My Mother-in-Law Drinks (22 page)

Because you can't interrupt a person who's grieving and who's right.

H
ave you ever felt a lack of desire to express youself? I don't mean a lack of desire to talk: to express yourself, specifically. To express feelings, tastes, attitudes, ways of looking at life. No, eh? Well, that's how I've been feeling, ever since I left that supermarket.

Let's be clear: I'm not depressed. I'm not a shut-in, I don't walk for hours at random (which in the end is the same thing as being a shut-in), I don't drive around aimlessly, I don't ruin dinners I'm invited to, I get normal amounts of sleep on a regular schedule, I don't do drugs, I smoke and drink in moderation.

And it's not even that I'm not interested in what I would have to say. It's that I don't feel like making the effort of seeking out a form to give my thoughts in order to make them accessible. Reaching out to others has its cost, that's the thing.

But in private I produce lots and lots of material that some might even go so far as to describe as intelligent. There are times, in fact, when I'm astonished at certain intuitions that come to me when I'm just walking down the street or eavesdropping on snatches of the conversations of the people who walk past me.

Take the day before yesterday, for instance. I was walking past a hoity-toity wine bar, a place that only opened recently. Just then I remembered that when I was a boy that building was an art nouveau movie theater, and a really nice one. This theater, since it was on the outskirts of town and had a clientele that was not particularly well-to-do, showed discounted movies. That is, it showed films that the movie houses in the city center had just stopped showing. In other words, it was a secondhand movie theater; they weren't even really second-run movies, or reruns, that's not the right term; they were new movies set aside on layover, and the deferred projections, which we enjoyed once the theaters in the center of the city were done with them, corresponded to the class divisions of society, which in those days were much more clearly drawn than they are today.

During the times of year when the first-run movie theaters shut down for the holidays, and there were no leftover films to offer us, the discount art nouveau movie house showed some films that were truly unbelievable (and lowered its ticket prices even more); I can't imagine where they found them. Like that one whose title I've never been able to forget,
Tarzak Against the Leopard Men.
(Tarza
k
, you get it? Isn't that
k
a
 
masterpiece?)

When this movie theater folded, in the sense that the owners just gave up running it because it was no longer bringing in satisfactory receipts, it had an afterlife straight out of the handbook: first the city took over its operation, transforming it into a sort of art house theater, then that folded too, and so they shut it down again and after that it reopened as a porn theater.

This phenomenon, typical of the outlying parts of the city, this downward spiral that unfailingly leads to the porn industry, which expropriates a resource once intended for the public and assigns it a use diametrically opposed to that which had inspired its salvage, has always had a slightly neorealist effect on me. Porn thriving where culture fails, and even showing culture how wrong it was. Decadence sets its seal, certifying the final act of surrender.

And so, as I walked past the former art nouveau discount movie house, which then became something of an art-house, indie cinema, only to become a porn theater and, in its present incarnation, a wine bar
con cucina
(that is, basically, a restaurant) frequented by young urban happy-hour militants who leave home dressed as if they were going to an audition for the dating show
Uomini e Donne
, it occurred to me that porn, at least until the advent of the Internet (which once and for all shifted the channels of consumption to home viewing, a transformation that had already begun with the spread of videocassette players), had unfailingly performed the distinctive function of propping up movie theaters that were running in the red. Porn put them back on their feet when it seemed like there was nothing left to be done, inevitably showing up at the end of a degenerative process, like a hyena rooting around in search of carrion.

And at that point I also realized that porn always comes after something else. After the death of Eros, after a bankruptcy, a business failure, the end of a dream. To celebrate itself, porn needs uninhabited, deserted spaces. The only concept of development driving it as an enterprise is profit. And so it takes over a failing business and avoids having to pay any startup costs. It settles the territory for as long as there's money to be made and then moves on to the next operation, since one place is just as good as any other.

