From where I’m sitting, I can see two large paintings facing each other across the room, country scenes of torpid calm: insignificant, invisible. To the right of the fireplace, half hidden by a Chinese vase that’s been outfitted with a shade and turned into a lamp occupying most of the surface of a small desk, is a late-nineteenth-century portrait of a young man with a drooping mustache and wild eyes — too much white showing in the eyeballs, a naïve artist’s mistake, I think. Next to the portrait is a more interesting painting of a country house covered with climbing plants and surrounded by a dense forest of emerald green leaves; it has a dark and mysterious atmosphere, and the road that should run up to the house is closed off with a drystone wall. Is the house abandoned? Is it the house that once stood here, before it was demolished, even though they kept the furnishings, the moldings and the door frames and window frames? I squint to pick some details out of the painting’s dimness, to cut the glare of the Chinese lamp reflected off the oil-paint surface. I get the sudden feeling that Rossi wants to strike me, as punishment for my distraction, and I dodge fearfully.
As he continues speaking, he raises his hand, and in the darkness at the other end of the room a doorjamb obeys him, breaking loose from the wall; it becomes solid, as if sucking in atoms from the space around it — it gathers shape and volume from the air and the light — and it becomes a human body stepping toward us. It’s the hunter, or the gardener, in servant’s clothing, carrying a tray and serving us glasses of port. I hadn’t seen him when I walked in: he must have been standing motionless and rigid in that spot ever since I came, an iguana on a rock.
I sip at my port and slowly begin to grasp that we’re not necessarily waiting for Elisabetta Renal, that this is not a friendly prelude to the dinner, that we’ve already begun; Rossi is already communicating to me what he thinks it’s important for me to know, saying that I have to see the photos in an album, that he has to explain the story of “this” family, that he and Elisabetta have debts toward the past, and that — no matter what he and his wife might wish — the garden has to take into account the duties each of them has, it has to marry their wishes and their duties; and I shake my head, because unions have never been my specialty: I’m no good at compromises. Rossi misreads me, thinking that I don’t understand.
“Yes, I know,” he says. “I ought to make myself clearer.” And he picks up a photo album lying on the little table next to his wheelchair, hands it over, gestures for me to open it, and begins to tell a story.
It’s the life of a man from adolescence to adulthood. The man is named Alfredo Renal. The shape of his life was more or less like Rossi’s: born in the fifties, coming of age in the sixties, an adult in the seventies and eighties. He lived for others, in two senses: helping them directly and planning for their future. He did volunteer work, and he pondered the sociopolitical situation. A good man, but firm. Tolerant, but practical. A dreamer, but also a realist. A man who gave of himself totally, who wore himself out in the service of his fellow man.
A dead man, I think, noticing the past tense.
A saint. One of those young upper-class saints, chaste and industrious, who died early. Some extreme perversity kept him from taking advantage of the wealth he was born with. I have some flicker of memory — I might have heard of him. A saint for a brother: that’s quite a burden for a sister who’s no saint at all.
But I’ve never been interested in designing a eulogy-garden, building a celebration-garden, or erecting a monument-garden. The only monument I’m interested in is the monument to my own obsessions; the only celebration that of my own fixations; the only eulogy, for my own visions. The only things that fascinate me are the ideas running through my head. (I say “running” but in fact some of them drag themselves along like soldiers with wounded legs, searching for shelter before the next barrage; and even that’s not a good example because it still gives a sense of anxiety and urgency and mortal peril, while in fact some of my ideas simply haul themselves through the long corridors of my head like chronic depressives, dim in the leaden light seeping through the tall arched windows.) The only thing that fascinates me is myself.
But I force myself to look at the photos, to register a few details I can report to Carlo. The pictures all focus on Alfredo Renal’s smile: he was always smiling, and his smile was tactful, affable, docile. He smiled at the camera with the look of someone relying on a friend while faced with a difficult choice; you couldn’t disappoint him, you couldn’t betray him: his smile said, “I’m an optimist,” “The good will triumph,” “Life is a gift” (I’m exaggerating, so I’m not registering anything; but those smiles irritate me). Renal’s hands are another focal point: they’re never out of place; I page back to check, and in picture after picture his hands are always resting lightly on his neighbor’s shoulder, or hanging at his sides, or laid on the arms of a chair, half open or turned slightly toward the photographer; no fists, no fingers laced together on his knee, no hands supporting his head — they’re resting, and they hide nothing. (But after a moment I realize that I’m looking again at that smile: it’s not just irritating, it’s disgusting, it’s a terrible smile, an unctuous sore.)
Rossi scrutinizes me, savoring the sight of someone being won over by the photos of Alfredo Renal — he’s won over by my interest. He is not in any of the photos. Elisabetta Renal isn’t in any of them either. In fact, only a few elect personages are pictured with the saint. Just men — and sometimes a child. And there’s no panorama around, no scenery, no stage. You can’t tell where these pictures were taken; there’s not even a faded little lemon tree or a boxwood hedge or a hornbeam to look at, so I keep going back to that smile, the ever-present smile on those dead lips.
It’s 9:30 when we go into the dining room, and Rossi hasn’t made any reference to his wife’s being late; the table is set for four, but there are only three chairs, and at Rossi’s place the edges of the tablecloth hang open, making a white archway around the darkness beneath the table, like the mouth of a tunnel or a maxilla waiting for its mandible to slip in below. I’m hungry enough to eat a chair, but I’m distracted by the arrival of Elisabetta Renal.
She appears just as I’m approaching the table and taking hold of the back of my seat and the gardener is slotting Rossi into his spot; she comes in greeting me and greeting her husband — it’s the first time I’ve seen them together — she calls him “dear” but doesn’t kiss him and doesn’t look at him. She gazes at me and immediately sees my shameful bulging button.
She’s wearing a light blue dress that makes her look younger — maybe even too young. Her round collar is a half-moon rising on the horizon of her neckline and sealing it shut from one clavicle to the other. My first thought is that she chose it because last time she noticed me peeking down her shirt. As she moves from the door to the table, her pleated skirt ripples and lifts and falls, covering and uncovering her knees until the skirt disappears under the tablecloth along with her naked legs (Elisabetta Renal also never gets cold). I throw her a few quick glances and then immediately check to see whether her husband has caught me out, if he’s understood how I look at her, what I see in her.