by Pino Corrias
For a couple of years now, Andrea has been living in that 750-square-foot penthouse apartment, plus 200 square feet of terrace, within which he has limited himself to scattering his emptiness on the hardwood floor, a parquet the color of Virginia-blend tobacco, mild and sweet. The bed, the built-in armoire, and the bathroom are all on the interior side, which overlooks the roofs. The kitchen is just a corner of the living room, which then opens out toward the expansive picture window that looks down over the Tiber. The living room is empty, except for a black carpet, a glowing sand-colored glass cactus, a large canvas by Mario Schifano—two couples drawn in white against a black background—titled Assenza di gravità, dated 1990, a screen on the wall, twelve tiny speakers bluetoothed to an iPad that’s filled with a hundred hours or so of jazz. The walls are white except for the far wall, which is orange and gold with luminous yellow threads, like the Dan Flavin neons that run along the four sides of the perimeter. Aside from the two armchairs, there’s a dark hardwood table, unadorned, without drawers, and without chairs except for the padded office chair. Then there’s the computer, the printer, three red oversize cushions on the floor, a dozen shelves full of books and CDs, all of them survivors of the death of paper publishing, the disappearance of records, and twenty or so years of moving.
At night, the lights on the orange wall give the impression that the apartment is the interior of a magic box where the air floats in a warm iridescence, while the speakers put out the crystalline music of the Esbjörn Svensson Trio—piano, string bass, and drums—filled with that northern European sweetness capable of chilling even the baroque amplitude of the Roman night. Taken as a whole, the apartment communicates comfort and a solitude that is, all things considered, self-aware. An entirely untrammeled solitude.
“Tell me about the wires that you’ve connected.”
“You should have seen the spark, when your name came up,” Oscar tells him seriously.
Every alarm bell starts ringing in Andrea’s head. “What does it have to do with me?”
Oscar talks as he chews his food. “Your name and Jacaranda’s are made to be together. I don’t know why it never occurred to me before this.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about the idea that hit me, a way to save the movie and save all our asses.”
“Leave me out of this story.”
“It’s not a story, it’s a plan.”
“Leave me out of your plan.”
“Like fuck I will. You’re in it, up to your neck: If I go under, how are you going to pay for this lovely apartment that comes complete with sunsets? Or have you forgotten that I plucked you out of a manhole in the Milan sewers?”
Andrea bursts out laughing right in his face. “You never plucked anyone out of anywhere; I came to Rome under my own steam, leaving behind me the nice bright sunshine of spring.”
“Ooooh! Ooooh! You were down a manhole, and a nice deep one, too, under siege by three or four hysterical Milanese women. I tossed you a rope and hauled you all the way up here, to the most beautiful city on earth, a place that has existed for two thousand years without honor, or law.” Oscar is emptying one glass of margarita after another and the tequila is just winding him up. “And now, instead of living in the midst of Milan’s miserable poplar trees, you live in the heart of the world. You write for the big circus. You fill your tank with pussy on a regular basis. You eat late at night with the producer. And last, but not least”—he points his fork in all directions—“you look down on the Tiber that flows over the miseries of mankind. And you know what?”
Andrea sighs. “What?”
“The idea has never occurred to you that you might wind up down there, in that water, has it?”
“Oh, fuck.”
“I wouldn’t want you to start thinking about it tonight.”
“Why on earth should I?”
“Because if the movie’s a flop and I’m out six million euros, holy Christ, I swear I’ll ruin all your lives, one by one, and throwing yourselves into the Tiber might not be the worst solution you can find.”
“Don’t come complaining to me: what with pay TV and broadcast networks, home video, and all the other bullshit that’s out there, in the end you won’t lose a penny even if it flops in its theatrical release.”
“Fuck that! It can’t flop anywhere. I’m asking you to do one thing for me, after I’ve done hundreds for you, is that clear?”
