I Hadn't Understood (9781609458980) (14 page)

“Ciao, Ale,” I say. My tone of voice is just pathetic.

She stares at me in a way that forces my guardian angel to intervene, taking up a position just behind my shoulder and whispering in my ear: “If you fail to fuck this one, I'm never speaking to you again as long as you live.”

“Come here,” she says.

I go there. That is to say, one step below the one she's standing on. Guys, where on earth does she buy her perfume?

She lifts her left hand to chest level, braces the fingernail of her index finger behind the pad of her thumb, forming a horizontal “Okay” (she has magnificent hands), takes careful aim (sort of like when you pick your nose and then flick the snot) and mischievously smacks her nail against the knot of my tie. An incredibly sexy gesture, truth be told.

“That wasn't very nice of you,” she says.

I look at her, clueless. I think my forehead might be a little sweaty.

“Listen,” I say to her, catching my breath, “I have no idea what you're talking about, but whatever it is, I'm ready to get down on my hands and knees to beg your forgiveness.”

She holds her breath for a second, reemerges, and laughs right in my face.

I swear to her that I wasn't kidding.

She looks me straight in the eye, to judge my degree of sincerity, I have to guess.

“You really don't know?”

“I swear I don't.”

She sighs. She decides to trust me.

“Okay, then do I really have to explain to you that it's not very nice of you not to call me, after I gave you my cell phone number?”

You remember the jaw of the Tyrannosaurus rex after King Kong rips it half off with one hand? Well, that's the way my jaw is dangling right now.

“Ah. The cell phone . . . sure. Of course.” Brief pause to collect my thoughts. “No, listen, do you seriously think that I forgot? Do you think that I'm so stupid that I don't want to call you?”

“You're probably that stupid,” whispers my guardian angel, from just over my shoulder.

“Well, but you didn't call,” she says.

Only then do I realize that the episode of Alessandra's cell phone, the opportunity that she'd implicitly offered me when she gave me her number, the sheer wanton waste that is staring me in the face. In other words, I hadn't forgotten it at all. It's just that I'd set it aside for later. Like when you put a check in your wallet instead of cashing it. Have you ever walked around for days with a check in your wallet instead of going to the bank and cashing it or depositing it? I mean, you practically have the money in your pocket, you could get your hands on it, but you don't. You just wait a little longer.

When you leave a check in your wallet, or when you decide to forego calling Alessandra Persiano, you're putting on airs. You're behaving like those wealthy landowners who have a villa in Sardinia and never bother to go.

The problem, to come back to the issue at hand, is that with A.P. I had been putting on worldly airs while at the same time pretending I didn't know that there was a statue of limitations ticking on my opportunity. Because when God Almighty bestows a blessing of this sort upon you, he always assigns a peremptory time limit, and when it expires, he rightly runs down his list of names and calls up the next candidate. Because our forefathers were expressing an age-old wisdom when they said: “Get moving, because if you don't take her to bed, someone else will.”

“I was going to,” I answer. “I swear.”

She lowers her head, still vaguely dissatisfied. How can you blame her, after all?

“Is it too late?” I ask, shamelessly.

Just then Maria Laura Francavilla, a fellow civil lawyer, catches up with us, hurrying down the steps. She nods hello to me (and I nod hello back), and lays a hand on A.P.'s shoulder.

“Sorry, Ale, but the witnesses are waiting, are you ready to come?”

“I'll catch up with you, you go ahead,” she replies.

Maria Laura turns on her heel and climbs the stairs alone, evidently annoyed.

“I don't know if it's too late,” says Alessandra, returning to the topic of us. “Why don't you try and find out?”

Excellent answer.

She turns to go.

I grab her arm.

She turns around.

What just happened to her? All of a sudden she looks so unhappy, as if I'd hurt her somehow, without realizing it. Instinctively, I loosen my grip.

She won't look me in the face. As if she's on the verge of tears.

“Listen,” I tell her, “I'm not having an easy time of it right now.”

I realize that I'm spouting bullshit, so I try to make up for it.

“No, I'm not having that hard of a time, it's just that I don't want to see you leave like that.”

She looks up. I'm certain, absolutely dead certain, that I could kiss her right now, if I tried.

