I Hadn't Understood (9781609458980)

by De Silva, Diego

  “Exactly what are you trying to insinuate?” I said at that point, raising my voice.

  “I’m not insinuating a thing, I’m just doing my job. I have a student who comes to school regularly with a swollen face from being beaten up, and it strikes me as my responsibility to talk to his parents about it,” she said.

  Whereupon I couldn’t think of a thing to say and I just answered, “You’re quite right, please forgive me,” catching her so completely off guard that she replied, instinctively, “Don’t mention it,” even though—I’d be willing to bet a sizable sum of money—she was probably yearning to tell me to go jump off a cliff, plunging to my bloody bone-shattering death at the bottom of a jagged ravine, after a long succession of various impacts at different angles and speeds on boulders of all sizes; but by this point she’d already said “Don’t mention it,” and she was stuck with her anger and annoyance bottled up inside her, poor thing.

  “So . . . are you going to come?” she asked after an extended and demented silence.

  “I’m not sure. Look,” I answered, “it would be kind of complicated to explain it to you right now, but I’m not sure I see any need for a meeting.”

  “What do you mean you don’t see any need? The need is clear as day.”

  At this point, I’m about to fly into a rage again, because if there’s one thing that sets me off it’s when somebody tries to give me lessons in my own field of expertise. “Look, teacher, we’re talking about my son here, I don’t know if that detail escapes you.”

  “Listen,” the teacher replied, exhausted by the relentless diatribe I seemed incapable of abandoning, “I just don’t understand why your wife insisted at such length on having me call you, seeing that you’re so uninterested in hearing about this problem.”

  “And so?” I said, spiteful as a Barbary ape. “My wife! Now, there’s a parent who knows how to take on the challenges that her children present . . . Wait a second, did you just say that my wife told you to call me?”

  “Why, does that surprise you?”

  “And just what do you care if it surprises me or not?” I would have been deeply tempted to say to that dumb cluck, if I hadn’t been so completely blown away by the fact that Nives had insisted on involving me in a school conference after my unforgivable cut-and-run from the restaurant; so I agreed to come in for the meeting and we finally put an end to that demented telephone debate, in part because we were both exhausted, I believe.

  After which I decided to get inside and stay out of sight before discovering what else that fucked-up day had in store for me. I made my way home, hugging the walls the whole way.

  Along with everything else, just to round out the picture, Pallucca, Maria Vittoria never showed up, and my critical guardian angel just wouldn’t let up, and there’s nothing more exasperating than having someone on your back saying over and over: “You see? You see? What did I tell you?,” especially if that someone is you.

  Anyway, I get out of bed on the morning of the meeting with the obsessive thought of Alessandra Persiano playing a Venetian adagio for strings in the background; I turn off the alarm clock before it can ring; I get into the shower and practically fall asleep, I’m in there so long; I put on my bathrobe and drag myself into the kitchen, dripping water on the floor as I go; while I make my morning coffee I turn on the tv and click to a channel with a morning show in which a television show hostess in a miniskirt who’s had her mouth redone by a plastic surgeon interviews an orthopedist who looks at her thighs and gives advice on the best way to lift your grocery bags; I sit down on the Stefan closest to the television set, pull the hood of the bathrobe over my head, and start patting my hair dry when the front-door intercom buzzes.

  I run to answer, praying silently that it’s not Alfredo again.

  “Hello.”

  “Buon giorno, Counselor. Can I come up for a minute?”

  My jaw drops, and my arm, hand, and the intercom receiver with it, so unbelievable is it to me that I’m actually listening to Tricarico’s voice.

  “Wait a minute, you have the nerve to come ring my doorbell, what’s more at my home, and what’s more at seven in the morning, after everything you’ve done?”

  “Oh, I know it, Counselor. In fact I wanted to know how it turned out.”

  “Ah, nothing special, believe me. I just spent two hours trying to explain to the police what happened and they came this close to throwing me in jail. Now that you know how it turned out, would you do me a favor and stop busting my balls from now on for all time in saecula saeculorum?”

  “Counselor, forgive me, but what was I supposed to do, shouldn’t I have defended you?”

  I look around, instinctively searching for other human faces that might mirror my helpless astonishment.

  “Look, let’s just say that you did the right thing,” I reply, doing my best to stave off the surge of blood that’s inundating my brain, “let’s just say that I have no reason to criticize, that your intervention was providential and that in fact I owe you a debt of gratitude. But I don’t want you following me around anymore, okay?”

  “Sure, but can I come up for a minute?”

  “No.”

  “They arrested Mimmo.”

  “What did you just say?”

  “Mimmo. ’O Burzone. They arrested him last night.”

  “Come on up.”

  THE FLEXIBILITY OF THE LABOR MARKET

  How can it be that all this is happening? I wonder as I hurry to get dressed before Tricarico gets upstairs. What was the first mistake I made?

  I mean, a person ought to know what he’s doing, right? But that’s not necessarily the way it goes.

  I’m deeply upset at the idea that Burzone is back in jail so soon, especially at the thought that I might be to blame for it, in some manner that I can’t understand but I darkly fear.

