I Hadn't Understood (9781609458980) (28 page)

 

S
cimmia” was the last song on the flip side of
Diesel
, Eugenio Finardi's third album.
Diesel
came out in 1977, which is to say, a period when the communist movement in Italy not only existed but had real meaning, with a variety of forms and gradations, so that there were those who occupied schools and universities, putting up with vastly dull, interminable assemblies where hundreds and hundreds of cigarettes and the occasional joint were smoked, there were others who had already started a solo career based on adroit and strategic political ass-kissing, others still who were on drugs and didn't understand a thing, and of course those who just one year later would go on to kidnap and kill the chairman of the Christian Democratic party.

So while the political landscape was fairly lively and diversified, the musical state of affairs (since music was a sort of mystical membership card for the younger generations of the left) was pretty much immobile. In the sense that in those years, what we mostly listened to were the
cantautori
, or singer-songwriters, largely self-taught musicians, not all that gifted or experienced, who adapted disproportionately long lyrics, intelligible only here and there, now and again, to melodies that anyone could reproduce with a month or two of basic guitar lessons.

The incredible thing is that, aside from selling truckload after truckload of records (some of them with just one song on only one side of the disk), the Italian
cantautori
could count on a vast audience of mannered depressives who not only learned every verse by heart with the dedication of a Taliban gang, but even sang them themselves, competing to be the first to memorize the most challenging ones. The distinctive feature of these artists, in any case, was not their political engagement, which was implicit (and in fact, whenever an interviewer would ask a notoriously politicized singer-songwriter: “Now, do you consider yourself to be a politically engaged
cantautore
?” he would always give an answer along the lines of: “What can I tell you, I just write the things I feel; I write so that I can express myself and my sensations. Whether that's political involvement, I really couldn't say”), as much as the unmistakable predominance of lyrics over melody, so that the music wound up constituting a sort of extra bonus tacked onto a minor literary work with world-changing ambitions.

In other words, the Italian singer-songwriter of the second half of the seventies was a non-card-carrying political militant who had zipped his literary and/or poetic aspirations into the popular digital file of a slightly overgrown pop song (with a few admirable exceptions, of course, that over the years proved just how exceptional they were, proving the rule once and for all).

Nobody really liked the
cantautori
all that much, truth be told (more than anything else, they were an act that people tended to put on), and in fact when disco music burst onto the scene (which, okay, was crappy as could be, but at least it involved some possibility of fun), the new younger generations didn't think twice about defenestrating the
cantautori
in exchange for some enjoyment and perhaps a little sex.

Finardi, despite his discography, was press-ganged into the ranks of the
cantautori
of his generation (in part because he was politically engaged), but, unlike his fellow singer-songwriters, he was a rocker hiding in plain sight. He wrote his songs and sang them, but he was yearning for a rock band, a band that he reconstituted with every record he made, recruiting cutting-edge musicians. Unlike his contemporaries, who played sitting in a chair onstage, delivering long-winded speeches before playing each song, and accompanied at most by a back-up guitarist and maybe a bongo player, Finardi appeared onstage with a full complement of rock musicians (electric guitars, bass guitar, drum set, keyboards), and he danced, broad-jumped, and grimaced: he overdid it, but at least he played the rock-and-roll game. He tried to impose the model of the rock band in a marketplace dominated by acoustic guitars and bongo drums. In fact, he was the first one to identify the musicians who played on his albums by name and musical instrument. Maybe that was his real idea of rebellious music. In any case, he paid for it. “Scimmia,” from this point of view, is the song in which Finardi best exemplifies his rocker notion of how to tell the story of a life in songs. It starts on such a caustic and peremptory note that it could just as easily have ended right there, having already fully served its purpose right at its inception:

 

The first time I shot up

was one night

at a friend's house

just to see what it was like.

 

A verse like that, for an era in which every act of juvenile transaction had to be analyzed, politicized, and explored in depth, has the probative value of a full confession. Because it has the courage to tell the truth. Because it denies the act of shooting up its supposed higher meaning and motivation. It takes it back down to its own level: the desire to try something new. Which is the real reason people do things.

