My Mother-in-Law Drinks

by Diego De Silva

  Like the name of the chief justice of a given tribunal, and the exact timeline of appeals to the higher administrative courts, and what exactly is a legislative decree (“As opposed to a decree law, Counselor?”), and how much time has to pass before a legal separation actually provides grounds for a divorce, and just what provisions were made by the Lodo Alfano (“And while we’re at it: what on earth is a lodo?”), and: “You mean to tell me that this name means nothing to you?” And I could go on ad infinitum.

  Christ, I’d like to see how you’d handle it. One of these days I’m just going to answer: “I don’t know the name of the chief justice, I’ve never presented an appeal to a higher administrative court in my life, I don’t even know where the higher administrative courts are located: I don’t know a fucking thing!!” In other words, I’ll tell the truth, and I’ll put an end to that line of questioning once and for all.

  The embarrassment of being asked questions you don’t know the answers to constitutes one of the gravest social costs of being a semi-unknown member of the bar (SUMOTB). While I’m on the topic, I’d like to stop for a moment and consider this unspoken-of matter of routine discrimination. We SUMOTBs—let it be known, at least this once—are subjected to mistreatment on an almost daily basis at the hands of the average citizen, who, inasmuch as he is a potential user of legal services (PULS), feels free to subject us to gratuitous argumentation with the unstated purpose of rubbing our faces in our own lack of success.

  It’s a discriminatory form of harassment directed at part-time and freelance workers in general and us SUMOTBs in particular, exposed as we are to the psychological bullying of the PULSs.

  I invite you to take a look instead at those older lawyers, perhaps not even all that well respected, who always seem to be heading somewhere in a hurry, rushing from one courtroom to another, hearing after hearing, huffing and puffing in exasperation, and exchanging wisecracks you’d expect from truck drivers when they pass each other in the halls. Do you think that those guys ever have to deal with the problem of refining questions to fit a certain line of cross-examination? That they’d allow themselves to be subjected to the barrage of faux-casual tests to reveal their degree of connectedness to the larger milieu of the bar?

  The funny thing is that they might not be anywhere near as well informed as they’d like you to think (because after all, let’s get one thing straight: just because you get older doesn’t necessarily mean you get better at what you do). In all likelihood they’re just clever johnny-one-notes who’ve been doing the same half-dozen things for a lifetime, and they wouldn’t stick their nose in a law book even if an exasperated colleague threw it in their faces. And yet no one would dream of pestering them because outside of the tiny bit of knowledge that they manage to get by on, they don’t even bother to wonder what’s going on in the world of jurisprudence. And even if you ask them questions pertaining to their fields of expertise, they answer only if generously recompensed, and even then after they’ve had time to gather adequate documentation. And right they are to do so. So a person says, e.g.: “That lawyer over there collects debts for bank X or company Y.” Or else: “This one does labor law, that one’s an expert on traffic accident liability.” And that person never even dreams of going over and asking any of them what a legislative decree is, or to explain how it differs from a decree law, or why on earth they’ve never heard of Massimiliano Sesti Orfeo.

  In contrast, we SUMOTBs, who try to get by on a handful of specializations in the absence of any clearly defined area of expertise, are forced to put up with whatever PULS happens along to question us whenever he feels like it (so when he does, we just end up feeding him a line of bullshit).

  Which takes us back to the paradox of the virtual unknown who’s expected to know more than the seasoned and respected members of the bar.

  Obviously, this is all sheer insanity. But that’s the way it is.

  “Hey, you,” I felt like saying to Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo, “let me clear things up a little for you:

  1) I don’t have the slightest idea who this counterfeit version of Keanu Reeves might be, nor who the hell answers to the name of Emiliano (or was it Aureliano, I’ve already forgotten) Sesti Orfeo, but I imagine he’s some relative of yours.

  2) Cut it out with the riddles. Do you have some score to settle with this character? All right, then tell us who he is instead of playing games. Especially since you’ve constructed this mini television studio, and we’ve been standing here for a solid twenty minutes taking in this reality show; don’t you think it’s high time you at least rolled the opening credits?”

  As if he’d heard me, Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo turned to look at Matrix and answered the rhetorical question I’d asked him in my head.

  “He was my son,” he said.

  Matrix filled his lungs with air and sighed, like a defendant who’s just heard the sentence demanded by the prosecuting attorney after a lengthy summation.

  Ah, I thought. Well, so what?

  It’s not like he’d said Pier Silvio.

  Or Lapo, or whatever.

  What was I supposed to have taken away from this—aside from the fact that, obviously, he seemed to consider Matrix responsible for his son’s death?

  Here’s another one of the incongruities I run into with a frequency that is surely no accident. I believe that each of us has certain typical incongruities, serial challenges that crop up for him or her alone and recur in keeping with a stated pattern.

