Andrea Canobbio - The Natural Disorder of Things

“I killed a man.”

I have to be more convincing, and not give myself away. “I don’t believe it. More or less? ”

“I’m pretty sure.”

“What do you mean? Did you kill him or didn’t you?”

“Yes, I killed him.”

“How?”

“I hit him … I hit him with my car … Well, actually he was already on the ground when I ran him over …”

I turn and look at her as if I want to see whether she’s pulling my leg. “What was he doing on the ground?”

She waves it away. “It’s too complicated to explain …”

She’s leafing through “Little Red Riding Hood,” so I can look at her without fear that she’ll look back at me: she’s gazing down at the booklet and its illustrations. I lower my eyes too, and look at her feet.

“Did you know who he was?”

“Of course I knew, I had an appointment with him, in the parking lot of a supermarket …”

She told me that one day she got a call from a man who said he wanted to talk to her about an important donation; an old widow had died without heirs, and he claimed to be her butler; he said there was a handwritten will, but before turning it over for probate he had to meet with her because he was afraid something shady might happen and the money might not get to the Renal Foundation as the lady had wished. Elisabetta suggested that he talk to Mosca, but the butler had insisted on seeing her. “That’s why I called you, because I cannot meet with that man,” he said, giving her to understand that it was Mosca he was concerned about. The story didn’t ring true, and Elisabetta thought that if she met the butler once she could persuade him — she pictured him as old, frightened, and anxious — to proceed in the normal way and trust the probate system and Mosca.

They agreed to meet in a café downtown, and as soon as the man bent down to greet her — he was fiftyish, tall, and stout, in a gray summerweight wool suit and camel-hair coat — Elisabetta saw that he certainly was no butler and there must have been something else going on. The man introduced himself as Mariano Conti, the owner—“for how much longer I don’t know”—of an investment company. He apologized for having lied to her, but the things he had to tell her were too delicate and important to say over the phone. He told her about a betrayal: he had worked a lot with Mosca, done a lot of favors for him, sent a lot of money his way, and now his former partner had tired of him and was dumping him. Elisabetta said that Mosca’s business had nothing to do with her; she didn’t see the point of this meeting, and she wanted to leave.

“Wait,” he told her. “If in five minutes you still think the thing has nothing to do with you, then you can go.” And he explained how Mosca had used the foundation from the very start for his own money laundering. He asked her to tell Rossi, to call a meeting of the foundation’s board and expose Mosca. Again Elisabetta got up to go, but then something made her pause. She thought that exploiting the foundation to cover up illegal activity was like abusing a child, the child Alfredo had never had. And that wasn’t all: the bookkeeper in her demanded that she straighten things out simply for the satisfaction of a job well done, and that was the funniest aspect of the indignation she felt: this reconciliation with her father’s spirit. She told Conti that she needed documents to show to Alberto, that they needed proof. And Conti promised to furnish documents. They decided to meet not far from the villa a few nights later, in a supermarket parking lot.

She got to the supermarket, saw Conti waiting for her near a car, and parked, but she had no intention of getting out; she was waiting for him to come over, get into her Ka, and show her the documents. Maybe he had left them in his car: he turned as if to get them.

Then Elisabetta heard the sound of a car revving up and saw the white van shooting down the driveway; she heard the sound of the impact, a thud that she’ll never forget, and saw Conti’s body fly through the air.

She looked at the body; maybe he was dead, or maybe not. Panicking, she turned on her engine and ran over him by mistake as she fled. Then he was certainly dead.

“And what about the driver of the van?”

“I didn’t see him. It was rainy and dark.”

“Did they catch him?”

“No. In the paper the next day they said that Conti had a lot of enemies but that the police thought it was an accident.”

“Did you think that they might have wanted to kill you too?”

“Yes, I thought of that, but I’m not so sure anymore.”

“So what do you mean? … Why do you say this made you think that you’d woken from your slumber?”

“Because for the first time I thought that I had to leave: I began to dream of another house, anywhere else, and a job — another life. But then there’s Alberto. He needs me.”

“Are you sure he does?”

“What do you mean?”

“You can’t leave him?”

“No, I don’t want to leave him,” she replies.

And maybe it’s because I’m so crushed by this — maybe to hide my disappointment — that I say the words that spell my ruin: “Weren’t you afraid that the police would track you down when they looked at the log of car accidents that happened that night?”

She looks up from “Little Red Riding Hood.” She smiles bitterly: she built a trap for me without even meaning to, and I fell right into it.

She says slowly, “Who says it was the same night?”

She’s wearing one of my old striped pajamas; I have no top on, and I feel ugly and fat.

“Well … I just assumed it … you were driving like you were drunk …”

“You’d been following me for a while when you saw me go off the road—”

“I wasn’t following you, I just happened to be driving behind you …”

Her tone changes: she doesn’t raise her voice, but she’s clearly furious; she freezes me with an icy rage that she’d kept hidden until it was the right moment to strike. Now the moment has come, and it erases everything that came before; it’s as if all her loving actions were only building up to this attack.

“All you do is ask questions, and tell lies, and clam up, but the result is always the same: the upshot is that I tell you my whole life story and you’ve never told me anything about yourself.”

“I don’t know what I’m supposed to tell you … Nothing has ever happened in my life.”

“Explain why Mosca knew your father.”

“My father?” I stutter. “Mosca? I haven’t the foggiest idea why.”

She doesn’t believe me.

“Mosca told me he remembers your father very clearly. He recalls that he had a furniture factory.”

Now I don’t need any further confirmation; I should be satisfied, but I haven’t got time for this.

“It’s true, but it didn’t do very well; he sold it and then started working as a gardener. I was just a kid. I don’t know anything else.”

“About your father? You don’t know anything else about your father?”

“That’s right. He didn’t talk, and I didn’t ask. None of us asked, and he rarely talked. None of us ever talked much.”

“That must have been quite a cheerful household.”

I hurl the Tales Told booklet across the room. “Don’t say another word about my family.”

She gets up from the sofa. She goes upstairs. After a bit she comes down, fully dressed, and goes out the front door without saying goodbye. I follow her without speaking. I help her drag the tarp off the Ka. I fold it up with my back to her; I hear her get in the car, back out, and leave.

I stand there in the courtyard, half naked, in the shadow of the canopy. There’s no sound, and unless I talk to myself, I haven’t any hope of hearing another person’s voice for the rest of the day.