I Hadn't Understood (9781609458980) Read online

  I take a breath.

  “Yeah, in fact, that’s what I say.”

  “That’s right, come on. Let’s behave like adults.”

  “Right, let’s behave.”

  Exactly forty minutes later, I charge into Nives’s office like an avenging fury. The minute her secretary Marianna sees me coming she knows this is no time to intervene. She doesn’t even make an effort to intercept me, the way secretaries do in movies when someone busts into the boss’s private office, and the secretary comes running up right behind the intruder just as they open the door and calls out: “I’m so sorry, Mr. Thus-and-Such, I told him he couldn’t go in but he refused to take no for an answer.”

  But what does happen behind me is that a guy who was sitting in the waiting room jumps up and yells: “Hey, where the hell is he going?” to which Marianna replies: “He’s the doctor’s husband,” and he says: “Ah.”

  I throw open the door and interrupt the session so vehemently that Nives and her patient—a woman I know, by the way—practically jump into one another’s arms in their startlement.

  The time that it takes for Nives’s expression to swerve from surprise to indignation is the exact same amount of time it takes for a child to progress from the astonishing realization of the boo-boo to the explosion of tears.

  Nives’s patient hides her face in her hands, as if I’d caught her necking with my wife or something like that. In effect, I would never have guessed that an oafish social-climber like Felicia Parisi was in analysis. She’s the kind of person who, when they do condescend to speak to you, seem to be saying nothing but: “Problems, me? Oh, good Lord, the very idea.”

  “How dare you?” Nives raises her voice, red in the face. She’s so angry that her lips are trembling.

  At that point I realize what a complete fuck-up I’ve just committed, but I stay cool. Fuck-ups don’t legally entail proactive restitution. Which is why in a process of criminal escalation, like when somebody goes out to commit a robbery and then commits murder, e.g., the murder is preceded by other actions that are of lesser criminal importance. A murder committed by a hooligan is always a dirty, vulgar, wasteful murder, awkward and bloody, committed with a violence that squanders and spoils. That’s why, in contrast, a murder committed by a professional is described as “clean” or “perfect.” Profes­sionals don’t leave a mess.

  In other words, in view of the aspects of criminal law that I’ve just explained, I stand in the door and begin clapping my hands.

  “Well, well, my compliments, eh; nice job,” I say.

  She registers my incomprehensible sarcasm with a mixture of curiosity and indignation that, among other things, makes her particularly attractive. She throws the notebook that she was holding until just a second ago onto the floor and strides toward me, all ligaments, as if she were walking in a suit of armor.

  “What the fuck are you talking about? What are you saying? What right do you have to interrupt one of my sessions? You could be arrested for this, did you know that?”

  Eh, you could have the police confiscate all my Ikea furniture, I say to her in my mind.

  “Of all the masterpieces you’ve put your signature to in your career, this beats them all, no question,” I say.

  Nives’s nostrils flare, practically emitting smoke.

  “Get out of here immediately,” she commands.

  “Nives, what’s happening here is very serious, I hope you realize that,” Felicia Parisi puts in her two cents.

  “Who asked you anything, mind your own fucking business if you can manage it,” I say to her, slapping the back of my hand in her general direction.

  She turns red as an Apache.

  Nives looks at her and immediately afterward turns to look at me, as if she can’t believe what she just heard.

  “why how dare y—”

  I level my index finger straight at her.

  “Do you want to know why I’m here? Eh?! You want to know?”

  She clenches her jaw, frustrated by my interruption, but she’s dying of curiosity. Felicia Parisi too has retracted her neck like a bulldog. I don’t have the slightest idea of what I’m about to say.

  “Listen closely. Probably up till now I haven’t been as good a father as I ought to have been, but from today forward, everything’s going to change, understood? The mother’s exclusive on this story has expired. I want to have a say in raising my kids, I want to stop you once and for all from doing exactly as you please and prefer, knowing full well that Idiot Boy here isn’t going to contradict a thing you say. Have I conveyed the idea? So brace yourself: a new era is about to begin!”

