I Hadn't Understood (9781609458980) (6 page)

That's what I think. Forget about a, b, c, and d.

 

“Counselor,” says the turning cassette tape.

The pronunciation of a sewer rat.

I sit up straight on my Skruvsta swivel chair, as if I were a Carabinieri lance-corporal.

Silence.

Street noise.

“Hello,” the answering machine speaker insists.

It's hard to believe, but in the third millennium there are still people out there who don't understand how answering machines work.

A few seconds of indecisive breathing, car horns and muffled voices in the distance.

End of messages.

I look at the answering machine display.

Identity withheld.

I don't like the way things are going.

I definitely don't like that voice.

I stand up, I go to the window. I breathe in, I blow out, with a grunt of annoyance.

Right now I'm fighting off overtures from that part of me that wants to convince me to call up Alfredo and drag out of him whatever it was he decided not to tell me (and I can't even imagine how low I'd be willing to sink just to find out what it was), when Espedito Lenza walks in: shirt sleeves rolled up to the elbows, tie loosened, trousers even looser than the tie, crotch of the trousers riding super-low, accordion pleats around his fly, forehead glistening.

All he's missing is a car jack in one hand and a spare tire in the other.

“Vincé' . . . ?” he says.

That's how we say hello where I come from. By uttering the person's Christian name, followed by half a question mark.

As if we wanted to prove to our friend or acquaintance that we still remember what he's called.

I'm glad you knocked on my door, I almost feel like telling him.

“Oh, Espe.”

He drops into one of the two Hampus chairs on the other side of the desk and rubs his forehead, relaxing, as if my office were the ideal spot to unload his cares and worries. He makes no bones about making himself at home.

“I have a fucking problem,” he says.

Truth is, I'd sort of guessed that already.

“Actually, it's the other way around,” he adds, looking at me sidelong, almost as if there were something inopportune about my presence.

I don't open my mouth, even though the presentation was unequivocal.

The fact is that, however likable I might find Espedito (we have the same fixation with shoes that people shouldn't be wearing, and in fact every time we go downstairs for an espresso, we run an informal competition to see who can spot the most), I'm still fed up with people coming to tell me their problems. It's been happening to me as long as I can remember. As soon as I meet someone, I'm not saying the first time, but at most, the third time that I see them, I wind up having to listen to a minute-by-minute account of the history of their private lives.

Okay, admittedly, I cast certain glances that are like lambent pools of profundity. I consider every word spoken to me as if it meant something, even when I couldn't care less. So other people lose their misgivings, think they can trust me, and start leaking like faucets. It's practically impossible to stop someone when they're determined to confide in you. There are times when you just have to turn and run. One time I abandoned someone in a Feltrinelli book store, telling him that if he'd just wait five minutes in the DVD section I'd be right back.

To be perfectly honest, it's not like this talent I have of getting other people to open up to me ever did me the slightest bit of good. So I finally gave it up, preferring to chase after women with no particular interest in autobiography. Until I actually wound up marrying one whose profession it is to listen to the things that other people confide in her, though she gets paid very nicely for her trouble, unlike me. Even now, despite my VAT registration number, my business cards, and all the accompanying paraphernalia, I can't see why it is that my clients feel entitled to update me in excruciating detail on their personal tragedies, only to be shocked—shocked!—when I ask them to pay me a retainer, for instance.

 

“I can't do it anymore with my wife,” Espedito says, circumstantiating.

“Do tell?” I'm tempted to reply. Instead I give him a skeptical glance, just to undercut the drama. In part because it strikes me as very odd that Espe should have any problems with hoisting the flagpole. If his wife, for it is she whom we are speaking of, had even a vague idea of the number of times—a number that he updates with the dependability of Norton Antivirus and with any woman (only those no longer drawing breath being a priori excluded) that comes within his reach—Espedito had cheated on her, at the very least she would fracture his skull with a ball-peen hammer while he was sleeping.

