We'll Sleep When We're Old

by Pino Corrias

  “No, my friend, it’s the movies.” Oscar Martello’s face emanates flashes of pure happiness when he utters the words “the movies.”

  “Of course: it’s the movies. This way we can all wind up writing soaps for the Albanian national television network.”

  “No one puts anyone on trial and no one goes to jail in this country, unless you’re some fucking gypsy. Crimes just help to bulk up your résumé. And after all, we’re the ones who decide what the truth is; we can act as well outside of the movies as we do in them.”

  Oscar’s idea has started to open a breach through Andrea’s mental pulsations, which are dripping tequila as they illuminate a close-up of Jacaranda sitting next to him at a table in La Coupole, in Paris, while the continental evening descends. The image isn’t all that bad, after all. “Go on.”

  “Once the mystery has built up, we’ll blow it wide open. And while people are rushing to their movie theaters, that’s when Jacaranda will leap out of the woodwork and be back, good as new. She was never kidnapped by the Mafia. Jacaranda is simply, wonderfully, romantically head over heels. And in love with whom? With the writer! The Mafia doesn’t have a fucking blessed thing to do with it; she was just on the run with her beloved. Happy ending for her, double the publicity for us. Do I make my point?”

  “That way, everyone will assume I wrote that tremendous piece of shit.”

  “Look at the positive side and stop getting lost in the details, for Christ’s sake. I’ll put your name on the screenwriting contract, and you’ll even get a share of the royalties.”

  Suddenly he doesn’t mind the idea quite as much. “You will?”

  “I will. A nice chunk of cash for your trouble, no?”

  “And then what will happen?”

  “What will happen is that unfortunately you’ll have to pay taxes on it. Ha ha!”

  “No, I’m asking a serious question.”

  “You and Jacaranda are going to play boyfriend and girlfriend for a couple of weeks, War & Peace will tell your fantastic Paris story, and then we’re all friends like before.”

  “What about the director?”

  Oscar makes a face as if he’s just bitten into half a lemon. “To hell with the director! He doesn’t know a thing and it has to stay that way. I never want that asshole underfoot again.”

  “But he’s also her boyfriend.”

  “Whose boyfriend? Get caught up with events. Jacaranda gets a new boyfriend every time she needs one, especially when she has a movie coming out. And that asshole Fabris does the same thing.”

  “Let true love triumph.”

  “Fuck, but do you write films or just read about them in the gossip mags? No one loves anyone. Get that into your head.”

  Meanwhile, Jacaranda

  So events grind into motion that night. And as they grind into motion they determine their first consequence, which ricochets not all that far from that conversation on the terrace—at least, not too far as the crow flies—landing in Monte Mario over near the Hilton. The reverberation has reached the fourth floor of the small white villa that stands midway between the grand villa that once belonged to the valorous Cecchi Gori clan and the four hundred rooms of the hotel Hilton, where at that hour Jacaranda is asleep, with no company other than the little lamp on the night table that designs an infinity of stars on the ceiling and, at their center, the sweep of the Milky Way, which has the same color of sand and silk as her nightie.

  She sleeps clutching tightly the secret that for all these years has been tormenting her, like a bad memory that won’t let itself be forgotten. The secret that even presses on her dreams, sometimes turning them so sour that it awakens her.

  Jacaranda opens her eyes, looks at the time, sees that it’s three in the morning. Someone is thinking about her. But whether lovingly or malevolently she cannot say.

  And already in the dimension between wakefulness and sleep, there’s that sensation of not being in her own home but in some provisional place, which is something that’s happened to her ever since she was a tiny girl, when she first moved with her mother. And as a teenage girl, when she went to live in at least three different apartments with her aunt. And after her adolescence, with her girlfriends, living in cramped rooms and filthy kitchens and bathrooms packed with lipsticks, panties, and bras: those were the years she attended the Academy of Dramatic Arts, a time of short-order hamburgers, when she played Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire, the role created by Vivien Leigh in Elia Kazan’s film version of the play, the one who is raped by Marlon Brando at the end. A role that cut into her like a knife wound, as she learned the part, so that she burst into tears at the end of the final audition, right in the middle of the round of applause, because she felt suffocated by it, that time and forever after.

