We Are Family

by Fabio Bartolomei

  “It was just two glasses of Morellino, I’d asked for a Dolcetto,” a young woman replies with an annoyed expression.

  Now I need to find a nice way of telling her that at least ten young women just like her come in here every night. They read the menu, they heave a sigh, they ask for advice, and with each piece of advice they reply with a: “No,” with an: “I don’t like that,” and an: “I don’t feel like that tonight.” She kept me there like a fool for five solid minutes while she reread the menu for the fourth time, even though nothing about it had changed in the meantime, and in the end she said: “Okay, then, Morellino for me, too, no wait, make that a beer, I think that would be better . . . Or else, do you have Dolcetto? Maybe a Dolcetto, okay. Wha-a-at? Oh, let’s just go with another Morellino!”

  “You said: ‘Oh, let’s just go with another Morellino,’” I summarize.

  “No, I said a glass of Dolcetto,” she replies with the attitude of someone who’s been accustomed to getting her way since she was three, and so has never had a good reason to grow up.

  I think about my tip, I think about the poor bastard on her left who has to put up with her every blessed day, and I apologize for my mistake. I come back with a glass of Morellino, I tell her that it’s Dolcetto, and she drinks it without noticing a thing.

  I’m tired, I set aside my notes on the constitution, but before burrowing under the sheets I decide to mark on Adele’s topographic map the principality’s latest moves. I’d been meaning to do it for months and I don’t want to put it off any longer. On the sheet of paper I sketch with dotted lines the direction of the movements, I add the observation date next to it, I connect it to the previous ones. First it was moving in a northeasterly direction, then northerly, then westerly, and now it’s decidedly heading toward the east. Dang. Northeast . . . north . . . west . . . the situation is clear. Crystal clear!

  “Are you asleep? Vittoria?”

  “A-a-al . . . what is it . . . ”

  “I figured out where the principality is going.”

  “Good boy, now go back to sleep and you can tell me tomorrow . . . ”

  “Aren’t you curious to know right now?”

  “Sure, Al . . . just don’t tap me on the shoulder.”

  “Do you see the chart of the movements? You see it?”

  “Where?”

  “Look at the direction . . . You see?”

  “See what?”

  “We were going northeast, then north, and now we’re heading west! Venice, Munich, Brussels . . . ”

  “Oh lord, Al, I don’t understand . . . ”

  “The promised home is trying to get back to Mamma and Papà!”

  58.

  To celebrate the fifth anniversary of the founding of the principality, Vittoria has decided to throw a great party. There will be thirty or so guests, all friends of hers. I circulated invitations to my few friends at the university, but the answers, all on the order of “If I can find the time, I’d be delighted to come,” are all too familiar. The only one who accepted on the spot is Raimondo, who in fact made a point of coming well ahead of time to help out. Once Vittoria told me that Raimondo seems like one of those characters from an American comedy whom they present to you at the beginning of the movie as a small boy, dressed in a shirt, bow tie, argyle sweater, and glasses, and then, to tell you that time has passed but it’s still the very same person, they show you an adult dressed exactly the same way. Aside from the bow tie, which he only wears for first communions and weddings, that’s Raimondo, he always dresses the same way for fear that someone might lose track of his life.

  “But what are you doing?” Vittoria asks us when she gets home from the grocery store with Tiziana.

  “A soccer match . . . why?”

  “You still haven’t done anything!” Tiziana complains.

  “Sorry, we’ll help you right away,” says Raimondo.

  “As soon as we finish the match, we’ll help you,” I correct him.

  Soccer matches, one-against-one with an unguarded goal, ought to consist of delightful touches, narrow dribbling, and finely calibrated shots, a sort of two-person dance in front of the goalposts. But it’s a rare thing for Mother Nature to give good feet to those who have already been given a portentous brain; sometimes she won’t even give them to people who left their brains stuck to the wall of a garage. One of Raimondo’s Pruzzo-style kicks leaves the ball up a tree. One of my Zico-style heel kicks sends it sixty-five feet in the wrong direction, straight out into the street. Since I’m the one who had to climb the tree, this time responsibility for retrieval falls to my friend.

