My Mother-in-Law Drinks

by Diego De Silva

  “Oh, well,” I say with a shrug.

  I told you he wasn’t a bad guy.

  “Still . . .” the ADA says all of a sudden, narrowing his eyes slightly, as if from one moment to the next he’d been seized by an irresistible curiosity.

  “What?”

  “Odd, that the two of us have never met.”

  Eh, I think. Not really all that odd.

  “Sure is,” I confirm.

  “Have you always practiced in this district?” he asks, making things even worse.

  My forehead begins to perspire.

  “Well, yes.”

  “Truly strange,” he drills in. And he goes on staring at me.

  Goddamn it all to hell, what do I need to do to escape the persecution of my own professional anonymity, change professions? I’m an unsuccessful lawyer, and that’s that.

  “I don’t do a lot of criminal law,” I toss out, in the hope that he’ll leave me in peace.

  “I know plenty of civil lawyers too,” he notes circumstantially, confirming his ontological uncertainties concerning me.

  Oh, sweet Jesus.

  “Let’s just say that I’m one of those lawyers who doesn’t like to dally in the courthouse.”

  He must have liked that one, because he finally looks satisfied, thank God.

  “Too right.”

  What is he doing, making fun of me?

  Well, let him have his fun (if that’s the case), as long as we can be done with this conversation.

  He smiles, he extends his hand.

  I happily shake it.

  “It’s been a real pleasure, Counselor.”

  “Oh, same for me.”

  You have no idea.

  “I need you to come by my office, even tomorrow if possible. Just to take a few statements from you.”

  “If you think that would be best.”

  “I’ll be expecting you, then.”

  At last, we declare the session adjourned.

  At this point there’s nothing I want to do so much as go home, but the carabinieri inform me that there’s a fresh crop of reporters outside, and that the best way to avoid another attack would be to get a ride in an ambulance heading out on an emergency call.

  I tell them that I’ll take advantage of that suggestion and how, first of all because I don’t think I could physically endure another beating from a crowd of question-asking, flash-popping journalists, and second because the prospect of fleeing the scene in secret, completely unbeknownst to the press, gives me a certain shiver of excitement, to be honest.

  Whereupon they tell me that they’ll inform me as soon as the ambulance is ready.

  And while I’m sitting there waiting my phone rings.

  With what delight I read the caller’s name on the display.

  “Mother-in-Law! I was just wondering when you’d go to the trouble to call.”

  She heaves one of her little sighs and replies:

  “I always knew you’d come off looking smart, eventually.”

  I shake my head.

  “Oh, how I love getting compliments from you.”

  “Really, you were great.”

  “Not you too? Listen, did you all get the part about how that poor wretch shot himself? God Almighty, he’s under the knife right now, they’re trying to dig out the bullet in his cranium, they don’t even know if he’ll pull through, and ever since I walked out of that goddamned supermarket (why on earth I ever set foot in there in the first place I couldn’t say), no one says anything to me except how masterful I was, when I couldn’t even stop him from doing it.”

  “Don’t spout bullshit, Vince’. You found yourself in a situation straight out of the loony bin and you did what you could. That’s it. You’re not to blame for anything.”

  I assume a confidentially dramatic tone.

  “My jacket is covered with blood, Ass. The engineer’s blood, you understand?”

  “You want me to get the stain out?”

  “Don’t try to be funny.”

  “What are you trying to do, make yourself feel responsible for a despairing man’s attempted suicide?”

  I heave a long sigh.

  “I know it’s hard to understand, but that’s pretty much the size of it.”

  “Hey, try to calm down, okay? You didn’t have any role in it, you can’t consider yourself guil . . . Wait a minute.”

  “What?”

  “God, I can’t believe it.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You’re such a charlatan, Vincenzo,” she says, with a caustic note in her voice that makes me break out in one of my sweats.

  “Huh?”

  “Go fuck yourself.”

  “Hey, what’s come over you, have you lost your mind? Have you started drinking again?”

  “You’re playing the part of the failed hero. The one who’s overcome by a sense of guilt for having failed to avert disaster. Christ, it’s disgusting.”

  I turn as red as a field of tomatoes and my perspiration level skyrockets.

  “What are you . . .” I stammer.

  She doesn’t give me the time to defend myself (that is, if I even could) and she overpowers me, tearing me to shreds.

  “Who the fuck do you think you are, James Bond on her majesty’s secret service, and now you’re developing mission failure syndrome? Fuck off! And another thing, now that I have a clear picture of the vulgar little song and dance you just tried to put over on me: the pathetic detail of the blood on your jacket was really despicable. Shame on you.”

  “Are you out of your mind?” I try to counterattack, displaying high dudgeon. “How dare you come up with such a thing?”

  It doesn’t work.

  “How dare I come up with such a thing, eh?”

  It suddenly dawns on me how Nives must have felt when she was a little girl and caught the dressing down that later turned her into a psychologist.

  I wipe my forehead, smearing the cuff of my shirtsleeve with sweat, then I fan myself using my left hand as a paddle and raise the white flag.

