We'll Sleep When We're Old

by Pino Corrias

  A shiver runs through all the journalists who are drinking, chewing, and jotting down notes. All of them exchange glances, a little bewildered at the idea that they may have to handle a slightly more serious story than the usual, inoffensive bullshit with which each of them fills their pages and their lives.

  They cluster around Oscar the oracle in a semicircle. And, ignoring all the other actors from the cast, hoisted aboard as background scenery, the most zealous reporters venture questions suitable to the occasion: “Can you tell us where Rizzi is?”

  “Has she been threatened?”

  “Is it true that she’s left the country?”

  “Are we sure that this isn’t a publicity stunt?” (“Ah, no! Now I’m insulted, how dare you think such a thing?”)

  “Today the War & Peace agency posted that this is a sort of elopement. What’s the real story?”

  Oscar plays the mystery card and pontificates like a wise old man: “The truth, the truth! The truth is always ambiguous, always presumed, you all are journalists, you ought to know that.” And as he says it, he pours drinks for them all, doing his best to get them drunk, to balance on the razor-thin line of uncertainty, to keep all the fires burning under the fat ass of a movie that, with all the kerosene he’s been dumping on it, sooner or later is going to have to heat up.

  Lea Lori, the film critic whom he keeps on his expense roster (even though she’s “a toilet with pedals,” as he told Andrea one day: “In the old days, I only paid the most fabulous pieces of pussy. And now look at me. I’m clearly getting old.”), did her job on the blog that she writes every day, in her description of the “power of this film, based on the rough nature of the story that smacks of the crime pages. A work of cinema that occupies a worthwhile space in the realm of what we call democratic filmmaking, but without the tedium of the so-called auteur school.” A specific critique meant for idiots, given the gross defects of the plot, but one that would exert its influence, shaping the judgment of other anemic or simply lazy critical minds, which, not knowing what to think for themselves, would simply think with the well-coiffed little head of Lea Lori. And Lea Lori thus ensured her daughter’s job security for another six months.

  After the umpteenth round of bottles, giggles, lies, and insipid questions, Oscar declares the boat trip over. “But we never even set sail!” objects one of the journalists, who had knotted a silk scarf around his neck for the maritime occasion.

  Oscar turns around, trying to imagine what right that complete nothing of an ink-dabbler thinks he has to expect a ride on his boat. “Friend, I have to work for the Italian cinema. But if you want to take a ride, stay on board. Go ahead and fill up the tank, it’s only fifteen hundred gallons.”

  Revelations at Dinner

  On their sixth Parisian afternoon, while back in Italy No, I Won’t Surrender! has opened wide on four hundred screens, Andrea and Jacaranda strolled and chatted. She hasn’t taken pills, neither of them has had too much to drink. Night has fallen. Over the darker streets of Saint-Germain all the stars have flickered on. And they have walked in among the mirrors of the Brasserie Lipp to sit at one of the little tables that give you the illusion of having everything within reach, tenderness, food, the city. And sometimes, even the world.

  An instant before sitting down, she took off her amaranthine red leather jacket, and the new white T-shirt she was wearing left uncovered her collarbone and her sternum all the way up to the swell of her breasts. The warm light of the dining room highlighted the cornice of her blond hair, the fine, regular features of her face, the gold chain dancing around her neck. As he looked at her, he could make out the pores of her skin, the fine blond fuzz, backlit, and the regular wave of her breathing that seemed to lull her in that instant of unique, never-again perfection.

  They ordered steamed fish, julienned vegetables, and a dry white wine. They felt good, they were hungry. They were on the same wavelength.

  They told each other about the most beautiful places on earth they’d each seen. For Jacaranda those were the Punta della Dogana in Venice, on a sunny day with a cold northwest wind, and the top of the Empire State Building, at night, in June.

  “Why in June?” he asked her.

  And she answered, laughing, “Otherwise, you freeze to death.”

