My Mother-in-Law Drinks (16 page)

Matrix's problem, the way things stand now, is that Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo has no intention of buying that ticket.

Mulder gets a whiff of the potential bad outcome and hastily runs for cover.

“Engineer, that's enough, I think.”

The funny thing is that he looks at me while he says it.

Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo's hand begins to shake. Which doesn't strike me as a good sign for Matrix. Who in fact begins to salivate excessively, all of a sudden.

“Have you noticed how quick these bastards are to take up the mantle of victimhood, Captain?”

I can't help thinking of the movies again. When you're watching a film, if someone with a gun starts spouting all kinds of theoretical nonsense while holding someone else at gunpoint (think, for instance, of Samuel L. Jackson reciting from the Book of Ezekiel, or at least so he says, to his victims in
Pulp Fiction
), you can pretty much be sure he's about to shoot.

“I know, I know, you're right,” Mulder replies, trying to seem as accommodating as he can, “but there's no reason to make things more complicated than they have to be.”

He puts both hands in the air and takes a few steps back.

“All right, I'm leaving.”

Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo says nothing. He probably didn't even hear him, drunk as he is on the feeling of power that he gets from holding his finger on the trigger. Look at him: he has all the trappings of a dirty old man with his eyes glued to the ass of an underage girl, who only realizes what a creep he's been after getting thrown off the bus.

At this point I really ought to do something; so I do.

“What's the matter with you, Engineer? Are you trying to ruin everything?”

Like a bucket of ice-cold water. Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo turns to look at me, blinking his eyes twice, as if he didn't recognize me.

The effect I was hoping for.

“What?”

“I thought you wanted to put this guy on trial,” I say, looking disappointed. “That's why you asked me to stay, right?”

“That's . . . right.”

“Then don't do anything stupid. Even if you just shoot him in the foot, he could die from loss of blood.”

He looks up into the air. He registers the concept. He lowers the gun. He runs his other hand over his forehead.

“Yes. You have . . . a point, Counselor.”

“Good,” I say.

We all heave a sigh of relief. Especially Matrix, but I immediately shoot him an icy glare to make it clear to him that I've just saved his ass (forget about his foot), just in case he missed the point.

Matteo the deli counterman puts the bottle to his lips and takes a long drink, permission be damned. For that matter, Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo's reflexes are still too sluggish from the emotional roller coaster for him to scold Matteo over this minor oversight (actually I think that if I wanted to I could probably even disarm him: but there's no way I'm going to make things hard for myself just to do Matrix a favor).

Mulder reappraises me with his eyes, almost as if he'd just promoted me to the rank of fellow cop, thanks to this latest dramatic twist. I gesture to him to make himself scarce, seeing as his presence has produced undesired results. He complies, backing away, turning around, heading back down the aisle, and disappearing. I watch him turn into Pac-Man again on the monitor as he retraces his steps back through the grocery-store labyrinth.

“I believe I owe you my thanks, Counselor,” says Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo, who has in the meanwhile completely regained his mental clarity.

“Actually,” he corrects himself, speaking to Matrix, “you're the one who should thank him. If it wasn't for him, you'd be walking with a limp by now.”

But Matrix, as I would have expected, just stares at the floor.

“Hurrah for gratitude,” I observe.

Whereupon Matrix starts to say something, but I steal the ball.

“Ah, no, eh? Not another word out of you. Christ, they make you all with a cookie cutter, don't they, all you targets of the Anti-Mafia Law. You're professional criminals, you spend decades running from the law without being caught, they make movies about you and everything, and then the next thing you know you take a bullet to the forehead because you don't know when to keep your fucking mouth shut.”

“But I . . .” he tries to object.

“That's enough. You've already caused enough trouble.”

Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo smiles contentedly.

“You see why we needed a lawyer here?”

I say nothing, realizing how right he is. I just spoke to Matrix the way a lawyer speaks to his client. And to think I'd promised myself that I'd never defend these people again as long as I lived.