  “Okay, maybe I hammed it up a little, but I swear that I nev . . .”

  “Now you listen to me,” Ass interrupts me, “you so much as try and make a reference to this miserable cabaret of yours to the first journalist who comes along and asks you a question, and I swear I’ll spit in your face.”

  I lick my lips.

  “Hey, relax. I don’t plan to. I’m just a little upset, okay? Right now I don’t even know what I’m saying.”

  “No, you know exactly what you’re saying. And you’re not upset in the slightest. You’re just turning into an idiot, that’s all. You’ve caught a whiff of celebrity and you’re wallowing in it.”

  “Hey. Hey. Mother-in-Law. Are you still there?”

  Fuck.

  I sit there motionless, cell phone in hand, humiliated and sweaty, staring at the picture of Alagia and Alfredo when they were small; then I hear, not far overhead, a horrendously familiar flap-flap, and guess who lands next to me a second or two later.

  “Oh, just who I was hoping to see,” I say. “What happened to you? I thought you’d been drummed out of the service, for, you know, poor guardianship.”

  “Funny,” he says, one hand brushing his equipment. “Who knows where you find the courage to crack jokes, after the miserable display that you just made of yourself.”

  “Listen up,” I reply, “while you were hanging out on a cloud scratching your balls, I was down here taking care of business on my own. And I think I did a mighty fine job too, if you don’t mind my saying so. And, as usual, you show up when it’s all over. Why don’t you go back to collecting unemployment in the celestial heights, I already can’t stand looking at you.”

  “Now that you’re famous? Not on your l
ife.”

  “I wouldn’t have pegged you for such an opportunist.”

  “Ah! Of all the people to talk, after that pathetic performance with your mother-in-law.”

  At this point I don’t even bother retorting: I just shoot him a glare so eloquent that he understands that this isn’t the day for it and gets the hell out of there. The coward.

  “Counselor,” one of the carabinieri from before comes over. “The ambulance is leaving.”

  I look at him.

  He looks at me.

  “Counselor?”

  “Eh?”

  “The ambulance,” he repeats, pointing at it, as if showing me what one looks like.

  LETTING HER GO WITHOUT LIFTING A FINGER

  If at this point you’re getting the impression that there’s something missing, like an answer to a question, you aren’t mistaken: that’s how it is. And the question is this: “Are you planning to overlook the fact that Alessandra Persiano hasn’t gotten in touch with you, or do you think you have some right to an explanation?”

  So, since you seem so eager to hear about it, Alessandra did finally show up. And it was just as I was heading for the ambulance, in slow motion, still catatonic from the telephonic browbeating I’d gotten from my mother-in-law.

  Then and there, I swear, I was so stunned from my sudden plunge in self-respect that I didn’t even recognize her. She must have thought I was still in shock or something, because she took my face in her hands and told me to look at her.

  “My love, it’s me,” I heard her say, and only then did I ask her where she’d been all this time.

  “I was right here, where would you expect me to be?” she replied, adding a melancholy smile.

  At that point I really would have liked to hear her explain, but the driver hit his horn, practically sending the both of us into ventricular fibrillation; so we hastened to climb in and the ambulance took off, tires screeching, with the siren wailing.

  After that, what can I tell you. We went home, where it seemed that nothing had changed, except for the blinking red light on the cordless phone that indicated that the voice mail was full (I don’t know about you, but to me there’s something fairly depressing about the consolation offered by the place you live, as if it were showing you the unmodifiable picture of your existence, and no matter what you do and how many resolutions you make, it still offers you the same living room on the right, the kitchen on the left, and your bedroom down at the end of the hall).

  Alessandra Persiano was exactly the way you would expect a woman in love to be in a situation of that nature: sweet, considerate, proud of me and my televised performance, happy that nothing bad had happened to me, humanely showing concern for the tragedy of Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo, intellectually disturbed by the issues that the live televised hostage taking raised with regard to the inadequacies of courtroom trials and the media spectacle that’s taken over the administration of justice.

  As is always the case when you escape unscathed from a traumatic experience, we became frantically talkative, seized by the need to compulsively recount everything that happened without skipping a single detail, a single line of dialogue, comparing notes from our different points of view, as if by cross-referencing and juxtaposing them, taking turns interrupting each other and finishing each other’s sentences, we were trying to come up with a shared, definitive solemn version of events, one that was our and ours alone.

  And I was constantly filling in, completing, and adding every last minuscule detail that surfaced in my memory, giving in (this is the truth) to the presumption that I somehow knew much more about it than those who had seen the whole thing on TV (more or less like when you travel to see an away soccer match, and when you get home your friends, who watched the same match on TV, still pepper you with questions, as if you’d seen the real match and they’d only watched an imitation).

  At a certain point, Ale latched on to the theory of the television lawyer that Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo had drummed into me so obsessively, treating me like some sort of cretin who doesn’t know what world he’s living in, and for a good half an hour that was all that we talked about.

