It was safer just to say that his wife grew on him. One day he looked up and said into the mirror, “If you married me you would save a lot of money. I would have to drive you around for nothing.” So they got married, and Mario stopped raising the flag on his meter when she got in his cab. And he took her everywhere. In that respect, his proposition might have been imprudent. But otherwise their marriage had been happy, until this fantasy of hers. To see her walking was perhaps the hardest evidence yet that she had lost her senses. It made Mario extremely uncomfortable to be out in the Buffala vineyard working a large sale while subject, conceivably, to a sudden assault by, or confrontation with, his crazy wife. That was private business, to say the least.
“Your wife, signore,” Mario suddenly heard, making him for a moment wild-eyed.
“Your wife,” again. It was the Frenchman.
“My wife what, masseur?”
“Your wife — does she gesticulate passionately and is she all movement?” With this, curiously, the Frenchman stood unsteadily up and began to paw the ground with his dainty shoe.
So relieved was Mario that she had not been seen approaching them that he uncharacteristically revealed an intimate matter. “She has great desire and above normal accommodation. She has to. I have large size.”
“I would like to meet her,” the Frenchman slurred.
This remark had a most curious effect on Mario. It seemed to come from the mouth of the officer who had spoken of wanting to meet Cicciolina as well as from the mouth of the advanced Frenchman, and it seemed as if this rather hybrid speaker were somehow speaking of wanting to meet the same person. Yet the officer was not the Frenchman, and Cicciolina was not his wife. What a fantastic blend of lunacies that was. He and the Buffala brothers were supposed to be drinking good wine — he wondered if they had made an error and got some of the house stuff. All he could do, under the circumstances, was try to be as sane as possible. That was his advice to himself whenever things got strange: Be as sane as possible.
The sanest thing he could imagine was that the Frenchman must know something about his wife. The most practical way for that to be true would be if it had been the Frenchman she had run off with. It was a fact that the Frenchman was large-size. Whether he had large size was open to speculation. The sanest thing to do here would be to ask the Frenchman to take down his pants, but that might mess up the Michelin mention. The next sanest thing Mario could think of was that it had been the Frenchman prowling his house the night before, and that he might have seen his wife inside, before she took off on her fantasy. It could, in this light, be a quite innocent question from the advanced Frenchman, under the circumstances. Still, this left the fact that the Frenchman was at least a prowler. It had been dark and visibility poor, especially since Mario had not slowed down when he saw the figure at his windows, but he could have sworn that the man was smaller than the present Frenchman, that it had been one of the wiry variety allegedly good with the wire on the German lines in the war. He really didn’t know what to think, and not knowing what to think — feeling things slip a little in his head — made Mario more nervous than the prospect of his deranged wife rushing up to them and making some kind of scene, possibly involving the relative sizes of himself and the giant, advanced, intoxicated, sweating Frenchman that they so badly wanted to make a favorable impression upon.
“I would like to meet your wife,” the Frenchman said again, confirming Mario in his belief that there was a connection between his fare for the day and his perambulating wife, and firming his resolve to think as sanely as possible through the mess and act accordingly. He decided that the best thing to do would be to bury the Frenchman alive. Whether they put him in with the mummies, or fed him to the vipers, or burned him slowly to death with hot nuclear wastes, or exploded his giant desire with an overdose of Cleopatra’s aphrodisiacs was of no concern to Mario — you could not predict what would really happen in the mind of a large, advanced Frenchman under a vineyard. They only had to dig a good, fat hole and put the fat frog in it and cover it up. He was suddenly very passionate about his lack of concern for the Frenchman’s fantastic psychology.
“My wife is of no concern to me, masseur,” Mario said. “I would call some of my large girlfriendship if I had not lost my address book in the burglary.”
The Frenchman pursed his lips and gave Mario a squinty look he had seen somewhere before. For a moment he thought it was just more of his confusing voices and faces, but then it came to him. Paul Newman had given such a look to a bull at close range in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. The Frenchman was mocking him! It was beyond the imagination. He had not known the French to be fans of Paul Newman. And the Frenchman was not even careful to pretend to be curious about the burglary. He wasn’t curious, obviously, because he knew about it! You do not say “the burglary” and have normal, innocent people just sit there. It was the best evidence he had that the Frenchman was the very person of large size his cheerful wife was walking hill and dale to find, and this explained why she had been seen near them all day. It was fantastic, but Mario had become the paid escort to the man his wife was leaving him for, and all day he had been keeping the man just out of her reach. It was too much. “It just goes to show you,” Mario said aloud to no one in particular. “In this world, one word says it all.” He had heard this useful line from an American baseball player of Latin extraction. The ballplayer had actually said, “In America, one word says it all,” but Mario figured if one word said it all, it said it all wherever you were. If there was such a thing as universality, this logic was sound. He wished the ballplayer had gone on to say what the word that said it all was.
Mario planned to strike the Frenchman, but he was going to have to be careful that the Frenchman did not somehow survive the blow and sit on him. Large size was actually an inadequate description of the Frenchman. He was mozzafiato—take your breath away.
“Jerry Lewis is not an international comic genius,” Mario announced suddenly and loudly. At this, both Germano and Adriano Buffala stood up and assumed crouched positions not unlike runners before the start of long-distance races. But the Frenchman, who had been rummaging briefly in the toolshed beside the hospitality patio, waved Mario off with a gesture of impatience. He emerged from the shed with a shovel, and after quartering about the patio a bit came to a spot he seemed to find significant, and with all his weight sank the shovel into the ground. He stood on the flush tangs of the shovel with a look on his face knowing and confident. Germano and Adriano took off, and Mario casually strolled to his Fiat before firing it up and making haste away from the advanced Frenchman and the vineyard full of stories.
Mario had no idea how to contend with a large Frenchman who did not care if you insulted Jerry Lewis. The idea even frightened him a little. One might as well be dealing with a Moroccan, or worse. A Frenchman unprepared to defend Jerry Lewis might do anything at all, because he would be a man who was empty inside, perhaps not even a man in the normal sense but a kind of alien — an anti-homme, as he thought the French might put it.
Mario’s imagination was not equal to the prospect of the empty Frenchman. A non-Jerry-Lewis-loving frog gave him chills, in fact. He rolled up the cab’s windows and had a calming talk with Cicciolina, whose tette—if it were possible — had, since the day before, assumed an aspect of greater lift, greater heaviness, greater size. She was a marvel, l’onorevole Cicciolina, and he was gladdened at that moment to be a modern Italian. It gave you a sense of well-being to have one of your own kind in high places. In a way, though not in an entirely rational way, it was not unlike having your mother run the country. It was like turning the country into a home, a home into a bed, a bed into a passion of large size.