by Peter Robb
Dotti’s anger and suspicion had been aroused when he found Carapezza had given forty paintings Guttuso had earmarked for the foundation to the Museum of Modern Art in Rome instead. The Carapezzas weren’t talking. Precious one, Ginevra Carapezza, Fabio’s mother, had earlier crooned at Dotti on the phone, legally we can’t be touched. When Dotti had asked her after the funeral what’d happened to a list he’d seen Guttuso make of things he wanted to leave people after his death, Ginevra Carapezza had said, My precious, you know what your uncle was like. He’d write something one day and tear it up the next. It was neither Marta Marzotto nor Giampiero Dotti, however, who brought in the magistrates. It was a hanger-on of the art scene who’d managed to get past the doorkeeper at palazzo del Grillo and sneak into Guttuso’s apartment, where he saw, he told the magistrates, the painter lying with a dead, empty, absent gaze. The magistrates were legally required to investigate.
The big Guttuso retrospective for the Fondation Maeght had been due to open in St Paul de Vence in the south of France in the coming spring. In mid 1986 its curator and Guttuso and others had selected the paintings in his studio. We chose fifty or more paintings. There were thousands of drawings around. I remember Renato said there were no worries with the drawings, we could have paved the road from Rome to Milan with them. The paintings chosen were photographed and preparation of the catalogue was under way. Guttuso was very excited. He’d refused a group show at the Grand Palais in Paris for this one-man retrospective. Then at the end of summer the curator suddenly found he was no longer able to speak to Guttuso. The manservant wouldn’t put him on the phone, the doorkeeper wouldn’t let him up. We made a last try on November the nineteenth, he said. But they weren’t allowed in. The lawyers took over. The curator spoke out because Ginevra Carapezza was saying there were practically no pictures left in Guttuso’s studio. The curator said
In his last days I felt he was living for that exhibition at St Paul de Vence. It was inhuman of the Carapezzas not to let him hold it … Sure there were paintings in the studio. And not just little drawings but canvases two metres by three. One day they’ll turn up again …
Among those who remembered over a hundred canvases in Guttuso’s cluttered studio, and thousands of drawings, was the governor of the Bank of Italy. After three weeks of dignified silence Fabio Carapezza Guttuso sued Dotti, a couple of daily papers and persons unknown. His lawyer explained it was the only way to stifle a vulgar polemic created around an affair that was crystal-clear as spring water. It was hard to avoid vulgar polemic the way things were unfolding. Angelini’s deathbed conversion of Italy’s communist painter hadn’t passed unnoticed. A satirical paper came out with a banner headline GOD EXISTS and in slightly smaller letters AND HE WANTS HIS SHARE OF THE LOOT. The authors of this effort were taken to task for bad taste and disrespect in communist and catholic papers. Antonello Trombadori, the communist leader who’d spent a lot of time by the deathbed, announced that he’d smash the face in of anyone who doubted the maestro’s conversion in extremis. This Trombadori was the same communist who’d proclaimed Moro is dead in the corridors of parliament while Moro was fighting for his life. It was too much for the journalist Giorgio Bocca, who wrote that it showed the historic compromise had been rather more than a passing political stratagem. Bocca was disgusted by this display of sleazy vulgarity: the old hacks of stalinism and clerofascism gathered around the deathbed. He saw Guttuso’s conversion as very Italian.
We’re all drenched in catholicism. We sin and then we confess … We went to bed fascists and woke up democrats. We’re all mamma’s boys supplied with insurance and counterinsurance, like those middle class families during the Resistance who used to send one son up to the mountains with the communists and another down to the family firm to negotiate with the Germans.
Bocca then turned his attention to Guttuso himself, whom the past and future demochristian prime minister Fanfani, the one who’d had two and a half million dollars from Sindona, had just described on TV as one of the fathers of the democratic Republic. A remarkable tribute, Bocca thought, to someone who’d remained a Stalinist sectarian all his life.
