by Pino Corrias
Oscar Martello, hero of the Superworld that pumps out cash, projects, and vendettas, shows up uninvited in Andrea’s apartment at midnight, hastening the eviction of Fernanda, a.k.a. Ninni. He’s coming from one of those benefit banquets thrown by Donna Angelina Casagrande, known as the “Queen of Flowers” not only because she loves the San Remo Casino (the suit of clubs in English cards is the suit of flowers in Italian, you see), but also because as a girl she was a flower vendor, with a kiosk on the street, or at least so the legend has it. Since then, millions of euros have flowed through her legs. A high-profit pair of legs: “When I was young, every time you stuck your dick in her, out came the receipt,” says Oscar. Over time, she became an aristocrat, like certain other former penniless waifs, sucking down the earthly possession of three husbands, a meat wholesaler from the Marche region who went hurtling at top speed into Lake Maggiore at the wheel of his stupid Ferrari; then the nephew of a sheik from Dubai who vanished into the flames of some holy war, bound and determined to win himself his seventy virgins; and finally a false French baron who stuffed himself silly with pâté and Château Lafite and had finally even come down with a terminal case of diabetes, but who ultimately died in his bed, choking on a supine nocturnal reflux. And now Donna Angelina, a happily spruced-up widow, freely sprinkles a few crumbs of the fortune she’s piled up, tax free, in Monte Carlo and Luxembourg, giving back with sumptuous dinners prepared by Michelin-starred chefs, at which all the laymen and high prelates gulp down such molecular delicacies as suckling pig, duck in vermouth, citrus shrimp, raw scampi in jars of ice and lime, and thousand-euro bottles of Dom Pérignon, just so they can ship a little millet flour, powdered milk, and aspirin past its sell-by date to some village in the Sahel, destined to be wiped off the maps by the next sandstorm. For three hours, Oscar dutifully ate what was put before him (“Surrounded by those old hags loaded down with gold and those nimble-fingered bankers who make money out of the sandstorms in question, I don’t know if you take my point”) pretending all the while that he too was good-hearted enough to deserve a benediction, along with a lobster and mayonnaise and a dozen smiling photographs to celebrate the world hunger that had made them all filthy rich. Camouflaged in those surroundings, Oscar was scheming some plausible alternative to murdering the director who, that very afternoon—before fleeing in tears, protected by the shrieks of his miserable Milanese agent—had shown him for the hundredth time rushes of the film, fresh from the Moviola, once again shattering his metabolism, mood, and vocal cords.
Where are you now, Attilio Fabris? Where are you now, Attilio the Phenomenon? As Oscar walked into Donna Angelina Casagrande’s home, he’d looked for him everywhere, sniffing out his scent from room to room, among dozens of guests, until he reached the Tiepolo room, walking at Helga’s side; to bolster her demeanor she strode through the guests erect like a flag at the Olympics, with the grace of a pink flamingo. Oscar dreamed of finding him, dragging him soundlessly into one of those aristocratic drawing rooms lined with volumes of the Treccani encyclopedia, a crackling fireplace, and at least one Morandi on the wall, jamming a fat wooden pencil into his ear and applying pressure on it until it pierced his eardrum, and then finally pissing into that ear.
When he discovered that no one had so much as dreamed of inviting that asshole of a director, much less his odious agent, he went on drinking. And just before getting into a fight with Helga in public because she was telling him to calm down (“I’ll calm down when and if I feel like it, you bitch. And get that stick out of your ass. Relax. They’re every bit the criminals that we are, no less and no more.”) he started off down the enfilade of baroque drawing rooms toward the exit. At the last door in the sequence, the queen of the poor black orphans Donna Angelina Casagrande tried to plant a kiss on his lips. He pushed her behind a brocade curtain, realizing in that brief instant of exaggerated proximity that the little old grandmother—some indeterminate age between fifty-one and sixty-nine years old—had once again had her tits redone and she was just looking to give them an inaugural run. So he slipped his hand down the front of her dress, gave her nipples a squeeze, and told her, “I’m hard as a rock, sweetheart, but if I let you kiss me, I’d probably catch your case of the wrinkles.”
