I Hadn't Understood (9781609458980) (25 page)

Reinvigorated by this development, once we get to the front door of the shared office, I culpably fail to warn him that the instant I insert the key in the lock the canine burglar alarm is going to go off. And so, when I unlock the door and the damned toy spitz explodes in furious full-throated yelping, Tricarico leaps straight into the air with fright and puts one hand on his heart.

Whereupon I burst into laughter and open the door.

“What the fu—” Tricarico grunts, but afterwards he starts laughing, too. All things considered, he's a funny guy, truth be told.

“It's the dog that belongs to this cooperative here,” I explain, gesturing toward the door of the Arethusa while I close the front door behind us. “It always does that.”

“Well, you could have warned me, couldn't you?” he objects, justifiably, with one hand still on his chest, and even a little red in the face.

“Oh, well, you know,” I lie, “by now I don't even think of it anymore.”

Maybe because it's detected the presence of a stranger, the toy spitz is yapping even more furiously than usual. It's howling itself hoarse, hurling itself against the door, head-butting the door so powerfully that it's a wonder that it doesn't sustain a canine lapdog skull fracture. At this point, I'm sure that the dog is alone in the office, otherwise Roberto-Sergio or Clelia-Ginevra, in there, would already have forced it to pipe down. It's incredible how angry a little dog like that can make a person.

I haven't even finished composing the concept in my mind when, as if through some kind of telepathic conjuncture, I turn toward Tricarico with the chilling certainty that he's thinking exactly the same thing.

“Wait, didn't you need to go the bathroom?” I ask, subconsciously hoping to prevent him from doing something that I don't even want to imagine.

“Would you excuse me for just a moment?” he says. A request that, to judge from the expression on his face, translates roughly as a firm injunction not to even think of trying to stop him. And so, with the presence of mind of a guinea pig, I step aside.

He knocks at the door.

No answer. Aside from the toy spitz, obviously.

He looks at me.

Don't do it
, I think.

He does it.

I silently pray that they've locked the door.

The door doesn't open.

I heave a sigh of relief.

Tricarico turns his head and looks at me, arching his eyebrows in a compassionate expression.

Don't do it
, I think again.

He lowers the handle and delivers a sharp, decisive shove forward, as if he were shifting into first gear. And the little tongue of the door-lock reveals its precarious fragility. The great thing is that it doesn't even break.

Tricarico looks back at me and smiles, with a diabolical glimmer that back-lights his right eye.

For a single fleeting instant the toy spitz is silent.

“Oh, be careful!” I cry when he opens the door and the little beast hurtles straight at him with a snarl, latching on to the right sleeve of his jacket.

Without losing even a smidgen of composure, Tricarico lifts the dog level with his face, and with the other hand he grabs it by the scruff of its doggy neck. The toy spitz clenches its jaws, scrambles its legs furiously, snarls and foams at the mouth, its eyes rolling frantically, its crescent-shaped tail whipping back and forth through the air. Seen from up close, in an oblong version, the dog is obscenely rickety and stunted, pathetic in its senseless blinding rage. It's not biting anything but the sleeve of a jacket, the little moron, but it has no intention of releasing its grip. Without even realizing it, I barricade myself behind my bodyguard; in fact, he turns as if to ask me to give him a little room.

I comply.

Tricarico takes a step forward and enters the office of the Arethusa cooperative.

I follow him with bated breath: in fact, this is the first time that I've had the experience of entering this office. Before today, the office of the Arethusa cooperative was Bluebeard's Room for all of us in here. I can already picture Espe's incredulous face when I tell him about it.

While the toy spitz dangles from the enemy's forearm, savaging the fabric of the sleeve, we look around. Tricarico seems rather interested in the poster of the Robert Doisneau photograph, “Kiss by the Hôtel de Ville,” which I personally find super-trite. I stop instead to gaze in rapt admiration at a magnificent Klappsta easy chair, a sober Le Corbusier imitation, which I've been thinking about getting for years.

