I Hadn't Understood (9781609458980) Page 9

  When I step out into the hallway, Virginia-Ignazia or whatever the fuck her name is has already buzzed the downstairs door open, balanced precariously with one hand on the intercom and the other on the handle of her office door, pulling it toward her to keep the little canine kamikaze from bursting out into the open. You can hear the little criminal scratching and yelping away. Obviously, the dog is taking advantage of the fact that Roberto-Sergio is temporarily absent, otherwise by now he’d have already taken a few kicks to the hindquarters for sure.

  “Yes, certainly, mezzanine,” Iginia-Terenzia or Vitulia-Marcella or whatever her name is says into the intercom.

  I walk over to her, doing my best to ignore the canine car alarm.

  “Thanks, that was kind of you,” I tell her.

  “But of course, Vinshenso, if we don’t help each other out, who will?”

  “We who?” I’m tempted to ask. I can’t stand being drafted into categories of humanity that seem destined for failure.

  “Well, sure,” I say.

  “Look at the little scamp, he just won’t stop.”

  She’s talking about the four-legged recidivist scratching and snarling on the other side of the door. She’s clearly uneasy, and I can hardly blame her. That’s why she’s constantly offering her services as an unpaid secretary. You can hardly dress her down for her shitty little dog if she’s just answered the intercom for you.

  “Oh, it’s not a problem,” I say, as fake as a pirated DVD, “but it’s just that, right now, when my client’s coming in, if you could . . . ”

  I don’t know, drown him maybe, I think.

  “Oh, of course, not to worry,” she says, as the doorbell rings.

  Before opening the door, I wait for Ophelia-Lavinia to maneuver herself back into her office.

  When she turns the doorhandle, angling her right leg into the narrow aperture of the office door, the toy spitz is so excited at the prospect of lunging at the first set of legs he sees that for a moment he actually stops barking. He makes an attempt to feint around the obstacle, rears up on his hind legs, and even snaps his teeth at random patches of empty air once or twice, but his mistress beats him to the punch and slips into her room with a lightning speed that she must have acquired from years of cohabitation: in the blink of an eye, literally the blink of an eye, she’s already inside and the door is clicking shut behind her, just like in one of the chase scenes in a Tom and Jerry cartoon, when the mouse vanishes around a corner, leaving a cloud of dust to dissolve behind him, like a fart.

  I open the door.

  “Counselor Malinconico?” the individual who appears on the threshold inquires.

  How’s that saying go: behind every great man there’s a great woman? Let me see if I can describe the subject that appears before me now, though I’m not sure I’m up to the task.

  First of all, her age: undefinable. She could as easily be twenty-five as forty-seven, I swear it. You just can’t tell. And you can’t tell why you can’t tell either. In the sense that there aren’t any noticeable malformations, handicaps, or oddities that might derail the normal process of assessment. That is, if you open the door to a stranger who is suffering from a devastating outbreak of vitiligo, it’s understandable that you can’t guess how old she is. At least until she says something. Because the disease overwhelms all the other indicators and markers; it demands your full attention.

  In this case, on the other hand, we’re in the presence of a typical (and I use the term advisedly) instance of a face without signs of the passage of time. One of those sets of facial features that, at a certain point in their personal evolution, come to a screeching halt. They don’t know whether to go backward or forward, and in this hovering uncertainty they even wind up losing their sexual attributes to a certain degree (in fact, truth be told, if I hadn’t already known that it was a woman coming to pay a call on me, I wouldn’t have been a hundred percent certain which little box to checkmark).

  The problem, when you’re dealing with a genetically equivocal citizen, is that you have to stay constantly on your toes when you talk to them, because if you lower your guard for even a second you’re lost. It’s a little bit like when you have folks calling into a television talk show from who-knows-where, and the sound isn’t synced right. If you hear someone saying one thing while you see their mouth saying something else, the only way to follow the conversation is to look away. But the inconvenient aspect is this: it’s no good avoiding the gaze of a person you’re talking to, especially if that person is married to a hardened criminal who specializes in butchering mob cadavers.

