Now, even though I realize that it’s an inherently unfair question, compare the examples provided above once again and tell me which of the two writing styles you prefer.
If you ask me, all really good books are written in the gratuitous mode.
Take The Catcher in the Rye. It’s one of the most disinterested books I’ve ever read.
Which is why it still sells so many copies.
I think.
How did I even work my way around to this topic? Ah, yes, that whole business about the envy I feel for people like my mother-in-law, who enjoy a simplified conception of life, as opposed to us brooders, who poison our lives by brooding and then use writing as a way of recalibrating things.
You want to know why I write? What’s the real, most essential, truly indisputable reason, trimmed free of any and all idle chitchat? I’ll tell you why: I write so that I have time to come up with the proper comeback.
My problem is that I’m slow on the draw. That’s why I hate my thoughts. If only they’d give me a brief summary of the things that happen, instead of getting all twisted up over everything, then I’d have a chance of coming up with something snappy (and, more important, on topic) more or less when needed.
The thing I ought to have said always comes to me when I’m almost home. Specifically, as I’m turning my key in the door to my building. That’s when it appears before my eyes, as if I could actually see it, a well-formed phrase, spare, musical, impeccably logical: designed to discourage any attempt at rebuttal. And that’s when I could practically kick myself in the teeth. Because the last thing I can do now is pick up my phone, call the person who won the battle of wits, and say to them, “Hey, so, anyway, about that talk we were having, I’d like to add that . . .”
You can’t do it. Overtime rules forbid it.
In real life I can’t delete, start over, rethink what I said, correct it.
So I write.
To take my revenge on words.
To tell the story of how things would have gone if I’d used the right ones.
ACTION!
It’s about time,” I was about to say to the deli counterman—a fatty with a soul patch you’d expect to see on a carabiniere and the same face he must have had when he was ten (I don’t know if you know the kind of guy I’m talking about, one of those types you’re sure look exactly like themselves as children even if you’ve never seen them before)—when he came over to me, shop apron all wrinkled and white cap in his hands, as if he were on a visit to pay his condolences.
“What on earth is going on here?” he asked me, more brokenhearted than worried.
He saw for himself before I could get the words out.
Matrix glared at him as the deli counterman’s jaw dropped at the sight of that surreal scene.
Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo stared at him without saying a word, his arm dangling inert at his side, the gun in his hand. He’d prudently positioned himself midway between us and Matrix, facing sideways, so that he could keep an eye on his prisoner and at the same time stage-manage the appearance of the new witness.
Instinctively, the deli counterman with the face he’d had as a boy stepped toward him, though not with any intent of taking his weapon or trying to dissuade him in any way: he just made the move, trustingly, as if he could do something to help him.
“Dotto’,” he said.
Scandalized, as if he refused to change his mind about the handcuffed man.
Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo snapped his arm straight out into the air in front of him and aimed the pistol on a line with the counterman’s broad moon-face.
“Stop right there, Matteo. Don’t get any closer.”
Calmly, without a hint of menace in his voice.
Matteo the deli counterman stopped short, turned as white as the cap he was clutching in his hand (just one hand, now), and took a step back. The old woman raised both arms in a pugilistic stance of self-defense. I was on the verge of telling her: “Oh, would you stop always thinking it’s all about you? He’s aiming at him, not you.”
“Please,” Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo added, almost apologetically. “Stay back.”
And that’s when it became clear that he was a bit of a sentimentalist, because if he hadn’t felt called upon to tell Matteo the deli counterman how sorry he was to have to treat him that way, he wouldn’t have fallen into the moment of distraction (a classic: and they always seem to fall for the classics) that any self-respecting criminal would instantly recognize and turn to his advantage.
With stunning promptness, in fact, Matrix leapt to his feet and charged head-down like a battering ram, taking along behind him both arms trapped by the handcuffs that screeched along the metal rail of the dairy case, producing a subversive, premonitory sound.
Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo was just fast enough to turn and block the impact with his left arm, otherwise Matrix’s head butt would have caught him square between his spine and his ribs. He nevertheless hit him hard enough to knock him off his feet, causing him to lose both his balance and his gun in the same instant (the deli counterman Matteo looked down to see the pistol slide to within a yard or so of the tips of his shoes). The old woman was using me as a human shield, and every so often it seemed to me she jumped into the air back there behind me.
Pirouetting in a tight circle, Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo windmilled both arms in the air in a wild but ultimately unsuccessful attempt to grab the metal rail that ran along the front of the dairy case; he then tumbled over onto his right side. He immediately tried to reach out and grab the handgun, but Matrix hurled himself on top of him and kneed him hard in the belly, knocking the wind out of him. Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo clenched his teeth and squeezed his eyes shut in a deforming grimace and then curled up in a fetal position, as if to gather the pain into the exact center of his body, thereby suffocating it.
