Andrea Canobbio - The Natural Disorder of Things

I leaned him against the fender, but he didn’t wake up, and I was afraid he would slide back down again to the pavement; I made another enormous effort and somehow dragged him to the R4. It took me about twenty minutes, but I finally loaded him in, sitting down with his head thrown back. I returned to his spot and tidied it up, throwing away the needle and its protective tip and the lighter and the spoon in a trash can. I took back the belt. (And during all this back-and-forth I didn’t doubt for a single instant that we would spend more time together: other sunny days, other trips to the supermarket, other lunches, other TV movies — I didn’t doubt for an instant that we would go on living and seeing each other and knowing each other.)

When I got to the house, my father was waiting for us outside. I told him that Fabio hadn’t woken up, and only then did I think, We’d better take him to the emergency room. But I didn’t say it. I waited for my father to say it. My father said, “Let’s bring him inside.” I don’t recall thinking anything else. But that’s impossible. I must have thought that he was only sleeping, that he was going to wake up.

We brought him up to his bed, undressed him, put on his pajamas, and tucked him in under the sheet. My mother didn’t wake up, or at least she didn’t come in.

My father went out of our bedroom, and I stayed and watched Fabio for a while. He inhaled, exhaled, held still for a second — uncertain about whether to draw another breath — but then he inhaled, exhaled, hesitated, and began again.

I found my father sitting in the kitchen, his hands clasped on the table. He was staring straight ahead. I took three steps into the dark hallway, toward our bedroom. And didn’t go in. I couldn’t have fallen asleep anyway, with Fabio breathing that way. I could have gone to sleep in Carlo’s room, but instead I came back toward the light. I sat down in the kitchen, at the head of the table, tracing the blurry arabesques of the veined marble surface, spellbound by them just as I had been in childhood.

Considering that I must have brought Fabio home at two and we didn’t call the doctor until six, we must have spent four hours sitting at the table without talking. When I looked up, I saw my father’s profile. He was holding back the tears, sobbing silently. Who knows what he was thinking?

Who knows what I was thinking? Besides the fact that I wanted to tell my father we should take Fabio to the emergency room, I must have thought about something else. But I don’t remember. I remember only that I couldn’t speak. I should have said something, and I didn’t.

At six my father stood up and went out of the kitchen. I heard him go to Fabio. He came right back out and called the doctor. He told me to put on my pajamas, and he did so too. When the doctor arrived, Fabio was dead. While I was standing there, my father told him that I had found my brother in the parking lot and brought him home, that he was sleeping but that we weren’t worried because he woke up as soon as he got home and put on his pajamas by himself. I don’t know if the doctor believed it — maybe he didn’t even wonder whether we had any reason to lie, and he surely didn’t notice that our pajamas weren’t wrinkled from a night of sleep; he wasn’t a police detective or anything.

When he left I went back into our room. I sat down on the bed next to Fabio. Without thinking about it, without thinking that he was dead — as if he were just sleeping and he might awake at any moment — I took him under the arms, lifted him up, and embraced him. I squeezed him tight. I could feel my father’s gaze on my back.

I make a habit of presenting my gardens to the clients before I’ve put on the finishing touches. My initial reason was insecurity: in my earliest jobs I kept some wiggle room for myself so that I could change substantial elements if I saw that the client was unhappy. Now I’m famous enough that clients rarely dare to make suggestions, let alone criticize my work. With the Renals, though, I acted in a new and even more arrogant way: I presented a design and then built something completely different, without saying anything to the person who commissioned it. I didn’t even really grasp who had commissioned this. Was it Rossi? Elisabetta? Alfredo’s ghost? The foundation — and therefore Mosca? Who should I have talked to, to say that I wasn’t executing any of the elements that, by the way, I had actually designed for the data center of a bank? Elements that appeared on the plans Rossi had displayed on an easel at the party celebrating Alfredo Renal’s book; elements that will ultimately come to life in the space they were originally designed for.

And Thursday turned out to be the perfect day, because it had rained for the first two days of the week, and Wednesday had been one of those June days when the rain-cleansed air is scrubbed even cleaner by the wind, making it so crystalline that even myopic people feel they can see for miles, and distant objects look so sharply chiseled that it throws you off balance, tumbling you forward — as if the horizon were a nearby shelf and you could reach right out and grasp those things. I knew that the garden would look splendid, the still-damp stone would shine in the sunlight, the crushed glass would spray rainbow glimmers all around, the wet metal surfaces would reflect the plants, the shells would be perfectly clean, and the boxwood hedges would be decorated with minuscule globes of water scattered across the tiny leaves. And that a garden like this one always looks better with dark, moisture-soaked earth than with the dry earth of a breathless July or a snowless January.

At 10:00 a.m. Witold and I stood near the balustrade with our backs to the garden, smiling at Rossi, the twins, and even the assistant, who for the occasion had replaced her usual skirt suit with jeans and a T-shirt that had LISA written in rhinestones on the front. By now I’d figured out that Rossi always dressed the same, as if to say, “This is the paraplegic’s uniform”: a blue cardigan, a white shirt, sweatpants. He had come down in his electric wheelchair, and now the twins, both dressed as gardeners, muttered something behind his back, pointing to the motor and the heavy struts of the chair, worrying about how they were to lift it. “There’s never more than a five-degree slope,” I said. “It’s designed so that an electric chair can easily get around the whole garden.”

Rossi burst out laughing, and when I realized what I had said, I laughed too. The others smiled in embarrassment.

“You’re right, it is sort of like a penal sentence,” he said. “If you want to avoid faux pas, you can call it a motorized chair.”

I was happy to see him in a good mood; I had run into him only a couple of times recently, and each time I felt guilty about wanting to steal his wife away; I was afraid he had already begun to hate me. He seemed quite calm and eager to proceed with the tour. He turned and said to his assistant: “Lisa, please go see whether my wife—” She was the only thing holding us up, and just at that moment she appeared, smiling and out of breath, her hair still wet from the shower, with shorts and a tank top and flip-flops. I tried not to look at her again for the rest of the tour.

“There are seven sections, and the transition from one to the next is very important.” I paused. “If you agree, I’d suggest going all the way though the garden without talking, and then on the way back I’ll tell you what I was trying to achieve.”

They all nodded except the twins, but by now I was accustomed to their inexpressiveness.

As we moved along, the only sounds were our footsteps on the different paving surfaces, the hum of Rossi’s chair, and the trills and whistles of sparrows, magpies, and blackbirds.