My Mother-in-Law Drinks (30 page)

Alessandra Persiano was exactly the way you would expect a woman in love to be in a situation of that nature: sweet, considerate, proud of me and my televised performance, happy that nothing bad had happened to me, humanely showing concern for the tragedy of Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo, intellectually disturbed by the issues that the live televised hostage taking raised with regard to the inadequacies of courtroom trials and the media spectacle that's taken over the administration of justice.

As is always the case when you escape unscathed from a traumatic experience, we became frantically talkative, seized by the need to compulsively recount everything that happened without skipping a single detail, a single line of dialogue, comparing notes from our different points of view, as if by cross-referencing and juxtaposing them, taking turns interrupting each other and finishing each other's sentences, we were trying to come up with a shared, definitive solemn version of events, one that was our and ours alone.

And I was constantly filling in, completing, and adding every last minuscule detail that surfaced in my memory, giving in (this is the truth) to the presumption that I somehow knew much more about it than those who had seen the whole thing on TV (more or less like when you travel to see an away soccer match, and when you get home your friends, who watched the same match on TV, still pepper you with questions, as if you'd seen the real match and they'd only watched an imitation).

At a certain point, Ale latched on to the theory of the television lawyer that Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo had drummed into me so obsessively, treating me like some sort of cretin who doesn't know what world he's living in, and for a good half an hour that was all that we talked about.

“You know,” she chose to confide in me, with a discretion that seemed to say: “This is just between us” (even though it was at least the fourth time that she'd repeated the concept), “I'm uncomfortable admitting it, but this idea that our profession, at the levels that really count, has moved from the courtroom to the television studios strikes me as frighteningly true. I know that I shouldn't say so, but the more I think about it, the more I realize that I'm in complete agreement with the engineer. That man, after all, with just a short speech confronted us with a very simple truth, a truth that we lawyers know very well but which we've never had the courage to admit.”

“And that would be?” I asked, immediately regretting it, since, as I should have been able to foresee, a political harangue commenced forthwith.

“That talent no longer matters, Vincenzo. That a lawyer, these days, is no different from a realtor, someone who sells in theory, you see, who doesn't even sell but merely promises to sell units of real estate, without knowing precisely when and how they'll be built, who provides services that serve no real purpose and never gets his hands dirty with actual work, but instead mediates, channels, makes statements without structure or shape: pay close attention and you'll see that he never actually says anything, at the very most he limits himself to denying things, to contradicting the opposing side.”

Christ, she sounded like Radio Radicale. Once she gets started, there's no way of stopping her. And heaven have mercy on you if you dare to let your attention wander. She's capable of grabbing your jaw and forcing you into position, making you stare her in the face until she's done. And if she's not convinced you're listening, she'll even ask you to repeat back what she's said.

“If you think about it, it's absurd, but that's how it is: the television lawyer offers nothing solid, he doesn't get results, he loses more cases than he wins, and yet he's on top of the world. His professional success is entirely independent of merit; the only defense he offers is the delegitimizing of the prosecution. And with this elementary system he reverses the burden of proof: de facto, you realize, he subcontracts his job to the legal institution, which almost seems to have to justify its reasons for wanting to put his client on trial. And yet this modern charlatan is successful, creates trends, pontificates whenever a reform is implemented and even then notice how he never says anything strictly technical but instead limits himself to broad, obvious, pragmatic considerations, dodging the real point, pushing the discourse into the realm of simplistic politics, and yet his opinion is the one the newspapers print, you get it? People like us, with years and years of hard work behind us, the ones who make the machinery run and do the dirty work of trial hearings, we're kept out of this circle, we don't count, even though professionally speaking we know a thousand times more about the actual practice of the law than they do.”

And at this point she brought up the example of a, shall we say,
colleague
of ours, notoriously ignorant and conceited, who all the same is constantly featured on TV and in the newspapers (we have no idea how she does it) dispensing banal platitudes on the difficult conditions facing young people today, as if she knew something about it, and her law office is thriving even though she doesn't know the difference between a lawsuit and an appeal and in spite of the fact that, most important of all, she systematically ruins virtually all of the unfortunate clients who turn to her, thinking that she's every bit as talented as she claims to anyone who will listen.

I know at least a dozen fellow lawyers who've had to do triple backflips to make up for her colossal screw-ups (a couple of which would have justified lawsuits on the grounds of crass ignorance).

“The truth is,” Ale continues, increasingly pessimistic, but finally coming to her (I hope) concluding statements, “that the world runs backwards, Vince'. We've watched this go on year after year right before our eyes. We realized, of course we realized what was happening: we talked about it, scandalized and concerned, but we were unable to do anything to stop it. And look where we've come to. But at least, perhaps, we can stop . . .”

“Listen, would you tell me why you didn't come to see me right away after I got out of the supermarket?” I asked her point-blank.

I'd been waiting for her to volunteer an explanation spontaneously ever since we'd gotten home, to tell the truth.

She scratched her elbow.

“You said you were there,” I added.

“In fact, I was there. From the very beginning,” she confirmed sadly. “I got to the supermarket as soon as I heard that you had been involved in the hostage taking.”

“Well, then what?”

“Then . . . when I saw your children and Nives arrive, I decided I should wait my turn.”

“Wait your turn?” I repeated, as if by repeating the phrase with a question mark at the end I could make it mean something (or, better yet, prove that it was sheer nonsense).

No answer.

“I didn't think you felt you came after anyone else. Not even my children.”

