My Mother-in-Law Drinks (2 page)

My interlocutor stood silent for a long time, while I speculated mentally on the whys and wherefores of that inexplicable phenomenon. At last, he broke the silence.

“No, I think . . . I think that makes perfect sense, really.”

He wasn't having an easy time of it though, because his voice broke on the last couple of words in the sentence.

So I brusquely interrupted my meta­physical pursuit of Marcella Bella and turned my eyes back to him. He looked pretty beat up.

“Listen, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to upset you.”

“No, no, you didn't,” he hastened to reassure me, squinting as he shook his head. “What you said was really nice.”

“Well, I'm glad to hear that, Signor . . .”

“Sesti Orfeo. Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo.”

 

And that's where I sort of got hung up for a second.

For a working professional to introduce himself with his official title is, all things considered, a perfectly normal thing to do. But when I heard the way he underscored his credentials (with that surname that smacked of fallen nobility, moreover), who can say why, it just gave me a strange impression immediately. As if the guy was up to something. Which he was.

“For that matter, Counselor, you'd never have been so intransigent in the negotiations over damages if you hadn't taken his case to heart,” he added, throwing me offstride, so much so that I paused a moment to look him in the eye.

“If it had been up to me, I would have taken it to trial,” I said, puffing out my chest.

And the guy nodded, even tossing in the faintly virile smile of a man admiring the balls another man has shown in his decision making.

I'm not a tough guy. I never have been. If you want to know the truth, I doubt I've ever made a real decision in my whole life. I don't much like making decisions. To make decisions you have to be sure of yourself, and I'm hardly ever sure of anything. I'm more of a multiple options kind of guy, really.

Here's a for instance: I've never broken up with a woman. That doesn't mean I haven't offered my passive cooperation in letting a relationship waste away and die. In fact, when it comes to the failure to render emotional aid and assistance, I'm a repeat offender, if I'm really being brought to book for my transgressions. But standing by and watching as a relationship goes under for the third time isn't the same thing as stating openly: “Look, I don't want to be with you anymore, and that's that.”

This is the thing: I don't want to take responsibility for losing something important. I don't see why I should. If I'm going to have to lose something important, I'd rather have someone else take the blame for it, truth be told.

Same thing goes for my, shall we say, professional life. I'm not going to knock my head against the wall over matters of principle. Because, obviously, if you're going to make a big deal about matters of principle, you need to be able to rely on a working system of justice.

If there's any chance of sparing a client the ordeal of a lawsuit—and I'm not trying to brag here, but I've never swindled a client—I choose that option. I hate protracted negotiations that drag on so long that you almost forget about them, lawsuits that last seven, eight, ten years. Nothing turns my stomach like a case file yellowing away in the filing cabinet, dates of hearing that when you reread them it dawns on you that your oldest child wasn't even born yet (even though, Jesus Christ, the whole thing's about nothing more than a miserable fucking patch of damp wall in a relative's kitchen). I find it debilitating to be involved in something where if you happen to run into a client on the street, he doesn't even bring the topic up, he just gives you a look steeped in compassion that seems to have been put on just to say: “It probably isn't even your fault, but Counselor, what a fucked-up profession you're in.”

The worst thing is you can hardly blame them. These days—there's no point trying to be all juridically correct—we're all pretty much resigned to the idea (a little facile, yes, but still applicable in the majority of cases) that bringing a lawsuit is the one sure, patented way of ensuring that a dispute seizes up and remains disgracefully insoluble.

Modern lawyers are a little bit like psychoanalysts, in that certain people continue going to them for years even after it has become abundantly clear that they'll never solve their problems. (I know a couple of people who've told me that they can't even remember why they went into analysis in the first place, and they weren't kidding when they said it.)

Consider people who don't pay their bills. They've found a fail-safe method for getting by: they just sue. They use time as a form of currency. And they eventually wear their creditors down to the point where they're happy to take pennies on the dollar just for the sake of getting shed of the whole goddamned dispute and never having to think about it again.

All this is just to illustrate that—to return to the moment in which I was about to reply to Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo—I'm usually not so strict if there's any chance of resolving a case amicably.

But when Vittorio Comunale's employer asked to meet me in his lawyer's office to settle the case out of court, the offer that fell on my ears was so shamelessly stingy that I got that mocking grin on my face that you see in the movies when somebody openly provokes a serial killer (a silent smile that says: “You haven't got the faintest idea what kind of trouble you've just landed yourself in”), after which I turned on my heel and left, muttering a quiet “
Arrivederci
,” and maybe not even that.

The next day, they called me to quadruple the offer, but by that point I had become intractable, and I was even starting to enjoy myself. Listen to me, I told my colleague, if your client really thinks he made a reasonable offer, why don't you have him come repeat it in court, then we'll see just how much the shattered leg of a forty-year-old construction worker is really worth; and that's just limiting ourselves to the leg, since the pillar that fell on him did plenty of other kinds of damage, as I'm sure you're aware.

So he says: I swear to you that I had no idea he'd offer you that figure.

So I say: Are you telling me he made an idiot out of you?

So he says (after a pause during which he must have been wondering if he'd heard me correctly): Thanks for the professional solidarity, Counselor, but these things happen. Haven't you ever had a client put you in a difficult spot?

So I shoot straight back at him: Not to this degree, but sure, every once in a while.

I was instantly reminded of a nightmarish moment of embar­rassment, one of those scenes where reality itself fades away as everyone turns to stare at the one individual still picked out in high definition: that is to say, you.

Filippo Sciumo, that was the ogre's name. He liked to go around town stealing car radios by smashing in the windows with his knee, the idiot, until one night he happened upon a vehicle with windows made of bulletproof glass, after which he'd fallen to the asphalt howling so loud that the carabinieri themselves came galloping to his rescue (apparently—according to Sciumo—they never once stopped laughing the whole way back to headquarters as he sat handcuffed in the backseat of the squad car).

