—Aboveground swimming pools are tacky.
Cassowary Man downed his coffee in a single gulp, removed from his pocket a little black notebook, its pages all creased, and read this strange sentence. I was about to ask him why he had started badmouthing me again, but he caught me off guard.
—Beg your pardon?
—My sentiments exactly,—he answers, pleased with himself.—That’s exactly what Nicky said: “Beg your pardon?” Nicky is a friend of ours, and he was showing us the swimming pool he had built in his yard, aboveground, of course. “Beg your pardon?” And the answer was…—He reads from the notebook,—“Whenever I see a swimming pool I feel better.”
He takes a cigarette from the pack on the table, sticks it in his mouth, and doesn’t light it. He stares at me.
—Francesca?—I ask.
—Who else?—he says, a little too loudly.—She’s in a kind of acute phase, listen to this,—he reads from the notebook,—“A ponytail means your hair is dirty.” We had just gone into Hi-Tech on Saturday afternoon, and the salesgirl asked if we needed any help. She had a ponytail, of course.
—And what did she say?
—Who, the salesgirl?
He pats around his pockets, evidently looking for a lighter that isn’t there. I pass him mine, and he lights his cigarette. He inhales deeply and speaks while exhaling all the smoke.
—What do you think she said? The same thing anyone else would have said: “May I help you?”
—And Francesca?
—What Francesca said is…—He looks at the notebook again.—“No, thank you. Just browsing.”
He takes another long drag on his cigarette and assumes a difficult to decipher expression of vigilance, of expectation.
—Well, at least you’re back together,—I say.—Last thing I knew, she had moved out.
Here we go: as if invoked by my words, a savage paranoia starts beating in his eyes. We’re back in the savannah, surrounded by all kinds of danger.
—She came back because I begged her on my knees to come back, Pietro,—he whispers.—I told her I was sorry, do you get it? me to her, and I promised her I would never bring up the subject again. That’s why she came back.
—And did you keep your promise?
—Of course. If I dare to even mention it again, she’ll leave and never come back. But I write things down, I write everything down.
He squeezes the black notebook between his hands, which seems to calm him down. Maybe I can still change the subject and ask him why he’s coming here to confide in me if later in the office he goes around telling everyone I’m a smartass. But the truth is that I’m much more interested in the behavior of his Francesca, and his ashen face, disfigured by the blade of apprehension, tells me he’s about to tell me a real doozie.
—I’m trying to figure it out, Pietro: it’s a mechanism of a perfect simplicity. At this point she can say anything, and everyone ends up thinking they’ve misheard…
He closes the notebook, throws away his cigarette.
—The secret is, she doesn’t realize it. That’s what makes it all work: that’s the beauty of it; because Francesca is beautiful, and beauty intimidates people. You remember Francesca, don’t you?
—Yes.
—You remember what a nice piece of ass she is?
Boom. She’s pretty, sure, but not as pretty as he thinks. In other words, she’s got a few flaws. Her front teeth are too long, for example, what orthodontists call an overbite. I noticed because Claudia has the same thing, and in a year or two she’ll have to wear a retainer.
—Yes.
—And can you envision her? I mean, can you imagine her face, her expression, when she says certain things?
—Yes.
—Her own special expression, I’m saying. The way she smiles curling her lips, the light that shines in her eyes…
I get it: he wants me to say no.
—Well, not really. I’ve seen her once or twice.
He shakes his head, disappointed, looking down.
—Well…then you won’t understand. You won’t get it.
He goes back to staring at me, but from the change in his expression you can clearly see he’s working on an idea.
—Maybe you can imagine someone else,—he says, with sudden enthusiasm.—Let’s try this: think about a very pretty girl you know well.
—Why?
—So you can understand.
—But I do understand.
—Pietro, for you this stuff about Francesca is just a story, just words. But what I want is for you to see it, if you can. Otherwise you’ll never understand what I’m going through. Come on, think of a hot piece of ass you know…
He continues to stare at me wide-eyed, his pupils dilated to the point of invading his whole iris. Maybe he does coke. Maybe he did a line this morning, half an hour ago, before coming here.
—Come on,—he insists,—what’ll it cost you?
Fuck it, he’s right: what’ll it cost me? We’re never going to get around to why he’s been badmouthing me anyway.
—I have to think of a pretty girl I know?
—Right. But really pretty.
—Done.
—What’s her name?
What difference does it make? What kind of simian curiosity can drive him to ask a question like that?
—Just so I can give her a name while I’m describing the situation to you,—he adds, because I must have tensed up.—You don’t have to tell me who she is. Just her name.
—Marta.
