Class

by Francesco Pacifico

  “It’s detectives.”

  The boy with the pink, poorly shaved lips is interning for an agency that tails the lovers of jealous, wealthy men. He also does background research on reality TV characters, helping writers anticipate whether an unbalanced lover or a criminal relative will pop up in a given season. It’s an unusual job for this grad-school boy, but for this generation, Sergio thinks, fame and eccentricity are everything.

  “So how do you dress when you’re out spying on people?”

  “Like this. Normal. If I’m trying to figure out where a lady’s off to every day, if she has a lover other than our client, I have to spend a few days in a row standing in front of her building starting at like eight a.m. So then I have to dress differently every day.”

  “You like getting dressed and getting undressed.”

  “I do.”

  “Good fun. Good fun.”

  “You don’t come back from New York very often.”

  “You know how much I like this thing where you know me and I have no idea who you are?”

  “I wish I could go without telling you my name, but then how could you write to me when you fall in love with my manuscript?”

  “I don’t mean to sound old”—what an anglismo! The words sound stupid in Italian, but the sentence makes perfect sense translated into English—“but I find your generation endearingly shameless.”

  The boy replies, “I guess,” which gives Sergio a hard-on. He ditches Maria for the second night in a row and goes off to tail Marzio with the detective. At a traffic light near the bus depot he writes, “Btwn hipsters and the unemployed I always choose hipsters.” He checks Marzio’s wall and sees that he’s unfriended him.

  “Does he have a smartphone?”

  “No. He’s broke.”

  “Then he’s back home?”

  “And that’s where we’re headed.” Sergio drives all the way to Via Tiburtina to avoid giving him the impression that what he really wants is to park the car immediately in leafy, hidden Via di Pietralata.

  They park in a nearby street, reach Marzio’s building, and crouch behind a car in a spot that’s not visible from Marzio’s window.

  You know the apartment well, Sergino. It’s where you used to stay in my room for hours and hours, forever. And now, in the future, a wealthier and more diverse future, you’re leaning on a car door, smoking a joint with a boy detective. After a while they spot Marzio, who has come downstairs to smoke a cigarette by the entrance to the building. Sergio’s knees hurt, he’s fidgeting, he’s puffing smoke, his eyes are watering, he’s happy. He reads a text from Gassa: “So you leave me with the load and leave? I’m not banging her; she’s old.” He’s not going to reply. Nothing and no one can distract him from his detective. He’s placed his forehead on the boy’s shoulder in order to better read his phone. The detective observes Marzio’s movements through the car’s windows. “He’s out to buy cigarettes,” he whispers. Five minutes later: “He’s smoking another cigarette downstairs. Poor guy.”

  When Marzio goes back up to his parents’ apartment, they stay crouched near the ground and slowly begin to laugh. “I shouldn’t be smoking on duty.”

  “You’re not on duty. Can I touch you?”

  They’re facing each other, on their knees, touching each other’s foreheads.

  “No, come on.”

  “Can I kiss you?”

  “I wish.”

  The little darling, so easy and light, keeps his balance by holding his open palms pressed against the door of the car. He pulls his forehead away from Sergio’s and gifts him a kiss.

