My Mother-in-Law Drinks

by Diego De Silva

  That whole evening I waited for them to play the only song of theirs that I actually knew by heart, and the forty-five of which I had bought a few years earlier. That song, of course, was “Diario” (Diary), but they never played it.

  “Diario” is a song from 1973, with lyrics by Vandelli set to music by Dario Baldan Bembo. It’s about a guy who comes home from work at the end of the day, and as he performs the routine sequence of acts associated with that time of the evening he realizes that his woman has left him.

  His discovery of her absence takes the form of a traumatic interruption of their domestic intimacy, an epiphany typical of mourning. It is a well-known fact that routine can anesthetize recent grief, projecting it into a fragile and provisional oblivion, which functions as a semi-waking state of despair.

  And so a poor fool who’s been freshly dumped comes home from work and gives in to the leisurely flow of habit as if nothing had happened:

  It’s six o’clock, time to head home

  I find the place exactly the way you left it

  I’d better get myself something to eat

  I grab a paper, I turn on the TV

  At first, in other words, everything seems normal. Then, something happens. A moment of friction, a flash of insight, an epiphany, in short: a detail that stands out among the others and suddenly lacerates the reassuring surface of things, making concrete the loneliness and solitude that have been overlooked until this moment.

  But notice the detail:

  How is it my fault if a little ash always

  Drops on the floor, you’ll clean it up

  You see the gesture that serves as the catalyst for his discovery that he’s been abandoned? It’s not like the narrator comes home, shuts the door behind him, and bursts into tears. Or, I don’t know, goes into the bedroom, sees the dressing gown of the woman he loves, and folds over at the waist. Not at all: a little ash falls off the tip of his cigarette, he realizes that the woman who used to clean it up is gone, and his heart breaks then and there.

  In fact at this point the song shifts into a different harmonic realm (corresponding to the change in the narrator’s state of mind), and goes:

  I was forgetting, my love, that now you’re gone

  I never gave you what you wanted

  And from there it takes off in a lyrical and deeply noble refrain, in which the dumpee proves himself capable of a generosity worthy of a man with unbelievably broad views:

  Go out among the crowds, woman, go

  Out into the streets of the world and the cities

  Go in search of greener pastures

  Live out your fantasies in the real world.

  After that, now that he’s launched into it, he tells her not to “look back” (in case she ever happened to think she’d made a mistake), and that “among the stones that line the riverbank a white flower will bloom” that she once “dedicated to him before God.”

  Really, just unbelievable.

  And in fact no one believes it, truth be told.

  But as far as my own feelings go, if you want me to tell you, this male chauvinism, so ham-handed and at the same time so stupidly heartfelt and still free of the censorship that shortly thereafter Italian feminism would impose on the language, sort of does it for me.

  After all, this man who refuses to blame himself for dropping cigarette ash on the floor (because anyway, as we say in my part of the world, ci sta chi ci pensa: there’s someone whose job it is to take care of that) inspires a certain human compassion for the sheer ineptitude he shows in performing a basic task, which is to say, smoking a cigarette without leaving a trail of ashes behind him around the apartment.

  This abstension from any and all responsibilities for household care, a right claimed by way of biological inadequacy, for that matter, is not all that distant from the lives we lead now.

  I, for instance, can testify that I saw more than one male adult, when I was a child, who not only failed to even consider the question of where to drop his ashes, but who didn’t even know the location of the laundry hamper, which tells you something.

  To this day I clearly remember (it’s a sort of mild childhood trauma) an uncle of mine, a conceited oaf and an idiot (certain, though reality had never provided him with anything in support of his belief, that his intelligence was well above average, that he was a refined man of letters and even something of a sophisticate), who, when he woke up in the morning, used to sit up in bed while his wife, who was even stupider than him, scuttled around putting on his socks and big-boy underpants and would then led him to the bathroom to help him wash up and get dressed (I’m not joking, this is all true; after witnessing this scene out of a porno I remember asking my grandmother if by any chance her son suffered from some debilitating illness that we were unaware of, and she replied: “What are you talking about. He’s fit as a fiddle”).

  This lack of self-sufficiency, and the resulting total dependence upon the female gender, was a horrendously widespread condition among Italian men until not even all that long ago, a collective submission that made it so that male chauvinism took the form of a sort of de facto ideology of ineptitude (let’s put it this way: men boasted that they didn’t know how to do fuck-all), whereby they consigned themselves to the women in their lives like senior citizens to home healthcare workers, expecting them to wait on them hand and foot, in a way that more closely resembled volunteerism than love, conjugal though it was.

