My Mother-in-Law Drinks (38 page)

And in any case, in the interest of covering all our bases, let it be said that in literature too it's possible to pull a “Six months later”: e.g., by closing one chapter of a novel with a separation or a death, without telling what happened next and then moving on to the next chapter; but the reader, who is alone with the book and therefore has to do everything for himself (without the assistance of lights, locations, bodies, voices, and music playing in the background), will internalize that unnarrated interval and drag it with him into the next chapter in the form of pure melancholy; while film, which possesses an array of tools of mystification and above all enjoys the privilege of light, doesn't give the viewer time to self-flagellate, assaulting him with all the biting intensity of its toolkit, centrifuging his emotions and hurling him bodily into a possible future, to fill him with a new hope.

An illusion, no question. But isn't it a great one?

 

I'm so astounded by the sheer intelligence of these thoughts that I don't hear my cell phone until the third ring. I jump to my feet in the grip of anxiety. I know it's her calling me, I just know it.

I gather my jacket up from the floor but I can't find my cell phone; it must have fallen out of the pocket when I threw the jacket on the Foppapedretti valet (or perhaps I should say,
toward
the valet).

I get down on my knees and scan the floor.

When I finally spot the phone, on like the twelfth ring or so, perfectly camouflaged between one leg of the bed and a leg of the Hemnes nightstand, it's too late.

With my heart in my throat I look at the caller ID for the missed call.

I knew it, I knew it, I knew it.

I immediately call back, praying that it won't go the way I'm afraid it will.

No such luck: it goes straight to the “can't be reached” message.

I grip my phone tight, I lift my arm, and I hurl it straight forward, aiming at the wall and practically dislocating my shoulder (I don't release, obviously, I only pretend to throw it; the last thing I need to do right now is break my cell phone just so I can feel like I'm in a movie).

I try calling back: same as previously.

Of course; it went straight to the “can't be reached” message just a moment ago.

I ought to have figured it out by now, right? Nope, I press
CALL
for the third time (thereby giving the witch a gift of three consecutive records of my clinging psycho-affective dependency), and for the third time the prerecorded female voice informs me that the number I've dialed cannot be reached for the moment, in a peremptory tone that I'd swear has just a hint of annoyance lurking beneath the surface.

I listen to it in English too, as long as I'm at it.

Once I hit the bottom of my helplessness, and the bedroom begins to take on a murkiness that seems to foreshadow the grayish-yellowish hue that will tinge all my returns home from this moment forward, I start pacing back and forth in the apartment, trying to convince myself that a person would have to be terribly cynical to call for the sole purpose of making an incomplete attempt, to prefabricate an alibi as vulgar as it is threadbare.

The message she's sending, I tell myself out loud, is clear: “I tried to call you. You weren't there (or you chose not to answer). I am therefore authorized to do whatever the fuck I want until the next time we speak; that is, if we ever do.”

I wish that that busybody guardian angel who was assigned to me were here right now. Then at least he could tell me that this is not the way these things are done. That if Alessandra Persiano had really wanted to talk to me, she would have called back. Most important of all, she wouldn't have shut off her phone after the first attempt. And that therefore, in fact, she really is a bitch.

I really need this kind of reassurance, because to think badly of your own girlfriend is a little like thinking badly of yourself. It's not something you can handle alone. But he's never around when you need him; so I decide to set aside my resolution to be discreet and I do what I have until now wholeheartedly intended not to: I call Espe and tell him the whole story.

Contrary to my expectations, he lets me confide in him graciously and with admirable sensitivity. He starts by categorically ruling out the hypothesis that this constitutes a definitive separation, and to support this belief he describes a couple of personal experiences that have absolutely nothing in common with my own, and in fact I forget them in real time (it's typical of friends to offer examples that don't have anything to do with anything when you ask them for advice); then he remains silent for a few seconds (but as we all know, on the phone, seconds are converted into minutes the way that lire are converted into euros) before asking me a direct question that, I confess, really catches me off guard.

“Do you think she's pissed off at you for any specific reason?”

“Sorry, what do you mean?”

“I mean do you get the impression that there's something that she just can't forgive you for?”

Fuck, I think to myself.

“I'm not following you,” I lie.

Pause.

“Have you been faithful to her, Vince'?”

“Come again?”

“Did you fuck someone else?”

“Ah, I see,” I say to myself. “He's beating around the bush.”

“I don't see what that has to do with anything,” I reply, starting to fan myself with my free hand.

“Okay, let's move on from there. Just one woman?”

“Espe, please.”

“Two? Three? Twenty-three? Believe me, there's a big difference.”

“Only one, I swear.”

“That's exactly the difference: one is the worst.”

“What?” I say. But I know exactly what he means, and I couldn't agree more.

“Is this affair still going on?”

“There is no affair.”

“How long did it last? And don't lie to me.”

I unbutton my shirt.

“Two months. Three, maybe. But I might have seen her four or five times in all.”

“Hmm.”

“What are you ruminating about now?”

“And Alessandra doesn't know a thing.”

“Of course not.”

“And you're sure.”

“Sure of what?”

“Of that.”

“Of
what
?”

“That she doesn't know.”

“Yes. I think so. I mean, no. Fuck, no. She doesn't know.”

He withdraws for a moment. Probably to chambers, to deliberate.

“Now I have to ask you a tough question. But you have to answer me on the spot.”

“Good lord, Espe. I don't know what I was thinking when I decided to confide in you, really.”

“Ready?”

I take a deep breath.

“Ready.”

“Did you pull some bullshit move, by chance?”

“Some bullshit move?”

“That's right, some blunder. Like Alessandra was about to catch on and you had to cover your ass at the last second.”

Sudddenly I can't see; I lose my twenty-twenty vision all at once.

Then out of nowhere I feel a compelling need to unburden myself of the truth. This is why people cave under questioning and confess.

“Yes. Goddamn you. Yes.”

“There,” he says with satisfaction.

“But it went off without a hitch, Espe, I swear to you,” I hasten to justify myself while talking in machine-gun bursts, as if I were trying to stall before he could file the verdict and make it official. “That idiot, I mean the other woman, sent me a text message calling me Filippo on purpose just to make me jealous, and Alessandra and I ended up laughing about it, just think, Alessandra wanted to call her and ask for this Filippo's phone number and . . . Oh, Christ.”

And that's where I break off, because justifications (as you realize right in the middle of trying to justify yourself) need to be brief in order to be convincing.

Espe picks up on my discomfort, and meets me halfway.

“There's no reason for you to explain it to me, Vince'. If you say that she didn't put it together, I believe you, okay? But it's just that when a woman pulls away from one day to the next without telling you why, and your conscience isn't absolutely spotless, then the first question to ask yourself is whether she knows something that you thought she didn't.”

“Ah, I see,” I reply in terror.

“We need to think like guilty men, understand me, Vince'?” he says, shifting into the first person plural just to make it clear how close he feels to me at this moment. “Because if we are the first to be suspicious of ourselves, just imagine how suspicious they are.”

“But I really believe there's no way she could have figured it out.”

At this point I'm answering without even thinking about what I'm saying, as if I'd signed some diabolical pact with Espe and I automatically set out in bad faith, converting that bad faith into actual sincerity.

“Well, in that case, you're ahead of the game,” he says, becoming more tractable; as if my answer had convinced him and, therefore, reassured him.

“Really?”

“Suuure. And remember not to fuck up by bringing up the subject yourself or offering her the slightest pretext for thinking you lied. Stick to your story, play the moron, and flip the problem on its head. Go on acting as if you can't wrap your head around why she would want to treat you this way. If that's the reason she left you, that is, if she's convinced you took another woman to bed, then you'll see: she'll come back.”

I look around, bewildered by the professional approach that Espe has taken to my personal drama. It's as if he's scaled down my romantic sufferings to some lesser stage of trauma, delivering me a version of myself that I find frankly repugnant.

The truth is that this, shall we say, criminologist's approach unsettles me because it appeals to the more ignoble part of my personality; and it does so directly, without hypocrisy. As if he were saying to me: “I'm not going to sit here and play the sidekick to your pretentious moaning about how complicated you are and the fact that you think you're losing your woman for who knows what untranslatable motives. Let's take it down a couple of levels. Let's start out from the basic assumption that you're a filthy male pig who likes to screw the first piece of female flesh that comes within reach. I'm not going to treat you like an overwrought intellectual, I'm going to treat you like a male hypocrite who wants nothing more complicated than to have sex and get away with it. So why are we wasting our time and our breath, just tell me that you didn't leave any embarrassing evidence at the scene of the crime, right?”

However much I value his good intentions, I'm filled with a powerful need to disassociate myself from such a materialistic (or perhaps I ought to say flatly material) version of my suffering.

“I think that you're looking at things from a rather narrow point of view.”

He hesitates, as if he were tempted to laugh in my face, or emit a Bronx cheer in my direction, or possibly both; then he retreats to a more open-minded point of view.

“Maybe so. But if it turns out I'm right, I want you to let me know.”

“Okay.”

“But another thing: dinner with the hotties is still on for tomorrow night. You're not going to come up with some excuse at the last second, eh?”

“No, don't worry, I'll be there.”

“You'll see, you'll feel better.”

I suddenly visualize a picture that chills my blood.

“Tell me something: are you already envisioning, like, a big old orgy?”

“Are you joking? I'm an old-fashioned gentleman.”

“Listen, I'll ride along. Nothing more.”

“Eh. I know. How many times are you going to tell me?”

“You don't believe me, eh?”

“Oh, good lord, why shouldn't I believe you? Your heart is broken, you're proof against temptation. What kind of effect would I expect two gorgeous babes who are dying to spend the evening with you to have?”

“Oh, go get fucked, Espe.”

“Sure, but I want to be in the driver's seat. Oh, and I'm picking you up at eight. Wear a nice suit. Come to think of it, do you
have
a nice suit?”

I hang up on him, then I go back to my tour of my apartment in an attempt to recover my noble state of anxiety in order to cleanse myself of the horrendous discomfort that this not-exactly innocent conversation between old friends has left me with. But it does no good: I already feel like I don't know myself.

At that point I delve into the archive of Happy Moments, exhuming a couple of truly unforgettable ones dating from the first six months of my affair with Alessandra Persiano; then, without any collateral effect much less a direct link, I find myself singing the refrain “E mi manchi amore mio” by Laura Pausini (which just yesterday, wafting out the windows of a Fiat Cinquecento as it went past, practically brought me to tears), then I try to break the bank with the evergreen “Se bruciasse la città”
 
by Massimo Ranieri (which even fits in perfectly with the condition of separation aggravated by geographical distance), but nothing happens at all—zero.

The failure of this last experiment really worries me. Because “Se bruciasse la città”
 
is a neorealist song. It contains a faithful description of the fantastical scene that's inscribed in the genetic code of any male who's been dumped, and it's therefore an ideal test bench. You can't be insensible to the power of “Se bruciasse la città” if your woman has just left you.

In the song in question, as many of my Italian readers will remember, the narrator, who has just learned that his ex is getting married in May (people always get married in May, in songs), wishes he could make his way through the smoking rubble of the city devastated by some unspecified cataclysm to rejoin his beloved (love being reborn in the ruins: who hasn't daydreamed about that fairytale, at least in response to your first brutal dumping as an adolescent?).