We'll Sleep When We're Old

by Pino Corrias

  With that treasury of phone numbers and cocaine—cut with cornstarch and shameless confidence—Oscar dug the foundations of his fortune, making home deliveries in the movie industry, for private parties and dinners. He became everyone’s best friend. He sold. He bought. He doubled his prices and then offered insane discounts. He was likable, he was munificent, he offered advice. He listened to secrets. He dispensed opinions.

  And in the meantime he absorbed ideas. He learned how to observe the backstage workings of the movies, which are invisible to the naked eye, but much more instructive than what you see in the movie theater. And, even more useful than that, he learned to navigate the backdrops of the Roman night, with its crowd of narcissistic actors, irritable actresses, scoundrels and thieves, politicians with way too much testosterone, genuine artists, fake artists, homosexuals both cheerful and on the brink of despair, depressed daughters, good-for-nothing sons devoted to bodybuilding, sharks with the teeth of CPAs, money launderers, young heiresses with bad breath, lawyers from the Locri area of Calabria, dripping dandruff and cash, widows covered with wrinkles, rubies, and hysterical Jack Russell terriers that pee on the couches, barricaded in their pink and yellow mansions in the Parioli district or in their funereal villas on the Appian Way. Everyone needed the bit of help he could give them, Oscar Martello’s little helping hand, Martello the consoler of solitary nostrils, propman with a face you want to slap and a heart of gold for all the poor drug fiends out there in circulation. His cell phone rang constantly at all hours. And he always answered, and he listened and listened and listened. They’d open his heart, and he’d open their billfolds.

  From Coke to Cinema

  In those days, peddling between ten and twenty grams of coke a day in exchange for cash, free sex, the occasional extortion, invitations out on yachts and speedboats, all-expenses-paid vacations at the Hotel Cristallo in Cortina, Oscar had produced his first movie. A cyberpunk reenvisioning of the story of Saint Francis in which the saint cut his oppressive father’s throat, screwed Saint Clare, talked to the birds of the forest only to lure them in so he could catch them and roast them over an open fire, and recommended sex as the viaticum toward the ineffable, along with sexual charity, as a critique of the vested powers. A tremendous piece of trash that aroused the indignation of the press, arguments among theologians, and the eager excitement of the moviegoing public on account of Saint Clare who, thanks to Oscar’s ever vigilant and innovative mind, appeared fully nude, and completely shaved, in the throes of an ecstasy that her faith perfected into a pair of resounding orgasms every bit up to the standards of the Living Theatre.

  His debut in the world of filmmaking was greeted by his customers with the occasional sarcastic comment, a certain amount of admiration, and a great deal of envy. From that moment on, Oscar, as he steadily dusted the cocaine off his heels, increasingly wallowed in cinema. He learned to perform the part of the producer: he’d earn ten and boast a hundred. He envisioned international blockbusters and put together passable TV series featuring good-hearted doctors, lawyers hunting for justice, priests hunting for sinners. All of it canned cat food for unhappy families.

  But the whole time, he was making money. He was milking cash out of the Ministry of Performing Arts. He pocketed political recommendations from the notary Alfonso Davanzati, the head of the Freemasons, and from that aging queen Amedeo Castelli, who was building the new outskirts of the city, and a functionary of the Vatican’s Opus Dei. From them he had learned that politicians are like certain smartphone apps: they cost you a few euros every month but they come in handy, providing you with what you need, a workaround or a recommendation, at any hour of the day or night. And when they’ve served their purpose, you leave them in background mode, ready for their next use.

  He learned from his mistakes. His TV series got better and his doctors got meaner. He perfected his aptitude for sensing the things that were in the air. He’d picked up a fragment of Dan Brown, the heretic. He’d toss in a dash of Padre Pio, the saint, and a pinch of Paulo Coelho to tamp down the blood from the stigmata with a little New Age talc. He’d add the chill of a murder victim. Or else the flames of a cheating wife. And even the mystery of an alien asleep in the catacombs of Rome.

