His father phoned on Wednesday evenings, between eight and a quarter past. They had seen each other rarely over the last nine years and it had been a long time since the last visit, but the phone call in Mattia's two-room apartment had become a ritual. In the long pauses between words the same old silence arose between the two of them: there were no televisions or radios on, never any guests rattling their cutlery.
Mattia could imagine his mother listening to the phone call from her armchair without changing her expression, with both arms on the armrests, as when he and Michela were in primary school and she sat there listening to them recite poetry by heart and Mattia always knew it while Michela said nothing, incapable of doing anything.
Every Wednesday, after hanging up, Mattia found himself wondering whether the orange floral pattern of that armchair was still the same or whether they'd replaced it, since it had been threadbare even back then. He wondered whether his parents had grown old. Of course they had, he heard it in his father's voice, which was slower and wearier, more like an attack of breathlessness.
His mother came to the phone infrequently and her questions were a matter of form, always the same. Is it cold? Have you had your dinner yet? How are your classes going? We eat dinner at seven over here, Mattia had explained the first few times. Now he merely said yes.
"Hello?" he said, speaking in Italian.
There was no reason to answer the phone in English. Only about ten people had his home number and none of them would have dreamed of calling him at that time of day.
"It's Dad."
The delay in his reply was only just perceptible. Mattia meant to get a stopwatch to measure it, to calculate how much the signal deviated from the straight line of more than 1,000 kilometers that connected him and his father, but he forgot every time.
"Hi. Are you well?" said Mattia.
"Yes. And you?"
"Fine… And Mom?"
"She's right here."
The first silence always fell at that point, like a mouthful of air after swimming a lap underwater.
Mattia ran his index finger along the scratch in the pale wood of the round table, a few inches from the middle. He couldn't even remember whether he had scratched it or whether it had been the old tenants. Just under the enameled surface it was compressed chipboard, which got under his fingernail without hurting him. Each Wednesday he dug that furrow a few fractions of a millimeter deeper, but a lifetime wouldn't be enough for him to break through to the other side.
"So you saw the sunrise?" his father asked.
Mattia smiled. It was a joke they had between them, perhaps the only one. About a year before, somewhere in a newspaper Pietro had read that watching the dawn over the North Sea is an unforgettable experience, and in the evening he had read his son the clipping over the phone. You absolutely have to go, he had advised. Since that day he asked from time to time so have you seen it? Mattia always answered no. His alarm was set to seventeen minutes past eight and the shortest way to the university was not along the seafront.
"No, no dawn yet," he replied.
"Well, it's not going anywhere," said Pietro.
They had already run out of things to say, but they lingered for a few seconds, the receivers pressed to their ears. They both breathed in a little of the affection that still survived between them, diluted along hundreds of miles of coaxial cables and nourished by something whose name they didn't know and which perhaps, if they thought too carefully about it, no longer existed.
"I'll say good-bye, then," Pietro said at last.
"Sure."
"And try to keep well."
"Okay. Say hi to Mum."
They hung up.
For Mattia it was the end of the day. He walked around the table. He looked distractedly at the papers stacked up on one side, the work he'd brought back from the office. He was still stuck on the same step. No matter where they began the proof, he and Alberto always ended up banging their heads against it sooner or later. He was sure that the solution lay just beyond that final obstacle, and that once past it getting to the end would be easy, like rolling down a grassy slope with his eyes closed.
But he was too tired to go back to work. He went into the kitchen and filled a pan with water from the tap. He put it on the stove and lit the gas. He spent so much time on his own that a normal person would have gone crazy in a month.
He sat down on the folding plastic chair, without completely relaxing. He looked up toward the unlit bulb dangling in the middle of the ceiling. It had blown just a month after he'd arrived, and he'd never bothered to replace it. He ate with the light turned on in the other room.
If he had simply upped and left the apartment that very evening and not come back, no one would have found any sign of his presence, apart from those incomprehensible pages stacked on the table. Mattia had put nothing of himself into the place. He had kept the anonymous pale oak furniture and the yellowed wallpaper that had been stuck to the walls since the building was constructed.
He got to his feet. He poured boiling water into a cup and immersed a tea bag in it. He watched the water turn dark. The methane flame was still lit and in the gloom it was violently blue. He lowered the flame until it was almost out and the hiss faded. He held his hand over the burner. The heat exerted a faint pressure on his devastated palm. Mattia brought it down slowly, and closed it around the flame.
He had spent hundreds and thousands of identical days at the university, and consumed innumerable cafeteria lunches in the little low building on the edge of the campus, but even now he remembered the very first day when he had walked in and copied the sequence of gestures of the other people. He had joined the line and, taking small steps, had reached the pile of plastic imitation-wood trays. He had picked one up, set the paper napkin on it, and helped himself to cutlery and a glass. Then, once he was in front of the uniformed woman who served up the portions, he had pointed to one of the three aluminum tubs, at random, without knowing what was in them. The cook had asked him something, in her own language or perhaps in English, and he hadn't understood. He had pointed to the tub again and she had repeated the question, exactly the same as before. Mattia shook his head. I don't understand, he had said in English in a loud and nervy voice. She had raised her eyes to the sky and waved the empty plate in the air. She's asking you if you want sauce on that muck, said the young man next to him in Italian. Mattia had spun around, disoriented, and shook his head. The young man had turned toward the dinner lady and simply said no. She had smiled at him and finally filled Mattia's dish and handed it to him. The young man had chosen the same and had brought it up to his nose and sniffed it with disgust. This stuff is revolting, he had observed.
You've just got here, then? he had asked him after a while, still staring at the thick puree on the plate. Mattia had said yes and the young man had nodded with a frown, as if it were a serious matter. After paying, Mattia had frozen in front of the cash register, his hands gripping the tray. He had looked around for an empty table, somewhere he could avoid feeling people's eyes on him and eat alone. He had just taken a step toward the back of the room when the young man from before had overtaken him and said come on, over here.
Alberto Torcia had already been there for four years, with a permanent research post funded by the European Union for the quality of his most recent publications. He too had escaped from something, but Mattia had never asked him what. Neither of them, after so many years, could have said whether the other was a friend or just a colleague, in spite of the fact that they shared an office and had lunch together every day.
It was Tuesday. Alberto sat down opposite Mattia and, through the glass of water that he brought to his lips, glimpsed the new mark, pale and perfectly circular, on his palm. Alberto didn't ask any questions, but merely gave him a crooked glance to let him know that he understood. Gilardi and Montanari, sitting at the same table, were sniggering over something they had found on the Internet.
Mattia drained his glass in one gulp, then cleared his throat.
"Yesterday evening an idea came to me about the discontinuity that-"
"Please, Mattia," Alberto interrupted him, dropping his fork and flopping back in his seat. His gestures were always very exaggerated. "At least have pity on me when I'm eating."
Mattia looked at the table. The slice of meat on his plate was cut into identical little squares and he separated them with his fork, leaving between them a regular grill of white lines.
"Why don't you do something else with your evenings?" Alberto went on more quietly, as if he didn't want the other two to hear him. As he spoke he drew little circles in the air with his knife.
Mattia said nothing and didn't look at him. He brought a little square of meat to his mouth, chosen from the ones on the edge whose fringed borders disturbed the geometry of the composition.
"If only you'd come and have a drink with us every now and again," Alberto continued.
"No," Mattia said brusquely.
"But-" Alberto protested.
"Anyway, you know."
Alberto shook his head and frowned, defeated. After all this time he still insisted, even though in all the years they had known each other he had managed to drag him out of the house only a dozen or so times.
He turned to the other two, breaking into their conversation.
"Have you seen her over there?" he asked, pointing to a young woman sitting two tables away with an elderly gentleman. As far as Mattia knew, the man was a geology professor. "If only I wasn't married, Christ, what I could do to a woman like that."
The others hesitated for a moment, because it had nothing to do with what they were talking about, but then they shifted gears and joined in, speculating about what such a babe was doing with an old windbag like that.
Mattia cut all the little squares of meat along the diagonal. Then he reassembled the triangles so as to form a larger one. The meat was already cold and tough. He took a piece of it and swallowed it almost whole. The rest he left where they were.
Outside the dining hall Alberto lit a cigarette, to give Gilardi and Montanari time to move away. He waited for Mattia, who was following a rectilinear crack along the ground and thinking about something that had nothing to do with being there.
"What were you saying about discontinuity?" he said.
"It doesn't matter."
"Come on, don't be a dick."
Mattia looked at his colleague. The tip of the cigarette between his lips was the only color that brightened that entirely gray day, the same as the one before and doubtless the same as the one that would follow.
"We can't escape it," said Mattia. "We've convinced ourselves that it exists. But I may have found a way to get something interesting out of it."
Alberto came closer. He didn't interrupt Mattia until he had finished his explanation, because he knew that Mattia didn't talk much, but when he did it was worth shutting up and listening.
The weight of consequences had collapsed on her all at once one evening a few years before, when Fabio, as he pushed inside her, had whispered I want to have a baby. His face was so close to Alice's that she had felt his breath sliding along her cheeks and dispersing among the sheets.
She had pulled him to her, guiding his head into the hollow between her neck and shoulder. Once, before they were married, he had told her it was the perfect fit, that his head was made to slip into that space.
So what do you think? Fabio had asked her, his voice muffled by the pillow. Alice hadn't replied, but had held him a bit tighter. She hadn't had the breath to speak.
She'd heard him closing the drawer with the condoms in it and had bent her right knee a little more to make room for him. Rhythmically she stroked his hair, her eyes wide open.
That secret had crept after her since her school days, but it had never taken hold of her mind for more than a few seconds. Alice had set it aside, like something she would think about later on. Now, all of a sudden, there it was, like an abyss cut into the black ceiling of the room, monstrous and irrepressible. Alice wanted to say to Fabio stop for a moment, wait, there's something I haven't told you, but he moved with disarming trust and he certainly wouldn't have understood.
She felt him come inside her, for the first time, and imagined that sticky liquid full of promise that he deposited in her dry body, where it too would dry.
She didn't want a baby, or maybe she did. She hadn't ever really thought about it. The question didn't arise and that was that. Her menstrual cycle had stopped around the last time she had eaten a whole chocolate pudding. The truth was that Fabio wanted a baby and she had to give him one. She had to, because when they made love he didn't ask her to turn the light on, not since the first time at his house. Because when it was over he lay on top of her and the weight of his body canceled out all her fears and he didn't speak, just breathed, and anyway he was there. She had to, because she didn't love him, but his love was enough for both of them, enough to keep them safe.
From then on sex had assumed a new guise. It bore within itself a precise purpose, which had soon led them to abandon everything that wasn't strictly necessary.
For weeks and then months nothing had happened. Fabio had himself examined and his sperm count was good. That evening he told Alice, being very careful to hold her tightly in his arms as he spoke. He immediately added you don't have to worry, it's not your fault. She pulled away and went into the other room before bursting into tears, and Fabio hated himself because he thought-in fact he knew-that it was his wife's fault.
Alice started feeling spied on. She kept a fictitious count of days, drawing little lines on the calendar beside the phone. She bought tampons and then threw them away unused. On the right days she pushed Fabio away in the dark, telling him we can't today.
He kept the same count, without telling her. Alice's secret, slimy and transparent, wormed its way between them, forcing them further and further apart. Every time he hinted at doctors, treatments, or the cause of the problem, Alice's face darkened and he was sure that it wouldn't be long before she found a pretext for an argument, any random nonsense.
Exhaustion slowly defeated them. They stopped talking about it and, along with the conversations, sex too had grown less frequent, until it was reduced to a laborious Friday night ritual. They took turns washing, before and after doing it. Fabio would come back from the bathroom, the skin of his face still gleaming with soap, wearing fresh underwear. In the meantime Alice would already have slipped on her T-shirt and would ask can I go now? When she came back into the room she would find him already asleep, or at least with his eyes closed, facing the wall and with his whole body on his side of the bed.
There was nothing very different about that Friday, at least at first. Alice joined him in bed just after one, having spent the whole evening shut up in the darkroom that Fabio had given her as a third anniversary present. He lowered the magazine he was reading and watched his wife's bare feet walk toward him, sticking to the wooden floor.
Alice slipped between the sheets and pressed herself against his side. Fabio let the magazine fall to the floor and turned out the bedside light. He did everything he could to not make it look like a habit, a duty, but the truth was clear to both of them.
They followed a series of movements that had become consolidated into a routine over time, and which made everything simpler, then Fabio entered her, with the help of his fingers.
Alice wasn't sure that he was really crying, because he held his head tilted to one side to avoid contact with her skin, but she noticed that there was something different in his way of moving. He was thrusting more violently and more urgently than usual, then he would stop suddenly, his breath heavy, and start again, as though torn between the desire to penetrate more deeply and the desire to slip away from her and from the room. She heard him sniffing as he panted.
When he finished he quickly withdrew, got out of bed, and went and shut himself in the bathroom, without even turning on the light.
He stayed there for longer than usual. Alice moved toward the middle of the bed, where the sheets were still cool. She put a hand on her stomach, in which nothing was happening, and, for the first time, thought she no longer had anyone to blame, that all these mistakes were hers alone.
Fabio crossed the room in the semidarkness, climbed into bed, and turned his back to her. It was Alice's turn, but she didn't move. She felt that something was about to happen, the air was full of it.
It took him another minute, or perhaps two, before he spoke.
"Ali," he said.
"Yes?"
He hesitated again.
"I can't do this anymore," he said softly.
Alice felt his words gripping her belly, like climbing plants sprouting suddenly from the bed. She didn't reply. She let him go on.
"I know what it is," Fabio went on. His voice grew clearer. As it struck the walls it assumed a slight metallic echo. "You don't want to let me in, you don't even want me to talk about it. But this…"
He stopped. Alice's eyes were open. They were accustomed to the dark. She followed the outlines of the furniture: the armchair, the wardrobe, the chest of drawers and on top of it the mirror that didn't reflect anything. All those objects sitting there, motionless and terribly insistent.
Alice thought of her parents' room. She thought how similar they were, that all bedrooms in the world were similar. She wondered what she was afraid of, losing him or losing those things: the curtains, the paintings, the carpet, all that security folded carefully away in the drawers.
"You barely ate two zucchinis this evening," Fabio went on.
