Three Light-Years: A Novel (21 page)

His narration made it really seem like something an elderly, sick person would make up. Halfway through he felt guilty; Marta didn’t deserve to have her story dishonored that way. Or maybe the story gripped him as it hadn’t the evening he’d heard it, stole the scene and used him as a puppet. He recalled that at one point his mother had said something that made him laugh, and he recited the line as if it were his own: “And now you have to imagine one of those movie scenes with a dying man on his deathbed.” As if the two of them never saw any dying men. Cecilia laughed and said, “Oh sure, I can imagine.”

Now he felt a different urge to tell it, the story no longer seemed so improbable, he was no longer sorry to have told it but he was sorry to be coming to the end. He managed to make Cecilia laugh again, imitating the glowering face of a watchmaker wearing a monocle.

Because at the heart of it all was a pocket watch, locked away in a jewelry box in the drawer of an enormous dresser in the room of a man who is slowly dying. The man has been a widower for ten years, he is no longer able to walk, never leaves the house, and has trouble speaking. His daughter, Cecilia, cares for him with absolute devotion; though she’s only twenty, she spends her days with him and lives as a recluse in a house full of furniture and bric-a-brac, not far from the bank where her father worked before his sudden illness. One day the old man takes a turn for the worse, doesn’t get out of bed, can no longer speak, and must be spoon-fed and washed when he soils himself, like a child. Cecilia prays that he won’t suffer much, but she can’t bring herself to hope that he will die quickly. She watches over him till late, sleeps in an armchair beside the bed, is always ready to serve him.

One evening her father asks her to get the claret-colored velvet jewelry box from the drawer. Cecilia is familiar with the jewelry box, she knows it contains some of her mother’s keepsakes, she thinks her father wants to give them to her. But there’s also a pocket watch in the jewelry box that doesn’t seem to be of much value. The old man raises his head from the pillow with an enormous effort, his forehead beaded with sweat, and mumbles something, he wants to speak but he can’t. Cecilia puts a pencil in his hand, supporting him so he can write on the first page of a book. He prints some letters in a shaky, somewhat lopsided hand. Cecilia recognizes the last name of the watchmaker who repaired the old grandfather clock at their home a couple of times. She thinks her father is asking her to take the pocket watch to be fixed. She thinks he’s delirious, she doesn’t take him seriously. That night her father dies.

Several months go by; Cecilia gets over it. She decides to straighten up the house. She comes upon the watch again. She weeps, thinking about her father. And it occurs to her that maybe she should respect his last wishes, absurd though they may be, and take the old “turnip” to the watchmaker. A considerate gesture, a way of remembering him. Would visiting the cemetery and placing fresh flowers on the grave be any different? So she makes her way across the entire city, in a horse-drawn tram, the watch wrapped up and tucked in the purse she holds tightly on her lap. She arrives at the watchmaker’s place. She’s never been in the shop; the watchmaker has always come to their house, where he’d take the clock apart on the floor and arrange the pieces carefully on a white cloth. The small shop is very simple, the sign unassuming. Cecilia enters and the tinkle of the bell announces the arrival of a customer, but the watchmaker is bent over his workbench, wearing his monocle, and seems not to have heard. From the back, pulling aside a red drape, a young man has appeared; he looks into Cecilia’s eyes and she knows that this is the man for her. The young man looks just like Cecilia’s father when he was twenty, in a sepia photo, wearing a Cavalry uniform.

“Then what?”

“Then they got engaged, they got married.”

“So where’s the scandal?”

“They were brother and sister! Didn’t you get it?”

“No, how can that be? Wasn’t he the watchmaker’s son?”

“He was the son of the girl’s father, who had gotten the maid pregnant. The watchmaker married her afterward. And the girl’s father helped them, he set up the shop, he sent his son to school.”

“Well, okay, you didn’t tell me about the maid.”

Viberti smiled. “I forgot … but it wasn’t that hard to figure out.”

