I Hadn't Understood (9781609458980) (24 page)

 

T
he situation in which I find myself is completely anomalous. It violates all the boilerplate rules of chase scenes.

Being followed is one of those typically cinematic sensations, the kind of thing that when it actually happens to you, you immediately feel as if you're at the center of attention, as if you're being followed not only by the person who's following you but also by an audience who's eager to know who's following you and why.

In these cases, in fact, the first thing you do when you're out walking is to slow down, take a deep breath, and square your shoulders, as if somehow you felt incredibly interesting all of a sudden. The second thing you do is look around to get the best possible vantage point of the street you're on, and pay careful attention to the things surrounding you (parked cars, moving cars, an indeterminate point on the sidewalk across the street, pedestrians walking ahead of you, pedestrians coming toward you—and in fact as they pass by, they give you looks as if to say
What the hell are you looking at?
—shop signs, and so on), with a view to coming up with some way of gaining leverage and turning the tables on the person following you, just like in the movies, in fact, when the person being followed suddenly disappears from the field of view of the follower, who immediately comes to a sudden halt in the middle of the sidewalk, disoriented (you know, so that anyone who happens by would swear that what this guy is doing is following somebody), and then kind of fumbles his way forward for a while until the guy he's following, in magnificent athletic condition, appears from around a corner, grabs him by the scruff of the neck, hurls him up against the nearest wall, and beats him silly until he confesses who sent him.

That's as far as tailing somebody on foot. When it comes to car chases the boilerplate is slightly different (for instance, in the car being chased there's almost always a woman in the passenger seat next to the driver, upbraiding him for having flirted shamelessly for the whole evening with another woman; just then, he shoots an eloquent glance up at the rearview mirror, returns his gaze firmly to the road ahead of him, doesn't even bother to answer the woman, whereupon she flies into a rage but she doesn't even have time to start dressing him down before he shifts gears, jams his foot down on the accelerator, and takes off like a rocket, and after the woman comes this close to doing a face-plant into the windshield, he says: “Better fasten your seatbelt”), even though, at the end of the chase scene, it's always the car following them that goes hurtling off the road.

Obviously in your case this is all just a farce, because if you really did think that a criminal was following you in order to rob you or settle some account that you know nothing about, at the very least you'd start running like a sewer rat or you'd scream for help in the general direction of the first policeman, traffic cop, or mailman (anyone wearing a uniform, in other words) you happen to see; I very much doubt that you'd waste time acting like the poor man's James Bond, a part, furthermore, that no one has assigned you.

The fact is that reality, in these cases, gives you a distorted idea of things from the very beginning, and you are only too eager to jump right in because, obviously, everybody needs a dose of self-importance now and again. They're false dangers, situations with an induced, facilitated risk. It's kind of like the inhabitants of Rome, if you've ever noticed, who always seem to be on the verge of trading punches but then they never actually come to blows, like on a train when people are lined up down the corridor of a passenger car, and the guy up ahead takes forever to get seated, so one guy says: “You wanna get a move on?”; and the other guy answers him: “Yeah, sure, if you just give me a second here”; and the first guy says: “Well, as long you don't take the whole damned afternoon”; to which the other guy says: “Excuse me, do you have a problem here?”; and the first guy: “Maybe my problem is you, what do you say?”; and the other guy: “Ah, you think so? Well, that being so, I'm not sure I'm going to help you with your problem”; and the first guy: “No, I'm pretty sure you're gonna take care of it, like it or not”; and the two of them are perfectly capable of going on like this for a solid fifteen minutes without ever actually trading punches unless the people behind them in line don't start a shouting cascade of objections, so they have to shut down their debating session. You just picture the same kind of exchange in Naples, and try calculating how many (or how few) seconds would pass before the first fist crunches into the nasal septum of the other debater.

In reality, the chase scene that actually does take place usually involves an acquaintance who spots you on the street from an average distance, not too close and not too far, and calls your name but you don't hear him, whereupon he raises his voice by an octave, but you go on walking, minding your own business, and at that point your acquaintance has already kind of overdone it with the decibels, embarrassing himself with the other pedestrians who look at him with a certain distaste, so he decides to take it to the limit, and he comes after you, only by now you've gained a considerable headstart on him, and so the chase is on.

My current situation, as I was saying, doesn't even comply with this elementary plot structure. I'm riding in a city bus, comfortably seated among family members of convicts, construction workers, and little old men (and why do you always see little old men riding the bus? It's not like they have to go to work), and despite the miserable clattering of sheet metal produced by the rattletrap bus, I can't help but obsess on the puttering noise of the Vespa following close behind us, faithfully slowing down for every bus stop. The driver has even noticed it, I saw him glancing into the rearview mirror a couple of times as if he's about to stop the bus and get out.

I try to ignore what's going on but I can't seem to do it, the engine of the Vespa is drilling through my brain, I even go so far as to suspect that Tricarico might have intentionally doctored the muffler (it certainly wasn't making this much noise this morning). He's just trying to wear me down, there's no mistaking the pattern. They're tremendous, the guys who set out to wear you down. They're more or less like hyenas—the way that hyenas tag along behind wounded animals so that they can devour them at their leisure once loss of blood and exhaustion has laid them by the heels.

This thought makes me so furiously indignant that suddenly I can't stand to just ride along quietly without saying a word so I decide to get off the bus and dress Tricarico down, but good. Only, at the next stop, when I hop down from the bus and see him pulling up (beaming at the sight of me again so soon), the whole scene of the clobbering of the hooligan on the sidewalk unreels before my eyes, and my aggressivity shrinks so radically that I unexpectedly find myself saying:

“Let's do this. You can give me a ride to my office, but I don't want to hear a word out of you, understood? Not one word.”