  “Yes, that’s me,” I reply.

  She smiles and nods. Then she comes in.

  I almost forgot to describe the rest of her. Height, about five foot three. Round face. Very curly hair, thick and fluffy, with numerous silver streaks, though I couldn’t say if they were natural or the aftermath of haphazard salon highlighting. Makeup that stops just short of being overdone, just garish enough to get a mark to pull over. Broad forehead. Incredibly thick eyebrows. Green eyes (not bad, truth be told). The furtive expression of a mouse, vigilant on either side; one of those people who can always locate another exit. Uniform nose, small mouth smeared with lip gloss. A Bahamas smock-shirt.

  As for her body shape, completely normal down to the waist; from there on we’re looking at the Michelin man, but wearing a pair of black leggings. Running shoes. Cell phone in one hand, car keys and remote in the other.

  She dressed special for the occasion, I decide.

  She holds out her hand.

  “I’m Fantasia.”

  “So pleased,” I reply.

  Then I show her the way.

  The toy spitz must still be in shock, because it doesn’t make a sound.

  When we enter the office, Miss Fantasy goes straight to one of the Hampus chairs, takes a seat, turns off her cell phone, and nothing else. A double play that leaves me pleasantly stupefied. Generally, whenever I receive someone in my law office I’m busy justifying myself the whole time, I don’t know if I convey the idea. In the sense that I put on a guilty attitude, as if I had to persuade the client not to judge from appearances. To put it in absurd terms, take the client out of this room. Make him or her forget the two hundred square feet and the Ikea furnishings and force him or her to focus exclusively on me, to think that, despite the architectural minimalism, I’ll be completely up to the job of winning his or her case. In other words, I can’t just sit down at my desk, strike a pose (after all, that’s what desks are for), and listen, rationing out my opinion over the course of the session, the way that lawyers with imposing offices can do. Not me—I have to talk nonstop, subtitle every transition, repeat words, nod to the point of damaging my neck, act astonished and understanding, respond at any given point about the entire matter.

  Incredibly, for once I can skip the examination entirely, how do you like that. Signora Burzone has made such a spectacular show of disinterest in the formalities, the last thing I would have expected from someone like her. I’m surprised, and I have to admit it.

  “Now then,” I say with senseless optimism, as I take a seat on my Skruvsta.

  “Forgive me if I drop in on you without warning, Counselor Malinconico, but you know, lately I’ve been so tired, so impatient, I can’t get a wink of sleep, you can imagine the state my husband’s in, the children are so upset about what happened to us . . . ”

  I nod, though not the slightest trace of anxiety appears on her face.

  “Don’t worry, I know what it’s like to go through something like this,” I say.

  “And who could understand us better than you, Counselor,” she replies. A phrase that makes me feel as comfortable as if she’d left a kilo of heroin in my office for safekeeping. (I don’t know if the metaphor conveys the idea.)

  “Do you mind?” I ask, pointing to my cigarettes.

  “Please, Counselor, go right ahead.”

  I pick up the pack and, before taking one for myself, I offer
it to her.

  “Do you smoke?”

  She sits, motionless, and saying nothing, for a long time, and then shakes her head no, but with a touch of reproof, as if I’d just committed a gaffe.

  I freeze for a couple of seconds, and then I understand.

  Je-e-e-e-sus.

  I light up, with a new appreciation for my grandmother. As sanctimonious as she was, I never heard her say that only whores put a cigarette in their mouth, truth be told.

  “So, as you can understand, it’s especially difficult to be all alone at a time like this. I have the apartment to keep up, people gossiping, the kids, their school . . . ”

  “ . . . the dog . . . ” I’m tempted to add.

  I take another drag and take care not to blow the smoke out in her direction; the last thing I want to do is trigger other progressive ideas.