Matteo the deli counterman stood staring at the pistol on the floor as if he’d never seen anything remotely like it in his life. Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo gathered his strength and threw a punch in Matrix’s general direction, but Matrix dodged it easily, and taking advantage of that further loss of balance he climbed onto the engineer’s back, wrapping his legs around him to keep him from reaching the gun. Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo found himself crushed to the floor with Matrix riding him like a horse, whereupon he slammed both his hands to the ground in an attempt to buck off his jockey: a move that Matrix immediately countered by glueing his torso to his back in order to force him down with every ounce of his weight. It was as if the two were miming intercourse, with the further aggravating factor of the attempted ear bite on the part of the one on top.
Now the situation had been grotesquely reversed. A prisoner who’d been deprived of the use of his arms riding on the back of the man who’d handcuffed him in the first place.
As for us three useless bystanders: Matteo the deli counterman went on staring at the pistol as if it were some sort of alien organism that had infected his psychomotor software; I was tempted to come to Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo’s defense, but my ignorance of his motives kept pushing back against that impulse; the old woman had regained her voice, and she had emerged from her hiding place behind my back and was now shouting at the top of her lungs, “Police! For the love of God, call the police!” as she watched the fight on the television monitors instead of live in front of her (a circumstance that would later give me food for thought about people’s tendency to look to screens for a confirmation of reality).
Meanwhile two female cashiers had shown up, one klutzier than the other, clutching each other by the arms as they took turns stammering “Maronna mia” instead of moving their asses and calling the police before we had time to commemorate the day.
At the far end of the aisle, I got a confused glimpse of two or three shoppers (one of whom must have been the aforementioned “Franco”) who had shown up on set and were w
atching the writhing bodies struggle from a safe distance and who were clearly as indecisive and frightened as we were (except they had the advantage of having just shown up and thus being exempt from any obligation to take action).
Suddenly one of the cashiers took off running for the exit. Her coworker dashed after her, I suppose in imitation. To my inexpressible relief, the old woman went after them.
Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo covered his ears with both hands to protect them from Matrix’s gnashing teeth, as his ponytailed opponent went on snarling and drooling on his head like a rabid dog trying to clamp its jaws shut on anything within reach. Every so often he’d lift a foot and drive his ankle into the engineer’s belly.
I couldn’t take much more of just standing there and doing nothing, and I was about to leap into the fray when Matrix raised his head and called out to Matteo the deli counterman:
“Hey you! Get the gun!”
The counterman responded with the same disconcerted expression that the guys sitting in the back row in school (generally tall, incredibly skinny, with long bangs and turtleneck sweaters) used to put on whenever the teacher yanked them out of their anonymity and called on them by their last names, whereupon they, abruptly rejoining the scholastic community, would point to themselves inquiringly.
They were incredible, those guys. In practical terms, they attended school incognito, camouflaging themselves with whatever organic material came to hand. You didn’t even notice that they were in your class at all until February or March. When the teacher managed to track them down, we’d watch them being questioned as if they were fugitives from the law finally brought to book. I can remember a couple of them, but I still have no earthly idea what their names were.
“You understand me, asshole?” Matrix upbraided him, seeing as Matteo the deli counterman was showing no signs of life beyond pure astonishment. “Put the gun to this piece of shit’s head and get these cuffs off me, now!” he commanded.
“What?” I asked in Matteo’s place.
If you were to ask me what I considered to be the low point of that whole absurd episode thus far, I would have to say: when Matrix ordered Matteo the deli counterman to get ahold of the pistol and use it on Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo to get him to uncuff him. Worse than the capture itself, worse than the pulling of the gun, worse than the struggle, worse than the annoying old lady, worse than the reality-show ambush. Only if you hold your fellow man in such low regard to the point that you take his absolute obedience for granted could you assume the right to impart such an order. Because to talk to another human being that way, you have to put him on the scale somewhere below shit.
“Do what I tell you, you’ll be better off,” Matrix added, after letting fly another ankle to the engineer’s belly.
“Go fuck yourself,” I blurted out, pointing my finger straight at him. And I bent down to grab the pistol, with the vague intent of using it in some way (glossing over the minor detail that I’d never picked up a gun in my life).
Matrix glared back at me, nonplussed, but he didn’t have the time to process the meaning of the disruption before Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo whipped around and slammed his elbow straight into the middle of his face.
Matrix’s nose erupted spectacularly, knocking him backward and roughly unhinging the corporeal structure erected with such diligence atop his enemy’s back.
