Andrea Canobbio - The Natural Disorder of Things

“Everything! Everything is connected to everything else; people like that, who don’t do anything, people who let themselves be manipulated—”

I interrupt him: “No, wait. Renal’s ideas were weirder than you think. He wrote books.”

“He never published any books.”

“But he did write stuff. Now Rossi has made a book out of Renal’s stuff, and he’s throwing a book party two weeks from now.”

“And you’re invited?”

“Yes.”

“So you’ll see them with your own eyes.”

“Who?”

“The people who hang around the foundation.”

“Okay. Then I’ll tell you all about it.”

“Yeah, right; you tell me things only once I’ve already discovered them. You ask questions without telling me anything, and then it turns out that you already knew everything … And you could have found this stuff for yourself: all you have to do is search online.”

“I thought you had other sources—”

“What kinds of sources do you expect me to have? Are you fucking with me?”

“No way.”

But now the silence is heavier. I wait and let him be the one to break it.

“Who is Rossi?”

“He’s the husband of Elisabetta Renal.”

“Are you hiding anyone else from me?”

“I haven’t hid anything from you; we talked about Rossi—”

“I thought he was a Renal too.”

“If his name is Rossi, then he can’t be a Renal.”

“Do you know about the massacre?”

“Yes, I know about it. In the War of Independence, in the 1840s.”

“Well, then there was another one too.”

“When?”

“In 1945, right after the war ended. People assassinated the owners of the estate, and their peasants. Fourteen people in all — ten adults and four children. Taken into the stables one by one to have their throats slit. The kids too. The killers were never caught.”

“It seems odd to me that there were two massacres … Do me a favor, look for—”

He interrupts me: “Okay, I’ll look, but then you have to tell me why you’re so interested—”

“I’m interested because they’re my clients.”

“So why is it that you’ve never asked me to do searches like this before?”

Finally he’s using a different tone. I laugh. “This time I’m more interested.”

“Does it have something to do with a black Ka?”

Pause. “Maybe.”

Pause. “And what if I discover that the Renals were complete fascists? What will you do — drop the job?”

I don’t answer.

Carlo sighs and says, “Okay, I’ll let you know.”

I put down the phone, thinking that I’d like to hug my brother. But if he were here, I wouldn’t hug him. There are some things brothers don’t do anymore, at our age.

I think about it again, a few days before the Renals’ party, when I’m in the city trying on a dark gray suit in a men’s shop downtown; the salesman marks it with pins beneath the collar, on the sleeves, at the waist, and the hem of the pants: it needs tailoring all over because I’m not a standard size. Every inch of the shop is lined with fake walnut paneling. I haven’t been in a store like this since Carlo’s wedding, when the bride’s parents insisted that at least the family members all wear jacket and tie, and I ended up buying a beige suit, which later went to the basement and was devoured by mice.

“Before offering you a selection of shirts, I’ll need to know something more about the occasion. Is it a wedding?”

“No, a party.”

“Then I’d opt for a stripe. A wide stripe or a narrow one — you could go either way. Would you like people to notice you?”

I look at him in the mirror to see whether he’s joking. No, he’s quite serious.

“Certainly,” I answer.

Statuesque and immobile in the mirror, I admire the profile of my belly in the three-button suit while the salesman flutters around me. When I walked into the shop and told him that I needed to be completely re-outfitted, top to toe, his face lit up; he’s a young guy, completely bald, with a knot in his tie more than four inches across. I’d suggested a double-breasted jacket at first, but he argued against it fervently, and he turned out to be right: the three-button model does me quite nicely.

The black shoes: the toe looks too square to me. I point it out, but he mishears me and gets it backward.

“I have a shoe that is even squarer. Shall I bring it out?”

Obviously not. I try this pair on and find that it’s very comfortable. I say so: “These are also very comfortable.” He doesn’t comment.

The tie: he explains how to make a knot like his. Is it necessary? Not only necessary, apparently, but crucial. It’s the most important thing.

He wants me to look in the mirror to see the overall effect. The overall effect is pure shit, in other words good. Would I like people to notice me? Certainly. Does it have something to do with a black Ka? Certainly. Because I actually have followed Elisabetta Renal. I know who she spends time with, I know the kind of clothes worn by the men she spends time with. I know who she sees in the evening, at night. But I don’t think I’ll go tell Rossi.

The first time, I didn’t have to lie in wait for her, I didn’t even mean to follow her, not in the morning, anyway, but we needed some fertilizer, and I heard the Ka driving away and I told Witold that I’d go buy it. She had a five-minute advantage; when I got out to the road I turned right, toward the plant nursery, and if she had gone the other way I would already have lost her. I sped up to catch her before she got to the other fork in the road, the one in front of the abandoned factory, and I was just in time to see her turn left; she was behind a blue van that must have slowed her down, helping me out. After half an hour, we were still on the same main road; there were three cars between us, and Elisabetta didn’t seem in a hurry: she didn’t try to pass but simply kept to her place in the line of cars, behind a Fiat Panda, like a well-behaved carriage in a train. Was she also reading the wooden billboards along the road — those affable and inoffensive wayfarers from another era that rose on the dusty shoulder to advertise Morpheus Mattresses and Beta Tools? And what was she thinking, what ideas was she spinning? In any case, I decided to phone Witold: I told him that I’d gotten a call from my mother, that she needed me, that I didn’t know if I’d get back to the villa before late afternoon. He stuttered something confusing, and it took me a second to realize that it was a famous quote for me to identify (“Be careful not to get mixed up in riots and not to raise your elbow too often”); I said I had a weak cell-phone signal, I couldn’t hear, I’d call him later.

Three times I was tempted to stop following her, and three times I ignored the temptation; my eyes were attached to the Ka with elastic bands, and I hadn’t felt so peaceful and relaxed in days — all I had to do was follow a woman who was cheating on her husband, maybe, and if at times I felt like turning around and going back (stopping off to see my mother for real, perhaps), it was only a reflection of the boredom of driving on a flat, straight road without any hope, at fifty miles an hour, when even the sky was cloudy, like a great curtain of pale gray flannel. I listened to the Trovatore that Witold had left — maybe on purpose — in the Mercedes. The landscape of the plain seemed even greener in that milky light; the leaves above the road whirled in the wake of each passing car, but the trees themselves didn’t get involved, and the whirling died down right away.

By the end of the hour-long drive, she had led me into the city; I smiled about the time I’d wasted, childlike, and I had the same feeling I’d had on the days I played hooky from school. I waited with my motor running beneath a row of horse-chestnut trees while Elisabetta parked her car, paid the attendant, and displayed the receipt on her dashboard. Then she headed for a building that had a dark wood door with shining brass knobs, pushed a buzzer, and went in. This, I thought, will be the first and last time I follow her.