Like Family by Paolo Giordano Page A

“Isn’t one enough for you, Babette? In a while, maybe. Who knows?” In the meantime we procrastinated, disappointing her. Never would she have expected, however, that, faced with a fait accompli, Nora would dream of backing out.
    But Mrs. A. was more unreachable than ever. Since the illness had advanced swiftly and steadily, around the middle of July she had moved to her cousin Marcella’s house, where for the most part she would live out her last five months, lying on the right side of a double bed that wasn’t hers. The cancer had breached another rampart and seized control of her brain as well. Talking on the phone had become difficult—her voice was gone; to communicate with her, we had to go through the extraneous filter of Marcella, while to see her we had to ask permission and then be watched the whole time.
    Nora wouldn’t admit it, nor would she do so later on, but she was scared, terrified of the possibility of spending a second pregnancy in bed. The months of immobility with Emanuele had marked her more deeply than I had realized, and this time there would be no Mrs. A. by her side, only a harried husband in whom, I understood that summer, she did not have enough faith. From that day on, neither of us held anything back, baring resentments that had long been concealed, in a painful, relentless crescendo.
    _____
    In the end Nora’s lateness turned out to be a false alarm, but at that point it didn’t matter much; the effects had already been felt. Outwardly our married life went along unchanged, structured around a sequence of commitments, yet as if its heart had been drained. I had seen Nora sad, upset, angry but never listless or indifferent. Without the intercession of her exuberance, the world went back to being the cold shell that I had inhabited before I met her. Even Emanuele, at times, appeared alien to me.
    â€œWe could eat at the fish place tonight, talk a little.”
    â€œIf you want. Though I’m not very hungry.”
    â€œLet’s go anyway.”
    And then we sat there eating dinner like strangers, no different from those couples who have nothing to say to each other, whom we had often pitied from the pedestal of our rapt enthrallment.
    â€œWhat’s gotten into you?”
    â€œNothing.”
    â€œYou look sad.”
    â€œI’m not sad, I’m just thinking.”
    â€œAbout what, then?”
    â€œAbout nothing!”
    â€œYou’re scaring me. Are you doing it on purpose?”
    We continued needling each other, anything to break a silence for which we were unpracticed. Nothing seemed to come to our rescue: considering how foolishly we behaved, ours might have been the first marital crisis in the history of mankind.
    A young couple can also fall ill, from insecurity, from routine, from isolation. Metastases flourish unseen, and ours soon reached the bed. For eleven weeks, the same period in which Mrs. A. was losing the elementary functions of her body one by one, Nora and Ididn’t touch or reach out to each other. Lying at a safe distance, our bodies seemed like impregnable slabs of marble.
    Dozing lightly, I tortured myself thinking about the time when her body was available to me and mine to her, when I could caress her without asking permission, anywhere—on the neck, her breasts, between the curved notches of her spine, along the cleft of her buttocks—when I was free to slip my fingers under the elastic without worrying about annoying her and she, drowsy, would return my attentions with an instinctive shiver. Neither one of us refused sex, ever; we might neglect it for long periods of time due to lack of opportunity and energy, but we did not withhold it. No matter how things were going, we knew that an untarnished space awaited us in our bedroom, a refuge of furtive embraces and caresses.
    If our cancer had also aimed to affect the brain, then it had succeeded: with my wife lying a few inches away, I no longer