  “What’s that down there? A cargo truck?” Raimondo asks me from the street.

  “No, it’s just a semitrailer. I don’t know, it’s been there for a week.”

  “Maybe you should call the police . . . it might be stolen.”

  “It’s outside the jurisdiction of the principality, if someone comes and gets it, fine. Otherwise, as far as I’m concerned, it can stay parked there forever.”

  We only return to the house after I’ve managed to tear victory from the jaws of defeat, exhausting my adversary with four overtimes and sessions of penalty kicks. Raimondo goes over to be enslaved by Tiziana, while I stall for time with Vittoria, hoping against hope not to get dragged into any activity.

  “Is Adele coming?” I ask her absentmindedly.

  “Al, forget about her. For tonight, she already had something to do.”

  “I was just asking . . . ”

  “Don’t get obsessed. Look around, rather. Tiziana likes you,” she whispers.

  “How do you know?”

  “I just know, it’s obvious.”

  “What’s obvious, how can you tell?”

  “Trust me, there are certain things that a woman just knows. Try to strike up a conversation with her and you’ll see.”

  I can already imagine what I’ll say at the university: “These days I’m seeing an older woman, very experienced . . . ”

  “What are you thinking about, Al?”

  “Nothing. All right, I’ll try to strike up a conversation, then. I’m going, eh? You’re not trying to make a fool out of me, are you?”

  “With Tiziana? No, no, listen, go ahead and don’t worry.”

  For the rest of the evening, I don’t miss a single chance to make it clear to Tiziana, discreetly, that I’m interested in her. I place two notes in her hand, I hide a paper heart in her pocket, I lay a bouquet of flowers on her handbag. Each time, she smiles at me, but then she goes back to talking with her friends as if nothing had happened. After a while, I stop nurturing illusions, it’s going to turn out just like all the other times, a kiss on the cheek and so long. When everyone gets up to go play the guitar in the yard, and I assume that I’m going to end the evening conceding defeat to Raimondo, Tiziana takes me by the hand and leads me to my room. I don’t even have a chance to swallow the breath-freshening mint, which I put in my jeans pocket just in case, before I find myself locked in her arms. Her mouth tastes of wine and, in open contradiction of my reference texts on the subject:—Flight from the Harem, A Nymph in the Woods, and Amorous Acrobatics from Vittoria’s collection of Harmony Romances,—her lips are cool, almost cold. She lifts my T-shirt, I understand that she wants to take it off so I do like with Mamma: I lift both arms in a V. From here on, though, we’re in new territory. I’m about to beat the record. She starts to undo my pants, and to make it easier for her I sit down on the bed and raise my legs as high as I can. She laughs.

  “What are you doing? . . . You must at least know how to take off your own shoes?”

  She unbuttons her blouse, slips off her panties, lifts her skirt and, scampering across the bed, comes and lies on top of me. I try to concentrate on what I’m supposed to do next because I don’t want to get it wrong, but she’s faster than my thoughts. As soon as I think ab
out touching her tits, she takes my hand and guides it under her bra. While I wonder whether it might not be a good idea to kiss her, at least out of gratitude, I find her tongue between my teeth.

  When you get right down to it, things always turn out the same way. The time comes when the grown-ups tell you they’re tired, that they just can’t keep it up, that they’re all sweaty, and that time always seems to come just when you were finally starting to enjoy yourself.

  “Five more minutes!”

  And they shake their head and tell you that it’s been two hours that they’ve been at it and that they need a minute to catch their breath.

  “Five more minutes and then I’ll stop, I swear!”

  And then they tell you that it’s the third time you’ve said that, that it’s a bad idea to overdo things, and that doing it six times in a row is the kind of thing you can’t even tell people because after all no one would believe it.