"I wasn't hungry," she replied automatically.
Here we go, she thought.
"The same yesterday. You didn't even touch the meat. You cut it up into little pieces and then hid it in your napkin. Do you really think I'm that stupid?"
Alice clenched the sheets. How could she have thought he would never notice? She saw again the hundreds, thousands of times in which the same scene had repeated itself before her husband's eyes. She was furious about all the things he must have thought in silence.
"I expect you also know what I ate the evening before and the evening before that," she said.
"Tell me what it is," he said, loudly this time. "Tell me what it is that you find so repellent about food."
She thought of her father bringing his face down to the plate when he ate soup, the sound he made, how he sucked the spoon rather than simply putting it in his mouth. She thought with disgust of the chewed-up pulp between her husband's teeth every time he sat in front of her for dinner. She thought of Viola's gumdrop, with all those hairs stuck to it and its synthetic strawberry flavor. Then she thought about herself, without her T-shirt, reflected in the big mirror in her old house, and the scar that made her leg something slightly apart, something detached from her torso and useless. She thought of the balance, so fragile, of her own silhouette, the thin strip of shadow that her ribs cast over her belly and which she was prepared to defend at all costs.
"What is it you want? Do you want me to start stuffing myself? To deform myself to have your baby?" She spoke as if the baby were already there, somewhere in the universe. She called it your baby on purpose. "I can do some sort of treatment if you're so keen on the idea. I can take hormones, medicine, all the junk necessary to let you have this child of yours. Maybe then you'll stop spying on me."
"That isn't the point," Fabio shot back. He had suddenly regained all his irritating self-confidence.
Alice moved toward the edge of the bed to get away from his threatening body. He rolled onto his back. His eyes were open and his face was tense, as if he were trying to see something beyond the darkness.
"Isn't it?"
"You should think about all the risks, particularly in your condition."
In your condition, Alice silently repeated to herself. She instinctively tried to bend her weak knee, to demonstrate to herself that she was in full control, but it barely moved.
"Poor Fabio," she said. "With that wife of his, crippled and…"
She couldn't finish her sentence. That last word, already trembling in the air, caught in her throat.
"There's a part of the brain," he began, ignoring her, as though an explanation might make everything simpler, "probably the hypothalamus, which controls the body mass index. If that index falls too low, gonadotropin production is inhibited. The mechanism is blocked, and menstruation stops. But that's just the first of the symptoms. Other things happen, more serious. The density of minerals in the bones diminishes and osteoporosis ensues. The bones crumble like wafers."
He talked like a doctor, listing causes and effects in a monotonous voice, as if knowing the name of an illness were the same as curing it. Alice reflected that her bones had already crumbled once, and that these things didn't interest her.
"Raising that index is enough for everything to return to normal," Fabio added. "It's a slow process, but we still have time."
Alice lifted herself up on her elbows. She wanted to leave the room.
"Fantastic. I suppose you've had all this ready for a while," she remarked. "That's all there is to it. Easy as that."
Fabio sat up as well. He took her arm, but she pulled away. He stared into her eyes through the gloom.
"It's not only about you anymore," he said.
Alice shook her head.
"Yes, it is," she said. "Maybe it's what I really want, haven't you thought of that? I want to feel my bones crumbling, I want to block the mechanism. As you said yourself."
Fabio thumped the mattress, making her start.
"So now what do you want to do?" she said provocatively.
Fabio sucked in air through his teeth. The compressed violence in his lungs made his arms stiffen.
"You're just selfish. You're spoiled and selfish."
He threw himself on the bed and turned his back to her again. All of a sudden things seemed to return to their place in the shadows. There was silence again, but it was an imprecise silence. Alice noticed a faint whirring sound, like the rustle of old films in the cinema. She listened, trying to work out where it was coming from.
Then she saw the outline of her husband bobbing slightly up and down. She became aware of his suppressed sobs, like a rhythmical vibration of the mattress. His body asked her to stretch out a hand and touch him, to stroke his neck and his hair, but she didn't lift it. She got up from the bed and walked toward the bathroom, slamming the door behind her.
After lunch Alberto and Mattia headed down to the basement, where nothing ever changed and you measured the passing of time only by the heaviness of your eyes as they filled with the white light of the fluorescent bulbs on the ceiling. They went into an empty classroom and Alberto sat down on the teacher's desk. His body was massive, not exactly fat, but to Mattia it seemed as if it were constantly expanding.
"Fire away," said Alberto. "Tell me everything from the start."
Mattia picked up a piece of chalk and broke it in half. A fine white dust settled on the tips of his leather shoes, the same ones he had worn on the day of his graduation.
"Let's consider things in two dimensions," he said.
He started to write in his neat hand. He began at the top left corner and filled the first two blackboards. On the third he copied out the results that he would need later. It was as if he had performed this calculation hundreds of times, when in fact it was the first time he had pulled it out of his head. He turned toward Alberto every now and again, who nodded at him seriously, while his mind scampered to keep up with the chalk.
When he got to the end, after a good half hour, Mattia wrote "QED" next to the framed result, just as he had done when he was a boy. The chalk had dried the skin of his hand, but he didn't even notice. His legs were trembling slightly.
For about ten seconds they stayed there in quiet contemplation. Then Alberto clapped his hands and the noise echoed through the silence like a whiplash. He got down off the desk and almost fell on the floor, because his legs had gone to sleep from dangling like that. He put a hand on Mattia's shoulder and Mattia found it both heavy and reassuring.
"No bullshit this time," he said. "You're having dinner with me tonight; we've got something to celebrate."
Mattia smiled faintly.
"Okay," he said.
They cleaned the blackboard together. They took care that nothing legible was left, that no one would be able to make out so much as a shadow of what had been written on it. No one would really have understood it, but they were already jealous of the result, as one is of a beautiful secret.
They left the classroom and Mattia turned out the lights. Then they went upstairs, one behind the other, each savoring the little glory of that moment.
Alberto's house was in a residential area exactly like the one where Mattia lived, but on the other side of the city. Mattia took the bus, which was half empty, his forehead resting against the window. The contact between that cold surface and his skin soothed him, and made him think of the compress that his mother used to put on Michela's head, nothing but a damp cloth handkerchief, but enough to calm her in the evening when she had those attacks that made her tremble all over and grind her teeth. Michela wanted her brother to wear a compress too, she said so to her mother with her eyes, and so he would lie down on the bed and stay there, waiting for his sister to finish writhing.
He had showered and shaved, and had put on his shirt and black jacket. In a liquor store he had never entered before he had bought a bottle of red wine, choosing the one with the most elegant label. The lady had wrapped it up in a sheet of tissue paper and then put it in a silver-colored bag. Mattia rocked it back and forth like a pendulum as he waited for someone to open the door. With his foot he arranged the doormat in front of the door so that the perimeter aligned precisely with the lines of the paving.
Alberto's wife came to the door. She ignored both Mattia's outstretched hand and the bag with the bottle. Instead she drew him to her and kissed him on the cheek.
"I don't know what you two have been up to, but I've never seen Alberto as happy as he is tonight," she whispered. "Come in."
Mattia resisted the temptation to rub his ear against his shoulder to get rid of an itch.
"Albi, Mattia's here," she called.
Instead of Alberto, his son Philip appeared from the hall. Mattia knew him from the photograph that his father kept on his desk, in which Philip was still only a few months old, and round and impersonal like all newborn babies. It had never occurred to him that he might have grown. Some of his parents' features were forcibly making their way beneath his skin: Alberto's long chin, his mother's not-quite-open eyelids. Mattia thought about the cruel mechanism of growth, the soft cartilages subject to imperceptible but inexorable changes, and, just for a moment, about Michela and her features, frozen forever since that day in the park.
Philip came over, pedaling his tricycle like a boy possessed. When he noticed Mattia, he braked suddenly and stared at him in astonishment, as if he had been caught doing something forbidden. Alberto's wife gathered him in her arms, lifting him from the tricycle.
"Here's the horrid little monster," she said, burying her nose in his cheek.
Mattia gave him a forced smile. Children made him uneasy.
"Let's go in. Nadia's here already," Alberto's wife went on.
"Nadia?" said Mattia.
Alberto's wife looked at him, confused.
"Yes, Nadia," she said. "Didn't Albi tell you?"
"No."
There was a moment of embarrassment. Mattia didn't know a Nadia. He wondered what was going on and feared he already knew.
"Anyway she's in there. Come on."
As they walked toward the kitchen, Philip studied Mattia suspiciously, hiding behind his mother's back, his index and middle fingers in his mouth and his knuckles gleaming with saliva. Mattia was forced to look elsewhere. He remembered the time he had followed Alice down a longer hall than this one. He looked at Philip's scribbles hanging on the walls instead of paintings and was careful not to trample his toys scattered on the floor. The whole house, its very walls, was impregnated with a smell of vitality that he was unused to. He thought about his own apartment, where it was so easy to decide simply not to exist. He already regretted accepting the invitation to dinner.
In the kitchen Alberto greeted him, shaking his hand affectionately, and he responded automatically. The woman sitting at the table stood up and held out her hand.
"This is Nadia," Alberto said. "And this is our next Fields Medal winner."
"Nice to meet you," said Mattia, embarrassed.
Nadia smiled at him. She made as if to lean forward, perhaps to kiss him on the cheeks, but Mattia's motionlessness held her back.
"A pleasure," she said, and nothing more.
For a few seconds he remained absorbed by one of the big earrings that dangled from her ears: a gold circle at least five centimeters in diameter, which when she moved began swinging in a complicated motion that Mattia tried to decompose into the three Cartesian axes. The size of the earring and its contrast with Nadia's jet-black hair made him think of something shameless, almost obscene, that frightened and aroused him at the same time.
They sat down at the table and Alberto poured red wine for everyone. He grandly toasted the article they would soon write and obliged Mattia to explain to Nadia, in simple terms, what it was about. She joined in with an uncertain smile, which betrayed thoughts of a different kind and made him lose the thread of the conversation more than once.
"It sounds interesting," she observed finally, and Mattia looked down.
"It's much more than interesting," said Alberto, waving his hands around as if imitating the shape of an ellipsoid, which Mattia pictured in his mind.
Alberto's wife came in holding a soup tureen, from which emanated a strong smell of cumin. The conversation turned to food, a more neutral territory. A tension that they hadn't previously been aware of dissipated. Everyone, apart from Mattia, expressed nostalgia for some kind of delicacy that they couldn't get here in northern Europe. Alberto talked about the ravioli his mother used to make. His wife remembered the seafood salad they used to eat together in their university days, in that restaurant facing the beach. Nadia described the cannoli filled with fresh ricotta and dotted with tiny chips of dark black chocolate that the only pastry shop in her little village made. As she described them she kept her eyes closed and sucked in her lips as if she could still taste a little of that flavor. She caught her lower lip with her teeth for a moment and then let it go. Mattia fixed on that detail without realizing it. He thought there was something exaggerated about Nadia's femininity, in the fluidity with which she rolled her hands around, and the southern inflection with which she pronounced her labial consonants, almost doubling them when there was no need. It was as if she possessed a dark power, which depressed him and at the same time made his cheeks burn.
"You just need the courage to go back," Nadia concluded.
All four of them remained in silence for a few seconds, as if each were thinking about what it was that kept them so far from home. Philip banged his toys against one another a few feet away from the table.
Alberto was able to keep a tottering conversation alive all through dinner, often embarking on long monologues, his hands waving above an increasingly untidy table.
After dessert, his wife got up to collect the plates. Nadia made as if to help her, but she told her to stay where she was and disappeared into the kitchen.
They sat in silence. Lost in thought, Mattia ran an index finger along the serrated edge of his knife.
"I'll just go and see what she's up to in there," said Alberto, getting up as well. From behind Nadia's back he darted a glance at Mattia, which meant do your best.
He and Nadia were left on their own with Philip. They looked up at the same time, because there was nothing else to look at, and they both laughed with embarrassment.
"What about you?" Nadia said to him after a while. "Why did you choose to stay here?"
She studied him with her eyes half closed, as if trying to guess his secret. She had long, thick eyelashes and Mattia thought they were too still to be real.
He finished lining up the crumbs with his index finger. He shrugged.
"I don't know," he said. "It's as if there's more oxygen here."
She nodded reflectively, as if she had understood. From the kitchen came the voices of Alberto and his wife talking about ordinary things, about the tap that was leaking again and who would put Philip to bed, things that at that moment seemed tremendously important to Mattia.
Silence fell again and he forced himself to think of something to say, something that seemed normal. Nadia entered his field of vision wherever he looked, an awkward presence. The dark color of her low-cut top distracted him, even as he was staring at his empty glass. Under the table, hidden by the tablecloth, were their legs and he imagined them down there, in the dark, forced into a strained intimacy.
Philip came over and put a toy car in front of him, right on his napkin. Mattia looked at the miniature Maserati, then looked at Philip, who observed him in turn, waiting for him to decide to do something.
Rather hesitantly he picked up the toy car and made it go back and forth on the tablecloth. He felt Nadia's dense gaze upon him, assessing his embarrassment. With his mouth he imitated a shy vroom. Then he stopped. Philip stared at him in silence, slightly annoyed. He stretched out his arm, took the car back, and returned to his toys.
Mattia poured himself some more wine and drained it in one gulp. Then he realized that he should have offered some to Nadia first and asked her would you like some? She said no, no, drawing in her hands and hunching her shoulders, as people usually do when they're cold.
Alberto came back into the room and made a kind of grunt. He rubbed his face hard with his hands.
"Sleepy time," he said to the child. He lifted him up by the collar of his polo shirt as if he were a doll.
Philip followed him without protest. As he left he glanced back at his toys piled up on the floor as if he had hidden something in the middle of them.
"Maybe it's time for me to go too," said Nadia, not quite turning toward Mattia.
"Yeah, perhaps it's time," he said.
They both contracted their leg muscles as if to get up, but it was a false start. They stayed where they were and looked at each other again. Nadia smiled and Mattia felt pierced by her gaze, stripped to the bone as if he could no longer hide anything.
They got up, almost at the same time. They put their chairs next to the table and Mattia noticed that she too had the foresight to lift hers off the ground.
Alberto found them standing there, not knowing how to move.
"What's happening?" he said. "Are you off already?"