She burst out laughing right in his face and he caught a whiff of her bad breath. “I only have two wrinkles, asshole. And I’m usually sitting on them. Care to check me out?”
“Some other time, sweetheart. But only if first you’ll suck my cock with both hands tied behind your back.”
She laughed again and he took advantage of the opportunity to make his getaway down the pink marble staircase, leaving the chauffeured Jaguar coupe to Helga and setting off on foot down Via Condotti and Via della Fontanella di Borghese, then taking Via Tomacelli until he reached the bridge, ignoring along the way, in order of appearance, a little Indian girl begging for spare change and offering incense, a Romanian playing the accordion and singing “Roma capoccia” before the half-empty tables of a trattoria, a Chinese man selling phosphorescent necklaces, and a couple of homeless men wrapped up in their filthy cardboard boxes, whereupon he finally took a breath of Roman night air. Time to recharge his batteries. Time to perfect his plan.
Now he’s heading for Andrea’s kitchen. “Don’t think for a second I didn’t see her.”
“Who?”
“The superbabe who rode downstairs in the elevator.”
“Her name is Fernanda. Ninni to her friends.”
“Spectacular: great tits, great ass, fiery eyes. Where did you find her, on Amazon?”
“She’s a costumer.”
“Of course she is. She knows how to put them on or take them off—ha ha ha!”
“Both, actually, it depends.”
“Hmmm. Anyway, I need you unattached.”
“What?”
Oscar is wearing a pin-striped charcoal gray suit, an off-white dress shirt, a gray tie with tiny red polka dots, and a pair of black Allen Edmonds wingtip oxfords. On his wrist is a brand-new €170,000 extra-flat white gold Patek Philippe watch, and on his pinky finger is an old ring with a skull etched into iron that can’t have cost anything more than 20,000 lire. The watch represents his point of arrival. The ring represents his point of departure. He stops, turns to look at Andrea with gunfighter eyes, and repeats, “Unattached. Don’t you even think of starting up a relationship right now.”
“Why not?”
“Because I suddenly just connected the wires.”
“Which means what?”
“Which means I may have figured out a solution.”
Andrea has rolled a joint. Oscar lights up and takes two drags, luxuriantly. He’s enveloped in a cloud of white smoke, dense with aroma, that crackles as it makes him squint. “Now let’s get comfortable and I’ll tell you all about it, then you’ll see whether I’m not the lord of stories.”
“Sure, just don’t say it every five minutes.”
They’ve decided to make a giant pitcher of ginger margarita. They start messing around with bottles of tequila, salt, lemon, ginger, and crushed ice.
“Do you have crackers and olives?”
“But weren’t you just out for dinner with the good white matrons who are going to save the world?”
“Very funny. When I’m surrounded by those old whores, my stomach always ties itself up in knots.” He gulps down more flaming smoke, puffs some out, spits, passes the joint, and says, “And now it’s unknotted again.”
“I have some goat cheese, salted anchovies, and butter, and if you like I can heat up some bread.”
“I adore you.”
“Why do you go?”
“What?”
“Why do you go to those dinners.”
“Because if I don’t, Helga sulks for a week. She’s convinced that if she socializes with the better nature of those burnt-out society dames, they’ll make her a princess one day.”
“Or else they’ll make you a prince.”
“I couldn’t care less. I’
m an ex-proletarian, but I’m not an ex-anarchist yet.”
They both know there’s not a speck of truth to it, but it’s all part of the masquerade that Oscar loves to hide behind. Just as he likes to pretend he’s not climbing the social ladder that keeps him up nights chasing after Helga’s ambitions; Helga, to whom he’s been married for the last seven years, Helga who has already scrambled up to the sky and above in her stiletto heels, a long way from the mud-floor hovel in the favelas of Buenos Aires, and who made it out alive from a first marriage to the bodyguard of an admiral who used to whip her with a leather belt, and now they say that she’s resting up for her spectacular last act: waiting for the heart attack that will carry off the great Oscar Martello, so she can stage a princely funeral, then dump his corpse in a potter’s field and inherit the whole tamale.
“Where’s Helga? Did she go on home?”
