Massimo has nervous legs and a mind that keeps the future up at night. Find his face in the crowd and you’ll know him-his eyes always follow, his mouth often leads. Mothers and nuns know to avoid him and schoolteachers sense his crimes before any redhandedness actually happens. Though 42, the man is still the naughtiest boy in the class. Too smart for his own good-or for anyone’s good-he is quick enough to climb beyond most pointless squabbles. Which is why the fights he picks are, well, very much picked.
I rent office space from his frequently absent boss because work is far better with some public passing through. And he likes me with a brand of attraction that is both instinctive and grossly premeditated. I am the girl with the boing-boing curls. Disbelief is a bobbing bow in my hair. He’s grateful for that at times: naughtiest comes to naught without someone to shock. So, without much choice in the matter, I succumb: the man is a word-spender and words are my currency. Like it or not, he recognized this immediately and wasted no time stirring up mischief stew, just to get some bubbling out of me.
Yesterday morning, because I was off-guard and laughing at his imitation of the country’s prime minister, Massimo began announcing his poor calendar of clients with spell-binding, inimitable accuracy. Like a whispering judge with a very loud gavel, he named them, pounding their faults on the table with labels that somehow bruised me. Il Tirasassi, la Contafiabe, il Giradischi and la Gatta morta. His despicable tongue cut these people apart and stitched them back together in a voice just loud enough for near ears. Massimo’s verbal sewing has the tightness of the town’s best tailor: the Rock-thrower, the Fairy-tale-teller, the Record-player and the Flirty lady-cat who pretends to play dead. Two words and he had them. Two words to wade through ‘til they soaked you to the core.
‘Stop it!’ I jolted, as if he’d dipped my self-righteous braids into the ink-well.
‘Why?’ he asked, quite satisfied with my frown. Massimo likes studying face lines, the same way you and I like watching windy children chase waves on the beach.
Well, because name-calling is mean. But answers like that are far too reformatory, so I left my protests in my pocket and changed tune. ‘What compound word goes with you?’ I demanded.
‘Ah,’ he shrugged, equally entertained. ‘No child can ever name himself.’
‘Okay,’ I conceded. ‘What’s mine, then?’
He thought and produced a wicked smile. Unlike mine, his thinking generates immediate results. ‘Ficcanaso?’ He said the name as a question and I took it as a dare.
‘Nosy?’ I stared, wearing disbelief again. ‘You’ve got to be joking. Any more reserved and I’d be underground.’
‘Yes. But busybodies almost never reveal themselves. You make your living by knowing all about us.’
My silence served him victory.
‘Vedi che ho ragione,’ he goaded. ‘You see that I am right.’
Right. The article starts here, actually. I was turned completely inside out at the unfair exactness of his accusation. A zillion offences at bay in this world and he chose precisely the one that bent me backwards to see it. I do make my living by eavesdropping into the Italian mind-set. Quite true. Which is precisely why the conversation suddenly took the turn that it did.
At the time, his rightness smacked me. What strikes me even now, as I write our exchange, is the three minutes it just took to translate the phrase ‘Vedi che ho ragione’. When Italians tell you they’re right, they actually say ‘I have reason,’ and this enthralling habit cannot help but tickle the mind-buds the same way it teases the tongue. Italians appeal to Reason to prove their disputed points; the mere mention of the principle lends loftiness to the most trenched-in arguments. Either that, or ragione is simply the voice of justification: ‘I have my reasons for saying this, and that alone makes it right.’ Justice is a personal system of weights and balances, rightness is a well-justified argument.
‘Just because you have reason, does not make you right,’ I said. In English, it makes perfect sense. In Italian, unfortunately, that repetitive sentence sounds like a ludicrous riddle. Language is a jester poking fun at the court.
‘What are you saying?’ he argued. ‘You get nervous and you lose all logic.’
That, incidentally, is quite true, too. Generally. ‘I’m not nervous,’ I fumed. ‘Just mad.’
‘I’ve never known a woman who could separate the two.’
Oh. You’re in trouble. You are so in trouble. ‘Massimo,’ I started, ‘just wait. I’m going to cook you up and serve you over someone else’s breakfast.’
He laughed. ‘Does that mean I should consider myself publishable?’
‘Oh, yes. Two words against 850.’
‘And who decides who wins?’ he asked, intrigued as always with verbal duel.
‘I don’t want to win,’ I told him. ‘I just want to say it.’
Sometimes, having reason is reason enough.
