Andrea Canobbio - The Natural Disorder of Things

“What was in our room before we were born?”

She looked up from her music, already alarmed. “We” meant Fabio and I, and that meant trouble. Furthermore, I knew that my father had bought the house when Carlo was two, and she knew that I knew. I also remembered the music she was reading, Bach’s harpsichord partitas: I remembered her playing them, and her students mangling them.

“Carlo’s crib was in there. It was his room.”

“And what was in his room?”

“Nothing.”

“Nothing?”

“We used it as a storeroom; we put old furniture in there.”

“And when Fabio was born, why didn’t I move into Carlo’s room?”

“Carlo was already in school; he did his homework there in the afternoon.”

“But we also went to school, later.”

I’m just making a statement, but it sounds like a reproach. Have I ever reproached my mother for something like this?

“There were no other rooms.”

“So Carlo’s academic success comes from the fact that he had a room to himself.”

And then, to shut me up, she says something terrible, and I see that I must have really angered her. “You had a room to yourself too, ultimately.”

She goes back to reading the music. She desperately wants me to leave. But this time I really can’t.

Yes, I remember Carlo doing his homework in the afternoon while I played. Naturally, he often slipped away from his desk and darted over to give me orders — quietly but as authoritatively as ever — after which he’d disappear and I would carry out the orders.

“You mean after Fabio died.”

This is my terrible answer to her terrible answer. No one in this house has ever mentioned his death.

She begins to cry: her eyes tear up, the handkerchief appears in her fist, there’s a quick gesture to swab the leak, the spurting emotions, the discomfort and embarrassment.

And I press on.

“I wasn’t in school anymore, but you’re right, I did get the room.”

At this point I know I can’t expect her to comment. There won’t be any answers to my questions. But silence won’t stop me from going on. I know where I’m heading, but I’m not sure about how to get there. I could, for example, tiptoe up to the topic slowly, carefully, circumspectly:

“Someday I’d like you to tell me something about your past — where you and Papa met, in what exact circumstances. What was the first thing he said to you?

“And what did you like about him?

“Men are often different when they’re young.

“I mean, their character is different. Cheerier.

“First they make women laugh, so they can marry them, and then they become glum and depressed.

“But maybe Papa’s character never changed — what do you think?

“No, I don’t think he changed.

“He must have been taciturn even when he was young.

“But on the other hand, chatterboxes aren’t reliable.

“Papa must have been sure he himself was reliable.

“That’s why losing the factory was so hard for him.

“Not that he ever showed it.

“Because there are lots of ways of communicating.

“Words are not always necessary.

“A small-scale industrialist becomes a gardener after a bankruptcy. That’s one way of saying something.

“Like the people who work at the university. They’re out of the running too.

“Then again, the world is full of hidden dangers.

“And then there comes a point when you feel you’ve done your duty and you can’t go on anymore.

“You even end up thanking the person who ruined you.”

But then, at the last minute, I choose the most direct way of asking her. Not to be nasty. But because I think that she’d stop respecting me if she heard me talk so much. So I say:

“Do you remember that guy who ruined Papa? He was called Conti.” She doesn’t answer.

“Sure you remember. Conti is one name. And you know what? There was another one.”

She doesn’t react.

“Mosca. Does that mean anything to you? Was he the other guy?”

She gets up and goes out of the room. She takes her purse and an empty plastic shopping bag. She leaves the house.

I sat there for a while with my arms resting on the cold marble. I thought about the skills I’d developed in the last twenty-four hours: wounding people and driving them away.

The night before, Elisabetta had tears of fury in her eyes; she kept saying that I shouldn’t let myself get so low, but she didn’t explain why. It’s not easy to find a reason not to, and it’s even harder to help other people find reasons. I was dazed and didn’t have the strength to answer her, but I kept murmuring that she shouldn’t cry, that we were together again and nothing else mattered. But actually a lot of other things did matter; she had expected to find me wearing mouse slippers and a tiger apron, cheerful and satisfied, preparing a tasty dinner, with no weighty issues on the table — just some ice-cold white wine. There wasn’t even that.

“What do you mean, you fell? You didn’t throw yourself down on the ground?” she asked me. I didn’t recall telling her that; she stroked my face, which was pocked by the gravel as if I’d survived smallpox; I must have rolled off the mattress in my sleep. I didn’t know what to say: I was thinking about my dream, my quasi vision, and I was laughing at the idea of my father dressed as a ghost, but Elisabetta — looking at my dusty, filthy body and the pale streaks of dirt in my hair — just grew more irritated. “It’s not funny, you know. How much did you drink?”

“Two or three.”

“Two or three what?”

But meanwhile I was thinking of Andreotti and my father, and smiling.

I told her that I was going to shower and that if she really did belong to the second category of rescuers, she shouldn’t leave; she didn’t smile, and if she had actually taken off I would have simply gone to bed — maybe that would have been even better. The stairs up from the ground floor seemed to go on forever; I got undressed and got into the shower and let out a hoot (the water was scalding hot), and struggled with the old faucet without managing to turn it, and then the plastic handle broke off (the ultrasuperglue gave way — I knew it was going to happen sooner or later).

I went down in my bathrobe to find her sitting on the stone bench; without looking her in the face, I tried to describe something to her. I couldn’t do it. The idea, more or less, was that sometimes it’s important to fall down and lie in the dust; that the earth is always sucking you down, that the force of gravity pulls you all day and it’s useless to resist; that it’s horrible to stand up all the time, as if trying to demonstrate that you keep your thoughts above the rest of your body. “Take the trees,” I said. “It seems like they’re standing up, but it’s not the same thing. You have to see the whole tree; the roots are just as important as the branches. So in a garden … you have to think of a garden as an organism with roots, and the roots are planted somewhere else, in the body of the person who made it, and you can only ever see half of it: you can’t see the roots, you can’t describe them.”

“So every now and then the best thing to do is get drunk and throw yourself on the ground to sleep,” she said with no trace of a smile. She shook her head and said that maybe if we ate something the alcohol would wear off. And at that very moment it did wear off, and I was sober. I told her that I was sober, that maybe I’d made a confusing speech but I was grateful to her for having listened. And then she gave in and hugged me.

The broiling heat of the day had produced a perfectly still evening, where each brief and pathetic breeze petered right out, and as we sat in the wicker chairs in the courtyard, eating prosciutto and cantaloupe, the plants and things seemed to stare at us stupidly. Indra did a little performance for us: he stood up on his hind legs and hopped forward like a tiny tiger-striped kangaroo, then got bored and ran off, barking and ululating, to the woods. It was getting dark. I said that maybe now the kitchen wasn’t so hot.