He nods his head yes with some display of confusion.

“Did you hear me talking, Counselor?”

“You starting again? I said
not one word
, do you understand Italian, yes or no?”

He raises both hands.

I climb onto the scooter.

And we go.

When I do this sort of thing, that is, peel out in high gear for a vicious argument and then desist, converting my impulse for a brawl into a simmering and inoffensive broth of resentment, I find myself hemmed into that very particular variety of unproductive conflict, exquisitely aesthetic in nature, in which you do your best to make it clear to the other person that you can't stand them, and yet there you remain. Which is, after all, a typically matrimonial situation: instead of telling your spouse to go fuck himself, you sulk. Practically speaking, you deep-freeze the conflict. You put it in the freezer, in the lowest compartments, and you make use of the daily chill drawer until one fine day you decide that a trial separation is the one and only way to defrost it. People break up to defrost their conflicts much more frequently than you'd be likely to guess. Because at a certain point you've got to get over the cold wars. You have to make something happen, at last. Which is why, when people break up, even people who aren't stupid, they discover that they're so stupidly determined not to let their spouse come out the winner, and they do everything they can to engage in a form of obstructionism. Separation and divorce, once you start down that road, produces chain reactions that are virtually unstoppable. It turns into a matter of principle. A way of saying, too late, the words that you wish you'd said that one time when you couldn't think of anything to say. It doesn't do you a bit of good, but it's one of those things you decide you just have to do, even if you don't exactly understand the reason why.

“Separation,” by the way, is a word that has an inexplicable driving force, a sort of linguistic front-wheel drive: the minute you utter the word you've started separating, even if it doesn't seem that way. It brings misfortune, in a certain sense. It pulls down decisions on your head without even giving you the time to make them. It conditions your behavior, undermines existing relationships, launches itself into the future with immediate effect. It's a sort of virus. That's why you have to be so careful about saying the word. If you ask me, most people who have broken up up only did so because one day they uttered the word.

 

In short, on the Vespa I act all offended the whole way to the office, even when we pull up in front of the street door and I finally get off the scooter.

“Well, thanks very much,” I say. “Take care.”

Tricarico grimaces and raises a finger.

“Can I say something?”

“What are we, at school?” I comment.

He snickers.

“Can I come up for a minute?”

“Eh?”

“To your office. Just for a minute.”

“What now?” I say, indignantly. “Do you want to take a look at my office?”

“No, what do I care about your office, Counselor?”

He seems to mean what he's saying.

“Don't you dream of it,” I decree.

“Please,” he says, and puts on a miserable expression.

If he's acting, he's very good.

“What's got into you?” I ask.

“I have to go to the bathroom.”

I'm flabbergasted, bowled over, flummoxed.

“Oh, my God. And you need to come to my office? There's a bar across the street, don't you see it?”

“I don't use bar bathrooms.”

“Why not?”

“They're disgusting. And I have a problem with closing the door.”

I stand there, arms akimbo, and tilt my head to one side.

“For real?”

He looks at the pavement.

“You mean, you're afraid you'll be locked in?” I ask, realizing as I speak that I've lowered my voice.

He doesn't answer, but he's answered.

I run my hand through my hair, accompanying the blazing recollection of a trauma I experienced many years ago. Something like twenty-seven, twenty-eight years ago, at a party at a classmate's house, I was locked in the bathroom. Actually, I didn't even really need to go to the bathroom, in the sense that I didn't have to pee, but I went into the bathroom anyway because when you're at a party where there's a girl that you like, every so often you have to disappear for 15-20 minutes at a time; that way after you've been gone for a while she'll start asking other people where you are and even come looking for you, if she can't figure out why you've suddenly vanished. In general, in these cases, you go out onto the balcony to smoke one cigarette after another, running the risk of contracting bronchial asthma while waiting for her to turn up and instead she promptly fails to turn up (while your friends, who have figured out your little subterfuge, emerge from indoors, asking questions like: “What's up, too hot inside?”; or else, in an even more diplomatic show of delicacy: “You want me to go get her?”); but the problem at the home of this classmate of mine was that there weren't any balconies and so, not knowing where else to implement my strategy of disappearing from circulation, I went into the bathroom, and after a while, when I was ready to return to the party, I turned the handle but the door wouldn't open. I tried everything I could think of to get that fucking key to turn but nothing worked, it was as if someone had cemented it in place with liquid steel.

After I'd been locked in there for fifteen minutes or so, Stefano Cavallo showed up. I told him in a whisper that he had to help me get out of there, and discreetly, if there was any way he could pull it off. And do you know what that traitor, that son of Cain did in response to my request? He started shouting: “Oh, everyone, come running, Malinconico's locked himself in the bathroom!” And a minute later the entire party had rushed en masse from the living room to the door of my little prison, with my classmates eagerly debating the best way to get me out of there, and me having to pretend I thought it was fun and funny, taking part in the discussion and laughing at their shitty jokes on the other side of the locked door. I swear, I can still remember every minute of it, the look of pity on the face of the girl I liked, when I finally managed to get out of there.

All this just to say that since that night I've never locked a bathroom door in my life, not even at home; so now I can't help but feel an irresistible impulse of solidarity toward Tricarico, after his confession.

And anyway, I found Stefano Cavallo's diary later and I pissed in it.

“Okay, whatever, come on up,” I concede. “Just a minute, though, and then off you go.”

“Okay.”

As we head upstairs, I realize the degree to which the discovery that even a Camorra hitter suffers from fears of this kind has already improved my relationship with him. Take a look at me: suddenly I'm even walking differently. I've stopped worrying about him coming after me; I'm no longer pacing myself in accordance with his gait, but I even accelerate.