“I was afraid you’d ask me that,” says Elisabetta, smiling gratefully just because I’d spoken.
“Afraid? Why afraid?” I smile too.
Rossi does not smile.
“Because I don’t have a clear idea.”
“There’s nothing wrong with that,” I say, and another of my famous phrases pops into my head: “It’s not the client’s job to have a clear idea.”
Rossi doesn’t react. Elisabetta would like to react, but she’s afraid of making a mistake. So I speak — I have to.
“Please at least tell me what you don’t want. What you don’t like in a garden.”
She shakes her head and smiles.
I press her: “There are gardens that are like objects for contemplation, beautiful and a bit chilly, a bit fake, like a seventeenth-century painting. Would you like a garden like that?”
She looks at me as if she’s seeking a hint. But I didn’t pose a difficult question. “Oh no,” she says, “no.”
“Beautiful things get boring after a while,” I add. “At least for me … I mean … often it seems to me it’s in bad taste … to go for beauty alone …”
She looks at me to see whether I’m making fun of her, to see where I’m going with this.
“Then there are theatrical gardens … built as stage sets: the backdrops, the wings … Is that what you want?”
Now she understands how it works. “No, I think not.” But she’s less sure than she was before.
“Quite right,” I say. “Nowadays there’s not … there aren’t the right people or occasions anymore … for filling a stage. The garden itself has to be the show … but it needn’t necessarily be showy …”
I’ve started talking like her, limping, accelerating, and slowing down; at first I can’t find the right words, and then they all come in a rush. An uncertain anger compels me as I speak.
Elisabetta keeps her hands in her lap, twisting her napkin. Rossi seems distracted, staring at the wall behind me.
“Then there’s the tranquil, peaceful retreat … the place to pull away and meditate … the silent refuge … an orderly, symmetrical, unchanging, perfect garden … Do you want a garden like that?”
“No.”
“Good,” I say. “I wouldn’t have designed it for you.”
At this point they don’t know whether they should wipe away their smiles and just feel awkward.
“Then there are the gardens made for walking … I don’t mean just mazes … but gardens in motion, musical gardens …”
“My wife loves to listen to music while driving,” Rossi says suddenly. “She often takes a drive in the middle of the night when she can’t sleep, and comes back after an hour or two.”
Elisabetta picks up her glass full of water and very calmly stretches out her arm and empties the glass onto the carpet. As she puts it back down on the table, Rossi smiles slightly, just as calm as she is. I’m not exactly petrified, because everything happened so fast that the gesture didn’t even surprise me — maybe I’m just slow to react. Now Elisabetta’s looking down at her plate, at the untouched roast and potatoes.
I almost don’t notice that Rossi has begun to talk again:
“ … Yes, she likes to drive at night … I used to go with her myself … the movement of the car, the music, moving through the towns and the countryside … even without music, there’s a kind of deafening silence … and there’s no risk of seeing too much, of getting caught up in some detail … you just want to keep going forward … things suddenly appear out of the night, for an instant, as if they’re going to be there forever … and even the most banal things — the ugliest things — look marvelous when they appear and disappear immediately … Mr. Fratta, have you ever thought that, before the invention of the car, nobody could experience such a thing?”
“No … actually … But how would one make a garden for—” I stop short: I’ve already had an idea.
“Maybe we’re asking too much of you.” Rossi smiles.
“No,” I say, and before I can stop myself I’ve invented another phrase: “There’s no such thing as asking too much.”
There’s no such thing as asking too much? Wrong: people always ask too much.
“Listen,” Elisabetta Renal said then. “Maybe I really don’t know what kind of garden I want. But I’m sure about one thing: whatever it is, you’ll know how to make it.”
And without giving me any time to thank her for her faith in me, without checking to see whether her husband was watching or whether the servant was nearby, she held her plate out to me: the slice of meat and the three chunks of potato, all intact though probably cold. The plate slowly skimmed over the centerpiece and hovered in midair for five seconds. I felt myself blush with shame; my arm weighed two tons — I couldn’t lift it. Finally I managed to take the plate, in silence; I laid it on top of my own and started eating again, with downcast eyes.
Carlo never found himself a girl who liked cooking, a girl who deliberately used the age-old strategy of getting to a man’s heart through his stomach; indeed, he was never really satisfied with any woman. Occasionally I thought that if he’d found such a girl he would have ended up differently: if he’d found a woman who was simple in every way but had an incredible gift for inventing a complicated dish every night that would make him forget everything else; a short, ugly wife with no tits or ass, an exceptional cook whose dinners would leave him speechless and untormented by desire — because that was more or less the problem. His first serious girlfriend didn’t even know how to mix mint syrup into water: I clearly remember that she put too much mint in her drinks. Cecilia belongs to an even more dangerous category — she’s an experimenter: she thinks that cooking should be inventive, and she pairs flavors that are irreconcilable and tastes that clash, and then expects everyone to applaud the audacity of the inedible results. But that’s not to say she doesn’t have other virtues.
Now I myself filled that ideal feminine role during the weekends when my brother and the kids came to stay with me, because I would spend long hours developing meals for them. They arrived on the evening after my dinner at the Renals’ (Carlo had the kids over Easter weekend) and stayed until Monday; we even saw their grandmother on Sunday — she didn’t cry in front of them. I made a prosciutto foam, an oven-baked pasta gratin, and turkey breast cooked in milk and pancetta. Except at mealtime, Carlo spent all three days in front of the TV, watching the news updates and the special reports and the written crawl of the teletext, and even asked me if he could go online to look for more news. Better than nothing, I thought: at least he’s interested in something, even though he seemed as inanimate as before. Two or three times I came close to asking him if he had ever heard of someone named Alfredo Renal, but I didn’t want to break the spell of his wan curiosity about the world that began when the bombing did — and maybe I wasn’t sure I wanted to know anything more about Renal.
So I play war games with the kids and take them to see Malik’s dogs; Durga has recovered and is in great shape: I’ve been hearing her barking again in the last few days, and burbling with happiness, especially late at night, as if she’s glad it’s nighttime and she’s expecting some male dog to hear her and hurry over to keep her company. We also see one of the two new dachshund puppies — Malik holds it in his arms; it should be striped like its parents, but the markings aren’t visible yet. Filippo doesn’t buy it, though; things in his universe are divided into groups — big (fathers), medium-sized (mothers), and small and insignificant (children). For example, there are cars, motorcycles, and bicycles. Soccer balls, baseballs, and marbles. So the puppies will never have stripes, he says, until they themselves become fathers and mothers. Malik starts to ask for an explanation, but I signal him to let it drop.