Andrea Canobbio - The Natural Disorder of Things

As soon as we got in the car, Carlo grabbed my arm and apologized. I told him that he could insult me as much as he wanted, he still wouldn’t be able to make me mad. He even turned to the kids, who were watching us wide-eyed, and said, “Kids, Papa got mad at Uncle Claudio, but that was wrong because Claudio doesn’t have anything to do with it. Papa’s worried about other stuff, okay?” They nodded with great conviction; when kids nod like that, it means they deeply want to believe what the grown-ups are telling them. When we got home, Carlo put them to bed, and I didn’t see them again. I poured myself a vodka, walked around the ground floor a bit, and then closed the shutters at the back of the house.

I light a fire in the fireplace from sheer habit, though I know I’ll be too hot, and pull out a pile of magazines (back issues of House & Garden ) to flip through, put them on the floor beside the armchair, pour myself another vodka, and turn off my cell phone. I don’t know why I go then and lean against the windowpane — maybe I saw a flash of something; behind the reflection of my face, another face suddenly appears, just for a second, then there’s only darkness, and the empty courtyard. Two seconds go by. I say “Fucking hell,” and I run to the door, then run back to the hearth, hobbled by my mouse-shaped slippers, grab the poker, and run out, but see no one there: there’s no one there anymore, if someone was there, but I don’t know. Carlo, already in his pajamas, opens a window upstairs and looks at me like I’m crazy. “What’s happening?”

“Nothing.”

“So what are you doing with that thing?”

I look at the poker that’s still in my hand, ready to strike. “I thought I saw a wild boar.”

“And you want to kill it with that?” he asks, “or scare it away with your slippers?”

I shrug and go back inside. I close all the shutters. I go to sleep at 2:00 a.m.

My father often used to forget to close the front door of our apartment, on purpose. It was (and is) a double door, and when he was home during the day he liked to leave one half open so that daylight from our windows flowed out to the landing and the stairs. My mother and the tenants on the ground floor didn’t appreciate his aesthetic approach; they rebuked him, and he would apologize, chalking it up to forgetfulness (but he wasn’t at all forgetful). He was completely unable to distrust strangers: he had worked out a whole private system that didn’t let him; it wasn’t exactly that he trusted other people — he simply couldn’t subscribe to the usual prejudices, even when they were well founded. He wasn’t an expansive type, and he didn’t make friends easily; he had gotten through the war unharmed because of his diffidence about choosing a precise position, about people who were too sure of themselves. But that was precisely why he never sat in judgment on anyone. Nothing had shaken him, not even the death of his beloved retriever, who’d been tied to a tree and butchered by somebody with a hatchet (after that, Grandpa decided to move his family down into the valley). I often think that there was something infantile about my father. (I dreamed that I suggested to Rossi and Elisabetta that we put a bronze statue of my father in the middle of their garden. They agreed.)

It’s so strange to hug the little body of this miniature Filippo Fratta. At 8:00 a.m. they’re already in my bed having a pillow fight, and soon afterward I’m fighting with them myself to get them dressed. Kids work on the principle of conservation of the status quo: they refuse to see the inevitability of shifting from pajamas to playing (even for their favorite game), or shifting from playing to lunch (even if their favorite food is on the table), or shifting from lunch to nap (even if they’re exhausted), or shifting from nap to playing another game, and so on, until they tumble into sleep again at night, willy-nilly. So in the morning it’s a battle for me to get them dressed and a battle to get them washed, but when they begin playing with the water in the sink, they don’t want to stop, and then it’s a battle for me to get them out of the bathroom, and when we’re getting set to go to Malik’s, they don’t want to put on their shoes, even though they desperately want to go to Malik’s — they wouldn’t let me be if I didn’t take them there. (Actually, saying that they want to go there isn’t quite precise: they want to be there already, as soon as it’s mentioned.) Carlo says that they live in an eternal present, that they don’t have our sense of time as an arrow shooting from dawn to sunset, from Monday to Sunday, from autumn to summer, and, when they hear us talking about events in the past or the future, they really have no idea what we’re talking about; yesterday and tomorrow are like people or things that aren’t in the room: maybe they remember their shapes or their faces, but they don’t pay them much attention because they’re not around. At that point I ask him whether there are any adults who live in an eternal past, and he starts laughing and says, Yes, there are. But I wasn’t trying to be funny, so I don’t know what he thinks I meant; anyway, by this time we’re at Malik’s.

Our neighbor was wearing his dark blue, special-occasions turban, and his beard was combed and smooth; he was shining with pride over his new baby and even moving differently, more confidently. His wife, by contrast, scurried around the little apartment as if this were an official visit. It was Carlo who put her into a tizzy; he doesn’t usually come. The baby girl was splendid; I had bought her a gift from me — a pink jumpsuit — and one from the kids — a plush tiger, of course. Filippo and Momo gave the baby a cursory glance, but Carlo turned out to be a perfectly sophisticated conversationalist: he told stories about when Filippo was born and how badly he and Cecilia fumbled the diaper changes. They offered us Indian sweets, but I was the only one who ate them, and then we went out.

In a celebratory mood, Malik put on Durga’s muzzle and brought her out of her pen. The kids reached out dubiously to pet her back, keeping their bodies as far away as possible. She was tame, calm. “What’s up with her?” I asked. Malik told me that she understood there was a pup around: that the new baby had softened her. That whenever his wife brought the carriage outside, Durga stopped moving around and just lay down and watched her. While telling me this, Malik scratched the dog beneath her jaw, and Durga shut her eyes blissfully. I said that I needed to get another dog; I felt like I was betraying Gustavo, but it was eight months now since he’d taken off. I needed a dog who’d bark if someone came into the courtyard at night. Malik shook his head and said that no one came around their place. “I’m not the one who scares them away,” he added. Inside his house he has a remote control that he can use to open the Doberman’s gate if he needs to. He put Durga back in her pen, and we went over to Filippo, Momo, and Carlo, who had gone to the other side of the yard to look for the dachshunds and the poor Shar-Pei, who had just had his eyelids operated on.

Now it’s later; I’m playing with the kids in my courtyard and in the meadow. I have a straw hat to protect me from the sun. I’m sweating, and I keep having to stop and catch my breath. I don’t need to think: Filippo is in charge, he tells me my lines as the game goes along — he’s my prompter. But every now and then, the instructions are too wordy. “Okay, Uncle Claudio, now you say, ‘Hey, we have to kill the bad guys,’ and then you run to that bush over there, and Momo and I yell, ‘Watch out!’ and the bad guys aren’t behind the bush, they come out of the woods instead, and you fall down, because they hurt you, and then you yell, ‘Come help me, they hurt my leg,’ and then Momo and I run over, and we shoot the bad guys and we get to you — okay?”