I Hadn't Understood (9781609458980) Read online

  But what I said was, “No, I don’t go out nights.”

  She waited a little while before asking the next question, nasty thing that she is.

  “Are you alone?”

  Now you’re going just a bit too far, I thought to myself.

  “No, I’m not alone,” I replied.

  But I don’t know why I said it. Maybe because there was a kernel of truth in it, all things considered.

  Then she plunged into a glacial silence and then she started stammering and saying excuse me, I didn’t mean to, I didn’t know that, I couldn’t have imagined, I never should have, and things like that.

  And she almost hung up on me in her haste to get off the line.

  I looked down at the cell phone in my hand, as if to say: “How about that.” And I took a few short strolls around the perimeter of the bedroom, just to stretch my legs.

  I called back Alessandra Persiano but her cell phone was still turned off. So I tried her landline, dialing *67# before the phone number so that my own number would be concealed. I didn’t feel like making her abstinence official after I’d tried her in vain on her cell phone, what the fuck, but either she wasn’t home or if she was, she didn’t want to answer, so I said, Fine, she wants to make me pay, and I went into the kitchen and made myself a Harmonious Cream of Zucchini and Squash. Then I went to bed, but I left my cell phone turned on, in fact I had it within easy reach on the nightstand, truth be told.

  After a couple of hours of partial sleep, I saw my cell phone was blinking. It was Nives again, a text message. I WANT TO TALK TO YOU, it said, YOU OKAY FOR LUNCH AT TWO O’CLOCK AT IL SERGENTE?

  SI, I wrote back, without even putting the proper accent on the ‘i’—sì—and at that point I turned off my cell phone because it really was time to call it a day.

  So now here I am, sitting in the vestibule of the prison office reserved for judges, waiting for the hearing to begin. Tricarico came to pick me up with his Vespa, even though I had told him not to bother.

  “Good Lord, Counselor, it’s the least I can do,” he had argued on the phone. “What are you supposed to do, take a bus to the prison?”

  “What do you mean, take a bus?” I said, skipping the second half of the response, which goes: “Look, you bumpkin, I do own a car, you know. Okay, it’s a 1999 Ford Fiesta, but I just installed new floor mats.”

  And it’s not like he drives a Rolls Royce, after all.

  But I was in no condition to explain all that to him, worried as I was about the hearing, Alessandra Persiano’s protracted eclipse, and Nives’s phone call; so I told him, “Fine, okay, don’t worry about it, swing by and have done with it.”

  Then, when we pulled up in front of the prison, a colleague of mine whom I know and who was just leaving the building, stopped to watch me dismount from the Vespa as if to say, What are you doing on a Vespa driven by that guy? Whereupon it occurred to me that it was a pretty good question, so I adjusted my blazer and turned to thank Tricarico for the ride, making it unmistakably clear in that manner that it was time for him to clear out and get gone and stay gone. For good.

  “At your service,” he replied, completely missing the point.

  I started toward the front gate, but since I didn’t hear the sound of the Vespa taking off, I turned around and glimpsed the erect figure, shall we say, of Tricarico, contemplating the street with the passivity of a taxi driver waiting for his fare.

  I sketched out an interlocutory “No” with my head, as if to say: “Why on earth aren’t you leaving?” Since he didn’t react in any way, I went back and asked him, clearly, why he hadn’t left yet.

  “Then how would you get back home?” he said.

  “That’s not your concern,” I replied.

  “Then what am I doing here waiting?”

  “Exactly,” I said.

  And I turned on my heel, just to emphasize the point.

  In the yellowish-grey waiting room where I’m sitting right now there are two other lawyers that I’ve never seen before. They’re talking about soccer, exchanging insipid observations and the kind of wisecracks that sophisticated professionals turn out all day, so jaded that they no longer pay any attention to their surroundings, because they’ve seen it all. In their opinion, anyone who lays eyes on them will remain captivated and intimidated by their false cynicism.

  Except that false cynicism has to have the right sort of context to be properly appreciated. And in this place, there’s nobody—except for me, Burzone, and the guards, and you can imagine how little they care—who can appreciate the false cynicism of these two.

  I mean, if you go in to have a sonogram and the sonogram technician is talking about taxes with the nurse while he rubs the probe back and forth over your belly, then you’re in the presence of a successful example of false cynicism, because while on the one hand it might strike you as disrespectful for a doctor to talk about taxes while he’s composing a Futurist portrait of your digestive tract on the computer screen, just try to imagine the state of paranoia that would assail you if he did the sonogram in silence, concentrating exclusively on the blobs and squiggles chasing each other around on the monitor and maybe even stopping now and then to think about them.