  —

  THE UNEASE HIS meeting with his father gave him follows him to Milan, where he’s watching a piece of video art projected onto an enormous cloth. I slide from membrane to membrane, from the two-man stakeout in front of my parents’ building to the final day of Sergio’s Italian tour. He sits against the wall in a gallery-studio run by photographers from Maurizio Cattelan’s crew. The spare, empty room oozes with street cred, an environment so brilliantly modest that in its past life it had to have been a mom-and-pop store. Art-clique girls in glasses and all-black outfits crouch down under the half-closed gate when they enter and throw their arms around everyone they recognize. There’s a dim glow from a single blue lightbulb hanging from the ceiling, and a keyboard player from one of the biggest, hippest pop acts in the city is playing music on a laptop he rests on a coffee table. He slouches in his chair, his posture a sign of either endless leisure or endless work. Big pictures printed on king-size sheets hang from the walls. If it weren’t for the video he’s following distractedly, it’d be a night of joints and networking. There’s this fashion victim talking to him, one of those straight guys who enjoys flirting with gays, who’s telling him about a Tumblr called Balenciaga Did It First. But he keeps coming back to the video in the next room, which he can see from where he’s sitting if he looks over the straight guy’s shoulder out through the open door. The video fills him up again with that old competitive desire for compensation, as if the kiss from the detective never even happened. It’s such an instant feeling that it’s not until hours later that he registers why the vision of a yellow electric guitar, the Steve Vai Ibañez, had the impact that it did. Until the guitar appears, the video chronicles the 1985 Heysel Stadium disaster, when thirty-nine Juventus fans were crushed to death after the stands collapsed an hour before the European Cup Final kickoff. Three hours later I find Sergino lying on the couch in the living room of his Milanese host, Tim Small. It’s here that he finally recalls why the yellow Ibañez, the grotesque instrument made famous by a grotesque virtuoso, drove him to drink four vodka lemons, and now that the buzz is subsiding, he can’t bring himself to sleep. His cab to Malpensa will be here in just a few hours. Milan to London, then the BA001 flight.

  If you put aside the ashtray smell, Tim’s living room provides a number of anti- or pro-insomnia remedies: box sets of TV shows piled up under the flat screen, movies, a number of American literary magazines, and a PlayStation 3. Sergio lies on his back, his eyes fixed on the ceiling, and he feels that awful drive to just do something, fast, to quell the sense of injustice the vision of the yellow Ibanez has unleashed. It’s the same kind of feeling that nearly strangled him back at his father’s office.

  The story of the owner of the Ibañez—a fellow scholar of philosophy—is one of Sergino’s favorite Roman anecdotes. I’ve heard him tell it many times, and at this very moment I can see him at a party at the n+1 office, in Dumbo, where he’s recounting it to Sheila Heti and Marco Roth. He’s stoned and adorable, the gesticulating Italian brought in to spice up intellectual parties; “Rome is a city of parasites, you see? Miserable people.”

  The man was his age, late twenties, a volunteer assistant to the department’s graduate student coordinator. It was rumored that the two men were having an affair. The coordinator was a tall, attractive, unlikable middle-aged man. They looked a lot alike: they were both gym buffs and wore black turtlenecks, their aesthetic a combination of the handsome, brooding existentialist and the virile Roman hick. The PhD students complained about the professor’s elusiveness and his arbitrariness, and their antipathy was transferred to the duo, or couple, an attitude that had a classist hue. A man who played Dream Theater covers with his band didn’t deserve a position in a philosophy department. This was how Sergino felt. The young man had received a grant, whereas he, Sergino, hadn’t. He’d had to do his work with no funding.

  The privileges awarded to the program coordinator’s pupil were of the impalpable sort typical of the informal feudalism that reigns in so many Italian institutions.

  For example: the day of their thesis defense, the grad students had to sit and wait outside the faculty room in the late July heat, except for the favored pupil, who was free to come and go between the hall and the air-conditioned room. He’d emerge and deliver some meaningless information to his colleagues, the sole purpose of the exchanges being the opportunity to show off his strolling p
rivileges, which his fellow students found maliciously tautological. “The atmosphere seems optimal.” “We’re about to start.” “The professors are in good spirits.”

  This is the story Sergio would always tell: the small abuse of power that occurred that day and was, for him, the most compelling evidence that Rome was doomed and had to be deserted by all good people.

  After all the PhD candidates defended their dissertations in front of the committee, standing under the unnecessary fluorescent lights that hung from the ceiling of the cool, sunlit room, the coordinator gathered the young scholars in the reading room. “Some of your theses have disappointed us,” he said distractedly, casually. “We’re not going to tell you which. Our assessments have been noted in the registry and will not be made public.”

  His words had thrown them all into anguish just as the long day was winding down, just as this crucial phase of their career was drawing to a close, just as they were about to begin a far more difficult path: hunting for grants, waiting for a tenure that might never emerge.

