I Hadn't Understood (9781609458980) Page 21

  “What?” She pretends not to understand. I’d bet thirty euros that she actually liked my entrance.

  “I said ‘idiot,’ your honor.”

  “Moderate your language, Counselor.”

  If that was a smile that looked like it was trying to get onto her lips, she was very good at concealing it.

  “I beg your pardon, judge. I’m mortified at appearing before you for the first time in such a, shall we say, informal manner.”

  She thinks that over.

  “We don’t allow cell phones to remain on during a hearing, Counselor.”

  “You are perfectly right about that, your honor. But in point of fact, the hearing had not yet begun. My cell phone rang outside, before I ever set foot in your office.”

  She looks at me. She looks at the idiot. She inhales. She exhales. All through her nose.

  “Take a seat, Counselor. Let’s get started.”

  I take a seat, beaming. Burzone too looks like the cat that ate the canary. The idiot sits at the right corner of the desk, bowed over the transcription form. Without bothering to glance at him, as if she were talking to a spinning tape recorder, Anjelica Huston begins dictating the elements of the hearing, and he takes down every word.

  The ADA, as I expected, hasn’t bothered to show up. For that matter, when the presence of one of the parties isn’t required, why on earth go to the trouble of attending? He must have sent his written conclusions on confirmation of detention and, no doubt, a request for continued detention in prison. Nothing seems more likely than that this hearing will be over in ten minutes, or even less, with Anjelica Huston accepting the request of Mr. Cool by issuing a lovely decree of cautionary detention, Burzone going back to doing pushups on his cot, and me without a clue of what to do next.

  I begin to resign myself. And I weep inwardly, thinking that I’ve spent my whole life waiting to see how things turn out.

  The preliminary judge acknowledges the presence at the hearing of Burzone, she acquires (that’s the way they say it) to the official case file my appointment as Burzone’s fiduciary representative, and then she proceeds to interrogate Burzone, stating his first and last name, place of residence, marital status, certificates of study (completed junior high school), profession (“Currently unemployed”), real property (“None”), prior criminal convictions (“None”: an entry that sounds even less likely than the preceding one): all information that she garners from the record of his arrest and which she dictates to the idiot in a totally flat voice, with the exception of his monicker (or, shall we say, his pseudonym). That she asks Burzone himself to confirm with measured (and just slightly bitchy) irony.

  Burzone looks at me, I nod my head yes, and he confirms. I expect La Huston is going to want to have some fun by asking him the origin of his nickname; instead, to my relief, she skips over that detail.

  “Well, now,” she says, having gotten through the introductory ceremonies of the hearing, “we have here a case of disposal and concealment of a corpse.”

  Okay, I think to myself. That much I know.

  “Would you care to tell me, Signore Fantasia, just what happened and how you come to be here?” she asks, crossing her forearms on the desk. It’s a pose that I must have seen in at least four hundred movies. Okay, I know I’m repeating myself, but it really is incredible how we fail to realize how completely clichéd the poses that we continually strike really are. We ought to pay closer attention to it, I believe. For instance, now that I think about it, I seated myself in a very uncomfortable way, with my back rigid and my legs crossed without the slightest suppleness or relaxation, making an enormous effort to keep my shins aligned, and in fact my calves hurt now. In general, when I sit down, it’s not anything like that.

  Burzone shoots me another ocular request for authorization to answer the question. I nod yes again.

  “Your Honor, what can I tell you? It was my daughter who wanted to get the dog, and she was going to drive me crazy if I didn’t make her happy. What do I know about where the creature gets to and what it brings back home?”

  “So you’re saying that you have a dog that likes to collect souvenirs, Signor Fantasia?” La Huston observes.

  “Sooveh-whats?” asks Burzone; he even leans over toward the secretary and tried to peek at the minutes, like a little boy trying to copy off the student at the next desk over. In these situations, you have to admit, his timing is impeccable. The preliminary judge, in fact, has an uptick of embarrassment, or really, a paralysis of embarrassment, and is rendered speechless.

