My Mother-in-Law Drinks (25 page)

A few people cheer, while a few others boo and jeer.

“Come on, Malinconico, don't be a hypocrite. There are no lawyers who don't want to be famous. Legal careers are based on success and fame.”

“Well, I'm sorry to disappoint you but that's not where my ambitions lie.”

“Ah, no? Then what is it exactly that you're hoping for, to remain a supremely talented nobody?”

Well, how do you like that, I think to myself.

“The whole idea of niche professions is out-of-date, Counselor. Get rid of it. Today you have an opportunity to practice your profession at the very highest level, the level that matters. Here, on live television, right now, without having read the files and exhibits, without having prepared your defense, without knowing where to start nor exactly what to say, without judges or court clerks or witnesses or defendants, without any civil rights or due process. We're in the kingdom of approximations, we're on TV, you understand? And not just any channel: RAI TV.
This
is the courtroom that people pay attention to.”

I'm left stunned, or perhaps I should say . . . left behind, as if I were unwilling to give him credit for having recovered so quickly. The worst thing is that I can't even motivate myself to come up with a response to his arguments because, however much it annoys me to admit it, they intrigue me. But in any case I couldn't make a retort even if I wanted to, because he doesn't give me the time.

“Criminal prosecutions have become a farce. There's no longer any mystery, there's nothing compelling about them. Can you imagine the look on Kafka's face if he could see what's become of the trial in these people's hands? To get to a definitive verdict you have to go through three levels of courts, which is quite enough to ensure that the crime's dramatic impact thoroughly fades away. And in the meanwhile, television holds a trial of its own, shapes an audience, splits it into those in favor and those against, teaches them all to parrot court-speak, and sees to it that certain laws are passed and others aren't.”

He's leaking like a faucet. Clearly he's been pondering these concepts for a long time, and that's why he expresses them with such conviction. For that matter, you can't undertake any sort of armed military mission without some foundation of theoretical preparation.

Keep going, I think. Sooner or later I'll answer you.

“Why would you expect people to care about a case that drags on for years and years, with delays and peevish objections of every kind, only to culminate, when it does culminate, in a cobbled-together verdict that fails to punish the guilty or compensate the victims? The half-baked television version is a thousand times more impactful. It gives rise to ways of thinking, it shapes trends.”

At this point I'm getting ready to say something.

He probably realizes it, and drives home his point.

“You might tell me I haven't done much better. That I've put together a vulgar spectacle and by doing so I'm sinking to the same level as the criminal I'm judging. I'll admit that, if it gives you any satisfaction. But try stopping the first person you meet on the street tomorrow morning, and ask them if they know who my son was.”

He stops to gather his thoughts while I try to reassemble the different parts of his argument which, while it still fails to convince me, is technically impeccable.

“The trial of the probable murderers of Massimiliano, yes that really was a piece of buffoonery. Two coke-addicted hired killers who've done nothing but lie for the past two years, kicking their criminal responsibility back and forth without naming a single name or admitting to a single juridically useful fact. I wish I could show you the arrogance with which they sit in court and answer the prosecuting magistrates' questions, the barefaced shamelessness of their statements. You ought to come by sometime and see the gall of the witnesses as they retract their testimony. The
omertà
—the code of silence—that you can smell in the air the minute someone mentions this man's name. The judges' powerlessness against a mouth that refuses to open.”

A silence of agreement falls.

Even the hyenas are quiet.

I don't know if I'm successful in masking it, but at this point I'm truly impressed.

“I won't tolerate this quagmire any longer, Counselor. This silencing of truths that are evident to one and all. Today I'm speaking my mind, taking the floor, and I'm no longer interested in complying with the rules. I want a kangaroo court of my own, ham-handed and slapdash, a trial held in aisles lined with sliced prosciutto and fresh mozzarella. Look, I fit in perfectly. There's no need to even include a word from our sponsors, no commercials of any kind. I want an audience, a
real
audience, made up of unspecialized television viewers, and I want them to hear about my son, I want them to remember his story, I want them to believe
more or less
in his innocence. That's enough for me. I want to have the benefit of the doubt, but
genuine
doubt, with some who believe and others who don't. I've had more than enough of this culpable ambiguity to which I've already been sentenced, de facto. And look, I'm not even interested in seeing justice served; I don't aim that high. All I want is for justice to be known.”

He stops as if to savor the silence after that summation (which, to give him full credit, has left us even more speechless than we were before; who knows whether he improvised it or wrote it out in advance), and that's when—just as I'm making a superhuman effort to come up with an argument that has even a shred of validity to offer in rebuttal to his impeccable populist pragmaticism—an unpleasant and familiar odor reaches us, making us all simultaneously lower our eyes in Matrix's direction.

I say we “lower” our eyes because a puddle of piss is spreading across the floor at the prisoner's feet.

With a by-now well-honed sense of television timing, we raise our eyes and look at the monitors, to see whether the detail in question is also visible in the live broadcast (at this point there's not a gesture, a word, or an event of any kind, no matter how minuscule, that we don't automatically go looking for confirmation of on the television sets: as if reality had moved inside those boxes, and the present moment were on a loop-delay).

Since it doesn't appear to be glaringly obvious (the floor was already smeared with yogurt), we lock eyes and come to an instantaneous agreement to say nothing about the embarrassing spill.

It's a little pact that automatically springs up among us, and to which I adhere instinctively and immediately without even understanding who or what it is we're trying to defend (is it Matrix's privacy, so openly violated by this exposure, or our own images, which we'd rather not see sullied on television, or even worse, the reality show that I'm helping to put together, albeit against my will?).

The only thing I do understand—as I catch Matrix's eye and see that he's now staring at Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo and smiling at him with the desperate satisfaction of someone who's finally managed to land a blow—is that he did it on purpose.