As an individual Guttuso could live as he pleased, loving the proletariat viscerally, as he used to say, but very much at home in the villas of the haute bourgeoisie of Varese; being for the most radical communism but using capitalist cunning to accumulate a great fortune. But to call him an example, a master of democratic culture, takes some barefaced cheek … He pretended not to understand that he was always favoured by the Soviets not for the good paintings of his youth or the pompier over-production of his maturity—that horrible Funeral of Togliatti—but for his betrayal as an intellectual.
Others were shocked by the treatment of Marta Marzotto. Alberto Moravia, another old friend who’d been kept at bay, said
It isn’t logical to behave like that toward a woman one’s been deeply in love with, as he was without a doubt. For me the really obscure point of the whole affair is not the conversion and it isn’t the inheritance. It’s Marta’s story.
The film director Lina Wertmüller agreed.
This whole business of conversions and inheritances and monsignori and adoptions is murky. There’s something sixteenth-century about it … During my life I’ve seen so many love affairs with my own eyes and Renato’s and Marta’s was one of the strongest … Sure, Guttuso was terrified of death, and maybe he didn’t want to be seen any more by anyone in the condition he was, not even Marta. But not even a last phone call?
Marta Marzotto needed a bit of support. The count Marzotto, discreetly understanding for years, was now appalled by the publicity and the scandal and was trying to prevent her using the name Marzotto any longer. He wanted a separation. Marta, through her lawyer, blamed the media, which she said had spared neither the living nor the dead. She was really quite alone. Nearly all the beautiful people who’d lounged on the white divans of her salon in piazza di Spagna had all disappeared like snow in the sun, as a woman friend put it. She’d been cast as the seductress, the spoiler, the scarlet woman. It was the old story.
* * *
THE WIFE of the Uruguayan ambassador to the Hague was shown in, very smart in a houndstooth tailleur. She’d been part of Marta’s circle when her husband was ambassador in Rome. Now she brought news from Rome to the court in exile in Milan. Or she would, when the countess got off the phones. So the ambassadress and I made muted small talk, so as not to rudely listen in. We kept our voices down, to leave the countess undisturbed and because we were both trying to overhear what she said.
Well INTERRUPT him then. My god, these girls today—The countess at moments sounded a little like the Red Queen in Alice. The ambassadress and I spoke in whispers of the trial. Andreotti had been such an intelligent man, streets ahead of all the others. Very witty at dinner parties. We agreed that Italian politics were a nightmare for outsiders. You never knew where anyone stood. Andreotti gave Renato a solid gold Rolex. It was engraved with someone else’s name. Renato gave it to my son. He’s still got it. The countess was shouting over the buzz and squeak of somebody on the phone. The ambassadress’s time in Rome had been the years of lead and at the Uruguayan embassy in Rome nobody had been able to understand the Red Brigades at all. So the ambassadress had done the political reports herself. In Uruguay they’d had the Tupamaros, and she knew a thing or two about terrorism. I imagined her finely manicured hands flying over a keyboard late at night. Terrorist cells. Kneecappings. Abductions. People’s courts. Executions. Interrogation techniques.
That GARBAGE of Andreotti’s in the paper. About Renato turning over in his grave. His dear dear friend. It was quite SICKENING. He was NEVER a friend of Renato’s. Did you see the Corriere? She flailed around on the divan. The manservant, an elderly and stately Sri Lankan in a striped jacket, brought in an armful of fax paper to the countess, at least a dozen yards. It was the Ivory Coast couple’s references. Every page was emblazoned with a coat of arms. Angelini is a HORRENDOUS individual. He got mad
e a cardinal after he looked after the pope that time he was shot. The others didn’t want him at all. The countess’s manservant returned with a silver tray with a silver teapot and a gold rimmed cup. The countess wasn’t having anything. Neither was the ambassadress. I sipped alone. The countess was now on the phone to an art gallery in Palermo, the same one, I realized, where Sciascia had presented La Vucciria. She was getting on to Vivi Caruso. Friends of Renato’s, Leonardo’s, it’s a whole CULTURE. After a couple of peremptory requests she got through. And who was it kept me out, that time I arrived at the palazzo del Grillo with the police? What? Yes I know it was Angelini. BUT WHO WAS BEHIND ANGELINI? I craned forward, but before the answer came the countess was distracted by a call on the other line. There was a problem with the photos of her fashion showing. She’d lately taken up fashion designing and her clothes were being distributed by a chain of department stores. A trifle down market, to be frank about it.
