My Mother-in-Law Drinks (35 page)

The satirical variety show
Magazine 3.

 

The transgressions you're most inclined to forgive?

Misdemeanors and petty felonies.

 

That's exactly the answer a lawyer would give.

I didn't feel like coming up with a moralistic answer.

 

Favorite song?

Fabrizio De Andrè's “Verranno a chiederti del nostro amore.”
 

 

What would you be doing if you hadn't become a lawyer?

I'd be a rock guitarist.

 

Why, do you play the guitar?

No.

*

In that case, sorry?

Will you stop making comments about my answers?

 

What's your motto?

If you can't seize the moment, just take a little extra time.

 

What kind of motto is that?

Listen, are we done?

 

I have the impression that you've given me a series of nonsensical answers.

Sorry about that.

I'
m heading toward Assunta's place when my cell phone starts vibrating, forcing me to slow my pace. Without stopping I pull it out of my jacket breast pocket, already resigning myself to have to answer questions from another journalist.

But it's a text message.

From guess who.

My heart starts playing a piece of speed metal music.

I stop and lean against the trunk of a Smart car parked sideways between a Fiat Panda and a glass recycling bin, and I hyperventilate.

A, shall we say, matron, who is dragging a wheeled checkered cloth shopping cart behind her, walks past me and stares at me with a lack of discretion that I could even forgive if that indiscreet stare weren't tainted with disgust. So I ball up my fist and shake it at her, as if to say: “You want to tell me what you're staring at?” and she keeps on walking.

I've had enough of those housewives who go around town expressing their opinions of their fellow man by squinting or rolling their eyes. Why don't you just stay home, if you find modern society so repugnant? What do you think, that you're so wonderful to look at?

I take another minute before reading, hating myself for the queasiness I feel at the idea of learning the content of the text message that just a moment from now is going to appear on my cell phone screen, and I finally make up my mind.

 

I'm here.

The flight went fine.

Kisses. Ale

 

Ah, the flight went fine, I think to myself.

Wow, what a piece of news.

I shut my eyes, reopen them, and reread:

 

I'm here.

The flight went fine.

Kisses. Ale

 

And then once more:

 

I'm here.

The flight went fine.

Kisses. Ale

 

The total absence of pathos so completely takes the beauty out of the experience for me that I'm ready to believe in magic: and so I go on compulsively reading and rereading this vapid text, as if I expected it to transform suddenly before my eyes into something else, like maybe:

 

How handsome you were, stretched out on our bed, so sad, resigned to the fact that what we have together is coming to an end. I was an idiot not to tell you how much I love you, in that moment, not to confess to you that I have no idea why I've been so stubbornly pulling away from you in the last few months, when you're the one thing in this world that I want. Forgive me, and wait for me, confident I'll come back to you. As soon as I can get away from this stupid trial we'll lock the doors and close the shutters and make love for three straight days (speaking of which, have I told you you're getting better all the time?).

 

Just saying.

Instead the text remains unchanged, indifferent to all my entreaties and/or utopian dreams, just like the objects in front of Massimo Troisi when he tries to move them with the power of his mind in
Ricomincio da tre
.

I take a deep breath.

What a distinctive flavor depression has.

I resume my stride with my cell phone in my hand, and all around me everything becomes muffled. I stop thinking entirely, I just move my legs and walk.

I feel very much like Alan Ford in an old comic book story in which Brenda, his not-quite-girlfriend, gives him his walking papers in a letter, and he wanders down the sidewalks of New York with an idiotic smile stamped on his face (the compositions of the great Magnus go on for two or three pages, with the same unaltered drawing of Alan in the foreground, with only the background of each individual panel changing, signifying the flow of life all around him, indifferent to the despair of the protagonist as he moves through it), until suddenly he stops and bursts out sobbing in the middle of the crowd.

I go on walking for I don't even know how long in this state of dazed self-pity until I realize I've long since walked past Ass's front door.

