Andrea Canobbio - The Natural Disorder of Things

“Okay, but why is it a melodrama?”

“I was just saying that for effect. Picture it: your best friend, a man you trust completely, steals your wife … and not only that, he expects to go on living with you, as if nothing had happened. And if, after just a few months of marriage, your wife couldn’t stand you, couldn’t stand the sight of you—”

“But you’re just making all this up!”

“No, I’m trying to understand. I’m hypothesizing.”

“Don’t try to tell me that the two of them killed Alfredo Renal.”

“I don’t think so. He died of cancer. He must have had a miserable time in his final years. Or maybe he didn’t care. But just try to imagine one more thing: the three of them in the villa, the life they lived together. Can you imagine it?”

“No, I can’t.”

“Make an effort. Alfredo marries Elisabetta. But there’s nothing between them. What could there be? Alfredo Renal isn’t a man, he’s a saint. Elisabetta is young, Alberto makes her laugh, he takes her places, he doesn’t shut himself up in his room writing treatises for the good of mankind; he doesn’t dedicate all his time to prisoners or sick people.”

“But why would they all live together?”

“Alfredo needed both of them. Ultimately he chose to withdraw to the country and give up the active life, but he kept them both close by. He became a philosopher, and meanwhile the two lovers stayed lovers. Until they’d had enough, and they stopped loving each other. Now, think about that moment: Renal sees that Elisabetta no longer loves Alberto. It’s as if she’s betraying him all over again.”

“You’re making all this up,” I repeat, irritated.

“No, I’m building realistic hypotheses on the basis of known facts.”

“If I knew this was what you’d do, I wouldn’t have asked you anything. My fault.”

“No, no, I enjoyed myself. You’re the one without any imagination.”

“It’s true. I haven’t.” I don’t mind not having any. “And what about Rossi: did she push him off a cliff?”

“You can joke if you want. But you’re not far off the mark, anyway. It was an accident — the car drove off a bluff and flipped over; she got away with a few scratches, but Rossi was paralyzed from the waist down, his vertebrae were crushed.”

“If he’s the same person you’re talking about,” I say, “Rossi must have changed a lot. He’s more like your portrait of Alfredo Renal.”

“He probably began to imitate Renal, from being around him so long.”

“It’s strange, though. Sometimes they seem to ignore each other. At other times it seems like they’re still in love.”

He looks at me with half a smile, as if it’s clear that I don’t understand anything, that there’s no hope I’ll ever understand anything, as if the secrets of the human soul were suited only for finer minds than mine. So, out of spite, I ask him whether we should trust this professor, whether he might be losing his memory.

“He’s got the memory of an elephant, that shithead.”

When the war ended, my grandfather came to the village to open his “artisanal woodworking shop.” He brought my grandmother, and my father, who was twenty-two. They came from the lake up north, almost at the Swiss border, where until 1940 they’d lived peacefully in a farmhouse with animals and a vineyard, and where my grandfather had a small carpentry shop with four workers. They owned some land, which they sold along with the house in order to move close to the city, which offered more job opportunities and fewer people looking to settle old scores. My father’s situation was the most serious and urgent reason for their move: after Italy’s 1943 armistice with the Allies, he had lain low to avoid further military duty; ten months of freezing guard duty in a regiment of Alpine troops had been enough. Everyone in his neighborhood knew him, and both the partisans and the Fascists swore they would get even with him for not joining their respective sides; after the Liberation in 1945, the partisans came looking for him, explaining to my grandfather that the boy’s failure to join them meant he must have been spying for Mussolini’s Republic. So my grandfather went down to the valley, where he found success. Each year his business got bigger, and when he turned the reins over to my father, ten years later, he had twenty workers and a well-established, thriving little company. I never saw the old house near the lake; I don’t know when my grandparents got married; I know just a few details and some worn-out old anecdotes about them, and the same is true for my mother’s family.

When we meet someone, we rarely wonder what path brought him to us — our curiosity never reaches very far back; with just a few bits of information we can sketch in his whole background and then file the issue away forever. We’re hardly interested in our own history — forget about other people’s. For example, I wondered what odd circumstances had brought me into the world of Alfredo Renal, a person I could never know now, who would never tell me his version of the facts, who maybe wouldn’t even have spoken a word to me if we had met while he was alive: I was neither a derelict nor one of the elect, according to his criteria. And anyway, the real Alfredo surely wasn’t the saint people said he was. In those final days of May, I was building a garden commissioned by two people about whom I knew almost nothing. I knew nothing about Alfredo’s grandparents, who used to sip lemonade on a summer afternoon in the shade of a walnut tree in the middle of the meadow (we found the roots underground and the base of the trunk, and the twins confirmed that the tree had been chopped down ten years earlier; the lemonade is my own invention). I don’t know much about the Pole who has been working with me for five years; only that he has a literature degree and adores nineteenth-century Italian writers, and couldn’t find work in Poland.

I didn’t see Rossi anymore; our regular lunches had stopped abruptly after the party. I was told that he couldn’t stand the heat and preferred to eat indoors, but evidently guests weren’t expected to follow him inside — maybe he couldn’t stand guests either. If he was angry with me for some reason, I didn’t care. All I needed was to see Elisabetta. She was the one who kept us company now, but from a distance. They were sunny, blue-sky days, and the air was laced with the fragrance of jasmine and lindens and early hay. Elisabetta would sit by the balustrade in a tank top and shorts and a big straw hat and watch us for half an hour every day, holding a glass of orange juice. Whenever she appeared, I would stop whatever I was doing and lift my eyes to her. I would stare at her until she waved at me cautiously. It was a game, like the glances we’d exchanged the first night at dinner, but this time I had the upper hand. I wanted to force her to wave to me, I wanted to put her embarrassment to the test, because the longer I stood still, the more my insistent gaze would be noticeable to Witold and Jan (and the twins in the secret room). And every day she tried to hold out a little bit longer. She never came down to talk to us.

Friday night Carlo and the kids came, and I was almost unprepared: I hadn’t shopped for food, I hadn’t thought of any games or excursions to keep them occupied over the two days; fortunately, on Sunday we had to go over to Grandma’s. I took them to the mall to eat pizza, but Filippo whined the whole time because he wanted hamburgers and potato chips instead; Carlo was very agitated — the Americans had just bombed a hospital, and he said the Chinese embassy was one thing, but hospitals were something else altogether. Momo took advantage of our distraction to dart away, and I had to run and grab him at the exit a couple of times. Carlo barely touched his pizza. I finally got him to spit out what was wrong, but then he made me pay for asking. He asked when the hell I was going to start watching TV, saying it was inhuman to live the way I did, without knowing what was going on in the world, that I was lower than an animal. “Okay, okay, I’m lower than an animal,” I admitted. It turned out that the Red Brigades had just surfaced again and killed someone; twenty years later there were still people running around shooting people, and that was what was troubling him. I leaned back in my chair with a sigh and said now I understood why he was so upset. He started shouting, “What do you understand? What do you think you understand? You don’t understand shit! You’re just blissing out with your flowers and your hedges — and you’re nothing but a dick, a total dick!” The whole pizzeria turned to look at us, Filippo started crying, and the waiter came over to say we had to talk more quietly. I asked him for the check.