There were no books for him, no post-or pre-traumatic stress syndromes, no Adult Children of Ironic Parents groups to go to, no women counselors that spent their lives holding your hand if you’d had too much fun abusing something and now wanted as recompense to hold hands with idle women. No nothing. He was alone. He might have been on Mars. This gave him comfort. At least he was not in a herd of whiners who pulled out a poker chip and explained its significance before they told you their name. Mr. Irony resolved he would carry a cow chip before a poker chip, if that was not ironic — already, he was relieved to discover, he was not sure what irony was. A positive sign.
Still, he was pretty certain that extracting from the pocket in a somber, proud, ceremonious fashion and confidentially beginning to explain to an innocent bystander that what this cow chip represented was … was ironic. Perhaps he could, for a while, find a substitute for irony. Substitute therapy was common, even if it itself was perhaps a little ironic.
He had recently witnessed a father and young daughter purchasing some candy for the mother’s birthday. The child, who was allowed to select the candy, decided on chocolate-covered peanuts, and decided that they were “pretend poops.” Indeed, the candies had looked like small, hard turds.
“But don’t tell Mommy we’re giving her pretend poops,” the father instructed.
The child grinned wickedly. “It’ll be … pretty surprisy!”
That, Mr. Irony thought, might be an acceptable substitute for ironic: surprisy. Irony he could quit, but, as methadone to his heroin, he could not quit that which was surprisy.
“Surprisy it is, then,” he announced, still leaning against the refrigerator, immediately looking less glum. He then crawled out of his own kitchen window and crawled back in. It felt good. He felt fine. Not himself, but all right.
“All surprising right,” he said, beginning a rubber-legged dance that came to him. He bandied this way through the apartment, saying “Surprise you!” to walls and paintings and furnishings. He told everything to surprise off. “Just get the surprise out of my way,” he said to a pair of boxer shorts, and deftly toed them — through an incredibly long arc — into the clothes hamper. Suddenly, badly, he wanted a uniformed maid working full time in his small apartment, altogether too small for such a servant, and he wanted only new clothes.
Piling all of his old clothes into a heap, and thinking of how he might safely present himself at the haberdasher’s naked, he paused to congratulate himself: not just any man could kick irony once it had its teeth in him. A lesser man, one less surprisy, would have failed.
The Modern Italian
MARIO MOSCALINI PASSED ON his way out the door every morning one of several Michelin guides to Italy that were kept open to his favorite passage about modern Italy. He sometimes glanced at the books, but he had long before memorized the passage:
Modern Italy. — In this land abounding in every type of beauty, the modern Italian lives and moves with perfect ease. Dark-haired, black-eyed, gesticulating, nimble and passionate, he is all movement and fantasy.
This overflowing vitality appears in many modern achievements that may surprise the visitor. Improvement of the soil, industrial complexes, nuclear power centres, dams, motorways and skyscrapers, characterize the fantastic economic development which has taken place after World War II, giving Italy a new look and belying the legend of the macaroni-eating, guitar-playing Italian. A new way of life has been created in the country.
On Mario, one such modern Italian, these words had the calming, assuring effect of a psalm.
He was thinking specifically of the moving about modern Italy with perfect ease as he whipped his taxi through the customs gates at the port of Livorno to pick up his first fare of the day, a merchant seaman. Mario liked sailors. Unlike regular tourists, they were not finicky about what they wanted to see or do or where they wanted to go. They wanted food, women, to sleep, and they spoke in a direct fashion. With a sailor Mario was free to be himself, a man.
The sailor this morning was well-fed-looking, and Mario was not surprised to hear him ask for a “puta” right away. He turned to the sailor and said, with a conspiratorial wink, “I have large size.”
“Not a fat one,” the sailor said.
“No,” Mario said, “you do not seize my meaning. I have large size.” He held up his arm, flexed, his fist touching the ceiling of the cab.
“Non capisco Italiano,” the sailor said.
“You not must to know Italiano. In plain English, I have large size.” He winked again.
“Let me out,” the sailor said.
“But we are not to la puntana so presto—”
“You take her,” the sailor said, stepping from the moving taxi and running down the street.
Mario Moscalini was nimble enough, to be sure, to have caught the man, but it was just a matter of a language barrier, or something, and the skipped fare was not large, so he elected to just move on with traffic. Later he regretted this decision somewhat, because the day proved very dull, and it would have been enlivening to have stopped the sailor and wildly demanded his fare — and more, as reparation for the rudeness — and generally to have demonstrated to the fool what passion can mean. The man had been at sea too long for his own good.
It was not until he was on his way home that things picked up. He was tired, and it was funny the way it worked, but the best things seemed to happen to him when he was too tired to avail himself of golden opportunity. And if ever a golden opportunity bore down on him, it did as he clicked off his duty lights. He saw Cicciolina, pornostar and parliamentarian, by the side of the road, alone and needing a ride. She was supposed to be in Rome making legislation or movies. But she was here under a streetlight. Something was wrong, entirely out of place, so he got her into the cab without pressing her for an explanation. She would volunteer her troubles if she wanted to. Mario respected a person’s privacy if he respected anything in the world. And he respected l’onorevole Cicciolina if he respected anyone in the world. If she had not had the sense to pull her dress up over her tette at her press conference at Piazza Navona in Rome when she won her seat in parliament, he had been told that the very irreplaceable Bernini fountain there could have been much more seriously damaged than it was. People acted as if they had never seen tette before. It was ridiculous. Still, hers were a bit special, they looked good in movies, and it made him wonder if they were like movie stars themselves — maybe not so great-looking in real life. He thought she would be glad to show them to him, even if she was in some kind of trouble, so he turned down an oddly unfamiliar street — he knew Livorno backwards, he thought — where he could park if she agreed to a showing, and they were suddenly surrounded by the blue lights of polizia. How could she be in trouble with the law? She was the law.
An officer approached Mario’s window, pointing adamantly in the direction they had come. Then he threw his arms to heaven and shook his head. Mario saw now the one-way signs he had — it was incredible — been going against. And he a professional driver. That was why the officer was so wild in his gesticulations probably. Mario had let down the fraternity of professional men on the road. He got out to face the officer.