I Hadn't Understood (9781609458980) Page 24

  “Let’s do this. You can give me a ride to my office, but I don’t want to hear a word out of you, understood? Not one word.”

  He nods his head yes with some display of confusion.

  “Did you hear me talking, Counselor?”

  “You starting again? I said not one word, do you understand Italian, yes or no?”

  He raises both hands.

  I climb onto the scooter.

  And we go.

  When I do this sort of thing, that is, peel out in high gear for a vicious argument and then desist, converting my impulse for a brawl into a simmering and inoffensive broth of resentment, I find myself hemmed into that very particular variety of unproductive conflict, exquisitely aesthetic in nature, in which you do your best to make it clear to the other person that you can’t stand them, and yet there you remain. Which is, after all, a typically matrimonial situation: instead of telling your spouse to go fuck himself, you sulk. Practically speaking, you deep-freeze the conflict. You put it in the freezer, in the lowest compartments, and you make use of the daily chill drawer until one fine day you decide that a trial separation is the one and only way to defrost it. People break up to defrost their conflicts much more frequently than you’d be likely to guess. Because at a certain point you’ve got to get over the cold wars. You have to make something happen, at last. Which is why, when people break up, even people who aren’t stupid, they discover that they’re so stupidly determined not to let their spouse come out the winner, and they do everything they can to engage in a form of obstructionism. Separation and divorce, once you start down that road, produces chain reactions that are virtually unstoppable. It turns into a matter of principle. A way of saying, too late, the words that you wish you’d said that one time when you couldn’t think of anything to say. It doesn’t do you a bit of good, but it’s one of those things you decide you just have to do, even if you don’t exactly understand the reason why.

  “Separation,” by the way, is a word that has an inexplicable driving force, a sort of linguistic front-wheel drive: the minute you utter the word you’ve started separating, even if it doesn’t seem that way. It brings misfortune, in a certain sense. It pulls down decisions on your head without even giving you the time to make them. It conditions your behavior, undermines existing relationships, launches itself into the future with immediate effect. It’s a sort of virus. That’s why you have to be so careful about saying the word. If you ask me, most people who have broken up up only did so because one day they uttered the word.

  In short, on the Vespa I act all offended the whole way to the office, even when we pull up in front of the street door and I finally get off the scooter.

  “Well, thanks very much,” I say. “Take care.”

  Tricarico grimaces and raises a finger.

  “Can I say something?”

  “What are we, at school?” I comment.

  He snickers.

  “Can I come up for a minute?”

  “Eh?”

  “To your office. Just for a minute.”

  “What now?” I say, indignantly. “Do you want to take a look at my office?”

  “No, what do I care about your office, Counselor?”

  He seems to mean what he’s saying.

  “Don’t you dream of it,” I decree.

  “Please,” he says, and puts on a miserable expression.

  If he’s acting, he’s very good.

  “What’s got into you?” I ask.

  “I have to go to the bathroom.”

  I’m flabbergasted, bowled over, flummoxed.

  “Oh, my God. And you need to come to my office? There’s a bar across the street, don’t you see it?”

  “I don’t use bar bathrooms.”

  “Why not?”

  “They’re disgusting. And I have a problem with closing the door.”

  I stand there, arms akimbo, and tilt my head to one side.

  “For real?”

  He looks at the pavement.

  “You mean, you’re afraid you’ll be locked in?” I ask, realizing as I speak that I’ve lowered my voice.

  He doesn’t answer, but he’s answered.