"It's late, you must be tired," Nadia replied for both of them.
Alberto looked at Mattia with a smile of complicity.
"I'll call you a taxi," he said.
"I'll take the bus," Mattia said quickly.
Alberto gave him a sidelong look.
"At this time of night? Come on," he said. "And besides, Nadia's place is on the way."
The taxi slipped along the deserted avenues on the edge of town, between identical buildings without balconies. Few windows were still lit. March days end early and people adapt their body clocks to the night.
"The cities are darker here," said Nadia, as if thinking out loud.
They sat at opposite ends of the backseat. Mattia stared at the changing numbers on the taxi's meter, and watched the red segments going off and on to compose the various figures.
Nadia thought about the ridiculous space of solitude that separated them and tried to find the courage to occupy it with her body. Her apartment was only a few blocks away and time, like the road, was being consumed in a great hurry. It wasn't just the time of that particular evening, it was the time of possibilities, of her nearly thirty-five years. Over the past year, since breaking up with Martin, she had begun to notice the foreignness of the place, to suffer from the chill that dried her skin and never really left her, even in the summer. And yet she couldn't make up her mind to leave. She depended on the place now; she had grown attached to it with the obstinacy with which people become attached only to things that hurt them.
She reflected that if anything was going to be resolved, it would be resolved in that car. Afterward she would no longer have the strength. She would finally abandon herself, without remorse, to her translations, to the books whose pages she dissected by day and night, to earn her living and fill the holes dug by time.
She found him fascinating. He was strange, even stranger than the other colleagues that Alberto had introduced her to, to no avail. The subject they studied seemed only to attract sinister characters, or to make them so over the years. She could have asked Mattia whether Mattia had been attracted by math because he was weird or if math had made him weird, to ask something funny, but she didn't feel like it. And yet, "strange" conveyed the idea. And disturbing. But there was something in his eyes, a kind of shining molecule drowning in those dark pupils, which, Nadia was sure, no woman had ever been able to capture.
She could have turned him on, she was dying to. She had pulled her hair to one side so as to reveal her bare neck and she ran her fingers back and forth along the seams of the bag that she held on her lap. But she didn't dare to go any further and she didn't want to turn around. If he was looking elsewhere, she didn't want to find out.
Mattia coughed quietly into his clenched fist, to warm it up. He noticed Nadia's urgency, but couldn't make up his mind. And even if he did decide, he thought, he wouldn't know what to do. Once Denis, talking about himself, had told him that all opening moves were the same, like in chess. You don't have to come up with anything new, there's no point, because you're both after the same thing anyway. The game soon finds its own way and it's only at that point that you need a strategy.
But I don't even know the opening moves, he thought.
What he did was to rest his left hand in the middle of the seat, like the end of a rope thrown into the sea. He kept it there, even though the synthetic fabric made him shiver.
Nadia understood and in silence, without any abrupt movements, she slid toward the middle. She lifted his arm, taking it by the wrist as if she knew what he were thinking, and put it around her neck. She rested her head against his chest and closed her eyes.
She was wearing strong perfume and it nestled in her hair; it stuck to Mattia's clothes and forced its way into his nostrils.
The taxi pulled up on the left, in front of Nadia's house, with its engine running.
"Seventeen-thirty," said the taxi driver.
She sat up and they both thought how much trouble it would be to find themselves like this again, to break an old equilibrium and build a different one. They wondered if they'd still be able to do it.
Mattia rummaged in his pockets and found his wallet. He held out a twenty and said no change, thanks. She opened the door.
Now follow her, Mattia thought, although he didn't move.
Nadia was already on the sidewalk. The taxi driver watched Mattia in the rearview mirror, waiting for instructions. The squares on the taximeter were all illuminated and flashing 00.00.
"Come on," said Nadia and he obeyed.
The taxi set off again and they climbed to the top of a steep flight of stairs, with the steps covered in blue carpet and so narrow that Mattia had to walk with his feet at an angle.
Nadia's apartment was clean and very well kept, as only the home of a woman living on her own can be. In the middle of a circular table there was a wicker basket full of dry petals, which had stopped giving off any perfume a long time ago. The walls were painted in strong colors, orange, blue, and egg-yolk yellow, so unusual here in the north that there was something disrespectful about them.
Mattia asked may I come in? and watched Nadia take off her coat and lay it on a chair with the confidence of someone moving in her own space.
"I'm going to get something to drink," she said.
He waited in the middle of the sitting room, his ravaged hands hidden in his pockets. Nadia came back a few moments later with two glasses half full of red wine. She was laughing at a thought of her own.
"I'm not used to all this anymore. It hasn't happened to me for a long time," she confessed.
"That's fine," replied Mattia, rather than say that it had never happened to him.
They sipped the wine in silence, looking cautiously around. Each time their eyes met they smiled faintly, like two children.
Nadia kept her legs folded on the sofa, so that she could get closer to him. The scene was set. All that was required was an action, a cold start, instant and brutal as beginnings always are.
She thought about it for another moment. Then she set her glass down on the floor, behind the sofa, so as not to risk knocking it with her foot, and stretched out resolutely toward Mattia. She kissed him. With her feet she slipped off her high heels, which fell resoundingly to the floor. She climbed astride him, not leaving him the breath to say no.
She took his glass from him and guided his hands to her hips. Mattia's tongue was rigid. She began rolling hers around his, insistently, to force it to move, until he began to do the same, in the opposite direction.
With a certain awkwardness they rolled onto one side and Mattia ended up underneath. One of his legs was dangled off the sofa and the other was extended straight, blocked by her weight. He thought of the circular movement of his own tongue, its periodic motion, but soon he lost concentration, as if Nadia's face squashed against his own had managed to obstruct the complicated mechanism of his thought, like that time with Alice.
He slid his hands under Nadia's top and contact with her skin didn't repel him. They got undressed slowly, without pulling apart or opening their eyes. There was too much light in the room and any interruption would have made them stop.
As he busied himself with the unfastening of her bra Mattia thought it happens. In the end it happens, in some way you couldn't imagine before.
Fabio had gotten up early. He had switched off the alarm clock so that Alice wouldn't hear it and had left the room, forcing himself not to look at his wife, lying on her side of the bed, with one arm out of the sheet and her hand stretched out as if she were dreaming about clutching on to something.
He had fallen asleep out of exhaustion and passed through a sequence of nightmares that gradually became more and more gloomy. Now he felt the need to do something with his hands, to get himself dirty, to sweat and wear out his muscles. He considered going to the hospital to do an extra shift, but his parents were coming for lunch, as they did every second Saturday of the month. Twice he picked up the phone with the intention of calling them and telling them not to come, that Alice wasn't feeling well, but then they would have phoned to find out how she was doing, and he would have had to talk to his wife again, and things would have gotten even worse.
In the kitchen he took off his T-shirt. He drank some milk from the fridge. He could pretend nothing was wrong, behave as if nothing had happened the night before and carry on like that, as he had always done, but deep in his throat he felt a completely new sense of nausea. The skin of his face was taut with the tears that had dried on his cheeks. He splashed his face with water at the sink and dried himself with the dish towel hanging next to it.
He looked out the window. The sky was overcast, but the sun would come out shortly. It was always like that at this time of year. On such a day he could have taken his son out for a bike ride, followed the track that ran along the canal all the way to the park. There they would have drunk from the fountain and sat on the grass for about half an hour. Then they would have come back, on the road this time. They would have stopped at the bakery and bought some pastries for lunch.
He wasn't asking for much. Only for a normal life; the one that he had always deserved.
He went down to the garage, still in his underwear. From the top shelf he took down the box of tools and its heaviness brought him a moment of relief. He took out a screwdriver, a size 9 and a size 12 wrench, and started dismantling his bike, piece by piece, methodically.
First he smeared grease over the gears, then he polished the frame with a rag drenched in alcohol. With his fingernail he scraped away the spots of mud that were stuck to it and also cleaned thoroughly between the pedals, in the cracks that his fingers couldn't enter. He put the various pieces back together again and checked the brake cables, adjusting them so that they were perfectly balanced. He pumped up both tires, testing their pressure with the palm of his hand.
He took a step backward, wiped his hands on his thighs, and observed his work with a weary sense of detachment. He knocked the bike to the ground with a kick. It folded in on itself, like an animal. One pedal started spinning in midair and Fabio listened to its hypnotic swish, until silence fell once more.
He was about to leave the garage, but then he turned back. He lifted the bike and put it back in its place. He couldn't help checking to see if it was damaged. He wondered why he was incapable of leaving everything in a mess, of giving vent to the rage that flooded his brain, cursing and smashing things. Why he preferred everything to seem as if it were in its proper place even when it wasn't.
He turned out the light and climbed the stairs.
Alice was sitting at the kitchen table. She was sipping tea thoughtfully. There was nothing in front of her but the sweetener container. She raised her eyes and looked him up and down.
"Why didn't you wake me up?"
Fabio shrugged. He went over to the tap and turned on the water full blast.
"You were fast asleep," he replied.
He poured dishwashing soap onto his hands and rubbed them hard under the water to remove the black streaks of grease.
"I'll be late with lunch," she said.
Fabio shrugged again.
"We could just forget about lunch," he said.
"What's this, a new development?"
He rubbed his hands together even harder.
"I don't know. It's just an idea."
"It's a new idea."
"Yeah, you're right. It's an idiotic idea," Fabio shot back through clenched teeth.
He turned off the tap and left the kitchen, as if in a hurry. Shortly afterward Alice heard the thunder of water in the shower. She put the cup in the sink and went back to the bedroom to get dressed.
On Fabio's side the sheets were crumpled, full of wrinkles flattened by the weight of his body. The pillow was folded in half, as if he had kept his head underneath it, and the blankets were piled up at the end of the bed, kicked away by his feet. There was a faint smell of sweat, as there was every morning, and Alice threw the window open to let in some fresh air.
The pieces of furniture that the night before had seemed to her to have a soul, a breath of their own, were nothing but the same old pieces of bedroom furniture, as scentless as her tepid resignation.
She made the bed, stretching the sheets out properly and tucking the corners under the mattress. She turned down the top sheet so that it was halfway down the pillows as Sol had taught her and got dressed. From the bathroom came the buzz of Fabio's electric razor, which for some time she had associated with drowsy weekend mornings.
She wondered whether the previous night's conversation had been different from the others or whether it would be resolved as always. Would Fabio, just out of the shower and still not wearing his T-shirt, hug her from behind and keep his head pressed against her hair, for a long time, long enough to allow the rancor to evaporate? There was no other possible solution, for the time being.
Alice tried to imagine what would happen otherwise. She was transfixed by the sight of the curtains swelling slightly in the draft. She became aware of a sharp sense of abandonment, like a presentiment, not unlike what she had felt in that snow-filled ditch, and then in Mattia's room, and which she felt every time, even now, as she looked at her mother's neatly made bed. She brought her index finger to the pointed bone of her pelvis, running it along the sharp outline that she was not prepared to give up, and when the buzz of the razor stopped she shook her head and went back into the kitchen, with the more solid and imminent worry of lunch.
She chopped up an onion and cut off a little chunk of butter, which she set aside in a small dish. All those things that Fabio had taught her. She was accustomed to dealing with food with ascetic detachment, following simple sequences of actions, the end result of which would not concern her.
She liberated the asparagus stalks from the red elastic band that kept them together, held them under the cold water, and laid them out on a chopping board. She set a panful of water on the burner.
She was alerted to the presence of Fabio in the room by a series of small approaching noises. She froze, waiting for contact with his body.
Instead he sat down on the banquette and started distractedly flipping through a magazine.
"Fabio," she called to him, not really knowing what to say.
He didn't reply. He turned a page, making more noise than necessary. He gripped one corner between his fingers, uncertain whether to tear it or not.
"Fabio," she repeated at the same volume, but turning around.
"What is it?"
"Can you get me the rice, please? It's in the top cupboard. I can't reach."
It was just an excuse, they both knew that. It was just a way of saying come here.
Fabio threw the magazine on the table and it struck an ashtray carved from half a coconut, which began to spin. He sat there for a few seconds with his hands resting on his knees, as if he were thinking about it. Then he suddenly rose to his feet and walked over to the sink.
"Where?" he asked angrily, taking care not to look at Alice.
"There." She pointed.
Fabio pulled a chair over to the fridge, making it squeak on the ceramic tiles. He climbed up on it with bare feet. Alice looked at them as if she hadn't seen them before, and found them attractive, but in a vaguely frightening way.
He picked up the box of rice. It was already open. He shook it. Then he smiled in a way that Alice found sinister. He tilted the box and rice started spilling onto the floor, like thin white rain.
"What are you doing?" said Alice.
Fabio smiled.
"Here's your rice," he replied.
He shook the box harder and the grains scattered all around the kitchen. Alice came over.
"Stop it," she said, but he ignored her. Alice repeated it more loudly.
"Like at our wedding, remember? Our damn wedding," shouted Fabio.
She gripped him by a calf to make him stop and he poured the rice over her head. A few grains stuck in her smooth hair. She looked up at him and said again stop it.
A grain hit her in the eye, hurting her, and with her eyes closed Alice slapped Fabio's shin. He reacted by shaking his leg hard, kicking her just below her left shoulder. His wife's bad knee did what it could to keep her upright, bending first forward and then backward, like a crooked hinge, but then it let her drop to the ground.
The box was empty. Fabio stayed standing on the chair, bewildered, with the box upside down in his hand, looking at his wife on the floor, curled up like a cat. A violent shock of lucidity flashed through his brain.
He got down.
"Ali, did you hurt yourself?" he said. "Let me see."
He slid a hand under her head to look at her face, but she squirmed away.
"Leave me alone!" she yelled.
"Darling, I'm sorry," he pleaded. "You are-"
"Go away!" shouted Alice, with a vocal power that neither of them could have suspected she owned.
Fabio pulled away. His hands trembled. He took two steps back, then stammered an okay. He ran toward the bedroom and came out wearing a T-shirt and a pair of shoes. He left the house without turning to look at his wife, who still hadn't moved.
Alice pushed her hair behind her ears. The cupboard door was still open above her head, the lifeless chair in front of her. She hadn't hurt herself. She didn't feel like crying. She couldn't manage to think about what had just happened.
