My Mother-in-Law Drinks

by Diego De Silva

  I look at his terrified silhouette in the monitor above me, and I feel a surge of compassion that for a moment clouds my vision.

  Furious at the snag, Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo grabs Matrix by the hair and yanks him toward him, jabbing the pistol barrel under his chin.

  Matrix closes his eyes, clamps his lips shut, and inhales loudly, the way certain sick people do as they brace themselves to withstand with dignity an oncoming attack of the recidivistic pain that afflicts them.

  “So you want to keep playing games, eh?” Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo warns him. “All right then. Why don’t we see what happens if I shoot you right in the legs, that way I won’t even have to bother tying you up.”

  “So you want to keep playing games, eh?” I parrot him mentally, resisting the impulse to emit a loud and mocking Bronx cheer. I mean really, is it possible to utter a line like that with any real conviction?

  Matrix opens his eyes, but refuses to give him the satisfaction of a response.

  Anyway, he’s bluffing, I think to myself.

  “Come on, Matteo, get moving,” said the engineer, with considerable nerve: the poor guy was standing there like a coat­rack.

  “To hell with this,” I blurt out. And with two impatient strides I reach the useless deli counterman and grab the adhesive tape out of his hand. “Give it here.”

  Matrix opens both eyes wide straight at me with a look of perplexity seasoned with something like an overtone of familiarity, wondering who is this guy who has stood by doing nothing from the start except to take the occasional initiative that unfailingly leads nowhere.

  Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo, on the other hand, flashes an appreciative smile at my unasked-for intervention (and I’m really starting to wish he’d stop flirting with me, because he’s been semi-molesting me for the past two hours).

  Without wasting any time, I kneel down in front of Matrix, unroll a length of tape, stick it to the left leg of his trousers (as I do so I notice that he’s wearing a very nice pair of boots that my friend Paoletta would probably swoon over), and then I windmill the roll repeatedly around his ankles, overlaying ascending spirals of tape until I reach his knees, packaging his shins and calves together; then I yank it tight, pull the roll toward me, lift the strip of tape to my mouth, and tear it sideways with my teeth, declaring the job complete.

  I stand up. With contemptuous eyes, I look both the hostage taker and the hostage up and down, the two of them pressed up against each other like a couple of lovers in amorous transport, then I raise my right arm and throw the roll of adhesive tape over the head of Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo, just grazing it, so that he’s instinctively forced to duck for fear of being hit; after which he stares at me in astonishment.

  At this point I really shouldn’t say a word, and in fact I remain silent, symbolically intensifying the dramatic quality of my gesture, which then and there (in part due to the presence of the video cameras filming us, most likely) makes me feel particularly theatrical, I have to confess.

  Shortly thereafter, in fact, I realize that I’ve aesthetically panned the sketch that Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo has so painstakingly assembled. By throwing the roll of packing tape in his direction (though not actually at him) I must have metaphorically denounced him for the menial nature of the task he’d obliged me to perform (on a purely substitutional basis, to top it off, since that knucklehead Matteo the deli counterman was too petrified to lift a finger).

  I take a look at my image on the monitor and my takeaway impression is that I am now running the show (it’s incredible how television manages to liberate the overweening jackass that lives inside us all). After all, I’ve just stolen the scene from the very guy who mounted the show, and put a lot of hard work into it, in the first place. Or rather, I didn’t steal it: I earned it. Perhaps this—I conjecture extemporaneously—is the true meaning of the expression “steal the show.” It’s incredible how often we use an expression to indicate its opposite. The Italian language truly is awash in amnestied crimes of grammar.

  Matteo continues to stand there, his mouth hanging half open. Suddenly I’m fed up with his ineptitude.

  “Hey,” I say to him, “what is it, did your water break?”

  His eyes reveal that the wisecrack has gone over his head.

  “I just got you out of a jam, unless I miss my guess,” I continue. “You can cut it out now.”

  At this point he snaps out of it, probably realizing that I’m right. And he takes two steps backward.

  I turn to the engineer.

  “Happy now?” I ask, in brazenly rhetorical fashion.

  A brief but significant silence ensues, after which a burst of applause can be heard coming from the front entrance.

  I become a statue.

  Matrix, Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo, and the knucklehead immediately register the applause, turning to me with a new expression in their eyes.

  My self-esteem skyrockets, causing a delightful moment of vertigo.

  I feel like a tiger.

  I’m a revelation. A rock star.

  I’m Bruce Willis in the first Die Hard.

  I’m the man for the job.

  I have the situation well in hand.

  I love myself.

  Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo seems saddened and disappointed.

  Disappointment is the most open-captioned emotion of them all. Nine times out of ten when you look at a disappointed person you can immediately guess the reason. It’s easy enough to conceal the causes of envy, jealousy, or rivalry. The same even goes for anger. But with the captioning they have for disappointment, there’s not much to be done: they’re easy to read.

