Three Light-Years: A Novel (25 page)

There was a Marian shrine nearby where Mercuri had dragged him many times, on their way back from tennis, to show him the ex-votos that adorned the chapels. Mercuri wasn’t a believer, but he loved the votive offerings, the stories behind them. He told him that in the summer, returning home from the hospital, he’d go into the cool darkness of the church to find a bit of relief and there he would play a little game: he’d imagine a different life, someone else’s life, a dramatic event, an accident, a narrow escape, gratitude to the Madonna, and the idea for the small painting or statuette. Viberti had never felt at ease in the church, obviously because of the shorts. Or because of the danger that always lurked at the end of their tennis matches, the chance that Mercuri would insist on going up to their apartment and would find Marta lethargic.

*   *   *

I’d like to continue imagining my father’s languid stroll as he slowly made his way home, submerged by the rising tide of memories. But it would mean imagining another man, with a tolerance for melancholy even greater than his. It’s a strange thought, a strange desire. I don’t think it’s a self-destructive impulse, on my part. I think it’s a desire for symmetry, for simplification, just as things start to get complicated, and the unexpected lies in wait. So I continue creating my ex-voto.

Thinking about Mercuri, Viberti finds himself in front of a place that unless he’s greatly mistaken is a Japanese restaurant. What a coincidence, he thinks. He tries reading the menu posted outside, but it’s a text for the initiated and he can’t understand much. Why hadn’t he invited Silvia to eat with him? There wouldn’t have been anything wrong with that. “What’s the harm?” he wonders aloud. He pictures telling Cecilia that he had dinner with her sister, he pictures her surprise and amusement.

He takes the phone from his pocket and calls Silvia. He asks her if one of the Japanese restaurants she mentioned to him is called Hasaki, because if that’s its name, he’s found it. But that’s not its name, it would be too easy. Hasaki is a
fake
Japanese restaurant, the owners are actually Chinese. Not a
bad
restaurant, but not a
real
Japanese restaurant.

Viberti says: “I was rude, I didn’t ask if you wanted to eat something, I’m sorry.”

Silvia is silent, then she says, “Are you inviting me to dinner?”

“Yes, actually, I am,” Viberti says.

Silvia says, “Well, then I’ll be there in five minutes.”

A moment later she calls him back: “Go in and ask for two seats at the counter.”

A moment later she calls back again: “Can I come in jeans?”

What will he say all evening to this crazy woman? Viberti enters the restaurant almost hoping that it will be full, but while the dining room is full, there’s no one at the counter. A Chinese host comes to meet him. Chinese, Japanese, Korean, who can tell. He shows him to a seat. Viberti takes out
The Cook
, but doesn’t read a single line of it; instead, he watches the real chefs on the other side of the glass, who are cutting the fish with strokes at first slow and cautious, then suddenly swift and brutal, and he doesn’t take his eyes off the spectacle until Silvia arrives.

She’s put on a green skirt in the same creased cotton as the tank top and T-shirt. “I changed after all,” she announces. She’s also put the headband back in her hair.

This woman, Viberti thinks, this woman knows no shame.

She never shuts up. She wants to explain the menu to him. Viberti’s discomfort is physical, as he struggles to get a word in every now and then to show that he’s paying attention. Sitting at the counter is easier, however—he doesn’t have to face his dinner companion and so can keep his eyes on the Chinese cooks, who, pretending to be Japanese, brandish their knives with dexterity, as if the course of the planets and the stars depended on their movements.

“You order for me, let me sample the main dishes,” he says to stem the tide of words.

Silvia orders, and out of the blue, without warning, she’s talking about Cecilia. She says they’re very close, she doesn’t know what she would have done, at certain times in her life, if it weren’t for Cecilia. She isn’t just a sister and she’s not a friend in the traditional sense of the word. She didn’t try to mother her, Silvia wouldn’t have stood for that. She has some issues with the idea of maternity, in particular with the idea of maternal authority. Not with the idea of authority in general. The idea of maternity implies an authority exercised through affection, through the exploitation of affection, which is a paradox. Maybe she was exaggerating, certainly that’s not always the case, and it doesn’t apply to all mothers, of course. Was she exaggerating?