MARTA’S WORLD. MAD MARTA. FOR THE WOMAN WHO WANTS EVERYTHING AND WANTS IT NOW.
She’d been going to use a portrait of her by Guttuso as her trademark label, when Fabio Carapezza demanded a million dollars in reproduction rights. He could have ruined the launch. I had to yield. It wasn’t the first time Guttuso’s images of Marta Marzotto had been suppressed. After the retrospective at the Fondation Maeght had fallen through and Guttuso was dead, Fabio Carapezza had taken legal action to stop an Italian weekly reproducing the paintings that would’ve been shown. The magazine had got hold of the pictures taken for the catalogue in Guttuso’s studio. They were almost all of the countess. The retrospective would have been a hymn to Marta Marzotto’s body.
How did Carapezza become part of the household?
I introduced him myself. It was all my idea to hire him as secretary. I said to Renato, he’s such an affectionate boy and he can keep all your affairs in order. He was trying for a public service career, but he kept failing to get in. Finally Andreotti intervened and he got through.
Marta Marzotto was graciously dredging things up, but you could see she’d no driving interest in them now. Not in the money, never had. She’d said that forthrightly at the time. So had Giampiero Dotti. Neither had wanted any of Guttuso’s fortune for themselves. Nearly a decade had passed now and the countess had moved on to a new life. Death and the past were clearly not her thing. From time to time her interest would shine again briefly on some detail of iniquity, but on the whole you felt she’d seen so much in her time that even these held her attention only briefly. The empty strongbox even amused her. Renato Guttuso had hoarded his treasure there. It wasn’t only the love letters and the erotic paintings. I had to understand, she said, that Renato had been very poor for a very long time. They both held keys, but the countess had opened the box for the first and only time ten days after after the death of Mimise. The countess went to retrieve their love letters and the erotic drawings. She found it emptied of everything. The jewels, the gold ingots, the paintings by Picasso and Balthus and Magritte were gone. It was a big strongbox, a metre by three. Earlier, she’d been surprized to learn from the ailing Guttuso that his long-serving business advisor and accountant had been replaced by a young man Guttuso didn’t know. The countess discovered, after the painter’s death, that the old advisor had been sacked by Carapezza.
The rapidity of Carapezza’s adoption still impressed her, years later. Guttuso, she insisted, was seriously ill, often catatonic and in deep mourning. The lung cancer had metastasized to his brain, and moments of mental clarity alternated with lengthening periods of blankness or confusion. An adoption request in Italy, as anywhere, had to be supported by copious documentation, birth certificates, formal declarations and so on, and in Italy the bureaucracy which supplied this was monumentally slow-moving. Usually it took an age for the machinery of public offices to crank out a response to the simplest request for certification. Then there was the adoption process itself. The whole thing, in Carapezza’s case, had taken a couple of weeks.
* * *
UNDER INVESTIGATION by the magistrates on suspicion of having taken advantage of a sick man, Carapezza announced he would produce Guttuso’s secret will and clarify things once and for all. Since a secret will by Italian law had to be published immediately on its maker’s death, by the lawyer in whose presence it’d been written, witnessed and sealed, this announcement itself raised a few questions. And when it was opened, the secret will resolved nothing. The five-line document, prepared by a solicitor called to the palazzo del Grillo and signed by the dying painter, simply annulled all previous wills and left his estate to his legal heir. There was no mention of Carapezza as his heir, which was odd. If the adoption were invalid the heirs were Dotti and his brother. Not that they wanted anything. Or might the heir have been Guttuso’s extramatrimonial son? Marta Marzotto had suddenly thrown everyone into even greater confusion by mentioning for the first time an unacknowledged secret natural son. Suddenly everyone was talking about Guttuso’s real son but nobody could trace him.
In mid January Carapezza called the undertakers to arrange the funeral and three days later Guttuso was dead. A leading Sicilian judge later observed of Guttuso’s final disposition,
It’s a non-will. Renato Guttuso chose not to leave a will. He called the solicitor only to cancel his previous wills. A typically Sicilian way of solving a problem by washing his hands of it.
