I Hadn't Understood (9781609458980) Read online

  I breathe in, happily.

  This must be what success is like, I tell myself. A place for everyone, not just for a few. But a place where everyone looks at you as if you did them a favor by dropping by. As if your very presence brought some inestimable added value. As if after that, in that place, home values increased.

  Success—I learn in this exact moment—is something that involves government property.

  Once I’m done with my meditation on celebrity, I reach out for the blinking light on my answering machine.

  Messages: two.

  I push the playback button.

  First message: Alfredo.

  He’s calling from the street (traffic noises in the background).

  “Ciao Dad. I tried calling you at home but you weren’t there. Your cell phone was turned off.”

  “I was in the middle of an arraignment,” I want to tell him.

  Then comes a dripping pause that smacks of: “I was just about to tell you something very personal and very important but now I’m getting the feeling that I’m about to change my mind.”

  Listen, Alf, could you get a move on?

  I wait, already knowing exactly what’s coming next.

  And in fact:

  “Listen, I wanted . . . oh, never mind. It doesn’t matter. Ciao.”

  I look at the far wall, while the tenor of my mood plummets.

  Now. There could be a number of explanations for the cold feet of a sixteen-year-old son leaving a message like that on your answering machine. Let me just lay out some alternatives:

  a) maybe it wasn’t important;

  b) it was important but it wasn’t urgent;

  c) he didn’t feel like saying it to an answering machine;

  d) he was caught off-guard by a friend who just happened to be walking by;

  e) his cell phone battery was dying.

  That’ll do for now.

  If we explore these five options with a modicum of lucidity, we quickly come to the realization that they are nothing other than minor antibodies, pathetic attempts to ignore the obvious.

  Option a) is the most threadbare of the five: if something isn’t important, you don’t even start to explain;

  option b) is lawyerly, in the sense that it doesn’t fly in the face of the truth, it just disqualifies it: it sidles over to it, but only to chomp it down more thoroughly;

  option c) has a certain austere dignity, but it’s basically a delaying device at best;

  options d) and e) are so blatantly fake that it’s not even worth discussing them.

  The thing is that reality mumbles. It expresses itself in incomplete sentences. And the translations that circulate are terrible, done by incompetents. Riddled with misreadings, typos, entire lines missing. Without a modicum of professional standards, completely lacking in any sincere effort.

  Which is exactly why I’m accustomed to explaining the things that happen to me. I make imperfect translations in an effort to get by until, one fine morning, I meet reality in the street—nonchalant, understated, never vulgar—and I stand there, rooted to the spot, staring as she passes me by and vanishes in the distance without bestowing so much as a glance in my direction. But it’s not like I’m completely nonplussed, it’s not like I’ve never met her before.

  Same thing right now. Hard as I might try to pretend that I don’t get it, this is what I really think: my son wanted to tell me something crucially important, something that’s weighing on his mind, something that’s causing him pain. He was at such loose ends that he even considered confiding in me (not something he’d normally do), and the one time I might have been able to be of some help to him, he couldn’t reach me. So, whatever it was, it’s now all my fault.

  That’s what I think. Forget about a, b, c, and d.

  “Counselor,” says the turning cassette tape.

  The pronunciation of a sewer rat.

  I sit up straight on my Skruvsta swivel chair, as if I were a Carabinieri lance-corporal.

  Silence.

  Street noise.

  “Hello,” the answering machine speaker insists.

  It’s hard to believe, but in the third millennium there are still people out there who don’t understand how answering machines work.

  A few seconds of indecisive breathing, car horns and muffled voices in the distance.

  End of messages.

  I look at the answering machine display.

  Identity withheld.

  I don’t like the way things are going.

  I definitely don’t like that voice.

  I stand up, I go to the window. I breathe in, I blow out, with a grunt of annoyance.

  Right now I’m fighting off overtures from that part of me that wants to convince me to call up Alfredo and drag out of him whatever it was he decided not to tell me (and I can’t even imagine how low I’d be willing to sink just to find out what it was), when Espedito Lenza walks in: shirt sleeves rolled up to the elbows, tie loosened, trousers even looser than the tie, crotch of the trousers riding super-low, accordion pleats around his fly, forehead glistening.

  All he’s missing is a car jack in one hand and a spare tire in the other.

  “Vincé’ . . . ?” he says.

  That’s how we say hello where I come from. By uttering the person’s Christian name, followed by half a question mark.

  As if we wanted to prove to our friend or acquaintance that we still remember what he’s called.

  I’m glad you knocked on my door, I almost feel like telling him.

  “Oh, Espe.”

  He drops into one of the two Hampus chairs on the other side of the desk and rubs his forehead, relaxing, as if my office were the ideal spot to unload his cares and worries. He makes no bones about making himself at home.

  “I have a fucking problem,” he says.

  Truth is, I’d sort of guessed that already.

  “Actually, it’s the other way around,” he adds, looking at me sidelong, almost as if there were something inopportune about my presence.

  I don’t open my mouth, even though the presentation was unequivocal.

