Andrea Canobbio - The Natural Disorder of Things

I’ve always been proud of finding jobs for people: I’ve fixed all of Witold’s relatives up with work, but maybe the first life I tried to organize was Fabio’s. When he left school I managed to get him a job as a warehouseman at the FLD factory, and I covered for him when he began to steal. Later, at the garage, I vouched for him, and I insisted on paying for the replacement parts that disappeared, even though it wasn’t ever clear he was the one who took them — somebody slyly took advantage of the presence of a perfect fall guy. I can’t believe my brother could really steal — I never could, not even when faced with the evidence. The only thing that ever disappeared from our house was a wallet of gold coins. Every year for Christmas our father gave us each one coin as a gift, and he managed to keep up the tradition even after he lost the factory. The wallet disappeared. From then on, without discussing the problem, each of us began to hide the things that were most precious and that could most easily be sold in secret places. And during the toughest two months, when Fabio lost control, before we succeeded in checking him into the detox center for the second time, my father and I made sure that one of us was always at home.

Technically I had not helped Malik with his job, but I’d helped him with many other practical and bureaucratic details. Finding jobs for people is my way of making friends. I don’t have other friends: I’ve lost them all along the way — not everyone accepts help. I couldn’t help Carlo even if I wanted to, unless I were willing to change fields. I think about Filippo and Momo all the time, so I already have ideas about the jobs that would suit them, and I reflect on their characters, their inclinations, to understand what they might do or want to do, so I can begin to build a network of connections. I ought to design a garden for a famous hospital director, in case Filippo wants to become a doctor, and for an engineer, because I think Momo will have a way with numbers and computers.

For the rest of the weekend Filippo tries to imitate the sounds made by a diarrhetic Doberman, and Momo echoes him without knowing what he’s mimicking. I build the balsa wood cannon, let myself be massacred in a battle with unequal weapons (the rules are established, rewritten, and broken by Filippo), I cook, I watch The Lion King with the kids, I put them to sleep, I dress them again in the morning, I try with very little success to get Carlo to talk. When six o’clock on Sunday rolls around, I can honestly say I’m happy the kids are going back to the city, even though when they’re gone I let myself go and I eat and drink too much and get drunk and stay up late for other reasons, damaging my health. The kids are already strapped in their car seats, I’ve just made a joke about the cheap flimsiness of the Clio, and Carlo is saying goodbye with his window down, and I haven’t once thought about who might have rung my doorbell yesterday morning. At that very moment a black Ka drives into the courtyard of my farmhouse.

Elisabetta Renal stops about ten yards away and looks at me, and I see Carlo look at her with surprise, desire, and envy.

“She must have taken a wrong turn,” I say, but I can see perfectly well he doesn’t believe me. Because he probably saw the same car from the window yesterday, and forgot or didn’t want to tell me.

“We’ll see you next week,” he mutters, and he shifts into gear with a demoralized slump. And for a moment I imagine their drive home, the father’s silence and the obsessive chatter of the older son. Momo will sleep.

THE LIGHT IS LUKEWARM AND DIFFUSE, IT’S SIX O’CLOCK ON A TRANQUIL EVENING, spring has just begun; on my feet in the middle of the courtyard, I haven’t got the strength to go back indoors. The conversation with Elisabetta Renal lasted no more than fifteen minutes: she came to invite me to dinner, and she left. Then the phone began to ring, and it uprooted me from the square foot of ground where she had abandoned me. It was Witold: he always calls me on Sunday evening, and I don’t yet know why, because we always make a plan for Monday on Friday or Saturday, so these calls are unnecessary — maybe he wants to check that I’m still alive, that I haven’t killed myself with wine and food, or that I haven’t decided over the weekend to do without him and hired an Albanian or a Kurd instead. We confirmed the appointment that we had already made for the next morning.

Going back into the house, I noticed the toys scattered around, but I didn’t go near them or touch them, as if they had fallen from the sky and might explode; I pitched camp in the kitchen, set the table for two, reheated the leftover half of the roast, and ate lustily at first, sitting at my place, and then more slowly and thoughtfully, sitting at the guest’s place. I stayed on the sofa until eleven o’clock (at eleven I discovered that it was already eleven), drinking a bottle and a half of wine, staring at the absent shape sitting in my place — he was completely indifferent to life’s complications — and then turned on the TV to hear the latest news about the aerial attacks, flipped channels randomly a few times, and ultimately began to tremble with cold, even though I don’t usually mind the cold. It can’t have been caused by the wine, because I drink wine every evening, and it wasn’t the war, I don’t think. It can’t have been the departure of the kids, which plunges me into gloom but never into panic. So the cold must come from Elisabetta Renal. I thought about her in bed without managing to get any warmer.

The next morning I went out at six and crossed the plain to the south, passing the carbonized wrecks of the weekend’s accidents, the rivers and the poplar plantations stretching as far as the eye could see, a cluster of neo-Gothic villas, a hospital, tire warehouses, a restaurant-hotel, abandoned fields, a farmhouse, an organic pig farm, a pharmaceutical lab, a gated residential community, a (pretty decent) mall. When I got to the ridge of the Ossiglia house, up in the hills thirty-five miles from my home, the light was metallic, the air fresh, and I was wearing a fat winter jacket; the Poles asked me if I felt okay. From Witold’s expression, I could tell that I had forgotten to bring something that I should have remembered. I pretended to look for the thing in the back of the R4 for a long time while I struggled to reconstruct last night’s phone call, and finally I remembered what had taken place here several mornings ago, before we happened to go meet Mr. Rossi at Villa Renal.

That day the garden we were finishing seemed disastrous and ugly, and I paced it up and down four times without managing to explain to Witold why I was so disgusted. I had known for a week, or maybe a month, but I had ignored the problem, hoping that it would solve itself. It didn’t. I shook my head mutely and swung my arms around. The garden’s whole dynamic and the dialogue among its parts were ruined by one corner, one hinge that I hadn’t figured out how to build right, and the garden couldn’t unfold, couldn’t develop; one single microscopic patch of earth — fifteen misconceived, defective square yards — was ruining everything; like a fishbone stuck in your throat, this thing kept the garden from talking and breathing. I sat down on one of the four teak chaise longues and closed my eyes. Witold pretended to be completely absorbed in his work, unloading material from the R4 without looking my way.

There was no way to correct it. Having to throw out weeks if not months of work isn’t just a blow to your pride: you fear you might be making an even greater error, and it’s not easy to change something if you don’t have any idea of what to replace it with; but until you fix the error your mind stays tangled up in it and your feet are mired in the mud and you just can’t escape. I moved close to the bed we had built, a useless web of raised rhomboid planters regurgitating moss, a stack of planters staggered across three levels and interspersed with layers of polished white stones. Enraged by my own stupidity, I said that I wanted to eliminate this monster, but Witold rebelled, in his way: he began to grumble, saying that the job was supposed to have been finished a while ago, that there was no point rethinking elements that the client had already accepted, expressed enthusiasm for, or anyway approved. I kicked at the wood, slamming the planter with my boot. I told him that he wasn’t the one who made the decisions, that the garden was mine, the job was mine, that I was the boss, and if he didn’t like it that was just too bad. I kicked again. I told him that Jan would have to bring the excavator the first morning he could, and in the meantime I would come up with a solution.