The realization that my crisis with Alessandra Persiano had not only begun but was actually halfway complete came to me one morning in court, as I was exiting a courtroom—which was crowded with colleagues who were not exactly sweet-smelling—where a civil claim hearing had been in session after successfully obtaining a postponement of something like eleven months in a case of mine (as you no doubt know, bringing a civil suit down in Naples almost routinely involves requesting a postponement at some point. There are more than five million civil suits pending in Italy. Oh, I know, that number doesn’t strike you as all that astonishing; but I assure you that until you enter into the realm of statistics you can’t grasp just how seriously messed-up the Italian justice system is).
It was a vision in the form of an awareness, a déjà vu from the future, the perception of an irremediable loneliness that you have no choice but to face up to, as if in that very instant I had already gone home and found the little sheet of notepaper folded in half on the kitchen table. It was so palpable that right then and there I felt the impulse to grab my balls to ward off the impending disaster, in keeping with the superstition, and I would have done it, too, except that I was busy at the moment trying to squeeze between the fat bellies of two commuting out-of-town lawyers dressed in caramel-colored suits, who were completely indifferent to my repeated attempts to wedge myself between them, busy as they were exchanging patently puffed-up accounts of their recent professional successes (it’s incredible how we men, even after reaching respectable ages, still stand around telling each other tall tales for the simple love of bragging).
Don’t ask me how such a thing could have happened to me, nor why I immediately took that odd sort of premonition so seriously, nor why I took such great fear. I don’t know why. What I think I’ve learned, in my not-even-all-that-memorable romantic career, is that when we grow apart from someone we’ve loved (or still do), we leave lots of evidence behind us around the house. Little messages of inattentiveness and dissatisfaction that we scatter everywhere, and we even do it intentionally. We amass piles of discourtesies, omissions, unreturned gazes, words that no longer mean anything. And when we get out on the street, back among the crowds, and we lose the reassurance of the presence of the person who is usually alongside us, even though we feel we don’t love her the way we used to, all of this accumulated distance catches up with us among the noises and voices of others, and it becomes loneliness in its purest form.
Once I’d escaped, instead of hurrying off and finding myself a cozy little place where I could settle my accounts with my panic and try to analyze it in some way, I went off to freeze my butt on one of the marble benches not far from the main entrance to the courthouse, and there I started watching the passersby, wondering what it was they possessed that I lacked.
Sitting on the next bench over, in the role of Forrest Gump, there was a homeless man with a carton of Tavernello red who kept shooting me sidelong glances as if he was wondering whether we hadn’t met somewhere before. I came this close to asking him if he’d let me have a swig of his wine.
That was when my cell phone rang. I pulled it out of my jacket breast pocket, cursing myself for having forgotten to turn it off or at least silence it (which is what I always do, by the way, on the rare occasion that I actually attend a hearing).
I was in no state of mind to answer my phone, much less to talk to Nives, who in all likelihood was calling to dress me down for giving whiskey to her mother; so I just sat there staring at that plastic leech that kept crying out in my hand, throwing a fit and shrieking as if it were possessed, while my wino neighbor nodded in solidarity, as if he too had recently experienced that same annoyance.
I did my best to resist, but since that fucking cell phone wouldn’t stop denouncing my inaction (it’s incredible how many times a phone will ring before putting itself to sleep on those occasions when you just wish it would shut up), I finally had to give in, but only after stocking up on oxygen first.
“If this is about the Jack Daniel’s,” I say, opening with a frontal attack, “I’m stupid, infantile, and inappropriate. If there are no other recriminations, shall we just end the call there?”
The ensuing pause must have lasted, I don’t know, a solid minute.
“This is Alagia, Vince’.”
Her tone was absolutely commiserative.
Whereupon I had a vision: me in a theater, center stage, caught in a cone of harsh light; out in the orchestra seats and up in the balconies, a packed and sadistic audience pointing at me and laughing (a couple of them were even people I knew).
“Would you tell me why the fuck you’re calling me on your mother’s phone?” I retorted, pathetically aggressive.
The tavernellista turned to look at me.
I must have been shouting.
“Because the battery in mine is dead,” she said, maintaining her cool.
My eyes narrowed. All around me things had gotten blurry.