—Okay. Marta. Now imagine the scene. It goes like this: Marta is at a restaurant with friends. The restaurant has only recently opened, and it belongs to a friend of her friends, who for the record is gay, not a minor detail. The owner approaches their table and asks how everyone likes the culatello* with Parmigiano sorbet: he asks everyone, but by sheer accident, he’s looking straight at her when he asks, making her feel obliged to answer. And she answers…—He looks at his notebook,—“It’s delicious, my compliments to the chef.” But the owner doesn’t understand. “Beg your pardon?” he says. “It’s delicious,” Marta repeats, “my compliments to the chef.” Okay? Can you imagine the scene?
—Yes.
—Can you visualize the expression on Marta’s face while she’s saying this? Her tone of voice, eyes, everything?
—Yes.
—Now I want you to focus. Don’t underestimate the power of a mind focused on building a truly complete image. Marta, we were saying: try hard to envision her. Her face, her way of smiling, of moving her hands. She’s beautiful, all dressed up. Her earrings, her makeup…
This is getting ridiculous: suddenly Piquet looks me in the eyes and speaks to me slowly, articulating his words as if he wanted to hypnotize me.
—Close your eyes, you’ll see how many things appear…
Here we go: what’s even more ridiculous is that I do close my eyes, here, sitting at the café near the school, under the guidance of a paranoid cyclothymic who looks like a cassowary; the most ridiculous thing of all is that this farce really does manage to trigger my imagination in the end. There she is, Marta, sitting at the restaurant: she’s all dressed up, wavy hair cascading over her forehead, soft red lips with slight veil of lip gloss, bare-shouldered, luminous, an asymmetrical neckline, troubled chestnut eyes with only a hint of eyeliner; she bursts out laughing, drinks red wine in small sips, and leans forward slightly to whisper something…
—The owner arrives, asks how they like the culatello with sorbet, and she says, “It’s delicious. My compliments to the chef.”…
Except that—I realize—I’m not imagining it at all, I’m remembering: yes, it’s my memory of when I took her out to dinner at that restaurant near Torre Velasca thirteen years ago, right after her audition for Canale 5, when she still didn’t know she’d passed with flying colors, which is why she was so seductive, so excited and available, because I had tickled the most secret and burning ambition in the fog of her nineteen years—to work in television, become famous, be desired and admired—and she felt one step away from fulfilling it…
—Are you there?…And two hours later, there she is, dancing naked to “Dance Hall Days” by Wang Chung at my walk-up on Via Bonghi, slightly drunk but still in control of herself, in a lethal mix of naughtiness and naiveté, determined to discharge into me, a television writer, all her pulverizing beauty and thus falling short of the bull’s-eye she doesn’t realize she’s already scored. Here she is coming closer, circling around me, and with her lips she grazes my ear, and suddenly she sinks her teeth into my neck as if she really did want to suck my blood—that seminal bite I have repeated so many times since then, on the neck of every other woman I have found in my arms, but that was unfortunately never again inflicted on me…
—Pietro, are you there?
—Yes, I’m there.
—Good. Now the only thing you have to do is change the first thing Marta says. Everything you have just imagined stays the same, except her first line is no longer “It’s delicious, my compliments to the chef.” Her first line, the thing she says right after the owner looked at her asking “How is it?” now becomes…
But it makes no sense to remember these things. Marta is crazy in a totally physical, sexual way—something much more dangerous. Marta doesn’t say things without realizing it; without realizing it, Marta gets undressed; without realizing it, Marta goes to bed with people and gets pregnant. I have to stop thinking about her. I have to stop immediately.
—“Who’s the fairy that made these portions?”
I open my eyes again.
—Now do you understand?
Of course. Piquet is as pale as a sheet; he seems to be still hanging on to the question he just asked, and all I have to do is say something to him. Any little thing about this Francesca who’s tearing him apart. Not about Marta, Marta has nothing to do with this.
We’re talking about Francesca.
—Come on, now, you can hardly blame her,—I say.—Built-in swimming pools are much classier than the ones aboveground; when women put their hair in a ponytail it’s almost always because it’s dirty; and the portions in restaurants are always tiny. If you ask me, her only problem is that she’s too savvy in a slightly brutal way, but I wouldn’t worry if I were you.
I know exactly the kind of smile I’m struggling to adopt—reassuring, ironic, knowing—and my sense is that it’s working; but it’s useless, because suddenly we’re no longer in the hypnotist’s office, we’re back in the savannah, where irony has no citizenship, and a cheetah must have also appeared, because the cassowary hunches over with a wild look in his eyes.
—Ah, no?—He gets pissed off.—So listen to this. Tuesday night, opening of a photography show at Studio Elle.—He lowers his voice.—“It looks like black dicks are bigger than white dicks after all.”—He raises it again.—Do you know the color of the hand she was shaking? Do you know who it belonged to?
