by Pino Corrias
Or else it was the loneliness of those last days in Paris that pushed him over the threshold of a strange emotion, that of thinking of Jacaranda in a past that he’d like to relive in the future.
The telephone immediately started ringing, all the calls from unknown numbers, probably journalists hunting for news. But just as he’s about to turn it back off, he sees the number of Massimiliano Testa, his agent, again, and when he answers, the man doesn’t even give him a chance to speak, but tells him, “Fuck, Andrea, I’ve been calling you for hours, for days, and you never answer. Do you mind if I ask what the hell kind of mess you’ve gotten yourself into? Okay, don’t say anything on the phone. I’ve found you a lawyer, his name is Giovanni Soffici, he’s wide awake, good at his job, with plenty of connections in the district attorney’s office. I’ll send you his phone number, call him immediately. Do you need money? I don’t like anything about this story.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” he finally manages to get out after drinking in those sentences that struck him as so meaningless.
“Have you just landed from the moon?”
“No, from Paris, I just deplaned.”
“Then you don’t know anything.”
“About what?”
“About Rizzi.”
“About who?”
“Jacaranda Rizzi. Are you drunk?”
An airplane soars past and into the sky, its shadow slipping over the sun. “Jacaranda what?”
“They say she’s killed herself.”
The sea off Fiumicino turns black twice. And Andrea has to breathe deeply twice. “I don’t believe it, that’s impossible. She was with me until the day before yesterday.”
“I know that. But this is something that’s been circulating since last night. I’ve been trying to reach you for hours.”
“Who says so? When did it happen?”
“I don’t know. They’re saying it on the Internet. Facebook says so. I’m getting one phone call after another. Everyone is looking for you.”
“That’s complete crap. What does the Internet say? And why would she have killed herself? And where?”
“In Amsterdam. They found her body in a canal. That is, they say it could be her.”
He shuts his eyes. He can feel his heart pounding. He needs a drink, he needs to think. “Bullshit. I’ll call you back.”
He rejects two incoming phone calls. First he calls Jacaranda. The phone’s turned off. He calls Oscar Martello. The phone’s busy. He calls Anvil Film. The phone’s busy. He calls the landline at Martello’s house. The phone’s busy. He calls Milly Gallo Bautis-ta. The phone’s turned off.
He’s just stood up from his table when he sees him screeching to a halt aboard a dark blue Yamaha R6 motorbike. He’s wearing a black leather jumpsuit with yellow trim. When he takes off the full-face helmet and the pirate bandanna, Andrea recognizes the expression of a bird of prey that has just spotted the prey in question: it’s Mirko Pace, the muckraker. He gets off, lights a cigarette, and waits.
Andrea doesn’t have to be asked twice. He goes over to him. He’s terse and unceremonious: “What’s all this about Amsterdam, another one of your fucked-up inventions?”
His phone has started ringing again. He rejects the call.
“No. It’s a rumor that’s running from one venue to another.”
“And what does this rumor say?”
“That a woman has been found floating in a canal. Blond, with short hair. No ID. If you like, the description could match.”
The phone goes on ringing, with calls from unknown numbers. He rejects them.
“But why should it be Jacaranda, of all people?”
“Because someone saw her picture, she’s an actress, isn’t she? And when she left you in Paris, she showed up in Amsterdam, didn’t you know that?”
He starts to lose his patience. “No, I didn’t know that. What was she doing in Amsterdam?”
The muckraker answers a call: “I’ve found him, it’s all good. I’ll call you back.” He turns and looks at him. “But it’s still just a rumor, without any solid confirming evidence.”
“And why have you been repeating it?”
“That’s obvious. We’re still under contract for the movie, right? We’re just trying to keep up.”
The phone rings.
“Turn it off, trust me.”
Before turning it off, Andrea tries another round of phone calls, Jacaranda, Oscar, Milly. All without results. So he powers down. Then he looks Mirko in the face and it’s as if he’d just noticed his existence in that instant: “What are you doing here? Who told you where I was?”
Mirko hands him his second helmet. “We didn’t know how to get hold of you. Starting yesterday I sent one of my guys to check all the flights arriving from Paris. He saw you half an hour ago. He took a file photograph and then called me. Shall we go?”
“He took a file photograph of me, for Christ’s sake . . . No. I’m going back to the airport and finding a flight to Amsterdam.”
“Don’t talk bullshit. My partner has sent one of our boys to talk to the ambassador’s underling. We’ll be the first to hear about any news. Oscar is all wound up. He wants to hold a press conference.”
“When?”
“Right away.”
“And are you supposed to take me to this press conference?”
“No. He sent me to keep you from attending. He wants you to remain missing, that way we can stoke the mystery.”
“Fuck. But if Jacaranda—”
“Hey, my friend, he doesn’t give a shit about Jacaranda, do you get it or don’t you? He cares about the movie: the more people talk about it, the more money it brings in.”
He’s tempted to lunge at him and punch him in the mouth. Instead he just stands there. “What the fuck was Jacaranda doing in Amsterdam?”