“Listen, Vincenzo, it strikes me that we're taking things a little too far. We're in the courthouse, you do realize that? Omigod, listen to what I'm saying . . . ”

Oh how I love the second act of any courtship. Who is the playwright who came up with such a perfect script? At times like these, we don't have anything to do with what happens, really. We're just actors. The script is all written, we mouth line after line, better than if we'd memorized them.

“Listen, let's get together tonight, you feel like it? My place, your place, anywhere you name,” I suggest. Just like that. Without preliminaries.

“What?” she asks, somewhere between scandalized and amused.

“Please. If I think that I have to call you, you'll see, I won't be able to do it. I can't even tell you why. I have a million things pending that I can't seem to get done, but I don't want to risk the run of . . . Oh shit.”

I freeze.

Alessandra is about to laugh but she stops herself.

It had been a while since I last got tangled up. And to think that the first time it happened she had been there. The same morning she gave me her cell phone number, in fact.

I can't say another word, maybe because I'm afraid it'll happen again, or else because I don't have anything more to say.

So Ale covers her nose, holds her breath again, and then bursts out into a laugh that's pure tenderness.

I imitate her.

And it lasts for a while.

And in that way we both manage to get rid of our awkwardness.

 

 

M
y professional obligations today have occupied roughly 1 m. 40 s., the time necessary to walk halfway down the hallway to the civil division to the courtroom, where I find tacked to the door a nice white A4-format sheet of paper on which is written that the hearing has been officially postponed because the judge is indisposed. In other words, it's barely 10:15, and I no longer have a fucking thing to do. Which presents me with the problem of how to kill time until noon/1
P.M.
, so that I can return home at a presentable time of day to a son who is understandably convinced that his father is a lawyer, a profession that makes it highly unlikely he'd have leisure time any given morning. And so I call a brief meeting with myself, at the end of which we agree to drop by my law office, which is certainly not close by.

The minute I leave the courthouse, I see the chairman of the bar association, just outside the main exit, being held captive by a couple of time-wasters in jacket and tie who are telling him an anecdote that they seem to consider highly amusing. Every now and then, the more histrionic of the two smacks the chairman on the forearm to accompany the latest punchline of the story. The chairman smiles with each smack, but I can see all the way from here that he's wishing the guy misery and pain.

I look at him as if to say: “Life is hard when you're chairman.” He tells me to go fuck myself with a gesture that we both recognize, after which he acts as if he just remembered something very fresh and recent and he launches a lascivious wink in my direction. I get the reference immediately and I put on my
Ihavenoideawhatyou'retalkingabout
face. He falls it for it the way he would if I told him that pigs have wings, and to show me that he doesn't believe me he tilts his head to one side and arches his eyebrows. Aghast at the speed with which the tip seems to have reached him, I take the bait and, without even realizing what I'm doing, I walk over to him, obedient little sheep, as if I have to justify myself. He, old slut that he is, reads my approach as a surrender (he's been playing this game all his life, and I fall for it every time), and so he laughs disgustingly right in my face. When I get to normal conversational distance I praise through clenched teeth the quality of his mother's amatory performance, ignoring the two idlers, who take a step back at the sight of our evident intimacy. He mutters something incomprehensible that I, by virtue of my uneasy conscience, manage in some absurd way to decipher; like an idiot I ask him who told him, and he replies in triumphant glee that the courthouse stairwells are monitored by video surveillance cameras. I'm on the verge of laughing but with a last-minute visceral lunge I manage to convert my laughter into a pompous pose of indignation that comes off as entirely unconvincing. “You turn my stomach,” I say, addressing him in the categorical second-person plural, and I turn on my heels, pursued by his gales of understandably self-satisfied laughter.

Remember, in terms of ethical turpitude, we lawyers have a very specific reputation on the market, but above and beyond every other shortcoming, even the most despicable kinds of self-interest, what we are is gossips. We're worse than shampooists, worse than concierges, worse than journalists, worse than body-builders, worse than university professors, worse than elementary school janitors, worse than barbers, worse than politicians, worse than neighborhood poets, worse than lifeguards. Name any other category or profession you can think of: we're worse.

 

While I'm walking along, Nives calls me on my cell phone. At first I'm afraid she's going to ask me about Alfredo, with the vague suspicion that she might have found out something via some vestigial umbilical impulse; then I remember that she has always been completely insensitive, umbilically speaking, so I ask her impassively how she's doing.

