My Mother-in-Law Drinks (19 page)

Show up at any academic conference (“
g
onference,” she'd say), lecture, exhibition, paid author appearance, election campaign dinner, or press conference, and there you'll find Mary Stracqualurso.

Little does it matter whether or not she actually received an invitation (if she did not, she will take umbrage and invite herself, and you can rest assured that she will always find someone happy to give up his or her front-row seat for her): she'll be there no matter what, it wouldn't be the same without her; Mary Stracqua is the city's historical memory, a city that will never be able to separate her from itself (another of her rust-proof convictions is that nothing happens without her knowing about it).

But the most deeply inexplicable mystery concerns the atmosphere of collective intimidation and
omertà
that Mary has managed to create around herself, nipping in the bud any possibility of dissent. In this city that always looks the other way there is not a journalist, university professor, doctor, lawyer, engineer, or even failed artist who's had the nerve to tell her to her face what everyone thinks, and that is that she's an illiterate bum, incapable of stringing together three coherent words (much less of putting together an actual news story), organically servile with any representative of actual power with whom she comes into contact, whether it's her condo board or the city council in town hall, and moreover that the news guild membership card that she carries with her says a great deal about the usefulness of what we smilingly call professional orders. Everyone, formally, respects her. And everyone, pragmatically, condones her. They all let her live, make her appearances, offer her commentary. Occasionally (even now), they let her write.

I know a couple of managing editors of local papers who, after being subjected to her weekly barrage of phone calls requesting publication of an editorial she's scrawled, organize collective newsroom readings of her articles, where the staff split their sides with laughter for days at a time (some jot down the finest savagings of the language and then send them out by email, chain-letter-style); after that, however, once the great author's spelling has been cleaned up and her ideas organized into something resembling a coherent whole, obviously, they always publish it.

See the way it works? We laugh at Mary Stracqua, and at the countless small and mid-sized parasites like her who infest the newsrooms of our nation's press, the political secreteriats, the ministries, the television stations, the universities; but the truth is that we are all accountable for their survival. We allow them to set an example, instead of quashing that example. We perpetuate this collective intellectual conformism, this cultural hypocrisy that allows us, like the little professors of trash media, to point and jeer at the ignorant when they can't hear us. We're tolerant and accommodating. And when we stand by and watch them, we are taking part in an interactive spectacle. We're tacitly approving a disgrace.

Look at what we've done, in our small way, to ruin the world.

M
y mother-in-law, and who could blame her, enjoys making fun of me, but I really had given some serious thought to the whole issue of sex and life.

And since the last thing I want is for anyone to think that I'm a person who says things just to hear the sound of his own voice, I think it's best to take a few moments right now to clear up my point of view on the topic.

 

If anyone ever asks you a question that contains the phrase “sex life,” what you're going to think they've asked you, regardless of how they put it and even of their actual intentions, is: “How long has it been since the last time you got lucky?”

And right after that: “Do you think there is any real chance that you'll get lucky within a reasonable period of time, starting now?”

The immediate problem posed by questions about one's sex life is disarmingly materialistic: Do you have sex? Do you not have sex? How often?

In the presence of sex, we become disgustingly quantum, and that's that. And when sex is followed by life—forget about it.

Sex isn't a form of life. It's a kind of heart attack (and in fact sometimes you die having sex; and there are people who hope that's how they'll go, if they have any say in how they're going to meet their maker).

Having a sex life means, if we're being completely truthful, dying every so often.

*

One of the last times I ran into Nives, at a parapharmacy downtown (she was right there when I walked in, or I would have avoided her like the plague, since I was already something like two weeks behind in my alimony payments), I was with a female friend of mine who needed to buy I can't remember what (by the way, it's unbelievable how many parapharmacies there are around the city these days).

Let me point out immediately that there's never been anything between me and this female friend; in fact, she's just a friend who happens to be female. But she's one of those female friends who, when they're with you, behave as if they were your girlfriend, you know the type? Like they'll walk along beside you hooking pinkie fingers with you, they'll brush the crumbs off your lips after you've gone to get breakfast in a café and you've had a croissant, they give you a quick kiss when they show up and another one when they leave.

It should also be noted that these female friends, when they're having trouble with their husbands or live-in boyfriends, are likely to be willing to have sex with you (three times, tops, otherwise you ruin the friendship), but this wasn't the case here, in part because I was (more or less) with Alessandra Persiano (who, if you know what I mean . . .), and my female friend had been in a happy relationship with some guy for a couple of years now.

And Nives, who has busted my balls as long as I've known her with this piece of mythology that when two people are in the same room she can instantly tell whether or not they're an item, even if they don't so much as say a word to each other, these things ought to be obvious to her trained eye, she is a psychologist, after all.

But the minute my friend and I walked into the parapharmacy, she flew into a veritable rage of jealousy and put on a display of boorish behavior so callous and offensive that even now I blush in shame at the thought.

Like the very first thing she did was to snicker openly and allusively in a really repulsive manner, cc'ing everyone present, then she said hello to me but not to my friend, and before leaving she brushed a little dandruff off the shoulder of my jacket (as if she were still free to indulge in such personal and intimate gestures), and finally took her leave with a phrase so corrosive that the Mafia could use it to dispose of corpses, which ran verbatim:

“I see that your sex life is enjoying a sharp uptick, my compliments.”

