I Hadn't Understood (9781609458980) Page 3

  So anyway, I walked up out of the subway station and it was a beautiful day outside, warm sunshine, sparkling air (sixth of October), people talking quietly, streets relatively uncrowded.

  At that moment—truth be told—I felt strangely better, as if the clubbing I had just undergone didn’t hurt nearly as bad as I’d thought it had when we were underground.

  I started walking aimlessly, skirting the taxi queues and listening to the conversations of people waiting for a cab, leaning on their wheelie suitcases. The world struck me as reasonable, arranged in the only way possible, if you know what I mean. The taxicabs, the buses, the cell phones going off, the cars slowing down to avoid hitting anyone.

  I’ll be okay, I was telling myself; this is hardly going to kill me.

  So I went on strolling, in the grip of a weird Zen sense of calm, until—once I wound up in the shopping mall, standing in front of that giant LCD television set—despair lunged out and wrapped its tendrils around me, like a carnivorous plant seizing you by the ankles.

  I look around with that bewildered gaze that you get when you’re trying to catch the flight attendant’s eye right after liftoff and no one feels bad but you, so in a frenzy of panic I went and buried myself in the self-service cafeteria that luckily was on the same floor. I walked up to the pasta counter without even picking up a tray and ordered a dish of bavette al pesto.

  The girl served me with an indifferent shrug, whereupon I thought to myself: “Why don’t people mind their own fucking business?” That made me feel a little better.

  I paid, I sat down at a formica table for two, and I twisted my fork in the pasta. While I was sitting there, I reflected that if this was one of those movies with a happy ending, my wife would show up unexpectedly right now (I’d recognize her from her clothing, and only then would I look up from my plate) and say nothing more than “What are you eating?”

  And then we’d each have a forkful of noodles without saying a single word.

  I swear on anything you care to name that for a couple of minutes at least I believed that might really be about to happen.

  THE PENGUIN ON THE LEDGE

  Just as I’m starting to wake up, I instinctively reach out to touch the other pillow and I discover—like a scene from the corniest movie where there’s some guy starting to wake up and he instinctively reaches out to touch the other pillow—that I’m alone.

  I open my eyes wide as if I didn’t already have a perfectly clear idea of the way things are and I see her standing in front of the Leksvik chest of drawers, already almost completely dressed, brushing her hair and scrutinizing herself in the mirror with the gaze of a detective.

  She isn’t done getting dressed, but she’s already out of the house, already mentally returning to her own world. She’s already disavowing, it’s obvious. She has to accelerate her return to the role that she abandoned once again on my account: that’s why she put on that hostile expression, as if I’d just done something to her (and in fact I have just done something to her).

  She dominates me unconsciously with her vertical indifference. She’s no longer present, she’s already out of here, I ought to just accept it for what it so blatantly is.

  But instead.

  “Nives,” I say to her.

  It’s not like I have anything to say. I just want to intone her name, that’s all.

  “Mmm?” she asks as she fiddles with the catch of her left earring. I knew she’d say “Mmm?” as she fiddled with the catch of her left earring.

  “Don’t go,” I whine.

  Just listen to me. I’m a disgrace to my gender.

  I’m a dishrag of a man.

  She emits a barely perceptible nasal sigh (which I perceive all the same) and then answers without even turning around.

  “Vincenzo, please.”

  That’s exactly what I would do if I were in her place, and this convergence of views about the right way to treat someone in my condition is the detail that crushes me once and for all.

  “Why don’t you stay a little longer?” I add, just to gild the lily.

  From my point of view, the right angle that we form is pure humiliation.

  At last she gives me the benefit of a glance and turns around. At this instant in time, she couldn’t be any more elegant, graceful, or unself-consciously majestic. The hour and a half of sex we’ve just had has conferred upon her movements the perfect degree of sleepiness, an aesthetic contrivance that as far as I’m concerned will never go out of style. Every individual element and feature, from her high cheekbones to the pair of Hogans (lying there on the floor, waiting obediently to be laced onto her delicate little bare feet), all conspire on behalf of her beauty. The dress she’s wearing is her handmaiden. Her calves are breathtakingly perfect. Her hair, bountiful and chestnut brown, allows itself to be coiffed without the slightest resistance.

  In the half-light, I detect a slight tan that up till then had eluded my notice, and I register the detail with a sting of resent­ment, as if I’d been deprived of something.

  She lets my last line linger in the air for a few seconds and then she puts her hairbrush down on the counter of the Leksvik dresser, suspending the process of eliminating all evidence of the crime (this drastic interruption of her current task—as if it’s something that can wait, whatever it might happen to be—is a typically feminine form of gallantry), and walks toward me.

  I continue to look at her, in gratitude, as she sits down on the bed, invading my space and forcing me to move over a little.

  I’m completely in her hands, a patient enduring the throes of an acute kidney stone attack as he glimpses the syringe full of painkiller in the hands of the nurse. She’s good, though, she doesn’t take advantage, that much I have to admit.

