My Mother-in-Law Drinks (8 page)

Pirouetting in a tight circle, Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo windmilled both arms in the air in a wild but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to grab the metal rail that ran along the front of the dairy case; he then tumbled over onto his right side. He immediately tried to reach out and grab the handgun, but Matrix hurled himself on top of him and kneed him hard in the belly, knocking the wind out of him. Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo clenched his teeth and squeezed his eyes shut in a deforming grimace and then curled up in a fetal position, as if to gather the pain into the exact center of his body, thereby suffocating it.

Matteo the deli counterman stood staring at the pistol on the floor as if he'd never seen anything remotely like it in his life. Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo gathered his strength and threw a punch in Matrix's general direction, but Matrix dodged it easily, and taking advantage of that further loss of balance he climbed onto the engineer's back, wrapping his legs around him to keep him from reaching the gun. Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo found himself crushed to the floor with Matrix riding him like a horse, whereupon he slammed both his hands to the ground in an attempt to buck off his jockey: a move that Matrix immediately countered by glueing his torso to his back in order to force him down with every ounce of his weight. It was as if the two were miming intercourse, with the further aggravating factor of the attempted ear bite on the part of the one on top.

Now the situation had been grotesquely reversed. A prisoner who'd been deprived of the use of his arms riding on the back of the man who'd handcuffed him in the first place.

As for us three useless bystanders: Matteo the deli counterman went on staring at the pistol as if it were some sort of alien organism that had infected his psychomotor software; I was tempted to come to Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo's defense, but my ignorance of his motives kept pushing back against that impulse; the old woman had regained her voice, and she had emerged from her hiding place behind my back and was now shouting at the top of her lungs, “Police! For the love of God, call the police!” as she watched the fight on the television monitors instead of live in front of her (a circumstance that would later give me food for thought about people's tendency to look to screens for a confirmation of reality).

Meanwhile two female cashiers had shown up, one klutzier than the other, clutching each other by the arms as they took turns stammering “
Maronna mia
” instead of moving their asses and calling the police before we had time to commemorate the day.

At the far end of the aisle, I got a confused glimpse of two or three shoppers (one of whom must have been the aforementioned “Franco”) who had shown up on set and were watching the writhing bodies struggle from a safe distance and who were clearly as indecisive and frightened as we were (except they had the advantage of having just shown up and thus being exempt from any obligation to take action).

Suddenly one of the cashiers took off running for the exit. Her coworker dashed after her, I suppose in imitation. To my inexpressible relief, the old woman went after them.

Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo covered his ears with both hands to protect them from Matrix's gnashing teeth, as his ponytailed opponent went on snarling and drooling on his head like a rabid dog trying to clamp its jaws shut on anything within reach. Every so often he'd lift a foot and drive his ankle into the engineer's belly.

I couldn't take much more of just standing there and doing nothing, and I was about to leap into the fray when Matrix raised his head and called out to Matteo the deli counterman:

“Hey you! Get the gun!”

The counterman responded with the same disconcerted expression that the guys sitting in the back row in school (generally tall, incredibly skinny, with long bangs and turtleneck sweaters) used to put on whenever the teacher yanked them out of their anonymity and called on them by their last names, whereupon they, abruptly rejoining the scholastic community, would point to themselves inquiringly.

They were incredible, those guys. In practical terms, they attended school incognito, camouflaging themselves with whatever organic material came to hand. You didn't even notice that they were in your class at all until February or March. When the teacher managed to track them down, we'd watch them being questioned as if they were fugitives from the law finally brought to book. I can remember a couple of them, but I still have no earthly idea what their names were.

“You understand me, asshole?” Matrix upbraided him, seeing as Matteo the deli counterman was showing no signs of life beyond pure astonishment. “Put the gun to this piece of shit's head and get these cuffs off me,
now
!” he commanded.

“What?” I asked in Matteo's place.

