and the grains scattered all around the kitchen. Alice came over.

"Stop it," she said, but he ignored her. Alice repeated it more loudly.

"Like at our wedding, remember? Our damn wedding," shouted Fabio.

She gripped him by a calf to make him stop and he poured the rice over her head. A few grains stuck in her smooth hair. She looked up at him and said again stop it.

A grain hit her in the eye, hurting her, and with her eyes closed Alice slapped Fabio's shin. He reacted by shaking his leg hard, kicking her just below her left shoulder. His wife's bad knee did what it could to keep her upright, bending first forward and then backward, like a crooked hinge, but then it let her drop to the ground.

The box was empty. Fabio stayed standing on the chair, bewildered, with the box upside down in his hand, looking at his wife on the floor, curled up like a cat. A violent shock of lucidity flashed through his brain.

He got down.

"Ali, did you hurt yourself?" he said. "Let me see."

He slid a hand under her head to look at her face, but she squirmed away.

"Leave me alone!" she yelled.

"Darling, I'm sorry," he pleaded. "You are-"

"Go away!" shouted Alice, with a vocal power that neither of them could have suspected she owned.

Fabio pulled away. His hands trembled. He took two steps back, then stammered an okay. He ran toward the bedroom and came out wearing a T-shirt and a pair of shoes. He left the house without turning to look at his wife, who still hadn't moved.

Alice pushed her hair behind her ears. The cupboard door was still open above her head, the lifeless chair in front of her. She hadn't hurt herself. She didn't feel like crying. She couldn't manage to think about what had just happened.

She started picking up the grains of rice scattered over the floor. The first few she picked up one by one. Then she started sweeping them together with the palm of her hand.

She got up and threw a handful into the pan, in which the water was already boiling. She stood and looked at them, carried chaotically up and down by convective motions. Mattia had called them that once. She turned off the flame and went and sat on the sofa.

She wouldn't put anything away. She would wait for her in-laws to arrive and find her like that. She would tell them how Fabio had behaved.

But no one arrived. He must have warned them already. Or he had gone to their house and was telling them his version, saying that Alice's belly was as dry as a dried-up lake and that he was fed up with living like this.

The house was plunged into silence and the light seemed unable to find a place for itself. Alice picked up the telephone and dialed her father's number.

"Hello?" answered Soledad.

"Hi, Sol."

"Hi, mi amorcito . How's my baby?" said the housekeeper with her usual concern.

"So-so," said Alice.

"Why? ?Que pasa?"

Alice remained silent for a few seconds.

"Is Dad there?" she asked.

"He's asleep. Shall I go and wake him up?"

Alice thought of her father, in the big bedroom that he now shared with only his thoughts, with the lowered blinds drawing lines of light on his sleeping body. The rancor that had always divided them had been absorbed by time; Alice could hardly remember it. What oppressed her most about that house, her father's serious, penetrating glance, was what she missed most now. He wouldn't say anything, he hardly ever spoke. Stroking her cheek, he would ask Sol to change the sheets in her room and that would be that. After her mother's death something had altered in him: it was as if he had slowed down. Paradoxically, since Fabio had entered Alice's life, her father had become more protective. He no longer talked about himself, he let her do the talking, losing himself in his daughter's voice, carried along by the timbre rather than the words, and responded with thoughtful murmurs.

His moments of absence had begun about a year before, when one evening he had confused Soledad with Fernanda. He had pulled her to him to kiss her, as if she really were his wife, and Sol had been forced to give him a gentle slap on the cheek, to which he had reacted with the whining resentment of a child. The next day he hadn't remembered a thing, but the vague sense of there being something wrong, an interruption in the cadenced rhythm of time, had led him to ask Sol what had happened. She had tried not to reply, to change the subject, but he hadn't let it go. When the housekeeper had told the truth he had grown gloomy, had nodded and, turning around, had said I'm sorry, in a low voice. Then he had holed himself up in his study and stayed there until dinnertime, without sleeping or doing anything. He had sat down at his desk, with his hands resting on the walnut surface, and had tried in vain to reconstruct that missing segment in the ribbon of his memory.

Episodes such as this were repeated with ever greater frequency and all three of them, Alice, her father, and Sol, tried to pretend nothing was wrong, waiting for the moment when that would no longer be possible.

"Ali?" Sol urged. "So shall I go and wake him up?"

"No, no," Alice said quickly. "Don't wake him. It's nothing."

"Really?"

"Yes. Let him rest."

She hung up and lay down on the sofa. She tried to keep her eyes open, directing them at the plastered ceiling. She wanted to be present at this very moment, in which she noticed a new, uncontrollable change. She wanted to be witness to the umpteenth little disaster, memorize its trajectory, but after a few minutes her breathing became more regular and Alice fell asleep.

Mattia was startled to find that he still had instincts, buried beneath the dense network of thoughts and abstractions that had woven itself around him. He was startled by the violence with which these instincts emerged and confidently guided his gestures.

The return to reality was painful. Nadia's foreign body had settled on his own. Contact with her sweat on one side and the crumpled fabric of the sofa and their squashed clothes on the other was suffocating. She was breathing slowly. Mattia thought that if the ratio between the intervals of their breath was an irrational number, there was no way of combining them to find a regularity.