I Hadn't Understood (9781609458980) Page 13

  So with my tail between my legs I start explaining to Alfredo that I’d forgotten about a prior engagement, and he interrupts me to say that I don’t need to worry about it, I certainly hadn’t known that he’d show up this morning.

  I tell him that for lunch he can make himself one of the Healthy Choices that are in the fridge, and he says okay, I’ll be healthy if I have the choice, and I don’t know what to say for a second, and then I laugh politely and say, okay, see you later, and he says okay.

  And at last I go to work.

  Today in the courthouse there’s pure bedlam. A number of different divisions are in session at the same time, so there are hearings under way everywhere, with plaintiffs, defendants, prosecuting magistrates, defense attorneys, witnesses, expert witnesses, defendants’ relatives, and all the rest, producing that typical temporary surge of overcrowding that plunges the Hall of Justice into an evocative frenzy of self-importance—an automatic effect of concentrating large numbers of human beings in any given place.

  When you happen to walk into a building crowded with people, after a while you just naturally start to walk as if you were in line waiting to audition for a part. That’s perfectly understandable, because it’s very rare for someone to feel relaxed in a crowd. You can tell me you don’t give a damn about what other people think of you until you’re blue in the face, but I know better: you care. Bodies know when they’re being observed. That’s just one of their basic traits. And when a body senses that it’s being observed, it generally tends to become exceptionally clumsy. That’s why when you walk into someplace that’s crowded, even a place where there are normally lots of people, like a courthouse for instance, or a lecture hall in a university, for instance, everybody seems to be remarkably clumsy. That diffuse sense of clumsiness washes over you, and before you know it, you feel clumsy yourself. As if you were about to do something glaringly idiotic any second now.

  In that case, you have two options: either you become insignificant and you try to blend into the herd—and when that happens a friend you’ve known since you went to elementary school together might look you in the face and fail to recognize you—or else you study the behavior of the others around you, you pick the ones who strike you as the most successful, and you imitate them.

  Most people try to blend into the background. Those who don’t are mostly lawyers. And lawyers, in their efforts to stand out from the crowd, necessarily wind up striking fairly oafish poses.

  If you watch them closely—lawyers in a crowded courthouse—you have a hard time believing that they’re deadly serious about their behavior. They shuttle from one hallway to another, from one courtroom to the next, or more likely from the courtrooms to the bar, weaving in and out, dribbling around people in a way that seems intentional, as if they’re trying to show them they’re taking up vital space. They make a display of their well-established sense of direction and skill at maneuvering through the hallways and hearing rooms to make it clear that they (the lawyers) are at home in the building, while the others (consumers of the service dispensed by the justice system) are merely guests.

  When they run into other lawyers they jovially call out to them, using their professional title and surname in jest, and exchanging absolutely meaningless phrases at the top of their lungs, for one reason and one reason only: to make themselves heard. What on earth are they thinking, that afterwards the people they run into comment in an undertone to their colleagues: “Oh, did you notice, that lawyer we just ran into, how nicely he yells?”

  Sure, I know, not all lawyers are like that, thanks for the information. But I’m talking about the lawyers who are like that, obviously.

  I take the main hallway and slide into the flow of traffic. After a short distance I glimpse an overweight lawyer who strikes me as familiar, and at the exact same moment he glances at me as if he just had the same impression. And so we each look at the other the few extra seconds that now oblige us to the minimum professional courtesy: the requisite exchange of greetings.

  But now it dawns on me that the other lawyer is Picciafuoco, my horrendous colleague. I might have seen him three or four times in my entire, shall we say, career, and yet I recognize him.

  “Picciafuoco, right?” I call, pointing to him from within hailing distance.

  “Yes,” he says.

  But already from the tone of voice in which he said it, it’s obvious that he has no desire whatsoever to stop and talk.

  As if I’m dying to.

  I extend my hand and remind him of my name. He nods, as if to say there was no need to remind him.

  “The place is packed today, eh?” I point out.

  “Yes, yes it is,” he replies.

  By which point our conversational resources are completely exhausted.

