The Solitude of Prime Numbers

The image of Michela playing with a twig and breaking up her own reflection in the water before sliding into it like a sack of potatoes ran through his head like an electric shock.

Exhausted, he sat down a couple of feet from the river’s edge. He turned around to look behind him and saw the darkness that would last for many hours to come.

He stared at the gleaming black surface of the river. Again he tried to remember its name, but couldn’t. He plunged his hands into the cold earth. On the bank the dampness made it softer. He found a broken bottle, a sharp reminder of some nighttime festivity. The first time he struck it into his hand it didn’t hurt, perhaps he didn’t even notice. Then he started twisting it into his flesh, digging deeper, without ever taking his eyes off the water. He expected Michela to rise to the surface from one minute to the next, and in the meantime he wondered why some things float while others don’t.

Mattia is the mathematically gifted twin brother of Michela. His brain works exceedingly well, while hers is confused and clouded. Mattia is responsible for Michela, and spends his time defending her from the taunts of cruel classmates at school. He resents that he has no real friends, and is never invited to parties because Michela makes the other children (and their parents) uncomfortable. In the third grade, Mattia is finally invited to a party, finally has a chance to be with the other children, but is forced to take Michela along with him by his mother. He knows things will not go well. He knows she will ruin his good time, and for once, he rebels. On the way to the party, they stop at a park they both know. “Wait here”, he says. And leaves her there, for a few hours. The party is not as much fun as he had hoped, he still feels out of place with the other children, and he worries about what he has done to Michela, so he leaves early. When he comes back, she is gone, and no trace of her is ever found again.

Alice is an only child, pushed by her father, who wants her to become an expert skier. Every morning during Christmas vacation, she has to get up early and go to ski school. Every morning her father forces her to quickly finish her breakfast, and every morning, by the time she gets to the ski lift, she is desperate to go pee. It doesn’t matter how much she tries to empty her bladder before leaving the house, while she’s on the lift, her breakfast has caught up with her, and she’s in agony. Every morning, she gets off of the ski lift, crouches down, pretends to tighten her boot, and pees inside her ski suit. Every day is agony. This fateful morning, the mountain is shrouded in fog, which gives Alice a place to hide, for which she is grateful, because this time she not only pees herself, she also poops. Desperate to hide from her ski school mates, she decides to make her own way down to the lodge, to lose her ski pass along the way, to get cleaned up and spend the rest of the day inside in the warmth instead of on the side of a frigid foggy mountain. She is so busy making plans that she skis off of the trail and breaks her tibia, and spends the rest of the day wondering if she will freeze to death first, or be eaten by wolves, while waiting to be rescued.

Mattia and Alice are both wounded by their childhoods, and live fairly tortured lives, trying to fit in. Alice turns to anorexia as a method of coping, hiding her food in her napkin at the dinner table rather than eat. Mattia turns to cutting, finding relief from the pain his sister’s disappearance has brought into his family by wounding himself. Perhaps Mattia and Alice would have been solitary outsiders without these behaviors, but while they think they are hiding their pain and their self destructiveness from their friends and family, the reality is that the others only pretend not to notice, because to notice and act would be too difficult. When Mattia and Alice meet, as teens, they are drawn to each other, and while they never truly connect, their friendship is the closest thing either one of them has to something real.

Years later, Mattia and Alice have drifted apart physically, but are still very much in each others thoughts. He is working as a mathematician in a northern European country, she is working as a photographer in their native Italy. Her anorexia has robbed her of her health and her marriage. His cutting and solitude have robbed him of love and true friendship. One day, she spies something that startles her, and causes her to reach out to him, telling him he must come.

The Solitude of Prime Numbers is a story of loneliness, but a loneliness combined with love. A prime number can only be divided by itself and the number 1. Mattia and Alice are only truly connected with themselves and each other, and perhaps not as much with each other as they might wish.

Paolo Giordano, an Italian physicist, has a definite gift, and the writing here is stark and lovely. The story itself is somewhat disquieting, and you wish several times that things could go differently for Mattia and Alice. A beautiful read.