My classmates went to a party, too, but they only invited me at the last minute, hoping I wouldn’t go. I decided to make them happy. In order to keep from needlessly worrying Agnese and Mario Elvis I put on my wide-wale corduroy pants, my wannabe Clarks desert boots, and the sweater without reindeer, and I went to the bus stop. As usual, I’ll ride from one end of the route to the other a few times, I’ll jot down brilliant ideas in my human flesh diary, and then I’ll go home and tell a bunch of amusing episodes that took place in my imagination. Turns out my mother’s prediction that I’d have lots of friends in high school was wrong, as was my father’s prediction, though he’d moved up the happy event to middle school. My classmates are all fifteen or sixteen years old, they think about nothing but motor scooters and girls, and if you don’t have one or the other, you’re cut out. Raul said that the motor scooter is not a problem, he can get me one cheap, then it’s just a matter of reissuing the registration and paying for insurance. Maybe I’ll be able to afford it in a couple of months, we’ll see, in any case chasing after my classmates would be a pointless, endless pursuit. Even if I had a motor scooter, they’d treat me like a penniless wretch because I don’t own a jacket with goose down filling, and once I’d bought that they’d keep it up because I can’t show off a portable stereo in my room with two turntables and at least four stacks of cassettes. Every so often I got the impression that there were also normal people in their ranks, like Federico and Luca, who had started to devise a plan to attempt an expedition from Rome to Stockholm by motor scooter. But their enthusiasm waned day after day, and in the end it became clear that the purpose of the trip was to pick up chicks and in fact, they turned to the simpler solution of making a short film so they could stage auditions with all the girls in the school. I’m interested in girls myself, but they seem to be suffering from some kind of illness, the dating disease. I’ve got a date with this one, I’ve got a date with that one, oh how I wish I could get a date with this other one. I’ve had a date, I was excited, I was expecting who knows what, but after a couple of hours at the park I was bored out of my skull. I wanted to play, but that girl must have had low blood pressure or something because every five minutes she was lying down on the grass.
37.
No one can stop the Santamaria family. Mamma’s baking ciambelloni, Papà has started getting overtime again, and I’ve started selling classwork. Latin, Greek, and Italian at five thousand lire apiece, math at seventy-five hundred because the math teacher likes to use guerrilla techniques and the margin of risk is greater. The damned old woman paces continuously up and down the aisles between desks, whips around without warning, then sometimes she pretends that she’s reading her gradebook with her head bowed, but actually she’s got her eyes focused on the class the whole time. There are even times, and in those cases there really is nothing you can do, when she sits behind her desk on the raised dais, motionless, wearing sunglasses. There are other strong students you could ask for help, but I’m the only one who’s never been caught. Their stratagems are limited to pens stuffed with notes and the dangling cableway with invisible nylon fishing line. I have one and one alone, and it’s infallible: finish the quiz in the first twenty minutes, when most of the kids are still struggling with the translation of the first sentence in the text or the first basic steps of the equation, at a point when no teacher would ever suspect you might have finished and therefore the monitoring is far looser. It was important never to give in to the temptation to hand in my paper before the time was up, that way my teachers might have an idea that I’m a good student but they’d never dream just how fast I actually am. With this approach I’ve saved up 250,000 lire in the first quarter alone. Last year I’d doubled my capital by investing the whole sum in phone tokens just a few months before their value rose from fifty to a hundred lire; unfortunately, though, given the initial investment, I only made 20,000 lire. Until just a few weeks ago, I was hoping to take advantage of the tensions between the United States and Iran by investing all my money in gold, but now a much tastier opportunity has presented itself. Since we’re in Italy, the sex education of unprepared female students was entrusted to two sophomore girls who offered special accelerated courses. The advice offered by the two tutors fell along these lines: five days before and ten days after your period, you can have sex without contraceptives and not worry about it, always keep your panties on when you’re jerking off a boy because sperm can cover distance, if by mischance someone happens to come inside you, climb up on a chair and jump off with your legs spread, repeat at least fifteen times. Then a senior girl got knocked up by a recidivist in her class, so-called because he had already gotten a girl pregnant two years earlier, the general level of trust in the two experts collapsed, and I decided to sink my funds into condoms. Ninety-five percent of the daring fornicators in this school would be willing to pay three times their market price just to avoid the embarrassment of having to buy them at the pharmacy.
