Three Light-Years: A Novel by Andrea Canobbio Page B

swiveled his head around his purple-and-emerald neck as though performing a relaxation exercise, and stared goggle-eyed at Viberti.
    “No, thank you.”
    “Pigeons are one of the world’s great mysteries,” Marta said, shaking her head. She gestured to shoo him away and the movement of her hand was so frail that she seemed to want to detain him, invite him into the house with them.
    If Viberti mentioned an old acquaintance he’d accidentally run into at the hospital, Marta would speak up immediately. “I remember him perfectly,” she would gush with a triumphant smile, and begin telling her son everything the familiar memory had passed on about the man. It was a simple enough trick—all you had to do was steer her toward the most distant memories, because terra firma lay in the past, whereas the present meant stormy waters where nothing remained afloat for long.
    That’s why Giulia was wrong; it was pointless to torment Marta by making her feel at fault, it wasn’t true that all conversation had become impossible, it was just a matter of finding a safe topic to explore.
    “Can I offer you anything?”
    The formula itself was strange, even more than its repetition. Never would his mother, in full possession of her faculties, have used the word “offer” with her son, so formal, so distant, as though the metamorphosis of the lexicon were an early sign of a more general metamorphosis by which all things, plants, animals, and human beings, would one day become new and unfamiliar, an entire planet of aliens, virgin territory to be classified, identified, treated with aloof politeness.
    “A glass of water, thanks,” Viberti said.
    “You didn’t come to eat, did you?”
    “No, thank you, Mama, everything’s ready at home.” He drank a sip of water. “In fact, I’m going now.”
    Marta went out onto the balcony and came back in with the watering can in her hand.
    “I’ll come with you, that way I can water the plants on the landing.”
    “All right,” Viberti said.
    Going out ahead of her, he commented that the flowerpots seemed wet already, maybe Giulia had seen to it. Marta nodded, disappointed. She went back inside and closed the door, forgetting to say goodbye to him.
    His mother’s world. Not yet an alien planet, actually, not yet a virgin land of new and unfamiliar objects. For now, familiar, battered objects that suddenly appeared where they shouldn’t be. The pots on the stove, for example, charred turnips and carrots, dried-up soup, evaporated water, red-hot metal. Who’d turned on those burners? She had, but in a parallel universe, which she’d left without retaining any memory of it. Standing outside the door, Viberti tried to imagine his mother’s mind, to envision the effect of those sudden apparitions. Of those sudden disappearances. Impossible to remember where she’d placed her glasses just a few moments ago. Impossible to find the money she’d hidden away in a safe spot. It was a world of objects with a life of their own. The life that little by little was slipping away from her.
    Viberti went up the stairs, stopping at each landing to glance out the windows. In the courtyard the light had taken on the shade of spent embers. He looked at his watch; some evenings barely ten minutes would have passed since he’d gone down.
    When I try to put myself in his shoes, that’s how I imagine him: standing between one floor and another, in a no-man’s-land, as if, having left his mother’s house, he doesn’t yet have the right to enter adult life. And I want to say to him, come on, hurry up, because I’m there waiting for you in that adult life, you have to turn your attention to me, don’t put it off. But he doesn’t move. Staring at his watch, he studies the hand’s blithe sweep between seven and nine, stubbornly, firmly indifferent to his mother’s fate, and to his.
    *   *   *
     
    Cecilia had a vital gift: her attentive gaze. Viberti’s stories really seemed to interest her.