  “Listen, Your Honor,” he resumes, taking advantage of the interval, “I told the assistant district attorney the same thing: I saw a little pile of dirt in the yard, I went out to take a look, I did some digging, and the next thing I know I’m in trouble. I don’t know anything about the object that was in the hole, I swear it on the head of my baby daughter.”

  “The object,” Anjelica Huston repeats, as if the generic nature of the expression had offended her intelligence; then she looks at me to make me feel guilty about representing him. It’s a form of investigative racism that I’ve quickly become accustomed to, luckily for me.

  “Your honor, excuse me,” Burzone shoots back, “but are you saying that if someone comes to your house and finds a handgun, then that means it’s yours?”

  “Why, if they find a handgun in my house, who should I accuse, my next-door neighbor?” the judge retorts.

  “Exactly,” says Burzone, then falls silent; as if the preliminary judge had just confirmed his theory, instead of demolishing it.

  Here the preliminary judge stumbles, doubting her own logic. She looks into the middle distance, probably doing her best to remember what she just said. Burzone sits there, with a face oozing good faith, as if the matter was all taken care of now.

  Madonna, what a clever son of a bitch.

  “I’d have to agree with your observation, judge,” I break in, in a frantic attempt to hijack the interrogation from the ridiculous morass it’s sinking into, “but, if you’ll allow me the point, it is precisely when we come to the concept of home that the detention that I’d imagine the ADA has certainly asked you to uphold is most clearly baseless and false.”

  “Oh, really?” she tells me with her expression.

  I go on, since by now I’ve got a running start.

  “The hand, because what we are talking about is a hand, you’re quite right on that point,” I take a moment to lick her ass, because if you want to cover your own you’ve got to lick someone else’s, “was found in Fantasia’s backyard. And what is a backyard if it is not a virtual extension of an enclosed space, a sacred domicile, an unwalled piece of property?”

  I take a breath. It strikes me that Anjelica’s nose has gotten sharper. I continue.

  “Inasmuch as it reproduces a greenery whose general lack is felt keenly in our modern world, a backyard is a bridge between the open air and the enclosed interior. It lies vulnerable to the intrusion of any and all passersby. It negates the concept of the home, even though it is at the service of the home. The master of the house is the master only when he is inside the house: the backyard strips him of that role. It is an architectural alternative to the claustrophobia of private ownership. It gratifies a desire for exposure. It’s mine, and yet I allow the rain to muddy it, the wind to dishevel it, the stranger to enter it. And that is exactly why we cannot reasonably state that the limb in question was in my client’s home.”

  Here I break off. I have the feeling that Burzone, even though he hasn’t understood a word, is dying to slap me on the back. Anjelica Huston listened to me the whole time with an expression hovering somewhere between “How about that?” and “Okay, okay, we get your point” and “What the fuck does this have to do with anything?”

  I’m pretty satisfied with my own performance. A couple of lines I’d planned out at the drawing table, truth be told, but the rest was improvised. It’s times like this when I think I can understand jazz.

  “So
you’re of the opinion that the ADA has requested a confirmation of detention,” the preliminary judge comments. “I wonder how on earth you found out such a thing. In any case, your definitions of premises and property are quite evocative. You really ought to be a writer, you know that?”

  Burzone and I exchange a glance.

  “I have a novel in my desk drawer, but the publishing houses keep sending me rejection letters,” I reply.

  La Schnozzola makes a superhuman effort to keep from bursting into laughter. Look at her, she’s turned all red. That’ll teach her to crack funny with lawyers she doesn’t even know. Burzone also acts as if he’s stifling a laugh, but I’m pretty sure he didn’t even get the joke.

  “Anyway, I’d like to know what you think of my observations about the backyard,” I continue.

  Hey, being a criminal lawyer is starting to look like fun.