When you see a prisoner abandon himself to such an instinctive need, you finally
really
understand what it means not to be able to use your hands, to be in the hands of someone else. It's almost as if you take part personally in his regression. And it's hard to take.

By pissing himself, Matrix has upped the ante. He has, so to speak, reversed the responsibility for his capture. As if he had turned to the television cameras and said: “Look at me now. Look at what he's done to me.”

And Engineer Romolo Sesti Orfeo, practically from one second to the next, finds himself cast as a torturer and turnkey, something very different from the image he had until just a minute before (at least, it hadn't come through so clearly).

Which, necessarily, changes everything.

Y
ou should see him, Matrix, now that his self-induced incontinence is beginning to become visually recognizable on television—the buzz of the hyenas, in fact, has begun to take on the unmistakable tonality of disapproval (a couple of them are already bickering with each other); Scully and Mulder exchange a glance for the third time; the female journalist from RAI (who strikes me as a fine specimen of a jackal, truth be told) has leapt straight up into the air; Mary Stracqua hasn't noticed a thing; her (ex) cameraman has already zoomed in repeatedly on the trousers—you ought to see, as I was saying, what a face of pure innocence he's put on. What a Christlike position he's assumed (on his knees, his head bent over one shoulder, his sad eyes staring, his mouth half-open). How he's playing the part (badly, but that hardly matters) of the prisoner deprived of his rights. A truly despicable spectacle, a horrifying blend of pity and disgust.

 

By now we all ought to be able to agree that in order for reality shows to work, they must arouse aesthetic revulsion. Since reality shows are documentaries about human misery made for nonscientific purposes, we watch them to feel superior. And so it's obvious that in such a format a corporeal excretion becomes pure kryptonite.

People have no problem swallowing polemics motivated by relative indignation concerning, for instance, television's humiliation of the body, provided they remain strictly within a cast-iron aesthetic schema (the
veline
, or pneumatic young TV showgirls, showing off their tits and asses, oh what an objectification of the female body); but like hell are they going to put up with the compassion stirred by the sight of some poor man soaking in a puddle of his own urine. The reality show does not admit classical
pietas
. At the very most, programmed emotions.

Let's take, for example, shows designed to resemble shipwrecks: concentration camps surveilled by tyrannical video cameras that save the lives of those who remain but execute the prisoners they liberate. In the concentration camp of the reality show, being freed is like being sent to hell. Whoever is rescued from the island is a dead man.

The apprenticeship of privation created to teach the true values of life does not leave room for personal initiatives or reckless impulses. It's a sort of coercive emotional treatment tested out on the contestants (sort of like the one to which Malcolm McDowell is subjected in
A Clockwork Orange
to eradicate violent impulses from his psyche), who are asked in the final episode the regulation question: “Do you feel like a different person now?” And with tears in their eyes they all say yes.

Imprisonment, exile, loneliness, sadness, distance, the challenges of socialization and adaptation, even hunger and thirst—when placed within that sort of logic all these are nothing but slightly more demanding parlor games in which the contestant never really runs the risk of doing himself or herself any real lasting harm. The safety nets are always carefully strung up. In fact if you feel ill there's a medical service ready to examine and treat you. Death on a live broadcast is not (yet) a part of our scheduled programming. Because clearly the last thing the corporation wants is lawsuits for wrongful death on its docket. It's enough to see the contestant make a little bit of a fool of him- or herself (which is after all a way of winning).

This is why Matrix's coup de théâtre has so irremediably undercut the would-be reality show of his hostage taking. Because it has suddenly made it very serious indeed. It has engendered a real danger of fellow feeling, which is something that you want to avoid above all else in this kind of program.

Years ago I saw part of a porno variety show that was called, I think,
Provini in diretta
.

This is how it worked: a well-established porn actress agreed to mate without preamble with various aspiring cine-stallions (or rather, ordinary chronically horny male civilians, decidedly unattractive and driven by the desperate ambition to achieve their goal of screwing not so much the woman of their dreams as the woman of their wet dreams) for a preset number of minutes.

The conditions for taking part in the audition: prior authorization to broadcast whatever was filmed, no matter the outcome in terms of performance.

Translation: you want to screw the porn star? Be our guest, she's all yours, you don't even have to pay a cent. But if you can't do it, you'll spend the rest of your life in the public archive of epic embarrassments (which as a poison pill, let's admit it, has more the flavor of a deal with the devil than a mere abusive clause, and moreover without the certainty of benefit that any self-respecting devil is required to provide, in keeping with the minimum demonic contractual standards currently observed).

Now you're probably thinking: “Sure, but at the very worst the only people who are going to know about it are consumers of pornography, whether occasional or habitual: it's not as if I'm making a fool of myself on, say, a prime-time show like
Domenica In.
” Sure but fucking nothing. It's a monumental failure and humiliation, and there's no fixing it. It's a blot on your sexual criminal record that you have absolutely no chance of getting expunged. You can already imagine it, the private showings people would hold just to roll on the floor laughing behind your back.

After three or four auditions, I swear, I had to turn it off. I just couldn't bring myself to watch it anymore. They should have called the show
If This Is a Man
, seriously. A full-fledged celebration of performance anxiety and impotence. There wasn't a single one of those desperately horny losers who came anywhere close to producing even the most timid attempt, and I don't even mean an effort sufficient to cross the threshold, but even just to ring the doorbell.

And it was genuinely heartbreaking to have to watch the puppet show of commiseration that followed, the whining and the justifications, the requests, all rigorously turned down, for a second chance, the contractual courtesy of the porno diva in stiletto heels and fishnet stockings as she consoled the miserable wretch before dismissing him and moving on to the next failure.