I Hadn't Understood (9781609458980) Read online

  Alagia on the other hand starts off with the Chicken Wrap (a tortilla with chicken tenders and a curry sauce), then moves on to the San Diego Beef (another wrap, but with beef, lettuce, and various sauces), and then asks me to let her have a bite of my Whopper (which I offer her, however half-heartedly), winding up her meal with vanilla ice cream (but with caramel syrup on hers, instead of chocolate). Between one deeply unhealthy serving and the next, she drinks a medium Sprite.

  Every time we leave the airport, we promise we’ll never do it again.

  I park my car and set off at a run, because Alagia has dance at three, and I want to make it back to the office to review a couple of files.

  I hurry into departures, take the escalator up, and emerge into the airport mall. I head straight for the food court, craning my neck in search of Alagia, who’s waving a napkin from one of the last tables at the Burger King so I can find her.

  It’s a bright sunny day and the concourse, overlooking the runways, is drenched in light. Not many people, an agreeable silence, a janitor’s trolley blocking the hallway leading to the restrooms.

  Come to think of it, it’s not a bad idea to come eat lunch here. There is an unbroken succession of planes taking off and landing, and an airplane arriving or departing is always something worth looking at.

  And now Alagia stands up from the little fast-food table and walks toward me: tattered low-rider jeans, running shoes with the laces all flapperjawed, so that one of these days she’s going to fall flat on her face and remember it for the rest of her life, midriff uncovered. She pops a chicken tender into my mouth, then she plants an affectionate little peck on my left cheek.

  “You know that you remind me of Espedito Lenza, with those pants?” I tell her.

  She studies the air for a minute, then she gets it.

  “Ha, ha,” she comments. Still, you can see that she feels like laughing.

  “Oh, you know that Espe’s not at all bad-looking.”

  “Ha, ha,” she says again. She liked that one.

  We grab our trays and walk to the cash register to place our orders. Right up until the last second, I weigh the possibility of being unfaithful to my Whopper, but when the cashier says, “Prego?” I lose my nerve.

  We sit down. Alagia polishes off her Chicken Wrap and starts in on the San Diego Beef, picking out the chunks of beef nestled inside the tortilla with her fingers. I start with the Whopper, so that the onion rings can cool off.

  “How’s dance?” I ask.

  “Great,” she answers.

  “In fact, you can tell. You’re looking much lighter, the way you walk.”

  “Lighter, you think?”

  She takes a sip of Sprite.

  “As if you were more on tiptoe.”

  She looks into the middle distance just over my head, pursuing the concept.

  “Mmm,” she agrees.

  “It’s nice when you resemble the things you do,” I point out.

  “That’s true, you’re right.”

  What a nice conversation this is, I think. And I bite into the Whopper again, feeling a wave of sadness at its imminent end.

  “There’s something I wanted to ask you,” I say.

  “Mmm,” she says, again.

  “How’s your brother doing?”

  She swallows the mouthful and furrows her brow. She’s identical to Nives when she furrows her brow.

  “What do you mean, how’s he doing?”

  “In the sense of whether you know something about him that I don’t.”

  “Uh. No, I don’t think so,” she replies, discounting my observation. “Why?”

  She extracts a strip of lettuce and raises it to her mouth.

  “He left a message on my answering machine, saying he wanted to tell me something.”

  “Wanted to tell you what?”

  “That I couldn’t say. He hung up without telling me.”

  “Ah, and why would he do that?” she asks, without looking me in the eye.

  I set the Whopper down on the tray, in exasperation. Alagia looks at it.

  “Are you listening to a word I’m saying?”

  “Sure, I can hear you,” she answers, scrutinizing her tor­tilla as if it were a kaleidoscope. It’s incredible how my words slide over without engaging her in the slightest when we’re at Burger King.

  “Anyway, he hasn’t seemed quite right for a while now,” I go on. “One minute he’s cheerful, the next he’s all gloomy . . . he doesn’t have one of those girlfriends that break up with you and then call you up, by chance?”

  A knowing half-smile flickers onto her face.

  “No, not at all.”

  “No?”

  She shakes her head no again.

  “And how do you happen to know?”

  “I just know, that’s all.”

  “You just know, that’s all,” I repeat.

  “Don’t worry,” she decrees, putting the hollowed-out tortilla back on her tray. That means she’s about to ask me for a bite of my Whopper.

  “And how do you happen to just know, and that’s all?”

  She emits a sort of “Pffh” sound through a narrow gap between her lips. A sound that makes me feel like smacking her.

  “Have I been annoying you for long?” I ask.

  “Come on, Vincenzo.”

  “Why are you laughing?”

  “I’m not laughing.”

  “Oh, yes you are. You’re thinking about something. Otherwise you wouldn’t have that stupid little smile on your face.”

  Her face reddens angrily. She glares straight into my eyes.

  Oooh, she’s scaring me.

  “If I feel like laughing, that might be my own fucking business, agreed?”

  A couple of heads look up from the surrounding tables.

  I lean forward from the waist.

  “You know how they say some girls look prettier when they’re angry? Well, in your case, it doesn’t apply.”

