Envy

by Alain Elkann

  “You shouldn’t cut them up, it’s like erasing fragments of your own life. You destroy them and all the evidence is gone for ever.”

  PART SIX

  LISA AND TED

  1

  PARIS

  ONE AFTERNOON, when we were out for a walk, Cesare called. He is a handsome man, tall, blond, intelligent and ambiguous. He never wants to bring anything to a conclusion. When an idea takes concrete form, he becomes elusive. One of his favourite expressions is:

  “I’ve got a whole lot of new things to tell you, interesting stuff. Whenever the time is right, we can talk things over at our leisure.”

  Cesare sometimes declares that he wants a certain job and as soon as someone makes the effort to get it for him, he says that he’s not interested in the slightest and, to the contrary, he would rather do without it. His worldview and his life do not involve plans. Cesare is also an extraordinary collector of objects and friends. Of himself he always says: “I who am not”. For Cesare things should never have a purpose. Death is a subject that doesn’t scare him, it’s as if it didn’t concern him. His chosen role is always to be argumentative and disagreeable and he takes an excessive interest in the most unpredictable things, but then he gets bored and his attention wanders. For example, as soon as he buys an apartment somewhere, that place immediately bores him. In short, he is a spoilt man, but certainly one with no lack of charm and intelligence.

  Cesare is a great friend of Rossa’s, and he has always admired her. Perhaps he is in love with her; he trusts her, and wishes her well. In her he sees a blend of two qualities he considers essential—beauty and intelligence. He, who is usually so intolerant of women, who strike him as obstacles between him and freedom, smiles when he talks about Rossa. And it was he who told me one day:

  “Giacomo, have you ever had an affair with Rossa? You should, she’s a really beautiful woman.”

  I shall always be grateful to him for that wise and generous advice.

  He asked me:

  “Where are you?”

  “In Paris.”

  “Why don’t you come to Capri? I’m staying at Dino’s, it’s simply wonderful!”

  I thought that on Capri I might put my thoughts in order and start to write.

  2

  CAPRI

  WE ARRIVED ON THE HYDROFOIL from Mergellina. The weather was overcast, just a glimpse of a pale sun without enough strength to penetrate the greyish-purple mass of clouds that blended with the colour of the sea. Cesare came to pick us up at the Marina Grande. He had the cheerful air of someone who has been on holiday for days, slept lots, and feels wonderful. The house was pleasant, surrounded by white, purple and pink bougainvillea and other flowers with a very summery scent. Everything was ripe and warm. From the terrace of the house you could see the Faraglioni rocks and hear the sound of the sea, the engines of the boats and the chirruping of the crickets. We instantly fell in with the rhythms of the long, slow days, punctuated by meals and sleep. Rossa was happy, she read the papers with her usual meticulous attention, following the Bank of Italy affair, the scandals and the phone tapping. Cesare was idly reading a book and criticising events in Rome. There were many American tourists on the island and you heard English spoken everywhere. Rossa and I went for long swims and tried not to eat too much, but we couldn’t resist the pizza and the local Falanghina wine. The nights on Capri were warm, star-filled, indulgent.

  I knew right from the first day that I was about to begin my novel. A character like Cesare was beginning to take shape, but he was a killer: he passed himself off as an art dealer, frequented high society, but he always carried a concealed pistol, a Luger, with which he killed his victims. His was a vice. He wanted revenge, to demonstrate his hatred of humanity, which had disappointed him. He was a killer who killed for pleasure, not for necessity. He despised the murderers who hit the headlines, couldn’t stand the underworld and detested any kind of affiliation, be it political, religious, or ideological. He was a dandy who, rather than play the violin or write poetry, killed people. Irresistibly attracted to risk, he managed to elude all investigation, ensuring that he was never suspected or arrested. Basically, he enjoyed killing the way a gambler enjoys gambling. He didn’t want to get caught, and would have preferred to die in a shoot out. Nor did he want to end up in the promiscuity of a prison, mixing with the other convicts and listening to their life stories. He was an immoral man who lived for the day and took death for granted.

  This was what I was thinking of writing there on Capri. In the meantime I idly savoured our holiday. For hours I would sit watching and listening to the sea, the gulls. All around me I could smell lemons, tomatoes, rocket, basil and rosemary. Capri is a place where you learn to live among a superabundance of smells: flowers, sugar, fish. It’s an island where you walk a lot and a place that induces thought, a place where local people remember you and greet you warmly.

  The character I was daydreaming about fascinated me, but first of all I needed to master a language of which I knew nothing. I would have to learn how to set up a murder, how to shoot, how to leave no traces and how to avoid wiretaps.

  An assiduous newspaper reader like Rossa, who preferred the crime pages, would have been useful to me. I would use her as a consultant as well as a character. Her name would be Lisa and she would become Cesare’s ideal woman. Cesare’s name would be Ted. I had found two perfect names and created two characters suitable for a murder story, but it had to be clear that Ted’s heroes were not criminals, but libertines. The intervals between one murder and the next could be very long. Ted resembled Cesare physically and like him he was an elegant, inquisitive man, who spoke languages well. But being an unpunished murderer requires qualities of perseverance and concentration that Cesare didn’t possess. Although Ted killed only seldom, by now he had committed many crimes and Interpol was on his trail. It was known that there was an ‘uncatchable’ killer, who seemed to kill at random, without a motive. He chose his victims on a whim, as Sax did with his models.

