I Hadn't Understood (9781609458980) Page 14

  Remember, in terms of ethical turpitude, we lawyers have a very specific reputation on the market, but above and beyond every other shortcoming, even the most despicable kinds of self-interest, what we are is gossips. We’re worse than shampooists, worse than concierges, worse than journalists, worse than body-builders, worse than university professors, worse than elementary school janitors, worse than barbers, worse than politicians, worse than neighborhood poets, worse than lifeguards. Name any other category or profession you can think of: we’re worse.

  While I’m walking along, Nives calls me on my cell phone. At first I’m afraid she’s going to ask me about Alfredo, with the vague suspicion that she might have found out something via some vestigial umbilical impulse; then I remember that she has always been completely insensitive, umbilically speaking, so I ask her impassively how she’s doing.

  “How do you think,” she says, and nothing more, a response that catapults me into a hopeful sea of melancholy that I should have long ago learned to ward off, considering my long experience with my ex-wife’s sentimental flip-flops.

  “What is it?” I ask, instead, in an objectively despicable tone of voice.

  “I don’t know, Vincenzo, I just can’t seem to find a center of gravity to this situation, really, I can’t . . . ”

  A center of gravity? Really, could you ever have imagined a phrase of that kind? Would you ever come up with a center of gravity, I mean a spontaneous center of gravity, in your life? Well, she would. And the stupefying thing is that she actually sincerely means it. When she says that she can’t seem to find a center of gravity, she actually feels the lack of a center of gravity. She’s so dazzled by herself, by her unconscious adoption of the Stanislavsky Method (whereby actors live for months in the role of the characters they are supposed to play), that she’s actually accustomed to thinking in terms of centers of gravity, bedsheets that come clean after a last laundry cycle, significant relationships, emotional frictions, internal broom closets, the parking garages of the soul (that last one I made up myself), and all the rest of that ridiculous bullshit. It’s the grammar of acting according to Stanislavsky, and then Lee Strasberg, Elia Kazan, the Actors Studio, and all the rest of that stuff that’s put her into a trance, even if she doesn’t know it.

  Truth be told, to put it in terms of the most perfect clarity, from time to time, at irregular intervals, but intervals nonetheless, Nives needs to have sex with me. Why that should be I’ve long since stopped wondering, it’s enough for me to know that I fuck better than the architect, evidently (of all the sources of male satisfaction that you can imagine, there are none greater than this one). When she makes these apparently purposeless phone calls to me, that’s where she’s heading, even if she doesn’t know it.

  I could just say to her: “Okay, understood: when?”; and we’d spare ourselves a vast quantity of centers of gravity and other metaphors of that kind. But instead we always have to rehearse the same little vignette over and over again, so that she can feel justified in cheating on the poor cuckold yet again.

  But today it’s not going to work out for her, because all of a sudden—just think!—I don’t feel like it. I still don’t know exactly what’s happening to me, but you can bet your hat that this sudden mood swing must have something to do with Alessandra Persiano. So I blurt out a junk store allegory that I must have heard years and years ago on Dancin’ Days or Água Viva, or some other Brazilian telenovela. And I throw a monkey wrench into her plan.

  “They’re just clouds passing over, Nives.”

  Her feelings are hurt, I can tell by the prolonged silence that follows.

  “Maybe you’re right. I’m sorry,” she replies resentfully.

  Whereupon I say, “Sorry for what,” and she says, “Oh nothing,” I say “Did I say something wrong,” she tells me, “Absolutely not a thing,” and after another exchange of hypocritical tropes we put an end to this meaningless phone call.

  I quicken my step, expecting the angel of argumentativeness to appear at my side at any moment, clapping his hands and crying “Nice work—nice work” (subtitle: “Now she’ll never go to bed with you again; proud of yourself?”), but instead, nothing happens. I can hardly believe the silence-as-approval. I walk along guilt-free, and after a while I reach my office, with a bounding step, light as air.

  As I’m approaching the street door I cross paths once again with Giustino Talento, the demented tenant who summarized his problems with his live-in Polish girlfriend, Lalla or Lilla or whatever her name was.

  Terrified at the prospect of a second run-through of our last, let us say, conversation, I briefly consider the possibility of taking shelter behind a car, but then I discard that hypothesis, square my shoulders, and continue on toward my encounter with the inevitable.

  “Hey there,” I say.

  “Vincenzo, how are you?” he asks me, beaming.

  We’re already old friends, apparently.

  “Oh, not bad. And your . . . girlfriend?” I ask, just to have something to say.

  I must have put my foot in it, because all of a sudden he turns very serious on me. His eyes are lost in the middle distance.

  “Last night she cooked dinner and set the table just for me. ‘Aren’t you going to eat?’ I asked her. And she told me that from that night forth we were never to eat together again.”

