I Hadn't Understood (9781609458980) (13 page)

She says that Alfredo feels an authentic cultural interest, all the more noteworthy because it came to him spontaneously.

She says that if we make an effort to accept this interest of his instead of opposing it, we have some hope that he might become indifferent (to that interest).

She says a few other things, but I can't remember them right now.

“Just think,” she explained to me the last time, “Alfredo is doing something strange, unique, and risky, something none of his friends would do. That makes it irreplaceable for him. You and I have nothing as exciting to offer him as an alternative.”

She says—I just remembered—that, despite the risks to which it exposes him,
this need our son feels to use his body to understand the world makes him a body endowed with an experimental intelligence
(those are Nives's italics).

Which, all things considered, might even be true. It's just that whenever Nives issues these fine diagnoses, first of all, it twists my balls into a knot because it always seems that she's just issuing them for herself and not for anyone else, I don't know if I convey the idea; and second, if you ask me, when you're talking about your own children, anybody who can lay such a clear-cut, impeccable line of reasoning is nothing but an idiot. You can't be clear-cut and impeccable with your children. Because it's a well known fact that children were created precisely to contradict any and all principles. And if you use your own son as an underpinning for a principle, it really does mean that you haven't understood a single god-damned thing.

I've always turned up my nose—truth be told—at the idea of principles as a basis for action, even leaving aside my role as a parent. I remember perfectly well the moment that it first happened. I must have been ten years old or so. One evening my father's brother, a self-centered individual with a completely unjustified but extremely elevated opinion of himself—and no one in the family seems to know where he got such an opinion—told my mother that he didn't want his son (my cousin) eating pre-packaged ice cream treats. At that point I broke in to ask him why. And he replied: “On principle.” Just like that, flatly. Whereupon I asked just what principle that might be. And he said again: “On principle.” As if he'd said: “God exists.” Exactly, precisely the same. Whereupon I told him that maybe he hadn't understood the question. And he told me that I had absolutely no right to dare to insinuate that he was the kind of person who misunderstood questions.

If at the age of ten I had understood the meaning of the verb “to insinuate,” I would probably have replied to him that no, I had by no means insinuated that he had failed to understand the question, I had stated it, clearly, outright.

That very evening I decided that a principle, inasmuch as it is a conceptual motive upon which a doctrine or a science or even simply a reasoning is based (definition taken from the 1979 Devoto-Oli dictionary, Euroclub, Milan, pg. 884), was simply a cheap rhetorical contrivance employed by people who have no other arguments to employ. In fact, I still think so, if for no other reason than that the idea of a principle was so appealing to my idiot uncle.

So that's the way it is, as far as Alf is concerned.

 

“I'm guessing you don't want to go to school today, right?” I ask Alfredo.

He pulls the ice pack off his face, he licks his swollen lip.

A stab of pain right here, in the arm, like a myocardial infarction under way, when your son licks his swollen lip.

“I don't feel up to it, Dad.”

I can already see them, his classmates, sort of pitying him and sort of mocking him. Truth be told, I would have gone to school if I were in his shoes, because in cases like this the girls take turns comforting you and you get rides from people who wouldn't normally even take you under consideration.

Just look at the things that go through my head.

“You know you don't have to talk me into it. I wouldn't think for a second of sending you to school.”

He smiles, reassured.

“Why didn't you go home?”

Meaning Nives's home, which used to be my home too, until just a short while ago.

Yes, I know, it's a bastard question, it's sort of like asking: “Who do you love more, Mommy or Daddy?” But if I don't take advantage of these situations, just bear with me.

“I just didn't,” he says.

Head up, shoulders straight, like a gentleman.

But I'm disgustingly pleased at the idea that he chose to come to my house.

“Listen, let me ask you something, but I want you to tell me the truth. Are you sure you haven't banged your head or anything like that? Don't give me the runaround, because if you have we need to get you a CT scan.”

“No, no, it was just a couple of punches, not even straight on, they just grazed me, I swear.”

“Okay. Listen, I have to go into the courthouse, I've got a case. You stay here and wait for me. Let me give Totonno a call though and ask him to drop by and take a look at you, okay?”

