My Mother-in-Law Drinks (32 page)

“There's no need for you to say those exact words.”

“True,” I catch myself saying.

“So you see.”

“Eh. So I see,” I confirm, like an asshole.

Then we both fall silent.

“Well?” he asks, understandably.

“Well, what?

“Christ, Vince'! Yes or no? You're lowering this fucking answer from Father Abraham's testicles!”

I go into a trance and the scene from this morning plays out again before my eyes: Alessandra Persiano pushing the last few items into her roller suitcase with just one hand because she's holding her cell phone to her ear with her other, as she repeats out loud the ID code of the taxi she's just called, and then she closes the suitcase and comes over to me, as I watch her passively from the bed, and she plants an insipid little kiss on my cheek and says: “I'll call you later.”

“Give me twenty minutes, okay?” I say.

“That long?” he asks, as if he'd already done more than enough to meet me halfway.

“I'd like to read the newspapers, if you don't mind,” I retort, picking the stack of papers back up.

“I can tell you what they say.”

“Aaah!”

I'
m everywhere:
la Repubblica
,
Corriere della Sera
,
Il Mattino
,
La Stampa
,
il manifesto
,
l'Unità
, and
Il Messaggero
, not to mention the vast number of newspapers I never even knew existed, and others that I would never, ever have dreamed of buying.

My performance on television is unanimously hailed as an example of civil activism, a “celebration of the right to defense counsel as a value in and of itself, not a mere protection of one partisan interest” (
la Repubblica
); a “surprising demonstration of emotional clarity and talent for dialectical improvisation, powerful enough to reverse the situation when it seemed that all was lost” (
Corriere della Sera
); the “well-founded hope that it is through the unexpected discovery of one's fellow man that one arrives at a sense of belonging to a larger community” (
L'Unità
); and even an ethical model for the profession to which I belong: “Watch and learn how a real public defender does his job” (
il manifesto
).

There are even a few prominent bylines who go out on a limb in my favor: “Just this once, I feel like going overboard: Malinconico is the greatest lawyer now working, and he probably doesn't even know it” (Antonio D'Orrico,
Sette
); “I actually find his awkwardness sexy; the way he winds up digging himself into unlikely dialectical holes but always manages to work himself free, even winning extra points on difficulty” (Mariarosa Mancuso,
Il Foglio
); “He managed to defend simultaneously both the prosecutor and the defendant: how on earth did he do it?” (Massimo Gramellini,
La Stampa
); “The attempted suicide of this father is nothing more nor less than the symbolic murder, horrifically televised, of a justice system that no longer serves any real purpose. The outmatched Counselor Malinconico, who has all our sympathy, has defended a case that he could never hope to win” (Goffredo Fofi,
Il Mattino
); “He wore the wrong tie, but who gives a damn: Malinconico is the man that a great many Italian women would like to have ask them out to dinner” (Maria Laura Rodotà,
Corriere della Sera
).

Especially memorable, moreover, was the “L'amaca”
 
column that Michele Serra dedicated to the trial (
la Repubblica
), and I feature the unabridged version here:

 

If the politicians (you can guess which ones) who give us today (too) our daily mantra of “Let's put an end to televised trials paid for with taxpayer money” (as if taxpayer money wasn't already used to pay for the salaries and countless privileges that those same politicians enjoy, the lucky ducks) only had a certain sense of proportion, they would acknowledge that the talk shows against which they hurl their preprinted anathemas are the equivalent of the Teletubbies in comparison with the grotesque, heartbreaking legal experiment that we witnessed yesterday, aghast and hypnotized, on the screens of our home television sets: undeniable proof of the degree to which a televised trial (a real one: in fact, as we saw, a narrowly averted tragedy) is driven by the largely ignored demand for justice, which politicans ought to give far greater consideration beyond the invective that they normally assail it with.

From this point of view, the improvised summation of the polymath lawyer Malinconico (a surname that—I confess—I envy him) did full honor to the adjective that he bears as a family crest: an authentic blues riff of justice denied, which no one, not even a despairing father (which is to say no politician or cabinet minister), has the right to stand in for. Justice, ladies and gentlemen, whether you like it or not, is above partisan politics and personal interests. Because it is there to give an answer to people who are afflicted by grief and (of course) injustice. And this is the moral that this remarkable reality show, at once horrendous and wonderful, has given us.

 

Predictably enough, there are also a few assholes (do I have a vested interest? of course I do) who accuse me of hogging the spotlight, claiming that “when the video cameras are running, even courage becomes suspect” (and the last thing I'm about to do is to provide publicity for him and his filthy rag of a newspaper by naming names), but I know perfectly well that in cases like this, smear jobs come with the territory.

I hardly need to say how squalid I feel getting my fingers smeared with ink from searching for my name in all this newsprint, ignoring all the other news as if the rest of the world's stories didn't exist, weren't worthy of my attention, but I do it all the same, because here and now I would rather be an imitation of myself than the original.

That's just the way I am: when I lose a sense of the pace of life (which—and you're free to disagree, if you like—kind of does what it pleases, more or less like the bodies we're all born in), when I'm broken and I don't know how to fix myself, when I'm missing pieces and parts and I can't even be bothered to find out where they may have fallen, the only option is to find something else to do, let it pass, like a bad cold.

However irresponsible it may seem (and it undoubtedly is), I find that practicing disengagement as a technique for solving various problems works reasonably well. The only real challenge is choosing your manner of disengagement. Because even disengaging is an activity, and it demands application and method. You can't fool around when it comes to disengaging. It's vital to have something that catches your interest and keeps you (in point of fact) disengaged, otherwise your mind will always circle back around where it's not supposed to.

