Andrea Canobbio - The Natural Disorder of Things

Every now and then I mutter a soft reminder: “Bedtime.” There are minor variations: “Filippo … sleep,” or “It’s getting late — bed.” But I don’t stand up, I don’t make a move to pick them up and carry them to bed, I don’t even raise my eyes as I’m trying to get the soldiers to stay on their feet (they’re the old Airfix figures from when we were kids: they’re thirty years old and have every right to be tired of fighting, but there are no armchairs for these soldiers); I pepper the game with reminders to prove that I haven’t forgotten my adult duties and responsibilities. But who am I proving it to? There are only four of us in my living room, around the fireplace with the great log that takes all evening to burn: Filippo and Momo don’t want to hear what I’m saying, and Carlo is lost in his own thoughts.

When the kids agree to go to bed, I’m the one who takes them upstairs. I have to put them in their pajamas, I have to make them brush their teeth, and put a diaper on Momo for the night. Filippo points out that “Momo wears a diaper at night but not in the daytime because he’s part little.” Then I have to tell them a story or a read a fairy tale, straining my eyes in the orange glow of the night-light. And even after I realize the children have fallen asleep, I stay in the bedroom for a moment, thinking about Elisabetta Renal’s husband and his everyday life, what he might be doing while his wife romps around the countryside driving into ditches: peering through a magnifying glass at a stamp collection for hours, or dusting off battle souvenirs from the Risorgimento, or reading nineteenth-century aristocrats’ memoirs full of enlightenment, determination, pride, and even vanity.

I go back downstairs, pour myself a glass of vodka and one for Carlo, who rarely drinks. I sit down facing him; I have to talk to him, I have to find a topic that will take his mind off things for at least half an hour — a lullaby for him. But I can’t think of anything. I’m thinking about the wheelchair instead. A wheelchair is such a potent symbol of impotence that it disarms and discomfits the person who’s standing. A man condemned to a wheelchair condemns his interlocutors to have some reaction: embarrassment, at least, and sometimes even guilt. A man slumped in an armchair (condemned to an armchair) presents the same kind of problem. Do I talk to him? Do I not talk to him? Do I lay my head in his lap?

Unexpectedly, Carlo is the one who speaks: “How can you stand being here alone all the time? How is it possible that you’re my brother?”

I had often thought that Fabio wasn’t really our brother (the thought was not linked to any particular event or specific historical moment, and thus scattered through my childhood; it was a thought I had on anonymous days, a thought that recurred in dull mornings at school and frustrating afternoons in the courtyard, while playing games that were never completely successful). For example, I recall my astonishment (maybe this is one of my earliest memories) when I found Fabio in a blue school smock in the nursery school courtyard during playtime. How did he get all the way there? What was he doing there? Who had brought him? I hadn’t noticed anything; I was seeing him for the first time. He was in a corner, playing by himself (now I know that all three-year-olds play by themselves, even when it looks like they’re playing with others); it was absurd that they’d enrolled him, absurd and hopeless. I was astonished but also worried: I feared that the teacher would get mad at me for a mistake that was my parents’ responsibility alone. He wasn’t fit for nursery school, and I didn’t want to pay the price. I was sure that he would never grow up, that he’d never move out of the room we shared, out of our house, that he was irremediably little. They tell me that I repudiated him, that I denied to my classmates and teachers that he was my brother. Fabio didn’t deserve to be treated like this: if ever there was a good kid, it was Fabio. He was hardly noticeable. Not even Carlo, who ruled me with an iron hand, was able to get Fabio involved in our games.

I’m thinking about him as I get milk for the kids, who have been up since eight, and then I get anxious because I still haven’t fixed the shower faucet; it doesn’t often happen, but sometimes my mess and filth and discomfort reach a critical point, and even though I usually manage not to worry about the environment I live in, I’m unable to disregard it completely. When I do worry, I’m consumed by anxiety, and this morning it’s triggered by the wall plate for the shower faucet: it’s come off the wall and I’ve already ascertained that the only way to attach it again is with ultrasuperglue, but none of the tubes of superglue that I have in the house has worked so far, so I’ve decided that I absolutely must go to the nearest home center with the kids while Carlo sleeps in (he’ll sleep till ten, as usual).

Filippo wants to finish the battle — actually start the battle, because yesterday we merely laid the foundations, so I have to negotiate and make concessions, and the usual lures don’t work; the promise of a comic book isn’t enough, not even two comic books, not even two comic books and a cartoon video rental, or video purchase, not even the purchase of two videos. I have a flash of inspiration as I’m tying Momo’s shoes and he’s repeating the endings of our sentences (“comma-book,” “bideo”): I offer Filippo the idea of building a cannon out of balsa wood and elastic bands so we can shoot glass or metal marbles at the soldiers, a precise replica of the cannon I used with Carlo and Fabio. Sometimes — not always — the old toys work, proving somehow fascinating and strange to the kids; the deal is struck.

I strap the car seats into the E270 and the kids into the car seats, and I set off for the home center, which lies halfway between the nearest village and the mall, so I end up tracing the route I take every morning at 7:00 or 7:30 when I go fetch Witold, who has recently, with my help, bought a home for himself and his large family in an area of comfortable new two-family houses. But this morning is different, because I normally drive the R4, very sleepily, all alone, and now I’m in the Mercedes, with the kids, and I’m agitated. The E270 changes things; obviously it’s faster, but that’s not all: it goes faster without my realizing it, we shoot down the road as if we’re flying, and Filippo points it out: he says we’re going to get a heavy fine. I ask him how he knows that fines are heavy — has he ever hefted one? He doesn’t fall into my trap: he doesn’t answer. I ask him, “Do they write them up on lead paper?” And immediately, in a maneuver that’s typical of him, he keeps me from pressing on in an area where he feels uncertain of his footing and asks whether I know how to fish for fish.

The other novelty about this morning, compared with my usual workday mornings, is the presence of Filippo, who speaks and fills the aural space with his stories, his questions, and his clarifications, and generally directs conversations according to his preferences, while Momo looks out the window with the same fascinated and rapt expression that he has when watching television. There are three systems for fishing, I say, trying to concentrate and forget my anxiety: nets, poles, and underwater spearguns. Wrong — there are four: you can throw a hair dryer into the water and electrocute all the fish. I ask how he thought of that. He says that when Mamma and Papa still lived together, Mamma had threatened to do that, to throw the hair dryer into the tub and electrocute herself. This, too, is a typical move, because if I had told him there were five systems, he would still have added another one: he has to carve out a space for himself in adult conversations, and he does so with his clarifications. Filippo is the clarification king. “You’re the clarification king, Filippo,” I say, and I look back without a smile to catch his eye in the rearview mirror.