That was what rock music did, back when it existed (not today, when it serves as a soundtrack for fashion designers' runway presentations): it addressed reality by its first name. It bodychecked reality, put reality into words and music, without extenuating circumstances. And if it created poetry, that was incidental, something it happened to find on the floor. When it lost this function of telling the truth, revealing hard facts, rock music died.

Now Finardi is over fifty, and he's playing the blues.

 

 

I
'm up at 6:15 in the morning so I can get over to the claims center of the Generali insurance company as early as possible, in hopes of finally closing the file on the case of Pallucca, Maria Vittoria, a client of mine who suffered a nasal septum fracture when she walked straight into the automatic front door of a clothing store. The automatic-door mechanism, all things considered, must not have been working very well. And even though at first the owners of the clothing store rushed to the woman's assistance, saying, “We are so sorry, nothing like this has ever happened before, we're insured, don't worry about a thing,” when in fact I went into the insurance office confident that I'd be able to take care of the matter with a minimum of effort, I discovered that the people from the store, the day after she broke her nose, had written a letter to the company stating that on thus and such a date a certain Pallucca, Maria Vittoria claimed to have injured her face by striking it against the automatic doors of the premises of their place of business, period: that is, a revoltingly ambiguous statement that, while it may not have completely reneged on the promises made the day before, certainly seemed well on the way to doing so. Among other things, with all the claims adjusters who work at the Generali claims center, I had to be assigned a particularly oafish claims adjuster, the kind of adjuster who seems to resent the existence of the world at large, so that when I pointed out to him that the store owners had repeated over and over to my client that they would immediately write to the insurance company to settle her claim, he told me that that's not the way it looked to him, in fact from what he could see my client's claim was completely unproven, and he saw no evidence that his policy-holders were in any way at fault, which may even have been the case, but the way he said it was so arrogant and disdainful that I really had to force myself to count to ten to keep myself from hauling off and punching him right on the kisser.

So the case was left dangling in the breeze; in the meanwhile, Pallucca, Maria Vittoria had gone in for her medico-legal physical and now I was back for another meeting to see whether the insurance company would at least meet us halfway, splitting the liability fifty-fifty so that we could just settle the case amicably without having to take it to court. I'm never very happy about going to court, in part because, as my old friend Angelo Puzo likes to say, every out-of-court settlement is a victory.

So to make a long story short I pull up outside the main street door of the Generali insurance company just a few minutes after 7:30, and I think to myself, look at that, for once I'm the first one here, but when I step into the lobby I can't find the sign-up sheet anywhere. The sign-up sheet is a miserable piece of paper ripped out of a notebook fastened to the front door with a strip of scotch tape, and lawyers write their names on it to make a reservation before the office opens for the day's business, and the claims adjusters take the lawyers in order by running down the list of names on the sign-up sheet—which is what wasn't there.

I step back into the street to look for the concierge, since the doorman's booth is empty, and I immediately spot him in front of a café across the street talking to some loser. I wave my arms to attract his attention, and when he finally sees me I pretend to write on an imaginary sheet of paper. He holds up his index finger and goes on talking with the loser, leaving me to wait like a child, and I start to get annoyed, because waiting for the concierge who's chatting with someone outside the café across the street instead of sitting in his booth doing crossword puzzles and occasionally making himself useful is just one more of the many things to which I've developed an allergy.

After a while he condescends to cross the street, and without so much as an apology or a good morning, he just strides briskly into his little booth and, whistling an unrecognizable little tune, pulls open the drawer in the counter, pulls out the sign-up sheet, and sticks it up in plain view on the wall across from the mailboxes, using a single strip of scotch tape that he made materialize from who knows where.

Pen in hand, I step forward to sign up, but when I finally come to this crucial moment, I see that there are already three names marked on the sheet. Whereupon I close my eyes and then open them again, accompanying the sudden wave of heat.

