The Disruption of Order
About the Book
In these short stories, Bruno Petroni builds settings where the overwhelming everyday life of a small-town leaves room for the unexpected. With the sharp, magnetic syntax that characterizes his writing, the author reveals the voices of characters who cling to a number of certainties about the world—certainties that still prove insufficient to protect them from themselves.
These are stories that reveal how terrible things in life escape our control. Betrayal, humiliation, loneliness, decay, and rejection unfold in blindsiding, unpredictable ways. The disruption of order turns us into witnesses—only as good literature can—of the fact that the darkness of powerful men, seen up close, resembles more a broken lightbulb on a naked wire than the unfathomable mystery of the night. It’s in that darkened room that a meeting between political power and literature takes place. But it is an awkward crossing, full of dissonances that are as unsettling as they are funny and absurd.
Excerpt
The Yellow Dragon
My son grabs three fries at once, dips them into the ketchup, then into the mayonnaise, and stuffs the resulting messy paste into his mouth. He chews quickly, swallows, and takes a gulp of his soda. Then he picks up his burger and takes too big a bite. My son weighs one hundred and one pounds. A child his age and height should be eighty-eight pounds.
His name is Miles. He is twelve years old. The kids at school call him Peppa. He himself told us (his mother and me). He told us as if it were funny.
My son doesn't cry in front of me. I don't know since when. A couple of years.
“The kids call me Peppa,” he said.
I didn’t understand the nickname. My wife did. My wife’s name is Deborah. Deborah didn’t ask why they call him Peppa; she laughed with him. I did ask, but Miles pretended not to hear.
That night, before going to sleep, my wife and I had a brief argument in which Deborah said, “It’s not a big deal. He was laughing when he told us.”
I said, “He was laughing to conceal how he really feels.”
And she answered, “He doesn’t need to conceal anything in front of his parents.”
I looked up ‘Peppa’ on Google. As soon as I saw her, I understood why my son was being called that. Miles not only weighs a dozen pounds more than he should, but he also has rosy cheeks, and his nostrils point more forward than downward. Neither Deborah nor I have a nose like that. When I turned off my laptop, my wife asked me if I was satisfied, if I was going to start calling him ‘Peppa’ too from the next day on. Then she said that stupid thing she ends up saying half the times we argue about Miles: “You don’t love your son.”
Almost every argument about our son stems, more or less directly, from his physical appearance. Miles is starting middle school in two months. Ever since the subject came up, I’ve insisted that we have to send him to a private school. Deborah says ‘no’, that he has to go to a state-run school, like everyone else, and we argue over it. It might seem that this argument has nothing to do with Miles’ physical appearance, but if I keep insisting that he should go to a private school, it is because I picture my son in a state-run school, being bullied day in, day out by underprivileged children, full of pent-up anger, eager to take their revenge on the world by picking on the fat kid, the cross-eyed kid, the ugly kid. Deborah gets worked up about this over and over again. She says Miles is normal, that I’m the abnormal one. Then she contradicts herself by saying that our son will learn to defend himself, that she remembers kids like Miles in her school twenty years ago, kids who “got along great with everyone.” I remember those kids too. I went to a state-run school myself. The ugly or the fat or cross-eyed kids who got along great with everyone were the underprivileged, scrappy kids nobody picked on for being ugly because they could break your nose. Besides looking like Peppa, Miles is a middle-class kid with college-educated parents.
At this point in the argument, Deborah always changes the subject, forgets all about school violence and starts talking about what really worries her.
“He’ll grow out of his shyness once he starts meeting girls,” she says.
She uses her matter-of-fact tone, as if she had been born yesterday. My wife is beautiful, brilliant, and forgetful. She forgets that she could bat her eyelashes at any boy at school, have a silly crush every other day, and flirt around the schoolyard just because she was a beautiful, outgoing girl. I, who was an ordinary kid, neither cool nor shy, had my own difficulties when it came to kissing a girl, but after a while I managed. I picture Miles, a couple of months from now, at recess—a schoolyard full of kids in a state-run school in a mixed income district—trying to talk to a girl. Not the prettiest one, because he’s not stupid. Just an ordinary girl, any girl. I can’t picture the conversation, but I can imagine what comes after: the girl laughing with her friends; Miles sitting alone on a bench, staring at his notebook, fully aware that those laughs are at his expense.
For now, luckily, he isn’t aware of that. Two girls Miles’ age, with sleek hair and Disney hoodies, two princesses eating at the next table are laughing at him. My son, still a boy, who is more interested in food than in girls, doesn’t pick up on what’s going on. I do notice, though; I see the look from one of them first, then the other, the glances they exchange, the confirmation, and the laughter.
At that age, Deborah was a princess too. I’ve seen pictures of her, and while I can’t say for sure that she laughed at fat boys who ate as if the world were about to end, or gave them pig names, I can say that she looked like these girls: blonde, slim, perfect nose, eyes, mouth—everything in proportion.
Miles looks sideways at the princesses enjoying their ice cream and quietly says, “Dad, can I have ice cream?”
I wish he'd just say: “I want some ice cream,” without the ‘Dad’, without that shyness.
“You want some ice cream?” I ask him.
“Yes,” he answers.
“Of course you can have some ice cream. Give me two minutes.”
I wait for the princesses to finish (they eat delicately, the ice cream doesn’t drip down the sides, their hands remain clean), and leave without seeing the mess my son is about to make, so that they don’t laugh at him again under their breath.
I do love my son, and I don’t want him to suffer. It’s ridiculous having to explain to Deborah that I love my son, and that if I speak honestly about his problems, it’s precisely because I love him. I shouldn’t have to explain to her that I’d rather be able to say things like: “He’ll learn to stand up for himself”, “His shyness will go away once he starts going to parties and stuff like that,” “Miles is so sweet. He’ll make friends right away”, like the things she says without a care in the world. I’m not saying that Deborah doesn’t love her son, of course. I’m saying that she can’t grasp how serious the problem is because she was always on the other side, aloof, detached from it all.
As for me, I wasn’t friends with the kids who acted like they owned the school, but I wasn’t friends with the ones who holed up in the ‘ghetto of ugliness’ either (being friends with them came at the cost of being lumped in with them). From my middle ground, I was able to see how complicated it all was. I understood the suffering of the kid who got gum stuck in his hair, I understood the mocking laughter of his friend (who’d had gum stuck in his hair the week before), I understood why the cool kid stuck gum in their hair as he walked by. From my vantage point in the middle, I understood this: it’s better to stick gum in someone’s hair than to be the one with gum stuck in theirs.
I love ‘my son’. Deborah loves ‘her son’. I know what’s going on with my son. Deborah doesn’t know what’s going on with her son. My son loves his mother more because she doesn’t know what’s going on with him. My son is eating his ice cream now (the napkins I brought aren't enough), and even though he probably hasn’t realized that I bought it for him after the girls left, I know he senses my concern (always), and that’s why he loves me less than he loves his mother.
Translated by Sandra Botta - Edited by Cecilia Della Croce