  “You know,” she chose to confide in me, with a discretion that seemed to say: “This is just between us” (even though it was at least the fourth time that she’d repeated the concept), “I’m uncomfortable admitting it, but this idea that our profession, at the levels that really count, has moved from the courtroom to the television studios strikes me as frighteningly true. I know that I shouldn’t say so, but the more I think about it, the more I realize that I’m in complete agreement with the engineer. That man, after all, with just a short speech confronted us with a very simple truth, a truth that we lawyers know very well but which we’ve never had the courage to admit.”

  “And that would be?” I asked, immediately regretting it, since, as I should have been able to foresee, a political harangue commenced forthwith.

  “That talent no longer matters, Vincenzo. That a lawyer, these days, is no different from a realtor, someone who sells in theory, you see, who doesn’t even sell but merely promises to sell units of real estate, without knowing precisely when and how they’ll be built, who provides services that serve no real purpose and never gets his hands dirty with actual work, but instead mediates, channels, makes statements without structure or shape: pay close attention and you’ll see that he never actually says anything, at the very most he limits himself to denying things, to contradicting the opposing side.”

  Christ, she sounded like Radio Radicale. Once she gets started, there’s no way of stopping her. And heaven have mercy on you if you dare to let your attention wander. She’s capable of grabbing your jaw and forcing you into position, making you stare her in the face until she’s done. And if she’s not convinced you’re listening, she’ll even ask you to repeat back what she’s said.

  “If you think about it, it’s absurd, but that’s how it is: the television lawyer offers nothing solid, he doesn’t get results, he loses more cases than he wins, and yet he’s on top of the world. His professional success is entirely independent of merit; the only defense he offers is the delegitimizing of the prosecution. And with this elementary system he reverses the burden of proof: de facto, you realize, he subcontracts his job to the legal institution, which almost seems to have to justify its reasons for wanting to put his client on trial. And yet this modern charlatan is successful, creates trends, pontificates whenever a reform is implemented and even then notice how he never says anything strictly technical but instead limits himself to broad, obvious, pragmatic considerations, dodging the real point, pushing the discourse into the realm of simplistic politics, and yet his opinion is the one the newspapers print, you get it? People like us, with years and years of hard work behind us, the ones who make the machinery run and do the dirty work of trial hearings, we’re kept out of this circle, we don’t count, even though professionally speaking we know a thousand times more about the actual practice of the law than they do.”

  And at this point she brought up the example of a, shall we say, colleague of ours, notoriously ignorant and conceited, who all the same is constantly featured on TV and in the newspapers (we have no idea how she does it) dispensing banal platitudes on the difficult conditions facing young people today, as if she knew something about it, and her law office is thriving even though she doesn’t know the difference between a lawsuit and an appeal and in spite of the fact that, most important of all, she systematically ruins virtually all of the unfortunate clients who turn to her, thinking that she’s every bit as talented as she claims to anyone who will listen.

  I know at least a dozen fellow lawyers who’ve had to do triple backflips to make up for her colossal screw-ups (a couple of which would have justified lawsuits on the grounds of crass ignorance).

  “The truth is,” Ale continues, increasingly pessimistic, but finally coming to her (I hope) co
ncluding statements, “that the world runs backwards, Vince’. We’ve watched this go on year after year right before our eyes. We realized, of course we realized what was happening: we talked about it, scandalized and concerned, but we were unable to do anything to stop it. And look where we’ve come to. But at least, perhaps, we can stop . . .”

  “Listen, would you tell me why you didn’t come to see me right away after I got out of the supermarket?” I asked her point-blank.

  I’d been waiting for her to volunteer an explanation spontaneously ever since we’d gotten home, to tell the truth.

  She scratched her elbow.

  “You said you were there,” I added.

  “In fact, I was there. From the very beginning,” she confirmed sadly. “I got to the supermarket as soon as I heard that you had been involved in the hostage taking.”

  “Well, then what?”

  “Then . . . when I saw your children and Nives arrive, I decided I should wait my turn.”

  “Wait your turn?” I repeated, as if by repeating the phrase with a question mark at the end I could make it mean something (or, better yet, prove that it was sheer nonsense).

  No answer.

  “I didn’t think you felt you came after anyone else. Not even my children.”

  “I didn’t think so either,” she said, as if the admission caused her a sense of discomfort she’d rather not show. “I only realized it in that instant.”

  Now, I’d like to open a parenthetical consideration. For what obscure reason, whenever you enter into a discussion of emotional import with the woman you love, do you eventually inevitably find yourself face-to-face with dogma? That is to say, you’re presented with a fait accompli (obviously something that was done without your knowing about it; even better, when you were away), unproven and clearly illogical, but which she nevertheless places at your feet like a heavy stone, an irrefutable reason that, however, she refuses to explain to you even out of simple courtesy and which, in fact, you are even implicitly informed that you have already been given every opportunity to remedy? Whereupon you don’t know what the fuck to say. You just sit there, feeling guilty without knowing why, while she limits herself to saying nothing.