I'm about to try to justify myself somehow when on the monitor showing the front entrance a dramatically familiar figure appears, accompanied by an assistant equipped with a video camera.

The instant I recognize her, I swear, my heart stops; and at the same time I swing around, aghast, and stare at Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo, as if to ask him if this was the “television coverage” he was hoping for.

He looks at the screen, and then at me.

“
Mary Stracqualurso?
” he says in horror.

Now
that's
a name that we all know.

A silence of solidarity ensues.

Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo, with a heartbroken gesture signifying both total despair and complete resignation, picks up his remote control and activates the audio from the entrance.

Mary, in the meantime, has completed her negotiations with Mulder and Scully to start reporting, and she already has her microphone in hand, while the cameraman positions himself at the appropriate distance, first panning over the surrounding monitors and then focusing on her.

“
Buonciorno,
” she begins in a thick Neapolitan accent.

All four of us look exchange a look.

It's miracle I don't burst out laughing.

T
he guy at the reception desk must have thought he was making quite the impression of the sophisticated hotel clerk by not looking either of us in the face at all as we handed over, respectively, my driver's license and Alessandra Persiano's state ID card.

From behind her incredibly cool passion-violet-orange Alain Mikli glasses, Ale shot me a sidelong glance captioned: “So get a load of this guy.”

“He must be a conscientious objector,” I commented aloud.

Alessandra Persiano emitted a raspberry of a snicker confined entirely to her nose. For a moment the receptionist remained motionless, then he started up again, completed the necessary series of steps to assign a hotel room, and finally handed over the electronic key card, though not before he'd informed us (with his face turned in the opposite direction ) that the
card
(that's right, he used the English word, with a pretentious mushy French
r
in place of a proper trilled Italian one) also turned the power in the room on and off, so we should be sure to remember to insert it in the appropriate slot.

This wasn't the first time that I'd encountered this misguided sense of discretion on the part of hoteliers. As if there were a rule book somewhere that stated that couples without luggage asking for a room must necessarily be having some kind of illicit affair. Maybe it's the time of day that arouses suspicion; who knows. But the reception desks of the world are crowded with clerks who act all discreet while ushering you through the check-in process, so that when they're done with you, you head for the elevator with your head bowed, perhaps with your wife hurrying after you, asking what's your rush.

Just in case you're wondering whether I didn't feel like a little bit of an idiot for agreeing to the idea of going to a hotel to rub up against each other when we could have just as easily holed up at home (and, as we say in Naples, enjoyed ourselves on the cheap and cheerful): yes, in fact, I felt like a complete idiot. In part because the room cost something like 190 euros, with breakfast included, one of those rooms with satellite TV that welcomes you by name when you walk in and a pseudo-Montblanc pen on display on the nightstand, the kind that the minute you see it you say to yourself: “I'm taking that with me.”

But Alessandra Persiano had decided to indulge in a naughty whim to place a narrative seal on our recovery as a couple (you would not believe the emphasis that women put on narrativizing the events of their love lives), so there was no way I could safely object. Among other things these kinds of hotels, where they're always holding conferences on topics like
The Consequences of Secondhand Smoke on the Pathologies of the Middle Ear
, or else
Repersuading the Badly Advised Client: What Investment Scenarios?
with that distinctive patented technoluxe gloss, always get on my nerves after a while. Because instead of putting you at your ease, they force you to act like a government official traveling on business.

When you walk into those earth-tone rooms, where there's a button for everything and the piped-in chill-out music that you'd expect from a CD that comes free with a shrink-wrapped newsweekly like
L'Espresso
follows you into the bathroom along with the pervasive scent of lavender, you inevitably begin to assume certain preprogrammed behaviors, like taking off your jacket and rolling your shirtsleeves halfway up your forearm, brushing back your hair, and loosening your tie, even if you don't wear one.

