Padgett Powell - Typical - Stories

The instability of the human mind, its unsteady footing and proclivity to slide down avalanches of delusion, was the thing about human life that most disturbed Mario. Famine, war, genocide, birth defects, violent crime, racism, bad automobiles — all these things paled next to mental instability for Mario. It was a shame. It was one thing not to be able to eat, or to get shot, or to be born with something missing, or to have a car not start, but not to know what was up was incalculably worse. Hell, Mario thought, was precisely that — not having a clue about what was up. He felt so sorry for his departed wife that, when her ardor had receded, he indulged in uncharacteristic sentimentality and kissed her on the forehead. So dire was her state, she appeared grateful.

In the night Mario dreamed of having to return to the vineyard to pick up the Frenchman. There he found Germano and Adriano haggardly standing beside the supine form of the advanced Frenchman. Beside him was a four-foot-deep hole and beside that a mound of dirt. Checking instinctively and furtively, Mario could detect no exposed spolia of tombs or parts of mummies, and the dirt did not look radioactive.

Germano said that they were lucky. The Frenchman had dug between tombs. Had he simply pulled up an active, large vine, he would have gotten a mummy. Adriano showed Mario his eight crossed fingers, which he had held crossed by sitting on them all the while the Frenchman had dug, and which now hurt him considerably to undo. “That was foolish,” Mario said. “You could hurt yourself, and what is more, my needle valve is sticking on the way out here, and you are the best at a needle valve. Can you look at it in your condition?” Adriano unwound his fingers and checked them in the air, and they went to take a look at Mario’s carburetor, leaving the Frenchman in his fat, snoring peace.

Then Mario had a frightening dream. He dreamed that none of his previous day and night had taken place, that it had all been itself some kind of dream. His wife had missed him because he had come home much later than usual, delayed by the officer, and she had gone ruefully to bed alone. She was in the bed when he searched the house but was concealed in the covers. In his search for stolen valuables he had read not a note from her but one of the open passages about modern Italy and the modern Italian. This dream was unnerving.

Mario had no capacity for multiple levels of illusion, for the kind of layered reality that a dream like this suggested. He began to sweat and toss in now partial sleep, and then the dream sweetened back into things familiar — he and Adriano and Germano were adjusting the needle valve. He calmed down. As soon as his sleep was regular, however, the dream turned on him again. As Adriano reached in to turn the valve, the needle somehow became the gap in the front teeth of Sevriano Buffala, the psychiatrist, whose smiling face, which suddenly resembled the face of Sigmund Freud himself, looked at him from under the hood of the taxi. The face spoke to him: “It’s you who’s crazy, Mario Moscalini. Your wife is a rock of salt.”

This all made perfect sense, in the dream. Dreams have a way of doing that. Needle valves can look like gaps in teeth, and people being rocks of salt can be perfectly sensible. Mario sat up in bed and marveled at the lunacies he had just accepted as reason.

When he got up the next morning he decided to postpone his trip to see Sevriano Buffala. He was not really worried that the doctor of bogus science would actually attempt to suggest that the trouble was with him. It was just that maybe he was acting a bit precipitously in taking his wife to see the smiling quack. It was the kind of innocent, well-meaning thing people did all the time in the interest of their loved ones — and sometimes never saw them again. The loved ones went straight into lifelong loony bins. The risks of being irresponsible in matters of unhinged relatives were very high. You had to think twice, or three times, about just how deranged they were. His wife was not, after all, dangerous to anyone, including herself. She had not interfered with his seeing Cicciolina, which at present was what really mattered to him, so why force her to walk a shaman’s tightrope of mental fitness?

Besides, if he went directly out to the vineyard this morning to catch Sevriano, the chances were extremely high that Germano and Adriano would force him into filling in the Frenchman’s hole. Or worse, if the Frenchman had expired from his august labor, they might make him party to the burial, which might get tedious later in a legal sense if the Michelin company proved attached to their scribe and sent authorities. It would look suspicious, the Buffala brothers and a respected taxi driver burying a fat man in a hole he himself had dug. And his disinterment would rattle the Buffala brothers to no end, for fear that mummies, vipers, aphrodisiacs, or nuclear fuel waste might be discovered. Any of that and their vineyard was probably at an end. On top of all this, Mario did not want to develop trouble with his needle valve on the drive out there.

He got quietly up and repaired to the kitchen and decided to surprise his wife by fixing breakfast for them. She was sleeping late. She deserved it — it could not be more obvious that she was under considerable strain and needed all the rest she could get.

Mario was a little rusty in the kitchen, but he was confident he could remember his good mother’s recipe for pizza bianca, and he wanted to cook the bread in the old wood stove his wife never used. He liked the smell of bread most when it was cooked over wood. It made bread taste like some kind of airy game.

He set about rolling the ingredients for the pizza together on his wife’s floured board and soon had a large round of dough that was kneadable in the extreme. He vaguely remembered that the pizza did not want a lot of kneading, because it became tough, but the mound beneath his working hands began to feel good to him. A little more, he decided. As he worked the dough, a sensation of excitement came into his size, and another sensation crept up the back of his neck, as if he were being watched. He wanted to turn to see who was watching him, but the mound of dough held him. He had to work it a little more. It was absurd, but the heavy slag of leavening bread reminded him not a little of Cicciolina’s ample tette, or one of them, anyway. He caressed her, forming her up to him, then mashing her gently, pressing her entire tetta to her chest with both his hands. He would have bent to kiss her but for the absolute need to see who was watching him. You do not kiss the tetta of l’onorevole Cicciolina on a board in the kitchen if someone is watching you. For a second — very brief, but disturbing — the flattened dough then resembled not Cicciolina but a piece of the hide of the white, advanced Frenchman.

Before he turned, he decided the party watching him could not be his wife — she was still soundly asleep. It was probably the prowler, the burglar. This gave him a thrill. Maybe he should continue to caress Cicciolina until the man was closer to him, and then suddenly whirl and strike the bastard a mortal blow with an iron fist that had but a second before been an incredibly tender, loving hand. This had much appeal.

He waited but could not hear the blackguard crossing the kitchen. It was more than a little unsettling to try to hear someone creep up on you as you worked up pizza bianca on a floury board in your kitchen. Finally it occurred to Mario that he might be in some marginal danger, and it was certain that he was not — distracted as he was — acquitting himself well with Cicciolina. He took a deep breath and whirled. No one was there. What he saw where he had expected the man — it was crazy, but he now realized he had expected the Frenchman — was a Michelin guide to Italy open to the psalm of the modern Italian. He looked at the book. He stared it down. It was on its back, and across the room, yet somehow was watching him. If he thought a book on its back could watch him, maybe he should see Sevriano Buffala after all.