  I run my hand through my hair, accompanying the blazing recollection of a trauma I experienced many years ago. Something like twenty-seven, twenty-eight years ago, at a party at a classmate’s house, I was locked in the bathroom. Actually, I didn’t even really need to go to the bathroom, in the sense that I didn’t have to pee, but I went into the bathroom anyway because when you’re at a party where there’s a girl that you like, every so often you have to disappear for 15-20 minutes at a time; that way after you’ve been gone for a while she’ll start asking other people where you are and even come looking for you, if she can’t figure out why you’ve suddenly vanished. In general, in these cases, you go out onto the balcony to smoke one cigarette after another, running the risk of contracting bronchial asthma while waiting for her to turn up and instead she promptly fails to turn up (while your friends, who have figured out your little subterfuge, emerge from indoors, asking questions like: “What’s up, too hot inside?”; or else, in an even more diplomatic show of delicacy: “You want me to go get her?”); but the problem at the home of this classmate of mine was that there weren’t any balconies and so, not knowing where else to implement my strategy of disappearing from circulation, I went into the bathroom, and after a while, when I was ready to return to the party, I turned the handle but the door wouldn’t open. I tried everything I could think of to get that fucking key to turn but nothing worked, it was as if someone had cemented it in place with liquid steel.

  After I’d been locked in there for fifteen minutes or so, Stefano Cavallo showed up. I told him in a whisper that he had to help me get out of there, and discreetly, if there was any way he could pull it off. And do you know what that traitor, that son of Cain did in response to my request? He started shouting: “Oh, everyone, come running, Malinconico’s locked himself in the bathroom!” And a minute later the entire party had rushed en masse from the living room to the door of my little prison, with my classmates eagerly debating the best way to get me out of there, and me having to pretend I thought it was fun and funny, taking part in the discussion and laughing at their shitty jokes on the other side of the locked door. I swear, I can still remember every minute of it, the look of pity on the face of the girl I liked, when I finally managed to get out of there.

  All this just to say that since that night I’ve never locked a bathroom door in my life, not even at home; so now I can’t help but feel an irresistible impulse of solidarity toward Tricarico, after his confession.

  And anyway, I found Stefano Cavallo’s diary later and I pissed in it.

  “Okay, whatever, come on up,” I concede. “Just a minute, though, and then off you go.”

  “Okay.”

  As we head upstairs, I realize the degree to which the discovery that even a Camorra hitter suffers from fears of this kind has already improved my relationship with him. Take a look at me: suddenly I’m even walking differently. I’ve stopped worrying about him coming after me; I’m no longer pacing myself in accordance with his gait, but I even accelerate.

  Reinvigorated by this development, once we get to the front door of the shared office, I culpably fail to warn him that the instant I insert the key in the lock the canine burglar alarm is going to go off. And so, when I unlock the door and the damned toy spitz explodes in furious full-throated yelping, Tricarico leaps straight into the air with fright and puts one hand on his heart.

  Whereupon I burst into laughter and open the door.

  “What the fu—” Tricarico grunts, but afterwards he starts laughing, too. All things considered, he’s a funny guy, truth be told.

  “It’s the dog that belongs to this cooperative here,” I explain, gesturing toward the door of the Arethusa while I close the front door behind us. “It always does that.”

  “Well, you could have warned me, couldn’t you?” he objects, justifia
bly, with one hand still on his chest, and even a little red in the face.

  “Oh, well, you know,” I lie, “by now I don’t even think of it anymore.”

  Maybe because it’s detected the presence of a stranger, the toy spitz is yapping even more furiously than usual. It’s howling itself hoarse, hurling itself against the door, head-butting the door so powerfully that it’s a wonder that it doesn’t sustain a canine lapdog skull fracture. At this point, I’m sure that the dog is alone in the office, otherwise Roberto-Sergio or Clelia-Ginevra, in there, would already have forced it to pipe down. It’s incredible how angry a little dog like that can make a person.

  I haven’t even finished composing the concept in my mind when, as if through some kind of telepathic conjuncture, I turn toward Tricarico with the chilling certainty that he’s thinking exactly the same thing.

  “Wait, didn’t you need to go the bathroom?” I ask, subconsciously hoping to prevent him from doing something that I don’t even want to imagine.

  “Would you excuse me for just a moment?” he says. A request that, to judge from the expression on his face, translates roughly as a firm injunction not to even think of trying to stop him. And so, with the presence of mind of a guinea pig, I step aside.

