Like Family (3 page)

That evening, however, descending the stairs in the institute's most modern wing, I, too, felt an unexpected relief, even a sense of gallantry, for how I had set aside my own ambitions in support of Nora's serenity. My emigrant colleagues might have academic glory unlocked to them and spacious offices in glass-and-metal structures, but they would live far away, far off not only from here but far off from anywhere. They would meet and marry foreign women, “convenient wives,” for the most part Nordic, with whom they would communicate in an intermediary language, French or English, like diplomats. And I? I, on the other hand, had Nora, who understood every nuance of the words I uttered and every implication of those I chose not to say. Could
I aspire to anything more than that or imagine risking it all for a grant, albeit a prestigious one? All progress made by physics from the beginning—heliocentrism and Newton's law of universal gravitation; Maxwell's synthetic, perfect equations and Planck's constant; restricted and general relativity; multidimensional twisted strings and the most remote pulsars—all the glory of those discoveries taken together would not be enough to give me the same sense of satisfaction. I was mindful of the fact that romantic ecstasy was destined to last just a brief time (not Planck's constant—that would remain forever), and I had enough experience in relationships to know that such bliss could just as quickly turn into its exact opposite—but for that evening at least I could cling to it. Returning home, I deviated from the shortest route and at the fish market bought enough fried fish to feed a family of four. There was never another mention of Zurich.

_____

And now here we are again. I'm back to speculating about European destinations that might reconcile my professional needs with Nora's expectations and which
at least have an Italian elementary school for Emanuele. Durham, Mainz, Uppsala, Freiburg—none of them meet all the criteria completely, so I cross them off in succession. When I finish that list, I move on to a different one: the names of the colleagues with whom I'll be competing for the next research grant. I check out their recent work on the Net, the number of citations they've gathered, I enter the data into an app and calculate the scores to compare them with mine. I have good reason to believe—with a few points in my favor, assuming the estimate is correct and excluding departmental intrigues—that I can still make it through at the next round.

Even if that's so, the same uncertainty will come up again in a few years, then yet again, until a stroke of luck appears (a well-timed series of broken femurs on the fifth floor of the physics faculty, for instance) or until, more likely, I decide to put aside an impractical dream and devote my energies to something more concrete. There are positions open in finance, software, business consulting: physicists are able to manage large quantities of information, they are versatile, and above all they do not complain—so they say.

I push further for commiseration from my psychotherapist and declare myself depressed, or at least about to be. He, after describing my depression as “at most theoretical,” prescribes ordinary Lexotan for the worst nights.

Here we are, then, all three of us absorbed by ourselves and no one else: Nora reeling from her proliferation of chores, Emanuele trying to suppress his longing for his nanny and me giving in to psychic weakness. A family just starting out is sometimes like that: a nebula of self-centeredness in danger of imploding.

_____

All of this is enough to make me forget Mrs. A.'s cough, which in the meantime has worsened to the point of not allowing her to sleep. Another insomniac, and not because her room is infested with ghosts—her ghosts have been her best friends for a long time—now every time she lies down, her chest begins to heave, until she's forced to sit up again and gulp some more water, more cough syrup.

She's also stopped going to Mass because she was disturbing people; she noticed how they began eyeing
her with disapproval, how the shoulders of those in front twitched impatiently. On the last Sunday, she left a few moments before the Eucharist, awkwardly stepping on the foot of the person beside her as she made her way out of the pew. The coughing echoed against the high, unadorned vault, unbearably amplified.

On her walk home via the shortcut that runs through the birch trees, driven by anger, she wondered about the business regarding Communion (“business” is a word that comes to me when talking about her, since she used it so frequently: “a fine business” or “what is this business?” or “we have to settle the business about the socks”—she had a “business” for everything). She wondered whether the special mystique surrounding Communion wasn't a lot of hype after all, dependent on the hymns, the words whispered by the officiant, the people lined up with bowed heads, hands folded in prayer. With that thought, Mrs. A. began slowly to break away from a faith that she had never doubted and that she could have used now more than ever. She would no longer go to confession, not even as the end approached. At a certain point, I think, she
was convinced that this time it was up to the Lord to ask
her
for forgiveness.

