My Mother-in-Law Drinks

by Diego De Silva

  “Hey. Hey now,” Alessandra Persiano went on in her Nurse Persiano mode (one of my personal favorites). “Calm down, okay? Nothing’s happened.”

  It had been a long time since she’d been so sweet to me.

  “Nothing’s . . . happened? Because I had the distinct impression that . . .”

  “Shh.”

  She placed the tip of her left forefinger on my lips.

  I stood there like that, my lips sealed by her magnificent pinkie finger, incredulous in the face of this reversal of fortune, amazed that I was out of the doghouse without having done practically anything, baffled at the rapidity with which my cast-iron certainty that our relationship was about to come to an end had just crumbled into dust.

  Alessandra Persiano had now gone all doe-eyed with me, flirting so relentlessly that I was tempted to remind her that we were on a public thoroughfare.

  Seen up close, her beauty ravages me like nothing else on earth. And if you want to know the truth, I don’t especially like this feeling. For a while now, I haven’t really been comfortable with the lowering of defenses that comes with love. The feeling of being so disgustingly vulnerable and open to any and all kinds of compromise in the presence of a pair of eyes, the curved lips that make up a smile, the unutterable rotundity of a tit.

  Maybe it’s because I’m no longer (even) forty years old, but I think that type of ineptitude is acceptable when you’re young, when you have, as the saying goes, your whole life ahead of you. Because when you already have a good portion of your life behind you—and quite a bit more, let’s be honest, settling around your waistline (I think you know what I mean)—you can’t handle that kind of happiness. When it comes to love, happiness is costly, no kidding around. They don’t give it out free of charge, that kind of happiness. In fact, if you really want the whole story, no happiness ever comes free of cost. Happinesses are tremendously expensive, and if you take out a mortgage on them, it’s even worse.

  And let’s not go any further with this. That would be the wise choice.

  “I’d forgotten how handsome you look when you’re scared,” Alessandra Persiano purred, brushing her lips against mine.

  Whereupon a hot flash of enthusiasm came over me (I felt it spread out from my spine, the sort of instantaneous inflammation that’s gone as quick as it comes: this is something that’s happened to me since I was a kid), and right then and there I regained my sense of humor. Because the first thing I want to do when I’m happy is crack a joke.

  “You see,” I said, “that’s how it is with us semi-ugly guys. We need specific planetary alignments of the emotions to make the most of our looks: embarrassment, shyness, disappointment, failure, illness, mourning . . . in other words, you need to pity us a little in order to find us alluring, if you see what I mean.”

  She half closed her eyes as she shook her head no (that’s her way of enjoying the crap I say), then she remarked, with a phrase that I’m hearing entirely too often these days:

  “You’re such an idiot.”

  “I love you too.”

  She grabbed me by the tie and pulled me toward her, with the insolence of a two-bit street thug trying to start a fight.

  There are kisses that are given to remember what kissing was like once upon a time. To understand whether they still have that flavor that you used to like so much. When they work, those are the best.

  This was one of those.

  In fact, my boxer shorts were suddenly too tight on me.

  “Guess the idea I just had,” Alessandra Persiano said immediately after, nibbling her lower lip.

  “If it’s the same idea I just had, we’d better hurry home.”

  “I don’t think I can make it all the way home.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Plus I don’t feel like it.”

  “I was pretty sure you did.”

  “I meant the going home part.”

  “Well . . . then what?”

  She smiled, craftily.

  “Then come with me.”

  She took me by the hand.

  “But, what . . . ?” I tried to ask as she dragged me along with her.

  “Shut up.”

  BOSS AND UNDERLINGS

  I stand there uncomfortably at the end of the aisle, waiting for Mulder as ordered, while Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo, a short distance away, follows his every step on a monitor that he’s conveniently split up into six panels, mapping the entire supermarket, including the emergency exits.

  Watching a miniaturized version of the captain moving quickly down the aisles, bending over continuously to check even under the lower shelves, immediately makes me think of Pac-Man, that old video game in which a bulimic ball moves through a maze gobbling down a long line of pills until it runs into certain colorful little ghosts that kill it, putting an end to its pig-out. From the familiar little smile that appears on Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo’s lips, I guess that he must have just made the same connection.

  Matteo the deli counterman nonchalantly twists open a bottle of mineral water and is about to tip it up and take a swig. Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo promptly looks daggers at him, freezing him to the spot with the bottle just inches from his mouth, forcing him to look inside it like a pair of binoculars.

  I witness this wordless ocular tongue-lashing and for once I have to agree with the boss. It’s not as if you can just start nonchalantly popping open bottles of mineral water in this kind of situation. You can’t act freely if you’re in the same room as someone holding a gun. The first rule of power is that when you’re in its presence you have to ask permission.

  Every now and then Matrix kneels down and then gets back up. His legs are probably falling asleep on him. The engineer shoots a discreet glance at him from time to time between one screen of Pac-Man and the next.

  “Hey,” Matrix suddenly says to Matteo the deli counterman, “splash a little water in my face.”