Mirko Pace looks at his watch, lights a cigarette, and hands it to him. Andrea refuses the offer.
“Okay, I’ll update you.” He tells him the bare necessities. He tells him that two days ago at dawn Jacaranda was picked up by Milly Gallo Bautista, her agent, who appeared and was photographed on the Parisian scene covered with plumes and shawls as if she’d just stepped out of a cedar chest from the 1930s, and that she’d taken custody of her client protégée. She pushed her into a taxi and then together they boarded a high-speed train for Amsterdam, setting up housekeeping in a neutral zone, the apartment of a girlfriend, more or less midway between Dam and the Sofitel. “Don’t ask me what they planned to do, I have no idea.”
Connections
Twenty minutes later, Andrea is traveling at top speed along the beltway, heading into Rome, glued to the oblique back of Mirko Pace, with gusting wind exploding on either side. As he holds tight, he’s telling himself that he absolutely has to meet with Oscar, look him in the face, figure out how the fuck he ever reached that point, and then maybe throw him down the stairs. Because with the proliferation of mirrors onstage, Oscar is stripping him of his sense of orientation. The initial contrivance, at least somewhat amusing, of the escape to Paris and the love nest there, hatched within the harmless fairy tales that La Dolce Roma feeds off of, now strikes him as lit by an increasingly grim glow, one that Jacaranda actually did plunge into. Swallowed up, devoured as if in the blink of an eye. She, who was not only the woman he suddenly realized he’d fallen in love with—or something like that—but also the sole witness to Oscar’s past, as well as a formidable resource for the accounting of his own immediate future.
They roar through roundabouts and down straightaways, they zip past the aqueduct, they turn onto the Via dei Fori Imperiali: Andrea tries to free his mind of the image of Jacaranda’s honey-colored eyes and of the void that now scares him. He wants to stay cold. But his head is spinning. They sail at full speed into the siege of traffic emerging onto Via del Circo Massimo running along the Circus Maximus, and then onto the riverfront embarcadero along the Tiber.
He wants to think. With Jacaranda’s death,
the box office will explode tenfold, and then a hundredfold, burning through all records in terms of ticket sales. By now, all the online venues will be feverishly lunging at the last photographs of her taken by the henchmen of War & Peace. Photos of the party at Sabaudia at Milly Gallo Bautista’s house. Photos of a dinner party at Oscar Martello’s. Photos of the wrap party for No, I Won’t Surrender! And maybe even the “file” photo of her last boyfriend, who’d just landed at Fiumicino.
Along the banks of the Tiber, processions of dark-blue government cars, sirens blaring. They veer over onto the sidewalks, whip around buses stopped in intersections and tourists plunging into traffic.
Starting tomorrow, the print editions of the newspapers, the afternoon newscasts, the breaking newscrawls all over the channels, will take care of the rest. Revealing details, plot twists, mysteries about “this sad tale of loneliness.” Everyone will rush out to their local movie theater to see it. And then they’ll set off on the manhunt for the villain. All the journalists, the sorrowful female anchors, the tear hunters—they’ll each dig their own little section of the collective grave.
The stench of diesel exhaust and the smell of burned gasoline fills the air. Every jerk of acceleration from a stoplight cramps his stomach and his neurons.
Perhaps someone will trot out the Mafia at some point, with the supposition that it was a hit made to look like a suicide. The others will choose to illuminate the paths that lead to Jacaranda’s heart, the real or imagined love affairs, the depressions, the psychopharmaceuticals. Every trail has its own script already written, like automatic fairy tales with high levels of hypnotic intensity.
And he, Andrea Serrano, “mediocre writer of screenplays and TV series, an artist living a messy life, currently under the investigator’s examination,” will land in the middle of it. After all, he was her last, ill-conceived love story, with a midnight drive to Paris and other associated mysteries. They’ll put him in the spotlight and roast him over a slow flame: Hey, everyone, do you think Jacaranda killed herself over this nutjob?
They’ll rifle through all the file cabinets in search of his past as an unstable traveler, crime reporter, and not entirely reassuring writer. They’ll examine all the various strata of life experience, scrutinizing spots on his personal history, analyzing alibis, grilling family members, friends, enemies, ex-girlfriends, and they’ll pore over his relationship with Oscar as a friend, employee, and accomplice.
Mirko drops him off at his apartment building. He takes back the helmet, he tells him, “Don’t show your face for a while. You’ll be all right.” It’s an order, not a suggestion. And since he doesn’t expect an answer, he squeals out, engine roaring.
Stunned as he is, Andrea simply obeys.
When he walks into his apartment, the place he finds is silent and tidy, nothing’s happened, the roofs of Rome and the refrigerator in the kitchen are still in their places. The thought of Jacaranda comes in waves. What always happens to him happens: he has the sensation of having just come back from a very long trip. He tries sitting down while his thoughts gallop along. Is this another one of Oscar’s tricks, fine-tuned by his muckrakers? For a second, he hopes it’s true, but that would be too much, even for him. And yet Jacaranda meant to avenge herself, not kill herself. Right? He circles the thought. He searches for a motive that he finds convincing. He finds none. In fact, actually, he does find one as big as a house, but it’s Oscar’s motive. More or less the same motive that pushed him to get rid of Eusebio Reverberi: to delete his past, free up the future, and up his earnings a hundredfold. But then Andrea’s stomach cramps when he remembers the note that she left him on the mirror. “Don’t try to find me”: as simple and straightforward as a farewell.