  I’m at a loss for anything to say. But he’s not done confiding in me.

  “‘But why?’ I asked her. And she told me that she’s always had problems eating in front of other people, because it embarrasses her, and she doesn’t want to do it anymore. And she took her plate into the other room, just like that. And that was it.”

  “Well,” I toss out, “it doesn’t seem like anything aimed at you personally. Sure, it’s not much fun, I realize, but we all have our fixations.”

  “Sure,” he replies, clearly ready for my objection, “but I didn’t know anything about this particular fixation until last night. I’m just presented with this immutable state of affairs, from one day to the next. From now on, I have to get used to the idea that I can no longer sit at the dinner table with my girlfriend, do you understand that?”

  I nod, making it clear that I’m on his side, as I think: he certainly has a point, poor guy. It’s just that I don’t give a crap about his girlfriend’s unprecedented unilateral diktats.

  “I’m about to make an important decision,” he says, staring me in the eye in a way that intimidates me.

  “What . . . kind of decision?” I ask, humoring him.

  “I need to talk to you about it,” he declares.

  “To me?”

  “Tell me a good time to drop by your office.”

  “Ah, well, right here and now I couldn’t say,” I pull my wallet out of the inside jacket pocket, “call me and we’ll decide on a time.”

  I try to hand him my business card, but he doesn’t even deign to glance at it.

  “I could do tomorrow afternoon at five o’clock,” he says.

  I think it over for a moment.

  “Maybe I didn’t make myself clear,” I observe.

  “See you tomorrow, then.”

  He nods, walks around me, and heads off.

  I stand there in the middle of the sidewalk, business card in hand, dazed. From a billboard across the street, a jerk in a double-breasted suit points his finger straight at me, addressing me with the informal “tu” and advising me to turn to him with trust and confidence if I ever need a loan.

  Given the hour, the Arethusa cooperative hasn’t opened, so to speak, for business yet, which means I’m spared the psychopathic toy spitz’s ritual bark-fest.

  As I’m heading for my room, Espedito calls my name. I hadn’t even noticed he was in.

  “Vincè?”

  I go back and look in at the door.

  “Ciao Espe, how you doing?”

  He’s sitting at his desk but I practically can’t see him, there’s so much smoke in the room. He looks like Mysterio, Spider-Ma
n’s arch-enemy with the lightbulb head, emerging from billowing clouds of smoke like a rock star.

  He swivels the thumb and index finger of his right hand.

  “Not great.”

  I express my regret that the problem doesn’t seem to be going away.

  “Why don’t you open your window a crack?” I ask.

  “Why don’t you go open your own window in your own room?” he replies.

  “Are you still angry about the other day?”

  “What? No, what are you saying?”

  “I did sort of lecture you.”

  “But you were talking about your own problems.”

  “Yeah, but I was supposed to be talking about yours.”

  “Oh, will you cut it out?” he cuts in abruptly. “Here, this is for you,” he says. And reaching across his desk he picks up a padded envelope, a handsome baby-shit yellow-brown. It’s about the size of a magazine and it’s nice and fat; but it looks like it’s light, from the way he’s waving it.

  “What is it?” I ask, baffled, as I head over to the desk.

  “Search me. The courier dropped it off half an hour ago. I even signed for it.”

  He waves the receipt in the air.

  “For me?” I ask.

  He pushes the flimsy sheet of paper closer to my eyes.

  My mouth turns into a pair of inverted parentheses. I take the package.

  “You probably just ordered something you can’t remember,” Espe observes.

  I turn the package over in my hands, I read my own name in the space for the recipient (it’s funny how sometimes reading your own name makes you feel like a stranger to yourself). The return address is a well-known electric appliance chain.

  “No. I don’t think I did. In fact, no. I never buy anything by mail order.”

  “Well, open it up,” Espe resolves. He hands me his letter opener.

  While I’m cutting the packing tape, I come to a halt.

  “What if it’s a mail bomb?” I say.

  “What are you, an idiot?” says Espe.

  Still, you can see that he took the possibility seriously for a second or two.

  I slowly rip open the envelope and proceed to extract the contents. Espedito watches my every move in a silence you could slice like butter.

  I suddenly stop.

  “Oh, Espe.”

  “Eh?”

  “We look like a couple of fools.”

  “Eh, I know. You going to open it already?”

  I give a sharp jerk to the two edges of the envelope and rip it open, liberating the sealed package contained within.

  “But it’s a cell phone,” says Espedito.

  “Yeah, it is,” I concur.

  “Lemme see.”

  And he snatches the box from my hands with the confidence of a past master in appraising cell phones.

  “Look at that, they didn’t even shrink-wrap it.”

  He turns the package over a couple of times and then hands it back to me in disgust.

  “It’s a piece of shit. It doesn’t even take pictures. They might as well have sent you an old TACS phone.”