In fact, one of the rare disagreements between us had to do with religion. For a while she had made up her mind to teach Emanuele some prayers, not paying much attention to our opinion. Not that Nora and I were totally against it, but we'd chosen to get married in a civil ceremony and we had never set foot in a church together, except for other people's ceremonies or purely as tourists. For the sake of conformity, I had received the sacrament of baptism at twelve years of age, along with my First Communion and confirmation, in a kind of convenient three-in-one (my father, who didn't at all agree with it, had gone to the priest with his hand rigidly outstretched and muttered something about Galileo's recantation and the stake, causing the cleric to turn pale). As suddenly as it had appeared, my faith was soon spent.

Nora, more simply, has always been lukewarm with regard to God. As far as I am aware, she never prays and has worn an ebony rosary around her neck for as long as I've known her, oblivious to its symbolic import, just because she likes the way it looks. “What
harm is there?” she replied when I seemed puzzled by such an insouciant attitude.

Emanuele seemed to sniff out our ambivalence. At the table he would start reciting Mrs. A.'s prayers, defying us with his eyes. We went on eating, as if we hadn't noticed. When he didn't stop, Nora told him gently but firmly that it was not the proper time, that he should save his prayers for when he was alone in bed.

I wonder if faith would seriously have taken root in our son if Mrs. A. had had more time to nurture it. Maybe it would have been a good thing for him: any kind of belief, rational or not, complex or simple depending on the need, is still better than none, I'd say. Often I have the feeling that those of us educated in the field of rigid consistency, fenced in by scientific rigor, struggle more than others. Maybe Mrs. A. was right to place her trust in the divine to some degree, just as she relied on the radio's morning horoscope. Maybe Nora is right to wear her rosary around her neck so casually.

In a few months, Emanuele's Catholicism vanished. During Mrs. A.'s funeral, I watched him: he couldn't even keep up with the Our Father—he didn't know
the words—and he struggled to latch onto scattered bits and pieces, scanning around. Jesus will likely remain just one of many stories that have been told to him.

_____

We learned of Mrs. A.'s worsening condition through a phone call. It's Nora who calls her one evening. In all those years, Babette has never once dialed the number of our home; I suspect she always paid a fixed rate on her phone bill and not a penny more. Nora has a hard time understanding what she says, since Mrs. A. is constantly interrupted by her coughing. She first went to her general doctor, who prescribed a cortisone inhaler, but it didn't do any good. So she wasted fifteen precious days. She went back, and this time he made an emergency referral to a pulmonologist, who first ordered an X-ray and then, when he'd seen that, a CT scan with a contrast medium.

“A CT scan?” Nora asks, alarmed, drawing my attention as well.

A CT scan, yes, but the report hasn't yet arrived. With the X-ray, however, she'd reversed her route.
After the pulmonologist, who pointed out a thickening on the right side—“it could be an infection, the start of bronchial pneumonia or bleeding, call it a shadow for the moment”—she went back to her general doctor, the only one who always speaks plainly to her and who did so on this occasion as well. The doctor held the plate up in front of him for a long time, studying it against the light from the window. Then he handed it back to her, rubbed his eyelids with the palms of his hands and said simply, “I wish you the best of luck.”

With that, Mrs. A. bursts into uncontrollable tears. CT scan or no CT scan, she knows. As Nora, teary and wide-eyed, forms the letter
C
with her fingers, a capital
C
for “Cancer,” mouthing the other letters and then pointing to her chest, Mrs. A., in a paroxysm of coughing and sobbing, rants about a bird that came to find her, a bird that, at the end of the summer, had brought her the seemingly fatal pronouncement.

T
he diagnosis is quickly made. No surprise for Mrs. A., nor for us at that point, though there is a certain amount of bewilderment. Among all cancers, lung cancer is by far the most easily attributable to lifestyle, to pernicious habits, to negligent behavior. Mrs. A. never smoked a cigarette in her life, not even as a young girl when she helped out her father in the tobacco shop; if an impatient customer lit one while still inside the store, she would open the back door to get rid of the stink. There is no significant incidence of malignancies in her family—a great-aunt with throat cancer, a second cousin with a
pancreatic tumor—and her personal medical history is limited to an osteoarthritic condition and the usual childhood diseases. She followed a healthy diet; whenever she could, she ate vegetables from her own garden, she breathed clean air and never failed to stick to her regimen, ever. And still.

I convey what I am able to understand of the pathology report to a doctor friend after Mrs. A. reads it to me, mangling all the medical terms (something she will continue to do until the end, her intelligence mocked by the impenetrable scientific jargon, although in the final months she will speak with the assurance of one who feels she has mastered the complexity of internal medicine, having come to know it intimately). I manage to make out “carcinoma” and “non-small-cell” and “stage four,” and that is enough for my friend to mutter grimly and say, “It will be quick. They are remarkably swift tumors.”

