I Hadn't Understood (9781609458980) by Diego De Silva Page B

date it, sign it, and hurry over to the police station to register it (and I’m certainly not going to waste your time here explaining why the figure reported in the contract is higher than the figure that I pay him on the first of every month, under the table). All my officemates are in the same legal condition: Espedito Lenza, bookkeeper (but the plaque on the door says “business advisor”); Rudy Fiumara, a wingnut who has no discernable profession and seems to make no rational use of his room, seeing as how we almost never see him (but he has a fundamentalist approach to being neighborly, and he’ll have the bar downstairs deliver an espresso in a thermos demitasse even if you don’t want it); and the Arethusa cooperative, a cooperative that is made up of a husband-and-wife team—he’s one of those guys whose name is Roberto but every time you see him you call him Sergio (you know the ones, the Robertos that you can’t help but call Sergio? Or the Giancarlos that you can’t get out of your mind that they’re really Antonios? You know, those guys)—while she has a refined name, like Iginia or Vitulia or Marosia. They have the most idiotic little Italian spitz, which every time the doorbell rings goes completely bonkers and starts barking, furiously, until Roberto-Sergio and Iginia-Vitulia-Marosia see that they’re going to have to pound it silly to make it stop. Since it’s a mezzanine apartment, there’s a security issue, but instead of installing steel bars, the landlord decided to save a little money and just had holes drilled into the wall on either side of each casement window. So every night, before leaving, you have to remember to slip a steel tube five and a half feet long into the holes to keep burglars from breaking and entering (let me assure you that the sight of a window barred from the interior with an Innocenti steel tube triggers a bout of depression you can’t even begin to imagine).
    Or else you say:
    Now, your professional office suite, these days, certainly isn’t what it used to be. The authoritative law office, the office that’s located on an upper floor of an impressive palazzo in the city center, with a courtyard and a doorman, a receptionist, a secretary, paralegals, five or six phone lines, a spacious waiting room, original paintings and vintage furniture; the suite of offices designed to crush the will of the client and make it clear from the very first appointment just who it is who holds the whip hand (and especially just how much he can expect to pay in hourly fees), has seen its day. Nowadays, a professional is constantly on the hunt, never in one place; then, every so often, he’ll need some downtime. Let’s be done with overblown struc­tural rhetoric. Let’s be done with the gilded cage that only confines your thoughts and restricts your initiative within the iron bars of ostentation (plainly vulgar and even a little fascistic, if we want to call a spade a spade). Let’s be done with underlings and employees who do the dirty work of photocopying and carrying briefcases, let’s be done with subordinates, let’s be done with the young woman who fields your phone calls and organizes your schedule. Let’s be done with the tawdry cliché of the illicit affair with your secretary. Let’s be done with ownership of law offices. Let’s be done with ownership in general. Don’t establish ties, unknot them. Today you’re here, tomorrow you’re somewhere else. Do you need to meet with a client who’s important enough to merit a face-to-face? Tell him to call you on your cell phone and you can have lunch together (or better yet, eat a sandwich at a little table in a bar). Does your cell phone make you feel as if the world is breathing down your neck? Then you just turn it off. You’re a freelancer and a professional (just listen to the way those two words chime together), so