  “Say what?” Matteo asks.

  Matrix snorts rudely through his nose.

  “What were they even thinking when they hired you?”

  Got to agree with you there, I think to myself.

  But a second later I add (still in my thoughts): “But that doesn’t mean that he ought to be working for you instead, asshole.”

  “Hey, you,” the engineer shouts at Matrix, “you need to ask me, not him.”

  “I beg your forgiveness with my face pressed to the floor,” Matrix replies, sarcastically self-flagellating. “Could that guy splash a little water in my face, because I hate the taste of blood, pretty please?”

  “And by ‘that guy’ I assume you’re referring to Matteo?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then repeat your question.”

  Matrix sighs and makes the correction.

  “Could Matteo splash a little water in my face?”

  Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo makes him wait awhile before responding.

  “No.”

  Then he turns his back on him, refocusing his attention on Pac-Man.

  Matteo the deli counterman sports a double chin of gratification.

  Matrix clenches his jaw, capitalizing his rage. I’ll bet any amount you like that right now in his head he’s storyboarding a video clip of the various forms of torture he’d like to personally inflict on his captor before sending him to meet his maker, should he manage to get out of this situation alive.

  Here comes Mulder.

  I wait for him, motionless, without the slightest idea what I’m supposed to say to him (the best I’ve been able to figure out is that I’m supposed to serve as a sort of barrier, keeping him from nosing around on set), when the voice of Big Brother thunders over the loudspeakers.

  “Stop right there.”

  Mulder stops short.

  I turn to look at my commander as if to ask why he would appoi
nt me bailiff and then do everything himself.

  Mulder is just a few steps away from me.

  I look at him.

  He looks at me.

  Oh my God, why?

  “What are we doing?” I ask the engineer, turning my head in his direction.

  “Nothing is what we’re doing. Captain, your inspection is over.”

  “Can I come closer?” he asks, speaking to the monitor.

  “What now, do you want to check to see if there are any children hiding here too?” Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo replies.

  “No,” he replies, with a regulation smile, “on the contrary, I thank you for having allowed me to venture this far to check. I’m only interested in seeing whether the prisoner is injured.”

  “I’ve already told you he’s fine,” the engineer replies. “Am I just wasting my breath, or is it a simple matter of you not believing me?”

  At this point I count to three, confident that Matrix is going to try to take advantage of the situation in some way or other (and in fact that’s exactly what he does: I know them, these kinds of people).

  “He broke my nose,” he tattles, in a whiny voice. “Help me, I’m hurt bad.”

  The voice of someone with a terminal illness, slightly hoarse: the kind of full package of victimhood you’d expect from an appeal to Amnesty International.

  Criminals are always eager to turn to institutions when they’re the target of some injustice. They have a fine-honed sense of legality. They adhere to the values of civil society with the timing of a conscientious taxpayer.

  Truly a stupid move, on Matrix’s part, to stage that pathetic bid for pity. Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo, in fact, is quick to swat it down.

  “Oh, what a pity,” he remarks. “Did you hear that, Captain? He hurt his little nose.”

  And with these words, he aims his pistol straight at him.

  “You think he’ll start crying if I shoot him in the foot?”

  His arm held out straight and stiff as a rod, an icy gaze, the pistol ready to fire, like a snarling dog driven into a rage by a leash holding him back just inches from his prey.

  We all look each other in the eye, stunned at the speed with which he’s moved from rhetorical irony to cold menace.

  In that moment I catch myself thinking that if there were a director running this thing instead of the stinking fixed video cameras, he’d probably zoom in on the barrel of the pistol and from there do a slow diagonal pan toward Matrix’s feet and then pan even more slowly up toward his terrified face and just hold that, leaving all of us in suspense, waiting for the gunshot, creating that secret rooting for tragedy that always drives a blockbuster. After all, suspense—I conjecture extemporaneously—is nothing other than the awareness that there’s nothing you can do but sit back and watch things happen. It’s a welcome state of powerlessness. When you buy your movie ticket, when you invest in emotions (because, let’s face facts, emotions are for sale just like everything else), the fact is you’re commissioning a hypocritical state of anxiety into which a director places you and from which he then plucks you with the sleight of hand of a movie camera. You’re the passive paying subject of an agreed-to masochism, made possible by a work of art.

  Now Matrix is afraid. He’s pissed off the boss, and he knows it. The problem with criminals is that they always want to land on their feet. They’re even arrogant when it comes to acting. They don’t hope even for a second that you’re going to eat up the song and dance about their struggles and/or repentance: with much deeper duplicity, they chip away at your sense of personal dignity. So you wind up going along with them just to protect that value of dignity that you can’t stand to see betrayed. It’s sort of like they’re asking you to buy the ticket so you don’t have to see the show.

  Matrix’s problem, the way things stand now, is that Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo has no intention of buying that ticket.

  Mulder gets a whiff of the potential bad outcome and hastily runs for cover.

  “Engineer, that’s enough, I think.”

  The funny thing is that he looks at me while he says it.

  Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo’s hand begins to shake. Which doesn’t strike me as a good sign for Matrix. Who in fact begins to salivate excessively, all of a sudden.

  “Have you noticed how quick these bastards are to take up the mantle of victimhood, Captain?”

  I can’t help thinking of the movies again. When you’re watching a film, if someone with a gun starts spouting all kinds of theoretical nonsense while holding someone else at gunpoint (think, for instance, of Samuel L. Jackson reciting from the Book of Ezekiel, or at least so he says, to his victims in Pulp Fiction), you can pretty much be sure he’s about to shoot.

  “I know, I know, you’re right,” Mulder replies, trying to seem as accommodating as he can, “but there’s no reason to make things more complicated than they have to be.”

  He puts both hands in the air and takes a few steps back.

  “All right, I’m leaving.”

  Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo says nothing. He probably didn’t even hear him, drunk as he is on the feeling of power that he gets from holding his finger on the trigger. Look at him: he has all the trappings of a dirty old man with his eyes glued to the ass of an underage girl, who only realizes what a creep he’s been after getting thrown off the bus.

  At this point I really ought to do something; so I do.

  “What’s the matter with you, Engineer? Are you trying to ruin everything?”

  Like a bucket of ice-cold water. Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo turns to look at me, blinking his eyes twice, as if he didn’t recognize me.

  The effect I was hoping for.

  “What?”

  “I thought you wanted to put this guy on trial,” I say, looking disappointed. “That’s why you asked me to stay, right?”

  “That’s . . . right.”

  “Then don’t do anything stupid. Even if you just shoot him in the foot, he could die from loss of blood.”

  He looks up into the air. He registers the concept. He lowers the gun. He runs his other hand over his forehead.

  “Yes. You have . . . a point, Counselor.”

  “Good,” I say.

  We all heave a sigh of relief. Especially Matrix, but I immediately shoot him an icy glare to make it clear to him that I’ve just saved his ass (forget about his foot), just in case he missed the point.

  Matteo the deli counterman puts the bottle to his lips and takes a long drink, permission be damned. For that matter, Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo’s reflexes are still too sluggish from the emotional roller coaster for him to scold Matteo over this minor oversight (actually I think that if I wanted to I could probably even disarm him: but there’s no way I’m going to make things hard for myself just to do Matrix a favor).

  Mulder reappraises me with his eyes, almost as if he’d just promoted me to the rank of fellow cop, thanks to this latest dramatic twist. I gesture to him to make himself scarce, seeing as his presence has produced undesired results. He complies, backing away, turning around, heading back down the aisle, and disappearing. I watch him turn into Pac-Man again on the monitor as he retraces his steps back through the grocery-store labyrinth.

  “I believe I owe you my thanks, Counselor,” says Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo, who has in the meanwhile completely regained his mental clarity.

  “Actually,” he corrects himself, speaking to Matrix, “you’re the one who should thank him. If it wasn’t for him, you’d be walking with a limp by now.”

  But Matrix, as I would have expected, just stares at the floor.

  “Hurrah for gratitude,” I observe.

  Whereupon Matrix starts to say something, but I steal the ball.

  “Ah, no, eh? Not another word out of you. Christ, they make you all with a cookie cutter, don’t they, all you targets o
f the Anti-Mafia Law. You’re professional criminals, you spend decades running from the law without being caught, they make movies about you and everything, and then the next thing you know you take a bullet to the forehead because you don’t know when to keep your fucking mouth shut.”

  “But I . . .” he tries to object.

  “That’s enough. You’ve already caused enough trouble.”

  Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo smiles contentedly.

  “You see why we needed a lawyer here?”

  I say nothing, realizing how right he is. I just spoke to Matrix the way a lawyer speaks to his client. And to think I’d promised myself that I’d never defend these people again as long as I lived.

  I’m about to try to justify myself somehow when on the monitor showing the front entrance a dramatically familiar figure appears, accompanied by an assistant equipped with a video camera.

  The instant I recognize her, I swear, my heart stops; and at the same time I swing around, aghast, and stare at Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo, as if to ask him if this was the “television coverage” he was hoping for.

  He looks at the screen, and then at me.

  “Mary Stracqualurso?” he says in horror.

  Now that’s a name that we all know.

  A silence of solidarity ensues.

  Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo, with a heartbroken gesture signifying both total despair and complete resignation, picks up his remote control and activates the audio from the entrance.

  Mary, in the meantime, has completed her negotiations with Mulder and Scully to start reporting, and she already has her microphone in hand, while the cameraman positions himself at the appropriate distance, first panning over the surrounding monitors and then focusing on her.

  “Buonciorno,” she begins in a thick Neapolitan accent.

  All four of us look exchange a look.

  It’s miracle I don’t burst out laughing.

  TEXT MESSAGE IN A BOTTLE

  The guy at the reception desk must have thought he was making quite the impression of the sophisticated hotel clerk by not looking either of us in the face at all as we handed over, respectively, my driver’s license and Alessandra Persiano’s state ID card.