My Mother-in-Law Drinks (3 page)

So I extended my hand and assumed my customary stance of departure (leaning slightly forward from the waist, standard businesslike smile, right leg just starting to lift into a step, vaguely reminiscent of the actor Alberto Sordi).

“It's been, ahem, a pleasure to meet you, Engineer, but now I ought to be . . .”

“Do you handle criminal cases as well, Counselor?” he asked me in reply, as he stood staring (by now openly) at the video monitor behind me.

Whereupon I just stood there stupidly, hand outstretched, which by the way is a position I detest because it creates a panhandling effect that increases with the fury of an avalanche.

“I . . . sure, when it comes up,” I said, but in the quizzical tone of voice that comes naturally when someone asks a question out of left field.

And at last I withdrew my hand, which by now had become a sort of prosthesis.

“When it comes up,” he repeated, leaning on the four words and staring at me as if to say that he really intended to remember that. This last bit of ambiguity really plucked my last nerve.

“Listen, you're acting kind of strange, you know that?” I told him flat out, somewhat rudely. In fact, my jaw had set firmly.

Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo once again fixed his gaze on the monitor. Behind him, at the end of the aisle, Matrix appeared, coming toward us with the brisk step of someone who knows exactly what he's looking for.

“Yes, I know,” the engineer replied at last, his voice dropping an octave. “But there's a reason for it, believe me.”

I instinctively shot a glance over at Matrix, who kept coming closer, even though he seemed entirely indifferent to us.

“Don't look at him, please,” Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo begged me under his breath.

Whereupon I replied, whispering in turn out of an automatic instinct for imitation:

“Hey, listen to me, I don't know what you're up to, but whatever it is, I want nothing to do with it.”

And he replied, still under his breath:

“In that case, get out of here now, Counselor, because something's about to happen that you might not want to see.”

 

Hooooold everything.

 

You've just heard the kind of phrase that basically leaves you without any alternatives.

If someone tells you to leave because any minute now something's going to happen that would be better for you not to see, do you leave? Of course you don't: you can't. Because by that point you're already in. And the worst part of it is that you have no idea in what. Maybe it's a tragedy that you have a chance of preventing. Perhaps someone's about to die and you could save them. Or else nothing could happen at all (in which case it was theoretically possible that all Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo wanted to do was pick Matrix up and take him back to the privacy of the stockroom): and in that case you'd enjoy the benefits of courage without having to lift a finger.

One alternative would be to run off and call the police: but what if the tragedy occurs just as you're rushing to get help? Tragedies, it's well known, take place in a matter of seconds. What are you going to do, miss that crucial instant? The carpe diem ethos works in tragic proceedings as well. It's far too convenient to trot it out only when you're trying to get someone into bed. Your conscience would torment you for the rest of your life, and it would be right, of course. You might try to tell it, “I couldn't have done anything about it anyway,” and it would reply, “Sure, but you didn't know that when you took to your heels.”

The fact is that there are situations in which you have to stay, even at the risk of getting involved in something inconvenient. It's no fun to say it, but that's how it is. From outside the situation it's easy to shake your head no. But just find yourself in the midst of things happening all at once, then come talk to me about it.

Just to give an example, I know some people who, a few months before getting married, used to go out walking with their doubts in tow (there was no mistaking what was happening because when you ran into them, you'd see them arm in arm, the doubts), and these people, even though you could see it on their faces that all they wanted to do was cancel the wedding, you understood just as clearly that they were absolutely incapable of mounting that revolution, so all that was left for them to do was to go out for a walk in the early afternoon.

One huge lie that we have inherited from the rhetoric of liberty is that when it comes to the important decisions in life there's always time to go back and make a change. But it isn't true. Because time passes, and it's not willing to cooperate with anyone or anything. Time has no patience for ignorance. Just like the law. It's no accident that the whole concept of the statute of limitations is based on the passage of time. And if legislators (which is more or less like saying God, in that field) based such a nitpicky mechanism on the passage of time, there must be a reason. Time has a compromising effect, no doubt about it. And those who jilt their fiancées at the altar (I've never heard a story in which the opposite happens), even if their deed, in the accounts of subsequent generations, tends to be regarded as a masterly blow that few on earth have ever had the nerve to strike, are individuals who turn their backs on time, and their reputations as free men should be reevaluated once and for all, because there's nothing praiseworthy about humiliating a woman in front of her friends and family after the corsages have all been chosen, unsightly though they well may be.

F
rom what I know about myself, walking into a supermarket in the middle of the morning on a weekday is never a good sign. Especially if the supermarket is on the far side of town.

What happens to me when something starts to go wrong, especially in periods when it seems like everything's going just fine, is that a kind of frenzy, a frustration, a jumpiness comes over me, so that I have to go out wandering, as if I'm looking for something I've lost.

And since I can hardly wander around looking for nothing in particular, and given that I have no idea what it is I need but nevertheless feel a sense of disquiet that prevents me from going for an ordinary stroll (because an ordinary stroll requires a clear conscience), I invent nonessential errands for myself, such as, in fact, in this case, buying a jar of Buitoni Fior di Pesto.

The fact is that since Alessandra Persiano has come to live with me, a few things have happened.

The first thing is that a number of my fellow lawyers have stopped saying hello to me.

The second thing is that many other fellow lawyers who never used to say hello to me have started saying hello to me now.

Obviously, there isn't a bit of difference between the former and the latter: in both cases, the motive is envy.

