Andrea Canobbio - The Natural Disorder of Things

My paternal grandparents’ famous silence was quite different from my maternal grandparents’ famous silence. My paternal grandparents came from peasant and artisan stock, mountain people accustomed to working hard without wasting time chatting; they lived by the principle that you’re better off not talking unless you have something really important to say, something vital, something crucial for survival, for the task at hand, or for the running of the household; that it’s best to communicate without words, to do instead of say. As Carlo joked, “It’s a cross between peasant traditions and lofty philosophy.” My maternal grandparents lived in a small provincial city where my grandfather taught music in a school and my grandmother was a dressmaker. She wasn’t naturally taciturn: at work she was considered a great gossip, but her husband obliged her to be quiet at home, in front of their daughters, so they wouldn’t pick up the vice of talking about other people’s business. My mother’s two sisters were housewives who cooked and mended and embroidered, but as far as I can tell — we didn’t see them much — their father’s policy had no effect on them. My mother was her father’s favorite, the only one who had the patience to learn to play the piano. For Grandfather, silence wasn’t a question of age-old peasant distrust for words: his reticence was self-taught. He hated teaching at school — hated his clamorous students and his petty colleagues — but he loved giving private lessons to musically gifted children. For him, teaching was about showing rather than telling. He hated opera, which he didn’t consider real music; he complained that Italy was musically backward, and he admired the Germans and, to a lesser degree, the French. A great piece of music shouldn’t have to use stories to evoke emotion (and then the stories used in opera were full of hysterical women and laughably fat lovers and stabbing deaths); he considered music, like math, to be an abstract art that fostered pure feelings. Even today, when my mother hears a TV reporter telling a story in a way that she finds too fervid or sentimental, she’ll shake her head and mutter, “Italy, home of melodrama.” That was her father’s expression.

On Monday I worked on the Renal garden with Witold, but I didn’t see Elisabetta; I didn’t go looking for her, and she didn’t come looking for me. We held off until Tuesday afternoon; at three o’clock I was talking to a client on my cell phone, and I’d rambled away from Witold and was crossing the open meadow toward the woods. After the conversation was over, I pictured myself spending another evening alone, and I thought that my dinners with the guest were over for good, so I might as well send her a text message. “Come over tonight,” I typed. After a few seconds my voice-message indicator flashed: she had called while the line was busy and left a voice message saying that she had hardly eaten the night before and she was hungry. I called her right back and told her our messages had crossed. I was afraid she didn’t believe me, so I said, “Really, we thought of each other at the exact same moment.”

“I believe it — I saw you.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m in the house, I saw you on the monitor; I called you on purpose because I saw that you were on the phone and I wouldn’t have to talk to you directly—”

I started laughing. “So that’s how you spend your time …”

“Not always …”

“Can you see me now?”

“Of course, I’m keeping an eye on you.”

“What am I doing?” I said, swinging my arm around.

“You’re waving at me.”

I was concentrating on her voice, looking toward the garden but thinking only about the warmth of her voice and how it stoked my desire. And then, through my vision of Elisabetta standing somewhere in the house, I made out a real figure: Witold. He was at the edge of the garden with his arm up, and even from far away I could see that he was confused: he didn’t understand why I was waving at him, but he felt he had to respond. I had caught him staring at me in recent days; maybe he understood what was going on, and the idea of me with a woman must have worried him, because he was a creature of habit and my isolation had been a reassuring element for years.

So on Tuesday, and all the rest of the evenings that week, Elisabetta came over, and she didn’t accuse me of lying or keeping silent anymore, even though I continued to do both, and everything seemed to be going fine. I knew that I wouldn’t see her on the weekend — she and Alberto were going to the seaside, to their beach house — but I had the kids coming to stay, so I didn’t expect to miss her too much.

Carlo was agitated. I asked him why he wasn’t happy that the war was over, and he said he was very happy that the bombing had stopped, but the people of Serbia, Kosovo, and Albania still weren’t okay, their lives were miserable, and even without the bombs there were traffickers throwing refugees off their boats, and even without ethnic cleansing they faced nothing but violence and hardship.

Of course he was right. It’s not like I ever thought he was wrong, but usually I just listened and nodded, because he always exaggerated. And he was exaggerating now, too, but not about the facts — that was the point: the injustice that made him react so melodramatically was real and awful, it wasn’t a figment of his imagination. I felt kind of dizzy and nauseated: how could I have thought that Carlo invented everything? That on top of his posture of anger and shock and misery, he had also invented all the ills of the world that made him so angry and shocked and miserable?

I left Carlo in my study, slumped in one of his favorite armchairs, chewing on his fingernails. The TV was on in the living room; the kids were watching The Lion King for the hundredth time. Rafiki, the shamanic baboon, was making Simba look into the water at the reflection of his father’s face. I knew this part by heart. When Simba decided to go back to Pride Rock, Filippo turned to me and said: “Papa’s worried about the war.”

“Well, the war is over. You’ll see, everything will be better now.”

“Papa is very sensitive. You’re more stable. ”

“Thank you.”

We finished watching the cartoon, and I put them to bed. When I came back downstairs, Carlo was still in my study, and he was holding the book of Alfredo Renal’s writings. It seemed like a good opportunity to talk about something else, so I asked him what he thought of the idea of the landscape of the plains being a big hodgepodge. He shrugged. “That’s old news.”

“Old news that’s wrong, or right?”

“The picture is right, but the conclusions are all wrong. Who says it was better before? Why should we go back to the past?”

“Right, of course; but I don’t even think the picture is right.”

“Oh, finally you have an opinion,” he said. “When did you decide to start having opinions?”

I ignore him and press on. “It’s not true that this landscape is a hodgepodge, it’s not true that it’s all the same; maybe it looks that way from the outside, but each of us has places that we love, places where we feel at home. It’s not all interchangeable. Right?”

“Maybe so. But this isn’t about your personal memories; this is about looking at the world objectively. At least I think so.”

“And what’s it like, objectively?”

“Objectively, it’s pretty much of a hodgepodge.”

“So what if it is? Can’t we get along okay in a hodgepodge?”

“I guess some people can: you wallow in it. For someone else it might be hell.”

“Hell? Really?”

“And even if there were only a single person who couldn’t stand it, it would be your human duty to try to change the hodgepodge. Rather than justifying the way things are just because you’re okay with it.”