“How do you think,” she says, and nothing more, a response that catapults me into a hopeful sea of melancholy that I should have long ago learned to ward off, considering my long experience with my ex-wife's sentimental flip-flops.

“What is it?” I ask, instead, in an objectively despicable tone of voice.

“I don't know, Vincenzo, I just can't seem to find a center of gravity to this situation, really, I can't . . . ”

A center of gravity? Really, could you ever have imagined a phrase of that kind? Would you ever come up with a center of gravity, I mean a spontaneous center of gravity, in your life? Well, she would. And the stupefying thing is that she actually
sincerely
means it. When she says that she can't seem to find a center of gravity, she
actually
feels the lack of a center of gravity. She's so dazzled by herself, by her unconscious adoption of the Stanislavsky Method (whereby actors live for months in the role of the characters they are supposed to play), that she's actually accustomed to thinking in terms of centers of gravity, bedsheets that come clean after a last laundry cycle, significant relationships, emotional frictions, internal broom closets, the parking garages of the soul (that last one I made up myself), and all the rest of that ridiculous bullshit. It's the grammar of acting according to Stanislavsky, and then Lee Strasberg, Elia Kazan, the Actors Studio, and all the rest of that stuff that's put her into a trance, even if she doesn't know it.

Truth be told, to put it in terms of the most perfect clarity, from time to time, at irregular intervals, but intervals nonetheless, Nives needs to have sex with me. Why that should be I've long since stopped wondering, it's enough for me to know that I fuck better than the architect, evidently (of all the sources of male satisfaction that you can imagine, there are none greater than this one). When she makes these apparently purposeless phone calls to me, that's where she's heading, even if she doesn't know it.

I could just say to her: “Okay, understood: when?”; and we'd spare ourselves a vast quantity of centers of gravity and other metaphors of that kind. But instead we always have to rehearse the same little vignette over and over again, so that she can feel justified in cheating on the poor cuckold yet again.

But today it's not going to work out for her, because all of a sudden—just think!—I don't feel like it. I still don't know exactly what's happening to me, but you can bet your hat that this sudden mood swing must have something to do with Alessandra Persiano. So I blurt out a junk store allegory that I must have heard years and years ago on
Dancin' Days
or
Água Viva
, or some other Brazilian telenovela. And I throw a monkey wrench into her plan.

“They're just clouds passing over, Nives.”

Her feelings are hurt, I can tell by the prolonged silence that follows.

“Maybe you're right. I'm sorry,” she replies resentfully.

Whereupon I say, “Sorry for what,” and she says, “Oh nothing,” I say “Did I say something wrong,” she tells me, “Absolutely not a thing,” and after another exchange of hypocritical tropes we put an end to this meaningless phone call.

I quicken my step, expecting the angel of argumentativeness to appear at my side at any moment, clapping his hands and crying “Nice work—nice work” (subtitle: “Now she'll never go to bed with you again; proud of yourself?”), but instead, nothing happens. I can hardly believe the silence-as-approval. I walk along guilt-free, and after a while I reach my office, with a bounding step, light as air.

 

As I'm approaching the street door I cross paths once again with Giustino Talento, the demented tenant who summarized his problems with his live-in Polish girlfriend, Lalla or Lilla or whatever her name was.

Terrified at the prospect of a second run-through of our last, let us say, conversation, I briefly consider the possibility of taking shelter behind a car, but then I discard that hypothesis, square my shoulders, and continue on toward my encounter with the inevitable.

“Hey there,” I say.

“Vincenzo, how are you?” he asks me, beaming.

We're already old friends, apparently.

“Oh, not bad. And your . . . girlfriend?” I ask, just to have something to say.

I must have put my foot in it, because all of a sudden he turns very serious on me. His eyes are lost in the middle distance.

“Last night she cooked dinner and set the table just for me. ‘Aren't you going to eat?' I asked her. And she told me that from that night forth we were never to eat together again.”

I'm at a loss for anything to say. But he's not done confiding in me.

“‘But why?' I asked her. And she told me that she's always had problems eating in front of other people, because it embarrasses her, and she doesn't want to do it anymore. And she took her plate into the other room, just like that. And that was it.”

