by Pino Corrias
That was when she chose which side of the road she would work. Having learned just how to settle the hash of the vast numbers of her penniless tenants, how to fight with the tax authorities, how to grease the palms of the bureaucracy, how to see through the fog of the ordinary world, she realized she was finally ready to run the extraordinary world of cinema, where everyone tries to cheat everyone else, with the excuse that they all consider themselves past masters of make-believe. Including the supreme instance of it: that they’re in it for the art, and not for the greed of money and mirrors.
She opened her first office as a movie agent with Diego Locatelli, a Milanese advertising executive, an expert in casting and smuggling cash to numbered Swiss bank accounts, so useful for depositing undeclared income from movie contracts. And then she got pregnant. But the baby girl she had inside of her, whom she planned to call Ophelia, imagining her as lovely as her old rag doll, failed to survive a terrible night of contractions and bleeding at the start of her fourth month, leaving Milly so alone, so empty, that even the mere presence of José Bautista, his body, his stupid screenplays about cowpokes with handguns, became intolerable to her. And so she finally sent him away—even though he loved her and had done nothing wrong—offering as a sole consolation the fact that she kept his wonderful, lovely surname. It was during those months that she started eating sweets, bingeing drunkenly on colorful finger pastries and perfumed custards, just as she had dreamed of doing during the luminous days of the pastry shop, and suffering unexpected bouts of depression. During the longest of those bouts, she decided to give in to the desires of her body and let herself go. She began to put on weight, dye her hair purple, dress up in cyberpunk and grunge style, buying rags for two thousand pounds in London’s finest boutiques. Drinking small Camparis during the day. Sampling men and women during the night (“So I’m bisexual, what of it?”) and putting them back in the box the next morning. Keeping a couple of grams of coke on hand for emotional emergencies, tucked away in the little amber turtle she wore around her neck. This change of lifestyle worked out well. She became an eccentric personality of the Roman nights, a perennial party guest who had known how to transform her waning beauty into a character, and thus remain magically desirable to men, and even more so to women, especially the younger and more insecure ones.
Over the years, she had saved up enough money to buy the pastry shop on Corso Trieste where she’d once worked. And after that, four more. Changing her mind once and for all about solitude: no longer the source of every ill and ache of the heart, but an unrivaled palliative, an open door to the world, a meadow across which to gallop her daily vendetta, which fed on two sentiments: contempt for the weak and hatred for the strong. And one rock-solid certainty: defense of her territory, which meant her apartments, the pastry shops, and her movie agency. That is why she surrounded herself with lawyers and dogs, both trained to bite. But for certain special matters, she preferred to use her own teeth. And Oscar Martello fell into that category.
“They say that our movie is half baked,” she told him.
“What do you mean ours? It’s my movie.”
“It may be yours, but they say it’s never going to take off.”
“Oh, really? And just who says that?”
The music forces them to stand very close, Oscar and Milly, as if they were fond of each other.
“Rumors.”
“Pay no attention to rumors, Milly. That movie is sharp as a sword, a surefire hit.”
Milly blows out her cheeks and then exhales. “No, please, I’m begging you, don’t you go saying ‘sharp as a sword’ too! I’ve heard this thing with the sword a million times.”
“And where did you hear it, darling, at the orphanage?”
“No, dickhead, I’ve heard it from con artist producers like you who don’t know how to choose a story, pick the wrong directors, and then when the movie goes belly up, put all the blame on my actors.”
“Relax. The movie is fine: once it starts, you can’t look away. And Jacaranda is great in it.”
“I knew that before you told me. You still owe her a final payment, and don’t forget it.”
“How could I forget it with you there to remind me every twelve hours?”
“Then pay up.”
Oscar crosses his forefingers over his lips as if to say, I promise!, but his eyes are telling a completely different story. They say, I’m never in a hurry, to pay or to die.
For an instant, the DJ halts the electronic tempest of strings and percussion. A gap opens up in which voices, clinking glasses, and laughter emerge, and Andrea jumps in. “Now let’s have something to drink, and then maybe we can take a spin around.”
“There, that’s right, enjoy the party,” says Milly.
“What are we celebrating?” asks Andrea.
“The beginning of summer, sweetheart. The full moon. And the fact that we’re still alive.”
Jacaranda in the Aquarium
Three vodkas later, Andrea is still greeting men and women lounging on the perimeters of the scene. Mirko Pace, the second-ranking muckraker, walks past, with his usual smart-ass demeanor, his sideburns sculpted into arches, and his skin well done from baking in the UV-ray solarium, a habit he’s never lost since his days of penniless deprivation, when he read Novella 2000, dreamed of becoming a reality TV bachelor, and still lived in the Giambellino neighborhood. Now he gets his tans at the Parioli Sport Village, which is even worse. For this evening he’s wearing a silver jacket, an unbuttoned gray shirt, skintight black trousers, a gold Rolex, and an indeterminate number of bracelets and tattoos. As he strolls past Andrea he gives him a wink and a thumbs-up; he looks like a caricature but he’s dead serious. Once he’s close enough, he imparts his moral support with a knowing smile. “I always said you were a winner.”
