I Hadn't Understood (9781609458980) Read online

  I accept the offer.

  I push down on the door handle.

  I lean into the door and try to open it.

  I wonder what profession Tricarico’s mamma does or did.

  That door is closed. It’s what you’d call a perfectly clean job, and I contemplate it with candor of a boy scout.

  Tricarico flashes me a smile that says “mission accomplished” and heads off down the hall toward the bathroom.

  I stand there for another couple of minutes, reviewing the various scenes of the imminent detective mystery, where Attilia-Germana does her best to snap the toy spitz found in the locked room out of its inexplicable state of shock and Roberto-Sergio inspects the door and window of the office in search of any signs of breaking and entering.

  I emerge from the spell and I walk over to my, shall we say, office. I pull the Innocenti steel tube away from the window and I turn on my computer. After a while, the sound of a flushing toilet heralds Tricarico’s return. I sit down on my Skruvsta, I open the file on a car accident lawsuit that was taken care of last fall, I furrow my brow, and, in other words, I strike a pose. Tricarico walks in and starts getting acquainted with my office without betraying even the slightest appreciation for the overarching Ikea-ism of the place. I am once again obliged to recognize that he possesses a discretion that continually astonishes me, in someone like him.

  “Listen,” I say to him as he’s standing there, absorbed in Nighthawks with his back to me (he clearly has a thing about posters, I guess), “I wanted . . . well, it wasn’t a pretty sight, but still, thanks, that’s all.”

  “For what?” he says, without even turning around.

  “I meant the dog.”

  “Ah. Don’t mention it, it was nothing,” he replies, continuing to admire my reproduction of Hopper’s famous coffee shop.

  Since the silence that follows an expression of gratitude always embarrasses me, I return to the subject, just for the sake of something to say.

  “It was a misery to have to deal with that toy spitz yelping every time and . . . hey, are you listening to me?”

  At the very instant in which he turns to answer me, it’s as if his face has suddenly become more pointed. Evidently what I said must have aroused his interest, and now he wants to explore it in greater depth.

  “So it isn’t true that you never even noticed it anymore,” he points out.

  “What do you mean?” I stall for time.

  “When we came in, that’s what you said.”

  “Well, what is this, a lie detector test? Aside from the fact that you never even asked permission,” I counterattack, reddening.

  “Permission?” he asks, bewildered.

  “Permission, permission. You did it all on your own. You just up and went in there. What if I hadn’t wanted you to do it? What if they’d come back and found you in their office? Eh? What would I have said to them?”

  “Counselor, what do you mean, first you thank me and then you scold me?”

  Whereupon I don’t know what to say, since it’s obvious that he has a point. It’s pure good luck that someone knocks at the door just then.

  “Now who the fuck is that,” I grumble in relief. And I start to get up from the Skruvsta.

  “Don’t bother,” he says, “I’ll go.”

  “What do you mean you’ll go, wai—”

  But I’m not fast enough to stop him before he’s out of the room and down the hall. I’d like to yell after him that he’s not my secretary, but instead I sit there, half curved over the Jonas, astonished at how intrusive he is.

  Reality hits pause until I hear him open the door and say Buon giorno. When whoever it is returns the greeting and asks if I’m there, and from the voice I recognize the demented tenant who recently confided in me about his disquieting problems with his Polish live-in girlfriend, I’m reminded of a television commercial that ends with the phrase: “Help me,” with Christian De Sica flopping over helplessly onto the steering wheel of the car.

  In fact, I sit back down.

  Tricarico comes back, letting the tenant go ahead of him, the tenant whose name I absolutely can’t remember just now, actually.

  “Ciao, Vincenzo,” says the guy, walking in so briskly that then and there I have to wonder if by some chance I might have given him an appointment.

  “Oh, ciao,” I reply in some confusion.

  Before I can even inquire as to the reason for this visit, he takes a seat on one of the Hampus chairs without asking.

