I’m heading toward Assunta’s place when my cell phone starts vibrating, forcing me to slow my pace. Without stopping I pull it out of my jacket breast pocket, already resigning myself to have to answer questions from another journalist.
But it’s a text message.
From guess who.
My heart starts playing a piece of speed metal music.
I stop and lean against the trunk of a Smart car parked sideways between a Fiat Panda and a glass recycling bin, and I hyperventilate.
A, shall we say, matron, who is dragging a wheeled checkered cloth shopping cart behind her, walks past me and stares at me with a lack of discretion that I could even forgive if that indiscreet stare weren’t tainted with disgust. So I ball up my fist and shake it at her, as if to say: “You want to tell me what you’re staring at?” and she keeps on walking.
I’ve had enough of those housewives who go around town expressing their opinions of their fellow man by squinting or rolling their eyes. Why don’t you just stay home, if you find modern society so repugnant? What do you think, that you’re so wonderful to look at?
I take another minute before reading, hating myself for the queasiness I feel at the idea of learning the content of the text message that just a moment from now is going to appear on my cell phone screen, and I finally make up my mind.
I’m here.
The flight went fine.
Kisses. Ale
Ah, the flight went fine, I think to myself.
Wow, what a piece of news.
I shut my eyes, reopen them, and reread:
I’m here.
The flight went fine.
Kisses. Ale
And then once more:
I’m here.
The flight went fine.
Kisses. Ale
The total absence of pathos so completely takes the beauty out of the experience for me that I’m ready to believe in magic: and so I go on compulsively reading and rereading this vapid text, as if I expected it to transform suddenly before my eyes into something else, like maybe:
How handsome you were, stretched out on our bed, so sad, resigned to the fact that what we have together is coming to an end. I was an idiot not to tell you how much I love you, in that moment, not to confess to you that I have no idea why I’ve been so stubbornly pulling away from you in the last few months, when you’re the one thing in this world that I want. Forgive me, and wait for me, confident I’ll come back to you. As soon as I can get away from this stupid trial we’ll lock the doors and close the shutters and make love for three straight days (speaking of which, have I told you you’re getting better all the time?).
Just saying.
Instead the text remains unchanged, indifferent to all my entreaties and/or utopian dreams, just like the objects in front of Massimo Troisi when he tries to move them with the power of his mind in Ricomincio da tre.
I take a deep breath.
What a distinctive flavor depression has.
I resume my stride with my cell phone in my hand, and all around me everything becomes muffled. I stop thinking entirely, I just move my legs and walk.
I feel very much like Alan Ford in an old comic book story in which Brenda, his not-quite-girlfriend, gives him his walking papers in a letter, and he wanders down the sidewalks of New York with an idiotic smile stamped on his face (the compositions of the great Magnus go on for two or three pages, with the same unaltered drawing of Alan in the foreground, with only the background of each individual panel changing, signifying the flow of life all around him, indifferent to the despair of the protagonist as he moves through it), until suddenly he stops and bursts out sobbing in the middle of the crowd.
I go on walking for I don’t even know how long in this state of dazed self-pity until I realize I’ve long since walked past Ass’s front door.
If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s losing control of my mental faculties, so I decree that the time has come to rebel: I position my cell phone in front of me as if to take a selfie, I enter REPLY mode, I concentrate long enough to calculate the degree of resentment to inject into the text, then, accompanying myself with a malevolently satisfied smile (and even though I feel as if my thumb has developed a localized case of Parkinson’s), I compose the following text:
Congratulations on your choice of airline.
It takes me a minute to hit SEND, but in the end I press the button. During the sending process I close my eyes, savoring a sensation of vaguely nauseating lightheadedness that is not entirely unpleasant. When I reopen my eyes, and the display confirms the message has been sent, I slip my cell phone back into my pocket as if it were a .44 Magnum with smoke still pouring from the barrel and I look around, ready for new opportunities.
As I head back toward the front entrance of Ass’s apartment building, I compliment myself effusively.
The situation changes radically when, as I’m ringing the downstairs doorbell, I feel the vibration of an incoming text in my breast pocket.
