My Mother-in-Law Drinks (12 page)

 

“All right, thank you, Counselor Malinconico,” says Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo again, raising his eyebrows and making my surname echo over the vegetables and the mozzarella (he must have diligently miked the entire supermarket, to obtain such a roundly stereophonic effect).

“Thanks for dick, Engineer,” I retort, still giddy from the homage paid to me a short time ago.

“What?” he replies, pretending to find me amusing.

“You heard me,” I repeat, just to eliminate any doubts.

And I place a hand on the knucklehead's shoulder, in an instinctive yet incomprehensible urge to express my solidarity (and in fact he goes: “Mhm!” even accompanying the sound with an affirmative nod).

“I'm not offering you my cooperation,” I say, articulating the idea more fully. “I'm just trying to limit the damage. So please refrain from thanking me. I don't approve of what you're doing.”

“Ah,” he says.

“Right,” I say back.

For a little while it's as if there was nothing left to say (which is what happens when you realize that the other person's point of view is exactly as valid as your own. It's as if both parties were getting in each other's way).

I think I hear a faint rumble of applause from my fans back at the entrance. But it might just be my imagination.

“Well, I don't give a shit,” the engineer says brusquely. “I'm not here to win anyone's approval.”

I didn't expect him to use that kind of language. It disappointed me a little, truth be told.

“Okay,” I say, blushing (because we always blush a little when someone speaks to us rudely), “if you're going to put it like that, do you mind if I leave?”

“Then you fail to understand. This is a trial, and we need a lawyer.”

“Hey, you know something?” I say, warming to the topic. “This whole thing is starting to turn into a . . .”

“. . . comedy sketch,” I'm about to say; but I never do, because we're distracted by the commotion that suddenly reaches us from the main entrance, where the carabinieri have just started dispersing the crowd.

Whereupon we all look up at the monitors, having by now become accustomed to the idea that they're our window to the outside world.

The language employed by law enforcement in these types of situations, consisting largely of imperatives (“Keep moving, people”; “Clear out: no blocking traffic”), is usually even more modular than a Billy bookcase (no matter how you arrange the words, the meaning remains the same), and yet it is certain to achieve its intended disruptive effect.

There are a few acceptable variations on the theme, but they too verge on the rhetorical (e.g.: “Let us do our job here,” words often pronounced the minute they arrive on the scene, and therefore long before they've had a chance to do anything) or else—even worse—they border on morbid curiosity, which has the sole effect of stoking that curiosity to a raging flame (thus the celebrated “Nothing to see here”: which is absolutely guaranteed to nail a crowd to the spot).

Usually, anyway.

Times must be changing, because things seem to be going differently.

First of all, the carabinieri summoned to investigate the foul deed are two in number: nothing out of the ordinary thus far. But the two carabinieri are a man and a woman, and this takes some getting used to, considering the fact that carabinieri teams have long been—misogynistically—made up of men only.

Another thing is that they're both young and even pretty athletic—already something that smacks of a TV show—and since she, important detail, is a redhead, I automatically associate them with Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, the two FBI agents from
The X-Files
who, in spite of the attraction constantly buzzing between them, in nine seasons spent tracking down aliens never—how to put this—closed the deal (an omission to which the series owes a considerable part of its success).

Third, she's the one keeping back the crowd, and she does so without using a single regulation cliché. All she says and repeats is: “
Per favore
,” “Please,” with a technique you'd expect from a unit production manager on a film set, using her arms as movable police barriers to indicate the imaginary perimeter of the area that is off limits.

Fourth, he doesn't have a soul patch. He's the kind of tall that during introductions normally elicits the regulation question: “Hey, do you play basketball?” (in the mind of the everyman, basketball is the masonic order to which all tall people belong), and he displays an admirable composure during this preliminary inquiry into what's happened. In spite of the fact that he's already glimpsed the situation in the television monitor overhead (and in fact he never takes his eyes off it), he listens closely to what Giovanni the grocery clerk, having been prepped in advance by Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo, has to tell him.

The deus ex machina himself must be feeling somewhat overlooked, because he suddenly bursts into the monitor, filling it with his face.

“Buongiorno,” he begins, immediately silencing all voices below.

Mulder puts his cranium into reverse and looks at his close-up, without losing his composure (I'm guessing this young man must do yoga, given the way he responds to external events with such a phlegmatic demeanor).

Scully too, caught off-guard by the noise from the television speaker, turns around.

“Buongiorno,” the carabiniere replies, calmly. “I can see you. And I hear you. I imagine the same is true for you.”

“Precisely. We're both miked, Captain Apicella.”

Mulder arches his eyebrows.

“Do we know each other?”

Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo takes a step back to allow the captain to admire him.

“You ought to still remember,” he replies, “even though it's been a while.”

The carabiniere narrows his eyes, circumnavigates the oval of the engineer's close-up, then his spine stiffens, and he turns to his colleague. When he resumes his conversation with the screen, his tone has changed.

“Of course I remember.”

The engineer bites his lip, as if this confirmation has stirred some old pain.

“You were the first to arrive.”

“That's right.”

A meditative silence ensues, and both men seem to reexperience the memory together, no doubt sharing stills from the past.

“How are you, Engineer?” Captain Mulder-Apicella resumes.

The most conventional question possible, and slipped into what we can only call an inappropriate context, but asked with such authentic interest that I'm moved to wonder whether I've ever said it in that tone myself at some point.

“Well, you can see for yourself, no?” he replies, spreading his arms just barely to present the scene of the hostage situation (a little bit like a circus artist who gesticulates at the end of the routine toward his fellow performers, so as not to hog the applause all for himself), as if the evidence of what he has done is a faithful depiction of his state of desperation.