But who should I tell them to, thoughts of this kind? My problem is a motivational deficit when it comes to the effort of transmitting them. It's sort of like when you sign up for a gym membership, and you start out with the very best intentions, and for the first few weeks you don't miss a single day; then the motivation gradually begins to subside until one day, as you're lying there on your back on a bench hoisting a couple of dumbbells, you suddenly stop and ask yourself: “What the fuck am I even doing this for?” And you stop going.

The only person I seem able to talk to these days—aside from Espedito Lenza, the accountant/financial adviser and cotenant of the office space we theoretically both work in (though I'm not sure that “talking” is the right word to describe the verbal activity I engage in with him)—is my mother-in-law.

I know that technically I ought to say “ex-mother-in-law,” but I just can't seem to do it. In part because it has never even occurred to me to consider Assunta as belonging to my past. And then also because the concept of “ex” is already implicit in the concept of the mother-in-law, in my opinion.

The in-law, as a category, is by definition someone who
has been
: worker, husband or wife, mother or father, plus a whole multitude of secondary positions and lieutenancies and proxies of all sorts occupied over the course of a lifetime. Such a person has performed so many different jobs that once they attain the status of father- or mother-in-law it's a little bit like being made senator for life. They're an ex inasmuch as they're a father- or mother-in-law, in other words. So true is this that their highest (and last) aspiration is to become a grandparent (which in turn means telling their grandchildren the story of their life and therefore, once again, behaving like an ex).

The nice thing about talking with my mother-in-law, I was saying, is that with her you never have to justify anything you've done. I know that sounds a little odd, but if you think about it, the majority of human interactions is to a very large degree made up of justifications.

Assunta, on the other hand—either because she's allergic to extra verbiage, or because she has an extremely prehensile intelligence and is very quick to grasp concepts, or because she can't stand people who piss and moan (and also because, let's be frank, when she wants to she can be a bitch on wheels)—has this prerogative that is entirely her own, i.e., she never expects anything from other people, and I mean nothing from nobody, and since she communicates this from the outset, this complete lack of interest in profit, whatever form it might take, this predication of the relationship on a totally gratuitous footing, she puts you wonderfully at your ease. Because it's wonderful to interact with someone who asks nothing of you (which is after all the founding contract of all friendships, as well as the reason that friendships break off).

Make no mistake: she's not an easy woman to get along with, Ass. It's not as if she behaves this way with everyone. This is how she makes friends. It's a special treatment, reserved only for those she likes.

The really remarkable thing (and it astonishes me, because you'd expect it to be the other way around) is that, even now that she's sick,
she
's the one who keeps
me
company. Who raises my spirits, even.

I drop by to see her every night (after seven, when I leave my office; you can easily imagine the wisecracks I get from that idiot Espedito), and I really believe that if my list of appointments for the day didn't include a short visit to see my ex-wife's mamma, these days I'd be short on meaningful human relationships (with the exception, obviously, of Alagia and Alfredo; but the relationships one has with one's children, of course, are not simply human, they're superhuman), and I wouldn't even miss them all that much.

The fact is that ever since I walked away (unharmed, luckily: otherwise I wouldn't be here to tell the tale) from that whole hostage-taking affair, everything has—how to put this—become superficialized. I mean it. It's as if suddenly reality had started to do a shimmy and grind all around me. As if reality were suddenly terribly interested in taking care of me.

Sometimes it's embarrassing how considerate and kind reality can be with me. It invites me places, it sends for me, it sees me home. It gets me things. Special deals. Delicacies. It always puts easy-listening music on in the background (though I could do without that, to be honest).

I don't know if you've ever had reality doing a shimmy and grind around you. I imagine you have. I think that everyone, at least when they were young (between the ages of twenty and twenty-five, let's say), has had their period of social bliss with reality doing a shimmy and grind. Maybe it only lasted a total of six days, but they've had it. And they'll never forget it.

