Three Light-Years: A Novel (46 page)

It makes no sense to buzz Viberti’s intercom, because Viberti is on the run.

She pulls a piece of paper out of her handbag, and leaning against the wall writes:

Dear Claudio, I wanted to talk to you about something important, can you call me? Thank you. Silvia Re (Cecilia’s sister). P.S. It’s really important.

She buzzes the intercom of
M. VIBERTI
.

“Yes?”

“I have to leave a message for Dr. Viberti, can you open for me?”

She hears conferring in the background. They won’t open.

They open.

On the mailboxes in the building’s vestibule, the name plates say:
MARTA VIBERTI, II FLOOR—DR. CLAUDIO VIBERTI, V FLOOR
. She hears voices in the stairwell. Instead of slipping her note into the mailbox, she takes the elevator and presses the button for the second floor.

On the landing is an elderly lady wearing a pinafore with tiny blue flowers, and a younger woman who is trying to persuade her to go back into the apartment.

“I was right, you see?” the older woman says triumphantly. “She didn’t believe me, but I knew you’d come up.”

Silvia apologizes with a smile, she didn’t mean to disturb her, she has an urgent message for Claudio, can she tell him to call her?

The lady steps forward, away from the protection and support of the woman behind her; she clings to Silvia, takes her hands, squeezes them. “Of course, I’ll tell him.”

“Thank you, signora, you’re very kind. Tell him Silvia Re was looking for him.”

“I recognized you!” the elderly lady exclaims.

“Let’s go inside now, Mrs. Marta,” the woman looking after her says.

Signora Marta has no intention of releasing her prey. She looks at Silvia, smiling, her blue eyes boring into hers: “How are you?”

“I’m well, signora, I’m very well. And you?” She smiles at the caregiver, to reassure her. “I didn’t think you’d recognize me.”

“I don’t forget people who are…” Marta says, lowering her eyes impatiently, searching for the right word as if it had fallen on the floor, “… people who are
nice
.”

Silvia squeezes her hands, murmurs a thank-you. “I didn’t forget you, either.” She doesn’t know how to extricate herself, she doesn’t know if she wants to break away from those eyes. “I’m fine, I’ve been working hard and I’m a little tired. I’m working for three different publishing houses. Right now I’m doing a book on Hindu mythology. It’s kind of boring.”

Marta smiles. “We have to do boring things as well,” she says. “If you only knew how bored I was with my husband!”

They laugh, clasping each other’s hands, laughing with relief, together and for their own reasons. The caregiver smiles, too.

“I’ll leave you now, I have to go. But I was very glad to see you again.”

“Me, too, very much so,” the signora says, “come back and see me.” She doesn’t let go.

The caregiver has stepped back, waiting, but as soon as she notices Silvia’s embarrassment she comes forward again and manages to draw them apart. Silvia admires the delicacy with which she guides the elderly woman, barely touching her.

They go into the house without looking back. Marta is saying: “… a friend of Claudio, I recognized her.” The door closes by itself, as if there were someone else hidden behind it. Not the nondescript Viberti, unless he came in through the window.

It’s comfortable in the lobby, very cool. She can’t wait for him there, however, she doesn’t feel like having to put on another act. She goes out the door.

She doesn’t feel like going straight home either. And there are no cafés nearby with air-conditioning and a view of the building’s door.

She sits on a step across the street. She thinks she’s passed the point of no return, the point at which you no longer have enough oxygen to return to Earth and so you let the spaceship drift lazily into a black hole toward Alpha Centauri, light-years away, hoping to find breathable air there.

Every now and then she gets up and goes to buzz the intercom, in case Viberti has come in through some other entrance. She can’t believe he doesn’t want to see her.

She waits in front of the door for an hour and a half. She exchanges a few text messages with her girlfriends, pretending to be at home watching
Totoro
.

The whole story seems so unlikely, she tries imagining that she’s seen it all wrong. She thought the man in the green Lacoste polo outside the hospital was him, she thought the man in the blue car was him, but she can’t be one hundred percent certain. It’s happened to her before—convinced that a stranger was someone she knew, she’s had to apologize for making a fool of herself. And if he’s not answering the phone, there must be a reason.

