“Beautiful,” Mathías said, lost in thought, then thanked him and headed for the exit. He was just about to open the door when he turned and walked back. “Listen, if I wanted to put all this material together in a single film, how would I go about that?”
“A single reel?”
“Yes.”
“If you like, we can do it for you.”
Mathías looked at the man for a moment, then lowered his eyes and picked up a blunt pencil stub from the counter.
“What if I wanted to shorten a few scenes, cut others completely and so on?”
“You mean, edit them.”
“Yes, edit them.”
“Well, either you find an editor to work with or you learn to use a Moviola and edit it yourself.”
“And who has a Moviola?”
“Actually, we have. We can let you hire the room by the hour.”
“What about the sound?”
“These films don’t have sound.”
“Yes, I know, but what if I wanted to put sound on them?”
“That’s a bit complicated. You have to make a magnetic track and either keep it separate and synchronize it every time you project the film, or you transfer everything onto super 16 and add an audio track.”
“Is that difficult?”
“Expensive more than anything else.”
So Mathías stayed in London. His friend Junior told him with a laugh that if he wasn’t going to be too much of a pain in the arse, he could crash in his living room for as long as he wanted. Mathías found work in a Caribbean restaurant near the flat, and every penny he put aside he spent on renting the Moviola by the hour. It was an old light blue Steenbeck with six decks. The thin man with the grey skin from Dolly Films, whose name was Marlow, showed him how to pass the film through the machine and how to mark the points where you wanted to cut with a yellow wax crayon.
“You have to be very careful,” he told him. “These films are developed directly as a positive. They’re the only copies you have. If you make a mess you’ll have to throw everything away. So think carefully before cutting.”
He gave him a roll of transparent tape riddled with holes and showed him a small black metal machine with supports for the film and a paper cutter with springs. He explained how to cut the film and join the ends with the tape.
“The scenes you cut, mark with a small piece of white tape and a title or with a number and attach them here.” Marlow led to him a funny-looking trolley that resembled a coat rack with a canvas laundry bag beneath it. Attached to the horizontal bar at the top were dozens of little metal hooks on which you could hang the scraps of film by their sprocket holes.
So Mathías started spending all his free time in the dark with the Moviola, and some years later he would tell me that it was probably the purest, cleanest period of his entire life. He spent hours on end by himself, looking again and again at his scenes, looking for the right frame at which to cut, imagining the music he would insert. In his new-found enthusiasm, he decided to walk around the city and shoot more images: water flowing, puddles, lights, the coming and going of people, neon, traffic, refuse, and so on. At a few points in the film he even decided to use colour film for various apparently insignificant details, which gave an unexpected and very effective sense of alienation. When he told me about the idea, I have to confess I found it rather pretentious, one of those spurious film festival tricks that always left me with a false taste in my mouth. But when I actually saw the finished documentary, I was surprised to have to admit that they worked and, even though I couldn’t explain to myself why, I knew that without them everything would have been weaker and more slipshod. He called the documentary simply Water, and once it was finished dragged Junior to see it. When he switched the lights back on, Junior turned to Mathías and told him it was a masterpiece.
“You think so?”
“You should enter it for some competitions.”
“I think so too,” Marlow said, leaning in the doorway of the projection room.
“Really?”
“Yes, really.”
He had ten or eleven prints made of the documentary and sent it to a few festivals. The film caused something of a stir and even won a few prizes, including one in Brazil. Years later, as we sat in a large black car on our way to a restaurant at the top of a skyscraper in São Paulo, Mathías told me, with a touch of sadness in his voice, that he would have preferred to be one of those reclusive directors who kept filming in 16mm, and at that moment would have liked to be in the dark, editing them on an old Steenbeck. But in the meantime he had became quite a famous director and formed a company with his producer.
For a moment or two I looked at him as he gazed out vaguely at the cars gliding past the window. My studies on cosmic radiation and the possible destiny of the universe had already made me somewhat cynical and blunt.
“Fuck off,” I said to him, and fortunately he laughed.
3
RIGHT FROM THE START, my second year at university proved to be much greyer. I had moved to a small new building in Witton Court on the other side of the campus, beyond the Botanical Gardens and the River Kelvin, a building so bleak as to be positively numbing.
The previous year, crossing the park and passing the red stones of Kelvingrove Museum and the facade of the university’s main building, I’d learnt the meaning of words like “awe” and “gratitude”. Walking towards the Mathematics Department every morning, I couldn’t help feeling all that stone and those massive five-hundred-year-old buildings lowering over me and somehow protecting me. I would feel that I was part of a centuries-old granite dream, a dream that became reality every day thanks to all of us, and I would be overwhelmed by a surge of pride. On better days, I also liked to sit for a few minutes facing the statue of Kelvin and look at him with his notebook in his hand and feel a bit as if I were his grandson. Walking to Byres Road from the new hall of residence, though, I didn’t feel anything at all, except maybe an insidious wave of depression. I couldn’t get used to the direction the cars were going and I always had the impression that they were about to run me over. The river was nothing but a thin stream with a rusted lock-gate, and the terrible state of Kibble Palace always put me in a grim mood.