“No need to make that face. I can't get it up. I can't get it up anymore with Teresa.”

I say nothing, then I speak without thinking.

“Do you think it's really over then?”

He lifts his eyes to my face as if I'd just revealed that I was his father or something of the sort. But then I'm just as appalled at myself as he is, I have to admit. I've been surprised at the things coming out of my mouth since this morning.

“Eh?” he asks, rhetorically.

In the face of his complete dismay, I fully grasp how indelicate I've been, and in the full flush of embarrassment I clamp my mouth shut. My response to his dilemma was to reel out the standard phrase for cases in which a friend comes to you to confide that his girlfriend has dumped him. How I came up with it, I really couldn't say.

A reciprocal silence ensues that makes me yearn for station identification or a word from our sponsors.

“Um, no, of course not,” Espedito hastens to retract, “it must just be that I'm worn out lately. I've been working too hard, I eat out practically every day, I've been
drinking
”
—
he says it in italics—“I haven't been getting enough sleep, and then I have to see Valentina at least three times a week . . . ”

Valentina, as we were just mentioning, is Espe's girlfriend. Sells perfumes, twenty-nine years old, definitely on the vulgar side. I know her both because she's in and out of the office fairly frequently, and because I've had to help cover up their misdeeds more than once. And on one of those occasions, of this I'm certain, Teresa saw through my evasions, because she called me on my cell phone and asked if I could put her husband on the line, since that asshole had told her that he'd be with me but hadn't bothered to advise me of the fact. Whereupon I had no idea what to say and I simply improvised a sudden and fictional loss of cell phone reception, and just the thought of that embarrassing charade brings a wave of shame, as if I were the one who was screwing the expert in perfumes.

“You see the way it is?” he goes on, making a show of wanting my approval.

I stretch my neck the way you do to show how completely pointless it would be to add any further commentary, since he's just said it all. And with a certain sense of relief I realize that if your goal is to rid yourself of the annoying and persistent buzz of someone who wants to bore you to death with his private life, all you need to do is feed back his version of the facts in the exact same dramaturgical terms in which he first presented them.

“The fact is,” Espedito resumes the charge, disabusing me of my naïve hopes, “I function perfectly with Valentina”—and here he illustrates with a hand gesture, like he's shifting an imaginary gear stick into third—“even when I eat badly. Even when I don't get much sleep. Even when I drink a little too much. It's with Teresa that I can't get it up.”

I give up.

“Don't fixate about it,” I toss out. “These things happen sometimes.”

A disheartened expression spreads over his face; he twirls thumb, index, and middle finger of his right hand.

“Three months. I haven't been able to do a thing for the past three months.”

I don't know what to tell him. Personally, I've never had to put up “detour” or “out of order” signs up on the approaches to my underground parking garage, as it were, or if so, never any longer than you might expect, say, a head cold to last. I could recommend he take the magic pill, but I'm pretty sure he's already thought of that. For an ideological southern Italian male like him, taking Viagra puts you in the same category as a Mafia stool pigeon.

“It can't go on like this, you understand? I just think about it all the time. And the more I think about it, the more it doesn't work.”

He draws a line across his forehead with the tip of his index finger.

“What am I going to do with Teresa? How'm I going to hold on to Teresa? I'm worried, Vincè,” he whines.

Look at that, he's even calling me by my first name. Should I be flattered by this mark of extreme familiarity? Should I be touched at the sight of the state he's in? Should I walk over next to him, hesitate for a moment, put my hand on his shoulder, and say in an undertone: “Come on, buck up, you'll see, when you least expect it everything'll straighten out”? Well, I don't have the slightest intention of doing anything of the sort, so there. In fact, I'm actually pretty disgusted at all this pissing and moaning about his lazy dick, so there. I'm going to level with him right now, I'll tell him how he's going to hold on to Teresa.