  She recoils, drops her arms to her sides, and looks around as if the airport had suddenly become intolerable.

  There are times when I think, and I do mean that this is what I think, that we really should give up entirely this idea of talking to one another. Because it doesn’t do anyone any good. It’s not the question of understanding one another, struggling to agree on given points; that’s not the problem. It’s that no conversation seems to stay on topic for more than a couple of sentences; the issue is one of pertinence.

  Now, for the moment, let’s forget about the fact that I’m talking with my daughter, in practical terms. Let’s say you ask some friend of yours a question. You notice that he smiles. Since there was no reason to smile, on account of nothing you said was in the least funny, you register the anomaly (which was slightly annoying, by the way) and you let it ride. Then the guy smiles again, and this time you have to go ahead and ask just where that smile of his comes from. And at that point he loses his temper and defends his right to do exactly as he pleases with his own face. As if you had called his right to do so into question. Whereupon you do your best to get the conversation back on track, but he decides he’s offended and he barricades himself behind the whole matter of the principle of the thing (which is obviously nothing more than a lateral escape route, because that’s all that matters of principle ever really are). So now you lose your temper and you reply sharply, and he gets angry too, and you raise your voice, and he raises his voice, and then maybe just to be offensive you say things that have even less to do with the original topic (which at this point has been completely crushed in the chain reaction of front-end and rear-end conversational crashes), and the only reason you don’t actually wind up in a fistfight is because it’s not something you usually do, and so you sit there in complete silence for a while glaring at each other in hatred until you start to get a little depressed, and then one of the two of you says something slightly funny (to call it funny is a stretch; it’s not the sort of funny that would normally make anyone laugh), and the other one
laughs even though he wouldn’t normally laugh at it, and then you start over from scratch, without discussing that topic anymore (so it remains unresolved), until the next time that talking together breaks down at that same exact point.

  And that’s just the way relations are between people, even people who’ve known each other all their lives, and that’s why there’s no real difference between talking or not talking, and sincerity is incidental, something that really isn’t anywhere near as good or helpful as people seem to think. Talking doesn’t solve problems; if anything it papers them over. You can’t rely on words, that’s all there is to say on the matter. There are times when you find yourself looking at someone who said something to you that you’d set aside, convinced that it had a certain value between the two of you, and you suddenly realize that they don’t even remember it, and that’s when you decide that it’s best to forget about it and you never even think about it again, understood?

  “Are you planning to go away?” I ask, already exhausted by the bickering that might ensue or else might already be over, who can say.

  I must seem pathetic, because she looks as if she’s sorry now.

  “Christ, Vincè.”

  And she requisitions my Whopper.

  And I laugh.

  And so does she.

  And we make peace.

  And we never mention the matter again.

  I told you.

  DESPERATE LAWYERS

  Phone call. A number I don’t recognize appears on the screen.

  “Hello.”

  “Is this my colleague, Counselor Malinconico?”

  I look up at the ceiling with all the tolerance of a chicken farmer. When another lawyer calls me “colleague,” I assume he’s about to try to chisel a discount of some sort out of me.

  “Yes,” I admit, resignedly.

  “Ciao colleague this is Gaetano Picciafuoco I’m calling for Fantasia okay now the situation is delicate and sure we’re talking about a questionable individual and afterward of course you can tell me what you’ve concluded about this whole thing anyway if you ask me we can get off scot free if we just stick to the facts because okay let’s say you found a hand buried in my backyard and it’s obvious that the dog is how the hand got there because the license from the dog’s collar wound up in the hole too but that doesn’t mean it was me, what is this, guilt by association with your dog? Aside from the fact that if it was me, first, I wouldn’t so stupid as to bury the hand right in my own backyard and second, let’s say and I’m not admitting this is what happened, but if it was me I would have dug a much deeper hole while the shallowness of the excavation proves beyond any reasonable doubt that we are in the presence of the typical burial style of an animal concealing its prey, which brings us back to square one, which is where are you trying to take this, that I’m legally responsible for whatever my dog does? I don’t think so because in that case you’d have to arrest us both don’t you think?”

  I hold the cordless away from my ear and I stare at it in bafflement. If I was to use a single word to describe my state of mind in the face of this verbal avalanche tumbling over me, I’d say: skeptical. Really, I don’t know whether to believe it. And in the meanwhile, as I examine the problem, this guy is still talking.

  “In other words a dog is a dog and after all we’re talking about a pit bull not a toy poodle that stays wherever you put it, a pit bull is autonomous it’s a gladiator it’s a criminal it goes wandering around amusing itself, it’s not like when a pit bull comes home you ask it if it brought anything with it, what do you think?”

  I ought to say something, I imagine; but instead I’m surprised to catch myself in a state of astonishment.

  “Wait a minute,” I manage to wedge a word in edgewise when lack of oxygen forces him to pause for half a second before resuming the relay race. “Maybe you skipped a section I don’t understand. You represent this Fantasia? Fantasia Domenico, a.k.a. Mimmo ’o Burzone?”

  “Of course,” replies my—let’s use the term—colleague.

  “Okay, but, hold on, I don’t understand where I come in.”

