Andrea Canobbio - The Natural Disorder of Things

But now it is Monday, and in the meantime I hadn’t given it another thought. Of course, during last night’s phone call, Witold, who never forgets anything, had asked me whether he ought to get materials for the new bed. I didn’t understand what he was talking about and hung up the phone.

Now I’m observing the scene, and keeping an eye on Witold observing the scene: he’s keeping an eye on Jan flattening the earth with the small excavator that we use for big jobs, the excavator that until last year was handled only by Witold; Witold agreed to turn it over to Jan when I insisted, although he’s generally reluctant to give up any responsibility, even when it means taking on greater responsibilities. Witold tends to centralize things. Sooner or later, whether I want it or not, he will become more than just my right-hand man: he’s starting to reason, to choose, to suggest, and in the future we’ll be able to accept four or five jobs at once instead of just one or two. He is thirty years old, and he could become a garden designer too, if only he would cultivate a healthy dose of worldly ambition, if only he would stop tolerating me as if I were his cross to bear. I’m imagining the logo of our future partnership, Fratta & Witkiewicz, which would ward off his leaving me, which would keep him tied to me for a while, when I see a bottle green Honda HRV appear at the end of the driveway that winds up from the gate to the house. Witold raises his head too. He looks at me.

“Christ, Christ, Christ,” I mutter to irritate him, because I’m irritated.

Signora Ossiglia crosses the garden with one arm waving in front of her head, as if she’s got an enormous feather fluttering from her hat, and shouts that she doesn’t want to disturb us. She’s a tall, bony, energetic fifty-year-old; I shake her hand, waiting for her to ask me what Jan’s doing, waiting for her to notice the ripped-up, disemboweled planters piled in a corner, and the cone of moss ready for the dump.

“You haven’t decided to eliminate the bed, have you?” she finally says.

Witold doesn’t react; I look at her without speaking.

“You haven’t decided to take it all apart, have you?” she repeats.

I don’t know what to say; Witold can’t take the tension, and he glances over at me, almost imploring me to make something up.

“It all collapsed in the night,” I say. “I think some of my calculations were wrong”—I swirl my right finger and draw little circles in the air—“in the planning stage.” I smile, as if it’s a common accident, a forgivable oversight.

“What a pity — I liked it so.”

“We’ll build it again, more beautiful than before.”

“Oh, I’m sure you will.”

She says that she had two free hours and that she couldn’t resist — she couldn’t help coming up to walk among the boxwood cubes and spheres. She’s referring to the bottom end of the garden. I give her a false smile of gratification (it means nothing to me) and say I’ll accompany her. We set off.

I tell her about my passion for sweet gum trees, I talk about “seasonal chromatic variations,” I explain the importance of alternating between fullness and emptiness, I talk about “attention to visual aspects.” I don’t like explaining, I don’t like talking this way, but with certain clients it’s the best approach: it fills up the conversation and gets it over with. Indeed, after ten minutes she tells me to go back to work, she didn’t mean to disturb me (in other words, she wants to be alone). I smile, I bow slightly, and I go off. But before I turn the corner of the little wall of yellow and red bricks that marks the bottom end of the garden, before I head toward the spot where Witold and Jan are clearing away the last traces of the bed, I look back to see what Signora Ossiglia is doing all by herself. What my clients do by themselves in my gardens, when they take possession of my gardens, when I cut the umbilical cord and abandon my creatures to their adoptive parents. What my clients see in my gardens, which I’ll never see, because I’m seeing other things there; concerned with my own anxieties, which are almost always useless from their point of view. What represents a whole world for me is, for them, a place that’s subordinate to the house, where they can spend time on Sunday afternoons in the spring looking after plants, where they can stroll with friends, where they can stroll alone before going back into the house, a house that doesn’t even exist for me (even though I pretend it’s not true, and I speak of the house and the garden “reflecting each other,” and “rhyming,” and “creating a musical accompaniment for each other”).

So this is what Signora Ossiglia did when she was alone: she bent down to caress the dwarf azaleas decorating the border of the boxwood checkerboard. I would have liked to caress Elisabetta Renal that way, yesterday evening, when she got out of her Ka: stroke her cheek and reassure her, make her understand that she had found someone to share her fears with. She didn’t show the hostile, decisive character that I would expect from a person capable of running over a man with her car; she seemed instead to need help: she was in a dense panic, as if the air had clotted up around her, and she moved and spoke with difficulty. Right off the bat, she didn’t say hello, she didn’t pretend to ask whether I was Claudio Fratta, she didn’t pretend to introduce herself; she said only “What are you doing Thursday evening?” and her voice trembled.

It was just a moment before she caught the mistake, and she thought she could still fix it: “I’m Elisabetta Renal; you’re Claudio Fratta, aren’t you?” But in the face of my silence she gave up and repeated, “What are you doing Thursday evening?”

She could have said, “Why don’t you come to our place Thursday evening?” or “Come over on Thursday evening,” or “Are you free Thursday evening?” which would have been a good middle ground. The question “What are you doing Thursday evening?” is out of place, extreme; it can seem aggressive, but when spoken in a supplicating tone, it confuses the issue even further, because it’s like a feeble claw grabbing your throat: you can’t tell whether you should believe the aggression or the plea for help — and indeed I couldn’t formulate an answer.

I almost never do anything in the evening, so I was sure I was free that night, but I wasn’t as sure that I wanted to let her know it; I didn’t want to answer “Nothing — why?” and yet that seemed to be the only possibility.

Ultimately I stuttered “ … why?” without any capital letters.

The truth was that I didn’t quite understand: for a moment I thought she wanted to go out with me alone, to ask me why I had behaved that way in the emergency room. It would have been better if she hadn’t come to flush me out of my nest here; the farmhouse courtyard is a sad place, and she was looking around it, seeing the planters lined up sloppily against the wall like condemned men; the tangled garden hose, all muddy and leaky; tools; watering cans; black plastic bags strewn around randomly; two piles of gravel abandoned in front of Gustavo’s dog bed; and, farther off, the canopy protecting the parked cars and stacked-up snow tires and mountains of newspapers and plastic bottles. It wasn’t a place that could make her fall in love with me. I’m embarrassed by my courtyard; it was as if she’d come and asked to look inside my mouth before entrusting her garden to me. The sweatshirt I was wearing was decent, but I almost never shave on Sunday mornings, and after a day of playing with the kids I must have looked as sad and rumpled as the courtyard. At least my hands were jammed into the pockets of my jeans, so I looked fairly nonchalant.

Elisabetta Renal’s appearance, by contrast, wasn’t sad, not in the same sense of the word, even though she was afraid. When I had seen her face last, it was ravaged and bloody, but it showed no traces of the accident now; maybe the cut on her forehead was camouflaged by her hair, or maybe they’d sewn it up so well there was no scar — I was happy to have brought her to a good hospital. I didn’t understand why that face attracted and interested me so, and I’d already asked myself many times whether, if I hadn’t seen it for the first time that November evening, and if I hadn’t imagined its expression at the very moment when the Ka gave the coup de grâce to the man with the steaming head, that face would have the same effect on me — would I want to stroke it and kiss it and examine it closely? I don’t even know whether those eyes are beautiful: they’re so dark and elusive, and her gaze is ambiguous — direct and provocative sometimes, and the next instant just imploring.