And what better way could I have found to disengage from my private concerns, in the kind of situation I'm in now, than that of contemplating the effects of my television debut (that is, remaining right there in that damned supermarket, in a certain sense)? The privilege of becoming a public personality consists in enjoying another life in which you start out with a clear advantage. In which you can make up for the failures that you collect in private.

Are you depressed because your woman has left you? Read about yourself in the newspaper and you'll see someone else who happens to have the same name as you but no signs of that inner torment. Who talks and smiles as if everything was going just fine. Who gets off funny lines. Who wouldn't bet a penny on himself but who is endowed with the esteem of others. Who knows perfectly well that he's not up to the things he says, but who goes ahead and says them anyway.

Well, to offer myself as an example, if for at least the past six months you've found yourself intolerable and haven't had the slightest desire to spend time with yourself; if your relationship with the woman you live with, after a grueling sequence of highs and lows, has come to the point where you stay in bed while she packs her suitcase; if your ex-wife has started asking for her alimony payments for the sole purpose of bringing you face-to-face with your inability to pay them; if your working life comes closer and closer with each passing day to straight-up unemployment (overlooking the minor detail that you're self-employed, at least in theory), it's clear that if you have the opportunity to live life with another identity, you're going to take advantage of it.

And so I thought that reading my name in the papers over and over again would have given me that distinctive sensation of dispossession that those who have experienced it describe: a destabilization, I imagined, similar to what happens when you think obsessively about a given word and after a while it seems to break apart and lose all meaning, all ties with its object, turning into a flavorless clump of letters (a virtual disintegration: that's what I was aspiring to). I thought that hearing myself referred to by authoritative editorialists would gratify me to the point that I'd be able to believe that
another Malinconico is possible
. That a vacation was finally coming my way.

But that's not what's happening. Because the more I see myself in the papers, the more I feel like myself. And the shelves of the Billy bookcase across from me warped months ago and I continue to have no earthly interest in replacing them. And it's not even nine in the morning and already I want a cigarette. And I don't feel as if I know anything I didn't know yesterday. And time, which I imagined would slow down a little bit, so that it would be—to quote that old song by the Rolling Stones—on my side, continues being the same old windshield wiper as ever, letting me watch as it ticks off the days before my eyes.

And so I start to wonder if it wouldn't be better for nothing ever to happen at all, for life to be nothing but monotony and repetition. If the changes that you spend your life sitting around hoping for won't prove to be gigantic frauds, when it comes down to it.

Well, you know what I say? I want to remain as I am. Broken as I am. I'm tired of the sense of guilt in the background, tired of always thinking that there's something wrong with me, something I ought to be doing that I'm not, some train I've missed, something important I still haven't taken care of. This is what I am, okay? This is what I'm like, and there's nothing I can do about it. No one can do anything about themselves; that's just how it is.

I don't like myself, but I don't want to change, okay?

Leave me alone.

 

“Guess what?!?” shouts Espe, bursting into my office and waving his cell phone in the air. “Jennifer Lopez just announced a change of plans: dinner's at her place!”

I register the news and decide to ignore it, for the time being.

“Could you possibly stop fumbling with your junk while you talk?”

He takes a quick look down at the mezzanine.

The hand, in fact, is still there.

He quickly pulls it away.

“Sorry,” he replies, pretending to be embarrassed. “What am I supposed to do? It gets in the way.”

I place my elbow on the desktop of the Jonas; then I stretch out the thumb and forefinger of my right hand and use them as stakes to support my forehead, which I set down on them a moment later, disconsolate.

“Well? Aren't you going to say anything?”

“Yes, one thing,” I say, reemerging from my meditative pose, “I don't remember telling you to confirm the date with your, let us say, friends.”

“You said twenty minutes, no?”

“Eh. So?”

“So look: it's been twenty-five.”

“So how does that work? Once the deadline passes, silence equals consent?”

“You're not going to throw away the invitation now that Jennifer Lopez has invited us over to her place, are you?”

“Right, what kind of a fool would I look like, is that it?”

“Exactly. Help me say it.”

“God Almighty, Espe, there's no reasoning with you.”

“That's the story of my life, old man. Well?”

“
Yes!
Just get the hell out of here.”

He puffs out his cheeks and waves his hands in the air as if to underscore how much I made him sweat to obtain my agreement, but now that he's achieved his goal, he doesn't so much mind getting the hell off of my back.

 

For a little while I contemplate the empty air, then I listlessly shift my gaze to the forest of newspapers covering the surface of the Jonas and I realize that I won't even be able to get rid of them for a whole week, since the recycling truck came by to pick up the paper products just yesterday.

And at the exact moment when I start to wonder whether, given the size of my, shall we say, office, it might not be better to take them home, I have a sudden flash forward: me opening the door, closing it behind me, and before I have a chance to set the bag of newspapers on the floor, I hear Alessandra Persiano's absence coming at me from the bedroom, roaring as it races down the hall, and a second later it overwhelms me, suffocating me in its coils like the black smoke on
Lost
.

At this point I ought to be having an anxiety attack, but instead I realize that the premonition is having a strangely familiar effect on me, even leaving me with a faint smile on my lips.

At first I don't understand.

Then, even though I do nothing to remind myself of it, a refrain pops into my mind:

 

Go out among the crowds, woman, go

out into the streets of the world and the cities . . .

 

“Diario!”

Jesus, how many years has it been since I've heard it.

F
or the reader who might (possibly) not know it, Equipe 84 was an Italian musical group that was active in the sixties and seventies: to date, without question one of the finest groups we've ever had.