  I fall silent and just breathe, waiting for my heartbeat to stop racing. In the meanwhile, I do my best to remember what the hell I just said.

  Now Nives is looking at me uneasily.

  “Vincenzo, do you feel all right?”

  I let fly.

  “Oh, go fuck yourself. Now I have to hear it from you? Since this morning all I’ve heard from anyone is that same fucking question! Enough!”

  At that point Her Highness Lady Felicia grabs her purse and her cell phone and prepares to leave the office in disgust.

  “Goodbye, Nives,” she says, walking past her and taking up a point on the wall-to-wall carpeting exactly midway between the two of us.

  “Hold on, Felicia,” Nives says. “This is just an unexpected disruption. Don’t leave, we can still finish the session.”

  “No, it’s lasted long enough for me,” Felicia says, tartly.

  God, how I feel like slapping her in the face.

  “Then this is our last session,” Nives declares unexpectedly, as sharp and spare as a scalpel.

  “What?” the turd cries.

  “You heard me,” my ex-wife snaps decisively.

  Hey, I can’t believe my ears.

  “You’re telling me not to come back? Did I undertand you correctly, Nives?” Felicia demands in outrage.

  Exactly, I reply mentally. In fact, she just told you to go get fucked by a choir of gospel singers. Didn’t you hear her? Because that’s precisely what she just said.

  “If you can’t handle this kind of situation, Felicia,” Nives points out dryly, “it means that you’re refusing to do your part in this therapy. In which case there is no reason for us to go on meeting.”

  You can’t even imagine the look on that turd’s face now. She just stands there, like a TV antenna, incapable of deciding what to do next. Boys, that is some woman I married.

  “Your husband is a boorish oaf,” says the turd. And glares at me.

  I plaster a Walter Matthau smile across my lips.

  “I’m not the one who asked him to break into our session,” Nives replies. “I’m not responsible for what he does. I don’t even know what he’s talking about.”

  Nives’s logic proceeds like a seeing-eye dog. It accompanies the turd’s thoughts, preventing them from walking into the sides of buildings, signaling contradictions and incongruities.

  “I want you to do something,” the poor thing finally croaks.

  “I just told him to leave. And I just asked you to stay. So what are you going to do? Are you going to stay?”

  At that point something truly incredible happens: Felicia Parisi—Felicia Parisi!—tucks her head back down into her shoulders and goes back to her place, like an embarrassed little schoolgirl.

  Nives levels her eyes straight into mine, with a look of reproof that is completely devoid of vindictive anger. She leans over the carpeting, picks up her notebook, walks over to Felicia, puts a hand on her shoulder, and then comes back to me.

  Behind me, at a safe distance, is Marianna, slack-jawed. I see her out of the corner of my eye.

  “Now please leave,” Nives tells me, brooking no contradiction. “Whatever this is about, we can discuss it later.”

  I nod, turn on my heel, and finally leave the office, as she gently closes the door behind me.

  I return home with a feeling of serenity that I don’t k
now where it even comes from, but it’s there. Get this: I find a parking place not far from the front door of my apartment building, which is, how to put this, something verging on the miraculous, as these things go. Once I’ve parked my car, in fact, I stop for a second and just look back to admire it, as if I’d achieved something. I don’t know if you ever catch yourself doing things of the sort.

  Sometimes I think that when you straighten your back, and you start knocking on doors and demanding things, instead of submitting to everything by exerting the basic hack minimum level of resistance (which, let’s face it, is the way that I live), the world takes notice. Just develop a little bit of respect for yourself and life makes things easier for you. Which is why all of a sudden you find a parking place right outside your own front door, or a woman gives you a lingering glance, or someone offers you a job. Like when you get into a relationship, and all of a sudden four or five different women suddenly call you up on the same day (including a couple of your exes that you haven’t seen in years), and you wonder: “Hey, but where the fuck were you all until the day before yesterday?”

