Midnight In Sicily

by Peter Robb

  Turned out we were in the same boat. Both single mothers bringing up kids on our own. At the time that was the case. Or had recently been. A kind of fellow feeling grew up between us, sharing experiences and problems. Women alone. She hung round and we talked. She liked the restaurant a lot. She spent more time here than she planned and more than I expected too but finally she moved on to other parts of Sicily. She was writing kind of like a travel book. She finally went back to America and a year or so later a copy of this book arrived in the mail. We couldn’t read it at all. The whole thing was in English. But we could see there was a whole lot about us, much more than we were led to expect. A whole chapter for instance called Clara’s Restaurant.

  Clara gave a slight shudder and ground out her cigarette. She looked at me grimly.

  Apparently it was quite a success. Ten days ago I got a phone call from a travel agent in Palermo. He had a coachload of American ladies and they all wanted to come and eat at Clara’s Restaurant. I told him it was closed and he said they were coming anyway. They wanted to see me. So this mob of American women in polyester trousers arrived in a great coach and I had to give them lunch. They followed me around. They wanted to see everything that was in the book. They all wanted to TOUCH me. And there’s more of them coming next summer.

  She poured us each a little more marsala and relaxed. So that’s what Americans are like. They’re so … You wouldn’t be writing anything like that, after all. She looked at me.

  Of course not, I said. I’m trying to make sense of the Andreotti trial. All quite rebarbative.

  So what’s your problem? said Clara. Have some marsala. Have a mandarin.

  X

  A LOVER DENIED

  MARTA MARZOTTO was still one of the best known women in Italy but she took time to track down nevertheless in the autumn of 1995. She was always on the move. Rome, Venice, Cortina. France, Africa, America. She’d even been to Australia. And when she was in Milan you had to be careful. Don’t ring too early for the love of God, her scared-sounding manservant said urgently when I did get through to her house. She gets angry. When we did finally get to speak long distance, the countess wasn’t angry at all but she was very impatient. Make it snappy, whatever you want, she said. I’m off to a funeral in three minutes. One of my earliest lovers.

  I’m sorry, I said. Really sorry to hear that.

  Darling of course we’ll have lunch together, the countess then crooned. I hesitated.

  Perhaps … I said.

  What? Well TELL THEM to send a car for you, the countess snapped loudly. It’s absurd.

  Tonal shifts suggested I wasn’t the only person she was speaking to. I hoped I was picking up the right bits. I offered to ring later, after the funeral. No no no, she said. Come right on up to Milan. Only not today because there’s the funeral and not tomorrow because I’ve got my fashion showing and before the weekend because then I’m off to Venice. Whenever you like. And we’ll have a NICE LONG CHAT. Then she added peremptorily in another register, Put it down over there. So I got on a plane in Palermo and we took off past the stony treacherous peaks of Punta Raisi and climbed steeply over the cobalt sea. A couple of hours later I was puttering sedately toward the centre of Milan through a placid and leafy suburb with curved tram tracks running down the empty road. I’d never done such a thing before, flown from one end of Italy to the other, and no amount of foreknowledge could have muffled the jolt. The crowds and the clarity and the drama and the ruins of the south were gone. When I got near the centre of Milan, I saw a wasteland of abandoned public works begun by the vanished socialists. One of the holes was probably where the fountain had been, the beautiful old fountain dismantled and trucked off for restoration work when prime minister Craxi’s brother-in-law was mayor of Milan. It’d lately been sighted, apparently, restored and reconstructed in the garden of the exiled Craxi’s Tunisian villa. The countess was at home and in the middle of a telephone conversation.

  Dreadful, said the countess, shaking her head over something she’d just heard on the phone. Too too awful. She put down the receiver and tucked her bare feet up on to the sofa, under her green silk peignoir. She looked at me. They want me back you know, she said. Oh yes. They miss me badly and they’d give anything to have me back. But I’ll never return. Never. Ever. I’d been surprized to find her now living in Milan, and had wondered why she had left Rome, and why she seemed to be casting anathemas on the capital. When your HUSBAND betrays you, she intoned solemnly, you EXPECT that. You accept it. That’s normal, that’s life. She paused. But when your LOVER cheats on you, no, no, that’s too much. The humiliation, the pain—No. There can be no going back. That shut me up. I was expected to know and I’d no idea who the lover was she was talking about. I’d no idea even how things stood with the count Umberto, though I presumed they were separated. I thought they separated after the Guttuso drama. I nodded slowly.

