My Mother-in-Law Drinks (11 page)

“It's a long story,” I dismissed the matter brusquely.

“What is?” he asked, genuinely perplexed.

“Ohhh, Alfre'. Please.”

“Vincenzo,” Alagia broke in while Alf gave me a worried look, “now I need you to explain why you left me standing like an asshole on the other side of the street.”

I flared my nostrils and sucked in a lungful of air like a bloodhound on a trail, then I exhaled loudly, immediately provoking a dizzy spell from hyperoxygenation, and then settled on a kind of hooded-eye paternalism along the lines of: “I'm going to teach you something that you won't understand here and now, but it will be useful to you someday.”

“If there's a habit you need to be careful not to fall into,” I decreed, though I lacked the courage to look my daughter in the eye as I assumed my posture as a professor of Just Measures, “it's the habit of walking and then stopping while you go on talking while the other people keep walking.”

This statement was followed by a dead silence.

I went into the kind of trance a soccer player experiences after kicking one into his own goal.

In order to restore that demented statement to something resembling a clear meaning I attempted a conceptual autoreverse, a little like what you do with one of those Russian-nesting-doll-style sentences that contain several people identified by their ties of kinship, such as: “Aldo is the husband of Luigi's wife's sister,” which in order to understand them you have to run through them in the opposite direction and think to yourself: “Luigi has a wife; his wife's sister, that is to say, his sister-in-law”—and already the concept of “sister-in-law” begins to sweep away some of the clouds—“is married to Aldo” (and at this point you contextualize Aldo within his family and you almost feel as if you can see him); but even this procedure failed to produce any concrete results. I'd uttered a sentence that could have been conceived by a goat, and that was that.

As my son and daughter burst out laughing right in my face, spraying saliva and slapping each other on the back like a pair of marionettes in a Ferraiolo Brothers' puppet show, I found myself thinking that it's only when you try to improvise a concept that's just a little bit complicated that you realize how much you tend to overestimate your own powers of expression.

A person thinks: “This is something I know,” and believes that that settles the matter. He couldn't be more wrong. Until you find the right words, you don't know anything. You really ought to do some test runs before you open your mouth. If, when you see highly intelligent guests on television shows expressing themselves in a series of impeccable metaphors and armor-plated turns of phrase, you assume that they're improvising, you're mistaken. Those people write out the things they're going to say beforehand. No more nor less than actors working from a script. Words must be chosen carefully, and then some.

“Both of you can go fuck yourselves,” I told those impertinent louts. “And you,” by which I meant Alf, who was laughing so hard he'd almost hit me with a piece of flying snot, “blow your nose, goddamn it.”

At that point I turned and walked away, inoffensively offended.

“Come on, Papà, come back!” Alfredo shouted after me, making me feel the way I used to when I was seven years old or a little younger.

That imbecile sister of his, however, wouldn't stop laughing.

“Choke on it,” I silently wished her.

They caught up with me about fifty feet on, surrounding me like a couple of hoodlums looking for trouble.

“Well?” I said.

I felt like laughing.

I don't know if this will make sense to you, but we all loved each other very much in that moment.

“What was it exactly that you said?” Alagia said, breaking the silence with all the delicacy of a hippopotamus. “‘Get in the habit of stopping to walk when other people are talking and walking while stopped?'”

“Has anyone ever told you what an asshole you are?” I replied, blushing.

She looked her brother in the face and they both burst out laughing again and, before long, I was laughing along with them.

As we were walking toward the apartment building where Ass lived, I linked arms with Alagia and reminded her, as long as she was behaving like an editor of the Accademia della Crusca Italian Dictionary, that, when she was in second grade I think, she once wrote “
un'altro
” instead of “
un altro
” in a composition.

She gave me a juicy kiss on my right cheek and told me I was an idiot.

 

As for my mother-in-law, just as I'd imagined, she had a good hearty laugh when she unwrapped my present.

For me it was a moral victory.

What I didn't realize was that she would actually open the bottle.

