Now I’m perfectly sober. I straighten my spine and turn toward him slightly. I smile at him.
“No, I’ve never done interior design. Always only plants and gardens.”
I consider asking him right away whether he knew my father, if he remembers Fratta Furniture. Instead I say, “And what do you do?”
“I’ve done a lot of different things … I went from finance to politics, but I got fed up with that — it was too difficult, and now I do market research. And in my free time I help out the Renal Foundation.”
“What kind of research?”
“Mainly for credit card companies.”
“So you’re still dealing with money after all …”
He smiles. “Yes, you’re right; I pretend that I’ve changed fields, but it’s still about money. I used to deal with it in the traditional way — bringing it together, moving it around, making interest on it. Now I report on people’s buying habits, I sell databases …”
“And are those databases reliable?”
“Shh,” he said, and gestured to say that the conversation could continue later.
The eminent historian tapped the microphone twice with his finger, shot a sardonic look at the audience — an expression of deep hatred mixed with a comedian’s grimace — and began to read his text. Giletti pulled a microscopic video camera from his pocket to film it all.
I wasn’t able to pay attention because I had too much new information to file away, a jumbled mass of clues in my head that needed cataloging.
And anyway I knew what we were about to be told, since the speech more or less followed the introduction to the book written by the same eminence, which I had read. This collection of Alfredo Renal’s essays was only the first volume in a series. It was a selection of his writings on urbanism and sociology.
“—but the great cancer devouring the flatlands, the scattered ‘exurban city,’ is a mixed-up sprawl of residential, industrial, and agricultural areas, a structure with no beauty, no order, and no hierarchy—”
Hierarchy was the saintly Alfredo’s real fixation. But I was thinking about another hierarchy, about a hierarchy that might exist; I was thinking things like: What if one person had another behind him, and that person had another one behind him, and so on into infinity? Then the remembering would never stop — there would be no end to the effort required of the people who have to do the remembering, even if they preferred to forget.
“—and without hierarchy, space is simply anarchic, and anarchy is above all an absence of civility: consumer culture devours our souls — our Western culture is based on Greek philosophy and Christian religion, but consumer culture rocks our environment first, erasing our traditions, our style, our roots—”
And I was thinking about how far I had come with my memories weighing me down, how far I’d walked on the earth, in the mud, over the dry leaves in the woods, even when I spent hours walking in order not to think, even then, my boots sank half an inch deeper; even though I wasn’t as fat as I am now, I sank under the weight of those memories, my past like heavy ballast in my head.
“—the old town centers, full of charm and history, are disappearing, our lovely countryside is being blotted out by suburbs, getting mixed up and patchy like the hide of a sick animal … the villages and the crops of our beautiful Italy … and the flatlands turn into a headless body, where, instead of town centers, we have only ‘shopping centers,’ ‘exercise centers,’ ‘meat centers,’ ‘used-car centers’—centers for nomadic communities, centers for consumers, for people without any history and without any joy—”
My thoughts were winding like long, voracious snakes, tangled and sinuous but running only one way, like the garden mazes you can’t get lost in because they’ve got only one entrance and one exit and no forking paths: I knew where my life began and ended, and I knew the flavor of the poison.
“—because supermarkets were first conceived as miniaturizations of the old town center, and then they became the model for the exurban city. The exurban city is a dissemination of the metaphor of the supermarket … and it’s a model imposed on us from outside, there’s nothing Italian about it—”
Two for the price of one … Why hadn’t I ever thought of that? I knew perfectly well why. Because one was more than enough. But it turned out that there were at least two of them, if not more — did I have to discover them all? Or was there a limit to remembering? Three, four — how many names were required to make sure the memory was saved, to make sure it was left in good hands?
“—we move through the world as if we’re walking the aisles of a supermarket, we pick things off the shelf — life and people and human bargains — as if everything had a price and we could appropriate anything just by paying for it at the cash register. What a terrible moral lesson Alfredo Renal teaches us!”
Everyone’s head was nodding: some agreeing, some drowsing. I’ve always liked supermarkets, but I know some people hate them. Carlo, for one, even though he hasn’t got much in common with Renal. He doesn’t like me to take the kids to the mall too often, though they have as much fun there as they do at the amusement park.
After twenty minutes I leaned toward Mosca and asked him what he thought.
“A genius,” he whispered. “Renal was a genius.”
It didn’t seem like he was joking.
I went on observing him from the corner of my eye.
When I drove around with my father and he told me (not at any length, but with brief references and gestures, without wasting any words, without repeating himself) how places had changed, what old factories had been replaced by new ones, who had sold their businesses and who had bought them, it felt like he was talking about a friend or some other living organism; he talked about these flatlands as if he were talking about a person he’d observed since childhood, and even now he saw the traces of the child in the grown man, he knew all its virtues and defects and accepted them all. Remembering was actually a pleasure for him, not just a pastime: preserving the traces of the metamorphosis, reconstructing the small-scale history of the land through the genealogy of names and things. The land was an animal that sloughed off its skin every season, but it couldn’t turn into an entirely different beast: the limit to its mutation was written into its genetic code. And being a citizen of the plain meant knowing that code (which could never be taught; even if you had a more loquacious father, you had to learn it yourself).
After his accident, he lost all his curiosity. Coming home at night, I would tell him that I’d noticed work being done on some road, or a For Sale sign on some villa, but he didn’t listen to me — he no longer cared. Now it was my turn to point to places and say, “Do you remember?” when I took him to the hospital for a checkup, or to visit my uncle and aunt, or to the city to see Carlo. I would show him a building being demolished and say, “This was the place where that guy made cabinet handles for you, right?” or “Am I crazy, or did this road use to run behind the town, on the other side of the canal?” He would shake his head and not answer.
“Maybe it happens to everyone when they get old,” I said to Carlo.
Carlo got angry. “It doesn’t happen to everyone when they get old, the old people figured it out a while ago, but Papa has always been slow.” He maintained that at some point the changes in the landscape got too frenetic for his memory to keep up with. Places had always preserved their identities despite all the changes, but at a certain point this had failed. Now places did their best to be unrecognizable; they camouflaged themselves as if to confuse an invading army. Nowadays people fished for their dreams in a different imaginative pool; there were spores free-falling to earth from distant planets; there were sponges that could absorb any current.