Andrea Canobbio - The Natural Disorder of Things

One time, for example, I was in the farmhouse courtyard on a spring day when I had brought them over to see it; I’d bought the place as soon as I had some savings. I was very proud of having bought it, and though it needed to be completely restored, I was in no hurry: I had no intention of leaving my mother to look after my father alone, so I really wasn’t planning to move out; I thought maybe I’d rent it when it was ready. My father had already been using the wheelchair for several months, and my mother was pushing it around the sunny courtyard while I scraped old paint off a shutter laid across two sawhorses. “Papa wants to talk to you,” my mother said. “I’m going to tidy up indoors.” So we were left alone. His hands lay inert in his lap; they were traced with bluish veins like rivers on a relief map. His legs were nothing but skin and bones: he just didn’t want to use them anymore. I was concentrating on my work: the scraper I was gripping and the flakes of dry paint that lifted off to reveal the naked wood beneath. My father didn’t talk, and I didn’t ask him what he wanted to tell me.

I could have asked him if he liked the farmhouse.

I could have talked about the weather.

Asked him if he wanted to talk to me about Carlo.

If he wanted a glass of water or wine.

If he was pleased with me, with my work, with my gardens.

If he wanted to go home.

I kept quiet with my father facing me in a wheelchair.

I could have asked him any old thing, but the one thing I should have asked him kept me from talking at all.

I should have asked my father if he wanted to talk about the night Fabio died. I should have asked him to explain to me what we had done, he and I, and how it was possible to go on living. I should have asked him, and he would have had to explain it to me. If your father doesn’t explain it, who will? If your father doesn’t explain why he let his son die, how can a son wish to live?

In the last few weeks, especially since Elisabetta left, I was tormented by imagining that conversation that never happened. When I pictured my father, I no longer saw him sitting next to me in the car, as usual, with our four eyes playing the world like the four hands of a pair of pianists in a duet. Now we were facing each other, I standing and he trapped in his wheelchair, I as both judge and defendant, he as both judge and defendant, I weak and strong because I was standing, he weak and strong because he was seated. As long as we were in the car we kept moving forward, our eyes never met, and there was never any threat to the silence. Now we were planted in each other’s paths, though, and the silence became unbearable. But which of us should have broken the silence?

So I imagined someone else in my place, and someone else in his, to distract myself and give me some relief. I pictured Renal and my father. What would they have told each other? About the indifference of a man who becomes a gardener so he’ll never again run the risk of thanking the loan shark who ruined him. About the saintliness of a man who can love all humanity but can’t love the woman who chose to marry him. I pictured Elisabetta and my mother. The Sleeping Beauty who can never leave her enchanted castle because she wants to look after a paralyzed Prince Charming. The pianist who studies Bach and detests melodrama because feelings should be kept in the heart, under lock and key. I pictured Witold and Rossi. The Pole who proclaims his love for Italy in order to forget his longing for his homeland. The man who had the misfortune of seeing his ideal of perfection personified in another man.

But all of them would have had something to say to one another, if only because they’d never met. They would have started talking about the weather, then they would have told one another the stories of their lives, maybe using Tales Told as a springboard. I pictured them all together in one room, and the sound of their voices suffocated me. Only my father and I were condemned to spend eternity in the places where my mother had left us, wordless, in the most perfect and lacerating silence.

But no, now I’m getting carried away. I’m too fond of silence to betray it this way.

There are lots of ways of communicating. True. You can say things without speaking. True. For example, Fabio’s favorite places to shoot up. Some of them I knew about because they were where all the junkies went, protected places where they wouldn’t be bothered. Others were places I’d followed him to, where I’d waited for him and spied on him. But I think the places he liked best were an untilled field behind my father’s old factory and a bench in the public park in town (my father had worked for the town for a while). And it’s true that these messages are no more vague and imprecise than a statement full of words.

“Biggle opty hatpat?” can mean a thousand things.

But did my father’s silence mean something?

There are two different versions of the fairy tale. One is that our father is offended by the world and won’t recognize that he has any responsibility for his bankruptcy and the death of his son: he’s silent because he has nothing to say, because there’s no point getting upset about fate, you simply have to bow your head and carry on. The second is that our father knows perfectly well it was partly his fault he lost the factory, and feels guilty for not being able to get his son off drugs and for having let him die: he’s silent because he lacks the courage to speak, because he thinks that admitting his guilt would lose him the affection of his wife and sons.

The first version is reassuring; it’s Carlo’s version. The second is not reassuring; it’s mine. The first version does nothing to redeem our father, or rather it redeems him by transforming him into a victim of his own upbringing, of his own history, of his background: a marionette. The second does too much to redeem him, because it seems intolerable to think that the old man died without ever understanding what he had lived through. So then, maybe — thinking about it now — I see that this one is reassuring too.

But we’ll never know which of the two is closer to the truth, if indeed there was only one truth in our father’s head, because he doesn’t talk, not even with himself, he doesn’t articulate his feelings in words, he never runs the risk of lying to himself or anyone else; all he does is keep everyone from laying bare his lies, perhaps, and thus perceiving what he feels. He is the owner of his own silence, and he gave birth to my silence: he’s the father of my silence.

(But no, now I’m getting carried away.)

Mosca eventually called me, and without showing too much eagerness, I agreed to go to his house to see the site. The elevator opened directly into the apartment, and as soon as the doors parted, a nervous little white terrier slipped between my legs so that Mosca had to kick at it to get it back in the house. The apartment took up the whole top floor of a building in the center of the city. Mosca explained that he’d had all the interior walls ripped out, and then he himself, with an architect friend, had designed the layout of the rooms. It was a checkerboard based on the principle that every space should be the same size—3.1416 yards square — and that all the spaces should flow into one another without any corridors or foyers; and he wanted the hanging garden to follow the same philosophy. Well, I’ll design any kind of garden if the money is right. If I needed cash and someone asked me to, I’d design a garden with succulent plants topped by Corinthian capitals with red velvet drapes. But I didn’t need money at the moment. I could turn down a job and shop around carefully for my next victim.

On the great terrace surrounded by a palisade of silver firs, where some haggard azaleas and yellowing gardenias were suffocating slowly, we stopped to watch the yellow disk of the sun diving into the city’s haze. The air was terribly close. I asked why he didn’t have air-conditioning, and he said that there was nothing worse for the health, and that his checkerboard idea fostered excellent air circulation: he had been inspired by houses in India and the Minoan palace of Knossos. He took me on a guided tour, presenting each room by name, as if this were Versailles: “the little reading room,” “the writing room,” “the music room,” “the screening room,” “the bedroom,” “the bathroom,” “the steam room,” and so on. “The rooms are also balanced by the number of furniture pieces in each one.” I nodded. We turned left and ran into Giletti, stretched out on a chaise longue reading a newspaper, holding the pages up and away from the terrier, who was trying to rip them. Mosca gave the dog another kick, and Giletti rose to greet me while I was telling him not to bother getting up. We went on with the tour.