My Mother-in-Law Drinks (14 page)

Alagia let out a faint sigh before answering.

“Vincenzo.”

Calmly, as if there were no reason to get worked up.

“What do you want?”

“You're an idiot.”

I couldn't have agreed more.

“Listen, little girl, this isn't the day for it.”

“You can save the ‘little girl' for your girlfriend.”

Provided she's there when I get home, I thought to myself.

“I thought it was your mother calling, all right?”

Another sigh. She seemed worried.

“She's exactly who I wanted to talk to you about.”

“Why are you whispering?”

“Because she's in the other room, and I don't want her to hear me.”

“Has something happened?”

“Grandma doesn't want to see her.”

“What?” I asked, jumping to my feet, both because of the harsh nature of the report and because the bench had anesthesized my butt cheeks.

The
tavernellista
shot me a worried look.

“You heard me. ‘Don't bring your mother here anymore.' Just like that. Verbatim.”

“But why? Did they have a fight?”

“Of course not. Why would they fight at a time like this?”

“Then what the hell's come over her?”

“We have no idea, Vince'. She doesn't want to listen to reason. Worst of all, she won't tell us what her reasons are. If Mamma shows up at her apartment, she won't even speak. Or else it's like yesterday, when she just locked herself in the bathroom until Mamma left. It's uncomfortable, I assure you. And Mamma's heartbroken.”

“Sure, I believe you. Jesus, what a situation. Did you talk to her doctors about it? You don't think it's Alzheimer's, do you?”

“She's fine, Vince'. From that point of view, I mean. She's sharp as a tack. You should hear how much Romanian she's picked up, with all the practice she gets with Miorita.”

Miorita would be Ass's caregiver.

“That's just crazy.”

“There's another thing.”

“Now what.”

“She's always asking about you.”

“About
who
?”

“Apparently you're the only person she has any interest in seeing, besides me and Alfredo; and she's not even all that interested in seeing the two of us, if you want to know the truth. That is, she has nothing against our coming to see her, but it's not like she's all that thrilled either. But she never stops talking about you.”

“It must have been the Jack Daniel's.”

The reference made my bench neighbor swing around.

“You know, I thought the same thing? All right, but in any case you've always been her favorite.”

“Okay, you can stop buttering me up, I get it.”

Meaningful pause.

“Mamma is really depressed, Vince'. I wouldn't have asked if it weren't truly necessary.”

“Hey, I can't force Assunta to see your mother if she doesn't want to, okay?”

Silence.

Cue the sense of guilt.

“Hey,” I said, promptly assuming the form of a doormat (a metamorphosis that comes to me very easily, since I perform it on a regular basis in my interpersonal relationships), “are you still there?”

“Yes,” she replied, appropriately overwrought, the little shit.

“I meant to say that I'll do everything within my power, okay?”

“Okay. Thanks.”

Pause. At the end of which I got the urge to make a voluntary statement.

“Still, go fuck yourself.”

For a moment she seemed really hurt.

“Why?”

“Because you really know how to make me feel I'm in the wrong. You're almost even sneakier than your mother. By the way, is she aware of the project?”

“Of course not. You know she can't stand mediation.”

“Ah, right. I had forgotten about her bedrock principles.”

“I need to ask you one more thing.”

“And that would be?”

“We ought to try to keep her from finding out that you're going to see Grandma.”

It took me a minute or so to take in the concept.

“Oh, really?” I blurted out. “Now I'm supposed to carry on a clandestine relationship with your grandmother to keep from offending your mother's rigid beliefs? Listen here,” I piled it on as I got excited, “you're already asking me for a favor: I'm not going to do it on the sly on top of that!”

It took her a moment to launch her counterattack.

“Christ, Vince', put yourself in her shoes: your mother is dying of cancer and you can't even comfort her because she doesn't want to see you, but at the same time she's constantly asking after your ex (and let me emphasize,
ex
) wife. Wouldn't you be depressed? Don't you think it would be more noble of you to do your best to fix this absurd situation without bringing it to your ex (and let me reemphasize,
ex
) wife's attention, rather than boasting about it?”

Shit, I thought.

I hate it when my interests and considerations are rendered null and void by those of other people. Because it's obvious that when other people's interests prevail objectively over your own, you have to give in. And you have to do it in spite of the fact that, when all is said and done, you might not give much of a damn about those other people's interests; after all, you have problems of your own, and it's not written in stone that you always have to take on the problems of other people, who enlist you in their causes with the flimsy excuse of being in the right. It's not as if just because someone's in the right they can go around intimidating their fellow man and handing out to-do lists. A person ought to renounce the privileges that come with being right in order to be considered truly right in the eyes of others. But no, all those people who are in the right simply use the fact to their own advantage. So that, at the end of the day, they aren't really all that right, if you ask me.

Take right now. You were just sitting there on a bench making yourself feel miserable about your own problems and not bothering anyone else by doing so. At a certain point someone calls you, gives you this long list of information about your ex-mother-in-law who's about to start chemo and who has inexplicably declared that she no longer wishes to receive visits from your ex-wife, and you, who weren't even aware of the situation, and whose only crime it was to have answered your phone, find yourself from one moment to the next with a job to do.

And the best part about the whole thing is that you're in the wrong, to top it off.

Doesn't it all seem like a little much?

“Hey,” I shot back, verging on exasperation, “why is it that one way or another I always have to catch a dressing down? Why do you always have to make me feel like a crook, even when you're asking me to do you a favor? I mean, what the fuck!”

Silence.

Ahh.

That shut her up.

Just for the moment, of course.

