by Pino Corrias
His mother died, overwhelmed by a sorrow that she could no longer combat, or that she had gotten tired of fighting, but giving them in those eight years of daily survival the certainty that they were loved—which is, after all, the only map needed to find the treasure of life.
Alice set sail in pursuit of a marine equipment designer who lived in Australia. She vanished, leaving behind her a cheerful shower of picture postcards every time she moved to a new Australian city or state, until the day that she announced she was getting married in Queensland, in a Baptist church made of light blue sheet steel. From that day forward, he’d hear from her only every time she popped out another baby.
Andrea chose cities on terra firma—Milan, London, Buenos Aires, Rome—even though his blood came from a big island, Sardinia, the place that had generated his family’s history, only eventually to wipe out all traces of it. He discovered that fact the day his cousin Marco took him to an out-of-the-way piazza in the city of Cagliari and pointed to a flower bed in the middle of it, and told him, “There, that’s where your house was, the home of the Serranos.”
“There, where?”
Ignoring the question, Marco continued to tell him about things that couldn’t be seen. “Your family bought and sold horses. You had land and stables. When the war broke out, the men left for the front, the women for the countryside. The horses were all requisitioned and butchered. Then came the bombing raids and all the rest vanished too.”
From that day on, the house of his past and the blood of his roots had become the air above a flower bed. And what little Andrea knew about his father vanished into that air. Including the way he swam, pushing aside masses of water. As if in that revelation of vanished places, he and his sister and his mother had also been liquefied, lost forever in a time that was no longer even nostalgia, but just a piazza full of traffic.
From that day forth, Andrea always lived alone. He learned to cook the bare necessities. He knows how to wait for sleep or a friend who’s gotten lost. He’s learned to travel to find his way home. He spent three years of his first life reading one detective novel a day. And three more years watching television until dawn, including the on-air auctions, the cooks, the quarreling couples, the drooling bodybuilders. As a young man, and later as an adult, he’s never feared death. After the deaths of his father and mother, however, he’s always feared memories. That’s why he’s never even thought of getting married, much less putting a child on this earth. He read Leskov’s The Enchanted Wanderer. He was stirred to emotion by Goya’s white clouds and the rain in Blade Runner. He learned to travel without money and to get drunk without a reason. He’s thrown punches in self-defense, to hurt others, to defeat fear, and for sheer pleasure. And he’s fallen in love for more or less the same set of reasons.
He’s built his lean physique by walking and swimming. And then he’s broken it back down by overdrinking. He’s studied life, judging it to be a largely messy affair, but one that needs to be worn with a certain elegant nonchalance. And as he’s studied it, he’s started to rewrite it. And as he’s rewritten it, he’s made it his work, one episode at a time, according to the grid of the handbooks: the hero’s challenge of life, the descent to the underworld, the return to the surface. Knowing that the three acts are almost never as important as the liberation of intermission in the theater, when the lights come back up, and you can see the faces of all the other audience members, including her face, and the ice cream vendors come through. To live in that moment of intermission is his dream.
Andrea Serrano is five foot eleven inches tall. He has black hair, combed back. His eyes are almond shaped, his face is hollow cheeked, his nose is narrow. He has fleshy lips, the dark skin of the sea-dwelling Sardinians, prominent veins and muscles on his neck. And a body that makes way for itself, when he walks for hours through the city in search of ideas for his neoromantic adventures.
In his free time, he’s always worked. He’s filled the rest of his time with love affairs that were more than just love affairs and girlfriends who were never just girlfriends, but also friends, confederates, and deep down, mirrors, in which they’d make themselves up, and the makeup was him. Until a certain evening five years ago, when the mirror broke once and for all.
It happens in Milan and it starts with the first ring of the telephone. It’s Luisa, a divorced blond biologist, who suffers from minor stress-generated headaches, but is proud of her large breasts and her body—a body that knows how to devour a man—until she eventually loses him. She doesn’t even say hello, she just asks him, “Do you mind telling me why you never call me?”
