I Hadn't Understood (9781609458980) (17 page)

I stick my head into the, shall we say, living room.

He's not there.

Into the bedroom.

Not there either.

Into the bathroom.

Nothing.

I hurry into the kitchen (which is the last room in the apartment).

On the kitchen table, in plain view, there's a sheet of paper.

 

THANKS ALL THE SAME DAD.

I THOUGHT IT OVER AND I REALIZED THERE WAS NO REASON NOT TO GO TO SCHOOL AFTER ALL.

I'LL GET THERE IN TIME FOR SECOND PERIOD, SO WHATEVER.

AND IF THEY ASK ME WHAT HAPPENED, I'LL JUST TELL THEM THE TRUTH.

I'M GLAD YOU WERE ON MY SIDE.

IAG

ALF

XXX

 

I pull out a Stefan and take a seat, reading the note over and over again from the beginning until the words on the paper have become incomprehensible scribble.

I put down the piece of paper and stare into the middle distance.

I'm rich, I think to myself.

That's what goes through my head.

Then I sniff.

Aw, go to hell.

Those are the words that come to mind when you unexpectedly feel a wave of happiness, without warning.

 

 

T
here's nothing gradual about the way things happen. When things happen, they just happen. And it's not like you can walk them along, guide them with one hand to keep them from veering out of control and sweeping you away with them as they crash into the void. There's no way to slow things down when they happen. You can't control them, you can't manage them. Even understanding them is beyond our reach. In fact, the most common recurring phrase in this connection is the following: “I don't know what's happening to me.” Certain phrases don't exactly come about by chance. If something happens to you, there's nothing you can do about it, and that's that. It's not true that life changes little by little. Either it changes or else it remains the same. After your life changes, you might say: “Yeah, but before that, this and that and the other thing happened,” and you talk yourself into believing that the change was in the air somehow. But deep down you know why, or really, deep down you
don't
know why your life has changed. You just don't know the reasons why things happen. It's like when you come down with a psychosomatic disease: the natural countermove is to look around for a triggering event. You thoughtfully review the recent events in your life that were bound up with choices or sacrifices (which are actually pretty much synonymous), and you decide to put the blame on one prime suspect. You open an investigation into suspect number one, and you bombard it with damning evidence until you've pinned it down as the instigator behind your psychosomatic disease. But the truth is that no one knows what events produce psychosomatic diseases. Because the array of events that can trigger a psychosomatic disease (which, by the way, no one really can define or understand) is so vast that one is as suspicious or likely as another.

But you don't even really have to go into the realm of psychosomatic diseases to prove how unreliable explanations that attribute specific causes can be. Take a head cold. You apply the same inquisitorial procedure. You get a cold and you think to yourself: “It must have been that one time I left the house dressed too lightly.” Which is obviously only one of an array of potential explanations, since it's a well-known fact that you can catch a cold in any of several million ways. The fact is, though, that once you've spent the night sleeping with your mouth wide open and at half past midnight you realize that you've already gone through a family-size box of Kleenex, you have to find some way of rationalizing such an enormous pain in the ass. So you put the blame on that one time you should have dressed more warmly. And with the passage of time you become absolutely convinced of it. Even if it would be sufficient to remember the thousands of times you left the house dressed much more lightly than that one time (times when it was even colder, what's more) to completely demolish the prosecution's case. All of this long and intricate explanation leads up to the fact that I can't tell you how it is that I wound up in Alessandra Persiano's bed, but, unless I happen to be in the throes of a prolonged hallucination, the naked woman sleeping alongside me right now is none other than her.

As soon as we walked into her apartment, that is, here, I threw myself at her with a vehement impatience that my subsequent performance couldn't possibly hope to live up to. So before it was all said and done, or really before any of the saying and doing even began, just forty seconds after I entered the home of Alessandra Persiano, I also entered Alessandra Persiano herself, but I remained inside her such a short time that, after the first and last thuds, she called my name beseechingly, as if wondering where I'd vanished to. Whereupon I thought to myself: “Now I look like an asshole,” but I didn't say it out loud, because really there was no need. And then she, who at that moment was on top of me and was objectively somewhat ridiculous, all rumpled and disheveled on account of me, said to me, “Why don't we just start over from square one, but taking it easy this time, since there isn't anyone actually in hot pursuit of us?” In response to which I asked, in perfectly good faith, whether by “from square one” she meant going right back to where we started from, that is to say, on the landing outside her apartment, or even better, in the elevator, and she burst out laughing right in my face (Alessandra Persiano always bursts out laughing right in my face), and that helped to break the tension so that no more than five minutes later we started fucking but for real this time and we didn't stop for a good solid four hours, filling our heads with good talk in the intervals, along with everything else.