  Then there were the apartments of her boyfriends, even the short-order boyfriends, whose names she doesn’t even remember anymore, but the furnishings, yes, she remembers them, especially the sofas and the beds she had sex on, pretending to have orgasms that never came through, and the milky light that filtered in through the windows at dawn while they snored and she lay awake, watchfully eyeing her beauty as it dripped away, nourishing nothing.

  All of those places were homes that she put on like someone else’s overcoat, to feel a little warmth against the cold, and sometimes, like the scripts that offered her the haven of a well-written character, a destiny, a meaning. Always sensing that that home, that boyfriend, that script, would have a provisional duration, a limited time outside which, she knew full well, what awaited her was the void that wasn’t a blank space, but rather a black, cold one, where it sometimes poured down rain.

  That void frightened her and, at the same time, attracted her—just as she was attracted by the idea of bestowing herself freely on men who were useless for anything other than to bring a little light into that blackness, whether in real or cinematic life, each of those lives paying a bit of oxygen to the other. Letting her public—but also her directors like Attilio Fabris and producers like Oscar Martello—go on believing that her suspension bridges over life remained standing, still capable of taking her somewhere. And that (instead) they hadn’t long ago begun crumbling, and were by now being held together by nothing but benzodiazepine—or alcohol when she was younger, or cocaine when there was someone to buy it for her—to support the weight of her magnificent body, but only one step at a time, one reawakening at a time. Which was, after all, the quantity of suffering that she could tolerate, or at least so she believed.

  With her eyes wide open, she thinks back to the movie, and the tragic dimension that it contains, at least for her, since it is the story of a woman who won’t surrender, played by a woman who has done nothing but surrender in real life.

  She still hasn’t seen the whole movie. The producer and the director had a fight. Punches were thrown. That’s not usually a good sign. But how would she know?

  Attilio, the director, is worthless. He’s one of those guys who live in their mirror and already by the third night they’re snoring.

  But not Oscar. Oscar never sleeps. Oscar, bandit that he is, says that now he’s found the solution. He has an idea up his sleeve to launch the movie the way it deserves. With the spotlights trained full on it and a skyful of fireworks. He told her, “Get ready for a full-frontal assault of television cameras, film festivals, and awards seasons.”

  So now she knows that this will finally be the right time. The moment she’s been awaiting for years, the time to empty her gut and, finally, also her head. To utter that story in public and to cry enough to rid herself of all the salt that’s burned her inside. To set down the brick that for too many years she’s been carrying, the brick that every now and again she’s tried to forget, to conceal in her secretmost hiding place, and that then suddenly reappeared in the center of her chest, choking off her breath, like what happens to Nicole Kidman, the mother of a little boy killed by a hit-and-run driver, in a movie that always brings tears to her eyes, Rabbit Hole; a
hard, flat, sharp-edged grief that, however, she can no longer do without because it keeps her company.

  By now, she’s sick and tired of that company. She has to do it. She can do it. And at last she’ll stop letting herself be overwhelmed by things, even when she is the protagonist of those things. To be done, once and for all, with this sensation that has been devouring her little by little, with the feeling that she’s being lived much more than she’s actually living. And finally free herself, vindicate herself. Fill the void, be able to breathe once again. Or at least that’s what Jacaranda believes she’s revealing to herself in the confusion of her half-waking state, in that hundredth night she’s lived through alone, when even the most senseless thoughts seem like so many arrows bringing luminous revelations.

  Oscar Martello, the Story

  Oscar Martello has a handsome face, like some fifth ace tucked up a sleeve, short hair, dark eyes, and a smile that calls for a straight-armed slap. He usually wears dark silk-and-cotton sweaters without a shirt, custom-tailored jackets and trousers, handmade leather ankle boots. In the course of his lifetime, he’s taken plenty of punches. He’s returned them. He’s learned to feint from them. Aside from movies, he also produces detective shows for TV. And then there’s the long-running series, more spectacularly unbelievable than fiction, of his own real life. He got his start in raggedy patched pants and now he goes everywhere with fat wads of bills wrapped in a rubber band, and when he pays stratospheric hotel bills or restaurant checks, it seems like cinema. He’s becoming a bandit, and perhaps it was fated so, because he came up from the street. As Helga likes to say—and she knew knife dancers from the toughest outlying areas of the cities of Argentina—“Those who come up from the street have no limits.”

