I Hadn't Understood (9781609458980) (31 page)

 

Y
ou caught him off guard,” Alagia says, referring to my phone call with Alfredo. Today the airport is half-empty, and our line at the Burger King actually seems like a lot of people.

“I didn't ask him a particularly hard question,” I point out, as I look up at the backlit transparent display photograph of the Whopper as if it were women's lingerie.

“No, actually that's a pretty challenging question,” Alagia says.

The guy ahead of us in line, a gentleman in his early sixties, fit for his age, with a distinguished appearance and a dark suit, orders a large Coke and a Double Bacon Cheeseburger XXL—the advertising slogan for which is: “When you could eat a wild animal.”

“So if I asked you the same question, you wouldn't know what to say?” I ask her.

Alagia thinks it over while the Burger King cashier serves the unsuspectable
paninaro
, whose Double Bacon Cheeseburger XXL is so massive that it's leaning to one side like the Tower of Pisa. I'd be embarrassed to eat that monster in public, truth be told. I have to admit that I'm starting to like the guy.

“You know what?” Alagia resumes. “When you suddenly come into a lot of money, you're going to be worried about squandering it, so you wind up buying something that you don't really like. And that only makes things worse. If you ask me, the best thing to do is just put a thousand euros in your pocket and go out and spend it freely on crap of all kinds. At least you'll have fun.”

My personal hero picks up his tray and walks off.

It's our turn.

“So you're saying you want a thousand euros?” I ask.

“Why don't you start by paying for our burgers.”

We go over to a table and sit down.

“Your mother didn't say anything to you, did she?” I ask her, after gulping down my first onion ring.

“No, why, what should she have told me?” she says, and chomps into her San Diego Beef, spilling a fair amount of filling onto her tray liner.

“Let's just say I screwed up big time.”

Alagia grabs a chiclet of meat and stuffs it back into the tortilla; she rapidly surveys the biggest lettuce leaves scattered across her tray and browses on a couple of them.

“Like how big time?”

“Super-rude.”

“As in?”

“We were having lunch together and I walked out.”

“I don't follow you.”

I pop open my San Benedetto and take a swig from the bottle.

“Look, let's take you and me right now, okay? Now imagine that I stand up, pretend I have to answer a cell phone call, even though the phone doesn't even ring, then I walk out and leave you sitting here.”

Alagia puts her San Diego Beef back in its basket (I've never seen her do anything like that before) and stares at me.

“Did you really do that?”

“Mm-hm,” I reply, my mouth full and a hint of satisfaction in my voice.

“You're a complete idiot, Vincè, you know that?”

I brush my hands together to get the crumbs off.

“Oh, thank you for the in-depth analysis.”

“What did you want, for me to say nice job?”

“No, not nice job. But why'd you do it, maybe.”

“There is no reason to do anything that idiotic. At least not what you just described.”

“In fact, I don't even know what made me think of telling you about it, if you want to know.”

I doubt that she even heard me, to judge from the intensity with which she's suddenly started brooding.

“Wait, does Emilio have anything to do with this, by chance?” she asks, after a while.

Emilio would be the name of the architect.

“Why do you ask?”

“Because for the past few days, Mamma's been treating him like shit.”

“Oh really?” I ask, straightening my back.

“When we're at dinner she practically refuses to look him in the eye, and she's really rude to him whenever he tries to talk to her . . . frankly, I don't know how he can put up with it.”

“Imagine,” I say, repulsively delighted. And I take two consecutive and super-carnivorous bites of my Crispy Chicken Deluxe.

“So does he have anything to do with it or doesn't he?”

“Who, the architect?”

“He wouldn't have happened to be there, too, the time that you walked out on her?”

“Eh. That is, yes, up till a certain point. In the sense that he'd already left by the time that I left too.”

“Look, can you just tell me what you did?”

“Me? Nothing.”

We both turn almost simultaneously toward the plate glass windows to watch a plane coming in for a landing. I take another bite of my CCDL.

Alagia rips open a packet of ketchup and drizzles it over her French fries.

“To get back to the question of money,” I say, “should I give it back, in your opinion?”

On the way to the airport, I had told her everything.

“Or else you know what I could do,” I resume, before she can answer me, “seeing that neither you nor Alfredo want anything, I could set up a nice insurance policy in both your names, what do you say?”

“That it's not a huge amount of money, so why don't you take it and use it to live without worries for a while.”