“And you couldn’t have called me from the landline?”
Alagia let out a faint sigh before answering.
“Vincenzo.”
Calmly, as if there were no reason to get worked up.
“What do you want?”
“You’re an idiot.”
I couldn’t have agreed more.
“Listen, little girl, this isn’t the day for it.”
“You can save the ‘little girl’ for your girlfriend.”
Provided she’s there when I get home, I thought to myself.
“I thought it was your mother calling, all right?”
Another sigh. She seemed worried.
“She’s exactly who I wanted to talk to you about.”
“Why are you whispering?”
“Because she’s in the other room, and I don’t want her to hear me.”
“Has something happened?”
“Grandma doesn’t want to see her.”
“What?” I asked, jumping to my feet, both because of the harsh nature of the report and because the bench had anesthesized my butt cheeks.
The tavernellista shot me a worried look.
“You heard me. ‘Don’t bring your mother here anymore.’ Just like that. Verbatim.”
“But why? Did they have a fight?”
“Of course not. Why would they fight at a time like this?”
“Then what the hell’s come over her?”
“We have no idea, Vince’. She doesn’t want to listen to reason. Worst of all, she won’t tell us what her reasons are. If Mamma shows up at her apartment, she won’t even speak. Or else it’s like yesterday, when she just locked herself in the bathroom until Mamma left. It’s uncomfortable, I assure you. And Mamma’s heartbroken.”
“Sure, I believe you. Jesus, what a situation. Did you talk to her doctors about it? You don’t think it’s Alzheimer’s, do you?”
“She’s fine, Vince’. From that point of view, I mean. She’s sharp as a tack. You should hear how much Romanian she’s picked up, with all the practice she gets with Miorita.”
Miorita would be Ass’s caregiver.
“That’s just crazy.”
“There’s another thing.”
“Now what.”
“She’s always asking about you.”
“About who?”
“Apparently you’re the only person she has any interest in seeing, besides me and Alfredo; and she’s not even all that interested in seeing the two of us, if you want to know the truth. That is, she has nothing against our coming to see her, but it’s not like she’s all that thrilled either. But she never stops talking about you.”
“It must have been the Jack Daniel’s.”
The reference made my bench neighbor swing around.
“You know, I thought the same thing? All right, but in any case you’ve always been her favorite.”
“Okay, you can stop buttering me up, I get it.”
Meaningful pause.
“Mamma is really depressed, Vince’. I wouldn’t have asked if it weren’t truly necessary.”
“Hey, I can’t force Assunta to see your mother if she doesn’t want to, okay?”
Silence.
Cue the sense of guilt.
“Hey,” I said, promptly assuming the form of a doormat (a metamorphosis that comes to me very easily, since I perform it on a regular basis in my interpersonal relationships), “are you still there?”
“Yes,” she replied, appropriately overwrought, the little shit.
“I meant to say that I’ll do everything within my power, okay?”
“Okay. Thanks.”
Pause. At the end of which I got the urge to make a voluntary statement.
“Still, go fuck yourself.”
For a moment she seemed really hurt.
“Why?”
“Because you really know how to make me feel I’m in the wrong. You’re almost even sneakier than your mother. By the way, is she aware of the project?”
“Of course not. You know she can’t stand mediation.”
“Ah, right. I had forgotten about her bedrock principles.”
“I need to ask you one more thing.”
“And that would be?”
“We ought to try to keep her from finding out that you’re going to see Grandma.”
It took me a minute or so to take in the concept.
“Oh, really?” I blurted out. “Now I’m supposed to carry on a clandestine relationship with your grandmother to keep from offending your mother’s rigid beliefs? Listen here,” I piled it on as I got excited, “you’re already asking me for a favor: I’m not going to do it on the sly on top of that!”
It took her a moment to launch her counterattack.
“Christ, Vince’, put yourself in her shoes: your mother is dying of cancer and you can’t even comfort her because she doesn’t want to see you, but at the same time she’s constantly asking after your ex (and let me emphasize, ex) wife. Wouldn’t you be depressed? Don’t you think it would be more noble of you to do your best to fix this absurd situation without bringing it to your ex (and let me reemphasize, ex) wife’s attention, rather than boasting about it?”
Shit, I thought.
