Andrea Canobbio - The Natural Disorder of Things

“Why did you come when I wasn’t there? I don’t know if Alberto showed you everything — I don’t know what he told you — you must come back to us on Thursday evening.”

“Your husband was very gracious; I stopped by without letting him know, and even so—”

“You must come to dinner with us,” she repeated, and I was more than ready to accept, I simply didn’t have the time to react, not in words, and not even with a gesture or a facial expression, but I’m sure I didn’t express any doubt, especially because of my relief at the idea of seeing her with her husband and postponing a tête-à-tête with her.

She must have thought that I didn’t want to come, though, because she said with an offended tone, “You absolutely must.”

Not even a minute had passed; I was in the middle of my courtyard, and to me it seemed clear that I would have accepted any invitation at all, but Elisabetta Renal was very agitated, and until now I hadn’t found a pause in her anxiety where I could slip a word in.

“Yes, naturally, of course I’ll come,” I said, as if talking to a petulant client about a poorly done job.

Faced with my irritation, she did something totally paradoxical: she relaxed, smiled, slipped her hands into the pockets of her jeans, and pushed her shoulders back as if she were stretching. I smiled too. And the flowering magnolia near the entry gate smiled too, making the courtyard less sad.

“It’s very strange,” she said. “Do you know how I found your address?”

I shook my head.

“I found it in the phone book.”

I couldn’t tell whether she was making fun of me.

“You may be the only person I know who still has his name in the phone book; nobody wants to be found these days.”

I smiled. I thought that if this were just an isolated thing, I could forgive her. But suddenly she seemed to have a lot to say.

“Do you know when I first heard about you?”

“You told me: from Mr. Libet, the engineer.”

“Oh, that wasn’t true … I mean, he talked to me about you, but much later … Once I had to go to the dentist, but there were two dentists on the same landing, I didn’t read the names, and I went in the wrong door and in the waiting room were two ladies who were talking about you and this beautiful garden … Forty-five minutes later I realized I was in the wrong place and I crossed the landing and I went into the right dentist’s office and — God, I’m telling such a stupid story!”

She covers her mouth with her hands, her fingertips on her lips, her eyes moist.

“No, absolutely not. Why is it stupid? No, go on.”

She shakes her head, looks off to the side.

“And what happened at the other dentist’s?” I ask slowly.

She shakes her head no. She bites the knuckles of her left fist.

“You can’t leave me wondering; go on.”

She doesn’t move.

“Go on.”

She takes a long breath and gathers her courage.

“There was a magazine, I opened it, and inside was a picture of you and an article about your gardens,” she says in a single breath.

I nod. “I’m very popular with dentists.”

“The thing that persuaded me,” she says, regaining her confidence, “and persuaded Alberto too … is that … well, I don’t know if it’s true, but I read … the magazine said that you’re there during the work, you participate … you don’t just draw up a design … it said, ‘He’s someone who gets his hands dirty …’”

“I build gardens,” I say. “I’m an architect and a gardener. And my hands … yes, they’re almost always dirty …”

Elisabetta Renal smiles. “You’ll come to dinner?”

“I’ll come.”

All at once she turned and got back into her car. She started the engine and only then looked at me from behind the glass. At that moment she must have realized that she hadn’t even said goodbye, so she rolled down her window and asked whether their garden site really was as disastrous as she thought it was, whether there was no hope at all for it. I came two steps closer — actually so that I could get a better look at her neckline, the white edge of her bra echoed by a band of lighter skin; she wasn’t looking at me anyway, and maybe she wasn’t even listening, her head filled once more with the reverberations of her restlessness, or something that kept her eyes glued to the dashboard.

“It’s a difficult site, but easy sites produce only banal gardens,” I lied.

It was only after she was gone, when I saw the Ka disappear around the curve at the bottom of the road, that I felt all the fear she had transmitted to me. I was afraid that I would rip apart like a sheet of newsprint paper and fly away on the next breeze, and I feared the opposite too: that I might fall to the ground and spend the whole night in the courtyard, as cold as a stone; I was afraid that the ghosts of my dead would come back to punish me; that nothing would happen and that Elisabetta Renal would disappear from my life.

And to squelch that possibility (that she had sought me out by chance, that she was really interested only in my gardening work), I developed a strange conviction: that she had sought me out to make amends. To make amends for her rudeness, for example: she had never thanked me for taking her to the emergency room. But if that were the case she ought to have read from a different script: as soon as she got out of her car she should have put on a surprised expression and said, “Wait, I know you — where have I seen you before?” She didn’t do that. Make amends for what, then? Make amends for a mistake? That night she had made a mistake and hadn’t realized it. Had it taken her five months to figure it out? Maybe less — maybe she figured it out right away, but it took her five months to find me. Five months to invent the story about the two dentists.

Later on, trembling with cold, half awake: Why didn’t she come into the house? Why didn’t I offer her a drink? She could have stayed for dinner, we could have sat on the sofa in front of the fire, then I would have undressed her, held her, kissed her lips, the hollow at the base of her neck, her nipples, her belly button, her lips, the insides of her thighs, her toes. And I went back to thinking about the thousand ways I could have convinced her to stay, if I hadn’t stood there as stolidly as a horse just listening to her; and I listed all the witty ways I could have countered her invitation by asking her to stay for dinner right then, with the irresistible nonchalance that some men use to get women into bed.

I go back to Witold. He’s loading the debris into a wheelbarrow, pretending not to care, but actually curious to know how I plan to fill the empty space that Jan carved into the heart of the garden.

“Listen,” I ask him, “do you remember whether, when we accepted this job, whether I told Signor Ossiglia something like ‘Well, it’s a difficult site—’”

“But easy sites produce only banal gardens,” concludes Witold. “Yes, you said it; you say it to everybody — I thought you did that on purpose …”

“Sure, I do do it on purpose, but I don’t want to do it too often.”

“Anyway, this garden is not banal,” says Witold.

Because he never compliments me spontaneously, I ask him to explain why he thinks it’s not banal. And while he’s explaining, I get a good idea for rebuilding the bed.

Two days at home. Witold and Jan in exile at the Ossiglias’ finishing the job, I at the computer creating a design for the garden of a bank’s data center; in order to do it, I would have to give up the Renal garden, but I’ve decided to accept that, I think, and refuse the bank, even though I don’t know how to break it to Witold, and until I tell him I don’t stop working on it, as if he were always here, standing behind me, peeking over my shoulder at the glowing screen.