Andrea eyes him in bafflement. Then it dawns on him: Oscar must have let slip the fact that Andrea’s fucking Jacaranda and that before long there’ll be something meaty they can sink their teeth into. Andrea stays in character. Aided by the vodka and everything he’s had to drink during dinner, he nods his head to show he’s caught the reference and underscores it by acting vague. “How’s life these days?”
“Never as good as it is for you. Maybe one of these days we can have a little chat with my partner.” And since Andrea continues to gaze at him impassively, he adds, “In the strictest privacy.”
“With you and your partner, only in the presence of my lawyer.”
It’s an old line, but Mirko Pace pretends to guffaw heartily. “And just who would your lawyer be? Old man Martello?”
“No, why would you think that? He doesn’t defend me. If anything, he’s my ball and chain.” Again, they laugh heartily together. And for both of them it means that the conversation is over.
Andrea moves on. He’s looking for a bathroom. But all the bathrooms are packed with people humping, snorting, snapping selfies, and fixing their makeup. He manages to find a tiny, empty one, though. He makes use of it. Then he stumbles into the main kitchen, the big one, with reggae music at low volume, where everyone’s standing up, average age of twenty, swaying and eating all sorts of things, curry meatballs, biscotti, salami, yogurt, pickled onions, chocolate puddings. And they chew, with the assistance of their youthful metabolisms. And they gulp. And they drink.
It’s getting late and he still hasn’t found her. He glimpses Oscar in an area of sofas surrounded by hands and laughter. He skirts around different densities of crowd. He needs air and silence. He steps out into the garden, amid milky lights and couples concealed in the shrubbery, who snort, whisper, and drug themselves in blessed peace. The full moon riding high in the sky as always surprises and enchants him, just as it did when he was a little boy and imagined sailing up there by magic, closing his eyes. He starts down a path made of sand and stones and lined with palm trees that runs around the dark side of the villa, where the trees end and you can hear the backwash of the waves. On that side he finds a large sliding-glass door that
finally offers a patch of silence. He enters a study shrouded in shadows, decorated with maps on the walls and shelves filled with books, and in the center of the room, an immense blue aquarium, illuminated by a shower of white pearls, bubbles of air rising in single file through the clear water, past colorful waltzing fish.
Jacaranda appears in that instant. She materializes on the far side of the aquarium glass, caressed by the shifting shadows of that sea in a box, making her face undulate. He remembered her with the long red hair from her last movie. Instead now, it’s back to her real hair: blond, short, brushed back. Her eyes are still honey colored, the color that the pulps call “Jacaranda gold,” and they’re focusing on him from a distance that’s not entirely attainable.
“Are you ready to go on set?” he asks her with a smile, doing his best to close that distance.
She leaps over it. “I don’t like this story.”
She has a lovely voice, but a nasty tone that suggests alarm, fragility, hesitation. Andrea has heard it somewhere before, he can’t remember where, but he knows what causes it: psychopharmaceuticals. She looks around. She’s beautiful even though she’s not smiling. “I still can’t figure out why I accepted. I’d hoped I was through with Oscar, and instead he always manages to pin my back to the wall.”
He tries to give her a hand, tugging her away from that wall. “We’re just going on a trip, all expenses paid. And when we get back, everyone is going to want to take your picture, interview you, and offer you stacks of scripts.”
“Is that how you see it?”
“I look on the positive side of things.”
“The negative side would be that, as usual, that prick Oscar wants to use me to trick everyone.”
“Why as usual?”
She hesitates. “That’s how he uses people. And then dumps them.”
Andrea feels like an idiot, but he goes ahead and says it. “Well, the movies do the same thing.”
She contradicts him, but nonchalantly. “The movies are something that resembles a game. Oscar isn’t a game. He’s a . . . mean person.” Once again, that catch in her voice that promises nothing good: neurosis, insecurity, trouble. And, naturally, Xanax in steady doses over time to fill holes of different sizes in the space of the soul. He supposes that perhaps Jacaranda is just a little more fucked up than expected. Or else she’s under greater pressure than one might be led to think. Her fragility reinforces him, to an entirely unexpected degree, eliminating all his sense of uncertainty. “How about we do it like this: we’re on the set of our movie. Now you and I start acting and we leave. After all, Paris is a better destination than Lamezia Terme, don’t you think?”
She ignores the wisecrack. “Is it time already?”
“It’s midnight. We’ve got a thousand miles to cover, heading due north, even if no one’s coming after us. We have no baggage, we have no appointments. We’ve got a nice apartment waiting for us in Paris, and maybe even a ride up to the top of the Eiffel Tower.”
She looks at him with a slight intensity of focus, one of those gazes in which you see a person for the first time. “Romantic.”
“So it would seem.”
“But it’s a script. And I’ve had better.”
