My Mother-in-Law Drinks (39 page)

This is the refrain:

 

If the city were on fire

To you

To you

To you I'd run

I'd even beat the fire just to get back to you

If the city were on fire

I know

I know

You'd come looking for me

Even after our farewells

I am love

For you

 

Then, as long as he's at it, the apocalyptic dreamer makes a quick reference to the location that the two former lovers preferred for their intimate encounters:

 

That meadow on the outskirts of town

Saw you become mine so many times

It's been too long since it knew

Where my happiness lies

 

Which is not exactly a gentlemanly thing to go around telling the whole world, but if a guy's girlfriend is about to get married to someone else, we can overlook a stylistic misstep, I think (and in any case the choice of a meadow as one's trysting place is a classic, to be found in many popular songs: let one serve as an example among many, “L'uva fogarina,” which, after an extended series of “diridindindins,” hails the act of love during a grape harvest, in fact, in the midst of a meadow or field, “
in mezzo al pra'
”).

And so, in short, I sing the song again from beginning to end, in a mumble, but there doesn't seem to be any way of getting back to my suffering. In fact, if you want to know the whole truth, I'm not the least bit interested in burning Milan to the ground (because that's where Alessandra Persiano is right now) and sacrificing all those innocent lives just for the sake of making peace with her.

As much as it annoys me to acknowledge it, Espe has corrupted me. And I even suspect that I'm enjoying the infection.

 

It's at this point that I receive the phone call that I absolutely shouldn't be receiving. Of course, I know with total certainty who it is. I'm so certain that when I see the name on the display I'm not the least bit surprised.

When this kind of thing happens, I start to think that the future, at least the near future, consists of nothing other than the least opportune thing that we can imagine happening to us.

“Hello.”

“Counselor?”

“Yes?”

“It's Irene,” says Cameron Diaz.

I close my eyes and open them again.

“Oh, hi. Sorry, I hadn't saved your number.”

“That's all right, I just wanted to talk to you.”

“Ah,” I say, flattered. “But where are you calling me from? I hear a lot of noise around you.”

“I'm at a bar, with some friends. We're just having some drinks. What about you?”

“Me? At home, much more prosaically.”

She says nothing, as if my answer had made her feel somehow indiscreet. In the background I hear a clinking of glasses that makes me yearn for a margarita.

“I'm sorry. Maybe I shouldn't have called you.”

“No, it's fine,” I reply, hoping she detects the faint sigh of resignation that I inserted into my voice.

What on earth are you doing? I ask myself.

“You know, it's been a long time since I've gone out.”

“Really?”

“Yes. I wanted you to know that. It did me good to talk to you.”

“I'm overjoyed to hear that.”

“I'm overjoyed”? What the fuck am I saying?

“Listen, maybe it's late,” There's Something About Mary resumes, “but I was wondering if you wouldn't like to come join me. My friends are really nice, you'd like them.”

“There, that's exactly what you need,” I say to myself. “A nice extemporaneous evening out with a group of kids young enough to be your children. Maybe you'll run into Alagia at this place, and it'll be a full house.”

“Thank you, you're very kind. Maybe some other time.”

A moment's silence.

“I overstepped my bounds. I apologize.”

“No, it's just that it's a little late, and tomorrow morning I have a lawsuit.”

“You don't have to explain. I wouldn't want to spend an evening in the company of people I don't know either. But will you save my phone number now?”

“Yes. As soon as we hang up.”

“All right then, let's hang up.”

“All right,” I say, with some embarrassment. “I certainly hope you enjoy the rest of your evening.”

“‘Enjoy the rest of your evening'?” I say to myself. “What are you, the TV weather girl?”

“I hope the lawsuit goes well, Vincenzo.”

I'm so struck at hearing her say my name that I trip myself up like a genuine moron.

“What lawsuit?”

“Didn't you say that you have a lawsuit tomorrow?”

“Ah, the lawsuit. Certainly, of course I do.”

Jesus, what an asshole I am.

“Good night,” she says, without a hint of irony in her voice.

The girl has style.

“Good night, Camer . . . Irene.”

 

“What are you looking at?” I ask that busybody of an angel, who of course has decided to show up right now.

“Me? Nothing.”

“I didn't go, as you saw, no?”

“Hm-hm,” he says sardonically.

“And besides, she was with her friends, right? That shows that it was nothing but a friendly invitation.”

“A woman who gets out her phone and calls you while she's spending the evening out at a bar, and with plenty of company, is definitely not making a friendly invitation, Vince'.”

An impeccable observation. And in fact it gets on my nerves.

“Listen, why don't we just drop this topic now, okay? I-didn't-go-and-that's-that dot com. Now quit bugging me because I'm hungry.”

He lifts one hand and opens and closes it backwards, like an old-fashioned gent: “
Addio core
.”

I ignore him.

“No question though, the resemblance is startling, eh?” I say.

He rolls his eyes.

I grab my phone again to order a pizza, even though I don't even know what number to call.

Huffing and puffing as if doing so were an intolerable sacrifice, I get out the phone book from wherever it was (you have to admit that it's always, and I mean always, a 2 x 4 to the forehead to find a number in the phone book), and as I flip to the page with the pizzerias I'm reminded that right around the corner they've just opened a fast-food place called (I swear)
Luncho Espress.
And so I pass the motion by acclamation to try out the food from a placed called
Luncho Espress
,
 
an experience that should not be missed.

So I look up the number and dial it.

The phone is answered by a guy who clearly doesn't give a shit. When I ask what they have that's hot and above all whether they deliver, he says nothing for, like, twenty seconds, and then, as if he were under some kind of duress, he asks where I live, and he does it all with such patent rudeness that I wait for him to get ready to take down my address before hanging up on him in a rage.