  He took a couple of trips to Los Angeles, but instead of coming home a reconverted ammerikano like all provincial producers, he came back filled with simple, national-popular ideas. Like: Husband and wife, leading a standard life. In the fourth scene, roundhouse punch: the adolescent son dies of leukemia. Boom! The couple slips into a dark crisis. Grief, reexamination: Who are we, where are we going, why are we alive? “The kind of bullshit everyone wonders about at times like that, right?” Tears. Pitiless analysis, husband and wife go at it brutally. It gets so bad that maybe the two parents orphaned of their son are on the verge of a breakup.

  But that’s not how it goes; instead, there’s a turning point: it is revealed that their late son had a first sweetheart, and they never knew it. The parents want to get to know her. They invite her over. She has freckles and a button nose. Her name is Luciiia. “Just listen to how musical it is!” And the young thing tells them about the time they skipped school together and had their first kiss: pure love bubbles from her naive lips. The parents listen: it’s a surge of fresh water churning the pond of their opaque, adult love. They feel envy, they feel nostalgia: How long has it been since their first kisses? And what have they turned into now?

  That nostalgia stirs their emotions back up again.

  The father and the mother look at each other with new eyes.

  They touch each other with new hands.

  They speak to each other with new words.

  So it’s possible to start living again after all. “Music! Long shot, zoom in on their faces as their cheeks brush. Close-up: a kiss. Tears: tremendous, spectacular sex!”

  The Narrative Foundations

  One thing that Oscar inherited from that blessed, deeply rotten man, Eusebio Reverberi, was open access to the drawing room of Donna Angelina Casagrande, which meant a direct line to the Vatican, which in turn brought him his first half-price penthouse on Piazza Mignanelli, discounted mortgages, foreign exchange to foreign exchange, inside tracks with God-fearing politicians—men in the finest political alignments of the former Christian Democrats, the former Socialists, the former Fascists, all of them now tributaries to Berlusconi’s New Right and the old lunatic-asylum Roman Left without so much as a change of wardrobe, bank accounts, or lovers—and good news concerning the permeability of Catholic morality, making it possible to rob whatever’s not screwed down, and only afterward to cultivate in blessed peace one’s own sacrosanct sense of guilt.

  He reduced his use of cocaine virtually to zero. The “virtually” went up his nostrils on weekends, when he’d roam the city in search of good reasons not to go back home at night, home where, nowadays, Helga had taken up residence. Helga, his sweet damnation, who had in the meantime popped out two baby girls so fragile that they brought tears to his eyes every time he looked at them—though, truth be told, he usually didn’t look at them at all. He started smoking the contraband Cohibas that he had smuggled in from Cuba, and providing hot meals free of charge to the hordes of starving screenwriters—screenwriters more accustomed to eating hamburgers and contracts for pitifully small multiples of euros, journalists who couldn’t wait to abandon the depressing open-plan cubicles of their ink-on-newsprint papers, and who believed, as they swallowed a dozen oysters, on a terrace with Filipino houseboys and candles glowing in the night, that they were finally tasting Hollywood.

  He liked to call money “large,” but that term applied strictly to payments in the thousands of euros and above, the next level up being “rocks,” which stood for millions. Anything beneath the thousand euros were “yards,” or spare change, or even better, “nothing.” Four yards for a dinner with a babe at Dal Bolognese, in the Piazza del Popolo, five yards for raw fish at San Lorenzo. Ten large for a long weekend at the Quisisana on Capri—t
he Italian name, which meant “Here you heal,” changed jocularly to Quisiscopa, or “Here you fuck”—with a couple of whores, ideally a mother-and-daughter set. Fifty large for a fucking vacation that can hold its head up, with sailboat, a crew, and champagne, for instance, a week with Helga in that volcanic psychiatric institution for the wealthy known as Pantelleria.

  Then one day he saw the ocean liner Rex set sail across the black sea of Amarcord, an unforgettable scene shot entirely on Sound Stage 5 at Cinecittà, and it had the effect of a dazzling revelation: all he needed if he wanted to buy the world was to purchase the world-in-a-box represented by the movies. And then expand it, using the infinite spaces of the imagination and stories, which are the only sea capable of keeping us afloat. And allowing us to tolerate the death that every goddamned day sends our lives straight to the bottom.