  “Why, don’t you know?”

  “Don’t I know what?”

  “That there are two of us,” he says, with an urgency that he can’t contain.

  I freeze. Even though I knew that Burzone had appointed me as his defense lawyer, I’m fairly troubled by the confirmation that I’ve just received of that fact. It’s not like there’s anything unusual about it. Quite the contrary: the substitution and/or addition of lawyers is a common enough practice, especially among inmates. Every day, so many appointments and dismissals stream out of the prison that it looks like a train station. When it comes to counsel for the defense, jailbirds are practically biologically predisposed to experimentation. They hire and fire with a nonchalance that verges on the offensive. They exploit their lawyers, they use them (especially the younger lawyers). At times, they even appoint one but forget to fire the other one (or else they do it intentionally, just to have an extra lawyer on hand, you can never have too many), and what happens then is that when their day in court finally comes, two lawyers show up instead of one, and amid a general sense of embarrassment they stipulate a provisional alliance in the reciprocal hope of eliminating their rival in the fullness of time.

  The fact is that down here lawyers have become no different from insurance agents or realtors. There are scads of them, each one hungrier than the last. Just take a short stroll down any street, even on the outskirts of town, and count the plaques lining the street doors of the apartment buildings. A lawyer, these days, in order to get a case, even a court-appointed case, is eager and willing to perform a fanciful array of undignified pirouettes and double gainers. What’s driving them isn’t even a lust for money or the desire for social prestige—it’s not even that anymore. Here it’s a matter of maintaining just a bare minimum of logical market presence (that is, pay your expenses and take home a little extra money to live on) or quitting the profession entirely. And the true tragedy is that this general policy of survival now extends horizontally across the entire class of lawyers, shared by the nobodies and the well-connected, the privileged and the miserably poor. In the sense that the cosseted offspring of a successful lawyer is roughly as ravenously eager—if not hungrier—to drum up new cases as people who are, in professional terms, motherless bastards. This is the new culture of competition, spawned in the spirit of gluttonous real estate developers, and it perceives no difference between greed and need, establishing in its majestic equality a false parity between competitors who start out from completely different conditions. The rich and the poor are fighting over the same scraps and bones. There you have it, the demise of the principle of equality.

  I’ve seen things you non-lawyers can’t even imagine. I’ve seen elderly professionals shamelessly brown-nosing magistrates aged twenty-nine. I’ve seen lawyers, green and youthful, personally bringing trays of espressos to all the body repair shops in a neighborhood in hopes of snagging a car crash lawsuit. I’ve seen stakeouts at the front door of the city morgue, with ensuing leafleting of business cards at the arrival of the gurney. I’ve seen Camorra accountants and specialists at inflicting corporal punishment for overdue payments of protection money treated with a lavish regard and obsequiousness that you’d only expect for the highest officials of the state. I’ve seen colleagues lining up for an audience with the lowliest clerks of the court in the hopes of a court-appointed case, paying a commission in advance based on a fixed percentage of the honorarium. I’ve seen prison guards boasting of their pull with this lawyer or that to the relatives of inmates in exchange for season soccer tickets. I’ve seen colleagues barely thirty years old strike deals with notoriously shady clerks of the court to rig a bankruptcy auction, steering the final assignment of the goods allegedly being sold. I’ve seen their photos in the newspaper a few months later. I’ve seen car accidents so bogus that you’re tempted to step in on the side of the insurance company on a pro bono
basis (which is more or less the same as, say, waking up one fine morning with a vocation to become a militant anti-Semite). I’ve seen lawyers squabbling before the Italian supreme court over a seat on the boards of condominiums. I’ve seen respected university professors make phone calls to prominent persons of interest in corruption cases offering legal representation, even knowing full well that another lawyer has already been appointed, bragging about their personal friendship with the assistant district attorney assigned to the case and devaluing, between the lines, the professional competence of the colleague in question. I’ve seen the very same lawyer that the university professor was trying to undermine recount the scandalous professional misbehavior to a group of young colleagues and not twenty minutes later run into the university professor at the front door of the court house and, like on a sappy reality TV show, throw his arms around him as if he were a long-lost brother. I’ve seen that same lawyer persuade the person of interest that yes, actually, it would be a shrewd move to include the university professor in his defense team, because such a strong lineup of legal counsel would assure an acquittal with a victorious fanfare. I’ve seen the person of interest sit at the hearing between the court-appointed lawyer and the university professor; frankly he seemed more afraid of his defense team than of the judges. I’ve heard the professor, in the throes of his summation, stumble over a juridical point of such simplicity that if one of his students had fudged the point during a final exam he would have ordered him out of the lecture hall. I’ve seen the lawyer shrug and take it, blushing like a guilty confederate, deftly avoiding the astonished gaze of the panel of judges. I’ve seen the son of the lawyer become a teaching assistant to the university professor who had tried to have his father tossed off the case. I’ve seen this and much much more, but if I don’t stop here, it’ll be midnight before I run out of examples.

  “Hello,” I hear him say at the other end of the line.

  My interlocutor sounds irritated, like a smartypants treating you as if you were wasting his valuable time.