As Andrea is trying to come up with an adequate answer, he hears the beep of call waiting. His phone might lie there in silent slumber for hours at a time, but once the first phone call wakes it up, the others waste no time piling on. The second call is from the delectable Tereska, who comes from Prague, plays the cello, weeps every time she hears Mahler’s Symphony no. 4 in G major, has smooth skin, and expresses her love the way children and puppies do, eyes wide open: “My looove, are you there?” And at that exact same moment the downstairs intercom buzzes: it’s Francesca, who’s shouting through her tears, “I’m pregnant, asshole, will you buzz me up?”
He just can’t go on like that. He should have thought of it before, but that night, unequivocally, he realized that being loved without loving in return is a miserable condition. And so he consoled Luisa, said farewell to Tereska, waited with Francesca for the negative results of the pregnancy test, but didn’t stick around to hear her justifications for having made the whole thing up. The decision to leave that life behind him must also have influenced, through some mysterious channels, the real estate management company that sent him a registered letter informing him that the apartment building would be undergoing a renovation, the condominium fees were going to double, and if he couldn’t pay he’d be evicted. Just one week later it was his agent’s turn: the man was named Massimiliano Testa, and he usually wore life like an ascot, but instead he showed up with a face that looked like a floor rag, his hands in his pockets, and his eyes downcast, to tell him that Giorgio, his boyfriend, had gone back home to his wife, the literary agency was teetering with debt, and he was thinking about leaving for San Francisco, where he planned to become a piano player in a bordello.
Saturation had triggered a wide-scale, generalized weariness. The weariness had stimulated loneliness. The loneliness, thoughts.
For many years, Andrea navigated his way across the surface of life that way, and was perfectly satisfied. He’d constructed that existence during the tough years of his adolescence, while fate was chewing up his family. Then came his time at the university, studying literature, only to quit in utter contempt, followed by months of insomnia, and grueling trips through Greece, Morocco, and the Balearic Islands. After all that cutting, wounding sunlight, he finally allowed himself to be won over by the gray hues of London, a city he explored for a solid year, living for the first six months in a thoroughly beatnik hovel in Camden Town, a bartender by night and a poet by day, full of beer and dreams, with only Dylan Thomas’s starry skies to comfort him. But then he climbed straight up to the dizzying heights of a luxurious penthouse in Chelsea—the guest of a young woman, Jane Allison, who had been using a camcorder to film faces on the Underground in order to devise an encyclopedia of the world, and had extracted him from that world. At the time he had been twenty-one, with a clean-shaven head and a powerful physique, and would take hour-and-a-half runs along the Regent’s Canal, past the zoo, do fifty pull-ups, jump rope, work the heavy bag, and occasionally get into brawls in pubs with the troublemakers of Tottenham.
Jane Allison was beautiful, elegant, and gleaming like a young doe. She was a banker’s daughter. But she was shooting up heroin twice a day, and it inundated her eyes with light and her heart with an irreparable emptiness.
Andrea hadn’t gone to London to save her, he’d gone to save himself. He dumped her, along with her two-bit artistic videos, and her Chel
sea penthouse. He took a job that he’d found in the Guardian’s classified ads selling prosthetic limbs and medical devices. He saw other bits of real life. Among them the sweet, sweet eyes of Susan, who was forty years old and had been living for the previous five in a wheelchair in one of those little one-story red brick houses that fill the suburbs of Chiswick, where he had gone to deliver replacement parts for certain defective wheelchair gearings.
Susan had been a high school chemistry teacher until the day that the father of one of her Arab students had thrown her down the stairs. The man had told her he was in love with her, but she’d turned him down, and with just one punch he’d knocked her into a whole different life.
Andrea was enchanted by her eyes, by her face, which bore none of the marks of rancor. Susan lived alone, read Emily Dickinson, rooted for Arsenal. She offered him a cup of tea. Then some marijuana, which she’d gotten from the Jamaicans in Brixton and which made your head spin like an amusement park ride. When the evening lights turned on, she asked him if she could undo his trousers, look at him naked, caress his body and the youth that had abandoned her once and for all. And she did it with a maddening slowness, sticking her head between his legs, sniffing at him, kissing him. And then explaining to him how to take her in his arms, lay her out on the bed, slip into her, but gently, a little at a time, seizing her lips in his.