  My typical incongruity is that I tend to fail to keep up with what’s happening around me. For as long as I’ve been a regular habitué of courthouses (and the plural here is purely rhetorical, because I only frequent a single courthouse, and not all that often, truth be told), I’ve found that the reality of the place tends to catch me off-guard (which is another way of saying dimwitted and befuddled).

  Like for instance the first time I walked into a courtroom to witness a criminal trial, when after five minutes I realized that I didn’t have the faintest idea what the hell was going on, and how different an actual trial was from the way trials were described in my law-school textbooks. It was a head-on collision with the truth. It was like growing up in a family where everyone always speaks perfect grammatical Italian, with plenty of subjunctives and all the rest, and suddenly being forced to learn dialect (with judges who roll their eyes and heave theatrical sighs, chronically depressed defendants, and lawyers who think they’re hilarious, among others).

  What am I talking about? I’m talking about standing still while everything flies past you. About watching without understanding. About not being able to ask someone to explain for fear of looking like a damned idiot. That’s what I’m talking about. A little like when you’re sitting at a table with a big group of people and someone makes a joke and everyone’s falling over laughing and you, who didn’t even hear the joke because you were thinking about something else just then, start laughing along with everyone else so as not to feel left out. And after a while all your facial muscles start aching from the effort (because there are plenty of things you can fake in life but laughter isn’t one of them), so you pick up a napkin and hide behind it just enough to cover the bare minimum, waiting for the chorus of yuks to wear itself out and for everyone to go back to talking normally. But instead the hilarity skyrockets, and everyone starts slapping everyone else noisily on the back (one guy even sprays the guy sitting across from him with a mouthful of water). So you concentrate obsessively on the scraps of phrasing taken from the unknown wisecrack, repeated between hiccups of laughter, in an attempt to grasp the nature of the joke unleashed by the comic genius of its originator, but in the meantime the collective giddiness has lit the fuse of other comedians, and they start throwing out more witticisms based on the first one that you missed, and more waves of laughter, and even though you’re completely in the dark you start fake-laughing all over again, and so on and so forth, until you get
to the point where you can’t take it anymore. And so, with cramping jaws, you get up and announce that you have to go to the bathroom, and in fact you do, and while you’re in there you wash your face three times in a row, after which you look at yourself in the mirror and it seems to you that you’re looking at a man on the verge of despair.

  I don’t know if I’ve conveyed the idea.

  I’m talking about exclusion from context. About alienation from what’s going on around you. About that lucid lack of awareness that makes you feel like a misfit incapable of grasping the mechanisms that count. Someone who’ll always talk about done deeds, because although he was there while the deeds were being done he didn’t understand what was going on. And so he’ll never amount to shit; at the very most he’ll be able to add up the damages (if not to be compensated for them), or do a little after-the-fact analysis.

  Success, career, wealth, politics: all the areas of life that matter are based essentially on this distinction between those who grasp matters in real time and those who reflect on the aftermath in a deferred viewing. It’s a question of the speed and especially the elasticity with which you learn. It’s not a matter of hard work, it’s about understanding quickly. If you lack this quickness, then you’re shut out of the realm in which decisions are made, and you’ll have to settle for those made by others.

  There was a loud burst of talking from the front entrance. Some imbecile even shouted. There’s always some imbecile shouting in the distance when something happens.

  What are you shouting about? You’re not the one who’s in trouble.

  Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo, with the nonchalance of someone who hears a tremendous crash out on the street and goes over to the window to look down, picked up the remote control and pressed another combination of buttons.

  On the screen the supermarket lobby appeared, with a big crowd of spectators beyond the cash registers, and the attendants engaged in a mix of explaining and barring the way to the rubberneckers who always cluster around when public disasters occur, who were trying to get in and reach the epicenter.

  Matrix and I exchanged a look of genuine amazement at what at first glance struck us both as a monumental technological innovation.

  That two video cameras might simultaneously provide footage of two distant points of the same location ought to be easy enough for us denizens of the third millennium to wrap our minds around. If the television monitors were connected via a network, obviously one could choose them as needed or even all together, thus making it possible to monitor the entire supermarket section by section. And yet at that moment that possibility, relatively elementary though it was, flabbergasted us as though we were a couple of troglodytes gaping at the discovery of fire.

  In the final analysis, the brilliance of the idea, its disarming efficacy, consisted in using the technological equipment that the supermarket already possessed without making any substantial modification to it: in other words, using what was already there (there’s nothing more astonishing than simplicity).

  This video security system, hijacked and turned, in a certain sense, against itself, along with the images of the people gazing as though hypnotized at the television monitor broadcasting the hostage-taking scene, incredibly reminded me of the live feed of the Twin Towers, both in terms of the strategy of attack and the resulting collective sense of shock and devastation, when television, on a worldwide scale, for the first time in history, was swallowed up by the unscheduled programming that invaded its frequencies, holding it hostage, self-broadcasting, destroying all the existing schedules, and taking all the time and space available for itself.

  Whenever I’m in the middle of a mess of some kind I become capable of totally inappropriate extemporaneous conjectures (such as this one) that actually make me feel rather intelligent, truth be told.