But no, she saw him, it was him, and he saw her. He must be frightened, who wouldn’t be.

She returns home because a storm is brewing. She’ll try again tomorrow.

As soon as she gets home she drinks three glasses of water, she pats the book of Hindu mythology, she feels as if she hasn’t opened it in months. Then she lies down on the couch and begins thinking about Signora Viberti. She wonders if she’ll ever be like her. Maybe not, in the future there won’t be elderly people as lovely as that any longer. She can’t seem to express the thought more clearly; she falls asleep.

*   *   *

As if she were on vacation, Friday morning she stays in bed until ten.

Looking in the mirror, trying to make herself presentable, she remembers all the times she’s asked herself whether men are scared off by her hair; that’s why she wears the black headband, to keep it under control—and that scares men even more. With that wide black headband she seems to be saying:
You’re under my control now. You’ll end up as my prisoner.
That’s what men seem to read in her, and they run away.

Still, it seems only right that Viberti find the courage to speak to her and share in the decision. She tries to reach him all day Friday, sends him an e-mail, leaves messages on the answering machine.

On Saturday she tries again, to no avail. She calls the hospital; the doctor isn’t in. She calls his cell phone and his home phone, alternating every five minutes, just so it’s clear she won’t stop. No answer. So she calls Cecilia, who is on her way to pick up Mattia. Cecilia is more evasive than usual; it’s obvious the question makes her uncomfortable. She says she thinks Viberti is actually out of town; he was supposed to take his elderly mother to the country, to get her out of the city’s heat. She adds that she’s sure to find him on Monday.

The moment her sister says the word “country,” Silvia sees before her the name of the place where Viberti went to hide out: San Colombano. The first night, over dinner at the Sino-Japanese restaurant, they’d talked about vacations, and Viberti told her he had a dreary house in a dismal place, a real morgue, which as a boy he used to call San Columbarium when his mother forced him to go there.

To get there, she soon discovers, she’d have to take a local train and then a bus: a half-day’s trip; by car it takes only two hours. She doesn’t own a car, but Stefania’s father does. She calls her.

Stefania resists a bit, then gives in. Half an hour later she comes to pick her up. The car is a metallic gold Lancia Delta that is nearly eleven years old. Her father takes it out of the garage only on Sundays. Stefania can barely reach the pedals, she has to drive right on top of the steering wheel and lean sideways when turning. To be even with her and keep her from craning her neck too much as she talks, Silvia slides her seat forward too. They look like two elderly spinsters on an excursion.

The day is hot, sunny. “San Colombano is just beyond the foothills, the ‘mid-elevation’ mountains,” Stefania says. They discuss this outmoded geographical designation, the
mezza montagna
, telling stories and constructing historical-sociological theories. The mid-mountain is a reassuring place, it doesn’t offer the extreme challenges of the mountain, but it’s at a higher altitude, more beneficial than the countryside. They’re capable of rambling on about any subject for hours on end. They’re used to buoying themselves up by talking. And so they arrive in San Colombano without having once mentioned Viberti or discussed what Silvia wants to tell him, or planned how they will find him once they reach the town.

Here it really is cooler than in the city. The town isn’t dismal at all. There’s a piazza, there’s an old café-restaurant. Silvia gets out of the car, enters the café. She asks the barista if he knows the Viberti family, if he knows where they live. The barista gives her directions. She gets back in the car. She says: “Just outside of town, a white house on the left, after the bend in the road.”

“How did you know they would know?”

“I didn’t know. I didn’t even know if this was the right place.”

“You mean we came all this way and you weren’t sure it was the right place?”

Silvia doesn’t answer. Stefania starts the engine again. In the car, silence falls. When they come to the specified spot, Stefania stops. She turns to her friend and asks: “Are you scared? What are you going to do? Do you want me to come with you?”

Silvia shakes her head slightly. No, she’s not scared. “I’ll get out, I’ll tell him, and I’ll come back. Wait for me here?”

They hug.

