I Hadn't Understood (9781609458980) (23 page)

“You always manage to catch me off guard, and there's nothing I can do about it,” she admits, overwhelmed and amused.

The return of hope is like the jolt of a strong drink, straight to the head.

“If you only knew how you catch me off-guard,” I add.

She says nothing. God, how I want to fuck her. Now. Here and now.

“Ale?” I call her name.

“Hmm,” she goes.

“I called you a lot yesterday. Over and over.”

“And I waited all day for you to call me.”

“ . . . you jerk,” is the unmistakable kicker to the line, perfectly present in the subtext.

Tricarico, sensing the delicacy of the conversation, keeps a considerable distance. This isn't the first time he's shown that he has the gift of discretion, which, I have to say, confuses me more than a little.

“Can I explain what happened?”

“Let's hear it.”

“Right now?”

“Why not, is someone bugging your phone?”

“Ale, I want to be with you.”

“That's your explanation?”

“So you never want to see me again?”

“What the fuck does that have to do with anything right now?”

“Beats me. But I need you to answer the question.”

She keeps me hanging for a few seconds. My God, those are the longest seconds.

“Do you think I'm the kind of woman who loses her memory the morning after, eh, Vincè? Is that what you think of me?”

No, it's that I think that I'm the kind of man who makes women lose their memory the morning after, is what I feel like telling her. But it would be pitiful, so I skip it.

“Ale, please, don't take every word that comes out of my mouth and turn it against me, I can't even think anymore. I don't know if I really believe the things I'm saying, or if I'm just trying to make sure I don't say anything wrong. And when that happens, I wind up not talking, and I come off like the kind of guy who doesn't have anything to say. But in fact I have a lot of things I want to tell you, if only you knew. I just have to find a way to get started, that's all.”

There follows an extended silence of data being computed. When Alessandra Persiano finally answers, she's practically surrendered.

“You're incredible, Vincenzo, really. When I talk to you, I feel as if I'm constantly jumping from place to place. I don't recognize my surroundings anymore.”

I can't figure out if these are compliments or warning signs of an eviction. While I think I remain silent, just for a change. On the wall across the street, I marvel as I read a spray-painted message:

I DNT LV GETTING LOST IN WORDS . . . BUT I LV GETTING LOST IN YOUR BLUE EYES
. . .
ONLY 4 U
. . .
BY MARCE

Jesus.

“Anyway, you're right,” Alessandra Persiano says a minute later.

“About what.”

“That I nitpick the things you say.”

“You do?”

“Sure. It's just that . . . I don't know. I get nervous.”

“Why?”

The timing leading up to the line that follows is, how to put this, just perfect.

“Because it's your fault, you idiot.”

 

When a woman calls you an idiot, it generally means she's falling in love. And I feel like such a complete idiot right now that I start walking down the middle of the road without any concern for the cars that have to steer around me, without even honking, because of what an idiot I must look like, I'd have to guess.

 

 

L
ove, if I may give my views on the subject, is a disease that affects a person's sense of dignity and self-respect. It operates by highs and lows. It buys and sells. You can recognize it immediately. It has symptoms—how to put this?—symptoms that are unmistakable.

First of all, it makes you feel like a chosen person. It sends you out to observe other people and pity them. Deep down, it approves the idea that we really aren't all equal.

It's not true that when you're in love the whole world looks beautiful to you. It's just that you look down on the whole world from a point of extreme elevation. You look at people going by and you think: “Poor miserable dopes, look at the way they run around, living their drab lives. You see how they hustle and bustle, work, get stuck in traffic jams, wait in line at the cash register?”

In other words, when you're in love you turn into a goddamned cynic. Worse: a new-money oaf, who discovers that the minute he has some personal wealth he values the things he used to look down upon when he couldn't afford them; so he goes around trying to palm himself off as a sensitive soul, with a yearning for the beautiful and the spiritual.