  False cynicism is the conceit of a professional who wants to show the world that he’s elsewhere while those who rely upon his professional services are in a state of enforced immobility. Now it’s obvious that there is no one in this waiting room who relies upon the professional services of these two bags of hot air and who would therefore have any reason to hang around and drink in their unwelcome false cynicism.

  And the unbelievable thing is that these two sad sacks don’t even realize that they’re staging a show without an audience. They’re putting on a whole song and dance for themselves, as we like to say down here. And yet they keep it up. They laugh, they slap each other on the back, they discuss and debate, they egg each other on. How they manage, I couldn’t say. The guards huff and puff in annoyance and fan themselves, among other things. Why do these guys think the guards are huffing and puffing and fanning themselves, because it’s hot? After all, we’re in the cooler, everyone in here’s on ice, ha ha.

  Burzone’s sitting in a chair, arms folded across his chest, legs crossed, looking as if he doesn’t want to confide in anyone. When the guards (two of them, with potbellies and paintbrush mustaches: whenever you see two prison guards, they almost always seem to have potbellies and paintbrush mustaches) brought him in here, he looked at me as if to say: “So you’re here, eh?”; and then not even Buon giorno.

  I pulled out the standard form for appointing a defense lawyer, I walked over to him, and I practically slapped him in the face with it, telling him to fill it out and sign it.

  “I got no pen,” he said.

  “Me either,” I replied.

  And I went back and sat down in the horrendous steel-and-green-plastic chair I’m sitting in right now.

  Whereupon—I would have bet twenty euros that he was going to do it—one of the two false-cynical lawyers immediately hustled over to Burzone, slithering like an iguana, and offered him his fountain pen (which is more or less like someone in the street witnessing a furious spat between you and your girlfriend and the minute you walk off trying to pick her up).

  Then Burzone showed the iguana how a real lady behaves: he turned away from him with disgust, obviously totally indifferent to the tacit proposal, shot me a glance of renewed esteem, asked one of the guards to lend him a pen, filled out the form to appoint me as his lawyer, signed it, and gave it to the guard to take it to me.

  The iguana went back to talking about soccer, but the complete humiliation he had just endured remained embossed on his face.

  At last the door of the office opened and a male secretary appeared, with farsighted glasses, a comb-over, a preprinted form in one hand, and the general demeanor of someone whose work is miles beneath him.

  I instinctively get to my feet, and am immediately filled with embarrassment at the ac
tion—Burzone is still seated, as stolid and phlegmatic as a viscount.

  “Oh,” I feel like telling him, “you’re the one who might be staying in prison or might be going home; really, I’d recommend that you cross yourself because the odds are good in my opinion that you’ll be eating in the prison dining hall again tonight, I don’t know if you follow me; so why the fuck are you acting all imperturbable?”

  The thing that has always annoyed me most about the arrogance of Camorristi, personally, is the nonchalance with which they put it on or take it off, depending on the circumstances.

  Look at how self-sufficient he acts now. But the odds are good that before long he’ll stage a pitiful show of begging for his freedom, and that he’ll confide to the preliminary judge that for the past two days he’s been doing nothing but thinking longingly of his family, speaking to the Madonna of Pompeii, and drinking nothing but water.

  Because then, when they’re down on their knees and implor­ing, Camorristi trot out fetishes and metaphors that even the hyper-Catholic militants of Communion and Lib­eration would feel the need to edit at least somewhat: his first-born son’s first communion, his toddler boy’s little pony, the drawing that his grade-school daughter did, with him coming home and the family waiting for him at the window (with an attempt at exhibiting said drawing by the defendant, halted in the nick of time by the presiding judge just as the defendant was extracting it from the breast pocket of his jacket), the wife who had an operation for her tumor though it looks like it might not be in remission after all, the pilgrimage that the whole family took to Lourdes, the medallion of Jesus Christ, kissed and rekissed after answering each question, the little villa in the subdivision purchased only after much scrimping and saving and sacrifice (the closed-circuit video cameras on poles sticking out of the walls at the corners of the villa, providing video security surveillance 24/7/365, I’m deeply tempted to add, just to see the expression on their faces). But then, when they’re done begging, the look of sheer arrogance reemerges.

  The false cynics take two steps back and call out in chorus, “Buon giorno, Carpinelli,” to the secretary.

  The secretary, who is obviously called Carpinelli, responds automatically but then gives them a look as if to say he must have met them somewhere before, but he can hardly be expected to remember, with all the lawyers he meets every day, leaving aside the famous ones, so there’s really no point in the two of them greeting him by name as if they were famous themselves. Which they’re not.

  “Fantasia,” he then announces in a loud voice.

  The false cynics withdraw into a corner. The guard with the less-prominent pot belly of the two gives Burzone a shove on the shoulder, urging his ass up out of the chair. As I lightly touch the knot of my tie, I feel as if my heartbeat just accelerated slightly, and in fact it just has, but I almost get it muddled with the vibration of the cell phone that’s bouncing around in the breast pocket of my jacket. I thought I’d turned it off.