“Sorry, I didn't mean to be unfair. It's just that we're very worried about Mamma, Alfredo and I.”

“All right, listen, forget about it. I'll see what I can do.”

And we exchanged our goodbyes.

See if you can guess the word I said when I hung up the phone.

The
tavernellista
shot me another look of solidarity, then he hoisted his container of wine into the air, as if dedicating it to me, and took a long swallow.

I nodded to him as if to say: “To your health.”

 

And that was it. I went for a walk around the neighborhood in order to mull over the potential developments of the events currently under way, when unexpectedly, as in a vision, I glimpsed Alessandra Persiano intently tapping away at her cell phone about fifty feet away from me, as the crow flies.

For a moment, I swear, I didn't think she was real, so light and luminous was she, so perfectly attired (one of the things about her that really drives me crazy is that even if you see her in an article of clothing that she's worn like four hundred times before, it always looks as if she just bought it), nonchalant in her loveliness, inexplicably sexy as she looked down at her cell phone screen with a faint expression of disgust on her lips.

As my cowardly heart flung itself against the bars of my rib cage, consuming in just a few seconds at least a couple of hours' worth of fuel (to the point where I wanted to say to it: “Why don't you sit still, don't you know who that is?”), I registered the symptoms of a very specific cognitive delusion that I've only ever experienced when I've run into famous people, for example this one time with Sting.

I don't know if you've ever noticed, but when you happen to run into famous personalities on the street they always prove a little disappointing. And not because we like them less than we remembered or less than we thought we would if we ever came face-to-face with them: quite the opposite. What disappoints us is how comfortable they seem in their own skin, the way they do just what they want to do, the way they act more or less like anyone else. It's their autonomy with respect to what we expect of them, their right to be ordinary people if they feel like it, that brazen freedom to enter and exit their characters, that suddenly liberates them of all the things that we've projected onto them without their even knowing it, so that we somehow feel stupidly cheated.

Though it's embarrassing to admit it, we don't acknowledge their right to brazenly spoil our imaginary world by doing what they please with themselves. We don't like to see them operating with such freedom. We'd prefer them to live in seclusion, far from the hellish realms of ordinary life. They ought to stay put where we left them, rather than wandering around freely (if you're going to be so damned important, do you have to be free as well?).

I'm beginning to believe in the existence of a perverse law of conservation that forces us to pay for success by depriving us of freedom. Take Roberto Saviano. For the people who love him, the knowledge that he can't move around freely is a form of insurance for our imaginations. The public preserves him aesthetically intact in the cloistered existence of an armor-plated, bodyguard-protected life. They won't run into him on the street; they have to wait to see him on TV. They can't ask him to autograph their copy of
Gomorrah
the way they could with a book by any other writer; they'd have to get past the officers of his police escort. And if they want to chat with him for a moment, they have to take advantage of the few minutes available before he is whisked off again. But can you just imagine how depressing it would be to be standing next to him at a nightclub while he (perfectly justifiably) chatted up some chick, who wasn't even all that pretty, because maybe he'd had too much to drink (that is, the exact same thing you would do, if you could). Of course it would disappoint you. You'd think to yourself (even though it's none of your fucking business): “Oh, Savia', seriously?”

 

In short, having gotten over (as it were) the shock of this vision of Alessandra Persiano, I fanned myself with my hand for a moment, stopping dead in the middle of the street, waiting for her to notice me.

She didn't notice.

I'm not exactly stunning, after all.

“No, you certainly aren't,” my guardian angel immediately confirmed (though let me point out that I wasn't the one who hired him).

“Do you really have nothing else to fucking do?” I replied.

And I started waving my hand like one of those automatic mannequins that raise and lower their arms to signal a detour on the highway.

Finally, the woman who I was starting to doubt was actually my girlfriend spotted me. The expression that appeared on her face, and I'm not exaggerating, was the expression she might have had if she'd entombed me the day before.

“Am I already a zombie?” I wondered as I walked toward her with a sense of resignation very much like what I used to feel when, as a boy, I got up from my desk and approached the blackboard knowing I was unprepared (if you want to know the truth, those moments are pretty nice).

“Come on, it's nothing,” said the bastard assigned to my guardianship. “The worst will come later.”

“Ah, thanks, you're an angel,” I shot back.

In the all things considered very brief distance that separated me from Alessandra Persiano, I ran down a short list of the formulas of dismissal that she could have chosen to employ in a circumstance such as this:

a) Please, don't make things any harder than they have to be;

b) I'm glad I ran into you: it's better to talk in a neutral setting, I don't think I could have handled this kind of anguish at home;

c) I don't want to lose you as a friend;

d) The keys are on the front table. Don't try to get in touch with me, please. I'll call you;

e) I need to try to understand what I'm feeling, and I can't do that unless I get some distance from you;

f) Shall we find a place to sit down in a coffee bar around here?

 

When I reached her, prepared as I was to be executed by a firing squad right then and there, the astounding sight of her face lighting up, smiling, as if she was as surprised as anyone by the happiness that had overtaken her, so wrong-footed me emotionally that I actually thought I'd heard the sound of a little chime in my ears, like when cartoon characters fall in love.

“You just got a text,” she said.

“Eh?” I said.

Completely thunderstruck, I'm sure.

“A text,” she said again; but since I just kept staring at her as if this were the first time I'd ever heard that particular word, she started jabbing at the air with her forefinger in the general direction of my jacket's breast pocket, then she restated the concept slowly and carefully, even raising her voice a little.

“You just received a text message on your cell phone.”

So that was the little chime I'd heard.