But there's no point in you saying how you love sunsets, because if you didn't like them before then you really don't like them now. Likewise, it's pointless for you to inhale great lungfuls of fresh air, saying how much you love the scent and flavor, because you know you've never given a damn about breathing deep like the veterinarian in the television commercial for Amaro Montenegro, otherwise you wouldn't have started smoking. Just like it's pointless for you to go into bookstores and ponder the blurbs on the back covers and inside flaps of the books, because you know perfectly well that you can't wait to get out of there. And it's useless for you to stop and talk to everyone you meet, even people you don't know, and patiently listen to every word they say to you, implicitly repeating that tired old sermon about how everyone deep down has something interesting to say as long as you know how to listen, because really, other people are of no interest to you whatsoever. And there is no point in you talking and talking, because anyway you don't really believe the things you're saying. Just as it's useless for you to start playing an instrument again, because when you stopped fifteen years ago there must have been a reason.

This sort of mental defectiveness, which ushers together both a resurgence of cynicism and metaphysical yearnings, not only undermines laboriously constructed reputations and damages decades-old friendships; it can also have serious repercussions on political elections, so that parties need to be worried about the vote of people in love.

 

And then there's cosmic depression, which threatens the very process of evolution.

Let's say you're at the station waiting for a train. You're in love and you're in a relationship (but she's at home, or at work). It's not like you're leaving on some extended trip; you're going to be back the next day. You're reading the newspaper, everything's normal. All around you are other people waiting for a train. It's not raining, it's not hot out, it's not cold. In a situation like this, here's what can happen: the public address system, for instance, might announce a ten-minute delay, or else a middle-aged woman might ask you if this is the platform for the train to Bologna, and you, for no good reason, just like that, I mean from one minute to the next, feel yourself sliding into a completely meaningless state of disappointment, a sadness based on nothing, and your entire immune system turns in its resignation en masse, and the world suddenly becomes the worst possible place to live, so that you have the impression that you can sense all the injustices that blight this planet gathered into a single unpleasant bundle, and everything starts to go a sort of drab blue-grey, and now you want your momma, and your shoulders start to slump, you turn into a living triangle, and then your hand of its own accord seeks out your inside jacket pocket in a desperate quest for an antidote, and now you've found it, you dial the number and then you give the death blow to whatever remaining pathetic shreds of your dignity are trailing along at your heels like a big-eyed seal pup imploring you not to do it but, there, you've done it, the phone rings once, twice, a third time: “Ciao,” you say to her; and she answers: “Oh,” as if to say: “Why'd you call?”; and you say: “It's me”; and she says: “I know” (understandably—what else is she supposed to say to you?); so then you say nothing and you even act slightly offended; she vaguely perceives it but she can't really be certain (because if she were certain she'd tell you to go to wherever it is that you ought to be told to go in that case), and at that point she asks you, in no uncertain terms, what's wrong, and you say: “Oh, nothing,” but you say it in the key of D minor, understood, with that nostalgic harmonic shift in your voice, the ambiguous, guilt-inducing intonation that in your devious intentions ought to be sufficient to make her melt at the other end of the line and respond: “Ah, now I understand, darling, you just want me to tell you that I love you, and of course I do, I'm so happy that you called me, call me again whenever you want, I hope you do”; but instead she justifiably says: “Ah,” which amounts to: “Well then, why did you call me in the first place, if you don't have anything to say to me?”

Whereupon the phrase brings you back to your senses with the immediacy of a bucket of cold water, you straighten your back, the train station becomes a train station again, and you feel as ashamed as if you'd been caught molesting fifteen-year-olds when you fully realize the depth of the level to which you just sank, because you know perfectly well that your dignity should be safeguarded from these deplorable sideshows that, among other things, have nothing at all to do with love, since what they amount to is premeditated bouts of whining, indecent petty episodes of extortion, demands to be picked up and carried like a baby and even taken to the park to feed the ducks.

 

Another masterpiece of love is that it invents a series of coincidences and cause-and-effect relationships. It constructs improbable geometries linking events that have nothing to do with one another, making a mockery of hindsight and prompting lines like this: “I mean, do you realize that if that morning my car battery hadn't died, I would have driven to X, instead of accepting the invation of Y, when he asked me to come join him at Z, which is where I met you for the first time, and everything that's happened since then?”

Which might, after all, even be true, in the sense that no one can deny that something took place in a certain order of events, if that's the way it actually happened.