I think that I recoiled out of sympathy. Reaching toward the pistol as I was, in a not-entirely-wholehearted attempt to get my hands on it, I lost my balance. Luckily Matteo the deli counterman was behind me, and he promptly seized both my arms and kept me from falling. Whereupon I released a couple of pathetic kicks into the air, in the instinctive search for solid ground upon which to plant my feet (more or less like toddlers do when their mothers place both hands under their armpits and lift them up to teach them to walk). Finding that attempt unsuccessful (that fucking floor seemed amazingly slippery), I threw my hands back behind me, harpooning the shoulders of Matteo the deli counterman. We remained in that position, each gripping the other, like a couple of drunks staggering to their feet from the sidewalk after the bouncer has done his job.
Even before getting back onto his feet, Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo immediately lunged for the gun, beating me to the punch in that respect, wobbly though my attempt had been; then he stood up, waved the weapon around in the air in our direction (and we paid practically no attention to it, so hardened were we to all threats of danger at this point), and returned his attentions to Matrix, who was partially unconscious, semi-invertebrate, dangling from the hand rail of the deli case. But he did so without haste; in fact, with a perceptible and distinctly unsettling calmness of demeanor, almost as if regaining control of the situation had given him a desire to take his time.
He kneeled down in front of Matrix, the pistol pointed right at his face, waiting for his captive to take a closer look at him, just to remind him who was in charge.
Matrix opened his eyes with effort, blinded by his own streaming blood, humiliated by the defeat.
“Too bad,” commented Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo, “I wanted to leave your feet untied, for all the good it’ll do you.” Having said this, he hit him in the head with the butt of the pistol.
Matrix didn’t even cry out. He made a standing broad jump to the floor, kicking his legs out in front of him pitiably like a fresh victim in a movie when the killer fires one last gunshot just for effect before turning to go; then, moaning, he scraped the soles of his shoes over the floor tiles, following the stations of the pain as it wended its way through his body and smearing his footwear with the yogurt previously spilled.
That was truly nasty.
A smirk appeared on the lips of Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo that made him look both pleased and nauseated at the same time, a twofold expression that lingered awhile on his face.
At this point, I decided it was time to leave.
Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo turned to Matteo the deli counterman, who was now looking at him with openmouthed bafflement.
“Matte’, I need you to do me a favor. Go over to the household goods section and get a roll of packing tape, the brown kind; then come back here and tape this guy’s ankles together.”
Matteo the deli counterman, whether more upset or disgusted by what he’d seen I couldn’t say, shook his head no.
“You’d better listen to me,” the engineer admonished him. “Because if you don’t do as I tell you, and if you’re not back within ten seconds, I’m going to shoot him. And it will be your fault.”
It was at that exact moment that I gave up my plan to hightail it, out of the vague yet compelling need to make myself useful in some way. As if I’d suddenly been overcome by an undefined sense of responsibility, which led me to believe that I was the only person there capable of fending off the worst outcome. Me, of all people.
“Go on, Matte’,” I advised, but in a tone of voice that smacked more of “Listen to me” than “You’re free to choose.”
The guy tried to argue once or twice, then in the end he gave in.
Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo picked up the remote control again, aimed it at the monitors, and pressed some buttons. A second later he spoke and his voice was broadcast over the loudspeakers, perfectly synchronized with the live images onscreen.
“Thanks for your collaboration, Counselor Malinconico.”
Hearing my name so publicly proclaimed threw me off-balance.
I looked up the aisle. There was no one now.
“I’d like it if you’d stay, too, now that the trial’s about to start.”
“Trial?” I asked.
Matrix straightened his neck. I can guess that this was an unsettling world for him to hear; something like “audit” for a well-paid professional.
“Do you know who this gentleman is?” Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo asked me, ignoring my question.
I
looked Matrix up and down. As if I hadn’t already seen more than enough of him.
“No, I don’t know who he is.”
“Strange,” he replied, sounding a little disappointed.
It’s not like the guy was so famous that I was bound to recognize him.
“Then I’ll tell you another name,” he added, pausing before laying down his ace in the hole. “Massimiliano Sesti Orfeo. Given the line of work he’s in, you must have heard of him.”
I looked at the floor, muttering that name, which rang no bells whatsoever, as a wave of embarrassment from my failure to answer him took possession of my limbs.
Considering me to be a full-fledged criminal lawyer, Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo must have thought that all it would take was an eloquently stated hint for me to reconstruct the whole chain of events automatically, but that name, aside from the fact that it coincided with 50 percent of the engineer’s own, didn’t mean a fucking thing to me.
Obviously at that point in the episode the last thing I wanted to do was make the cringe-inducing statement “No, I have absolutely no idea who that is, sorry.” So I limited myself to looking him in the face without saying yes or no, leaving him to understand that I might very well have known who he meant.
Sweet Jesus, I said to myself, it feels like this kind of thing has been happening to me for as long as I can remember, I’m sick to death of it. When is everyone going to stop asking me about things I ought to know and reliably fail to have any idea about?
My Mother-in-Law Drinks Page 6