  “Oh please, come in, make yourself comfortable,” I feel like saying to him.

  I look him up and down: he’s wearing a worn-out polo shirt, once dark blue, that looks as if it hasn’t been changed in the past two days at least, and a pair of horrible pleated jeans for fifty-year-olds, so drab that they trend worrisomely toward beige. I’ve never seen him looking so bedraggled. And since I believe that the state of a person’s clothing more or less reflects their psychological state, I’m starting to get apprehensive about the potential development of this unscheduled entertainment.

  He leans forward and starts scrutinizing me, as if he were trying to predict my next move. Whereupon I look at the surface of my desk, sensing the sudden lack of a chessboard.

  Behind him, in the door, Tricarico eyes me closely, awaiting further instructions. I transmit no signals, but I find his presence pretty comforting just now.

  We all remain silent and motionless for two long minutes until the tenant whose name I continue not to remember finally says:

  “Sorry if I didn’t come by the day before yesterday, for our appointment. I still needed to think it over.”

  What the fuck are you talking about? I think.

  Tricarico puts his hands in his pocket and stands there listening.

  “I’m losing control of my nerves, Vincenzo. I’m thinking things that I shouldn’t think. I don’t where this is all leading.”

  “Where what’s leading?” I ask.

  He closes his eyes and then opens them again. The thought that just went through his mind must have made him wince.

  “She wants me to move out. To move out of my own home, you understand?”

  Tricarico pulls one hand out of his pocket and traces a couple of circles in midair. I slap him down with a ferocious glare. He desists.

  “I’m sorry to have to get you involved in this,” he resumes, “but you’re the only person I trust.”

  There we go. Let’s say that up to now, it was all within the bounds of the acceptable. But I don’t like that last phrase, whatever it meant, even a little bit.

  “Listen, can you tell me what you’re talking about?” I try saying. But it’s like trying to start a conversation with an answering machine.

  Giustino Talento. His name suddenly appears in my memory like a lightning bolt.

  “I can’t blame you if you don’t find it in your heart to forgive me, I just want you to know that, Vincenzo,” he goes on, talking to himself, “But I have to share this thing somehow. You understand me, don’t you?”

  “No.”

  He looks at me, glassy-eyed, and clamps his mouth shut. At that point I realize that the objective of his off-kilter mind is to use me as nothing more than a recipient to whom he can serve his demented subpoena. For this kind of wingnut, what matters is not that you interact with his lunatic plans; it’s enough that you listen to those plans, that you become a party to them. Knowledge becomes consent. Obviously, a deranged form of extortion. In the sense that he starts out from an absurd pretext, but still one that is articulated in accordance with a comprehensible logic. And in fact, you can even sort of understand it. That’s what’s so disturbing about wingnuts, what makes them so truly invasive and unpleasant: the suspicion that, if you stop and listen to them, they might actually wind up convincing you. As if their way of thinking could somehow infect yours. It’s because when they bend reality to their wishes, they bend you with it. Which is how they destabilize.

  “Listen to me,” I tell him, “I
don’t know what you have in mind and I don’t want to know. And just to be perfectly clear, I didn’t understand a single word of whatever you just said.”

  He lowers his head, but his lips are twisted with the victorious smirk of a properly served subpoena.

  Without even realizing it, I give Tricarico a glance, and he intervenes like a radio-controlled bouncer.

  “Oh,” he says, putting a hand on his shoulder, “it’s time for you to go.”

  Giustino turns around, looks up, focuses on him.

  Goodbye victorious smirk of a properly served subpoena.

  “Did you hear me?” Tricarico explores the concept in greater depth. As if to say that, otherwise, what comes next is physical ejection from this office and probably from the apartment building itself.

  Giustino looks at me, but I don’t say anything. He gets up.

  He turns on his heel and leaves, freeing up some space.

  One time, at the zoo, I saw a gorilla curve his shoulders in that exact same way, turning his back on a crowd of rude little boys clustering around the front of his cage, jeering. Identical.