  At last we hear the siren of the carabinieri. Even though this is an intervention that we’d fully taken into account (perhaps it would be more exact to say that we’ve been expecting them), I heave a sigh of relief. The arrival of law enforcement, even if it fails to solve the problem, instantly makes you feel relieved of the responsibility to deal with it yourself. It puts into effect a sort of subcontracting of responsibility for whatever is going on. In certain situations it’s a panacea, because it frees you from prudence. And that is why people often become uninhibited pottymouths when the police show up (e.g., at the scene of a car crash).

  Some time ago I witnessed a fender bender between a car and a scooter from the window of a friend’s apartment. The rear-ender: an older woman. Rather elegant too. The rear-endee: a guy who looked about twenty, maybe twenty-five. The face of a nice young man. They both park their vehicles (he gets off his Vespa; she gets out of a Smart car). The young man neither raises his voice nor makes recriminations; he just requests her insurance details and leaves it at that. She acts mildly exasperated, tries telling him that it’s just a scratch, he replies that the owner of the body shop he goes to has been able to buy plenty of real estate with just scratches; in other words they trade sharp words but keep it just within the union regulations for the dialectics of friendly differences, after which the matron resigns herself to her fate, gets back in her car, pulls out her license and registration, and is about to hand them over to the young man, who is legally entitled to peruse them.

  At that exact moment, however, a pair of traffic cops walking a beat in the neighborhood happen upon the transaction in progress and come over as duty requires, completely unsuspecting of the fact that they are the full moon that is about to unleash a werewolf.

  In fact, the woman not only tears her documents out of the young man’s hands with admirable dexterity, but unexpectedly treats him to a gale of filthy insults as personal as they are gratuitous, clearly showing herself to be a pedigreed habitué of some of the more down-at-the-heels taverns of a bygone era.

  The two traffic cops exchange looks of astonishment, then set about trying to make her see reason, but the lady, to use what is perhaps a misnomer, shrills at them to keep their paws off her (some
thing those unfortunate civil servants certainly had every intention of doing), and she then lunges at the guiltless young man with a rage so disproportionate that one of the two police officers instinctively puts his hand on the butt of his pistol.

  What left us speechless, me and my friend (or really I ought to say just me, because by now that idiot was rolling on the floor in helpless laughter, and at a certain point he even had to hurry into the other room to keep from suffocating), were not so much the obscene imprecations, the variations on the exclusively scatological and sexual themes that poured out of her mouth, as the voice itself. A monstrous, vicious, guttural sound, intolerable to the human ear, broken here and there by hawks of spit and grunts, a harbinger of calamities and disasters. I swear, the first thing to do was summon an exorcist. And when she finally left (I don’t even know how) and was pulling away in her car (obviously without having supplied the details of her insurance policy), she even stuck her head out of the driver’s side window and went on shrieking, the harridan. Such a scene that the traffic cops and the young man stood there comforting each other for a good ten minutes afterward.

  “All right, thank you, Counselor Malinconico,” says Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo again, raising his eyebrows and making my surname echo over the vegetables and the mozzarella (he must have diligently miked the entire supermarket, to obtain such a roundly stereophonic effect).

  “Thanks for dick, Engineer,” I retort, still giddy from the homage paid to me a short time ago.

  “What?” he replies, pretending to find me amusing.

  “You heard me,” I repeat, just to eliminate any doubts.

  And I place a hand on the knucklehead’s shoulder, in an instinctive yet incomprehensible urge to express my solidarity (and in fact he goes: “Mhm!” even accompanying the sound with an affirmative nod).

  “I’m not offering you my cooperation,” I say, articulating the idea more fully. “I’m just trying to limit the damage. So please refrain from thanking me. I don’t approve of what you’re doing.”

  “Ah,” he says.

  “Right,” I say back.

  For a little while it’s as if there was nothing left to say (which is what happens when you realize that the other person’s point of view is exactly as valid as your own. It’s as if both parties were getting in each other’s way).

  I think I hear a faint rumble of applause from my fans back at the entrance. But it might just be my imagination.

  “Well, I don’t give a shit,” the engineer says brusquely. “I’m not here to win anyone’s approval.”

  I didn’t expect him to use that kind of language. It disappointed me a little, truth be told.

  “Okay,” I say, blushing (because we always blush a little when someone speaks to us rudely), “if you’re going to put it like that, do you mind if I leave?”

  “Then you fail to understand. This is a trial, and we need a lawyer.”

  “Hey, you know something?” I say, warming to the topic. “This whole thing is starting to turn into a . . .”

  “. . . comedy sketch,” I’m about to say; but I never do, because we’re distracted by the commotion that suddenly reaches us from the main entrance, where the carabinieri have just started dispersing the crowd.

  Whereupon we all look up at the monitors, having by now become accustomed to the idea that they’re our window to the outside world.

  The language employed by law enforcement in these types of situations, consisting largely of imperatives (“Keep moving, people”; “Clear out: no blocking traffic”), is usually even more modular than a Billy bookcase (no matter how you arrange the words, the meaning remains the same), and yet it is certain to achieve its intended disruptive effect.