I have some excellent prospects of making money, but first I need to stop wasting money on Roberta, my ex from elementary school. One day she said: “Help me with this quiz, I haven’t studied at all,” and I replied: “Five thousand lire,” and she replied: “I don’t have enough money, I’ll give you two packs of cigarettes,” “I don’t smoke,” “I’ll let you see my tits. With my bra on, though.” Every time I tell myself this is the last time, that I’m a dodo, that I should think about my family’s welfare, that I don’t need to pay to see her tits because I can see Vittoria’s whenever I want, but the minute Roberta takes me by the hand and takes me into the bathroom, I lose all self-control. What I need is a girlfriend, someone whose tits I can look at for free, but after the misguided episode of the reenactment of the partisan bomb against the Nazi troops on Via Rasella, I sort of became the laughingstock of the school. At recess everyone locks themselves in the bathroom to do forbidden things, and so do I. They smoke and neck, I get out my toy soldiers and organize blitzkrieg battles on the toilet lid. Since there’s never much time, I have to opt for something quick, the failed American raid on the embassy in Tehran, for instance, or the partisan attack on Via Rasella, as I mentioned, the kind of thing you can pull off in a few minutes, just enough time to line up two columns of German soldiers and then blow them away with an explosion. There were those that decided however that I’d been spending too much time locked in that stall and so they climbed up to look over, thinking they’d catch me doing who knows what. I doubt that there’s even one of the three hundred students in my high school who hasn’t been informed of my embarrassing little foible. If I haven’t been completely marginalized and if anyone still speaks to me at all, it’s only because of how useful I am for class assignments and quizzes. I don’t really mind it, I have little enough in common with my immature fellow students.
“Okay, that’s enough, you win . . . ” I say.
“Al, we don’t stop playing the game just because you’re losing!” Vittoria objects.
“But after all, you’ve already won!”
“You drove me crazy for an hour so I’d play with you, and then you just quit the game like that . . . You’re a poor loser!”
“Don’t use that word!” I say and run out of the living room.
“Los-er!”
“Don’t say it!” I shout and lock myself in the bathroom.
“Almerico is a poor loser!” she says to me through the keyhole.
“That’s enou-ou-ough!”
God I hate her when she’s like this. So, I’m a poor loser, what about it? What do you do, shatter the need for family harmony of a fourteen-year-old? Since when does growing up mean learning how to lose? Have we lost our minds?
No one will leave me alone! I live to hear people tell me: “Good job, Al.” So? What’s wrong with that? “Nice dive, good job, Al,” “Nice drawing, good job, Al.” Now, that’s the life!
“Mamma, Al’s crying because he lost at Monopoly!” says the spy.
I blame Papà and that nonsense about how you’re never supposed to cheat. Certainly, if you cheat and then you have scruples about it, Papà’s right, it’s best to lose, but I enjoy the victory all the same, and anyway I sleep like a rock every night! No one understands me. They turn it into a question of right/wrong while here it’s a matter of beautiful/ugly. Cheating a little helps us to make our days, our lives, the world more beautiful.
“Aesthetics is the basis of morality!” I shout.
“Mamma, Al has lost his mind . . . ”
38.
After a couple of weeks of blessed peace the powers that be started attacking us again. Some kingpin somewhere decided that soon the 170 line, the bus route that Papà drives, will be eliminated because it has too few passengers. After such a long time, Mamma had another of her collapses of self-esteem, she’s afraid that along with the bus route they might eliminate the jobs, and I understand her fear, Mario Elvis is getting old and if they fire him he can forget about his space program.
“Get that nasty thing off your face,” Vittoria tells me as I gaze into the mirror, admiring the development of my secondary sexual characteristics.
“Quite a mustache, eh? It covers the whole lip, at this point,” I reply.
“It looks like a hamster’s belly.”
“Nice mustache, right Mamma?”
“Nice nice nice, soft soft soft . . . ” says Agnese teetering in my direction.
Now we’ll give her a half hour of the Princess of Monaco Treatment to remind her that she’s a wonderful pastry chef and a woman of great taste.