  I can’t stand people who give monosyllabic answers and then refuse to volunteer another single stinking word, you know the kind, and after a while there’s a pool of shitty embarrassing silence stagnating between the two of you, and you just feel like telling them: “Aw, go fuck yourself.”

  People like that, I hate them, for real.

  Which by the way, I am deeply tempted to remind him, this shameless individual who’s suddenly acting all terse and telegraphic, when he called me on the phone yesterday he had quite a different attitude, unless I’m much mistaken.

  In the end, to extract myself from that miserable plight, I decide to bring up our former shared interest—that is, Mimmo ’o Burzone—in part so I can give him the news that I turned down the appointment, which I imagine ought to make him happy.

  “Oh, say, colleague,” I lead off, as if it had just popped into my mind, “I meant to tell you that Fantasia’s wife dropped by my office, just a little while after you called me.”

  “Ah,” he says.

  An “ah” that sounded a lot like “And who the fuck cares?” A reaction that honestly baffles me.

  “And so,” I resume, “it turns out that I had to turn down the appointment. Too much going on, I really can’t keep up with it all. I was sorry, though, I have to tell you.”

  He takes in the news and begins to nod, looking around repeatedly with a certain arrogance, as if—I don’t know—as if the people around him owed him money or whatever.

  “So then you have to wonder who they’re going to get now,” he says, after a short pause.

  “Who they’re going to get?” I ask. But I already understand.

  At that point my shameless colleague snorts in generic resentment, slaps me philosophically on the shoulder, and vanishes into the crowd.

  I stand there, staring distractedly into the middle distance, if there is any such a thing as the middle distance in a hallway packed with people.

  They retracted his fiduciary appointment.

  Obviously.

  But why?

  They must have someone else, of course. Burzone’s not going to deprive himself of all legal representation at a time like this.

  Do you remember what the wife said to me? “Don’t you worry about him”—referring to Picciafuoco—“the same way we appointed him we can fire him.”

  Sure, but she meant that they could fire him so they could hire me.

  But I turned them down, and now what?

  Exactly.

  And now nothing.

  Now they must have hired somebody new.

  Eh.

  Necessarily.

  With all the criminal lawyers looking for work.

  Then why do I have this horrible cloying sensation?

  Who knows.

  The civil court division is on the top floor. And since the vast majority of lawyers are civil lawyers, there are white-sale lines for the elevators. So I brace myself psychologically for taking the stairs, and I take the stairs.

  I’m holding up pretty well when, on the last flight of stairs, I glimpse the unmistakable calves of Alessandra Persiano, who is leaning against the railing and waiting for me, with a semiserious scolding expression on her face. All around her i
s a gymkhana of wolves and dirty old men jostling to be the first to say hello to her.

  Well aware that she is the uncontested star of the hall of justice, AP dismisses the pathetic suitors, liquidating each of them with a glance and a smirk (just then, she reminds me of the scene with Totò tossing the suitcases that Mario Castellani hands him out the window of the sleeping compartment on the train).

  I look at her again and I stiffen, in part because it’s normal to stiffen in the presence of Alessandra Persiano, and in part because I’m suddenly swept by a sense of guilt that I can’t place right then and there, baffled as to the reason, though the fact that A.P. is waiting for me is makes it clear that she has something she wants to scold me about.

  Standing there, I catch myself thinking that if through the intervention of a merciful god I should one day happen to get A.P. into bed, after a bout of lovemaking as grueling as it would be unforgettable, I would reach out for the pack of cigarettes on the side table and, suddenly inspired, say to her: “You know, that morning, when I saw you waiting for me on the stairs, no matter how packed the courthouse might have been, suddenly the place was empty: there was no one there but you and me.”

  And then I’d light the cigarette.

  I file the pitiful scene away and laboriously climb the last few steps separating me from her.

  Jesus, she really is one hell of a woman, Alessandra Persiano. Like any true work of art, she has one unmistakable trait: every time you see her it’s like the first time.

  I walk toward her, crossing unharmed through the magnetic field of all my fellow lawyers who are dying inside as they watch me in disbelief, wondering what I could possibly have that they don’t (I’m asking myself the same thing, as it happens). In this particular moment, I am without a doubt the most roundly despised lawyer in the hall of justice (or at least on this flight of stairs in the courthouse). I wonder if she realizes that she is making me famous.