L
ook at me, not him,” Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo orders Matrix, who starts staring Matteo in the eyes as soon as the deli counterman approaches him with the roll of packing tape.

Matrix turns his head in the engineer's direction with scientific slowness, in such a way that his gaze remains fixed in a menacingly sidelong glare at the poor counterman, and in fact within seconds Matteo has turned pale and stopped cold just a few feet away from them, the roll of adhesive tape in his hands as if he no longer knows what to do with it.

I look at his terrified silhouette in the monitor above me, and I feel a surge of compassion that for a moment clouds my vision.

Furious at the snag, Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo grabs Matrix by the hair and yanks him toward him, jabbing the pistol barrel under his chin.

Matrix closes his eyes, clamps his lips shut, and inhales loudly, the way certain sick people do as they brace themselves to withstand with dignity an oncoming attack of the recidivistic pain that afflicts them.

“So you want to keep playing games, eh?” Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo warns him. “All right then. Why don't we see what happens if I shoot you right in the legs, that way I won't even have to bother tying you up.”

“So you want to keep playing games, eh?” I parrot him mentally, resisting the impulse to emit a loud and mocking Bronx cheer. I mean really, is it possible to utter a line like that with any real conviction?

Matrix opens his eyes, but refuses to give him the satisfaction of a response.

Anyway, he's bluffing, I think to myself.

“Come on, Matteo, get moving,” said the engineer, with considerable nerve: the poor guy was standing there like a coat­rack.

“To hell with this,” I blurt out. And with two impatient strides I reach the useless deli counterman and grab the adhesive tape out of his hand. “Give it here.”

Matrix opens both eyes wide straight at me with a look of perplexity seasoned with something like an overtone of familiarity, wondering who is this guy who has stood by doing nothing from the start except to take the occasional initiative that unfailingly leads nowhere.

Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo, on the other hand, flashes an appreciative smile at my unasked-for intervention (and I'm really starting to wish he'd stop flirting with me, because he's been semi-molesting me for the past two hours).

Without wasting any time, I kneel down in front of Matrix, unroll a length of tape, stick it to the left leg of his trousers (as I do so I notice that he's wearing a very nice pair of boots that my friend Paoletta would probably swoon over), and then I windmill the roll repeatedly around his ankles, overlaying ascending spirals of tape until I reach his knees, packaging his shins and calves together; then I yank it tight, pull the roll toward me, lift the strip of tape to my mouth, and tear it sideways with my teeth, declaring the job complete.

I stand up. With contemptuous eyes, I look both the hostage taker and the hostage up and down, the two of them pressed up against each other like a couple of lovers in amorous transport, then I raise my right arm and throw the roll of adhesive tape over the head of Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo, just grazing it, so that he's instinctively forced to duck for fear of being hit; after which he stares at me in astonishment.

At this point I really shouldn't say a word, and in fact I remain silent, symbolically intensifying the dramatic quality of my gesture, which then and there (in part due to the presence of the video cameras filming us, most likely) makes me feel particularly theatrical, I have to confess.

Shortly thereafter, in fact, I realize that I've aesthetically panned the sketch that Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo has so painstakingly assembled. By throwing the roll of packing tape in his direction (though not actually at him) I must have metaphorically denounced him for the menial nature of the task he'd obliged me to perform (on a purely substitutional basis, to top it off, since that knucklehead Matteo the deli counterman was too petrified to lift a finger).

I take a look at my image on the monitor and my takeaway impression is that I am now running the show (it's incredible how television manages to liberate the overweening jackass that lives inside us all). After all, I've just stolen the scene from the very guy who mounted the show, and put a lot of hard work into it, in the first place. Or rather, I didn't steal it: I earned it. Perhaps this—I conjecture extemporaneously—is the true meaning of the expression “steal the show.” It's incredible how often we use an expression to indicate its opposite. The Italian language truly is awash in amnestied crimes of grammar.

Matteo continues to stand there, his mouth hanging half open. Suddenly I'm fed up with his ineptitude.

“Hey,” I say to him, “what is it, did your water break?”

