My Mother-in-Law Drinks

by Diego De Silva

The phone is answered by a guy who clearly doesn’t give a shit. When I ask what they have that’s hot and above all whether they deliver, he says nothing for, like, twenty seconds, and then, as if he were under some kind of duress, he asks where I live, and he does it all with such patent rudeness that I wait for him to get ready to take down my address before hanging up on him in a rage.

  “Go take it up the ass, Luncho,” I say, and at that point I opt for a quick plate of spaghetti with Buitoni Fior di Pesto.

  I put a pot of water on to boil, I turn on the TV, and I run through the list of channels available thanks to digital cable (which is to say a technological innovation that really was needed, one of those useful innovations that, really, once you have it you ask yourself regularly: “How on earth did I live without this, until just the other day?”).

  A local TV station is playing a commercial for the impending concert of an Italian band whose name I’ve heard many times without understanding what it means. Three skinny guys dressed in a style that’s a hybrid of Armani and Sears, Roebuck, all of them with their faces ravaged by the business of living (one of them is clinging so hard to a semi-acoustic guitar that he looks like he’s afraid somone’s going to come along any minute and confiscate it: and perhaps that would be for the best, all things considered), looking straight ahead as if urging the photographer to hurry up because if there’s one thing they hate doing it’s posing for pictures.

  Meanwhile the voice-over of someone who’s clearly mentally unhinged gallops along repeating the name of the group and the date of the concert, panting and flushed as if he were announcing the imminent apparition of the Virgin Mary, and a cell phone number appears superimposed on the screen, preceded by one of the most chilling commercial names of modern times (“Infoline”), and the presale prices of tickets.

  Balcony seating 35 euros, concert seating 50 euros.

  I look at those numbers as a sort of personal affront. I feel like such an anachronism. It’s not like I just discovered how much concerts cost these days. It’s just that when confronted with examples of this sort, I’m seized by a nostalgia for the days when no one would have stood for those kinds of prices for a concert by a group with that level of aesthetic incompetence.

  WHEN YOU WAKE UP AND REALIZE

  YOU DIED IN YOUR SLEEP

  At the beginning of the eighties, in fact, right in 1980, that is, when politics (I don’t mean professional politics, but rather the kind of self-taught not-for-profit politics that marked those youth movements that based their reason for being on a contempt for the Italian Chamber of Deputies, Senate, mass media, free market, and religion) was dead and its body was cold, all that survived, for just a short time, was the practice of proletarian self-discounts at concerts.

  The practice of self-discounting, in the second half of the previous decade (the late seventies, in other words) had been imposed with the caustic savagery of a political right, self-evident, requiring no theoretical justification. The message (or perhaps it would be more accurate to say the lesson) conveyed by the act of self-discounting was inhibitory in its nonnegotiable self-righteousness: we don’t pay to get into concerts because it’s right not to pay. Full stop. Nothing more need be said. And if the security team tried to do its job by defying that diktat, bim-bam-boom, bricks and bats would fly.

  And it wasn’t as if, when faced with the arrogant practice of self-discounting (which was actually more of a self-exemption, because these people weren’t demanding a discount so much as they were saying: “Let us in or we’ll wreck the place from floor to ceiling”), anyone was willing to provide explanations.

  In those years, if you asked why, then you just looked like a fool (in which case you’d be banished with a smack to the back of the head or a chorus of insults such as: “You’re out of it,” “You’re freaking out”—that one had almost exactly the same value as “You’re freaking me out”—“Ouch, you’re bringing us down,” “You’re harshing our mellow,” etc.; and then you were mocked for at least a semester as the political equivalent of the Lampwick character from Pinocchio, as much as if you’d said “between you and I” at your high school final exam) or, at the very worst, you’d be taken as a political know-nothing (in which case you became the target of derisive whistles and spit, as well as possibly being physically attacked by some aspiring, homegrown Che Guevara, beet red with fury for the occasion, who actually had no intention of hitting you at all, but just planned to be stopped in the nick of time by a couple of volunteers and thus still come off looking like an implacable leader unwilling to brook dissent).

  The movement, in other words, was unwilling to tolerate uncertainty, much less debate. It treated you like a mental defective if you failed to understand. So what happened was you went along with it. Okay, you said, intimidated by the thought that someone might suspect you didn’t know what you were talking about. So you behaved like Obelix in that old comic book where his friends, the other Gauls, are readying a military expedition, and they spend days and days arguing about attack strategies and battlefield conditions and finally, without understanding a word of what they’re saying, he screams: “I don’t know why, but I’m coming with you guys!”

  But it should also be said that in those days there was also a degree of self-interest in obtaining self-discounts (or I should say, self-exemptions), truth be told. Though it wasn’t clear why the same principle didn’t apply to pushers. Did anyone ever get a joint through proletarian self-discounting, I wonder?

  In other words, for a good long while in Italy self-discounting was the nightmare of musicians from around the world, but especially Italians, who were often subjected at concerts to genuine authentic people’s trials in addition to the self-discounting. The self-discounters would climb up onto the stage, take the singer prisoner, and subject him to the third degree. They’d ask him: why did you go on TV, what the fuck kind of song did you write, what kind of bourgeois smart-ass lyrics are these, look at your cute little fashionable shirt, where do you think you’re going to wind up with this music, at the Sanremo Music Festival?

