My Mother-in-Law Drinks

by Diego De Silva

  He paused argumentatively, but since he’d apparently enjoyed the wisecrack, and had come that close to laughing, he gave me an answer.

  “The television crew.”

  Matrix went into a nosedive.

  So did I.

  I stopped for a moment to reflect, even though the idea, oddly enough, struck me as anything but unexpected.

  “More television coverage?” asked. “Aside from the footage you’re already shooting?”

  “You can’t possibly think that I put all this together for a closed-circuit viewing.”

  “Earlier you said something about a trial.”

  “That’s right.”

  “What do you have in mind, your own version of Court TV?”

  He shook his head.

  “That’s prerecorded.”

  Just then Matteo came back with the packing tape. Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo nodded to him to come closer; then he finished the thought.

  “We’re going live.”

  We all looked at each other.

  And it’s here that the show begins.

  MISUNDERSTANDING

  I thought I was being plenty funny by getting her that bottle. You know when you feel irresistibly witty because you’ve planned out a gag gift for someone, confident that the recipient’s sense of humor will win out, like buying an exercise bike for a friend who just broke both legs in a skiing accident, or else (this really happened when I was in high school) a convenience ten-pack of Kleenex for a classmate who was found jerking off in the gym; in other words, the kind of presents that even before you buy them, in your imagination you run through the full sequence of expressions on the recipient’s face seconds after tearing open the giftwrap? There, that’s the kind I mean.

  I assumed that they’d burst out laughing and then tell me to go to hell, that they’d say that I was the same old idiot as ever and that was why they’d always liked me, that I couldn’t have come up with a better idea for a gift to bring with me when I went to see her, such a welcome change from the faux-compassionate visits from her girlfriends, all of them basically overjoyed to learn that she had one foot in the grave before they did.

  Okay, after the wisecracking preamble I’d see her bite her lips and get a faraway look as she pondered the unthinkable facts of a Timeline Without a Future; I’d take her hand in mine and I’d sit there listening to myself as I spouted off a series of prerecorded phrases like You’re-a-strong-woman-and-I-know-you’ll-pull-through-this, or else In-certain-situations-you-find-strength-that-you-never-even-knew-you-had, or Look-people-don’t-die-of-cancer-the-way-they-used-to, and so on; because everyone knows that when you go to see a sick person—and the sick person is perfectly aware of the reason for your visit—those are nothing more nor less than goodbyes.

  I said nothing to my children, who’d both been kind enough to come with with me, at least not until we’d entered the coffee-roaster’s-wine-and-spirits-rum-boutique-and-grappa-shop not far from where I live, which is, as an aside, a place I frequent regularly. And when I’d pointed to the Jack Daniel’s, and, what’s more, asked to have it giftwrapped, they’d exchanged an alarmed glance, suspecting that they knew who the intended recipient of the alcoholic gift package in question might be.

  “Do you really think that’s a good idea?” Alfredo asked me after we left the coffee-roaster’s-wine-and-spirits-rum-boutique-and-grappa-shop.

  Alagia hadn’t said anything, but she was giving me a look.

  I felt like a fugitive from the law or who knows what.

  “Oh, cut it out, guys. Now we have to sit around a conference table and take a vote to decide what gift to get Grandma?”

  “Papà, Christ on a crutch, it’s a nutty idea,” Alf decreed.

  I really couldn’t let him get away with that last one.

  “Coming from someone who spent his summer holidays in a Rom camp so that he could go on the Internet and talk about his experiences, that sounds a little like a joke to me. What was the problem, didn’t you have anywhere better to go on vacation?”

  “I was doing an investigative piece and you know it,” he replied, already resentful, but also with a bit of a chip on his shoulder. “I met some Roma, we became friends, and I asked them if I could stay with them for a few days.”

  “A self-commissioned investigative piece, because I don’t think that an editor at Corriere della Sera or la Repubblica assigned it.”

  “Oh my God, Papà! Do you always have to reduce the things I do to a question of money?”

  It was true, he had a point. I never miss a chance to try to tear down his journalistic ambitions, in spite of the high consideration in which I have always held his ideas, and especially the determination he puts into his work.

  It’s the same thing with his Roma holidays: if you think that the idea of his spending his August vacation in a gypsy encampment to provide live coverage of the life they lead didn’t tickle me, you’re wrong. I absolutely loved it. I find it bold and unabashed, indicative of an intelligence that refuses to settle for secondhand information. I’d happily buy a newspaper just to read an article like that. So it’s obvious that I ought to be proud of this son of mine. And in fact I am. It’s just that I’m so completely fed up with this young man’s intellectual honesty. I find my admiration of him to be exasperating. I hate to see his wasted efforts, which no one pays him for. I detest the websites to which he makes a gift of his original and invaluable articles. I’d like to see him get what he deserves, because that’s the way his mother and I always told him things would go. And he believed us, he took us at our word. I can’t go back on my promise. I shouldn’t educated him, shouldn’t have instilled in him the importance of hard work, of empathy, of having an inquiring mind—that’s the fact of the matter. Every time I see him come up with a new project, and complete it without getting anything in return, and with a smile on his face too, a wave of frustration washes over me, and then I direct it straight at him, the last person on earth to deserve it. And instead of cheering him on, which is what I’d like to do, I wind up demotivating him.

