Andrea Canobbio - The Natural Disorder of Things

“I always had the impression you were avoiding me. Until I realized you were following me.”

“When was that?”

She poured herself a drink, and I did the same.

“Mosca pointed out that it was strange for someone like you to be at that club at that time of night.”

I nodded; I had expected it.

“And why were you following me?”

I don’t understand why she keeps asking me that. I’m no good at replying without actually answering — I don’t know the evasive answers that reveal nothing at all. I wasn’t trained in that sort of conversation. I can’t do it. Either I tell her the truth — that I need her — or I keep quiet. I keep quiet. And to cut the conversation short, I decide to get up and saunter around the kitchen looking nonchalant.

But I fell down as soon as I stood up. The floor rose to greet me, tipped right up to my chin, and I banged my head violently for the second time that night. I didn’t faint — but I found myself on all fours, humiliated. Elisabetta was crouched down talking to me as if she were trying to console a huge, sad dog, and I stared at a tile and thought that one universe wasn’t big enough to hold both the geometric perfection of the square and the turbulence vibrating within me.

She guided me to my big, useless bed. I lay down and knocked off my shoes, but I couldn’t undress. The last memory I have is of her, at 1:30, sitting on the edge of my bed and holding my hand.

When I woke it was 4:00 a.m. and I felt much better. My head was no longer spinning. It was pitch-black, but I sensed that someone was lying next to me. It had been ages since someone else slept in my bed, and it’s not a feeling you can re-create any other way, not even with a mannequin. It’s a beautiful feeling.

So I didn’t want to wake her. But I desperately needed to piss, so I got up cautiously and went out of the room and into the bathroom. I looked at myself in the mirror for ten minutes, thinking back on my arrival at the hospital and the point when I went into the exam room on a gurney: they X-rayed me and clipped the films up on a light box. The doctor was a woman so young that she seemed like a child, but her colleagues and the nurses obeyed her, and clearly they respected her; she came across like a little general, pointing to the X-ray of my cranium as if it were a battle map; and while talking to another doctor she named the tiny bones of my face, one by one, with childish glee, entertaining herself in the midst of the sad, boring night. I had no fractures, and my life wasn’t in danger. A solicitous nurse dressed the wound on my cheekbone, and the girl-doctor discharged me with her sleepy eyes half shut: the entertainment was done.

I undressed and put on the T-shirt and boxer shorts that I sleep in.

The room was no longer so dark — there was a faint glow now, or maybe I’d just gotten used to the gloom, so I could see the outline of Elisabetta Renal’s body stretched out on the right side of my bed, the deserted side.

Until the moment I touched the bed, I’d merely intended to lie down again in my spot and fall back asleep, and if she were to wake up, I’d ask her why she had stayed to sleep, whether she had drunk too much vodka to drive or whether she was afraid I might still need her, or a doctor, or a hospital.

But as soon as I touched the bed my intentions changed. I sat down on her side and stared at her. Maybe she wasn’t sleeping, I thought. Her eyelids trembled with the effort of staying shut. I slowly moved closer and kissed her lids. She didn’t move. So I began kissing her whole face. Her nose and her cheeks, her lips and her chin. She had a hand on her belly, and I went down to kiss the hand. I brushed against the fabric of her blouse, tracing the line of her bra. I saw a naked foot, and, gripped by some kind of euphoria, I began kissing that too. The euphoria had a caption to it, like the display photos in a plant catalog: “There’s a woman in my bed, I can kiss her.” I rested my lips on her toes, then touched them softly, one by one, with my lips, breathing against her skin.

When in the dimness I saw that her eyes were open and watching me with a serious and astonished and curious look, when I understood that she was waiting for something, I glided up her calves, lifted her skirt, roamed around between her thighs, and reached her white underpants, where I stopped to await her reaction. She began moving her hips up and down, pressing her sex against my mouth.

I slipped her undies off. I kissed her and licked her, and she grabbed my hair and pulled it. I squeezed her buttocks between my hands, crushed my whole face against her, and penetrated her with my tongue; my wound reopened, and I felt blood bathing my face and her thigh, but I didn’t stop kissing her until she arched her back like a branch loaded with flowers and then fell back onto the bed and pushed me aside. A moment later she was bowing down over my belly, and I was staring incredulously at the ceiling. I came in thirty seconds.

I asked, “Where are you going?”

“That’s enough.”

“Why ‘enough’?”

She got up and went into the bathroom. I lay down on my side, covering my belly with a corner of the sheet. Why “enough”? I wondered.

Coming out of the bathroom, she left the light on, and now we could see each other’s faces. She came back with a damp towel, cotton, and alcohol, cleaned the blood off me, disinfected the wound, and put another Band-Aid on my cheekbone. She lay down again on the other side. It really was all over.

“Why ‘enough’?”

“Enough. You’ve been in an accident.”

She looked at me like a concerned nurse, and I was irritated but too weak to protest.

What accident was she talking about? She seemed to be distancing herself already: “You’ve been in an accident” was a way of saying “This was just an accident.”

At some point I must have fallen asleep.

At 5:15 I heard the sound of the Ka’s engine and its tires on the gravel, and I awoke with a start.

At 6:00 I took a sleeping pill.

This is what I told her about the night we spent together, what I told her the next evening, when she came to see me and we ate together in the kitchen for the first time. Elisabetta sat at my place, because she found the sofa too uncomfortable for eating. She listened in silence. She was embarrassed, but smiling. Then she told me that she had to think about it, that she wasn’t sure it was a good idea for either of us. “Speak for yourself,” I said. But I thought it was the end.

In those final days of May, the Renal construction site became a garden. There’s always a point when a project you’ve designed and so often pictured in your imagination comes to life and takes the last few steps on its own; when your imaginative effort is suddenly interrupted, and a stranger — the garden — decides everything for you, decides everything for itself; it takes shape and suddenly has its own unique face, not exactly like the face in the frame hung on your mental wall, but it’s still a friendly and familiar face; it turns out your only task was to recognize that face in the crowd and tease it out and set it in the foreground: the garden itself is like the real person, while the design project is just like a memory. But sometimes it remains nothing but an impression and never springs to life. Sometimes you get all the way to the end of a job, and you’re still the one and only person responsible for what you’ve made, and the garden is just an inert heap of crude or sophisticated plants and dirt and materials that you’ve intentionally or unintentionally given some kind of shape to, which arouses some kind of emotion in the clients (or maybe no emotion at all). Then your attitude changes, and exhaustion makes you self-indulgent, and you no longer have the strength to solve problems, except when your errors leap out at you — like a flower bed built wrong — and force you to find a remedy. You finish the job on inertia alone. Or sometimes both things are true.