Andrea Canobbio - The Natural Disorder of Things

“The dining room,” “the kitchen,” “Mr. Giletti’s rooms”; we turned left again and found ourselves in “the laundry room,” then “the ironing room,” where I saw a Peruvian woman in a white apron who didn’t seem to be benefiting from the excellent air circulation system: she was grunting and sweating over her steam iron. We went back to the little reading room and sat at a round table with a smoked glass top that held a carafe filled with ice cubes and lemonade. I asked whether I could add some gin, and Mosca turned to his right and murmured at the wall, “Do you know if we have any gin in the house?” and the wall answered with a muffled voice, “Not as far as I know.” I didn’t give him the satisfaction of asking how it worked. But he went on for a bit singing the house’s praises, and I sipped my lemonade in silence.

Suddenly he broke off, his brow furrowed. He pretended to cast about for the right words, but there was no way he hadn’t already chosen them.

“You must be wondering about Mr. Giletti’s role in my life …”

I put on a sincerely amazed expression. “No, really, I’m not.”

“At first I thought I could solve the problem by buying a dog, so I got that terrier, Hello, but he wasn’t enough.”

Another pause.

I say, “Dogs are good company; I had one myself, but—”

“No, no, you misunderstand me. It wasn’t for company. I’m not lonely, I’m perfectly self-sufficient.” He smiled. I smiled too, reflexively, but without knowing why. “What I needed was a witness.”

“A witness?”

“An eyewitness. Someone to see me living my life. When I turned fifty I began to feel strange. And I thought, I’m not the type of person who gets clinically depressed.”

A pause.

Was that a question? I shake my head: no, he’s not the type.

“And then I understood: I’ve always lived alone, I’ve been working and earning — earning a lot of money, if I do say so myself — but I don’t like spending money just to show how rich I am, that’s just not the way I was raised. I don’t show off my money; it’s hidden. So where does that leave me? I was like a buried land mine: no one knows where it is, anybody might step on it. I was about to explode. But then I had this idea: a witness, a biographer, a documentary filmmaker. Giletti is all that. He tells the story of my life.”

A pause; a sip of lemonade.

“Don’t get me wrong, it’s not for posterity. I don’t give a damn about posterity. It’s for me. For me alone. You have no idea how my life has been enriched since Giletti started following me. In the evening he tells me what I did that day. The objective account of my life. And then I go to bed with this new awareness: I exist.”

I was now sweating diligently and consistently, very focused on the task of sweating; I was like a piece of cheese left on the counter outside the fridge.

“A lush green garden would help make the house fresher,” I said. “I’m also thinking about some stands of reeds, and some small palm trees that you could bring inside during the winter.”

He stared at me to see whether I was making fun of him or whether I really hadn’t understood any of what he had said.

“Come, let me take you into the multimedia room; I want to show you a tape that I received anonymously in the mail.”

Giletti appeared with a laptop computer under his arm.

“It was a VHS video, but Mr. Giletti copied it digitally so we could examine it more closely. He’s really a technical wizard.”

It was nighttime, with fog and fluorescent lights, but I immediately recognized the lot at the supermarket, and Conti standing and smoking, and the parked cars.

“Last fall an acquaintance of mine, Mariano Conti, was hit by a car in the parking lot of a mini-mall. It was very sad. This Conti wasn’t the most honest of men, but he certainly didn’t deserve to end up like that. He got his start lending money, with interest rates that were a bit high, but not unreasonable. Then he set up an actual investment company, and I helped him out. That was a mistake. I couldn’t ever shake him. He was a hard man to shake.”

The film rolls for a few more minutes, and nothing happens until the Ka appears.

“The quality is really dreadful. Look, you see, only at this point did I realize that this had anything to do with me. That’s Elisabetta Renal’s car.”

Giletti froze the image, fiddled with the computer mouse, and enlarged the Ka’s license plate.

“I recognized that the standing man was Conti, and I thought she was going to hit him, but now wait … in just a moment there’ll be another surprise …”

The white van shoots down the driveway, hits Conti full on, and hurls him thirty feet away. After a moment the Ka starts up again and runs him over.

I sit there without moving, just sweating, and say nothing.

“It’s a nasty business,” Mosca says, “but I still didn’t understand why I’d been sent the tape, until … There, watch the car that starts moving now …”

My Mercedes leaves the parking lot with its lights off. Giletti enlarges the license plate. It’s fuzzy but legible.

“So you were there too, and you saw everything even better than this camera did. But don’t worry; I’m not going to ask you to tell me about it. I’m not even going to ask you whether you knew the driver of the van, or whether you were there to make sure he did a good job—” He puts out his hand as if to stop me, but I haven’t moved; I don’t feel offended or accused, and I have nothing to say.

Giletti shuts the laptop.

“Thank you,” Mosca says to him. Giletti leaves the room. “And don’t worry, I’ve already found out who sent me the tape, and I’ve met his terms. But, you see, I cannot keep on tidying up that woman’s messes. She’d gotten it into her head that she was going to find out something or other.”

I look at him without speaking.

“Yes, I understand. You’re in love with her. But Elisabetta doesn’t deserve it. She’s a very superficial woman. When he married her, Alfredo made the biggest mistake of his life, a colossal, incomparable mistake, and even though he really loved her — in his own way, of course — I can’t help thinking that she made him die. At first she was just a young girl, but she has never grown up. She’s a woman of no character, and she’s not even very clever.” He stopped and looked at me, struck by a sudden thought. “You do know you’re not the first, don’t you?”

I couldn’t flush with anger. I was already purple.

“Of course, you’re thinking that Elisabetta has the right to do whatever she wants. But you’re wrong. A woman doesn’t outlive a husband like Alfredo Renal.”

I run my eyes along the edge of the table, and I count circles around the carafe where the ice cubes have all melted by now.

“Forget about her. Let me explain: I care about the foundation. And the foundation is held by Elisabetta and Rossi: two people who for very different reasons are both extremely fragile. Alberto, in particular, is on the edge of a nervous breakdown.”

I drop my gaze to my crossed legs.

“Well, I don’t want to keep you here any longer. The work on the garden is finished, isn’t it? More or less.”

I nod.

“I was sure you’d understand right away; you’re an intelligent man.”

Then I’m in the elevator with Hello the dog nipping at my ankles. I kick him out of the elevator. Mosca laughs. “Good, good, that’s the way: kick the past away, send it packing. Please do think about my hanging garden; I’ll keep bothering you until you design it for me. And keep in mind that I have lots of contacts.”

He stares at me. I stare at him.

“Compliments on your house,” I say. “It’s really phenomenal.”