We sit down, and I caress the little dinner roll set near my silverware; I don’t know how long I can hold out. I can’t hold out anymore: I pick it up, break it in half, and eat it. First one half, and then the other. Rossi and Elisabetta watch me in silence. I look at their rolls. And at the empty spot to my left, to Rossi’s right, across from Elisabetta. At the roll set near the empty spot’s silverware. I think, absurdly, that the servant is going to sit there. I have a strong sense that my hosts fear I’m going to reach for the other roll. These glances last no more than ten seconds altogether, but the silence and the awkwardness of the moment would be enough to mute the most enthusiastic conversationalists.
Rossi asks Elisabetta if we can begin. She looks stunned. “Of course,” she says. “Are we expecting someone else?”
Rossi doesn’t answer, he just raises one hand. The servant comes in carrying a steaming bowl and sets it down in front of Elisabetta Renal.
“Tortellini in brodo!” she exclaims, and I don’t know whether she’s being ironic or truly enthusiastic.
Another trip from the kitchen, another bowl. It’s for me. It’s quick work counting the tortellini: I get just ten of them. I try to suppress a sarcastic thought as I consider this other upper-class custom, which goes along with the hand washing in the basement. Instead of a tureen brought to the table, bowls are filled and then served with the items already apportioned. That’s all you get, unless you’re permitted to grab the daisies and poppies from the centerpiece and add them to the broth. I still have two or three hours ahead of me before I can leave here and stop in a pub and eat three burgers, and the realization stuns me; I put a tortellino in my mouth, and a flood of gastric juices doubles me over.
“Careful, it’s hot,” says Rossi.
After a bit, Elisabetta Renal asked whether we had already talked about the garden.
“Mr. Fratta presented some ideas to me,” Rossi lied without looking at me. I was on my third tortellino, and he hadn’t even shot me a conspiratorial look.
“Just random ideas,” I said, to make it seem less concrete.
“Please tell them to me too — otherwise I’ll feel left out.”
I talked about some ideas I’d sketched for the bank’s data center; they were structures and designs that couldn’t easily be adapted for the site at the Villa Renal, but my two tablemates wouldn’t have been able to figure that out. I spoke of steel and Plexiglas, fountains and topiaries, mosaics and mirrors and lights. They nodded without asking questions, and as I talked I went on eating; there was no risk of chewing with my mouth open because, as soon as a tortellino reached my tongue, it melted away into its broth — they were not only scant but overcooked, so I just drank them down instead of chewing. I tried to make them last, but there were only ten … such a perfect number: it must have been intentional.
The gardener-hunter comes in to take the plates, then goes back out and returns with the second course, a little coin of meat with three chunks of roasted potato. I feel a deep pain, along with deep shame over my hunger and my inability to hide it, to tame it. I’m pained by this evening: by Rossi paralyzed in a wheelchair; by Alfredo Renal, the philanthropist with the ambiguous smile; by Elisabetta, who didn’t finish her tortellini (she ate only six or seven). Shamed by the thoughts piling up in the ignoble corner of my mind (I should ask for guarantees; I should be paid in advance; maybe they’re not so flush right now; or maybe they’ll just be stingy and try to skimp on plants and not grant me carte blanche with the materials), pained by the glances that build fragile suspension bridges from my eyes to hers and his (I think, I’m still in time to walk out of here forever, all I have to do is speak up, they have no power over me, today is April Fools’ Day; then I immediately think, They’ve got me, I’m caught).
Rossi’s eyes are like those of a blind man, shifting from me to his wife without seeing us; he molds his ideal world, wearing a saintly expression of obligatory kindness (as in the photos of Alfredo Renaclass="underline" I imagine that Rossi doesn’t see the background, and the foreground figures he does see are clearly just posing, retouched by his own hand). Elisabetta Renal doesn’t ever look at her husband, as if she has amputated his whole corner of the table: she slices her scissor-eyes toward her right side, and — snip! — the man in the wheelchair never existed.
When she looks at me, she keeps her eyes locked on mine until I give in and look down. It’s a game, I understand it perfectly, but I’m too tired and disheartened, too floored by pain and shame, to hold her gaze, and I’m also afraid that once again she’ll use her eyes to transmit her chill to me. I look at Rossi, shut up in a glass reliquary like a saintly relic; he misunderstands my glance and calls the servant, who brings me a miniature roll. Tired and depressed, I devour it in less than a second.
Who was the fourth place set for? Were we waiting for someone who didn’t come? Or was it Alfredo Renal’s spot? I thought, They’re crazy, they scare me, but it wasn’t true. Every now and then a fly fell into the halogen lamp that opened toward the ceiling like a brazier, letting off a sizzle and a foul-smelling plume of smoke.
It was as if something terrible was about to happen, some grotesque and terrible event. When the servant twin carried in the dessert, he’d suddenly be completely nude, or dressed as the big bad wolf, chased by the hunter twin. One of Momo’s favorite fables was “The Wolf and the Seven Little Goats,” because he identified with the little white goat, the one who saves himself by hiding inside the grandfather clock, and he always liked to claim that role before I began telling the story. I felt like scuttling under the table and hiding there for a while by myself.
“Alberto, you won’t believe what happened to me today,” says Elisabetta Renal suddenly.
She says that she ran into an old classmate and could hardly recognize her because the woman had gotten so old, fat, and sloppy—“she probably drinks”—but the amazing thing is that a few minutes later she ran into that woman’s old boyfriend, who happened to be in the city just by chance, since he moved abroad ten years ago — and even though he came back to Italy occasionally, he hadn’t been here in six years — but that’s not alclass="underline" he was with his wife, who was young and beautiful and Spanish, and the two of them were radiant, the very picture of happiness, and what made the story even more bizarre was that ten years ago the old classmate — the woman who’s so fat and ugly now — had dumped that boyfriend and hooked up with another guy (the son of an industrialist, who married her and cheated on her and made her miserable), and — just think — her old boyfriend, the one who lives abroad, had tried to kill himself, in despair, when she’d left him.
“Isn’t it incredible that I ran into them, and that they don’t know anything about each other’s lives, and that I’m the only one who knows how it all ended?”
“That is incredible, dear,” said Rossi. “A classmate from which school?”
Elisabetta flushed and shook her head as if she didn’t recall. She glanced around miserably and seemed to be on the verge of tears.
I didn’t know what expression to put on.
We were silent again.
I cleaned my plate (wondering only whether the half teaspoonful of green sauce was merely decorative garnish) while Rossi struggled along with the slice of meat as if it were a whole shank of pork; Elisabetta hadn’t even picked up her fork.
I can’t take the tension, so I say, “You two haven’t told me anything, though; do you have some idea for the new garden? Do you want something in particular?”