“I left her on a slow simmer at the party. I need to be able to think without having her talk to me about producers that need killing, priests that need feeding, apartments that need to be bought, daughters that need to be sent to the French day school, and charcoal tablets to be taken to stop aerophagia.”
There was a time—he told Andrea in detail, greedy eyed, unaware of the recklessness of what he was doing—when Helga gave him blow jobs to die for. And she’d slide all her fingers between her legs while she was going down on him and moan while he came in her face. That was love. Then they got married. “And now the bitch always has a migraine.”
Oscar has taken off his jacket and tie, rolled up his shirtsleeves, and now he’s starting to prepare their beverage, squeezing lemons, filling the pitcher with crushed ice, adding just a couple of drops of raspberry juice, the ginger, six healthy shots of tequila reposado, and a pinch of crumbled chili pepper, his own personal invention to add a smidgen of character to the dancing Mexican soul of the cocktail.
Andrea pulls everything else out of the fridge and turns on the toaster.
Oscar says, “I adore your apartment, everything’s within reach. At my place, I just get lost.”
Oscar lives on the Aventine Hill, in that rose-colored art nouveau mansion, with green shutters set in cornices and columns and cream-colored flowers. The front door, surrounded by Virginia creeper, is made of heavy crystal, brass, and hardwood; the main staircase rises in a spiral; the floors are hardwood, mosaic, and marble. The ceilings—frescoed with branches of grapevines, pink ribbons, ochre scrollwork, and blue flowers—are high and arched. The house is four stories tall, each floor set back, with a large terrace between the third and the fourth floors. Aside from the reigning family, it contains the three Filipino factotums, Helga’s personal maid, Miriam, a nameless Siamese cat that’s been getting fatter for years and won’t let anyone touch it, and a tiny, hysterical bulldog named Napoleon that, when it’s not sleeping, chews up everything within reach. Oscar hates both cat and dog and whenever he can, if no one’s looking, secretly kicks them. Then there are two immense living rooms that open out onto the main terrace, an array of sitting rooms, the dining room, the rec room, half a dozen bedrooms, each with its own bathroom, two kitchens, a gym with sauna and Jacuzzi, a sunroom, a greenhouse full of flowers, and a sixty-foot swimming pool with two lanes.
All told, sixteen thousand square feet of floor space—plus his own personal turret, known as the Castle, where he has his study, furnished in sage green, and with windows on four sides overlooking the terrace below, the cupolas of Rome, and his two and a half acres of gardens. A house that Oscar is rapidly transforming into a museum, since his latest obsession—after money, cocaine, women, movies, TV, real estate, and naturally Cinecittà—is buying art. This is his way of feeling like a college graduate without having to go to the trouble of studying. He started a few years ago, purchasing the banal beauty of the figurative painters of the dreary novecento, such as the various painters of the Roman school, Scipione and Mafai among them, plus a couple of De Chiricos, five sketches by Boccioni, and even a few horrid Guttusos. Then he figured out that conceptual art offers identity only at stratospheric prices, multiplied by the sheer incomprehensibility of the work. He had to have them as pure exhibitions of wealth, which was exactly what he was looking for. The most famous piece in his collection, aside from the shark in formaldehyde by Damien Hirst, the heaps of rocks by Richard Long, the colorful puppets by Jeff Koons, and a couple of installations by that genius of cheerful bullshitting Maurizio Cattelan, is Piero Manzoni’s Achrome, for the three celebrated reasons that all La Dolce Rome talks and gossips about incessantly.
It was Massimiliano Urso, the contemporary art critic, as he walked arm in arm with Oscar, sipping champagne, who explained to him with a certain perfidious enjoyment that the young Manzoni, who died of alcoholism and heart disease at the tender age of just twenty-nine, had done more or less 300 artworks. Whereas nowadays the catalog of his work magically numbers 1,229. “Which doesn’t include the fact that, in public auctions and private galleries, at least twice as many are in circulation.”
“So what you’re telling me is . . . ?”
“That it’s probably a fake.”
The revelation left Oscar speechless. When he regained his ability to speak, the words that came out were the wrong ones. “Then what should I do?” he asked in alarm, staring with a new understanding at his stupid Manzoni.
“Keep it. And when you find another fool, sell it to him.”
Oscar wasn’t fast enough to respond with a head-butt, a face-slap, or at least a “How fucking dare you, you miserable hobo,” before Urso wandered off nonchalantly, leaving him standing there in surprise and frustration. The humiliation still smarts, all these years later, whenever he thinks back on it. Not that it did a lot of good to strike Urso from the list of his future invitees. Nor did threatening to sue him if he so much as ventured to say a bad word about his Manzoni. That time, too, the damned critic simply shrugged and wrong-footed him. “Go ahead, and we’ll have some fun.”
“Have I ever told you how much I hate critics?”
“A hundred times or so.”
“They’re parasites. They’re frustrated. They sit there in the dark spitting out decrees about those who have the courage to venture out into the glare of daylight. They have to demolish others in order to exist.”
“So who do you have it in for now?”
“Everyone. At Angelina’s party there must have been at least a dozen, all of them gathering crumbs from under the table.”
In the hierarchy of living things, according to Oscar Martello, critics are below dogs, even when the dogs in question are canine nonentities, such as the farting dachshunds that contessas tend to keep, or his own blasted bulldog, Napoleon. He has personally threatened many of the working television and movie critics, while he has put others on his expense reports, which he usually doles out in the form of plates full of Spanish pata negra ham and tiny lines of coke to make them feel like they’re part of the in-crowd. The idea that a critic might do his job for the pure intellectual pleasure of the thing has never even crossed his mind, no more than his imagining that a politician is there for some reason other than the take.
“Did I ever tell you the story of Angelina Casagrande?”
“No, that’s one I haven’t heard.”
“Well, when she was a girl she was beautiful, sexy as hell, and, who knows why, between one marriage and the next she fell in love with a literary critic, I can’t remember his name, just that he wore these dreary boiled wool jackets and traveling salesman ties. He made a living by gnawing at novels and selling reviews. He said he wanted to save the world with beauty, but actually all he felt toward the world was hatred. After a couple of years of German poetry and canned tuna from the supermarket, she dumped him and hooked up with one of these bandits from the Roman political world. The great Achille Marchesi, do you remember him?”
“I didn’t know that she’d been his lover, too.”
“No one knew it, he was the vice president of the Senate, he had seven c
hildren, a great defender of family values, on close personal terms with the Vatican cardinal secretary of state. An unrepentant cocksman, and a great friend of mine.”
“And then what happened?”
“Then what happened is that Angelina told me that she’d never laughed so hard in her life as when she ate, drank, fucked, and thieved with Marchesi. And to entertain her he would have his bagman summon a handful of these piece-of-shit critics, her ex-boyfriend among them, these highfalutin’ art professors, these archaeology sniffers, and he’d keep them waiting for hours, promising them the chairmanship of some foundation or academy or public toilet. But he’d promise all of them—one by one—the same chairmanship, if you get the point. Telling them it was a secret. Then he’d leave them on a slow boil for the months that followed and watch them struggle to slit each others’ throats.”
Andrea considers the viciousness of the prank, then an old story comes to mind. “I knew three girls in high school, friends of mine, who’d do more or less the same thing, on a smaller scale. They’d get comfortable in a café, and they’d call in succession all the biggest losers in their class, the fat boy, the pimply boy, the skinny pigeon-chested boy, promising each of them they could cop a smell. And then they’d make bets on which of them would be the first to get there.”
“Then what would happen?”
“The boys really would show up. But the appointment had been made for the bar on the opposite side of the street and they would enjoy the scene from their café.”
Oscar thinks it over. “I hope they all wound up old maids, your three young sluts.”
“No, even worse, all three of them are married.”
“Ha ha! That’s a good one.”
“What about your friend Marchesi—he came to a bad end, I’m guessing. Cancer, leukemia, something like that?”
“Ulcerative colitis. Practically speaking, he died in a pool of shit.”
“Oh, fuck. Would you pass me the ice?”
They’re hanging out in the kitchen as if it were nine at night, but it’s actually two in the morning. They’ve each put together a plate for themselves. Then they head out into the living room to drink and eat, in the pink armchairs by the plate glass window.