At any rate, my job was to obtain a plea bargain, and knowing his tendency to take offense at trivial slights, I'd told him over and over again to keep his mouth shut and let me take care of it (especially because I'd already struck a deal with the prosecuting magistrate: all we had to do was fill in the form), but instead, that lamebrained ape, that dangerous moron, may the devil screw him on his afternoons off, one second after the reading of the counts of indictment, had the brilliant idea to loudly dry-gargle and then spit on the floor.

I've had tough moments in my life. But none of them compare to this one; I swear, I wished that a natural catastrophe of some kind would swoop down and strike the part of the world I occupied at that moment, eliminating all forms of life (first and foremost my own) that might possess memory of what had just happened.

“Hey, Malinconico, are you still there?” my colleague had asked me, since I'd stopped speaking entirely, horror-struck as I was at the resurfacing of that bloodcurdling memory.

“Yes, sorry, I just got . . . distracted there for a second.”

“Well, what are we going to do?”

So I said (rocketing back to reality): “I'm not even going to discuss it.”

Just like that, cut and dried. Absolutely sure of myself. And I'd have toughed it out, too, if Vittorio Comunale hadn't insisted on getting it settled immediately (“Just get me a reasonable sum, Counselor, all I want is to put it behind me”).

When you think of the victims of workplace accidents and you try to put yourself in their shoes, or in the shoes of their families, you imagine them as combative, spirited, determined to carry on the battle to the last breath. That's not how they are. People who are injured on the job come out of it as debilitated as if they'd had open-heart surgery, and the same goes for the family (“Counselor,” Comunale's wife once told me on the phone, “my husband is
broken
”).

 

“Forgive me, I didn't mean to pry.”

Those were the words with which Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo commented on the decline and fall of my warlike intentions concerning his old friend's lawsuit.

“No, not at all, I apologize if I seemed a little combative,” I replied, placatingly, in my turn. “Evidently, I still haven't entirely gotten over that epi . . .”

And there I left the sentence unfinished, because the attention of Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo, from one second to the next, had been totally captured by one of the closed-circuit television monitors that dotted the supermarket's ceiling: specifically the one directly behind me, some six feet overhead, perched directly above the boxes of egg lasagna (and who can say why they always put the egg lasagna on the uppermost shelf).

Whereupon I turned to look myself, expecting to see some jaw-droppingly hot babe or at least an armed robbery in progress, but there was nothing on the monitor that justified the distraction, aside from a guy with a ponytail wearing a trench coat straight out of
The Matrix
nodding in the general direction of the automatic swinging entry gate, as if it had opened because it realized who it was dealing with.

“Something wrong?” I asked, turning my disappointed eyes back to Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo. I was starting to get sick of this conversation.

“What? Ah, no, sorry,” he said, emerging suddenly from his trance, “it's just that that monitor seemed to me to, how to put this . . .”—and here I got the impression that he was improvising—“. . . to be taking its sweet time.”

Whereupon I must have seemed even more confused than before, because he immediately hastened to explain what the hell he was talking about.

“The video security system is operated by the central computer. When a customer comes in, the sensor on the video camera captures the face and automatically transmits it to the monitors; then the computer records everything on the hard drive. Sometimes it happens that a monitor stalls for a few seconds, as if the system had taken too big a bite out of something and were bracing itself to swallow it all down, I'm not sure if that's clear.”

I nodded generically, to convey that I thought I'd grasped the concept, though I still failed to see the connection between that brief treatise on video security and the relative stranger who suddenly seemed so eager to lay it out for me. But he went on, in a hold-on-and-in-a-second-you'll-see-what-I-mean tone of voice.

By that point I didn't really give a damn about seeing what he meant, since I'd already been standing there talking to this gentleman I didn't even know for a good fifteen minutes (moreover it was ten in the morning and I was considering the possibility of swinging by the courthouse, just to see what was going on), but I stayed put and kept listening, more than anything else because It Just Didn't Seem Right.

“Now. If that sort of spell extends even by the slightest amount of time, I'm talking microseconds here, I'd notice it immediately, because it might be an indicator of the onset of a technical glitch of some kind.”

As he was finishing his sentence he pulled out of his jacket pocket a gizmo that looked very much like a remote control and aimed it at the monitor which, according to him, had just malfunctioned. Only he didn't push any buttons, and I could see that clearly.

“Then I suppose that would make you . . .” I said, with a rhetorical flourish.

“The computer engineer who designed the video security system,” he finished, underscoring the words ever so slightly.

“Ohh, I see,” I said (by which I meant: “At last, we can go”).

The truth was that—aside from my complete lack of interest in the topic at hand—I didn't really believe what he was saying. That is, it's not that I thought he was making it up (though I did have my doubts about the idea that the system had problems swallowing its mouthfuls of data), but it seemed to me that the object, or perhaps I should say, the subject of his interest was not the supposed malfunction of a television monitor or anything like that, but more likely the guy dressed like a character from
The Matrix
, whose movements in fact he went on tracking on the monitor while speaking to me. He reminded me, to return to the subject of elevators and the grimness of the temporary relationships established therein, of the Falsely Nonchalant, that is, those people who talk to you about the weather, all the time taking sidelong glances at themselves in the mirror, because they just find themselves so irresistible and delude themselves into thinking that you haven't noticed a thing (just like the people who pick their noses during a conversation, confident that they're fast and clever enough to be able to extract the booger and easily roll it between thumb and forefinger without your catching on). All the same, the detail left me absolutely indifferent: if he liked
Matrix
characters with ponytails, that was entirely his business.