My Mother-in-Law Drinks

by Diego De Silva

  So you ask her, in the kindest and most reasonable way you can think of, to tell you just what problems she feels the two of you have, since you’re just not seeing them; but she’s sick of explaining, and so she merely repeats under her breath that you just don’t understand (the subtext being that you need to stop pestering her about it, since you ought to be able to figure it out for yourself); on top of which, the fact that she’s forcing you to lean forward to hear what she’s saying is something that has always driven you into a black rage.

  Whereupon you try to ask a few questions, hoping to get some clue as to what’s going on; and you even offer an array of simplified explanations on the fly, with the sole effect of making her become even more withdrawn, so that before long—obviously—you lose your temper and start shouting (but since you don’t know what you’re talking about you can’t even get your thoughts straight, and you wind up muttering a series of offensive phrases that even you can’t make heads or tails of), while she keeps her cool, and the fact that she remains as calm and collected as an Englishwoman while you go on ranting dementedly makes you lose your temper even more (because after all the most intolerable thing about all this is that you don’t even know what you’re fighting about), and so you start saying things that you don’t think or exhuming issues from ages ago that you can’t even remember all that clearly, and in the course of just a few minutes a fissure opens up with such force that you can actually hear the cracking sound.

  So this time I decide not to bother to fall intentionally into the trap. I’ll wrap myself in silence too; then let’s see what happens.

  She says nothing, I say nothing.

  To get through it, we turn on the TV. We zap from one news program to another. The story is one of the first to go by in the crawler at the bottom of the screen.

  After a while, we stumble on an entire story on RAI News 24. Seen on television, there is something at once banal and sinister about the images of the supermarket: that yellowish inexactness, that snuff-film-like lack of focus that makes them at once unsettling and ridiculous. Alessandra Persiano agrees with me that they are nothing much to look at.

  “But you’re not bad at all,” she comments.

  And I detect in myself a certain something, a twinge of pleasure at seeing myself on TV. It’s probably the lack of focus, in fact.

  At the end of the news report, we decide to have something to eat.

  We make the food together. We’re kind and helpful to each other.

  Then we turn off our cell phones and go to bed.

  We don’t make love.

  After we’ve been lying silent in the dark for a while, she tells me that the next day she has to go to Milan, because that criminal trial that she told me about is beginning.

  I say I remember, but I don’t remember.

  “I’ll be away for a few days,” she says.

  And it’s clear that’s not what’s going to happen.

  When did this all begin? What did we do to each other to treat each other with this level of hypocrisy? I shouldn’t feel so obstinately mute in the presence of the woman I love when she feeds me a line like: “I decided I should wait my turn.” Did I really make her feel so completely excluded or did she simply realize that I’m not the one she should be with?

  I could ask her, certainly, but I don’t. Because this truth belongs to me, and I refuse to receive it in response to a question.

  And so, for once, I leave things the way I found them. I don’t intervene; I don’t try to rescue or save.

  And she, in spite of the fact that she understands exactly what I’m doing, doesn’t narrow the distance she’s keeping from me by so much as a millimeter.

  It might seem as if we’ve reached some sort of tacit understanding, but it’s not true. We don’t want the same thing. And the worst thing is that neither one of us is responsible for this heartbreak. The grand asshole who put us together just parked us here, waiting to make up his mind about what to do. He’s acting the way he always does when he’s unsure of himself, when he’s fumbling, when he still doesn’t know whether he should leap into the void or let himself die.

  For us, right now, love is an exchange of blame.

  THE MORTALITY OF YOUNG LOVES

  Why is love so fragile in its first few months of life? Why so allergic, so vulnerable to chills and bad weather, such a victim of the pitiless law of natural selection?

  Because of the conflicts of interest that have been tormenting me for the past few years, I’ve recently been speculating on the subject of the physiological death of love during the breaking-in period.

  Now if in ordinary life (the kind without exceptional traumas or joys, which is after all the kind of life we all tend towards: an October-life, where you don’t have to wear a heavy coat or gloves) death is a bit-part actor, in Young Love it plays the role of an unfair tax, an IRS of happiness. Like the little fish that swim along under a shark’s tail, with the difference that the IRS-death doesn’t attach itself to Love in order to freeload off it, but rather to crash into the nearest reef, taking Love along with it.

  In other words, death, in Love, is essentially fucking bad luck waiting in ambush. Because, after all, Old Lady Death has this unfortunate tendency to make herself the center of attention, especially that of lovers. Lovers, that is, who are loved in return, lovers with a working relationship and all that. Because obviously if you are an unrequited lover and you haven’t got a relationship going on, the problem doesn’t even come up. In that case, the Old Lady won’t even bother with you, with all the requited lovers there are out there.

  In fact when you first get together and you’re really happy, and the days and nights never seem long enough, it’s typical to be assailed by the fear that from one moment to the next everything might end.

  When those sort of thoughts come to you, don’t waste a lot of time interpreting them: they’re thoughts of death. They come to you because you’ve been doing well for yourself and death—which is always out chasing down tax evaders, and has a sterling record of catching them—has wasted no time in calling you in for an audit.