There's one (he's called Massimo Corrente, though I really shouldn't name names) who's become a real problem. He waits for me outside the hearing rooms, shoots me defiant glances in the hallways (at times he even puts his hands on his hips, so that the only thing missing is for him to say, “Excuse me, would you mind looking somewhere else, thanks”), he walks past and lightly grazes me when I stop to talk with a colleague or (less frequently) with a client, he harasses me with anonymous phone calls, all silent, except for those times when he abandons himself to guttural panting.

One night when I just couldn't take it anymore I shot back, “Come on, you animal, tell me what you're wearing, I'm already in my underwear,” and that put an end to that. But if he doesn't stop persecuting me I'm going to report him for stalking.

Anyway, this whole thing with my colleagues who, one way or another, can't seem to wrap their heads around my new love affair has turned into a pain in the neck. Not a serious one, granted, but still equipped with all the essential features that characterize a genuine pain in the neck: frequency, persistence, monomania.

Now I'm not trying to say that this is the reason for my recent problems with Alessandra Persiano, but the fact that a small army of obsessives like the one I just described should be hard at work injecting poison into my daily existence has its inevitable consequences for my life as a member of a couple.

Okay, at first success is extremely gratifying. The fact that the public recognizes your better qualities is obviously something that brings pleasure. Especially if those qualities are confirmed by a hot babe who makes people (let alone lawyers) turn around in the street. And even more so if you're completely fucking worthless as a lawyer.

All right, let's tell it like it is: the best thing about success is detecting that sense of inferiority in other people's eyes.

It's a deliciously vulgar sensation, and no one will ever admit to it, but it's just to experience that feeling that everyone wants to be successful. After a little while, though, things start to get complicated. In the sense that every so often you're tempted to stop one of them, one of those loser doormen who shoot you glances as you walk past, and say to him, “So tell me, you think I'm so repulsive that I couldn't possibly be with a beautiful woman? What did you expect, that she'd shack up with you? Have you taken a look at yourself in the mirror lately?”

In short, when you're being observed to the point where you feel like you're posing for a calendar, after a while the suspicion starts to set in that you've wound up in someone else's place sheerly by accident, and that just when you least expect it he will return to reclaim that place and send you back to the losers' quarters, where in fact you grew up and where your old friends will be waiting to welcome you back with open arms.

Which is precisely the kind of dilemma these vultures are trying to push you into.

At first, when I confided in Alessandra Persiano about this sort of persecution, she would say, “Just enjoy it.”

And then I pointed out that it wasn't becoming to pay yourself compliments.

“Pay myself compliments? I'm paying you a compliment, you idiot,” she would reply.

And I didn't know what else to say.

The third thing that's happened to me since this truly beautiful woman has come to live with me is that my ex-wife has started asking for the alimony check that she used to refuse categorically in a display of the compassion she's always shown for my miserable income.

And when I asked her if she didn't think that becoming such a stickler immediately after a woman other than her moved in with me didn't seem at least slightly suspicious as far as coincidences go, she replied in no uncertain terms:

“Oh, certainly I'm doing it on purpose, I'd have to be a weasel to deny it. I need to punish you, and this is the only method I have at the moment for processing the pain that you've caused me by letting another woman into your life.”

“It seems to me that I ought to remind you that you lived with that gigolo of an architect for two and a half years after you dumped me, Nives. Was that just a way of processing your pain, too?”

“Don't you dare try it, Vincenzo. I'm not going to let you manipulate me with your chronological evaluation of events. I'm mad at you, I have to find an outlet for my aggressive impulses, and the way things stand now it doesn't do me a bit of good to worry about whether it's wrong or right.”

“Christ, Nives. You're a psychologist.”

“Now don't start referring to our roles as a way of making me feel guilty.”

“What are you talking about roles for, Nives, I was referring to income. It takes me three months to scrape together what you earn in one.”

“So? You can't lean on the idea that the costs of our divorce are a burden to be borne only by me.”

“But you broke up with me.”

“At first. But after that I wanted to get back together.”

And so we went back and forth like this for a good half hour, with me pacing up and down the hall of my apartment sweating like a moving man, trying to talk some sense into her, and her trying to explain to me that there was nothing objectionable in her behaving like an asshole.

In the end, I shouted at her to go get screwed by a cooperative of unemployed butchers, but not before telling her I hoped that all her patients, every last one of them, would commit suicide en masse, thus providing an excellent advertisement for her practice.

She must not have cared for this last line, because she hung up without another word, and when I called back to tell her that I had only been kidding it went straight to voice mail.

Then there was what happened with her mother, which helped us get things back onto an even keel somewhat.

L
isten, I think that I'd better . . . call the police,” I stammered, in the pathetic hope that such a clumsily expressed threat might dissuade Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo from his intentions, whatever they might be.

“There's no need, they'll be here before long. Now if you'll excuse me,” he replied with the mechanical calm that comes an instant before launching oneself into an undertaking whose outcome is unforeseeable.

And he finally strolled off, nonchalantly trailing after Matrix, who in the meantime had reached us and walked past without so much as a glance, turning down the next aisle, where on the near side was stationed the refrigerator case full of dairy products and fresh pasta, and on the far side there was the fruit and vegetable section, with the self-service scales, the plastic bags, the cellophane gloves, and all the rest of the necessary equipment.

I stayed put, between the canned tomatoes and the boxed pasta, enlisted in spite of my own intentions, cursing the moment I decided to walk into that supermarket (where it was fucking freezing, moreover) to buy a jar of Buitoni Fior di Pesto, and anyway, I must already have at least eleven jars of Buitoni Fior di Pesto at home; in fact, Alessandra Persiano makes fun of me every time she opens the pantry and finds them lined up like toy soldiers, Look at this, you still shop like a single man, she says, and she laughs, Ha ha.