“Well, why not tell him the truth?”
“Oofah, Adriano. You are fantastic. He wants to believe in the modern Italy, and he is health-conscious. He has a lot to be conscious of, too. He is big. Tap a keg, my advice to you.”
“All right. I will find Germano and get our story straight.”
On the way, Mario told the Frenchman that there was an ugly rumor concerning the strange potency and unique flavor of the Buffala brothers’ new wine. “They have had un sacco di success with this wine, my friend. It is a product verily of the modern Italy. But of course, with success, with a sack of success, you have a sack of talk.”
“How far is it?” the Frenchman asked. “If it is far, stop for another aperitif, I’ll remain aboard.” It was like a clever Frenchman to feign uninterest in the slander of successful wine.
“It has been said that the heavy bocket and the risputed hallucinogenic quality — a California wholesaler is very interesting in this — is because the soil is refused from a nuclear power station fuel dump and the grapes, they have changed mutationally in one generation or less to a new fruit. Mendel, Gregor.”
This was all baloney. The nuclear defense which Mario was setting up was just a herring to keep people from thinking certain other theories regarding the weird wine. These theories were all supplied by the Buffala brothers. It was policy to tender the theory they wanted a given customer to swallow, and then to deny it less vigorously than they denied the competing theories, which they discreetly let slip out. Once a customer was sottoed on the wine, and the psychology correctly applied, he believed the wine special for reasons he found comforting, or credible, and bought, as it were, sacks of it. “That is how you have a sack of success,” the Buffala brothers were fond of saying. “You sell sacks of it.”
What was special about the wine actually varied from week to week. Benzine was getting too expensive, isopropyl was boring. This week they were using ethylene glycol — antifreeze. The third Buffala brother, Sevriano, was a psychiatrist, and he was the technical adviser to his brothers, the true vintners. He was also the originator of all the rumors and the psychology of their applications, and he was the only one among the brothers who did not at least partially subscribe to one or several of the bogus stories at any given moment. Sevriano had taken his training in Paris. Germano and Adriano put the contaminants in the wine themselves, yet they found themselves arguing the logic, and finally the truth, of the fictions, or marketing strategies, as Sevriano liked to call them. What was special about the wine had been summed up neatly once by a redheaded American hippie, who commented after his first two bottles, “Man, this is some bad shit,” and bought all he could carry on his back.
Mario Moscalini also had trouble maintaining a purchase on what was really the matter with the wine, but he had proved remarkably adept at adducing the psychologies of prospective buyers and getting them to subscribe to a working marketing strategy. He had been so adept that Sevriano had considered making him a Buffala brother, which was not a difficult thing to do, since the Buffala brothers were not brothers.
To the Frenchman, whose eye was peeled for a bar and another cognac, Mario now delivered the denial phase of the nuclear-mutation strategy. “This mutation calendar is a clear false,” he said. “They found some welding rods on the site. That is all.” The denial was so weak it convicted of the contrary — Mario thought it was like saying, I didn’t kill him, I just shot him a little.
The Frenchman produced his notebook and made a note in it. “Calumny,” he said, and chuckled. He might chuckle, Mario thought, but it will work. He is a nuclear man if I ever saw one. The French are advanced. After about two bottles of the wine, he would look at the bottle, and then at the ground, and then at his hand that had touched the bottle. The question would then not be far off: “How’d this nuclear waste thing get going, Signor Buffala?” And Adriano and Germano would laugh and deny it all, and the Frenchman would feel so buzzedly good sitting there as they brought him another bottle that he would actually like the idea of a mutant wine, a wine with even a little radioactivity itself in it — that’s how they treat cancer, with a little fire, you fight fire with fire and this fire feels good.
Today Mario did like the nuclear business, perhaps because he was yet mindful of his radio having blown out driving by a power station. The other defenses were also attractive at times. Some rather romantic, if not downright somber, types went for a strategy that posited Etruscan, or earlier, tombs beneath the vines, and featured the hungry tips of the grapevine roots tubering into ancient skulls, even into still oily bandages that covered 2,500-year-old human organs resembling carrots and peas. An accident in which a tractor had slipped out of gear had resulted in the tractor pulling up a large vine with a whole mummy wrapped in the roots. A giant, subterranean den of vipers could be advanced if the client appeared remotely Satanic, though they had never worked out a responsible scenario for how the poisons might get into the vines — it was preposterous that sensible snakes would bite plants. Oversexed folk, or for that matter those that might be judged undersexed, fell prey to an account of a buried cache of aphrodisiacs sent north by Cleopatra during troubles at Carthage. These strategies could be pitted against one another in endless shadings of credibility and incredibility, and it really didn’t seem to matter how they were blended or denied if you could get one honestly laced bottle down the hatch.
They had no trouble getting a bottle down the hatch of the advanced Frenchman. During the first two — the customary complimentary dosage used to ply a prospective buyer — the Frenchman disported himself about as any other corpulent, half-drunk foreigner. On schedule, he did at one point look at his bottle, then at the ground, and then at the hand that had held the bottle. Most customers here began to compose reasons for being on their way with wine for the road. But the Frenchman drained his current bottle by turning it to the sky, then sighted through the green bottom of it into the heavens and asked that another bottle be opened. “I’m treating myself for cancer,” he announced, a remark that struck Mario and the Buffala brothers as on the nail. Mario could diagnose — he had a fantastic nose for diagnostic marketing.
Mario and the Buffala brothers continued to nimbly and passionately accommodate the Frenchman. There was of course no calculating the benefit to accrue from a mention in the Michelin guide. Mario was just a little disconcerted at the length of time the Frenchman wanted to drink. This was predictable enough; it was not uncommon for the large man who would think nuclear to want to dawdle. But Mario had seen, while entertaining the Frenchman with some gesticulations about the absurdity of mummies, his wife pass between rows of grapevines several hundred yards from where they sat.
What was decidedly puzzling about this was that she appeared positively cheerful again. He had clocked her as losing that rosy aspect by now. If she was still cheerful in this absurd dalliance, he wanted immediately to go home and secure the house against her inevitable return. For surely that’s where she would go when all this false cheer wore off, when she came out of her fantasy of wanting another man. Another thing that was fantastic was the amount of walking she was doing. This was not like her. She never walked anywhere. That is how Mario came to marry her. Every day for three months he found her in his cab. Every day she looked better and better in the rearview mirror. Mario knew the absurdity of that — no one could possibly look better each day for three months. Even if you started with some kind of warty witch, in three months of absolute improvement, you’d be somewhere beyond Helen of Troy, whom Mario regarded as the equivalent of the speed of light in women. You do not go beyond the speed of light, in physics or in women.