I Hadn't Understood (9781609458980) Page 15

  I reconstruct events at the speed of a videotape being rewound. I’m assailed by a mixture of fear and disgust. I leap to my feet, recoiling. The Skruvsta falls over, slamming against the Effektiv, which, however, remains immobile. I immediately turn off the cell phone and extract the battery. I let the two dismantled parts of the phone drop onto the Jonas and I start pacing back and forth in the room, waiting for a reaction that never comes.

  “Ah, so that’s it, eh? Is that how it is?” I grumble, furious and confused.

  Espedito appears in the doorway.

  “Did you drop something, Vincè?”

  “Eh?” I say. “What?”

  Espedito walks in and looks at the overturned Skruvsta on the floor. I look at it with him.

  “Yeah. In fact, the chair,” I say.

  He stares at me in concern.

  “Do you feel okay?”

  “I don’t know. I just got a strange phone call.”

  “What phone call?”

  I’m looking him right in the eyes, but I don’t hear the question.

  “Do you still have the envelope?” I ask.

  “The one the cell phone came in? Yes, it must be in my trash can.”

  “Give it to me. And get me the receipt from the courier, too.”

  I gesture for him to go ahead of me toward his office.

  “What on earth is happening, Vincè? Who was that on the phone?”

  WHAT?

  At police headquarters, they took what seemed to be ten minutes or so to take down my complaint against parties unknown. The cell phone and the box wound up in a metal locker with a number tag on it, the envelope and the receipt from the courier in a file folder, along with a printout of the complaint.

  Then we said goodbye.

  That’s how I dealt with the problem.

  The wait in line for a parking spot at the university is brutal. Among other things, everything is cement as far as the eye can see, the sun is pounding the pavement like a streetwalker, and my car isn’t air conditioned.

  While I’m waiting in line I find myself noticing, with a certain degree of horror, the luxury that surrounds me. Kids who are barely twenty, dressed in indeterminate style, generically wealthy, get out of cars whose cost, at a rapid glance, would probably suffice to cover the household needs of an average family for two years straight, even with a grandparent to take care of.

  Okay, I’m not trying to moralize here. In that moment I feel like a penniless loser, I admit it. But that’s not the point. And the point isn’t that the aggressive ostentation of wealth (the plenary remission of this age-old form of oafishness) annoys me. The fact is—I’m going to go ahead and say this even though I can’t really explain it—that I don’t believe in this wealth. It looks so unstable, so provisional to me. Extraneous. Wealth that has no real residence, just a pied-à-terre. Money that’s bound to be confiscated by an investigating magistrate, sooner or later, I don’t know if you get the picture. Like one of those shops with five plate-glass windows that suddenly appear from one week to the next in the heart of downtown, and as you walk by it you say: “It won’t last.” Just like that, instinctively. You don’t even think it over, you don’t drill down into the concept. You don’t need any evidence, to put it the way Pasolini might have. You just know that the money behind that shop is no investment, it’s money with other uses that just needs someplace to stay for a little while. Money that serves as a cautionary tale, I guess you could say.

  At last a parking spot frees up. The student who’s getting in his car—imitation handsome, bumpkin-Bieber hairdo, charcoal gray suit meant to make him look like a young executive but the effect is that he looks like he ought to be showing model homes—sneers at my automobile as he pulls out.

  With a sense of relief, I park and set off down the access road leading to the central pavilion. On the other side of that, according to Alagia’s directions, I ought to run right into the main dining hall.

  My God, this university is a blight to behold. Now I remember why I never came to class when I was enrolled here. It looks like a low-security American prison for people sentenced for financial wrongdoings. The only nice thing about the place are the dogs lying around everywhere on the lawns and flowerbeds. When you walk past them, you have to envy them their openly fatalistic view of life.

