Andrea Canobbio - The Natural Disorder of Things

I almost don’t notice that Rossi has begun to talk again:

“ … Yes, she likes to drive at night … I used to go with her myself … the movement of the car, the music, moving through the towns and the countryside … even without music, there’s a kind of deafening silence … and there’s no risk of seeing too much, of getting caught up in some detail … you just want to keep going forward … things suddenly appear out of the night, for an instant, as if they’re going to be there forever … and even the most banal things — the ugliest things — look marvelous when they appear and disappear immediately … Mr. Fratta, have you ever thought that, before the invention of the car, nobody could experience such a thing?”

“No … actually … But how would one make a garden for—” I stop short: I’ve already had an idea.

“Maybe we’re asking too much of you.” Rossi smiles.

“No,” I say, and before I can stop myself I’ve invented another phrase: “There’s no such thing as asking too much.”

There’s no such thing as asking too much? Wrong: people always ask too much.

“Listen,” Elisabetta Renal said then. “Maybe I really don’t know what kind of garden I want. But I’m sure about one thing: whatever it is, you’ll know how to make it.”

And without giving me any time to thank her for her faith in me, without checking to see whether her husband was watching or whether the servant was nearby, she held her plate out to me: the slice of meat and the three chunks of potato, all intact though probably cold. The plate slowly skimmed over the centerpiece and hovered in midair for five seconds. I felt myself blush with shame; my arm weighed two tons — I couldn’t lift it. Finally I managed to take the plate, in silence; I laid it on top of my own and started eating again, with downcast eyes.

Carlo never found himself a girl who liked cooking, a girl who deliberately used the age-old strategy of getting to a man’s heart through his stomach; indeed, he was never really satisfied with any woman. Occasionally I thought that if he’d found such a girl he would have ended up differently: if he’d found a woman who was simple in every way but had an incredible gift for inventing a complicated dish every night that would make him forget everything else; a short, ugly wife with no tits or ass, an exceptional cook whose dinners would leave him speechless and untormented by desire — because that was more or less the problem. His first serious girlfriend didn’t even know how to mix mint syrup into water: I clearly remember that she put too much mint in her drinks. Cecilia belongs to an even more dangerous category — she’s an experimenter: she thinks that cooking should be inventive, and she pairs flavors that are irreconcilable and tastes that clash, and then expects everyone to applaud the audacity of the inedible results. But that’s not to say she doesn’t have other virtues.

Now I myself filled that ideal feminine role during the weekends when my brother and the kids came to stay with me, because I would spend long hours developing meals for them. They arrived on the evening after my dinner at the Renals’ (Carlo had the kids over Easter weekend) and stayed until Monday; we even saw their grandmother on Sunday — she didn’t cry in front of them. I made a prosciutto foam, an oven-baked pasta gratin, and turkey breast cooked in milk and pancetta. Except at mealtime, Carlo spent all three days in front of the TV, watching the news updates and the special reports and the written crawl of the teletext, and even asked me if he could go online to look for more news. Better than nothing, I thought: at least he’s interested in something, even though he seemed as inanimate as before. Two or three times I came close to asking him if he had ever heard of someone named Alfredo Renal, but I didn’t want to break the spell of his wan curiosity about the world that began when the bombing did — and maybe I wasn’t sure I wanted to know anything more about Renal.

So I play war games with the kids and take them to see Malik’s dogs; Durga has recovered and is in great shape: I’ve been hearing her barking again in the last few days, and burbling with happiness, especially late at night, as if she’s glad it’s nighttime and she’s expecting some male dog to hear her and hurry over to keep her company. We also see one of the two new dachshund puppies — Malik holds it in his arms; it should be striped like its parents, but the markings aren’t visible yet. Filippo doesn’t buy it, though; things in his universe are divided into groups — big (fathers), medium-sized (mothers), and small and insignificant (children). For example, there are cars, motorcycles, and bicycles. Soccer balls, baseballs, and marbles. So the puppies will never have stripes, he says, until they themselves become fathers and mothers. Malik starts to ask for an explanation, but I signal him to let it drop.

As usual, though, Durga was the highlight of the visit; she can always hypnotize the kids. On our way home we stopped again to look at her, in her pen, from above. The path that runs up diagonally through the chestnut woods and ends at my back door starts here, on the property where the famous photographer built his breeding farm. I cordially dislike the famous photographer, and I think he dislikes me; we’re nothing more than civil to each other … maybe he’s annoyed that I’m friendly with Malik and not with him; the problem is that I don’t like his obsession with breeding stripes into all kinds of dogs, his absurd quest for the perfect mix — the striped Doberman, the striped dachshund, the striped Shar-Pei (that experiment was a failure). But I do have to admit that he treats them very well: the pens are immense, and for Malik it’s a sort of paradise on earth (until two years ago he was working in a barn somewhere, looking after thirty cows), and coming here with the kids has become indispensable for me — I couldn’t possibly invent anything better to engage them, especially when they’re with me for three days.

I made Filippo promise that he would never venture alone into the woods to come look down on Durga’s pen like this; I don’t think he has the courage for it, but one time even I nearly rolled down the bluff — despite my knowing this underbrush like the back of my hand, because I’ve gone back and forth so often (sometimes, instead of eating, I’ve tramped around in the weeds to keep myself from thinking too much). We stood and watched Durga trot frenetically and yet somehow phlegmatically along the horseshoe curve of reinforced glass, swinging back and forth like a living pendulum. The limestone overhang where we were standing acts as the fourth wall of the enclosure; the dog can’t climb it, since even the feline hadn’t been able to. Durga’s pen had originally been built for Julio, a beautiful, arrogant ocelot, when the photographer had a passion for actual tigers (before moving on to tiger-striped dogs) and was trying to set up a small zoo. But Julio died of boredom after a year — boredom or loneliness.

“How can you stand being here alone all the time?” Before Carlo met Cecilia, he had lived with me in the farmhouse for two years. He wasn’t a guest: he paid the bills, so to speak. I remembered the feeling of being in the house and hearing someone else moving from room to room, opening drawers, turning on faucets; the feeling of coming home and finding someone there; it was a pleasant feeling, and sometimes I wondered if it was always pleasant, no matter who your housemate was, and each time I’d tell myself, No, of course not … But then, after a few days, I’d be asking myself the same question again, or some variation on it. Like: when my father came home, was he happy to find my mother there (and vice versa)? That was ten years ago, and when Carlo lived with me I was someone else — I worked as a gardener, our father had recently died — and physically I was someone else too: a stranger, an unknown. Thin.