  When the professor went to get a coffee at the bar in the garden, the star pupil shared a secret: there was a way to see the confidential assessments, though they had to sneak into the faculty room to do it. The assistant knew that everyone on the faculty was a hopeless technophobe, so none of them wanted to risk saving their files on the old, beige computer. Instead they printed each report separately and then retyped the new information in the same formatted file. They were using the PC as a typewriter.

  If you pressed Ctrl+Z, he said, you could look through what they’d written in the final assessment and then go backward all the way to the first defense. This magic trick, which allowed the faculty’s largely unimpressed comments to appear one by one, a few words at a time, provoked disgust and even nausea among the men and women standing around the pupil, who sat at his chair in front of the computer. After they’d gone through just four assessments—out of more than a dozen—they asked him to stop.

  When Sergio told this story to Americans he’d sum it up this way: “First my mother gets cancer, and now this?” They had let a moron debase them—a gym rat, for crying out loud! A bodybuilder-philosopher! With a crew cut! With gel in his hair! A guy who read Ruiz Zafón novels and was a fan of Dream Theater! Who took heavy-metal guitar lessons! When he was talking to you, he’d make this gesture of rehearsing pentatonic scales on an invisible guitar, his left hand’s fingers all spiderlike. His yellow Ibañez was the thing he was most proud of. He kept a picture of it on the desk informally awarded to him by the coordinator.

  I’m so happy to hear more about this truly happy phase in Sergio’s life. I love to provide accounts of his Roman discomfort as much as I love to recap his languid, satisfied sleep on couches next to Pulitzer winners and their editors, the abandonment with which he inhabits his fully realized dreams, the sense of balance, of justice that he feels when he lets reality redeem his Roman blues.

  Sergio had good reason to be angry at the assistant and his yellow Ibanez. Two years earlier, he had met a French professor in Grenoble who had heard about his work on Foucault and offered him €10,000 to cover a year of work. Sergio gave his coordinator the news, so that everything could be made official. But the coordinator took it personally that he hadn’t been involved, and he let the arrangement fall through.

  Sergino abandoned his academic career after the defense. While he was in the faculty room staring at the beige computer, his mom had a final relapse. She would be dead four months later.

  The way he’d describe it to Americans at parties, Sergio had no money and a living mother and was looking at everything from the “entirely wrong perspective”. He soon found himself with no mother and a lot of money. He’d hoped his fate would lead to knowing the feeling of having his own money—maybe in the form of grants—while he still had a mother, but it hadn’t been possible. The first money he got, the first money with which he could do what he wanted, was the €50,000 that he’d used to pay his bills and cover airfare while he moved around looking for work.

  What he told people was that death had unleashed a series of “celestial forces and psychic fields,” and the orphan had managed to find, in incredible circumstances (incredible, “though entirely deserved,” he’d said once when he was so high that he actually disclosed the real reason he’d left Rome, “I mean, I lost a mother and got some money…I sort of killed my mom to get some money, isn’t that enough of a sacrifice, for fuck’s sake?”), a perfect job: tour manager for Universal in Milan.

  “I left before all this crap started making me ill,” he dared to say once, and I see it now, I see the effect of “all that stress and all the cars and the traffic…” With this perennial confusion about which plane of reality he’s on, which tense he’s living in—and with the stoned condensation of his sweat on his big, bald head, which heats up whenever he’s in the midst of conversation—Sergio is the rare instance of a person who manages to be endearing even when he’s bragging about flying first class.

  —

  THIS IS THE way I’m seeing all of this, and I return to him sleepless on the couch, overwhelmed by his own thoughts as he waits for the alarm to go off and for the cab to pull up downstairs. Once he recalls the program coordinator at the PhD program, he can’t stop thinking about the anger and frustration the entire department has caused him over the years. The memories are physical: his back itches. Sergino hasn’t learned how to deal with his demons, which is why he reenters the frenzied mode of plan making: he stalks the pupil’s Facebook profile, his Twitter, his Instagram. He’s impatient for inspiration, and this is why he can’t calm down.