Totonno, that is Antonio Rossi, is our public health general practitioner. He's a lifelong friend of mine. One of those people who, when you're on the verge of a breakdown, you don't even have to tell him what's wrong and he's already fixing you up.

“Okay.”

I touch his forehead. It's cool.

 

So I go and get ready for work. Alf gets comfortable on the Klippan sofa and turns the other tv on, with the sound down very low. He puts his feet on a stool that I keep there for the purpose. He wedges a cushion behind his head and hugs another to his belly (classic pose of self-consolation). I call Totonno, who assures me he'll swing by before lunch. Before I leave I ask Alf if he needs anything. He doesn't need anything. So I tell him that I'm leaving and later that day we'll have lunch together. Whereupon he asks me if I can call Nives to let her know that he won't be coming home but will be staying at my house. I say okay and head downstairs.

On the street, the thought of Alfredo, safe and sound, waiting for me at home, serves as a kind of morphine. All things considered, it's not bad to be able to keep the people you love in a cage, if you understand what I'm trying to say here.

 

I
stop outside the main entrance of the courthouse to call Alagia, since inside my cell phone doesn't hit on all four cylinders.

“Vincè. What's up.”

I snort through my nose in irritation. You work yourself blind to teach your kids manners, then one day they invent caller ID and in just a few weeks they wipe out the efforts of a lifetime.

“Good morning to you, eh. Where are you, at the university?”

You can hear noises in the background that sounds vaguely like a party.

“Eh.”

“Listen, I need to talk to you, is there some way I can see you today?”

“When, today?”

“No, at midnight the day after tomorrow. I told you I need to talk to you—bear with me.”

“Is it really that urgent?”

“Sweet Jesus, Ala', what do I have to do to have a conversation with you in person, file a request in triplicate?”

These are the small things that remind you of your status as a separated father. They say that happiness consists of small things. That goes double for unhappiness.

“But what's happened, something with Mamma?”

Not yet, I think to myself.

“I dunno. Alfredo.”

There's a brief pause. I can clearly hear the voices of a group of kids talking, not far from Alagia. First one says: “Whatshisname, you know, the professor who looks like a flea market version of Umberto Eco, has invited the students in his course to a reading of his book of poetry at the Feltrinelli book store.” Another one says: “Are you going?”; and the first one replies: “Of course, I'm going to have take a final exam with that miserable hobo”; “Ah, okay,” cuts in a girl's voice, then she adds: “Ask him to sign the book, with a dedication, that way he'll remember your name.”

“Okay, listen,” says Alagia, “I have three classes today, I'll be here all day long. Why don't you catch up with me at the cafeteria and we can eat lunch together?”

At the cafeteria? I'd already planned on a nice lunch with Alfredo. I wanted to buy country bread, prosciutto, Vannulo mozzarella nuggets, all that stuff he loves.

“At the cafeteria? At the cafeteria. Okay. Fine. I'll come meet you at the cafeteria. I can do that. All right. I'll see you there. At the cafeteria.”

A reflective pause.

“Oh, Vincè.”

“Eh,” I reply.

“Are you okay?”

“Am I okay? Of course I am, why?”

“What do I know, it's just that you said like five times: ‘At the cafeteria, yes, at the cafeteria.'”

“No, it's just that I was thinking about how to . . . oh, Christ, but what a pain in the ass you are, Ala'.”

She laughs, idiot that she is.

“Okay, I'll expect you about two o'clock,” she says, clearly making a tremendous effort to finish the sentence.

“Eh. And you just go on laughing,” I say. But I'm laughing too, truth be told.

“At . . . o'clock . . . pffst . . . ”

“Hold the phone closer,” I say. But the only result is that she laughs again.

So we go on like that, until one of the two of us, and by now I can't even remember whether it was her or me, finally hangs up first.

I immediately call home to tell Alfredo that I won't be back for lunch. I ask him what he's doing, how he feels, how his bruise, his lip, his leg are coming along. I fire a volley of questions at him.

He snickers and replies: “Like Wolverine.” Which is the name of one of the X-Men, the one with the bone-claw sabers that project from his knuckles, who also has the power to heal his own wounds (Alf was only referring to the power of self-healing his wounds). In practical terms, if he's shot with a bazooka, or stabbed with a red-hot spear, or if he bangs his head against the wall at 225 mph, you can see the injury retract­ing all by itself, like an octopus retreating into its underwater cavern. One minute it's there, the next minute it's gone. It's called “healing factor,” I think.

