And that’s when it dawns on me.
“What did you say, sorry?”
I don’t add: “And how the fuck dare you make a date for me without even asking, you horny lunatic!” but it’s as if I said it.
He looks at me as if he weren’t wondering what planet I was from.
“Do you really think that I was going to leave two hot babes of that level waiting to see whether Father Malinconico would say yes or no?”
I smile at him in disgust, then I throw open my arms, let them drop heavily against my sides, and parade around in an apathetic little stroll from the desk to the door and back again.
“Mamma mia, Vince’, since when have you become such a pain in the ass?” he asks me after, like, maybe, my third lap.
I stop in my tracks, and I look at him with new eyes. Because no matter how much of a con artist he is, I suddenly realize he has a point.
“Can it really be that you don’t have any other outlets for your energy?” I ask, shifting into reverse.
“You’re so right. Tomorrow I’m going to join Greenpeace and volunteer to go out on the next whaler-sabotage expedition.”
“You’re forty-seven years old.”
“That’s not a problem.”
“Look at the gut on you.”
“You see how little you understand? Women like it.”
“Which explains that line snaking out the door.”
“Listen, let’s just get one thing clear, okay? No one’s forcing you to go all the way. I know that you want to be faithful to your beautiful lawyer.”
My eyes start to cloud over.
“What’s the matter with you?” Espe asks.
I shake my head no, as if to say, “It’s nothing,” and he finishes laying out his plan for the evening’s entertainment.
“All you have to do is come along, hang out with them for a little while, while I see how far I can get with one of them.”
I lift my right forefinger, as if to ask if I can have just a few seconds to try to get the finer points of this concept straight in my head.
“All right then, if I’ve understood correctly, I’m supposed to play the clown and talk about how hard the whole thing was, while you go to work on one of them (the Jennifer Lopez look-alike, I’m guessing), and when we leave, and go over to your place, I imagine, I’m supposed to stay with Anna Karenina, or whatever the fuck her name is, and say to her: ‘I’m so sorry, you’re beautiful and I really like you and everything, but I don’t want to cheat on my live-in girlfriend’?”
“There’s no need for you to say those exact words.”
“True,” I catch myself saying.
“So you see.”
“Eh. So I see,” I confirm, like an asshole.
Then we both fall silent.
“Well?” he asks, understandably.
“Well, what?
“Christ, Vince’! Yes or no? You’re lowering this fucking answer from Father Abraham’s testicles!”
I go into a trance and the scene from this morning plays out again before my eyes: Alessandra Persiano pushing the last few items into her roller suitcase with just one hand because she’s holding her cell phone to her ear with her other, as she repeats out loud the ID code of the taxi she’s just called, and then she closes the suitcase and comes over to me, as I watch her passively from the bed, and she plants an insipid little kiss on my cheek and says: “I’ll call you later.”
“Give me twenty minutes, okay?” I say.
“That long?” he asks, as if he’d already done more than enough to meet me halfway.
“I’d like to read the newspapers, if you don’t mind,” I retort, picking the stack of papers back up.
“I can tell you what they say.”
“Aaah!”
BLUES
I’m everywhere: la Repubblica, Corriere della Sera, Il Mattino, La Stampa, il manifesto, l’Unità, and Il Messaggero, not to mention the vast number of newspapers I never even knew existed, and others that I would never, ever have dreamed of buying.
My performance on television is unanimously hailed as an example of civil activism, a “celebration of the right to defense counsel as a value in and of itself, not a mere protection of one partisan interest” (la Repubblica); a “surprising demonstration of emotional clarity and talent for dialectical improvisation, powerful enough to reverse the situation when it seemed that all was lost” (Corriere della Sera); the “well-founded hope that it is through the unexpected discovery of one’s fellow man that one arrives at a sense of belonging to a larger community” (L’Unità); and even an ethical model for the profession to which I belong: “Watch and learn how a real public defender does his job” (il manifesto).
There are even a few prominent bylines who go out on a limb in my favor: “Just this once, I feel like going overboard: Malinconico is the greatest lawyer now working, and he probably doesn’t even know it” (Antonio D’Orrico, Sette); “I actually find his awkwardness sexy; the way he winds up digging himself into unlikely dialectical holes but always manages to work himself free, even winning extra points on difficulty” (Mariarosa Mancuso, Il Foglio); “He managed to defend simultaneously both the prosecutor and the defendant: how on earth did he do it?” (Massimo Gramellini, La Stampa); “The attempted suicide of this father is nothing more nor less than the symbolic murder, horrifically televised, of a justice system that no longer serves any real purpose. The outmatched Counselor Malinconico, who has all our sympathy, has defended a case that he could never hope to win” (Goffredo Fofi, Il Mattino); “He wore the wrong tie, but who gives a damn: Malinconico is the man that a great many Italian women would like to have ask them out to dinner” (Maria Laura Rodotà, Corriere della Sera).