In the flurry of phone calls that follow—we now call her every evening for updates—the words that recur most frequently are “I can't understand it.” I'd like to tell her that there is precious little to understand, that it's just the way it is. Her tumor can be
classified as a statistic, maybe in the overlooked tail end of a Gaussian curve, though still within the natural order of things, but I keep this realism to myself, expressing it only to Nora, who, like Mrs. A., dazedly wonders why. As far as Nora is concerned, my rationality is only an embellished form of cynicism, one of the things that irritates her the most about me, a residue of my youthful callousness that she has not yet been able to correct. We don't talk about it anymore.

The plausible reason that everyone was looking for arrived soon enough, however, in the form of a newspaper clipping that Giulietta, a neighbor of Mrs. A., brings her one afternoon. A scientific study of dubious credibility has drawn attention to an anomalous percentage of tumors in Val di Susa. Possible causes include the telephone repeater whose noxious effect the residents of the valley have been clamoring about for years and the nuclear power plants along the Rhône.

“Could be,” I comment on the phone, “yes, it could be,” yet I can't help but note that expressions such as “anomalous” and “nuclear power plants” are perceived by Mrs. A. as reassuring or appalling depending on her need. There's no reason to make an issue of it. The
telephone repeater and the transborder power plants—if that's what it takes, so be it, let's blame them. It's easier to point the finger at enriched uranium in France or electromagnetic radiation than accuse an equally invisible fate, a void, the merciless scourge of God.

_____

Soon there isn't even time to wonder about the reasons. Mrs. A. is overwhelmed by a host of new routines, which starkly remind her of Renato's years of dialysis, only now the body in the spotlight is hers, and she herself is caring for it. With the first cycle of chemotherapy coming up—the oncologist has planned for three of them, with twenty-day intervals, after reluctantly ruling out the idea of an operation—Mrs. A. would like to acquire a wig. She has no way of knowing when her hair will begin to fall out, clump after clump, and she wants to be prepared. By some perversity of fate, her hair is the only feature she really cares about: she walks lopsidedly, she hasn't bought a new dress for at least twenty years (so that we can never go wrong by giving her a cardigan on every birthday), she doesn't spend as much as a penny on cosmetics, and
the pieces of jewelry she wears are the same ones her husband knew, but she pays special attention to her hair. Sometimes, to pamper her, Nora would make an appointment with her own hairdresser for Mrs. A. She pointed out to me several times how few women there are whose hair is naturally white like that of Mrs. A., a chalk white streaked with silvery strands. “I hope mine will be like that when I get old,” she says, and I suspect that behind that wish there's a deeper longing to identify.

“First I want to get it cut,” Mrs. A. announces over the phone, “short, like I wore it when I was a girl. At least I'll get used to seeing myself bald.”

Nora takes the idea for what it is, an impulse. “Don't be silly. It suits you the way it is.”

The hope left unspoken by Mrs. A. is that cutting her hair will strengthen the roots enough so that it won't fall out anymore. Her way of thinking is cluttered with popular beliefs that always amused or enraged me, depending. She has no idea of the destructive power of the poison that will be introduced into her body, the force with which it will wipe out all forms of life and resistance, good or bad, without
differentiating, like a hurricane. Nora finally manages to dissuade her. She takes the trouble to find the best store to shop for a wig. She consults a client for whom she decorated an apartment in Liguria, a woman who the year before sacrificed both breasts to a malignant cyst and of whom Nora now speaks with a certain admiration, as if that experience had promoted the lady to a higher level of consciousness. The woman refers us to a shop in the city center, and, judging from my preliminary phone call, she has not steered us wrong: the girl who answers the phone is much less embarrassed than I am to talk about wigs for a woman with cancer—in fact, she isn't embarrassed at all, as if people called her all the time with the same pressing need.

Mrs. A. comes to our house, and in the kitchen I measure the circumference of her head with the tape measure that was kept in the sewing box, once her exclusive domain. Then I take photos, front, back and profile. The wig will have to be styled just like that forever, a perpetual coiffure for hair that will never grow.

I take her to the fitting myself, which makes me feel rather weird, almost how I'd feel if I had to
accompany her to the gynecologist. Mrs. A. is jovial—cancer can be defeated—and she seems to be pleased that this part of the day is entirely given over to her, that someone has taken the trouble to drive her car and now even offers her a coffee. No one has devoted any time to her for as long as she can remember.