  For Andrea, it’s Torres del Paine, in Chilean Patagonia, in the warmest month of the year, January, and without wind. At sunset, when the granite turns red.

  “What else? Tell me another,” she asked him, like a little girl.

  “Any table in any restaurant in Paris, looking into your eyes.”

  She burst into laughter, threw a crust of bread at him, and asked, “And they pay you to dream up this crap?”

  “Not as much as I’d like.”

  Jacaranda told him that she lived for a whole year in Venice, perhaps the loveliest year of her life, in spite of the fact that she had a boring, jealous boyfriend.

  “The architect?”

  “Yes. I’ve always admired architects. Some of them are geniuses.”

  “And was your architect a genius?”

  “I don’t know, maybe. But instead of looking at the world, he read too many books and constantly called his mother on the phone.”

  “Mothers ruin the world.”

  “Architects are even worse.”

  “How did you become an actress?”

  She had probably answered that question a million times before, but she’s thoughtful enough to make it seem like the first time. “Half of the blame goes to my aunt Dora. And half of it was my own choice. By taking me away from that boarding school and saving my life, she introduced me to the theater. In Milan, Strehler was still around, in Rome, Gassman. Lots of things were circulating: ideas, scripts, dinner parties. Those were creative years. In the end, I chose to attend the Rome Film Academy. And that’s how the rumba began.”

  “Don’t you like what you are?”

  “I like the work. I hate everything that surrounds it.”

  “Maybe the two things are connected.”

  “In what sense?”

  “At the circus, before going on, and at the end of each performance, you need a lot of sand to clean up.”

  The waiter brings the fish and the mayonnaise. He fills their glasses and then vanishes.

  It’s at that moment that their talk heads in the direction they were both expecting. She looks at Andrea meaningfully. “I know where you’re trying to steer the conversation.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Toward your friend, Oscar Martello, the sand king.”

  “We also got interrupted before making the deep dive.”

  “Maybe because I didn’t trust you.”

  “And now you trust me?”

  “Maybe the time has come to tell you what I know about him.”

  If there had been a spotlight in the shadowy dining room of the Brasserie Lipp, this would be the moment to turn it on. Good actress that she is, she senses it. And good screenwriter that he is, he sees it.

  “I’m listening. I’ve heard lots of backbiting about him. Most of it has to do with his manners, his arrogance, and his money.”

  Jacaranda drinks and thinks it over. “What I have to say about him isn’t backbiting, it’s his story. You’ve known him for five years, I’ve known him for twenty.”

  “Really? You never told me that before.”

  She fails to catch the irony; she’s too focused on what she’s reviewing in her mind’s eye and recounting. And the sorrow that she’s experiencing. “My aunt was a close friend of Eusebio Reverberi, the producer, maybe she’d even had an affair with him, I never really knew. I remember him from when I was a girl, he’d come over for lunch on Sundays; he’d always bring a box of pastries. And I remember when his henchman first showed up, your friend.”

  “He was his driver.”

  “He was his everything, he was always underfoot, at lunch, at dinner, even after dinner.”

  “That’s just his personality.”


  “No, he was studying him. And you know why? To learn everything he could from him, starting with how you make a movie. So then he could get rid of him and take everything he possessed, ideas, friends, and contacts. Until one day, he actually did.”

  “What day?”

  “The day they arrested Eusebio. Did Oscar never tell you about it?”

  “Yes. He told me that the police staged a raid at the crack of dawn. They were looking for accounting documents. Instead they found cocaine, an unregistered pistol, and an underage female.”

  “Nonsense. The police weren’t looking for accounting documents. They were there because an anonymous phone tip had come in to police headquarters. Guess who made the phone call?”

  Andrea isn’t sure he really wants to know. “Do I have to guess?”

  “His lackey and your friend, Oscar Martello.”

  “How can you say such a thing? You were just a little girl.”

  “No, I wasn’t a little girl, I was sixteen years old, exactly half my age now.”