“I didn't know you worked here,” Mulder remarks.

Matteo and I exchange a look of confusion (he even goes so far as to shrug his shoulders and twist his lips into a frown: the conventional stance for expressing a giant question mark), amazed as we are to hear these two men shooting the breeze.

“It's a job I sought out deliberately.”

“I thought so. Engineer?”

“Yes, Captain.”

“I need to know if anyone's been wounded, please.”

Ohh, at last a topic that concerns us all, I think to myself. And Matteo must have thought the same thing, because I see his shoulders relax. Mulder just took the long way around to get to the matter at hand, I now see.

“Only him,” replies Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo, indicating Matrix with a jut of his chin, “and that's just a nosebleed. For the time being.”

Matrix offers no response except to retract his neck and lower his head, hiding himself from the monitors.

“No one else?” asks Mulder, skipping over the “for the time being.”

“No one else.”

“And those two I see standing next to you, who would they be?”

“Next to him, huh?” I object inwardly. “We're a good ten feet away from him.”

“One of them works at the deli counter, the other one's a lawyer.”

“A lawyer?” Mulder asks with some confusion, and immediately scrutinizes the television set with an almost paleontological interest, as if the professional guild to which I belong had gone extinct several thousand years ago.

“That's right.”

“Are you saying he's
your
lawyer?”

“No.”

“And what is a lawyer doing there with you, if you don't mind my asking?”

“Good question,” I agree mentally. In fact—without the slightest idea of what I could say on the subject—I lift my little forefinger like a third-grader, but Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo shoves ahead of me.

“I asked him to stay.”

“So he just happened to be passing through and you made him a court-appointed lawyer?” the carabiniere observes.

Too bad, Mulder, I say to myself, and you were doing so well until a few seconds ago.

“Ha, ha, that's funny, Captain,” I butt in.

“Excuse me,” he says, trying to act superior in spite of the fact that his face is turning red, “what did you say your name was?”

I look around, as if to enlist those present in helping me to remember whether I might have forgotten something by chance.

“I didn't say,” I say.

“He didn't say,” Matteo backs me up.

We all take turns looking each other in the face (including Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo, while Matrix, at the risk of having his neckbones seize up, goes on staring at the floor tiles to conceal himself from the monitors), as if to underscore just how gratuitous the carabiniere's question really was.

“Ah, yes, in fact I didn't think I'd heard it,” he says.

The whole group hovers in an awkward state of apprehension.

“What was that, another joke?” I ask.

I don't know if you've noticed, but I start coming out with snappy answers when an argument really catches my interest.

Mulder scowls.

“You know, I'm not having any fun here, Counselor.”

“Well then just imagine how I feel. I've been here from the start and I can't even leave.”

He ignores my comment and passes over me entirely, being intentionally disrespectful, and goes back to speaking to Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo.

“Engineer, would you please tell me why you want Counselor . . .”

“Malinconico,” Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo replies on my behalf.

“Malinconico?” Mulder repeats.

Scully smiles in amusement.

“What, you don't like it?” I intervene, in annoyance.

Obviously the one I have it in for is Mulder, not her. She's actually not bad.

“No, it's kind of cute,” he says without deigning to look in my direction.

Cute! A totally dismissive adjective, spritzed about like an urticating toxin with slightly delayed effects by full-fledged human jellyfish, who practice the undermining of other people's merits as a way of life.

The best part is that then they accuse you of being touchy (jellyfish always make sure they have an alibi ready before rubbing up against the epidermis of their intended prey) if you lose your temper and tell them that “cute” is a term that, if they really insist on using it, they're welcome to go say to their maiden aunt's toy poodle.

“Well, I think your
Happy Days
haircut is cute, Captain,” I counterattack. “Maybe I'll ask you for the number of your hairdresser later on.”

The funny thing is that Scully, without even realizing it, cranes her neck, looks at his head, and stifles a grin.

And sure, I said “
Happy Days
haircut” because it was the first thing that popped into my mind. If someone asked me out of the blue what a
Happy Days
haircut looks like, I wouldn't have the slightest idea what to tell them.

We remain in a silence poised between the tense and the ridiculous, until Mulder opts to continue with the line of questioning, forcing himself not to take the bait.

“May I ask,” he resumes, once again addressing Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo, “why you asked Counselor Malinconico to stay, Engineer?”

“Because I'm the prosecution and he's the defense.”

“You're the prosecution and he's the defense,” Mulder restates the idea, with some skepticism.

“That's right.”

“It sounds like a trial.”

“That's right,” Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo confirms.

“It seems to me that there are quite a few other things you'd need to put on a trial, Engineer.”

“You mean a judge, a courtroom, a jury, a stack of legal documents thousands of pages long, evidence in favor of and against the defendant, witnesses who make statements and retract them, extenuating formalities, one adjournment after another, lawyers who nitpick all day long, prosecuting attorneys who just shuffle papers instead of moving the trial forward, and so on and so forth?”

Hey, not a bad summary, I say to myself.

Sure, a little cynical. But still.

“More or less,” Mulder tosses back.

“Well then, I don't know what planet you live on. That's nothing but a museum a few visitors venture into every now and then.”

I'm starting to like this man.

“And who exactly do you expect to venture into your so-called trial?” Mulder objects.

The same question I would have asked myself, if I didn't already know the answer.

Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo dismisses the question with a chuckle.

“Well, how about . . . everyone in Italy?”

For a moment Mulder's head is clearly spinning. He understands perfectly well (that's obvious), but he plays the fool to keep from taking in the reality all at once (I trick myself with the same method whenever my nose slams up against a lack of alternatives).