If there's one thing I can't stand, it's losing control of my mental faculties, so I decree that the time has come to rebel: I position my cell phone in front of me as if to take a selfie, I enter
REPLY
mode, I concentrate long enough to calculate the degree of resentment to inject into the text, then, accompanying myself with a malevolently satisfied smile (and even though I feel as if my thumb has developed a localized case of Parkinson's), I compose the following text:

Congratulations on your choice of airline.

 

It takes me a minute to hit
SEND
, but in the end I press the button. During the sending process I close my eyes, savoring a sensation of vaguely nauseating lightheadedness that is not entirely unpleasant. When I reopen my eyes, and the display confirms the message has been sent, I slip my cell phone back into my pocket as if it were a .44 Magnum with smoke still pouring from the barrel and I look around, ready for new opportunities.

As I head back toward the front entrance of Ass's apartment building, I compliment myself effusively.

 

The situation changes radically when, as I'm ringing the downstairs doorbell, I feel the vibration of an incoming text in my breast pocket.

My legs start trembling, but I act cool, calm, and collected, grabbing my cell phone at the exact same moment that Miorita (Ass's caregiver) answers the intercom saying, “Yes,” without a question mark, in a tone that sounds a lot like, “Did you really have to ring this apartment, with all the surnames listed there?”

“It's me,” I say.

She thinks it over for a minute.

I still can't tell if she's doing it intentionally.

“Ah, Vinshinzo,” she says, in her accent.

“Yeah, Vinshinzo,” I say (meaning: “Do you think you might open the door now or should we carry on this conversation a little longer?”).

The lock clicks open, accompanied by a buzzing sound like a protracted Bronx cheer.

I shoot a distracted glance at Alessandra Persiano's reply as I push the front door open to go in.

 

Perhaps I'd have appreciated it if you'd called me to find out if I'd arrived safely. Do you think that sending me a sarcastic response is going to make things easier? Have a good day.

 

Shit, I think. And I bitterly curse the moment I let myself give in to my anger and send her that cutting text, from which I already disassociate myself.

How solid her point of view looks to me and how infantile my own viewpoint seems to me now. What I wouldn't give to be able to go back in time and simply chop off that damned thumb if I could.

After all, I say to myself: I had a reasonable position, founded on omissions and things left unsaid; all that was needed was a dry, terse response (like, maybe: “Good. Break a leg in court”) and I would have seemed remote and austere, but instead I had to ruin my facade of indifference with that stupidly hostile sentence, which revealed my resentment and, with it, my weakness. Practically speaking, I handed it to her, as they say, on a silver platter (when really, for these kinds of offerings, a plastic plate would be more than sufficient).

This is what always seems to happen with text messages: they give you the illusion that you have all the time you need to make your move and foresee the reactions that you'll provoke, but instead the opposite is true. When you're texting you feel all strategic, but you're simply being impulsive in a whole new way.

When I engage in flame wars via text, all I ever do is step in dogshit. And having stepped in dogshit in permanent written form, the dogshit sticks to me as documentary evidence, Exhibit A for the prosecution.

But I'm not emotionally credible as a witness. I tend to have fleeting bursts of rage, and it takes next to nothing to make me see the opposing side's arguments, especially if the opposing side is the woman I live with.

In other words, I suffer from premature capitulation. I wonder whether this tendency of mine to capitulate so prematurely is the main cause of the emotional shipwrecks into which I periodically steer myself.

 

I find Assunta curled up on the sofa, wrapped in a double-faced wool cardigan, with the TV turned on. I don't like the look of her complexion, to tell the truth. How long has it been since the last time I saw her, three days, four? It seems like two years have gone by.

She looks at me sideways, like she's just read my mind. I barely have time to come up with some diversion before she can broach the subject.

“I didn't know you watched
Mad Men
.”

“I like the guy who plays Don Draper.”

“So he's the reason you watch it?”

“Why else would I watch a show full of depressed people?”

I'm left speechless for a couple of seconds, as if I'd found the compressed review irreverent somehow, then I realize that I endorse it in the most unconditional terms imaginable. I've been watching
Mad Men
from the first season, and I can't wait to watch the next one, but I don't think I would have been capable of coming up with such a stark and essential critique.