This time, the shameless smile that he normally wears when he improvises something to amaze or defraud vanishes. That threat comes not from the tequila, but from his plan: He has thought about it. And deep in his dark eyes, a light full of heavy metals and viciousness has just condensed. Andrea notices the change. But instead of memorizing it—because this is the moment when this story begins—he shakes his head, takes another gulp of margarita, and forgets, instead. Allowing Oscar to unfurl the smile that turns him into a fucking wooer with a snarl, always ready for a threat followed by a caress: “Did you get scared, you little bobbing dickhead?”
The Film to Be Saved
The movie is called No, I Won’t Surrender!, with an exclamation mark that in the trailers is pierced by a bullet as the foreground is filled with the pouting face of Jacaranda Rizzi, staring the audience right in the eyes in an extreme close-up.
It doesn’t take a film critic to see that the movie lurches along, fails to engage, makes promises, and then disappoints. It takes just Oscar Martello, the lord of the box office.
It’s the story of a young woman in Palermo who goes to war against the Mafia clan that killed her beloved husband by mistake. Technically, a random killing on the sidelines of a shoot-out, a case of collateral damage.
Once she’s dried her tears, instead of bowing her head to destiny, the star of the movie sets about planning her vendetta. She reassures her son. She takes him to safety, to stay with a sister of hers who lives in Urbino. Then she goes back to Palermo to face off, one by one, with the Mafiosi who have robbed her of her life. She gets a gun, she learns to shoot, she learns to use her head, her vicious impulses, gasoline and arson. She adopts their methods. She harasses them with phone calls in the middle of the night. She threatens them. She shoots bullets into their front doors. She destroys a speedboat that belongs to one of them. She finds out where another one parks his cars and sets them on fire. She burns down the mob boss’s villa, then she destroys his reputation and his family with photos of his secret trysts with his lover.
Her plan is to fill their lives with terror and anguish for as long as possible and then kill them, one after the other, when she decides it’s time to take back her own life. Unfortunately, fate is not entirely in her hands. Even though those hands are very beautiful, and any sensible fate would be happy to let itself by fondled by her.
Jacaranda Rizzi has the face of a Sicilian woman of Norman descent, a peaches-and-cream complexion, that blond hair, those honeyed eyes, those sparse freckles scattered like stars, a body that would enchant any male, the kind of body that promises fire and nectar, perdition and paradise.
But even the people in the movie struggle to fit together. They’re all too beautiful, too well dressed, their hair too perfectly groomed, all that blood, all that viciousness. Or maybe it’s the director’s fault, maybe he just couldn’t figure out how to knead all the ingredients together properly. Jacaranda’s too luminous to go unnoticed, to live in hiding the way she plans to, and the bad guys are too naive to be truly dangerous. Palermo is icy instead of steamy, and the vendetta is too hot, when it really ought to be ice cold. What the audience wants is suspense, surprise plot twists, and instead there’s too much comedy for there to be cruelty and vice versa. In the end, what reigns supreme is confusion. And then there’s the finale, which just leaves you baffled. The star, after killing the last Mafioso soldier and finally facing off with the mob boss, who’s helpless, back to the wall, simply stops, lowers her gun, and decides not to kill him, satisfied with the terror that she’s
glimpsed in his eyes, a terror that will torment him forever. She vanishes into thin air, just as the cops from the mobile squad come along to sweep up the aftermath, because she’s left enough evidence to convict them all. What’s become of her? Has she managed to save herself, or has good luck abandoned her? Does she now lie buried in some reinforced concrete highway pier?
Only after a solid fifteen minutes—by which time you’re ready to ask yourself why the fuck you ever paid to see a story you can’t make head or tails of, full of shoot-outs, chase scenes, helicopters, speedboats, etc.—does the main character reappear in a small German town with neatly tended flower beds. She goes to pick up her son at school, and when she says to him, “From now on, we’ll live one day at a time,” half the theater laughs and the other half cries. Half the audience complains and half is stirred emotionally.
