“Well then it’s just as well I wasn’t there, or I definitely would have started laughing.”
“That’s exactly what she said when we left.”
Assunta. Assunta Russo, also known as Ass. Alagia and Alfredo’s grandmother. Nives’s mother. My mother-in-law. That is, my ex-mother-in-law. A piece of work. Probably the only human being on the planet in whose presence Nives sheds her intellectual pretensions, takes her vocabulary down a good ten notches, and suddenly starts speaking in simple sentences composed of subject, verb, and object, even taking care to stay on topic.
Ass (it’s just an abbreviated form of her name and nothing else, and those of you who know English can keep your smart comments to yourselves; besides, if there’s anything my mother-in-law lacks, in every sense of the word, it would be that) is the exact opposite of her daughter. Pathologically incapable of dressing up an idea. Indifferent to the subconscious. Allergic to complexity.
To take care of Nives and fund her education, she’d worked as a waitress in a restaurant for practically her whole life, a little like Ellen Burstyn in Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore (“Only that prick of a husband of mine didn’t get killed in a car crash, and worst of all I didn’t meet Kris Kristofferson afterward,” she pointed out to me when I suggested the comparison with the Scorsese film), and it’s probably from her dedication to earning a living that she developed her idiosyncratic way of dealing with those people who take problematic approaches to the questions of life.
This much is obligatory biography. But since I’ve known her for a while now, I believe that I can safely say that this tendency to get straight to the heart of the matter is part of her character. In the sense that even if she’d been wealthy enough not to have to work for a living, her hard-assed waitress’s pragmatism would still have guided her through her passage here on earth. Among other things, she never made a point of the fact that she’d spent the best years of her life humping trays so that her daughter would never lack for anything. None of us has ever heard her feel sorry for herself, not even once, like those failures who bombard their children with reminders of all the things they had to give up, practically taking them to court over it, accusing them of making them slave away for them without social security and withholding (you wouldn’t believe how many people like this there are out there). It’s just that Ass just isn’t like that. The only way she knows how to think is in terms of cause and effect. That’s why she’s always fought against Nives’s innate tendency to take the long way around when it comes to understanding things. And as if she’d set out to achieve it, she got herself a psychologist daughter.
Nives claims that she chose her profession as a response to the simplified world model that her mother offered her (and I hardly need point out here that from “as a response” to “offered her” are her exact words).
According to her reconstruction of events, it all dates back to a little tantrum she threw when she was roughly nine years old. One afternoon a wave of unexpected sadness came over her, the kind of depression that attacks children for no good reason and turns them into whiny pests, and sure enough she started pestering her mother, crying and complaining over nothing, the way kids do when they’re trying to get your attention but they don’t know what they want, basically because what they really want is for you to figure it out for them.
Ass let her carry on for a while, hoping that she’d cut it out on her own, but when she realized that at this rate they might still be at it that night, she sat the girl down and delivered a little lecture that more or less consisted of the following considerations:
“You got a good night’s sleep. No tummy aches, no nightmares. Yesterday in school you recited a poem by heart; I know that because your teacher told me when I ran into her at the supermarket. At lunch you ate a cutlet, mashed potatoes, and a second helping of strawberries. Then you watched the cartoons you like on TV. You don’t have much homework for tomorrow, your forehead isn’t hot, and your dog hasn’t died. So will you explain to me why I ought to worry about a problem that doesn’t even exist?”
And Nives stood there, raptly following point by point that presentation which was impeccable both in theory and in application; then without speaking a single word or shedding another tear, she went into her bedroom and did her homework, dragging behind her a sense of mortification unlike anything she would ever experience again in her entire life.
From that day forward she never misbehaved willfully, terrified by the prospect of a second rendition.
It was that same day that she felt within her the first stirrings of a decision that she would come to several years after that (from “felt within” to “after that,” obviously, I had nothing to do with).
“I’ll become a psychologist,” she said to herself when she discovered that a scientific discipline existed that dealt specifically with the feelings of sadness that wash over people for no apparent reason. “I’ll try to solve the problems that my mother thinks don’t even exist, I’ll listen to people when they tell me about them, and I’ll take them seriously.”
“And I will bust Vincenzo Malinconico’s balls all the livelong day,” I would add.
Now I don’t want to come off as a cynic. When Nives told me the story of the minor childhood trauma that scarred her for life I actually felt a twinge of pity, and I took her hand and then we embraced sweetly (okay, at the time I hadn’t gotten her into bed yet, but I swear that I was prompted only by a sincere desire to console her). I can see how a little nine-year-old girl experiencing a wave of unfounded sadness would have her feelings hurt by such a show of maternal cynicism. Because there’s no doubt that sadness is real. And it comes when it feels like it, more or less like sneezing. Only you can’t just put on a sweater to make it go away.
