I began driving with him in order to be his chauffeur. He had dislocated his ankle while pruning a pagoda tree; I was doing my second year of architecture at the university, and I had just taken two final exams (all in all, I did four finals before I dropped out) and I couldn’t refuse to help him for a month; it was April, and it would have been unthinkable for him to recuperate at home: the homeowners who were least loyal and least attached to him would surely have dumped him (naturally there was an imbalance between personal courtesy and economic means: the least loyal clients were also the ones who paid the most and had the biggest gardens), and his work supported the whole family, but my older brother was a serious student and my younger one was still in high school and didn’t have a driver’s license, so I can fairly say that my fate was decided by pure chance, because if I had gone on studying architecture, if I had graduated, I don’t know what kind of underpaid work I would have found — certainly I wouldn’t have made the money I’ve accumulated in the past seven years. When he asked me to go around with him, I looked at my mother — who said nothing: she was engrossed in peeling potatoes or trimming artichokes, or maybe she was reading a musical score — and my father said that if I didn’t help him he wouldn’t know which way to turn, that he felt he was “banging his head against a brick wall,” and that made an impression on me because I’d never heard him use that expression before — even though once, long ago, I had seen him actually bang his head, on purpose, in sheer desperation (and then later, of course, long after I began working with him, he did really bang his head, though not on purpose, at least I don’t think so), but that was just an isolated episode, my father was the last person in the world — as everyone said — to fall apart from nerves: he seemed not to have a single nerve in his body, that’s what Carlo maintained, anyway.
Carlo studied history and had decided that our father was an unconscious representative of the damned of the earth and — forgetting his history as a capitalist exploiter — tried to incite him against the employers who didn’t pay him sick leave and obligated him to work when he was crippled, and who would never admit that he’d hurt himself on their property, cutting a branch from their tree. This angry brother of mine came home almost every Friday night from his university housing and would begin to mutter about the family’s misfortunes, mainly using terms that no one in the house had ever heard, let alone uttered; he maintained that it was right and necessary to revolt, that the dominant class reacted to nothing except brute force, that there was no room in the revolution for the meek and the cowardly, that the proletariat would raze all the fences and throw open the gardens to the deprived and oppressed children (often he reeled off statistics and percentages about children in the South or in poor countries who were forced to work sixteen-hour days; when he started with the numbers, we felt free to stop paying attention). My father’s reaction to this subversive wall of sound was uniform and constant: he had no reaction. I remember that only once, at the table one Sunday night — in other words, after two days of long-suffering silence — my father leaned over to me and asked conspiratorially, “Tell me — did he get bitten by a rabid dog?” And that was the only thing I ever heard him say, the only thing I ever heard from him or from my mother. And I wonder whether this attitude, along with the physiological ebbing of his rage and the vicissitudes of life, contributed to Carlo’s current state (his giving up on the struggle, his frequent mental blackouts, his surrender in the face of the world’s insistence on being the world that it is).
So in that period all three of his sons, not just Carlo but all three of us, perceived that a small injustice had been loaded onto the great injustice that our father had suffered when he lost his factory, and by then it seemed that he could not escape his fate: to suffer injustice and not protest or even react; to take a slap and turn the other cheek. The myth of his meekness and submissiveness, though, wasn’t really believable for us: we had known him before, and we had seen him when he was under full sail, seated at his owner’s desk in the office on the second floor of the little factory. Carlo had understood, and I had intuited, that his was a choice, a rational decision. My father walked into the storm with his head lowered and never lifted it up, not even to inveigh against whoever was hurling all that hail in his face. But his clients saw him as a good-hearted old peasant, maybe a bit luckier than the others, lucky enough to choose a more comfortable and less risky line of work, but still a country bumpkin: ignorant, obtuse, slow on the uptake, as bumpkins have been since the dawn of time. They treated him condescendingly, speaking loudly as if he were deaf (and implying that he was a bit slow); they limited their vocabularies, spoke in simple sentences, and avoided the subjunctive (maybe because some of them didn’t actually know how to use it), and they always wanted to explain and explain and explain everything: they’d glance at my ever-patient, ever-calm father and decide that he needed to be treated like a child. I felt humiliated, I looked away; I made no secret of my disapproval. But my father took advantage of it. He pretended to be a dunce, and in time I learned that it’s the best strategy for a gardener. Often the clients don’t know exactly what they want, but they know that they want it, and they’re determined to get it; the belief that their gardener is decent but just a bit stupid helps them tolerate the discomfort of not being understood.
I began by going around with him as his driver but ended up helping him on his jobs too, and I went on doing it even after his ankle healed, without it being said explicitly (not a lot of things were said explicitly in my family, and Carlo’s Jacobin verbosity was all the more astounding because none of us had ever thought we could talk all day about one topic without getting bored) that I was dropping out of the university and learning my father’s gardening trade. Everything about plants was a mystery to me, and my father taught me a small fraction of what I now know. He had no teaching talent, and he did many things instinctively: he couldn’t have explained why dahlias need sunny exposure or why hyacinths need well-drained soil. In the beginning he told me what to do, and later he signaled it with his eyes. Little by little, I began to know more than he did. I never let him see it. But I’ve often wondered whether he understood it on his own, and whether his anxious determination to continue performing the most dangerous tasks was born of a secret fear (for a person like him, it could only be secret) that I might steal his trade.
Sometimes you think you’ve found the site you’ve been waiting for all your life: you’ve never seen it before, but you recognize it, it was waiting for you and you knew that sooner or later you’d discover it. When you come back to it the next day or even just an hour later, full of expectations, it says nothing to you, it’s insipid and banal and stupid, and you’re sure that those stones and that terrain will never produce anything good. So if a site ever speaks to you this way — if as soon as you lay eyes on its tufts of grass, like an unknown woman’s head of hair, it tells you it’s ready to become the most beautiful garden of your life — don’t believe it: turn your back and forget about it. Because if destiny decides that your most beautiful garden is to rise from these very stones, this very terrain, if it is really the site you’ve been waiting for, destiny will seek you out and find you — maybe by calling you on the phone with a childish voice full of pauses and hesitations and sudden bursts of speed.