  It is no accident that most love affairs come to an end shortly after they begin. That’s when the insatiable Old Lady offers you a deal: “Give it all up,” she says, “and you’ll avoid a world of pain.” A superstitious belief that’s as old as the hills, but terribly effective. When all you really need to do is come to the realization that it’s not necessarily better to break up sooner rather than later. In fact, if you ask me, e.g., later is better.

  And that is why, when you are in love and that love is returned, you ought to do everything you can to avoid paying that abominable tax.

  Lovers are all tax evaders. That is why, when they walk down the street, passersby turn to look at them as if they’d just stolen something from them.

  THEN WHAT GOOD ARE FRIENDS?

  Don’t say a word: I bought ten newspapers this morning. Not all from the same newsstand, of course. I even disguised myself a little bit, truth be told (with sunglasses, a rasta skullcap with “Legalize” written on it that Alf gave me, a day’s worth of stubble, etc.), just to see what it feels like to want to pass unobserved, unrecognized (if there’s one thing I’ve always envied famous people for, it’s the problems they face), but still all three news vendors told me very sincerely how much they admired what I’d done.

  I got to the office especially early, to have a chance to work undisturbed on my press clippings for at least half an hour, and in any case before Espedito could burst into my room with his plans for getting lucky which (I’m willing to bet any amount of money) he’d certainly try to drag me into in order to take advantage of my, let us say, fame and strike while the iron was still hot (the first text message I got after the supermarket was from him; it said: “Now I think we’re finally going to get laid”), but instead my potbellied office-mate, whose nameplate hanging on the
front door I treacherously reproduce below (recommending in particular that the reader appreciate the disproportion in size between the characters):

  Espedito Lenza, CPA

  FINANCIAL ADVISER

  was already there waiting for me.

  “Hey,” I say, with as much enthusiasm as I would have shown if the day before an SUV had run over his cat, “you’re in early this morning.”

  “Come here, come here!” he exclaims, throwing his arms wide, eager to express to me in unmistakably physical terms his joy at seeing me safe, sound, and fungible as a close friend who’s momentarily become a celebrity; then he rushes toward me, undertaking a lunge that makes him look like an overweight Ninja Turtle, and wraps me in a reckless and irresponsible hug, without a thought to either the stack of newspapers clamped precariously under my right arm or his own general heaving bulk. The next thing I know his protruding belly slams into me, I’m shoved backwards, six pounds of newspapers tumble to the floor, and to keep from following them down I desperately grab on to that idiot’s shoulders. He pulls me toward him with virile promptitude, in a pathetic pantomime of a tango step.

  I recoil in disgust.

  “What the fu . . .”

  “I swear I could practically kiss you,” he says, taking advantage of our sudden proximity.

  That line twists my mouth into a frown.

  I finally twist free of his abominable embrace.

  “Look at what you did,” I protest, bending over to pick up the newspapers. “You think you’re built like Carla Fracci?”

  “Hoo-hoo!” he retorts mockingly, as I scrabble around on the floor for newspapers. “So we suddenly have an appetite for news this morning, do we?”

  “Go fuck yourself.”

  “You’re such a dope, I bought four or five papers myself.”

  “What’s your point? Are you saying we usually take turns buying papers?”

  “Well, not really. Still, you could have said something.”

  “What are you, my press office?”

  “Is it just me,” he replies, standing with arms akimbo, “or is someone here getting a swelled head?”

  I look up at him, on the verge of saying something, but I’m too late. He’s already turned his back on me and started off resentfully toward his office.

  “Oh, come on, don’t be an idiot, come here,” I call after him, getting to my feet. But he doesn’t even turn around.

  I’m left standing alone in the entrance hall, my hands encumbered with the stack of newspapers. I heave a sigh, thinking to myself that pretty soon I’m going to have to go in and apologize to him, and I look at the door of what until recently was the office of the Arethusa cooperative, but which is now the pied-à-terre of the landlord’s son, Alberto, a pampered heir-to-be who drops by regularly to smoke joints with two friends who are even bigger losers than him (and, let me point out, never with a girl: and to think that the kid’s twenty years old, for Christ’s sake), often putting us in awkward situations with our clients (who are admittedly few and far between) on account of the distinctive odor that fills the hallway. One time we even told him it might be a good idea to at least open the window, but he told us—I swear—that he catches cold easily; and he was completely serious.

  Ah, the Arethusa. The married couple whose last names I never could seem to remember, and their freakish, demented little Italian spitz. The elevated heart rates we used to get from the furious barking fits that he’d break out in whenever someone rang the doorbell. We haven’t heard from either of them in quite a while. Never laid eyes on them again: never even ran into them in the street. I don’t think it was a coincidence that their office was vacated in the immediate aftermath of the sudden (and, to them, inexplicable) catatonia into which the dog fell one day, a transition from hysterical yapping to a serene contemplation of the empty air. I never walk past that door without feeling guilty (however indirectly) for the tragedy that befell them. One day I’ll make a clean breast of things, and tell them how sorry I am.