  Marta Marzotto en déshabillé was a very handsome woman. She needed no cosmetic arts. She had silvery blonde hair and a strong, open nordic face. She was instantly recognizable from the hundreds of paintings and thousands of sketches, the tens of thousands of photographs. I couldn’t believe it when I heard later she was sixty-five. He hasn’t got a penny, said the countess, reverting to an earlier conversation. She had a touch telephone with a line in one hand and a cellular in the other and was stabbing out a number with her fingernail. And now he’s not even getting money from the TV. It’s terrible. They’ve dumped him from the show. I wasn’t quite sure where this was going or why I was being told about it. The countess had a way of flying several different conversational kites at once, even when you were the only person she was talking to. Sometimes their lines got tangled. Maybe she wasn’t talking to me. Nonsense, cried the countess, jabbing at the buttons on her touch phone with a nail of the hand that wasn’t holding her cellular. That show aims to shock. It’s a freak show. A court of miracles. I’ve been a guest myself. It’s meant to be unpleasant. So why can’t they have a guest with AIDS? Calls were coming in on the two phones as fast as they were going out. She called her lawyers to get some documents Guttuso had left, documents she said would show me his real state of mind toward the end. Then a friend rang. She and Marta had been out together the night before.

  —Well, you know darling at OUR AGE—The other phone rang. The countess listened for a minute. Well send me the copy. Lawyers were quick in Milan, I thought. Ivory Coast, mmm. And he’s got a driver’s licence? And how’s her cooking? And they’re absolutely trustworthy? I MEAN darling that I’ve got THINGS at home … She’d been saying coppia, not copia, couple not copy. It was a servant problem. Then she got down to setting the record straight.

  * * *

  THE PALAZZO del Grillo in Rome stands next to a thirteenth-century tower of the same name, not far from the Colosseum, by the site of the imperial forum. It’s an opulently decorated rococò building of the eighteenth century, with a splendid main staircase, and has its own internal garden with a fountain and statues of nymphs. In 1964 a chunk of it was for sale, and by 1964, the time of La Dolce Vita and the height of the first Italian boom, Renato Guttuso was the most sought-after painter in Italy. As speculators’ blocks spread like a cancer over Italy, he reminded its occupants of the poor and passionate world they had lost. And he looked around for something gracious for himself. For the first time ever he had real money to spend and he was looking for a better house. Through his communist party connections he’d got to know a powerful financier who was then head of the Banca Commerciale Italiana. From him Guttuso learnt of two apartments for sale in the palazzo del Grillo, and through him he got a loan to buy the vast and luxurious new studio and home. It helped that the seller was a friend of his wife, Mimise Dotti. She was a wealthy northern Italian woman, extraordinarily beautiful when Guttuso first met her in 1937, when she was still married to a count with Vatican ties.

  The first floor apartment became the huge and opulent studio, from which by lift or a spiral staircase you ascended to t
he living quarters on the second floor. The first floor studio soon became also a salon for the beautiful people and the powerful people. The second floor was strictly private. You reached the studio though an upper courtyard and a terrace garden. In 1980 Guttuso painted an oil of this garden that he called The Evening Visit. He said his idea was a picture of a visit to my studio at dusk. I was unable to bring the visitor into focus, until I had … a vision: a tiger. He added that looking back, the tiger soon became something more, a visitor who comes bringing me her beauty but … also her ferocity. It seemed an invitation to identify in the tiger a beautiful and ferocious woman who by the time of this painting had been visiting Guttuso in his studio for a decade, Marta Vacondio, the countess Marzotto.

  La Marzotto is unmistakeable in the images of Guttuso’s prolific last twenty years. Hundreds of them. Clothed, nude and partly clad, often only in stockings and suspender belt. Wearing net stockings. Awake, asleep and half awake, in movement and repose. Sitting, standing, lying and on all fours, seen from in front, behind, above, and much more often below, culminating in the vast unfinished canvas of multiple images, dominated by a huge-haunched yet wolf-like standing nude Marta in very high heels, that lay wrapped in bubble plastic and stacked against a wall in the villa Cattolica.

