Andrea Canobbio - The Natural Disorder of Things

I took two steps toward the bed. When I heard her shut the door, I turned to see what she intended to do.

“Why did you follow me?”

It was the first time she used the familiar tu with me. She wasn’t talking about this evening: she wasn’t asking why I’d followed her into the twins’ room. She wouldn’t have used that tone.

“Tell me why,” she repeated.

“No.”

Maybe she expected me to account for it, or to make up some story. She stiffened. Then she smiled. She approached the pillows, picked up one of the pairs of pajamas, and rumpled it.

“Just one. It’ll drive them crazy.”

“Come,” she added after a moment.

She took me into a little room where there was a character dressed like me, sitting on a swivel chair in front of a pyramid of small TV monitors; Elisabetta completely ignored him. “Alberto had these cameras installed for our security,” she said. She pointed to a screen. In the greenish aquarium of the infrared picture, one of the twins could be seen, dressed as a hunter, patrolling around the cistern. On other monitors, I recognized the garden we were building, seen from various angles, and some stretches of the entrance driveway: more or less the spot where I ran over the dog the first day and, yes, the spot where I had pissed that evening when I came to dinner.

I said I understood. The security guard shot me a suspicious look.

Elisabetta was hypnotized by the monitors. They must have spoken to her somehow, spoken of a prison that she had to flee from — or maybe not, maybe that was just what I’d hoped.

“We have to go back up,” she said finally.

As soon as we got outside she abandoned me, and I found myself standing with Receding Hairline and his aquiline nose and pale eyes, along with the small, solid type I’d also met at the Blue Dahlia. Elisabetta was leaving me in good hands, she said, while she had to go sit in the front row. Receding Hairline was Mr. Mosca, and the other was named Giletti, but Giletti was a sort of shadow: he always stood silent and half hidden behind Mosca. We three sat down near the balustrade, waiting for Rossi and an eminent mustachioed historian to take their places on the dais to talk about Alfredo Renal’s book. The atmosphere had changed: the guests were whispering now instead of chattering loudly, and they’d put down their plates and glasses and composed their expressions as if at a funeral.

At first I hardly listened to Mosca, because I was so offended that Elisabetta had left me in the lurch this way: I’d been having fun like a little kid when she suddenly shattered the toy, and then, to top it all off, she had left me with her lover, if that was what he was — if not, who was he? He was a guy who talked like Rossi, and I could have listened to him, too, for days without registering a word, just for the pleasure of hearing him talk, watching his gestures, admiring the confidence they expressed. I think he was asking me to design a hanging garden for him, for his penthouse in the city, or else he asked me later — maybe early on in the conversation he was just telling me how much he loved plants, and I was nodding, trying hard to stay pinned to the center of my seat instead of slumping over.

At a certain point he begs my pardon and says that he didn’t catch my name. I pull out a business card, and he begins to mutter, “Fratta, Fratta, Fratta,” as if he’s praying, fingering the beads on a rosary. I feel a warm breeze stroking my face, like when you’re driving with the window open, in summer, and you slow down for a red light and a backwash of warm air floods the car and envelops you. Everything around us slows down, we brake, the temperature rises.

“Did you used to be an interior designer? For some reason I associate your name with furniture.”

His heavy words drop into the pond of my attention and sink quickly; I hear the thud and the splash, and I feel the concentric waves that fan out and break against my temples, the stab of a migraine.

Now I’m perfectly sober. I straighten my spine and turn toward him slightly. I smile at him.

“No, I’ve never done interior design. Always only plants and gardens.”

I consider asking him right away whether he knew my father, if he remembers Fratta Furniture. Instead I say, “And what do you do?”

“I’ve done a lot of different things … I went from finance to politics, but I got fed up with that — it was too difficult, and now I do market research. And in my free time I help out the Renal Foundation.”

“What kind of research?”

“Mainly for credit card companies.”

“So you’re still dealing with money after all …”

He smiles. “Yes, you’re right; I pretend that I’ve changed fields, but it’s still about money. I used to deal with it in the traditional way — bringing it together, moving it around, making interest on it. Now I report on people’s buying habits, I sell databases …”

“And are those databases reliable?”

“Shh,” he said, and gestured to say that the conversation could continue later.

The eminent historian tapped the microphone twice with his finger, shot a sardonic look at the audience — an expression of deep hatred mixed with a comedian’s grimace — and began to read his text. Giletti pulled a microscopic video camera from his pocket to film it all.

I wasn’t able to pay attention because I had too much new information to file away, a jumbled mass of clues in my head that needed cataloging.

And anyway I knew what we were about to be told, since the speech more or less followed the introduction to the book written by the same eminence, which I had read. This collection of Alfredo Renal’s essays was only the first volume in a series. It was a selection of his writings on urbanism and sociology.

“—but the great cancer devouring the flatlands, the scattered ‘exurban city,’ is a mixed-up sprawl of residential, industrial, and agricultural areas, a structure with no beauty, no order, and no hierarchy—”

Hierarchy was the saintly Alfredo’s real fixation. But I was thinking about another hierarchy, about a hierarchy that might exist; I was thinking things like: What if one person had another behind him, and that person had another one behind him, and so on into infinity? Then the remembering would never stop — there would be no end to the effort required of the people who have to do the remembering, even if they preferred to forget.

“—and without hierarchy, space is simply anarchic, and anarchy is above all an absence of civility: consumer culture devours our souls — our Western culture is based on Greek philosophy and Christian religion, but consumer culture rocks our environment first, erasing our traditions, our style, our roots—”

And I was thinking about how far I had come with my memories weighing me down, how far I’d walked on the earth, in the mud, over the dry leaves in the woods, even when I spent hours walking in order not to think, even then, my boots sank half an inch deeper; even though I wasn’t as fat as I am now, I sank under the weight of those memories, my past like heavy ballast in my head.

“—the old town centers, full of charm and history, are disappearing, our lovely countryside is being blotted out by suburbs, getting mixed up and patchy like the hide of a sick animal … the villages and the crops of our beautiful Italy … and the flatlands turn into a headless body, where, instead of town centers, we have only ‘shopping centers,’ ‘exercise centers,’ ‘meat centers,’ ‘used-car centers’—centers for nomadic communities, centers for consumers, for people without any history and without any joy—”

My thoughts were winding like long, voracious snakes, tangled and sinuous but running only one way, like the garden mazes you can’t get lost in because they’ve got only one entrance and one exit and no forking paths: I knew where my life began and ended, and I knew the flavor of the poison.