I hate it when my interests and considerations are rendered null and void by those of other people. Because it’s obvious that when other people’s interests prevail objectively over your own, you have to give in. And you have to do it in spite of the fact that, when all is said and done, you might not give much of a damn about those other people’s interests; after all, you have problems of your own, and it’s not written in stone that you always have to take on the problems of other people, who enlist you in their causes with the flimsy excuse of being in the right. It’s not as if just because someone’s in the right they can go around intimidating their fellow man and handing out to-do lists. A person ought to renounce the privileges that come with being right in order to be considered truly right in the eyes of others. But no, all those people who are in the right simply use the fact to their own advantage. So that, at the end of the day, they aren’t really all that right, if you ask me.
Take right now. You were just sitting there on a bench making yourself feel miserable about your own problems and not bothering anyone else by doing so. At a certain point someone calls you, gives you this long list of information about your ex-mother-in-law who’s about to start chemo and who has inexplicably declared that she no longer wishes to receive visits from your ex-wife, and you, who weren’t even aware of the situation, and whose only crime it was to have answered your phone, find yourself from one moment to the next with a job to do.
And the best part about the whole thing is that you’re in the wrong, to top it off.
Doesn’t it all seem like a little much?
“Hey,” I shot back, verging on exasperation, “why is it that one way or another I always have to catch a dressing down? Why do you always have to make me feel like a crook, even when you’re asking me to do you a favor? I mean, what the fuck!”
Silence.
Ahh.
That shut her up.
Just for the moment, of course.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to be unfair. It’s just that we’re very worried about Mamma, Alfredo and I.”
“All right, listen, forget about it. I’ll see what I can do.”
And we exchanged our goodbyes.
See if you can guess the word I said when I hung up the phone.
The tavernellista shot me another look of solidarity, then he hoisted his container of wine into the air, as if dedicating it to me, and took a long swallow.
I nodded to him as if to say: “To your health.”
And that was it. I went for a walk around the neighborhood in order to mull over the potential developments of the events currently under way, when unexpectedly, as in a vision, I glimpsed Alessandra Persiano intently tapping away at her cell phone about fifty feet away from me, as the crow flies.
For a moment, I swear, I didn’t think she was real, so light and luminous was she, so perfectly attired (one of the things about her that really drives me crazy is that even if you see her in an article of clothing that she’s worn like four hundred times before, it always looks as if she just bought it), nonchalant in her loveliness, inexplicably sexy as she looked down at her cell phone screen with a faint expression of disgust on her lips.
As my cowardly heart flung itself against the bars of my rib cage, consuming in just a few seconds at least a couple of hours’ worth of fuel (to the point where I wanted to say to it: “Why don’t you sit still, don’t you know who that is?”), I registered the symptoms of a very specific cognitive delusion that I’ve only ever experienced when I’ve run into famous people, for example this one time with Sting.
I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed, but when you happen to run into famous personalities on the street they always prove a little disappointing. And not because we like them less than we remembered or less than we thought we would if we ever came face-to-face with them: quite the opposite. What disappoints us is how comfortable they seem in their own skin, the way they do just what they want to do, the way they act more or less like anyone else. It’s their autonomy with respect to what we expect of them, their right to be ordinary people if they feel like it, that brazen freedom to enter and exit their characters, that suddenly liberates them of all the things that we’ve projected onto them without their even knowing it, so that we somehow feel stupidly cheated.
Though it’s embarrassing to admit it, we don’t acknowledge their right to brazenly spoil our imaginary world by doing what they please with themselves. We don’t like to see them operating with such freedom. We’d prefer them to live in seclusion, far from the hellish realms of ordinary life. They ought to stay put where we left them, rather than wandering around freely (if you’re going to be so damned important, do you have to be free as well?).