My legs start trembling, but I act cool, calm, and collected, grabbing my cell phone at the exact same moment that Miorita (Ass’s caregiver) answers the intercom saying, “Yes,” without a question mark, in a tone that sounds a lot like, “Did you really have to ring this apartment, with all the surnames listed there?”
“It’s me,” I say.
She thinks it over for a minute.
I still can’t tell if she’s doing it intentionally.
“Ah, Vinshinzo,” she says, in her accent.
“Yeah, Vinshinzo,” I say (meaning: “Do you think you might open the door now or should we carry on this conversation a little longer?”).
The lock clicks open, accompanied by a buzzing sound like a protracted Bronx cheer.
I shoot a distracted glance at Alessandra Persiano’s reply as I push the front door open to go in.
Perhaps I’d have appreciated it if you’d called me to find out if I’d arrived safely. Do you think that sending me a sarcastic response is going to make things easier? Have a good day.
Shit, I think. And I bitterly curse the moment I let myself give in to my anger and send her that cutting text, from which I already disassociate myself.
How solid her point of view looks to me and how infantile my own viewpoint seems to me now. What I wouldn’t give to be able to go back in time and simply chop off that damned thumb if I could.
After all, I say to myself: I had a reasonable position, founded on omissions and things left unsaid; all that was needed was a dry, terse response (like, maybe: “Good. Break a leg in court”) and I would have seemed remote and austere, but instead I had to ruin my facade of indifference with that stupidly hostile sentence, which revealed my resentment and, with it, my weakness. Practically speaking, I handed it to her, as they say, on a silver platter (when really, for these kinds of offerings, a plastic plate would be more than sufficient).
This is what always seems to happen with text messages: they give you the illusion that you have all the time you need to make your move and foresee the reactions that you’ll provoke, but instead the opposite is true. When you’re texting you feel all strategic, but you’re simply being impulsive in a whole new way.
When I engage in flame wars via text, all I ever do is step in dogshit. And having stepped in dogshit in permanent written form, the dogshit sticks to me as documentary evidence, Exhibit A for the prosecution.
But I’m not emotionally credible as a witness. I tend to have fleeting bursts of rage, and it takes next to nothing to make me see the opposing side’s arguments, especially if the opposing side is the woman I live with.
In other words, I suffer from premature capitulation. I wonder whether this tendency of mine to capitulate so prematurely is the main cause of the emotional shipwrecks into which I periodically steer myself.
I find Assunta curled up on the sofa, wrapped in a double-faced wool cardigan, with the TV turned on. I don’t like the look of her complexion, to tell the truth. How long has it been since the last time I saw her, three days, four? It seems like two years have gone by.
She looks at me sideways, like she’s just read my mind. I barely have time to come up with some diversion before she can broach the subject.
“I didn’t know you watched Mad Men.”
“I like the guy who plays Don Draper.”
“So he’s the reason you watch it?”
“Why else would I watch a show full of depressed people?”
I’m left speechless for a couple of seconds, as if I’d found the compressed review irreverent somehow, then I realize that I endorse it in the most unconditional terms imaginable. I’ve been watching Mad Men from the first season, and I can’t wait to watch the next one, but I don’t think I would have been capable of coming up with such a stark and essential critique.
How I admire the nonchalance with which some people can take an unprejudiced look at a book, a movie, a painting, a concert, whatever it happens to be, and capture its essence. Me, I don’t know how to do that.
“Hey, that’s true,” I say, “these guys are all unhappy, each one more miserable than the next. You’re absolutely right.”
“So why do you watch it?”
“Because I like the actress who plays Joan, obviously.”
“Ah, the busty one. Eh, well. Of course.”
I sit down next to her as Miorita goes back and forth between the living room and the kitchen, clumping around in her beat-up Crocs almost as if she were deliberately trying to annoy me (I’m starting to wonder if she’s jealous of the fact that I’m Ass’s favorite).