How I admire the nonchalance with which some people can take an unprejudiced look at a book, a movie, a painting, a concert, whatever it happens to be, and capture its essence. Me, I don't know how to do that.

“Hey, that's true,” I say, “these guys are all unhappy, each one more miserable than the next. You're absolutely right.”

“So why do you watch it?”

“Because I like the actress who plays Joan, obviously.”

“Ah, the busty one. Eh, well. Of course.”

I sit down next to her as Miorita goes back and forth between the living room and the kitchen, clumping around in her beat-up Crocs almost as if she were deliberately trying to annoy me (I'm starting to wonder if she's jealous of the fact that I'm Ass's favorite).

So nothing special, we chat, as usual. I try to wangle her forgiveness for making a fool of myself by motormouthing on the phone after the supermarket, she is courteous enough not to touch on the subject again, then we move on to the press coverage, she asks me what it's like to see myself in all the newspapers, I say, “No big deal,” she says, “Suuure,” then she asks me if anyone's recognized me on the street, I say, “A few people, yes,” whereupon she asks me, with a provincialism that I'd never have expected from her, “Really? You can't really remain completely indifferent to a stranger's lack of discretion, tell me what it was like” (so odd how people tend to ask you to tell them about sensations more than events), so I concentrate for a few seconds and then I say to her, “I've got it,” and she says, “What?” and I say, “Do you remember in school when the teacher would be lecturing and at a certain point he'd mention a historical figure, say King Ferdinand, and since there was a Ferdinand in our class, we'd all turn around smiling and look at him, and suddenly he'd take on a new light in our eyes, and he'd smile back at us as if he somehow deserved the attention, because he was now the beneficiary of a renown and notoriety that obviously had nothing to do with him and yet he was gratified by the coincidence?” And she says, “Of course, of course, I like this analogy, bravo,” and I say, “There, now you see, that's how I feel”; after which she confesses that she got a certain thrill out of hearing me mentioned so frequently on the news in the past few days, whereupon, taking advantage of this unexpected softening on her part where television is concerned, I confide to her that I've been invited to appear on both
Annozero
and Daria Bignardi's show and that I'm thinking about picking Daria Bignardi, and she asks me why, and I tell her that since Daria Bignardi's studios are in Milan, I want to go there, because Alessandra Persiano is in Milan and it's there that I'm planning to see her, convinced as I am that if we meet up in neutral territory we might be able to fix whatever it is that's gone wrong between us, because if you think about it, I add, you always need neutral territory to talk and come to an understanding, and sure enough at corporate and professional offices of a certain level there's always a room specially designated for this called, in fact, a meeting room, furnished with a long, usually oval table, chairs, and at the most a bookshelf, usually half-empty, and what else could a room so designed and furnished be but a neutral territory? And she says (the asshole), “In fact, you don't have a meeting room, do you?” And I say, “Thanks for reminding me, what would I do without you,” and she says, “But, excuse me, do you have to go on Bignardi's show to go to Milan? Can't you just plain go to Milan, call Alessandra, and say to her, ‘Hey there, guess where I am?'” And I say to her, “‘Why, I'm surprised at you, are you really trying to compare going up there just to see her—giving her such an inordinate satisfaction, practically crawling at her feet, or even worse, giving her a chance to accuse me of having gone up there to check up on her (I can already hear the speech: ‘So this means I'm not even free to travel for work without your feeling you have the right to follow me and see what I'm doing? Thanks a lot for the vote of confidence')—with going up there for an independent and admirable reason like being the guest of honor on a popular talk show.” And she says, “Vincenzo, you amaze me, what an idiot you are, but how old are you, twelve?” And I say, “How much do you want to bet that it works?” And she says, “Certainly, you must really respect her a great deal, this woman,” and I say, “It's not how you think,” and she says, “Obviously you'll have to tell her that you're going to be on Bignardi's show, otherwise how can you be sure that she'll see you?” And I say, “Clearly.” And she says, “Wow, what a brilliant plan.”