  This was militant cultural criticism—forget about the number of stars and smiley or frowny faces at the beginning of reviews in the local newspapers. A musician (especially an Italian musician, because a foreign musician, as soon as he got a whiff of what was happening, would turn around, leave the country, and not come back until things began to improve) was not allowed to act like a rock star. He couldn’t treat the audience with disdain or superiority, make money, screw fashion models, appear on television, or give autographs. Music was a political matter, a way of making a statement; you couldn’t sell out or be a whore or catch the syphilis of success. It was brutal, back then, to climb onto a concert stage.

  At the beginning of the eighties, though, all that was finally coming to an end. And the astonishing thing was that the end came with a velocity that verged on the technological. It came, moreover, with such a discretion, a silence, an absence of warning signs, that once the results became evident it seemed as if it had all happened without the protagonists themselves being aware of it—as if they’d discovered they were dead while still walking, meeting, organizing, and making a ruckus in the general conviction that they were actually still alive.

  At concerts the practice of self-discounting still continued, but there was no mistaking the fact that by now, after the most violent and criminal elements had been pounding on the gates and doors of stadiums and theaters to be let in, nobody really cared that there was a slice of the public that did their talking with their fists, using tough manners to impose an antagonistic vision of popular art.

  The message of self-discounting, practically from one morning to later that same day, had lost all its critical value and had become, paradoxically and unconsciously, a demand for things to be free, for no reason other than self-interest. The ones who continued to practice it with the mindset of the political action, once they’d burst into the stad
ium or theater, realized that the audience didn’t give a clenched fist about the fact that they’d gained free admission after the show had started (“Okay,” the audience in the concert seating seemed to say, “they let you in for free? Now be good and let us watch the show”).

  The musicians would only stop playing long enough to leave the now-obsolete radicals enough time to get comfortable and then they’d start playing again, as if they’d stopped for station identification and a word from the sponsors. It was the most depressing thing, a loss of meaning, live, that gave you an unsettling hunch about the tragic drift that was going to characterize the continuing deterioration already under way.

  I remember once, at a concert by the band AreA—Demetrio Stratos was already dead, and the group had started playing jazz-rock (in fact, they just strummed and bored their audience after a while)—a band of self-discounters threw an oversized M-80 outside the stadium. It made such a huge roar that the musicians all exchanged glances and stopped playing. Inside the stadium we were all more surprised than afraid. After a couple of minutes Giulio Capiozzo stood up from his drum set and went over to the microphone.

  “We’d like to know what just happened,” he said.

  That’s it. Nothing more. A sincere, completely nonrhetorical question, which in its simplicity provided a pathetic depiction of the state of affairs.

  The fact that anyone would ask to know what had happened in the aftermath of a loud explosion from outside the stadium during a concert pointed to the end of a shared experience, the definitive undermining of a political act that had by now lost its original identity. A couple of years earlier, it would have been obvious to everyone that a mass concert-break-in was under way.

  The security crew didn’t make an issue of it, they just let in the rioters who’d set off the M-80. A total of four or five minutes, all told.

  “If we’re done with the fireworks, then we’ll start playing again,” Capiozzo wrapped up, slightly annoyed, and went back to his drums and quietly sat down.

  The concert started up again, and in the meanwhile the bomb-throwers (there might have been a baker’s dozen of them) were admitted into the empty space between the bottom tiers and the hurricane fencing along the field. While AreA was playing, the radicals who had thrown the M-80 all looked at each other and started chanting their old battle chant: “Workers’ autonomy, organization, armed struggle, revolution.” And the effect was devastatingly pathetic. Both because they were unable to interfere even slightly with the music being played (which, after all, since it was jazz-rock, wasn’t even particularly loud), and because they were just a tiny knot of people, and not particularly robust individuals, either: the last holdouts of a battle that, as you could easily see, had long since lost touch with reality and was already firmly rooted in the past, a melancholy low-budget remake of itself. Like Vittorio Gassman’s line in the final scenes of C’eravamo tanto amati: “The future is now past, and we didn’t even notice it happening.”

  After that point, what happened is what happened. And we all know what happened. It all came to an end: the self-discounts, the armed struggle, the revolutions, the workers’ autonomy. Nowadays, people pay for their concert tickets, and they pay through the nose. Musicians have all become rock stars, or at least they’ve all tried to without being shy about it. They’ve lined up to get a spot playing on TV, they’ve all gone to the the Sanremo Music Festival and even to the Festivalbar. And while formerly they were forced to defend themselves at their concerts against people who indicted them and tried them as criminals, now they whine about their albums being downloaded online. They warn against drugs, sex without love, political views that don’t speak the language of the ggente—the ordinary people courted by the populists in Rome. They get married (some of them even get married in church), they raise families, rediscover old-fashioned values, quit drinking, quit drugs, and advise young people not to waste their lives.

  In the end, the marketplace triumphed. The audience evicted the people. We’re freer now than we were then. Free to buy anything we want.