  “You’re not going to change my mind if I stay a little longer,” she says, with impeccable simplicity. “All that’ll happen is I’ll be late getting back to work.”

  Which is the perfect answer in a case like this one.

  I’m so completely in accord with her that I’d be willing to countersign the phrase.

  As she extends her lovely legs to snag the Hogans with her toes and pull them toward her, I take a worm’s refuge in the thought of Alessandra Persiano, fantasizing that I’d accepted the ride she offered me that time.

  I’m in her apartment (which I’ve never seen, so I improvise on the spot a generic floor plan, since it’s notoriously impossible to fantasize a sex scene without some modicum of set design), in a spacious entryway with a vintage coat rack, a handpainted Vietri majolica umbrella stand, and a late-eighteenth-century hall table that, if I’m not mistaken, she mentioned to me on one occasion. She no sooner gets the door closed than I’m on her; in fact, I embrace her from behind, I pull her to me and kiss her on the lips, obliging her to twist her body in an unnatural contortion that super-excites the hell out of us both right then and there, so we put off all foreplay to our second go-round. Halfway through the kiss, Alessandra Persiano turns, mischievously diabolical, shoves me back against the door, and starts to unbutton her blouse. She wants to drive but I don’t give her the chance, I lunge at her hungrily and before she knows it I’m in her, I’m holding her in midair, my hands clamped firmly around her thighs, and I can hear her moaning into my ear: “The . . . con . . . dom . . . umm . . . mmm,” which means that we’re fucking without one. And I think to myself who cares, and it’s wonderful. I even lose my grip on her and she starts to fall, grabbing me by the shoulders and knocking me backward so I bang my head against the door we were braced against, whereupon she laughs and—truth be told—she keeps laughing just a little longer than she needed to (so she too is a member of the category of actors without a film crew) and at that point she asks if she can make me that cup of coffee that she invited me up for in the first place.

  While the whole vignette evaporates from my retina, Nives stands back up triumphantly. I still have the fantastic moans of Alessandra Persiano in my right ear, but I feel like a complete piece of shi
t. Nives is leaving again. She’s my wife, and she’s about to go home to another man.

  She walks back to the Leksvik, picks up her hairbrush to apply the finishing touches. A sudden wave of anger sweeps through me.

  “Are you done with the disinfestation?” I say, while I fold a pillow in two and lodge it comfortably behind my back, another move straight out of cornball cinema.

  She stiffens, but she won’t do me the favor of looking at me.

  “You’re safe to go, no one will notice a thing,” I add, fleshing out the concept.

  Another silence.

  “You took a shower, didn’t you?” I add relentlessly.

  At that point, I deserve a response. Which she doles out, barely turning her head in my direction.

  “Okay. You need to make me feel guilty so you’ll feel better. Go ahead, be my guest.”

  The hairbrush is poised in midair. Her hair, charged with static electricity, is eager for the next stroke.

  “No fair. It’s no good if you say it,” I shoot back promptly.

  “Excuse me?” she enunciates distinctly, accompanying each syllable with a bat of her eyelashes, aristocratic and supercilious.

  So I straighten my back a little, sitting upright and pursuing the intuition on which I’ve decided to stake everything.

  “It’s like asking me to tell you a joke, when you’ve just told me the punchline.”

  She reddens slightly. One point to me.

  “Oh, really? And what do you expect me to do?”

  “You tell me. You’re the psychologist.”

  She dismisses my riposte with a sniff and goes back to brushing her hair. Her hand isn’t as steady as it was, though.

  I renew my attack.

  “But if you need a hint, here it is. Explaining the explanation isn’t all that noble on your part, is it? Maybe you should just keep it to yourself, if you’re so convinced of it, and let me behave the way I see best, for example.”

  I’m hitting my stride now. And what’s more, I haven’t even inverted a sentence. But here comes the countermove.

  “So you’re saying that I should stand still so you can spit in my face, right?”

  A couple of hours from now it’ll occur to me that at this point I could have said: “Hold on there for a second, let’s try to play fair. You’re the one who brought up spitting in the face, not me. If you think you’re clever enough to understand the reasons for my aggression, then you should let me express my aggression, and not throw it back in my face so you can use it for your own benefit. Why don’t you learn to accept your own responsibilities instead of avoiding them, my good doctor.”

  But right then and there, I can’t think of a single word to say.

  Nives picks up her purse from the Poäng side table, slips her brush into it, and snaps it shut.

  There, she’s leaving, and now she’s pissed.

  I stand there counting the sheep of my own idiocy as I watch her speed up the various maneuvers involved in getting out of the apartment, hesitate, stand on the threshold, bow her head in the throes of a sudden attack of misgivings or something approaching it, and speak to me again, without turning around.

  “Why do we have to fight? I’m happy.”

  Don’t say a word, kid. Not a single word. You’ve already caused enough trouble. You know the ledges that run around apartment buildings, the ones that, when the husband comes home early from the office and the lover backs along it, half an inch at a time, making his way to the first open window? Well, you just move like that. Move like a penguin on a ledge.