She started picking up the grains of rice scattered over the floor. The first few she picked up one by one. Then she started sweeping them together with the palm of her hand.
She got up and threw a handful into the pan, in which the water was already boiling. She stood and looked at them, carried chaotically up and down by convective motions. Mattia had called them that once. She turned off the flame and went and sat on the sofa.
She wouldn't put anything away. She would wait for her in-laws to arrive and find her like that. She would tell them how Fabio had behaved.
But no one arrived. He must have warned them already. Or he had gone to their house and was telling them his version, saying that Alice's belly was as dry as a dried-up lake and that he was fed up with living like this.
The house was plunged into silence and the light seemed unable to find a place for itself. Alice picked up the telephone and dialed her father's number.
"Hello?" answered Soledad.
"Hi, Sol."
"Hi, mi amorcito. How's my baby?" said the housekeeper with her usual concern.
"So-so," said Alice.
"Why? ?Que pasa?"
Alice remained silent for a few seconds.
"Is Dad there?" she asked.
"He's asleep. Shall I go and wake him up?"
Alice thought of her father, in the big bedroom that he now shared with only his thoughts, with the lowered blinds drawing lines of light on his sleeping body. The rancor that had always divided them had been absorbed by time; Alice could hardly remember it. What oppressed her most about that house, her father's serious, penetrating glance, was what she missed most now. He wouldn't say anything, he hardly ever spoke. Stroking her cheek, he would ask Sol to change the sheets in her room and that would be that. After her mother's death something had altered in him: it was as if he had slowed down. Paradoxically, since Fabio had entered Alice's life, her father had become more protective. He no longer talked about himself, he let her do the talking, losing himself in his daughter's voice, carried along by the timbre rather than the words, and responded with thoughtful murmurs.
His moments of absence had begun about a year before, when one evening he had confused Soledad with Fernanda. He had pulled her to him to kiss her, as if she really were his wife, and Sol had been forced to give him a gentle slap on the cheek, to which he had reacted with the whining resentment of a child. The next day he hadn't remembered a thing, but the vague sense of there being something wrong, an interruption in the cadenced rhythm of time, had led him to ask Sol what had happened. She had tried not to reply, to change the subject, but he hadn't let it go. When the housekeeper had told the truth he had grown gloomy, had nodded and, turning around, had said I'm sorry, in a low voice. Then he had holed himself up in his study and stayed there until dinnertime, without sleeping or doing anything. He had sat down at his desk, with his hands resting on the walnut surface, and had tried in vain to reconstruct that missing segment in the ribbon of his memory.
Episodes such as this were repeated with ever greater frequency and all three of them, Alice, her father, and Sol, tried to pretend nothing was wrong, waiting for the moment when that would no longer be possible.
"Ali?" Sol urged. "So shall I go and wake him up?"
"No, no," Alice said quickly. "Don't wake him. It's nothing."
"Really?"
"Yes. Let him rest."
She hung up and lay down on the sofa. She tried to keep her eyes open, directing them at the plastered ceiling. She wanted to be present at this very moment, in which she noticed a new, uncontrollable change. She wanted to be witness to the umpteenth little disaster, memorize its trajectory, but after a few minutes her breathing became more regular and Alice fell asleep.
Mattia was startled to find that he still had instincts, buried beneath the dense network of thoughts and abstractions that had woven itself around him. He was startled by the violence with which these instincts emerged and confidently guided his gestures.
The return to reality was painful. Nadia's foreign body had settled on his own. Contact with her sweat on one side and the crumpled fabric of the sofa and their squashed clothes on the other was suffocating. She was breathing slowly. Mattia thought that if the ratio between the intervals of their breath was an irrational number, there was no way of combining them to find a regularity.
He tried to take in some air by stretching over Nadia's head, but it was saturated with heavy condensation. He suddenly wanted to cover himself up. He twisted one leg because he felt his member, flaccid and cold, against her leg. He clumsily hurt her with his knee. Nadia gave a start and raised her head. She had already fallen asleep.
"Sorry," said Mattia.
"Doesn't matter."
She kissed him and her breath was too hot. He remained motionless, waiting for her to stop.
"Shall we go to the bedroom?" she said.
Mattia nodded. He would have liked to go back to his apartment, his comfortable void, but he knew it wasn't the right thing to do.
They both became aware of how embarrassing and unnatural the moment was, as they slipped beneath the sheets from opposite sides of the bed. Nadia smiled as if to say everything's fine. In the darkness she huddled up against his shoulder. She gave him another kiss and quickly fell asleep.
Mattia too closed his eyes, but was forced to open them again immediately, because a jumble of terrible memories lay in wait for him, piled up beneath his eyelids. Once again he had difficulty breathing. He reached his left hand under the bed and began rubbing his thumb against the iron netting, at the pointed juncture where two meshes met. In the darkness he brought his finger to his mouth and sucked it. The taste of blood calmed him for a few seconds.
He gradually became aware of the unfamiliar sounds of Nadia's apartment: the faint hum of the fridge, the heat that rustled for a few seconds and then stopped with a click of the boiler, and a clock, in the other room, that sounded to him as if it were going too slowly. He wanted to move his legs, to get up and out of there. Nadia was still in the middle of the bed, depriving him of the space he needed to turn around. Her hair stung his neck and her breathing dried the skin of his chest. Mattia thought that he would never manage to close his eyes. It was late already, perhaps after two. He had to teach the next day and was bound to make mistakes at the blackboard; he would look like a complete idiot in front of all his students. At his own place, on the other hand, he would have been able to sleep, at least for the few remaining hours.
If I'm quiet about it she won't notice, he thought.
He remained motionless for more than a minute, thinking. The sounds were becoming more and more apparent. Another sharp rattle from the boiler made him stiffen and he decided to leave.
With little movements he managed to free the arm that was underneath Nadia's head. In her sleep she felt the lack and moved to try to find him. Mattia drew himself upright. He rested first one foot on the floor and then the other. When he got up the bed squeaked slightly as it settled.
He turned to look at her in the semidarkness and vaguely remembered the moment when he had turned his back on Michela in the park.
He walked barefoot to the sitting room. He picked up his clothes from the sofa and his shoes from the floor. He opened the door, as always, without a sound, and when he was in the corridor, still clutching his trousers, he finally managed to breathe deeply.
On the Saturday evening of the rice incident, Fabio had called her on her cell phone. Alice had wondered why he hadn't tried on the home phone first and then thought that perhaps it was because the home phone was an object that belonged to both of them and he didn't like the fact that there was something they shared at that moment any more than she did. It had been a short call, in spite of the drawn-out silences. He had said for tonight I'm staying here, like a decision that had already been made, and she had replied as far as I'm concerned you can stay there tomorrow as well and as long as you like. Then, once these tiresome details had been worked out, Fabio had added Alice, I'm sorry, and she had hung up without saying me too.
She hadn't answered the telephone again. Fabio's insistent calls soon abated, and she, in an attack of self-commiseration, had said to herself you see? Walking barefoot through the flat she had picked up at random a few things of her husband's, documents and a few items of clothing, and put them in a box, which she had then dumped in the hall.
One evening she had come back from work and found it wasn't there. Fabio hadn't taken away much else. The furniture was all in place and the closet still full of his clothes, but on the living room shelves there were now gaps among the books, black spaces that bore witness to the start of the breakup. Alice had stopped to look at them and for the first time the separation had assumed the concrete outlines of a hard fact, the massive consistence of a solid form.
With a certain relief she let herself go. She felt as if she had always done everything for someone else, but now there was just her and she could simply stop, surrender, and that was that. She had more time for the same things, but she was aware of an inertia in her actions, a weariness, as if she were moving through a viscous liquid. She finally gave up performing even the easiest tasks. Her dirty clothes piled up in the bathroom and, lying on the sofa for hours, she knew that they were there, that it wouldn't take much effort to pick them up, but none of her muscles considered this a sufficient motive.
She invented a case of the flu so as not to go to work. She slept much more than necessary, even in broad daylight. She didn't even lower the blinds; she had only to close her eyes to be unaware of the light, to cancel out the objects that surrounded her and forget her hateful body, which was growing weaker and weaker but still clung tenaciously to her thoughts. The weight of consequences was always there, like a stranger sleeping on top of her. It watched over her even when Alice plunged into sleep, a heavy sleep saturated with dreams, which was coming more and more to resemble an addiction. If her throat was dry, Alice imagined she was suffocating. If one of her arms tingled from being under the pillow too long, it was because a German shepherd was eating it. If her feet were cold because the blankets had fallen off them in her sleep, Alice found herself once more at the bottom of the crevasse, buried in snow up to her neck. But she wasn't afraid, or hardly ever. Paralysis allowed her to move only her tongue and she stretched it out to taste the snow. It was sweet and Alice would have liked to eat it all, but she couldn't turn her head. So she stayed there, waiting for the cold to rise up her legs, to fill her belly and spread from there to her veins, freezing her blood.
Her waking life was infested with half-constructed thoughts. Alice got up only when she had to, and her drowsy confusion faded slowly, leaving milky residues in her head, like interrupted memories, which mixed with the others and seemed no less true. She wandered through the silent apartment like the ghost of herself, unhurriedly following her own lucidity. I'm going mad, she thought sometimes. But she didn't mind. In fact, it made her smile, because at last she was the one making the choices.
In the evening she ate lettuce leaves, fishing them straight from the plastic bag. They were crunchy and made of nothing. They tasted only of water. She didn't eat them to fill up her stomach, but just to stand in for the ritual of dinner and somehow occupy that time, which she didn't know what else to do with. She ate lettuce until the flimsy stuff made her feel ill.
She emptied herself of Fabio and of herself, of all the useless efforts she had made to get where she was and find nothing there. With detached curiosity she observed the rebirth of her weaknesses, her obsessions. This time she would let them decide, since she hadn't been able to do anything anyway. Against certain parts of yourself you remain powerless, she said to herself, as she regressed pleasurably to the time when she was a girl. To the moment when Mattia had left and, shortly afterward, her mother too, on two journeys that were different but equally remote from her. Mattia. That was it. She thought of him often. Again. He was like another of her illnesses, from which she didn't really want to recover. You can fall ill with just a memory and she had fallen ill that afternoon in the car, by the park, when she had covered his face with her own to prevent him from looking on the site where that horror had taken place.
No matter how hard she tried, from all those years spent with Fabio she couldn't extract so much as one image that crushed her heart so powerfully, that had the same impetuous violence in its colors and which she could still feel on her skin and in the roots of her hair and between her legs. True, there had been that one time at dinner with Riccardo and his wife, when they'd laughed and drunk a lot. She'd been helping Alessandra wash the dishes and had cut the tip of her thumb on a glass that had shattered in her hands. And as she dropped it she had said ouch, not loudly-she had barely whispered it-but Fabio had heard and come running. He had examined her thumb under the light; leaning forward he had brought it to his lips and sucked a little of the blood, to make it stop, as if it had been his. With her thumb in his mouth he had looked up at her, with those disarming eyes that Alice couldn't resist. Then he had closed the wound in his hand and kissed Alice on the mouth. She had tasted her own blood in his saliva and imagined that it had circulated throughout her husband's body and come back to her cleaned, as though through dialysis.
There had been that time and there had been an infinite number of others, which Alice no longer remembered, because the love of those we don't love in return settles on the surface and from there quickly evaporates. What was left now was a faint red patch, almost invisible on her drawn skin, the spot where Fabio had kicked her.
Sometimes, particularly in the evening, she remembered what he had said. I can't do this anymore. She stroked her belly and tried to imagine what it would have been like to have someone in there, swimming in her cold liquid. Tell me what it is. But there was nothing to explain. There was no reason, or not only one. There was no beginning. There was her and that was that and she didn't want anyone in her belly.
Perhaps I should tell him that, she thought.
Then she picked up her cell phone and ran through her contact list till she got to F. She rubbed the keyboard with her thumb, as if hoping to activate the call by mistake. Then she pressed the red button. To see Fabio, talk to him, rebuild: it all seemed like an inhuman effort and she preferred to stay there, watching the furniture in the sitting room being covered with a layer of dust that was getting thicker by the day.
He hardly ever looked at the students. When he met their clear eyes directed at the blackboard and at him, he felt naked. Mattia wrote out his calculations and made precise comments, as if he were explaining them to himself as well as to everyone else. The classroom was too big for the dozen fourth-year students who were taking his course in algebraic topology. They arranged themselves in the first three rows, more or less always in the same places and leaving an empty seat between one and the next, as he himself had done in his university days, but in none of the students could he spot anything that reminded him of himself.
In the silence he heard the door at the back of the classroom close but he didn't turn around until the end of the proof. He turned a page in his notes, which he didn't really need, realigned the pages, and only then noticed a new figure in the topmost margin of his field of vision. He looked up and saw it was Nadia. She had taken a seat in the back row; dressed in white, she sat with her legs crossed and didn't greet him.
Mattia tried to conceal his panic, and moved on to the next theorem. He almost lost his thread, said I'm sorry, and tried to find the step in his notes, but was unable to concentrate. A barely perceptible murmur ran through the students; the teacher had never once hesitated since the beginning of the course.
He started over and made it to the end, writing quickly, his writing sloping more and more toward the bottom as it shrank toward the right-hand edge of the blackboard. He crammed the last two steps into a top corner because he had run out of space. Some of the students leaned forward to make out the exponents and subscripts that had gotten jumbled up with the formulas around them. There was still a quarter of an hour to go before the end of the lesson when Mattia said okay, I'll see you tomorrow.
He set down the chalk and watched the students get up, slightly puzzled, and give him a little wave before leaving the classroom. Nadia was still sitting there, in the same position, and no one seemed to notice her.
They were alone. They seemed very far apart. Nadia got up in the same instant as he stepped toward her. They met more or less halfway across the lecture hall and stayed a good meter apart.
"Hi," said Mattia. "I didn't think-"
"Listen," she broke in, looking resolutely into his eyes. "We don't even know each other. I'm sorry I just turned up like this."
"No, don't-" he tried to say, but Nadia didn't let him speak.
"I woke up and didn't find you, you could at least have…"
She stopped for a second. Mattia was forced to lower his gaze because his eyes stung, as if he hadn't blinked for more than a minute.