  That was when Sax came back to my mind and everything began to come together and take shape. He too would become a character in the story I was on the point of writing.

  The book would begin in London, at a party where Ted meets an Englishwoman who talks to him about a lady friend of hers who had given up everything for love of a great artist, Julian Sax. She had lived with him in a house where he had painted her, tormenting her, for two years, only to leave her without any explanation. He had registered the house where they had lived together in her name, but he had gone. He never returned, nor did he answer her calls. He didn’t want to see her again. Ted, who knew who Julian Sax was, would feel an immediate curiosity about that woman.

  On listening to her friend’s story, a cold shiver would run down his back and he would feel an instinctive dislike for Sax. The tale of a woman abandoned by her lover mattered nothing to him, but he hated the arrogance of those who think they can do what they wish while riding roughshod over other people’s feelings.

  Ted would meet Lisa and realise that she was shy, still in love and suffering over what had happened. So he would ask her many things about Sax, his behaviour and what kind of man and lover he was. How many pictures, how many drawings had he made using her as a model? Had he given her any portraits? He would want to know what they talked about, what had Lisa’s relationship with Sax’s children been like. Why had they not had a child together?

  Ted and Lisa would meet on other occasions, dinner at the Poissonerie or the Caprice. Lisa would get interested in this new friend who took life as a light, amusing thing. Sax had been a devil, Ted was an angel who had fallen into her life and he had a rare quality in a man—he could listen to a woman without interrupting her, showing real interest in what she was saying.

  Ted would be enchanted by Lisa. She was very beautiful and although she only spoke to him of another man and of her romantic misadventure with him, she did so with moral elegance and expressed herself with charm. It was sad that su
ch a young, delicate woman had allowed herself to be deceived by such a perverse man, well aware of how their affair would end. Sax was known for his habit of taking women to pieces. Lisa could not resign herself to the idea of no longer sharing his life and his days: she knew he was wicked and dangerous, but he had painted her, immortalised her forever. No one else would ever do that. When he was still in love with her and they worked and slept together, she was dazzled by his talent and didn’t want to notice time passing. She felt she was the only woman who would stay with him always. Ted wanted to know every detail of the affair between Julian and Lisa and he realised how the artist had stolen her heart. Competing with a genius wasn’t going to be easy, also because his real ‘talent’ had to remain in the shadows.

  He would ask Lisa where Julian lived and she would tell him that she knew everything because a girlfriend spied on him for her. He lived in a certain street and every day, at the same time, he would eat at Tony’s. She knew that, after leaving her, he had had a passionate affair with a coloured woman. He had painted her and ditched her and now he was living with a very young girl.

  Ted would go to Tony’s where he would see Julian with a brunette, pregnant, who was perhaps one of his daughters. He would observe him and find him an interesting man, dressed with the calculated but sophisticated negligence of the artist. He would notice his penetrating, ironic gaze, his impatient hands toying with his tortoise shell glasses or picking idly at his food, listening to the young woman’s talk, sometimes laughing, sometimes absent.

  Ted would not try to approach him, but would tail him obsessively, memorising what he did, the hours he kept and his habits.

  He would begin to understand why Lisa talked of Julian with so much enthusiasm, why she stubbornly continued to think about this diabolical old man, so tenacious and despotic in his work, with his manias and his rules for living, thus reducing him, Ted, to a mere go-between. As long as Julian was around, Ted would not exist for Lisa as far as love was concerned. This thought was a torment for him because he felt he was the right man, the one who could make her forget Sax. He would have to be very patient and persevering. Insinuate himself into Lisa’s life, day after day, until he became indispensable.

  But Sax had to die, to disappear. Only after his death would Ted win Lisa.

  He would kill him without remorse. The time had come to punish Sax once and for all, to punish a man who thought he was invulnerable and omnipotent only because he had a great talent. His pride knew no bounds and his ascetism concealed something frivolous and overstated. He used people weaker than himself to feed his own legend. Lisa was one of the many victims who had let themselves be dominated in the belief that he was a genius, but Ted knew that this wasn’t so. Sax lacked that ingenuousness, that passion, which only true geniuses possess. There was too much effort, too much will, too much fussiness in the way he worked. Moreover, he had become a fixture in the society columns and gloried excessively in his reputation as a perverse womaniser.

  Early one August morning, Ted would leave Julian Sax dead on the pavement with one unerring shot. As soon as he committed the crime, Ted would race nimbly across the park and down into the tube before catching a train, followed by the ferry. He would throw his Luger into the Channel. As soon as he got to France, Ted would go back to London and the next day he would talk to Lisa about the murder, trying to console her and to understand with her who had killed Sax.

