My Mother-in-Law Drinks

by Diego De Silva

  So he says: I swear to you that I had no idea he’d offer you that figure.

  So I say: Are you telling me he made an idiot out of you?

  So he says (after a pause during which he must have been wondering if he’d heard me correctly): Thanks for the professional solidarity, Counselor, but these things happen. Haven’t you ever had a client put you in a difficult spot?

  So I shoot straight back at him: Not to this degree, but sure, every once in a while.

  I was instantly reminded of a nightmarish moment of embar­rassment, one of those scenes where reality itself fades away as everyone turns to stare at the one individual still picked out in high definition: that is to say, you.

  Filippo Sciumo, that was the ogre’s name. He liked to go around town stealing car radios by smashing in the windows with his knee, the idiot, until one night he happened upon a vehicle with windows made of bulletproof glass, after which he’d fallen to the asphalt howling so loud that the carabinieri themselves came galloping to his rescue (apparently—according to Sciumo—they never once stopped laughing the whole way back to headquarters as he sat handcuffed in the backseat of the squad car).

  At any rate, my job was to obtain a plea bargain, and knowing his tendency to take offense at trivial slights, I’d told him over and over again to keep his mouth shut and let me take care of it (especially because I’d already struck a deal with the prosecuting magistrate: all we had to do was fill in the form), but instead, that lamebrained ape, that dangerous moron, may the devil screw him on his afternoons off, one second after the reading of the counts of indictment, had the brilliant idea to loudly dry-gargle and then spit on the floor.

  I’ve had tough moments in my life. But none of them compare to this one; I swear, I wished that a natural catastrophe of some kind would swoop down and strike the part of the world I occupied at that moment, eliminating all forms of life (first and foremost my own) that might possess memory of what had just happened.

  “Hey, Malinconico, are you still there?” my colleague had asked me, since I’d stopped speaking entirely, horror-struck as I was at the resurfacing of that bloodcurdling memory.

  “Yes, sorry, I just got . . . distracted there for a second.”

  “Well, what are we going to do?”

  So I said (rocketing back to reality): “I’m not even going to discuss it.”

  Just like that, cut and dried. Absolutely sure of myself. And I’d have toughed it out, too, if Vittorio Comunale hadn’t insisted on getting it settled immediately (“Just get me a reasonable sum, Counselor, all I want is to put it behind me”).

  When you think of the victims of workplace accidents and you try to put yourself in their shoes, or in the shoes of their families, you imagine them as combative, spirited, determined to carry on the battle to the last breath. That’s not how they are. People who are injured on the job come out of it as debilitated as if they’d had open-heart surgery, and the same goes for the family (“Counselor,” Comunale’s wife once told me on the phone, “my husband is broken”).

  “Forgive me, I didn’t mean to pry.”

  Those were the words with which Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo commented on the decline and fall of my warlike intentions concerning his old friend’s lawsuit.

  “No, not at all, I apologize if I seemed a little combative,” I replied, placatingly, in my turn. “Evidently, I still haven’t entirely gotten over that epi . . .”

  And there I left the sentence unfinished, because the attention of Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo, from one second to the next, had been totally captured by one of the closed-circuit television monitors that dotted the supermarket’s ceiling: specifically the one directly behind me, some six feet overhead, perched directly above the boxes of egg lasagna (and who can say why they always put the egg lasagna on the uppermost shelf).

  Whereupon I turned to look myself, expecting to see some jaw-droppingly hot babe or at least an armed robbery in progress, but there was nothing on the monitor that justified the distraction, aside from a guy with a ponytail wearing a trench coat straight out of The Matrix nodding in the general direction of the automatic swinging entry gate, as if it had opened because it realized who it was dealing with.

  “Something wrong?” I asked, turning my disappointed eyes back to Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo. I was starting to get sick of this conversation.

  “What? Ah, no, sorry,” he said, emerging suddenly from his trance, “it’s just that that monitor seemed to me to, how to put this . . .”—and here I got the impression that he was improvising—“. . . to be taking its sweet time.”

  Whereupon I must have seemed even more confused than before, because he immediately hastened to explain what the hell he was talking about.

  “The video security system is operated by the central computer. When a customer comes in, the sensor on the video camera captures the face and automatically transmits it to the monitors; then the computer records everything on the hard drive. Sometimes it happens that a monitor stalls for a few seconds, as if the system had taken too big a bite out of something and were bracing itself to swallow it all down, I’m not sure if that’s clear.”

  I nodded generically, to convey that I thought I’d grasped the concept, though I still failed to see the connection between that brief treatise on video security and the relative stranger who suddenly seemed so eager to lay it out for me. But he went on, in a hold-on-and-in-a-second-you’ll-see-what-I-mean tone of voice.

  By that point I didn’t really give a damn about seeing what he meant, since I’d already been standing there talking to this gentleman I didn’t even know for a good fifteen minutes (moreover it was ten in the morning and I was considering the possibility of swinging by the courthouse, just to see what was going on), but I stayed put and kept listening, more than anything else because It Just Didn’t Seem Right.