A little girl who suddenly feels sad for no reason one afternoon (and actually, now that I think about it, it would be vitally important to know whether it was a Sunday) ought to have her constitutional rights recognized—and by “constitutional” I mean relating to her biological constitution—namely her right to have her parent explain to her that feeling sad for no good reason is just something that happens, and that there’s no cause for despair, because it’ll pass soon enough.
But in order to provide this kind of assistance a mother would have to be willing to recognize the cry for help that takes the form of a child’s whining about motiveless sadness and, thus, validate it, at least a little. And the problem is that there are people in the world, even people who are mothers, who simply don’t believe in motiveless sadness (perhaps because they’re all too familiar with the motivated kind). And so they simply ignore the request. And they don’t do it out of selfishness or arrogance: it’s more that they just aren’t willing to consider the larger theological question. Because it’s obvious that no one can persuade anyone else to believe in the existence of something. You either believe or you don’t, and that’s that.
A mother who refuses to take responsibility for her little girl’s unmotivated sadness refuses to believe in it. It’s a little bit like a doctor dealing with a hypochondriac: he tends to dismiss out of hand any set of symptoms embroidered with a rich array of details.
Now I—in case you’re interested in knowing what I think about it—profoundly envy people like my mother-in-law. People who focus on evidence and rank things by priority. People who get things done. Who dismiss the anguish of a depressing afternoon with a shrug of the shoulders. Who believe that the soul may very well exist, but who still prefer not to open that can of worms. Who don’t take their own thoughts all that seriously, and thus manage to avoid sitting around constantly rethinking, refining, modifying, and revising them.
Because I, unlike people like Ass, am a perennial victim of the things that go through my head. And if only I could think those thoughts just once and be done with them. My thoughts exit and enter my mind with such freedom, such promiscuity, such grim determination as to prevent
me from making so much as a single decision with anything like true conviction, so that it’s debilitating to have to interact with them. My thoughts are a bunch of sluts, if you want to know the truth.
I wish they’d stop treating me like a hotel, coming to me for consolation and help after they’ve been out doing who the hell knows what around town. That for once in their miserable lives they’d content themselves with their owner and just stay faithful to me.
If I were to identify my chief shortcoming, the one that I most often see recurring in my relationships with other people, I’d have to say that it’s my tendency to brood over things. I brood over things a lot. When I’m walking. When I’m working. When I’m having fun. When I’m feeling sorry for myself. When I’m having sex. And especially when I’m not having sex. (And when you think about it, brooding is an activity for psychopaths. Because you brood over what’s happened, and what’s happened—as the word itself indicates—has already happened. So it’s clear that fretting over issues that you can’t do anything about is a morbid pleasure, a form of intellectual necrophilia, a masochistic indulgence.)
Well, I do something even worse: sometimes I’m so overwhelmed by my broodings that I actually sit down and write. I fill page after page of Word documents in the hope of finding the right words to nail down one point of view, one I can stick to forever. I work deep into the night, when I really get obsessed. And then I say to myself: What, are you stupid? Are you trying to write a book or something?
Certain nights, as a famous Italian singer puts it, I feel as if I’ve reached conclusions that might be, so to speak, of public interest, and I go to sleep with a sense of satisfaction.
Then, a couple of days later, when my opinions resume their customary vacillation, I turn on my computer, I open the file Brood.doc, I reread it, and I don’t find a single convincing phrase. It all seems patched together, phony. It has the look of a falsified account (if I knew how to read a balance sheet). With the various sentence-pipes all screwed together to form a plumbing system, instead of being left free to wander as they will, each with its own shape, likes the branches of a tree. I don’t know if that’s clear
If there’s one thing that I’ve come to understand by deleting in one moment of lucid irritation long files I’d spent hours and hours on, it’s that you can tell immediately whether the person who is writing something is disinterested or is pursuing some purpose of their own. Because in the first case, you’ll be able to understand the writing, however difficult it might be. In the second case, however, you’ll need to reread it, and even after you reread it you’re left with a certain degree of confusion, so you go on reading awhile longer, thinking that it will become clearer to you as continue (the way it is with board games, when at the beginning they explain the rules to you but you don’t feel like concentrating so you cut the explanation short and say, “Okay, let’s just start playing”), and in the end, when you still don’t understand it (or rather, you don’t trust that you’ve understood correctly), you experience genuine annoyance at the effort you’ve had to undertake, as if you’d tried to do a favor for someone who didn’t deserve it.
When you write that way, that is, in pursuit of a goal, stuffing your sentences with synonyms, adverbs, and ideas that are alluded to but never fully expressed, it means that you’re trying to fool someone (whether it’s yourself or someone else doesn’t really matter).
I personally believe that I’m pretty clear on the difference between disinterested writing and utilitarian writing because in my, shall we say, profession, I’m required to make use of the latter, which is inevitably at odds with the former (and it’s no coincidence that I do the former kind of writing at night).
Lawyerly writing is in fact a kind of writing that is designed to turn a profit. There’s nothing wrong with that, let’s be clear. Among other reasons because all sciences consist of languages. And law is a science. That a scientific language should possess a certain degree of incomprehensibility, and that this incomprehensibility should be experienced in a negative manner by those who haven’t mastered a certain type of subject, is the most natural thing imaginable.