  Here’s the way it is: reality makes inquiries about individuals. When life offers you these special bonus discounts, it’s basically opening a line of credit. It’s telling you: okay, here you go, but don’t be a loser, don’t turn around and squander it all so that you’re penniless again tomorrow morning. You didn’t find this on the sidewalk: I gave it to you, to you and nobody else. So give me some evidence that I wasn’t wrong about you. Keep up the good work: change.

  The problem, at least as far as I’m concerned, is that I can’t seem to get anyone to change their mind about me for more than a day or so—maybe a day and a half.

  So I stick with the bonus discounts.

  As I stick my house key into my front door lock, all the thinking, rethinking, and sense of guilt that I’ve been wallowing in up till now about Alfredo lose a significant percentage of their burdensome weight. That’s the way it always is with me, where problems are concerned. From a distance, they always prompt a bunch of complicated considerations. Then, once we’re face to face, we always find a way of coming to terms.

  Just now, fr’instance, the kind of awkwardness I feel at the idea of seeing Alf for the first time after getting the news is the same as when you have to explain to your children the process that leads to birth. Maybe it’s that too many things have already happened today, who can say? One thing I can rely on is that by now, that chucklehead of a sister of his has certainly already told him the expression that appeared on my face in the cafeteria.

  I walk in, toss my keys onto the hardwood Monga bench that was actually originally a piece of bathroom furniture but who really cares, and I call out Alfredo’s name, followed by an entirely rhetorical question mark.

  No answer.

  “Hey, let’s not try to be funny, no one’s in the mood,” I say, a little louder.

  More silence.

  “Alfre’? Come on, don’t be an idiot.”

  I stick my head into the, shall we say, living room.

  He’s not there.

  Into the bedroom.

  Not there either.

  Into the bathroom.

  Nothing.

  I hurry into the kitchen (which is the last room in the apartment).

  On the kitchen table, in plain view, there’s a sheet of paper.

  THANKS ALL THE SAME DAD.

  I THOUGHT IT OVER AND I REALIZED THERE WAS NO REASON NOT TO GO TO SCHOOL AFTER ALL.

  I’LL GET THERE IN TIME FOR SECOND PERIOD, SO WHATEVER.

  AND IF THEY ASK ME WHAT HAPPENED, I’LL JUST TELL THEM THE TRUTH.

  I’M GLAD YOU WERE ON MY SIDE.

  IAG

  ALF

  XXX

  I pull out a Stefan and take a seat, reading the note over and over again from the beginning until the words on the paper have become incomprehensible scribble.

  I put down the piece of paper and stare into the middle distance.

  I’m rich, I think to myself.

  That’s what goes through my head.

  Then I sniff.

  Aw, go to hell.

  Those are the words that come to mind when you unexpectedly feel a wave of happiness, without warning.

  OUTLET

  There’s nothing gradual about the way things happen. When things happen, they just happen. And it’s not like you can walk them along, guide them with one hand to keep them from veering out of control and sweeping you away with them as they crash into the void. There’s no way to slow things down when they happen. You can’t control them, you can’t manage them. Even understanding them is beyond our reach. In fact, the most common recurring phrase in this connection is the following: “I don’t know what’s happening to me.” Certain phrases don’t exactly come about by chance. If something happens to you, there’s nothing you can do about it, and that’s that. It’s not true that life changes little by little. Either it changes or else it remains the same. After your life changes, you might say: “Yeah, but before that, this and that and the other thing happened,” and you talk yourself into believing that the change was in the air somehow. But deep down you know why, or really, deep down you don’t know why your life has changed. You just don’t know the reasons why things happen. It’s like when you come down with a psychosomatic disease: the natural countermove is to look around for a triggering event. You thoughtfully review the recent events in your life that were bound up with choices or sacrifices (which are actually pretty much synonymous), and you decide to put the blame on one prime suspect. You open an investigation into suspect number one, and you bombard it with damning evidence until you’ve pinned it down as the instigator behind your psychosomatic disease. But the truth is that no one knows what events produce psychosomatic diseases. Because the array of events that can trigger a psychosomatic disease (which, by the way, no one really can define or understand) is so vast that one is as suspicious or likely as another.

