Andrea Canobbio - The Natural Disorder of Things

I head up the knoll to look for Rossi and thank him for inviting me, but when I get to the top, I instantly wish I were elsewhere. Many faces turn toward me and look me up and down, and many backs of heads remain indifferent to my arrival; there are too many people here crowded together, and I feel like roaring and tearing someone to shreds. Like this waitress, for example, who approaches with a tray of champagne flutes but no intention of offering one to me. She asks me if I need anything, because otherwise I should wait down below. At first I don’t understand, and some guests look at me blankly, neutrally. “There is a possible upside, though,” remarks someone behind me, “the man is solid, he’s there.”

I say that I’m looking for Mr. Rossi so I can thank him for inviting me, that I’m Claudio Fratta and I designed the new garden (gesturing toward the far side of the house).

The waitress flushes, blurts an apology, and flees. I’m left without any champagne. For a moment the crowd looks like a gigantic tree full of forking branches, and you think that the only way to explore it is by passing from one person to another, from one conversation to another, mapping it with the agility of a clever monkey — not like the elephant you are, with great gray cylindrical legs, unbudgeable blocks of reinforced concrete. “We have to be realistic about it: he’s not completely on the right side,” says a guest. Someone has attached two halogen floodlights near the second-floor windows, and the blinding white beam flattens all the guests to the ground, making halos of their hair and casting dark shadows across their eyes.

I go around to the back of the house, slalom between the flaming terra-cotta pots of citronella, brush past the buffet — this time they pulled out all the stops, but I ate dinner anyway before coming, to be on the safe side. At the far end of the terrace are a bunch of heads standing high above the rest, and for an instant I wonder whether they’re all members of a very tall family, but that’s because I forgot about the dais set up for the presentation of the book: the twins built it over the last few days. And I finally see Rossi, signing copies of Alfredo Renal’s book; I’ve already been given a complimentary copy. I don’t approach; Elisabetta must be next to him, blocked by some guests’ backs: I see only her hand resting on her husband’s shoulder.

After the longest five minutes of the evening, Elisabetta steps away, and I manage to approach. Rossi greets me, smiling. “How elegant!”

I just look at him.

“Why are you making that face?” He says that he wasn’t poking fun at me, that I’m the other star of the evening, apart from the book itself. “Do you know how many guests have already told me they want to meet you?”

No, I don’t know.

“I took the liberty of displaying your project, down there—”

I turn around, incredulous, and see a cluster of people studying the blueprint for the garden I designed for the bank’s data center: it’s standing on a large easel like a painter’s unfinished picture.

Strengthened by a few Bellinis mixed by the bartender, I spent half an hour describing the details of the plantings and paving and rocks and lighting; I don’t generally like to talk about my ideas, not even with clients, but I would have revealed my most important professional secrets if these people had asked me to. I went on talking and drinking, casually reaching out to take a glass from the tray each time a waitress came near; I must have had ten or twelve. I was beginning to feel like a mangy old bear performing at a town fair (in his childhood, my grandfather looked forward to the moment when the itinerant bear tamer would say, “Do what the mountain bears do,” and the beast would obediently, wearily stand upright) when Elisabetta Renal appeared before me, shining like a figure in a dream, like Cinderella at the ball — wearing a dress of red silk I would never forget, with a black shawl covering her bare back and shoulders — and took me by the hand, saying she was rescuing me from the curious throng because the risotto was being served.

Before the alcohol suddenly wore off, I staggered around the party, letting myself be towed by the hostess, mumbling some blather in response to questions that seemed to me to be (and perhaps actually were) increasingly stupid. (“But how do you come up with your ideas?” I don’t come up with ideas: ideas live in my brain, they’ve pitched their tents inside me like nomads on the steppes of the Caucasus; I don’t summon them, they’re already there, and they bounce around without paying me any attention, they live their primitive life and I watch them from afar.)

People looked at me and smiled, for some reason; I could no longer pronounce certain consonants, my tongue refused to tap against my palate or my teeth, and my voice was drowning in a dull, distant buzz. But Elisabetta Renal was laughing and looking at me merrily: I made her forget her fear, and that was what kept me standing; otherwise I would have let go and shut my eyes and dropped to the ground in the crowd, curling up to sleep in a flower bed. Actually, there was one specific spot that I wanted to disappear into, and it was a square inch of Elisabetta’s skin, a soft, white, tender spot.

I didn’t make a good impression. Thinking back on it, I realized I could have signed up some new clients (Witold would criticize me for that later), and the client that I picked up shortly afterward didn’t count, because it wasn’t my doing. At a certain point Elisabetta grasped my necktie, tugging on it like the pull chain of an old toilet so that I had to lean toward her, and murmured in my ear that the knot was dreadful; I didn’t need to be told twice — I felt as if I had a cowbell hanging from my neck — so I undid the knot and slipped the tie into my pocket. I began to moo, and, since that made Elisabetta laugh, I went on to bark at a woman’s back, and then I growled and startled another woman. I can’t establish exactly the order of the events that followed the animal noises. I know only that I spilled a Bellini on my shirt, and right after that I overturned a plate of risotto on my hostess’s arm, and that she laughed, her eyes tearing up (maybe partly because she was scalded). We went into the house to clean up.

The kitchen was bustling. She must have been drinking too — I hadn’t noticed — or maybe it was her laughter that destabilized her: she leaned against my arm while I cleaned my shirt with a wet towel, and my own knees were out of control, so I had to find something solid to hold on to. Talking about animals made me think of the twins; I hadn’t seen them all evening, and I did an imitation of their usual look, a stunned and perplexed expression — the kind of imitation that’s terribly difficult unless you’re drunk.

Elisabetta asked me if I’d ever seen where they slept.

“Are they somewhere else tonight?”

She shook her head. “They’re here.”

“Then I don’t want to see,” I told her. Even drunk, I thought that would be too much, but she had taken my hand and I didn’t have the strength to resist that pressure, to resist the red silk dress and what it hid. We went down the stairs to the ground floor, behind the greenhouse, Elisabetta leading the way to the twins’ apartment, and I following her naked back above all, the movement of her hips, and the tiny toes that peeked out, rosy and perfect, from her sandals. At that moment, if I had a choice, I would have taken her feet instead of her décolleté as my pillow.

She threw open a door and turned on the lights, and I saw a big brass double bed, two marble-topped night tables, a crucifix centered over the bed, and blue-striped pajamas folded on each of the two pillows. I wasn’t laughing anymore. Elisabetta watched me with a bright look.