I Hadn't Understood (9781609458980) (32 page)

 

I
turn the key in the lock, open the door, and walk into the group office, amazed that I've succeeded at that undertaking. By now, I'm so used to the yipping and yelping of the bellicose toy spitz that I have to focus my mind to summon up the explanation of the unnatural silence that unexpectedly drenches the place. The door of the Arethusa collective is actually open for once, a detail that confers a vaguely funereal atmosphere to the place.

I stick my head in.

The only person in the room is Roberto-Sergio, sitting at his computer, with a screenful of email.

Uh oh, I think.

“Ciao,” I say, avoiding any use of his name, since I'm not sure exactly what his name is.

“Oh, ciao Vincenzo,” he says, turning to look at me.

“Your wife?” I ask, so as not to ask: “The toy spitz?”

“At home,” he answers gloomily. “We have a problem.”

“A . . . problem?” I ask, with the exact tone of voice of the guilty party in an episode of “Columbo,” when Peter Falk informs them that the guy they just killed is dead.

“The dog, Vincenzo,” he says, with such a face.

“What? Is it dead?” I ask, in a crescendo of anxiety.

My interest must strike him as heartfelt, because his voice gets a little husky.

“No. We really don't know what's wrong with it. It's as if from one minute to the next the dog had lost its will to live. It seems . . . depressed.”

“What do you mean depressed? Do dogs get depressed?”

“We've taken it to the veterinarian, but he says there's nothing wrong. But the dog has practically stopped eating, it mopes around, it won't leave the apartment, if we try to put the leash on it, it backs away. In fact, Virginia's at home with it right now. It's just so heartbreaking.”

“I'm so sorry to hear it,” I tell him. I even mean it, when I put a hand on his shoulder.

“Thanks, Vincenzo. Let's just hope the dog gets over it.”

I leave the room.

“Should I close your door?”

“No, thanks.”

I step out, and at the far end of the hallway I see Espedito lip-syncing some show tune, sketching invisible spirals in midair with both arms, and swiveling his hips like a Hawaiian hula dancer.

I hurry down the hall and shove him into my office.

“Vincè, God Almighty has bestowed a miracle upon us,” he says.

“Shh!”

I close the door, turn on the light, and go over to remove the steel tube from the window. I swing open the shutters, take off my jacket, drape it over the back of the Skruvsta, sit down at the Jonas, and drift into a trance, as I hadn't made up my mind whether to feel guilty or not.

“Can you believe it? The toy spitz is depressed, what a beautiful stoke of luck,” Espe exults, intoxicated with joy, and starts shaking his ass again in celebration.

“You know that I'm almost sorry about it?” I say, even though I do feel like laughing, truth be told.

“Nah, don't let them chip at your emotions,” he replies, dismissing my comment with a semicircular gesture of the left forearm that makes me think of a windshield wiper on a car. Then he hikes up the waist of his trousers, as if to get the fit of the crotch just right. “That little fucking ball-buster has done nothing but make us look like assholes. Last week I had to rush to get a glass of water for one of my clients, it threw such a scare into him. I don't know about you, but I have to go see some of my clients in their offices, because they won't come here anymore on account of that turd of a dog, believe you me.”

“Seriously?”

“What do you think, I'm kidding?”

I'm doing my best to think whether anything of the sort has ever happened to me (and just the difficulty I'm experiencing trying to come up with a memory of a client in this office before the visit from Lady Burzone is humiliating) when my landline rings. I look at the number on the screen, recognize it instantly, and my heart leaps into my mouth. I can hear the thump-thump so loud that it sounds as if I have a couple of houseguests fucking in my chest cavity.

Before now, I discover, I hadn't realized how tremendously important it had become to me to hear her voice again, and to grasp this ordinary event as concrete evidence of her existence. It is a typical trait of love that it makes the people you love cease to exist, so that when you love someone you're continually obliged to prove that, no, they actually do exist. Because a person who falls in love isn't all that certain that what's happening to them is real. People in love are suspicious of reality, they always keep their eyes wide open: that's why they get so little sleep. When they get the phone call they've been waiting for for hours, they're practically talking with phantoms and specters. If it happens to you, the way it does to me right now, that you start breathing normally again when you hear the voice of a ghost, then you have something to worry about.