  Now listen to the rest of “Diario”:

  If I go out for a while I’ll get over it

  My friends are down at the bar waiting for me

  No, I’ll stay here, after all I know

  You still believe I’m seeing her

  The former collector of cigarette ash, in other words, had also been cheated on. And the narrator, in his astounding sincerity, even admits it. Because he doesn’t say, e.g. “You still believe I’m seeing someone else” (that is, some unspecified, generic lover, with reference to a sort of generalized jealousy on the part of his ex-girlfriend); no, his statement is specific: “You still believe I’m seeing her,” that is, a woman with a precise identity, a repeat offender, well known to the long-gone cheated-upon partner described in the song.

  The question that arises spontaneously at this point in the song (which comes before the second and last refrain and the conclusion, which involves another reference to the white flower before God), is this: you, my good friend and lyricist of “Diario,” are by your own admission:

  a) someone who never lifts a fucking finger around the house (because if you’re at the level where you don’t know how to use an ashtray, we can make certain assumptions about how helpful you are in the kitchen, and whether you do the dishes every once in a while or ever help to make the bed, just as an example);

  b) someone who regularly goes out at night and leaves his woman alone at home (“My friends are down at the bar waiting for me”);

  c) someone who also has a steady lover on the side, of whom, moreover, his live-in girlfriend is fully aware;

  and you’re telling me that you come home and find her gone, and you’re surprised? The surprising thing would be if you came home and she was still there, if you don’t mind my saying so, eh.

  This fresco, crude and possessed of a certain quality of grotesquerie, of good-for-nothing spoiled masculine debauchery—which demands extreme catering and tolerance of philandering while philosophically singing the praises of the woman’s freedom when she finally hands in her resignation from her position as chambermaid and betrayed lover, exhorting her not to change her mind and look back, and reminding her that when a white flower blooms among the stones along the riverbank she must remember the dedication that she made to him before God—is, to my mind, anthropologically speaking, a masterpiece.

  A brilliant transposition of the profile of the average Italian cheating male, opportunistic and
whiny, and originally portrayed by the master himself, Alberto Sordi, into the form of a pop ditty.

  DISGUSTING HEIGHTS

  I’d never in my life experienced the problem of my voice mail being full.

  It’s not as if it makes you feel who knows what, when you come right down to it. In fact, after a little while it’s a tremendous pain in the ass sitting there listening to all that talk. In part because the people who leave voice mail messages have a habit of winding up to it slowly, so that the recording cuts them off just as they’re finally making up their minds to get to the point. And the amazing thing is that they don’t call back, either. And there you sit, an even bigger idiot than they are, wondering what they might have been calling about.

  At the very least, I’m over those nervous fits I always used to get when I watched those movies where the main character comes home from work (and not from a vacation, either) and listens to fifteen messages in a row while loosening his tie and unbuttoning his shirt cuffs as he parades around the room (super neat, decorated like a high-priced modern showroom, and almost invariably illuminated by designer standing lamps that emanate diffuse light; there’s never a single ceiling lamp in movies), commenting with eloquent facial expressions on the indignant messages from female voices scolding him for not calling as he’d promised. Because obviously when you watch a scene of this kind you feel like a lonely coyote. And the thought occurs to you to leave yourself a message when you leave the movie theater, just so you don’t have to howl at the moon.

  But anyway it’s unbelievable the sheer number of people who suddenly notice you exist after you come by a little television visibility.

  First of all, the clients. When on earth has it ever happened that I received from fifteen to twenty requests for legal services in a single day? Such a sudden and daunting increase in demand that I felt compelled to make a quick subcontracting agreement on the spot with the associated law offices of two old friends, thus assembling an emergency stable of legal defenders (in practical terms, I offer them my clients and my brand and they do the dirty work of defending the cases—while I reserve the right to make the occasional stage appearance at the hearings—and the split is fifty-fifty).

  Professional considerations aside, I received messages from (I’ll just list them as they come to me): friends (damn, I never knew I had so many friends), acquaintances (a much smaller number than the friends), relatives and kin ranging from moderately close to the most far-flung, cousins I’ve never heard of, old schoolmates (one message in particular, from that huge idiot from Monteverde Marco Gettatelli, I found especially appalling; it said, in a practically impenetrable Roman accent: “I gotta tell ya, Engineer Sesti-the-fuck’s-his-name, or whatever it was and still is, to hell with him, why couldn’t he have fired that bullet into that fat dickhead of yours instead of trying to kill himself?”), an ex-girlfriend from my high school days who I definitely thought was dead (she says that her husband cheats on her; “Can hardly blame him,” I commented internally), the chairman of the bar association (“You almost seemed impressive,” he said), the mayor, my close friend Dalia (who took the opportunity to say that here and there she might have edited the summation down a bit), the head of my condo board (but just to remind me to pay my share for the work on the elevator), a woman who said she was my “aunt” something or other, Alf to apologize (and that filled me with sadness, because when your children apologize to you, you’re the one who feels at fault), and some potty-mouthed creep who rattled off a seemingly endless chain of insults without giving his name.

  I must have jotted down (even though I wasn’t all that sure that I wanted to call them back) something like a dozen names and numbers for reporters from local and national publications who expressed just how tremendously urgent it was that I get back to them at any time of the day or night (oh sure, because they couldn’t just call me back, right?).