  This was his dream. It became his secret project. He needed to make his money grow exponentially, and fast, too. And so he grabbed every production he could lay his hands on, taking work from the state television networks and the private networks. He siphoned money out of the ministry. He multiplied the teams of screenwriters. He learned to play fast and loose with the advances on signature, which he knew were the first spark of any movie, the seed that instilled it with life and triggered the creative churn. He promised more than other producers and beat them to the punch. He actually laid out advances on signature of five large to screenwriters, and ten large as a second installment. As a result, everyone hurried home to rack their brains and draft the treatment of this imminent masterpiece and then rushed back to Oscar to deliver, hoping that the promise of a second installment wouldn’t crumble to dust in their hands. They had no idea that watching second installments crumble to dust in their hands only stimulated Oscar Martello’s creativity, reawakened his old love of theatrical improvisation, drove him to all his finest performances, the ones where he played the furious producer, a role that usually started with this line: “You’ve written a giant steaming piece of shit, every last one of you is fired,” he’d say, freezing his audience to the spot. Then he’d indulge in a full minute of silence as he paced back and forth, while the screenwriters gasped like beached whales, inventing excuses or absurd questions, such as, “Why are you being so negative?” or even, “I don’t know if you read all the way through to the end, because the last scene has a wonderful plot twist and we were thinking that—”

  At that point, Oscar Martello would let his eyes bug out, suck in all the oxygen in the room, emit a series of sounds, emit an array of vibrations, and then shout, “I wipe my ass with wonderful plot twists in the last scene!” He’d stop, and then slowly and clearly enunciate, “Wonderful plot twists belong at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end of any good story: chapter one in the handbook of a professional screenwriter.”

  Then he’d take a wide stance to get a solid balance as he felt the gales of inspiration begin to gust inside him. “Open your ears wide: stories are like buildings. If I’m going to construct a building, where do I start, from the roof, from the foundations, or from the plot twists?” He never expected a reply, he just relished the absurdity of the question in silence, savoring the looks on their faces and the air hissing out of the air conditioner.

  “That’s right! Good boys, just keep your traps shut, that way you won’t piss me off even worse. And do you know why you’ve all so royally screwed the pooch? Because instead of starting from the foundations or even from the roof, you went straight ahead and started with the flowers on the windowsills. You decided to dabble in a form of fucking literature that nobody at all gives a damn about, much less the TV industry. You’ve produced a piece of Mannerism, which as far as I’m concerned, amounts to so much mental masturbation. Man-ner-ism,” he would say, acting it out. “Got it?”

  He’d take pleasure in the overall effect. Then he’d go and sit down, pick up a Cohiba; he’d bite off the end, spit it out, light it up, suck down the smoke, and cough. By taking away his oxygen, the smoke would soothe his nerves. From there, slumped in his armchair, he’d say, “I don’t give a damn about the flowers on the windowsill. I want nice, spacious foundations, nice, solid foundations, I want nar-ra-tive foundations,” enunciating as he held his arms out horizontally to indicate the vastness of the concept and the depth of the challenge. “Do you all know what the fuck I’m talking about?”

  As he looked around the room he’d lock eyes with the screenwriters’ darting, evasive gazes, he’d imagine their cute little hearts in frantic palpitation. In fact, no one in the room knew what the hell he was talking about, and for that matter, neither did he. All the same, he looked out at them from the center of these entirely fictional narrative foundations, shrouded in clouds of smoke, in the throes of a full-blown brainstorm—which absolutely ruled out any trivial sidetracking toward such thorny issues as advances deliverable in either “large,” “yards,” or “nothing,” much less the purely fictional second installments. There was just no time for it. The new plot was growing and speaking through him. Through the great Oscar Martello, the oracle.

  “Imagine . . .” he said amid the silence.