“Maybe together we can improve it.” And he immediately regrets saying it.
She has other things on her mind. “And Milly?”
“What about Milly?”
“Am I supposed to leave without saying anything to her? She’s my agent.”
“No one can know anything about it. We’ll leave and that’s that. Unless you came here in your own car.”
“I don’t own a car. And I don’t even have a driver’s license.” She says it in an irresistibly bitchy tone. Except that an instant later, a goldfish appears in the cobalt aquarium that separates them and spins around, scattering reflections across her face, which, for the first time, seems to open into a smile. She draws closer. Now he can finally see all of her: she’s wearing a long silk dress, clinging to her lithe body, with a pattern of pastels, largely pink and white, like Maggie Cheung in the movie In the Mood for Love.
She notices his glance. She says, “I know, I can’t go to Paris looking like this, people will think I’ve lost my mind.”
“Fuck, you could have thought of that before.”
“Well, I didn’t.”
He ignores her tone. “We’ll take care of it. Are you ready?”
To Be on a Trip, To Be in a Film
They’ve turned off their cell phones. They’re walking down the halls of the huge villa toward the music, the pulsing lights, and the living rooms. They angle across them diagonally, ignoring the noise and the crowd that surges and darts, like schools of fish.
Jacaranda has found her handbag, and now she’s tailing after Andrea toward the door. He turns to her and says, “Wait for me here.”
He goes back into one of the first bedrooms, where the jackets and coats are piled high. He chooses a jacket in amaranthine red leather, evaluates it to guess the size, empties the pockets. He fishes out a black shawl and a small Panama hat, made of pink and white straw. When they leave, he has her try on the hat and jacket, which fit her perfectly. “Where we’re going, it’s going to be colder.” Then he takes her by the hand. They walk quickly past the parked cars. The Jaguar lights up like an ingot out of Goldfinger. As the tires slip on the asphalt, they sail past the bodyguard fast asleep on a chair. The gate is wide open, the engine sings, ahead of them nothing but pavement and moonlight.
Four hours later: empty service plaza, except for the two of them sitting at the counter and a sleepy waitress.
Jacaranda has just taken a Xanax. He’s had a double espresso. Now she’s as dazed and soft as a little girl. “Do you know where we are?”
“I told you: in a movie.”
“No, seriously.”
“In Versilia. On our left is the sea, on our right the Apuan Alps. Follow your nose and in six hundred miles, Paris.”
“And now what’s going to happen?”
“The boy and the girl are going to keep on running away.”
She thinks it over. “From what?”
“From life.”
“Oh, yes, that would be nice.”
“I was just kidding.”
Her eyes narrow like twin fissures, and she forces a smile. “I wasn’t.”
“I know practically nothing about your life, except for your work.”
She’s looking elsewhere and thinking about who knows what. Then she notices him again, and says, “It’s better that way.”
Andrea goes off to wash his face; she’s wearing him out as much as the trip is. When he gets back, Jacaranda is gone.
He waits for her, guessing that she’s in the restroom. Then he goes to check: it’s empty. He asks the waitress. The waitress awakens from her lethargy. “I’ve seen your girlfriend before. She’s an actress . . . she’s a singer, isn’t that right?”
Andrea ignores the question. “She’s not my girlfriend. Did you see her leave?”
The waitress rings up his bill and ignores what he said. “There’s no one else here now.”
He sets off down the aisles through shelves of colorful boxes, emerges into the warm air. The emptiness surprises him, as if it were produced by the sudden lack of something.
Cars rush past in the distance, cutting their way through the night with a wedge of light; those too are lives in transit. All of them with an appointment to keep, or else to leave behind. He watches them and considers that he’s among those heading no place, even if his place is called Paris, is called Cinema. Paid to act out a strange story without a finale, where no one counts the miles to be deducted or even the emotions, for that matter, but only the deceits to be tacked on. Then he decides that alcohol plays nasty tricks when it fades: it clogs your heart with bad thoughts. And in fact, he’d be happy just to find out where that turd has gone to ground so they can leave and he can stop thinking them.
He finds her stretched out in the back
seat, wrapped in the amaranthine red jacket and the black shawl, already fast asleep. She has the face of a little girl, and a look of sweet dreams that he gazes down on for a while until his annoyance subsides.
Part Two
* * *
PARIS, OR ANYWHERE
Very Separate Rooms
He was dazed by the fifteen hours of driving, plus three hours of sleep in a Swiss motel with a scalding-hot shower, followed by a gorgeous afternoon driving through the green and blue hills of Chablis. She was worse off than him, caught in a spiral of sleep and wakefulness, freshly squeezed orange juice and vodka, pills for anything you got, an obsession with the complete works of Amy Winehouse, the loveliest and most unsettling and warm voice of the entire European division of addicts and alkies who died of bad living, songs fished out of the Jaguar’s audio menu. And she started the playlist over every time it came to an end, without even the slightest courtesy of asking Andrea whether he’d had enough of that languid death on the installment plan.