When we meet someone, we rarely wonder what path brought him to us — our curiosity never reaches very far back; with just a few bits of information we can sketch in his whole background and then file the issue away forever. We’re hardly interested in our own history — forget about other people’s. For example, I wondered what odd circumstances had brought me into the world of Alfredo Renal, a person I could never know now, who would never tell me his version of the facts, who maybe wouldn’t even have spoken a word to me if we had met while he was alive: I was neither a derelict nor one of the elect, according to his criteria. And anyway, the real Alfredo surely wasn’t the saint people said he was. In those final days of May, I was building a garden commissioned by two people about whom I knew almost nothing. I knew nothing about Alfredo’s grandparents, who used to sip lemonade on a summer afternoon in the shade of a walnut tree in the middle of the meadow (we found the roots underground and the base of the trunk, and the twins confirmed that the tree had been chopped down ten years earlier; the lemonade is my own invention). I don’t know much about the Pole who has been working with me for five years; only that he has a literature degree and adores nineteenth-century Italian writers, and couldn’t find work in Poland.
I didn’t see Rossi anymore; our regular lunches had stopped abruptly after the party. I was told that he couldn’t stand the heat and preferred to eat indoors, but evidently guests weren’t expected to follow him inside — maybe he couldn’t stand guests either. If he was angry with me for some reason, I didn’t care. All I needed was to see Elisabetta. She was the one who kept us company now, but from a distance. They were sunny, blue-sky days, and the air was laced with the fragrance of jasmine and lindens and early hay. Elisabetta would sit by the balustrade in a tank top and shorts and a big straw hat and watch us for half an hour every day, holding a glass of orange juice. Whenever she appeared, I would stop whatever I was doing and lift my eyes to her. I would stare at her until she waved at me cautiously. It was a game, like the glances we’d exchanged the first night at dinner, but this time I had the upper hand. I wanted to force her to wave to me, I wanted to put her embarrassment to the test, because the longer I stood still, the more my insistent gaze would be noticeable to Witold and Jan (and the twins in the secret room). And every day she tried to hold out a little bit longer. She never came down to talk to us.
Friday night Carlo and the kids came, and I was almost unprepared: I hadn’t shopped for food, I hadn’t thought of any games or excursions to keep them occupied over the two days; fortunately, on Sunday we had to go over to Grandma’s. I took them to the mall to eat pizza, but Filippo whined the whole time because he wanted hamburgers and potato chips instead; Carlo was very agitated — the Americans had just bombed a hospital, and he said the Chinese embassy was one thing, but hospitals were something else altogether. Momo took advantage of our distraction to dart away, and I had to run and grab him at the exit a couple of times. Carlo barely touched his pizza. I finally got him to spit out what was wrong, but then he made me pay for asking. He asked when the hell I was going to start watching TV, saying it was inhuman to live the way I did, without knowing what was going on in the world, that I was lower than an animal. “Okay, okay, I’m lower than an animal,” I admitted. It turned out that the Red Brigades had just surfaced again and killed someone; twenty years later there were still people running around shooting people, and that was what was troubling him. I leaned back in my chair with a sigh and said now I understood why he was so upset. He started shouting, “What do you understand? What do you think you understand? You don’t understand shit! You’re just blissing out with your flowers and your hedges — and you’re nothing but a dick, a total dick!” The whole pizzeria turned to look at us, Filippo started crying, and the waiter came over to say we had to talk more quietly. I asked him for the check.
As soon as we got in the car, Carlo grabbed my arm and apologized. I told him that he could insult me as much as he wanted, he still wouldn’t be able to make me mad. He even turned to the kids, who were watching us wide-eyed, and said, “Kids, Papa got mad at Uncle Claudio, but that was wrong because Claudio doesn’t have anything to do with it. Papa’s worried about other stuff, okay?” They nodded with great conviction; when kids nod like that, it means they deeply want to believe what the grown-ups are telling them. When we got home, Carlo put them to bed, and I didn’t see them again. I poured myself a vodka, walked around the ground floor a bit, and then closed the shutters at the back of the house.
I light a fire in the fireplace from sheer habit, though I know I’ll be too hot, and pull out a pile of magazines (back issues of House & Garden) to flip through, put them on the floor beside the armchair, pour myself another vodka, and turn off my cell phone. I don’t know why I go then and lean against the windowpane — maybe I saw a flash of something; behind the reflection of my face, another face suddenly appears, just for a second, then there’s only darkness, and the empty courtyard. Two seconds go by. I say “Fucking hell,” and I run to the door, then run back to the hearth, hobbled by my mouse-shaped slippers, grab the poker, and run out, but see no one there: there’s no one there anymore, if someone was there, but I don’t know. Carlo, already in his pajamas, opens a window upstairs and looks at me like I’m crazy. “What’s happening?”
“Nothing.”
“So what are you doing with that thing?”
I look at the poker that’s still in my hand, ready to strike. “I thought I saw a wild boar.”
“And you want to kill it with that?” he asks, “or scare it away with your slippers?”
I shrug and go back inside. I close all the shutters. I go to sleep at 2:00 a.m.
My father often used to forget to close the front door of our apartment, on purpose. It was (and is) a double door, and when he was home during the day he liked to leave one half open so that daylight from our windows flowed out to the landing and the stairs. My mother and the tenants on the ground floor didn’t appreciate his aesthetic approach; they rebuked him, and he would apologize, chalking it up to forgetfulness (but he wasn’t at all forgetful). He was completely unable to distrust strangers: he had worked out a whole private system that didn’t let him; it wasn’t exactly that he trusted other people — he simply couldn’t subscribe to the usual prejudices, even when they were well founded. He wasn’t an expansive type, and he didn’t make friends easily; he had gotten through the war unharmed because of his diffidence about choosing a precise position, about people who were too sure of themselves. But that was precisely why he never sat in judgment on anyone. Nothing had shaken him, not even the death of his beloved retriever, who’d been tied to a tree and butchered by somebody with a hatchet (after that, Grandpa decided to move his family down into the valley). I often think that there was something infantile about my father. (I dreamed that I suggested to Rossi and Elisabetta that we put a bronze statue of my father in the middle of their garden. They agreed.)