I put my hand on the receiver, let it ring one more time, and then I look over at Espe. He holds up both thumbs as if to say, “Way to go, dude,” and he oils out of the room with all the discretion of a consummate playboy.

I take a deep breath and, at last, I answer.

“Hey,” I say cheerfully, in a pathetic attempt to exorcize the feeling of apprehension that has been haunting me ever since I received her last text message.

“Ciao, Vincenzo,” says Alessandra Persiano.

Which already strikes me as horrifying, as greetings go.

“So, how's everything?” I insist, sticking to my cringe-inducing cheerfulness, like someone with a terminal illness but a good sense of humor.

“So-so,” she says.

“Well, how about Chinese food?” I ask, desperately skirting the issue.

“I'm not all that hungry.”

“Ale,” I say, after a brief pause.

“What?”

“Is what I think is happening happening?”

She doesn't answer right away. A pause that's already an answer.

“I couldn't tell you, Vincenzo.”

The Edward Hopper poster blurs. The humiliation has turned me nearsighted.

“I'm sorry,” she says, after a while, since I don't say anything.

“Did I overdo it? Was I trying to go too fast? Could you tell me what I did wrong?”

“Don't do that, Vincenzo. What you did is what you did, don't you think?”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Would you be willing to repudiate the things you did, Vincenzo?”

“Would you just stop calling me Vincenzo?” I snap at her, before I realize what I've said. In fact, I immediately regret it.

“Why, isn't that your name?”

“It's just that repeated over and over, like a term of address or a post-graduate degree, it's so damned impersonal, it makes me feel like some horrible stranger.”

“You're right, I'm sorry,” she says, after thinking it over.

One point to me. Which doesn't make me feel any better.

“Would you explain the thing about repudiation?” I ask.

“What thing? I don't remember.”

“If I was willing to repudiate the things I did.”

“Ah, right.”

“Well, affirmative, if you're still interested in the answer. You name it, I'll repudiate it, if it would help.”

Silence. I can hear that she's a little closer to laughing.

“That's a side of you I'm not sure about, Vinc . . . sorry.”

“What do you mean?”

“You don't know why you do things.”

Which is completely true, even if I don't see anything strange about it.

Since I don't have the courage to say that, though, and I still feel obliged to defend myself somehow, but since at the same time I lack any original ideas at the moment, I rummage around in the most recent information at hand.

“No, it's just that I don't see myself, when I do things.”

“What?”

“That is, I only understand things after I've done them.”

“So you just do them, whatever, without meaning anything by it.”

Embarrassment sweeps over me like heatstroke. I wonder why I so frequently trap myself in such ridiculous situations. It's hard enough to be consistent with yourself; trying to be consis­tent with someone else's opinions, especially when the only reason you said what you said is that it was the first thing that came to mind, is a deeply unrewarding task.

“Why, is there a firm commitment with every single thing you do?”

Jesus, I can't believe that I'm having an argument because of Tricarico.

“I'm talking about the two of us, Vincenzo.”

“So am I, talking about the two of us.”

“Then why do I have the impression that we're saying different things?”

“What do I know, Ale? It all seems much simpler to me than you're making it out to be.”

“So it's just me complicating things.”

I let a moment of silence go by, then I veer suddenly in a new direction.

“It's unbelievably wonderful making love with you,” I say.

“What?” she says. But her voice sounds different.

“If you were here right now, I wouldn't let you say a single word, you know that?”

“Vin . . . cenzo.”

This time, she said it in a completely different way.

“You're at the other end of the line, but I can smell your scent as if you were here. You can't even imagine how badly I want you.”

She says nothing, but I can feel how close she is right now.

“You see how you are? You're always accelerating.”

“Please, Ale, don't walk away from me. If you leave now, you'll never come back, I know it,” I say, one step short of a supplication.

She sighs.

“Just give me a little time, Vincenzo. It's all happened so quickly. I need to think it over. And I can't understand a thing if you're all over me.”

“I just wish I was,” I say.

She sighs again.

“I don't know if I made myself clear,” I add, since she hasn't picked up the reference.

“Oh, I got it, I got it.”

“Are you smiling, at least?”

“Of course I am.”

“I already miss you.”