  As a boy, Oscar wanted to be an actor. He studied mime in Milan. He dreamed of working for Julian Beck’s Living Theatre. And perhaps he could have achieved that dream. But at the end of his first apprenticeship, on the stage of the Palazzina Liberty in Milan, Julian Beck started kicking him during an improvisational performance. The kicks were part of the show, but after the second one Oscar spun around, dodged the third one, and started slapping Julian Beck’s face, to a loud burst of applause from the other students. Before stepping down off the stage, he said to him, “I am a free man and you’re a dickhead.” The next day he left for Rome.

  In Rome he got a job driving cars for weddings, during which he’d proposition the girlfriends of the bride, cadge meals, fill his pockets with the traditional Jordan almond confetti and with phone numbers. One day he bought himself a camera. He discovered that he had a talent for framing a picture. He had a good eye. In those days, he lived in a studio apartment in the San Lorenzo quarter, he dreamed of getting work in the movie industry.

  Instead of the movie industry he found a hack producer, a movie industry wannabe, Eusebio Reverberi, a “Roman from Frosinone,” a producer possessed of a certain sly genius for big box office, lusting for money and work, who happened to need a driver, a personal assistant, and a sidekick for his routines as he foisted off lies on his potential investors. Reverberi had gotten his start with light, low-budget comedies, a bit of soft porn disguised as light entertainment, an unremarkable side business in girls to fill the beds of Roman politicians in the interests of pillow talk. In his way, he loved the movies, he believed in the magic of a darkened theater. But he was one of those fragile men who are sure to lose everything sooner or later.

  Oscar watched, drove, and learned.

  He learned that in the movies, everyone claims they’re penniless, but money circulates constantly because there are always installments to be paid, ex-wives who demand alimony, beautiful Cuban girls who ask for diamonds, and sons and daughters who need rehab clinics where they can dry out. At first, Oscar skimmed a little off the top on the fuel, the restaurants, and the girls, cadging blow jobs in the car, high atop the Aventine Hill, with a view of the sunset. But even though the Aventine was one of the seven hills, it was still just a way of looking at life from the lowest point, a bequest of his father the doorman, his mother the housewife. Both of them tenants of the world of before, the world of losers, the world with the scent of the bouillon cube in the front hall, the swayback sofa in the cramped little living room, the lightless life of Serravalle Scrivia, an Apennine town on the age-old highway, in the province of Alessandria, which is to say, nowhere. The horrendous colorless North, frigid girls who kiss with icy tongues, the priest from the parish youth club with a raging hard-on, the flaking plaster walls of the vo-tech school, the movie theater in the town piazza that showed two movies every Sunday, an old-fashioned Western and Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments. Until the night that Oscar went to a movie theater in Novi Ligure and saw the Californian epic of The Strawberry Statement, the universities of Berkeley and Columbia, occupied in the sixties, building up to 1968, police, kisses, fists and nightclubs, grass, liberation of Vietnam, with a West Coast soundtrack, and “The Circle Game” as sung by Buffy Sainte-Marie, a movie that had opened his eyes, his heart, and his imagination, and had convinced him to leave that filthy pit of fog and gravel behind him and go out and capture the world. And, sooner or later, buy that world for himself.

  Within six months he learned to think bigger and bigger all the time. Not only to use the custom-tailored shirts of his boss, Eusebio Reverberi, but also to order them for himself from the tailor Piero Albertelli with the exact same air of nonchalance. And also to use his visual talent, his facility for memorizing names, places, circumstances, and films. To imitate the way that those born to money act. To transform his lack of manners into sheer arrogance in order to compete with them. To despise them and, at the same time, to admire them. He used to say, “I’m an anarchist, I dismantle power and I pocket it.”

