My Mother-in-Law Drinks (20 page)

T
he attire that Mary Stracqualurso chose for the special edition broadcast: a mutt-colored light-wool skirt suit; a patterned blouse with an unwatchable slit between the buttons right in the middle of the tits (through which, even from here, you can just make out a hint of lace); an Hermès scarf wrapped around her neck loosely like a tie, as if she'd just reported a two-hour piece from Baghdad; a bad dye job with visible roots; pearl earrings; ballet flats that a teenage girl might wear; and a fountain pen poking out of her jacket pocket.

From the controlled excitement she adopts as she reports the news she must feel very CNN right now. And, in fact, once—I swear—I actually heard her say on TV: “My colleague Peter Arnett” (who is, for those who might not remember, the journalist who not only won a Pulitzer Prize in 1966 for his reporting in Vietnam, but became very famous twenty or so years ago for his coverage of the Gulf War for, you guessed it, CNN).

“We interrubt our recularly zcheduled procramming for an extraordinary edition of the news,” she announces; and then a dramatic pause ensues.

“‘Our regularly scheduled programming'?” I dismiss the phrase mentally with the speed of an old maid commenting on the courtyard below. “Our normal home-shopping shows, is what you mean.”

God, I can be cutting when I want to be.

“I'm sbeaking to you from the vront entrance of the Migliaro subermarget,” the dean of local reporters says, finally getting to the point, “on the wesdern outsgirds of the zity, where, as var as we gan dell, a gitnabbing appears to have daken blace a short dime aco.”

Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo, Matteo the deli counterman, and I turn to look at one another, wondering just what the “wesdern outsgirds” might be (mouthing the question just slightly out of sync), and then almost immediately exchange an “Ah, yes,” nodding our heads.

“Thus var,” Mary goes on, accompanying herself with the leer of the incorrigible joker who can't keep herself from getting off a line, even when she knows it's out of place, “nothing particularly oritchinal, if you forgive me the choke, ha ha.”

We are all thrown into a state of bewilderment similar to that caused by minor earthquakes, when you look around in search of other eyes that might share your suspicions (in the monitor, in fact, I lock eyes with the scandalized visages of Mulder and Scully).

Matrix stares at Mary Stracqua on the TV screen, his face twisted and his distress showing in every fiber of his body, as if he was having a tremendously hard time translating, or else simply couldn't believe his own ears, or else was mortified at the realization that the story of his first (I'd have to guess) live onscreen capture should have been entrusted to the specimen in question, or perhaps all three.

I sympathize with his dilemma, and I have to remind myself how much I hate him in order to tamp down a feeling of fellowship.

We hardly have the time to recover from our astonishment before TeleCessPool's Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter goes on to finish her thought.

“. . . If it weren't vor the vact,” she goes on, savoring the imminent scoop, “that the gitnabbing is still under way, and apove all that we can actually proadcast it live, since it was gaptured from the very beginning by the subermarget's system of videosurfeilliance.”

Look at her: her nostrils are flaring with satisfaction.

“In this kind of store, as you know, the glosed-circuid monidors are gondinually vilming: which means that the gitnabbing was regorded by the system, and so it won't even be necessary to infesticate to find the griminals, and the bolice will vind that half their work is already done, ha ha.”

In the glacial pause that follows I find that thus far, all things considered, aside from that masterpiece of fine taste concerning the lack of originality of this hostage taking, the ridiculous diction, the wisdom of the closing statement, and the accompanying side dishes of idiotic giggles, she has not yet said anything inaccurate, journalistically speaking.

Instinctively, I triangulate once again with Matteo the deli counterman and Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo, finding confirmation of my impression in their faces. And so, when Maestra Stracqua resumes, we find ourselves all a bit more willing to listen to what she says.

“It cives the imbression of peing in an American mofie, with the pankrobbers locked inside the pank and the bolice outside necotiating to free the hostatches.”

“Oh, how Pindaric,” I comment inwardly.