  By now I had the plot in mind, as well as the characters. The story of a murderer who kills to defend the honour of a woman whose feelings had been trampled on by an artist. All I had to do was get to work and write it. The novel called for a slow rhythm. Even though the plot was simple, the characters were complex and so the tale had to be told in its own time if it was to unfold in a credible way. The reader, on discovering that Ted was a murderer, would have to swing between the desire that he redeem himself and manage to win Lisa, and the taste of witnessing the birth of a decision to commit a crime. The appeal of the story lay in the fact that it was both romantic and passionate, dark and full of shadows. My subconscious would emerge and it would be clear why I was obsessed with Sax, why I envied a man who lived a monastic life in London painting portraits that an American art dealer sold for millions of dollars. My envy and admiration for him had prompted me to create Ted, who would become my alter ego, my personal avenger. I would transform Rossa into Lisa because only in a novel could I accept her becoming a model for Sax, but I would revenge myself by having him killed. For her part Lisa should not seem a naive victim, quite the contrary; she was a very special, stubborn woman who didn’t want to resign herself to being abandoned and who, unconsciously, inspired her admirer to avenge her. The description of the crime would have to be accurate, plausible. That was why I had to go to check out every detail: Sax’s house, Tony’s, the pavement, the building opposite, the shops next door, the restaurants where Ted would take Lisa to try to seduce her.

  3

  LONDON

  REMEMBERING THAT CESARE owned a small apartment in St James’s, I asked him if Rossa and I could stay there. He gave us the keys gladly, unaware of my plans.

  The apartment could easily have been Ted’s. Wallpaper with stripes in a shade of burgundy, antique furniture, pictures by minor artists of the Italian seicento, Afghan carpets. There was a small, dark ante-room, a living room with two leather armchairs, a desk, two bedrooms, a bathroom and kitchen. It was the perfect place for Ted, who had to have the same tastes and manias as Cesare. There, he would prepare to murder Sax.

  I took Rossa to lunch at Tony’s and we saw Sax. He was alone, relaxed, leafing through a newspaper. He didn’t notice our presence, and I tried to memorise every detail of the place and to capture every expression on his face. I thought that the man sitting in front of me, who with a simple and natural gesture was dunking a biscuit in his tea, was a great painter, old by now, whose paintings are recognised everywhere. People would say:

  “That’s a Warhol, a Van Gogh, a Goya, a Caravaggio, an Antonello da Messina, a Sax”.

  There he was, fragile, defenceless, and observing him aroused a different emotion in me compared to the other times. Who was I to decide to kill him, even through a novel and a fictional character like Ted? I began to realise that Ted would not do it because, as he was preparing to commit the crime, to eliminate his rival for ever and avenge Lisa’s offended love, something would make him see that he couldn’t do it. Killing Sax would not be right, it wouldn’t bring him luck. Besides, wasn’t it absurd to think of winning a woman by killing the man she was in love with? Death would make him a hero, an irreplaceable memory, while all he would be for Lisa was a friend unable to console her.

  No, Ted would understand that Sax ought to be challenged. He would have to let him know, through mutual acquaintances, that a young man, very rich and seductive, was winning Lisa, who had got over things, was blooming again and having the time of her life. This would certainly upset Sax. A slap in the face to his vanity. But was Sax a jealous man? And was Ted capable of falling in love with someone? Was it possible for him to imagine living with a woman? Would he be able to give up being a criminal, working only as an art dealer and living a normal life? Was he sure he could control the urge to kill? Ted would understand that in reality Julian had loved Lisa and his pictures bore witness to that love. But, at a certain point, he could no longer live with her, he needed new emotions, and his attention had shifted to a fat black woman who aroused an incontrollable sexual desire in him and this too was borne out by the portrait he had made of her.

  Lisa should not be consoled, but seduced. In his way, Ted too was an artist. He had to tell her that he was a killer wanted all over the world. This might terrify her, but perhaps her curiosity would be aroused and she would fall in love with him. But he wouldn’t trust Lisa completely, just as he didn’t trust anyone. He had gone unpunished because he had chosen a solitary life and he would never let his secret out. He couldn’t do that, he could not fall in love, nor could he
kill an artist. A great criminal must know his own limitations. But if Ted didn’t kill Sax and if he gave up the idea of winning Lisa’s love, how would the book end? With no crime and no coup de théatre would the novel still hang together? On the contrary, the strength of the story would be that of setting itself up as the great novel of seduction, envy and passion that I had in mind. The storyline would be charged with tensions right to the finish. Only when the perfect crime was ready to be committed would Ted change his mind. Lisa would never be his.

  It was certainly a very particular situation. We were at Tony’s, Rossa was eating a salad while I bit into a hamburger. In front of us was Julian Sax, taking the last sips of his tea and leafing through the newspaper. He could never have imagined what had been going through my mind over all those months. He didn’t know that I envied him, that he had become my obsession, that he had inspired me to write a book and that only a moment before I had decided that Ted would not kill him. He didn’t know that Lisa would always love him. Luckily, Rossa too was unaware of all this. She would have to wait until she read the novel.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  My thanks to Elisabetta Sgarbi who was the first to read this novel and contributed to it with her invaluable and intelligent editing; to Rosi Elkann, who stayed lovingly at my side throughout the writing of the book, and to Stefania Eusebio who patiently interpreted the numerous corrections that led to the definitive version.