Once we're done with our respective appreciations, Tricarico tears the dog's jaws away from the sleeve of his jacket with a sharp yank, and the rest of the dog comes away with the jaws. At this point the toy spitz flips out; it probably doesn't even realize that it's no longer chomping down on anything. Its jaws continue to snap at empty air as it alternates each bite with a pathetic snarl; all the while, Tricarico holds it suspended in midair, waiting for it to come to the realization of the way things now stand.

In fact, after a short interval, it dawns on the dog that its situation has changed. For the first time, it looks straight at its new adversary. At that point, it finally falls silent. A slightly pathetic interlude, truth be told.

Continuing to dangle the diminutive quadruped, Tricarico turns his head and glances at me, as if to say: “You see?” I shrug my shoulders to deny the existence of any prior bet or understanding between the two of us, whereupon he, with the impassiveness of someone setting out to demonstrate a theorem, lifts his right arm, opens his right hand flat, braces the toy spitz, and then delivers a straight-armed slap in the face with such intense violence that the poor little dog, recoiling against the palm of the other hand that's gripping it relentlessly by the scruff of the neck, reminds me of nothing so much as a crash-test dummy when its shoulder harness jerks it back against the seat back the instant after the car hits the wall.

The sound of the impact (flat, vaguely metallic) is just as chilling as the yip of pain that accompanies it. After which the office of the Arethusa collective is plunged into a horrible silence.

Tricarico kneels down and gently places the dog back on the floor. The toy spitz, now catatonic, sits there tucked back on its hind legs, between the Rebus rattan wastebasket and the sawhorse legs of the Galant desk, without making a single solitary sound.

Tricarico stands up, turns toward me (I'm more or less as shocked as the dog), puts one hand on my shoulder and permits himself two little pats, as if he were telling me: “There, there, it's all over.” Then he turns his gaze to the Robert Doisneau poster, which he must really like a lot.

I open my mouth, wondering if all this really happened. In the space of just a couple of minutes, and without any particular effort, my unorthodox bodyguard and handler has solved a problem that has been the bane of my existence for the past two years every time I returned to my office.

The truth is that, just beneath the surface of my repulsion for the crudeness of the method, I feel an intriguing sense of admiration for this elementary ability to triumph over situations. I'm ashamed to say it, but I like his openly anti-cultural attitude. Even if it disgusts me.

The secret of the Camorra's success, I think as I'm standing there, must be the way that they eliminate the whole idea of problem-solving. In their cognitive system, probably, there's no human situation that can't be solved in a brusque and direct manner. Life is objective, it responds to elementary input: why make things complicated? You want something? Take it. Does someone you know have more money than you? Make him give you some. Do you yearn for a woman who won't give you the time of day? Rape her. Whatever the topic, they approach it in terms of elimination and appropriation. Nothing remains uncertain. There are no pending questions. That's why Camorristi have such a natural and practical relationship with death; they kill and are killed continuously. It's because, as far as they're concerned, there's absolutely nothing tragic about death.

Whereas I'm constantly overwhelmed by imponderables. I have a horror of death. I perceive life as something that continually opposes an obstinate and dignified resistance to my every desire. I have, so to speak, a mortgage-holder's attitude to life. Life gives me a series of deadlines, life obliges me to make a number of periodic payments, if that conveys the idea. It's not something I take for granted, the idea that I'm here and that life is here too, that we're both in the same place. Life isn't free, you know. I have always nurtured this idea of life as a mortgage that extracts a portion of what I make every month, while at the same time preventing me from turning into a complete savage, in a certain sense.

In other words, unlike Tricarico, I've never had the nerve to break into the office of the Arethusa collective and deliver a nice straight-armed smack right to the snout of that shitty little toy spitz that's been giving me heart attacks every time I come to work, though I can't tell you how much pleasure it would have given me to do so.