  The door.

  I welcome Tricarico into the kitchen and I offer him an espresso, as long as we’re at it. He seems a little doleful, like someone who hates to have to leave or something like that.

  “I’m sorry about what happened at the airport,” is the first thing he says, as he takes a seat. “Did you get hurt?”

  “Forget about the airport. Tell me what happened with Burzone,” I say, pulling out another Stefan and sitting down next to him.

  “Maybe they were tapping his phone. Or maybe they were just watching him. The dead body, the one without the hand, was wrapped up in packages in his brother-in-law’s car, not far from his house. They caught him with his hands in the trunk, the dick-head.”

  The memory of the preliminary judge and the ADA walking into the courthouse together surfaces in my mind like a lightning bolt. And it all makes sense.

  Including Alessandra Persiano’s bafflement when I told her about how quickly Burzone had been released.

  I smooth back my hair, which is still wet.

  “The case just got a lot more complicated,” I point out, already concerned about the coming judicial twists and turns. “As long as all they had was the hand, that was one thing: we could always say that the dog buried it, and who knows where the dog found it, and forget about the rest. But now . . . ”

  Tricarico looks at me with something approaching compassion.

  “You’re not going to have to worry about that, Counselor.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We’ve already hired another lawyer. That’s what I came to tell you.”

  “Ah,” I reply, in the grip of a faint sense of vertigo that passes immediately.

  “Valeriani, you ever hear of him?”

  “Of course I’ve heard of him, he’s famous.”

  “Eh,” says Tricarico. And he takes a sip of coffee.

  I say nothing, mortified at having been flunked and then replaced, however much the news actually comes as a relief.

  “Look, just explain one thing,” I ask, clearly struggling. “What fault is it of mine if that idiot got arrested again?”

  “Oh, no faul
t of yours. It’s just that we figured out why they released him so quickly.”

  Because by this point it had become clear that the preliminary judge and the ADA were in cahoots to release Burzone so that they could rearrest him later, once he’d provided them with a little extra evidence. Which explains why the ADA hadn’t filed a request for the confirmation of detention.

  I start scratching myself all over. I’m probably turning red.

  “I told you when we started, Counselor, there’s no obligation,” Tricarico continues. “If you work out, they’ll keep you. If you don’t work, they’ll just hire someone else.”

  “Ah, right. Thanks for reminding me.”

  “I knew that you weren’t cut out for this kind of work.”

  “You mean I’m too honest?”

  “No. It’s just that it’s not your thing.”

  Now I really do turn red. Out of indignation, perhaps.

  “Oh, listen, did you just drop by to insult me?”

  “Counselor, I only told you what I think, not that what I think is necessarily the truth.”

  “Of course it’s not the truth!”

  “Then why are you getting offended?”

  “O-o-oh, Jesus Christ! It’s impossible to talk to you!”

  “Why, what’d I say?”

  “Look, here’s a great idea: I’ll give you back your money, okay? Why on earth would you even pay for a two-bit lawyer like me?”

  “Counselor, what on earth does the money have to do with it, who asked you for the money? You did your job. If Mimmo is a shit-head who gets arrested, that’s not any fault of yours.”

  “Okay, listen,” I get to my feet, in exasperation, “we’ve talked enough. Now I have someplace to go.”

  “Now you’re offended.”

  “That’s none of your business. Shall we say goodbye?”

  He finally gets to his feet, too.

  “Mamma mia, you sure are hypersensitive, Counselor.”

  “How do you know a long word like hypersensitive?”

  His eyes seeks out my eyes and stare into them. He’s flushing red.

  For a few long seconds he reflects on whether he ought to lose his temper or just take the line as a joke.

  He leaves me hanging for a while, and then bursts out laughing.

  THE FLAVOR OF THE WRONG PLACE

  The café Ketty, where I have my appointment with Alf’s teacher, is a typical little place of business organized according to its proximity to the neighboring high school—so really, more than a bar, it’s a retail outlet offering single-portion pizzas, various fried foods, and pastries with nutella.

  In this kind of a bar, if you order an espresso, it’s always with a sense of inadequacy. And it’s not only because of the smell of fried foods. It’s more basic: it’s that an espresso really doesn’t have anything to do with the kind of café I’m talking about. In the sense that the espresso machine, if you look at it carefully, has the feel of one of those things that they keep around because you never know, it might just come in handy. In fact, the first person to have that twinge of inadequacy when you ask for an espresso is none other than the barista. You can see it from the way he makes an espresso, that he doesn’t really have a practiced hand. And then he serves it apologetically. You might be familiar with the blend of coffee, and maybe it’s not bad. But then when you taste your espresso, it has that distinctive flavor of the wrong place.

  I’m the first to get there and, not knowing what to do with myself while waiting, after randomly punching buttons on my cell phone for a good solid five minutes, I order a flavor-of-the-wrong-place special espresso at the counter and I strike up a friendship with Ketty, the chatterbox who’s given her name to the bar. She asks me if I’m the father of a student at the high school across the street, and when I confirm that I am, she demands a rough description of Alf, confident that she’ll be able to recognize him from the description, as if I’d come in off the street looking for a scrap of information about his disappearance.

