Andrea Canobbio - The Natural Disorder of Things

I slow down to examine the girls in their thigh-high white boots, see-through white lace, nearly white bleached hair; the blacks dress in black, and the whites dress in white: maybe Carlo has a ready explanation for prostitute fashions too. But he can’t explain it to me now, because he’s disappeared: I lost him … surely he wasn’t coming here, that was only my idea — it’s not like him to have to pay. But now that I’ve begun, I continue my rounds, and even stop a few times to look more closely at the girls who knock on my window, trying to make me roll it down. Cute, young.

After accumulating a strong enough dose of excitement and despondency, I decided it was time to go home, and I wheeled onto a deserted-looking stretch of roadside so that I could back up and turn around. Framed in my rear window, in the white glow of my backup lights, I saw a threesome that looked like two women sitting and one standing. But the sitting ones’ heads were too small for grown women; they were actually kids, a boy and a girl, and they weren’t seated. I rolled down my window and leaned out to see them better: the woman wasn’t dressed as a hooker, and she couldn’t possibly have brought the children along while she worked; their car must have broken down … maybe they needed help.

She came over to me smiling, holding the children by the hand. She wasn’t wearing makeup, she wasn’t pretty.

“Let’s make a family?” she asked with a Slavic accent.

I didn’t understand. I kept following my own line of reasoning, completely autistically.

“Do you need a ride? Where do you have to go?”

She shook her head.

“Let’s make a family,” she declared.

“What does that mean?” I murmured.

She shrugged her shoulders, and her smile vanished; she was disappointed I didn’t understand. Other cars had stopped; wide-open eyes observed us through the windshields. They stopped because they’d seen someone else stop, and the more people pulled over, the more others would stop, for the same reason that no one goes into a deserted restaurant. Anyway, I couldn’t leave the children on that road; I told her to get in.

She directed me to the outskirts of the nearest semiurban area, a few miles away. She didn’t say a word, and the kids sitting in the back looked out the window. We stopped in front of a four-story apartment building, and we went into an apartment on the ground floor. It wasn’t particularly bare; it didn’t seem temporary. The rooms were all lit up, the table in the kitchen was set, and in the kids’ room there were toys on the floor. The girl lay on one of the beds to read a Pokémon comic; the boy took my hand and gestured for me to sit down on the red rug.

He wanted me to drive a truck along an imaginary road while he bombed me from above with a fighter plane. I nodded — this was a role I knew well. Then the woman appeared at the door, saying “Hello?” as if she were answering the phone. She had me sit at the head of the table, where she had laid out a supper of fatty, spicy stew; it was tasty, and I had seconds. They sat at the table but didn’t eat, and the kids muttered and looked at me, laughing. The wine was crummy. I didn’t want coffee; it was 3:30 in the morning.

The whole performance wasn’t as sad as it might have seemed, at least not until the last act. But I didn’t even go into the bedroom, so I didn’t leave in a bad mood. The woman made a slightly disappointed face, I don’t know why; maybe she thought that without sex I wouldn’t come back. She must have thought that I’d completely misunderstood, because she repeated it twice, she even asked me if I didn’t want something quick. I paid her and said goodbye to the kids. They looked mortified too, as if I really was a father and had just announced that I was leaving forever.

He said that the marriage is the biggest mystery; it’s hard to understand why a man of forty-five who has always lived with his mother suddenly decides to get married, unless he wants to start a family; the family is the thing that triggers it — certainly not the woman — because the aim is to have children and raise them with Christian values, to bring up an eager platoon of Christian soldiers.

I begged him to stop exaggerating and get to the point, but it was as if I hadn’t spoken.

And, on the other hand, there’s the mystery of a girl who falls in love with someone like Renal — what could a woman see in a man like that? If people were obligated to write something when they got married, if people had to explain why they were marrying, listing their noble and idealistic reasons along with their self-interested ones, or sketching their loved one’s portrait, for example, describing the other person in black and white, describing their bride’s or groom’s irresistible aspects …

Now he was really annoying me.

I told him that it was impossible, that it made no sense. Elisabetta was the sister of Alfredo, and the wife of Rossi.

“Has she ever told you she was Renal’s sister?”

“No. Why should she? I never asked her.”

“Exactly. Why didn’t you ever ask her?”

“Because it’s obvious that she’s the sister — she’s a Renal.”

“Yes, of course, the widow of Alberto Renal would naturally introduce herself as Elisabetta Renal. But explain to me why you never asked her. What would be wrong with it? You could have asked her in a thousand different ways — why would it be a problem? You didn’t want to seem too curious?”

“Maybe.”

“But then you come and ask me, and you don’t believe what I tell you.”

“No, that’s not true. I believe you, but I don’t know if I believe that professor of yours.”

To find out more about the Renals, Carlo went to talk with an old teacher of his, Professor Pozzi. He’s a widower of seventy-seven who lives alone in an enormous house, full of furniture and lace doilies and a gigantic TV with a gigantic armchair facing it. Carlo remembered vaguely that Pozzi knew a lot of lay Catholic volunteers and other charity activists, because his wife pushed or dragged him into it. And Pozzi naturally remembered Renal. He remembered that Renal had married a very young girl and that he was deeply attached to an old high school friend.

I didn’t like my brother’s smug way of telling me what he had discovered, as if he were showing me up for some incapacity of mine. His tone, too, was irritating. To dampen it, I asked him whether Pozzi was that old Communist who, according to Cecilia, pretended to help Carlo secure university positions while actually throwing obstacles in his way.

He didn’t answer. He sighed and waved his hand to chase off an invisible fly.

He tells me that I have to concentrate on the story, that I have to imagine it as a melodrama, a passionate, violent struggle: it has all the right ingredients — love, jealousy, betrayal. And then he stares at me.

I don’t react.

Alfredo Renal needed to take on a secretary to help manage his inheritance. But, as with all his other initiatives, he also wanted to help a friend in need. And Rossi repaid his generosity: he seemed to be born for the job — he was perfect in the role of the grand philanthropist. He came up with the idea for the foundation, according to Pozzi. Renal would have been happy just visiting the sick, organizing charity auctions, and occasionally accompanying the handicapped to Lourdes.

What annoys me most is that I have to admit he’s right.

So Elisabetta married Alfredo Renal. So she wasn’t the normal sister who had to deal with an exceptional brother. She had chosen Renal. And then she chose Rossi.

“So she’s not necessarily married to Rossi.”

“Pozzi says she’s not. At least, not formally.”