Andrea Canobbio - The Natural Disorder of Things

“Mamma,” I stutter, “what are you talking about?”

But she has already said enough, and she even said it twice, and she doesn’t intend to say anything more. She shakes her head as if it’s already inevitable.

“Mamma, how can you possibly think that I killed someone?”

She glances up with a look that slices right through me, like a knife.

I imagine her one night, many years ago, when a neighbor rang to let her and Papa know that one of their sons was asleep or passed out or maybe dead in a parking lot. And she said to Papa, “Send Claudio to get him; bring him home,” and then closed herself in her room.

“Listen, I don’t know what you’re talking about. If you mean that man, Conti — I didn’t kill him. And this other character, Mosca, is just someone I met by chance; he wants me to fix up his terrace. I asked you if he was Conti’s partner because I don’t want to work for him and then discover later that he ruined Papa.”

She shakes her head again.

“Well, then don’t fix up his terrace, because he was the one. He ruined Papa.”

I pour water into her cup and push the sugar bowl closer.

“So why did you tell me to remember only Conti’s name when I was little?”

“I told you to remember …? What are you talking about?” I tell her what I did with the old pistol: how I threw it into a hole where Witold and I were planting a sweet gum tree this afternoon. I don’t know if she believes me.

I refused to take her back home and made her stay the night in Carlo’s room, but I don’t think she closed her eyes all night, and I didn’t sleep either.

The next day I called Mosca and told him that I had a lot of ideas for his garden, that, in fact, I’d even built a little model and I’d be happy to show it to him if he could stop by my house some evening, before the beginning of August, so the work could begin in September. I thought he would say that we should meet in the city, and I had two other excuses ready (the project existed only on my computer; or I had some unusual plants in my courtyard that I was planning to use, if he liked them) — it was really better for him to stop by here whenever it was convenient. But he caught me off guard by accepting enthusiastically; the very next day he’d be in this neighborhood, in the early afternoon, and he could drop by. “Good, I’ll expect you,” I stuttered. But it wasn’t okay at all for him to come by so soon — I wasn’t ready.

After lunch I abandoned the site at the bank’s data center; the sky was white with dense haze, and the air was stagnant; Witold’s figure trembled like a candle flame in the distance. I drove twenty miles off and parked in the shade of some plane trees in a little public park, to stand surveillance over a shop marked MARTINO STATIONERY CARDS • BOOKS • TOYS. As soon as I saw Martino come out — walking stiffly at first, then loosening up into a long stride; his torso was hunched slightly forward, and he was clearly unwell but as determined as a bull — I got out of the R4 and headed toward the store. Inside was the salesgirl, a tall, unattractive brunette who helped Martino in the afternoon; I had seen her only once: there was no way she would remember me. I asked her for a green cardboard expanding file because I knew they kept them in the back, on the topmost shelves, and she would have to get out the ladder. And indeed she sighed and said, “It’ll take a minute.” A minute was just what I needed.

When she disappeared I went around behind the counter and opened the drawer beneath the cash register. The pistol I was looking for was right there waiting for me, and I took it and slipped it into my pocket. Now I had to hope the girl wouldn’t take too long, so that Martino wouldn’t have time to come back. I began watching for him through the window full of toys; if I hadn’t been in a hurry I would have bought something for the kids. She finally came back with the file, and I paid for it and left. I got home at four; it must have been 120 degrees inside my car, and I was longing for a cool shower, but the shower faucet was still stuck on the boiling hot setting.

I called Carlo and asked him to come, because I had an important appointment tomorrow and I wanted him to be there. He replied that he was busy. So I said that he wasn’t allowed to say no to me, that if he had appointments, he had to cancel them, and if he had to give exams, or attend a thesis defense, he’d have to call in sick, and that I wouldn’t accept any excuses — that I would erase him and the kids from my life. He was silent for a moment, trying to figure out if I was joking. “I’m not joking,” I said. “Get in the car and come here.”

“But why tonight? Isn’t your appointment tomorrow?”

“I have to explain — it’ll take a while.”

“Can’t you even tell me who you have the appointment with?”

“No. Come. I need you.”

Things your parents say — or merely hint at — can lie dormant inside you for years and then suddenly come to life and ring out clearly above the clatter of words that regularly shout through your mind. They’re like sleepers, the spies that the Soviets cultivated in the West, or the secret guardians of Italy who were poised to launch the Gladio coup against the Communists: only Andreotti knew who they were — the guardians themselves had almost forgotten. The problem with those dormant words is that when they come alive they’re dangerous. Having survived oblivion simply strengthens them: they emerge from hibernation without having spent any energy — in fact, they’ve acquired more. When you first hear the words, your mind temporarily represses them; I can picture them going into a kid’s head but knowing that they can’t hope to be heard for years, so they find a little nook and patiently hunker down and doze, despite the din of all the other happy and angry and rude words in there with them. But they’re always on the alert, and they pop out at the right moment, robust and strong, and rise up to the highest peak of your memory and can’t be knocked off it: they shine their blinding light on every one of your thoughts and lead you toward your destiny.

Almost all the synonyms for my word have something to do with accounting: to settle accounts, to make him pay, to even things out. And the only reason I even have my word is an account being out of balance: too much interest due on a debt that was contracted in order to cover other debts. Martino the accountant must have understood such things; I wonder if he advised my father not to accept that loan … Wasn’t it his job to warn against certain people and certain interest rates? No, maybe it wasn’t his job. But anyway, he didn’t save him. And in our childhood games, I was Martino the accountant. Carlo was the hero, the successful entrepreneur, and I was the sorcerer, the magician, the accountant who smoked like a chimney amid the bizarre tools of his job, and Fabio was the peasant in the background, the nameless worker on the assembly line; we could have put a cardboard dummy in his place, because he wasn’t really there anyway — he was off playing by himself.

The last time we had seen Martino was at my father’s funeral, and even then we’d noticed the signs of Parkinson’s disease. We talked to him, Carlo and I first, asking him about his stationery store, and then my mother and I, reminiscing about the times at the factory and, before that, the carpentry shop; he was only a kid when my grandfather took him on as an errand boy, and he went to accountants’ school at night — there was so much energy in those days, said Martino, postwar reconstruction and growth, nobody thinks about it anymore, it’s better just to forget about it. And even though I’d always known, it was only at my father’s funeral that I understood exactly where his store was, and I promised I’d stop by. I didn’t make good on the promise until I read about Conti in the paper and thought I should find out whether he really was the same person who had ruined my father.