So with my tail between my legs I start explaining to Alfredo that I'd forgotten about a prior engagement, and he interrupts me to say that I don't need to worry about it, I certainly hadn't known that he'd show up this morning.

I tell him that for lunch he can make himself one of the Healthy Choices that are in the fridge, and he says okay, I'll be healthy if I have the choice, and I don't know what to say for a second, and then I laugh politely and say, okay, see you later, and he says okay.

And at last I go to work.

 

Today in the courthouse there's pure bedlam. A number of different divisions are in session at the same time, so there are hearings under way everywhere, with plaintiffs, defendants, prosecuting magistrates, defense attorneys, witnesses, expert witnesses, defendants' relatives, and all the rest, producing that typical temporary surge of overcrowding that plunges the Hall of Justice into an evocative frenzy of self-importance—an automatic effect of concentrating large numbers of human beings in any given place.

When you happen to walk into a building crowded with people, after a while you just naturally start to walk as if you were in line waiting to audition for a part. That's perfectly understandable, because it's very rare for someone to feel relaxed in a crowd. You can tell me you don't give a damn about what other people think of you until you're blue in the face, but I know better: you care. Bodies know when they're being observed. That's just one of their basic traits. And when a body senses that it's being observed, it generally tends to become exceptionally clumsy. That's why when you walk into someplace that's crowded, even a place where there are normally lots of people, like a courthouse for instance, or a lecture hall in a university, for instance, everybody seems to be remarkably clumsy. That diffuse sense of clumsiness washes over you, and before you know it, you feel clumsy yourself. As if you were about to do something glaringly idiotic any second now.

In that case, you have two options: either you become insignificant and you try to blend into the herd—and when that happens a friend you've known since you went to elementary school together might look you in the face and fail to recognize you—or else you study the behavior of the others around you, you pick the ones who strike you as the most successful, and you imitate them.

Most people try to blend into the background. Those who don't are mostly lawyers. And lawyers, in their efforts to stand out from the crowd, necessarily wind up striking fairly oafish poses.

If you watch them closely—lawyers in a crowded courthouse—you have a hard time believing that they're deadly serious about their behavior. They shuttle from one hallway to another, from one courtroom to the next, or more likely from the courtrooms to the bar, weaving in and out, dribbling around people in a way that seems intentional, as if they're trying to show them they're taking up vital space. They make a display of their well-established sense of direction and skill at maneuvering through the hallways and hearing rooms to make it clear that they (the lawyers) are at home in the building, while the others (consumers of the service dispensed by the justice system) are merely guests.

When they run into other lawyers they jovially call out to them, using their professional title and surname in jest, and exchanging absolutely meaningless phrases at the top of their lungs, for one reason and one reason only: to make themselves heard. What on earth are they thinking, that afterwards the people they run into comment in an undertone to their colleagues: “Oh, did you notice, that lawyer we just ran into, how nicely he yells?”

Sure, I know, not all lawyers are like that, thanks for the information. But I'm talking about the lawyers who
are
like that, obviously.

 

I take the main hallway and slide into the flow of traffic. After a short distance I glimpse an overweight lawyer who strikes me as familiar, and at the exact same moment he glances at me as if he just had the same impression. And so we each look at the other the few extra seconds that now oblige us to the minimum professional courtesy: the requisite exchange of greetings.

But now it dawns on me that the other lawyer is Picciafuoco, my horrendous colleague. I might have seen him three or four times in my entire, shall we say,
career
, and yet I recognize him.

“Picciafuoco, right?” I call, pointing to him from within hailing distance.

“Yes,” he says.

But already from the tone of voice in which he said it, it's obvious that he has no desire whatsoever to stop and talk.

As if I'm dying to.

I extend my hand and remind him of my name. He nods, as if to say there was no need to remind him.

“The place is packed today, eh?” I point out.

“Yes, yes it is,” he replies.

By which point our conversational resources are completely exhausted.

