My Mother-in-Law Drinks

by Diego De Silva

  Matrix’s breathing was labored, defenseless and uninformed as he was with regard to his own future prospects. Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo snapped a handcuff around the first wrist, ran the chain around the metallic bumper that ran along the front of the dairy products case, and then proceeded to cuff the other hand.

  Having successfully partially hogtied him, the engineer withdrew the pistol and, with the ultra-nonchalance of a consummate professional, turned on his heel and started walking calmly down the aisle, leaving his hostage behind him, as if he were done with him.

  I was still standing there with the old woman clutching my arm, as if we were a pair of extras dressed for a film, waiting for the unit production manager to tell us whether we should stay or were free to go.

  “Did he arrest him?” the old woman asked me.

  “What does it look like to you?” I replied.

  Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo looked me right in the eye and nodded, just once.

  The old woman immediately released my arm and stared hard at me, just inches away from my face.

  I started covering my ass like an idiot with such pathetic phrases as “Hey, surely you don’t think that . . .” and “Look, I have nothing to do with . . . ,” the end result of which was only to reinforce her suspicions of some association (whether of a criminal or law-enforcement nature was unclear: from the way she was looking at me I doubted that there was any difference between the two for her) between me and Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo.

  After blundering along for a bit, I blurted out a generalized “Aw, fuck it” under my breath, and even took a backhanded swing at the air between me and the old woman; then I made a point of putting her damn-it-to-hell cranberry beans back on the top shelf (now you can climb up there yourself if you want them so much, you mistrustful old biddy).

  She threw her head back in reverse, visibly horrified, and finally cut out the ocular inquisition she’d been conducting.

  Having resolved our personal problems, we went back to our consideration of the hostage situation in progress.

  Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo, with surreal nonchalance, had gone back to fiddling around with the remote control, once again aiming it at the two overhead monitors across from the dairy case.

  Matrix, meanwhile, still down on his knees, finally managed to swivel his head in the direction of his handcuffer in search of some indication of what his fate would be; when he saw him madly engaged in what appeared to be a generic operation of product testing, an expression of genuine confusion came over his face.

  I too had begun to wonder if Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo might not be slightly cracked.

  I think I read somewhere (or else I’m completely making it up, who knows; regardless it strikes me as logical and even vaguely scientific) that when you really and truly screw up, whether involuntarily or intentionally, it sometimes happens that your brain is unable to come to grips with the immanence of your actions; in other words, your brain refuses to tell itself the story of what you’ve just done. The result is a temporary vacatio mentis, or perhaps we should say fugue state, after which for a short while we behave incongruously, just as, sure enough, once happened to me when it was handbags, so to speak, between me and a sort of girlfriend, and I ended up ordering her out of my car in a part of town that was clearly unsafe for a young woman on foot. I took off, tires screeching (I still remember the sight of her disbelieving face in the rearview mirror), but as soon as I had swerved around the corner I completely forgot where I lived and after driving around at random for a while (which was a real nightmare, now that I think back) I went back to where I’d left her, not so much to make up for what I’d done but rather because I hoped she’d give me directions, or at least to get her to say to me, “Where the fuck do you think you’re going? That way, you idiot!” (I don’t know how germane this example actually is; but anyway.)

  “Nice work,” Matrix said. Referring to Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo.

  The engineer didn’t bother to reply; instead he set down the remote control on one of the shelves where the fruit was displayed across the aisle, and appeared genuinely curious to see what was coming next. Matrix must have interpreted his silence as a sign of weakness, because he immediately launched into a crescendo of threats intended to win his release, like in a cop movie where coolheaded veteran detectives detect a hint of hesitation in the bad guy, so they walk toward him, unarmed, urging him to shoot as he backs away, trembling, until he collapses, breaks into tears, and hands over the gun.

  “As long as you just handcuffed me, okay . . . but this, here,” and he clarified by shaking his hands and rattling the handcuffs against the metal rail of the dairy case, “this is taking it too far.”

  What struck me was the way he managed, even from his helpless, hunched over position, to be so brazen, and clearly very confident that before long their roles would be reversed.

  Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo must have thought the same thing because he immediately turned to look at me, flashing me a mocking smile that more or less translated as: “You hear this guy?”

  Why the hell he kept shooting me those looks of connivance was beyond me; and aside from being intrinsically objectionable, it was starting to worry me, because the last thing I needed was for Matrix to think that I was in cahoots on this thing and come looking for me once the whole business was over.

  “Tell me,” Matrix went on, “are you by any chance hoping that this will get you a promotion?”

  Short pause, after which he got to the point, lowering his voice slightly and putting on a friendly smile.

  “Tomorrow morning I’ll get out of jail, then I’ll come find you, wherever you might be, and first I’ll shoot you in both hands, and then in the face, you can count on it . . .” But he said it in the tone of voice of an old uncle who, upon running into the little nephew he hasn’t seen in forever, crouches down and says, “You’ve gotten so tall!”

  Now then. I don’t know what sort of impression words like these make when they’re written down on a sheet of paper; but I guarantee that when you hear them live they induce the same kind of nausea that would beset you if, without any advance notice, they were to take you away and force you to witness an autopsy. Because they do more than just promise death: they give it shape and presence; they bring it close; they show it to you.