  “ . . . and then there’s this Carabinieri warrant officer who’s constantly buzzing around our house, I look out the door and there he is, he follows me everywhere I go, when I go to do my grocery shopping, suddenly he pops out from nowhere, ‘Signora, how’s your husband, let me carry your groceries for you, why, what a nice dress you’re wearing today . . . ’”

  She sits there on the extreme edge of the Hampus and talks with half-lidded eyes. A little bit I guess she’s putting on airs (who knows, maybe in the circles she moves in she’s considered hot stuff), and so she treats me with the slippery detachment of a sophisticated woman who long ago learned to reduce masculine intentions to one kind, and one kind only (if we leave aside the minor detail of what a complete dog she is); and a little bit you can see that she’s uncomfortable being all alone in an office with a man (criminals always seem to be disturbingly traditional).

  “One of these days, I’m going to accept his advances, too, but I’ll have a surprise ending ready for our little evening out.”

  There it is. Aside from the chilling conclusion (I can already see them in my mind, the seagulls feasting on the warrant officer’s dead body, on a deserted beach), at this point I’m really curious to know what the hell this come-on artist of a policeman has to do with Burzone’s troubles with the law. What do we care, either of us (and especially one of us)? Not a damn thing, obviously. But still, there I sit, nodding yes-yes with my head, patiently taking part in this dreary remake of the interrogation scene in Basic Instinct. It’s senseless, I know.

  I put my cigarette out when it’s only half-smoked. I exhale two streams of smoke from my nostrils.

  “In other words, as I was telling you, after the last hearing, my husband trusts only you, Counselor.”

  “As you were telling me, Signora?” I ask, thrown off balance by her filthy logic.

  But she doesn’t even hear me.

  “That’s why he wanted you to come as soon as you could, Counselor. He said, Amalia, go see him immediately, I want Counselor Malinconico and no one else.”

  No, listen, is it possible to carry on a conversation of this kind? And what kind of conversation is this, after all? How can you talk with someone who not only leaps from one non sequitur to the next whenever she feels like it, but sits there, ugly and unblinking, taking it for granted that you’re going to follow her lead whatever she decides to say? Really, it’s enough to make a person drool idiotically. Enough to make you question the fundamental underlying principles of dialectics. At this point, I feel so deeply choreographic that if, let’s just imagine an absurd scenario, I were to go into the adjoining office to shoot the breeze with Espedito and only come back twenty minutes later, I’m not sure that it would make much of a difference to this, shall we say, little chat.

  “So he wants me and nobody else but me,” I say, as I begin to breathe differently, the way you breathe when you’re really starting to get pissed off.

  “You see, my husband is a man with lots of habits and routines, Counselor, he takes a bath twice daily, he uses creams, body lotions, lots and lots of personal products, he’s obsessed with hygiene, he wouldn’t last in prison.”

  That is indeed a problem, I think to myself.

  “So why is it that a certain colleague of mine named Picciafuoco called me up to tell me that he’s representing your husband too, Signora?”

  I figure I’ll give the old system of non sequiturs a shot. You never know when it’ll work.

  Bingo.

  “Don’t you worry about him, Counselor. The same way we appointed him we can fire him.”

  For a second I don’t even recognize her anymore. Her eyes have turned blood-chilling and glassy. Her voice has dropped in timbre, vaguely mannish. Her jaw is slack. A manager. This must be her real face.

  “Why, aren’t you happy with him?”

  “Let’s just say he could have tried harder.”

  As if she were talking about some rusty old piece of ballast. A burden of which she would gladly have rid herself long ago, if she’d been able to decide for herself.

  “All right. Shall we take a little time now to discuss what happened to your husband?”

  “Why, don’t you know already, Counselor?”

  “I know what I’ve read in the documentation I was given, but I’d like to hear a little more about it.”

  “Listen, Counselor, all I can tell you is that the dog buried something in our garden and that’s when this whole thing got started.”

  “Something,” I say, in disgust.

  She reactivates the partial closure of her eyelids. Whenever they feel threatened, they put on aristocratic airs.

  “You know what dogs are like, Counselor.”