If it had a theatrical release without any fanfare, it would surely be a flop. But fanfare is Oscar Martello’s specialty.
The Plan
“Tell me about the plan.”
“It came to me after watching the movie ten times in a row, emerging first depressed and then furious.”
“Can’t you recut it? Usually you can find a way out.” Andrea and Oscar both know that the history of cinema is full of mediocre films that, once they’re recut, become smash hits. The great Franco Cristaldi locked himself in the Moviola room with Cinema Paradiso—which was long, slow, and dull—and by cutting fifty minutes, transformed it into a film that won everything, even too many awards.
“That’s the point: we can’t, there’s no way out. The asshole shot an endless quantity of tracking shots. If you move a single thing, you’re moving too much. And if you cut, you’re cutting everything.”
“Didn’t you notice it when you watched the dailies?”
“No, that’s my fault.”
“So what are you going to do?”
“Instead of doctoring the movie, we need to doctor the premiere.”
“Interesting. How are you going to do that?”
Oscar smiles. He leads into it without any haste; he likes to drag out the anticipation. He says, “I hired two freelance muckrakers.”
Oh, this is starting out well, thinks Andrea. Instead he says, “Well good for you.”
“They’re Totò Guerra and Mirko Pace.”
“I know them. Guerra and Pace. They have the nerve to desecrate all that is sacred by doing business as War & Peace.”
“They’re the best in the business.”
“They’re garbage.”
“Nice work, genius. Their job is to fabricate garbage.”
“They destroy people.”
“Not always. Sometimes, instead of sending them to hell, they launch people into the firmament.”
“Is that the case here?”
“You can bet your life on it.”
Totò Guerra and Mirko Pace, the muckrakers, are each about forty years of age. They’re exactly the way you’d imagine them: skinny, angular faces, necks and arms swathed in tattoos. They come from the outskirts of Milan. They go everywhere with minicameras, mini–tape recorders, and family-pack portions of sheer ruthlessness. They wear skintight black suits, white shirts, narrow black ties. A couple of morgue assistants, here for the news. To hobble their victims they use hidden video cameras and escorts in plain view. They invent scandals on commission for all the celebrity magazines, as well as for a couple of websites specializing in gossip. And, likewise on commission, they make those same scandals disappear.
In the early days, in search of easy money, they’d focused on the good-for-nothing scions of the jet set: two days of stakeouts and they were sure to have handfuls of photographs with young girls, hot to trot, cocaine, Thai masseuses, transsexuals with bulging biceps, swinger clubs, the whole nine yards. At the time, the point of the work the duo did was almost never to publish the photographs, but to ensure they weren’t published. Their fees spiked heavenward, the agency was riding high. But since it was like shooting fish in a barrel—and with all the shooting that was going on, a platoon of investigating magistrates had developed the habit of summoning them for questioning as “individuals with information about what had happened”—after a dozen or so exploits they started to get scared about all those investigations that were threatening to dry up their sources, and leave them with third-degree burns on their buttocks. They were starting to get sick and tired of those muscle-bound, overtattooed assholes who always wound up begging for mercy through their tears, and especially of the unscrupulous lawyers who first represented them and bought back all the compromising photos under the table, only to turn around and hit them with bills that were more expensive than the blackmail they’d just paid.
So War & Peace began to be curious about the lawyers themselves, about their fingertips so well trained at ferreting out cash, delving deep into the deposits of showbiz, under the monuments of the eternal city, down the infernal circles of muck and gold that made up La Dolce Roma: a landscape of interchangeable living rooms, telephone conversations destined to be tapped, movies, television, soccer, music, jet set, politics, worlds on a continuum so intimate that they overlapped and become one single universe, inhabited by men and women willing to sell their souls and their sleep at night for a well-placed photograph or an appearance on television, a love affair or a betrayal in the gossip papers, a contract, an election, a gram of cocaine and a gram of power.
