Andrea Canobbio - The Natural Disorder of Things

But the very certainty that I’ve lost before I start impels me to turn the engine back on again and pushes me up the road; my headlights grab the blacktop and pull it in from the thick darkness of the hills, and then the road slides away under my wheels like the treadmill in a gym, and I toss the darkness over my shoulders the way a mole tosses back the earth he’s dug up, and then I pass under the brick arch at the entrance to the property and down into the dusty valley, under the dark, sad green trees, and then I remember that I should piss now to avoid asking to use the bathroom before dinner. I get out, walk around the car looking for some bushes, and decide to stand in front of the headlights — I don’t want to risk wetting my pants and my shoes and then show up at the house spattered with droplets. I piss right in the middle of the street, pleased by my stream sparkling in the light of the high beams.

When I came out of the tunnel of plane trees and arrived at the villa, I braked abruptly before a bundled-up figure who gestured that I should pull over to the side — I saw him only at the last minute and nearly ran him over. It was one of the groundskeepers, the gardener or the hunter (I didn’t remember anymore which one’s hair was shorter in the back, and which had the longer sideburns), and he was wearing — I realized as soon as I got out of the car — a dark green loden coat that was two or three sizes too big for him, buttoned up to his neck and reaching almost to his ankles. He welcomed me and said that my hosts were expecting me; his face was a stony mask, utterly normal. We did not go up the road to the knoll: instead he led me along the glass wall of the garage-greenhouse toward a little door half hidden by a climbing plant.

We entered the basement level of the house, and my guide halted uncertainly for a moment, as if he expected me to ask something and wanted to give me time to speak up. I had no intention of taking off my jacket, even though it looked dreadful. But he pointed to a small toilet where the door was ajar and the light was on and said, “If you’d like to wash your hands …” For a moment I thought this was what people did in truly elegant houses — that guests were always invited to wash their hands in the basement before going up to the main floor to sit at the table — but no, this was impossible. I didn’t want to irritate him, though, seeing that I’d treated him badly the first time we met (if it was actually he and not his brother), so I thanked him and washed my hands.

We go up two narrow flights of stairs and reach the entrance hall. I can’t square my impression of the exterior with the room that I’m in now. On the inside it’s clearly an old house, from the door frames, terra-cotta floor, and ceiling decorations to the antique furniture and the paintings in their gilded frames. I can give it only a quick glance, because a few steps take us to the threshold of a room where I can hear a fire crackling in the fireplace: we’re in the drawing room and standing in front of Rossi, who’s seated before the hearth in his wheelchair. This time he smiles at me immediately, and I smile back; he shakes my hand—“What a pleasure to see you again”—and invites me to sit in the small armchair next to him. Everything is carefully arranged at just the right distance, we’re at the same height, so that I don’t feel he’s towering over me (as I would if I were sunk into a lounge chair), or that I’m towering over him (as I would if I had chosen a stiff side chair). This skill in anticipating what the guest will do in order to put him at ease fills me with gratitude toward the master of the house, but then — I think immediately — on many occasions that same kind of consideration has gotten on my nerves and made me loathe other hosts. The fact is, I like Rossi; I like his wife, but I like him too, though in his case I don’t quite understand the reason why.

“It seemed like spring was here,” he says, “and instead the cold weather has come back.”

The weather, the climate, the rain and the sun, the hot and the cold, unseasonal oddities and seasonal suitability — whoever invented the idea of conversations about weather gave us a huge gift; what a blessing it is to be able to talk about the weather, that bottomless well of conversation … what a relief.

“You don’t find it chilly, with just your jacket? Would you like us to lend you a sweater?”

If I put on a sweater, I probably wouldn’t even be able to slide the jacket back on. “It’s strange,” I say. “I never got cold even before I grew this fat; I’ve never felt the cold …”

“Oh, come now, you’re not fat …”

I cross my legs and let myself slide down a bit in the armchair; I like the sound of his voice, I like the plaid blanket that covers his legs and makes him look like a peaceful passenger on a cruise along the Riviera. I listen to him talk about a scientific theory that links human endurance to memory: it says that any human being can tolerate the heat of the desert as well as the Tuaregs do, or the cold of a polar ice pack as well as the Eskimos do, as long as he has a mental image, a memory of himself in a certain situation; he has to persuade himself … just as you can persuade yourself not to feel pain while walking on hot coals … and indeed it’s been proved that … I’m not following him anymore, just admiring the way he pronounces his words and the modulations of his voice.

From where I’m sitting, I can see two large paintings facing each other across the room, country scenes of torpid calm: insignificant, invisible. To the right of the fireplace, half hidden by a Chinese vase that’s been outfitted with a shade and turned into a lamp occupying most of the surface of a small desk, is a late-nineteenth-century portrait of a young man with a drooping mustache and wild eyes — too much white showing in the eyeballs, a naïve artist’s mistake, I think. Next to the portrait is a more interesting painting of a country house covered with climbing plants and surrounded by a dense forest of emerald green leaves; it has a dark and mysterious atmosphere, and the road that should run up to the house is closed off with a drystone wall. Is the house abandoned? Is it the house that once stood here, before it was demolished, even though they kept the furnishings, the moldings and the door frames and window frames? I squint to pick some details out of the painting’s dimness, to cut the glare of the Chinese lamp reflected off the oil-paint surface. I get the sudden feeling that Rossi wants to strike me, as punishment for my distraction, and I dodge fearfully.

As he continues speaking, he raises his hand, and in the darkness at the other end of the room a doorjamb obeys him, breaking loose from the wall; it becomes solid, as if sucking in atoms from the space around it — it gathers shape and volume from the air and the light — and it becomes a human body stepping toward us. It’s the hunter, or the gardener, in servant’s clothing, carrying a tray and serving us glasses of port. I hadn’t seen him when I walked in: he must have been standing motionless and rigid in that spot ever since I came, an iguana on a rock.

I sip at my port and slowly begin to grasp that we’re not necessarily waiting for Elisabetta Renal, that this is not a friendly prelude to the dinner, that we’ve already begun; Rossi is already communicating to me what he thinks it’s important for me to know, saying that I have to see the photos in an album, that he has to explain the story of “this” family, that he and Elisabetta have debts toward the past, and that — no matter what he and his wife might wish — the garden has to take into account the duties each of them has, it has to marry their wishes and their duties; and I shake my head, because unions have never been my specialty: I’m no good at compromises. Rossi misreads me, thinking that I don’t understand.