  “Now. If that sort of spell extends even by the slightest amount of time, I’m talking microseconds here, I’d notice it immediately, because it might be an indicator of the onset of a technical glitch of some kind.”

  As he was finishing his sentence he pulled out of his jacket pocket a gizmo that looked very much like a remote control and aimed it at the monitor which, according to him, had just malfunctioned. Only he didn’t push any buttons, and I could see that clearly.

  “Then I suppose that would make you . . .” I said, with a rhetorical flourish.

  “The computer engineer who designed the video security system,” he finished, underscoring the words ever so slightly.

  “Ohh, I see,” I said (by which I meant: “At last, we can go”).

  The truth was that—aside from my complete lack of interest in the topic at hand—I didn’t really believe what he was saying. That is, it’s not that I thought he was making it up (though I did have my doubts about the idea that the system had problems swallowing its mouthfuls of data), but it seemed to me that the object, or perhaps I should say, the subject of his interest was not the supposed malfunction of a television monitor or anything like that, but more likely the guy dressed like a character from The Matrix, whose movements in fact he went on tracking on the monitor while speaking to me. He reminded me, to return to the subject of elevators and the grimness of the temporary relationships established therein, of the Falsely Nonchalant, that is, those people who talk to you about the weather, all the time taking sidelong glances at themselves in the mirror, because they just find themselves so irresistible and delude themselves into thinking that you haven’t noticed a thing (just like the people who pick their noses during a conversation, confident that they’re fast and clever enough to be able to extract the booger and easily roll it between thumb and forefinger without your catching on). All the same, the detail left me absolutely indifferent: if he liked Matrix characters with ponytails, that was entirely his business.

  So I extended my hand and assumed my customary stance of departure (
leaning slightly forward from the waist, standard businesslike smile, right leg just starting to lift into a step, vaguely reminiscent of the actor Alberto Sordi).

  “It’s been, ahem, a pleasure to meet you, Engineer, but now I ought to be . . .”

  “Do you handle criminal cases as well, Counselor?” he asked me in reply, as he stood staring (by now openly) at the video monitor behind me.

  Whereupon I just stood there stupidly, hand outstretched, which by the way is a position I detest because it creates a panhandling effect that increases with the fury of an avalanche.

  “I . . . sure, when it comes up,” I said, but in the quizzical tone of voice that comes naturally when someone asks a question out of left field.

  And at last I withdrew my hand, which by now had become a sort of prosthesis.

  “When it comes up,” he repeated, leaning on the four words and staring at me as if to say that he really intended to remember that. This last bit of ambiguity really plucked my last nerve.

  “Listen, you’re acting kind of strange, you know that?” I told him flat out, somewhat rudely. In fact, my jaw had set firmly.

  Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo once again fixed his gaze on the monitor. Behind him, at the end of the aisle, Matrix appeared, coming toward us with the brisk step of someone who knows exactly what he’s looking for.

  “Yes, I know,” the engineer replied at last, his voice dropping an octave. “But there’s a reason for it, believe me.”

  I instinctively shot a glance over at Matrix, who kept coming closer, even though he seemed entirely indifferent to us.

  “Don’t look at him, please,” Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo begged me under his breath.

  Whereupon I replied, whispering in turn out of an automatic instinct for imitation:

  “Hey, listen to me, I don’t know what you’re up to, but whatever it is, I want nothing to do with it.”

  And he replied, still under his breath:

  “In that case, get out of here now, Counselor, because something’s about to happen that you might not want to see.”

  Hooooold everything.

  You’ve just heard the kind of phrase that basically leaves you without any alternatives.

  If someone tells you to leave because any minute now something’s going to happen that would be better for you not to see, do you leave? Of course you don’t: you can’t. Because by that point you’re already in. And the worst part of it is that you have no idea in what. Maybe it’s a tragedy that you have a chance of preventing. Perhaps someone’s about to die and you could save them. Or else nothing could happen at all (in which case it was theoretically possible that all Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo wanted to do was pick Matrix up and take him back to the privacy of the stockroom): and in that case you’d enjoy the benefits of courage without having to lift a finger.

  One alternative would be to run off and call the police: but what if the tragedy occurs just as you’re rushing to get help? Tragedies, it’s well known, take place in a matter of seconds. What are you going to do, miss that crucial instant? The carpe diem ethos works in tragic proceedings as well. It’s far too convenient to trot it out only when you’re trying to get someone into bed. Your conscience would torment you for the rest of your life, and it would be right, of course. You might try to tell it, “I couldn’t have done anything about it anyway,” and it would reply, “Sure, but you didn’t know that when you took to your heels.”

  The fact is that there are situations in which you have to stay, even at the risk of getting involved in something inconvenient. It’s no fun to say it, but that’s how it is. From outside the situation it’s easy to shake your head no. But just find yourself in the midst of things happening all at once, then come talk to me about it.

