What do you mean?”
That’s the question that arises automatically when you’re presented with a fait accompli. More than rhetorical, it’s a polemical question: it contains the illusion that by talking about what’s happened you can still do something to prevent it. And that’s the question Alagia slaps me in the face with when I answer her call to my cell. I’m on the street, with a nervous haste prodding me on, unjustifiably, because no one is expecting me where I’m going.
“Your grandma doesn’t want to do the chemo.”
“You already wrote that to me in the text.”
“Exactly.”
“But that’s bullshit. It doesn’t make any sense.”
“That’s what I think too.”
Actually that’s not exactly what I think, but it’s what I say.
“Vincenzo, don’t try to be telegraphic, for Pete’s sake. Do you think this is the kind of news you break in a text?”
I find her point so stupid that I abruptly stop where I am.
“In effect, I’d been planning to say it with flowers, but I’ve been so busy lately.”
Come to think of it, my retort is stupid too.
A guy with a dog that looks exactly like him walks past, looks me in the face, and snickers.
“What an asshole you are.”
“Among other things.”
Alfredo must be close by; he’s just asked her in the background: “Why?”
I start walking again.
“Go on, you talk to him,” I hear her say with a tone of disgusted superiority.
As I wait for her to hand the phone to her brother, I’m hypnotized by a flier stuck to a stoplight pole with packing tape, as if in a picture frame.
PUPPIES FOR SALE
BORN TO A PUREBRED GERMAN SHEPHERD
EXCELLENT PEDICURE
FOR INFORMATION: (348) *******
Generally speaking, when I run into a gem like this one, I immortalize it with my cell phone. Only right now I can’t, seeing as it’s pressed up against my ear. But since I wouldn’t dream of missing the opportunity to capture and archive this masterful display of extemporaneous illiteracy, it occurs to me that I’ll have to stay right here until the end of the phone call and then take the picture immediately thereafter.
“Papà?” says Alf.
“Tell that neurasthenic of a sister of yours that she’s an uncouth oaf,” I promptly reply.
“Sure, okay, I’ll tell her. But what’s all this about Grandma?”
“What can I tell you, Alfre’. She won’t go in for the chemo. She doesn’t feel up to it.”
“But she’ll die.”
“Yeah, I know that.”
God, it’s so frustrating.
“Did you try reasoning with her?”
I say nothing.
“Papà? Hello?”
I take a deep breath and prepare myself for the line of bullshit I’m about to hand him.
“Sure, I tried,” I say, stroking my forehead in shame, “but you know your grandmother, she doesn’t talk, she issues decrees.”
He heaves a helpless sigh.
“Now how are we going to break the news to Mamma?”
I have nothing to say, so he goes on, as if talking to himself.
“Plus, in this whole thing, Grandma keeps refusing to see her. And she’s pretty remote with us too. What is she thinking? Not only do we have to fight Grandma’s cancer, we actually have to fight Grandma who’s decided to stop fighting cancer. Why are we all so twisted, Papà? Why do we always make everything more complicated? Why can’t we just deal with our problems the way normal families do?”
I don’t feel I have much to add on this topic either.
“Papà?”
“Eh.”
“Holy Christ, why don’t you say anything?!”
“I was just listening to you, Alfre’.”
“Well, okay,” he says, fuming, “but at least emit a sound, moan, just so I know that we’re still connected, for Christ’s sake! I feel like I’m sitting here talking to myself!”
“You see?” I hear that jerk of a sister of his say in the near background.
I’m mortified.
“Come on, Alf, don’t be that way. The first session is in a week. She still might change her mind.”
“So in the meantime you’re not planning to do anything?”
For a moment everything around me goes blurry.
“Could you repeat that, please?”
My lips are quivering.
“Listen, Papà, we need to . . .” he says, trying to backpedal, sensing the storm bearing down on him, but I don’t let him finish.
“No, you listen to me, young man: who the hell do you think I am, your man in Havana?”
He tries to reply but I’m all over him.
“It’s not my fault if your grandma decides not to seek medical care, you understand? Just as it’s not my fault if she doesn’t want to see her daughter.”
I stop for a second and look around, because I’ve just realized I’m shouting.
Alf doesn’t dare to answer me.
Which just winds me up for the rest of my rant.
“Instead of calling me on the phone and delivering these indignant and insolent lectures, why don’t you get your asses in gear and go see your grandma and give her one of these lovely self-righteous speeches?”
“Papà, wait just a se . . .”
“You know what’s changed? What’s changed is that I’m sick and tired of being your scapegoat. I have problems of my own, and I certainly don’t come around and weigh you down with them, neither you nor your sister, much less your mother, get it? Why don’t the three of you learn to do the same, and leave me in peace!”
And with that, I hang up.
In the instant that follows, I realize that I’ve applied Ass’s lesson, exactly as imparted. Which not only offers me a chance to experience the liberating sensation that she had described to me, it makes me feel closer to her than ever before. If I weren’t already setting up the phone in camera mode so I could take home with me the flier advertising German shepherds with excellent pedicures, I’d call her and tell her just how right she was.
I get to the bus stop and take the first one that pulls up. If I felt like it, I could check the routes shown on the map posted on the pole, but I don’t feel like it. I’d rather leave it to fate and maybe ask later along the way whether I’m heading in the right direction or not.
It’s crazy, and I know it. But that’s how I’ve always used public transportation. As long as a bus isn’t actually going in the opposite direction I just get on board and then figure out how to get where I have to go.
There must be a reason that I tend to be a repeat offender when it comes to intentionally getting lost this way, but I don’t have the slightest idea what it could be.