But if a report from an expert witness, or even an ordinary medical prescription, is perceived by the reader as a text that is merely difficult to understand without the help of a translation on a facing page (and in fact the doctor provides one by reading the prescription aloud as he writes it), any legal document, the minute we lay eyes on it, immediately conveys a sense of falsehood. In the sense that a legal document is by its own admission inauthentic. And not because it doesn’t tell the truth. It’s inauthentic because it is ontologically prompted by a vested interest, because it is out to achieve a purpose or a profit and it makes no bones about it. It’s this very shamelessness that makes it seem untrustworthy at first glance.
Put any legal document (a subpoena, an appeal, a complaint, a verdict, or even a simple contract) in front of someone who’s unfamiliar with the courts and he’ll tell you that: a) he doesn’t understand it; b) he doesn’t trust what little he thinks he does understand.
And then if that person is actually the recipient of the document in question, what he’ll do next, and I mean beyond the shadow of a doubt, is to pick up the phone and call a friend who’s a lawyer and have him read it, in order to find out what it actually says.
All this just goes to show you that legal writing is not trustworthy. And that the mistrust that the average citizen feels toward it comes essentially from the fact that he perceives it as a utilitarian form of writing.
In much the same way (otherwise I’ll be told that I’m being unfair to my fellow members of the bar), though to a lesser degree, the average citizen is mistrustful of journalistic writing (the kind of writing in the newspapers that he doesn’t buy), as well as of advertising copy (even though—and this is a paradox—he’s not all that embarrassed to purchase a product for which he’s seen a commercial that strikes him as overtly dishonest).
Let’s take a look at a nice concrete example of utilitarian writing and disinterested writing. An example that has to do with me, since I am its author; but I’ll examine myself the way an entomologist would examine an insect, I promise.
Example of utilitarian writing (source: Brood.doc by Vincenzo Malinconico, hidden in folder “Photographs, Happy Village in Marina di Camerota, July 2004”):
Perhaps we ought to begin to consider whether this relationship, rather than improving our lives, isn’t simply complicating them. In that case perhaps we should ask ourselves what has broken between us, and why. Then, together, we can find the least painful solution for us both.
As you can plainly see, the style of writing that governs these phrases slithers along a path of disingenuous hypocrisy of a pretty coarse variety. It’s a kind of reptilian writing, which spots its prey from a distance and then draws closer in ever-tightening circles, awaiting the perfect opportunity to lunge and sink its fangs into it.
The author pretends to start from a potential doubt (before even touching down on the verb “to consider”—which already in and of itself suggests no real volition—he covers his ass with a “perhaps,” and then further armor-plates himself with a “begin to,” as if even that act of considering is an effort he’s not completely sure he’s willing to undertake), though it’s perfectly obvious that he knows exactly what’s going on; then, seeing as the responsibility for an eventual separation (which is after all the reptile’s real objective) is not a burden he’s willing to bear entirely on his own, he cunningly attempts to farm out half of it to the other party in the doomed relationship, venturing so far as to invite her to underwrite a metaphorical protocol of understanding, an emotional briefing intended to explore a problem that in reality he knows exactly how to resolve (which is to say, by dumping the girl while making her believe that this separation is something they actually entered into by common accord).
In other words, despicable stuff.
> Now let’s try writing the exact same thing (or to be more precise let’s treat the same topic of Love Looking Around for the Check) in a more gratuitous mode.
Here’s an example of the kind of prose that might come out of such an effort (or perhaps I should say the text that I wrote after the red-cheeked shame I felt after rereading what I’d previously composed in the utilitarian fashion):
Accept the fucking miserable reality, Vince’. You’re both stuck. Wasting time wondering how and when it happened is futile at best. The truth is that you just look each other in the face and talk about other things. The only question at this point is which of you is going to bring it up first.
As you can see, the shift in style was so radical and so sudden that the author was made to renounce outright the hypocrisy of the first person singular, going so far as to address himself in the second person. A necessary splitting of the personality in order to suppress the reptilian (a useful lesson to take away at this point might be “If you want to write, then suppress the reptile inside you”), regain control of present events, and finally break the code of omertà that governed his utilitarian writing.
From this point forward, it’s all downhill: the author seizes the topic by the horns, and without much beating around the bush writes: “You’re both stuck”: then, in a single line, he dismisses the old chestnut about tracing the problem back to its source, and limits himself to accepting the fact that what’s broken cannot be fixed (because first of all there are some things that are just beyond repair; and second, even if it could be fixed, these days it’s not worth spending money on repairs anyway). At this point his renewed faith in the truth allows him to serve up a metaphor, cynical but as eloquent as a scene in a movie: “looking each other in the face and talking about other things,” which is also a concise description of the awkwardness that arises between two people who have fallen out of love with each other.
My Mother-in-Law Drinks Page 5