"But it doesn't matter," Nadia went on. "I don't chase after anybody. I don't feel like it anymore."
She held out a piece of paper and he took it.
"That's my number. But if you decide to use it don't wait too long."
They both looked at the floor. Nadia was about to lean forward, and wobbled slightly on her heels, but then suddenly turned around.
"Bye," she said.
Mattia cleared his throat instead of responding. He thought that it would take a finite amount of time for her to reach the door. Not enough time to make a decision, to articulate a thought.
Nadia stopped in the doorway.
"I don't know what's wrong with you," she said. "But whatever it is, I think I like it."
Then she left. Mattia looked at the piece of paper, on which there was merely a name and a sequence of numbers, mostly odd numbers. He picked up his papers from the desk, but waited for the hour to finish before leaving.
In the office Alberto was on the phone, the receiver pinched between his chin and his cheek, so he could gesticulate with both arms. He raised an eyebrow to Mattia in greeting.
When he hung up he leaned back into his chair and stretched his legs. He gave him a complicit smile.
"So?" he asked. "Were we up late last night?"
Mattia deliberately avoided his gaze. He shrugged. Alberto got up and went and stood behind Mattia's chair, massaging his shoulders like a trainer with his boxer. Mattia didn't like to be touched.
"I understand, you don't feel like talking about it. All right, then, let's change the subject. I've jotted down a draft for the article. Feel like casting your eye over it?"
Mattia nodded. He drummed gently with his index finger on the 0 of the computer, waiting for Alberto to take his hands off his shoulders. Some images from the previous night, always the same ones, ran through his head like faint flashes of light.
Alberto went back to his desk and slumped heavily into his chair. He started looking for the article amid a shapeless pile of papers.
"Ah," he said. "This came for you."
He tossed an envelope on Mattia's desk. Mattia looked at it without touching it. His name and the address of the university were written in thick blue ink, which must have soaked through to the other side of the paper. The M of Mattia started with a straight line, then, slightly detached from it, a soft, concave curve set off, continuing into the right-hand vertical. The two t's were held together by a single horizontal line and all the letters were slightly sloped, piled up as if they had fallen on top of one another. There was a mistake in the address, a c too many. He would have needed only one letter, or nothing but the asymmetry between the two potbellied loops of the B in Balossino, to recognize Alice's handwriting straightaway.
He gulped and reached around for the letter opener, which was in its place in the second drawer down. He turned it nervously around in his fingers and slipped it into the flap of the envelope. His hands were trembling and he gripped harder on the handle to control himself.
Alberto watched him from the other side of the desk, pretending to be unable to find the papers that were already sitting in front of him. The trembling of Mattia's fingers was apparent even from that distance, but the piece of paper was hidden in the palm of his hand.
He watched his colleague close his eyes and stay like that for a good few seconds, before opening them again and looking around, as if lost and suddenly far away.
"Who's it from?" Alberto ventured.
Mattia looked at him with a kind of resentment, as if he didn't even recognize him. Then he got up, ignoring the question.
"I've got to go," he said.
"What?"
"I've got to go. I think… to Italy."
Alberto got up as well, as if to stop him.
"What are you talking about? What's happened?"
He instinctively walked over to him and tried once more to peer at the piece of paper, but Mattia kept it hidden between his hand and the rough fabric of his sweater, pressed against his stomach, like something secret. Three of the four white corners stuck out beyond his fingers, giving a clue to its rectangular shape and nothing more.
"Nothing. I don't know," Mattia shot back, with one arm already in the sleeve of his Windbreaker. "But I've got to go."
"And what about the article?"
"I'll look at it when I get back. You just go ahead."
Then he left, without giving Alberto time to protest.
The day Alice went back to work she turned up almost an hour late. She had switched off the alarm without even waking up and as she got ready to go out she had had to stop often, because every movement put an unbearable strain on her body.
Crozza didn't tell her off. He needed only to look at her face to understand. Alice's cheeks were hollow and her eyes, even though they seemed to pop too far out of her head, looked absent, veiled by an ominous sense of indifference.
"Sorry I'm late," she said as she walked in, without really meaning it.
Crozza turned the page of his newspaper and couldn't help glancing at the clock.
"There are some pictures to be printed by eleven," he said. "The usual crap."
He cleared his throat and lifted the newspaper higher. He followed Alice's movements from the corner of his eye. He watched her putting her bag in the usual place, taking off her jacket, and sitting down at the machine. She moved slowly and with excessive precision, which betrayed her efforts to make everything seem all right. Crozza watched her sitting lost in thought for a few seconds, with her chin resting on her hand, and at last, after brushing her hair back behind her ears, deciding to begin.
He calmly assessed her excessive thinness, hidden beneath her high-collared cotton sweater and in her far-from-skintight trousers, but apparent in her hands and even more in the outline of her face. He felt a furious sense of powerlessness, because he played no part in Alice's life, but by God she did in his, like a daughter whose name he hadn't been able to choose.
They worked until lunchtime without speaking. They exchanged only indispensable nods of the head. After all the years they had spent in there, every gesture seemed automatic and they moved with agility, sharing the space fairly. The old Nikon was in its place under the counter, in its black case, and they both sometimes wondered if it still worked.
"Lunch. Let's go-" the photographer said hesitantly.
"I've got something to do at lunchtime," Alice interrupted. "Sorry."
He nodded thoughtfully.
"If you don't feel well, you can go home for the afternoon," he said. "There isn't much to do, as you can see."
Alice looked at him in alarm. She pretended to rearrange the things on the counter: a pair of scissors, an envelope for photographs, a pen, and a roll of film cut into four equal segments. All she was doing was swapping them around.
"No, why? I-"
"How long is it since you've seen each other?" the photographer interrupted.
Alice gave a slight jump. She stuck one hand into her bag, as if to protect it.
"Three weeks. More or less."
Crozza nodded, then shrugged.
"Let's go," he said.
"But…"
"Come on, let's go," he repeated, more firmly.
Alice thought for a moment. Then she decided to follow him. They locked up the shop. The bell hanging from the door jangled in the shadow and then stopped. Alice and Crozza set off toward the photographer's car. He walked slowly, without showing it, out of respect for her laborious gait.
The old Lancia started only at the second attempt and Crozza muttered a curse between his teeth.
They drove down the avenue almost as far as the bridge, and then the photographer took a right and followed the road that ran along the river. When he changed lanes and switched on the right blinker to turn again, this time in the direction of the hospital, Alice suddenly froze.
"But where…?" she tried to say.
He pulled up outside a shop with its security gate half closed, across from the entrance to the emergency room.
"It's none of my business," he said, without looking at Alice, "but you've got to go in there. To Fabio, or some other doctor."
Alice stared at him. Her initial puzzlement gave way to fury. The road was silent. Everyone was tucked away at home or in a restaurant for lunch. The leaves of the plane trees fluttered soundlessly.
"I haven't seen you like this since…" The photographer hesitated. "Since I've known you."
Alice considered that like this in her head. It sounded ominous and she glanced at herself in the mirror, but it showed only the side of the car. She shook her head, then unlocked the door and got out of the car. She slammed the door and without turning around she resolutely walked in the opposite direction of the hospital.
She walked quickly, more quickly than she really could, to get away from that place and Crozza's damned insolence, but after about a hundred meters she had to stop. She was out of breath and with each step she took her leg hurt more and more, pulsating as if asking her for mercy. The bone seemed to penetrate the living flesh, as if it had come out of joint again. Alice moved all her weight to the right and just managed to keep her balance, leaning one hand against the rough wall beside her.
She waited for the pain to pass, for her leg once more to become inert as usual and her breathing to become an unconscious action again. Her heart pumped blood slowly, without conviction, but she could hear it even in her ears.
You've got to go in there. To Fabio, or some other doctor, Crozza's voice echoed in her head.
And then? she thought.
She turned back, toward the hospital, walking with difficulty and without any precise intention. Her body chose the way as if by instinct and the passersby she met on the sidewalk stepped aside, because Alice was staggering a little, although she wasn't aware of it. Some of them stopped, unsure whether to offer to help, but then walked on.
Alice stepped into the courtyard of Our Lady's Hospital and didn't think back to the time when she had walked along the same little avenue with Fabio. She felt as if she didn't have a past, as if she had found herself in that place without knowing where she had come from. She was tired, with that tiredness that only emptiness brings.
She climbed the steps holding on to the handrail and stopped in front of the doorway. She wanted only to get there, to activate the sliding doors and wait for a few minutes, just long enough to collect her strength and leave. It was a way of giving chance a little push, nothing more, to find herself where Fabio was and see what happened. She wouldn't do what Crozza said, she wouldn't listen to anyone, and she wouldn't admit even to herself that she really hoped to find him.
Nothing happened. The automatic doors opened and when Alice took a step back they closed again.
What did you expect? she wondered.
She thought about sitting down for a few seconds, hoping it would pass. Her body was asking her something, every nerve was screaming it, but she didn't want to listen.
She was about to turn around, when she heard the electric swish of the doors again. She looked up at the sound, convinced that this time she would really find her husband standing in front of her.
The door was wide open, but Fabio wasn't there. Instead, on the other side of the doorway, a girl was standing. It was she who had activated the sensor, but she didn't come out. She stood right where she was, smoothing her skirt with her hands. At last she imitated Alice: she took a step back and the door closed again.
Alice studied her, curious about that gesture. She noticed that she wasn't all that young. She might have been the same age as Alice, more or less. She kept her torso bent slightly forward and her shoulders tightly curved, as if there wasn't enough room for them.
Alice thought there was something familiar about her, perhaps in her facial expression, but she couldn't place her. Her thoughts closed in on themselves; they spun in the void.
Then the girl did it again. She stepped forward, put her feet together, and a few seconds later stepped back.
It was then that she looked up and smiled at Alice from the other side of the glass.
A shiver ran down Alice's spine, vertebra by vertebra, before losing itself in her blind leg. She held her breath.
She knew someone else who smiled like that, merely arching her upper lip, barely revealing the two incisors, and leaving the rest of the mouth motionless.
It can't be, she thought.
She stepped forward to see better and the doors remained wide open. The girl looked disappointed and stared quizzically at her. Alice understood and stepped back to let her go on with her game. The other girl continued as if nothing was wrong.
She had the same dark hair, thick and wavy at the bottom, that Alice had managed to touch only a very few times. Her cheekbones protruded slightly and hid her black eyes, but as she looked at her Alice recognized the same expression that had kept her up till late so many nights: the same opaque gleam as she had seen in Mattia's eyes.
It's her, she thought, and a feeling very like terror gripped her throat.
She instinctively fumbled for the camera in her bag, but she hadn't brought so much as a stupid Instamatic.
She went on looking at the girl, not knowing what else to do. She turned her head toward her and her vision dimmed from time to time, as if her crystalline lens couldn't find the right curvature. With her dry lips she pronounced the word Michela, but not enough air came from her mouth.
The girl didn't seem to tire of this. She played with the automatic door like a child. Now she was taking small jumps, back and forth, as if to catch the doors out.
An old lady walked over from inside the building. A big rectangular yellow envelope protruded from her bag, X-rays perhaps. Without saying a word, she took the girl by the arm and led her outside.
The girl didn't resist. When she passed by Alice, she turned for a moment to look at the sliding doors, as if to thank them for amusing her. She was so close that Alice was aware of the displacement of air produced by her body. By holding out a hand she could have touched her, but it was as though she were paralyzed.
She watched the two women as they walked slowly away.
Now people were coming in and out. The doors were constantly opening and closing, in a hypnotic rhythm that filled Alice's head.
As if suddenly coming to, she called Michela, this time out loud.
The girl didn't turn around and neither did the old lady who was with her. They didn't alter their pace by one iota, as if the name meant nothing to them.
Alice thought she should follow them, look at the girl from closer up, talk to her, understand. She put her right foot on the first step and drew her other leg forward, but it remained frozen where it was, fast asleep. She found herself toppling backward. With her hand she sought the handrail, but didn't find it.
She collapsed like a broken branch and slid down the two remaining steps.
From the ground she just had time to see the women disappearing around the corner. Then she felt the air becoming saturated with moisture and the sounds growing rounder and farther away.
Mattia had taken the three flights of stairs at a run. Between the second and the first he had bumped into one of his students, who had tried to stop him to ask something. He had brushed past him saying sorry, I've got to go, and in trying to avoid him he had almost stumbled. When he reached the entrance hall he had suddenly slowed down, to compose himself, but still walked quickly. The dark marble of the floor gleamed, reflecting things and people like a stretch of water. Mattia had given a nod of greeting to the doorman and gone outside.
The cold air had taken him by surprise and he had wondered what are you doing?
Now he was sitting on the low wall in front of the entrance and wondering why on earth he had reacted like that, as if all he had been doing all those years was waiting for a signal to go back.
He looked again at the photograph that Alice had sent him. It was of the two of them, by her parents' bed, dressed up as a bride and groom with those clothes that smelled of mothballs. Mattia looked resigned, while she was smiling. One of her arms was around his waist. The other held the camera and was partially out of the frame, as if she were now holding it toward him, as an adult, to caress him.
On the back Alice had written only one line and below it her signature:You've got to come here.
Alice
Mattia tried to find an explanation for the message and, even more, for his own peculiar reaction. He imagined coming out of the arrivals zone of the airport and finding Alice and Fabio waiting for him on the other side of the barrier. He imagined greeting her, kissing her on the cheeks, and then shaking her husband's hand by way of introduction. They would pretend to argue about who should carry the suitcase to the car and on the way they would try in vain to tell each other how life had been, as if it could really be summed up. Mattia in the backseat, them in the front: three strangers pretending to have something in common and scratching the surface of things, just to avoid silence.
It's pointless, he said to himself.
That lucid thought brought him some relief, as if he were taking control of himself again after a moment of bewilderment. He tapped the photograph with his finger, already intending to put it away and go back to Alberto, to get on with their work.
While he was still lost in his thoughts, Kirsten Gorbahn, a post-doc from Dresden with whom he had recently written some articles, came over to peer at the photograph.
"Your wife?" she asked him cheerfully, pointing at Alice.
Mattia twisted his neck to look up at Kirsten. He was about to hide the photograph, but then he thought it would be rude. Kirsten had an oblong face, as if someone had pulled it hard by the chin. In two years spent studying in Rome she had learned a little Italian, which she pronounced with all the o's closed.
