My Mother-in-Law Drinks (26 page)

As you can guess, the horror show in question dates back to the pre-Viagra years. Considering however not even so much the anxiety as the complete failure in terms of performance on the part of the auditioners, in all likelihood the magic pill of our present age would have had no more effect than a Tic Tac.

The purpose of the program (perhaps not directly pursued by the producers and directors themselves, but still very elegantly attained) thus wound up being to confirm the annihilating power of the video camera. Because it's obvious (though not to the participants of
Provini in diretta
, evidently) that to give a sexual performance under the gaggle of lights on a film set (and moreover with a cameraman right there directing traffic and giving you orders like, I don't know, “Now lift your leg” or “Pull out and then go back in”) must be quite a challenge if you're not a professional, or at least a filthy and completely uninhibited pig.

Thinking back on it all these years later,
Provini in diretta
was to a normal reality show what an Ultimate Fighting Champi­onship round is to a normal boxing match. Low blows, in particular, were absolutely allowed. And it was the program itself that administered them.

After all, it too was a reality show (what could be more real than a sexual failure caught on tape?); but the fact that, by exposing the contestant to that emotional massacre, it left the door open to human compassion made it completely unthinkable for a mass audience.

To defend against the risk of sentimentality (which, by creating fellow feeling with the contestant, tend to distance the viewer from the format), the reality show has therefore elevated the art of making an ass of oneself to a core, protected value. It's confined it within certain preset boundaries. It takes extreme care not to arouse compassion. In its universe, there is no such thing.

Exactly the dirty trick that Matrix had just managed to play on the reality show of his imprisonment.

 

“Hey,” I say in a low voice to Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo, in the tone of a friend offering advice, “let it go.”

“Let what go?” he replies, also in a voice just above a whisper.

I glance down at Matrix's puddle, just to make it clear what I'm talking about.

“It's not worth it.”

“What's not worth it?” he asks, pretending not to understand.

I tilt my head toward my shoulder and compress my lips as if to say: “Come on.”

“Oh, yes it is,” he says.

But he's not really convinced, and it shows.

I'm about to reply when, out of the blue, the formerly-hot female journalist from RAI breaks in from the front entrance, thundering from the television monitors in a piqued tone of voice, like a young schoolteacher disciplining a pair of naughty schoolchildren.

“
Can we hear what you're saying too?!?
”
 

Just like that, peremptory, as if we'd just made a rank beginner's mistake.

We all fall silent and turn in her direction, incredulous. In the dramatic pause that ensues she realizes that she's put her foot wrong and starts swiveling her head back and forth, looking first at Scully and now at Mulder as if the two of them were playing Ping-Pong.

I promptly retract whatever blame I was leveling at Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo for having treated her preemptively to a large helping of whoop-ass (he must have already known what an asshole she was); then we exchange a glance as if to say: “You first or me first?”

Me first.

“Listen, you,” I practically shout at her, “if you want to make yourself useful, why don't you just leave?”

The journalist lowers her sails then and there.

Mary Stracqua's ex-cameraman, now a freelancer, instinctively takes a close-up of her face (at that moment I wonder where
her
cameraman is).

“I only wanted to know what was going on,” she explains, her face red as a beet.

“In that case, just watch, and don't bust our balls,” Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo says, beating me to the punch.

The journalist heaves a sigh and the hyenas let loose. It's all a big collective “Waahh,” raucous laughter, and even a few entirely inappropriate offers of sexual services aimed at the poor woman (one, in particular, so horrifies her that she remains wide-eyed as if she'd just visualized the position proposed).

“What I want to know is where's your cameraman?” Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo asks like a punctilious director.

Exactly what I was wondering myself a minute ago.

“Ac . . . tually,” she stammers, “he just went out for a minute to shoot some footage of the exterior and . . .”

“. . . And you don't even know where your cameraman is. Okay, that's all we need to know.”

“All right, Engineer,” the formerly hot female journalist counterattacks in an upsurge of wounded dignity, digging in for the fight, “you got me. Now do you mind if I ask you a few questions?”