  There are a few acceptable variations on the theme, but they too verge on the rhetorical (e.g.: “Let us do our job here,” words often pronounced the minute they arrive on the scene, and therefore long before they’ve had a chance to do anything) or else—even worse—they border on morbid curiosity, which has the sole effect of stoking that curiosity to a raging flame (thus the celebrated “Nothing to see here”: which is absolutely guaranteed to nail a crowd to the spot).

  Usually, anyway.

  Times must be changing, because things seem to be going differently.

  First of all, the carabinieri summoned to investigate the foul deed are two in number: nothing out of the ordinary thus far. But the two carabinieri are a man and a woman, and this takes some getting used to, considering the fact that carabinieri teams have long been—misogynistically—made up of men only.

  Another thing is that they’re both young and even pretty athletic—already something that smacks of a TV show—and since she, important detail, is a redhead, I automatically associate them with Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, the two FBI agents from The X-Files who, in spite of the attraction constantly buzzing between them, in nine seasons spent tracking down aliens never—how to put this—closed the deal (an omission to which the series owes a considerable part of its success).

  Third, she’s the one keeping back the crowd, and she does so without using a single regulation cliché. All she says and repeats is: “Per favore,” “Please,” with a technique you’d expect from a unit production manager on a film set, using her arms as movable police barriers to indicate the imaginary perimeter of the area that is off limits.

  Fourth, he doesn’t have a soul patch. He’s the kind of tall that during introductions normally elicits the regulation question: “Hey, do you play basketball?” (in the mind of the everyman, basketball is the masonic order to which all tall people belong), and he displays an admirable composure during this preliminary inquiry into what’s happened. In spite of the fact that he’s already glimpsed the situation in the television monitor overhead (and in fact he never takes his eyes off it), he listens closely to what Giovanni the grocery clerk, having been prepped in advance by Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo, has to tell him.

  The deus ex machina himself must be feeling somewhat overlooked, because he suddenly bursts into the monitor, filling it with his face.

  “Buongiorno,” he begins, immediately silencing all voices below.

  Mulder puts his cranium into reverse and looks at his close-up, without losing his composure (I’m guessing this young man must do yoga, given the way he responds to external events with such a phlegmatic demeanor).

  Scully too, caught off-guard by the noise from the television speaker, turns around.

  “Buongiorno,” the carabiniere replies, calmly. “I can see you. And I hear you. I imagine the same is true for you.”

  “Precisely. We’re both miked, Captain Apicella.”

  Mulder arches his eyebrows.

  “Do we know each other?”

  Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo takes a step back to allow the captain to admire him.

  “You ought to still remember,” he replies, “even though it’s been a while.”

  The carabiniere narrows his eyes, circumnavigates the oval of the engineer’s close-up, then his spine stiffens, and he turns to his colleague. When he resumes his conversation with the screen, his tone has changed.

  “Of course I remember.”

  The engineer bites his lip, as if this confirmation has stirred some old pain.

  “You were the first to arrive.”

  “That’s right.”

  A meditative silence ensues, and both men seem to reexperience the memory together, no doubt sharing stills from the past.

  “How are you, Engineer?” Captain Mulder-Apicella resumes.

  The most conventional question possible, and slipped into what we can only call an inappropriate context, but asked with such authentic interest that I’m moved to wonder whether I’ve ever said it in that tone myself at some point.

  “Well, you can see for yourself, no?” he replies, spreading his arms just barely to present the scene of the h
ostage situation (a little bit like a circus artist who gesticulates at the end of the routine toward his fellow performers, so as not to hog the applause all for himself), as if the evidence of what he has done is a faithful depiction of his state of desperation.

  “I didn’t know you worked here,” Mulder remarks.

  Matteo and I exchange a look of confusion (he even goes so far as to shrug his shoulders and twist his lips into a frown: the conventional stance for expressing a giant question mark), amazed as we are to hear these two men shooting the breeze.

  “It’s a job I sought out deliberately.”

  “I thought so. Engineer?”

  “Yes, Captain.”

  “I need to know if anyone’s been wounded, please.”

  Ohh, at last a topic that concerns us all, I think to myself. And Matteo must have thought the same thing, because I see his shoulders relax. Mulder just took the long way around to get to the matter at hand, I now see.

  “Only him,” replies Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo, indicating Matrix with a jut of his chin, “and that’s just a nosebleed. For the time being.”

  Matrix offers no response except to retract his neck and lower his head, hiding himself from the monitors.

  “No one else?” asks Mulder, skipping over the “for the time being.”

  “No one else.”

  “And those two I see standing next to you, who would they be?”

  “Next to him, huh?” I object inwardly. “We’re a good ten feet away from him.”

  “One of them works at the deli counter, the other one’s a lawyer.”

  “A lawyer?” Mulder asks with some confusion, and immediately scrutinizes the television set with an almost paleontological interest, as if the professional guild to which I belong had gone extinct several thousand years ago.

  “That’s right.”

  “Are you saying he’s your lawyer?”

  “No.”

  “And what is a lawyer doing there with you, if you don’t mind my asking?”

  “Good question,” I agree mentally. In fact—without the slightest idea of what I could say on the subject—I lift my little forefinger like a third-grader, but Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo shoves ahead of me.