  Shortly after we begin sketching out Alf’s idenitikit, luckily, Nives shows up, stops at the front door of the café, removes her Safilo Glamour sunglasses, and looks me up and down.

  I experience an acceleration of my heartbeat, and I don’t know whether it’s because of an abiding sense of guilt from having abandoned her in the restaurant or because of how beautiful she is.

  Ketty ushers us into a back room, where the walls have been completely defaced by Sharpie graffiti.

  We sit there for a while in an unexpectedly intimate silence. Then I make up my mind to say something, even though I still can’t bring myself to look her in the face.

  “I don’t know why I did it, Nives.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” she says. But her lips are trembling.

  “I can’t even say I’m sorry.”

  “That’s not nice.”

  “I was trying to say that—”

  “Come on, cut it out,” she breaks in, as if she were scolding me for not undersanding.

  Whereupon, obviously, I don’t understand. And out of fear of a misstep, I stop talking entirely. Which is I think the reason we broke up.

  “I have to tell you something, before Alf’s teacher gets here,” says Nives.

  “I didn’t come here to see her,” I say.

  “Neither did I.”

  I’m so tempted to kiss her right now. Even though—and I’ve never been so sure of it—I don’t love her anymore.

  I look down at the table.

  “I’ve done a lot of thinking in the past few days. And you know something? I don’t understand a thing.”

  “Oh, that strikes me as a good sign,” I say.

  “Shut up.”

  “Okay.”

  She resumes. At first, she’s irritated at my interruption, but then she manages to get back to the intonation she started out with.

  “I’ve done everything I could to stay angry at you. I had every reason to feel that way, never to see you again and to reduce our interactions to the minimum necessary for the well-being of our children, but . . . ”

  “But what?

  “But when you walked out of that restaurant and you didn’t come back, I discovered that I didn’t give a damn about having a man by my side, if he wasn’t you.”

  For a moment, a single fleeting moment, I melt. Then the material of which I’m composed resolidifies. I feel like crying, goddamn it to hell. And not because I’m happy, but because I don’t know what to do with it, at this point. How many thousands of times have I dreamed of this moment? How many nights have I spent watching the Home Shopping Channel, just waiting to hear those words? Would it have taken so much, to say them to me when I needed them? I was here, for the love of God, why couldn’t you see me?

  “Nives . . . ”

  “You don’t need to say anything.”

  In fact, I wouldn’t know what to say. Luckily, the teacher shows up, out of breath, her car keys in one hand and her purse in the other.

  “Excuse me, I’m so mortified. Every morning it’s just such a battle to find a parking place.”

  We stand up and exchange the regulation round of greetings.

  Ketty shows up with order pad and pencil. We have barely fifteen minutes to talk about Alf. Currently empty of any thoughts on the matter, Nives and I glance at one another furtively.

  “Now then,” the teacher begins, “I’m very happy that you could both be here this morning. I’ve been wanting to talk to you for a whi—”

  A cell phone rings. It’s mine.

  The teacher stiffens and glares at me. Nives seems put out too.

  “Sorry,” I say, in embarrassment.

  I look at the display. There’s a phone number, but not one I recognize. I answer.

  “Hello? Yes. That’s me.”

  I straighten my back.

  “What did you say?”

  I get up from the table, in slow motion.

  Nives and the teacher follow me with their eyes, uneasily.<
br />
  I move off. I continue to listen, touching my hair.

  “Yes. I’m his lawyer,” I say, absolutely convinced of the words that come out of my mouth.

  Ketty, at the counter, is preparing a tray to bring to our table.

  She meets my disturbed gaze and stops what she’s doing.

  “I’ll be there immediately. No, I’m not far away. Yes. Thank you.”

  I go back to the table, with a different face.

  Nives stands up, frightened.

  “Excuse me, I have to go,” I say, without haste.

  “What’s happened, Vincenzo? Who was that on the phone?”

  “A murder.”

  “What?”

  “I have to go.”

  I reach out to shake hands with the teacher.

  “Excuse me, I can’t stay. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t worry, Counselor. We’ll talk another time.”

  I feel strangely calm, as if I were starting to glimpse some sense in everything that’s happening.

  “Vincenzo,” says Nives. And she takes my hand. It’s nice, the way she does it.

  “What?”

  “Why are you so upset, who’s been murdered?”

  “I can’t explain it to you now, I have to get going.”

  She squeezes my hand, hard.

  Then she plants a kiss on my lips.

  THE REFRIGERATORS OF MEN WITHOUT WOMEN

  Giustino Talento killed his girlfriend with seven stab wounds. They had an argument in the kitchen, as so often happens.

  The kitchen is the most dangerous place to have a fight, because weapons are lurking everywhere.

  When the police got there, they found him sitting in the bedroom, a blank expression on his face. He’d actually called the police himself, giving them his name and address. He even took the trouble to give the policeman who answered the call directions to make it easier to find the street door of his apartment house more easily.

  Then he washed up, changed his clothes, left the front door open, and sat down to wait for them to come and take him away.