Andrea Canobbio - The Natural Disorder of Things

THE PRICE OF IDENTIFYING EVERYTHING WITH EVERYTHING

IS THAT NOTHING IS IDENTICAL TO ITSELF ANY LONGER.

ALL THAT IS SOLID MELTS INTO AIR,

ALL THAT IS HOLY IS PROFANED.

THE TIME IS OUT OF JOINT.

He explained to me that these were famous phrases, used for educational purposes.

“Before the sit-in ended, I pulled down the sheets and took them home; I was so proud, and I had spent so much time writing them. I didn’t want them to end up in the garbage right away.”

Even now they didn’t end up in the garbage: he took them when he and the kids left for the city later.

As soon as Carlo was gone, my mother pretended to recall another nagging problem. My grandfather had found an American pistol in his vineyard; our father hadn’t ever wanted to get rid of it, and she was afraid that some Albanian might break into her house and steal it. I took it unwillingly, thinking that I’d throw it in some canal. But instead I brought it home and hid it in my basement. Then I spent the afternoon going around my house and yard with the poker in hand.

At ten that night I got into position near the abandoned factory; maybe Elisabetta wouldn’t come out, maybe she’d spent the whole day with Mosca and I would just see her coming in, without daring to stop her and tell her I couldn’t stand it any longer. I had intended to do two things during the weekend: ask my brother if it had really been him driving the gray Clio around the countryside at 3:00 a.m. last week, and ask my mother if there was another name besides Conti that I should remember, and if the other name was Mosca. But the questions were too hard to ask; I had to ask them in some other way — I had to try something more diplomatic.

When her Ka comes out onto the road, I’ve already given up waiting for her; I have resigned myself to going home to sleep. She zooms off as if she’d just robbed a bank; something must have happened — this time she could really end up killing herself. She skids and runs red lights and stop signs, and in the heat of the moment I think that she’s not running away — no one runs away that fast — she just really wants to die, she’s trying to fly off the road. I tremble as we pass a row of poplars, I tremble as we turn onto a bridge; I keep waiting for her car to swerve violently and crash, or leap into the void. There’s a curve up ahead that I know pretty well: you can’t take it at this speed, and that’s where she’s going to crash.

But instead I’m suddenly the one spinning through a planetarium of stars and explosions, in a cloud of glass shards — I’m the one having an accident, my E270 is being destroyed, the air bag explodes against my stomach all red and sticky with blood, and I’m the one gasping in the silence and the dark, blanketed with windshield fragments like a mirrored disco ball. Everything is still — I’ve landed — I’m afraid to move, I’m afraid I’ve broken in half, I’m afraid my throat has been slit, that these are the final moments of my life. Then a car stops on the side of the road and shines its lights on me, making me sparkle all over, and someone comes closer, a silhouette against the brightness who manages to force my door open, the hinges coming apart, the door folding and flipping over and dropping to the grass.

Now she’s leaning over me, whispering in my ear. “Everything’s okay now, don’t worry.” She tries to unbuckle my belt, practically hugging me, and says, “I had to pay you back for rescuing me, right? Now it’s my turn to take you to the hospital.”

THE NEXT MORNING MY COLLEAGUES, RELATIVES, AND FRIENDS WERE WHIPPED UPinto a maelstrom of worry: for two hours they flooded the nearby hospitals with phone calls; some calls were anguished (from Witold’s wife, while he was out searching for me in the emergency rooms), some were furious (Carlo, threatening lawsuits and digressing into an attack on the regional governor for his irresponsible decentralization of health services), and some were warbling, shrill, nearly incomprehensible (Malik gets like this when he panics); and while all this was happening I was asleep in my own bed, Monday morning; I had a cut on my cheekbone and a bruise on my left thigh, but otherwise I was beatific. The problem was that the tow truck, which I had called the night before, didn’t reach the body shop until midnight, after closing time, and so it towed my E270 back to my courtyard. It looked pitiful: it was completely destroyed. They say cars that look this bad are often dumped on the ocean floor to make playgrounds for the fish.

The first one to arrive, at 7:45, was Witold, who drove over in his Fiat Panda because he was alarmed that I didn’t show up at our usual appointment and didn’t answer my cell phone or my house phone (both of which were turned off). He grew even more alarmed when he saw the jagged, twisted, stripped, mutilated Mercedes, with its blood-spattered air bag dangling from the steering wheel like the tongue of a cow impaled on a butcher’s hook; then he panicked completely when no one answered the doorbell (I didn’t hear it; I’d taken a sleeping pill at six when I couldn’t get back to sleep). My R4, parked under the canopy, proved that I hadn’t driven off somewhere under my own steam, so therefore I must have been in a hospital, or staying with friends or relatives to recover from the accident. Malik was the nearest possibility. He got back in his car, drove around the hill, and rang at the famous photographer’s gate. He poured all his panic through the video intercom onto Malik (who’s always very susceptible to other people’s anxiety), and then drove off to check the nearest emergency room.

At 8:15, Malik stepped out of the chestnut woods and appeared in my courtyard together with Indra, the striped dachshund who had fathered the new litter. Malik walked around the carcass of the E270 three times, weeping in pain as he pictured my torn and lifeless body in some morgue; he tried ringing the doorbell and knocking weakly on all the shutters, and noted with surprise that the ones in the back were all closed: that didn’t augur well. Meanwhile Indra pissed on Gustavo’s dog bed, an unpleasant detail that did nothing to unravel the mystery. Then they both went home. Malik tried to call a few hospitals, but — as he himself later reported — he was so upset he couldn’t make himself understood.

After searching for me fruitlessly in one hospital, Witold thought it might be best to alert my family; but to avoid alarming my mother, who wouldn’t have been able to help search anyway, he called Carlo at 8:40. My brother immediately concluded that I must have taken refuge in our childhood home, and he devised a scheme with Witold: he would call my mother on some pretext, without mentioning the wreck of the Mercedes, and if I were there with her, surely she would tell him about it. But my mother saw through his pretext — first of all because Carlo almost never calls her (especially not at 9:00 a.m. on Monday), and second because he mumbled that he wanted to thank her for Sunday lunch, on his behalf and the children’s. That was too far-fetched.

“Is someone hurt?” she asked, without wasting words. Carlo denied it, but he wasn’t very persuasive, and my mother was now sure that something was up.

After an hour, during which she considered and then discarded all the simple explanations, she concluded that Carlo was hiding something from her, and she gave in and called me; I’d woken up by then, so I answered the phone, telling her that I’d had a little accident, nothing serious … and Carlo? No, Carlo couldn’t have known about it, I really didn’t think so.

“So was he calling to tell me something about Cecilia?” my mother asked me.