  He knocks at the door.

  No answer. Aside from the toy spitz, obviously.

  He looks at me.

  Don’t do it, I think.

  He does it.

  I silently pray that they’ve locked the door.

  The door doesn’t open.

  I heave a sigh of relief.

  Tricarico turns his head and looks at me, arching his eyebrows in a compassionate expression.

  Don’t do it, I think again.

  He lowers the handle and delivers a sharp, decisive shove forward, as if he were shifting into first gear. And the little tongue of the door-lock reveals its precarious fragility. The great thing is that it doesn’t even break.

  Tricarico looks back at me and smiles, with a diabolical glimmer that back-lights his right eye.

  For a single fleeting instant the toy spitz is silent.

  “Oh, be careful!” I cry when he opens the door and the little beast hurtles straight at him with a snarl, latching on to the right sleeve of his jacket.

  Without losing even a smidgen of composure, Tricarico lifts the dog level with his face, and with the other hand he grabs it by the scruff of its doggy neck. The toy spitz clenches its jaws, scrambles its legs furiously, snarls and foams at the mouth, its eyes rolling frantically, its crescent-shaped tail whipping back and forth through the air. Seen from up close, in an oblong version, the dog is obscenely rickety and stunted, pathetic in its senseless blinding rage. It’s not biting anything but the sleeve of a jacket, the little moron, but it has no intention of releasing its grip. Without even realizing it, I barricade myself behind my bodyguard; in fact, he turns as if to ask me to give him a little room.

  I comply.

  Tricarico takes a step forward and enters the office of the Arethusa cooperative.

  I follow him with bated breath: in fact, this is the first time that I’ve had the experience of entering this office. Before today, the office of the Arethusa cooperative was Bluebeard’s Room for all of us in here. I can already picture Espe’s incredulous face when I tell him about it.

  While the toy spitz dangles from the enemy’s forearm, savaging the fabric of the sleeve, we look around. Tricarico seems rather interested in the poster of the Robert Doisneau photograph, “Kiss by the Hôtel de Ville,” which I personally find super-trite. I stop instead to gaze in rapt admiration at a magnificent Klappsta easy chair, a sober Le Corbusier imitation, which I’ve been thinking about getting for years.

  Once we’re done with our respective appreciations, Tricarico tears the dog’s jaws away from the sleeve of his jacket with a sharp yank, and the rest of the dog comes away with the jaws. At this point the toy spitz flips out; it probably doesn’t even realize that it’s no longer chomping down on anything. Its jaws continue to snap at empty air as it alternates each bite with a pathetic snarl; all the while, Tricarico holds it suspended in midair, waiting for it to come to the realization of the way things now stand.

  In fact, after a short interval, it dawns on the dog that its situation has changed. For the first time, it looks straight at its new adversary. At that point, it finally falls silent. A slightly pathetic interlude, truth be told.

  Continuing to dangle the diminutive quadruped, Tricarico turns his head and glances at me, as if to say: “You see?” I shrug my shoulders to deny the existence of any prior bet or understanding between the two of us, whereupon he, with the impassiveness of someone setting out to demonstrate a theorem, lifts his right arm, opens his right hand flat, braces the toy spitz, and then delivers a straight-armed slap in the face with such intense violence that the poor little dog, recoiling against the palm of the other hand that’s gripping it relentlessly by the scruff of the neck, reminds me of nothing so much as a crash-test dummy when its shoulder harness jerks it back against the seat back the instant after the car hits the wall.

  The sound of the impact (flat, vaguely metallic) is just as chilling as the yip of pain that accompanies it. After which the office of the Arethusa collective is plunged into a horrible silence.

  Tricarico kneels down and gently places the dog back on the floor. The toy spitz, now catatonic, sits there tucked back on its hind legs, between the Rebus rattan wastebasket and the sawhorse legs of the Galant desk, without making a single solitary sound.