So anyway, at this point I have to say that I feel pretty discombobulated and even a little dopey after everything that's happened, truth be told.

In the meanwhile, the first state of mind that I register is that of a generic gratitude toward existence at large. Which is a condition of beatitude verging on the Franciscan, if we accept that St. Francis ever felt a sensation like this one. And I'm not just talking about the Zen tranquility that is so typical of the post-coital state, when you feel all invigorated and it's as if your body were sending a message from deep within that it was about time you paid a little attention to it for a change. I'm referring to the sudden intrusion of hope. The ability to grasp the meaning of every single act that allows you to earn a living. To think of the future as something that you can't wait to start.

And to be sure, it wasn't written in the stars that a piece of woman like Alessandra Persiano should come along and bestow this incredible favor on me of all people.

Reasoning about it coolly, I think that this New Malin­conico Miracle is due to the fact that I reacted fairly passively to her first approaches.

There's a short story by Proust that deals with this very same subject. It's called “The Indifferent Man.” It's about a marquise who falls head over heels in love with a man who treats her with complete indifference. Put in those terms, it seems about as obvious as a hot-water faucet, but you try making a hot-water faucet sometime. Anyway, this marquise, even though she is one of the most beautiful women in Paris, and, being a wealthy widow, is constantly pursued by a vast throng of suitors, winds up falling incurably under the spell of this guy who systematically ignores her. It's not that her beloved is all that much better than the various nobleman panting after her with declarations of love (and the marquise knows this perfectly well); it's precisely the unaffected way in which he becomes hard to track down, rejects her invitations, and dismisses her repeated advances that makes her so unhappy. And even at the end of the short story, when she agrees to marry another man, it's obvious that the indifferent man is the one she couldn't get out of her mind.

In other words, without even realizing it, I must have behaved like Proust's indifferent man. With the niggling difference that, unlike Proust's indifferent man, when Alessandra Persiano came charging back at me, I didn't even make her ask twice, truth be told.

The fact is that I belong to a generation of men who are pathologically skeptical when it comes to the idea that a tremendous babe might actually be coming on to them. I'm an outlet-store man. And outlet-store men, since they are invariably last season's model, have a troubled relationship with the latest things. They feel like they're past their sell-by dates, second choice. If anyone ever wants us, it's only because we're on sale, with deep discounts. So it's obvious that we would never dare to think that a woman like Alessandra Persiano, who is a Prada woman, might ever consider dropping in here to do a little shopping.

The other state of mind that I am registering just now, and with a sense of relief that I'm not even going to bother trying to describe, is the complete absence of any guilty feeelings that the thought of Nives triggers in me. I don't give a damn: it's a beautiful sensation. Whatever else people might say, a man who doesn't give a damn is a free man.

I'm so rapt in my conjectures that I don't even notice that Alessandra Persiano has turned in my direction, and is contemplating me with post-sexual curiosity—the kind that amounts to taking a closer look at the person you just had sex with, to get a better idea of whether or not you just made a mistake.

“Oh,” I say, “I thought you were asleep.”

She smiles, and then she sketches out the oval of my face with her enchanting right index finger.

I breathe in her vaguely fruit-scented aroma (beautiful women always give off a scent of fruit) and I scrutinize her, overjoyed at my complete inability to find one single defect.

“What were you thinking about?”

I give her a partial answer.

“About Francis.”

“Francis?”

“The one from Assisi, you know the one I mean?”

She opens her eyes wide, momentarily taking into consideration the possibility that I'm just joking, then dismisses that thought, and thrusts her head against my chest, sputtering out a crescendo of laughter that is only amplified by my thoracic cavity.

“I just don't know. I mean, you're amazing.” She remerges, half dazed by the absurd sensation that she's evidently experiencing.

“Why?” I ask, seraphically.

She shakes her head. I get a mouthful of hair. I blow it away.

“The things you say never seem to fit in with the place. Or the time.”