“But, come on, how come his father, that is, the watchmaker, knew and how come he didn’t object—the mother, too, the maid, she knew her son was the other man’s child, how come she…”

The story had had the desired effect, it had taken her mind off things. She was smiling contentedly, murmuring to herself: “Really
quite
a story,” and she squeezed his hand as if by telling it to her, he had given her a gift.

Thinking about his mother, however, had made Viberti strangely melancholy. Thinking about his mother, who remembered reading or thought she remembered reading that story. That story: like a mistaken diagnosis, the death of a neglected patient. The confession long in coming, deferred until fully delirious. The old man must have loved that boy more than anything, but who can say if he meant to have him marry his daughter. Maybe he merely wanted her to know of that brother’s existence. And if the character wasn’t in a story by Chekhov or Maupassant or Tarchetti, who could the author be?

They spoke about a scandal that had hit the hospital: the arrest of the hospital administrator on charges of corruption. Then Viberti stood up, saying he had to find a good urologist.

Cecilia misheard “neurologist,” she thought he was talking about his mother and said, “It won’t get any worse, you’ll see.”

Viberti wondered how she could know about the barista’s son, he didn’t think he’d told her about him. He gave her a kiss on the cheek and left.

*   *   *

Nothing changed, nothing had to change, though if someone had overheard their conversation without knowing the story of the months leading up to it, he would have thought that everything was about to change, because Cecilia had never opened up as she had that day and Viberti had never opened up as he had that day. Two nights later they made love in the car and then everything went on as before; they saw each other because Cecilia needed to and because Viberti didn’t have the courage to tell her that it was better if they didn’t see each other anymore. Besides, it’s impossible to pull the plug on hope.

A total inability to read people: the art of semiotics, fundamental in medicine, never learned.
Certain things, for example, you learn only through experience. When I was forty I found that if you open the left rear window a little, the air that comes in through the left front window doesn’t create a draft but cools your car. Because it’s immediately sucked out, channeled, see? It’s one of those things that nobody can teach you.

Every now and then Viberti thought that Cecilia might one day come to him and say that, yes, she wanted to try, she wanted to start a new life. But he thought that only occasionally; usually he was sure it would never happen. He was struck by the absolute skepticism with which he’d reacted to that confession of sorts: “So I said to myself that maybe I’m in love with you.” Not only had he not believed her, not only did he think she was saying exactly the opposite, it was as if she were asking him to put a period on the story and start a new paragraph, as if she were telling him: “So I said to myself that maybe I’ll never be in love with you.” And in fact she came up with the story Marta had told, to close the circle.

He couldn’t get it out of his head, the idea that he’d appeared too soon in Cecilia’s life. She and her husband had just separated, the wounds hadn’t yet healed, in a couple of years she would be ready for another relationship and he would always be remembered as a transitional episode.

But something Cecilia had said stuck in his mind and refused to be dismissed, indeed it rose to the forefront as the only noteworthy thing that had been said that morning: “Not after what I went through. What I’m still going through.” What was she still going through, exactly? Why after all those months of friendship with relapses hadn’t he thought to ask her: “So how is your relationship with your husband now?”

And why hadn’t he ever had the urge to follow her? And see with his own eyes where she lived? Who she went out with at night, if she went out, since she wouldn’t go out with him? So he decided he would do it, he would station himself near her house, in the parking lot behind the church, to spy on her. It seemed like a perfectly reasonable decision, and until he acted on it the infinite sadness of the plan didn’t occur to him.

He took up his post the first time, saw her return home after an afternoon shift, at half past eight. Nothing happened, there was nothing to see. After an hour he got fed up and went home.

Another time he waited from six to nine and didn’t see anyone who even remotely resembled her husband or ex-husband appear.

He followed her out of the hospital one afternoon then lost her in traffic, and instead of going straight home he continued driving down a very long road, almost leaving the city, and began wandering through the northeastern outskirts. Huge shopping malls had sprung up there, replacing abandoned factories, along with new buildings that architects tried to make less depressing by painting the roofs blue or the shutters pink; here and there, the empty shells of the old factories still stood, each carrying the weight of its entire history like the homeless man he’d met at the playground.