  As for me, I feel like a complete piece of shit, if you really want to know.

  FLIRTING WITH YOUR EX

  Some sort of avoidance mechanism must have made me completely forget about my appointment with Nives, because when my ex-wife calls me at 2:15 to ask: “Vin­cenzo, are you having problems?” I instinctively start to ask: “Problems of what kind?” but I manage to hold it in, remembering that we had agreed to meet for lunch at Il Sergente. I tell her that in fact I did have a problem so I’m running late but I’ll be there soon—ten minutes at the most, I improvise, even though from where I am when she calls me—that is, in an Expert electronics store browsing color television sets—it’ll take at least twenty minutes, if not longer.

  That’s me all over. A true master of the improvisational jazz of complications. Give me a situation that’s already compromised, and watch me launch into my virtuoso solo. The funny thing is that I work hard at complicating my life, in an almost invariably unsuccessful attempt to simplify it. The thing is, when I don’t know what to do, I fudge. Not in a fraudulent way. I’m just always trying to cut corners, catch up. Because alongside the survival instinct, there’s also the instinct to cut corners, which is why, for instance when you’re late for an appointment and you want them to wait for you, you declare ten when the actual time required is twenty minutes. Thus, you force the person waiting for you to give you a discount on the time you’re already running late, as if you had restarted the clock on that appointment from the moment when you stretched the truth. Because otherwise the other person could reasonably tell you: “Go fuck yourself,” or maybe even say nothing and just leave, while you’re still on your way.

  Of course, it would be great if that’s how things went. But that’s not how they go at all. There’s always a basic, concrete reason why people wait for you. And that basic, concrete reason, whatever people may say, is far more compelling than the lovely internal flights of rhetoric you indulge in about how intolerable it is for people to show up late. It’s not really all that simple to say: “I’m leaving now,” and then actually stand up and leave. If there’s a woman you want to see, let’s say, just to pick a random example, and even if she makes you wait and that’s something that normally gets you upset, there’s nothing more likely than that you’ll wait for her anyway, well past your normal limits of what’s tolerable. And even though at first glance it might seem like a typical case of male submission to female with the expectation of a fairly radical short-term reversal of positions, what is really happening in that situation, what you’re really doing, is you’re plea-bargaining with life. Because life (and it becomes especially clear to you when you’re waiting for something or someone who is running late) is made up primarily of plea bargains. It’s made up of transactions in which—and this is the revelation that blows you away—you discover that you’re capable of a degree of downward-trending comprehension that you normally can’t understand when you see it in other people. And there are things that become clear to you, for instance the fact that leaving now would be tantamount to telling the nasty thing you’re waiting for that, as far as you’re concerned, she can go get fucked (by some other guy? Just the thought of that possibility is enough to catapult you into bottomless despair).

  And anyway, to come back to the topic at hand, this time it’s Nives who has to stoop to a little plea-bargaining.

  “That’s all right, it doesn’t matter,” she says to me, but she says it as if something were happening that mattered, “but get here quickly if you can, okay?”

  I remain speechless for a couple of seconds with my cell phone in my hand, and then I roughly triple my walking speed.

  When I get to Il Sergente, I can scarcely believe my eyes. Sitting at the table with Nives is the architect. I see him through the plate glass window, before entering the restaurant. What the fuck does this mean, I wonder. Then, without thinking twice, I walk in.

  The restaurant is a large open space with a wood-burning oven in plain view, crowded with tables jammed one up against the other. The place is packed. The diners are all talking at once at an intolerable volume, which only confuses me even more. The waiters, red-faced and frenzied, hurry to and fro, their arms loaded with dishes. None of the staff seems to notice me. Perched on a high stool behind the cash register, a matron with dyed blonde hair and outsized seventies smoke-grey sunglasses is talking on the phone at the same time that she rings up a customer (a lack of respect that I find galling, just as much as if she were doing it to me, I have to say). Hanging on the wall behind her, a Last Supper featuring Totò, Peppino, Sophia Loren, Massimo Troisi, and Pino Daniele enjoys pride of place, a classic of local pop art that always prompts an indescribable surge of sadness in me. I stand there looking toward the table of the newlyweds until Nives catches sight of me, stands up, and waves me over, while the miserable cuckold blatantly avoids meeting my gaze.