  Just to give an example, I know some people who, a few months before getting married, used to go out walking with their doubts in tow (there was no mistaking what was happening because when you ran into them, you’d see them arm in arm, the doubts), and these people, even though you could see it on their faces that all they wanted to do was cancel the wedding, you understood just as clearly that they were absolutely incapable of mounting that revolution, so all that was left for them to do was to go out for a walk in the early afternoon.

  One huge lie that we have inherited from the rhetoric of liberty is that when it comes to the important decisions in life there’s always time to go back and make a change. But it isn’t true. Because time passes, and it’s not willing to cooperate with anyone or anything. Time has no patience for ignorance. Just like the law. It’s no accident that the whole concept of the statute of limitations is based on the passage of time. And if legislators (which is more or less like saying God, in that field) based such a nitpicky mechanism on the passage of time, there must be a reason. Time has a compromising effect, no doubt about it. And those who jilt their fiancées at the altar (I’ve never heard a story in which the opposite happens), even if their deed, in the accounts of subsequent generations, tends to be regarded as a masterly blow that few on earth have ever had the nerve to strike, are individuals who turn their backs on time, and their reputations as free men should be reevaluated once and for all, because there’s nothing praiseworthy about humiliating a woman in front of her friends and family after the corsages have all been chosen, unsightly though they well may be.

  THE COLLATERAL EFFECTS OF PUBLIC SUCCESS

  From what I know about myself, walking into a supermarket in the middle of the morning on a weekday is never a good sign. Especially if the supermarket is on the far side of town.

  What happens to me when something starts to go wrong, especially in periods when it seems like everything’s going just fine, is that a kind of frenzy, a frustration, a jumpiness comes over me, so that I have to go out wandering, as if I’m looking for something I’ve lost.

  And since I can hardly wander around looking for nothing in particular, and given that I have no idea what it is I need but nevertheless feel a sense of disquiet that prevents me from going for an ordinary stroll (because an ordinary stroll requires a clear conscience), I invent nonessential errands for myself, such as, in fact, in this case, buying a jar of Buitoni Fior di Pesto.

  The fact is that since Alessandra Persiano has come to live with me, a few things have happened.

  The first thing is that a number of my fellow lawyers have stopped saying hello to me.

  The second thing is that many other fellow lawyers who never used to say hello to me have started saying hello to me now.

  Obviously, there isn’t a bit of difference between the former and the latter: in both cases, the motive is envy.

  There’s one (he’s called Massimo Corrente, though I really shouldn’t name names) who’s become a real problem. He waits for me outside the hearing rooms, shoots me defiant glances in the hallways (at times he even puts his hands on his hips, so that the only thing missing is for him to say, “Excuse me, would you mind looking somewhere else, thanks”), he walks past and lightly grazes me when I stop to talk with a colleague or (less frequently) with a client, he harasses me with anonymous phone calls, all silent, except for those times when he abandons himself to guttural panting.

  One night when I just couldn’t take it anymore I shot back, “Come on, you animal, tell me what you’re wearing, I’m already in my underwear,” and that put an end to that. But if he doesn’t stop persecuting me I’m going to report him for stalking.

  Anyway, this whole thing with my colleagues who, one way or another, can’t seem to wrap their heads around my new love affair has turned into a pain in the neck. Not a serious one, granted, but still equipped with all the essential features that characterize a genuine pain in the neck: frequency, persistence, monomania.

  Now I’m not trying to say that this is the reason for my recent problems with Alessandra Persiano, but the fact that a small army of obsessives like the one I just described should b
e hard at work injecting poison into my daily existence has its inevitable consequences for my life as a member of a couple.

  Okay, at first success is extremely gratifying. The fact that the public recognizes your better qualities is obviously something that brings pleasure. Especially if those qualities are confirmed by a hot babe who makes people (let alone lawyers) turn around in the street. And even more so if you’re completely fucking worthless as a lawyer.

  All right, let’s tell it like it is: the best thing about success is detecting that sense of inferiority in other people’s eyes.

  It’s a deliciously vulgar sensation, and no one will ever admit to it, but it’s just to experience that feeling that everyone wants to be successful. After a little while, though, things start to get complicated. In the sense that every so often you’re tempted to stop one of them, one of those loser doormen who shoot you glances as you walk past, and say to him, “So tell me, you think I’m so repulsive that I couldn’t possibly be with a beautiful woman? What did you expect, that she’d shack up with you? Have you taken a look at yourself in the mirror lately?”

  In short, when you’re being observed to the point where you feel like you’re posing for a calendar, after a while the suspicion starts to set in that you’ve wound up in someone else’s place sheerly by accident, and that just when you least expect it he will return to reclaim that place and send you back to the losers’ quarters, where in fact you grew up and where your old friends will be waiting to welcome you back with open arms.