  At some moments in life you need somebody to shake you up, Guttuso said years after he met Marta, and it happened to me when I was getting on for sixty … I like women who are erotically mature, erotically open and without taboos. I don’t like really young women. Although Marta Marzotto was knocking forty when she first arrived as the evening tiger, and had five children, she was still twenty years younger than the maestro, while Mimise was seven years older. The countess had started life in northern Italy as a railway labourer’s daughter. In the hard days of the war her father rounded out his labourer’s wage by delivering coal in winter with a handcart. Little Marta used to do the rounds with him, perched on top of the coal sacks. That way you can see the world from high up, her father said. She used to hunt for frogs in the ditches and sell them for food, frogs being a popular dish in the Po valley. Her mother worked in one of the factories of the Marzotto textile empire, and also in the ricefields in the season, and when Marta was eleven she helped in the ricefields too. When she was fifteen she started getting up at four in the morning and going to town by train to work as a dressmaker’s apprentice, coming home after dark to the railway shack where she and her brother and her parents all slept in the same room. Like something out of Dickens, she said years later. But that was Italy and that was me. She was a tall skinny blonde with a freckled face and fabulous long legs, and when a model was sick one day Marta took her place. She was an immediate success, never looked back. In 1954 she married Umberto, count Marzotto, and entered Italy’s biggest textile dynasty, and for the next thirteen years, until the birth of her fifth child and the fateful meeting with Guttuso, she was a wife and mother and a great cook in the rich sleek Italy of the provinces.

  When Guttuso first met her in Milan at a friend’s house in 1967, Marta Marzotto was pregnant with her fifth child and admiring one of his paintings. She wasn’t yet Rome’s leading society hostess and fun person. Her intellectual slash artistic salon on the piazza di Spagna started by chance four years later. By then Marta was ceaselessly busy on the beautiful people scene. The guest list of the famous at her legendary evenings was endless. There were Francesco Rosi and Lina Wertmüller, the film directors, Moravia the writer, Pasolini who was both, Andy Warhol who was everything, and the architect and Venice biennale director Paolo Portoghesi, with his trademark black beaver hat. Rival hostesses and students of the salon as an art form said Marta’s was too mixed, too inclusive, too much fun to qualify as great. What do you mean, salon, she replied, they’re just friends. Later in the seventies politicians started coming, people like Giulio Andreotti, and industrialists like Agnelli of Fiat and De Benedetti of Olivetti. Maybe it was the arrival of the suits that made her suddenly tire of the whole thing after a decade. She sold up and moved to a grander house nearby and her life entered a more formal mode. Meanwhile Guttuso’s wife Mimise’s health was failing by the seventies, and she knew about Renato and Marta. Mimise was thinking of suicide.

  The palazzo del Grillo had split by then into two separate realms. Mimise Dotti never left the second floor and Marta Marzotto never went above the first. Guttuso’s secretary carefully eliminated all mention of Marta Marzotto from the newspapers, letters, invitations and photographs that reached Mimise on the second floor, and the domestic staff were trained to filter out all news of the countess. This divided world of the adored and failing wife on the second floor and the carnal, worldly mistress on the first was further split by Guttuso’s division of the visitors to the lower realm into the Sunday friends and the others. The prelates, the politicians and the intellectuals, the power figures who would surround him at the end, all came to visit on Sundays. Sundays were for serious conversation and exalted networking. The working-day friends who came in the afternoon to play cards and gossip and drink whisky and bring women and girl friends, these came every other day. The household ran on duplicity like this for a decade and a half. The countess became Guttuso’s muse and model as well as his lover. He still, though, loved his aging wife on the second floor. And Marta Marzotto meanwhile continued her ceaseless social round as stakhanovist of high society and an influential hostess. Italians have invented a word for the kind of person the countess consummately was, and still is, presenzialista. Marta Marzotto was present at every opening, at every party, every festival. She was on every chat show and in the pages of every newspaper, of every glossy. She’s published her memoirs and a book called The Success of Excess. Even now, in her sixties, she’s tirelessly there, and endlessly reported.

