Paolo Giordano - The Solitude of Prime Numbers

He tried to take in some air by stretching over Nadia's head, but it was saturated with heavy condensation. He suddenly wanted to cover himself up. He twisted one leg because he felt his member, flaccid and cold, against her leg. He clumsily hurt her with his knee. Nadia gave a start and raised her head. She had already fallen asleep.

"Sorry," said Mattia.

"Doesn't matter."

She kissed him and her breath was too hot. He remained motionless, waiting for her to stop.

"Shall we go to the bedroom?" she said.

Mattia nodded. He would have liked to go back to his apartment, his comfortable void, but he knew it wasn't the right thing to do.

They both became aware of how embarrassing and unnatural the moment was, as they slipped beneath the sheets from opposite sides of the bed. Nadia smiled as if to say everything's fine. In the darkness she huddled up against his shoulder. She gave him another kiss and quickly fell asleep.

Mattia too closed his eyes, but was forced to open them again immediately, because a jumble of terrible memories lay in wait for him, piled up beneath his eyelids. Once again he had difficulty breathing. He reached his left hand under the bed and began rubbing his thumb against the iron netting, at the pointed juncture where two meshes met. In the darkness he brought his finger to his mouth and sucked it. The taste of blood calmed him for a few seconds.

He gradually became aware of the unfamiliar sounds of Nadia's apartment: the faint hum of the fridge, the heat that rustled for a few seconds and then stopped with a click of the boiler, and a clock, in the other room, that sounded to him as if it were going too slowly. He wanted to move his legs, to get up and out of there. Nadia was still in the middle of the bed, depriving him of the space he needed to turn around. Her hair stung his neck and her breathing dried the skin of his chest. Mattia thought that he would never manage to close his eyes. It was late already, perhaps after two. He had to teach the next day and was bound to make mistakes at the blackboard; he would look like a complete idiot in front of all his students. At his own place, on the other hand, he would have been able to sleep, at least for the few remaining hours.

If I'm quiet about it she won't notice, he thought.

He remained motionless for more than a minute, thinking. The sounds were becoming more and more apparent. Another sharp rattle from the boiler made him stiffen and he decided to leave.

With little movements he managed to free the arm that was underneath Nadia's head. In her sleep she felt the lack and moved to try to find him. Mattia drew himself upright. He rested first one foot on the floor and then the other. When he got up the bed squeaked slightly as it settled.

He turned to look at her in the semidarkness and vaguely remembered the moment when he had turned his back on Michela in the park.

He walked barefoot to the sitting room. He picked up his clothes from the sofa and his shoes from the floor. He opened the door, as always, without a sound, and when he was in the corridor, still clutching his trousers, he finally managed to breathe deeply.

On the Saturday evening of the rice incident, Fabio had called her on her cell phone. Alice had wondered why he hadn't tried on the home phone first and then thought that perhaps it was because the home phone was an object that belonged to both of them and he didn't like the fact that there was something they shared at that moment any more than she did. It had been a short call, in spite of the drawn-out silences. He had said for tonight I'm staying here, like a decision that had already been made, and she had replied as far as I'm concerned you can stay there tomorrow as well and as long as you like. Then, once these tiresome details had been worked out, Fabio had added Alice, I'm sorry, and she had hung up without saying me too.

She hadn't answered the telephone again. Fabio's insistent calls soon abated, and she, in an attack of self-commiseration, had said to herself you see? Walking barefoot through the flat she had picked up at random a few things of her husband's, documents and a few items of clothing, and put them in a box, which she had then dumped in the hall.

One evening she had come back from work and found it wasn't there. Fabio hadn't taken away much else. The furniture was all in place and the closet still full of his clothes, but on the living room shelves there were now gaps among the books, black spaces that bore witness to the start of the breakup. Alice had stopped to look at them and for the first time the separation had assumed the concrete outlines of a hard fact, the massive consistence of a solid form.

With a certain relief she let herself go. She felt as if she had always done everything for someone else, but now there was just her and she could simply stop, surrender, and that was that. She had more time for the same things, but she was aware of an inertia in her actions, a weariness, as if she were moving through a viscous liquid. She finally gave up performing even the easiest tasks. Her dirty clothes piled up in the bathroom and, lying on the sofa for hours, she knew that they were there, that it wouldn't take much effort to pick them up, but none of her muscles considered this a sufficient motive.

She invented a case of the flu so as not to go to work. She slept much more than necessary, even in broad daylight. She didn't even lower the blinds; she had only to close her eyes to be unaware of the light, to cancel out the objects that surrounded her and forget her hateful body, which was growing weaker and weaker but still clung tenaciously to her thoughts. The weight of consequences was always there, like a stranger sleeping on top of her. It watched over her even when Alice plunged into sleep, a heavy sleep saturated with dreams, which was coming more and more to resemble an addiction. If her throat was dry, Alice imagined she was suffocating. If one of her arms tingled from being under the pillow too long, it was because a German shepherd was eating it. If her feet were cold because the blankets had fallen off them in her sleep, Alice found herself once more at the bottom of the crevasse, buried in snow up to her neck. But she wasn't afraid, or hardly ever. Paralysis allowed her to move only her tongue and she stretched it out to taste the snow. It was sweet and Alice would have liked to eat it all, but she couldn't turn her head. So she stayed there, waiting for the cold to rise up her legs, to fill her belly and spread from there to her veins, freezing her blood.

Her waking life was infested with half-constructed thoughts. Alice got up only when she had to, and her drowsy confusion faded slowly, leaving milky residues in her head, like interrupted memories, which mixed with the others and seemed no less true. She wandered through the silent apartment like the ghost of herself, unhurriedly following her own lucidity. I'm going mad, she thought sometimes. But she didn't mind. In fact, it made her smile, because at last she was the one making the choices.

In the evening she ate lettuce leaves, fishing them straight from the plastic bag. They were crunchy and made of nothing. They tasted only of water. She didn't eat them to fill up her stomach, but just to stand in for the ritual of dinner and somehow occupy that time, which she didn't know what else to do with. She ate lettuce until the flimsy stuff made her feel ill.

She emptied herself of Fabio and of herself, of all the useless efforts she had made to get where she was and find nothing there. With detached curiosity she observed the rebirth of her weaknesses, her obsessions. This time she would let them decide, since she hadn't been able to do anything anyway. Against certain parts of yourself you remain powerless, she said to herself, as she regressed pleasurably to the time when she was a girl. To the moment when Mattia had left and, shortly afterward, her mother too, on two journeys that were different but equally remote from her. Mattia. That was it. She thought of him often. Again. He was like another of her illnesses, from which she didn't really want to recover. You can fall ill with just a memory and she had fallen ill that afternoon in the car, by the park, when she had covered his face with her own to prevent him from looking on the site where that horror had taken place.