“I'm not sure that I really want to do that.”

She raises her eyes skyward before answering me in a slightly exasperated tone of voice, that is if you can combine slightness and exasperation.

“Vincenzo, you're forty-two years old, you realize that, don't you?”

“And what does have to do with anything?”

“What it has to do with is that you can't dither endlessly every time you have to make a decision. The last time we went to the movies together we walked in after the film had already started, because right up until the very last second you didn't know if you wanted to see this movie or that one.”

“You're wrong, I couldn't have any doubts about
Spider-Man 2
.”

Not even a smile. She must really be determined to complete her presentation of the concept. She can be a little ponderous at times, this girl.

“Or take the question of the money. It's not a huge amount: you did a job, they paid you, so keep it.”

“Maybe you don't realize the kind of people we're talking about.”

“Then give them back their money, if you think that's the best thing to do. But do it. Stop dithering, because in the meanwhile the movie's starting, if you get what I'm saying.”

“Hey, how do you know all these things about me? Have you been taking lessons from your mother?”

“You want to know what I think? That you're drumming up all these problems about things because you just don't want to do them.”

I stare intently into the middle distance, beyond her talking head, horrified at what I see.

“Well, here's something you might want to know.”

“What might I want to know?”

“That your mother's architect is coming this way, heading straight for our table.”

Alagia turns around, and when she sees him she actually starts to get to her feet, she's so surprised. But there's no need, because he's already standing by the table. He's wearing a peach-color Lacoste shirt, super queer, and he even has a suntan, to make things worse. If you ask me, he's exactly like her father, even if I've never met her father.

“Emilio, what are you doing here?” Alagia asks.

“Forgive me, Alagia. And forgive me, Vincenzo. I'm sorry to barge in, but I need to talk to you.”

By which he means the undersigned.

“Did we have an appointment, by any chance? I can't seem to remember that we did,” I observe.

“No, we didn't. I was driving on the beltway, I saw you, and I followed you.”

“Well, isn't that a coincidence. The other time you told Nives that you just happened to be walking by the restaurant and you saw her inside waiting for me. Do you have a GPS device that indicates the location of my next lunch appointment?”

Alagia smiles, even though she finds the situation embarrassing.

The cuckolded goat ignores the provocation and puts on a slow half-lidded blink of the kind that says: “That's not the point.”

Like hell that's not the point
, I think.

“That's exactly what I'd like to talk about with you, if you give me an opportunity, Vincenzo,” he says, with a reasonableness that smells fishy to me.

Alagia gazes apathetically at our favorite dishes, which also now strike me as somehow tainted by the intrusion.

“Don't take this the wrong way,” I say, “but I just don't feel like ruining my lunch with Alagia so I can sit here and listen to you.”

“Vincenzo's right, Emilio,” Alagia breaks in. “You really could have tried to find a better opportunity to talk to him. Plus, this hamburger lunch of ours is a little secret between me and Vincenzo, not even Mamma knows about it. All the more reason that I wish you weren't in on the secret.”

The turd emits a pained sigh through his nostrils. Then he turns to me, in a sort of exasperated request for compassion.

“You see the way things are, Vincenzo? This is your family, not mine,” and he nods toward Alagia with a tip of the head, as if she were a surprise witness or something. “You feel as if you're in the minority, you think they're holding you at arm's length, but it's not true. Alagia comes to have secret hamburger lunches with you, Alfredo has never confided a thing in me, Nives is constantly reaching out to you (and the two of you probably go to bed together—I don't know and I don't want to know), but I'm part of their lives too, and I love them just like I love Nives, and you need to give me a little room, because I can't win anything for myself if you keep competing with me, you understand that, don't you?”

For a moment, Alagia and I exchange a glance dripping with an oozing blend of pity and respect—and in fact he immediately takes advantage of our weakness to sit down at the table next to ours and join our little party, uninvited—then I suddenly say to myself, “Oh, wait a second, what the fuck is this guy saying? What does he know about coming home late at night to an apartment furnished entirely in Ikea, closing the front door, hearing the noise of the refrigerator and nothing else, and then rushing to turn on the tv as if it were an emergency inhaler? And the public television programming on RAI Educational at three in the morning, what does he know about that? And the frozen meals?”

