Three Light-Years: A Novel (28 page)

“A doctor in a factory because he’s passionate about it? Not likely, I’d say.”

“You told me it was difficult to give it up, in the end there was a feeling of great change in the air.”

“A great disaster.”

“Yes, but exciting.”

“Maybe. An office was better, though.”

“An office?”

“I left so I could open an office and set up a private practice.”

“You told me they were making life impossible for you because you were a leftist, they accused you of covering for the habitual absentees.”

“Could be. But I left to open an office.” He smiled. “I probably told you they fired me so I could brag about being persecuted by the bosses.”

That summer afternoon, sitting on the chair in the garden, watching the old man hold up
miraculous
specimens of various kinds of vegetables as if he were trying to sell them to him, Viberti thought that you had to be Mercuri to grow old like Mercuri and that he himself would have preferred a life like that.

*   *   *

That Monday, he sat down on a bench not far from the ER, like a patient waiting for a doctor. Cecilia would pass by, she couldn’t help but come that way and all he needed were a few seconds to let her know that nothing had changed, that they should resume their long, interrupted conversation. For a while all he saw were colleagues who recognized him and asked him, smiling, what he was doing sitting on that bench. He replied that he was waiting for Cecilia. A cardiologist pointed to him and said, “You’re waiting for Cecilia!” without even stopping. Because everyone knew they were friends. And there was no need to hide anything, there was nothing to hide anymore. He wasn’t completely at ease, sitting on the bench, for various reasons—people expected a doctor to always be on his feet, always on the run. To avoid their stares he took off his white coat, folded it, and set it beside him on the bench. He wasn’t really uncomfortable, he knew that everything would be fine as soon as the doctor he was waiting for appeared and examined him and reassured him by saying: “You’re in excellent health.”

And at the end of her shift Cecilia appeared outside the doors of the emergency room. She saw him, waved and smiled, forlorn and hurt, but not hostile, not guarded. She went over to him, said hello, and Viberti asked if he could walk her to the locker room. “All right, walk with me,” she said. They went up two flights of stairs in silence and in silence walked down a hallway. Then Viberti asked her how the boy was and Cecilia said he was fine.

“I really enjoyed seeing him again, I didn’t think he’d remember me.”

Cecilia smiled. They stopped outside the locker room door, in front of the window from which Viberti had watched her, two years ago.

“Once I saw you from here, down there in the parking lot, the car key kept slipping out of your hand.”

Cecilia put a hand over her mouth: “I remember! They had just released Mattia … What was I doing?”

“You were bending down to pick it up and then it dropped again.”

“And it was all muddy, it must have rained…”

“Yes, it had rained.”

“More than two years ago. And how long did you stay and watch me?”

“Until you left.”

Cecilia nodded. The courtyard was full of parked cars, but the saplings hid them and it was hard to remember exactly where the car had been parked, which way Mattia had come with his father; the leaves obstructed the view and the foliage had perhaps grown more dense. Still, in their memory they saw the same scene again, Viberti the way he had seen her, Cecilia imagining what he had seen from that angle.

After a while Viberti said, “I have to tell you something. I’m not the man you think I am. I’m a very boring, self-centered person. I’m a man who lives alone. I’ve lived alone for years and I don’t think it’s by chance. Often, when I’m alone, I don’t think about anything. Nothing comes to me and so I sit on the balcony and look out at the courtyards.”

Cecilia raised a hand to her mouth again, then moved it to cover his mouth, shook her head to make him stop. “Ssh … Don’t.”

She stroked his cheek. “You’re not self-centered, you’re not boring. Don’t say anything more.”

They stood in silence, lowering their eyes then glancing at each other briefly. Then Cecilia asked him: “Will you eat with me tomorrow?”

*   *   *

Ten days go by and as Viberti comes out of the hospital he sees Silvia standing near a newsstand. I’d rather not have to describe her again with that black headband that makes her hair puff out like a mushroom, but I fear I have no choice. I could assume it’s a given, I know it isn’t nice to keep repeating it. Should I be more tactful, should I have more respect and reserve, or should I be indelicate? After all, I only said it makes her head look like a mushroom (there, I said it again).