The central question remained. Had Guttuso been in possession of his faculties in the time he was incommunicado? Or had the cancer of the lungs and liver, its metastasis in his brain, the effects of chemotherapy, the shock of his wife’s death and the rivers of whisky drunk compromised his mental powers? Carapezza’s lawyers proposed to present a number of distinguished witnesses to Guttuso’s last days who would testify to Guttuso’s lucidity of mind. The first name on the lawyers’ list was Giulio Andreotti’s.
Marta Marzotto told me about what happened to the Gott mit uns. This was a series of drawings that more than anything else had made the young Guttuso’s name. Hiding in Rome in the early forties, the resistance fighter Guttuso had done a series of crude but powerful Goyaesque ink drawings on the horrors of the nazi war. The drawings were done on cheap butcher’s paper that had turned yellow and brittle with time. Guttuso had confided to the countess that a number of these now hugely valuable sheets had disappeared from the palazzo del Grillo. It was in this context that she started to speak now of the thief.
This was one of the four servants, two married couples, who’d run the show with Carapezza at the palazzo del Grillo. They fix everything now, sighed the sick Guttuso to Giampiero Dotti, possibly meaning also Carapezza’s parents, who’d lately come from Palermo and installed themselves in his palazzo del Grillo apartments. Someone in Guttuso’s employ was in touch with the forgery industry that had grown up around Guttuso’s work. Real works were vanishing and fakes were appearing on the market. The painter had been enraged once by the forgeries, ripping up fakes in art galleries, but now he was tired. He asked Marta to do something about it, and with great vigour she did. A police operation was planned on the galleries and printers she’d identified, but someone in Guttuso’s house tipped the forgers off. Marta urged Guttuso to sack the person she suspected. The painter said, There are so many wolves around. One goes, others arrive.
Aldo Torroni was the doorkeeper of the palazzo del Grillo. Usually he was downstairs in his little lodge, waving up the visitors he’d known for years, famous and otherwise, the regulars of Guttuso’s circle, while the servants busied themselves upstairs in the painter’s apartments. Marta Marzotto, for instance, had been coming every morning at a quarter to ten for the last nineteen years, and staying till one. The whole household was at Mimise Dotti Guttuso’s funeral, just after her death on 6 October 1986, and in the movement of mourners the good Aldo heard one of the servants say distinctly, If we can keep Marzotto away for just two days, then it’s done. He was puzzled by this, and even more puzzled when the next day he was ordered to keep out all those friends of G
uttuso’s he’d been nodding to daily, weekly for the last twenty years. He was perturbed enough to ask advice from the administrator of the palazzo del Grillo, who said Ask the maestro for a written statement. That way he’d know who should now be admitted and who not. The advice seemed good, and the doorkeeper asked upstairs for a written statement. He was promised one, but it never came. When Marta Marzotto rang one day, asking yet again what was going on, the good Aldo blurted out, referring to the soap of millionaire family intrigue that was all the rage then, Compared with us, countess, Dynasty’s a joke.
Two months after the painter’s death, the distinguished witnesses were testifying for Carapezza to the magistrates, and all agreed that Guttuso had been lucid to the end. The press reported that Giulio Andreotti, one of the few to be admitted to palazzo del Grillo even in the last months of the artist’s life, was busy trying to form a new government, but on the fifteenth of March found time, despite his efforts to resolve the crisis of government, to testify … that Guttuso had been lucid to the end. The communist leader Antonello Trombadori denounced keyhole history and issued veiled threats against those who wanted to take the soap opera road. He too testified that Guttuso was lucid to the end. Some witnesses even described Guttuso as lucidissimo to the end. These were the Sunday friends who’d seen Guttuso only intermittently and briefly, said Dotti’s lawyer. Marta Marzotto had herself by now run up fifteen hours of testimony to the magistrates. She thought Guttuso had been lucid part of the time and not all the time, because that was the effect of his afflictions. Another old family friend remembered Guttuso’s confusion, memory lapses, the way he’d say the same thing six or seven times, even before the death of his wife.