Now, if yesterday Alessandra Persiano hadn't told me that she preferred knocking on my door, if I hadn't sung “Scimmia” in my head last night until three in the morning (especially the last verse:
And if you hang tough six weeks you'll see
/
you won't think about it again
/
practically ever
), if only this knuckle-dragging lummox of a doorman hadn't made me use the sidewalk as a waiting room, then probably right now I'd have pretended not to notice that he's certainly taking a tip on the side from some despicable fellow-lawyer so that the lawyer in question can sleep in, not bother to come in early to sign in, butt to the head of the line, and, practically speaking, screw his fellow lawyers.

But this morning I don't really feel like letting it slide, because it's just not possible that every time you leave your house to try to earn your daily pittance you have to be a good boy and swallow another teaspoon of shit. I just can't take these small-scale atrocities anymore, this shake-down of your personal dignity that's implicit in every single phase of every single transaction. Freelance professional is an oxymoron. And it's not even knowing that that's how things work that I can't take anymore. What I can't take any longer is pretending I don't care.

So I decide to rebel. I rip the sheet of paper off the wall and thrust it into the doorman's face, waving it just inches from the guy's ugly mug.

“What the hell is this about?”

He recoils, astounded by my sheer impetus.

“What's what about, Counselor?”

Ah, so you've suddenly decided I have a law degree
, I think to myself.
How's that work?

“Right here, what you wrote on the sheet of paper, you see it? Where are these three names, when did they sign up?” I continue, blindsiding him, with documentation in hand.

“Oh, bef . . . earlier,” the little shit stammers.

“Oh, really? Earlier when? In the middle of the night? Did they sleep at your house? Are they hiding in the elevator? Huh? You want to know what we're going to do now?”

The concierge takes a step back, perhaps fearful for his personal safety. A well-dressed matron who just happened to be coming downstairs stops halfway down the last flight of steps. I brandish the pen, I slap the sheet of paper against the wall, and with three slashing lines of ink, I cancel the three names.

“Let's just take these three names off the list. And let's put my name at the top of the list, seeing as how I was the first one here this morning, understood?”

And I put down my name in block letters.

The corrupt doorman doesn't say a word.

“See you later,” I conclude.

I turn on my heel and leave.

The middle-aged woman stands motionless on the stairs.

I feel better now. I'm walking briskly, as if I had some idea of where I'm going. Maybe it's just an impression, but it strikes me that the pedestrians I pass notice me. If you ask me, if you really want my opinion on the subject, when someone changes their stride, people notice it. Even if they had no idea of the way you walked before. Because the times you actually display some balls, even if you tuck them away again immediately, you still look ballsy for a while afterward. It's a sort of aesthetic afterglow of manliness, a draining charge that keeps emitting sparks of energy that hit the people walking past. Like periods of intense sexual activity, which produce undefinable diffuse aesthetic enhancements, so that people who have sex look different than when they don't have sex. Not to say that when someone has sex they change all that much (because by and large people generally tend to look the same), but still there are a series of microtransformations instantly perceptible in a fleeting manner, somewhat reminiscent of apparitions. A series of apparition-transformations, that's right. As if somebody who has sex emanates, as it were, waves of low-frequency sexual gratification that make the air around him just a little more electric. As if there were an intermittent subtitling, in a certain sense.

Anyway, ripping the doorman a new one has certainly done me good. I feel as if it's got my blood flowing or something. I'm even feeling a little peckish. I think I might just get myself a pastry.

It's good to rip someone a new one every so often. Maybe that's why bosses are always ripping their employees a new one. It's not because they're so damned worried about continually reiterating the corporate regulations governing productivity. No, workplace bullying must just be good for your personal well-being.