How do you increase the volume of passengers on a bus route? How do you persuade people that are used to driving or taking the metro to hop onto an old-fashioned, uncomfortable, and noisy means of conveyance? To find out more I decided to stake out a strategic location. The end of the line is ideally placed, right across from the post office. But it’s just that not even fifty yards away, there’s also a metro station. This is the real problem: the competition. I take note of the fact that the workers at the ministry all leave the office at 5:30 P.M. sharp. There are hundreds of office workers, but they all head straight for their parked cars and for the metro, there are only six of them who board the 170 bus. Unfortunately, if I want to convince adults to change their habits, I almost always have to rely on a falsehood. As it happens, I just happen to have one in mind. I walk out of the metro station and stride up the line of employees running late, the diehards who leave the office at 5:40 P.M.
“The metro’s not running,” I say.
“What? The metro’s not running?” a guy asks me, clearly exasperated.
I throw my arms wide in helpless resignation.
“Yeah, and it looks like it’s going to take a while, I waited half an hour and I’m still here.”
In an instant, the rumor spreads. “Not running?” “Again?” they ask.
“And now what are we supposed to do?”
That was the question I was waiting for.
“Well, anyone who needs to go downtown can take the 170.”
“Oh great . . . and how long is that going to take?”
“No, it’s actually fast, the end of the line is right here and the bus is usually empty. Whereas the metro always pulls in packed with passengers.”
“But does it go by Via Cavallari?”
“Certainly, you just get out at Via Ignazi and from there it’s a short walk.”
So I head off toward the bus stop with fifteen or so people trailing along behind me while the rumor spreads and the bad news causes a domino effect, spreading dismay among dozens of office workers.
“What a pleasant surprise. Are you going to take a ride with me?” Papà asks me.
“Yes, Papà. But you need to go right away,” I whisper to him.
“I’m supposed to leave in five minutes.”
“No, Papà, right away . . . trust me.”
“Why?”
There, that’s the look I hate. He thinks that I must necessarily have done something wrong.
“All right, I convinced them to take the bus by resorting to a ploy. But now you’d better not disappoint them. So leave right away.”
Mario Elvis starts the engine. The passengers’ sigh of relief convinces him that he’s made the right choice. He takes on a couple more late arrivals, pulls the lever that works the hydraulic pistons to shut the doors, and with a whoosh of air and three metallic clangs he seals the still doubtful office workers into the vehicle. We pull out.
“If I ask you to do something, will you promise to do it without a lot of objections?” I ask him.
“That depends.”
“Yes or no.”
“No, Al.”
“Instead, say yes . . . and sing.”
“Sing? Why should I sing?”
“It’s a long story, but you just sing.”
“I can’t sing while I’m driving my bus.”
“Papà, these are laws of the market. The 170 route can’t compete with the metro. You need to offer an extra service. Just like with laundry soaps. When you don’t have anything better than the competition, then you need to stuff a baseball card or a soccer card inside the box or you add a lemon scent, and watch your sales skyrocket. It’s the mechanism of perceived differentiation. What’s more, you need to consider the importance of consumer loyalty. If you sing well, they’ll come back.”
“I don’t understand a thing . . . ”
“What the devil good is it to have a genius son if you never listen to a thing he says?”
I go and take a stance in the middle of the bus, ready to launch a series of messages. I cross my arms over my chest, meaning: I’m all alone in the world, no one understands me, and all I have on earth is what I’m hugging at this very moment. I clamp my mouth shut, letting my lower lip protrude, which means: I’m not going to cry because I’m a big boy now. I look at Mario Elvis and then I turn away the minute he returns my glance, which means: I’m mad at you and I don’t want to meet your gaze because that would suggest we’re on the same wavelength, decidedly out of the question as has already been made clear by the arms crossed over my chest. Papà gives me another glance in his rearview mirror, again I pretend not to notice, and so he starts singing. He sings and looks into the rearview mirror. He starts singing a little louder and when he sees that people are starting to look at him, he gets shy and begins whistling instead.
“What’s he doing? Is he singing?” asks a little old lady.