  And he’d tell stories, or really he’d create them, getting to his feet, pacing in circles, miming, working himself up, smoking and spitting. And he’d shout, and shout, and shout until the screenwriters, overwhelmed by their sense of guilt for their own miserable narrative ineptitude, finally convinced themselves that what they’d turned in was a fish skeleton without flesh, a lifeless story, an inert mass of words with a sprinkling of literary cream.

  “What the fuck good to me is cream, when I’m starving for meat, when I’m starving for big emotions?” Oscar would shout, staring at them one by one. “What am I supposed to sink my teeth into if I don’t have a story?” he’d yell, the veins bulging in his neck, as they all looked at the floor.

  They’d promise rewrites, retouches, inventions. And the minute the meeting was over, thanking the good lord above that they hadn’t heard those terrible words “You’re fired!” again, they’d hastily gather up their notes. They’d leave without so much as mentioning the long-forgotten promise of more large, just thanking their lucky stars that they’d ever received the old money. They’d hurry home to get back to work, pleased that they’d managed to get a second chance.

  But by that point they were in the trap. He would call them the next day and continue their indoctrination, “I want it to ooze sentiment, you understand?” he’d tell each of them. And the next morning he’d call them again, “Did you write? Summarize.”

  But working with so many different teams on so many different projects at the same time, surrounded by the confusion of Helga, the whims and complaints of his young daughters, and the inefficiency of the household domestic staff, every so often even the great Oscar Martello, king of the catch-a-sucker-every-minute narrative approach, would hit a logic fail and get his teams and his sentimental clichés mixed. At seven in the morning he’d yank one of his screenwriters out of bed with a call: “Listen up and listen good. The scene is that she hears footsteps and runs. Outside it’s snowing, this is the night of the living dead, do I make myself clear?”

  “Certainly,” says the guy, who’s still struggling through the fog of sleep.

  Oscar would work himself up, “She runs toward the car. There’s snow everywhere. She gets in. The car won’t start. The shadow’s getting closer. She tries again, it won’t start! The shadow gets even closer. She screams, the side window shatters into bits, the engine finally turns over, the tires screech, a hand is about to grab her, she screams with all the breath in her lungs, the tires finally grab the asphalt, and the car rockets forward. She survives by the skin of her teeth. Fuck, Rodolfo, you understand how?”

  A long pause, as if it were snowing in the telephone, too. “But I’m not Rodolfo,” the screenwriter says, finally wide awake.

  “Huh? What? Then who the fuck are you?”

  “Roberto. I’m writing Orphans of Love, not Werewolves of Milan.
”

  “Ah, Roberto! One of my eighteen fucking Filipino houseboys thinks it’s funny to hide my fucking eyeglasses. I can’t see, I can’t write. And this desk diary is written with a fucking microscope. But what are you doing, Roberto, resting on your laurels? Are you making progress? Did you write the big sex scene yet?”

  Oscar was a vicious beast who loved to sink his fangs into his screenwriters’ asses. He’d summon them for a meeting, sit them all down, and say, “Open your eyes and ears.” Their gazes of admiration were the power driving his stories, feeding him images and words. They would pump his imagination. And then and there, live, in front of them, the great Oscar Martello would chew up plot twists, grind out stories, digest cliff-hangers and, to general applause, shit out scripts.

  Andrea, Last of the Serranos

  Andrea is the last of the Serranos. His father was called Giaime, and he died of a heart attack when Andrea was just eleven. He remembers him as a great tree casting a long shadow. Like a big fish and a broad wake of bubbles. Never and never again would he ever have imagined the frailty of his solid heart. They lived in Milan, and they were so happy that they had no idea of it. That day, twenty-eight years earlier, the sky fell on the shoulders of his mother, who had blue eyes and was named Eleonora, affectionately called Nora, or by her loved ones Neretta, and because of that burden she began to shrink, shedding the pounds of all the smiles that had nourished her. She became a wandering soul, then a glass always full of cognac with sugar cubes, and finally an empty hug goodbye, leaving him and his older sister, sweet Alice, all alone.