Inside the shop they have us take a seat in a corridor from which you can keep an eye on what's going on in the other rooms. Above us hangs a drop-crystal chandelier fitted with energy-saving bulbs. The ambience of the place falls somewhere between elegant and shabby, though more shabby, actually. Mrs. A. points out the pieces of furniture, naming the style for each one: Empire, Liberty, Baroque . . . “See how many things I could have taught a child?” She sighs. But the child never arrived.

When Nora and I kissed for the first time, we were both wearing wigs: hers about a foot high, shaped like a pineapple, mine with curly gray ringlets. We both had white makeup on our faces. We were in acting class, rehearsing some scenes from
La locandiera,
none of which would be performed in front of an audience. We dressed in costumes to enhance the experience.

Every evening the male students and doctoral candidates in the department of physics, myself included, left the austere building on Via Giuria and scattered throughout the city looking for places where there were girls who did not have the same mortifying sobriety in their dress, the same slipshod disregard for their bodies in general. We took courses in photography, Asian languages, cooking, tango and aerobics; we slipped into film-club discussions full of female modern-lit students or pretended to believe in the spiritual potential of kundalini yoga, all to open the door to sex. After several such ventures, I'd landed in the acting class, though I had no interest in theater. At the first session, Nora, who had been studying for over a year, led me through the breathing exercises. My wife-to-be violently shoved her hand into my abdomen, forcing me to emit an embarrassing, spontaneous sound, before she'd even told me her name.

After class, late that evening, we walked back and forth along the riverfront, orbiting around the stop where a bus would eventually split us up and letting more than one of them go by. Most of the time, Nora
spoke about her father and her mother, who at the time were in the hostile throes of separation. She was tormented by the thought of her parents the way one can only be at twenty-five, when you suddenly realize that while you prefer to be an adult who is not like them, you may not succeed at it.

The night we were wearing the wigs, I made her laugh by imitating the Russian guy, Alexei, with whom I shared an office on the ground floor. For a month he'd been living in the room where we worked, to save on rent. He'd equipped it with an electric burner on which he heated the nasty contents of various canned food products, and at night he laid a sleeping bag on top of our joined desks, evading the guards. He put everything away before I arrived, except when he didn't hear the alarm go off. Unexpectedly, Nora kissed me. Since we were wearing wigs and I was imitating the broken English of a Russian, in a sense we were and weren't ourselves, but maybe that's always the way it is when you kiss someone new on the lips.

I tell all this to Mrs. A. as we wait, to distract her more than anything else, but she must already know
the story, or isn't too interested, because when a young woman appears with a head-shaped wooden stand on which her new hair is resting, she leaps to her feet.

The fake hair is remarkably similar in color and style to hers, but I'd be willing to bet that the texture is quite different. Mrs. A. sits down in front of a mirror and lets the girl place it on her head ceremoniously, like a crown. She stares raptly at her reflection, turning to one side and the other, and asks the young woman for a handheld mirror to check the back.

“I look almost better with than without it,” she says, and I can't decide if it's to cheer herself up or if she really thinks that. With that synthetic hair, she is certainly different from before: different yet also the same.

We are briefed on how to care for the wig: it can be combed and also washed with a mild shampoo, but not often; there's no need to, the wig's hair does not get dirty the way ours does (the young woman has the linguistic prudence to say “ours” instead of “real”). “And now you can choose a nightcap. It's complimentary, and we have them in different colors. Mint
green, do you like this one? What do you think? It goes well with your eyes, too. Here, wait, I'll help you take it off.”

Mrs. A. holds on to the wig with both hands. “No! I want to keep it on. If I can. So I can get used to it at least.”

The young woman can't keep a sad expression from crossing her face. “Oh. Of course you can. It's yours now.”

We leave the shop arm in arm. Mrs. A. is wearing her new hair, looking proud. “Let's not say anything to Nora. Let's see if she notices,” she suggests. I promise to go along—it sounds like fun. Meantime I text a message to my wife, explaining that Babette will be wearing the wig and that she should pretend not to notice.

In the frenzy we forgot to take the wooden dummy. I go back to retrieve it a few days later, by myself. I tell the same girl, “Excuse me, but the lady lost her head.” She, however, does not smile; perhaps the joke is in bad taste.

I leave the dummy in the car, on the passenger seat,
until the next time I see Mrs. A. I even exchange a few words with it. One afternoon I offer a young colleague a ride home. As he gets into the car, he looks up, puzzled. “And just what are you doing with this?” he asks. Then, giving me no time to explain, he bows to kiss her lipless face.