So nothing special, we chat, as usual. I try to wangle her forgiveness for making a fool of myself by motormouthing on the phone after the supermarket, she is courteous enough not to touch on the subject again, then we move on to the press coverage, she asks me what it’s like to see myself in all the newspapers, I say, “No big deal,” she says, “Suuure,” then she asks me if anyone’s recognized me on the street, I say, “A few people, yes,” whereupon she asks me, with a provincialism that I’d never have expected from her, “Really? You can’t really remain completely indifferent to a stranger’s lack of discretion, tell me what it was like” (so odd how people tend to ask you to tell them about sensations more than events), so I concentrate for a few seconds and then I say to her, “I’ve got it,” and she says, “What?” and I say, “Do you remember in school when the teacher would be lecturing and at a certain point he’d mention a historical figure, say King Ferdinand, and since there was a Ferdinand in our class, we’d all turn around smiling and look at him, and suddenly he’d take on a new light in our eyes, and he’d smile back at us as if he somehow deserved the attention, because he was now the beneficiary of a renown and notoriety that obviously had nothing to do with him and yet he was gratified by the coincidence?” And she says, “Of course, of course, I like this analogy, bravo,” and I say, “There, now you see, that’s how I feel”; after which she confesses that she got a certain thrill out of hearing me mentioned so frequently on the news in the past few days, whereupon, taking advantage of this unexpected softening on her part where television is concerned, I confide to her that I’ve been invited to appear on both Annozero and Daria Bignardi’s show and that I’m thinking about picking Daria Bignardi, and she asks me why, and I tell her that since Daria Bignardi’s studios are in Milan, I want to go there, because Alessandra Persiano is in Milan and it’s there that I’m planning to see her, convinced as I am that if we meet up in neutral territory we might be able to fix whatever it is that’s gone wrong between us, because if you think about it, I add, you always need neutral territory to talk and come to an understanding, and sure enough at corporate and professional offices of a certain level there’s always a room specially designated for this called, in fact, a meeting room, furnished with a long, usually oval table, chairs, and at the most a bookshelf, usually half-empty, and what else could a room so designed and furnished be but a neutral territory? And she says (the asshole), “In fact, you don’t have a meeting room, do you?” And I say, “Thanks for reminding me, what would I do without you,” and she says, “But, excuse me, do you have to go on Bignardi’s show to go to Milan? Can’t you just plain go to Milan, call Alessandra, and say to her, ‘Hey there, guess where I am?’” And I say to her, “‘Why, I’m surprised at you, are you really trying to compare going up there just to see her—giving her such an inordinate satisfaction, practically crawling at her feet, or even worse, giving her a chance to accuse me of having gone up there to check up on her (I can already hear the speech: ‘So this means I’m not even free to travel for work without your feeling you have the right to follow me and see what I’m doing? Thanks a lot for the vote of confidence’)—with going up there for an independent and admirable reason like being the guest of honor on a popular talk show.” And she says, “Vincenzo, you amaze me, what an idiot you are, but how old are you, twelve?” And I say, “How much do you want to bet that it works?” And she says, “Certainly, you must really respect her a great deal, this woman,” and I say, “It’s not how you think,” and she says, “Obviously you’ll have to tell her that you’re going to be on Bignardi’s show, otherwise how can you be sure that she’ll see you?” And I say, “Clearly.” And she says, “Wow, what a brilliant plan.”
We stop for a minute to watch Don Draper angrily climbing the staircase in his home with his wife at his heels, scolding him for never taking responsibility for what goes on in the family (I’ll take this opportunity to note that in a moving matrimonial quarrel—a classic trope—it’s always the wife pursuing the husband, never the other way around), and from a certain way that Ass has of settling back into the sofa I foresee an imminent transition to a much more serious topic of conversation than that of using my television appearances to win back my girlfriend.
A moment later, in fact, as Betty (Mrs. Draper, as lovely as Grace Kelly) shouts at her husband: “It’s not her job to raise our children!” she puts a hand on my shoulder and says:
“Now there’s something I need to tell you.”
I pick up the remote control, lower the volume, set the remote control down next to me, lean forward, place my elbows on my knees, and interlace my fingers.
Assunta follows the entire sequence with her eyes, as if she found my intricate preparations to be a bit much.