It's the down-home equivalent of the fifteen minutes of fame theorized by Andy Warhol. If it happens to you when you're young, it's wonderful. The kind of period in which you inexplicably move from a condition of semi-insignificance to one of widespread admiration, and suddenly in your little universe you become someone without having done anything to deserve it.

That's when girls all of a sudden notice that you exist. And that incomprehensible phenomenon of emulation and competition is suddenly unleashed among them, whereby they start clustering around you four or five at a time. All you need is for one of them to show some interest in you and the others will imitate her in a chain reaction. Practically speaking, you become a novelty. You become fashionable.

At the same time (in part because of this newly acquired popularity with females) it happens that lots and lots of male friends start to reach out to you. Including those you'd long ago lost touch with. And you go to lots of parties. And people laugh at everything you say. And they ask you where you bought your shoes and the tattered orange sweater you've been wearing for seven years now. And the girl who dumped you last month and treated you like a bathmat is going around telling everyone that she can't understand what went wrong between the two of you (especially now that you're going out with Renata Falci, who's cute as hell), since she was head over heels with you the whole time. And she thinks that by sending you the message via a third party she'll have you running back to her doorstep like a delivery boy (because you're kidding yourself if you think she's going to go to all the trouble of coming to you and crawling at your feet, begging for another chance, like you did at least twelve times before), only of course you never call her (first of all because you're going out with Renata Falci, and second because the last thing on earth you would do is call her, now that you know that's what she expects you to do), and so after a couple of days she calls you (in the early afternoon: she always calls at that time of day, to take advantage of postprandial sleepiness, probably), asking why you called her; whereupon you say to her: “Look, I didn't call you”; and she plunges into a bewildered silence, as if she had no idea what you're talking about (she's very good at conveying this sense of genuine disorientation), then she replies: “Hold on a minute: my sister told me that you called last night looking for me, I thought you wanted to tell me something”; and you say: “Your sister?”; and she doesn't answer, to emphasize the fact that your question was purely rhetorical, then (in a skeptical voice): “Ah, well, okay, in that case, sorry, my sister must have been confused”: and you say: “But how did your sister get the impression that it was me, if it wasn't me? Did the person who called say he had the same name as me?”; and she (after counting to five): “Are you by any chance trying to say that I made the whole thing up just to have an excuse to talk to you?”; and you think: Noo, of course not! but instead you answer: “I'm just saying that I didn't call you, that's all”; and at this point she pulls the evidentiary ace out of her sleeve, the ace that according to her lamebrain strategy ought to safely place her above all suspicion and she says, verbatim (in a tone of voice like And-now-let's-see-what-you-say-to-this): “Hey, listen, my sister's right here. Right next to me. Do you want me to put her on, so she can tell you herself?”; and you say (starting to get a little irritated): “I don't have any reason to talk to your sister. Why the fuck should I talk to your sister? So that she can talk me into believing that I called your house when I didn't?”; and she says: “All right, all right, I get it, there's no need for you to shout, there must have been some kind of misunderstanding, sorry for the call”; and you say (coldly, after having made an enormous effort to control the uptick in blood pressure that has pushed you close to nervous collapse): “No problem”; after which a very brief meditative pause ensues, and then she goes: “Are you dating Renata Falci?”

Another typical effect of the period of social bliss that you experience when you're young is this: if you play an instrument (especially the guitar), suddenly everyone's talking about you as if you're really good. And when they see you pluck and strum, like at a party, everyone sits around you and listens to you play in the most reverential silence, as if you were executing remarkable feats of virtuosity, even though the hardest thing you've done has been to play a diminished chord (and even then it took you a full minute to switch from the chord you played before). And there's always some guy who asks if you'd be willing to give him lessons, even though you're totally unqualified to give anyone else lessons, seeing as you've never taken any yourself, having only ever played by ear, and you modestly decline the request, while at the same time letting him think that you could if you wanted to.