If you were to ask me what I considered to be the low point of that whole absurd episode thus far, I would have to say: when Matrix ordered Matteo the deli counterman to get ahold of the pistol and use it on Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo to get him to uncuff him. Worse than the capture itself, worse than the pulling of the gun, worse than the struggle, worse than the annoying old lady, worse than the reality-show ambush. Only if you hold your fellow man in such low regard to the point that you take his absolute obedience for granted could you assume the right to impart such an order. Because to talk to another human being that way, you have to put him on the scale somewhere below shit.

“Do what I tell you, you'll be better off,” Matrix added, after letting fly another ankle to the engineer's belly.

“Go fuck yourself,” I blurted out, pointing my finger straight at him. And I bent down to grab the pistol, with the vague intent of using it in some way (glossing over the minor detail that I'd never picked up a gun in my life).

Matrix glared back at me, nonplussed, but he didn't have the time to process the meaning of the disruption before Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo whipped around and slammed his elbow straight into the middle of his face.

Matrix's nose erupted spectacularly, knocking him backward and roughly unhinging the corporeal structure erected with such diligence atop his enemy's back.

I think that I recoiled out of sympathy. Reaching toward the pistol as I was, in a not-entirely-wholehearted attempt to get my hands on it, I lost my balance. Luckily Matteo the deli counterman was behind me, and he promptly seized both my arms and kept me from falling. Whereupon I released a couple of pathetic kicks into the air, in the instinctive search for solid ground upon which to plant my feet (more or less like toddlers do when their mothers place both hands under their armpits and lift them up to teach them to walk). Finding that attempt unsuccessful (that fucking floor seemed amazingly slippery), I threw my hands back behind me, harpooning the shoulders of Matteo the deli counterman. We remained in that position, each gripping the other, like a couple of drunks staggering to their feet from the sidewalk after the bouncer has done his job.

Even before getting back onto his feet, Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo immediately lunged for the gun, beating me to the punch in that respect, wobbly though my attempt had been; then he stood up, waved the weapon around in the air in our direction (and we paid practically no attention to it, so hardened were we to all threats of danger at this point), and returned his attentions to Matrix, who was partially unconscious, semi-invertebrate, dangling from the hand rail of the deli case. But he did so without haste; in fact, with a perceptible and distinctly unsettling calmness of demeanor, almost as if regaining control of the situation had given him a desire to take his time.

He kneeled down in front of Matrix, the pistol pointed right at his face, waiting for his captive to take a closer look at him, just to remind him who was in charge.

Matrix opened his eyes with effort, blinded by his own streaming blood, humiliated by the defeat.

“Too bad,” commented Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo, “I wanted to leave your feet untied, for all the good it'll do you.” Having said this, he hit him in the head with the butt of the pistol.

Matrix didn't even cry out. He made a standing broad jump to the floor, kicking his legs out in front of him pitiably like a fresh victim in a movie when the killer fires one last gunshot just for effect before turning to go; then, moaning, he scraped the soles of his shoes over the floor tiles, following the stations of the pain as it wended its way through his body and smearing his footwear with the yogurt previously spilled.

That was truly nasty.

A smirk appeared on the lips of Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo that made him look both pleased and nauseated at the same time, a twofold expression that lingered awhile on his face.

At this point, I decided it was time to leave.

Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo turned to Matteo the deli counterman, who was now looking at him with openmouthed bafflement.

“Matte', I need you to do me a favor. Go over to the household goods section and get a roll of packing tape, the brown kind; then come back here and tape this guy's ankles together.”

Matteo the deli counterman, whether more upset or disgusted by what he'd seen I couldn't say, shook his head no.

“You'd better listen to me,” the engineer admonished him. “Because if you don't do as I tell you, and if you're not back within ten seconds, I'm going to shoot him. And it will be your fault.”

It was at that exact moment that I gave up my plan to hightail it, out of the vague yet compelling need to make myself useful in some way. As if I'd suddenly been overcome by an undefined sense of responsibility, which led me to believe that I was the only person there capable of fending off the worst outcome. Me, of all people.