  I scoot my Skruvsta backward, and I slap the sole of my loafer on the floor.

  People generally think that lawyers know the truth. That is, that our clients, in the confidential privacy of our law offices, tell us exactly what happened. After which we prepare our line of defense, that is, a rhetorical version of the things that actually happened. Because, as any reasonable person can understand, if you want to make a convincing fake, you need to get your hands on the original.

  Nothing could be further from the truth. There is only the slightest relaxation of mistrust between a lawyer and a client. It’s all a lurching, pathetic alternation of gossip, ambiguity, enigmas, partial confessions, implausible tall tales, accusations of other people who had nothing to do with it (generally identified as the shadowy mastermind behind everything that happened). No one tells you the truth; you can only guess at it. Drag it out of them and keep it to yourself once you’ve figured it out. We’re accustomed to making our way through the various gradations of our clients’ untruths in search of the turds they’ve stepped in and doing our best to limit the damage. That’s what we do. Our job consists of going back to the scene of the crime and doing our best to tangle and confuse the evidence and make the investigator’s job that much harder (in a certain sense, a criminal defense always amounts to tampering with a crime scene).

  So here I am again, as if I were working off the same old script, asked to perform legal services and given absolutely no trust. As delirious as it might seem when you spell it out, the demands of the particular client sitting across the desk from me today are these: “Don’t ask me anything. Don’t get me involved in this mess. Treat me as if I were the wife of a solid citizen unfairly accused. Give me a free ride when it comes to the details, the indiscretions, the behind-the-scenes stories, and the whole tawdry mess you’re going to have to wade through professionally from here on in. Just tell me yes and send me off, reassured, trusting, and relieved (by the way, don’t even ask for a retainer: can’t you see I didn’t bring my purse?).”

  Well, you know what’s different this time? My state of mind, all of a sudden, that’s what.

  “I really do appreciate the faith your husband’s shown in me, Signora, but I’m afraid I’m not going to be able to represent him in this case,” I say all at once.

  “What?” she cries, scandalized. “Why not?”

  “I’m very busy for the next few months. I’d be unable to devote the prop
er amount of time to your husband’s case. I’m sorry.”

  Her face wrinkles up and she tosses her head back and forth.

  “Wait just a moment, Counselor, maybe I didn’t make myself very clear. If you give me a chance, I’ll try to explain.”

  “No, no, you made yourself perfectly clear, believe me. It’s just that I can’t take the case, that’s all. I simply don’t have the time, really.”

  “But I, I had . . . I came because . . . I thought . . . ” she shifts uncomfortably on the Hampus.

  Perhaps she’d like me to play a little something while she struggles for words, to accompany her with a string of justifications, my apologies, a nicely crafted circumstantial platitude; but I keep my mouth closed.

  She doesn’t even bother insisting. She takes the time required to make a careful note of the date and hour of my refusal in the Registry of the Unforgivable and then she gets to her feet.

  I imitate her, like a schoolboy, astonished at my own impudent silence.

  She dismisses me with a curt nod of the head, lips compressed, the universal demeanor of the Woman Spurned. From that moment she stops looking at me.

  I detect an unsettling hint of intimacy.

  As she leaves, she walks ahead of me briskly, forcing me into a sort of clumsy chase scene that ends at the door, where I am careful not to extend my hand, because she would certainly refuse to clasp it.

  I close the door behind her and think: “Ah, what the hell, fuck her.”

  Not a sound from the office of Arethusa. They must have left already, I suppose. I poke my head into Espe’s room, driven by an urgent need for friendly faces. But he’s out too. And so, even though I have no idea of what I’d say if he opened his door, I even knock at Rudy Fiumara’s office, but he’s not there, of course. So after a while I decide to go back into my little office.

  In a daze, I take a seat on one of my Hampus chairs. In the distance, I can hear the steady marching of the troops of remorse: they’ll be here before long. And as I do my best to flick away the insistent sensation of inadequacy that’s already hemming me in, I say to myself: When am I going to learn not to start something I have no intention of finishing?