  While Tiziana puts her clothes back on, I try to make her panties disappear, but as soon as I reach out my hand to grab them, I feel my head start to go fizzy and my jaw go slack. She kisses me on the forehead, I’m tempted to hug her, but the impulse sent out from the brain evaporates before it can reach the limbs. From the garden comes a prolonged burst of applause and a chorus of whistles, and I hear someone yell: “Brava-a-a!” The cakes must have arrived, the celebrations for the inauguration of the principality are starting to heat up, and I decide to get a short nap, just a couple of minutes, then I’ll go join them.

  59.

  Come on, answer, Vittoria, please, answer-e-e-r. I don’t have the slightest desire to make this phone call, I guarantee it. I understand, I’m “waiting to be connected to the extension requested,” got it, you don’t have to tell me again! How I wish it was tomorrow. I’m-waiting-to-be-connected-to-the-extension-requested! What I wouldn’t give to be curled up in my bed, between the sheets, waiting for everything to be taken care of without my having to lift a finger.

  “Hello?”

  “Ciao, Vittoria!”

  “Ciao, Al.”

  “How are you? What are you doing today?”

  “Al, I’m at the office . . . what is it?”

  “Oui, c’est ma sœur. Je l’ai trouvée.”

  “Al, what are you saying?”

  “No, sorry, I wasn’t talking to you . . . I was talking with a gentleman here . . . a policeman.”

  “But why are you speaking French to a policeman? Since when do you speak French?”

  “I don’t speak French, I just learned those two or three hundred phrases that are in the pocket dictionary . . . while I was on the train.”

  “On the train? Al, where on earth are you?” she shouts.

  “Vittoria, nothing’s happened, don’t worry! I’m just here in Brussels . . . ”

  “In Brussels?” She shouts so loudly that the two policemen in front of me share a chuckle.

  “Well, all right then . . . if you’re going to get all mad then I won’t tell you a thing!”

  “Al, tell me immediately what you’re doing with a policeman in Brussels!”

  “If you don’t calm down, I won’t tell you anything!”

  “Tell me right away, for fuck’s sake!”

  “Hee hee, you said ‘fuck,’ wait till Mamma hears about this . . . ”

  “Al, I beg you, I’m about to have a heart attack!”

  “All right, all right, it’s nothing. I just came to Brussels to surprise Mamma and Papà.”

  “Al!”

  “With my own money, money I earned selling essays!”

  “Then what happened?”

  “I went to the hotel they’d mentioned in their last letter, Le Clocher, you remember, don’t you? Well, to make a long story short, they weren’t there, they must have left already.”

  “So what does the policeman have to do with all this?”

  “Nothing, it’s just that I was planning to stay in Mamma and Papà’s room, so I didn’t bring enough money . . . so I decided to sleep in the street for a while . . . and it turns out that it’s not strictly legal around here. So now I guess I’m at the police station. Because, among other things, I don’t really have a passport . . . ”

  “Al, I’m going to hang up now and call the embassy, I’ll try to explain the situation . . . in the meantime, try to get a phone number where I can call you back.”

  “Est-ce que je peux avoir votre numéro de téléphone, s’il vous plaît? Voulez-vous une tranche de ciambellone au chocolat?”