  “I’ll tell you in my decree, Counselor, don’t worry about that.”

  “It was out of interest, not worry.”

  “Well, then. Now, Signor Fantasia, you have stated that you know nothing about this object, as you call it, that was found in your backyard, and you believe that it might have been the dog that picked it up who knows where and then buried it, again, in your backyard.”

  “Eh.”

  “Would you mind answering ‘yes’ or ‘no’?”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “I need to hear him give the answer, Counselor,” the preliminary judge sets me back on my heels. But from the way she scolds me I can tell she likes me.

  “I apologize,” I say. She nods, but with the simulated scolding that women use when they seem to be trying to convey to you that you have an account to settle, a reckoning to be made, I don’t know if I convey the idea. I wonder why it is that for the past little while it seems as if women are aware that I exist.

  “Yes,” says Burzone, “that is, no, it’s not that I believe it: I’m completely certain that it was the dog, and in fact, you found the dog’s collar in the hole along with it, didn’t you?”

  “True,” admits La Schnozzola, very seriously.

  Whereupon I have a strange presentiment. Strange in the sense of positive.

  “Your dog visits some eccentric places, Signor Fantasia,” Anjelica resumes.

  Burzone is about to say something, but I intimate silence with a wave of the hand.

  “Why won’t you let him speak, Counselor?”

  “I didn’t hear a question, judge.”

  She slumps back in her swivel chair.

  “Okay,” she says, giving me that point.

  She puts on her glasses and lowers her head over the file. She turns to the idiot and resumes dictating rapidly.

  “There’s no point in my informing you of the ADA’s recommendations, since the counsel for the defense has informed us that he is already privy to that information; I would imagine that counsel, in view as well of the lack of a criminal record on the defendant’s part, would like to request that he be freed or, subordinately, be given house arrest. Would you concur, Coun­selor Malinconico?”

  She looks up from the file and gazes at me.

  “Quite right,” I confirm, concealing my utter surprise, since I had forgotten or never known that at some point in the course of the hearing I might be expected to put forth a request or a demand myself. If not, what in hell was I even doing here, for that matter? Aside from explicating my theory of the backyard as an illusory negation of private property, of course.

  The preliminary judge nods in her secretary’s direction, and the secretary takes down her words fairly promptly.

  “Okay,” she concludes, “you can have a seat in the other room. It’ll take us a moment to prepare the decree.”

  Burzone and I stand up in unison. I sketch out a sort of bow, he doesn’t. At Anjelica Huston’s behest, the idiot stands up to see us to the door. As he opens the door, he scrupulously avoids meeting my gaze. The guards greet me. One of them asks Burzone how it went. Burzone tilts his head in my direction (I notice it out of the corner of my eye, feigning complete ignorance as I do), and he traces a virtual comma down his cheek with his thumbnail, an age-old Italian signal that it’s all good: I experience a warm glow, as I discover to my horror just how eagerly I aspire to win the esteem of this piece of flotsam washed up from the sea of organized crime.

  In the waiting room, in the meanwhile, another prisoner has arrived, dressed in a tracksuit, loafers, bald dome, and facial features that would make anyone conclude then and there that Cesare Lombroso understood everything there was to know. The two false-cynical lawyers, who to all appearances constitute his defense team, cluster around him like squeegee men at a stoplight, one on this side, one on the other, talking at top speed, finishing each other’s sentences, showing off transcripts and documents that the prisoner glances at with annoyance. A stomach-turning display.

  “Who’s that?” I ask one of the guards under my breath. I nod toward the prisoner.

  “A piece of shit from hell,” the cop replies to my question.

  Oh really? And I was just assuming that once again the system had dragged in the wrong man.

  “Okay, but what did he do?” I specify.

  He lifts his pudgy hand and sketches out a couple of spirals in the air.

  “Ah,” I say, as if I’d understood.

  Burzone comes over to me.

  “How do things look now, Counselor?”

  I shrug my shoulders.

