My Mother-in-Law Drinks

by Diego De Silva

  The message she’s sending, I tell myself out loud, is clear: “I tried to call you. You weren’t there (or you chose not to answer). I am therefore authorized to do whatever the fuck I want until the next time we speak; that is, if we ever do.”

  I wish that that busybody guardian angel who was assigned to me were here right now. Then at least he could tell me that this is not the way these things are done. That if Alessandra Persiano had really wanted to talk to me, she would have called back. Most important of all, she wouldn’t have shut off her phone after the first attempt. And that therefore, in fact, she really is a bitch.

  I really need this kind of reassurance, because to think badly of your own girlfriend is a little like thinking badly of yourself. It’s not something you can handle alone. But he’s never around when you need him; so I decide to set aside my resolution to be discreet and I do what I have until now wholeheartedly intended not to: I call Espe and tell him the whole story.

  Contrary to my expectations, he lets me confide in him graciously and with admirable sensitivity. He starts by categorically ruling out the hypothesis that this constitutes a definitive separation, and to support this belief he describes a couple of personal experiences that have absolutely nothing in common with my own, and in fact I forget them in real time (it’s typical of friends to offer examples that don’t have anything to do with anything when you ask them for advice); then he remains silent for a few seconds (but as we all know, on the phone, seconds are converted into minutes the way that lire are converted into euros) before asking me a direct question that, I confess, really catches me off guard.

  “Do you think she’s pissed off at you for any specific reason?”

  “Sorry, what do you mean?”

  “I mean do you get the impression that there’s something that she just can’t forgive you for?”

  Fuck, I think to myself.

  “I’m not following you,” I lie.

  Pause.

  “Have you been faithful to her, Vince’?”

  “Come again?”

  “Did you fuck someone else?”

  “Ah, I see,” I say to myself. “He’s beating around the bush.”

  “I don’t see what that has to do with anything,” I reply, starting to fan myself with my free hand.

  “Okay, let’s move on from there. Just one woman?”

  “Espe, please.”

  “Two? Three? Twenty-three? Believe me, there’s a big difference.”

  “Only one, I swear.”

  “That’s exactly the difference: one is the worst.”

  “What?” I say. But I know exactly what he means, and I couldn’t agree more.

  “Is this affair still going on?”

  “There is no affair.”

  “How long did it last? And don’t lie to me.”

  I unbutton my shirt.

  “Two months. Three, maybe. But I might have seen her four or five times in all.”

  “Hmm.”

  “What are you ruminating about now?”

  “And Alessandra doesn’t know a thing.”

  “Of course not.”

  “And you’re sure.”

  “Sure of what?”

  “Of that.”

  “Of what?”

  “That she doesn’t know.”

  “Yes. I think so. I mean, no. Fuck, no. She doesn’t know.”

  He withdraws for a moment. Probably to chambers, to deliberate.

  “Now I have to ask you a tough question. But you have to answer me on the spot.”

  “Good lord, Espe. I don’t know what I was thinking when I decided to confide in you, really.”

  “Ready?”

  I take a deep breath.

  “Ready.”

  “Did you pull some bullshit move, by chance?”

  “Some bullshit move?”

  “That’s right, some blunder. Like Alessandra was about to catch on and you had to cover your ass at the last second.”

  Sudddenly I can’t see; I lose my twenty-twenty vision all at once.

  Then out of nowhere I feel a compelling need to unburden myself of the truth. This is why people cave under questioning and confess.

  “Yes. Goddamn you. Yes.”

  “There,” he says with satisfaction.

  “But it went off without a hitch, Espe, I swear to you,” I hasten to justify myself while talking in machine-gun bursts, as if I were trying to stall before he could file the verdict and make it official. “That idiot, I mean the other woman, sent me a text message calling me Filippo on purpose just to make me jealous, and Alessandra and I ended up laughing about it, just think, Alessandra wanted to call her and ask for this Filippo’s phone number and . . . Oh, Christ.”

  And that’s where I break off, because justifications (as you realize right in the middle of trying to justify yourself) need to be brief in order to be convincing.

  Espe picks up on my discomfort, and meets me halfway.

  “There’s no reason for you to explain it to me, Vince’. If you say that she didn’t put it together, I believe you, okay? But it’s just that when a woman pulls away from one day to the next without telling you why, and your conscience isn’t absolutely spotless, then the first question to ask yourself is whether she knows something that you thought she didn’t.”

  “Ah, I see,” I reply in terror.

  “We need to think like guilty men, understand me, Vince’?” he says, shifting into the first person plural just to make it clear how close he feels to me at this moment. “Because if we are the first to be suspicious of ourselves, just imagine how suspicious they are.”

  “But I really believe there’s no way she could have figured it out.”

  At this point I’m answering without even thinking about what I’m saying, as if I’d signed some diabolical pact with Espe and I automatically set out in bad faith, converting that bad faith into actual sincerity.