His eyes reveal that the wisecrack has gone over his head.

“I just got you out of a jam, unless I miss my guess,” I continue. “You can cut it out now.”

At this point he snaps out of it, probably realizing that I'm right. And he takes two steps backward.

I turn to the engineer.

“Happy now?” I ask, in brazenly rhetorical fashion.

A brief but significant silence ensues, after which a burst of applause can be heard coming from the front entrance.

I become a statue.

Matrix, Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo, and the knucklehead immediately register the applause, turning to me with a new expression in their eyes.

My self-esteem skyrockets, causing a delightful moment of vertigo.

I feel like a tiger.

I'm a revelation. A rock star.

I'm Bruce Willis in the first
Die Hard
.

I'm the man for the job.

I have the situation well in hand.

I love myself.

 

Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo seems saddened and disappointed.

Disappointment is the most open-captioned emotion of them all. Nine times out of ten when you look at a disappointed person you can immediately guess the reason. It's easy enough to conceal the causes of envy, jealousy, or rivalry. The same even goes for anger. But with the captioning they have for disappointment, there's not much to be done: they're easy to read.

At last we hear the siren of the carabinieri. Even though this is an intervention that we'd fully taken into account (perhaps it would be more exact to say that we've been expecting them), I heave a sigh of relief. The arrival of law enforcement, even if it fails to solve the problem, instantly makes you feel relieved of the responsibility to deal with it yourself. It puts into effect a sort of subcontracting of responsibility for whatever is going on. In certain situations it's a panacea, because it frees you from prudence. And that is why people often become uninhibited pottymouths when the police show up (e.g., at the scene of a car crash).

Some time ago I witnessed a fender bender between a car and a scooter from the window of a friend's apartment. The rear-ender: an older woman. Rather elegant too. The rear-endee: a guy who looked about twenty, maybe twenty-five. The face of a nice young man. They both park their vehicles (he gets off his Vespa; she gets out of a Smart car). The young man neither raises his voice nor makes recriminations; he just requests her insurance details and leaves it at that. She acts mildly exasperated, tries telling him that it's just a scratch, he replies that the owner of the body shop he goes to has been able to buy plenty of real estate with just scratches; in other words they trade sharp words but keep it just within the union regulations for the dialectics of friendly differences, after which the matron resigns herself to her fate, gets back in her car, pulls out her license and registration, and is about to hand them over to the young man, who is legally entitled to peruse them.

At that exact moment, however, a pair of traffic cops walking a beat in the neighborhood happen upon the transaction in progress and come over as duty requires, completely unsuspecting of the fact that they are the full moon that is about to unleash a werewolf.

In fact, the woman not only tears her documents out of the young man's hands with admirable dexterity, but unexpectedly treats him to a gale of filthy insults as personal as they are gratuitous, clearly showing herself to be a pedigreed habitué of some of the more down-at-the-heels taverns of a bygone era.

The two traffic cops exchange looks of astonishment, then set about trying to make her see reason, but the lady, to use what is perhaps a misnomer, shrills at them to keep their paws off her (something those unfortunate civil servants certainly had every intention of doing), and she then lunges at the guiltless young man with a rage so disproportionate that one of the two police officers instinctively puts his hand on the butt of his pistol.

What left us speechless, me and my friend (or really I ought to say just me, because by now that idiot was rolling on the floor in helpless laughter, and at a certain point he even had to hurry into the other room to keep from suffocating), were not so much the obscene imprecations, the variations on the exclusively scatological and sexual themes that poured out of her mouth, as the
voice
itself. A monstrous, vicious, guttural sound, intolerable to the human ear, broken here and there by hawks of spit and grunts, a harbinger of calamities and disasters. I swear, the first thing to do was summon an exorcist. And when she finally left (I don't even know how) and was pulling away in her car (obviously without having supplied the details of her insurance policy), she even stuck her head out of the driver's side window and went on shrieking, the harridan. Such a scene that the traffic cops and the young man stood there comforting each other for a good ten minutes afterward.