  But it’s no accident that, when all is said and done, as time goes by, we have less and less music worth buying.

  I HAVE A DREAM

  The audience applauds as if operated by remote control when Daria Bignardi, beautifully dressed, walks onto the set and reaches the center of the stage, positioning herself with her back to the megascreen, which is showing scenes from the hostage taking in slow motion. She greets the spectators and announces the title of this episode: “Do-it-yourself Justice.”

  We guests are seated facing each other in two rows of three.

  I’m sitting between Giancarlo De Cataldo and Ambra, wearing a sky-blue suit and my old down-at-the-heels Blundstone 500 slip-on boots, which give just the right touch of slovenliness to my overall look. I have three days’ worth of stubble and I’m not wearing a tie.

  Across from us sit Emanuele Filiberto, Vittorio Sgarbi, and Fabrizio Corona (who can’t seem to stop looking at my Blundstones, though I can’t figure out whether that’s because he likes the fact that they’re so beat up or because he’s disgusted with them for the same reason).

  Bignardi introduces us to the welcoming applause of the studio audience while the TV cameras archive one face at a time (the first—I’d like to see them try any other order—is mine), she summarizes in a few evocative lines the whole dizzy adventure at the supermarket, then she asks the control booth to run a few sequences (in particular, the one in which Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo scolds me for having an antiquated conception of the legal profession, reiterating the theory of TV as the sole forum for the only kind of trial that really counts anymore), and then opens the dances, starting (and I would have put money on it) with Ambra.

  “I don’t know about you,” says the TV host and actress, “but I haven’t been glued to any television the way I was to this in a long, long time. Aside from the principles in question (televised trials, the question of why you can’t take the law into your own hands, etc. etc.), I believe that the live feed from the supermarket has been one of the most gripping and tragic television spectacles that we’ve witnessed since 9/11.”

  Silence falls over the audience in place of the applause that one might expect but which doesn’t come.

  Daria Bignardi is caught off guard. When a guest beats the clock in terms of the time assigned to them to speak, it’s as if the program has just suffered a heart attack. Which means that it runs the risk of stagnating, unless there’s an urgent and decisive intervention.

  I immediately look at Sgarbi, who nods progressively, showing that he approves—if not of the content, then at least of the aesthetic—of the opinion that Ambra has just expressed.

  “Right,” he breaks in, seizing the floor, “very good. I think that’s the one sensible thing we can say on the topic.”

  Ambra preens, satisfied that she’s dodged the bullet of cynicism that she knows she risked.

  Emanuele Filiberto blinks twice in succession, as if he can’t quite see why Sgarbi found her observation so exhaustive.

  “Could I ask you,” Bignardi asks Ambra, starting to take a step forward but then stepping back (which is her way of battling against the basic immobility of the role of moderator without going for a stroll around the set the way some colleagues of hers like to do, for instance Giovanni Floris, who does so much traveling around the studio during his show that sometimes no one even seems to know where he is), “whose side were you on?”

  “Well, not on the Camorrista’s side, that’s for sure,” Ambra replies.

  A wave of laughter, followed by applause.

  Daria seems put out.

  “Have you noticed,” I break in, speaking to everyone and no one in particular at the same time, in an attempt to undercut the irritation that seems to hover in the air, “that a second after the laughter comes the applause? It’s a little bit like a second sneeze, don’t you think
?”

  Everyone turns in my direction, baffled.

  I wait.

  It takes a while to get this one.

  The first one to get it is De Cataldo, who unleashes a hearty slap to my leg. The others follow in rotation, nodding and snickering, showing their approval of my subtle juxtaposition.

  So now I get a round of applause myself.

  Fabrizio Corona intercepts a roving TV camera and shoots it a ferocious glare.

  “The second sneeze, nice work, Malinconico: they both come in pairs,” Daria acknowledges.

  “Right,” I confirm with some satisfaction.

  “In any case, you have a point, Ambra,” she resumes, putting things on a personal level, “I should have been more explicit. The choice was between a despairing father who was demanding justice and a lawyer doing his best to stave off tragedy by insisting that trials should be conducted in a courtroom and not on TV.”

  Sgarbi snorts impatiently and brushes his hair with his hand, as if he’d suddenly had a hot flash. No question that Daria’s clarification, unobjectionable though it was, did have the ring of rhetoric, truth be told.

  “Oh, I was rooting for Malinconico, obviously,” Ambra replies, playing the fool. And she flashes me a big smile which I return without especially wanting to.

  “As we were preparing this episode,” Bignardi says, overcoming her momentary disgruntlement to return her focus to the program with admirable professionalism, “we conducted a broad survey of people from various walks of life, and what we found was that everyone, and I mean everyone we spoke to, was rooting for Counselor Malinconico during the live broadcast. Does this mean that the country is much more concerned about the protection of civil rights than we imagine? That lawyers are actually more popular than is widely thought? Or is this consensus limited strictly to Malinconico? De Cataldo?”

  “Well,” replies the judge/author, shifting around in his seat to get more comfortable, clearly caught off guard by the question, “as much as I may find Malinconico likable, I’m not sure I’d go so far as to name him Italy’s favorite son.”