  A doubt crosses his mind. “How do you happen to know all these things?”

  She turns her gaze away, the way she did in the bathtub. Then she turns back and stares at him. “Because that day at dawn the police weren’t looking for Eusebio, much less his invoices or anything of the sort. They were looking for me.”

  The room spins around once. Jacaranda’s face comes out deformed for an instant, before resuming its normal appearance.

  “In what sense were they looking for you?”

  “I was the underage female.”

  “Fuck. That was you?”

  “Don’t start getting ideas. And wipe that look off your face. Eusebio was three times my age; I wasn’t fucking him. I wasn’t doing anything with him. And I wasn’t naked in his bed, the way they said in the papers. I was in the guest room.” She looks at her plate, but what she sees is the scene from back then, she hears the sound of excited voices, slamming doors. Then she breathes, “My name was kept out of the news. And in all these years, it’s never emerged.”

  Andrea needs something more to drink. He pours some for her too. “Go on.”

  “When the police broke in, I was asleep. The shouting woke me up. I came out of my bedroom in sheer terror, wrapped in a sheet. Eusebio was in the hallway, wearing a pair of ridiculous red briefs, bare chested, his face as white as a ghost. But since he wanted to reassure me, he threw his arms around me. Some policewoman started shouting and someone took me into another room and told me not to move. That’s where the misunderstanding arose. The newspapers built quite a story out of it.”

  “And how does Oscar fit in?”

  “The cops went straight to the coke, found it with no difficulty at all, it was in a box of salt. And the handgun was in a wooden box, behind some books. Eusebio was positive that it was Oscar who informed them of every detail with that anonymous phone call. I told you: to ruin him and take his place.”

  Andrea tries to resist this revelation. “The fact that you’re convinced something is true doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s actually true.”

  “It all fits together. Including the fact that Eusebio was planning to fire him for that very reason, he felt he was being spied upon. He had told my aunt that he wanted to get rid of him once and for all because he’d noticed that the man was devouring his life. Little by little, he was taking over everything.”

  “When he got out of prison, he really did fire him. But then he died from a heart attack. What did Oscar have to do with that?”

  “Everything. The last coke he ever snorted was coke Oscar bought for him. As always. But when they autopsied Eusebio’s corpse, it turned out that the coke was insanely pure: a chemical time bomb.”

  Andrea thinks it over and decides that the plot holds together. So does the motive. “Still, though, fuck: the pistol, the cocaine, the orgies, maybe your friend Reverberi kind of asked for it, don’t you think?”

  “He was no saint. He was a bandit himself, like almost everyone, but unlike Oscar he wasn’t a bad man.”

  They practically haven’t touched their food. On the other hand, they’ve finished their wine and ordered another bottle. The waiter comes over, looking worried: “Is something wrong?”

  Of course not. Everything’s fine. I’m on an all-expenses-paid vacation to arrange a piece of cinematic fraud, on the payroll of an unscrupulous producer who used an underage girl and a batch of superpure cocaine to screw a friend, and he did it so ruthlessly that he might have even become his friend’s murderer. And that murderer has been my best friend.

  “It doesn’t add up.”

  “Oh, yes, it does.”

  “Then tell me why sixteen years later he decided to cast you in his movie.”

  Jacaranda shakes her head to underline the simplicity of the answer. “Because he didn’t remember me. And because in the meantime, I changed my name.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “But it’s true. Nobody knows it, but I’m legally registered as Maria. Maria Rizzi is my legal name. Jacaranda came later.”

  “Maria is a beautiful name.”

  “At age twenty I didn’t think so, I wanted an artistic name.”

  “At age twenty people do a lot of stupid things.”

  “And plus back then my hair was red. I’ve changed. There’s nothing left to link me to that night. Which no longer even exists, no one remembers it now. Except for me and Oscar.”

  “Then what are you doing in his movie?”