I’m beginning to believe in the existence of a perverse law of conservation that forces us to pay for success by depriving us of freedom. Take Roberto Saviano. For the people who love him, the knowledge that he can’t move around freely is a form of insurance for our imaginations. The public preserves him aesthetically intact in the cloistered existence of an armor-plated, bodyguard-protected life. They won’t run into him on the street; they have to wait to see him on TV. They can’t ask him to autograph their copy of Gomorrah the way they could with a book by any other writer; they’d have to get past the officers of his police escort. And if they want to chat with him for a moment, they have to take advantage of the few minutes available before he is whisked off again. But can you just imagine how depressing it would be to be standing next to him at a nightclub while he (perfectly justifiably) chatted up some chick, who wasn’t even all that pretty, because maybe he’d had too much to drink (that is, the exact same thing you would do, if you could). Of course it would disappoint you. You’d think to yourself (even though it’s none of your fucking business): “Oh, Savia’, seriously?”
In short, having gotten over (as it were) the shock of this vision of Alessandra Persiano, I fanned myself with my hand for a moment, stopping dead in the middle of the street, waiting for her to notice me.
She didn’t notice.
I’m not exactly stunning, after all.
“No, you certainly aren’t,” my guardian angel immediately confirmed (though let me point out that I wasn’t the one who hired him).
“Do you really have nothing else to fucking do?” I replied.
And I started waving my hand like one of those automatic mannequins that raise and lower their arms to signal a detour on the highway.
Finally, the woman who I was starting to doubt was actually my girlfriend spotted me. The expression that appeared on her face, and I’m not exaggerating, was the expression she might have had if she’d entombed me the day before.
“Am I already a zombie?” I wondered as I walked toward her with a sense of resignation very much like what I used to feel when, as a boy, I got up from my desk and approached the blackboard knowing I was unprepared (if you want to know the truth, those moments are pretty nice).
“Come on, it’s nothing,” said the bastard assigned to my guardianship. “The worst will come later.”
“Ah, thanks, you’re an angel,” I shot back.
In the all things considered very brief distance that separated me from Alessandra Persiano, I ran down a short list of the formulas of dismissal that she could have chosen to employ in a circumstance such as this:
a) Please, don’t make things any harder than they have to be;
b) I’m glad I ran into you: it’s better to talk in a neutral setting, I don’t think I could have handled this kind of anguish at home;
c) I don’t want to lose you as a friend;
d) The keys are on the front table. Don’t try to get in touch with me, please. I’ll call you;
e) I need to try to understand what I’m feeling, and I can’t do that unless I get some distance from you;
f) Shall we find a place to sit down in a coffee bar around here?
When I reached her, prepared as I was to be executed by a firing squad right then and there, the astounding sight of her face lighting up, smiling, as if she was as surprised as anyone by the happiness that had overtaken her, so wrong-footed me emotionally that I actually thought I’d heard the sound of a little chime in my ears, like when cartoon characters fall in love.
“You just got a text,” she said.
“Eh?” I said.
Completely thunderstruck, I’m sure.
“A text,” she said again; but since I just kept staring at her as if this were the first time I’d ever heard that particular word, she started jabbing at the air with her forefinger in the general direction of my jacket’s breast pocket, then she restated the concept slowly and carefully, even raising her voice a little.
“You just received a text message on your cell phone.”
So that was the little chime I’d heard.
“Ah,” I said, returning to the three-dimensional world.
And I pulled out my phone.
As if I gave a damn about a text message in that moment.
I recognized the phone number of the sender. I broke out in a full-body sweat as if I’d been flash-frozen. I didn’t have the faintest idea how I was going to get out of this one.
“It must have been me calling you a minute ago,” Alessandra Persiano said, pulling me out of my quandary without knowing it.
I half closed my eyes, moved practically to tears at the thought that my vicious guardian angel had finally remembered to do something on my behalf.
“Oh, really? What happened, were you not getting any reception?” I replied, raising my voice as if I were particularly fascinated by the lack of cell phone service in that part of the city (when you’re caught red-handed, you always express great interest in insignificant details), and at the same time I took a look at the text, pretending to check to confirm that it was in fact a message alerting me to the missed call from Alessandra Persiano (I know that I could have waited to read it at a more opportune time, but pretending to check for her call while I was standing there seemed less conspicuous).
More than reading the text, I stared at it.
Why do you all say “I’ll call you” when you have no intention of doing so? You’re so predictable. VFCL
VFCL? I thought; and then, a second later: Ah, right, vaffanculo. Fuck off.
I instantly pushed the home button and shot back to the main menu, and then I slipped my cell phone into my breast pocket, as clumsily as back in the days when I used to shoplift ballpoint pens from the Upim department store.