  “Well, in that case, you’re ahead of the game,” he says, becoming more tractable; as if my answer had convinced him and, therefore, reassured him.

  “Really?”

  “Suuure. And remember not to fuck up by bringing up the subject yourself or offering her the slightest pretext for thinking you lied. Stick to your story, play the moron, and flip the problem on its head. Go on acting as if you can’t wrap your head around why she would want to treat you this way. If that’s the reason she left you, that is, if she’s convinced you took another woman to bed, then you’ll see: she’ll come back.”

  I look around, bewildered by the professional approach that Espe has taken to my personal drama. It’s as if he’s scaled down my romantic sufferings to some lesser stage of trauma, delivering me a version of myself that I find frankly repugnant.

  The truth is that this, shall we say, criminologist’s approach unsettles me because it appeals to the more ignoble part of my personality; and it does so directly, without hypocrisy. As if he were saying to me: “I’m not going to sit here and play the sidekick to your pretentious moaning about how complicated you are and the fact that you think you’re losing your woman for who knows what untranslatable motives. Let’s take it down a couple of levels. Let’s start out from the basic assumption that you’re a filthy male pig who likes to screw the first piece of female flesh that comes within reach. I’m not going to treat you like an overwrought intellectual, I’m going to treat you like a male hypocrite who wants nothing more complicated than to have sex and get away with it. So why are we wasting our time and our breath, just tell me that you didn’t leave any embarrassing evidence at the scene of the crime, right?”

  However much I value his good intentions, I’m filled with a powerful need to disassociate myself from such a materialistic (or perhaps I ought to say flatly material) version of my suffering.

  “I think that you’r
e looking at things from a rather narrow point of view.”

  He hesitates, as if he were tempted to laugh in my face, or emit a Bronx cheer in my direction, or possibly both; then he retreats to a more open-minded point of view.

  “Maybe so. But if it turns out I’m right, I want you to let me know.”

  “Okay.”

  “But another thing: dinner with the hotties is still on for tomorrow night. You’re not going to come up with some excuse at the last second, eh?”

  “No, don’t worry, I’ll be there.”

  “You’ll see, you’ll feel better.”

  I suddenly visualize a picture that chills my blood.

  “Tell me something: are you already envisioning, like, a big old orgy?”

  “Are you joking? I’m an old-fashioned gentleman.”

  “Listen, I’ll ride along. Nothing more.”

  “Eh. I know. How many times are you going to tell me?”

  “You don’t believe me, eh?”

  “Oh, good lord, why shouldn’t I believe you? Your heart is broken, you’re proof against temptation. What kind of effect would I expect two gorgeous babes who are dying to spend the evening with you to have?”

  “Oh, go get fucked, Espe.”

  “Sure, but I want to be in the driver’s seat. Oh, and I’m picking you up at eight. Wear a nice suit. Come to think of it, do you have a nice suit?”

  I hang up on him, then I go back to my tour of my apartment in an attempt to recover my noble state of anxiety in order to cleanse myself of the horrendous discomfort that this not-exactly innocent conversation between old friends has left me with. But it does no good: I already feel like I don’t know myself.

  At that point I delve into the archive of Happy Moments, exhuming a couple of truly unforgettable ones dating from the first six months of my affair with Alessandra Persiano; then, without any collateral effect much less a direct link, I find myself singing the refrain “E mi manchi amore mio” by Laura Pausini (which just yesterday, wafting out the windows of a Fiat Cinquecento as it went past, practically brought me to tears), then I try to break the bank with the evergreen “Se bruciasse la città” by Massimo Ranieri (which even fits in perfectly with the condition of separation aggravated by geographical distance), but nothing happens at all—zero.

  The failure of this last experiment really worries me. Because “Se bruciasse la città” is a neorealist song. It contains a faithful description of the fantastical scene that’s inscribed in the genetic code of any male who’s been dumped, and it’s therefore an ideal test bench. You can’t be insensible to the power of “Se bruciasse la città” if your woman has just left you.

  In the song in question, as many of my Italian readers will remember, the narrator, who has just learned that his ex is getting married in May (people always get married in May, in songs), wishes he could make his way through the smoking rubble of the city devastated by some unspecified cataclysm to rejoin his beloved (love being reborn in the ruins: who hasn’t daydreamed about that fairytale, at least in response to your first brutal dumping as an adolescent?).

  This is the refrain:

  If the city were on fire

  To you

  To you

  To you I’d run

  I’d even beat the fire just to get back to you

  If the city were on fire

  I know

  I know

  You’d come looking for me

  Even after our farewells

  I am love

  For you

  Then, as long as he’s at it, the apocalyptic dreamer makes a quick reference to the location that the two former lovers preferred for their intimate encounters:

  That meadow on the outskirts of town

  Saw you become mine so many times

  It’s been too long since it knew

  Where my happiness lies

  Which is not exactly a gentlemanly thing to go around telling the whole world, but if a guy’s girlfriend is about to get married to someone else, we can overlook a stylistic misstep, I think (and in any case the choice of a meadow as one’s trysting place is a classic, to be found in many popular songs: let one serve as an example among many, “L’uva fogarina,” which, after an extended series of “diridindindins,” hails the act of love during a grape harvest, in fact, in the midst of a meadow or field, “in mezzo al pra’”).