  “And remember,” Matrix added, just to make sure he’d covered all his bases, accompanying his words with an obscene leer, “I’ll make sure and come personally; that way you’ll be able to introduce me to your family.”

  It was after this abominable kicker that I felt certain that Matrix must be a camorrista: and not just a two-bit gangster, a heavy hitter. Not so much because of the tone of voice but because of the expressive power of his words, their ability to conjure up such frighteningly vivid images.

  Camorristi are past masters of the art of ambiguity, expert communicators, ideal ad men. The messages they send do much more than merely intimidate their recipients: they take them straight out of a state of law. Their messages suggest a throwback to an earlier society, where justice has no power because the strongest make the rules. It is this authoritarian subtext that offends us so intimately, because it turns back the clock with such rude certainty that we question what century we’re in. It’s the possibility of going so far back in time that throws us off balance.

  The Camorrese language is a reactionary form of Latin, as in ancient Rome, that sends us back to a world that we thought we’d left behind us forever.

  I had a hunch that this threat of a transversal vendetta would send Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo over the edge. And so it did, in fact. Don’t ask me why, I couldn’t say. Sometimes you just get lucky and nail it, right when you’re on the precipice of a world of pain. As if the motives that two or more people might have for slaughtering each other, when it comes down to it, had somehow acquired an aesthetic all their own.

 
When Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo lunged at Matrix I almost missed it; that’s how fast he was. He grabbed him by the hair and yanked him to his feet, jamming the pistol in his face again with such fury that I was afraid that I was about to see Matrix’s head turn into a New Year’s Eve fireworks display any second now. In the scuffle a half-liter bottle of yogurt tumbled off a shelf, cracking open on the floor and whitewashing a section of tile. The old lady once again dug her talons into my arm. Matrix was unable to keep his balance on his knees and instinctively pulled up his right leg so that he could brace himself against the floor with one foot. Interpreting that move as a potential attempt to fight back, Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo slammed his knee into Matrix’s ribs, simultaneously pulling him toward him and forcing his leg to bend awkwardly. Matrix squeezed his eyes shut and clenched his teeth to keep from screaming and bent forward even deeper, crawling on his knees, sucking air and coughing. I—or rather, we, since the old woman was basically attached to me—we both recoiled in empathy, taking part in a simulation of the pain that Matrix must have been experiencing.

  Now he was panting and biting his lips, perhaps suffering more from his helplessness than from the actual pain. Still holding him by a hank of his hair, Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo jerked Matrix toward him forcefully, claiming him as his personal property. Matrix made an attempt to say something, maybe an oath, or another threat; but all that came out was a grunt, something incomprehensible. The old woman was squeezing my arm at regular intervals, like a girl when you take her to see a horror movie (which in fact encourages physical contact), and any minute I expected her to throw her arms around me. Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo resumed his close-quarters battle with his prey, and now seemed intent on communicating something especially important to him.

  I hadn’t imagined him like this. While he was immobilizing and handcuffing the man, he’d behaved like the suspect-apprehension equivalent of a dental hygienist. Now he was pure rage.

  “Unfortunately for you, I’m no cop,” he said into the guy’s ear. But since he neglected to lower his voice, we heard it too.

  Bingo, I thought to myself.

  Ignoring the pistol barrel jammed into his cheek so hard that he was forced to keep his jaws open wide, and even though he was half-blinded by the extreme closeup of his captor’s face, Matrix stared right back at Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo, though he could hardly have expected to see anyone else at this point.

  But perhaps he did see someone else. A tremendously unhappy person (just for an instant, an abyss), then a horribly empty one.

  “Well, you’ve already taken my family away from me, piece of shit.”

  The old woman turned toward me, to share the dramatic intensity of that moment.

  A wince registered instantanouesly in Matrix’s glistening eyes, like a momentary drop in the tension. I thought I saw him hold his breath for a microsecond.

  Finally Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo let him go. Matrix’s head seemed to rejoin the rest of his exhausted body, with a sort of rebounding motion. The, shall we say, poor man coughed convulsively, partly suffocated by the quantity of saliva that had flooded his mouth on account of his gaping jaws, and zigzagging aimlessly around on his knees he tried to hoist himself upright in order to make up for the constriction of his arms.

  The engineer slapped at his clothes haphazardly, as if he felt it were important to straighten up his appearance before returning to check on his audience, which consisted of the old lady and myself, the latter even more aghast than the former. He then picked up the remote control and once again pointed it at the two monitors in front of him, pressing a series of buttons sequentially, or at least that was my impression.

  A moment later an image of Matrix appeared on the two television sets, on his knees, his wrists handcuffed behind him to the metal rail of the dairy case. It looked like a video clip from Al Jazeera.

  Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo shot me another one of his canny little glances.

  I must have responded with an especially baffled expression, because a tiny oblique tremor in the old woman’s eyebrows gave me the distinct impression that she was revising her opinion of me. For that matter, all it would take was a smidgen of logic to see that if I had been in cahoots with Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo, at the very least I ought to have given him a hand instead of standing there watching while he handled everything on his own (okay, maybe that was too sophisticated a thought process for the old biddy).