Which is to say, I can't seem to bring myself to simply take what I want. It strikes me as ridiculous to think that things are simply there, and that it's your fault if you fail to take them. I have never believed in the idea that all you have to do is reach out and grab. And the fact that someone else manages to do it still doesn't make me believe that it's true, and that's all.

“The bathroom?”

Tricarico's voice breaks into my thoughts like a doorbell.

“Eh?” I ask.

“The bathroom,” he repeats.

“Oh, right,” I say, “all the way down the hall, on the right.”

He heads down the hall.

I call after him.

“Oh, wait a sec.”

He turns around.

“What is it?”

“The door,” I say.

He turns his gaze in the direction of the lock he just forced a few minutes ago.

“What about it?” he answers, or really, he asks.

“Will they be able to tell?” I ask. It strikes me as incredible that we're in the same room as the now-silent toy spitz.

“No-o-o, absolutely not,” he rules out categorically. And he waves me out of the room, as if to say: “Come on, I'll show you.”

So I catch up with him, placing myself in his competent hands. As I do, I glance over again at the dog, staring into the void from its position on the floor, and I actually feel a twinge in my heart, truth be told.

Tricarico lets me go first (he's practically obsequious, as far as that goes), he pulls the door shut behind him with a sharp yank (at first the lock opposes some resistance, but then it yields to persuasion), and he gives the handle a couple of strong shakes, twisting it up and down, up and down, until you hear something sliding into place. At that point he steps to one side and, assuming the pose of an apprentice elevator operator, he points to the door handle with both hands, inviting me to give it the acid test myself.

I accept the offer.

I push down on the door handle.

I lean into the door and try to open it.

I wonder what profession Tricarico's mamma does or did.

That door is
closed
. It's what you'd call a perfectly clean job, and I contemplate it with candor of a boy scout.

Tricarico flashes me a smile that says “mission accomplished” and heads off down the hall toward the bathroom.

I stand there for another couple of minutes, reviewing the various scenes of the imminent detective mystery, where Attilia-Germana does her best to snap the toy spitz found in the locked room out of its inexplicable state of shock and Roberto-Sergio inspects the door and window of the office in search of any signs of breaking and entering.

I emerge from the spell and I walk over to my, shall we say, office. I pull the Innocenti steel tube away from the window and I turn on my computer. After a while, the sound of a flushing toilet heralds Tricarico's return. I sit down on my Skruvsta, I open the file on a car accident lawsuit that was taken care of last fall, I furrow my brow, and, in other words, I strike a pose. Tricarico walks in and starts getting acquainted with my office without betraying even the slightest appreciation for the overarching Ikea-ism of the place. I am once again obliged to recognize that he possesses a discretion that continually astonishes me, in someone like him.

“Listen,” I say to him as he's standing there, absorbed in
Nighthawks
with his back to me (he clearly has a thing about posters, I guess), “I wanted . . . well, it wasn't a pretty sight, but still, thanks, that's all.”

“For what?” he says, without even turning around.

“I meant the dog.”

“Ah. Don't mention it, it was nothing,” he replies, continuing to admire my reproduction of Hopper's famous coffee shop.

Since the silence that follows an expression of gratitude always embarrasses me, I return to the subject, just for the sake of something to say.

“It was a misery to have to deal with that toy spitz yelping every time and . . . hey, are you listening to me?”

At the very instant in which he turns to answer me, it's as if his face has suddenly become more pointed. Evidently what I said must have aroused his interest, and now he wants to explore it in greater depth.

“So it isn't true that you never even noticed it anymore,” he points out.

“What do you mean?” I stall for time.

“When we came in, that's what you said.”

“Well, what is this, a lie detector test? Aside from the fact that you never even asked permission,” I counterattack, reddening.

“Permission?” he asks, bewildered.

“Permission, permission. You did it all on your own. You just up and went in there. What if I hadn't wanted you to do it? What if they'd come back and found you in their office? Eh? What would I have said to them?”

“Counselor, what do you mean, first you thank me and then you scold me?”