“What’s the matter with you, Vince’?” Alessandra Persiano asked, drawing closer and pumping my sweat production up to a terrifying level.
“Nothing, maybe it’s just that, well . . .” I replied, amazed that she should mistake the chip on my shoulder for timidity.
“Well lookee here,” she broke in, flirtatiously; only to add, caressing my forehead in a motherly fashion, “You’re sweating.”
And if you just knew the reason why, I thought, shriveling inwardly.
Nearby that winged viper of a bodyguard was practically rolling on the ground laughing.
“The only reason you intervene is to get your kicks, eh, you filthy piece of shit?” I messaged him telepathically.
Every time I’m on the verge of changing my opinion about him, he always manages to restore my original attitude. There’s no two ways about it.
“Hey. Hey now,” Alessandra Persiano went on in her Nurse Persiano mode (one of my personal favorites). “Calm down, okay? Nothing’s happened.”
It had been a long time since she’d been so sweet to me.
“Nothing’s . . . happened? Because I had the distinct impression that . . .”
“Shh.”
She placed the tip of her left forefinger on my lips.
I stood there like that, my lips sealed by her magnificent pinkie finger, incredulous in the face of this reversal of fortune, amazed that I was out of the doghouse without having done practically anything, baffled at the rapidity with which my cast-iron certainty that our relationship was about to come to an end had just crumbled into dust.
Alessandra Persiano had now gone all doe-eyed with me, flirting so relentlessly that I was tempted to remind her that we were on a public thoroughfare.
Seen up close, her beauty ravages me like nothing else on earth. And if you want to know the truth, I don’t especially like this feeling. For a while now, I haven’t really been comfortable with the lowering of defenses that comes with love. The feeling of being so disgustingly vulnerable and open to any and all kinds of compromise in the presence of a pair of eyes, the curved lips that make up a smile, the unutterable rotundity of a tit.
Maybe it’s because I’m no longer (even) forty years old, but I think that type of ineptitude is acceptable when you’re young, when you have, as the saying goes, your whole life ahead of you. Because when you already have a good portion of your life behind you—and quite a bit more, let’s be honest, settling around your waistline (I think you know what I mean)—you can’t handle that kind of happiness. When it comes to love, happiness is costly, no kidding around. They don’t give it out free of charge, that kind of happiness. In fact, if you really want the whole story, no happiness ever comes free of cost. Happinesses are tremendously expensive, and if you take out a mortgage on them, it’s even worse.
And let’s not go any further with this. That would be the wise choice.
“I’d forgotten how handsome you look when you’re scared,” Alessandra Persiano purred, brushing her lips against mine.
Whereupon a hot flash of enthusiasm came over me (I felt it spread out from my spine, the sort of instantaneous inflammation that’s gone as quick as it comes: this is something that’s happened to me since I was a kid), and right then and there I regained my sense of humor. Because the first thing I want to do when I’m happy is crack a joke.
“You see,” I said, “that’s how it is with us semi-ugly guys. We need specific planetary alignments of the emotions to make the most of our looks: embarrassment, shyness, disappointment, failure, illness, mourning . . . in other words, you need to pity us a little in order to find us alluring, if you see what I mean.”
She half closed her eyes as she shook her head no (that’s her way of enjoying the crap I say), then she remarked, with a phrase that I’m hearing entirely too often these days:
“You’re such an idiot.”
“I love you too.”
She grabbed me by the tie and pulled me toward her, with the insolence of a two-bit street thug trying to start a fight.
There are kisses that are given to remember what kissing was like once upon a time. To understand whether they still have that flavor that you used to like so much. When they work, those are the best.
This was one of those.
In fact, my boxer shorts were suddenly too tight on me.
“Guess the idea I just had,” Alessandra Persiano said immediately after, nibbling her lower lip.
“If it’s the same idea I just had, we’d better hurry home.”
“I don’t think I can make it all the way home.”
“Excuse me?”
“Plus I don’t feel like it.”
“I was pretty sure you did.”
“I meant the going home part.”
“Well . . . then what?”
She smiled, craftily.
“Then come with me.”
She took me by the hand.
“But, what . . . ?” I tried to ask as she dragged me along with her.
“Shut up.”