the Solitude Of Prime Numbers (2010) (15 page)

"Voila,"
she said. She unfastened her seat belt and got out of the car.

Mattia stayed frozen in his seat, his eyes fixed on the park.

"Well? Are you getting out?"

"Not here," he said.

"Come on, don't be stupid."

Mattia shook his head.

"Let's go somewhere else," he said.

Alice looked around.

"What's the problem?" she insisted. "We're just going to take a walk."

She came over to the window on Mattia's side. He was stiff, as if someone were sticking a knife in his back. His hand gripped the handle of the door, which was half open. He stared at the trees a hundred yards away. The wide, green leaves covered their knotty skeletons and the fractal structure of the branches, hiding their horrible secret.

He had never been back here. The last time was with the police, that day that his father had told him give your mother your hand and she had pulled hers away and stuck it in her pocket. That day he had still had both his arms bandaged, from his fingers to his elbow, with a thick dressing rolled in so many layers that it took a saw blade to remove it. He had shown the policemen where Michela had been sitting. They had wanted to know the exact spot and had taken pictures, first from far away and then from close up.

From the car, on the way back home, he had seen the dredging machines sinking their mechanical arms into the river and pulling out big piles of wet soil, then dropping them heavily on the bank. Mattia had noticed that his mother held her breath every time, until each pile disintegrated on the ground. Michela must have been in that slime, but they didn't find her. They never found her.

"Let's get out of here. Please," repeated Mattia. His tone wasn't pleading. Instead he seemed absorbed, annoyed.

Alice got back into the car.

"Sometimes I don't know whether--"

"That's where I abandoned my twin sister," he cut in with a flat, almost inhuman voice. He lifted his arm and with his right index finger pointed to the trees in the park. Then he left it hanging there in midair, as if he had forgotten about it.

"Twin sister? What are you talking about? You don't have a twin sister. . . ."

Mattia nodded slowly, still staring at the trees.

"She was my identical twin. Completely identical to me," he said.

Then, before Alice even had time to ask, he told her everything. He spilled out the whole story, like a dam collapsing. The worm, the party, the Legos, the river, the bits of glass, the hospital room, the judge, the television appeal, the shrinks, everything, in a way he had never done with anyone. He talked without looking at her, without getting excited. Then he lapsed back into silence. He felt around under the seat with his right hand, but found only blunt shapes. He calmed down, feeling remote again, alien to his own body.

Alice's hand touched his chin and delicately turned his face toward her. All Mattia saw was a shadow moving toward him. He instinctively closed his eyes and then felt Alice's hot mouth on his, her tears on his cheek, or maybe they weren't hers, and finally her hands, so light, holding his head still and catching all his thoughts and imprisoning them there, in the space that no longer existed between them.

24

T
hey saw each other often over the next month, without ever making a real date but never really by chance. After visiting hours Alice always ended up wandering around Fabio's ward, and he always managed to run into her. They'd stroll around the courtyard, always taking the same route that they had decided by mutual agreement, without discussing it. That outer enclosure marked the confines of their story, carving out a space where there was no need to name that clear and mysterious thing flowing between them.

Fabio seemed to have a precise knowledge of the dynamics of courtship; he knew how to respect rhythms and moderate phrases as if following a set protocol. He sensed Alice's profound suffering, but remained beyond it, as if he were standing on the border. The excesses of the world, whatever form they might assume, didn't really concern him. They collided with his equilibrium and common sense and so he preferred to ignore them, simply pretending that they didn't exist. If an obstacle blocked his path, he walked around it, without altering his own pace in the slightest, and soon forgot it. He never had doubts, or hardly ever.

Nonetheless, he knew how to reach an objective, so he was attentive to Alice's moods in a way that was respectful, though slightly pedantic. If she didn't talk, he asked her if something was wrong, but never twice in a row. He showed interest in her photographs, in how her mother was, and filled the silences with stories from his own day, amusing anecdotes he picked up around the ward.