  He also learned—protected by his brash ignorance—to pocket the workings of the film industry. To express his opinions about scripts, discovering that he also had a talent for good stories. To track down affordable locations and services. To offer pesky actors small parts, saying to them, “Now you owe me a favor.” And as he built up a backlog of favors, he learned how to redeem them.

  Open Up, It’s the Police!

  The opportunity of his lifetime came the day a platoon of policemen from the First District burst into Eusebio Reverberi’s penthouse apartment in Vicolo del Divino Amore. It was six thirty in the morning: “Open up, it’s the police!”

  They said they were searching for documents concerning a suspicious corporate bankruptcy. They didn’t find them. To make up for that, they did find a half-naked underage female fast asleep, twenty grams of cocaine, a slab of hashish, five Rohypnol pills, amphetamine tablets, counterfeit prescriptions for codeine, and an unregistered Colt Python .38 Special, a six-shot, short-barrel revolver.

  Reverberi started whining, he said that someone, who knows who, must just have left the coke and the amphetamines there to set him up; the naked minor was a girlfriend’s daughter, he’d had no idea she was a minor and anyway he’d never touched her, he was just giving her a place to stay because the poor thing had been locked out of her home; the prescriptions for codeine and the Rohypnol were all just to help him get to sleep; and the handgun was to protect himself from certain Sinti gypsy loan sharks who had been threatening him. He called his lawyer. He called a cabinet minister he’d been supplying with girlfriends. He called Oscar to hold off the journalists, the lawyers, the busybodies, and the cats. He wound up spending nineteen days in Regina Coeli prison, where a huge gorilla of a convict tried to shove him up against the wall in the showers and rape him, and he wept and shouted so loud that the guards came running to rescue his virgin ass cheeks. When he was released, he told the press that he’d been framed, he was innocent, he had complete respect for the entire Italian magistracy with the exception of those two judges who had put him behind bars just to drum up some favorable publicity for themselves, and he swore he would make a social protest film about his odyssey through the criminal justice system. Then he went
home, threw himself a party with three Brazilian girls who took turns sucking his dick while the other two stuck balls of cocaine up his ass to send him cartwheeling through space as far as possible from the stench of prison that had imprisoned his nostrils. On the third night of carousing, as he was sitting in the bathroom and counting the passing angels, Eusebio Reverberi felt a surging wave of pure heat descend over him from the ceiling or perhaps direct from heaven, said, “Oh, fuck!” and died on the spot of a fulminant myocardial infarction.

  Oscar, in the days following Reverberi’s arrest, had set up housekeeping at his apartment. While waiting for him, he’d organized dinners, cocktail parties, and future films. When Reverberi got out of prison, he’d found his apartment reduced to a pigsty. The two of them had fought, and Oscar had been fired summarily on the landing. But as he left, he’d realized he still had the key. The key of fate, considering that when Reverberi kicked the bucket, falling face-first onto the marble bathroom floor, the three Brazilian girls decided to call Oscar’s cell phone and then take to their heels, without even stopping to brush their hair. He went over, opened up, saw, thought, and decided. He cleaned up the scene of the death. He threw open the windows. He dressed the corpse in a pair of pajamas and a dressing gown that was worthy of an English gentleman. Then he called the doctor and the lawyers to arrange the scene: the great producer had died while he was already hard at work on the screenplay inspired by his legal ordeal. The death of an innocent man. His heart hadn’t withstood the many humiliations piled on him by the judges, the press, and the world at large.

  At dawn, Oscar Martello left behind him that old life and set out on a new life with his nice fat severance pay: five and half ounces of cocaine that Reverberi, God rest his soul, had purchased with his assistance on the day of his release from prison, plus his address book with all the phone numbers, plus a Vacheron Constantin pink gold wristwatch that he was just crazy about, a few cashmere jackets, a small stack of cash, and the keys to the Jaguar Executive XJ6 that he’d been driving for a year and which he’d grown quite fond of. And it was only to be the first in a long series of such cars.