Thousands of transactions from which War & Peace try to skim their attendance fee and drop it into the slot of the wheel of fortune, which inevitably, after turning and turning, lines up the three fatal red cherries, followed by the corresponding shower of tax-exempt coins. A rain that now irrigates the entire crop of privates and corporals that work under them, the scoundrels paid by the day to spread contrived news, the platoon of unfaithful cops who arrange to identify license plates and tap phones illegally, sub-blackmailers and women willing to train rent girls. All of them people with their heads back and mouths open, waiting for a drop of grease to spill from the perennial feast of the Superworld.
“How can you trust a couple of attack dogs like those two?”
“I pay them and they bite whoever I tell them to.”
“I don’t want anything to do with this.”
“Why, are you afraid of getting your hands dirty?”
“You said it.”
“Oh, fuck! We have a virgin trying not to wallow in the mud.”
“I’ve always tried to write things I don’t need to be ashamed of.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’ve never written about gossip or other bullshit from some keyhole.”
“Sure, but now you write TV drama. And I assure you that even War & Peace are ashamed of the things you write.” And he bursts into loud, unaccompanied laughter (“Ha ha!”) as he gulps down his margarita. Then he calms down and says, “You’ll never even see them. And anyway, they’ll be taking care of you.”
“So you’re determined not to understand.”
“No, I understand, and I understand everything. If you’ll just be quiet, I’ll explain.” Oscar Martello gets up, walks over to the parapet of the terrace, looming up in shirtsleeves against the blackness surrounding the embroidery of the cupolas and the shooting stars of the automobiles traveling along the opposite bank of the Tiber, the Lungotevere embarcadero. Then he comes back indoors to the center of the room. He’s creating, now: “Thursday night you and I are going to a party in Sabaudia at Milly’s place, the fat woman who hates me. There are going to be lots of people, and Jacaranda will be there, too.”
Milly Gallo Bautista, the fat woman who hates Oscar and adores Andrea, grew up in an orphanage like in all the worst fairy tales. And on the strength of her guts, muscles, and resentment, she became one of the most powerful agents in Roman show biz. She gives a living to a hundred or so actors, directors, and screenwriters. In exchange, she sucks between ten and fifteen percent of their blood. She endows them with life, feeds off of them, and in the
meantime, she gradually kills them.
“Okay, we meet Jacaranda. Then what?”
Oscar spreads his arms wide, imagining how to frame the unexpected turn of events: “Then you’ll disappear together.”
Andrea evaluates the information.
Oscar smiles.
Oscar relishes the silence.
The revelation hovers in the night air and then slowly glides down to the point where Oscar’s gaze and Andrea’s gaze meet, while a seagull passes by outside the glass doors, just skimming the roofs, screeching like the wails of a newborn child.
“What do you mean we’ll disappear?”
“To Paris, a romantic getaway. The actress and the writer. Beauty and the Beast, tell the story however you like. But they won’t know that right away. First the suspense. First the mystery. Think about it. The mystery of the disappearance of Jacaranda Rizzi, the star of No, I Won’t Surrender! Pam-pa-pa-pam! A great, courageous actress takes a stand against the Mafia and now she may have been kidnapped by the Mafia. It’ll froth up like whipped cream on all the front pages. I can already see the banner headlines.”
“And you think that’s going to be enough to launch the movie?”
“Don’t you worry about that. The two of you will just stay holed up in Paris, no phones, no communication with the outside world, while back here War & Peace kick up a storm. And all this on the eve of the premiere! It’s bound to work.”
“It’s a crime.”
“What? Which crime?”
“It’s called raising a false alarm.”
“And who gives a damn?”
“I do. We’d run the risk of looking like fools and we’d run the risk of being put on trial. First we’d be seen as fakers and then we’d be seen as criminals. I’m not joking around: it’s a crime.”