“I'm not here to give interviews.”

“Well, you're the one who wanted television coverage, if I'm not mistaken,” she retorts, annoyed. “So let us do our job.”

It seems she shouldn't have said that, because Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo turns ugly again.

“
Your job?
What kind of job did you do for my son? Did your news program by any chance do a piece on him, a feature, an in-depth investigation? Did you talk to me so that I could have my say on the subject? You should have turned this into a cause célèbre, the massacre of two innocent young men: but you aimed low, presented it as a minor news item, one of those tidbits that leave your viewers horrified as they eat their lunch, just long enough to switch over to something completely different, as you like to say in your bland, anodyne language.”

Now he's pushing ahead like an express train, and there's no stopping him.

“Well, I have some news for you: I'm here to do your job. The job you don't seem able to do. The job you don't do. In fact, I've already done it, and now I'm moving on to the next phase. You can stay if you want to, you can film everything that happens and broadcast it live, and that's far more than you deserve. Or you can leave; it makes no difference to me. I don't intend to answer any questions.”

The journalist tries to say something, but Mary Stracqua unexpectedly intervenes in her defense, entirely unasked and out of place.

“Why don't you leave her alone?!” she exclaims, in an irrepressible outburst of feminine solidarity.

“Oh no, you're not telling me
she's
still here, are you?” says Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo, speaking to me instead of her.

And everyone laughs.

In the presence of yet another conversion of tragedy into farce, once again I'm tempted to leave, and I just barely manage to resist the impulse.

“All right,” I say to Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo, “I'll stay.”

He stares at me as if to say: “When did I ask if you would, excuse me?”

I ignore this (especially because he's right), and then I deal a new hand.

“What do you say we restore a minimum of decorum, Engineer? It doesn't seem to me there's anything to laugh at here.”

“You're perfectly right, Counselor. Let's get this over with, I'm in full agreement.”

And he aims his gun at Matrix.

Who clenches his jaw in an expression of defiance.

I don't know whether he reacts this way because he's not afraid of dying or because his criminal instincts tell him that Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo hasn't decided to shoot him yet.

I don't have criminal instincts (at least I don't think I do), but I'm inclined to think it's the latter, right here and now.

Evidently Mulder thinks otherwise, since he addresses Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo from the monitor, even putting both hands in the air, as if the gun were pointed at him.

“Engineer, wait!”

“What do you want, Captain?” Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo asks without lowering his pistol.

“Don't do it,” he whispers, almost as if he were asking it as a personal favor.

And in fact Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo hesitates for a moment.

“Why shouldn't I?”

“Because there's no need. Don't you see that you've already done what you set out to do?”

“You think so? Do you know what day it is today?”

Mulder is stumped.

So I answer for him:

“Wednesday.”

“That's right, Counselor. And do you know what happens, let's say, every other Wednesday, as regular as clockwork for about a year now?”

A rhetorically inquisitorial question, considering that he's glaring contemptuously at Matrix as he asks it.

“This disgusting bastard comes here, to this supermarket, to buy his favorite yogurt,” he says, answering his own question.

Mulder says nothing.

Whereupon Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo goes on to detail the charges with an indignation, it should be said, that is rather touching.

“How could you let such a dangerous criminal move around freely in this neighborhood? How could such a thing be allowed to happen?”

“I honestly don't know, Engineer. Believe me,” Mulder replies, genuinely overcome. “These things do happen, and there's nothing we can do about them. It sometimes happens that fugitives from justice go on leading ordinary lives, and it might take us years to find them. It's not our fault. We do what we can.”

“I have to agree with Mul . . . He's right,” I break in. “You can't put the blame on . . .”

“Stay out of this, Counselor,” the engineer brusquely interrupts me. “You're here to defend that man over there, not the police.”

I'm so taken aback that this time I don't even blush.

“I'm not your henchman,” I reply in a chilly tone. “Address me with due respect.”

He takes my point and arches his eyebrows in a way that to some extent placates me.