“Listen here,” I say, increasingly impassioned, “if there's one thing I find distasteful it's this insistence on a dignified approach with just a sprinkling of humiliation. This idea of treating marital problems as if they were corporate mergers, asking your rival to make a contribution, you hand over this block of shares and in exchange I'll promise to do X. But we're not talking about transactions here: this is a vicious goddamned jungle, you understand? It's win or lose, and it's not like you can smooth everything out with a nice balanced discussion. When Nives dumped me and set up housekeeping with you I didn't come around butting into any of your lunches, as I recall. If this is still my family, as you said just a few minutes ago, that just means that you weren't successful in your takeover. So what do you want from me now? You want me to lend you a hand? Well, it's admirable on your part to pretend to get down on one knee and beg like this, but my answer is no.”

Alagia nods, enthusiastically, I think.

The miserable cuckold's self-serving façade of dignity collapses in a pitiful heap. And he's left there, revealed as the frantic loser that he is.

“Then I'm going to put it to you in somewhat different terms,” he declares, assuming a ridiculous tone of voice, as if signaling that he's about to issue a threat.

For some reason that's unclear to me, I look Alagia in the eye instead of him, then and there.

“Oh, really? And how exactly are you going to put it to me?”

Whereupon he points his index finger straight at me and says:

“You stay away from . . . your wife.”

I'm baffled for a second or two; then I look over at Alagia, and she bursts into laughter.

“Hey, that's priceless. Do you realize what you just said?”

The miserable wretch realizes he's shot himself in the foot, and he turns red as a beet despite the suntan.

“Don't let's get lost in wordplay,” he says, clearly struggling. “If being civil doesn't work, I can stop being Mr. Nice Guy.”

“Now that's enough, Emilio. Cut it out immediately,” Alagia says.

“Why don't you just go fuck yourself?” I tell the turd.

And then I couldn't say who started it, but in the blink of eye we find ourselves rolling on the floor of the airport food court, thrashing and wrestling but without a hint of technical skill, while Alagia hops back and forth around us, shouting, “Stop it, stop it” and nobody tries to separate us and a woman says, “The police, there's a police station on the ground floor, call the police,” and finally at a certain point I manage to get one arm free and at last I'm about to haul off and really punch the shitbird good and proper but I don't get a chance because at the very last second someone pulls him off me, I have just enough time to get a full-screen close-up of his astonished expression, understandably incredulous as he feels himself being lifted straight up into the air like a big old hambone and then hurled with unspeakable violence against the counter of the Burger King, taking one of the cash registers, a pile of trays, and the promotional cardboard totem pole of the Double Whopper with him as he goes, whereupon I haul myself to my feet to find just who bowled this unconventional strike and I say to myself, no, this can't be, Tricarico again?

 

 

O
h how pleasant it is to spend half your afternoon at the airport police station with a cop nitpicking everything you say and completely disbelieving your version of what happened. Alagia explained to him over and over that everything that happened was the fault of that cuckolded goat, but the cop ignored her, he couldn't believe his good luck at finally being able to sink his fingers into something that in his mind vaguely resembled an investigation. The police must get bored silly at airports.

“And to think you're a lawyer, you ought to be ashamed of yourself,” he said to me when I showed him my bar association membership card instead of my identity card or my driver's license, in the hopes that my professional standing might help me to clear up what had happened.

“Ashamed of what?” I answered.

“Getting in a fight like that, in public, over a woman—and in front of your daughter, just to make things worse. Aren't you ashamed of yourself?”

“Leaving aside the fact that the only one who's itching to fight over a woman is my ex-wife's live-in boyfriend, do you realize that I took an elbow to the ribs because I was trying to protect him?”

Because in fact I actually had tried to save the architect from Tricarico, and all things considered, I had been successful. As soon I realized that he was the one wading into the brawl to protect me, I jumped on his back to try to keep him from slaughtering the faggot. Tricarico, unaware that it was me pummeling him on the back, had crushed his elbow into my ribcage, making me fall to my knees, coughing and dragging myself across the floor in a desperate quest for oxygen. Once he realized the seriousness of his error, he renounced his intention of executing the architect and came to my rescue, just as the police hurried onto the scene, having been summoned there by Alagia. The police, at the sight of Tricarico intent on slapping me gently in the face to bring me around, just assumed he was a good Samaritan and therefore detained only me and the still semi-conscious architect (who had already taken a couple of kicks to the face in the meanwhile), deeming the two of us to have been the sole protagonists of the brawl. Whereupon Tricarico took advantage of their misunderstanding to heel-toe it out of the airport without any of the onlookers—especially not Alagia, who knew nothing about his role in the fight, since she had immediately hurried off to summon Naples Airport's Finest—daring to point him out to the police as a participant in the melee.

