I Hadn't Understood (9781609458980) Read online

  In other words, without even realizing it, I must have behaved like Proust’s indifferent man. With the niggling difference that, unlike Proust’s indifferent man, when Alessandra Persiano came charging back at me, I didn’t even make her ask twice, truth be told.

  The fact is that I belong to a generation of men who are pathologically skeptical when it comes to the idea that a tremendous babe might actually be coming on to them. I’m an outlet-store man. And outlet-store men, since they are invariably last season’s model, have a troubled relationship with the latest things. They feel like they’re past their sell-by dates, second choice. If anyone ever wants us, it’s only because we’re on sale, with deep discounts. So it’s obvious that we would never dare to think that a woman like Alessandra Persiano, who is a Prada woman, might ever consider dropping in here to do a little shopping.

  The other state of mind that I am registering just now, and with a sense of relief that I’m not even going to bother trying to describe, is the complete absence of any guilty feeelings that the thought of Nives triggers in me. I don’t give a damn: it’s a beautiful sensation. Whatever else people might say, a man who doesn’t give a damn is a free man.

  I’m so rapt in my conjectures that I don’t even notice that Alessandra Persiano has turned in my direction, and is contemplating me with post-sexual curiosity—the kind that amounts to taking a closer look at the person you just had sex with, to get a better idea of whether or not you just made a mistake.

  “Oh,” I say, “I thought you were asleep.”

  She smiles, and then she sketches out the oval of my face with her enchanting right index finger.

  I breathe in her vaguely fruit-scented aroma (beautiful women always give off a scent of fruit) and I scrutinize her, overjoyed at my complete inability to find one single defect.

  “What were you thinking about?”

  I give her a partial answer.

  “About Francis.”

  “Francis?”

  “The one from Assisi, you know the one I mean?”

  She opens her eyes wide, momentarily taking into consideration the possibility that I’m just joking, then dismisses that thought, and thrusts her head against my chest, sputtering out a crescendo of laughter that is only amplified by my thoracic cavity.

  “I just don’t know. I mean, you’re amazing.” She remerges, half dazed by the absurd sensation that she’s evidently experiencing.

  “Why?” I ask, seraphically.

  She shakes her head. I get a mouthful of hair. I blow it away.

  “The things you say never seem to fit in with the place. Or the time.”

  “Naturally, I’m nothing but an outlet store” is what I feel like saying. But then I’d have to explain it all, and I don’t feel like it.

  “IlikeitIlikeitIlikeit!” she says over and over, electrified like a little girl, and runs her hands over me.

  “But you women,” I ask as I do my best to pin her down, “why is it that you’re always attracted by defects? I mean, a guy wears himself out trying to seem promising, reliable, convinced of the things he says; a guy studies, works hard, gets ahead, goes to the gym, does his best to dress fashionably, in other words, ruins his life, and then when you finally decide to take him to bed, what’s the secret that you confide in him? ‘I don’t really like handsome men’; ‘Your belly makes me feel safe’; ‘You’re so adorable when you misspeak’ . . . Jesus Christ, what a pain in the ass. Couldn’t you at least tell us in advance?”

  She looks up at the sky, or really, at the ceiling, and shakes her head.

  “God what an idiot you are, Vincè. It’s exactly because you try so hard to conceal them, your defects, as you call them, that we like you. A truly inept man is pathetic. But a man who’s trying to act self-confident, and then you realize that he’s inept, it just does something to you, you understand?”

  I think it over.

  “In other words, you’re trying to say that you women are still fascinated by ‘what’s underneath the surface’ and ‘Now you see it/now you don’t.’”

  She points her hand straight at my face, having formed all four fingers into a flat plane, the universal gesture meaning, “Take this for example,” however, when used at this distance from the subject, means in many parts of the world: “Now listen to this guy.”

  “As if you men are equally as captivated by the same things? When you look at a woman, you’re not imagining anything else, are you?”

  “Touché,” I reply.

  She kisses me.

  “You’re just the way I imagined,” she says.

  “You’re much better,” I rectify.

  “I imagined you at your best,” she shoots back.

  “I can do better than that,” I insist.

  “Maybe the best thing is for you to shut up,” she says. And she seals my mouth with her own.

  We’re squirming and caressing each other again when a cell phone—my cell phone—rings. I curse myself for not turning it off and I pretend I can ignore it, busily pursuing the activity now under way, but after a little while Alessandra Persiano, with impeccable feminine pragmatism, taps me twice on the shoulder.

  “Come on, answer the phone so we can forget about it,” she recommends.

  I snort in annoyance and roll over onto the other side of the bed, reaching out toward the nightstand. Alessandra Persiano fixes her hair, stands up, and walks to the window, walking indifferently past her clothing folded neatly on the chair, a detail that cheers me up as it clarifies her future intentions.

  “Hello.”

  I speak slowly and in a low voice, just to eliminate any doubts my caller might have as to whether this call comes at an unwelcome moment.