“I'll call you soon, Vincenzo.”

“Ale, wai—”

She's already hung up.

I sit there, with the receiver of the cordless pressed to my ear, listening to the busy signal that repeats frantically like the
beep-beep-beep
of an EKG in an operating room when they're losing the patient.

Lucikly, Espe's head pokes in through the half-closed door. “Come in,” I say.

“You done?” he asks, nodding at the phone.

“Yeah, I'm pretty sure I'm done.”

“Jesus, look at the face on you.”

“Still handsomer than yours.”

It may be the oldest comeback in the book, but my delivery must have been particularly convincing, because Espe stands motionless in the middle of the room and broods over it, almost as if he had to agree.

“Oh, I'm kidding,” I say.

“I'm not. You look like . . . you know the faces they make when they review movies on tv, and they don't like the movie?”

My brain stalls, I visualize the image, it strikes me as fantastic, then I burst out laughing. And I immediately feel better.

“Espresso?” asks Espe, with perfect timing.

“Well, sure, okay,” I reply.

I get my ass up off the Skruvsta, grab my jacket, and we leave.

When we walk into the bar across the street, we run into Giustino Talento as he's putting a liquor glass he's just emptied back down on the counter. He's wearing a distinctly filthy shirt, with a pair of bedroom sandals on his feet, and he's emitting medium-wave frequencies of malaise like a pirate radio station. The resentment that appears on his face when he sees me has an unmistakable hue.

Espe greets him first, with a forced smile.

I limit myself to waving coldly, because the discomfort of our last interaction still lingers.

Giustino responds to Espe but not to me. He crams his head down between his shoulders, walks past us, and leaves.

In the brief instant when he walks by us, I have the impression that his right eye is bruised.

We follow him with our gaze, in embarrassment.

Then we look one another in the eye.

“What did you ever do to him, Vincè?” Espe asks me.

 

 

I
set my alarm clock early enough to show up on time for my appointment with Alfredo's Italian teacher, who called me yesterday evening in my office to ask me to meet with her about the “situation with Alfredo.”

Then and there, when she used that expression, I thought I must have misheard her, it seemed so ridiculous; especially because she said it with the kind of slimy courtesy you expect from a government marshal who's in your apartment impounding your living room furniture (“I just need to have a talk with you about the situation with Alfredo, Signore Malinconico, nothing formal, if you could just meet me for an espresso at eight o'clock tomorrow morning, half an hour before class starts, that is if it doesn't interfere with your schedule for the day, of course”).

“And just what is this situation?” I asked.

“If I'm suggesting we meet, Signore Malinconico,” said Alfredo's Italian teacher, immediately putting on the voice of a high school teacher (because there are certain teachers who the minute you contradict them put on their teacher's voice), “it means that I think it's more appropriate to have a conversation, don't you agree?”

“So what are we doing right now, exchanging faxes?” I replied.

“Well, I meant to say a conversation face-to-face,” she amended. “In any case, I'm not at all happy about the tone I'm hearing in our phone conversation,” she added, stung by the retort.

“And who the fuck cares,” I feel like saying to her. She was starting to make my balls spin like propellers, truth be told.

“Listen to me,” I shot back, “did my son steal your pocketbook, by any chance? Has he thrown a classmate out the window? Did he commit obscene acts in the classroom?”

“No, you listen to me, Signore Malinconico . . . ” the teacher started reading me the riot act.

“
Counselor
Malinconico,” I interrupted.

“All right then,
Counselor
Malinconico, if I took the trouble to call you it's because I'm worried about Alfredo, not because I'm trying to have fun.”

“What does fun have to do with it?” I said with scalpel-like obstinacy. “I can't see anything fun about a phone call like this; you call me up and you talk to me about some mysterious situation with my son, as if everybody knows that my son is in the midst of such a notorious situation that there's no need to even say what it is; you act all top-secret and then you talk about it being fun?”

“Listen Counselor, Alfredo came to school again with a bruised face. Do you think that's normal? I don't.”

“Exactly what are you trying to insinuate?” I said at that point, raising my voice.

“I'm not insinuating a thing, I'm just doing my job. I have a student who comes to school regularly with a swollen face from being beaten up, and it strikes me as my responsibility to talk to his parents about it,” she said.