“I see what you mean,” Viberti says, “yes, it seems a bit of an exaggeration. You were saying that Cecilia wasn’t like that, though. How many years are there between you?”

Five, enough not to step on each other’s toes. Cecilia serves as a counterweight, she balances her relationship with her mother. When Cecilia got married and left home, in fact, it was a problem for her. She stuck it out until she got her degree and then got out of there.

“At a certain point it’s time to go,” Viberti says. This is where his monologue would fit in, about the building he’s lived in all his life, but that evening, with that woman, he doesn’t feel like reciting it. He’d told Cecilia the first time they met at the café, so it’s no wonder.

Silvia says that Cecilia is an excellent mother, considering the example they had. Considering the difficulty of the divorce, considering the problems with the boy.

As soon as she says the word “boy” she stops suddenly and looks at Viberti, who wasn’t expecting such an abrupt break or that look; he reddens, thinking that Silvia has read something in his expression.

“Am I talking too much?” Silvia asks.

Viberti smiles. “No, of course not.”

“No, I mean, you know these things, don’t you? You know my sister well…”

He shakes his head and thinks he’s shaking it correctly, with the naturalness and credibility of a consummate actor. “I can’t say I know her well, but I know about the divorce and I met the child, when he was hospitalized. Cecilia tells me things every now and then, but most of the time we talk about work.”

Silvia shakes her head in turn, she says that Cecilia actually doesn’t tell her anything. It’s not a matter of discretion, of privacy—it’s genuine reticence. And this, for her, is her sister’s only fault. Cecilia doesn’t open up as much as she would like, she doesn’t open up enough. But this fault may be what allows them to have a close relationship: she says too much about everything, Cecilia says nothing or almost nothing about everything.

She looks at him again: “What is Ceci like at work?”

“How do you mean?”

“Tense, nervous?”

“She’s a very good doctor.”

“Every so often I think it’s too stressful for her.”

Luckily the sushi arrives; Silvia appears to completely forget about her sister and begins explaining the names and characteristics of the fish, piece by piece, as if the poster hanging behind her door were there in front of her. Though Viberti doesn’t ask how she knows all these things, she tells him about a boyfriend who made her fall in love with sushi and green tea. He went to Japan a lot on business; she’s never been there, it’s too expensive, but she dreams of being able to afford it one day—though really it’s like she’s been there, like she’s visited it through her boyfriend’s stories, since he talked about it constantly, describing in detail the streets, the buildings, the parks, the shops and restaurants, especially the restaurants, the endless business lunches in Tokyo, Osaka, and Hiroshima, in restaurants that she’d be able to find with her eyes closed, almost—and in any case she has the map of Tokyo, for instance, imprinted in her brain, and she associates the areas with the photos that her boyfriend sent her and that she still uses as screen savers even now, images of neighborhoods that have become so familiar that they appear to her in her dreams, not just as exotic backdrops but as three-dimensional spaces full of life, including people talking and the noises of the city—or rather almost excluding them, because her boyfriend told her an incredible fact, that absolute silence reigns in Japan’s megalopolises, in the streets, on the subways, in the supermarkets, even the cars seem to make less noise, and the children don’t cry.

“The children never cry?” Viberti asks smiling.

“Never.”

They laugh. When she laughs, Silvia looks more like Cecilia. The two sisters are very much alike though there’s no real physical resemblance; what unites them is what Silvia can still be and what Cecilia will never again be, as if the younger one were a more carefree version of the older sister: a person who can still be happy.

Silvia stops abruptly and looks at Viberti: “I don’t believe it, I can’t believe you’ve never eaten sushi,” she says.

“It’s true.”

“I might know someone who’s never eaten pizza, but sushi, no, it’s not possible.”

Viberti smiles. He loves the hot sake, it seems like one of those things, like cider, on which it’s impossible to get drunk. “I swear.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“Take your sister,” Viberti says, “has she ever eaten sushi?”

“Of course, here, in this same restaurant. We came here a bunch of times, especially after the affair with the Japanese guy ended.”

“He was Japanese? I didn’t realize that.”

“His mother was Japanese, but he had always lived in Italy. I called him the Japanese guy. At one point he went back there.”

“And afterward, did you still feel like eating this stuff?”