Alice allowed herself to be carried away by his self-confidence and gradually abandoned herself to it, as she had abandoned herself to the support of the water when as a little girl she played dead in the swimming pool.

They lived the slow and invisible interpenetration of their universes, like two stars gravitating around a common axis, in ever tighter orbits, whose clear destiny is to coalesce at some point in space and time.

Alice's mother's treatment had been suspended. With a nod of the head, her husband had finally given his consent to let her sink into painless sleep, under a heavy blanket of morphine. Alice merely waited for it to come to an end and couldn't bring herself to feel guilty. Her mother already lived within her as a memory, settled like a clump of pollen in a corner of her head, where she would stay for the rest of her life, frozen in the same pile of soundless images.

Fabio hadn't planned to ask her and wasn't the type for impulsive gestures, but that afternoon there was something different about Alice. A kind of nervousness emerged from the way she wove her fingers together and moved her eyes from side to side, always careful not to meet his own. For the first time since meeting her he was hasty and incautious.

"My parents are going to the beach this weekend," he said out of the blue.

Alice seemed not to have heard. At any rate, she let the sentence drop. Her head had been buzzing like a wasps' nest for days. Mattia hadn't called her since his graduation, more than a week before, and yet it clearly was his turn now.

"I thought you could come to dinner at my place," Fabio tossed out.

His confidence faltered for a moment in the middle of those words, but he immediately shook off his uncertainty. He plunged both hands into the pockets of his white coat and prepared to accept any kind of reply with the same kind of lightness. He knew how to build a shelter for himself even before he needed one.

Alice smiled faintly, slightly panic-stricken.

"I don't know," she said gently. "Perhaps it isn't--"

"You're right," Fabio interrupted her. "I shouldn't have asked you. Sorry."

They finished their walk in silence and when they reached Fabio's ward again he murmured okay, long and drawn out, as if speaking to himself.

Neither of them moved. They exchanged a quick glance and immediately lowered their eyes. Fabio started to laugh.

"We never know how to say good-bye to each other, you and me," he said.

"Yeah." Alice smiled at him. She brought a hand to her hair, hooked a lock with her index finger, and tugged on it slightly.

Fabio took a resolute step toward her and the gravel of the path crunched beneath his foot. He kissed her on her left cheek, with affectionate arrogance, and then stepped back.

"Well, at least think about it," he said.

He smiled broadly, with his whole mouth, eyes, and cheeks. Then he turned around and walked confidently toward the entrance.

Now he'll turn around, thought Alice when he went through the glass door.

But Fabio turned the corner and disappeared down the corridor.

25

T
he letter was addressed to Mr. Mattia Balossino, B.Sc., and to the touch it was so light and insubstantial it seemed impossible it could contain his whole future. His mother hadn't shown it to him until dinner, perhaps out of embarrassment at having opened it without permission. She hadn't done it on purpose, she hadn't even looked at the name on the envelope: Mattia never got any mail.

"This came," she said, holding the letter over the plates.

Mattia glanced quizzically at his father, who nodded at something vague. Before taking the letter he ran his napkin over his upper lip, which was already clean. Seeing the complicated circular logo, printed in blue next to the address, he had no idea what it might contain. He pressed on both sides of the envelope to take out the folded page inside it. He opened it and began to read, rather impressed by the thought that this letter was specifically for him, Mr. Mattia Balossino, B.Sc.

His parents made more noise than necessary with their silverware and his father repeatedly cleared his throat. After reading it, Mattia refolded the page with the reverse sequence of gestures with which he had opened it, so as to return it to its initial form, and slipped it back into its envelope, which he then set down on Michela's chair.

He picked up his fork again, but was momentarily bewildered at the sight of the sliced zucchini on the plate, as if someone had made them appear there by surprise.

"It sounds like a wonderful opportunity," said Adele.

