The Solitude of Prime Numbers

  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.

  32

  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.

  33

  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.