I can't stand people who give monosyllabic answers and then refuse to volunteer another single stinking word, you know the kind, and after a while there's a pool of shitty embarrassing silence stagnating between the two of you, and you just feel like telling them: “Aw, go fuck yourself.”

People like that, I hate them, for real.

Which by the way, I am deeply tempted to remind him, this shameless individual who's suddenly acting all terse and telegraphic, when he called me on the phone yesterday he had quite a different attitude, unless I'm much mistaken.

In the end, to extract myself from that miserable plight, I decide to bring up our former shared interest—that is, Mimmo 'o Burzone—in part so I can give him the news that I turned down the appointment, which I imagine ought to make him happy.

“Oh, say, colleague,” I lead off, as if it had just popped into my mind, “I meant to tell you that Fantasia's wife dropped by my office, just a little while after you called me.”

“Ah,” he says.

An “ah” that sounded a lot like “And who the fuck cares?” A reaction that honestly baffles me.

“And so,” I resume, “it turns out that I had to turn down the appointment. Too much going on, I really can't keep up with it all. I was sorry, though, I have to tell you.”

He takes in the news and begins to nod, looking around repeatedly with a certain arrogance, as if—I don't know—as if the people around him owed him money or whatever.

“So then you have to wonder who they're going to get now,” he says, after a short pause.

“Who they're going to get?” I ask. But I already understand.

At that point my shameless colleague snorts in generic resentment, slaps me philosophically on the shoulder, and vanishes into the crowd.

I stand there, staring distractedly into the middle distance, if there is any such a thing as the middle distance in a hallway packed with people.

They retracted his fiduciary appointment.

Obviously.

But why?

They must have someone else, of course. Burzone's not going to deprive himself of all legal representation at a time like this.

Do you remember what the wife said to me? “Don't you worry about him”—referring to Picciafuoco—“the same way we appointed him we can fire him.”

Sure, but she meant that they could fire him so they could hire me.

But I turned them down, and now what?

Exactly.

And now nothing.

Now they must have hired somebody new.

Eh.

Necessarily.

With all the criminal lawyers looking for work.

Then why do I have this horrible cloying sensation?

Who knows.

 

The civil court division is on the top floor. And since the vast majority of lawyers are civil lawyers, there are white-sale lines for the elevators. So I brace myself psychologically for taking the stairs, and I take the stairs.

I'm holding up pretty well when, on the last flight of stairs, I glimpse the unmistakable calves of Alessandra Persiano, who is leaning against the railing and waiting for me, with a semiserious scolding expression on her face. All around her is a gymkhana of wolves and dirty old men jostling to be the first to say hello to her.

Well aware that she is the uncontested star of the hall of justice, AP dismisses the pathetic suitors, liquidating each of them with a glance and a smirk (just then, she reminds me of the scene with Totò tossing the suitcases that Mario Castellani hands him out the window of the sleeping compartment on the train).

I look at her again and I stiffen, in part because it's normal to stiffen in the presence of Alessandra Persiano, and in part because I'm suddenly swept by a sense of guilt that I can't place right then and there, baffled as to the reason, though the fact that A.P. is waiting for me is makes it clear that she has something she wants to scold me about.

Standing there, I catch myself thinking that if through the intervention of a merciful god I should one day happen to get A.P. into bed, after a bout of lovemaking as grueling as it would be unforgettable, I would reach out for the pack of cigarettes on the side table and, suddenly inspired, say to her: “You know, that morning, when I saw you waiting for me on the stairs, no matter how packed the courthouse might have been, suddenly the place was empty: there was no one there but you and me.”

And then I'd light the cigarette.

I file the pitiful scene away and laboriously climb the last few steps separating me from her.

Jesus, she really is one hell of a woman, Alessandra Persiano. Like any true work of art, she has one unmistakable trait: every time you see her it's like the first time.

I walk toward her, crossing unharmed through the magnetic field of all my fellow lawyers who are dying inside as they watch me in disbelief, wondering what I could possibly have that they don't (I'm asking myself the same thing, as it happens). In this particular moment, I am without a doubt the most roundly despised lawyer in the hall of justice (or at least on this flight of stairs in the courthouse). I wonder if she realizes that she is making me famous.