  Tricarico stands up, turns toward me (I’m more or less as shocked as the dog), puts one hand on my shoulder and permits himself two little pats, as if he were telling me: “There, there, it’s all over.” Then he turns his gaze to the Robert Doisneau poster, which he must really like a lot.

  I open my mouth, wondering if all this really happened. In the space of just a couple of minutes, and without any particular effort, my unorthodox bodyguard and handler has solved a problem that has been the bane of my existence for the past two years every time I returned to my office.

  The truth is that, just beneath the surface of my repulsion for the crudeness of the method, I feel an intriguing sense of admiration for this elementary ability to triumph over situations. I’m ashamed to say it, but I like his openly anti-cultural attitude. Even if it disgusts me.

  The secret of the Camorra’s success, I think as I’m standing there, must be the way that they eliminate the whole idea of problem-solving. In their cognitive system, probably, there’s no human situation that can’t be solved in a brusque and direct manner. Life is objective, it responds to elementary input: why make things complicated? You want something? Take it. Does someone you know have more money than you? Make him give you some. Do you yearn for a woman who won’t give you the time of day? Rape her. Whatever the topic, they approach it in terms of elimination and appropriation. Nothing remains uncertain. There are no pending questions. That’s why Camorristi have such a natural and practical relationship with death; they kill and are killed continuously. It’s because, as far as they’re concerned, there’s absolutely nothing tragic about death.

  Whereas I’m constantly overwhelmed by imponderables. I have a horror of death. I perceive life as something that continually opposes an obstinate and dignified resistance to my every desire. I have, so to speak, a mortgage-holder’s attitude to life. Life gives me a series of deadlines, life obliges me to make a number of periodic payments, if that conveys the idea. It’s not something I take for granted, the idea that I’m here and that life is here too, that we’re both in the same place. Life isn’t free, you know. I have always nurtured this idea of life as a mortgage that extracts a portion of what I make every month, while at the same time preventing me from turning into a complete savage, in a certain sense.

  In other words, unlike Tricarico, I’ve never had the nerve to break into the office of the Arethusa collective and deliver a nice straight-armed smack right to the snout of that shitty
little toy spitz that’s been giving me heart attacks every time I come to work, though I can’t tell you how much pleasure it would have given me to do so.

  Which is to say, I can’t seem to bring myself to simply take what I want. It strikes me as ridiculous to think that things are simply there, and that it’s your fault if you fail to take them. I have never believed in the idea that all you have to do is reach out and grab. And the fact that someone else manages to do it still doesn’t make me believe that it’s true, and that’s all.

  “The bathroom?”

  Tricarico’s voice breaks into my thoughts like a doorbell.

  “Eh?” I ask.

  “The bathroom,” he repeats.

  “Oh, right,” I say, “all the way down the hall, on the right.”

  He heads down the hall.

  I call after him.

  “Oh, wait a sec.”

  He turns around.

  “What is it?”

  “The door,” I say.

  He turns his gaze in the direction of the lock he just forced a few minutes ago.

  “What about it?” he answers, or really, he asks.

  “Will they be able to tell?” I ask. It strikes me as incredible that we’re in the same room as the now-silent toy spitz.

  “No-o-o, absolutely not,” he rules out categorically. And he waves me out of the room, as if to say: “Come on, I’ll show you.”

  So I catch up with him, placing myself in his competent hands. As I do, I glance over again at the dog, staring into the void from its position on the floor, and I actually feel a twinge in my heart, truth be told.

  Tricarico lets me go first (he’s practically obsequious, as far as that goes), he pulls the door shut behind him with a sharp yank (at first the lock opposes some resistance, but then it yields to persuasion), and he gives the handle a couple of strong shakes, twisting it up and down, up and down, until you hear something sliding into place. At that point he steps to one side and, assuming the pose of an apprentice elevator operator, he points to the door handle with both hands, inviting me to give it the acid test myself.