“Go take it up the ass, Luncho,” I say, and at that point I opt for a quick plate of spaghetti with Buitoni Fior di Pesto.

I put a pot of water on to boil, I turn on the TV, and I run through the list of channels available thanks to digital cable (which is to say a technological innovation that really was needed, one of those useful innovations that, really, once you have it you ask yourself regularly: “How on earth did I live without this, until just the other day?”).

A local TV station is playing a commercial for the impending concert of an Italian band whose name I've heard many times without understanding what it means. Three skinny guys dressed in a style that's a hybrid of Armani and Sears, Roebuck, all of them with their faces ravaged by the business of living (one of them is clinging so hard to a semi-acoustic guitar that he looks like he's afraid somone's going to come along any minute and confiscate it: and perhaps that would be for the best, all things considered), looking straight ahead as if urging the photographer to hurry up because if there's one thing they hate doing it's posing for pictures.

Meanwhile the voice-over of someone who's clearly mentally unhinged gallops along repeating the name of the group and the date of the concert, panting and flushed as if he were announcing the imminent apparition of the Virgin Mary, and a cell phone number appears superimposed on the screen, preceded by one of the most chilling commercial names of modern times (“Infoline”), and the presale prices of tickets.

Balcony seating 35 euros, concert seating 50 euros.

I look at those numbers as a sort of personal affront. I feel like such an anachronism. It's not like I just discovered how much concerts cost these days. It's just that when confronted with examples of this sort, I'm seized by a nostalgia for the days when no one would have stood for those kinds of prices for a concert by a group with that level of aesthetic incompetence.

A
t the beginning of the eighties, in fact, right in 1980, that is, when politics (I don't mean professional politics, but rather the kind of self-taught not-for-profit politics that marked those youth movements that based their reason for being on a contempt for the Italian Chamber of Deputies, Senate, mass media, free market, and religion) was dead and its body was cold, all that survived, for just a short time, was the practice of proletarian self-discounts at concerts.

The practice of self-discounting, in the second half of the previous decade (the late seventies, in other words) had been imposed with the caustic savagery of a political right, self-evident, requiring no theoretical justification. The message (or perhaps it would be more accurate to say the lesson) conveyed by the act of self-discounting was inhibitory in its nonnegotiable self-righteousness: we don't pay to get into concerts because it's right not to pay. Full stop. Nothing more need be said. And if the security team tried to do its job by defying that diktat, bim-bam-boom, bricks and bats would fly.

And it wasn't as if, when faced with the arrogant practice of self-discounting (which was actually more of a self-exemption, because these people weren't demanding a discount so much as they were saying: “Let us in or we'll wreck the place from floor to ceiling”), anyone was willing to provide explanations.

In those years, if you asked why, then you just looked like a fool (in which case you'd be banished with a smack to the back of the head or a chorus of insults such as: “You're out of it,” “You're freaking out”—that one had almost exactly the same value as “You're freaking me out”—“Ouch, you're bringing us down,” “You're harshing our mellow,” etc.; and then you were mocked for at least a semester as the political equivalent of the Lampwick character from
Pinocchio
, as much as if you'd said “between you and I” at your high school final exam) or, at the very worst, you'd be taken as a political know-nothing (in which case you became the target of derisive whistles and spit, as well as possibly being physically attacked by some aspiring, homegrown Che Guevara, beet red with fury for the occasion, who actually had no intention of hitting you at all, but just planned to be stopped in the nick of time by a couple of volunteers and thus still come off looking like an implacable leader unwilling to brook dissent).

The movement, in other words, was unwilling to tolerate uncertainty, much less debate. It treated you like a mental defective if you failed to understand. So what happened was you went along with it. Okay, you said, intimidated by the thought that someone might suspect you didn't know what you were talking about. So you behaved like Obelix in that old comic book where his friends, the other Gauls, are readying a military expedition, and they spend days and days arguing about attack strategies and battlefield conditions and finally, without understanding a word of what they're saying, he screams: “I don't know why, but I'm coming with you guys!”

But it should also be said that in those days there was also a degree of self-interest in obtaining self-discounts (or I should say, self-exemptions), truth be told. Though it wasn't clear why the same principle didn't apply to pushers. Did anyone ever get a joint through proletarian self-discounting, I wonder?

In other words, for a good long while in Italy self-discounting was the nightmare of musicians from around the world, but especially Italians, who were often subjected at concerts to genuine authentic people's trials in addition to the self-discounting. The self-discounters would climb up onto the stage, take the singer prisoner, and subject him to the third degree. They'd ask him: why did you go on TV, what the fuck kind of song did you write, what kind of bourgeois smart-ass lyrics are these, look at your cute little fashionable shirt, where do you think you're going to wind up with this music, at the Sanremo Music Festival?

This was militant cultural criticism—forget about the number of stars and smiley or frowny faces at the beginning of reviews in the local newspapers. A musician (especially an Italian musician, because a foreign musician, as soon as he got a whiff of what was happening, would turn around, leave the country, and not come back until things began to improve) was not allowed to act like a rock star. He couldn't treat the audience with disdain or superiority, make money, screw fashion models, appear on television, or give autographs. Music was a political matter, a way of making a statement; you couldn't sell out or be a whore or catch the syphilis of success. It was brutal, back then, to climb onto a concert stage.

At the beginning of the eighties, though, all that was finally coming to an end. And the astonishing thing was that the end came with a velocity that verged on the technological. It came, moreover, with such a discretion, a silence, an absence of warning signs, that once the results became evident it seemed as if it had all happened without the protagonists themselves being aware of it—as if they'd discovered they were dead while still walking, meeting, organizing, and making a ruckus in the general conviction that they were actually still alive.