Andrea Canobbio - The Natural Disorder of Things

The week after Easter, I met with the bank directors to turn down their job, but they wouldn’t hear of it: they said they didn’t intend to make do with a “second best” designer, and they were willing to wait three or four months until I had finished the Renal garden. I pretended not to be happy about this, but I was happy — and how! — and, when I told Witold, I could see that he, too, was very pleased; he imagines that working for people who handle a lot of money will be to our advantage somehow, but I wouldn’t be so sure.

After a couple of weeks I presented Rossi with a project that was essentially the project for the data center, simply lifted and dragged into the perimeter of the Renal garden, stuffed into the outline there; it’s the kind of thing you can do only with a computer, and I’ll have to redesign it completely, but there’s plenty of time for that. Not that I didn’t already try, but I kept going back to what Rossi had said, the thing about the deafening silence and the car moving through the night, which in itself is a banal and senseless idea, a definition that could easily suit two opposite kinds of gardens, but I wasn’t willing to admit that, and so I was racking my brain to wring some deep meaning from it, with logic like “Deafening means it eliminates other sounds, it covers the whole aural field, the inside of the car is a closed space, separated from the outside, and yet open to the outside, but the windows act as frames, so your point of view is restricted, as it is by a photograph, and music does something similar, it erases sounds and substitutes melody for random noise, and the most important thing is the idea of the continuity of sound, but there’s also the idea of the fragmentation of images …” And I went on like this for hours, getting tangled up in my thoughts.

In mid-April we began the job. We had to prepare the terrain, saving some plants and the hedges, which I had no intention of uprooting, and sweeping away everything else. Witold, Jan, and I couldn’t do it alone; we always asked other people for help with the first part, and this time the others were two Moroccans who usually helped Witold’s bricklayer brother. We worked hard for ten days; the weather was good, and I wanted to finish the preparations before the beginning of May; we got to the Villa Renal at seven, and we would find the twins already waiting for us; during the day, when we least expected it, they would pop out of the bushes like the twins in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland ; we would stop promptly at midday and eat lunch in the shade of a pair of linden trees, talking and laughing; the Moroccans added a merry spirit, and they had funny stories to tell (some of them dirty); without them the two Poles can be lethal — depression and sulky faces — but when egged on in the right way, the Poles can also come up with funny stories, and even Witold made us laugh; at one o’clock every day I went up the slope to where Rossi awaited me, sitting at a table under one of the big umbrellas; then I’d eat a second time (at his table there was no chance of overeating); I never figured out whether he was putting on a show just for me — hadn’t he said that he didn’t eat at lunchtime? He told me about his commitment to the Renal Foundation; the charity projects, which needed tending and expanding, and then there were Alfredo’s writings to edit.

Often we were joined at the table by the assistant whom I’d met the first day; it felt like a century ago — everything had changed — but the impression she made on me hadn’t changed; sometimes your first impression is diabolically on target, and it’s almost worse, later, when it turns out you were right, when you have to recognize the terrible truth that you grasped the essence of another human being at first glance. Fortunately, though, I had completely misunderstood Rossi: he was not at all a shy recluse, cut off from daily life, as I’d thought; he seemed to be busy with all kinds of commitments, and he certainly knew more people than I did. From what I could tell, they were organizing a party to present a book by Alfredo Renal. The assistant was almost always walking around the terrace and talking on her cell phone, and she would come back to sit with us for just a few minutes, passing coded, allusive messages to Rossi, referring to people by their titles or professions. I made it a point of pride to ignore her, and I would slip into the silences in their conversation with my talk of plants and materials. She ignored me too, naturally, and I believe she was quite irritated by my presence at that little table, day after day. But she didn’t show it: she didn’t seem to notice me — it appeared that she didn’t even see me.

It’s terrible to think that people don’t see you. It was as if I’d become invisible when I grew fat. Women especially, it seemed, didn’t notice that I was around. Naturally I thought it could be my fault: maybe I was the one not noticing them when they noticed me. As if you win a woman not because she likes you — as if charm weren’t important, or any other virtue — as if it were actually a question only of intuition, of seizing the moment when her guard is down. It might have been true, but more likely it was just an excuse to justify my loneliness. All the same, I went on gazing at women, and every now and then I noticed one looking annoyed, which means that she’d noticed, maybe. Elisabetta Renal seemed to see me, but she had her own reasons.

In those early days working at the Villa Renal, I saw her rarely and only in passing. She wore different masks depending on the circumstances, but mostly she avoided me. When I ran into her by myself, she usually wore the frightened expression she’d had the night she appeared in my courtyard. When I was with the workers, she had an empty, lifeless expression, exactly like a plaster mask. When her husband was around, she was falsely cordial. She never gave me more than five minutes of her time, and after a few days I thought that maybe I’d finish the job and go back to my usual life and never see her again. Such an idea was completely intolerable, especially if it bubbled up late at night, when I was already feeling impatient and my muscles were tense. Wine alone wasn’t enough to chase it away; I needed a stronger antidote. Then Elisabetta would come back to me and get undressed and straddle me on the guest’s sofa.

One time I came across her by surprise on the terrace with her husband; they didn’t see me, and I couldn’t resist the temptation to spy on them: I hid behind the balustrade with my face wedged between two of the little columns. The scene troubled me because by this point I’d convinced myself, for my own pitiful personal reasons, that there was nothing between them anymore, that the dinner on April first had revealed the true status of their marriage, which was nothing more than a chilly, impatient cohabitation, and that at best they ignored each other, while at worst they poured glasses of water on the floor. But that day I saw Elisabetta Renal stroking Rossi’s hand tenderly, cradling it in her own hands almost as if it were a kitten. I was spellbound by his closed eyes, by the light kisses she scattered over the back of his hand.

When Rossi invited me, on one of the last days in April, to visit Alfredo Renal’s study, which he now used as his own, I didn’t imagine that he wanted to talk to me about his wife. I accepted out of mere courtesy, but he acted as if he were granting me some great privilege. An elevator rose up along the shady side of the house, within a glass cage; we went into the attic. The study was overrun with filing cabinets and shelves packed with books, and photographs and prints hung on every square inch of the walls. There was a faint scent of eucalyptus, probably from a humidifier that ran all winter. Hanging conspicuously above a broad walnut desk overflowing with papers was a map of Italy, with an odd distribution of the colors that usually differentiate the regions.