  “Ciao, Ale,” I say. My tone of voice is just pathetic.

  She stares at me in a way that forces my guardian angel to intervene, taking up a position just behind my shoulder and whispering in my ear: “If you fail to fuck this one, I’m never speaking to you again as long as you live.”

  “Come here,” she says.

  I go there. That is to say, one step below the one she’s standing on. Guys, where on earth does she buy her perfume?

  She lifts her left hand to chest level, braces the fingernail of her index finger behind the pad of her thumb, forming a horizontal “Okay” (she has magnificent hands), takes careful aim (sort of like when you pick your nose and then flick the snot) and mischievously smacks her nail against the knot of my tie. An incredibly sexy gesture, truth be told.

  “That wasn’t very nice of you,” she says.

  I look at her, clueless. I think my forehead might be a little sweaty.

  “Listen,” I say to her, catching my breath, “I have no idea what you’re talking about, but whatever it is, I’m ready to get down on my hands and knees to beg your forgiveness.”

  She holds her breath for a second, reemerges, and laughs right in my face.

  I swear to her that I wasn’t kidding.

  She looks me straight in the eye, to judge my degree of sincerity, I have to guess.

  “You really don’t know?”

  “I swear I don’t.”

  She sighs. She decides to trust me.

  “Okay, then do I really have to explain to you that it’s not very nice of you not to call me, after I gave you my cell phone number?”

  You remember the jaw of the Tyrannosaurus rex after King Kong rips it half off with one hand? Well, that’s the way my jaw is dangling right now.

  “Ah. The cell phone . . . sure. Of course.” Brief pause to collect my thoughts. “No, listen, do you seriously think that I forgot? Do you think that I’m so stupid that I don’t want to call you?”

  “You’re probably that stupid,” whispers my guardian angel, from just over my shoulder.

  “Well, but you didn’t call,” she says.

  Only then do I realize that the episode of Alessandra’s cell phone, the opportunity that she’d implicitly offered me when she gave me her number, the sheer wanton waste that is staring me in the face. In other words, I hadn’t forgotten it at all. It’s just that I’d set it aside for later. Like when you put a check in your wallet instead of cashing it. Have you ever walked around for days with a check in your wallet instead of going to the bank and cashing it or depositing it? I mean, you practically have the money in your pocket, you could get your hands on it, but you don’t. You just wait a little longer.

  When you leave a check in your wallet, or when you decide to forego calling Alessandra Persiano, you’re putting on airs. You’re behaving like those wealthy landowners who have a villa in Sardinia and never bother to go.

  The problem, to come back to the issue at hand, is that with A.P. I had been putting on worldly airs while at the same time pretending I didn’t know that there was a statue of limitations ticking on my opportunity. Because when God Almighty bestows a blessing of this sort upon you, he always assigns a peremptory time limit, and when it expires, he rightly runs down his list of names and calls up the next candidate. Because our forefathers were expressing an age-old wisdom when they said: “Get moving, because if you don’t take her to bed, someone else will.”

  “I was going to,” I answer. “I swear.”

  She lowers her head, still vaguely dissatisfied. How can you blame her, after all?

  “Is it too late?” I ask, shamelessly.

  Just then Maria Laura Francavilla, a fellow civil lawyer, catches up with us, hurrying down the steps. She nods hello to me (and I nod hello back), and lays a hand on A.P.’s shoulder.

  “Sorry, Ale, but the witnesses are waiting, are you ready to come?”

  “I’ll catch up with you, you go ahead,” she replies.

  Maria Laura turns on her heel and climbs the stairs alone, evidently annoyed.

  “I don’t know if it’s too late,” says Alessandra, returning to the topic of us. “Why don’t you try and find out?”

  Excellent answer.

  She turns to go.

  I grab her arm.

  She turns around.

  What just happened to her? All of a sudden she looks so unhappy, as if I’d hurt her somehow, without realizing it. Instinctively, I loosen my grip.

  She won’t look me in the face. As if she’s on the verge of tears.