At that moment, Silvia has her back to the entrance, and she’s facing across the street, but it’s her for sure. She can’t have seen him. Without stopping to think, Viberti finds himself running down the sidewalk in the opposite direction. Taking the long way around, he finally reaches the parked Passat and sits behind the wheel, feeling ashamed at having run away like that. But he couldn’t help it, his legs started moving before he could consider whether fleeing was the most sensible thing to do. The most sensible thing now would be to go back and look for her and talk to her. He doesn’t know why he’s running away. He only knows that he doesn’t want to see her. He sits in the car, not moving, until he realizes that he’s sweating profusely; the car was in the sun all day, it’s a furnace. He opens the windows. He’s better off going home, calling her and arranging to see her. He’s better off calling her later on.

He approaches his house and as he looks for a parking space he sees her in front of his building; this time he’s certain that she, too, has spotted him. He caught her look of surprise, her face brightening as she decided to get his attention. In the rearview mirror he thinks she started to raise her arm. How did she manage to get there before him? She must have taken a taxi, but when? She must have taken a taxi because she saw him running away in front of the hospital, it’s the only explanation. How shameful. So shameful, Viberti thinks, and without even deciding that he doesn’t want to see her, he remembers a way through the courtyards that will allow him to enter the building without going through the front door. To escape again? To prove that he was already home and therefore wasn’t the one who ran away in front of the hospital, in front of his building?

He parks down the block and hastily slips into the driveway that leads to the old garage that’s been converted into a gym. For twenty yards he hurries along the glass walls in sight of people running in place on treadmills, in the cool air-conditioning. He knows a little metal door that was never locked when he was a child, there might be a padlock on it now, it might also be walled up, it must be thirty years since he’s used it. But in the wall at the end of the courtyard the magic little door appears before him as in a fairy tale, intact, still unlocked, maybe a little creaky on its rusty hinges, maybe identical to his recollection.

Sweaty and euphoric, having made it through a narrow walkway between two vine-covered, redbrick walls, he comes out in the courtyard of his building. In a second he’s in the cool shade of the stairs. He presses the elevator button and hears voices on the first or second floor. There’s a woman’s voice, then another woman’s voice with a Spanish accent, and then a third woman’s voice, which is his mother’s voice. He can’t understand what they’re saying, but it’s not hard to figure out what’s happened. Silvia buzzed his mother, the other V
IBERTI
on the intercom. She went up to her apartment! What does she think she’s doing? Is she planning on camping out in front of his door?

And for the third time, instead of deciding to see Silvia and invite her up to his apartment to find out why she’s looking for him, he goes back to the courtyard and cuts across it diagonally, no longer headed toward the magic door but toward a ladder leaning against the wall in the opposite corner, the ladder that he’s seen Giulia’s husband use a couple of times to climb up to the roof of the supermarket. As soon as he reaches the roof, he turns around to glance at the building’s internal facade, an instinctive gesture to make sure no one is watching him. But then his gaze lingers and focuses on his empty balcony. There, on the wicker chair, a ghost returns his look and, astonished, seems to say:
You went down to the courtyard; you used to be a spectator, now you’ve become the leading man, what’s gotten into you? And you didn’t even jump off the balcony, you didn’t shatter on the brick pavement. You went down to run, leap, scale the wall, scramble up. What do you think you’re doing?
He looks toward his mother’s balcony, Giulia’s balcony, but the apartments on the left side of the building don’t have a good view of this area. That’s why Giulia’s husband climbs that slightly sloping, red-tiled roof and goes back down the other side. Looking for what? The warehouse roof juts out from the flat roof of the gym and creates a space in which you can hide, a kind of small urban cave for part-time hermits.

He crouches, taking cover in the shadows; he wants to think and prepare what he’s going to say, he wants to face Silvia—but right away he starts thinking about Giulia’s husband; what does he come down there to do? It’s certainly not a comfortable place, you’re sitting on the tarred roof of an old garage that’s been converted into a gym. Viberti remembers when, perhaps thirty-five years ago, workers had laid down black rolls of tar paper, securing them with molten tar, sealing the joints and stinking up all the houses on the block with noxious fumes. How odd to now see up close the material that he often imagined stepping on; he thought it would be gummier. The warehouse wall is peeling in many places, the bricks are peeking out beneath the plaster and between the bricks there are cracks two fingers wide where a small tin of Dutch cigars and a lighter can easily be stored.

