Paolo Giordano - The Solitude of Prime Numbers

When Alice came to, a nurse was taking her pulse. She still had her shoes on, and was lying at a slight angle on top of a white sheet on a hospital bed by the entrance. She immediately thought of Fabio, who might have seen her in that terrible state, and suddenly sat up.

"I'm fine," she said.

"Lie down," the nurse ordered her. "We're going to do a checkup."

"There's no need. Really, I'm fine," Alice insisted, overcoming the resistance of the nurse, who tried to keep her where she was. Fabio wasn't there.

"You fainted, young lady. You have to see a doctor."

But Alice was already on her feet. She checked that she still had her bag.

"It's nothing. Believe me."

The nurse raised her eyes to the sky but didn't stand in her way. Alice glanced around, lost, as if looking for someone. Then she said thank you and left in a hurry.

She hadn't hurt herself when she fell. She seemed merely to have banged her right knee. She felt the rhythmical pulsation of the bruise under her jeans. Her hands were a little scratched and dusty, as if she had dragged them along the gravel in the courtyard. She blew on them to clean them.

She walked over to the reception desk and bent down to the round hole in the glass. The lady on the other side looked up at her.

"Hello," said Alice. She had no idea how to explain herself. She didn't even know how long she had been unconscious.

"A little while ago…" she said, "I was standing there…"

She pointed to the spot where she had been, but the lady didn't move her head.

"There was a woman, by the entrance. I didn't feel well. I fainted. Then… You see, I need to find out the name of that person."

The receptionist looked at her, bewildered, from behind the counter.

"I'm sorry?" she asked with a grimace.

"It sounds strange, I know," Alice insisted. "But you've got to help me. Perhaps you could give me the names of the patients who had appointments in this department today. Or examinations. Just the women, I only need those."

The woman looked at her. Then she smiled coldly.

"We aren't authorized to give out that kind of information," she replied.

"It's very important. Please. It's really very important."

The receptionist tapped with a pen on the register in front of her. "I'm sorry. It really isn't possible," she replied irritably.

Alice snorted. She was about to pull away from the counter, but then she approached again.

"I'm Dr. Rovelli's wife," she said.

The receptionist sat up straighter in her chair. She arched her eyebrows and tapped the register with her pen again.

"I understand," she said. "If you like I'll let your husband know you're here."

She picked up the receiver but Alice stopped her with a gesture of her hand.

"No," she said, without controlling the tone of her voice. "There's no need."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes, thanks. Never mind."

She set off toward home. All the way there she couldn't think about anything else. Her mind was becoming clear again, but all the images that passed through it were obliterated by that girl's face. The details were already blurring, plunging fast into the midst of an ocean of other memories of no importance, but that inexplicable sense of familiarity remained. And that smile, the same as Mattia's, mixed with her own intermittent reflection on the glass.

Perhaps Michela was alive and she had seen her. It was madness, and yet Alice couldn't help believing it. It was as if her brain desperately needed that one thought. Clinging to it to stay alive.

She began to think, to formulate hypotheses. She tried to reconstruct how things might have gone. Perhaps the old lady had kidnapped Michela, had found her in the park and taken her away, because she had a violent desire for a little girl but couldn't have children. Her womb was defective or else she was unwilling to make a bit of room in it.

Just like me, thought Alice.

She had kidnapped her and then brought her up in a house a long way from there, with a different name, as if she were her own.

But in that case, why come back? Why risk being discovered after all those years? Perhaps she was being devoured by guilt. Or else she just wanted to tempt fate, as she herself had done outside the door of the oncology department.

On the other hand, perhaps the old woman had nothing to do with it. Maybe she had met Michela a long time afterward and knew nothing about her origins, her real family, just as Michela remembered nothing about herself.

Alice thought of Mattia, pointing from inside her car at the trees in front of him, his ashen, absent face that spoke of death. She was completely identical to me, he had said.

Suddenly it seemed to her that everything made sense, that the girl really was Michela, the vanished twin, and that every detail now fell into place: the blank expanse of her forehead, the length of her fingers, her circumspect way of moving them. And more than anything that childish game of hers, that more than anything.

But just a second later, she realized she was confused. All those details collapsed into a vague sense of weariness, orchestrated by the hunger that had clenched at her temples for days, and Alice feared losing her senses all over again.

At home, she left the door half open with the keys still in it. She went into the kitchen and opened the cupboard without even taking off her jacket. She found some tuna and ate it straight from the can without draining off the oil. The smell made her feel sick. She threw the empty can into the sink and picked up a can of peas. With her fork she fished them from the cloudy water and ate half of them, without breathing. They tasted of sand and the shiny skin stuck to her teeth. Then she pulled out the box of cookies that had sat open in the cupboard since the day Fabio had left. She ate five, one after the other, barely chewing them. They scratched her throat as she swallowed, like bits of glass. She stopped only when the cramps in her stomach were so strong that she had to sit down on the floor to withstand the pain.

When it had passed, she stood up and walked to the darkroom, limping openly, as she did when she was alone. She took one of the boxes from the second shelf. The word Snapshots was written on the side in indelible red pen. She spilled the contents onto the table and spread out the photographs with her fingers. Some were stuck together. Alice quickly inspected them and at last found the one she was looking for.

She studied it for a long time. Mattia was young, and so was she. His head was bent and it was hard to study his expression to determine the resemblance. A lot of time had passed. Perhaps too much.

That fixed image brought others to the surface and Alice's mind stitched them together to re-create movement, fragments of sounds, scraps of sensations. She was filled with searing but pleasurable nostalgia.

If she had been able to choose one point from which to start over, she would have chosen that one: she and Mattia in a silent room with their private intimacies, hesitant about touching each other but their outlines fitting precisely together.

She had to let him know. Only by seeing him could she be sure. If his sister was alive, Mattia had the right to know.

For the first time, she perceived all the space that separated them as a ludicrous distance. She was sure that he was still there, where she had written to him several times, many years before. If he had moved, she would have been aware of it somehow. Because she and Mattia were united by an invisible, elastic thread, buried under a pile of meaningless things, a thread that could exist only between two people like themselves: two people who had acknowledged their own solitude within the other.