And I, in the presence of this masterpiece of gratuitous commentary (do you by any chance see a connection between my sex life and the fact that she ran into me in a parapharmacy in the company of a female friend? I mean, it's not as though we were buying condoms: but then, so what if we were?), instead of retorting that upticks of that kind had long since ceased to be any of her business, and that in fact it was no concern of hers with whom I had said upticks, I found myself, incomprehensibly, reflecting, then and there, on the spot, on the nature of the phrase “sex life,” as if it were more than I could do to overlook its fundamental inaccuracy.

These unscheduled insights into words or groups of words do occur from time to time; from one moment to the next they mistake you for an Italian language detective and just throw up their hands and turn themselves in, reporting themselves for their inadequacies; and you just stand there looking at them, thinking to yourself that people, yourself included, on the whole just operate on trust when it comes to everyday language: especially when dealing with concepts in common (ab)use that sound particularly chic, such as for instance the much-discussed “sex life.”

What makes the two concepts incompatible—if you're interested to know the conclusions I came to in the parapharmacy while my ex-wife was harassing me and my friend with her illegitimate jealousy—is that sex, unlike life, always entails an elevated degree of awareness, for as long as it lasts. Life, on the other hand, is something we enjoy by and large unconsciously. In the sense that it's something we take for granted until something happens that threatens it. Like the first law of motion, also known as the law of inertia (or Newton's first law), which states that a body will remain in its state of rest or uniform linear motion as long as external forces do not intervene to modify that state.

The fact that an external force can modify a body's state of rest or uniform linear motion (which are both states that closely resemble life itself) doesn't mean, as far as the body knows, that it won't maintain that state for all time, because as long as that state persists, it will have to tolerate it, waiting for it to come to an end.

You can't exist in a given state (in other words, you can't live your life) if you're continuously worrying that from one moment to the next an external force might very well intervene and modify that state. In order to live (that is, to maintain a state) you need to cultivate the illusion that the state in question will last for all time, or else be unaware that the state is temporary (which amounts to the same thing).

To accept the provisional nature of all states, then, means, in point of fact, to use another very chic transitive verb (one that my ex-wife in fact uses frequently), that one must suppress it, that is, behave as if you've forgotten that life (that is, the state of rest or uniform linear motion) is provisional; which is to say, hold infinity in the palm of your hand (I think I must have heard that somewhere).

In other words: we take life for granted. And if there's one thing we never take for granted, on the other hand (and when I say never I mean
never
, not even during times when it seems like you might finally be able to stop worrying about it), that would in fact be sex.

Sex—let's not act jaded about it—is always an event. It is to life as the external force is to the state of rest or uniform linear motion in the first law of motion. It modifies a body's condition (it's better if it's more than one; but two bodies is definitely the minimum for any serious consideration), it throws it into turmoil and regenerates it. Most of all, it cheers a body up. Which is the reason there are so many grouchy people out and about.

What makes people who aren't getting laid resentful and intractable (people who are always pissed off at everyone, who snap at you even if you just ask them what time it is) isn't even the lack of sexual activity per se, but the fact that, by not getting laid, people who aren't getting laid remain irremediably identical to how they always are, and they can't reconcile themselves to this continual unchangingness. Because after all—let's admit it—sameness is a condition that works fine when it comes to egalitarianism and equal rights, but when applied to oneself it's a tremendous pain in the ass. So much so that sex, even if you always do it in the same way (leaving aside eventual variations), is never the same. There is no such thing as reproducible screwing. The screwing may be better, the screwing may be worse (even screwing that doesn't turn out well is never the same from one time to another), but you'll never be able to produce an instance of screwing that is identical to another one.

Among other things, there are tons of people who aren't getting laid at any given time. But, really, a
lot
. In fact, as far as I know, they constitute a majority. Which strikes me as another excellent reason for rejecting the theory of the sex life, which at this point would become a privilege accorded only to the few, while the great thing about life is that life is a right accorded to all.

In other words, there's not much to be done about it: if you want to keep from being the same as you always have been, what is required is the intervention of an external sexual force, which from an organic point of view also serves a literally Newtonian purpose. In fact, the immediate and most unmistakable symptom of sexual desire, especially male sexual desire, is the interruption of that state of rest (so much so that on those occasions when that state is not interrupted, you're sure to remember the day).

But it's clear that women have their own ways of being roused from a state of rest. And it's a wonderful thing when they are. Because after that it won't be long before the motion begins, a motion that, while uniformly sussultatory instead of rectilinear, is still perfectly acceptable.

 

When we left the parapharmacy, I explained all these considerations to my friend, because I was afraid that unless I repeated it all aloud I'd probably wind up forgetting it.

She listened to every last word, nodding with conviction at the crucial points.

Then she told me that she couldn't understand how I could have thought such a thing while my ex-wife was treating me in that abominable manner in the parapharmacy, and in any case it seemed to her that I did the right thing by divorcing her, because there was no doubt about it: she was a tremendous asshole.

Whereupon an enormous wave of sadness washed over me at the thought that Assunta, by refusing to see Nives during such a difficult phase in her illness, had in fact expressed an opinion very much in line with my friend's view of her.

And as far as I'm concerned, no matter how many excellent reasons you might have for refusing to see another person you've known all your life—in this case, a mother and her daughter—there's always something about it that doesn't really add up. A faint whiff of bullshit.

The kind of bullshit that saddens everyone's lives a little.