  The one major crisis of jealousy was the time of Marta’s affair in 1977 and 1978 with the modish far-left party leader Lucio Magri. Since Magri had left the PCI and later rejoined, the affair also had a political dimension that particularly gnawed at Guttuso. The jealous painter did a striking series of big Allegories on the countess’s very public betrayal in 1979, in which the countess is always nude and Guttuso’s rival always has a monkey’s head. In one of them the couple is shown embracing naked on the Roman rooftops among rats and owls, their genitals thrust toward the viewer. Below, an older naked male hides his face, flanked by Michelangelo’s Night. The day after the opening of the exhibition that included this series of savagely carnal Allegories, the social page was removed from the copy of the Roman daily Il Messaggero that was delivered upstairs to Mimise. The years passed. In 1984 Mimise had a first stroke. The year after, the chain-smoker Guttuso showed the first signs of the lung cancer that would kill him. Though his wife was increasingly frail, it was Guttuso who seemed to have the most cause for worry as he tried to keep knowledge of his spreading cancer from Mimise. Then in 1986, quite unexpectedly, Mimise had a second stroke at the beginning of October and died.

  Marta Marzotto spoke to Guttuso on the phone. Ill with cancer, he was devastated by his wife’s death. Come on over Marta, come, he said. I’m in such pain that I’m grinding my teeth so hard I hurt myself. It was the last time they spoke together. Monsignor Angelini came on the line. Do come, countess, the prelate said. She did go to the palazzo del Grillo, but when she went the doorkeeper wouldn’t let her up. When she rang her calls weren’t passed to Guttuso. She wrote and her letters were never answered. A little over three months later, Marta Marzotto heard on the radio that Guttuso was dead, and she wept in anger as well as sorrow.

  What happened in the apartments of the palazzo del Grillo in those months, between Mimise Dotti’s death on the fifth of October and Renato Guttuso’s just after midnight on the following eighteenth of January, not even the investigating magistrates were able to decide in the end. The magistrates themselves were bitterly divided. There were some great surprises and some grave accusations. Marta Marzotto wasn’t the only person who’d been unable to see Guttuso in late 1986. Vivi Caruso
, his old friend the gallery-owner in Palermo, remembered the big retrospective that was being organized that year by the Fondation Maeght in France. When the director of the foundation and the show’s curator had come to Rome to discuss it, Vivi Caruso said, I rang palazzo del Grillo and asked the manservant to tell him they’d arrived. I can’t tell him, he said. But why, I said, is he too ill? No, he said, I just can’t tell him.

  Days after Guttuso’s death, another close friend, a famous psychiatrist who’d known him for fifty years, said he too had been prevented from seeing the painter. I was greatly disturbed by this. Giampiero Dotti, an international financier who was nephew of Mimise and close to both, had seen Guttuso four times, and had the impression that a cordon sanitaire was being thrown around the ever frailer painter. Dotti wrote that every other time he’d been to visit the doorkeeper had told him I have orders not to let anyone up, and that every time he’d rung the manservant had answered, The maestro doesn’t wish to be disturbed. When Marta Marzotto had gone to the safe deposit box in a Roman bank to which she and Guttuso had each held the keys and found it empty, Fabio Carapezza was already Guttuso’s son and heir. He’d been adopted in a lightning legal procedure that was begun eight days after Mimise’s death and completed in less than two weeks. Dotti was startled when he heard. He’d been at the palazzo del Grillo the day the adoption request was made, and nobody had mentioned it.

  Young Fabio Carapezza, a junior public servant and son of Palermo friends, was now worth maybe a hundred million dollars. Maybe double that. Who can say how much it’s all worth, sighed Guttuso’s old lawyer, who was now Carapezza’s. Days after the painter’s death, Marta Marzotto’s cry of outrage was followed by more detailed charges from other quarters. Dotti said he was worried about the future of the Renato and Mimise Guttuso Foundation, which the painter and his wife had established a year earlier. The Dotti country estate in northern Italy, summer home and studio for decades, was supposed to become a museum of the painter’s work. Dotti was determined the Foundation wouldn’t be sabotaged by people interested solely in the material side of this sorry affair. The Foundation was stalled because the gift first had to be acknowledged by the Italian president and Dotti believed, he wrote, that Fabio Carapezza, with his recent and powerful friends, had applied pressure to slow this down. The recent and powerful friends could only be monsignor Angelini and the Hon. Giulio Andreotti.