  “Good afternoon, Counselor, so when can we have a meeting?”

  I sit bolt upright in bed.

  “Who is this?”

  Of course, I immediately recognized the voice.

  “What are you saying, have you already forgotten about me?”

  He says it in an indulgent tone of voice that gets on my nerves.

  I start to sweat.

  “Who is this? How dare you call me again? Who gave you my phone number?”

  “Counselor, if you don’t mind my asking, why do you have to make it so complicated?”

  I turn to look at Alessandra Persiano, who is looking back at me with a worried expression, standing naked and beautiful in front of the window curtains.

  One time something happened to me that resembles this situation very closely. A case of intrusiveness that verged on extortion. I was selling a family apartment through a real estate agency. One day a guy calls me up from a rival agency and says why don’t you fire the agency you’re with now and let me sell that apartment for you. I ask him why I would do anything of the sort. He replies that he has some people who are interested in buying my apartment. I tell him that I don’t give a damn if he does. So he asks me if I’m trying to be funny. Whereupon I tell him that our conversation has gone on long enough and that it’d be better for him if he never tried to call me again. He apologizes and hangs up. I think back on this phone call for at least a couple of days, so shocked am I at the existence of such people (you ask yourself: “Does God exist?”; whereas “Do people like that exist?” is what you ought to be asking yourself). Incredible to say, a few days later the same guy calls me back and asks when he can come and show the apartment. Come and show what? I say, with a horrible morbid curiosity that drives me to find out more. What do you mean, to show what: to show the apartment. Just like that, as if the last time we talked I’d hired him as my realtor. I tell him that I have no intention of letting him show my apartment and he replies, in a tone of voice that almost seems friendly, that he needs to sell the apartment so that he can get his percentage. Whereupon I start shouting and I threaten to report him to the police for attempted extortion. And at that point he vanishes, never to be heard from again.

  The resemblance between these two episodes triggers a dizzying implosion of fu
ry. I hurl my cell phone at the floor. The battery detaches and winds up who knows where.

  Alessandra Persiano comes over to me, uneasily.

  “What’s happening, Vincenzo? Who was that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You sure? You’re so angry.”

  I stand up.

  “What the fuck do they want from me? Now you tell me,” I say to myself, walking aimlessly back and forth. The funny thing—so to speak—is that I’m naked, too. Which is not something I’d normally do.

  Alessandra Persiano remains on the bed, sitting in silence.

  “Sorry Ale, forgive me,” I say after a while.

  “What’s going on?” she asks.

  So I sit down next to her and explain. I start with the judicial hearing of Burzone, pausing to savor the finest moments of my performance as a public defender. Then I tell her about Picciafuoco’s phone call, the invasion of my office by the First Lady, the cell phone, the threatening phone call, and the report to the police.

  “So what it means is that they want to hire you,” she says after I’m done summarizing the salient points.

  “That’s the way it looks.”

  “It must mean you’re good.”

  I strike a pose.

  “Oh, please.”

  “And you turned them down.”

  “Exactly.”

  She taps her lips with the index and middle fingers of her right hand, tosses her hair back, gets to her knees on the bed.

  “You know what I think? The fact that you turned them down is exactly what convinced them that you’re the right man for the job.”

  “It strikes me as a somewhat optimistic opinion,” I say, wondering at the same time what’s become of my underpants.

  “Look, I can think of hundreds of lawyers who would falsify documents to be in your position. Whoever it is has powerful people behind him, don’t you doubt it.”

  I’m on the verge of responding, but Alessandra Persiano’s gaze blurs as she pursues another thought, so I skip it.

  “But there’s something that strikes me as strange,” she says.

  “What.”

  “I mean strange. Odd, I guess.”

  “What does.”

  “The interrogation.”

  “The interrogation?

  “Yeah. The judicial interrogation in the assistant district attorney’s office.”

  “Strange how? I don’t get what you mean.”

  “Usually the ADA doesn’t conduct a judicial interrogation in cases like this. That is, he ought to, in theory, but in practice he skips it. The Carabinieri just send him a transcript of their interrogation, he checks to make sure that the arrest was done in compliance with the law, and then he immediately asks the preliminary judge to confirm the detention.”

  Really? I think.

  “Yeah, I know,” I say.

  She goes on thinking, staring into empty space.

  “As if he were interested in talking to him, this Burzone.”

  “You think?”

  “Well, I don’t know. I could be wrong.”

  She drops her suspicion.

  “Why would someone send me a cell phone?” I ask, changing the subject. “What’s it mean?”

  “I don’t know. But with people like that you can’t always go looking for a meaning. It’s not like it’s the Mafia, communicating metaphorically. If you ask me, that’s exactly what they want, for you to wonder what it means. They want you to feel confused, frightened. They’re trying to hem you in, you see.”

  “Yeah, I thought the same thing, though maybe not in such analytical terms,” I reply, feeling depressed.

  She strokes my hair.

