Andrea Canobbio - The Natural Disorder of Things

Witold doesn’t approve of my style; I can feel his disapproval hovering in the air, and in order to criticize me without referring to the episode with the gardener, he’s listing all the advantages of a job in such a place: the freedom to invent, the favorable site, the wealthy family commissioning it, and, not least, the low risk of failure (after all those errors, a simply decent garden design will look like a masterpiece). I let him talk. We’re halfway down the dirt track leading to the main road when, as one might expect, my cell phone rings. It’s a man’s voice that I can hardly hear over the sound of the wheels on the crushed stone; I stop the car and turn off the engine.

He says he’s “Rossi,” as if I’m supposed to know who that is; he apologizes for the “inadequate” reception we got — his wife is out, he was working in the “studio” and he’d given orders not to be disturbed — might I have a moment to go back and have a chat with him? I reply that the reception wasn’t at all “inadequate,” that it’s my fault for stopping by without advance notice. Rossi responds that in any case he’d be delighted to offer me a cup of coffee or even a “frugal” lunch; he says he doesn’t usually lay out a whole lavish meal at midday.

“Just a moment,” I say, and turn to Witold. “What time is that appointment?” I ask without covering the mouthpiece.

Witold looks at me impassively, then turns away from me; I didn’t consult with him when I decided to come see the place, so why do I want his help now?

“So, we have time,” I say to fill the silence. “Okay, we’re coming.”

Climbing the hill a second time and arriving short of breath yet again, I thought I saw the gardener waiting for us by the front door, seated on a director’s chair, and I thought he was crazy. But then I immediately saw that it wasn’t the gardener, and that the chair was a wheelchair. The man who was shaking my hand might have been about ten years older than I am — fifty or fifty-five — and he was handsome and grizzled: the regular lines of his eyes and nose had been shaped by nature with perfect symmetry, and his regular smile and teeth had been formed to look pleasant and to transmit a sense of confidence and calm; he had a white shirt and cardigan to signal comfort and intimacy, the absence of any problems related to practical necessities: there were no pressing deadlines, no schedules or agendas or unbreakable appointments in his life.

From the waist down, it was another story; below, his body and clothes spoke a different language: the skeletal legs drawn up and lolling to the side like inert mannequin’s parts, the stained pale gray sweatpants, the bulk of the diaper at his groin, and the feet, in sneakers with immaculate soles, marooned in incongruous positions; there was an anti-bedsore cushion hidden under a towel, and the arms and prongs of the wheelchair were padded with foam rubber — the paraphernalia I knew so well, the kind of stuff buried somewhere in my basement.

Witold had immediately taken on a guilty and contrite attitude, as if he were the one who had crippled the man; I started to extol the virtues of the siting of the house, and the trees and terrain and hills and god knows what else, just so I could keep moving and not face him, and Rossi observed us in silence, shielding his eyes from the sun with his hand, his head thrown slightly back. The gardener came to our rescue, appearing in hunter’s uniform again — this time his sideburns might have been trimmed shorter, as well as the gray hair on the nape of his neck — and without waiting for instructions, he grasped the handles of the wheelchair and started pushing it, moving around the side of the house, and we followed him in single file, listening to the story of the birth of the idea for a new garden where once there had been an immense meadow sloping gently to the west. On the far side, camouflaged between the two sun umbrellas, the gardener in the gardener’s uniform was waiting for us — but I didn’t give them the satisfaction of seeing my surprise.

“I’ll lead the way,” Rossi said, and the twins — the gardener and the hunter — lifted him up and ventured down the three steps, then carried him around the whole meadow, stepping over all the obstacles and moving impassively like a pair of mirror images flanking the wheelchair. They put him down at every stage along the way, so as to allow him to explain the various phases of the failure, as he called it, and it was amazing to watch these two aged laborers’ control and energy and apparent lack of effort. Most amazing of all was the empty expression they shared; I thought that it couldn’t possibly have been real, that it certainly hid some rich and secret interior life, that they’d trained themselves to fake an animal-like (or even vegetative) insensitivity in order to fool outsiders. Certainly that emptiness attracted me, maybe only because it convinced me of my own fullness.

Rossi spoke of his wife, if that’s who she was, without ever naming her — she wanted a fabulous rock garden, she had fallen in love with the idea of a garden without plants, she had a Japanese obsession; he allowed her no more than a pronoun, and this certainly made me uneasy, because it was she who had called me, and maybe the husband assumed that we knew each other, indeed he seemed to take for granted that I’d been socializing with her for a while and that I would understand his ironic and possibly not-so-affectionate allusions to her volubility and her changing her mind a thousand times. We had reached the cistern, a concrete-rimmed water storage tank at the end of the meadow, and I turned toward the house, trying to imagine a garden on this site. The end point was already set: all I had to do was work backward from the water and everything would fall into place, all the way up to the villa. At that moment I saw the woman I’d seen earlier, standing behind the balustrade fifty yards from us, her arms crossed.

We go slowly back up. Swaying like a maharaja atop an elephant, Rossi tells us about a famous massacre that happened right near the cistern during the first war of independence from Austria; patriots fleeing after the defeat at Novara in 1849 took refuge here but were found and slaughtered by the Austrians. Blood in the water; crimson, vermilion, clouds of burgundy red; the burst heads flattened under the horses’ hooves, gray matter drifting and twisting on the water like rags that had slipped out of a washerwoman’s hands. (The hedges really are cotoneaster and holly, badly pruned.)

I don’t raise my eyes until we’re right on top of her, and I cannot hide my disappointment when I realize that she can’t be the woman from that evening, she’s not even Elisabetta Renal, and I’m hit with a suffocating fatigue. Rossi introduces her as his assistant, without saying what she assists him in, and she shakes our hands without interest and doesn’t say a word. She’s younger, smaller, more insignificant. She examines me from head to toe: she sees the dirty, sweat-soaked T-shirt, observes the muddy jeans and work boots, and then looks back up to stare at the rip that begins in my left armpit and runs straight across my chest like the gap in a breast-feeding shirt. She doesn’t get who I am, what I’m doing there.

Again we’re invited to stay for lunch, but we refuse, promising we’ll come again. I say that anyway I need time to think, I’ll need a week or ten days; I’m very interested in the job, but I have to think about it; I could already present a few ideas in ten, fifteen days, as well as a rough estimate; I need to think, did I already say that? I’m nearly stuttering with frustration. I look down at the ground; the gravel is of very poor quality.

“I’ll let you go — but first,” says Rossi when we’re in front of the R4, “I must ask you a favor. Our property has recently been overrun by wild dogs, which I don’t think is random chance; it seems suspicious to me. We’ve already alerted the carabinieri, and any of these animals that get killed on the property are turned over to them for examination.”