I also looked awful. During the summer in San Filippo, which I spent mostly on my own listening to the cassettes Mathías had left me—for various reasons, my friends had barely shown their faces—I’d started to grow my hair so that it fell over my face like the fur of an Afghan hound. On returning to Scotland I also decided to grow a beard, but I didn’t have much facial hair and it grew quite sparsely, making me look as if I were ill. I fell in love with a velvet jacket I’d found in a second-hand shop in Byres Road: in order to keep wearing it when the cold weather arrived, I had to cover myself with at least four or five layers, which made me look clumsy and ridiculous. I was also crazy about a synthetic plum-coloured scarf that these days I wouldn’t give my worst enemy. I always walked stooped and with my head down, rarely talking, savouring that dark, anonymous air I had started to indulge in.
If requested, the university was supposed to guarantee students single-sex accommodation. For whatever reason, a student could ask not to live in a mixed flat. I’ve never completely understood why, but the various students who demanded single-sex accommodation were never put together—perhaps in order not to ghettoize them—and were always put with people who would have been more than pleased to see members of the opposite sex passing in the corridor or the kitchen. I was one of these. A young Muslim fundamentalist, the son of Lebanese Shi’ites but brought up in England, had been forced by his parents to demand single-sex accommodation, and I was the one who was put with him. Although Hamal, this Muslim boy, wasn’t a bad person, he was very shy, and the fact that his presence made it impossible to bring women or alcohol into the building didn’t exactly endear him to us—especially not to Mark, a skinny Irishman who considered the four years of university nothing but an unrepeatable opportunity to sleep wit
h as many girls as possible. To be honest, he wasn’t much different in this from most male students, except for the fact that many of them succeeded, while Mark wandered around the campus and went to parties in a desperate and futile search for someone to get off with. Sharing a single-sex flat obviously didn’t help. The fourth flatmate was a certain Georg, a politics and economics student as big as a wardrobe, who divided his time between his room and the gym. He was always shut up in his room, like Ricardo, though without Ricardo’s strange, obscure charm. Mark would unfortunately learn the hard way that Georg was of uncertain sexuality. One evening, just a month after the beginning of term, Georg went to Mark and asked him if he wanted to go out for a drink. Mark wasn’t very keen on Georg’s bulk or his American-style caps, but he accepted in the end. On the way back, apparently, as they were crossing the bridge and talking about women, Georg made a clumsy pass at Mark, who retreated and started to laugh nervously. Two days later, coming back from his classes, Mark had found his room turned completely upside down and the door smashed in and a sperm stain on the sheets. For the next few nights Mark asked me if he could move his camp bed and stay in my room—as if I could possibly do anything against Georg’s bulk—then went back to his room and for the rest of the year slept with the bed against the door. Georg, for his part, continued dividing his time between the gym and the university as if nothing had happened.
Fortunately, I sometimes managed to talk to Greg. The hall of residence had a telephone in the kitchen, which everyone was expected to use sparingly. When I had a few minutes I called Greg on one of his mobiles and if he was able to he called me back. One day I told him I didn’t mind paying for a call once in a while, but he told me he didn’t know what to do with all his money and preferred to make this small contribution to science.
In those few years, Greg had changed into something more abstract. It was as if he had evaporated. I didn’t think much about it, but I always told myself that the first true signs of his transformation had manifested themselves a couple of days after his eighteenth birthday, at the end of our penultimate year at school.
On his birthday the chauffeur had dropped him in front of the school as usual and he had walked in through the gate as if everything were normal.
“Hi,” I said. “Happy birthday.”
“Thanks.”
“How about doing something this evening?”
He threw me one of his ironic glances. “Forget about trumpets and shooting stars.”
“Christ, how boring, Greg. You’re eighteen, let’s think of something.”
“Like what?”
“I don’t know, let’s have your chauffeur drop us at Biagio’s and we’ll all go somewhere together.”
Saying nothing, Greg continued walking into the school, but I was sure he was tempted by what I had said.
“Look, I don’t know. Let’s talk about it later,” he said as he turned left towards his class.
“Many happy returns!” I yelled after him.
He hated it when anybody shouted at him in public, and he raised a hand behind his back and gave me the finger.
Later, on the way out, I suggested the plan again, or at least the intention to celebrate in some way. Greg told me he wasn’t sure and we’d talk later.
