Ultimately I stuttered “ … why?” without any capital letters.
The truth was that I didn’t quite understand: for a moment I thought she wanted to go out with me alone, to ask me why I had behaved that way in the emergency room. It would have been better if she hadn’t come to flush me out of my nest here; the farmhouse courtyard is a sad place, and she was looking around it, seeing the planters lined up sloppily against the wall like condemned men; the tangled garden hose, all muddy and leaky; tools; watering cans; black plastic bags strewn around randomly; two piles of gravel abandoned in front of Gustavo’s dog bed; and, farther off, the canopy protecting the parked cars and stacked-up snow tires and mountains of newspapers and plastic bottles. It wasn’t a place that could make her fall in love with me. I’m embarrassed by my courtyard; it was as if she’d come and asked to look inside my mouth before entrusting her garden to me. The sweatshirt I was wearing was decent, but I almost never shave on Sunday mornings, and after a day of playing with the kids I must have looked as sad and rumpled as the courtyard. At least my hands were jammed into the pockets of my jeans, so I looked fairly nonchalant.
Elisabetta Renal’s appearance, by contrast, wasn’t sad, not in the same sense of the word, even though she was afraid. When I had seen her face last, it was ravaged and bloody, but it showed no traces of the accident now; maybe the cut on her forehead was camouflaged by her hair, or maybe they’d sewn it up so well there was no scar — I was happy to have brought her to a good hospital. I didn’t understand why that face attracted and interested me so, and I’d already asked myself many times whether, if I hadn’t seen it for the first time that November evening, and if I hadn’t imagined its expression at the very moment when the Ka gave the coup de grâce to the man with the steaming head, that face would have the same effect on me — would I want to stroke it and kiss it and examine it closely? I don’t even know whether those eyes are beautifuclass="underline" they’re so dark and elusive, and her gaze is ambiguous — direct and provocative sometimes, and the next instant just imploring.
“Why did you come when I wasn’t there? I don’t know if Alberto showed you everything — I don’t know what he told you — you must come back to us on Thursday evening.”
“Your husband was very gracious; I stopped by without letting him know, and even so—”
“You must come to dinner with us,” she repeated, and I was more than ready to accept, I simply didn’t have the time to react, not in words, and not even with a gesture or a facial expression, but I’m sure I didn’t express any doubt, especially because of my relief at the idea of seeing her with her husband and postponing a tête-à-tête with her.
She must have thought that I didn’t want to come, though, because she said with an offended tone, “You absolutely must.”
Not even a minute had passed; I was in the middle of my courtyard, and to me it seemed clear that I would have accepted any invitation at all, but Elisabetta Renal was very agitated, and until now I hadn’t found a pause in her anxiety where I could slip a word in.
“Yes, naturally, of course I’ll come,” I said, as if talking to a petulant client about a poorly done job.
Faced with my irritation, she did something totally paradoxicaclass="underline" she relaxed, smiled, slipped her hands into the pockets of her jeans, and pushed her shoulders back as if she were stretching. I smiled too. And the flowering magnolia near the entry gate smiled too, making the courtyard less sad.
“It’s very strange,” she said. “Do you know how I found your address?”
I shook my head.
“I found it in the phone book.”
I couldn’t tell whether she was making fun of me.
“You may be the only person I know who still has his name in the phone book; nobody wants to be found these days.”
I smiled. I thought that if this were just an isolated thing, I could forgive her. But suddenly she seemed to have a lot to say.
“Do you know when I first heard about you?”
“You told me: from Mr. Libet, the engineer.”
“Oh, that wasn’t true … I mean, he talked to me about you, but much later … Once I had to go to the dentist, but there were two dentists on the same landing, I didn’t read the names, and I went in the wrong door and in the waiting room were two ladies who were talking about you and this beautiful garden … Forty-five minutes later I realized I was in the wrong place and I crossed the landing and I went into the right dentist’s office and — God, I’m telling such a stupid story!”
She covers her mouth with her hands, her fingertips on her lips, her eyes moist.
“No, absolutely not. Why is it stupid? No, go on.”
She shakes her head, looks off to the side.
“And what happened at the other dentist’s?” I ask slowly.
She shakes her head no. She bites the knuckles of her left fist.
“You can’t leave me wondering; go on.”
She doesn’t move.
“Go on.”
She takes a long breath and gathers her courage.
“There was a magazine, I opened it, and inside was a picture of you and an article about your gardens,” she says in a single breath.
I nod. “I’m very popular with dentists.”
“The thing that persuaded me,” she says, regaining her confidence, “and persuaded Alberto too … is that … well, I don’t know if it’s true, but I read … the magazine said that you’re there during the work, you participate … you don’t just draw up a design … it said, ‘He’s someone who gets his hands dirty …’”
“I build gardens,” I say. “I’m an architect and a gardener. And my hands … yes, they’re almost always dirty …”
Elisabetta Renal smiles. “You’ll come to dinner?”
“I’ll come.”
All at once she turned and got back into her car. She started the engine and only then looked at me from behind the glass. At that moment she must have realized that she hadn’t even said goodbye, so she rolled down her window and asked whether their garden site really was as disastrous as she thought it was, whether there was no hope at all for it. I came two steps closer — actually so that I could get a better look at her neckline, the white edge of her bra echoed by a band of lighter skin; she wasn’t looking at me anyway, and maybe she wasn’t even listening, her head filled once more with the reverberations of her restlessness, or something that kept her eyes glued to the dashboard.
“It’s a difficult site, but easy sites produce only banal gardens,” I lied.
It was only after she was gone, when I saw the Ka disappear around the curve at the bottom of the road, that I felt all the fear she had transmitted to me. I was afraid that I would rip apart like a sheet of newsprint paper and fly away on the next breeze, and I feared the opposite too: that I might fall to the ground and spend the whole night in the courtyard, as cold as a stone; I was afraid that the ghosts of my dead would come back to punish me; that nothing would happen and that Elisabetta Renal would disappear from my life.
And to squelch that possibility (that she had sought me out by chance, that she was really interested only in my gardening work), I developed a strange conviction: that she had sought me out to make amends. To make amends for her rudeness, for example: she had never thanked me for taking her to the emergency room. But if that were the case she ought to have read from a different script: as soon as she got out of her car she should have put on a surprised expression and said, “Wait, I know you — where have I seen you before?” She didn’t do that. Make amends for what, then? Make amends for a mistake? That night she had made a mistake and hadn’t realized it. Had it taken her five months to figure it out? Maybe less — maybe she figured it out right away, but it took her five months to find me. Five months to invent the story about the two dentists.