“Let me explain here and now just why you're worried,” I start out, with a rising note of indignation. “Because as long as you give Teresa the full treatment on a regular basis, you can go out and fuck whoever you want with a clear conscience. You've done your duty as a husband to make sure your wife is satisfied, so now you can have a little fun on the side. And sure it's nice enough, from time to time”—and here I'm clearly addressing my own personal demons—“to let yourself be stroked and caressed for an hour and a half by some asshole who knows the way you like to be touched (compare him to that half-faggot you're living with now: where did you find him, in an atelier somewhere?), and then dump him like the miserable loser that he is, and even act all sorry about it.
Oh I'm so sorry, it was nice but you know that the two of us don't really work together
(what do you mean we don't work together, we just fucked like bunnies, didn't we?). It was nice, wasn't it, to keep your full-time job and do a little under-the-table moonlighting in your off hours? Well, the boondoggle is finished. There's been a fucking reform instituted. Your oldest and most trusted friend has just turned his back on you because he's fed up with telling lies, even if it doesn't bother you at all, and so he's thrown a monkey wrench into the works. You're losing your special privileges, that's all. And you can't take it. It's more than you can stand. That's why you're worried.”

I stop to catch my breath and figure out what I just said.

Espe stares at me agog. He's probably still reviewing my harangue in his head. Well, okay, it's obvious that I was mostly talking to Nives; but there was plenty of good material there for him, if he has the wit to see it, what the hell.

“Make up your mind who you want to be with, god damn it. Why don't you make a decision for once: do something, instead of helping other people to make decisions about things that are none of your business. Do you realize what an absurd line of work you're in? Eh? Turn this way, idiot: you have someone who knows how to make you happy, who only wants you to stay with her. So stay, by god almighty. What does it cost you to stay?”

Whereupon Espedito gets to his feet, looks down at the floor, and expels a breath of air in a highly self-critical sigh. And as I go on inveighing, relying on his understanding, he turns his back and removes his presence.

I basically walk him to the door.

 

I
'd never have given a little girl a name like that. Alagia—please, do me a favor. I remember the first time we went out together and Nives told me that she had a daughter, I had to ask her to repeat that off-kilter name, slowly, before I could even pronounce it. And I can still see her, the astonishment straight out of Classics 101 that ovalized her lips when I confessed I'd never heard it before: “But what about Alagia Fieschi, the niece of Pope Adrian V? Dante even mentions her. Why, don't you like it?”

“No, I do. So much,” I told her.

So anyway, that's the name of Nives' daughter. She had her with some goofy loser who took off like a cat with its tail on fire just a short while after Nives told him he was going to be a daddy.

“Do you think it might have been the name that scared him off?” I was sorely tempted to ask her.

Then Nives and I had Alfredo, who couldn't have hoped for a better big sister, truth be told. And I couldn't have dreamed of a more adorable daugher.

It's just too bad about the name.

 

I show up at the airport running ten minutes late, but luckily Alagia has her cell phone turned on, so I call her and tell her I'm stuck in the line at the parking structure. She tells me she's hungry so she'll just go ahead and get a Chicken Wrap as an antipasto while she waits for me to get there.

For the past few months we've had this standing biweekly tryst to eat artery-clogging food, so we meet secretly at the airport, because she has a Burger King fixation, and the only Burger King in Naples happens to be at the airport.

Though if you stop to think about it, there's something deeply maladjusted about driving all the way out to the airport to eat a sandwich, but for your children you'd do This and More. And when you're going through a divorce, the rule is that your ex-wife gets to do the This and you wind up doing the More. In other words, you become open to corruption at levels that someone not going through a divorce couldn't even begin to imagine.

I have to say that even though I'm not a huge fan of the food (if you want to call it that) at Burger King, I do have to admit that the Whopper is a superior hamburger. Can't say if it's the pickles, or maybe it's the onions. But that's the only sandwich that leaves my mouth watering, even while I'm actually biting into it. If you're really feeling ambitious, there's also the Double Whopper, but that's strictly for when you're working through loss and grief.