One day, instead of lurking around to spy on her, he stopped under the trees where they’d kissed for the first time that late afternoon in June, and another evening he looked for the exact spot where he had parked when they made love in the car. He stayed there thinking for an hour; that, too, was a way of spying on her; that, too, was a pathetic way to spend his time. He thought of all the times he had masturbated thinking about making love with Cecilia in the car. Their relationship was still in transit, maybe it would never reach port, and he couldn’t allow himself to think beyond fantasies of car sex. At most, he imagined doing it in the comfort of the backseat.

He stationed himself one last time and saw Cecilia take the child to someone, maybe his father. All the boy had with him was his schoolbag. Was it his father’s house or that of a classmate? He stood waiting for Cecilia to come back down, imagining her with her ex-husband. And there, in that place that told him nothing, in that neighborhood that wasn’t his, at that address which he’d never wanted to know, he thought that maybe he didn’t care about Cecilia anymore; maybe he wasn’t just fed up with that strange friendship-with-relapses, maybe he didn’t love her as he thought he did, maybe he no longer loved her or maybe he had never loved her, and it was just the fear that she might be his last chance playing a nasty trick on him.

He started the Passat and drove away, instantly feeling a sense of relief. Enough is enough. He was letting go, he had let go. The moment when you can finally say it’s over comes just like that, out of the blue. Even with relationships that seem never to end (maybe because they never began).

*   *   *

Nevertheless, he continues to see her. For two years, lunch has been their time together and it’s difficult to end the habit overnight. It’s equally difficult to come up with credible excuses when Viberti decides not to show up one day and the next day Cecilia asks why he didn’t come. Then again he has to eat in any case and he might easily be spotted if he went to one of the other cafés across from the hospital, so all through the month of March Viberti sometimes uses the side door and goes to eat his boiled vegetables in the café that he’s renamed “the urologist’s.” But he’s not at ease as he eats, he feels like she’s going to surprise him at any moment.

One day, coming around the column that conceals their table, for a moment he thinks Cecilia has brought her thirteen-year-old daughter to lunch. The young woman sitting with her looks familiar, even though Viberti is certain he’s never seen her before. He would remember the wide black headband in her hair and her intimidating look. Too late to retreat: Cecilia invites him to sit with them: “This is Silvia, my sister.”

Viberti sits down and says hello. “You never told me you had a sister,” he murmurs, gets up again, starts to sit down a second time, and then decides to get up and go order the plate of boiled vegetables and a glass of mineral water. All he has to do is go around the column, lean over the counter, and order his plate from the barista, but what he’d like to do is leave, go out the door, and eat by himself at another café. He mistook her for Cecilia’s daughter because the idea of meeting the young girl frightens him.

He returns to his seat. He’s petrified, like marble, and he thinks it shows, as if blue veins had appeared on his skin. He has no desire to make conversation; he hadn’t wanted to have lunch with Cecilia, let alone with Cecilia and her sister. This Silvia seems less interesting than Cecilia, not as tall, less attractive. He doesn’t know how it could have happened—in two years not a hint about the existence of a sister. He’d like to insist and say again “You never told me you had a sister,” to punish Cecilia, but it wouldn’t be polite. He feels rigid, like the column behind him. In fact, he
is
the column, he’s turned into a column so he can stay in that café forever, ignored by everyone, in mute adoration of the woman sitting at the table.

“Claudio always eats boiled vegetables for lunch,” Cecilia says. If she’d wanted to put him at ease she could have come up with a different opening. He feels like refusing to speak for the entire lunch so that Cecilia will realize how offended he is. But it’s hard to say absolutely nothing. If you don’t talk, you’re saying you don’t want to talk. Instead you have to be able to talk without saying anything: his mother was a master at this.

Cecilia persists: “Silvia, too, used to eat boiled vegetables for lunch and dinner … years ago. Remember, Silvia?”

“Were you on a diet?” Viberti asks.

Silvia is painstakingly chewing a bite of her sandwich and can’t answer, she taps her lips delicately with her fingertips, a gesture that Cecilia often makes, as if to say, “Wait, I’ll tell you.”