“Naturally, I'm nothing but an outlet store” is what I feel like saying. But then I'd have to explain it all, and I don't feel like it.

“Ilikeit
Ilikeit
Ilikeit!” she says over and over, electrified like a little girl, and runs her hands over me.

“But you women,” I ask as I do my best to pin her down, “why is it that you're always attracted by defects? I mean, a guy wears himself out trying to seem promising, reliable, convinced of the things he says; a guy studies, works hard, gets ahead, goes to the gym, does his best to dress fashionably, in other words, ruins his life, and then when you finally decide to take him to bed, what's the secret that you confide in him? ‘I don't really like handsome men'; ‘Your belly makes me feel safe'; ‘You're so adorable when you misspeak' . . . Jesus Christ, what a pain in the ass. Couldn't you at least tell us in advance?”

She looks up at the sky, or really, at the ceiling, and shakes her head.

“God what an idiot you are, Vincè. It's exactly because you try so hard to conceal them, your defects, as you call them, that we like you. A truly inept man is pathetic. But a man who's trying to act self-confident, and then you realize that he's inept, it just does something to you, you understand?”

I think it over.

“In other words, you're trying to say that you women are still fascinated by ‘what's underneath the surface' and ‘Now you see it/now you don't.'”

She points her hand straight at my face, having formed all four fingers into a flat plane, the universal gesture meaning, “Take this for example,” however, when used at this distance from the subject, means in many parts of the world: “Now listen to this guy.”

“As if you men are equally as captivated by the same things? When you look at a woman, you're not imagining anything else, are you?”

“Touché,” I reply.

She kisses me.

“You're just the way I imagined,” she says.

“You're much better,” I rectify.

“I imagined you at your best,” she shoots back.

“I can do better than that,” I insist.

“Maybe the best thing is for you to shut up,” she says. And she seals my mouth with her own.

We're squirming and caressing each other again when a cell phone—my cell phone—rings. I curse myself for not turning it off and I pretend I can ignore it, busily pursuing the activity now under way, but after a little while Alessandra Persiano, with impeccable feminine pragmatism, taps me twice on the shoulder.

“Come on, answer the phone so we can forget about it,” she recommends.

I snort in annoyance and roll over onto the other side of the bed, reaching out toward the nightstand. Alessandra Persiano fixes her hair, stands up, and walks to the window, walking indifferently past her clothing folded neatly on the chair, a detail that cheers me up as it clarifies her future intentions.

“Hello.”

I speak slowly and in a low voice, just to eliminate any doubts my caller might have as to whether this call comes at an unwelcome moment.

“Good afternoon, Counselor, so when can we have a meeting?”

I sit bolt upright in bed.

“Who is this?”

Of course, I immediately recognized the voice.

“What are you saying, have you already forgotten about me?”

He says it in an indulgent tone of voice that gets on my nerves.

I start to sweat.

“Who is this? How dare you call me again? Who gave you my phone number?”

“Counselor, if you don't mind my asking, why do you have to make it so complicated?”

I turn to look at Alessandra Persiano, who is looking back at me with a worried expression, standing naked and beautiful in front of the window curtains.

One time something happened to me that resembles this situation very closely. A case of intrusiveness that verged on extortion. I was selling a family apartment through a real estate agency. One day a guy calls me up from a rival agency and says why don't you fire the agency you're with now and let me sell that apartment for you. I ask him why I would do anything of the sort. He replies that he has some people who are interested in buying my apartment. I tell him that I don't give a damn if he does. So he asks me if I'm trying to be funny. Whereupon I tell him that our conversation has gone on long enough and that it'd be better for him if he never tried to call me again. He apologizes and hangs up. I think back on this phone call for at least a couple of days, so shocked am I at the existence of such people (you ask yourself: “Does God exist?”; whereas “Do people like that exist?” is what you ought to be asking yourself). Incredible to say, a few days later the same guy calls me back and asks when he can come and show the apartment. Come and show what? I say, with a horrible morbid curiosity that drives me to find out more. What do you mean, to show what: to show the apartment. Just like that, as if the last time we talked I'd hired him as my realtor. I tell him that I have no intention of letting him show my apartment and he replies, in a tone of voice that almost seems friendly, that he needs to sell the apartment so that he can get his percentage. Whereupon I start shouting and I threaten to report him to the police for attempted extortion. And at that point he vanishes, never to be heard from again.