Andrea Canobbio - The Natural Disorder of Things

Getting into the Ka was even harder, maybe, than getting out of the E270, and when I found myself huddled just a few inches from the dashboard, before realizing I had to slide the seat back, there wasn’t an ounce of my flesh that didn’t hurt. She began to talk right away, and I listened with my eyes closed; the lights of the passing cars jabbed through my eyelids and into my head — suddenly I had no armor to protect me from the world. I had never been afraid of riding in cars, and now I felt I would always be afraid.

It’s incredible that Elisabetta Renal had such an urge to talk, that she didn’t ask herself whether I was in any condition to listen, that she didn’t ask me if I was; and I didn’t have the strength to protest. She told me about the night I had brought her to the emergency room: she hadn’t seen my face clearly until we were in the hospital, but she didn’t forget it later, and, when she stumbled across my picture in that magazine, she recognized me immediately, and it was a relief, because she had started dreaming about me at night — she was afraid I would turn up asking for a reward. She imagined that she would see me and that I’d threaten her, or simply stare at her silently; she felt she owed me something that I would have claimed with blackmail or by force. On the one hand, she tried to forget me, and on the other hand, she knew she wouldn’t be able to, that to get me out of her dreams she would have to get me into her life somehow, and so she had started a long campaign to convince Alberto that the foundation needed a garden to celebrate Alfredo Renal.

“Reward?” I whispered. “Blackmail?”

In the emergency room they told her that the person who had brought her in hadn’t waited around, which was fairly common. Apparently, anonymous rescuers fall into three categories: some are diligent and selfless, and they wait to hear that the accident victim is safe; some want gratitude from the victim; and some just get the victim to the doctor and wash their hands of it all. But she sensed that I didn’t belong to the third category, that I was a different thing altogether, there was something in my attitude that didn’t fit.

“What ‘something’?”

“Your air of indifference. You pretended to be there by chance.”

“But I was there by chance.”

“Really? I don’t know why, but I got the opposite impression. As if you were following me.”

“But if I didn’t even know you yet …”

“And why did you leave?”

“Because I really am in the third category of anonymous rescuers. I don’t want to get involved.”

“And why were you following me now?”

I don’t answer. After a moment of silence, Elisabetta goes on with her story. That night, the night I abandoned her in the ER, she called Alberto, and when one of the twins had been sent to get her, she almost forgot about the danger that I might come back to pester her. She was distraught: all she wanted to do was sleep, to get home and take a pill and fall asleep until the next day. But the next day she started thinking about me, and she never stopped. “Thinking,” though, was the wrong word. She was afraid of me.

“Afraid?”

“Yes, afraid that you knew something.”

“Knew what?”

“Something you shouldn’t know until I decide to tell you about it. Unless you already know it.”

“I don’t want to know anyway.”

“Why?”

“Because then you’ll be afraid I’ll tell someone else.”

“No, I’m not afraid of that. I’m afraid of you, not of other people.”

I didn’t understand why she should be afraid of me: I had never made anybody afraid, I felt completely inoffensive, and she was much too excited; I couldn’t take her chattering anymore, and I asked her please to keep quiet until we got to the hospital.

Then I immediately began to think that it wasn’t true, that someone had once been afraid of me — or rather, I had been afraid that someone was afraid of me, no matter how strange and unnatural it was. In his final years my father seemed to have become my assistant: I was the contact person for the clients, and I determined the job priorities, on the assumption that he was getting more distracted or losing his memory, so that having a son to help him was a big advantage — but I read in his eyes that that wasn’t the truth. He was afraid of becoming useless, and that’s why he was afraid of me: afraid that I could do without him, that I would find myself another helper and leave him at home, in that house, all day long, every day — so he refused to listen to me and always insisted on doing the most dangerous jobs. (As it happened, I actually had found a helper: Witold, freshly arrived from Poland with his literary, antique opera lover’s Italian; Papa and I thought he was sort of delirious until Carlo explained things for us. According to Carlo, Witold’s linguistic “normalization” was a tragedy as great as the disappearance of a dialect.)

When I finished up in the emergency room, I found her sitting on the edge of a bench, gnawing on her already-chewed-down fingernails and sighing like someone about to take an exam. She belonged to the second category of anonymous rescuers, even though obviously there was nothing anonymous about this.

“They scolded me.”

“Who?”

“The nurses, because I moved you … took you out of the car …”

“And what should you have done?”

“Left you where you were and called an ambulance.”

“You should have said I was the one who taught you to move victims away from the scene …”

I looked around: there was only one couple in the waiting room, a fiftyish husband doubled over with a kidney stone and his drowsy wife watching him. In a piercing voice the man said, “Fortunately I have a high pain threshold.”

I asked Elisabetta to take me home.

We sat down in the kitchen, at opposite ends of the sofa, with a bottle of vodka on the table. She wanted to know why there was a sofa next to the dining table, how long I’d lived in that old farmhouse, why I lived there alone, why I hadn’t rented out the other wing, which I had restored though I didn’t live in it.

“Do you want to come live in it?”

She went on with her questions. Why did I have all those toys scattered around the house, why all the fairy tales, why the Disney videos, why the dog bowl, and did I cook for myself? And did I clean for myself?

“Does it look to you like anyone cleans here?”

She poured herself another drink. I did too. I stared into her eyes — by this point I had nothing left to lose. The worst she could do was leave. But maybe I would have stopped her before she got to the door.

“Was there anything else you wanted to know?”

“Yes, I wanted to know why you didn’t recognize me immediately … why you pretended not to recognize me … when I came here to your courtyard to invite you to dinner, that Sunday evening.”

I closed my eyes and leaned my head back; I’d claimed that the overhead light bothered me, so I’d turned off all the lights except the spotlight over the stove. I could have sat her in the living room, where I had another sofa that was probably more comfortable. But when we walked in, I suddenly felt it was very important that Elisabetta should sit in the guest’s place. Even though I had never imagined the guest with any particular face — except maybe my own face as an old man — and certainly not a female one.

“Well, I almost never know why I do what I do. Do you?”

“No, not always.”

I told her that I didn’t know why, because I had recognized her immediately — I had even recognized her voice on the phone.

“My voice? But we had never talked on the phone …”

I told her how I had fantasized about her voice and her way of talking. I told her that I had expected her to recognize me too, when we saw each other, that I wondered about the very things she was asking me about now.