  I stand there, the box under my arm, looking at Espe, undecided whether to tell him to go fuck himself then and there or wait until later.

  “Wait a minute,” I say. “I didn’t buy any cell phone.”

  He stops to focus.

  “It must be one of those things where you build up points, and after you recharge your card a certain number of times they give you a new phone. That happened to my brother-in-law last year.”

  “Whatever,” I say. And I head for the door.

  “Is it really that pathetic?” I ask, just before I turn the corner.

  I go into my—I use the term reluctantly—office, I remove the steel pipe from the casement window, pull open the shutters, sit down at my Jonas desk, and contemplate the gift pack.

  I wonder why—I subscribe to the observation that Espe made a short while ago—the package isn’t shrink-wrapped?

  An answer to that question starts to take form after I open the box, and I find that the cell phone is already assembled. The charger cord is rolled up ineptly. The instruction manual is roughly shoved into the space between the plastic shell and the cardboard box.

  I pull out the cell phone, remove the battery, and look at the two slices of this technological sandwich. There’s already a SIM card inserted.

  Just what’s going on here?

  I reassemble the phone, push the power button. As I do, I have the unpleasant sensation that I’m doing exactly what somebody expected me to do.

  The screen comes to life, depicting a digital duck waving at me with one hand.

  I go on thinking about nothing in particular and after a short while I drift into a reverie, with the cell phone spread out on the palm of my hand like a pet hamster.

  How much time has passed: five, maybe six seconds? When I hear the phone vibrating, I feel as if I’m in the middle of an old silent movie.

  I suddenly regain possession of my cerebral functions; I furrow my brow and stare at the screen.

  A message.

  MISSED CALLS: 11.

  What the—? Eleven missed calls. Eleven calls to whom?

  Whereupon I think back to Espedito’s theory of building up points and I decide to call my cell phone provider and ask for an explanation.

  After a little more than fifteen minutes of irritating homogenized wait music, a young woman answers and—before listening to my version of the facts—informs me that her name is Silvia. I tell her what happened and she puts me on hold. Another seven minutes go by, during which the background song ends and starts over at least sixteen times. Silvia finally gets back to me, apologizes for making me wait so long, and tells me no, the company hasn’t sent me anything, much less a cell phone with a working SIM card. I ask her if she’s sure. She thinks it over for a couple of seconds and then asks me if I’m sure that I received the cell phone in question from them. I answer yes in order to avoid having to admit that the return address that appears on the envelope is in fact that of a well-known chain of electronics retail stores, because at that point Silvia could easily tell me that I should be talking to the well-known chain of electronics retail stores, not to her. Except that at that point I could respond that I assumed that they probably subcontracted this kind of service out to other companies, but I don’t feel like arguing and so I retrench to the impossible-to-verify falsehood. Wherepon Silvia makes a further effort of goodwill and tells me that if I give her the serial number of the cell phone she could try to do some further investigation, but at that very moment my eye happens to light on the Dekad wall clock and I realize that it’s really gotten late, so I start to clear out of the office with the speed of Road Runner, and as I’m positioning the metal security pipe across the window I suddenly realize that I might just have hung up on her without saying goodbye.

  I go back to the Jonas to get the cordless, just in case Silvia happens by some miracle to still be on the line, and at that very moment, the cell phone rings.

  Uncertain what to do now, I look at it, lying flat on my Jonas in the throes of ring-tone epilepsy, and after a while I finally answer, accompanied by a sensation of unreality.

  “Hello?”

  “Aah, at last, there you are, Counselor.”

  “Who is this?”

  “Buon giorno, how are you doing? We just wanted to know if you liked our gift.”

  An adult voice, male, confidential with a sinister edge.

  I look at the screen, still covered with a plastic film. Caller unknown. A light sheen of perspiration cools my forehead.

  “Who is this?”

  “So did you like it, yes or no?”

  “I said: Who is this?”

  “I get it, you didn’t like it.”

  “Look, you might have called the wrong number.”

  “Why are you losing your temper, Counselor?”

  I hadn’t lost my temper, by any means, until he asked that qu
estion. As the unknown voice on the other end of the line knew full well.

  “Listen, I’ve had enough of this buffoonery. I don’t know who you are and I’m not interested in knowing. And your lovely little gift, you can go pick it up at police headquarters, because that’s where I’m taking it right now, understood?”

  The other takes a long, leisurely pause, demonstrating to me that my tirade made him go Wa-a-a-ah.

  “So when it’s all said and done, do I have to get on my knees and beg you?” he asks, conveying a sense of determination that annihilates me.

  “Beg?” I ask, disconcerted.

  Another pause. The tone that follows is pure accommodation.

  “It’s not nice to say no to a lady. Are you going to say no to me too, Counselor?”