  And so, in short, I sing the song again from beginning to end, in a mumble, but there doesn’t seem to be any way of getting back to my suffering. In fact, if you want to know the whole truth, I’m not the least bit interested in burning Milan to the ground (because that’s where Alessandra Persiano is right now) and sacrificing all those innocent lives just for the sake of making peace with her.

  As much as it annoys me to acknowledge it, Espe has corrupted me. And I even suspect that I’m enjoying the infection.

  It’s at this point that I receive the phone call that I absolutely shouldn’t be receiving. Of course, I know with total certainty who it is. I’m so certain that when I see the name on the display I’m not the least bit surprised.

  When this kind of thing happens, I start to think that the future, at least the near future, consists of nothing other than the least opportune thing that we can imagine happening to us.

  “Hello.”

  “Counselor?”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s Irene,” says Cameron Diaz.

  I close my eyes and open them again.

  “Oh, hi. Sorry, I hadn’t saved your number.”

  “That’s all right, I just wanted to talk to you.”

  “Ah,” I say, flattered. “But where are you calling me from? I hear a lot of noise around you.”

  “I’m at a bar, with some friends. We’re just having some drinks. What about you?”

  “Me? At home, much more prosaically.”

  She says nothing, as if my answer had made her feel somehow indiscreet. In the background I hear a clinking of glasses that makes me yearn for a margarita.

  “I’m sorry. Maybe I shouldn’t have called you.”

  “No, it’s fine,” I reply, hoping she detects the faint sigh of resignation that I inserted into my voice.

  What on earth are you doing? I ask myself.

  “You know, it’s been a long time since I’ve gone out.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. I wanted you to know that. It did me good to talk to you.”

  “I’m overjoyed to hear that.”

  “I’m overjoyed”? What the fuck am I saying?

  “Listen, maybe it’s late,” There’s Something About Mary resumes, “but I was wondering if you wouldn’t like to come join me. My friends are really nice, you’d like them.”

  “There, that’s exactly what you need,” I say to myself. “A nice extemporaneous evening out with a group of kids young enough to be your children. Maybe you’ll run into Alagia at this place, and it’ll be a full house.”

  “Thank you, you’re very kind. Maybe some other time.”

  A moment’s silence.

  “I overstepped my bounds. I apologize.”

  “No, it’s just that it’s a little late, and tomorrow morning I have a lawsuit.”

  “You don’t have to explain. I wouldn’t want to spend an evening in the company of people I don’t know either. But will you save my phone number now?”

  “Yes. As soon as we hang up.”

  “All right then, let’s hang up.”

  “All right,” I say, with some embarrassment. “I certainly hope you enjoy the rest of your evening.”

  “‘Enjoy the rest of your evening’?” I say to myself. “What are you, the TV weather girl?”

  “I hope the lawsuit goes well, Vincenzo.”

  I’m so struck at hearing her say my name that I t
rip myself up like a genuine moron.

  “What lawsuit?”

  “Didn’t you say that you have a lawsuit tomorrow?”

  “Ah, the lawsuit. Certainly, of course I do.”

  Jesus, what an asshole I am.

  “Good night,” she says, without a hint of irony in her voice.

  The girl has style.

  “Good night, Camer . . . Irene.”

  “What are you looking at?” I ask that busybody of an angel, who of course has decided to show up right now.

  “Me? Nothing.”

  “I didn’t go, as you saw, no?”

  “Hm-hm,” he says sardonically.

  “And besides, she was with her friends, right? That shows that it was nothing but a friendly invitation.”

  “A woman who gets out her phone and calls you while she’s spending the evening out at a bar, and with plenty of company, is definitely not making a friendly invitation, Vince’.”

  An impeccable observation. And in fact it gets on my nerves.

  “Listen, why don’t we just drop this topic now, okay? I-didn’t-go-and-that’s-that dot com. Now quit bugging me because I’m hungry.”

  He lifts one hand and opens and closes it backwards, like an old-fashioned gent: “Addio core.”

  I ignore him.

  “No question though, the resemblance is startling, eh?” I say.

  He rolls his eyes.

  I grab my phone again to order a pizza, even though I don’t even know what number to call.

  Huffing and puffing as if doing so were an intolerable sacrifice, I get out the phone book from wherever it was (you have to admit that it’s always, and I mean always, a 2 x 4 to the forehead to find a number in the phone book), and as I flip to the page with the pizzerias I’m reminded that right around the corner they’ve just opened a fast-food place called (I swear) Luncho Espress. And so I pass the motion by acclamation to try out the food from a placed called Luncho Espress, an experience that should not be missed.

  So I look up the number and dial it.