“Well,” I toss out, “it doesn't seem like anything aimed at you personally. Sure, it's not much fun, I realize, but we all have our fixations.”

“Sure,” he replies, clearly ready for my objection, “but I didn't know anything about this particular fixation until last night. I'm just presented with this immutable state of affairs, from one day to the next. From now on, I have to get used to the idea that I can no longer sit at the dinner table with my girlfriend, do you understand that?”

I nod, making it clear that I'm on his side, as I think: he certainly has a point, poor guy. It's just that I don't give a crap about his girlfriend's unprecedented unilateral diktats.

“I'm about to make an important decision,” he says, staring me in the eye in a way that intimidates me.

“What . . . kind of decision?” I ask, humoring him.

“I need to talk to you about it,” he declares.

“To me?”

“Tell me a good time to drop by your office.”

“Ah, well, right here and now I couldn't say,” I pull my wallet out of the inside jacket pocket, “call me and we'll decide on a time.”

I try to hand him my business card, but he doesn't even deign to glance at it.

“I could do tomorrow afternoon at five o'clock,” he says.

I think it over for a moment.

“Maybe I didn't make myself clear,” I observe.

“See you tomorrow, then.”

He nods, walks around me, and heads off.

I stand there in the middle of the sidewalk, business card in hand, dazed. From a billboard across the street, a jerk in a double-breasted suit points his finger straight at me, addressing me with the informal “tu” and advising me to turn to him with trust and confidence if I ever need a loan.

 

Given the hour, the Arethusa cooperative hasn't opened, so to speak, for business yet, which means I'm spared the psychopathic toy spitz's ritual bark-fest.

As I'm heading for my room, Espedito calls my name. I hadn't even noticed he was in.

“Vincè?”

I go back and look in at the door.

“Ciao Espe, how you doing?”

He's sitting at his desk but I practically can't see him, there's so much smoke in the room. He looks like Mysterio, Spider-Man's arch-enemy with the lightbulb head, emerging from billowing clouds of smoke like a rock star.

He swivels the thumb and index finger of his right hand.

“Not great.”

I express my regret that the problem doesn't seem to be going away.

“Why don't you open your window a crack?” I ask.

“Why don't you go open your own window in your own room?” he replies.

“Are you still angry about the other day?”

“What? No, what are you saying?”

“I did sort of lecture you.”

“But you were talking about your own problems.”

“Yeah, but I was supposed to be talking about yours.”

“Oh, will you cut it out?” he cuts in abruptly. “Here, this is for you,” he says. And reaching across his desk he picks up a padded envelope, a handsome baby-shit yellow-brown. It's about the size of a magazine and it's nice and fat; but it looks like it's light, from the way he's waving it.

“What is it?” I ask, baffled, as I head over to the desk.

“Search me. The courier dropped it off half an hour ago. I even signed for it.”

He waves the receipt in the air.

“For me?” I ask.

He pushes the flimsy sheet of paper closer to my eyes.

My mouth turns into a pair of inverted parentheses. I take the package.

“You probably just ordered something you can't remember,” Espe observes.

I turn the package over in my hands, I read my own name in the space for the recipient (it's funny how sometimes reading your own name makes you feel like a stranger to yourself). The return address is a well-known electric appliance chain.

“No. I don't think I did. In fact, no. I never buy anything by mail order.”

“Well, open it up,” Espe resolves. He hands me his letter opener.

While I'm cutting the packing tape, I come to a halt.

“What if it's a mail bomb?” I say.

“What are you, an idiot?” says Espe.

Still, you can see that he took the possibility seriously for a second or two.

I slowly rip open the envelope and proceed to extract the contents. Espedito watches my every move in a silence you could slice like butter.

I suddenly stop.

“Oh, Espe.”

“Eh?”

“We look like a couple of fools.”

“Eh, I know. You going to open it already?”

I give a sharp jerk to the two edges of the envelope and rip it open, liberating the sealed package contained within.

“But it's a cell phone,” says Espedito.

“Yeah, it is,” I concur.

“Lemme see.”

And he snatches the box from my hands with the confidence of a past master in appraising cell phones.

“Look at that, they didn't even shrink-wrap it.”

He turns the package over a couple of times and then hands it back to me in disgust.