Andrea Canobbio - The Natural Disorder of Things

At that point my mother turned to go, and when she saw me she wasn’t at all annoyed, as I had feared (had she asked me to wait for her in the courtyard?) — she was too annoyed with my father; she took my hand, and we went down the stairs and outside. I didn’t expect any explanation, and I don’t think she had any intention of giving me an explanation, but when we were at the gate of the little furniture factory, when she realized what our family was losing, she bent down and said softly but angrily, “Conti. Remember that name.” At first her tone made me think she was scolding me, but then I understood that she was talking about the person Papa had been speaking to on the phone.

And we went home. I don’t remember if I asked for any explanation, if I wanted to know why I should remember that name. I probably said nothing, I probably thought that Mamma and Papa had simply had a fight, and that was a curious novelty (I was most curious about my father’s reaction, his hitting his head against the cabinet; I thought about it a lot, and it often made me laugh), but the fight didn’t worry me — it couldn’t last; and I was right, it didn’t last.

Two things about that scene strike me now: the fluke that put me there to witness it, and my mother’s agitation, which made me into the keeper of a memory.

We rarely went to see my father at the office; even though the plant wasn’t far from home, we weren’t supposed to disturb him, which is why Carlo was so obsessed with Papa’s work that he forced me and Fabio to play in a pretend factory where he was the boss (I threw it back at him later when he tried to indoctrinate us with his revolutionary rhetoric), and I was Martino the accountant (I had gotten myself a datebook and an address book, and I smoked fake cigarettes made of paper), and Fabio was supposed to be the workman, but really he just kept on playing his own games: making long lines of toy cars (Carlo called this “the assembly line”) or Lego buildings (“the construction site”). Fabio didn’t explicitly refuse to take on the job that Carlo assigned to him; he just ignored the boss’s orders and went on doing whatever he wanted to do, and Carlo (I now see) was intimidated by this attitude and tried to turn it to his advantage by reinterpreting and renaming Fabio’s games, annexing them to his own. I’m still envious nowadays when I think about Fabio and his extraordinary ability to isolate himself, thus making other people create justifications for him and invent a useful role for him in the common game. (One day I had the amazing thought that maybe I believe I’m doing the same thing with my gardens, but I’m not sure.)

And even when my mother stopped by the furniture factory to tell my father something urgent, it didn’t mean we were allowed to go up to the offices; in good weather she left us in the courtyard to play with the two German shepherds, and in bad weather she entrusted us to one of the workmen, and we’d spend half an hour hypnotized by a piece of wood turning in the lathe. But kids take unpredictable and mysterious turns when they’re playing, and the flukes that lead them in one direction rather than another are completely random (Filippo and Momo buzz around like flies), and who knows why on that day I turned up at that moment in that point in space, who knows what I’d been thinking just a moment earlier, who knows what I was doing, what I was planning to do, what had happened to me two hours before, how I spent the following day, what I was doing two months later at the same time, what I thought when I heard that the factory was bankrupt, that my father had failed and was bankrupt, that he was “a failure”? It’s a mystery; I’ll never know: the telephone scene, the scene of my father’s despair, my mother’s words going home — these memories have erased all the rest. But I was there, I was a person, I tell myself occasionally, I was thinking about other things: about comics with Mickey Mouse and superheroes, about the toys I wished I had (a Gung-Ho rifle, a Lima train set, a Graziella leopard), about Carlo bossing me around, about Fabio not being our brother, about the piano that I didn’t want to learn to play because it was sad — I was there, I was a person with my own life, and I recall almost nothing about that life because everything was erased by my father’s crying; but I do recall, as I’ve said, that later when I thought about him hitting his head I laughed hard, and I never told my brothers about what I’d seen.

I didn’t even tell them about what I’d heard when my mother spoke to me. I never said that I had to remember the name Conti, I never shared my mission with them. It was a name for me, not others, to remember. I was the keeper of the memory. And I kept it well: I remembered the name, even though I never heard it spoken again by anyone, and never saw it in print until at least twenty-five years later.

Last year I read in the paper about an investment company under investigation for usury; its president was named Conti. I collected every possible article about the affair. Conti defended himself by saying he was the victim, maintaining that the magistrates were persecuting him because of his ties to a certain political faction. I was very interested in this Conti’s life for a short time: I followed him around and spied on him. A few months after I began trailing him, I witnessed his death in the parking lot of a mini-mall. But I’m not exactly sure that it was the same Conti, and I have no intention of asking my mother. And I’m not sure the subject interests me anymore.

The second time I saw my father cry was the night Fabio died.

A gray and rusty blockhouse next to a subdivision of little houses protected by hatred; long cars spilling out of garages built for families with lower incomes than this; and Pharaonic sidewalks never touched by human feet — sidewalks of asphalt (because around here, in the 1970s, asphalt was seen as wall-to-wall carpeting for the outdoors). It was a little factory, or a warehouse, built with blunt martial angles and bellicosities, reinforced cement and arrow slits, and maybe with skylights on the roof that couldn’t be seen from the street. There must still have been a watchman’s family living inexplicably in an annex, or the owners lived there, despairing of ever selling the place or renting it out — using it to store garden tools seemed like a waste, knocking it down would cost too much, and anyway, why? But they hadn’t lost faith in the future: they had procreated, and they hung out little blue jumpsuits with the other laundry in the courtyard — the kid will grow up with an idea of decayed greatness, and some corner of his mind will always have an image of the abandoned factory, the place where they never let him go play. Childhood memories: a big space that can be neither used nor demolished.

Just as I did the last time, I stop to spy on the factory; this time I do it to calm myself down, but it’s my tenth attempt to get calm: each attempt starts off well but ends quickly, leaving me even more agitated than before. At home, I spent an hour in front of the mirror trying to hide the fact that I couldn’t close my jacket anymore, and with all my fiddling and pressing on the button my mother had sewn, I think I made it stick out even farther: it looks like it’s about to pop off again; it seems bigger than the others. Looking at myself in the mirror, I pushed my spine farther and farther back, hunched over to bring the two sides of the jacket closer together, scrunched my arms up into the sleeves, and tried to flatten my stomach, but that was the hardest thing of all — it was impossible. When my hands were in my pockets and my arms tight against my body, I managed to give the impression (especially in profile) that the jacket could be closed. I look at myself now in the rearview mirror, and the interior light shows the true shape of my eyes — sad, unpleasant, framed pitilessly by the horizontal mirror; at home I didn’t feel I was so poorly built … my mouth and my nose might be okay, but my eyes do me in, together with the extra weight I’m carrying, which adds fat to my cheeks and under my chin.