"Hi," Mattia said uncertainly. "No, she isn't my wife. She's just… a friend."
Kirsten chuckled, amused by who knows what, and took a sip of coffee from the polystyrene cup that she was holding in her hands.
"She's cute," she remarked.
Mattia looked her up and down, slightly uneasily, and then looked back at the photograph. Yes, she really was.
When Alice came to, a nurse was taking her pulse. She still had her shoes on, and was lying at a slight angle on top of a white sheet on a hospital bed by the entrance. She immediately thought of Fabio, who might have seen her in that terrible state, and suddenly sat up.
"I'm fine," she said.
"Lie down," the nurse ordered her. "We're going to do a checkup."
"There's no need. Really, I'm fine," Alice insisted, overcoming the resistance of the nurse, who tried to keep her where she was. Fabio wasn't there.
"You fainted, young lady. You have to see a doctor."
But Alice was already on her feet. She checked that she still had her bag.
"It's nothing. Believe me."
The nurse raised her eyes to the sky but didn't stand in her way. Alice glanced around, lost, as if looking for someone. Then she said thank you and left in a hurry.
She hadn't hurt herself when she fell. She seemed merely to have banged her right knee. She felt the rhythmical pulsation of the bruise under her jeans. Her hands were a little scratched and dusty, as if she had dragged them along the gravel in the courtyard. She blew on them to clean them.
She walked over to the reception desk and bent down to the round hole in the glass. The lady on the other side looked up at her.
"Hello," said Alice. She had no idea how to explain herself. She didn't even know how long she had been unconscious.
"A little while ago…" she said, "I was standing there…"
She pointed to the spot where she had been, but the lady didn't move her head.
"There was a woman, by the entrance. I didn't feel well. I fainted. Then… You see, I need to find out the name of that person."
The receptionist looked at her, bewildered, from behind the counter.
"I'm sorry?" she asked with a grimace.
"It sounds strange, I know," Alice insisted. "But you've got to help me. Perhaps you could give me the names of the patients who had appointments in this department today. Or examinations. Just the women, I only need those."
The woman looked at her. Then she smiled coldly.
"We aren't authorized to give out that kind of information," she replied.
"It's very important. Please. It's really very important."
The receptionist tapped with a pen on the register in front of her. "I'm sorry. It really isn't possible," she replied irritably.
Alice snorted. She was about to pull away from the counter, but then she approached again.
"I'm Dr. Rovelli's wife," she said.
The receptionist sat up straighter in her chair. She arched her eyebrows and tapped the register with her pen again.
"I understand," she said. "If you like I'll let your husband know you're here."
She picked up the receiver but Alice stopped her with a gesture of her hand.
"No," she said, without controlling the tone of her voice. "There's no need."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes, thanks. Never mind."
She set off toward home. All the way there she couldn't think about anything else. Her mind was becoming clear again, but all the images that passed through it were obliterated by that girl's face. The details were already blurring, plunging fast into the midst of an ocean of other memories of no importance, but that inexplicable sense of familiarity remained. And that smile, the same as Mattia's, mixed with her own intermittent reflection on the glass.
Perhaps Michela was alive and she had seen her. It was madness, and yet Alice couldn't help believing it. It was as if her brain desperately needed that one thought. Clinging to it to stay alive.
She began to think, to formulate hypotheses. She tried to reconstruct how things might have gone. Perhaps the old lady had kidnapped Michela, had found her in the park and taken her away, because she had a violent desire for a little girl but couldn't have children. Her womb was defective or else she was unwilling to make a bit of room in it.
Just like me, thought Alice.
She had kidnapped her and then brought her up in a house a long way from there, with a different name, as if she were her own.
But in that case, why come back? Why risk being discovered after all those years? Perhaps she was being devoured by guilt. Or else she just wanted to tempt fate, as she herself had done outside the door of the oncology department.
On the other hand, perhaps the old woman had nothing to do with it. Maybe she had met Michela a long time afterward and knew nothing about her origins, her real family, just as Michela remembered nothing about herself.
Alice thought of Mattia, pointing from inside her car at the trees in front of him, his ashen, absent face that spoke of death. She was completely identical to me, he had said.
Suddenly it seemed to her that everything made sense, that the girl really was Michela, the vanished twin, and that every detail now fell into place: the blank expanse of her forehead, the length of her fingers, her circumspect way of moving them. And more than anything that childish game of hers, that more than anything.
But just a second later, she realized she was confused. All those details collapsed into a vague sense of weariness, orchestrated by the hunger that had clenched at her temples for days, and Alice feared losing her senses all over again.
At home, she left the door half open with the keys still in it. She went into the kitchen and opened the cupboard without even taking off her jacket. She found some tuna and ate it straight from the can without draining off the oil. The smell made her feel sick. She threw the empty can into the sink and picked up a can of peas. With her fork she fished them from the cloudy water and ate half of them, without breathing. They tasted of sand and the shiny skin stuck to her teeth. Then she pulled out the box of cookies that had sat open in the cupboard since the day Fabio had left. She ate five, one after the other, barely chewing them. They scratched her throat as she swallowed, like bits of glass. She stopped only when the cramps in her stomach were so strong that she had to sit down on the floor to withstand the pain.
When it had passed, she stood up and walked to the darkroom, limping openly, as she did when she was alone. She took one of the boxes from the second shelf. The word Snapshots was written on the side in indelible red pen. She spilled the contents onto the table and spread out the photographs with her fingers. Some were stuck together. Alice quickly inspected them and at last found the one she was looking for.
She studied it for a long time. Mattia was young, and so was she. His head was bent and it was hard to study his expression to determine the resemblance. A lot of time had passed. Perhaps too much.
That fixed image brought others to the surface and Alice's mind stitched them together to re-create movement, fragments of sounds, scraps of sensations. She was filled with searing but pleasurable nostalgia.
If she had been able to choose one point from which to start over, she would have chosen that one: she and Mattia in a silent room with their private intimacies, hesitant about touching each other but their outlines fitting precisely together.
She had to let him know. Only by seeing him could she be sure. If his sister was alive, Mattia had the right to know.
For the first time, she perceived all the space that separated them as a ludicrous distance. She was sure that he was still there, where she had written to him several times, many years before. If he had moved, she would have been aware of it somehow. Because she and Mattia were united by an invisible, elastic thread, buried under a pile of meaningless things, a thread that could exist only between two people like themselves: two people who had acknowledged their own solitude within the other.
She felt around under the pile of photographs and found a pen. She sat down to write, careful not to smudge the ink with her hand. At last she blew on it to dry it. She looked for an envelope, slipped the photograph inside, and sealed it.
Maybe he'll come, she thought.
A pleasant apprehension gripped her bones and made her smile, as if at that very moment time had begun again.
Before seeking the runway, the plane on which Mattia was traveling crossed the green patch of the hill, passed the basilica, and flew twice over the center of the city in a circular trajectory. Mattia took the bridge, the older one, as his point of reference and from there followed the road to his parents' house. It was still the same color as when he had left it.
He recognized the park nearby, bounded by the two main roads that flowed together into a broad curve bisected by the river. On so clear an afternoon you could see everything from up there: no one could have disappeared into nothingness.
He leaned farther forward, to look at what the plane was leaving behind it. He followed the winding road that climbed part of the way up the hill and found the Della Roccas' building, with its white facade and its windows all attached to one another, like an imposing block of ice. A little farther on there was his old school, with the green fire escapes, their surfaces, he remembered, cold and rough to the touch.
The place where he had spent the first half of his life, the half that was now over, was like an enormous sculpture made of colored cubes and inanimate shapes.
He took a taxi from the airport. His father had insisted on coming to collect him, but he had said no, I'll come on my own, in that tone that his parents knew well and that was pointless to resist.
After the taxi had driven off, he stood on the sidewalk on the other side of the street, looking at his old house. The bag that he carried over his shoulder wasn't very heavy. It contained clean clothes for two or three days at the most.
He found the entrance to the apartment block open and climbed to his floor. He rang the bell and heard no sound from inside. Then his father opened the door and, before they were able to say anything, they smiled at each other, each contemplating the passing of time in the changes that had occurred in the other.
Pietro Balossino was old. It wasn't just the white hair and the thick veins that stood out too much on the backs of his hands. He was old in the way he stood in front of his son, his whole body trembling almost imperceptibly, and leaned on the door handle, as if his legs were no longer enough on their own.
They hugged, rather awkwardly. Mattia's bag rolled off his shoulder and slipped between them. He let it fall to the floor. Their bodies were still the same temperature. Pietro Balossino touched his son's hair and remembered too many things. Feeling them all at the same time gave him a pain in his chest.
Mattia looked at his father to ask where's Mum? and he understood.
"Your mother's resting," he said. "She didn't feel very well. It must be the heat these past few days."
Mattia nodded.
"Are you hungry?"
"No. I'd just like a little water."
"I'll go and get you some."
His father quickly disappeared into the kitchen, as if looking for an excuse to get away. Mattia thought that that was all that was left, that parental affection resolves itself into small solicitudes, the concerns his parents listed on the telephone every Wednesday: food, heat and cold, tiredness, sometimes money. Everything else lay as if submerged at unreachable depths, in a mass of subjects never addressed, excuses to be made and received and memories to be corrected, which would remain unchanged.
He walked down the corridor to his bedroom. He was sure he would find everything as he had left it, as if that space was immune to the erosion of time, as if all the years of his absence constituted only a parenthesis in that place. He felt an alienating sense of disappointment when he saw that everything was different, like the horrible feeling of ceasing to exist. The walls that had once been pale blue had been covered with cream-colored wallpaper, which made the room look brighter. Where his bed had been was the sofa that had been in the sitting room for years. His desk was still at the window, but on it there was no longer anything of his, just a pile of newspapers and a sewing machine. There were no photographs, of him or of Michela.
He stood in the doorway as if he needed permission to enter. His father came over with the glass of water and seemed to read his thoughts.
"Your mother wanted to learn to sew," he said, as if by way of justification. "But she soon got fed up with it."
Mattia drank the water down in one gulp. He rested his bag against the wall, where it wasn't in the way.
"I have to go now," he said.
"Already? But you've only just got here."
"There's someone I have to see."
He walked past his father, avoiding his eyes and sliding his back against the wall. Their bodies were too similar and bulky and adult to be so close to each other. He took the glass through to the kitchen, rinsed it, and set it upside down on the draining board.
"I'll be back this evening," he said.
He nodded good-bye to his father, who was standing in the middle of the living room, at the same spot where in another life he was hugging his mother, talking about him. It wasn't true that Alice was waiting for him, he didn't even know where to find her, but he had to get out of there as quickly as possible.
They wrote to each other during the first year. As with everything else that concerned them, it was Alice who had started it. She had sent him a photograph of a cake with a rather clumsy Happy Birthday written with strawberries cut in half. She had signed the back only with an A-and nothing more. She had made the cake for Mattia's birthday, and then had thrown the whole thing into the trash. Mattia had replied in a letter of four closely written pages, in which he told her how hard it was to start over in a new place without knowing the language, and in which he apologized for leaving. Or at least that was how it seemed to Alice. He hadn't asked her anything about Fabio, either in that letter or in the ones that followed, and she hadn't talked about him. Both of them were aware, however, of his strange and menacing presence, just beyond the edge of the page. Partly for that reason they soon began to reply to each other's letters coldly and at increasingly longer intervals, until their correspondence faded away entirely.
A few years later Mattia had received another card. It was an invitation to Alice and Fabio's wedding. He had stuck it on the fridge with a piece of tape, as if, hanging there, it would inevitably remind him of something. Each morning and each evening he found himself standing in front of it and each time it seemed to hurt him a little less. A week before the ceremony he had managed to send a telegram that said Thank you for invitation must decline due to professional obligations. Congratulations, Mattia Balossino. In a shop in the city center he had spent a whole morning choosing a crystal vase that he had sent to the couple at their new address.
It was not to this address that he went when he left his parents' house. Instead he headed for the hill, to the Della Roccas', where he and Alice had spent their afternoons together. He was sure he wouldn't find her there, but he wanted to pretend that nothing had changed.
He hesitated for a long time before pressing the buzzer. A woman replied, probably Soledad.
"Who is it?"
"I'm looking for Alice," he said.
"Alice doesn't live here anymore."
Yes, it was Soledad. He recognized her Spanish accent, still quite noticeable.
"Who is looking for her?" asked the housekeeper.
"It's Mattia."
There was an extended silence. Sol tried to remember.
"I can give you her new address."
"That's okay. I've got it, thanks," he said.
"Good-bye, then," said Sol, after another, shorter silence.
Mattia walked off without turning to look up. He was sure that Sol would be standing at one of the windows watching him, recognizing him only now and wondering what had become of him in all those years and what it was he had come back in search of. The truth was that even he didn't know.
Alice hadn't expected him so soon. She had sent the card only five days before and it was possible that Mattia hadn't even read it yet. At any rate she was sure that he would call first, that they would arrange to meet, perhaps in a bar, where she would prepare him calmly for the news.
Her days were filled with waiting for some kind of signal. At work she was distracted but cheerful and Crozza hadn't dared to ask her why, but in his heart he felt he deserved some credit for it. The void left by Fabio's departure had made way for an almost adolescent frenzy. Alice assembled and dismantled the image of the moment when she and Mattia would meet; she studied the scene from different angles and adjusted every detail. She wore away at the thought until it seemed not so much a projection as a memory.
She had also been to the local library. She had had to get a card, because she had never set foot in it before that day. She had looked for the newspapers that reported on Michela's disappearance. They were upsetting to read, as if all that horror were happening again, not far from where she was. Her confidence had wavered at the sight of a photograph of Michela on the front page, in which she was looking lost and staring at a point above the lens, perhaps the forehead of whoever was taking the picture. That image had instantly undermined the memory of the girl at the hospital, superimposing itself over her too precisely to seem believable. For the first time Alice had wondered if it might not all be a mistake, a hallucination that had lasted too long. Then she had covered the photograph with one hand and gone on reading, resolutely dispelling that doubt.
Michela's body had never been found. Not so much as an item of clothing, not a trace. The child had simply vanished. For months the line of a kidnapping had been pursued, but to no avail. No suspects were ever named. The news had gradually moved to the margins of the inside pages before finally disappearing altogether.