“You're right, forgive me,” he excuses himself, shaking his head. “My nerves are shot.”

“Engineer,” Mulder resumes, “please. You've already taken a hostage; don't add murder to the list. Leave him to us. Let us arrest him.”

“So that he can wallow in jail waiting for another trial to start? And who knows when and how that trial will end. Thanks a lot, Captain, but I've already gone through that routine, and you just look where it's brought me.”

Mulder lets out a sigh that sounds very much like surrender.

A disconcerting silence falls, during which we all feel guilty.

Deep inside, however, I have another feeling. Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo's understandable contempt for our society's institutions really grated on me. In part because he's been hammering home the concept for the past hour.

There was a young cousin of mine (the son of an especially idiot uncle) who had the same bad habit: whenever he found a reasonable argument to justify some whim of his, he'd hammer away at it until you wanted to throw him down a staircase.

In fact, one time I did. He hurt himself too, and I didn't really care much, truth be told.

“Perhaps I should stay out of this too, Engineer,” I intervene, convinced I'm being witty, “but we get it that you have no respect for the Italian justice system.”

He turns to look at me, closes his eyes and opens them again, with an aristocratic remoteness that makes me want to tell him, in great detail, exactly what I rather confusedly think of him.

“The facts are entirely on your side, okay? Your arguments are impeccable, there's nothing wrong with them at all, they're completely wrinkle-free, in fact
you're
completely wrinkle-free, it's as if you'd been perfectly ironed, you look like one of Andrea Viberti's shirts, and none of us is capable of out-arguing you—there, are you happy now?”

I can see that he's a little bewildered by the mention of Andrea Viberti, but I'm not going to take the time to explain to him that he's a frighteningly well-dressed friend of mine in whose presence, as another friend of mine once put it, shirts seem to iron themselves; I just keep going full steam, by no means certain that the contents of my tirade are on a level with the vehemence that I display, as I convulsively pursue my various lines of argument, speaking at a breakneck speed to keep him from having a chance to think.

“And since that's the way things seem to be, let's just dispense with this whole farce: of the trial, of television as the ideal venue for a proper defense, and so on and so forth. Whatever you say you still understand perfectly that by pissing himself Calogero here, whatever the hell his name is, has just ruined your broadcast; otherwise you wouldn't have shot me that conspiratorial look a little while ago. Your reality show is finished, and we both know it. Go on, admit it. Porn . . .”

I stop and listen to the echo of this last word, which basically just tumbled out of my mouth, and I gaze at the look of horror on Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo's face, as he stands there wondering what the fucking hell I just said.

Out of the corner of my eye I register the cameraman's profile and see that his jaw has collapsed.

Even Mary Stracqua seems baffled.

It is in this exact moment that it becomes clear that I'm in the throes of a space-time trauma.

The fact is that I ought to avoid abandoning myself to these kinds of dialectical improvisations when I'm pursuing a complex concept. Because when that happens my thoughts and, as a direct result, my words tend to travel along at different speeds on two parallel tracks, whereby I wind up taking a little from here and a little from there, and expressing myself like someone with a dissociative personality disorder.

Let me explain: it's like when a friend comes over for dinner, and afterward you both take a seat on the sofa to watch TV, and you sort of doze off at a certain point, but since your friend keeps talking you answer him anyway because it seems rude to be sleeping while he's chatting away at you, so you come out with responses that are at first a little vague and then increasingly incongruous, because in the meanwhile you've started dreaming and, since you're being stimulated by the voice of your friend who goes on talking (because in these cases friends always seem to become inexplicably loquacious), what you do in effect is to reply with words from your dream (like, I don't know, “Let's take the boat, it'll be safer,” after he asked you whether the actress who just showed up isn't the same one who played X's wife in film Y), until after a couple of these demented replies your friend shakes you by the shoulder to determine whether you're asleep or actually insane, so you wake up with a jerk, knowing with absolute certainty that you've uttered a string of nonsense, even though you can't remember a word of it.