As usual, though, Durga was the highlight of the visit; she can always hypnotize the kids. On our way home we stopped again to look at her, in her pen, from above. The path that runs up diagonally through the chestnut woods and ends at my back door starts here, on the property where the famous photographer built his breeding farm. I cordially dislike the famous photographer, and I think he dislikes me; we’re nothing more than civil to each other … maybe he’s annoyed that I’m friendly with Malik and not with him; the problem is that I don’t like his obsession with breeding stripes into all kinds of dogs, his absurd quest for the perfect mix — the striped Doberman, the striped dachshund, the striped Shar-Pei (that experiment was a failure). But I do have to admit that he treats them very welclass="underline" the pens are immense, and for Malik it’s a sort of paradise on earth (until two years ago he was working in a barn somewhere, looking after thirty cows), and coming here with the kids has become indispensable for me — I couldn’t possibly invent anything better to engage them, especially when they’re with me for three days.
I made Filippo promise that he would never venture alone into the woods to come look down on Durga’s pen like this; I don’t think he has the courage for it, but one time even I nearly rolled down the bluff — despite my knowing this underbrush like the back of my hand, because I’ve gone back and forth so often (sometimes, instead of eating, I’ve tramped around in the weeds to keep myself from thinking too much). We stood and watched Durga trot frenetically and yet somehow phlegmatically along the horseshoe curve of reinforced glass, swinging back and forth like a living pendulum. The limestone overhang where we were standing acts as the fourth wall of the enclosure; the dog can’t climb it, since even the feline hadn’t been able to. Durga’s pen had originally been built for Julio, a beautiful, arrogant ocelot, when the photographer had a passion for actual tigers (before moving on to tiger-striped dogs) and was trying to set up a small zoo. But Julio died of boredom after a year — boredom or loneliness.
“How can you stand being here alone all the time?” Before Carlo met Cecilia, he had lived with me in the farmhouse for two years. He wasn’t a guest: he paid the bills, so to speak. I remembered the feeling of being in the house and hearing someone else moving from room to room, opening drawers, turning on faucets; the feeling of coming home and finding someone there; it was a pleasant feeling, and sometimes I wondered if it was always pleasant, no matter who your housemate was, and each time I’d tell myself, No, of course not … But then, after a few days, I’d be asking myself the same question again, or some variation on it. Like: when my father came home, was he happy to find my mother there (and vice versa)? That was ten years ago, and when Carlo lived with me I was someone else — I worked as a gardener, our father had recently died — and physically I was someone else too: a stranger, an unknown. Thin.
The week after Easter, I met with the bank directors to turn down their job, but they wouldn’t hear of it: they said they didn’t intend to make do with a “second best” designer, and they were willing to wait three or four months until I had finished the Renal garden. I pretended not to be happy about this, but I was happy — and how! — and, when I told Witold, I could see that he, too, was very pleased; he imagines that working for people who handle a lot of money will be to our advantage somehow, but I wouldn’t be so sure.
After a couple of weeks I presented Rossi with a project that was essentially the project for the data center, simply lifted and dragged into the perimeter of the Renal garden, stuffed into the outline there; it’s the kind of thing you can do only with a computer, and I’ll have to redesign it completely, but there’s plenty of time for that. Not that I didn’t already try, but I kept going back to what Rossi had said, the thing about the deafening silence and the car moving through the night, which in itself is a banal and senseless idea, a definition that could easily suit two opposite kinds of gardens, but I wasn’t willing to admit that, and so I was racking my brain to wring some deep meaning from it, with logic like “Deafening means it eliminates other sounds, it covers the whole aural field, the inside of the car is a closed space, separated from the outside, and yet open to the outside, but the windows act as frames, so your point of view is restricted, as it is by a photograph, and music does something similar, it erases sounds and substitutes melody for random noise, and the most important thing is the idea of the continuity of sound, but there’s also the idea of the fragmentation of images …” And I went on like this for hours, getting tangled up in my thoughts.
In mid-April we began the job. We had to prepare the terrain, saving some plants and the hedges, which I had no intention of uprooting, and sweeping away everything else. Witold, Jan, and I couldn’t do it alone; we always asked other people for help with the first part, and this time the others were two Moroccans who usually helped Witold’s bricklayer brother. We worked hard for ten days; the weather was good, and I wanted to finish the preparations before the beginning of May; we got to the Villa Renal at seven, and we would find the twins already waiting for us; during the day, when we least expected it, they would pop out of the bushes like the twins in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; we would stop promptly at midday and eat lunch in the shade of a pair of linden trees, talking and laughing; the Moroccans added a merry spirit, and they had funny stories to tell (some of them dirty); without them the two Poles can be lethal — depression and sulky faces — but when egged on in the right way, the Poles can also come up with funny stories, and even Witold made us laugh; at one o’clock every day I went up the slope to where Rossi awaited me, sitting at a table under one of the big umbrellas; then I’d eat a second time (at his table there was no chance of overeating); I never figured out whether he was putting on a show just for me — hadn’t he said that he didn’t eat at lunchtime? He told me about his commitment to the Renal Foundation; the charity projects, which needed tending and expanding, and then there were Alfredo’s writings to edit.
Often we were joined at the table by the assistant whom I’d met the first day; it felt like a century ago — everything had changed — but the impression she made on me hadn’t changed; sometimes your first impression is diabolically on target, and it’s almost worse, later, when it turns out you were right, when you have to recognize the terrible truth that you grasped the essence of another human being at first glance. Fortunately, though, I had completely misunderstood Rossi: he was not at all a shy recluse, cut off from daily life, as I’d thought; he seemed to be busy with all kinds of commitments, and he certainly knew more people than I did. From what I could tell, they were organizing a party to present a book by Alfredo Renal. The assistant was almost always walking around the terrace and talking on her cell phone, and she would come back to sit with us for just a few minutes, passing coded, allusive messages to Rossi, referring to people by their titles or professions. I made it a point of pride to ignore her, and I would slip into the silences in their conversation with my talk of plants and materials. She ignored me too, naturally, and I believe she was quite irritated by my presence at that little table, day after day. But she didn’t show it: she didn’t seem to notice me — it appeared that she didn’t even see me.
It’s terrible to think that people don’t see you. It was as if I’d become invisible when I grew fat. Women especially, it seemed, didn’t notice that I was around. Naturally I thought it could be my fault: maybe I was the one not noticing them when they noticed me. As if you win a woman not because she likes you — as if charm weren’t important, or any other virtue — as if it were actually a question only of intuition, of seizing the moment when her guard is down. It might have been true, but more likely it was just an excuse to justify my loneliness. All the same, I went on gazing at women, and every now and then I noticed one looking annoyed, which means that she’d noticed, maybe. Elisabetta Renal seemed to see me, but she had her own reasons.