Andrea Canobbio - The Natural Disorder of Things

“Fine, but I don’t remember what I’m supposed to say at the very beginning—”

“You’re supposed to say, ‘Hey, we have to kill the bad guys,’ and I’m supposed to explain to you that they might not be over there, but you’re stubborn, and you insist on attacking, and I don’t—”

“Wait a sec, you’re adding this new stuff now.”

He stops and looks at me. “Yes,” he admits.

“Okay. Should I start now?”

At the end of the morning, going back home through the tall grass, he says, “Uncle Claudio, you’re really good at pretending to play with us.”

I tell him I don’t understand, that I’m not pretending, I’m playing for real. “Who gave you the idea I was just pretending?”

He shrugs his shoulders. He scampers up ahead. I think, I want him to stop and turn back, and I wave a cherry branch at him. And Filippo actually does stop, and turns around, and comes running back, and hugs my legs.

I promised I would do a barbecue lunch, and I started fiddling with a rusty old grill in the courtyard while the kids brushed flavored olive oil on the steaks, the sausages, and the vegetables, and Carlo got caught in the smoke and began coughing. It was a perfect day to eat outdoors, except that every five minutes a pallid face popped out from the front gate or the stone wall or the woods, and then immediately vanished into thin air. While I turned the pork cutlets and waved my big serving fork around to show everyone that I was ready to strike at any moment, Carlo came over to me with a half smile that looked both ironic and idiotic.

“They look tasty, don’t they?” I said.

“Mmm,” he replied, and then, “What a story, the thing about your client …”

I had been expecting it; I said nothing. I knew he would go on anyway.

“Tell me the truth: she really hasn’t told you anything?”

“No.”

“You could ask her.”

“I don’t want to.”

“But”—with another smile—“maybe you’re not intimate enough for that …”

I could respond in one of two ways: impassive or insinuating. When it comes to sex, insinuation is the way to go with Carlo. If you throw up a wall to block him, he’ll never let you be. So I winked back at him.

“We’re very intimate.”

“Come on — tell me.”

“Like hell. You know I’m as silent as a tomb.”

“That’s for sure. And what about her — is she a bit livelier than you?”

I laughed. But I knew I had to keep him on tenterhooks.

“‘Lively’ is putting it mildly.”

“Wow.” He shook his head. “Lucky dog.” Then he said, “I have a funny idea to ask you about.”

I turned the sausages over without offering him any encouragement.

“Listen: say you’re Andreotti’s wife—”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake.”

“No, wait — you’re Andreotti’s wife, and you find out that he’s really guilty, that he actually did have that journalist, Pecorelli, assassinated. Do you still love him?”

And I picture Andreotti standing before me: the double-breasted suit of thick black wool, the hair still dark despite his age, the square skull, the pointy ears, the massive eyeglass frames, the hump on his back like Rigoletto’s. “What the hell do I know?”

“Come on, it’s a game …”

“Did I love him before?”

“You were crazy about him.”

I laugh. “Okay, yeah, I think so: I’d still love him, even though it’s pretty hard to put myself in her shoes.”

“So here’s another one.”

“Last one, though.”

“Last one — I promise. You find out your wife was a famous terrorist and once she even killed a man.”

I look right into his eyes.

“Who?”

“Who did she kill? You mean, did she kill a shithead or a nice guy?”

“For example, yeah.”

“It doesn’t matter. Let’s say she killed two people. A shithead and a nice guy.”

“And I’m deeply in love with her?”

“Deeply.”

“I’d go on loving her.”

“And you wouldn’t want her to be punished?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, would you want her to go to jail for murder, or would you want her to be acquitted?”

“But that has nothing to do with continuing to love her.”

“It has nothing to do with it?”

“I don’t think it does.”

He shakes his head. “Would you be able to love her and let her go?”

“What the hell do I know? I’m cooking sausages — lay off me.”

He smiles.

The kids were drumming their forks on their plates, and Momo was shouting “cookin’ shaushage,” and fortunately after lunch Carlo went back to stewing over things by himself. It’s hard to get used to my brother’s new silence. We used to roll our eyes, in my family, when he would get into his hour-long tirades, but deep down we were glad that someone had taken on the burden of talking. A completely mute household would have gone unnoticed. But we were proud of our parsimony with words, and Carlo made us see it more clearly when he came home from his university housing for the weekend. My mother maintained it was a question of genes and chromosomes, but I don’t think she ever pinpointed which ancestor had given Carlo the gift of gab. Fabio tempted fate once, by making fun of him; it was the only time Carlo really gave him a thrashing. We were playing office, and Fabio was doing his own thing as usual, not participating; he wasn’t actually boycotting the game, though, and Carlo tolerated him. All of a sudden Fabio picked up the phone (an old black Bakelite phone that was nothing but an empty shell) and began talking. But he wasn’t saying anything real. He was imitating Carlo’s speeches but using nonexistent words, or words that existed in some language we didn’t know. We stood there, not playing, just listening to him: I fascinated, Carlo growing more and more irritated. Even when Carlo grabbed the phone away, Fabio didn’t stop. He looked at Carlo in surprise and said, “Biggle opty hatpat?” And Carlo began punching him, and kept hammering away until I pulled them apart.

The next day, when we got to my mother’s house, we found her in a great mood; I hadn’t seen her this way for months. She told us that she had been organizing the attic and had made a pile in the courtyard of all the stuff she thought could be thrown away; that we should go down immediately and pick out whatever we wanted to rescue and take back to our houses. Carlo tried to ask her why the attic needed to be emptied out, but she was no longer listening; she had begun talking to the kids.

We rooted about a bit in the pile of old stuff; I was afraid I would come across something bad, and Carlo kept exclaiming in surprise. There was a slide-projection screen (torn), a backpack, two sleeping bags, a tent (torn), a record player, an amplifier (broken), two speakers, whole collections of car-racing magazines and rock-music magazines, a fishing rod, and posters for rock groups and concerts and protest marches. After a moment I sat down on the steps, overcome by the weight of the junk, rendered mute by emotion, by sadness about the simple presence of years past, which wafted up with the dust as soon as you touched anything, and stuck to our fingers just like the dust. But Carlo was getting into it; ultimately he’d toss it all out, but in the meantime he was having fun rediscovering objects that he hadn’t held in his hands for twenty years. I was looking at the tumbledown wall at the end of the courtyard, and the leaves of the paulownia tree peering over curiously from the neighbor’s garden, when I heard him yell with excitement, calling me the way he used to do when he needed a hand with one of the games that we’d invented right here as kids.

He had found the cardboard box in which he had carefully packed away the bedsheets he’d stolen from my mother’s linen closet and hung in his university’s main lecture hall during a sit-in. He asked me to hold one end so he could unfold the whole thing, which turned out to be three sheets sewn together for twenty or twenty-five feet of slogans. But, being Carlo’s slogans, they weren’t immediately recognizable — nothing as simple as “Death to the Bosses” or “Fascist Swine.” They said: