The Solitude of Prime Numbers

  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.

  35

  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 re
peated 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.

  36

  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? ¿Qué 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.

  37

  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 bedr
oom?” 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.