  “Christ, Alfre’, you work yourself so hard. And you pay the price; we’re always coming to pick you up in the emergency room, and all this for what?”

  “Please, Papà. Let’s not start this again.”

  “Fine, then let’s make a deal: I won’t start on that again and you won’t break my balls if I want to take a bottle of whiskey to your grandmother.”

  There ensued a silence of compromise, and we started walking again.

  Alagia must have been feeling quite hoity-toity just then, because she was unable to resist the urge to return to the topic, remarking that my idea struck her as “very kitschy,” which already was an opinion that made me hot under the collar.

  But the thing that pissed me off most was that in order to bestow that pearl of wisdom on me she actually stopped in her tracks, while Alf and I went on walking to the end of the sidewalk: a bad habit (I’m referring to the habit of coming to a halt in order to emphasize a point) that I’ve never been able to put up with, if you really want to know.

  For instance, you’re walking with someone. You’re talking about this and that (actually, let’s be honest: most of the time you’re listening apathetically to an account of generally insignificant events). At a certain point you realize that the guy you were talking to isn’t there anymore. So you turn around and realize to your astonishment that you’ve left him a good ten or fifteen feet behind you. But he’s still prattling on, ignoring with stunning nonchalance the distance between you.

  At this point there are really only two options: either you stop and wait for him to catch up with you (and you’d have every right, since he stopped without telling you) or else, as is more often the case, he just stands there (and he has the advantage, since he stopped a while ago) and you go back, immediately attracting the attention of everyone in the vic
inity (because of course, since the other guy stayed behind but hasn’t stopped talking, in order to make himself heard he’s had to raise his voice, and as a result the one who most stands out in this piece of open-air theater is you as you hurry toward a man who is yelling at you).

  The best part is that when you finally come face-to-face with the guy who’s monologuing in your general direction and get a chance to hear what was so tremendously important that he had to come to a full and gratuitous halt to say it to you, you’re ready to punch him in the nose.

  “Did you hear what I said?” Alagia asked, already a considerable distance behind me and Alf.

  “Hey . . .” blurted Alfredo turning around, only then realizing that his sister had lingered behind.

  “We’re crossing!” I said, polemically raising my voice in Alagia’s direction; then I grabbed Alf by his right wrist and we took off, heading for the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street, taking advantage of what was left of the yellow light.

  My son went along with this lightning-quick abduction with a considerable degree of bafflement (as I dragged him along he never once took his eyes off his sister, who in the meanwhile was hurrying pitiably to cover the distance between us, but by then it was practically impossible for her to make it before the light turned red, ha ha ha) but, with the exception of a couple of good hard tugs that he forced me to impart toward the end of the crossing, he didn’t put up any genuine resistance.

  When we reached the other side (scant seconds before the stoplight turned green for the through traffic), I uncuffed him.

  Back on the sidewalk where we’d left her, Alagia seemed furious. The traffic that was zipping past, fading into automotive evanescence,, between us (I’ve always been struck by the way that cars seem to dematerialize once the road clears up and they start chasing along after each other) made the space between us even more definitive, and highlighted in particular the marginalization that I had imposed upon her. I found myself thinking about how impeccable my timing can be when I decide to make a point of a matter of principle that basically leads nowhere.

  In any case, we stood there waiting for her: me staring at a manhole cover and bracing myself for the dressing down I was sure to get as soon as she made it across, Alf shooting her glances of self-justification alternating with little shrugs as if to say: “What do you want from me, he’s the one who did it.”

  “When did you turn into such a rude oaf?” Alagia practically screamed in my face like five minutes later, that is to say, the time it took for the traffic light to turn green (stoplights, as everyone knows, gauge the time required to turn from one color to another based on a scale that is inversely proportional to the impatience of those observing them: which is why, where I come from, people regularly run red lights).

  As she crossed, she was so pissed off that she walked as if she were wearing a back brace.

  “Don’t stop when you’re talking to someone while walking,” I told her, preparing to go head-to-head.

  “What?” she asked, confused.

  “Come on, let’s go,” I added, trying to grab Alf’s wrist again, but this time he was quick enough to elude my grasp.

  “Do you mind telling me what’s gotten into you?” Alagia asked, baffled by my lecturing tone.

  Alf added nothing, but it was clear that he would have countersigned his sister’s question.

  “Nothing’s gotten into me. Ask me anything you want, but just keep walking, all right?”

  “Is someone following us by chance?” Alfredo asked.

  “Ha ha, funny guy,” I said.

  “I wasn’t kidding. Why do we have to keep walking, exactly? I don’t understand.”