There’s a gray fence, a partly open wooden gate, a gravel driveway that crosses the front lawn. The house is two-storied and the upper story, with a mansard roof, has pale wood paneling. It’s a
mezza montagna
house that would be presentable in the mountains.

Viberti’s Passat is parked under a shed. There are no doorbells, chimes, knockers. She’s about to tap on the door, but she hears voices coming from around back.

She circles the house, passing under the shade of some pine trees, and comes out in the sun, to a more spacious lawn overlooking the valley. There’s a lovely view. The nondescript Viberti is sitting at a stone table with his mother. On the table are earthen pots of various sizes, some empty, others filled with soil and dry seedlings.

Viberti sees her, he gets up. Has he turned pale or is that just her impression? Is it the effect of the light that bleaches things for her, coming from the shade, or the contrast with the dark shirt he’s wearing? What’s certain is that Viberti is speechless.

Silvia apologizes for the intrusion, she apologizes for harassing him. She doesn’t mean to hound him. She asks if she could have just a few words with him, no more.

She isn’t wearing the black headband this morning, she tied her hair at the back of her neck like Cecilia does, in a stunted ponytail. Viberti still seems very frightened, though. He has no idea what to do.

His mother, however, seeing Silvia, makes a sudden decision. She gets up and without taking off her gardening gloves goes back into the house. The son follows her with his eyes, then he says to Silvia, “Of course, come,” and he walks with her to the outer edge of the lawn, where long spikes of blue flowers stick up amid the damp grass.

*   *   *

As I was writing this story I kept thinking about all the things I could have asked my three parents had they still been alive. But that, almost always, is the disadvantage of writing—you write in the future, and you end up being unjust, or maybe just imprecise. You use the few surviving traces, you stitch together remnants of conversations, all the rest is fabricated; and when you fabricate, perfectly plausible, or even probable, variants are discarded for narrative expediency, to avoid causing too much pain, to conceal inopportune details and reveal harmless ones. On the other hand, if I’d questioned my three elderly parents ten or twenty years ago, wouldn’t they have treated their memories the same way?

I really don’t know what Silvia and Viberti may have said to each other that day at the edge of the lawn and I have no desire to imagine it; or maybe I know all too well what they said and that’s the reason I don’t feel like recounting it. No, that’s not it: I tried and I’m unable to. Besides, what could they have said? They were two predictable people: Silvia, smiling faintly, tells him she’s pregnant, but she hasn’t come to cause him any trouble; Viberti, dead serious, tells her it’s her decision and that he will do his part in any case.

Then he asks her to please sit down at the stone table and wait for him, just five minutes. He needs to be alone a moment, he has something to tell her. Something important. And he remains at the edge of the lawn, looking out over the valley, gathering his thoughts.

*   *   *

Silvia has sat down on the wrought-iron chair, without shifting it, her back to the view. Marta has come out of the house, followed by Angélica with the coffee tray. Silvia thanks her, she explains that she doesn’t drink coffee, but she’ll gladly take a glass of water, thank you. And Marta sends Angélica back inside.

Marta doesn’t seem to notice her son’s absence. She’s staring at Silvia with a joyful light in her eyes. Who does she think she is? Really one of Viberti’s classmates? Or maybe she’s mistaken her for someone else. Her son had been married. Has she mistaken her for his first wife?

Silvia compliments her on the house. Such a beautiful location, such a view, such a charming little town. Meanwhile, she feels a chill. Even in the sun it’s too cool, maybe she’s reverted to the anxious, fearful person she’d always been.

“It was my husband’s grandfather who bought it,” Marta says. “My husband was one of the most boring people in the world. Not a bad man. I remember him fondly. Oh dear, ‘remember’ is a loaded word, I don’t know if I told you that I have problems remembering lately.”

Silvia smiles. She takes a sip of water. She smiles at Angélica, who smiles back to let her know she recognizes her. She feels accepted, like an old family friend. She thinks this woman, Viberti’s mother, is the loveliest person she’s ever seen. And she wonders why she has that effect on her. Because you could tell she must have been beautiful when she was young? Because she’s still beautiful, even though she’s more than eighty years old? Because she resembles Viberti? Because her son or daughter might resemble her?