  I wouldn’t have said a word about the principality, I wouldn’t have spoiled the surprise for Mamma and Papà. At the very most I would have said: “You don’t know what’s waiting for you when you get back!” There’s one thing I envy Vittoria for: she always knows exactly what will happen afterward. If you decide against letting someone see the classwork anyway, even though they’re too poor to pay, afterwards you’ll feel like a jerk; if you eat too much chocolate, afterwards you’ll get indigestion; if you fall in love every five minutes, afterwards you’ll feel as if you never even fell in love at all. I don’t know how she does it, she has a very special talent all her own. No matter how hard I try, I just never seem to be able to take afterwards into consideration. If you go to see Mamma and Papà, afterwards you’ll feel weighed down by a horrible sadness. It wasn’t that hard, it should have been enough to think about it for a second. If at least I could have seen them, but instead they slipped through my fingers, and I was so frustrated I would gladly have set the passenger car on fire on the trip home. I spent the last hour on the train thinking about the fight I was going to have with Vittoria. But this time too the gaps in my ability to foretell the future were all too evident. Of course, she wasn’t angry at all, she was scared to death, and when she threw her arms around me, she was just a complete mess. She trembled and sobbed. In my embarrassment I started smiling at the other travelers getting off the train, and so we were taken for a long-separated couple reuniting after a heartbreaking period apart. We slept together that night, curled up on her bed. She grabbed my foot, and it seemed like a massage, but it was really a leash.

  When I wake up I decide to thank her with a full principality flag raising. It’s 5:30 A.M., breakfast is ready on the table, flowers in a drinking glass, let’s let loose with the anthem!

  “We are fa-mi-ly! I got my sister with me-e-e!” I sing.

  Vittoria gets up. Her face isn’t really all that promising. She really reminds a lot of that morning in spring 1975, when she woke up covered with blisters and accused me of giving her chicken pox.

  “We are fa-mi-ly! Get up everybody and si-i-ing!” I go on.

  If I look at her more carefully, I see that murderous fury that I saw once before, on May 12, 1978, when I cut a pocket off her favorite skirt to make a tent for my Big Jim. Without the slightest sign of respect for the niceties of official ceremonial, she abruptly silences the tape recorder. Things are looking grim.

  “All decisions of the reigning prince must be confirmed by the firstborn princess. Article 55 of the principality’s constitution,” she tells me.

  My diversionary efforts didn’t work. It was obvious that sooner or later we were going to have to deal with the subject, and this must be an unabridged version of the man-to-man talks I had with Papà.

  “My decision respected the three fundamental parameters of the Regulatory Criterion,” I reply, “and in fact seeing one’s parents contributes to one’s physical development, one’s mental development, and . . . ”

  “No agency of the principality has the authority to make secret decisions concerning the good of the principality itself, otherwise we’re starting to think like Andreotti and that’ll be the end of that. Rough draft of Article 56!” Vittoria shouts.

  “It’s a fiduciary obligation of the reigning prince to take all due care of the assets of the principality in accordance with
the juridical criterion of the good paterfamilias. Article 33!” I reply.

  “What do the assets of the principality have to do with what you did?”

  I stare at her with a horrified expression. I throw my arms wide in disappointment.

  “The principality considers ‘wealth’ exclusively the accumulation and care of immaterial assets. Article 6! I’m surprised at you, if love for one’s parents isn’t an asset of the principality then I certainly don’t know . . . ”

  “The utilization of the art of oratory to deceive the people and uphold patently absurd theses is to be considered a criminal act. Article 68!”

  “I never liked that article! You insisted on it!”

  “Certainly! I insisted on it because I know you!”

  60.

  At the pub I ran into Roberta. I hadn’t seen her in at least three years, when her mother transferred her to another high school because of a joint she accidentally stumbled upon while intentionally rummaging through Roberta’s purse. The woman’s irrevocable decision, made for her daughter’s own welfare, moved her to the same school, same class, adjoining desks, as the boy who she’d got the joint from in the first place, in exchange for who knows what.

  Roberta came in with a girlfriend and, while I was wondering whether or not I ought to say hello to her, she walked straight toward me and gave me a hug. I didn’t expect her to recognize me. Whereas she hasn’t changed much, so I told her that she looked exactly the same, maybe a little fatter.

  When her girlfriend leaves, Roberta waits for me to finish straightening out the tables and together we go out for a walk. We talk about our high school days, about our studies, our vacations, and what we’re doing now.

  “Do you remember back in kindergarten when you were still trying to find your way?” she asks me. “Since I have a grandfather and father who are both lawyers, I didn’t have that problem . . . I enrolled in law school.”