  “What can I tell you? Let’s just wait and see.”

  “What if they send me back inside?”

  “Not a forgone conclusion,” I reply, in the tone of a scholastic hypothesis.

  “Maybe if I told her something that she wanted to know, Her Honor would send me home.”

  I stiffen, hoping that Burzone isn’t about to provide the answer I’m afraid of in response to the question I’m about to ask him.

  “In what sense, if I may ask?”

  “I was at least hoping for house arrest.”

  Which actually means: if it hadn’t been for you, I might be about to get out of here.

  In other words, not only have I defended this filthy creature, but I have to listen to him tell me that maybe things would have worked out better if I’d just stayed home.

  I’m starting to wonder if I’m cut out for criminal law. Something about Camorristi seems to make me touchy.

  “Are you guilty, Fantasia?” I snap, staring him in the eyes.

  “Ah?” he says, startled.

  “Do you dismember dead bodies and then bury them in the mountains, scattering the limbs to keep anyone from identifying the corpse?” I spell out in a crescendo.

  “Counselor, what are you saying,” says Burzone, with a very guilty little smile playing across his lips.

  “You don’t know anything about the hand they found in your backyard, do you?”

  “No. Yes. That is, what do you mean? Of course I don’t know anything,” he gasps.

  “Then what else could you have told the judge? You told her the truth, didn’t you?”

  Silence. He doesn’t even answer that one.

  “So, if you told the truth, then we have nothing to worry about. You have nothing on your conscience and I have nothing on mine, because I have represented a client who told the truth.”

  Full stop. Burzone is wrung dry. He has nothing left to say.

  Well, he asked for it.

  The preliminary judge’s door swings open again. We see the idiot stick his head out with the usual sheet of paper in hand. We all stop talking. He just stands there, without a fucking word. We look one another in the eye. What is this, a guessing game?

  “Fantasia,” he finally decides.

  We go back in.

  “Have a seat,” the preliminary judge invites us.

  I take a seat. Burzone sort of sits down and sort of doesn’t.

  The preliminary judge inhales a lungful before she begins expelling words.

  “All right, Signore Fa
ntasia, you’re a free man.”

  “What did you say?” I ask.

  “What’d you say?” asks Burzone.

  The preliminary judge looks at me with something bordering on tenderness.

  “We’re releasing him, Counselor. He can go home.”

  I don’t know if I’m capable of controlling the joy that’s colonizing my face. I turn to look at Burzone. He’s so overwhelmed by the news that he has practically no reaction. He’s just standing there, his hands in midair, as if someone had hit pause on a remote control.

  “There is insufficient evidence to order any measures of detention in your case,” Anjelica Huston explains. “The one judicial order we will issue is for periodic scheduled visits to a parole officer.”

  At that point, Burzone starts giving off blazes of light. “Periodic scheduled visits” was, evidently, the password. He clasps his hands together, crosses his fingers, puts them to his lips, and kisses his crossed fingers a dozen times or more. Then, in a completely unexpected twist, he leans over me and gives me a hug. I try to extract myself, but he just grabs me tighter and goes on panting and drooling into my ear, muttering words that I can’t understand. I’m not only immobilized, I’m baffled and embarrassed by this sudden piece of theatrics. Instinctively I work around the bulky thorax of Burzone as he continues to wrap his arms around me and sob with happiness to get a look at Anjelica Huston across the desk. She covers her mouth with one hand and laughs. I throw open my arms, signaling my surrender, in order to convey to Burzone that now it’s really time for him to release me. And he finally lets me go. He’s soaked the collar of my shirt and half my tie, I’m revolted to discover. I try to sort myself out with both hands, combing and straightening, while he dries his tears and does his best to recover, after which he thanks the preliminary judge and hurtles out of the room.

  PRESSING

  I emerge from the prison, catatonic, with my briefcase in one hand and a copy of the decree—which I don’t even want to read—in the other.