“Wednesday I have my first session of chemo.”
I take a few seconds, then I realize that the time has finally come to get down to brass tacks.
“Listen, Ass, till now I’ve never really talked to you about it, but I think you ought to let Nives . . .”
She shakes her head, stopping me from finishing my sentence, and shoots me the off-kilter glance you normally concede to the completely discredited, when denying them the faculty of arguing their case.
The next thing she says to me makes me feel like a complete and utter boob.
“Look, don’t think for a minute that I haven’t known all along you were here to see me on a mission, please.”
I suddenly feel a surge of feverish heat.
“On a mission?” I reply, pretending to be scandalized.
“Come on, now don’t make that face. I’ve been treating my daughter like shit for weeks now, I barely even answer the phone when she calls, I measure out my visits with my niece and nephew with an eyedropper, so now they’ve sent you, obedient minion that you are, to scope out the situation: what could be simpler. Why shouldn’t they have? It’s exactly what I would do myself.”
“Obedient minion that I am?” I repeat in my mind something like five times in a row.
If the mortification-induced outbreak of rosacea that has just swept over me is stamped on my face, I must be a ridiculous sight to behold.
The only thing that keeps me from telling Ass to go to hell in a handbasket (together with her lovely daughter, it goes without saying) is the affection I have for her.
So I say nothing, limiting myself to opposing a rhetorical resistance to the subcutaneous vascular dilation that continues to inflame my cheeks.
“Are you offended because I called you an obedient minion?” she asks when I don’t react.
“Oh, don’t be silly, why should I be?”
“In fact, why should you be? It’s the truth.”
“You’re right, it’s the truth,” I say indignantly. “In that case, my scouting expedition ends here.”
I get to my feet, but only because I can no longer bring myself to remain seated.
“Are you leaving?” she asks, with an edge of hostility.
I peer around nervously, as if I were looking for something, or I were having an attack of claustrophobia, what the fuck do I know.
No, I have no intention of leaving. And I already know that even if she asked me to go, I’d try to stay. But since I say nothing, she moves the conversation forward on her own.
“So tell me, is the only reason you’ve been coming to see me to reconcile me with Nives? And now that you know you’ve failed your task, you’re leaving?”
I fill my lungs with air, then I let my shoulders drop as an exasperated sigh escapes my lips.
“Holy Christ, Ass!” I exclaim, nauseated with myself and with this unexpected dispute.
She sits back and blinks twice, realizing that she’s been taking it out on someone who is not at fault.
“Sorry,” she says. And she turns her gaze away from me.
I can’t stand to see a pained expression on the face of someone I love; it reduces me to despair in a way that nothing else on earth can do. I’d do anything to wipe the pain from their features. When I see a mouth twisting in mortification, a gaze lost in the middle distance, a stab of pain that takes form and disfigures a face I adore, it just kills me.
And so I sit back down next to her and take her hands in mine, as if I were about to pop the question.
“Hey,” I say in a whisper, “I may be an obedient minion, and in fact I most certainly am one, but I haven’t been coming here as Nives’s informant, I swear to you. If I’ve been coming to see you, it’s because I wanted to.”
She slowly raises her head until her eyes line up with mine, with the air of mocking defiance I know all too well.
She’s already over it.
“Oh, you really don’t understand a thing. You’ve been coming because I wanted you to.”
I snicker.
“You know what your real forte is? Modesty, without a doubt.”
“I was just trying to explain to you that I’ve finally decided to allow myself the freedom to decide who I want to spend time with and who I don’t.”
I close my eyes; I shake my head. I gently squeeze her hands.
“Listen, Ass, being the chosen one flatters me, it really does. But you also ought to understand that declaring an embargo on your own daughter at this juncture is, how to put this, kind of . . . nasty, that’s the word.”
Her eyes open wide and then she whinnies in amusement.
“And you know what your true forte is? Finding exactly the right word.”
“Which word, ‘embargo’?”
She laughs.
“What an idiot you are.”
“Am I your pet or not? That ought to give me the right to speak my mind.”