I generally order a Whopper, onion rings, and soda; for dessert, vanilla ice cream with chocolate syrup. Sometimes I sub­stitute a Chick'n Crisp sandwich, but I almost invariably regret it afterwards.

Alagia on the other hand starts off with the Chicken Wrap (a tortilla with chicken tenders and a curry sauce), then moves on to the San Diego Beef (another wrap, but with beef, lettuce, and various sauces), and then asks me to let her have a bite of my Whopper (which I offer her, however half-heartedly), winding up her meal with vanilla ice cream (but with caramel syrup on hers, instead of chocolate). Between one deeply unhealthy serving and the next, she drinks a medium Sprite.

Every time we leave the airport, we promise we'll never do it again.

 

I park my car and set off at a run, because Alagia has dance at three, and I want to make it back to the office to review a couple of files.

I hurry into departures, take the escalator up, and emerge into the airport mall. I head straight for the food court, craning my neck in search of Alagia, who's waving a napkin from one of the last tables at the Burger King so I can find her.

It's a bright sunny day and the concourse, overlooking the runways, is drenched in light. Not many people, an agreeable silence, a janitor's trolley blocking the hallway leading to the restrooms.

Come to think of it, it's not a bad idea to come eat lunch here. There is an unbroken succession of planes taking off and landing, and an airplane arriving or departing is always something worth looking at.

And now Alagia stands up from the little fast-food table and walks toward me: tattered low-rider jeans, running shoes with the laces all flapperjawed, so that one of these days she's going to fall flat on her face and remember it for the rest of her life, midriff uncovered. She pops a chicken tender into my mouth, then she plants an affectionate little peck on my left cheek.

“You know that you remind me of Espedito Lenza, with those pants?” I tell her.

She studies the air for a minute, then she gets it.

“Ha, ha,” she comments. Still, you can see that she feels like laughing.

“Oh, you know that Espe's not at all bad-looking.”

“Ha, ha,” she says again. She liked that one.

We grab our trays and walk to the cash register to place our orders. Right up until the last second, I weigh the possibility of being unfaithful to my Whopper, but when the cashier says, “Prego?” I lose my nerve.

We sit down. Alagia polishes off her Chicken Wrap and starts in on the San Diego Beef, picking out the chunks of beef nestled inside the tortilla with her fingers. I start with the Whopper, so that the onion rings can cool off.

“How's dance?” I ask.

“Great,” she answers.

“In fact, you can tell. You're looking much lighter, the way you walk.”

“Lighter, you think?”

She takes a sip of Sprite.

“As if you were more on tiptoe.”

She looks into the middle distance just over my head, pursuing the concept.

“Mmm,” she agrees.

“It's nice when you resemble the things you do,” I point out.

“That's true, you're right.”

What a nice conversation this is, I think. And I bite into the Whopper again, feeling a wave of sadness at its imminent end.

“There's something I wanted to ask you,” I say.

“Mmm,” she says, again.

“How's your brother doing?”

She swallows the mouthful and furrows her brow. She's identical to Nives when she furrows her brow.

“What do you mean, how's he doing?”

“In the sense of whether you know something about him that I don't.”

“Uh. No, I don't think so,” she replies, discounting my observation. “Why?”

She extracts a strip of lettuce and raises it to her mouth.

“He left a message on my answering machine, saying he wanted to tell me something.”

“Wanted to tell you what?”

“That I couldn't say. He hung up without telling me.”

“Ah, and why would he do that?” she asks, without looking me in the eye.

I set the Whopper down on the tray, in exasperation. Alagia looks at it.

“Are you listening to a word I'm saying?”

“Sure, I can hear you,” she answers, scrutinizing her tor­tilla as if it were a kaleidoscope. It's incredible how my words slide over without engaging her in the slightest when we're at Burger King.