“So there you were,” the policeman was summing up, with a very disobliging tone of voice, truth be told, “having a fight with your wife's live-in lover; suddenly out of nowhere appears this other guy who starts beating up your wife's live-in lover, and you hurl youself on him to protect your wife's live-in lover.”

“Yes, that's right,” I answered without shame.

“And why on earth would you have done anything that stupid?”

Come to think of it, why on earth would I have done anything that stupid?

“What do I know? You don't really stop to think, in that kind of a situation,” I told him.

“What are you saying, do you find yourself in that kind of a situation on a regular basis?”

“Oh, sweet Jesus. Listen, there are at least twenty people who saw what happened. Why don't you go back upstairs and ask them, if you don't want to believe what I'm telling you?”

“I'll go, I'll go, don't you worry about that. For the moment, why don't you just answer my questions.”

He uttered that last phrase with a visible shiver of emotion. Whereupon I decided that he must be one of those cops who take their final police academy exam with the dream of one day being able to say things like “For the moment, why don't you just answer my questions.”

“And just who is this guy who wades into the fight and starts beating up your wife's live-in lover?”

“How would I know?”

At that point, he finally deigned to get Alagia's point of view.

“Signorina, would you happen to know anything about it?”

“Of course she doesn't know,” I intervened on her behalf. “She had just run downstairs to get you when the other guy showed up.”

He turned to look at me, brimming over with bumptious arrogance.

“The question was directed at her, if you don't mind.”

You could tell that he couldn't wait to say that either.

“It's like he said,” Alagia confirmed.

“Isn't that a nice coincidence,” the cop mused with a crafty leer. “You rush off at the exact moment when the mysterious brawler shows up, Signorina . . . ?”

“Cervi.”

“Cervi, and after that?”

If anything, that should be “and before that,” I thought to myself.

“Alagia.”

The cop craned his head forward and cupped his ear with one hand.

“Ala . . . ?”

“A. La. Gia,” she broke it down for him, in annoyance.

“What an odd name, I've never heard of it.”

“There you go.”

“Wait a second. Did you say Cervi?”

Whereupon Alagia and I exchanged an objectively ambiguous glance, which we meant as “Okay, now how're we going to explain it all to this guy?”

And of course he took it in a completely different way.

“You told me that this was your daughter,” he immediately challenged me, as if things had turned mighty damned serious all of a sudden.

“Not my biological daughter,” I replied.

Alagia stood there saying nothing but disapproving of my choice of adjectives with her eyes. I could have put it differently, I had to admit.

He looked at her. Then he turned back to me.

“Are you two trying to pull some kind of prank?”

“You're kidding me,” I said.

“Who is this girl, and how old is she?” the cop demanded, raising his voice.

“Hey, wait a minute, are you trying to insinuate . . . ”

“What are you saying, how dare you?” Alagia shouted in turn.

Luckily that's when the architect showed up, fresh from the nearby public health clinic, and cleared up everything, thanking me publicly for having come to his rescue.

“What have I been telling you for the past half hour?” I railed at that moron, who stood therefore dolefully, looking at his shattered dreams lying scattered across the floor.

Then we signed a complaint against unknown parties and left the office, pursued by the cop's preachy advice, as he exhorted us to set a better example for our children next time.

We both decided to forego a visit to the hospital.

The pathetic cuckold's face was all swollen, and he asked Alagia not to say anything to Nives; he wanted to tell her that he'd been attacked in the street.

She said that she wasn't sure she felt like doing him that favor, after the deeply uncomfortable situation he'd put her in.

And at last we left the airport.

Alagia accompanied me back to my office (where I was supposed to have an appointment with Pallucca, Maria Vittoria to receive payment of my fee), and when she said goodbye she added that now at least we had a good reason to give up eating Whoppers, since it was unlikely that we'd ever be going back to the airport.

And there on the spot, when I realized that we'd never go back for one of our secret junk-food meals together, I felt myself plummeting backward, dragged down by such a powerful wave of sadness that I told Alagia that I had to go because my client must already be upstairs waiting for me, and I practically turned and ran without looking back and not even a kiss on the cheek.