I take a seat, giving myself up to vague, listless thoughts made up for the most part of regrets already equipped with justifications, and by the time we’re well outside city limits (those stretches where, almost from one moment to the next, the landscape slips into a depression, and all you see are shuttered restaurants, gas stations, car repair shops, and half-built apartment buildings), I walk up to the driver and ask him if this bus goes to the hospital.
He turns around as if he suspects I’m trying to make a fool of him, but then he looks me in the face and asks me despairingly why I didn’t ask in the first place.
So he explains to me more or less where we are (I nod and pretend I understand), then he pulls over and lets me out (even though, he specifies, it’s not a stop on his route) and recommends I take another bus, but on the opposite side of the road.
I thank him and cross the road, without even slightly understanding where the hell I am, then I wait for almost forty minutes, buffeted by an inexplicably cold wind, until in the distance I see a bus appear, marked with the number that the driver told me to look for, and at that moment I feel so euphoric that I actually consider the possibility that it might be a mirage.
When I finally arrive at the hospital, I do some quick addition and realize that it took me exactly an hour and twenty-five minutes to get there.
I walk into the ward and speak with the chief nurse. She tells me that she saw me on TV and compliments me lavishly before telling me that Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo is in stable condition, and that in any case she can’t let me go in because right now the chief physician is making his rounds, but that if I’m willing to wait, I can get more information from him.
So I head over to the waiting room.
It’s awkward to find yourself in the same room as a very pretty girl, especially if you don’t know her and above all if the room in question is empty except for you and her. Because you immediately begin to act as if you’d done something wrong. It’s as if she knew something compromising about you and could tell everyone who cared to know anytime she chose. You act indifferent, but you are in fact acting, and it shows. Among other things, the unnatural effort you’re being forced to make puts you on edge in a way that comes very close to crossing the line into downright rudeness, so that if it happens that the girl asks you what time it is (which she does, with the utmost nonchalance and without any ulterior motives) you’re likely to bite her head off in response.
All of this, whether we like it or not, derives from the fact that beauty is a form of truth, and it doesn’t like having liars around it.
Personally I try to avoid this kind of embarrassment (because in the presence of great beauty I become terribly provincial: I blush, I stammer, I stand up and sit back down, I fan myself with my bare hands, and so on), but the problem is that when I wind up in a situation of this sort, I don’t know how to get myself out of it (even though right now, for instance, I could simply pretend that I need to make a phone call and take refuge in the hallway, or perhaps go straight home, since I don’t really even know what I came here for), and I behave in a variety of very odd ways.
In fact, when out of the corner of my eye I notice that the girl (who by the way looks a little like Cameron Diaz in There’s Something About Mary, and is emanating a wonderful scent that is vaguely reminiscent of caramel) has looked at me once, and then again, and then a third time, and I begin to fear that before long she’s going to try to start a conversation with me (though why she would want to do so, of course, I can’t figure out to save my life, unless perhaps she’s seen me on television), which is in fact exactly what happens, because she gets up and comes trippingly over to me and says, “Excuse me?” dominating me from above with her ineffable beauty, not only do I remain in hiding behind the pages of an issue of Marie Claire from, I think, six months ago that I picked up from a chair on my way in, but I don’t even answer her.
“Excuse me,” There’s Something About Mary repeats at this point, speaking a little louder and tilting her head to try to look into my face, understandably confused by my indifference.
So I’m forced to emerge from behind my Marie Claire shoji screen, like a tortoise from its shell.
“Oh. I’m sorry. I was just focused.”
She shoots a baffled glance at the magazine, then decides to ignore my answer.
“I apologize if I’m intruding. I’ve been hoping to meet you. I’m . . . or, rather, I was Massimiliano Sesti’s girlfriend.”
As she says this, she looks me right in the eye, without any uncertainty, like a person who has no fear of being taken the wrong way.
Her face remains smooth: she hasn’t granted me a ceremonious smile, or blinked hesitantly, or shown even a hint of awkwardness. This paragon of dignity, so compactly homogeneous, immediately extinguishes my shyness. I close my copy of Marie Claire and stand up, extending my hand.
“It’s a pleasure. Vincenzo.”
“Irene,” she replies.
She seems so tired. I’m very tempted to ask if she got any sleep last night.
“I remembered your last name, but not your first,” she adds, and at last she smiles.
Jesus, it’s as if the sun had just come into the room.
“I believe that,” I say. “It’s the only thing about me that people tend not to forget easily.”
The smile spreads until it narrows her eyes. I couldn’t say just what color they are, by the way (I don’t really know how to tell what color eyes are; but I do know how to drown helplessly in them).
“For what it’s worth, I wanted to tell you that I really appreciated what you did.”
“Believe me, I didn’t do anything,” I reply, and I say it with sincerity. “I don’t even remember exactly what I said. I was just feeling my way, hoping the mayhem would come to an end as soon as possible. I don’t even know whether I should feel guilty or not for what happened to the engineer. Maybe that’s why I came here today.”
“There’s no reason for you to feel guilty.”
“How can you say that?”
“Because he would have done it no matter what.”
I look into her eyes in search of some kind of sign that confirms the confidence with which she makes this statement, but once again she offers me nothing.
And so I go on.
“I was the one who distracted him so that the carabiniere could take him by surprise.”
She shakes her head. Once, decisively.
“That doesn’t count. In fact, I don’t think it’s an accident that he allowed himself to be distracted.”
“Why are you so sure?”
“Because I know how he felt.”
I say nothing.
We study each other, reciprocally.
“Would you tell me something?” I ask, adopting an indiscreet tone of voice.
“Sure.”
“How long has it been since you got any sleep?”
She seems happy that I asked, judging from the way she looks at me.