  I walk into the central pavilion, cutting through a café that I seem to remember was here when I was going to school. (A vague sense of déjà vu creeps through me.) Gathered in this bar is a fair sampling of college-age youth. There’s a line at the cash register. More kids are talking on their cell phones than to each other. With an abrupt surge of anxiety, probably caused by the thing with the cell phone earlier, I head up the first staircase I come to and find myself on the second floor where I hunt around impatiently for the exit as if I were feeling the onset of an attack of claustrophobia, a pathology I don’t happen to suffer. I get outside and suck a deep lungful of air. I lift one hand to my forehead to shade my eyes against this blinding cement wall of sunlight.

  That must be the student cafeteria across the street. If not, I don’t know how to explain the throng of dogs dotting the surrounding flowerbeds and lawns. I cross the street, still shading my eyes with one hand.

  Alagia is walking up and down outside the front entrance pretending to send text messages on her cell phone. I do the same thing: when I’m in the street waiting for someone, I scroll through my contacts at great length (in fact, I think that one of the reasons for the popularity of cell phones is that they give you a way to keep your hands occupied when you don’t know what else to do with them).

  Hot as it is out, she’s stripped down to her T-shirt. Her sweater (or whatever it is) is tied around her right thigh, like an emergency tourniquet to stop hemorrhaging. She’s tied up her hair in a ponytail that has pride of place on top of her head like the topknot of a Kendo master.

  It’s not because she’s my daughter (well, Nives’s daughter, but mine, too), but she really is cute. She has that tenderness that springs from the aesthetic contradiction between candid spontaneity and contrived pose, meaning, for example, that if you aren’t aggressive by nature there’s no point trying to put on an aggressive act, because your true nature just becomes all the more transparent.

  She walks toward me and then—smack smack—a kiss on each cheek.

  “You’re late,” she says.

  “There was a line at the parking structure,” I explain.

  “Mm,” she comments.

  And she takes a quick look at the Swatch Folkloral Chic that I gave her a few months ago.

  “Come on, I have class in half an hour.”

  As we walk in, she sort of waves hello to a big café-au-lait- colored dog sitting philosophically a few yards away from the main entrance. The dog looks up and sweeps the sidewalk with his tail.

  “Friend of yours?” I ask.

  We share a table with a pair of coeds. It’s normal, in cafeterias, to share a table with strangers. Which is actually a problem for me. Alagia notices I’m not comfortable as she pops the cap off her little bottle of mineral water.

  “What’s the matter?” she asks.

  “Nothing,” I reply.

  She doesn’t believe me. But it’s not like she devotes a lot of effort to doubting me.

  The fact is—and I can’t tell her about it now—many years ago I had a traumatic experience that involved a shared table. I went out for dinner with a girlfriend and because we hadn’t called ahead to make reservations and there was going to be a long wait, the waiter told us that if we wanted, there were two seats open at a table for four. Turns out that sitting all alone at that table was a retired school principal who was eating a mixed greens salad. So we said hello to her, just to be polite.

  Hands down, one of the most deeply unpleasant evenings of my life. You couldn’t get a fucking word in edgewise while she banged on, telling you how wrong you were. One diatribe after another, for the entire duration of the meal. And it’s not as i
f once she was done with her salad she toddled out of that shitty restaurant to collapse in a corner somewhere; oh no, she stuck it out, right up to and through the grappa, correcting every damn word that came out of our mouths. What. The. Fuck. You wanted to set her on fire, really. It’s like I’m still always looking around, afraid I’ll run into her, every time I go out to eat.

  But anyway, I have to admit that the experience only brought us closer, me and that girlfriend.

  “So, what’s happening?” Alagia asks me as she spears a chunk of roast potato, and as I’m asking myself why I didn’t think to get roast potatoes.

  “Your brother showed up at my front door this morning. Someone had just beaten him up.”

  I take a sidelong peek at the plates of the two young women sitting next to us to get some idea of how much longer they’re likely to be sitting there.

  “Yeah, I heard,” she says, frowning.

  “Ah, you heard,” I say in surprise.