  The fact is that, however likable I might find Espedito (we have the same fixation with shoes that people shouldn’t be wearing, and in fact every time we go downstairs for an espresso, we run an informal competition to see who can spot the most), I’m still fed up with people coming to tell me their problems. It’s been happening to me as long as I can remember. As soon as I meet someone, I’m not saying the first time, but at most, the third time that I see them, I wind up having to listen to a minute-by-minute account of the history of their private lives.

  Okay, admittedly, I cast certain glances that are like lambent pools of profundity. I consider every word spoken to me as if it meant something, even when I couldn’t care less. So other people lose their misgivings, think they can trust me, and start leaking like faucets. It’s practically impossible to stop someone when they’re determined to confide in you. There are times when you just have to turn and run. One time I abandoned someone in a Feltrinelli book store, telling him that if he’d just wait five minutes in the DVD section I’d be right back.

  To be perfectly honest, it’s not like this talent I have of getting other people to open up to me ever did me the slightest bit of good. So I finally gave it up, preferring to chase after women with no particular interest in autobiography. Until I actually wound up marrying one whose profession it is to listen to the things that other people confide in her, though she gets paid very nicely for her trouble, unlike me. Even now, despite my VAT registration number, my business cards, and all the accompanying paraphernalia, I can’t see why it is that my clients feel entitled to update me in excruciating detail on their personal tragedies, only to be shocked—shocked!—when I ask them to pay me a retainer, for instance.

  “I can’t do it anymore with my wife,” Espedito says, circumstantiating.

  “Do tell?” I’m tempted to reply. Instead I give him a skeptical glance, just to underc
ut the drama. In part because it strikes me as very odd that Espe should have any problems with hoisting the flagpole. If his wife, for it is she whom we are speaking of, had even a vague idea of the number of times—a number that he updates with the dependability of Norton Antivirus and with any woman (only those no longer drawing breath being a priori excluded) that comes within his reach—Espedito had cheated on her, at the very least she would fracture his skull with a ball-peen hammer while he was sleeping.

  “No need to make that face. I can’t get it up. I can’t get it up anymore with Teresa.”

  I say nothing, then I speak without thinking.

  “Do you think it’s really over then?”

  He lifts his eyes to my face as if I’d just revealed that I was his father or something of the sort. But then I’m just as appalled at myself as he is, I have to admit. I’ve been surprised at the things coming out of my mouth since this morning.

  “Eh?” he asks, rhetorically.

  In the face of his complete dismay, I fully grasp how indelicate I’ve been, and in the full flush of embarrassment I clamp my mouth shut. My response to his dilemma was to reel out the standard phrase for cases in which a friend comes to you to confide that his girlfriend has dumped him. How I came up with it, I really couldn’t say.

  A reciprocal silence ensues that makes me yearn for station identification or a word from our sponsors.

  “Um, no, of course not,” Espedito hastens to retract, “it must just be that I’m worn out lately. I’ve been working too hard, I eat out practically every day, I’ve been drinking”—he says it in italics—“I haven’t been getting enough sleep, and then I have to see Valentina at least three times a week . . . ”

  Valentina, as we were just mentioning, is Espe’s girlfriend. Sells perfumes, twenty-nine years old, definitely on the vulgar side. I know her both because she’s in and out of the office fairly frequently, and because I’ve had to help cover up their misdeeds more than once. And on one of those occasions, of this I’m certain, Teresa saw through my evasions, because she called me on my cell phone and asked if I could put her husband on the line, since that asshole had told her that he’d be with me but hadn’t bothered to advise me of the fact. Whereupon I had no idea what to say and I simply improvised a sudden and fictional loss of cell phone reception, and just the thought of that embarrassing charade brings a wave of shame, as if I were the one who was screwing the expert in perfumes.

  “You see the way it is?” he goes on, making a show of wanting my approval.

  I stretch my neck the way you do to show how completely pointless it would be to add any further commentary, since he’s just said it all. And with a certain sense of relief I realize that if your goal is to rid yourself of the annoying and persistent buzz of someone who wants to bore you to death with his private life, all you need to do is feed back his version of the facts in the exact same dramaturgical terms in which he first presented them.

  “The fact is,” Espedito resumes the charge, disabusing me of my naïve hopes, “I function perfectly with Valentina”—and here he illustrates with a hand gesture, like he’s shifting an imaginary gear stick into third—“even when I eat badly. Even when I don’t get much sleep. Even when I drink a little too much. It’s with Teresa that I can’t get it up.”

  I give up.

  “Don’t fixate about it,” I toss out. “These things happen sometimes.”

  A disheartened expression spreads over his face; he twirls thumb, index, and middle finger of his right hand.

  “Three months. I haven’t been able to do a thing for the past three months.”

  I don’t know what to tell him. Personally, I’ve never had to put up “detour” or “out of order” signs up on the approaches to my underground parking garage, as it were, or if so, never any longer than you might expect, say, a head cold to last. I could recommend he take the magic pill, but I’m pretty sure he’s already thought of that. For an ideological southern Italian male like him, taking Viagra puts you in the same category as a Mafia stool pigeon.

  “It can’t go on like this, you understand? I just think about it all the time. And the more I think about it, the more it doesn’t work.”

  He draws a line across his forehead with the tip of his index finger.