“Yes, they call him Elvis . . . he’s an outstanding singer, I take the 170 just to listen to him,” I tell her.
A few passengers smile, others exchange puzzled glances. A few gentlemen comment on his appearance but about his voice there are no complaints.
“Well, as far as his talent, he’s talented,” says an office worker in his early fifties.
“I’ve heard that there are people who take this bus just to listen to him,” a lady replies to him.
Three stops short of the end of the line, Mario Elvis has broken the ice.
“And this one’s for you, my dear lady with the grocery bags! Are you lonesome toni-i-ight!”
Being the genius of the family is a big responsibility. You need to keep an eye on everything, show that you’re always a strong and authoritative leader. It also takes real sensitivity to skillfully pilot the inevitable handover of power between parents and prodigy son, leaving them with the sensation that they’re still in command. My memorable project is finally getting in gear, I read as much in Papà’s eyes at the dinner table. He told Mamma everything and we had a cheerful meal. “Let’s just hope it lasts,” she said, immediately finding the reassurance that she had been looking for. Yes, it’ll last, because I’m going to lurk outside the metro station three times a day for a week, I’ll bring new customers for the 170 bus, and in the course of a month, in part th
anks to word of mouth, I hope to have a reassuring number of loyal customers. I stretch out a foot and slip it under the sheets, against Vittoria’s butt cheeks. She doesn’t say anything because she’s too busy, she’s been fooling around all day with her transistor radio in search of her favorite songs. As soon as she finds one, she pushes the “Rec” button on Papà’s tape recorder and captures it on tape. After a day’s searching she has “Tunnel of Love” by Dire Straits, without the beginning and with Mamma coughing toward the end, and “Enola Gay” by OMD, with me coughing on the first chorus, plus me coughing again and her yelling at me over the second chorus. Now she’s looking for “Johnny and Mary” by Robert Palmer, and I can already feel an irritating scratching in my throat.
39.
I just adore the day they give out report cards, I have top grades in everything except for history, a subject in which I got a B+ because of an argument with the teacher. She didn’t consider pertinent my analysis of the Italian Middle Ages that established a link of continuity between the establishment of fiefs and the ultimate influence of the Christian Democrats in southern Italy and the Lockheed scandal. Actually, doing well in school is easy, all you have to do is memorize and regurgitate, remember all the dates—which always makes a strong impression on your teachers—and refrain from any personal comment or analysis. I dedicate less than a minute to reading the report card and then I go back to reading the janitor’s newspaper. As a reflection of the basic anomaly of the system, the janitor buys a different newspaper every day, to keep an open mind, he says, while in the principal’s office all you can find is the Corriere dello Sport and the Guerin Sportivo. The Italian stock market has risen 2 percent, a miserable increase compared to the double-digit growth in my condom sales. Still, I’m not satisfied, it’s time to start diversifying my investments. I could establish an agreement with all the students in all five homerooms of the sophomore year for an exclusive purchase of their Ancient Greek dictionaries. That would allow me to corner the market and impose a much higher price on resale of those used textbooks. Only then I’d have to wait until September to earn back my money, and I can’t afford that. Maybe I’m taking the wrong approach. Civil and well-mannered systems aren’t going to lead to anything good. Every time I read an article about Renato Vallanzasca, I’m astonished at the vein of benevolent approval of certain journalists. They refer to him as “il bel René,” news reporting slides into the realm of hagiography. I can certainly understand that in a country largely populated by squalid bribers and tax evaders, even a common bandit like him can start to look like a romantic personage, and the moral of the story is that due to an excess of good manners, I’ve chosen an excessively tortuous path. A brief criminal career might help to give my undertaking a jump start, as well as adding a picturesque note to my life story. I try to imagine. “Il bell’Al . . . ” and things have already taken a bad turn. Compared with “il bel René,” it really sounds pathetic. “Handsome Al,” it just doesn’t cut it. How about “Brilliant Al . . . ” Even worse. “Amiable Al . . . ” Much better. “Amiable Al, the most extraordinary genius of the twentieth century, had a troubled childhood. Forced by events beyond his control, he devoted himself to a life of crime, pulling off a number of daring capers that are still studied today by detectives and police around the world.”
We Are Family Page 14