  I pull out the cell phone, look at the display in its frenzied announcement of an incoming call, and then I freeze to the spot.

  Alessandra Persiano.

  I’m so nonplussed by the obvious fact that she chose the worst possible moment to call me that I read and reread her name, as if I couldn’t quite manage to remember who she is.

  The guards lead Burzone into the office. I glimpse the preliminary judge sitting at his desk; no, make that: I see the preliminary judge sitting at her desk, since she’s a woman, reading through the file.

  The secretary stares at me in disbelief, completely scandalized at the idea that I might choose to answer my phone at this exact moment.

  So I scandalize him.

  “Hello.”

  My tone of voice is absolutely ambiguous.

  Alessandra Persiano takes a good long pause before answer­ing.

  “What do you mean ‘Hello,’ don’t you have my number in your cell phone directory anymore?”

  I have a hot flash.

  “Ale, I’m sorry, I can’t talk right now,” I say, lowering my voice, while Carpinelli, or whatever his name is, continues to stare daggers of disapproval at me that jar my nerves.

  Another pause, grimmer than the first.

  “No, I’m sorry. Forget it.”

  “No, what do you mean forget it?” I say, in horror. “Wai—”

  But I’m talking to myself. She’s already hung up.

  I examine the unfamiliar object that’s sitting in the palm of my hand. It’s made up of two components: a tiny alphanumeric keyboard and a backlit screen at the center of which the name of an Italian company that I think I must have heard somewhere enjoys pride of place; surrounding it are an array of graphic squiggles that resemble, from left, a megaphone, a walkie-talkie, a magnifying glass, and a notebook. Beneath them, today’s date and the time. I wonder just what purpose this curious device might serve.

  Fucking pigshit.

  Possible interpretations of Alessandra Persiano’s sudden termination of the phone call:

  a) she guessed that I was in a sticky professional situation and just hung up in order to avoid distracting me, intrinsically discreet person that she is;

  b) she got the impression that I was acting aloof, since she hadn’t answered any of my repeated phone calls (which is exactly what was happening), and she immediately expressed her opinion on the subject;

  c) she thought that I was with another woman (because when a woman goes to bed with you she is automatically liable to assume that every other woman who meets you wants to do the same, even though you try to tell her that you only wish that were the case);

  d) none of those options occurred to her, but the simple fact that I told her I couldn’t talk offended her deeply and now she never wants to see me again.

  I hardly need to tell you which interpretation strikes me as the most plausible just now.

  In the meanwhile, Burzone has taken a seat across the desk from the preliminary judge, the guards have come back outside, and Carapelli or Carpinelli, whatever the fuck his name is, is still standing there, looking me up and down as if I were adjusting my fly or who knows what.

  “Excuse me, but are you here for Fantasia?” he finally resolves to ask.

  “Um-hmm,” I say, distraught over the situation. I’m still holding my cell phone in my hand.

  Then he says the wrongest thing he could ever have thought of saying.

  “If you’d like to step in. And it might be best if you turn off your cell phone.”

  I put my cell phone back in my pocket. I take one step toward him, and I stop just this far away from his face.

  “What did you just say?” I demand point-blank, with blood buzzing in my ears.

  Piece of shit that he is, he turns pale.

  “Only . . . that . . . maybe you could turn off your . . . phone,” he stammers.

  You know, I’ve had it up to here with the rules of etiquette invented by frustrated bureaucrats. I must have developed an allergy of some kind.

  “Get the fuck out of my way,” I demand through clenched teeth. I wave him aside with a scornful gesture, then I walk into the office.

  The preliminary judge senses a squall brewing, looks up from her file, and focuses first on me, then on her secretary, who’s standing right behind me, still dazed from the way I body-checked him.

  Burzone, too, turns around to look with some alarm.

  “Buon giorno,” I say.

  “What seems to be the problem, Counselor . . . ?” asks the preliminary judge, suspiciously.

  “Malinconico,” I fill in the blank, satisfied that she recognized me as a lawyer; then, without measuring my words in the slightest, I come to the point.

  “The problem is that this idiot”—and I point out the idiot in question by tipping my head in his direction—“had the gall to tell me to turn off my cell phone.”

  The secretary turns red, but he keeps his mouth shut. Burzone gives me a glance of mixed respect and concern over how things might turn ou
t for him at this point. I just stand there, in the middle of the room, proud as punch and completely unrepentant.

  The preliminary judge removes her reading glasses and looks up at me. She has a long, vaguely masculine face, pronounced cheekbones, a slightly off-center nose. She so strongly resembles Anjelica Huston that I have to make an effort not to tell her so.