This syndrome is really remarkable. If it’s true, it’s really remarkable.
—No, who?
—The South African consul, who had come all the way from Rome to inaugurate the show.
—And what did you do?
—I ran away. I said a big hello to the air, as if I’d seen someone I knew, and left it at that. I waited on the other side of the room for five minutes staring at the brick wall painted white, and then, when I mustered up the courage to look at her, she was chatting happily with a friend of hers and the consul was gone.
—And she didn’t realize what had happened?
—Of course not.
—So we’ll never know what she thinks she said.
He grabs my arm.
—Pietro, the problem isn’t what she thinks she says, the problem is what she says. And in reality it’s my problem, not hers. Because in the end I understood, you know. In the end I understood everything.
Here we go. Sooner or later a paranoiac understands everything. Otherwise he wouldn’t be paranoid.
—What did you understand?
—Exactly what I said: that the problem is mine, not hers.
He lets go of my arm, thank God, and lowers his voice again—and a good thing he does: the trees might be bugged!
—Follow my line of reasoning: who is she really dropping her bombshells on? Who is she talking to when she says those things? To herself, no, because she doesn’t even realize she’s doing it. To other people? They’re a revolving cast of characters: friends, salesgirls, waiters, consuls…Can you believe that now, even as she’s doing it more than before, she never does it twice to the same person. Never. No, actually there is one person who is always there, who refuses to believe he misheard, who knows what’s going on; and that person is me. She’s doing it to me.
Naturally. He is the epicenter of the things happening around him, so things are always happening to him, all of them, even when they happen to other people; and he is the only one who can understand them.
—Now she’s in a lockbox,—he continues.—To get her to come back to me, I promised not to talk about it anymore. Now she knows she can blast away, and does she ever. Listen to this one, —he starts reading from the notebook,—“If I don’t take a piss I’m going to explode.” “I lost my virginity to a friend of my father’s.” “This sgroppino tastes like cum…”
Awesome…
—All in the past week, Pietro, and all in front of different people; the only constant was me.
—Okay, but how do you know she doesn’t do the same thing in front of other people when you’re not around?
—I tell you, she’s talking to me: she’s saying all of these things to me. My son’s psychologist thinks the same thing.
—What psychologist?
—The psychologist my son is seeing. I told you about him, didn’t I? Saverio’s had a lot of problems since his mother and I separated: nervous tics, stuttering, allergies. Now he’s started to count rather than speak, and we took him to a psychologist.
—What do you mean, he counts?
—Rather than talk he counts. So we took him to this psychologist, but naturally the psychologist wanted to speak with the two of us more than anything, also because of the fact that Saverio has stopped speaking. So to make a long story short I told this psychologist about Francesca, and she—
—Wait a minute.—I raise my voice a little, too, and I hope he understands why.—What do you mean, your son counts rather than speaks?
—Look, it’s very upsetting, it makes me want to cry just to think about it. Rather than speak he counts. “Saverio, how did it go at school today?” “17,616; 17,617; 17,618…” Theatricalization of rejection is what the psychologist calls it.
Theatricalization: what do you want to bet she’s the same psychologist I fainted in front of the other night…
—And he doesn’t say a word?
—Who, Saverio? No.
—Does he do this with everyone?
—Everyone.
—Even at school?
—Even at school.
—For how long now?
—A couple of weeks.
—You mean a single count that’s been going on for two weeks?
—I think so. Last night on the phone he shot out some huge numbers, like 100,000.
I’m baffled: he said that it’s upsetting, that it makes him want to cry just to think about it, but in reality he’s talking about it with an almost dismissive detachment, as if it were foot-and-mouth disease or heartburn.
—And what does the psychologist say?
—What do you expect her to say? She says to leave him alone, not to lay a guilt trip on him, and to tone down the conflicts between us parents, because, in her opinion, that’s what he’s rejecting. That’s why she wants to talk with the two of us, together and separately. Like I was telling you, the other day, when I was seeing her alone, I told her about Francesca, so that she would understand the situation I’m in, too, and to ask her what this stuff means…
Forget about it. Nothing doing. Piquet wants to talk about Francesca. No matter how hard I try to keep the focus on his son, he’ll always find a way to bring it back to Francesca. He could count as high as a billion, poor Saverio, and he would still never get this guy’s attention…
—…She’s saying all those things to me. She’s devised this way to force me to see her hidden aggressiveness, the part that frightens her, that she can’t accept and she represses, so she can see whether I can accept it.
—You mean Francesca.
—Yes.
—And why is she supposedly doing this?
—To test me. To see if I really love her.
All of a sudden, without even looking at his watch, he must have decided it’s late, because he takes the check, glances at it, and puts two €2 coins on the table.