“By then his memories were mine, and I didn’t want to give them back, it wasn’t right, and besides, raw fish is one of the few things that I can always digest, even at times of intense anxiety. For example, I would have starved to death when my father died, but Cecilia came here and bought sushi and brought it home to me.”

Viberti looks at her: “When did your father die?”

“Four years ago.”

“Of what?”

“A tumor.”

“A tumor?”

“Yes, why?”

Viberti takes a gulp of sake.

“It’s odd. We talked about my father, Cecilia and I. He died of a lymphogranuloma, many years ago. I don’t know. If she had mentioned her father’s illness, it would have been natural for me to tell her about my own father’s, I guess.”

“I told you, she doesn’t open up about
anything
, it’s awful.”

Well, maybe she’s reticent by nature, but maybe especially so with him. As if he were a stranger. But he doesn’t want Silvia to notice how his mood has changed.

“Were you very close to your father?” he asks, hoping to set off another monologue that will give him time to recover.

But Silvia just nods.

Viberti continues drinking hot sake, maybe that way he’ll manage to get a little drunk, at least. He feels a long surge of melancholy about to wash over him. All evening he’d tried to avoid it, coming up with that unlikely dinner with Cecilia’s long-winded sister, but sadness has caught up with him, it’s suddenly in front of him, around him, inside him. He sees the world as it truly is, and it’s the disorder of Silvia’s impossibly small house, the sheer volume of paper per square foot; it’s the deep, dark, cold lake in the film about reincarnation. He’s never liked lakes.

Poor Silvia starts talking again, telling him about a friend who lives in Barcelona. Behind that merciless conversational capacity, Viberti thinks, lies a heart more human than her sister’s unfathomable one.

At some point it’s clear to both of them that Viberti isn’t going to open his mouth again for the rest of the evening. Silvia says they’d better go, wait for her a moment, she’ll make a quick trip to the ladies’ room and be right back. The restaurant is still full, the Chinese cooks are cutting up the fish with the same flourish, but they seem less fascinating now that he’s been watching them for an hour. Viberti pays and goes out to the sidewalk. The evening air is not enough to restore him. He realizes that he’s had too much to drink, after all. He looks at his tennis shoes, his hairy calves, and smiles wistfully, not for the boy he was at fifteen, but for the ingenuous, enthusiastic man of a few hours ago. He has two options, to laugh or to cry. Start crying and confess to Silvia that he’s hopelessly (
hopelessly
) in love with Cecilia, tell her the whole story, disclose everything. And finally shut her up! Well, that would do it. He’d leave her speechless. He smiles. He chuckles to himself.

“So you’re not sad,” Silvia says, joining him outside. “I thought talking about my father had upset you, I’m sorry, I’m an idiot, I always notice things too late.”

Viberti shakes his head. “I drank too much,” he says, as he goes on chuckling.

Silvia smiles. “Are you drunk?” As if it were good news. “Then I’ll tell you something: when it’s time to pay the check I always get the urge to pee. By now it’s a Pavlovian reflex, you know? Because for years I used it as a trick not to pay, because I never had any money.”

“Now you do?”

“Have money? No, of course not.”

“So you didn’t want to pay. You went to the bathroom to avoid paying.”

They laugh uproariously. A Chinese man comes out of the place to see what’s going on.

And they go on like that, Viberti pretending or exaggerating his drunkenness to make Silvia laugh, Silvia pretending to believe that he’s drunk or drunker than he really is, while worrying about how he is and how he’ll make it home safe and sound. And so, when they get to her house it seems like the most natural thing in the world to both of them for Silvia to invite him to come up.

The excuse is to drink a cup of tea with cherry blossoms,
sakura
, to revive Viberti a little, but when they enter the small apartment Silvia says she wants to go through the whole tea ceremony with him. She boils water in the kitchenette and sets out a flower-shaped tray with a teapot and two hand-painted cups. Picking one up, Viberti recognizes Papa Smurf in his village of cheerful mushroom cottages and starts laughing again. “Now I’ll explain how it’s done,” says Silvia, taking the cup out of his hand. She spreads two rectangular straw mats between the sofa area and the work area, makes Viberti kneel down. “We’ll skip the preparation stage,” she says, “maybe another time I’ll tell you about that, too. Not that it isn’t interesting, but it’s rather long.”