Especially memorable, moreover, was the “L’amaca” column that Michele Serra dedicated to the trial (la Repubblica), and I feature the unabridged version here:
If the politicians (you can guess which ones) who give us today (too) our daily mantra of “Let’s put an end to televised trials paid for with taxpayer money” (as if taxpayer money wasn’t already used to pay for the salaries and countless privileges that those same politicians enjoy, the lucky ducks) only had a certain sense of proportion, they would acknowledge that the talk shows against which they hurl their preprinted anathemas are the equivalent of the Teletubbies in comparison with the grotesque, heartbreaking legal experiment that we witnessed yesterday, aghast and hypnotized, on the screens of our home television sets: undeniable proof of the degree to which a televised trial (a real one: in fact, as we saw, a narrowly averted tragedy) is driven by the largely ignored demand for justice, which politicans ought to give far greater consideration beyond the invective that they normally assail it with.
From this point of view, the improvised summation of the polymath lawyer Malinconico (a surname that—I confess—I envy him) did full honor to the adjective that he bears as a family crest: an authentic blues riff of justice denied, which no one, not even a despairing father (which is to say no politician or cabinet minister), has the right to stand in for. Justice, ladies and gentlemen, whether you like it or not, is above partisan politics and personal interests. Because it is there to give an answer to people who are afflicted by grief and (of course) injustice. And this is the moral that this remarkable reality show, at once horrendous and wonderful, has given us.
Predictably enough, there are also a few assholes (do I have a vested interest? of course I do) who accuse me of hogging the spotlight, claiming that “when the video cameras are running, even courage becomes suspect” (and the last thing I’m about to do is to provide publicity for him and his filthy rag of a newspaper by naming names), but I know perfectly well that in cases like this, smear jobs come with the territory.
I hardly need to say how squalid I feel getting my fingers smeared with ink from searching for my name in all this newsprint, ignoring al
l the other news as if the rest of the world’s stories didn’t exist, weren’t worthy of my attention, but I do it all the same, because here and now I would rather be an imitation of myself than the original.
That’s just the way I am: when I lose a sense of the pace of life (which—and you’re free to disagree, if you like—kind of does what it pleases, more or less like the bodies we’re all born in), when I’m broken and I don’t know how to fix myself, when I’m missing pieces and parts and I can’t even be bothered to find out where they may have fallen, the only option is to find something else to do, let it pass, like a bad cold.
However irresponsible it may seem (and it undoubtedly is), I find that practicing disengagement as a technique for solving various problems works reasonably well. The only real challenge is choosing your manner of disengagement. Because even disengaging is an activity, and it demands application and method. You can’t fool around when it comes to disengaging. It’s vital to have something that catches your interest and keeps you (in point of fact) disengaged, otherwise your mind will always circle back around where it’s not supposed to.
And what better way could I have found to disengage from my private concerns, in the kind of situation I’m in now, than that of contemplating the effects of my television debut (that is, remaining right there in that damned supermarket, in a certain sense)? The privilege of becoming a public personality consists in enjoying another life in which you start out with a clear advantage. In which you can make up for the failures that you collect in private.
Are you depressed because your woman has left you? Read about yourself in the newspaper and you’ll see someone else who happens to have the same name as you but no signs of that inner torment. Who talks and smiles as if everything was going just fine. Who gets off funny lines. Who wouldn’t bet a penny on himself but who is endowed with the esteem of others. Who knows perfectly well that he’s not up to the things he says, but who goes ahead and says them anyway.
Well, to offer myself as an example, if for at least the past six months you’ve found yourself intolerable and haven’t had the slightest desire to spend time with yourself; if your relationship with the woman you live with, after a grueling sequence of highs and lows, has come to the point where you stay in bed while she packs her suitcase; if your ex-wife has started asking for her alimony payments for the sole purpose of bringing you face-to-face with your inability to pay them; if your working life comes closer and closer with each passing day to straight-up unemployment (overlooking the minor detail that you’re self-employed, at least in theory), it’s clear that if you have the opportunity to live life with another identity, you’re going to take advantage of it.
And so I thought that reading my name in the papers over and over again would have given me that distinctive sensation of dispossession that those who have experienced it describe: a destabilization, I imagined, similar to what happens when you think obsessively about a given word and after a while it seems to break apart and lose all meaning, all ties with its object, turning into a flavorless clump of letters (a virtual disintegration: that’s what I was aspiring to). I thought that hearing myself referred to by authoritative editorialists would gratify me to the point that I’d be able to believe that another Malinconico is possible. That a vacation was finally coming my way.
But that’s not what’s happening. Because the more I see myself in the papers, the more I feel like myself. And the shelves of the Billy bookcase across from me warped months ago and I continue to have no earthly interest in replacing them. And it’s not even nine in the morning and already I want a cigarette. And I don’t feel as if I know anything I didn’t know yesterday. And time, which I imagined would slow down a little bit, so that it would be—to quote that old song by the Rolling Stones—on my side, continues being the same old windshield wiper as ever, letting me watch as it ticks off the days before my eyes.
And so I start to wonder if it wouldn’t be better for nothing ever to happen at all, for life to be nothing but monotony and repetition. If the changes that you spend your life sitting around hoping for won’t prove to be gigantic frauds, when it comes down to it.
