There was no way to correct it. Having to throw out weeks if not months of work isn’t just a blow to your pride: you fear you might be making an even greater error, and it’s not easy to change something if you don’t have any idea of what to replace it with; but until you fix the error your mind stays tangled up in it and your feet are mired in the mud and you just can’t escape. I moved close to the bed we had built, a useless web of raised rhomboid planters regurgitating moss, a stack of planters staggered across three levels and interspersed with layers of polished white stones. Enraged by my own stupidity, I said that I wanted to eliminate this monster, but Witold rebelled, in his way: he began to grumble, saying that the job was supposed to have been finished a while ago, that there was no point rethinking elements that the client had already accepted, expressed enthusiasm for, or anyway approved. I kicked at the wood, slamming the planter with my boot. I told him that he wasn’t the one who made the decisions, that the garden was mine, the job was mine, that I was the boss, and if he didn’t like it that was just too bad. I kicked again. I told him that Jan would have to bring the excavator the first morning he could, and in the meantime I would come up with a solution.
But now it is Monday, and in the meantime I hadn’t given it another thought. Of course, during last night’s phone call, Witold, who never forgets anything, had asked me whether he ought to get materials for the new bed. I didn’t understand what he was talking about and hung up the phone.
Now I’m observing the scene, and keeping an eye on Witold observing the scene: he’s keeping an eye on Jan flattening the earth with the small excavator that we use for big jobs, the excavator that until last year was handled only by Witold; Witold agreed to turn it over to Jan when I insisted, although he’s generally reluctant to give up any responsibility, even when it means taking on greater responsibilities. Witold tends to centralize things. Sooner or later, whether I want it or not, he will become more than just my right-hand man: he’s starting to reason, to choose, to suggest, and in the future we’ll be able to accept four or five jobs at once instead of just one or two. He is thirty years old, and he could become a garden designer too, if only he would cultivate a healthy dose of worldly ambition, if only he would stop tolerating me as if I were his cross to bear. I’m imagining the logo of our future partnership, Fratta & Witkiewicz, which would ward off his leaving me, which would keep him tied to me for a while, when I see a bottle green Honda HRV appear at the end of the driveway that winds up from the gate to the house. Witold raises his head too. He looks at me.
“Christ, Christ, Christ,” I mutter to irritate him, because I’m irritated.
Signora Ossiglia crosses the garden with one arm waving in front of her head, as if she’s got an enormous feather fluttering from her hat, and shouts that she doesn’t want to disturb us. She’s a tall, bony, energetic fifty-year-old; I shake her hand, waiting for her to ask me what Jan’s doing, waiting for her to notice the ripped-up, disemboweled planters piled in a corner, and the cone of moss ready for the dump.
“You haven’t decided to eliminate the bed, have you?” she finally says.
Witold doesn’t react; I look at her without speaking.
“You haven’t decided to take it all apart, have you?” she repeats.
I don’t know what to say; Witold can’t take the tension, and he glances over at me, almost imploring me to make something up.
“It all collapsed in the night,” I say. “I think some of my calculations were wrong”—I swirl my right finger and draw little circles in the air—“in the planning stage.” I smile, as if it’s a common accident, a forgivable oversight.
“What a pity — I liked it so.”
“We’ll build it again, more beautiful than before.”
“Oh, I’m sure you will.”
She says that she had two free hours and that she couldn’t resist — she couldn’t help coming up to walk among the boxwood cubes and spheres. She’s referring to the bottom end of the garden. I give her a false smile of gratification (it means nothing to me) and say I’ll accompany her. We set off.
I tell her about my passion for sweet gum trees, I talk about “seasonal chromatic variations,” I explain the importance of alternating between fullness and emptiness, I talk about “attention to visual aspects.” I don’t like explaining, I don’t like talking this way, but with certain clients it’s the best approach: it fills up the conversation and gets it over with. Indeed, after ten minutes she tells me to go back to work, she didn’t mean to disturb me (in other words, she wants to be alone). I smile, I bow slightly, and I go off. But before I turn the corner of the little wall of yellow and red bricks that marks the bottom end of the garden, before I head toward the spot where Witold and Jan are clearing away the last traces of the bed, I look back to see what Signora Ossiglia is doing all by herself. What my clients do by themselves in my gardens, when they take possession of my gardens, when I cut the umbilical cord and abandon my creatures to their adoptive parents. What my clients see in my gardens, which I’ll never see, because I’m seeing other things there; concerned with my own anxieties, which are almost always useless from their point of view. What represents a whole world for me is, for them, a place that’s subordinate to the house, where they can spend time on Sunday afternoons in the spring looking after plants, where they can stroll with friends, where they can stroll alone before going back into the house, a house that doesn’t even exist for me (even though I pretend it’s not true, and I speak of the house and the garden “reflecting each other,” and “rhyming,” and “creating a musical accompaniment for each other”).
So this is what Signora Ossiglia did when she was alone: she bent down to caress the dwarf azaleas decorating the border of the boxwood checkerboard. I would have liked to caress Elisabetta Renal that way, yesterday evening, when she got out of her Ka: stroke her cheek and reassure her, make her understand that she had found someone to share her fears with. She didn’t show the hostile, decisive character that I would expect from a person capable of running over a man with her car; she seemed instead to need help: she was in a dense panic, as if the air had clotted up around her, and she moved and spoke with difficulty. Right off the bat, she didn’t say hello, she didn’t pretend to ask whether I was Claudio Fratta, she didn’t pretend to introduce herself; she said only “What are you doing Thursday evening?” and her voice trembled.
It was just a moment before she caught the mistake, and she thought she could still fix it: “I’m Elisabetta Renal; you’re Claudio Fratta, aren’t you?” But in the face of my silence she gave up and repeated, “What are you doing Thursday evening?”
She could have said, “Why don’t you come to our place Thursday evening?” or “Come over on Thursday evening,” or “Are you free Thursday evening?” which would have been a good middle ground. The question “What are you doing Thursday evening?” is out of place, extreme; it can seem aggressive, but when spoken in a supplicating tone, it confuses the issue even further, because it’s like a feeble claw grabbing your throat: you can’t tell whether you should believe the aggression or the plea for help — and indeed I couldn’t formulate an answer.
I almost never do anything in the evening, so I was sure I was free that night, but I wasn’t as sure that I wanted to let her know it; I didn’t want to answer “Nothing — why?” and yet that seemed to be the only possibility.