If we were in an American movie, by now the building would be surrounded by dozens of police cars, with sharpshooters posted on nearby roofs, black-and-yellow police tape cordoning off an extensive surrounding area, a screaming crowd split up into sympathizers and those who would like to see the hostage takers locked up, and the most popular TV networks of the country competing for live coverage, and Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo would already be negotiating with a hard-bitten cop played by someone like Harvey Keitel or Tommy Lee Jones, who would have already told him to remain calm more than once, and made a certain number of fairly compromising personal commitments in exchange for a rapid and bloodless resolution.

But this is reality (which is like a movie with poor production values and a screenplay written by dilettantes), and so all we have to entertain us, at least for the present moment, is a pair of carabinieri awaiting reinforcements and Mary Stracqua behind the microphone.

“The divverence,” Peter Arnett's Neapolitan colleague continues, carefully lowering her eyelids to half-mast (I know that inspired hesitation: she's preparing to deliver an authorial insight!), “which chust coes to show how reality always outsdribs the imatchination . . .”

Wooow! I say to myself.

I practically burst into applause.

Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo (I'm not kidding) mops his forehead, as if listening to this idiot talk were physically exhausting.

“. . . is that in this gase we gan follow in real dime what's coing on inside the store, so it seems reasonaple to think that this is politigally motifated.”

. . . Oookay, I think to myself, with a sigh of relief. Once again, she just made it.

Jesus, that was hard. Like watching a depressive go for a walk on a ledge high up on the side of an apartment building. I can't wait for some other television station to show up, depriving Mary (at least) of the exclusive live feed, and freeing us from this torture.

I take a breath, look around, and the faces I see look as exhausted as my own. Matrix, on the other hand, has become completely expressionless. Up until now his expressions have ranged from lèse-majesté to impulses toward revenge, but what I see on his face now is a blank slate, a horrendously placid surface.

I'm reminded of those TV shows set in hospital emergency rooms where the doctor steps away for a few seconds only to find upon his return that the wounded patient is already as stiff as a board. Mary Stracqua's reporting from the front entrance must have stunned him, that much is clear.

I try to put myself in his shoes, recapitulating the events, and I think to myself: Now then. I'm handcuffed to the metal rail of a dairy case in a supermarket on the outskirts of the city; there are a dozen or so television monitors showing me in this humiliating condition; I'm probably going to die, because the guy who set up this whole prank doesn't exactly seem interested in letting me leave except feet-first; I still don't know why all this is happening to me, and to cover the live broadcast of my ultimate misfortune they've sent an aging bumpkin of a TV journalist from a local network who can't speak proper Italian and gets off an idiotic one-liners.

At the conclusion of this sort of train of thought, as is only natural, my emotions are all in turmoil. And this undermining of the defensive impulse, this apathetic surrender to whatever the future may bring, is a typical product of the state of confusion that Mary Stracqua seems to cause in anyone who listens to her.

When you find yourself forced into a corner, the only tool at your disposal that can possibly get you out of that situation is a clear head, the ability to make the most of even the faintest glimmer of a chance you have. You have to think fast, and you must be rigorously selective in the steps you take.

Mary, however, compromises all strategic and, more generally, all intellectual activity. She draws you out of yourself, she hijacks you, making you worry about her instead of yourself, leaving you with your heart in your throat every time she starts a new sentence and, especially, every time she finishes one. I can't imagine that there's a human being on the planet capable of withstanding the stress of these continuous acts of transference.

I include Matrix's reaction in the general symptomatology common to anyone who has undergone this surreal experience, and I come to the surprising conclusion that, when it comes to Mary Stracqua, even the Camorra is powerless.

“The store,” Naples's own Oriana Fallaci continues, “has been evacuated” (this one, by dumb luck, she pronounces perfectly), “the situation is already under gontrol, the puilding is about to be gordoned off, and vurther reinvorcements are on their way. No demands have yet been issued for the liperation of the hostach who, as these sequences show, is still in the gitnabbers' hands.”

