Andrea Canobbio - The Natural Disorder of Things

“—because supermarkets were first conceived as miniaturizations of the old town center, and then they became the model for the exurban city. The exurban city is a dissemination of the metaphor of the supermarket … and it’s a model imposed on us from outside, there’s nothing Italian about it—”

Two for the price of one … Why hadn’t I ever thought of that? I knew perfectly well why. Because one was more than enough. But it turned out that there were at least two of them, if not more — did I have to discover them all? Or was there a limit to remembering? Three, four — how many names were required to make sure the memory was saved, to make sure it was left in good hands?

“—we move through the world as if we’re walking the aisles of a supermarket, we pick things off the shelf — life and people and human bargains — as if everything had a price and we could appropriate anything just by paying for it at the cash register. What a terrible moral lesson Alfredo Renal teaches us!”

Everyone’s head was nodding: some agreeing, some drowsing. I’ve always liked supermarkets, but I know some people hate them. Carlo, for one, even though he hasn’t got much in common with Renal. He doesn’t like me to take the kids to the mall too often, though they have as much fun there as they do at the amusement park.

After twenty minutes I leaned toward Mosca and asked him what he thought.

“A genius,” he whispered. “Renal was a genius.”

It didn’t seem like he was joking.

I went on observing him from the corner of my eye.

When I drove around with my father and he told me (not at any length, but with brief references and gestures, without wasting any words, without repeating himself) how places had changed, what old factories had been replaced by new ones, who had sold their businesses and who had bought them, it felt like he was talking about a friend or some other living organism; he talked about these flatlands as if he were talking about a person he’d observed since childhood, and even now he saw the traces of the child in the grown man, he knew all its virtues and defects and accepted them all. Remembering was actually a pleasure for him, not just a pastime: preserving the traces of the metamorphosis, reconstructing the small-scale history of the land through the genealogy of names and things. The land was an animal that sloughed off its skin every season, but it couldn’t turn into an entirely different beast: the limit to its mutation was written into its genetic code. And being a citizen of the plain meant knowing that code (which could never be taught; even if you had a more loquacious father, you had to learn it yourself).

After his accident, he lost all his curiosity. Coming home at night, I would tell him that I’d noticed work being done on some road, or a For Sale sign on some villa, but he didn’t listen to me — he no longer cared. Now it was my turn to point to places and say, “Do you remember?” when I took him to the hospital for a checkup, or to visit my uncle and aunt, or to the city to see Carlo. I would show him a building being demolished and say, “This was the place where that guy made cabinet handles for you, right?” or “Am I crazy, or did this road use to run behind the town, on the other side of the canal?” He would shake his head and not answer.

“Maybe it happens to everyone when they get old,” I said to Carlo.

Carlo got angry. “It doesn’t happen to everyone when they get old, the old people figured it out a while ago, but Papa has always been slow.” He maintained that at some point the changes in the landscape got too frenetic for his memory to keep up with. Places had always preserved their identities despite all the changes, but at a certain point this had failed. Now places did their best to be unrecognizable; they camouflaged themselves as if to confuse an invading army. Nowadays people fished for their dreams in a different imaginative pool; there were spores free-falling to earth from distant planets; there were sponges that could absorb any current.

One time Carlo explained to me why our father had lost his factory. “The idea that someone, some bad person, ruined him isn’t important — that’s just a fairy tale circulated in the family to preserve the patriarch’s honor; it could even be true, maybe someone made him fail intentionally, and if so, so what? Why should the world have been more generous with our father? Just because he was a serious and sober person, just because he was a fair-minded and energetic entrepreneur? Come on, no one gets a break if he screws up; that’s been true since the dawn of humankind. Filippo Fratta paid the price for his own mistake — and what was his mistake? He didn’t grasp that between 1965 and 1975 the concept of quality was turned upside down—” (At this point Carlo’s explanation becomes very technical and I’m not sure I can render it exactly; I’ll try to reconstruct it from memory, based on where we were standing and why we had begun this conversation.)

This is how it went: in the basement a while ago we found some brochures that our father had had printed at the beginning of the 1970s, and we started leafing through them, joking about the photographs and the copy put together by an advertising agency that then tendered an outrageously high bill, which led to weeks of (silent) recrimination from my mother. Here again was the unmistakable furniture that perfectly matched the personality of its maker; we always knew the pieces looked like him, but what’s incredible is that our father was able to give such a personal briefing to the advertising agency (“who were absolutely genius mind readers,” according to Carlo) that even the room settings and the captions were completely Fratta-esque. “What did he say, what silences did he use, to make himself clear? These must have been the most perceptive advertising men ever — they must be millionaires by now.”

Whether or not he said them out loud, his words must have been “functional” and “modular.” The furniture had simple, modern, clean lines, the materials were solid, the details spare, the composition rational. The room settings were subtle, neither loud nor dull (a vase of flowers here, a table lamp there). The colors were natural; the dominant note was of wood finishes, such as birch and cherry. Only one clashing element leapt out at us: the rugs, which were thick and furry, in white, gray, or brown, and even a bottle green as luxuriant as a rich, fertile American prairie. Not at all a Fratta Furniture type of thing; but it was a masterly tribute to the taste of the period (we laughed when we imagined how the art director must have insisted on it). And the captions! “Door fronts with contrasting trim highlight the elegance of this suite of furniture,” “The corner night tables extend the lines of this charming combination,” “Beautiful lines and spare styling make this the perfect bedroom set.” Our father himself couldn’t have written them any better, even if he had been able to express his feelings in words.

So why did people stop wanting this stuff in the mid-1970s? Why did Filippo Fratta get into trouble? Because, according to Carlo, quality ceased to be an internal attribute (and not only for furniture). Quality became external; in other words, it was nothing but the image that the product managed to project into the consumer’s mind. “Don’t get me wrong: it’s not as if customers used to buy an armoire only for its usevalue; objects have always represented something else too. But at a certain point the process swung to the extreme: image became everything. The image of our father’s furniture never fucking changed : it was solid, robust, reliable — but who the hell cares about things being robust? Who the hell cares about things being reliable? People buy new things because they want to live a different life, because they want to dream … There’s no reason to make a face like that. It benefits you too.”