It's a typical example of environmental mimicry, the kind that can temporarily turn you into a total asshole, so that if you don't take a moment to get your head screwed on straight again, you might end up walking into an elevator a short while later and running into an old childhood friend, who you haven't seen in thirty years and who now works there as a bellboy, and pretend not to recognize him, just for instance.

Still, I have to admit that the sexual benefits obtained in return for the investment were well worth it, and then some.

The minute we shut the door behind us, Alessandra Persiano wrapped herself around me with such greediness that I didn't even have time to slip the electronic key card into the slot to turn on the electricity, and so, not knowing what to do with it, I held it in my hand for at least the first five minutes of copulation, until she noticed it, tore it from my grasp, and threw it over her shoulder with a defiant and ultra-erotic backhand that seemed as if she'd done it just to say to me: “You poor middle-class idiot imprisoned in your minor-league insignificant preplanned mediocre life, in this moment of total spontaneity, what are you doing, clinging to reality? You're worrying about the key card for the light? What are you thinking, that you might not be able to find it when we're done (i.e., you're already thinking about afterward)? Forget about the details, to hell with them, ignore them, they don't matter: we're about to destroy all that pointless nonsense right now.”

A very nice speech, no doubt about it (at least I assume it was: because all Alessandra Persiano actually did was throw the key away, if we're being honest); in response to which, nonetheless, it would have been child's play for me to say: “So did we really need to spend 190 euros to perform this fabulous iconoclastic act?” But the sex was going so remarkably well that not even my dialectical autism could spoil it.

The really memorable thing is that, once we were done with the first session, and I mean immediately after, like maybe a minute later, not even enough time to go freshen up a little, Alessandra Persiano had already climbed back in the saddle on top of me (just for fun, really, playacting at being the insatiable nympho, I'm guessing) and I, thinking that I would need at least a couple of the delectable gianduia chocolates available on the nightstand to recharge my batteries, felt myself practically respond on command, astonished (because I'm astonished every single time) at how my old playfellow had just confirmed himself to be a stubborn freelancer, refusing to accept full-time positions and always doing more or less what he pleases (and in fact when she felt herself suddenly tipped off-balance by the upstanding handbrake, she commented, her eyes widening: “Oh, Vince', holy crap”).

So anyway, if the purpose of that impulsive nooner was to capture and preserve the love that we'd rediscovered on the street and perhaps persuade it to stick around (because love, by its very nature, is something that comes and goes freely: the challenge is to trust it to return, and not pull any stupid-ass moves while it's away), I'm not saying we nailed it, but we were close.

But before delving into the story of the incident that just a short while later came close to sending everything to hell in a handbasket without any hope of remediation, I think it's appropriate to report the text of the postcoital conversation that began after the regulation five minutes of depression that overtakes virtually every woman after her second orgasm (when she turns over on her side with her back to you as if you'd somehow offended her, or else lies flat on her back staring at the ceiling, catatonic, and you lie there, waiting for who knows what, without any idea what the fuck to say now).

 

Ale: You know what just occurred to me?

Me: No, can I think it over for twenty minutes or so?

Ale: Idiot. Something that my mother told me a while ago.

Me: It's all fine, as long as it's strictly recreational.

Ale: You'll like this.

Me: If you tell me, I might.

Ale: All right then. When my parents met on the street, I mean whenever they ran into each other by chance, they'd fall in love all over again.

Me: Get out of here.

Ale: Really. And I'm not talking about who knows how long ago, they'd already been married for twenty-five years, give or take. They practically lived separate lives, at home they didn't pay all that much attention to each other, they talked no more than the union minimum required, they squabbled over trivial matters, the way people do when they can't stand looking at the same damned face day after day. And yet, this miracle would happen: all they had to do was meet by chance in the street and they'd start courting like a couple of kids. Mamma told me that a thrill would sweep over her, an urge to go somewhere and have lunch together, to have him take her to pick out a dress, to go back home and get along.