  “Okay, all right,” I say to myself; then I shoulder the cross and trudge off toward Espe’s office, if that’s the right term to describe his cubbyhole.

  The smartass is sitting at his desk, his back to the door, staring at the window. I stop at the doorway and emit a snort that falls midway between the argumentative and the conciliatory, but in his indignation he doesn’t even give me the satisfaction of turning around.

  Whereupon I try to break the counterfeit ice by improvising a stance, figuring I’ll just give it a shot and whatever comes out comes out.

  “Yes, it’s true: there were a few moments there when I was definitely afraid for my life, but that’s over now, there’s no reason for you to be so upset.”

  That one doesn’t work either.

  Okay, you asked for it.

  I step forward, I hoist the stack of newspapers high, and I slam it down on the desktop with all the strength my arms can muster.

  The noise is so explosive that the poor idiot jumps straight up into the air, rebounding off his chair so violently that he comes this close to falling over (under the weight of his fat ass, the chair’s upholstery emits a puff of air that’s reminiscent of a city trash truck). He brings one hand to his chest, goes purple, and finally turns to look at me—and I’m already laughing.

  He’s tempted to laugh himself (I can see it in his face), but since he’s too invested in his role as the princess with her pea to sacrifice his dignity, he merely raises his eyebrows and looks me coldly up and down.

  I’m about to launch a Bronx cheer in his direction, but I change my mind and come to the point.

  “Okay, let’s be done with this,” I cut in brusquely. “What do you have in mind?”

  “What do I have in mind?” asks Espedito I-Have-No-Idea-What-You’re-Talking-About Lenza, CPA, as if the question had dropped out of the clear blue sky.

  “Oh come on, cut the bullshit. Talk.”

  He scrutinizes me, evaluating the risk that, by continuing the little charade, he might incur of seriously pissing me off, thereby ruining his plan once and for all, and finally decides to opt for a frank approach.

  “Do you remember Anna Carena?”

  I have no need to wrack my memory, since the mere mention of the name, by conditioned reflex, projects an embarrassment-inducing D-cup chest before my eyes.

  Espe, in fact, looks me in the face and answers his own question.

  “So you remember her. Well: last night she was at the Push-Up, with . . .”

  “The Push-Up? What is that, a lingerie shop?”

  “Oh, good one, that’s the first time I’ve ever heard it. Now try and let me tell you the story without making me lose the thread: so there she was, so hot she could set your night on fire, in a turtleneck sweater that was at least two sizes too small, if you know what I mean, and the worst part was that she was standing next to a girlfriend who, and I swear my children’s lives, could have been a body double for Jennifer Lopez.”

  “Oh, really?”

  “I can see you’re starting to get the point. So I go into the club, I pick her out along with that other specimen—I’m not even going to tell you how she was dressed—and just to keep from ruining my evening entirely I walk past them without even turning my head, since the bitch usually won’t so much as glance in my direction. Instead, the minute she sees me she leaps to her feet, windmills both arms in the air, and asks me to come over and sit with them.”

  “How very odd,” I comment sarcastically, crossing my arms.

  In that exact instant I suddenly remember hearing or reading somewhere that crossing your arms while someone is speaking to you is a way of erecting a barrier, of manifesting disapproval; and even though the gesture I’ve just performed in fact does manifest disapproval, I continue to think—as I’ve always thought—that these alleged catalogues of body movements to be adduce
d as evidence of one’s intentions are nothing more nor less than steaming piles of bullshit.

  “You have no idea, Vince’,” Espe continues, as euphoric as a pusher singing the praises of his merchandise, promising a shower of psychedelic sparks, “these two were glued to the television set from the beginning to the end of the live feed. They kept interrupting each other, ah, he was so brave, and so skillful, and what an interesting man . . .”

  “No, eh?” I interrupt. “Don’t even think about it.”

  “Oh, believe me, I didn’t do anything. It was all their idea.”

  “Their idea?”

  “Tomorrow night at nine thirty, at the Push-Up, like I told you,” he adds without so much as a hint of shame; he even acts annoyed, into the bargain.

  My head starts to spin a little as I grapple with my incredulity.

  “Like you told me? Like you told me?!?” I shout, scandalized at his almost supernatural gall. “This is the first time I’ve heard anything about this fucking appointment from you!”

  He heaves a sigh of annoyance.

  “What the fuck, why are you so damned finicky? It’s not as if the basic concept changes, whether you hear about it before or after.”

  “Holy Christ, Espe,” I inveigh, slapping my legs (and to think that I’ve always despised the aesthetics of self-flagellation), “I knew it, and I knew it, and I knew it.”

  He stands up from his office chair in annoyance, as if he were the one who had had enough of me.

  “Listen, let’s just pretend like I never said anything, okay? I didn’t think that something as trivial as going out with a couple of women would trigger this enormous crisis of conscience for you. I’ll just give them a call and tell them nothing doing.”

  He reaches for his cell phone, but it’s disgustingly obvious that he never intends for his hand to get there.