Andrea Canobbio - The Natural Disorder of Things

“Witold told me it was the edge of the cistern that tripped him up. It was a terrible mistake, to design such a detail at an invalid’s house. I’ll never forgive myself.”

So I was lying to her again. But I thought: I was used to silence; now I talk, and I lie because I’m not used to talking.

Witold told me right away what happened. Rossi suddenly appeared, heading for the pond, ignoring Witold’s shout of alarm; he lurched across the raised border of white pebbles, his wheelchair overturned, and he shot forward into the water. Witold dove in and tried to grab him under the arms, Rossi struggled, I got there, and the two of us managed to lift him and pull him out. We didn’t have any time to consider what to do with him, where to lay him down, before one of the twins came running, followed by the other twin carrying a robe and towels. They wrapped Rossi in the robe and took him in their arms and carried him off with their usual efficiency, without saying a word.

Some towels are left on the ground, and Witold and I look at them, still panting. We certainly can’t dry our clothes with towels. I ask him what happened, but he doesn’t answer right away; he shakes his head and simply gestures, pointing at the garden and then at the pond. We look at each other, standing there, breathing hard, water dripping down into two matching puddles. I ask him how Rossi fell into the pond. He shakes his head. “He didn’t fall — he threw himself.” While I try with some difficulty to link words to the action he saw, and the action to its consequences, and consequences to a noun as thin and solid as a rope, Elisabetta appears, barefoot in jeans and a sweatshirt.

She leads us into the house, into one of the guest bedrooms, and insists that we shower right away; she brings us shampoo and two robes. She’s scared: she never looks me in the eye, and I stare down at the ground. After washing, we sit on the two beds with our naked, hairy legs sticking out beneath the light blue robes. Elisabetta took away our clothes before we could stop her — how does she plan to dry them? Witold giggles and says that maybe they’ll forget about us and we’ll be stuck in here for a week, but then he gets serious again and I know he’s thinking about what he saw. One of the twins brings in two cups of coffee and sets them down on a little table; he asks us if we want a cognac and says that our clothes will be ready in half an hour. I glance at Witold and say No, thanks, the coffee is all we need.

The second twin appears in the doorway, mirroring the figure standing next to our beds, and says that Rossi wants to speak to us. We follow him, walking barefoot across the cold floors. In the dim room Elisabetta is sitting on the edge of the bed and holding Rossi’s hand; he’s stretched out under the covers. Elisabetta says that Alberto wants to thank us. His eyes are closed; it looks like he’s sleeping. There’s half a minute of silence. Does she really have to hold his hand?

“Remind me of your name, please,” Rossi says.

Witold doesn’t react; I touch his arm and whisper that Rossi’s talking to him.

“Witold Witkiewicz,” he says feebly.

“Witold,” Rossi repeats.

Silence falls again. It’s the first time I’ve been in this room; it looks identical to Alfredo Renal’s room, which Rossi showed me more than a month ago: the same furniture, in the same arrangement, but not the same room — the other one is at the end of the hall. I think, He should have simply gone and slept in that room. There is a photograph of Alfredo Renal on the bedside table, another one standing on a dresser, and one hanging on the wall behind me, next to the armoire with the mirrored door; that’s the picture I want to inspect more closely, because from the corner of my eye I see that there’s someone standing next to Renal.

“Witold,” says Rossi, “what country are you from?”

“Poland.”

“It must be a beautiful country.”

I take one step to the side and peek at the photo; no one sees me do it. They are eighteen or twenty. Both wearing jackets and ties, clothes that look more adult than they are themselves. They’re smiling. Renal has his arms down at his sides and his head lowered a little bit, as if the light bothers him. Rossi, standing next to him, looks like the older brother, with a hand in his pocket swelling one flank of his jacket, the other arm held out, with a cigarette between his index and middle fingers.

“I’ve never been there,” Rossi speaks up again, “but it must be beautiful.”

Soon we’ll be out of here. I’m not cold, but I’m shivering. I want to get dressed. Elisabetta strokes Rossi’s still damp hair, readjusts the pillows behind his back, and then takes his hand in hers again and squeezes it. She doesn’t turn even slightly to look at me.

“Not as beautiful as yours,” says Witold, surprising everybody. “Italy is an extraordinary country.”

“Witold is an expert in Italian literature.” I feel I have to clarify this, to justify his enthusiasm.

“Italy has given the world a wealth of literature,” Witold goes on, smiling. “And most of all it has given us opera. Rossini, Verdi, Puccini. I think there’s nothing greater; sometimes … sometimes I think I would like to have been an Italian in the nineteenth century, to have been a patriot during the Risorgimento, going to the theater at night to hear the Trovatore or Rigoletto .”

Standing in the midst of us gray Italians, the Pole suddenly seemed taller: he stood there wrapped in his robe as if it were a hero’s mantle. We looked at his smile with something like deference, and then Rossi began to cry.

“Calm down, quiet down,” Elisabetta said to comfort him, and she waved us out of the room.

We went out, nearly pushed along by one of the twins. In the guest room were our clothes, magically washed and ironed and laid out tidily on the beds. Witold wasn’t smiling anymore. “What did I say that was wrong?”

“First you save him, then you make him cry,” I remarked, shaking my head.

We worked on the Renal garden for two more days, and Jan came back to help us re-create the cone of crushed glass that the wheelchair had crashed into; we left many little details unfinished, which didn’t actually bother me since I didn’t want to think about the ending: the end of the job and the end of coming to the villa and the end of the affair with Elisabetta, despite her assurances. We could have gone on working even with the villa closed up for the summer, but Rossi’s assistant told us it would be better to finish in September, right before they organized a nice party to inaugurate it; and she smiled — she always smiled at me now. During the summer the property was patrolled by security guards, and it just created trouble for them if there were people coming and going. “If we’re not here, they can shoot on sight?” I asked her seriously. She was taken aback and stared at me for a second, then burst out laughing; she must have decided that I was a joker (but I wasn’t laughing).

We finished restoring the pond on Thursday evening, and on Friday morning we drove to the villa in the R4. I wanted to say goodbye to Rossi again, check on him, and see Elisabetta one more time, just to squeeze her hand for a brief moment. It had been very hot for the last few days, and the idea of leaving these hills to go work down on the plain, near a highway intersection, was dreadful. Driving along the tunnel of plane trees, I felt absolutely sure that this was the last time I would go to the villa, but I didn’t believe my premonition — I’ve never believed in premonitions, whether mute and vague and imprecise or detailed descriptions of disasters and calamities.

One of the twins was coming toward us with a wheelbarrow that held a suspicious shape inside a black bag. Apparently they had found a drowned dog in the pond; before dying he had jumped from one cone of crushed glass to another, cutting his feet and going mad with pain. The man lifted the edge of the bag to show us the mutilated paws. For the first time his tone was not neutral; it sounded like he was blaming me, and since I don’t think he cared particularly about the dog, he might have been accusing me of being responsible for Rossi’s accident. I wanted to say, “Finally you have an opinion; when did you decide to start having opinions?” but instead I just stuttered, “Are the cones badly damaged?” His eyes flew open wide — for once they showed an expression — but the rest of his face stayed inert; his stunned eyes were like early snowdrops blooming long before any other flower. He didn’t answer me but just started walking again with his wheelbarrow hearse, the dog paws jouncing along outside the bag.