“And in fact it does. You said it and you’re still here, if I’m not mistaken.”
“So am I right?”
“Of course.”
“Oh, my God,” I comment, stroking my forehead.
“It doesn’t happen to you often, does it?”
“Ha, ha, funny lady. In that case, if I’m right, would you tell me why you’re behaving this way?”
“Because I want to know what it feels like to be an asshole, for a change. It’s not like I’m necessarily going to die the day after tomorrow; I have a little time left to earn her forgiveness.”
I try to collect my thoughts before answering. It’s no easy thing when you’re dealing with someone who formulates such solid ideas.
She’s a little bit like Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo, now that I think about it. Demanding conversationalists.
“Think for a second about what you just said, would you? A minute ago you scolded me for behaving like a twelve-year-old: does this strike you as a grown-up way to act?”
“I’ve been acting like a grown-up since I was fourteen, Vince’. Imagine how little I care, considering how long I have left to live.”
“Jesus Christ, Ass, this is your daughter you’re talking about. Your daughter and your grandchildren: which is to say my children, not to put too fine a point on it. Did you really have to experiment with being an asshole on them, of all people?”
“What do you think, that a person always wants to see their children? To have them in the house at all hours, with the right they seem to have to butt into everything and nitpick everything you do, including the way you dress when you go out and the clothes you wear around the house, to let you know about everything in their lives that isn’t working, from their vacuum cleaner to their marriage, as if you possessed limitless energy, and had no life of your own, with things you lack and things you need, as if it were your duty to always take out your scissors and clip away a little bit of space for yourself, because three quarters of your time they eat up for themselves? A time must come when you can stop taking care of your own children, am I wrong?”
Jesus, she’s right. She’s so right that I wouldn’t argue with her even if I knew what to say.
“You can easily imagine how much I adore Nives. And I feel ridiculous even saying it, it’s such a given. Probably she’s the only thing I ever did that I don’t regret; and you know how much it cost me to raise her. But my daughter is a tremendously self-centered person. She’s a power-monger. A winner. Capable of manipulating people in a way no one else seems to be able to do.”
“You’re telling me.”
“That’s right, I’m telling you. Because you know what I’m talking about.”
“And how.”
“For once in my life, I’d like to show her that everything can’t always go according to her plans. That I had a right to know about my illness, that she should have told me right from the very start and not left me to figure it out on my own.”
“So that’s it.”
She gently frees her right hand from the fragile grip of both of my mine and fans herself with it. Then she answers me with an edge in her voice, as if she were doing it unwillingly.
“Yes. No. I don’t know what it is, Vincenzo. All I know is that I no longer have any desire to understand anyone else. To behave like an adult, as you say. And that if right now I don’t feel like seeing Nives, I have no intention of feeling guilty about it. Period.”
I pull my head back, and it dawns on me that her unwillingness to engage in a give-and-take, for some reason that I can’t quite explain, moves me.
“Okay. Okay. You’re right,” I say, pulling back the hand she’d taken away from me and wrapping it once again in mine.
“Really?”
“Yes. I can’t see how I can disagree with you.”
“Thank you. It does me good to hear it.”
We sit for a few seconds without speaking. When I’m pretty sure that she’s over her inner turmoil, I go on.
“Hey.”
“What is it.”
“Do you want me to go with you on Wednesday?”
“That’s what I was trying to tell you before. I don’t think I’ll go.”
“Excuse me, what did you just say?”
“I just can’t do it, Vince’. Chemo is exhausting and demoralizing, and it takes real determination to take it on.”
I certainly wasn’t expecting this. And the worst thing is that I can’t say a single word. Because it’s clear to me from the expression on her face when she tells me this that any argument would sink like a stone—plunk.
My speechlessness must inspire a certain tenderness in her, because she immediately changes her tone.
“Hey. Don’t look at me like that. Today’s Thursday. I might very well change my mind.”
I nod sadly, pretending to believe her.
She looks at my hands, which are still holding hers captive, and then smiles at me.
“Now, unless you’re about to pull out a ring, you really ought to give me back my hands, because I need them.”