“I didn't think so either,” she said, as if the admission caused her a sense of discomfort she'd rather not show. “I only realized it in that instant.”

Now, I'd like to open a parenthetical consideration. For what obscure reason, whenever you enter into a discussion of emotional import with the woman you love, do you eventually inevitably find yourself face-to-face with dogma? That is to say, you're presented with a fait accompli (obviously something that was done without your knowing about it; even better, when you were away), unproven and clearly illogical, but which she nevertheless places at your feet like a heavy stone, an irrefutable reason that, however, she refuses to explain to you even out of simple courtesy and which, in fact, you are even implicitly informed that you have already been given every opportunity to remedy? Whereupon you don't know what the fuck to say. You just sit there, feeling guilty without knowing why, while she limits herself to saying nothing.

So you ask her, in the kindest and most reasonable way you can think of, to tell you just what problems she feels the two of you have, since you're just not seeing them; but she's sick of explaining, and so she merely repeats under her breath that you just don't understand (the subtext being that you need to stop pestering her about it, since you ought to be able to figure it out for yourself); on top of which, the fact that she's forcing you to lean forward to hear what she's saying is something that has always driven you into a black rage.

Whereupon you try to ask a few questions, hoping to get some clue as to what's going on; and you even offer an array of simplified explanations on the fly, with the sole effect of making her become even more withdrawn, so that before long—obviously—you lose your temper and start shouting (but since you don't know what you're talking about you can't even get your thoughts straight, and you wind up muttering a series of offensive phrases that even you can't make heads or tails of), while she keeps her cool, and the fact that she remains as calm and collected as an Englishwoman while you go on ranting dementedly makes you lose your temper even more (because after all the most intolerable thing about all this is that you don't even know what you're fighting about), and so you start saying things that you don't think or exhuming issues from ages ago that you can't even remember all that clearly, and in the course of just a few minutes a fissure opens up with such force that you can actually hear the cracking sound.

So this time I decide not to bother to fall intentionally into the trap. I'll wrap myself in silence too; then let's see what happens.

She says nothing, I say nothing.

To get through it, we turn on the TV. We zap from one news program to another. The story is one of the first to go by in the crawler at the bottom of the screen.

After a while, we stumble on an entire story on RAI News 24. Seen on television, there is something at once banal and sinister about the images of the supermarket: that yellowish inexactness, that snuff-film-like lack of focus that makes them at once unsettling and ridiculous. Alessandra Persiano agrees with me that they are nothing much to look at.

“But you're not bad at all,” she comments.

And I detect in myself a certain something, a twinge of pleasure at seeing myself on TV. It's probably the lack of focus, in fact.

At the end of the news report, we decide to have something to eat.

We make the food together. We're kind and helpful to each other.

Then we turn off our cell phones and go to bed.

We don't make love.

 

After we've been lying silent in the dark for a while, she tells me that the next day she has to go to Milan, because that criminal trial that she told me about is beginning.

I say I remember, but I don't remember.

“I'll be away for a few days,” she says.

And it's clear that's not what's going to happen.

 

When did this all begin? What did we do to each other to treat each other with this level of hypocrisy? I shouldn't feel so obstinately mute in the presence of the woman I love when she feeds me a line like: “I decided I should wait my turn.” Did I really make her feel so completely excluded or did she simply realize that I'm not the one she should be with?

I could ask her, certainly, but I don't. Because this truth belongs to me, and I refuse to receive it in response to a question.

And so, for once, I leave things the way I found them. I don't intervene; I don't try to rescue or save.

And she, in spite of the fact that she understands exactly what I'm doing, doesn't narrow the distance she's keeping from me by so much as a millimeter.

It might seem as if we've reached some sort of tacit understanding, but it's not true. We don't want the same thing. And the worst thing is that neither one of us is responsible for this heartbreak. The grand asshole who put us together just parked us here, waiting to make up his mind about what to do. He's acting the way he always does when he's unsure of himself, when he's fumbling, when he still doesn't know whether he should leap into the void or let himself die.

For us, right now, love is an exchange of blame.

W
hy is love so fragile in its first few months of life? Why so allergic, so vulnerable to chills and bad weather, such a victim of the pitiless law of natural selection?

Because of the conflicts of interest that have been tormenting me for the past few years, I've recently been speculating on the subject of the physiological death of love during the breaking-in period.

Now if in ordinary life (the kind without exceptional traumas or joys, which is after all the kind of life we all tend towards: an October-life, where you don't have to wear a heavy coat or gloves) death is a bit-part actor, in Young Love it plays the role of an unfair tax, an IRS of happiness. Like the little fish that swim along under a shark's tail, with the difference that the IRS-death doesn't attach itself to Love in order to freeload off it, but rather to crash into the nearest reef, taking Love along with it.

In other words, death, in Love, is essentially fucking bad luck waiting in ambush. Because, after all, Old Lady Death has this unfortunate tendency to make herself the center of attention, especially that of lovers. Lovers, that is, who are loved in return, lovers with a working relationship and all that. Because obviously if you are an unrequited lover and you haven't got a relationship going on, the problem doesn't even come up. In that case, the Old Lady won't even bother with you, with all the requited lovers there are out there.

In fact when you first get together and you're really happy, and the days and nights never seem long enough, it's typical to be assailed by the fear that from one moment to the next everything might end.

When those sort of thoughts come to you, don't waste a lot of time interpreting them: they're thoughts of death. They come to you because you've been doing well for yourself and death—which is always out chasing down tax evaders, and has a sterling record of catching them—has wasted no time in calling you in for an audit.