Andrea Canobbio - The Natural Disorder of Things

I trace the events that brought me here, to figure out where I made a wrong turn, where my map was wrong. (1) This morning, the examination of my wardrobe, triggered by a vague worry about how I should dress for dinner at the Renals’; (2) the need to bring a pair of corduroy pants to the dry cleaner and have a button sewn back onto the only decent and presentable jacket I have, the gray tweed; (3) the trip to the cleaners and the notions shop in the mall.

The original button must have been sewn on badly, I think, or it must have gotten tugged unexpectedly without my realizing it, on one of the few occasions when I wore the jacket (until last year I could button it easily). In the notions shop they had offered to sew the button on, which is when I thought of asking my mother to do it: it gave me an excuse to touch base with her, better than a hasty phone call would be. Now that I’m here on the balcony with the same dog going past again, now that I have to go back in to my mother, I’m not so sure it was a good idea.

She never cried in front of us: she wasn’t the type, and when she was troubled — not necessarily angry — but if she was upset by some news, by a phone call or a letter, she didn’t fling herself into a chair or a bed and break down; she just kept behaving in a way that seemed normal at first, except she didn’t talk (or talked less than usual) and gave us harsh, icy looks, and the implicit message was “You have no right to fall apart if I don’t.” Now she cries all the time — with me, not with Carlo, not with the grandchildren, whom she rarely sees and who wouldn’t know what to do … I don’t know what to do either, I don’t know how to comfort people and share their pain, I’m clumsy at funerals, I shake the hands of the bereaved as if I’m congratulating them, and I’m incapable of consoling friends who’ve been dumped by their lovers (not that they often ask me to).

Everybody cries. Maybe even my mother cried, when she was young, but the fact that she never let this be seen (she only let us see her being confident, authoritative — not authoritarian — calm, equitable, moderate, silent in her joy, silent in her anger; her silence was completely different from my father’s silence, and this still astonishes me: we were born to a pair of very different silences, and we were three very different children) meant that her children were forced to learn to ape emotions elsewhere, outside the home.

My mother never knew how to sew on a button; she didn’t — doesn’t — know how to cook; she cleans the house energetically but without paying attention; she irons badly. She’s famous in the family for these deficiencies: she’s considered an artist, and her sisters refer to her as “the artist” without rancor, simply because for many years she gave private piano lessons (even before my father’s bankruptcy, but afterward her income became more important), even though she never graduated from the conservatory because when she was twenty she married my father, who was ten years older.

I think about these things mechanically (I often think mechanically about them) while I watch her, bent over my jacket; after ten minutes’ work, the button she has sewn on looks like a chunky, shortstemmed mushroom, and what’s more, she has used thread that’s too light. I think about what she must have thought when I showed up at the door with the button in hand. She must have understood it was just an excuse. She cries.

I saw my father cry only twice. This doesn’t mean I never saw him in tears: he was a master at keeping his tears balanced on the rims of his lower lids, reabsorbing them, drinking them back with his eyes, as if he were crying on the inside. But there was no doubt that he cried, that this was his way of crying, and he cried only when he lost something important. (I didn’t see him, or I don’t remember him, when his parents died, because my grandfather was already dead when I was born and my grandmother died when I was three years old, but I’m sure that in both cases he cried that way.)

The first time I saw him cry was when he understood that he’d lost his business. In his office above the small factory, he was standing behind the desk and talking on the phone; it was one of those old gray desk phones, and the cord from the handset kept twisting up and forcing him to lean forward slightly, almost deferentially. I heard him repeating, “Thank you, thank you, I’m grateful, very grateful, you’re rescuing me, you’re very kind, thank you.” I remember the words very clearly for one simple reason: my mother was there too, standing between the door and the desk, between me and my father, and she was shaking her head vigorously, disapprovingly, and her disapproval was so theatrical and violent, her condemnation so strange (because my parents never argued, never: I never heard them fighting about anything serious or decisive, or for any frivolous reason) that it made my father’s words interesting — the banal phrases, the thanks (even that phrase “you’re rescuing me” could have been simply an expression, a rhetorical exaggeration, unusual though it was coming from my father, who never uttered a word that was fashionable or affected). My mother seemed to want to say that you should never thank anybody, ever, for any reason.

She shook her head hard; I saw her from behind, I saw my father in profile as I stood still in the doorway, breathing heavily, maybe because I had run up the stairs — even though, before getting to my father’s office, I must have gone to the office of Martino the accountant, a mysterious man who was always enveloped in the smoke from his two daily packs of cigarettes, buried amid his ledgers and invoices, flanked by his adding machine and his typewriter, his magical, monumental, musical instruments. He had an address book that snapped open to the right page after you slid the pointer to the letter you wanted. He had a sharpener with a spinning handle that could devour a whole pencil in just a few seconds. He had a paper-collating machine. He always gave me some kind of gift — the stump of a green eraser, a two-inch stub of pencil — or, when he had time, he would draft me a whole battalion of soldiers using three rows of letters on his typewriter:

I don’t remember whether Martino was in his office that day, whether I couldn’t find him or whether I stayed with him a while, as I usually did, in his little room next to my father’s room, and therefore whether my impression that I was panting when I got to my father’s door is just an imaginary detail that got tacked on to the memory later. Maybe I had gotten my breath back but lost it again as a result of the tension emanating from that scene: the simple arrangement of the players; the postures of their bodies — one spine bent forward (my father, in his shirtsleeves), one spine ramrod straight (my mother, with her coat and purse on her arm); the tone of my father’s words; my mother’s disapproval so vigorously expressed.

My father put the receiver back in the cradle and, without looking at my mother, walked around the desk and crossed the room and stopped in front of an open gray metal cabinet. For a few seconds he pretended to file away a folder that he’d carried from the cabinet to his desk, pretended to look for something else, and then, because my mother gave no sign of giving up and leaving, and because my father sensed that her outrage was increasing, and he didn’t want her to see him cry (I don’t think he had noticed me), he dropped all pretense and just stood there with his back to her, immobile before the cabinet.

That was when my mother said, “And thanking him, to boot!”

Without turning around, he responded feebly, “Yes — thanking him, to boot.”

Then he began banging his head against the cabinet, not very hard but making a huge noise (they’re really shoddy quality, those cabinets — every time you slide the door open the whole thing shudders as if it’s about to fall apart; they’re all in my basement now, holding my old files), doing it not to hurt himself but to drive my mother out, to present her with something embarrassing and new and too intimate, to frighten her into thinking he was going crazy (though it was really a very controlled craziness). Or maybe he simply felt like banging his head against the cabinet because he was in despair, he was finished, he was washed up: no more work, no more factory, failure, shame.