“Go on, Matte',” I advised, but in a tone of voice that smacked more of “Listen to me” than “You're free to choose.”

The guy tried to argue once or twice, then in the end he gave in.

Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo picked up the remote control again, aimed it at the monitors, and pressed some buttons. A second later he spoke and his voice was broadcast over the loudspeakers, perfectly synchronized with the live images onscreen.

“Thanks for your collaboration, Counselor Malinconico.”

Hearing my name so publicly proclaimed threw me off-balance.

I looked up the aisle. There was no one now.

“I'd like it if you'd stay, too, now that the trial's about to start.”

“
Trial?
” I asked.

Matrix straightened his neck. I can guess that this was an unsettling world for him to hear; something like “audit” for a well-paid professional.

“Do you know who this gentleman is?” Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo asked me, ignoring my question.

I looked Matrix up and down. As if I hadn't already seen more than enough of him.

“No, I don't know who he is.”

“Strange,” he replied, sounding a little disappointed.

It's not like the guy was so famous that I was bound to recognize him.

“Then I'll tell you another name,” he added, pausing before laying down his ace in the hole. “Massimiliano Sesti Orfeo. Given the line of work he's in, you must have heard of him.”

I looked at the floor, muttering that name, which rang no bells whatsoever, as a wave of embarrassment from my failure to answer him took possession of my limbs.

Considering me to be a full-fledged criminal lawyer, Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo must have thought that all it would take was an eloquently stated hint for me to reconstruct the whole chain of events automatically, but that name, aside from the fact that it coincided with 50 percent of the engineer's own, didn't mean a fucking thing to me.

Obviously at that point in the episode the last thing I wanted to do was make the cringe-inducing statement “No, I have absolutely no idea who that is, sorry.” So I limited myself to looking him in the face without saying yes or no, leaving him to understand that I might very well have known who he meant.

Sweet Jesus, I said to myself, it feels like this kind of thing has been happening to me for as long as I can remember, I'm sick to death of it. When is everyone going to stop asking me about things I ought to know and reliably fail to have any idea about?

Like the name of the chief justice of a given tribunal, and the exact timeline of appeals to the higher administrative courts, and what exactly is a legislative decree (“As opposed to a decree law, Counselor?”), and how much time has to pass before a legal separation actually provides grounds for a divorce, and just what provisions were made by the Lodo Alfano (“And while we're at it: what on earth is a
lodo
?”), and: “You mean to tell me that this name means nothing to you?” And I could go on ad infinitum.

Christ, I'd like to see how you'd handle it. One of these days I'm just going to answer: “I don't know the name of the chief justice, I've never presented an appeal to a higher administrative court in my life, I don't even know where the higher administrative courts are located: I don't know a fucking thing!!” In other words, I'll tell the truth, and I'll put an end to that line of questioning once and for all.

The embarrassment of being asked questions you don't know the answers to constitutes one of the gravest social costs of being a semi-unknown member of the bar (SUMOTB). While I'm on the topic, I'd like to stop for a moment and consider this unspoken-of matter of routine discrimination. We SUMOTBs—let it be known, at least this once—are subjected to mistreatment on an almost daily basis at the hands of the average citizen, who, inasmuch as he is a potential user of legal services (PULS), feels free to subject us to gratuitous argumentation with the unstated purpose of rubbing our faces in our own lack of success.

It's a discriminatory form of harassment directed at part-time and freelance workers in general and us SUMOTBs in particular, exposed as we are to the psychological bullying of the PULSs.

I invite you to take a look instead at those older lawyers, perhaps not even all that well respected, who always seem to be heading somewhere in a hurry, rushing from one courtroom to another, hearing after hearing, huffing and puffing in exasperation, and exchanging wisecracks you'd expect from truck drivers when they pass each other in the halls. Do you think that those guys ever have to deal with the problem of refining questions to fit a certain line of cross-examination? That they'd allow themselves to be subjected to the barrage of faux-casual tests to reveal their degree of connectedness to the larger milieu of the bar?