Andrea Canobbio - The Natural Disorder of Things

That aside, the situation was perfect, a tabula rasa where you could invent whatever you wanted, if only they’d let you. Sometimes I’m happy to let waves of ideas wash over me, and at other times the very brilliance and promise of my ideas only arouse my suspicions. I spun around. “Let’s go,” I said to Witold. And as I went back to the car I planned a new phone call: I would tell her that I’d been here, that I’d seen the site; or I would pretend nothing had happened, so she’d be obligated to insist, and then I’d come again with a project already all worked out, to stun her and win her over; or I’d snuff out her hopes right away, because in the end the space was so banal that it would make an even more banal garden — it was useless to try for singularity or sophistication. That’s right: maybe I’d tell her that I wasn’t interested in the job.

When we got to the lemon-tree planter, Witold grabbed my arm, holding me back as if I were about to be run over by a truck. I looked at him to understand what was going on, and he gestured with his head. The sun hammered down on the distant hornbeams, and the leaves whirled obediently in the breeze — shiny and dull, shiny and dull, top and underside — so the trees shifted hues like those holographic billboards. A man had stepped out of the avenue of plane trees below us, with a hunter’s vest and a shotgun slung over his shoulder. We spied on him from atop the knoll as he walked over to the R4; then, when we saw him begin to examine the car, we instinctively tried to hide behind a shrub, ridiculously, especially for anyone who might have been watching us from the house, concealed behind the shutters — the idea of it suddenly seemed very likely, now that we ourselves had become spies. The hunter walked around the car, then bent down and looked through the back window for thirty seconds, cupping his hands around his face to block out the reflections on the glass.

The dog was covered with a waterproof green tarp, and in any case it wasn’t the household pet. “There isn’t any dog bed or dog bowl or gnawed bones lying around — did you see any?” I whispered to Witold, whose eyes were wide open. It’s odd, actually, that they don’t have a dog here. We had come out into the open now, but in just those few seconds the hunter had disappeared. By the time we got down the slope and reached the R4, the man had reappeared on the path that ran around the knoll, and now he was dressed as a gardener. Dressed in a gardener’s uniform, just as he was dressed in a hunter’s uniform before. A big green apron, a tool belt, a straw hat, and rubber boots. O, the lost peasant traditions of yesteryear! That’s an expression coined twenty years ago by my brother, and it comes in handy when you’re casting a baleful eye on some faux-rustic product in the supermarket. Here were the lost peasant traditions of yesteryear: the deep, woody voice, the calcified facial muscles, and the deadened expression (instead of what people usually describe as a “lively expression”). I’d say that his neck was the most remarkable element: his ability to hold his neck as straight as a pine tree and his head immobile on his neck. Still, I couldn’t understand why I so hated this man on first sight, what he could have done to me.

We introduced ourselves. He mumbled something, maybe that he’d been told we might visit. He invited us to follow him. For more than half an hour he shepherded us around the property in the broiling midday sun. He made statements like “Here we planted such-and-such, but it didn’t grow.” He added comments like “That spot needs a tougher plant.” In the beginning he tried to speak in the local dialect, but I stopped him immediately: “Speak Italian, because,” I lied, “we don’t understand a word you’re saying.” When people arrogantly speak to strangers in dialect, it’s usually just thoughtlessness, and it’s best to prevent thoughtlessness.

And while we’re walking across the remains of an unfinished Zen garden (the traces of white gravel stuck in mud, stacked-up cadavers of stone slabs, briars, and sumac moving in to reestablish the natural disorder), a woman dressed in red appears at the concrete balustrade and watches our uncertain rambling for a few minutes. I don’t want her to realize that I’ve seen her — I keep the bright spot that is her dress in the corner of my field of vision and glance at her without moving my head: it looks as if she’s encircled by my nose, thanks to my left eye, which stubbornly follows the movement of my right, so I close it, but the gardener catches me winking, and I reopen my eye.

The woman rests her hand on the balustrade, and it’s as if she’s emphasizing its concrete presence, as if she’s saying, “Between me and you, fortunately, stands this barrier.” It’s not her, it couldn’t be: she was taller (but I’m seeing this woman from a distance) and had longer hair (she could have cut it). And if it were she, she would come down to greet us, or she would motion for us to come up (would she?).

Instead she turns and goes.

Now Witold was in a good mood: he bent down to test the acidity of the soil, and he reported the results to me in a sarcastic tone, as if they were scandalous, and every time the gardener opened his mouth, Witold looked as if he was about to laugh in his face. Not only was I not enjoying myself but I was growing more irritated, and I wanted to go. Then I tripped on a root, flew through the air, and tore my T-shirt as I hit the ground. They picked me up. My dignity wounded, I made it clear to the gardener that, no offense to him, I usually dealt with the master of the house, and that I couldn’t understand anything if I looked over a site in this manner, that I couldn’t understand what I was being asked to invent. Consistent with his style, he didn’t change expression (he had none). I pulled out a business card, the one I use for clients, and put it in his hand. It carried my cell-phone number beneath the words

CLAUDIO FRATTA GARDENS

But it hasn’t always been like this: dealing with the master of the house is a recent habit for Claudio Fratta. When I used to go around with my father, our interlocutors were the caretakers and the gardeners and the Filipina housekeepers, and we took orders from the caretakers and the gardeners and the Filipina housekeepers, and we learned the English names for the plants (“lime tree” for tiglio and “jasmine” for gelsomino ) because otherwise there wasn’t any way for us to communicate with the help. Since then, the Romanians have come, and the Poles and the Indians: my father would have to carry two or three dictionaries along with him now, and he didn’t usually deal with the master of the house, and he didn’t have business cards: when necessary, he wrote his phone number on bits of paper ripped from bags of humus; my mother furnished his car with old address books and outdated calendars, but he left them in the trunk with his tools, and, when he needed to write something down and went looking for the scrap paper, he’d reach into the recesses amid abandoned boxes and half-rotten flower bulbs and half-used bags of seed and pull out those flowered notebooks, swollen with moisture, their paper reduced to a soft, useless gray pulp.

Of all the spaces I shared with my father, the car is the one I remember best. I don’t have the same intense memories of me and my father eating in the kitchen, I don’t remember our bodies walking through the plant nursery or standing in the seed store where he bought his supplies, I don’t remember our spines curved over one of the gardens that he looked after — that we looked after. This means that if I find myself in one of those gardens, or in the store, or in the kitchen of the old house where my mother still lives, and I close my eyes and try to feel my father’s presence, I can’t do it; specific memories float up, scenes and episodes that have already been labeled and filed away, and they’re pale and flimsy, like pictures traced on a white wall by an eight-millimeter movie projector — ghosts. But in the car, in any car (not just the R4), my father is always with me, sitting in the passenger seat, and when I take certain shortcuts that he invented (some of which don’t actually shorten the route at all, I’ve discovered, but go through the less corrupted zones of our landscape or are uninterrupted by intersections or stoplights, though the mileage is longer), I say out loud: “Why don’t we go this way?” as if he were saying it to me, waving his knobby forefinger toward the window on his right.