Their relationship lasted for three months. Andrea took half an hour on the Underground or two hours by car to go and see her. But every time he got there, the sorrow stored up in that house seemed insurmountable. She realized it and, to bid him farewell, she let him come in and find her naked on the bed, with a tie around her neck, a dinner of sugary fritters, and a gift of a T-shirt that said ITALIANS DO IT BETTER. And when it came time to say goodbye, she didn’t shed a tear.
Leaving London behind him, Andrea returned to Italy for a year. He tried teaching, selling insurance, writing entries for the Encyclopedia of Art. He’d seen Bob Rafelson’s Five Easy Pieces and he’d learned from Jack Nicholson to wear black turtlenecks, light-colored corduroy jackets, pipestem trousers. And he’d also learned to think that by moving constantly from place to place he too would be able to escape whatever it was that was going wrong.
He left for Buenos Aires, where one of his best friends, Paul Carezza, had opened a restaurant facing the Plaza República de Paraguay, in the Recoleta neighborhood. But the tango and the tragic love affairs that inhabit the hearts of Argentine women wound up consuming all his good will in less than four months. Transforming it into nostalgia, yearning for home.
The Police Blotter at Night
Milan gave him a way out. At the last afternoon daily still eking out an existence, they were looking for a beat reporter to cover the police blotter at night. The managing editor was a guy he’d met in Camden Town one evening when the young Anglo Pakistanis, in the aftermath of a brutal murder of one of their compatriots, were roaming the streets with cricket bats, on the hunt for white prey. Andrea had run into him and rescued him as he wandered the neighborhood like a terrified target. He had said to him, “Are you Italian? Stay close to me.” He’d led him down secondary streets, while cars were being set afire on the main thoroughfares. He’d kept him from running, he’d calmed him down. The guy was called Daniele Barbieri, and that night he reeked of sweat, adrenaline, and fear. And the next day, he’d handed him his business card as a managing editor, wrapping his arms around him and telling him that he owed him his life.
In exchange for that life, a year later Andrea walked through the front door of the newsroom to offer him his own. Daniele welcomed him as a fellow veteran of a war they’d fought together. He became a beat reporter on probation. He started with a dog show, the inauguration of a neighborhood hospice, the story of an aging comedian who had attempted suicide but had failed even at that. But when it came time to cover his first murder, Andrea Serrano discovered his true calling. It was a story of Calabrian gang wars, a father and a son playing cards in a bar in Cesano Boscone, when two guys pull up on a motorcycle wearing full face helmets and lay them out with fifteen shots, and then tell everyone else, frozen to their chairs, “You talk, you die.”
The story got him six installments about the ’Ndrangheta in Milan, a few threatening phone calls, and a full-time contract. From that moment, he started spending time under the fluorescent lights of police headquarters. He learned to recognize the cop’s slow footsteps, the lies of suspects, the smells of apartments that had been visited by the flaming tail of crime reporters. And he learned that there’s nothing better at keeping readers’ lives alive than someone else’s death.
At last, he found he liked that black and white. It was a good way to simplify the world: good and evil, the innocent and the guilty. He worked at night. He didn’t sleep much. He earned good money. He fell in love with newly graduated lawyers, policewomen, emergency room doctors, and fellow broadcast journalists from local television stations. It was one of them—the pretty Ginevra Oliva who wore Prada and came with her own mirror—who taught him that navigating the surface certainly didn’t mean you were superficial, but rather “deep in a different way.” It was possible to tell the tale of an entire life in just eighteen lines, and the reasons for a murder in a forty-second news broadcast. It was possible to spend time with other people’s bad blood without ever turning bad oneself. It was possible to stitch up other people’s wounds without carrying the scars. All one had to do was make one’s way through the operating rooms of life along the right trajectory, the trajectory of the surgeon or the anesthesiologist. And when the day was over, say goodnight to everyone. Get out of there. Carry your private life out of the newsroom. And if possible, lie down to sleep next to a person who cares for you but asks nothing much more. And then go away in time.