  The only one I called back with relative promptness was Paolo Di Stefano, whose questionnaire response column I read regularly in Io donna magazine, which comes with the Saturday edition of Corriere della Sera, loosely based on Proust’s famous parlor game.

  I already had my answers ready (I’ve always wanted to take Proust’s questionnaire someday), and so when Di Stefano asked me if I had ten minutes to spare, I said yes without even pretending to think it over (the text of the questionnaire is on pages 286-289).

  Even Nives got in touch (that one wasn’t a message: I just answered the phone). A slow, disagreeable, shamefully hypocritical conversation that I transcribe here (supplying in italics, in the parentheses that follow the answers I gave her, what I was actually thinking):

  “Vincenzo, it’s me.”

  “How are you, Nives.”

  (You know, caller ID has been around for a while now, you idiot, why are you telling me that it’s you? Just hurry up, because I have Paolo Mieli on the other line.)

  “I thought you didn’t want to talk to me.”

  “Why would you think that?”

  (You’re right, I didn’t want to talk to you, but I’m hoping that if I’m nice you’ll hold off on asking for the alimony payments for at least a couple of months.)

  “The kids told me that you noticed I wasn’t there.”

  “Yes. I did notice. But don’t worry, I understand.”

  (Do you think I needed some kind of clue in order to notice such oafish behavior, driven entirely by a need to be the center of attention? You didn’t like it, eh, having to share the spotlight for once in your life, right?)

  “I just couldn’t handle it. I’d have embraced you and started sobbing on your shoulder, I swear it on our children’s lives.”

  When she got to the end of that one, I scratched my balls before answering.

  “If it’s any consolation, I’d probably have started crying myself.”

  (Sure, sure, of course. You crying: no doubt. You’re going to try to foist this piece of nonsense off on me, of all people? Christmas 1996: you slammed a hammer down on your left thumb in an attempt to drive a nail into the living room wall—so you could hang, what’s worse, a still life that was probably still because it was putrefied, done by a so-called girlfriend of yours who was a painter—and even then you shed not a single salt tear.)

  At this point she took a break and sniffed piteously a couple of times (a performance so cringeworthy as to earn her an immediate nomination for the Golden Rotten Tomato); after which she uttered my name emphatically and melodramatically, as if I needed to brace myself for who knows what revelation that any second now would change my life forever.

  “Vincenzo.”

  (The fuck is it, now?)

  “Yes, Nives.”

  “The reason I . . .”

  (Oh, sweet Saint Anthony. How much longer is this going to take? Here’s another thing I can’t stand about you: the way you break up sentences to heighten the suspense. We’re not doing amateur theater here: just say it, for fuck’s sake! The reason you what?)

  “. . . Yes?”

  “. . . The reason I couldn’t bring myself to embrace you is that I didn’t think you’d let me. And even though I have no right to say this, given that we’re divorced, feeling rejected by you still causes me a great deal of pain.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Nives. You know that you’re the last person on earth I’d want to hurt in any way.”

  (Oh, really? And all the times that it was you rejecting me, dumping me—when I did, in fact, cry—after we’d fucked like rabbits between your sessions at work? And all the times that I tossed and turned in bed like an obsessive at the thought of you going home to that architect you were seeing? All the times that I asked you, either directly or indirectly, to consider getting back together—when I asked you indirectly your rejection was even more painful—it didn’t hurt you then, did it, you stupid, conceited, egocentric monster? You know what I say to you? That I don’t give a good goddamn if
it hurts you to be rejected, in fact I’m delighted to hear it; now maybe you’ll understand what it feels like to be the one taking it unwillingly up the ass, you who never once in your entire life took it up the ass without wanting it, if I remember rightly.)

  Uncomfortable pause, during which I dreaded that any second now she’d say what I hoped against hope she wouldn’t say: which is exactly what she promptly did.

  “I . . . this conversation is becoming too difficult for me, Vincenzo. I know that your . . . partner . . . wasn’t there when you got out of the supermarket, and . . .”

  “I’d actually prefer not to talk about that, if you don’t mind.”

  (Alagia and Alfredo: the minute I see you two again, I’ll kick your asses, you little bastards.)

  “Yes, of course. It was indiscreet of me, forgive me.”

  “No, it’s just that we’re going through kind of an awkward period, and so that’s something that’s, how should I put it, been on our minds.”

  (You can say that again, my dear psychologist, that that was indiscreet of you. I never expected you to sink so low. Of all the self-nominations that you’ve trotted out so far, that one is absolutely the most devious. Fuck you and your alimony checks. I don’t have the money anyway.)

  “All right, I don’t want to meddle. But if you ever want to talk, I’m here.”

  “Okay.”

  (Of course, the only thing missing from my life is a regular session with you. What kind of idiot do you take me for?)