Andrea Canobbio - The Natural Disorder of Things

“I don’t think there’s anything new,” I said, and we were silent for thirty seconds, which was our way of commenting on their separation, Carlo’s errors, Cecilia’s revenge, the possibility of a reconciliation, the risks that Carlo would run if he stayed single. After having thought about these things together, and having tacitly agreed that Carlo should persist in trying to win her back, and Cecilia should give in honorably, that this would be best for the kids (but I don’t agree, not completely: sometimes I think exactly the opposite, and my mother thinks I agree only because I don’t have to speak out loud), we said goodbye and I made myself a big cup of coffee and got a chair and went out to settle down in the sun, battered but happy, next to the wreck of the Mercedes. I got a certain pleasure from seeing how the smooth lines of the car had gotten all smashed up; it was tangible proof of change, a satisfying sign that my old life was finally shattered.

After talking with our mother, Carlo checked back with Witold, who was driving over to the second local hospital (which his wife, moreover, had already phoned). They decided that Carlo would try calling the hospitals in the city, from the biggest to the smallest, and then he would contact the highway patrols (Witold preferred not to — he doesn’t like authorities, because, he says, his surname makes them suspicious; I think he’s just irritated because they always spell it wrong). All this searching turned up nothing. In the last of his calls, Carlo found time to accuse a male nurse of being a right-wing flunky, and the nurse retorted that he had been a card-carrying union man for the past twenty-five years, at which point Carlo’s tone softened and he said, “I’m sorry, comrade, I’m just scared because I don’t know what happened to my brother”; and when the left-wing nurse answered kindly, Carlo added, “I’ve already lost one brother, to drugs; please try to understand.” It was ages since he had last called someone “comrade”; he must really have been distraught. I keep thinking about what Carlo said (what he himself reported to me) not because it’s funny (though it is) but because it moves me. When he told me about that phone call, I had to pinch my inner thigh to keep from crying.

At 10:15, exhausted and disheartened, Witold drove his Panda into the farmhouse courtyard a second time. He was giving it one last try before Carlo called the police. But there I sat, coffee in hand, calm and sore, pondering my life and the events of the night before, and feeling the sun on my bare arms. Witold squeezed my arms with relief when he found me safe and sound, and kept asking me obsessively if I was okay; there was no way to reassure him: he wanted to take me right back to the hospital for tests. “I’m fine, really, don’t worry,” I said, “no bones are broken, I’m just a bit banged up,” but I realized that he wasn’t listening, or he didn’t believe me, because if the car looked that bad, then I must have hit my head, and clearly I could not be the one to decide if I was okay or not.

Next came the clarifications and explanations and play-by-plays: I called Carlo, I called Malik, Witold called his wife. I would have been happy to spend a few more minutes outside, contemplating my car, but Witold threw himself into the role of nurse and insisted that I get back into bed, and, although I refused categorically, he did manage to settle me in my armchair indoors. Meanwhile he arranged for the Mercedes to be towed out of the courtyard: he convinced the body shop to come get it right away, by threatening more or less explicitly to call one of their competitors. I heard him talking on the phone in the kitchen as I sat in the living room, enjoying the air that spiraled in through the open windows and the squares of light hitting the terra-cotta tiles, lost in my thoughts, seduced by Witold’s caretaking; I knew that if I didn’t chase him out immediately he would never leave, but I didn’t have the strength to stop daydreaming: I kept picturing sections of the Renal garden — the parts we had already begun to shape, and the parts still left to do, had all come clear to me now, as if I’d visited the perfect garden last night in a dream and all I had to do was remember the details of it and reproduce them in real life.

So I let the day go on without me; Witold took control, and after an hour his wife came too, and they confined me to the kitchen sofa and had me eat some broth and a hamburger with insipid mashed potatoes, when I would have happily devoured a couple of steaks instead; they took me to bed, closed the shutters, and managed to make me fall asleep, though I don’t know how — I haven’t slept in the afternoon for ages. After an hour I awoke with a start and staggered woozily downstairs, and at the foot of the steps, by the front door, I found a cardboard carton full of all kinds of liquor: bottles of vodka and gin, some still sealed and others half empty. I thought that Carlo had come with a gift for me, or that Malik had cleared all this stuff out of the famous photographer’s pantry, but each scenario was less plausible than the last, and the only likely explanation — which was confirmed by the sounds coming from the kitchen — was that Witold and his wife had set about cleaning, and that those were my bottles, waiting to be eliminated the wrong way: in the garbage.

I bend over to pick up the carton, but dizziness topples me toward the wall; I buck backward to straighten up and then stand there, unmoving, while the walls of the corridor swell and contract; I feel like I’m inside the lungs of an asthmatic animal. Slowly the things around me stop moving: first the coat rack and the mirror, then the shelves and the daguerreotypes in their matched frames depicting a couple of strangers (him with his mustache, her with her chignon) that I bought last year at a flea market (no one understands why: they’re not my great-grandparents — no pictures of them exist — and these photographs aren’t even particularly decorative). It’s outrageous that two strangers should dare to clean out the special stash I use for nighttime distress; it’s absurd that I should have hung portraits of unknown people in my entryway just because they seemed to belong to these walls, as if they lived in this farmhouse before me; it’s unbearable that the happiness which ran through every cell of my being this morning, through every capillary, through every muscle fiber, has already been burnt away, evaporated, lost. I have to call Elisabetta Renal immediately.

Instead I walk unsteadily into the kitchen and assault the two Poles who are scrubbing my house clean; not only don’t I thank them but I accuse them of sticking their noses into my business and of being moralistic zealots; I order Witold to put the liquor right back where he found it. Witold reddens and silently does so; his wife finishes drying two dishes and leaves the room without saying goodbye to me. Before leaving, Witold walks past me and says, “Don’t drive after drinking.” His tone is not at all punitive or sarcastic: he sounds so chagrined, so genuinely worried, that I cannot reply. After I hear them leave, I drop exhausted onto the sofa and successfully stare at nothing for at least half an hour.

And I don’t know how the day would have ended if my cell phone hadn’t started ringing, if she hadn’t decided to come see me, and if we hadn’t talked about what had really happened the night before.

The night before, she tried to pull me out of the Mercedes but she couldn’t: I was too heavy, she couldn’t even lift me out of the seat, so she asked me whether my legs hurt, if they felt trapped, and when through the foggy veil of shock I answered: “Too fat …,” she didn’t get it, she didn’t understand that I was talking about myself, she thought I was delirious. I surprised her, and myself, by managing to turn partway around and throw both my feet out of the car like a pair of grappling hooks thrown by a pirate boarding a ship, in the hope that they’d land on something solid. Elisabetta stood a few feet away and watched to see whether I could get up by myself, or whether I’d fall to the ground as she had done on that rainy night many months before. I pulled myself up and looked at her, wobbling, and held my hand out toward her with my palm down, as if I were showing her the height of some child — the child I was when my father lost his factory, or Filippo was when his parents split up, or the child that I had become now, because of the accident, who needed care. Elisabetta took my hand in her two hands, then moved next to me and held me up and largely directed my steps toward her Ka, which waited on the edge of the road with its brights on, illuminating the scene of the disaster. I moved jerkily, gathering all my strength to tug each leg up, because with every step I seemed to sink into mud, and each time I lifted my feet they felt soldered to the grass with ultrasuperglue.