  “He called me,” she adds.

  Whereupon I wonder why I even drove over here. I feel like someone trying to tell a joke to someone who’s already heard it. But I didn’t want to see her just so I could give her that news.

  “How is he?” she asks. And she lays her fork across her knife in her plate, as if she’d lost her appetite.

  “A couple of punches that just grazed him, is what he says,” I reply.

  She glares at me with one of her looks of resentment.

  “Is what he says? Sweet Jesus, Vincè. He came to your house. You saw him, didn’t you?”

  Which pisses me off. It’s not that I mind being told when I’m off track, especially when I deserve it. It’s just that when Alagia starts nitpicking over phrasing and words, she turns into an updated model of her mother. And sooner or later I’m going to stand up to her, since I don’t seem to be able to do it with her mother.

  “Well, he called you, didn’t he? And you fell into line with his version too, if I’m not mistaken. Unless I’m mistaken, you didn’t hurry over to see him so you could form your own personal opinion, did you?”

  She looks at me in astonishment. She doesn’t even try to come up with a response.

  The coeds sitting near us sense the tension and fall silent all at once. Which is just one more way of butting in.

  Alagia picks up her utensils again and starts operating on her cutlet with slow, gloomy gestures. I no longer feel like eating. I’m inhibited by the presence of these two women sitting next to us, I feel guilty about what I said, I’m happy that at least I said it though, seen up close this tomato-and-mozzarella salad becomes repellent, and suddenly all creation strikes me as intolerable.

  “You’re right, sorry,” says Alagia, after a while.

  I melt. The cyclonic mood-storm that was raging inside me until just a few seconds ago is suddenly over. A fundamental awareness colonizes my mind: I’m a piece of shit.

  I try to reach out for her hand, and then a wave of shame sweeps over me.

  “No, I’m sorry, darling. I hate myself when I’m rude with you.”

  She feels like crying, I can tell from the way her lower lip is trembling ever so slightly. She used to do the same thing when she was small.

  “Never mind,” she says.

  And she cuts off a wedge of cutlet.

  We sit there, bobbing in a melancholy silence.

  “Could I have one of your potatoes?” I ask, after a while.

  She looks up from her plate.

  “A potato?”

  “Um, hm.”

  She lowers her eyes to her plate again and then looks up sharply, slyly.

  “All the same with you if I throw it in your face?”

  So we start talking like a father and daughter again. We go back to old topics, we say things that we’ve already said a thousand times before, just readjusting the arrangement slightly, without getting anywhere or learning anything we didn’t already know, comparing our respective senses of impotence in order to decide whether we should continue to honor the pact of resignation that all of us in our, so to speak, family, have underwritten, or whether it might not be a good idea to actually try to do something about the way things are.

  At a certain point, Alagia interrupts me. Or maybe I should say, she approaches the topic from another angle.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “Of course you can.”

  “Why did you come to see me? Why don’t you talk to Mamma about it?”

  Eh, good question, I think.

  “Eh, good question,” I say.

  What follows is a scene from a silent movie. For that matter, what should I do, lay out an essay on the subject of intimidation? Should I tell her about the sense of inferiority that comes over me when I’m with her mother? Explain to her that I listen to her raptly even when I disagree with her? And what am I supposed to explain to her, if I don’t know anything myself? I know the effect, I’m baffled about the cause. Leaving aside the fact that even if I understood the cause, the effect would remain the same.

  Alagia acts like one of those tender-hearted teachers who assume they’re not going to get an answer and so they ask another question.

  “Listen,” she veers over into a philo-conspiratorial tone of voice, “there’s something I need to tell you.”

  I plump up properly in my chair. At last the unwanted neighbors get to their feet and hit the road.

  “Alfredo,” she says.

  “What.”

  “He asked me to tell you this, when I had an opportunity.”

  “To tell me what.”

  “At first I told him I wouldn’t; then I said to myself: ‘Oh, why not.’”