  She hesitates, then says, “That story has obsessed me my whole life. I intend to resolve it.”

  At the table of the Brasserie Lipp, sitting in that tiny portion of the world, Jacaranda is facing her past to try to change her future.

  But Andrea is still opposing resistance; he doesn’t want to give in to that reconstruction of the facts. “If his plan, Oscar’s plan, was to ruin your friend Reverberi and take his place, he’d already done it by sending him to prison. What need was there to kill him?”

  “Maybe he didn’t mean to kill him, but he arranged for it to happen, with the coke, with the stress, with the scandal. As for his reasons, he had an endless array of them. He wanted to rub out his old life and the smell of sweat that it had cost him. He knew that after he got out of prison, Eusebio would fire him and ruin his reputation. And all his dreams would end before they even began: no films, no money, nothing at all.”

  No matter which way you turn it in search of a way out or another explanation, Jacaranda’s reconstruction is based on pretty solid evidence. And when Andrea tells her, “I have a hard time imagining Oscar as a murderer,” the exact opposite idea actually surfaces in his mind. “Does he know about you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Have you talked about it?”

  “I did, but only when we were done filming.”

  “And how did he react?”

  “He turned pale, he told me that he didn’t remember a thing. He said that he always puts the past in the cellar. But he was acting to conceal his fright. He knows that I know the truth.”

  “And what do you have in mind?”

  “I told you already. I want to get free of this thing. I want to do it for myself, for Eusebio, to tell everyone who thinks they know him who Oscar Martello really is.”

  “If you’re right and things went the way you’re telling me, then you have a very dangerous job ahead of you.”

  “I know that.”

  Every word in that lengthy revelation has dense emotional implications and carries the jagged weight of consequences. The poison that dried up so many years ago is liquefying right before their eyes. The accumulated rancor is ready to unfurl into vendetta. And the vendetta threatens to turn into an appointment with fire.

  Tension floats in the air around them. Because the fire is going to devour everything, from the very first lick of flame. They both know it. But the idea of bracing for the consequences of the imminent roaring blaze isn’t sufficiently urgent to dim the light of that inst
ant. Luckily, there’s still time, a whole night ahead of them. And there’s still wine. Andrea raises his glass. “Well, you’re going to need protection when the time comes. So when you’re ready, let me know.”

  She too raises her glass, as well as raising her eyes to look into his. “That’s what I’m doing.”

  No Solution

  At home, after dinner, Jacaranda had changed her mood. When he’d asked her if he could call her Maria, she’d told him, “Go ahead, but don’t expect me to answer you.” She’d turned more off-putting than ever.

  “Do you want to be alone?” Andrea had asked her.

  And without turning around she had replied, “I am alone.” She had told him, “I don’t like any of what’s awaiting me. In fact, it terrifies me.”

  He was astonished by the rapidity with which her face too had changed, how the sweetness of her gaze had turned to suffering. And Andrea had glimpsed for an instant what that suffering multiplied over time would change in her face, swelling the bags under her eyes, irradiating a web of fine wrinkles around the lips, putting out the lights in her hair, so that the image of her future had finally made her even more desirable to Andrea’s eyes in the here and now of the present.

  Which was, however, a forbidden present, at least as much as her name from the past. A present that was separating them, at a clip that was visible to the naked eye. Because from that moment of revelation at the table in the Brasserie Lipp, Jacaranda had never let him get near her again, and locked herself up in her room. In the middle of the night he heard her go into the kitchen, probably to take her tranquilizers.

  In the darkness, Andrea tried to tune into the wavelength of her eyes, or her last glances. And that wavelength frightened him because it was veering toward the blackness of depression. It was prefiguring no escape routes, it was announcing shortness of breath, it was foretelling panic.

  As he heard her move through the apartment, he was tempted to get up, but he didn’t do it. Among all the possible options, he chose the Neutral Working Expression: break off communication, close his eyes. Without even imagining how bitterly he’d regret it.