I Hadn't Understood (9781609458980) Page 23

  In other words, when you’re in love you turn into a goddamned cynic. Worse: a new-money oaf, who discovers that the minute he has some personal wealth he values the things he used to look down upon when he couldn’t afford them; so he goes around trying to palm himself off as a sensitive soul, with a yearning for the beautiful and the spiritual.

  But there’s no point in you saying how you love sunsets, because if you didn’t like them before then you really don’t like them now. Likewise, it’s pointless for you to inhale great lungfuls of fresh air, saying how much you love the scent and flavor, because you know you’ve never given a damn about breathing deep like the veterinarian in the television commercial for Amaro Montenegro, otherwise you wouldn’t have started smoking. Just like it’s pointless for you to go into bookstores and ponder the blurbs on the back covers and inside flaps of the books, because you know perfectly well that you can’t wait to get out of there. And it’s useless for you to stop and talk to everyone you meet, even people you don’t know, and patiently listen to every word they say to you, implicitly repeating that tired old sermon about how everyone deep down has something interesting to say as long as you know how to listen, because really, other people are of no interest to you whatsoever. And there is no point in you talking and talking, because anyway you don’t really believe the things you’re saying. Just as it’s useless for you to start playing an instrument again, because when you stopped fifteen years ago there must have been a reason.

  This sort of mental defectiveness, which ushers together both a resurgence of cynicism and metaphysical yearnings, not only undermines laboriously constructed reputations and damages decades-old friendships; it can also have serious repercussions on political elections, so that parties need to be worried about the vote of people in love.

  And then there’s cosmic depression, which threatens the very process of evolution.

  Let’s say you’re at the station waiting for a train. You’re in love and you’re in a relationship (but she’s at home, or at work). It’s not like you’re leaving on some extended trip; you’re going to be back the next day. You’re reading the newspaper, everything’s normal. All around you are other people waiting for a train. It’s not raining, it’s not hot out, it’s not cold. In a situation like this, here’s what can happen: the public address system, for instance, might announce a ten-minute delay, or else a middle-aged woman might ask you if this is the platform for the train to Bologna, and you, for no good reason, just like that, I mean from one minute to the next, feel yourself sliding into a completely meaningless state of disappointment, a sadness based on nothing, and your entire immune system turns in its resignation en masse, and the world suddenly becomes the worst possible place to live, so that you have the impression that you can sense all the injustices that blight this planet gathered into a single unpleasant bundle, and everything starts to go a sort of drab blue-grey, and now you want your momma, and your shoulders start to slump, you turn into a living triangle, and then your hand of its own accord seeks out your inside jacket pocket in a desperate quest for an antidote, and now you’ve found it, you dial the number and then you give the death blow to whatever remaining pathetic shreds of your dignity are trailing along at your heels like a big-eyed seal pup imploring you not to do it but, there, you’ve done it, the phone rings once, twice, a third time: “Ciao,” you say to her; and she answers: “Oh,” as if to say: “Why’d you call?”; and you say: “It’s me”; and she says: “I know” (understandably—what else is she supposed to say to you?); so then you say nothing and you even act slightly offended; she vaguely perceives it but she can’t really be certain (because if she were certain she’d tell you to go to wherever it is that you ought to be told to go in that case), and at that point she asks you, in no uncertain terms, what’s wrong, and you say: “Oh, nothing,” but you say it in the key of D minor, understood, with that nostalgic harmonic shift in your voice, the ambiguous, guilt-inducing intonation that in your devious intentions ought to be sufficient to make her melt at the other end of the line and respond: “Ah, now I understand, darling, you just want me to tell you that I love you, and of course I do, I’m so happy that you called me, call me again whenever you want, I hope you do”; but instead she justifiably says: “Ah,” which amounts to: “Well then, why did you call me in the first place, if you don’t have anything to say to me?”

  Whereupon the phrase brings you back to your senses with the immediacy of a bucket of cold water, you straighten your back, the train station becomes a train station again, and you feel as ashamed as if you’d been caught molesting fifteen-year-olds when you fully realize the depth of the level to which you just sank, because you know perfectly well that your dignity should be safeguarded from these deplorable sideshows that, among other things, have nothing at all to do with love, since what they amount to is premeditated bouts of whining, indecent petty episodes of extortion, demands to be picked up and carried like a baby and even taken to the park to feed the ducks.

  Another masterpiece of love is that it invents a series of coincidences and cause-and-effect relationships. It constructs improbable geometries linking events that have nothing to do with one another, making a mockery of hindsight and prompting lines like this: “I mean, do you realize that if that morning my car battery hadn’t died, I would have driven to X, instead of accepting the invation of Y, when he asked me to come join him at Z, which is where I met you for the first time, and everything that’s happened since then?”

  Which might, after all, even be true, in the sense that no one can deny that something took place in a certain order of events, if that’s the way it actually happened.

  It’s just that car batteries run down, and in fact they run down every day, it’s not as if they run down in some kind of special way when you’re about to start a relationship with someone. The fact that you start dating someone on a certain day doesn’t authorize you to create a cause-and-effect linkage between a dead battery and your new relationship, because (leaving aside the fact that the battery would have run down anyway) your dead battery might also have been the cause of a variety of other events far more worthy of consideration than the one you’re so proud of right now.

  Without taking into consideration the fact that, as far as your new relationship is concerned, the dead battery has no more and no less significance than the other events that conspired to ensure that you’d enter that relationship (the fact that you accepted the invitation, for instance: you could just as easily have decided to stay home, and then so long, new girlfriend), and so, with all the other factors that come into play, it’s not clear why the dead battery should be at the root of it all, unless you’re trying to prove that chronology is the guiding criterion in new relationships.

  Which, by the way, if you always thought in terms of dead batteries, and not just when you’re trying to prove that your love affair was written by destiny in the stars—a destiny that on that particular day was plotting on your behalf—and instead you considered that all the billions of circumstances that make up your life each has a significant relationship with each and every other circumstance, at the very least your brain would creak and collapse as it struggled to uncover all the various significant relationships among things.

  And in any case, without even bothering to delve deeper into all these considerations: it’s not like it’s such an amazing story you’re telling. It’s not like your girlfriend was sitting perched on the very edge of your building’s roof and you just happened to look out the window right below her (oh, it’s even better if it wasn’t even your apartment), and you happened to notice a pair of feet dangling just overhead, so you engaged her in a lengthy conversation about whether it’s worth the trouble to go on living, and you talked her down from the roof, and since then you’ve never spent a moment apart. If that was how things had gone then sure, you’d have grounds for talking about occult forces at play, because really there’s no comparison between a dead battery and an averted suicide attemp
t.

  But that’s not what happened at all. All that happened was you met a girl you liked, she liked you, and now you’re a couple.

  This yearning for a starring role in hindsight, which drives people to rewrite virtual scripts long after the play is over, is in fact a defect in one’s self-respect, a clear side effect of love, because it’s obvious that if a person had a shred of dignity and any awareness of the things that he says, he wouldn’t talk that way about a dead battery.

  And then there’s the last, worst symptom, where your dignity is so completely pummeled and crushed that you might as well get it out of your head that there’s any chance of recovery, and that’s when you find yourself depending on the other person’s mood.

  This phenomenon has to do with the phase in which the relationship is lurching and staggering (you’ve already stopped inhaling lungfuls of fresh air, lingering in bookstores, etc.) and she’s not even all that certain that she wants you around anymore; in fact, she’s more there than here, more over it than into it, so there are times when she’s affectionate and other times when she treats you like shit.

  The truth is (and you know it perfectly well) that you no longer really interest her, in fact, if you want to be completely honest, you’re even starting to get on her nerves just a little, but it’s just that every so often she feels guilty and so, in the grip of passing waves of pity for you, she turns all sweet and loving, and you, dangling shamefully from her little finger, start wagging your tail like a fox terrier and kidding yourself the minute you sense a hint of reconsideration.

  There’s no need to say at this point that your love affair is dead and buried with a cross planted on the grave because, in the end, you know that if a woman wants you she’ll come looking for you, and when she stops coming around it’s because she doesn’t want you anymore, and really there’s not much more to say on the subject.

  You on the other hand go on dragging yourself through this sort of emotional methadone in the hopes that things might work out, but there’s no cure for this particular kind of malfunction, there’s no fixing things and, whatever people might say, it’s never happened, never, that anybody succeeded in straightening out this kind of situation, just try asking around.

  Depending on someone’s mood, this thing where if she’s nice to you then you can make it through to the end of the day in one piece but if she treats you with indifference then you’re just a shell of a man and you can’t get a thing done and your work piles up along with debts of various kinds, it’s just a completely shitty situation, ignominious, something you should get out of once and for all; it leaves a stain on your heart.

  And the most pathetic thing is that at this point whatever love there was is now dead and gone (what are you going to love when your dignity is in tatters?), but you go on talking about love. You’ve become the emotional equivalent of an Elvis fan, a misfit who’s incapable of living in the present, and in the way you dress, the way you talk, the way you listen to music, in the books you read and the things you write, and even in the way you go to bed with someone, you’re looking for something that no longer exists—that’s it, that’s all.

  SHOCK THE DOG

  The situation in which I find myself is completely anomalous. It violates all the boilerplate rules of chase scenes.

  Being followed is one of those typically cinematic sensations, the kind of thing that when it actually happens to you, you immediately feel as if you’re at the center of attention, as if you’re being followed not only by the person who’s following you but also by an audience who’s eager to know who’s following you and why.