When the bell rang, Alice was drying her hair. She opened the door distractedly, without even asking who's there, as she arranged the towel on her head. She was barefoot and the first thing Mattia saw of her was her bare feet, the second toe slightly longer than the big one, as if pushing its way forward, and the fourth bent underneath, hidden away. They were details he knew well, which had survived in his mind longer than words and situations.
"Hi," he said, looking up.
Alice took a step back and instinctively closed both sides of her bathrobe, as if her heart might burst out of her chest. Then she focused on Mattia, took in his presence. She hugged him, pressing her inadequate weight against him. He circled her waist with his right arm, but kept his fingers raised, as if out of prudence.
"I'll be right there. I'll just be a moment," she said, rushing her words. She went back inside and closed the door, leaving him standing outside. She needed a few minutes on her own to get dressed and put on her makeup and dry her eyes before he noticed.
Mattia sat down on the front step, his back to the door. He studied the little garden, the almost perfect symmetry of the low hedge that ran along both sides of the path and the undulating shape that broke off halfway through a sine curve. When he heard the click of the lock he turned around and for a moment everything seemed as it had been: he waiting outside for Alice and she coming out, well dressed and smiling, then walking down the street together without having decided where they were going.
Alice bent forward and kissed him on the cheek. To sit down next to him she had to hold on to his shoulder, because of her stiff leg. He moved over. They had nothing to rest their backs against, so they both sat leaning slightly forward.
"You were quick," said Alice.
"Your card arrived yesterday morning."
"So that place isn't so far away after all."
Mattia looked at the ground. Alice took his right hand and opened it palm side up. He didn't resist, because with her he had no need to be ashamed of the marks.
There were new ones, recognizable as darker lines in the middle of that tangle of white scars. None of them seemed all that recent, apart from one circular halo, like a burn. Alice followed its outline with the tip of her index finger and he was barely aware of her touch through all the layers of hardened skin. He calmly let her look, because his hand told much more than he could in words.
"It seemed important," said Mattia.
"It is."
He turned to look at her, to ask her to go on.
"Not yet," said Alice. "First let's get away from here."
Mattia got up first, then held out his hand to help her, just as they had always done. They walked toward the street. It was difficult to talk and think at the same time, as if the two actions canceled each other out.
"Here," said Alice.
She turned off the alarm of a dark green station wagon and Mattia thought it was too big for her alone.
"Do you want to drive?" Alice asked him with a smile.
"I don't know how."
"Are you joking?"
He shrugged. They looked at each other over the roof of the car. The sun sparkled on the bodywork between them.
"I don't need to drive there," he said by way of justification.
Alice tapped her chin with the key, thoughtfully.
"I know where we have to go, then," she said, with the same playfulness with which she announced her ideas as a girl.
They got into the car. There was nothing on the dashboard in front of Mattia, apart from two compact discs, one on top of the other with their spines facing him: Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition and a collection of Schubert sonatas.
"So you've become a fan of classical music?"
Alice darted a quick glance at the CDs. She wrinkled up her nose.
"No way. They're his. All they do is put me to sleep."
Mattia writhed against the seat belt. It scratched his shoulder because it was set for someone shorter, Alice probably, who sat there while her husband drove. They listened to classical music together. He tried to imagine it, then he allowed himself to be distracted by the words printed on the side-view mirror: Objects in mirror are closer than they appear.
"Fabio, right?" he asked. He already knew the answer, but he wanted to untie that knot, dissolve that awkward, silent presence that seemed to be studying them from the backseat. He knew that otherwise the conversation between them would stall right there, like a boat run aground on the rocks.
Alice nodded, as if making an effort. If she explained everything all at once, about the baby, the quarrel, and the rice that was still stuck in the corners of the kitchen, he would think that was the reason she had called him. He wouldn't believe the story about Michela, he would think of her as a woman having a crisis with her husband, trying to reestablish old relationships to keep from feeling so alone. For a moment she wondered whether that was actually the case.
"Do you have children?"
"No, none."
"But why-"
"Drop it," Alice cut in.
Mattia fell silent, but didn't apologize.
"What about you?" she asked after a while. She had hesitated to ask, for fear of his answer. Then her voice had come out all by itself, almost startling her.
"No," Mattia replied.
"No children?"
"I don't have…" He wanted to say anyone. "I'm not married."
Alice nodded.
"Still playing hard to get, then?" she said, turning to smile at him.
Mattia shook his head with embarrassment, and understood what she meant.
They had reached a large, deserted parking lot near the truck terminal, surrounded by huge prefabricated buildings, one after another. No one lived there. Three stacks of wooden pallets wrapped in plastic leaned against a gray wall, next to a lowered security gate. Higher up, on the roof, was a neon sign that must have shone bright orange at night.
Alice stopped the car in the middle of the parking lot and turned off the engine.
"Your turn," she said, opening the door.
"What?"
"Now you drive."
"No, no," said Mattia. "Forget it."
She stared at him carefully, with her eyes half closed and her lips pursed as if she were only now rediscovering a kind of affection that she had forgotten about.
"So you haven't changed that much," she said. It wasn't a reproach; in fact she seemed relieved.
"Neither have you," he said.
She shrugged.
"Okay, then," he said. "Let's give it a go."
Alice laughed. They got out of the car to switch seats and Mattia walked with his arms dangling exaggeratedly to demonstrate his total resignation. For the first time they each found themselves in the role of the other, each showing the other what they thought was their true profile.
"I don't know where to start," said Mattia, with his arms high on the steering wheel, as if he really didn't know where to put them.
"Nothing at all? You've never driven, not even once?"
"Practically never."
"So we're in a bit of a fix."
Alice leaned over him. For a moment Mattia stared at her hair falling vertically toward the center of the earth. Under the T-shirt that lifted slightly over her belly he recognized the upper edge of the tattoo, which he had observed close-up a long time ago.
"You're so thin," he blurted out, as if he were thinking out loud.
Alice jerked her head around to look at him, but then pretended nothing was wrong.
"No," she said, shrugging. "No different from usual."
She pulled back a little and pointed to the three pedals.
"Right, then. Clutch, brake, and accelerator. Left foot only for the clutch and right foot for the other two."
Mattia nodded, still somewhat distracted by the proximity of her body and the invisible smell of shower gel that lingered.
"You know the gears, right? And anyway they're written down here. First, second, third. And I have a feeling that'll do for now," Alice went on. "When you change gears, hold down the clutch and then slowly release it. And to start too: hold down the clutch and then release it while giving a bit of gas. Ready?"
"And if I'm not?" he replied.
He tried to concentrate. He felt as nervous as if he were about to take an exam. Over time he had become convinced that he no longer knew how to do anything outside of his element, the ordered and transfinite sets of mathematics. Normal people acquired self-confidence as they aged, while he was losing it, as if he had a limited reserve.
He assessed the space that separated them from the pallets stacked at the end of the parking lot. A good fifty meters, at least. Even if he set off at top speed he would have time to brake. He held the key turned too long, making the motor screech. He delicately released the clutch, but didn't press hard enough on the accelerator and the engine stalled with a gulp. Alice laughed.
"Almost. A bit more decisive this time though."
Mattia took a deep breath. Then he tried again. The car set off with a jerk and Alice told him to hit the clutch and put it in second. Mattia changed gears and accelerated again. They drove straight until they were almost ten meters from the factory wall, when he decided to turn the steering wheel. They did a 180-degree turn that threw them both to one side and returned them to the point they had started from.
Alice clapped her hands.
"You see?" she said.
He turned the car again and performed the same move. It was as if he knew how to follow only that narrow, oval trajectory, even though he had a huge lot all to himself.
"Keep going straight," said Alice. "Turn onto the road."
"Are you mad?"
"Come on, there's no one there. And besides, you've already figured it out."
Mattia adjusted the steering wheel. He felt his hands sweating from the plastic and the adrenaline stirring his muscles as it hadn't done for ages. For a moment he thought he was driving a car, the whole thing, with its pistons and greased mechanisms, and that he had Alice, so close, to tell him what to do. Just as he had imagined so often. Well, not exactly, but for once he resolved to ignore the imperfections.
"Okay," he said.
He steered the car toward the exit. Once there he leaned toward the windshield and looked in both directions. He delicately turned the steering wheel and couldn't help following its movements with his whole torso, as children do when they pretend to drive.
He was on the road. The sun, already low in the sky, was behind him and shone in his eyes from the rearview mirror. The arrow of the speedometer pointed to 30 kilometers an hour and the whole car vibrated with the hot breath of a domesticated animal.
"Am I doing okay?" he asked.
"Brilliantly. Now you can change into third."
The road went on for several hundred meters and Mattia looked straight ahead. Alice took advantage of the situation to observe him calmly from close-up. He was no longer the Mattia from the photograph. The skin of his face was no longer an even texture, smooth and elastic: now the first wrinkles, still very shallow, furrowed his brow. He had shaved, but new stubble was already emerging from his cheeks, dotting them with black. His physical presence was overwhelming; he no longer seemed to have any cracks through which one could invade his space, as she had often liked to do when she was a girl. Or else it was that she no longer felt she had the right to. That she was no longer capable of it.
She tried to find a resemblance to the girl from the hospital, but now that Mattia was here, her memory grew even more confused. All those details that seemed to coincide were no longer as clear as they had been. The color of the girl's hair was lighter, perhaps. And she didn't remember the dimples at the sides of her mouth, or those eyebrows, so thick at the outer ends. For the first time she was really worried that she had made a mistake.
How will I explain it to him? she wondered.
Mattia cleared his throat, as if the silence had gone on for too long or as if he had noticed that Alice was staring at him. She looked elsewhere, toward the hill.
"You remember the first time I came to pick you up in the car?" she said. "I'd had my license for less than an hour."
"Yeah. Of all the possible guinea pigs you chose me."
Alice thought that it wasn't true. She hadn't chosen him over all the others. The truth was that she hadn't even thought about anyone else.
"You spent the whole time clutching the door handle. You kept saying slow down, slow down."
She cried out with the shrill voice of a little girl. Mattia remembered that he had gone against his will. That afternoon he was supposed to be studying for his mathematical analysis exam, but in the end he had given in, because it seemed so damned important to Alice. All he did all afternoon was calculate again and again how many hours of study time he was losing. Thinking about it now, he felt stupid, as we all do when we remember all the time we waste wishing we were somewhere else.
"We drove around for half an hour in search of two free parking spaces because you couldn't get into a single one," he said, to banish those thoughts.
"It was just an excuse to keep you with me," Alice replied. "But you never understood anything."
They both laughed, to stifle the ghosts let loose by her words.
"Where do I go?" asked Mattia, becoming serious.
"Turn here."
"Okay. But then that's enough. I'll let you have your seat back."
He changed from third to second without Alice having to tell him, and took the curve well. He turned into a shady street, narrower than the other one and without the dividing line down the middle, squashed between two rows of identical, windowless buildings.
"I'll stop down there," he said.
They were almost there when a tractor trailer truck appeared from around the corner, heading straight toward them and taking up most of the road.
Mattia gripped the wheel tightly. His right foot didn't have the instinct to hit the brake, so he accelerated instead. With her good leg Alice searched for a pedal that wasn't there. The truck didn't slow down, but merely moved slightly to its side of the road.
"I can't get by," said Mattia. "I can't get by."
"Brake," said Alice, trying to seem calm.
Mattia couldn't think. The truck was a few meters away and only now did it show any sign of slowing down. He felt his foot contracting on the accelerator and thought about how he could pass it. He remembered how he used to ride his bike down the ramp of the bike path and how at the end he'd have to brake abruptly in order to get between the posts that blocked the cars entering. But Michela never slowed down, she'd go right between them on her bike with training wheels, but never once did she so much as brush them with the handlebars.
He turned the steering wheel to the right and seemed to be heading straight for the wall.
"Brake," Alice repeated. "The middle pedal."
He pressed it down hard, with both feet. The car jerked violently forward and came to a standstill just a few feet from the wall.
The recoil made Mattia bang his head against the left-hand window, but the seat belt held him in place. Alice rocked forward like a bending twig, but held on tightly to the door handle. The truck, two long, red segments, sped past them, indifferently.
They sat in silence for a few seconds, as though contemplating something extraordinary. Then Alice started laughing. Mattia's eyes stung and the nerves in his neck pulsed as if they had all been suddenly inflated and were about to explode.
"Did you hurt yourself?" Alice asked. It was as if she couldn't stop laughing.
Mattia was terrified. He didn't reply. She tried to become serious again.
"Let me see," she said.
She freed herself from her seat belt and stretched over him as he stared at the wall directly in front of them. He was thinking about the word anelastic. About how the kinetic energy now making his legs tremble would have been unleashed all at once on impact.
At last he took his feet off the brake and the car, its engine off, slipped backward slightly, down the almost imperceptible slope of the road. Alice pulled on the hand brake.
"You're fine," she said, brushing Mattia's forehead.
He closed his eyes and nodded. He concentrated to keep from crying.
"Let's go home and you can lie down for a bit," she said, as if home were their home.
"I have to go back to my parents' house," protested Mattia, but without much conviction.
"I'll take you back later. Now you need to rest."
"I have to-"
"Shut up."
They got out of the car to swap seats. The darkness had taken over the whole of the sky, apart from a thin, useless strip running along the horizon.
They didn't say another word the whole rest of the way. Mattia trapped his head in his right hand. He covered his eyes and pressed his temples with his thumb and middle finger. He read and reread the words on the side mirror: Objects in mirror are closer than they appear. He thought about the article he had left Alberto to write. He was bound to make a mess of it; Mattia had to get back as soon as possible. And then there were lessons to prepare, his silent apartment.
Alice turned to look at him, worried, taking her eyes off the road from time to time. She was doing all she could to drive gently. She wondered if it would be better to put on some music, but she didn't know what he would like. In truth she didn't know anything about him anymore.
In front of the house she went to help him out of the car, but Mattia got out by himself. He swayed on his feet as she opened the door. Alice moved quickly, but carefully. She felt responsible, as if it were all the unexpected consequence of a bad joke.
She threw the cushions on the floor to make room on the sofa. She said to Mattia lie down here and he obeyed. Then she went into the kitchen to make him some tea or chamomile or anything that she could hold in her hands when she came back into the sitting room.
As she waited for the water to boil she started tidying up, frantically. Every now and again she turned to glance at the sitting room, but all she could see was the back of the sofa, its bright, uniform blue.
Soon Mattia would ask her why she had summoned him there and she would have no escape. But now she was no longer sure of anything. She had seen a girl who looked like him. So? The world is full of people who look alike. Full of stupid and meaningless coincidences. She hadn't even spoken to her. And she wouldn't have known how to find her again anyway. Thinking about it now, with Mattia in the other room, the whole thing seemed ridiculous and cruel.
The only certainty was that he had come back and that she didn't want him to go away again.
She washed the already clean dishes that were in the sink and emptied the potful of water sitting on the stove. A handful of rice had been lying on the bottom of it for weeks. Seen through the water, the grains looked bigger.
Alice poured the boiling water into a cup and dipped a tea bag in it. It gushed dark. She added two heaping spoonfuls of sugar and went back into the living room.
Mattia's hand had slipped from his closed eyes to his throat. The skin of his face had relaxed and his expression was neutral. His chest moved regularly up and down and he was breathing only through his nose.
Alice set the cup down on the glass table and, without taking her eyes off him, sat down in the armchair next to him. Mattia's breathing restored her calm. It was the only sound.
She slowly began to feel that her thoughts were regaining coherence. At last they slowed down, after dashing madly toward some vague destination. She found herself back in her own sitting room as if she had been dropped in it from another dimension.
Before her was a man whom she had once known and who was now someone else. Perhaps he really did look like the girl in the hospital. But they weren't identical, certainly not. And the Mattia who was sleeping on her sofa was no longer the boy she had seen disappearing through the elevator doors that evening when a hot, unquiet wind came down from the mountains. He was not the Mattia who had taken root in her head and blocked her path to everything else.
No, what she had in front of her was a grown-up person who had built a life around a terrifying abyss, on terrain that had already collapsed, and yet who had succeeded, far away from here, among people Alice didn't know. She had been prepared to destroy all that, to disinter a buried horror, for a simple suspicion, as slender as the memory of a memory.
But now that Mattia was there in front of her, with his eyes closed over thoughts to which she had no access, everything suddenly seemed clearer: she had looked for him because she needed to, because since the night she had left him on that landing, her life had rolled into a hole and hadn't moved from there. Mattia was the end of that tangle that she carried within herself, twisted by the years. If there was still some chance of untying it, some way of loosening it, it was by pulling that end that she now gripped between her fingers.
She felt that something was being resolved, like a long wait coming to an end. She sensed it in her limbs, even in her bad leg, which usually never noticed anything.
Getting up was a natural gesture. She didn't even wonder if it was appropriate or not, if it was really her right to do so. It was only time, sliding and dragging itself after more time. Only obvious gestures that knew nothing of the future and the past.
She bent over Mattia and kissed him on the lips. She wasn't afraid of waking him, she kissed him as you kiss someone who is awake, lingering over his closed lips, compressing them as if to leave a mark. He gave a start, but didn't open his eyes. He parted his lips and went along with her. He was awake.
It was different from the first time. Their facial muscles were stronger now, more conscious, and they sought an aggression having to do with the precise roles of a man and a woman. Alice stayed bent over him, without getting onto the sofa, as if she had forgotten the rest of her own body.
The kiss lasted a long time, whole minutes, long enough for reality to find a fissure between their clamped mouths and slip inside, forcing them both to analyze what was happening.
They pulled apart. Mattia gave a quick smile, automatically, and Alice brought a finger to her damp lips, as if to make sure it had really happened. There was a decision to be made and it had to be made without speaking. They looked at each other, but they had already lost their synchronicity and their eyes didn't meet.
Mattia stood up, uncertainly.
"I'll just go…" he said, pointing to the corridor.
"Sure. At the end of the hall."
He left the room. He still had his shoes on and the sound of his footsteps seemed to be slipping away underground.
He locked himself in the bathroom and rested his hands on the sink. He felt stunned, groggy. He noticed a little swelling that was spreading slowly where he had hit his head.
He turned on the tap and put his wrists under the cold water, as his father had done when he wanted to stanch the blood gushing from Mattia's hands. He looked at the water and thought about Michela, as he did every time. It was a painless thought, like thinking about going to sleep or breathing. His sister had slipped into the current, dissolved slowly in the river, and through the river she had come back inside him. Her molecules were scattered all through his body.
He felt his circulation returning. Now he had to think, about that kiss and about what it was that he had come in search of after all that time. About why he had been prepared to receive Alice's lips and about why he had then felt the need to pull away and hide in here.
She was in the other room waiting for him. Separating them were two layers of brick, a few inches of plaster, and nine years of silence.
The truth was that once again she had acted in his place, had forced him to come back when he himself had always yearned to do it. She had written him a note and had said come here and he had jumped up like a spring. One letter had brought them together just as another had separated them.
Mattia knew what needed to be done. He had to get out of there and sit back down on that sofa, he had to take her hand and tell her I shouldn't have left. He had to kiss her once more and then again, until they were so used to that gesture that they couldn't do without it. It happened in films and it happened in reality, every day. People took what they wanted, they clutched at coincidences, the few there were, and made a life from them. He had either to tell Alice I'm here, or leave, take the first plane and disappear again, go back to the place where he had been hanging for all those years.
By now he had learned. Choices are made in brief seconds and paid for in the time that remains. It had happened with Michela and then with Alice and again now. He recognized them this time: those seconds were there, and he would never make a mistake again.
He closed his fingers around the jet of water. He caught some of it in his hands and bathed his face. Without looking, still bent over the basin, he stretched out an arm to take a towel. He rubbed it over his face and then pulled away. In the mirror he saw a darker patch on the other side. He turned it around. It was the embroidered initials FR, placed a few centimeters away from the corner, in a symmetrical position in respect to the bisecting line.
Mattia turned around and found another, identical towel. At the same point the letters ADR were sewn.
He looked around more carefully. In the water-stained glass there was a single toothbrush and next to it a basket of things all jumbled together: creams, a red rubber band, a hairbrush with hairs attached to it, and a pair of nail scissors. On the shelf under the mirror lay a razor, with tiny fragments of dark hair still trapped beneath the blade.
There had been a time when, sitting on the bed with Alice, he could scan her room with his eyes, identify something on a shelf and say to himself I bought that for her. Those gifts were there to bear witness to a journey, like little flags attached to stages of a voyage. They marked out the rhythm of Christmases and birthdays. Some he could still remember: the first Counting Crows record; a Galilean thermometer, with its different-colored bulbs floating in a transparent liquid; and a book on the history of mathematics that Alice had received with a snort but had actually read in the end. She preserved them carefully, finding an obvious position for them, so that it would be clear to him that she always had them before her eyes. Mattia knew it. He knew all that, but he couldn't move from where he was. As if, in yielding to Alice's call, he might find himself in a trap, drown in it, and be lost forever. He stayed there, impassive and silent, waiting until it was too late.
Around him now there was not a single object that he recognized. He looked at his own reflection in the mirror, his tousled hair, his shirt collar slightly askew, and it was then that he understood. In that bathroom, in that house as in his parents' house, in all those places, there was no longer anything of him.
He remained motionless, getting used to the decision he had made, until he felt that the seconds were over. He carefully folded the towel and with the back of his hand he wiped away the little drops that he had left on the edge of the sink.
He left the bathroom and walked down the hall. He stopped in the doorway of the living room.
"I have to go now," he said.
"Yes," replied Alice, as if she had prepared herself to say it.
The cushions were back in their place on the sofa and a big lamp lit everything from the middle of the ceiling. No trace of conspiracy remained. The tea had grown cold on the coffee table and a dark and sugary sediment had settled at the bottom of the cup. Mattia thought that it was merely someone else's house.
They walked to the door together. He touched Alice's hand with his as he passed close to her.
"The card you sent me," he said. "There was something you wanted to tell me."
Alice smiled.
"It was nothing."
"Before you said it was important."
"No. It wasn't."
"Was it something to do with me?"
She hesitated for a moment.
"No," she said. "Just with me."
Mattia nodded. He thought of a potential that had been exhausted, the invisible vector lines that had previously united them through the air and had now ceased to exist.
"Bye, then," said Alice.
The light was all inside and the darkness all outside. Mattia replied with a wave of his hand. Before going back in, she saw once again the dark circle drawn on his palm, like a mysterious and indelible symbol, irreparably closed.
The plane traveled in the dead of night and the few insomniacs who noticed it from the ground saw nothing but a little collection of intermittent lights, like a wandering constellation against the fixed black sky. Not one of them lifted a hand to wave to him, because that's something only children do.
Mattia got into the first of the taxis lined up in front of the terminal and gave the driver his address. As they passed along the seashore a faint glow was already rising from the horizon.
"Stop here, please," he said to the taxi driver.
"Here?"
"Yes."
He paid the fare and got out of the car, which immediately drove away. He walked across about ten meters of grass and approached a bench, which seemed to have been put there especially to look at the void. He dropped his bag on it but didn't sit down himself.
A strip of sun was already appearing on the horizon. Mattia tried to remember the geometrical name for that plane figure, bounded by an arc and a segment, but it wouldn't come to him. The sun seemed to be moving faster than it did in the daytime; it was possible to perceive its velocity, as if it were in a hurry to come up. The rays grazing the surface of the water were red, orange, and yellow and Mattia knew why, but knowing added nothing and didn't distract him.
The curve of the coast was flat and windswept and he was the only one looking at it.
At last the gigantic red orb detached itself from the sea, like an incandescent ball. For a moment Mattia thought of the rotational motion of the stars and the planets, the sun that fell behind him in the evening and rose there in front of him in the morning. Every day, in and out of the water, whether he was there to look at it or not. It was nothing but mechanics, conservation of energy and angular momentum, forces that balanced one another, centripetal and centrifugal thrusts, nothing but a trajectory, which could not be anything other than what it was.
Slowly the tonalities faded away and the pale blue of morning began to emerge from the background of the other colors and took over first the sea and then the sky.
Mattia blew on his hands, which the brackish wind had made unusable. Then he drew them back into his jacket. He felt something in his right pocket. He pulled out a note folded in four. It was Nadia's number. He read the sequence of numbers to himself and smiled.
He waited for the last purple flame to go out on the horizon and, amid the dispersing mist, set off for home on foot.
His parents would have liked the dawn. Perhaps, one day, he would take them to see it and then they would stroll together to the port, to breakfast on smoked salmon sandwiches. He would explain to them how it happens, how the infinite wavelengths merge to form white light. He would talk to them about absorption and emission spectra and they would nod without understanding.
Mattia let the cold air of morning slip under his jacket. It smelled clean. Not far away there was a shower waiting for him, and a cup of hot tea and a day like many others, and he didn't need anything else.
That same morning, a few hours later, Alice raised the blinds. The dry rattle of the plastic slats rolling around the pulley was comforting. Outside the sun was already high in the sky.
She chose a CD from the stack next to the stereo, without thinking too much about it. She just wanted a little noise to clean the air. She turned the volume knob to the first red notch. Fabio would be furious. She couldn't help smiling as she thought about how he would say her name, shouting to make himself heard over the music and lingering too long over the i, jutting his chin.
She pulled off the bedsheets and piled them in a corner. She took clean ones from the closet. She watched them filling with air and then falling back down, undulating slightly. Damien Rice's voice broke slightly just before he managed to sing, "Oh cuz nothing is lost, it's just frozen in frost."
Alice washed calmly. She stayed in the shower for a long time, her face turned toward the jet of water. Then she got dressed and put a little makeup, almost invisible, on her cheeks and eyelids.
By the time she was ready the CD had been over for some time, but she didn't notice. She left the house and got into the car.
A block from the shop she changed direction. She would be a bit late, but it didn't matter.
She drove to the park where Mattia had told her everything. She felt as if nothing had changed. She remembered it all, apart from the pale wooden fence that now surrounded the grass.
She got out of the car and walked toward the trees. The grass crunched, still cold from the night, and the branches were full of new leaves. Some kids were sitting on the benches where Michela had sat so long before. In the middle of the table, cans were arranged on top of one another to form a tower. The kids were talking loudly and one of them was moving wildly around, imitating someone.
Alice walked over, trying to catch scraps of what they were saying, but before they could notice her she had walked on and headed for the river. Since the city council had decided to keep the dam open all year, hardly any water ran at that point. The river looked motionless in the elongated puddles, as if forgotten, exhausted. On Sundays, when it was hot, people brought their deck chairs from home and came down here to sunbathe. The bottom was made of white stones and a fine, yellowish sand. The grass on the bank was tall; it came up above Alice's knees.
She walked down the slope, checking with each step to make sure that the ground didn't yield. She continued on to the riverbed, to the edge of the water. In front of her was the bridge and farther away the Alps, which on clear days like this seemed incredibly close. Only the highest peaks were still covered with snow.
Alice lay down on the dry pebbles. Her bad leg thanked her by relaxing. The larger stones pricked her back, but she didn't move.
She closed her eyes and tried to imagine the water, all around and above her. She thought of Michela leaning over from the shore. Of her round face that she had seen in the papers reflected in the silver water. Of the splash that no one had been there to hear and the wet icy clothes dragging her down. Of her hair floating like dark seaweed. She saw her groping with her arms, waving them awkwardly and swallowing painful mouthfuls of that cold liquid, which dragged her farther down until she almost touched the bottom.
Then she imagined her movement becoming more sinuous, her arms finding the right gestures and describing circles that gradually became wider, her feet stretching out like two flippers and moving together, her head turning upward, where some light still filtered in. She saw Michela rising back up to the surface and breathing, finally. She followed her, as she swam on the surface of the water, in the direction of the current, toward somewhere new. All night long, all the way to the sea.
When she opened her eyes the sky was still there, with its monotonous and brilliant blue. Not a cloud passed across it.
Mattia was far away. Fabio was far away. The current of the river made a faint, somnolent swish.
She remembered lying in the crevasse, buried by snow. She thought of that perfect silence. Also now, like then, no one knew where she was. This time too, no one would come. But she no longer expected them to.
She smiled at the clear sky. With a little effort, she could get up by herself.