Whereupon I couldn't think of a thing to say and I just answered, “You're quite right, please forgive me,” catching her so completely off guard that she replied, instinctively, “Don't mention it,” even though—I'd be willing to bet a sizable sum of money—she was probably yearning to tell me to go jump off a cliff, plunging to my bloody bone-shattering death at the bottom of a jagged ravine, after a long succession of various impacts at different angles and speeds on boulders of all sizes; but by this point she'd already said “Don't mention it,” and she was stuck with her anger and annoyance bottled up inside her, poor thing.

“So . . . are you going to come?” she asked after an extended and demented silence.

“I'm not sure. Look,” I answered, “it would be kind of complicated to explain it to you right now, but I'm not sure I see any need for a meeting.”

“What do you mean you don't see any need? The need is clear as day.”

At this point, I'm about to fly into a rage again, because if there's one thing that sets me off it's when somebody tries to give me lessons in my own field of expertise. “Look, teacher, we're talking about my son here, I don't know if that detail escapes you.”

“Listen,” the teacher replied, exhausted by the relentless diatribe I seemed incapable of abandoning, “I just don't understand why your wife insisted at such length on having me call you, seeing that you're so uninterested in hearing about this problem.”

“And so?” I said, spiteful as a Barbary ape. “My wife! Now, there's a parent who knows how to take on the challenges that her children present . . . Wait a second, did you just say that my wife told you to call me?”

“Why, does that surprise you?”

“And just what do you care if it surprises me or not?” I would have been deeply tempted to say to that dumb cluck, if I hadn't been so completely blown away by the fact that Nives had insisted on involving me in a school conference after my unforgivable cut-and-run from the restaurant; so I agreed to come in for the meeting and we finally put an end to that demented telephone debate, in part because we were both exhausted, I believe.

After which I decided to get inside and stay out of sight before discovering what else that fucked-up day had in store for me. I made my way home, hugging the walls the whole way.

Along with everything else, just to round out the picture, Pallucca, Maria Vittoria never showed up, and my critical guardian angel just wouldn't let up, and there's nothing more exasperating than having someone on your back saying over and over: “You see? You see? What did I tell you?,” especially if that someone is you.

 

Anyway, I get out of bed on the morning of the meeting with the obsessive thought of Alessandra Persiano playing a Venetian adagio for strings in the background; I turn off the alarm clock before it can ring; I get into the shower and practically fall asleep, I'm in there so long; I put on my bathrobe and drag myself into the kitchen, dripping water on the floor as I go; while I make my morning coffee I turn on the tv and click to a channel with a morning show in which a television show hostess in a miniskirt who's had her mouth redone by a plastic surgeon interviews an orthopedist who looks at her thighs and gives advice on the best way to lift your grocery bags; I sit down on the Stefan closest to the television set, pull the hood of the bathrobe over my head, and start patting my hair dry when the front-door intercom buzzes.

I run to answer, praying silently that it's not Alfredo again.

“Hello.”

“
Buon giorno
, Counselor. Can I come up for a minute?”

My jaw drops, and my arm, hand, and the intercom receiver with it, so unbelievable is it to me that I'm actually listening to Tricarico's voice.

“Wait a minute, you have the nerve to come ring my doorbell, what's more at my home, and what's more at seven in the morning, after everything you've done?”

“Oh, I know it, Counselor. In fact I wanted to know how it turned out.”

“Ah, nothing special, believe me. I just spent two hours trying to explain to the police what happened and they came this close to throwing me in jail. Now that you know how it turned out, would you do me a favor and stop busting my balls from now on for all time
in saecula saeculorum
?”

“Counselor, forgive me, but what was I supposed to do, shouldn't I have defended you?”

I look around, instinctively searching for other human faces that might mirror my helpless astonishment.

“Look, let's just say that you did the right thing,” I reply, doing my best to stave off the surge of blood that's inundating my brain, “let's just say that I have no reason to criticize, that your intervention was providential and that in fact I owe you a debt of gratitude. But I don't want you following me around anymore, okay?”

“Sure, but can I come up for a minute?”

“No.”

“They arrested Mimmo.”

“What did you just say?”

“Mimmo. 'O Burzone. They arrested him last night.”

“Come on up.”