  Whereupon I said nothing, afraid that I’d stumbled into a—as people like to say when they really want you to know that they customarily speak English—misunderstanding, if you’re one of the Italians who know what that word means. It’s when a person says one thing and the person who’s listening justifiably understands something else, at which point the first person registers the second person’s bewilderment and immediately says: “Sorry, there’s been a misunderstanding”; and the other one says: “Oh, yes, of course”: or else the second person is quicker on the draw and says to the first: “This must be a misunderstanding,” and finally—but only then—do they clear things up, happy not so much to have cleared up the confusion but rather to have both used the word misunderstanding.

  “It’s a long story,” I dismissed the matter brusquely.

  “What is?” he asked, genuinely perplexed.

  “Ohhh, Alfre’. Please.”

  “Vincenzo,” Alagia broke in while Alf gave me a worried look, “now I need you to explain why you left me standing like an asshole on the other side of the street.”

  I flared my nostrils and sucked in a lungful of air like a bloodhound on a trail, then I exhaled loudly, immediately provoking a dizzy spell from hyperoxygenation, and then settled on a kind of hooded-eye paternalism along the lines of: “I’m going to teach you something that you won’t understand here and now, but it will be useful to you someday.”

  “If there’s a habit you need to be careful not to fall into,” I decreed, though I lacked the courage to look my daughter in the eye as I assumed my posture as a professor of Just Measures, “it’s the habit of walking and then stopping while you go on talking while the other people keep walking.”

  This statement was followed by a dead silence.

  I went into the kind of trance a soccer player experiences after kicking one into his own goal.

  In order to restore that demented statement to something resembling a clear meaning I attempted a conceptual autoreverse, a little like what you do with one of those Russian-nesting-doll-style sentences that contain several people identified by their ties of kinship, such as: “Aldo is the husband of Luigi’s wife’s sister,” which in order to understand them you have to run through them in the opposite direction and think to yourself: “Luigi has a wife; his wife’s sister, that is to say, his sister-in-law”—and already the concept of “sister-in-law” begins to sweep away some of the clouds—“is married to Aldo” (and at this point you contextualize Aldo within his family and you almost feel as if you can see him); but even this procedure failed to produce any concrete results. I’d uttered a sentence that could have been conceived by a goat, and that was that.

  As my son and daughter burst out laughing right in my face, spraying saliva and slapping each other on the back like a pair of marionettes in a Ferraiolo Brothers’ puppet show, I found myself thinking that it’s only when you try to improvise a concept that’s just a little bit complicated that you realize how much you tend to overestimate your own powers of expression.

  A person thinks: “This is something I know,” and believes that that settles the matter. He couldn’t be more wrong. Until you find the right words, you don’t know anything. You really ought to do some test runs before you open your mouth. If, when you see highly intelligent guests on television shows expressing themselves in a series of impeccable metaphors and armor-plated turns of phrase, you assume that they’re improvising, you’re mistaken. Those people write out the things they’re going to say beforehand. No more nor less than actors working from a script. Words must be chosen carefully, and then some.

  “Both of you can go fuck yourselves,” I told those impertinent louts. “And you,” by which I meant Alf, who was laughing so hard he’d almost hit me with a piece of flying snot, “blow your nose, goddamn it.”

  At that point I turned and walked away, inoffensively offended.

  “Come on, Papà, come back!” Alfredo shouted after me, making me feel the way I used to when I was seven years old or a little younger.

  That imbecile sister of his, however, wouldn’t stop laughing.

  “Choke on it,” I silently wished her.

  They caught up with me about fifty feet on,
surrounding me like a couple of hoodlums looking for trouble.

  “Well?” I said.

  I felt like laughing.

  I don’t know if this will make sense to you, but we all loved each other very much in that moment.

  “What was it exactly that you said?” Alagia said, breaking the silence with all the delicacy of a hippopotamus. “‘Get in the habit of stopping to walk when other people are talking and walking while stopped?’”

  “Has anyone ever told you what an asshole you are?” I replied, blushing.

  She looked her brother in the face and they both burst out laughing again and, before long, I was laughing along with them.

  As we were walking toward the apartment building where Ass lived, I linked arms with Alagia and reminded her, as long as she was behaving like an editor of the Accademia della Crusca Italian Dictionary, that, when she was in second grade I think, she once wrote “un’altro” instead of “un altro” in a composition.

  She gave me a juicy kiss on my right cheek and told me I was an idiot.

  As for my mother-in-law, just as I’d imagined, she had a good hearty laugh when she unwrapped my present.

  For me it was a moral victory.

  What I didn’t realize was that she would actually open the bottle.

  REALITY SHOWS ARE NOTHING MORE THAN

  AN EXTENDED MICROPHONE GAFFE

  Look at me, not him,” Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo orders Matrix, who starts staring Matteo in the eyes as soon as the deli counterman approaches him with the roll of packing tape.

  Matrix turns his head in the engineer’s direction with scientific slowness, in such a way that his gaze remains fixed in a menacingly sidelong glare at the poor counterman, and in fact within seconds Matteo has turned pale and stopped cold just a few feet away from them, the roll of adhesive tape in his hands as if he no longer knows what to do with it.