  But at one point in the midst of his fevered reflections on the vermin that ruined the entire department, he remembers that the husband of the girl Berengo had sex with last winter—the raccomandato scholar who got that lucky grant to study at Columbia for a year, the guy who wants to be a director—is a Villa Mirafiori alum. He’s an easier person to prank; there are so many things he and the pupil have in common. A prank could certainly be arranged. And if the two dumb pranks he came up with for Tullio didn’t work out because the Tullios are a solid, close-knit family, the aspiring director’s world of fantasies and velleità would lend itself perfectly to something very outrageous. He thinks about this and begins to feel exhilarated. He bursts into laughter.

  The air in the room smells so stale it’s as if the air itself has a sore throat. Sergino gets up. He walks in a circle, pumps his arms up and down, tries to release some tension. Then he remembers that la Sposina is back in Rome and babysitting for Tullio, which is weird and sounds promising. Either the young couple is back in Rome, or the husband has stayed behind in New York and is finishing things up at Columbia. The idea of la Sposina working for the Tullios is so exciting. What could it mean? But now he has his idea, and he’s so discombobulated that he has to sit down at the table. There are three full ashtrays in front of him. He shivers, sweats, shivers, as if he’s in the midst of a bad fever. Then he goes to the kitchen, using his phone as a flashlight, and drinks small sips of cold water. He’s so drenched in sweat that he has to keep the refrigerator door closed. He sits at the kitchen table, which is attached to the wall, and that’s where he does his research: finds the short film on YouTube, reads the credits, finds Lorenzo Proietti on Facebook, sends him a message:

  Are you a Gassa fan? We’re interested in you shooting a video. Directing and everything. What about a meeting in Williamsburg, totally informal, just a chat? My place, next week?

  SERGINO READS LORENZO’S enthusiastic reply while sitting in the business-class lounge: “Williamsburg next week is ok! Exited!” (No c). Sergio accepts his friend’s request and puts him on the restricted list, so that he can post whatever he wants about him.

  So Sergino calls the detective and asks him to find out if Lorenzo is in Rome. “I don’t know the address. It’s fine if you can’t find him.” As he gives him instructions, he sends an email with the victim’s Facebook profile link.
/>
  “So what do I get in return?”

  “Love,” Sergio whispers.

  —

  BEFORE TURNING OFF his phone for the Milan–London flight, Sergio stares out at the runway and tweets, “First class.”

  —

  AFTER CLEARING CUSTOMS in Ireland, he pulls the curtains closed, stretches his legs in his pod with his wine and his iPad film selection and his thirty drops of Xanax, and surrenders himself to the sky. He thinks of his mother, feels his blood warm up, smacks a kiss with his thin lips, and if the sun is bright and the clouds are dark on the bottom and golden on top, he sheds a tear while the drug kicks in.

  PART IV

  THE BIG PRANK

  The train to the airport. Romanians, retired women, and Africans get on at the smallest, shabbiest stops. The parenthetical spaces around Rome’s remote bridges are covered in green and brown vines. They look like habitats for sad, sickly gnomes who sleep under decaying walls among abandoned water heaters and half-broken cabinets. It looks like Stalker, but here the branches are dry. Tuscolana, then Trastevere. “I’m in pain,” Lorenzo texts his closest friend. “But I’m all in. Haven’t slept, haven’t eaten. The whole car can smell my breath.” Bland, symmetrical high-rises organized around a gigantic shopping mall complex give way to the airport.

  Rome–New York via London, with a big duffel bag he stole from his father ten years ago. In all the photos of their family vacations, Dad looks tall and happy and always has that bad-ass bag on his shoulder. It’s the middle of June, and his skin is already peeling from the sunbathing he’s been doing on the beach in Ostia, but all he can think about are the twigs and spiderwebs in his stomach, punishment for not sleeping or eating all night. He’s going back to New York after leaving it for his wife’s sake.