"Yeah."

"Do you want to go?"

As she spoke, Mattia's mother felt heat flashing in her face. She was aware that it had nothing to do with the fear of losing him. On the contrary, she hoped with all her might that he would accept, that he would leave this house and the place that he occupied opposite her every evening at dinner, his black head dangling over his plate and that contagious air of tragedy surrounding him.

"I don't know," Mattia replied to his plate.

"It's a wonderful opportunity," his mother repeated.

"Yeah."

Mattia's father broke the silence that followed with random thoughts about the efficiency of northern Europeans, about how clean their streets were, putting it all down to the severe climate and the lack of light for much of the year, which limited distractions. He had never been anywhere of the kind, but from what he had heard that was clearly how it was.

When, at the end of dinner, Mattia began stacking up the dishes, collecting them in the same order as he did every evening, his father put a hand on his shoulder and said under his breath go on, I'll finish up. Mattia picked up the envelope from the chair and went to his room.

He sat down on the bed and began turning the letter around in his hands. He folded it backward and forward a few times, making the thin paper of the envelope crack. Then he examined the logo beside the address more carefully. A bird of prey, probably an eagle, held its wings open and its head turned to one side so as to show its pointed beak in profile. Its wing tips and claws were inscribed in a circle, which a printing error had turned slightly oval. Another circle, larger and concentric with the preceding one, contained the name of the university that was offering Mattia a place. The Gothic characters, all those
k'
s and
h'
s in the name and the
o'
s with a diagonal line running through them, which in mathematics indicated a null set, made Mattia imagine a tall, dark building, with echoing corridors and high ceilings, surrounded by lawns with grass cut to a few millimeters from the ground, as silent and deserted as a cathedral at the end of the world.

In that unknown and far-off place lay his future as a mathematician. There was a promise of salvation, an uncontaminated place where nothing was yet compromised. Here, on the other hand, there was Alice, just Alice, and all around her a swamp.

It happened as it had on the day he graduated. Once again his breath caught halfway down his throat, where it acted as a stopper. He gasped as if the air in his room had suddenly liquefied. The days had grown longer, and the dusk was blue and wearying. Mattia would wait for the last trace of light to fade, his mind wandering along corridors that he hadn't yet seen, now and then bumping into Alice, who would look at him without a word, without so much as a smile.

You've just got to decide, he thought. Go or don't go. 1 or 0, like a binary code.

But the more he tried to simplify things, the more confused he became.

Someone knocked on the door of his room. The sound reached him as if from the bottom of a well.

"Yes?" he said.

The door opened slowly and his father poked his head in.

"Can I come in?" he asked.

"Uh-huh."

"Why are you sitting in the dark?"

Without waiting for an answer, Pietro flipped the switch and 100 watts of light exploded in Mattia's dilated pupils, which contracted with a pleasant pain.

His father sat down on the bed next to him. They had the same way of crossing their legs, the left calf balanced on the right heel, but neither of them had ever noticed.

"What's the name of that thing you studied?" Pietro asked after a while.

"What thing?"

"That thing you wrote your dissertation on. I can never remember what it's called."

"The Riemann zeta function."

"Right. The Riemann zeta function."

Mattia rubbed his thumbnail under the nail of his little finger, but the skin there had become so hard and calloused that he didn't feel a thing. His nails slipped noisily over each other.

"I wish I'd had your mind," Pietro went on. "But I never understand a thing about math. It just wasn't for me. You have to have a special sort of brain for some things."

Mattia thought there was nothing good about having his mind. That he would happily have unscrewed it and replaced it with a different one, or even with a package of biscotti, provided it was empty and light. He opened his mouth to reply that feeling special is the worst kind of cage that a person can build for himself, but he didn't say anything. He thought about the time his teacher had sat him in the middle of the classroom, with everyone else staring at him like some exotic beast, and it occurred to him that it was as if he'd never moved from there in all those years.