He disappeared for two days running. He didn’t come to school, didn’t answer the phone, and was nowhere to be seen. When he reappeared, he seemed tired, as if he hadn’t slept: he was paler than usual and there were deep circles around his eyes.
During the break, I went to find him in his classroom. Apart from two girls who were laughing as they leafed through thick diaries chock-full of captions and cuttings, Greg was alone in the room, sitting at his desk doing nothing.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi.”
I sat down at the desk, facing him. “Well?”
“Well what?”
“You look terrible.”
“Look who’s talking.”
“Have you been ill?”
“No, I had to talk to the lawyers about Dad’s inheritance.”
“Your dad’s inheritance?”
“Yes, the inheritance: you know, that thing you’re entitled to when a family member dies.”
“And?”
“And I had to talk to the lawyers about matters connected with the inheritance.”
The word “inheritance” conjured up in my mind images of gold doubloons and safes. The mere fact that a friend of mine was an heir was incredibly thrilling.
“And how is it?” I asked, all emotional.
He raised his black-circled eyes and stared at me. He seemed to look through me, and I couldn’t help noticing a hint of resigned annoyance. “Let’s just say it’s not what I expected.”
Gregorio’s father had died when we were eight. A virulent cancer had carried him off in less than six months. The memories I had of Giulio Mariani were quite vague. From when I went up to the villa as a small boy to play with Greg or a few times at the village fairs, I remembered a somewhat elderly man, tall and slender, his greying hair combed back, always dressed in elegant suits and waistcoats.
“Look,” we children said to each other whenever we saw him, “Greg’s dad.”
If, in the years following the count’s death, you had asked anyone in the village what kind of person he had been, they would always have used the same words: a real gentleman. It was never actually said, but I’m sure that anyone in the village or the surrounding area would have taken it for granted that the wealth of the Mariani family was derived from their property and the general estate. Things, to use Greg’s words, were in fact a bit different.
Coming home from school on the day of his eighteenth birthday, Greg had had dinner with his mother, unwrapped his present—a gold Montblanc pen—then gone up to his room and some time later, he confessed to me, had been on the verge of coming down and making arrangements with the chauffeur for our escapade with Biagio. Instead, the butler had knocked at his door and told him that Signor Rastello was waiting for him in the small drawing-room downstairs.
“Rastello?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And what does he want?”
“I really couldn’t say.”
Massimo Rastello, the so-called trustee, was a mysterious figure who, for as long as I could remember, had always been involved in the life of the Mariani household. As a child, Greg had seen him trailing his father like a shadow, and since his father had died he had reappeared from time to time to give a few directives. Greg had never liked him very much, especially since the day he had decided, out of the blue, to dismiss Maurizio, the estate manager, whom Greg was always visiting to play with his electric train set. Greg had always found the presence of this individual somewhat sinister, but the word “trustee” and his father’s blunt words to his wife at table, barely a month before he died, “Just do as he says,” had stopped Greg from thinking too much about it.
Rastello turned when he heard steps at the entrance to the drawing room. “Hello, Gregorio. Happy birthday.”
Greg would have liked to act calm but he found himself swaying, his heart beating faster.
“This is a very important day for you, my dear Gregorio. More than you might imagine.”
Greg did not like that grave tone and all but imperceptible smile one little bit. “It’s a day like any other,” he said, trying his best to maintain his usual sharp tone.
Rastello raised his eyebrows and smiled with an unbearably paternal air. “Not really. Maybe it’s best if we close the door and sit down for five minutes.”
The so-called “small drawing room” had two doors, and, as Greg closed the door he had just come through, Rastello went and closed the other. To be on the safe side, he even turned the key in the lock. Greg went and sat down on the big brocaded couch he had always found uncomfortable and rather ugly, while Rastello sat down in an armchair on the other side of the narrow room, facing him.
“Where do you think all your wealth comes from, Gregori
o?”
I realize now that, in all probability, much of this conversation must have taken place before the time of the motorbike and the tarring of the Rocky Road. That explains the first signs of Greg’s transformation two years earlier, the slow emergence of his cutting remarks and his disenchantment.
Greg swallowed his saliva. “I don’t know… From the estate, I suppose.”
“From the farm?”
“I suppose so.”
Odiously, Rastello gave another paternalistic little laugh. “Gregorio, the farm is fortunately well managed, but it’s a miracle it manages to pay its way and we can still afford a few improvements from time to time. The summer rents have brought in a bit of money in the past couple of years, but I assure you that if we only had the estate, things would be every different.”
“You once told me about one or two businesses we invested in, if I’m not mistaken.”
“Yes, that’s right. They also form part of the package. And I didn’t invest in them. They’re yours.”
At this word, yours, Greg felt a strange shudder run right through him, from his heels up to his neck. “What do you mean?”
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