  “You, sir, are an idiot,” I mouth mentally; next I glare at my ex-wife, just long enough to let her know that I’m going to make her pay for this one; then I turn on my heel and walk out.

  Compared to the deafening din in the restaurant, ordinary street noise seems like silence. Even the air is nice out here. I look at a one way/no entry sign as if I found it rather interesting. A couple about to enter the restaurant asks me if there’s much of a wait. I tell them I have no idea and stroll off down the sidewalk at a snail’s pace, counting down from ten. Before I even reach six, Nives runs out of the restaurant and calls my name. I turn and give her another murderous glare. For a second I see in her eyes that she’s afraid I might smack her.

  “Why the fuck did you ask me to come, eh? How dare you pull this kind of move on me?”

  Guys, let me tell you, there’s nothing as satisfying as acting offended when you are unmistakably in the right.

  “Ah, how dare I? You gallop into my office, burst into the middle of a session of therapy, put on your little cabaret act, and now you decide that you can preach to me?”

  “So that’s what you wanted? To get even? Nice job, you did it, congratulations. Now you can go back to your table. Buon appetito.”

  I turn to go. She grabs me by the arm.

  “Wait. He’s leaving right away,” she says. She spoke in a low voice, I notice.

  “I don’t give a goddamn if he’s leaving right away,” I snap back at her, flying into a rage. “I wouldn’t have come in the first place if I’d known you were bringing him with you.”

  “I didn’t bring him,” she goes on explaining with perfect calm. “He showed up while I was waiting for you. I didn’t tell him I was having lunch with you.”

  “So, what, is he following you?”

  “He told me that he was walking by and he saw me from the street.”

  “And you believe him?”

  “What does that matter, since I lied to him in the first place? Anyway, he and I have just finished
having a fight. I told him to leave. He said he was leaving.”

  “Then how come he’s still inside?”

  “He waited for you to get here. He wanted you to see him. I think he’s trying to show you that he’s not giving you a free hand, he’s not going to get out of your way.”

  I think that over for a second.

  “Why, what a lovely analysis, Nives. And what do you expect me to do, fight a duel with that pathetic loser?”

  “He’s afraid of you, Vincenzo.”

  “Oh, he is? I can’t tell you how sorry I am, really. Wait a minute, what do you mean he’s afraid of me?”

  “He says there’s a distance between him and me, that I’m growing further away from him. That it’s ending between us, and that I don’t even realize it.”

  And that’s how you tell me? I feel like saying to her. Let’s go inside and I’ll order a bottle of champagne, right?

  Instead, I riposte with a textbook comeback:

  “Listen, Nives, those are problems between the two of you. You don’t have any right to involve me in your architect’s mood swings.”

  “I’m not the one that’s involving you, he’s the one who’s taking his time. I told him to leave, but I can’t expect to snap my fingers and have him obey my every command. What do you want me to do, throw him out of the restaurant? After all, he does have a point. He just found out that I lied to him.”

  “Ooh, for God’s sake, Nives, what do you want from me? You want me to say that he’s right, now?”

  “Quite the opposite. I wanted to stay and have lunch with you, and I still do. It’s up to you. If you come in, he’ll leave: practically speaking, the two of us can send him away together. But if you leave, then he’ll probably stay.”

  “But you could leave.”

  “And what difference would that make for you, if you’re leaving anyway?”

  “Eh. No difference.”

  “Exactly.”

  Well, Jesus H. Christ on a crutch.