From this side of the Stracqua Reality Show we remain mystified, but we don't even have the time to process this last phrase before the mental defective completes her defamatory tour de force, delivering a final, fatal blow.

“Here,” she says, pointing to the monitor being filmed by the video camera held by her unfortunate cameraman and assistant, “as you gan see, it's bossible to clearly see the outline of a man with his hands behind his back, and three other intifichuals, all without masks.”

There must be something intrinsically ridiculous about the dismay that suddenly appears on all our faces; otherwise I can't explain the hint of a smile that has just appeared on Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo's lips.

I don't know what the hell I'm feeling: something like the kind of muttering sound your computer makes when you're sitting there waiting, starting to suspect that okaying that automatic update was a big mistake.

“Hey,” Matteo the deli counterman says, breaking the silence, bright red from the seriousness of the accusation, “what the hell is this woman saying?”

Then he turns to Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo, conferring upon him directorial authority, as if to say: “What, you're not going to speak up?”

The engineer, contrary to my expectations, keeps his cool in the face of the gross libel perpetrated by the cretinous newscaster. If anything, he seems determined to have some fun with her.

A masochistic pleasure that, all things considered, I'm equally eager to enjoy.

“As you gan imatchine,” Mary Stracqua barrels on, “we are in the bresence of an anomalous case, goncerning which there is zdill a great teal to be dedermined, but bersonally, considering the nature of the agtion, I wouldn't rule out the hybothesis of a derrorist oberation.”

Whereupon Matteo the deli counterman waves his little hat like a white flag, calling attention to the harmlessness of his uniform; sort of like saying: “Hey, take a look at me, does this look like a terrorist's outfit to you?”

I scan the monitors for Mulder and Scully, and they seem to be just as disconcerted by the shamefully irresponsible information that Mary Stracqua continues to spout, ravaging that minimum of journalistic ethics that even an illiterate like her ought to be conscious of, if only from having heard others refer to it.

The two of them stand there, exchanging off-kilter glances, focusing on the idiot like two hunting dogs, driven by the impulse to tear the microphone out of her hand and at the same time restrained by the risk of being accused of infringing on the freedom of the press on live TV.

This further, perverse combination of circumstances that conspire once again in Mary Stracqua's favor, allowing her to spew her bullshit with impunity, with no objections from anyone, triggers an irrepressible rage within me.

I break in, and it feels as if I've just shattered the blank wall of
omertà
that has protected this living disgrace for far too long. The feeling that I'm taking the law into my own hands, seeing that justice is served retroactively, fills me with a sublime dizziness. If this is what cocaine is like, I understand why so many people snort it.

“Listen, Signora Stracqualurso, there's something I'm dying to know.”

She looks around, disoriented. I doubt that Mulder and Scully failed to inform her of the presence of the microphones, but, impatient to blurt out the news and self-centered as she is, she probably didn't take the time to add two and two.

“Here, over here,” I come to her aid.

I mean the monitor in front of her, which I'm speaking to her from and in which she can see me.

“I'm right here. Don't you recognize me? You just pointed me out to your audience as an alleged terrorist, why would you look at me now with that bovine expression?”

She turns salmon pink, as she struggles to comprehend the technological wonders of the new millennium.

The monitors show new arrivals among the rubberneckers crowded just outside the door: a large band of hooligans elbowing their way into the front row. They don't even know what's going on yet and already they're commenting. Unemployed hyenas, it's clear. The kind of guys that wander the streets in search of somebody else's business to stick their noses into (preferably of a catastrophic nature). But nobody beats them when it comes to stadium waves, there's no doubt about that.

“So tell me,” I ask, doing my best to look sincerely interested, “do you pick your clothes out on your own, or do you have an ill-intentioned girlfriend giving you advice?”

She looks at me in confusion. Matrix and Matteo the deli counterman also seem somewhat baffled. Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo, on the other hand, opens his eyes wide and then puts his hand over his mouth.