Well, you know what I say? I want to remain as I am. Broken as I am. I’m tired of the sense of guilt in the background, tired of always thinking that there’s something wrong with me, something I ought to be doing that I’m not, some train I’ve missed, something important I still haven’t taken care of. This is what I am, okay? This is what I’m like, and there’s nothing I can do about it. No one can do anything about themselves; that’s just how it is.
I don’t like myself, but I don’t want to change, okay?
Leave me alone.
“Guess what?!?” shouts Espe, bursting into my office and waving his cell phone in the air. “Jennifer Lopez just announced a change of plans: dinner’s at her place!”
I register the news and decide to ignore it, for the time being.
“Could you possibly stop fumbling with your junk while you talk?”
He takes a quick look down at the mezzanine.
The hand, in fact, is still there.
He quickly pulls it away.
“Sorry,” he replies, pretending to be embarrassed. “What am I supposed to do? It gets in the way.”
I place my elbow on the desktop of the Jonas; then I stretch out the thumb and forefinger of my right hand and use them as stakes to support my forehead, which I set down on them a moment later, disconsolate.
“Well? Aren’t you going to say anything?”
“Yes, one thing,” I say, reemerging from my meditative pose, “I don’t remember telling you to confirm the date with your, let us say, friends.”
“You said twenty minutes, no?”
“Eh. So?”
“So look: it’s been twenty-five.”
“So how does that work? Once the deadline passes, silence equals consent?”
“You’re not going to throw away the invitation now that Jennifer Lopez has invited us over to her place, are you?”
“Right, what kind of a fool would I look like, is that it?”
“Exactly. Help me say it.”
“God Almighty, Espe, there’s no reasoning with you.”
“That’s the story of my life, old man. Well?”
“Yes! Just get the hell out of here.”
He puffs out his cheeks and waves his hands in the air as if to underscore how much I made him sweat to obtain my agreement, but now that he’s achieved his goal, he doesn’t so much mind getting the hell off of my back.
For a little while I contemplate the empty air, then I listlessly shift my gaze to the forest of newspapers covering the surface of the Jonas and I realize that I won’t even be able to get rid of them for a whole week, since the recycling truck came by to pick up the paper products just yesterday.
And at the exact moment when I start to wonder whether, given the size of my, shall we say, office, it might not be better to take them home, I have a sudden flash forward: me opening the door, closing it behind me, and before I have a chance to set the bag of newspapers on the floor, I hear Alessandra Persiano’s absence coming at me from the bedroom, roaring as it races down the hall, and a second later it overwhelms me, suffocating me in its coils like the black smoke on Lost.
At this point I ought to be having an anxiety attack, but instead I realize that the premonition is having a strangely familiar effect on me, even leaving me with a faint smile on my lips.
At first I don’t understand.
Then, even though I do nothing to remind myself of it, a refrain pops into my mind:
Go out among the crowds, woman, go
out into the streets of the world and the cities . . .
“Diario!”
Jesus, how many years has it been since I’ve heard it.
MY FAVORITE SONG BY EQUIPE 84
For the reader who m
ight (possibly) not know it, Equipe 84 was an Italian musical group that was active in the sixties and seventies: to date, without question one of the finest groups we’ve ever had.
Contemporaries of the Rokes (the group that recorded “È la pioggia che va” and “Che colpa abbiamo noi”), they vied against Shel Shapiro’s excellent band for the title of standard-bearers of Italian beat music.
I only chanced to see them on one occasion (I think it might have been in 1976), during a festival in the piazza of a small town outside Salerno. By this point they were at the tail end of their career, and yet, as soon as they got up on the stage, they took possession of it with such ease and class that all of us, down below and looking up, began to behave like a sophisticated audience out of sheer empathy, as if associating with longhaired hippies who played a different kind of music and traveled around with beautiful girls in short skirts were the most natural thing in the world.
I can still remember the wiry physique of the front man, Maurizio Vandelli, also known as the Prince (in absolute terms, one of the most original voices of Italian music), who played an imposing double-neck electric guitar (perhaps a Gibson EDS-1275 Double Neck Guitar like the one that Jimmy Page used to play, who can say; back then I didn’t know much about guitars), which along with his bush of curly and gravity-defying hair gave him the allure of an international rock star.
Playing with him were Victor Sogliani on bass (“And on the cigarette,” said Vandelli when he presented him to the audience at the end of the concert, since he hadn’t put a single cigarette out the whole night), Alfio Cantarella on drums, and a keyboardist whose name I now forget.
Despite my extreme youth (at the time), I still remember how those songs rang familiar, even though I was hearing most of them for the first time (a kind of déjà vu that is typical of very good music: you’ve heard it somewhere before, even if you’ve never actually heard it at all, like when you fall in love at first sight and it feels as if you’ve met her before): “Io ho in mente te,” “Tutta mia la città,” “Un angelo blu,” “Bang bang,” “Auschwitz,” “Pomeriggio: ore 6” (which was about adolescents having sex: a topic that paradoxically is more scandalous today than it was back then), and the memorable covers of Lucio Battisti’s “29 settembre” and Lucio Dalla’s “Gesù bambino.”
My Mother-in-Law Drinks Page 25