So simple, so predictable, no mystery. Giulia’s husband doesn’t come here to phone a lover in privacy or enjoy half an hour of autistic solitude. He comes to smoke a cigar on the sly, like a boy of thirteen, because Giulia has forbidden it. So simple, so ridiculous. How he manages to hide the stink afterward, that’s a different story; smoke, tar, stink, and again Viberti thinks it’s none of his business.

His business is Silvia right now and that’s the business he has to focus on. He ran away, he made a bad impression, but it’s not serious, it can be remedied. He’ll leave the cave and go home now, and if Silvia really is camped outside his door, he’ll let her in and find a way to explain that he didn’t mean to run away, and find a way to listen to what she has to say.

Silvia must want to tell him that she found out about his relationship with Cecilia, and doesn’t understand how he could have slept with her.

That’s what made him run away, that’s what he was ashamed of.

He starts to get up then, but it occurs to him that he’d like to smoke first, he’d like to stink a little, too. It’s been twenty years since he’s smoked a cigarette and he wants to inhale and feel the effect of tobacco in his lungs again. He takes the box—Giulia’s husband won’t notice if one cigar is missing. He lights up, inhales deeply. He coughs, but he doesn’t choke. He feels his throat burning. He takes another puff. He’s never understood why people smoke. He persists, turns the cigar between his fingers, coughs, goes through the motions so that the ash drops from the tip. Halfway through he stubs it out.

From the courtyard he reenters the lobby of the building, takes the elevator. Silvia is not waiting for him on the fifth-floor landing. He’ll call her later, for one thing because the moment he steps into the house he notices that his head is spinning and that he’s beginning to feel nauseated. He feels a little idiotic. The intercom buzzes. Who could it be? He doesn’t answer. Feeling queasy, he peeks out the window and sees Silvia in front of the building. She’s still here, why doesn’t she go away? What does she want from him? A crazy lady, a maniac, why doesn’t she give up, why doesn’t she go away? Why isn’t she put off, doesn’t she understand that she should be put off? There are some patients like that, people who are unwilling to understand, who won’t resign themselves to the worst. The nausea is almost turning into an urge to vomit; how can one small cigar cause such distress? He swallows two Plasil tablets and lies facedown on the bed, monitoring his distress. The intercom buzzes again. Maybe it will buzz again and again, that woman will never get it. He spends the evening drifting from bed to couch, the TV on and off, now at the kitchen table, now pacing back and forth in the hallway like a prisoner in the rec yard. The intercom doesn’t buzz again.

*   *   *

He woke up in the middle of the night. The open window framed a square of vertical and diagonal lines, flickering like the screen of an old television that needs tuning. It was pouring, pounding on the rooftops, rushing through the gutters; it smelled like rain; the storm outside was torrential. The fogs of the past were gone, and now instead of just rain there were monsoons. The nausea had passed, his mouth was sour. He went into the bathroom and brushed his teeth, scrubbing furiously until his gums bled, then undressed, leaving his clothes scattered in the bathroom and hallway. In the bedroom, he put on his pajamas and started to close the window. He opened it again, and looked out at the deserted street; for a moment he thought he saw her through a watery film of rain. He decided it was a shadow, that he’d dreamed her up. Then he glimpsed her again and now he was certain he’d seen her.

She sat huddled in the recess of a small doorway across the street, facing his building. From up there it was impossible for him to tell if she was alive, if she was sleeping, if she was keeping an eye on the street in her obsessive, paranoid way, if she was a madwoman who wanted to kill him. He tried going to bed and turning off the light, as if by ignoring her he could make her disappear, but his motions lacked conviction; he knew he was bluffing. He listened to the pounding rain for another ten minutes, then got up, put on the clothes he’d just taken off, drank a glass of water, took an umbrella and the car keys, and went down to the street.