  In these cases, in fact, the first thing you do when you’re out walking is to slow down, take a deep breath, and square your shoulders, as if somehow you felt incredibly interesting all of a sudden. The second thing you do is look around to get the best possible vantage point of the street you’re on, and pay careful attention to the things surrounding you (parked cars, moving cars, an indeterminate point on the sidewalk across the street, pedestrians walking ahead of you, pedestrians coming toward you—and in fact as they pass by, they give you looks as if to say What the hell are you looking at?—shop signs, and so on), with a view to coming up with some way of gaining leverage and turning the tables on the person following you, just like in the movies, in fact, when the person being followed suddenly disappears from the field of view of the follower, who immediately comes to a sudden halt in the middle of the sidewalk, disoriented (you know, so that anyone who happens by would swear that what this guy is doing is following somebody), and then kind of fumbles his way forward for a while until the guy he’s following, in magnificent athletic condition, appears from around a corner, grabs him by the scruff of the neck, hurls him up against the nearest wall, and beats him silly until he confesses who sent him.

  That’s as far as tailing somebody on foot. When it comes to car chases the boilerplate is slightly different (for instance, in the car being chased there’s almost always a woman in the passenger seat next to the driver, upbraiding him for having flirted shamelessly for the whole evening with another woman; just then, he shoots an eloquent glance up at the rearview mirror, returns his gaze firmly to the road ahead of him, doesn’t even bother to answer the woman, whereupon she flies into a rage but she doesn’t even have time to start dressing him down before he shifts gears, jams his foot down on the accelerator, and takes off like a rocket, and after the woman comes this close to doing a face-plant into the windshield, he says: “Better fasten your seatbelt”), even though, at the end of the chase scene, it’s always the car following them that goes hurtling off the road.

  Obviously in your case this is all just a farce, because if you really did think that a criminal was following you in order to rob you or settle some account that you know nothing about, at the very least you’d start running like a sewer rat or you’d scream for help in the general direction of the first policeman, traffic cop, or mailman (anyone wearing a uniform, in other words) you happen to see; I very much doubt that you’d waste time acting like the poor man’s James Bond, a part, furthermore, that no one has assigned you.

  The fact is that reality, in these cases, gives you a distorted idea of things from the very beginning, and you are only too eager to jump right in because, obviously, everybody needs a dose of self-importance now and again. They’re false dangers, situations with an induced, facilitated risk. It’s kind of like the inhabitants of Rome, if you’ve ever noticed, who always seem to be on the verge of trading punches but then they never actually come to blows, like on a train when people are lined up down the corridor of a passenger car, and the guy up ahead takes forever to get seated, so one guy says: “You wanna get a move on?”; and the other guy answers him: “Yeah, sure, if you just give me a second here”; and the first guy says: “Well, as long you don’t take the whole damned afternoon”; to which the other guy says: “Excuse me, do you have a problem here?”; and the first guy: “Maybe my problem is you, what do you say?”; and the other guy: “Ah, you think so? Well, that being so, I’m not sure I’m going to help you with your problem”; and the first guy: “No, I’m pretty sure you’re gonna take care of it, like it or not”; and the two of them are perfectly capable of going on like this for a solid fifteen minutes without ever actually trading punches unless the people behind them in line don’t start a shouting cascade of objections, so they have to shut down their debating session. You just picture the same kind of exchange in Naples, and try calculating how many (or how few) seconds would pass before the first fist crunches into the nasal septum of the other debater.

  In reality, the chase scene that actually does take place usually involves an acquaintance who spots you on the street from an average distance, not too close and not too far, and calls your name but you don’t hear him, whereupon he raises his voice by an octave, but you go on walking, minding your own business, and at that point your acquaintance has already kind of overdone it with the decibels, embarrassing himself with the other p
edestrians who look at him with a certain distaste, so he decides to take it to the limit, and he comes after you, only by now you’ve gained a considerable headstart on him, and so the chase is on.

  My current situation, as I was saying, doesn’t even comply with this elementary plot structure. I’m riding in a city bus, comfortably seated among family members of convicts, construction workers, and little old men (and why do you always see little old men riding the bus? It’s not like they have to go to work), and despite the miserable clattering of sheet metal produced by the rattletrap bus, I can’t help but obsess on the puttering noise of the Vespa following close behind us, faithfully slowing down for every bus stop. The driver has even noticed it, I saw him glancing into the rearview mirror a couple of times as if he’s about to stop the bus and get out.

  I try to ignore what’s going on but I can’t seem to do it, the engine of the Vespa is drilling through my brain, I even go so far as to suspect that Tricarico might have intentionally doctored the muffler (it certainly wasn’t making this much noise this morning). He’s just trying to wear me down, there’s no mistaking the pattern. They’re tremendous, the guys who set out to wear you down. They’re more or less like hyenas—the way that hyenas tag along behind wounded animals so that they can devour them at their leisure once loss of blood and exhaustion has laid them by the heels.

  This thought makes me so furiously indignant that suddenly I can’t stand to just ride along quietly without saying a word so I decide to get off the bus and dress Tricarico down, but good. Only, at the next stop, when I hop down from the bus and see him pulling up (beaming at the sight of me again so soon), the whole scene of the clobbering of the hooligan on the sidewalk unreels before my eyes, and my aggressivity shrinks so radically that I unexpectedly find myself saying: