Cooking With Fernet Branca

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  Incidentally, you said on the phone I was ‘set up now’; but listen – even if the film turns out a huge success there’s no guarantee Pacini will use me again & anyway, how many films does a director of his age make? I’ll need regular commercial work, TV at least, & the trouble is no one wants to commission original scores these days because they cost. To be boastful for a moment, I agree I could become a pretty decent composer. But whether I shall get the chance is another matter. Up to me, I guess. But either way I’m a long way from being ‘set up’, alas.

  Enough. All my love to you, the family & darling Mili – & tell her I’m brushing my hair nightly with her lovely grease. And please consider seriously coming to join me here. (But no need yet to broach the subject openly with Father or even Uki!)

  Your loving sister

  Marta

  32

  Why did I bang on to my wretched kid sister about my career prospects being less rosy than she might imagine, stuck as she is in a feudal time-warp forty kilometres outside Voynograd? I’m now sorry I did – not just because it’s my problem and I don’t need to saddle her with it but because the real reason is even less cheerful and I couldn’t bring myself to tell her.

  The fact is, the filming at my house showed Pacini in a wholly different light, one very much less urbane and galant. It wasn’t that he was actually impolite, merely autocratic and ruthless. The first I knew was when he rang me the previous day to say there was some snag or other and he was having to re-schedule things at a moment’s notice so as not to have to pay the crews for hanging around doing nothing. Would it be all right if they came and shot the scene at my house straight away? Frankly, with all these plot wrinkles he kept adding I was no longer clear how this scene fitted into the film. I assumed the fisherman was one of the locals whom the young Greens were trying to entice to their commune to teach them how to fish using traditional eco-friendly methods. My house was supposed to be where he lived in poverty somewhere near the beach, the only one of his peers to have clung on to the old way of life. Or something like that. Since I had written enough music to go round I’m afraid I was rather letting the great director get on with his film in his own fashion without trying to understand it all. No doubt it would all come right in the cutting room. On the phone Pacini was apologetic and I was eager to accommodate him – why not? So I told him to come up the next morning and do it. They arrived at seven and the first thing that happened was that Piero took one look at Gerry’s new fence and threw a fit.

  ‘For God’s sake! Who put that monstrosity there?’

  I explained I had an eccentric English neighbour with paranoid friends.

  ‘Well, it’ll have to come down,’ he said, in what I soon came to recognize as his maestro’s voice. ‘I need lots of wild footage of the exterior and as I told you earlier, what I really love about this place of yours is its not having been messed about with or brought up to date. That fence just reeks of bricolage and garden centres. We’ll probably find there are gnomes behind it. It’ll have to go. From almost any angle I’m going to be getting at least some of it in the frame. The place is ruined.’

  I felt a bit hurt by his tone. It was almost as if he were blaming me.

  ‘It wasn’t my idea,’ I protested, adding pacifically, ‘but I’m sure if you ask Gerry nicely and supply the men to take it down and put it back up again it can all be amicably resolved. Shall I go and find him?’

  But when I went over I realized at once Gerry was away. The windows were shuttered and his car was gone from the shed among the trees where he keeps it. I went back to Pacini and told him. Instead of saying phlegmatically, ‘Che peccato, we’ll just have to come back when he gets home’, he simply began giving orders to his men to start taking the fence down at once.

  ‘Please, Piero, you mustn’t do that,’ I said, laying a restraining hand on his arm. ‘You can’t just tear down somebody’s new fence without asking them.’

  He patted my hand, presumably intending to convey reassurance but implying more of an admonition to just keep quiet and stay out of it. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘We’re not going to tear it down, as you put it. We’re not going to break anything. We’ll simply remove it intact, do the exterior shots, and then put it back up again exactly as it is now. This English neighbour of yours will never know the difference, I promise. But each day we delay means going further over budget. He might be away for months.’

  Faced with this cold, directorly determination there was nothing I could do short of making a scene – the very last thing I either wanted or needed with Piero Pacini of all people. So, thinking darkly of my future career, I went inside to begin purging my house of obviously jarring artefacts like the computer, music keyboard and sound system. Pacini helped by indicating the camera angles he was going to need. I was nevertheless surprised by just how much furniture had to be hidden or shifted before he was satisfied. And all the time there came suggestive sounds from outside and glimpses through the window of poor Gerry’s fence being forcefully dealt with. There were some loud splintering noises which did not at all imply intactness. There were also some blasphemies new to me – the men were all-too-clearly native Tuscans – the gist being that the Madonna was unpopular for having yielded her virginity to a series of farmyard animals and the absent Gerry for having used a nail gun instead of an ordinary hammer. By the time I could bring myself to go out and look properly the deed was done and the fence unquestionably down. In fact, it looked down in a manner that surely precluded a quick resurrection. Yet it was generally agreed that the fault was Gerry’s for having fired so many wire nails into the panels. As for the posts, they had simply been yanked out of the ground with ropes attached to the hydraulic platform used for low aerial shots. They came up with an ungainly clump of concrete at one end leaving ragged holes that even now were being expertly camouflaged with earth and turves. An hour later, with the immense splintery stack of panels piled safely out of sight behind some bushes, one would never have guessed there had been a fence there. I was aware of a distinct pang of pity for Gerry and all the work – not to mention near self-crucifixion – he had put into it.

  ‘First-rate kindling,’ a technician nodded towards the bushes, possibly hoping that I might look on the bright side. ‘No problems getting your fire lit this winter. Can’t survive up here in wintertime without nice big fires. Besides, a fire is company. We all need something to keep us warm,’ and he leered a little.

  The rest of the day was taken up with exterior shots from every conceivable angle and at every conceivable height. Then they were repeated when the sun had moved. By evening Pacini was mellower and drank a glass or two of Fernet Branca with me as his crew packed up.

  ‘Very satisfactory,’ he said. ‘We’ve got all the establishing shots we need. Tomorrow we’ll make a start inside. I’ll be bringing the actors, the fisherman and his wife. I would be grateful, my dear, if you would sleep in that box-room of yours? Or at any rate not in the bedroom. The set dressers have almost finished up there.’

  That sounded ominous. During the day I had been rootless and intimidated in my own home, jostled by strangers squeezing past me in the passage and clumping up and down the stairs carrying mysterious bundles. I had spent much of the time standing listlessly outside, now here and now there, permanently in somebody’s way. More than once it struck me I would do better to clear out altogether for the day and simply give them the run of the place. But stupidly I felt duty bound to hang around. By the end of the day I couldn’t think where the hours had gone, but they had, and their unaccountable passing had left me exhausted and headachy. God only knew what these people had done to my poor home in the interim.

  Accordingly I went upstairs prepared to be surprised but not horrified. During the course of the day my bedroom, probably like its owner, had aged seventy years. My magnificent peasant-chic matrimoniale bedstead which Pacini had admired so much was still there, but my bedding had been replaced with a mattress that looked, smelled and felt lik
e an immense burlap sack stuffed with seaweed. The window panes had been removed and chunks of plaster knocked artlessly out of the wall here and there. Black cobwebs now billowed slowly among the beams in the breeze from the glassless window. Surely I had never let them get quite so numerous? On closer inspection these, too, seemed to be props, probably squirted out of an aerosol can. All my nice rugs had been removed and replaced by a ragged straw mat. The rest of the floor had reverted to bare cracked bricks. I should have said the stripped and hollow room was uninhabitable except by teenaged hippies or a hibernating bear down from our high forests of Vilpi.

  ‘Don’t worry, Marta dear,’ said Pacini as I came back downstairs looking, I should imagine, like a householder in time of war who has just discovered what it means to have her home forcibly requisitioned for the billeting of troops while being expected to smile patriotically. ‘It’s only for a day or two. We’ll be out by Friday. Just you wait, it’ll all be put back exactly as it was.’

  The only possible advantage I could see in all this was that I might get a little housework done for free. As they removed their cobwebs they would, willy-nilly, remove mine too. Otherwise it was pretty much intolerable. After the convoy’s exhausts had died away down the hill I found some bread and shonka and made a listless dinner. That night I slept fitfully on the kitchen sofa next to a large pile of smelly netting. Why a fisherman, no matter how poor, would need to keep nets in his kitchen was not clear to me, along with much else. The only thing that did become clear around three a.m. was that I was much less keen to imagine a future writing film scores.

  It was this thought, in fact, that kept me awake until dawn broke and the chasms of dark air that filled the precipices outside were stealthily replaced by solutions of pearl. Goddamn it. I climbed stiffly off the sofa, picked my way around the reeking heap of nets and made a brew of coffee strong enough to stop a Bunki wrestler’s heart. I had become acquainted with the flaw in that popular notion of ‘the big break’. My big break had come when Pacini saw Vauli Mitronovsk, and it had led me here among the Apuan Alps with my own bedroom out of bounds to me and being obliged to sleep in a kitchen that was more like the hold of a trawler. And after it was all over, then what? Big breaks needed to keep on breaking if one were to make a sensible career. I decided I would have to become entrepreneurial after all. For as long as I was able to keep Pacini’s company I ought somehow to capitalize on it. I supposed that if Arrazzato went platinum my name would have some currency in the film world, especially if it won an Oscar or two. Failing that (and far more likely) it would have a succès d’es-time and film buffs would discuss it knowledgeably and show it at Piero Pacini festivals. But that wouldn’t do me any good at all.

  The coffee pot was empty and so was my mug. I was standing outside in the early cool, my heart pounding in my ears. Evidently it was stronger than the average Bunki wrestler’s. It may also have helped that the coffee had been liberally corretto with Fernet Branca. I was watching a pair of buzzards with their two young crank themselves into the rising thermals, envying them their brief lot of graceful aerobatics and snacks of carrion. And then, from far below on the Casoli road, the growing sound of a convoy of van engines.

  33

  The second day’s filming was much like the first; the third even more so. Pacini brought with him a muscular man of about thirty who looked as though he might drive lorries for a living, and a girl of about eighteen who might have hitched lifts in them. These were Franco the fisherman and his young wife. In the hours it took to make them up and dress them for the part the film unit busied itself setting up equipment in my bedroom and making sure the lighting was right. Meanwhile Pacini continuously played a CD of the music I had written for the film.

  ‘Atmosphere,’ he said. ‘It’s vital. I can’t work without music and it’s such a brilliant score, Marta dear. Each time I play it I can actually see the different scenes we have to shoot, and in complete detail. You know, this is the best score of all my films. Truly. Now I have to make the images we capture on film reflect what I see in my head and what I know in my heart.’ He laid a hand somewhere over his oesophagus. ‘But your music is wonderful. Hear that technician whistling? He’s already hooked without realizing it. You’re a genius.’

  It was impossible not to be mollified by all this praise, of course, as Pacini doubtless intended. He knew I’d been upset by the murder of Gerry’s fence and the upheavals in my house. Even so, I did think his response was genuine. Music clearly did mean a lot to him (and I’m quite able to spot the bogus enthusiasts who plainly can’t tell one note from another).

  Today I wished him buon lavoro and took myself firmly outside among the trees with a chair and a book. It was strange looking up at my own bedroom window in broad daylight and seeing the actinic white glare inside and the occasional dark shapes of people moving about. It was as though they were filming scenes that had been censored from my own life before I was allowed to live through them. They were secret episodes and would always remain hidden from me, viewable only by strangers.

  Towards midday there came a familiar burping of exhaust and Filippo arrived amid a shower of gravel in his sleek scarlet beast. He hadn’t come up the previous day and I was suddenly pleased to see him. From the car’s cramped interior he extricated a wicker hamper. A trestle table was set among the trees, a cloth was laid and on it a superb buffet lunch spread with chilled bottles standing in coolers. I still couldn’t gauge how much of this was part of Pacini’s appeasement offensive and how much simply the way he normally worked. In any case I was not about to complain, especially when I could see food of a more plebeian nature being served to the crew from the back of a white van. The two actors appeared and stood about in silence eating pasta off plastic plates. The girl taking the part of Barbara, whom careful makeup had rendered positively dewy, was wearing a coarse shift. Her supposed husband had blotched cotton trousers rolled to the knee and a ragged jerkin beneath which his torso was bare. His skin was now several shades darker, having acquired a deepwater tan in my kitchen. His tousled hair also showed blond highlights as if bleached by sun and salt spray. To my eyes the pair of them looked profoundly fake, which was something I had noticed on the set of Vauli M. It was a problem I’d always had with film and the theatre. Deep down, I knew I didn’t quite believe in them. One never hears music as an approximation of ideal sounds that composers have heard in their heads, whereas visual re-creations of imaginary dramas so often have something slightly wrong with them. This is especially true of historical scenes. I remembered watching the actors in Vauli M. off the set and eating in the commissary. Ostensibly it was a canteen full of eighteenth-century people, but they were too obviously twentieth-century people in eighteenth-century costume. They held themselves wrongly, their gestures were wrong, they ate wrongly, and when they got up at the end they walked wrongly. How did one know? One just knew. No doubt eighteenth-century actors had been just as wrong when trying to act Shakespeare’s characters of two centuries earlier. I found myself wondering exactly how salt-stained and piscatorial Pacini would expect the part of Franco to be acted.

  He, Filippo and I finished our marvellous cold lunch (the cold roast aubergine anointed with oil and garlic and pesto was particularly divine) and they went straight back indoors to work. I picked up someone’s copy of the shooting script and tried to identify the scene they were filming. There was a page whose numbering showed it had been inserted after the version I had worked from. It looked like a possible candidate:

  Interior/bedroom. Night.

  FRANCO (enters): Oh God, Barbara. What sort of a living is this? Another lousy catch. Those factory ships will be the death of us.

  BARB: You are right, my darling. The politicians – bah! – they are against us too. What do they care for us little folk?

  FRANCO: Little folk maybe, but not as powerless as they like to think.

  BARB: My love, the sea teaches us not to give up. Like a woman, she is full of secrets.

  FRA
NCO: And as with women, a man despairs of ever learning them.

  BARB: Come here and see if I have any secrets from you.

  FRANCO: Darling, did I not promise you an eel tonight, a big eel? At least I can give you that.

  BARB: Oh Franco.

  Mercifully, a blue line was scored through this piece of dialogue but I couldn’t discover what, if anything, had replaced it. Did I really want to know, I wondered. That single glimpse was enough to remind me how truly dreadful most scripts were, even those of Piero Pacini films. Nor did I wish to remember that my career was probably riding on the success of Arrazzato. I tried to go upstairs to ask the great director if I might squeeze into a corner of my bedroom and watch the scene being shot but I was stopped by a burly boy in rank jeans. He was sitting on the stairs with cables running past him reading a Mickey Mouse magazine, Topolino, Rodent Adventurer. From beyond him the music I had written for an amorous beach scene could be heard playing behind a closed door.

  ‘You can’t go up. Sorry, miss.’

  ‘This is my house.’

  ‘I know,’ said the boy uncomfortably, ‘but the maestro said not. There’s no room. Really. They’re packed in there like sardines as it is. Hot as hell. We’re much better off out here.’

  So I retreated and went back outside to my book and what was left in one of the bottles standing in its sweating cooler. The next time I glanced up I could see the bedroom window had been replaced and blacked out, presumably for a night scene. But I couldn’t concentrate. A vision of Father appeared to me demanding to know exactly what was being filmed in my bedroom, and I couldn’t answer. ‘It’s pornography!’ asserted this menacing wraith. ‘What did you think, you stupid girl? That a daughter of mine should allow such a thing in her very bedroom! The disgrace!’