“Anyway, he hasn't seemed quite right for a while now,” I go on. “One minute he's cheerful, the next he's all gloomy . . . he doesn't have one of those girlfriends that break up with you and then call you up, by chance?”

A knowing half-smile flickers onto her face.

“No, not at all.”

“No?”

She shakes her head no again.

“And how do you happen to know?”

“I just know, that's all.”

“You just know, that's all,” I repeat.

“Don't worry,” she decrees, putting the hollowed-out tortilla back on her tray. That means she's about to ask me for a bite of my Whopper.

“And how do you happen to just know, and that's all?”

She emits a sort of “Pffh” sound through a narrow gap between her lips. A sound that makes me feel like smacking her.

“Have I been annoying you for long?” I ask.

“Come on, Vincenzo.”

“Why are you laughing?”

“I'm not laughing.”

“Oh, yes you are. You're thinking about something. Otherwise you wouldn't have that stupid little smile on your face.”

Her face reddens angrily. She glares straight into my eyes.

Oooh, she's scaring me.

“If I feel like laughing, that might be my own fucking business, agreed?”

A couple of heads look up from the surrounding tables.

I lean forward from the waist.

“You know how they say some girls look prettier when they're angry? Well, in your case, it doesn't apply.”

She recoils, drops her arms to her sides, and looks around as if the airport had suddenly become intolerable.

 

There are times when I think, and I do mean that this is what I think, that we really should give up entirely this idea of talking to one another. Because it doesn't do anyone any good. It's not the question of understanding one another, struggling to agree on given points; that's not the problem. It's that no conversation seems to stay on topic for more than a couple of sentences; the issue is one of pertinence.

Now, for the moment, let's forget about the fact that I'm talking with my daughter, in practical terms. Let's say you ask some friend of yours a question. You notice that he smiles. Since there was no reason to smile, on account of nothing you said was in the least funny, you register the anomaly (which was slightly annoying, by the way) and you let it ride. Then the guy smiles again, and this time you have to go ahead and ask just where that smile of his comes from. And at that point he loses his temper and defends his right to do exactly as he pleases with his own face. As if you had called his right to do so into question. Whereupon you do your best to get the conversation back on track, but he decides he's offended and he barricades himself behind the whole matter of the principle of the thing (which is obviously nothing more than a lateral escape route, because that's all that matters of principle ever really are). So now you lose your temper and you reply sharply, and he gets angry too, and you raise your voice, and he raises his voice, and then maybe just to be offensive you say things that have even less to do with the original topic (which at this point has been completely crushed in the chain reaction of front-end and rear-end conversational crashes), and the only reason you don't actually wind up in a fistfight is because it's not something you usually do, and so you sit there in complete silence for a while glaring at each other in hatred until you start to get a little depressed, and then one of the two of you says something slightly funny (to call it funny is a stretch; it's not the sort of funny that would normally make anyone laugh), and the other one laughs even though he wouldn't normally laugh at it, and then you start over from scratch, without discussing that topic anymore (so it remains unresolved), until the next time that talking together breaks down at that same exact point.

And that's just the way relations are between people, even people who've known each other all their lives, and that's why there's no real difference between talking or not talking, and sincerity is incidental, something that really isn't anywhere near as good or helpful as people seem to think. Talking doesn't solve problems; if anything it papers them over. You can't rely on words, that's all there is to say on the matter. There are times when you find yourself looking at someone who said something to you that you'd set aside, convinced that it had a certain value between the two of you, and you suddenly realize that they don't even remember it, and that's when you decide that it's best to forget about it and you never even think about it again, understood?

 

“Are you planning to go away?” I ask, already exhausted by the bickering that might ensue or else might already be over, who can say.

I must seem pathetic, because she looks as if she's sorry now.

“Christ, Vincè.”

And she requisitions my Whopper.

And I laugh.

And so does she.

And we make peace.

And we never mention the matter again.

I told you.