  But you don’t even really have to go into the realm of psychosomatic diseases to prove how unreliable explanations that attribute specific causes can be. Take a head cold. You apply the same inquisitorial procedure. You get a cold and you think to yourself: “It must have been that one time I left the house dressed too lightly.” Which is obviously only one of an array of potential explanations, since it’s a well-known fact that you can catch a cold in any of several million ways. The fact is, though, that once you’ve spent the night sleeping with your mouth wide open and at half past midnight you realize that you’ve already gone through a family-size box of Kleenex, you have to find some way of rationalizing such an enormous pain in the ass. So you put the blame on that one time you should have dressed more warmly. And with the passage of time you become absolutely convinced of it. Even if it would be sufficient to remember the thousands of times you left the house dressed much more lightly than that one time (times when it was even colder, what’s more) to completely demolish the prosecution’s case. All of this long and intricate explanation leads up to the fact that I can’t tell you how it is that I wound up in Alessandra Persiano’s bed, but, unless I happen to be in the throes of a prolonged hallucination, the naked woman sleeping alongside me right now is none other than her.

  As soon as we walked into her apartment, that is, here, I threw myself at her with a vehement impatience that my subsequent performance couldn’t possibly hope to live up to. So before it was all said and done, or really before any of the saying and doing even began, just forty seconds after I entered the home of Alessandra Persiano, I also entered Alessandra Persiano herself, but I remained inside her such a short time that, after the first and last thuds, she called my name beseechingly, as if wondering where I’d vanished to. Whereupon I thought to myself: “Now I look like an asshole,” but I didn’t say it out loud, because really there was no need. And then she, who at that moment was on top of me and was objectively somewhat ridiculous, all rumpled and disheveled on account of me, said to me, “Why do
n’t we just start over from square one, but taking it easy this time, since there isn’t anyone actually in hot pursuit of us?” In response to which I asked, in perfectly good faith, whether by “from square one” she meant going right back to where we started from, that is to say, on the landing outside her apartment, or even better, in the elevator, and she burst out laughing right in my face (Alessandra Persiano always bursts out laughing right in my face), and that helped to break the tension so that no more than five minutes later we started fucking but for real this time and we didn’t stop for a good solid four hours, filling our heads with good talk in the intervals, along with everything else.

  So anyway, at this point I have to say that I feel pretty discombobulated and even a little dopey after everything that’s happened, truth be told.

  In the meanwhile, the first state of mind that I register is that of a generic gratitude toward existence at large. Which is a condition of beatitude verging on the Franciscan, if we accept that St. Francis ever felt a sensation like this one. And I’m not just talking about the Zen tranquility that is so typical of the post-coital state, when you feel all invigorated and it’s as if your body were sending a message from deep within that it was about time you paid a little attention to it for a change. I’m referring to the sudden intrusion of hope. The ability to grasp the meaning of every single act that allows you to earn a living. To think of the future as something that you can’t wait to start.

  And to be sure, it wasn’t written in the stars that a piece of woman like Alessandra Persiano should come along and bestow this incredible favor on me of all people.

  Reasoning about it coolly, I think that this New Malin­conico Miracle is due to the fact that I reacted fairly passively to her first approaches.

  There’s a short story by Proust that deals with this very same subject. It’s called “The Indifferent Man.” It’s about a marquise who falls head over heels in love with a man who treats her with complete indifference. Put in those terms, it seems about as obvious as a hot-water faucet, but you try making a hot-water faucet sometime. Anyway, this marquise, even though she is one of the most beautiful women in Paris, and, being a wealthy widow, is constantly pursued by a vast throng of suitors, winds up falling incurably under the spell of this guy who systematically ignores her. It’s not that her beloved is all that much better than the various nobleman panting after her with declarations of love (and the marquise knows this perfectly well); it’s precisely the unaffected way in which he becomes hard to track down, rejects her invitations, and dismisses her repeated advances that makes her so unhappy. And even at the end of the short story, when she agrees to marry another man, it’s obvious that the indifferent man is the one she couldn’t get out of her mind.