He decided he liked that strategy. He perfected it—after Ginevra—with Carla Risi, the anatomical pathologist; Sabrina Sideri, the lawyer; Marina Zani, his colleague at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It entailed detachment. It entailed silent overall views.
And he wound up perfecting it during his only journey into a genuine war zone, a month that he spent in the black-and-white slaughterhouse of Grozny, Chechnya, where the Russian militia castrated separatists and watched them bleed to death, as they smoked Sobranie cigarettes and drank vodka. It was all so cruel, so violent, so intolerable, that his everyday life filled him with an unexpected tranquility and, for the very first time, as he looked at himself in the mirror in a dreary hotel room at the foot of the mountains of Dagestan, it suggested to him the full awareness of that detached gaze—which he redubbed the Neutral Working Expression, borrowing it from the members of the French Foreign Legion, veterans of the massacres in Indochina—that he would don from now on to watch the operetta of his own first world.
His newspaper job lasted eight years and brought him a regular series of raises, some savings, a book of noirish short stories titled When Blood Becomes Printer’s Ink, the purchase of a romantic garret apartment on Via Scarlatti, near the central train station, an immense archive of armed robberies, murders, and deliriums, which he tended the way you do in coal mines and sentimental quarries, excavating more and more new tunnels, shoring up the old ones, but always keeping an eye on the light of the exit to make sure you’re never trapped by the overwhelming darkness.
When the newspaper folded due to a lack of readers, Andrea turned down a new position. He’d had enough of fluorescent lights, bitter coffee, policemen who show you their Beretta 7.65 and a photograph of their girlfriend. That’s to say nothing of the grim atmosphere that you could already sense in all the newsrooms, the first signs of decline, the restructuring plans, the new editors in chief chosen because they knew which knives and forks to use at dinner, the publishers with their crushing debt loads and the favors they needed to repay.
He had met Massimiliano Testa, the literary agent, and a couple of producers who were decently impassioned aficionados of the movies and bank accounts. Everyone was looking for television t
reatments; they paid well and they paid promptly. They too wanted their surfaces in black and white with a dusting of basic emotions—hatred and love, friendship and vendetta—to keep the gears turning. He said okay and his story started all over again from scratch, this time as a writer of multiple lives destined for millions of eyes.
In that new Milanese life punctuated by a regular order that reassured him—writing from the early morning until five in the afternoon, walking, reading, doing a hundred abdominal crunches a day, turning in at the end of every month, picking up a paycheck at the end of every month—the usual emotional chaos began to build up again, aggravated, this time, by his condition of solitude, which is the fate of all professional screenwriters. Sailing into that chaos came Luisa, Tereska, and Francesca. Each of them along a trajectory that wound up derailing into the two others due to lack of space, due to lack of time, due to lack of care. The epilogue hit him first as a revelation of the state of his emotions, and then suggested to him the possibility of considering those three final relationships as simply the beginning of a new series.
Once again, it was time to leave.
Falling in Love with Rome
Five years ago Rome spread out before him on his arrival. The city had introduced him to the rest of the world that manufactures stories in series. Many writers, with considerable talent and surprising imaginations, many directors enamored of the gaze. Actors with soul, actresses with the fire of their calling. But together with them, also the clamoring crowd that Oscar Martello calls the “Superworld of La Dolce Roma,” its inhabitants armed with tooth and claw and secrets to be used as so much ammunition. Sometimes dangerous, sometimes amusing.
All of them on the march—politicians in gray tweed, writers with performance anxiety, television functionaries with headaches, directors with penthouses, producers with lovers on the side, lovers with developer husbands building subdivisions, builders and developers with loan sharks, loan sharks with politicians in gray tweed—to conquer something, anything to keep them far away from all that outlying sprawl that they still can’t help seeing as they drive past it. Sprawl punctuated with vast barracks-like apartment houses and acres of garbage, long lines at bus stops, hardworking immigrants, panhandling immigrants, broken sidewalks, old men who walk along hugging the walls, children, mothers, and fathers all wearing the same synthetic tracksuits, the same rubber track shoes, fat bodied and skinny gazed, marching down the elegant Via del Corso on Sunday afternoons.