  “What am I going to do with Teresa? How’m I going to hold on to Teresa? I’m worried, Vincè,” he whines.

  Look at that, he’s even calling me by my first name. Should I be flattered by this mark of extreme familiarity? Should I be touched at the sight of the state he’s in? Should I walk over next to him, hesitate for a moment, put my hand on his shoulder, and say in an undertone: “Come on, buck up, you’ll see, when you least expect it everything’ll straighten out”? Well, I don’t have the slightest intention of doing anything of the sort, so there. In fact, I’m actually pretty disgusted at all this pissing and moaning about his lazy dick, so there. I’m going to level with him right now, I’ll tell him how he’s going to hold on to Teresa.

  “Let me explain here and now just why you’re worried,” I start out, with a rising note of indignation. “Because as long as you give Teresa the full treatment on a regular basis, you can go out and fuck whoever you want with a clear conscience. You’ve done your duty as a husband to make sure your wife is satisfied, so now you can have a little fun on the side. And sure it’s nice enough, from time to time”—and here I’m clearly addressing my own personal demons—“to let yourself be stroked and caressed for an hour and a half by some asshole who knows the way you like to be touched (compare him to that half-faggot you’re living with now: where did you find him, in an atelier somewhere?), and then dump him like the miserable loser that he is, and even act all sorry about it. Oh I’m so sorry, it was nice but you know that the two of us don’t really work together (what do you mean we don’t work together, we just fucked like bunnies, didn’t we?). It was nice, wasn’t it, to keep your full-time job and do a little under-the-table moonlighting in your off hours? Well, the boondoggle is finished. There’s been a fucking reform instituted. Your oldest and most trusted friend has just turned his back on you because he’s fed up with telling lies, even if it doesn’t bother you at all, and so he’s thrown a monkey wrench into the works. You’re losing your special privileges, that’s all. And you can’t take it. It’s more than you can stand. That’s why you’re worried.”

  I stop to catch my breath and figure out what I just said.

  Espe stares at me agog. He’s probably still reviewing my harangue in his head. Well, okay, it’s obvious that I was mostly talking to Nives; but there was plenty of good material there for him, if he has the wit to see it, what the hell.

  “Make up your mind who you want to be with, god damn it. Why don’t you make a decision for once: do something, instead of helping other people to make decisions about things that are none of your business. Do you realize what an absurd line of work you’re in? Eh? Turn this way, idiot: you have someone who knows how to make you happy, who only wants you to stay with her. So stay, by god almighty. What does it cost you to stay?”

  Whereupon Espedito gets to his feet, looks down at the floor, and expels a breath of air in a highly self-critical sigh. And as I go on inveighing, relying on his understanding, he turns his back and removes his presence.

  I basically walk him to the door.

  WHAT IF YOUR MOTHER FOUND OUT?

  I’d never have given a little girl a name like that. Alagia—please, do me a favor. I remember the first time we went out together and Nives told me that she had a daughter, I had to ask her to repeat that off-kilter name, slowly, before I could even pronounce it. And I can still see her, the astonishment straight out of Classics 101 that ovalized her lips when I confessed I’d never heard it before: “But what about Alagia Fieschi, the niece of Pope Adrian V? Dante even mentions her. Why, don’t you like it?”

  “No, I do. So much,” I told her.

  So anyway, that’s the name of Nives’ daughter. She had her with some go
ofy loser who took off like a cat with its tail on fire just a short while after Nives told him he was going to be a daddy.

  “Do you think it might have been the name that scared him off?” I was sorely tempted to ask her.

  Then Nives and I had Alfredo, who couldn’t have hoped for a better big sister, truth be told. And I couldn’t have dreamed of a more adorable daugher.

  It’s just too bad about the name.

  I show up at the airport running ten minutes late, but luckily Alagia has her cell phone turned on, so I call her and tell her I’m stuck in the line at the parking structure. She tells me she’s hungry so she’ll just go ahead and get a Chicken Wrap as an antipasto while she waits for me to get there.

  For the past few months we’ve had this standing biweekly tryst to eat artery-clogging food, so we meet secretly at the airport, because she has a Burger King fixation, and the only Burger King in Naples happens to be at the airport.

  Though if you stop to think about it, there’s something deeply maladjusted about driving all the way out to the airport to eat a sandwich, but for your children you’d do This and More. And when you’re going through a divorce, the rule is that your ex-wife gets to do the This and you wind up doing the More. In other words, you become open to corruption at levels that someone not going through a divorce couldn’t even begin to imagine.

  I have to say that even though I’m not a huge fan of the food (if you want to call it that) at Burger King, I do have to admit that the Whopper is a superior hamburger. Can’t say if it’s the pickles, or maybe it’s the onions. But that’s the only sandwich that leaves my mouth watering, even while I’m actually biting into it. If you’re really feeling ambitious, there’s also the Double Whopper, but that’s strictly for when you’re working through loss and grief.

  I generally order a Whopper, onion rings, and soda; for dessert, vanilla ice cream with chocolate syrup. Sometimes I sub­stitute a Chick’n Crisp sandwich, but I almost invariably regret it afterwards.