Paolo Giordano - The Solitude of Prime Numbers

"What about you?" she asked after a while. She had hesitated to ask, for fear of his answer. Then her voice had come out all by itself, almost startling her.

"No," Mattia replied.

"No children?"

"I don't have…" He wanted to say anyone. "I'm not married."

Alice nodded.

"Still playing hard to get, then?" she said, turning to smile at him.

Mattia shook his head with embarrassment, and understood what she meant.

They had reached a large, deserted parking lot near the truck terminal, surrounded by huge prefabricated buildings, one after another. No one lived there. Three stacks of wooden pallets wrapped in plastic leaned against a gray wall, next to a lowered security gate. Higher up, on the roof, was a neon sign that must have shone bright orange at night.

Alice stopped the car in the middle of the parking lot and turned off the engine.

"Your turn," she said, opening the door.

"What?"

"Now you drive."

"No, no," said Mattia. "Forget it."

She stared at him carefully, with her eyes half closed and her lips pursed as if she were only now rediscovering a kind of affection that she had forgotten about.

"So you haven't changed that much," she said. It wasn't a reproach; in fact she seemed relieved.

"Neither have you," he said.

She shrugged.

"Okay, then," he said. "Let's give it a go."

Alice laughed. They got out of the car to switch seats and Mattia walked with his arms dangling exaggeratedly to demonstrate his total resignation. For the first time they each found themselves in the role of the other, each showing the other what they thought was their true profile.

"I don't know where to start," said Mattia, with his arms high on the steering wheel, as if he really didn't know where to put them.

"Nothing at all? You've never driven, not even once?"

"Practically never."

"So we're in a bit of a fix."

Alice leaned over him. For a moment Mattia stared at her hair falling vertically toward the center of the earth. Under the T-shirt that lifted slightly over her belly he recognized the upper edge of the tattoo, which he had observed close-up a long time ago.

"You're so thin," he blurted out, as if he were thinking out loud.

Alice jerked her head around to look at him, but then pretended nothing was wrong.

"No," she said, shrugging. "No different from usual."

She pulled back a little and pointed to the three pedals.

"Right, then. Clutch, brake, and accelerator. Left foot only for the clutch and right foot for the other two."

Mattia nodded, still somewhat distracted by the proximity of her body and the invisible smell of shower gel that lingered.

"You know the gears, right? And anyway they're written down here. First, second, third. And I have a feeling that'll do for now," Alice went on. "When you change gears, hold down the clutch and then slowly release it. And to start too: hold down the clutch and then release it while giving a bit of gas. Ready?"

"And if I'm not?" he replied.

He tried to concentrate. He felt as nervous as if he were about to take an exam. Over time he had become convinced that he no longer knew how to do anything outside of his element, the ordered and transfinite sets of mathematics. Normal people acquired self-confidence as they aged, while he was losing it, as if he had a limited reserve.

He assessed the space that separated them from the pallets stacked at the end of the parking lot. A good fifty meters, at least. Even if he set off at top speed he would have time to brake. He held the key turned too long, making the motor screech. He delicately released the clutch, but didn't press hard enough on the accelerator and the engine stalled with a gulp. Alice laughed.

"Almost. A bit more decisive this time though."

Mattia took a deep breath. Then he tried again. The car set off with a jerk and Alice told him to hit the clutch and put it in second. Mattia changed gears and accelerated again. They drove straight until they were almost ten meters from the factory wall, when he decided to turn the steering wheel. They did a 180-degree turn that threw them both to one side and returned them to the point they had started from.

Alice clapped her hands.

"You see?" she said.

He turned the car again and performed the same move. It was as if he knew how to follow only that narrow, oval trajectory, even though he had a huge lot all to himself.

"Keep going straight," said Alice. "Turn onto the road."

"Are you mad?"

"Come on, there's no one there. And besides, you've already figured it out."

Mattia adjusted the steering wheel. He felt his hands sweating from the plastic and the adrenaline stirring his muscles as it hadn't done for ages. For a moment he thought he was driving a car, the whole thing, with its pistons and greased mechanisms, and that he had Alice, so close, to tell him what to do. Just as he had imagined so often. Well, not exactly, but for once he resolved to ignore the imperfections.

"Okay," he said.

He steered the car toward the exit. Once there he leaned toward the windshield and looked in both directions. He delicately turned the steering wheel and couldn't help following its movements with his whole torso, as children do when they pretend to drive.

He was on the road. The sun, already low in the sky, was behind him and shone in his eyes from the rearview mirror. The arrow of the speedometer pointed to 30 kilometers an hour and the whole car vibrated with the hot breath of a domesticated animal.

"Am I doing okay?" he asked.

"Brilliantly. Now you can change into third."

The road went on for several hundred meters and Mattia looked straight ahead. Alice took advantage of the situation to observe him calmly from close-up. He was no longer the Mattia from the photograph. The skin of his face was no longer an even texture, smooth and elastic: now the first wrinkles, still very shallow, furrowed his brow. He had shaved, but new stubble was already emerging from his cheeks, dotting them with black. His physical presence was overwhelming; he no longer seemed to have any cracks through which one could invade his space, as she had often liked to do when she was a girl. Or else it was that she no longer felt she had the right to. That she was no longer capable of it.

She tried to find a resemblance to the girl from the hospital, but now that Mattia was here, her memory grew even more confused. All those details that seemed to coincide were no longer as clear as they had been. The color of the girl's hair was lighter, perhaps. And she didn't remember the dimples at the sides of her mouth, or those eyebrows, so thick at the outer ends. For the first time she was really worried that she had made a mistake.

How will I explain it to him? she wondered.

Mattia cleared his throat, as if the silence had gone on for too long or as if he had noticed that Alice was staring at him. She looked elsewhere, toward the hill.

"You remember the first time I came to pick you up in the car?" she said. "I'd had my license for less than an hour."

"Yeah. Of all the possible guinea pigs you chose me."

Alice thought that it wasn't true. She hadn't chosen him over all the others. The truth was that she hadn't even thought about anyone else.

"You spent the whole time clutching the door handle. You kept saying slow down, slow down."

She cried out with the shrill voice of a little girl. Mattia remembered that he had gone against his will. That afternoon he was supposed to be studying for his mathematical analysis exam, but in the end he had given in, because it seemed so damned important to Alice. All he did all afternoon was calculate again and again how many hours of study time he was losing. Thinking about it now, he felt stupid, as we all do when we remember all the time we waste wishing we were somewhere else.