  The only problem is that since I can’t stop to think about them right then and there (the point at hand being that I’m in the middle of a mess), what happens is I skip over them. And if I try to conjecture later, after the mess has been straightened out, I find that I’m no longer capable of having so much as a shred of a thought that’s on even remotely the same level as the initial conjecture.

  Who even knows how many extemporaneous conjectures I miss on a regular basis.

  Over the supermarket loudspeakers we could hear the voices of the crowd clearly now. I’m not even going to bother repeating all the idiotic things they were saying (stuff like: “The Taliban”: or another one, exquisitely Pindaric in tone: “I know him, he’s on Posto al Sole”).

  Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo once again worked the remote control, after which he approached the camera that was transmitting from the front entrance, until he had framed himself in a close-up.

  “Silence,” he thundered.

  All pressed up close to the video camera like that, he kind of looked like The Scream by Munch.

  At the front of the store, the crowd suddenly went silent. We too stood in expectant silence.

  Something must have happened, because the television set went dark for a moment. Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo clicked his remote control again and the monitor turned back on.

  “Here I am again. Look up,” he continued, doing his best to recapture the attention of his already wavering spectators, unable to figure out the right direction to look in (it’s unbelievable how little it takes to lose an audience).

  “No, not that one. That’s a video of you. The other monitor, up high, on the right.”

  Brief pause.

  “On your right, for Christ’s sake. There, that’s it. Can you see me now?”

  There was a simultaneous alignment of heads.

  “Giovanni? Giovanni, can you see me? Yoo-hoo? Don’t look at me like that, you know me.”

  Giovanni (one of the grocery clerks, probably: he was wearing the same apron as Matteo the deli counterman) was staring at him on the screen with the same astonishment that had previously plasticized the face of his coworker (Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo must have been known as a mild-mannered father and head of household in that store).

  “Have you called the police?” he asked.

  Giovanni said nothing. When I looked closer it seemed to me that what had rendered him so thunderstruck wasn’t so much the shock of finding himself face-to-face with a criminal version of Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo, but rather the fact that someone was speaking to him through a television set. And that sense of unease, if you want to know the truth, then and there struck me as perfectly understandable, because it’s hardly normal to stand looking up at a screen to talk to someone. Fine, okay, we’ve gotten used to it: video intercoms, Skype, teleconferences . . . But a certain cognitive discomfort still lingers, a difficulty that’s reminiscent, in a way, of what old people experienced when TV was first invented. In my family there was a story about a great-grandmother of mine who, when they turned the television on at night, would hurry off to change her clothes and do her hair because she was convinced that guests had arrived. And it’s not like she was sick in the head or crazy: there was simply no way to make her understand that she could see without being seen.

  “Hey, Giova’,” Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo kept after him. “I asked you a question, are you going to answer me?”

  “Yes,” the clerk nodded vigorously, abruptly snapping out of his trance. “That is, Marisa called the ca-, ca- . . . rabinieri, I think.”

  “Okay, that makes no difference. Anyway, there’s no need to shout, I installed an omnidirectional microphone in the ceiling. I can hear you perfectly, the same as you hear me.”

  “Ah,” the clerk agreed, even though, to judge from the look on his face, I doubt that he’d dedicated a great deal of thought to the question of the omnidirectional microphone.

  “Now listen up,” said the master of ceremonies, finally coming to the point, “I’ve taken a man hostage, you understand? I’ve handcuffed him here
to the dairy case and now I’ve got him covered with my gun. No one is to approach us, understood? No one. The first person to try it is going to set off a nice little New Year’s Eve fireworks display, have I made myself clear? Keep people far away from this aisle. Same thing goes for the carabinieri. When they get here, let me talk to them. After all, I can see them and talk to them just fine from right here. Is all of that understood?”

  “Yes, yes, yes,” said Giovanni.

  Just like that: three times.

  “Excellent,” said Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo. And turned off the audio from the front entrance.

  Matrix was motionless, covered with contusions and completely demoralized. The blood, already clotting, tattooed half his face, and his nose, following the impact with the enemy elbow, had roughly doubled in size. All the same, he didn’t hide from the monitors; if anything he defied them with his eyes, putting on a show of dignified iciness.

  I was reminded of the look that the animals in the zoo gave us during a school field trip once when the class smart-ass spat in their faces through the bars of their cages.

  There was an embarrassing silence, the kind that overtakes you when you suddenly find yourself mired in a strange, dense moment of suspense.

  “It seems as if we’re waiting for someone,” I said, just to cut the awkwardness.

  “Exactly,” responded Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo.

  “Not the carabinieri,” I ventured, since it seemed as if he was finally in a mood to impart some information on the topic.

  He stared at me as if to say: “You’re good, you are.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Then who?”

  “Who do you think?”

  Whereupon I decided he had chapped my ass sufficiently.

  “Why don’t you give me the first initial, and then I’ll try to spell it from there.”