—It’s insecurity,—he adds.—It’s the fear of losing me.
—Is that what the psychologist said?
—Yes. I mean no. The truth is, she only asked questions and listened. But it was while I was answering her questions that I realized it: she’s testing me, do you see? She wants to see whether I accept the part of herself that she rejects. I realized it and I said it, and the psychologist didn’t object, so…
He fusses with his hair for a while and gets up, in a commotion of cracking joints. I get up, too, while he’s already walking toward the school.
—Um, your notebook…—I say.
He stops in his tracks, looks at me, then looks at the little black notebook that is still on the table.
—Oh,—he says and with two long strides goes back to recover it. The waitress arrives, takes the money, and starts clearing the table. He ignores her, but I say hello, because by now we know each other. Her name is Claudia, too. Once she asked me if I knew a good acting school.
—The last thing I need is to lose this,—says Piquet, slipping the notebook into the rear pocket of his jeans.
—Is the psychologist the one who advised you to write down everything she says?—I ask.
—No. It’s my idea.
—Why are you doing it?
He starts walking. I trail him.
—Francesca is sick, Pietro,—he says in a serious tone of voice. —For the moment she doesn’t want to hear about it, but sooner or later she’s going to have to get help: and when she agrees to get help, the fact that I’ve written everything down will end up being useful.
No one is left in front of the school. The movers are gone, so is the traffic cop. I look at the window of the man who called me dottore, and it’s closed. Only the C3 is still there, shining in the sun—twice as crumpled now, but with only one culprit for the damage.
—Because I won’t give up, do you understand?—Piquet starts up again.—She’s testing me, and I don’t want to have to lose her just because I’m not strong enough to take it. I am strong enough. I’ll pretend nothing’s happening, she’ll keep dropping her bombshells, and I won’t bat an eye. “You piece of shit,” “Beg your pardon,” “Way to go,” how hard can it be? By now I know how it works. It’s a disease, after all, like incontinence, but I love her, I can’t live without her, and if she were incontinent and refused to admit it, I’d learn to change her underwear without her realiz…—he stops, overwhelmed by the sequence of verb tenses—…well, without anyone noticing, in other words.
He stops and with the remote activates the alarm on his car. A huge Mercedes SUV parked in front of the park responds with a beep—very different from mine, shorter and sharper. What would Matteo think?
—And in the meantime,—Piquet concludes,—until she agrees to see someone, I’ll continue to stay close to her, and I’ll protect her, yes, I’ll cover her when she drops her bombshells in front of other people: I’ll pretend nothing’s wrong, I’ll smile like she does, and the people in front of her will be practically forced to think they’ve misheard. How hard can it be?
He looks at me, smiles. On his face I can see forming, literally, a warm, blatant sigh of relief, as if the formulation of this last idea had made his problem disappear in an instant. Bingo! He spent half an hour sinking before my eyes beneath the weight of an unbearable pressure, and now he’s settled everything simply by deciding to put up with it.
—Eh? How hard can that be?—he repeats.
—Easy as pie,—I say. Ignoring the fact that, in my opinion, Francesca won’t be exactly enthusiastic about this change.
—Well, I’ve gotta get going. I bought this awesome laptop, directly from the manufacturer in Taiwan, but I have to pick it up from DHL because the idiots sent it to my house. I told them to send it to the office, I specified it expressly on the order form, since I’m never home, but forget about it: they sent it to my home address, so it went back and now I have to go pick it up.
I wonder what I can do for him. If I were his psychologist, I could convince him to start some kind of therapy. If I were his wife, I could demand a court-ordered test or have him committed. If I were Enoch, I could take him to Africa with me…
—On the positive side, I won’t be going to the office this morning. The less time I spend in that nuthouse, the better. Things are getting worse and worse there. Worse and worse…
And if I were his CEO—if I had accepted Thierry’s foul offer and, while continuing to spend my time here, I was already the boss—I could fire him, yes, making sure he has a nice golden parachute, which together with his severance would be sufficient, I think, to give him enough time to fall flat on his face and pull himself back up, slowly but surely, without in the meantime getting himself fired for serious misconduct and hitting the skids.
—Bye, Pietro.—He shakes my hand.—Thanks for the advice.
What advice?
—Bye.
But I am who I am: the dead man walking, the smartass who’s got everyone fooled; and no matter what I might do to try to dissuade him, he would immediately think I was doing it to screw him. There he is, starting it up—vroom, a little heavy on the gas pedal—he lowers the window, waves good-bye to me again, and exits the parking lot, brushing past the trash bins. No, there’s nothing I can do. There he is putting on his turn signal and entering the side road. Who knows how high his son is counting now.