  I instinctively turned to look at the monitor behind me, or rather, above me, expecting to see a screenshot of Matrix done up as a hostage there too, and that is precisely what I saw.

  At that point, my confusion began to dissipate.

  Matrix hawked and spat some more. When he was breathing more or less regularly again and looked up, the first thing his eyes lit on were the two monitors looming over him on the facing wall. He looked puzzled, almost as if he’d seen someone he thought he knew.

  At first he must not have believed his eyes, because he first looked down at his body (“Wait, is that what I’m wearing?”), after which he craned his neck like an expanding telescope toward the monitors, a move he accompanied with a quick right-left-right shimmy of the shoulders (a little like what boxers do when they’re sizing each other up during a match).

  Once the movement test had chased the last of his doubts from his mind, he started grinding his teeth and hyperventilating, as if only then had he really begun to feel trapped.

  At that exact moment, I recognized the voice of a female cashier in the distance asking generically, “What on earth is going on over there?” and then another voice, also female, perhaps a little younger: “Franco, Franco, did you see that?”

  Then another. And another. And another one still.

  “That’s impossible. Look, he’s on that other screen, too!”

  “Oh my God, but where is he, inside the store?”

  “Mamma, why do we have to leave?”

  The populace of the supermarket had lifted their eyes to the closed-circuit television sets.

  At last I started to feel a little less alone.

  IT ALL STEMS FROM INFANCY

  (Including an accelerated course in not-especially-creative

  writing, with examples)

  What, your mother couldn’t have bothered to tell me herself?” I said to Alagia when she came to give me the news, acting as deeply resentful as I could manage.

  Her response:

  “Oh, I knew it. You’re such a pain, Vince’. When are you going to quit taking offense all the time? You’re always going on about all the slights and neglectful treatment you have to endure instead of just listening to what people are trying to tell you. I just informed you that Grandma has cancer; don’t you think you should be focusing on that?”

  Whereupon I was left more or less speechless. It’s true, I like to take offense, I like to point out shortcomings in the manners of others, especially when their mishandling of personal interactions is directed at me. I gloat when people fail to behave the way they ought to, because that gives me an opportunity to say so, to manifest my icy disapproval. Acting offended is the work I was put on this earth to do, truth be told.

  “Let’s just recapitulate for a moment, okay?” I replied, with just the right amount of indignation to keep her from realizing how pissed off I was. “As usual, your mother benefits from every mitigating circumstance; but what am I saying, mitigating circumstances would already represent progress. It never even occurs to you and Alf”—our nickname for my son, Alfredo—“to question anything she does or says. If she so much as spits it’s gospel truth. But when you two turn in my direction you suddenly discover the joys of parent-child dialectics, am I right? So true is this that it strikes you as perfectly normal to read me the riot act if I so much as dare to point out the childishness of Nives’s behavior toward me.”

  “Oookay,” Alagia said, liquidating my diatribe w
ith a pause that was not exactly brief and served to say: “I acknowledge that you’ve done your best, and I’ll also be so kind as to suspend judgment, which means you get to land on your feet, provided you agree not to drag it out any longer than you already have,” whereupon she continued, “So, can we talk about Grandma now?”

  “Of course, of course,” I replied, promptly accepting the compromise. I can’t hold my own with this girl: she’s practically an optimized, turbocharged version of her mother.

  We gave ourselves a few seconds of silence to alleviate some of the argumentative tension. I put on a show of pacing meditatively around my kitchen table (because that’s where we were) and then I made my way to the simple question I had culpably overlooked at the outset.

  “Where did you say she has it?”

  “How would I know? From what I understood, it’s some kind of leukemic lymphoma. One of the pretty rare kinds, too.”

  “Jesus fucking Christ.”

  “The really funny thing was the way she treated the doctor.”

  “Why, what did she do?”

  “You had to be there. He was this smooth operator; he’d clearly spent some time at the tanning parlor, and he was wearing a pair of orange Crocs with his lab coat, convinced he was God’s gift. He’d called us into his office for a private conversation, all like: ‘I need your help with this; we shouldn’t deny anything, just obscure the truth, unveil the actual situation little by little,’ ‘It’ll do us more good than it will her,’ and so on. The whole thing in the damned first-person plural. In other words, a lesson in sheer humanity that I couldn’t tell you, with Mamma holding her handkerchief pressed against her nose like a boxer after a match and Alfredo who was on the verge of pulling out a pad of paper and jotting down notes. Then, as soon as Grandma laid eyes on him, the junior doctor, she looked him straight in the face and said, ‘I’ve got cancer, right?’; and doctor boy just gaped at her like an idiot. You know when a wife waits up for her cheating husband to come home at two in the morning and wrings the confession out of him before he can come up with a good alibi? Like that. You’d have wanted to razz him if he hadn’t done such a perfect job of making a fool of himself on his own; anyway the truth was written all over his face. At that point it would have been practically impossible to pull the wool over her eyes.”