Mario discovered his wife at table before a plate of steaming pasta. She looked undisturbed, serene, even — if you could imagine it — happy. That was like her. She had the most developed capacity for self-delusion of any woman Mario had ever known.
She was even wearing house slippers. Thus she had thought to take off and conceal whatever kind of magical running shoes she had worn for the day’s incalculable mileage. She spoke pleasantly to Mario, who waved her off and searched the house thoroughly for these supernatural shoes.
In the course of his search, he located, in his nightstand drawer where he always kept it, his black address book, which contained the ninety-five names and numbers of his girlfriends. Some of these, Mario admitted, were untried. He had copied them from the secret rosters of local convents. It was absurd to just write all these girls off because they were pursuing a celibate life. Not all of them would become nuns, some would necessarily fall by the wayside, and these girls would be fresh and full of desire. It was like kinetic and potential energy, if you wanted to be scientific about it. Mario’s notebook was a trove of potential female energy. The notebook was where it had always been, and where it had not been the night before, following the burglary. His wife, for some odd reason, must have taken it with her on her failed, foolish quest for larger size.
He seized the book and intended to confront her with it, and with the absurd note she’d left about his not knowing beans about large size. He would walk into the steamy, happy kitchen full of her weird fantasy and slap both of these documents on the table and tell her that her fantastic lack of sense was at an end.
But he could not locate the note, and the address book alone did not somehow seem sufficient. A notebook of ninety-five girlfriends’ numbers presented defiantly to a wife seemed vaguely not the perfect thing. It spoke of the kind of damning evidence presented by one side in a court of law that eventually somehow works to the advantage of the other. He left the notebook in the drawer. He would get Cicciolina’s number and that would make it ninety-six.
He sat down to eat with his wife, who served him cheerfully. She was a marvel of deceit. She then had the temerity to ask him how his day had gone.
“You are fantastic,” he told her.
“Thank you, Mario.” She blushed. She blushed. In their previous, honest life together, she always blushed when he complimented her, and here she was counterfeiting the same complex physiological response. Anyone who could do that, under circumstances of running off for larger size, was worthy of Hollywood in Mario’s opinion. Or was crazy. She was either as good as Katharine Hepburn or she was gone. Either way, he had lost his wife. It was perfect, a situation that made perfect sense: he was sitting across from his smiling wife, who had fixed them an excellent meal and was solicitous of him and his petty workday, and he was smiling back, and anybody looking in their windows — as Mario certainly now knew people with black hearts did — would think them happily wed. But the party with the black heart could not see that his smiling wife had said he knew no beans about large size and had spent a night and a day running around cheerfully looking for it and had lost her mind.
Mario ate normally, the food was her best (wouldn’t it be?), and they retired and had a relationship in which his wife was especially ardent (wouldn’t she be?), and Mario forced himself to satisfy her. But he plotted throughout the relationship (it took some time, because his size did not want to be really large — how could it?) to go the following day to see Sevriano Buffala about his wife. He distrusted psychiatry — in his view you were either crazy or you weren’t, like pregnancy — but he loved the person who had been his wife, and it was worth pursuing the fantasy of modern medicine for the chance of bringing her back to earth.
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?