Since I have absolutely no idea of what to do with myself until 9:30, which is when the claims center opens, I decide on a purposeless courthouse incursion. But by the time I get there, my residual charge of virility has drained away entirely. In the semideserted hallway of the Labor Division, a clerk who's listlessly pushing a metal trolley loaded with judicial files gives me a quizzical glance that clearly underscores how unmis­takably gratuitous my presence must seem. Because it's obvious that you can't show up in a courthouse, and especially not first thing in the morning, without some good reason. Self-evidence, in a courthouse, is an invaluable trait. You can't go into a courthouse wihout an evident prupose. And in fact, people who go into a courthouse without some good reason are noticed immediately. Especially if they're lawyers.

I don't even try to count them anymore, these episodes in which I flee from a sense of inadequacy. And not only in courthouses, truth be told. In fact I believe that places, just in general, tend to make people feel inadequate. People don't pay enough attention to how places tend to discriminate; places impose behaviors, they divide and pigeonhole people; and those people hardly realize, or maybe they just pretend not to notice. It's not true that you can go wherever you want. I mean, a person can pass by, move through a place, but unless that person has something specific to do there, then they have to leave. You can't just hang out in places. Try walking into a bar, say because you have an appointment to meet a friend who hasn't shown up yet, and you'll see how quickly it becomes intolerable just to be there, unless you order something.

So I head for the exit, and just then who do I see arriving, coming straight toward me from the opposite direction? None other than Anjelica Huston, the preliminary judge with the schnozzola who ordered Burzone released for me, walking side by side with the cool dude ADA who held Burzone's first judicial interrogation.

Of course, there's nothing odd about the fact that two magistrates who've worked on the same case in different roles should walk into the courthouse together. Maybe they're just old friends, or maybe they're having an affair, or maybe they can't stand one another and they're just pretending. That's their business. But the question is: why on earth would the two of them so obviously avoid meeting my gaze?

At a loss for an answer, I head back toward the insurance company, where the claims center should be opening for business soon.

 

The three pieces of shit whose names I canceled from the sign-up sheet have written their names on the list again, which strikes me as a notable act of arrogance on their part, because it's obvious that if someone strikes your name off a list, it must mean something. You can't go around falsifying lists. It would mean the demise of the guiding principle of standing in line, one of the very few principles, if not the only one, that people allow to govern their lives. Even though it's a principle based on getting there first, which doesn't amount to much as far as underlying foundations of principles go, truth be told. Still, standing in line is an incarnation of an egalitarian principle that states: all human beings are equal in the face of the right to get someplace before other people get there. Which is a pretty loopy principle, if you stop to think about it.

Anyway, my name is still at the top of the list, so I sit in the waiting room of the claims center, enjoying the warm glow of pole position to the clear discomfort of my fellow lawyers, who are already starting to look impatient, considering the number of people already crowding into this dimly lit cubbyhole at just 9:05 in the morning.

Unless you've spent time in the waiting room of an insurance company claims center, you can't really have much of an idea of how depressing it is to witness the most common occupations that come with a degree in jurisprudence. The kind of thing that makes you wonder whether it was really worthwhile to spend all those years studying just you so could find yourself speculating on a car crash. Because when it's all said and done, that's what you're doing. You're bartering a court case (that you try to avoid pursuing) for a check for damages that includes a certain sum for your legal representation. Practically speaking, you're skimming something off the top. And lawyers (who work in the field of traffic accidents and insurance cases) can be grouped along a continuum from the relatively honest to the outright criminal, according to how much they skim off the top.

Finally, after we've been there for a while, the claims adjusters make their entrance. One after another, they walk to their drab little offices like so many aging showgirls heading for their dressing rooms. They love their morning stroll down the catwalk. This is the one moment when—you can see it on their faces—they find genuine satisfaction in the line of work they've chosen. You can see their point, for that matter. If you started out thinking you'd do who knows what for a living, and now you find yourself haggling over a body shop estimate, trying to limit the reimbursement of damages from a car crash to the lowest accepted minimum, what could be more gratifying than a waiting room filled with mendicants with law degrees, all willing and ready to kiss your ass in exchange for favorable treatment?