  “Listen,” I tell her, “I’m not having an easy time of it right now.”

  I realize that I’m spouting bullshit, so I try to make up for it.

  “No, I’m not having that hard of a time, it’s just that I don’t want to see you leave like that.”

  She looks up. I’m certain, absolutely dead certain, that I could kiss her right now, if I tried.

  “Listen, Vincenzo, it strikes me that we’re taking things a little too far. We’re in the courthouse, you do realize that? Omigod, listen to what I’m saying . . . ”

  Oh how I love the second act of any courtship. Who is the playwright who came up with such a perfect script? At times like these, we don’t have anything to do with what happens, really. We’re just actors. The script is all written, we mouth line after line, better than if we’d memorized them.

  “Listen, let’s get together tonight, you feel like it? My place, your place, anywhere you name,” I suggest. Just like that. Without preliminaries.

  “What?” she asks, somewhere between scandalized and amused.

  “Please. If I think that I have to call you, you’ll see, I won’t be able to do it. I can’t even tell you why. I have a million things pending that I can’t seem to get done, but I don’t want to risk the run of . . . Oh shit.”

  I freeze.

  Alessandra is about to laugh but she stops herself.

  It had been a while since I last got tangled up. And to think that the first time it happened she had been there. The same morning she gave m
e her cell phone number, in fact.

  I can’t say another word, maybe because I’m afraid it’ll happen again, or else because I don’t have anything more to say.

  So Ale covers her nose, holds her breath again, and then bursts out into a laugh that’s pure tenderness.

  I imitate her.

  And it lasts for a while.

  And in that way we both manage to get rid of our awkwardness.

  EGG

  My professional obligations today have occupied roughly 1 m. 40 s., the time necessary to walk halfway down the hallway to the civil division to the courtroom, where I find tacked to the door a nice white A4-format sheet of paper on which is written that the hearing has been officially postponed because the judge is indisposed. In other words, it’s barely 10:15, and I no longer have a fucking thing to do. Which presents me with the problem of how to kill time until noon/1 P.M., so that I can return home at a presentable time of day to a son who is understandably convinced that his father is a lawyer, a profession that makes it highly unlikely he’d have leisure time any given morning. And so I call a brief meeting with myself, at the end of which we agree to drop by my law office, which is certainly not close by.

  The minute I leave the courthouse, I see the chairman of the bar association, just outside the main exit, being held captive by a couple of time-wasters in jacket and tie who are telling him an anecdote that they seem to consider highly amusing. Every now and then, the more histrionic of the two smacks the chairman on the forearm to accompany the latest punchline of the story. The chairman smiles with each smack, but I can see all the way from here that he’s wishing the guy misery and pain.

  I look at him as if to say: “Life is hard when you’re chairman.” He tells me to go fuck myself with a gesture that we both recognize, after which he acts as if he just remembered something very fresh and recent and he launches a lascivious wink in my direction. I get the reference immediately and I put on my Ihavenoideawhatyou’retalkingabout face. He falls it for it the way he would if I told him that pigs have wings, and to show me that he doesn’t believe me he tilts his head to one side and arches his eyebrows. Aghast at the speed with which the tip seems to have reached him, I take the bait and, without even realizing what I’m doing, I walk over to him, obedient little sheep, as if I have to justify myself. He, old slut that he is, reads my approach as a surrender (he’s been playing this game all his life, and I fall for it every time), and so he laughs disgustingly right in my face. When I get to normal conversational distance I praise through clenched teeth the quality of his mother’s amatory performance, ignoring the two idlers, who take a step back at the sight of our evident intimacy. He mutters something incomprehensible that I, by virtue of my uneasy conscience, manage in some absurd way to decipher; like an idiot I ask him who told him, and he replies in triumphant glee that the courthouse stairwells are monitored by video surveillance cameras. I’m on the verge of laughing but with a last-minute visceral lunge I manage to convert my laughter into a pompous pose of indignation that comes off as entirely unconvincing. “You turn my stomach,” I say, addressing him in the categorical second-person plural, and I turn on my heels, pursued by his gales of understandably self-satisfied laughter.