  My blood pressure shoots northward of 160/99. One more preamble and I’m going to start doing some self-cutting.

  Alagia issues an affectless statement, as if she were reading the weather report.

  “He likes boys.”

  I feel an involuntary twitching of my lip muscles. Something intrinsically moronic sets out to conquer my face. What’s happening to my mouth? I feel as if I must look like the Mona Lisa. I even have my hands crossed in my lap.

  “What?”

  Alagia looks at me skeptically.

  “What does he like?”

  She throws her head back and ranges the room quickly with her eyes, as if I were an over-insistent would-be boyfriend who won’t take no for an answer, an insurance salesman, a Jehovah’s Witness, or some other form of persistent annoyance.

  “Listen up, Vincenzo,” she tells me, leaning forward with a comforting, paternalistic demeanor, “this kind of curiosity is normal at that age. It’s not like you know what you like or don’t like. You just experiment, don’t you see?”

  I’m a piece of real estate right now. I’m not going anywhere. They could rent me out.

  Where am I? How did I get here?

  I’m not where I think I am.

  That isn’t Alagia talking to me.

  It isn’t May.

  It isn’t true.

  “Oh, Vincè.”

  “Eh?”

  “Are you all right?”

  “All right. Yes.”

  “Look at you, you’re white as a corpse. Take it easy, hey, nothing terrible’s happened.”

  My eyesight is all blurry.

  “Jesus, you’re having an attack of some kind. I have to say I didn’t expect this. Or actually, maybe I did.”

  She’s fiddling with the balls of bread gum from the dinner roll that she’s gutted while we were talking.

  “Are you sure?” I ask, just to have something to say.

  “Vincenzo.”

  “Do you think he’ll get over it?”

  Jesus, I can’t believe I said what I just said.

  “It’s not a disease, you know.”

  Standard answer for blinkered morons. Like me.

  “Well, what I meant is do you think it’s something permanent?”

  Holy Mary, why can’t I stop myself?

  “I told you that I
don’t think so. When I was his age, I had a thing for a while with a girlfriend of mine, and then I fell in love with Francesco and that was the end of that. And anyway, even if it did turn out to be something permanent, I hardly think it’s something we should turn into a tragedy.”

  “Who did you have thing with when you were his age?”

  “Oh, enough is enough, Vincè,” she squirms in her chair. “I can’t believe this is you.”

  I touch my hair, overwhelmed at the thought that with all the people sitting in this cafeteria, I should be the one who feels worst.

  “But listen, there’s something else I’m worried about,” Alagia says, changing the subject with chilling nonchalance.

  “Ah, something else,” I say, under partial anaesthesia.

  “This thing he does where he goes around getting beaten up,” she says, as if pursuing a line of thought that she’d already been pondering in her head.

  “Well?” I ask, fully expecting her response.

  “I hope it’s not something he enjoys.”

  I hear synchronized bells, I see blinking colored lights, and I recognize the sound of a score counter running way faster than normal. My internal alarm has gone off, a manifestation of my terror. When I was a kid, that was part of the experience of playing pinball. Once you reached a certain score, the machine would go into a trance for a few seconds, putting on a celebratory show for you with its entire spectacular arsenal before spitting out another ball.

  “I’m not following you,” I lie.

  She doesn’t look at me, still lost in her wandering thoughts. The ensuing silence triggers an irresistible need to defuse the tension.

  “No, no, of course not,” I resume, as insincere as a flight attendant reassuring the passengers as the airplane plunges to earth. “You know how deeply he cares about this stuff. He has a cultural interest in these things, a normal cultural interest. Even your mother says that . . . ”

  Oh God, the horror.

  Alagia looks up at me, still half distracted, and fails to focus.

  I need to sleep. I want my bed. Sheets and blankets. A dark room.

  “You’re right, Vincenzo,” Alagia comes to, all confident and upbeat. “What are we worried about? After all, what’s happened? Nothing’s happened.”