  “Oh, stop worrying, it’s not like anybody’s threatened to kill you. They just want you defend the guy. And since you told them you wouldn’t do it, they’re asking you again, in the only buffoonish way they know how, that’s all.”

  “Yeah, I know, but still . . . ”

  She moves closer to me.

  “It’s complicated, the work we do, you know that, Vincè. I understand the way you feel about it. That’s why I got out of criminal law. People don’t understand these contradictions.”

  I say nothing.

  “Anyway, don’t make a big deal about it. If you don’t want to take the case, they can’t force you to. They’ll get tired of asking, and they’ll look for someone else.”

  I nod, but I’m not convinced.

  “There’s just one thing,” she asks me suddenly. “Why don’t you want to defend this guy?”

  “Because I wouldn’t know where to begin” is the answer that I can’t give her.

  “I don’t want to get mixed up with these people.”

  She glances at me, skeptically.

  “So, wait a minute, how did you wind up representing him at the interrogation? Were you standing in for someone?”

  “No, I was appointed by the court,” I answer without thinking.

  “Now come on, Vincè,” she says, clearly not satisfied. “You don’t just get appointed as a public defender. You have to sign up for it. You signed up, didn’t you?”

  There’s an accusatory note in her voice now.

  “In fact,” I admit.

  “And when you signed up to work as a public defender, who exactly did you think you would be representing? The crème de la crème?”

  Hm. Well, you’d better answer her.

  “You have a point. I don’t even know why I did it. I thought it was something that interested me, maybe.”

  She turns all understanding again.

  “But then, when it came to it, you lost interest.”

  “Right.”

  She strokes my forearm.

  “I was afraid that you’d do the same thing with me.”

  “My self-esteem is not exactly flourishing,” I say.

  She takes me by the chin and turns me in her direction.

  “That’s why I like you.”

  We kiss.

  “I don’t want to take this case,” I whine a second later.

  “So don’t take it.”

  “Oh, you make it sound so easy.”

  “If you ask me, you shouldn’t have let the wife come up to your office.”

  “I told her I wouldn’t take the case.”

  “Yeah, but afterward.”

  “So are they going to make me pay for the insult?”

  “No, on the contrary, the minute you turned them down you confirmed that you’re a good lawyer, I told you that. And in fact, they went ahead and fired Picciafuoco.”

  “I don’t get it. It’s not like I’m a famous lawyer.”

  “And it’s not like they’re asking you to represent Don Vito Corleone. Mimmo ’o Burzone, as he calls himself, is a complete nobody.”

  “Oh, thanks so much.”

  “It was just a way of telling you that they’re not trying to put you through some test. You did nice work for them and they want to try you out, you understand,” she becomes more and more convinced as she talks, “so they start you out defending an underling, a foot soldier. Burzone is just like a fence for stolen cars, his little basement workshop is like a chop shop. They bring him the loot and he breaks it down. He’s probably never even seen his employers. Look, this could be a big opportunity for you, if you’re interested in getting into criminal law.”

  “Are you recommending I take the case?”

  She fans herself with her hands.

  “Oooh, Vincè. You know what time it is?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  She glances over at the radio-alarm clock on the bedside table.

  “I have an appointment in my law office in less than an hour. And if you consider that it takes me at least half an hour to shower and get ready, you tell me how much time we have.”

  “Ah,” I say, finally catching her drift.

  HERE COMES THE CAVALRY

  Everyone knows—though nobody seems to know the reason why—that as soon as it starts raining
, sidewalks become crowded. Hordes of pedestrians with furrowed brows suddenly pour out into the streets, with the obvious objective of getting home. People are suddenly there—who knows where they were just a few seconds ago—as if they had hurried outdoors just to hurry back indoors. So you see these columns of streetwalker-men that form along the walls of the apartment buildings, taking turns standing under the balconies.

  I too, having just left Alessandra Persiano’s apartment building in an enviable psychic and physical condition, join the line. It’s sort of like queueing up for a vaccination—that’s how slow the line is progressing. The more impatient line-standers lift up on the tips of their toes to try to identify the obstacle. One elderly gentleman right behind me says that he’s going to be late paying a bill, and then starts laughing to himself. Somebody else emits a series of unrepeatable vocalizations. I have that delightful sense of warmth in my veins of having just made love, and I take it all very tolerantly. It’s not raining all that hard.

  The line starts moving again, and a short distance later I discover that the cause of the pedestrian traffic jam consists of a piece-of-shit thug sending text messages on his cell phone, stretched out practically full-length on a motor scooter that he thoughtfully parked on the sidewalk, directly under a sheltering balcony.

  What would you estimate the width of a city sidewalk on a secondary street to be? Five feet, to be generous? Place in the middle of that sidewalk an overweight motor scooter of the latest generation (the ones with seats that look like club chairs and all of the various accessories that go along with them), and you can easily guess how little room is left over. Of course, there’s not a policeman around, even if you called one in. And if there was one, you can just imagine how that would go.