It's just that car batteries run down, and in fact they run down every day, it's not as if they run down in some kind of special way when you're about to start a relationship with someone. The fact that you start dating someone on a certain day doesn't authorize you to create a cause-and-effect linkage between a dead battery and your new relationship, because (leaving aside the fact that the battery would have run down anyway) your dead battery might also have been the cause of a variety of other events far more worthy of consideration than the one you're so proud of right now.

Without taking into consideration the fact that, as far as your new relationship is concerned, the dead battery has no more and no less significance than the other events that conspired to ensure that you'd enter that relationship (the fact that you accepted the invitation, for instance: you could just as easily have decided to stay home, and then so long, new girlfriend), and so, with all the other factors that come into play, it's not clear why the dead battery should be at the root of it all, unless you're trying to prove that chronology is the guiding criterion in new relationships.

Which, by the way, if you always thought in terms of dead batteries, and not just when you're trying to prove that your love affair was written by destiny in the stars—a destiny that on that particular day was plotting on your behalf—and instead you considered that all the billions of circumstances that make up your life each has a significant relationship with each and every other circumstance, at the very least your brain would creak and collapse as it struggled to uncover all the various significant relationships among things.

And in any case, without even bothering to delve deeper into all these considerations: it's not like it's such an amazing story you're telling. It's not like your girlfriend was sitting perched on the very edge of your building's roof and you just happened to look out the window right below her (oh, it's even better if it wasn't even your apartment), and you happened to notice a pair of feet dangling just overhead, so you engaged her in a lengthy conversation about whether it's worth the trouble to go on living, and you talked her down from the roof, and since then you've never spent a moment apart. If that was how things had gone then sure, you'd have grounds for talking about occult forces at play, because really there's no comparison between a dead battery and an averted suicide attempt.

But that's not what happened at all. All that happened was you met a girl you liked, she liked you, and now you're a couple.

This yearning for a starring role in hindsight, which drives people to rewrite virtual scripts long after the play is over, is in fact a defect in one's self-respect, a clear side effect of love, because it's obvious that if a person had a shred of dignity and any awareness of the things that he says, he wouldn't talk that way about a dead battery.

 

And then there's the last, worst symptom, where your dignity is so completely pummeled and crushed that you might as well get it out of your head that there's any chance of recovery, and that's when you find yourself depending on the other person's mood.

This phenomenon has to do with the phase in which the relationship is lurching and staggering (you've already stopped inhaling lungfuls of fresh air, lingering in bookstores, etc.) and she's not even all that certain that she wants you around anymore; in fact, she's more there than here, more over it than into it, so there are times when she's affectionate and other times when she treats you like shit.

The truth is (and you know it perfectly well) that you no longer really interest her, in fact, if you want to be completely honest, you're even starting to get on her nerves just a little, but it's just that every so often she feels guilty and so, in the grip of passing waves of pity for you, she turns all sweet and loving, and you, dangling shamefully from her little finger, start wagging your tail like a fox terrier and kidding yourself the minute you sense a hint of reconsideration.

There's no need to say at this point that your love affair is dead and buried with a cross planted on the grave because, in the end, you know that if a woman wants you she'll come looking for you, and when she stops coming around it's because she doesn't want you anymore, and really there's not much more to say on the subject.

You on the other hand go on dragging yourself through this sort of emotional methadone in the hopes that things might work out, but there's no cure for this particular kind of malfunction, there's no fixing things and, whatever people might say, it's never happened, never, that anybody succeeded in straightening out this kind of situation, just try asking around.

Depending on someone's mood, this thing where if she's nice to you then you can make it through to the end of the day in one piece but if she treats you with indifference then you're just a shell of a man and you can't get a thing done and your work piles up along with debts of various kinds, it's just a completely shitty situation, ignominious, something you should get out of once and for all; it leaves a stain on your heart.

And the most pathetic thing is that at this point whatever love there was is now dead and gone (what are you going to love when your dignity is in tatters?), but you go on talking about love. You've become the emotional equivalent of an Elvis fan, a misfit who's incapable of living in the present, and in the way you dress, the way you talk, the way you listen to music, in the books you read and the things you write, and even in the way you go to bed with someone, you're looking for something that no longer exists—that's it, that's all.