  Still half incredulous at the amnesty that has been offered me, I stand up, slip on my vintage 2004 espadrilles and shuffle over to her with an attitude equably split between mortified and pathetic.

  She lays her head in the hollow of my left shoulder (which, as surrenders go, is just as fake as a three-dollar bill, but as a consolation prize it must be worth something) and stands there, without saying a fucking word.

  I wrap her in my arms, hoping for a reaction of some kind, of any kind.

  I hunt for her lips, but she turns away. I try again, but she means it. She breaks the clinch when I give up.

  I walk her to the door.

  I stand in the doorway dressed in boxers, a Carisma T-shirt, and espadrilles while she walks to the elevator and presses the call button.

  The bang of the elevator motor starting up, the noise of cables pulling the cab upstairs. I start awake out of my excruciating enchantment. And I remember something important.

  “Nives wait, wait just a minute.”

  “Now what?”

  I raise one hand in the universal symbol for halt and push air toward her twice. Nives shrugs reluctantly. I rush back into my bedroom, open the third drawer of the Leksvik, pull out my checkbook, and come running back, panting. Nives immediately identifies the foreign object I’m clutching in my hand. She looks skyward, without arrogance.

  “Oh come on, it doesn’t matter.”

  She opens the door of the elevator, which has stopped at the floor in the meanwhile.

  I step out on the landing, intractable.

  “Oh, but it does. We signed an agreement, you and I, remember?”

  Taking advantage of the short distance that separates us, she gives me the once-over with her eyes, halting briefly on the espadrilles. I imitate her reflexively and when I look down at the last thing she laid her eyes on, I discover the shameful state of my espadrilles, which look as if they barely survived the attack of a ravening horde of sewer rats.

  Nives suppresses a laugh, but mine bursts forth. So now she starts laughing too. It’s a nice moment.

  “Couldn’t we just forget about it, for this month?” she asks.

  Eh, I wish, I think to myself.

  “You understand that you’re insulting me by doing this?” I say, hoping that she’ll keep it up.

  “And you understand that you can’t talk to me about money when we’ve just made love?”

  I melt.

  She reaches out and touches the hand that’s holding the checkbook.

  “You don’t need to prove anything to me. You don’t need to uphold any principles with me either. You know that.”

  Yeah, right, I think to myself.

  “That’s not the point,” I insist shamelessly. “It’s not about what you think. I just want to do my part, that’s all.”

  “You’ve always done your part, it’s not like you’re doing it better if I take four hundred euros a month from you. The kids are crazy about you, and you know that I . . . ”

  Witnesses at a deposition who suddenly realize they’ve said the wrong thing catch themselves in exactly the same way.

  “You what? Huh? Finish the sentence.”

  But she doesn’t get the chance, because a southern Italian buffoon on the floor above us is pounding on the elevator door.

  “Just a second, for fuck’s sake!” I shout.

  “Shh,” says Nives.

  “What is it, are you ashamed?” I say.

  She stabs me with her gaze.

  “Sorry, sorry,” I grovel.

  Another series of three loud thumps on the door of the elevator. I look up at the ceiling while I clench fists and teeth, crushing the checkbook while I’m at it.

  “I’m-a come up there and kick your—”

  Nives censors me with one hand.

  “Come on, just let me go,” she says, hastily resolving the situation.

  She runs to the elevator, gets in, closes it. The stairwell swallows her up.

  I stand there, in my underwear, on the landing, hypnotized.

  Just then, my land line rings. Once. Twice. Three times. I don’t feel like talking to anyone, but since telephones that ring and ring irritate me, I walk back inside and trace down the cordless by following the rings. I wind up in the kitchen and locate it on the tabletop, concealed between the television remote control and the demitasses of espresso I made when Nives came by (there’s still lipstick on hers, a trace that prov
okes an adolescent stirring in my groin).

  I pick up the phone. I look at the display.

  Identity withheld.

  Now what?

  I heave a sigh and press talk.

  “Hello.”

  “Counselor Malinconico?”

  A woman’s voice.

  “Who’s this?”

  “Is this Counselor Malinconico?” she says again, with empha­sis, annoyed.

  I detest the current wave of telephonic boorishness, which has reversed the roles of caller and callee, with the advent of the cell phone. Nowadays, anyone who calls your cell phone (and therefore also on the landline, because the boundary automatically dissolves) starts the conversation by immediately pronouncing your name, followed by a question mark. Well, fuck you. You called me, why don’t you tell me who this is.

  “How about you tell me who’s calling?”

  The woman catches her breath.

  “Listen carefully. This is the district attorney’s office, and we really have no time to waste. There’s a judicial interrogation under way, and Counselor Malinconico is the court-appointed lawyer.”

  My blood pressure pinwheels.

  “Judicial interrogation? Court-appointed?”

  I pronounce the words as if they were the surnames of notorious Camorristi.

  The district attorney’s office-woman withdraws into a contemptuous silence. When she emerges, she lowers her voice almost to the level of complicity, slowly punctuating the words that follow.

  “I am talking with the lawyer Malinconico, am I not?”