The piping-hot shower relaxes him. After drying off, he opens his laptop and surfs the various news sites. Jacaranda looks out at him from every photo. In one she’s walking the red carpet of the Venice Film Festival, in a light-blue dress and the same gold chain around her neck that she wore in their days together in Paris. In another one, she’s about to dive off a motorboat, it’s a scene from a movie, and she’s so young and alive she could drive you crazy. For half an hour he reads the same news about the suicide over and over, not that it’s really news, it’s just a theory that is gathering around this anonymous body found around the same time as the new mystery of Jacaranda, reported in Amsterdam by the henchmen of War & Peace and then vanished from their radar. He tries to make the same round of phone calls again, but all he finds is the same cell phones, turned off. The whole world of instantaneous interconnections has coalesced against him, isolating him and holding him prisoner in a neutral but highly anxiety-inducing space.
There’s no cannabis in the apartment. With twenty drops of Valium, he tries to break the sense of isolation. He adds some vodka. The effect is an enchantment of sleep and wakefulness. Suspended between one and the other, he tries to call Jacaranda until his cell phone dies. When he wakes up he doesn’t know if he really called or if it was a dream. On the other hand, day has dawned. He makes an instant coffee, shaves, and then stands, dreamily, looking out over the Tiber that puffs mist into the air where the seagulls play. He needs air, he needs to walk. He buys newspapers that are already a day old and tell the same stories as last night, before the Valium and after the vodka.
An hour later, after passing Via Barberini, he stops on Piazza della Repubblica, where the city buses swing around the large roundabout. He goes over to sit on the steps of the portico to make a phone call he’s been holding off making for two years now.
This time the phone rings free. She answers on the third ring with a harsh voice. “What do you want?”
“I need to talk to you.”
“Well, I don’t.”
“You’re always so courteous, Helga.”
Helga in a Bubble
It happened only the one time. They’d never spoken about it, but that thing still floated between them. It was a bubble inside which, on one special occasion, the two of them might have found or smashed into each other.
It happened late one morning in June, two years ago. They’d chanced to run into each other—if there is such a thing as chance—outside his apartment building, on Piazza di San Lo-renzo in Lucina. She was just leaving the Louis Vuitton store and he was about to enter the Bar Ciampini. He’d just bought a paper from the newsstand, and when he turned around, he saw her. She was alone, without Oscar, without her two little girls, without her chauffeur. He’d called her name. She’d smiled in his direction. Which was a new development from what he was used to.
She was wearing a silk dress with a fine pattern of little flowers, a beige jacket and beige scarf, light suede boots, sunglasses. And a vermilion lip gloss that highlighted all her loveliness. She kissed him on the cheek, then she said, “I’ve had it up to here with your friend, he’s driving me crazy.”
“That’s the effect he has on everyone.”
“But the rest of you don’t have to sleep with him at night. We’ve been fighting for three days.”
“Where is he now?”
“He’s in Milan. He’s coming back tomorrow. I hope that at least he’s fucked one of his television starlets, maybe it’ll improve his mood.”
“And what are you doing?”
“I’m finally breathing.”
The conversation flowed intimately, without obstacles. There was sunshine, there were children and nannies, there were people riding past on bicycles. It was an ordinary day, but it seemed like the Sunday of the world.
They exchanged smiles. And a little burst of euphoria had locked arms with them both. “Turn off your cell phone and take the rest of the day off.”
Helga had lifted her sunglasses and looked him right in the eyes: “Roman Holiday, why not. Maybe you even have a Vespa?”
“No. No Vespa.”
“Well, I have the rest of the day off. Are you heading home? Why don’t you offer me something to drink?”
Helga is one of those women who are a
lways seductive, a natural gift, a reflex, even when they’ve just woken up and are brushing their teeth, looking at themselves straight on and in profile in the mirror, or at a restaurant, when they’re ordering a mineral water and they amuse themselves by knocking the waiter to the floor with a sidelong glance, or in a Roman piazza, with their husband’s best friend. And do it without ever expecting the slightest interference with their will, so unsettling as to stun any attempt at self-defense, so sure of themselves that obeying their slightest whim, even the most dangerous, comes naturally, never seeming as if it’s the result of some request of theirs, but quite the contrary, a kind concession on their part, accompanied by a little flutter of the eyelashes.
When she and Andrea go upstairs together to his apartment, they drink an espresso, then a vodka, then another. They turn on the music. They smoke some grass. They get comfortable. The grass makes them laugh. The grass burns away all senses of guilt. The grass makes them fly through the air. And when they land, what they want are all manner of sweet things, honey, dried fruit, and more vodka. And what with all the drinking, they both understand what they’re doing there, without any need to speak of it.
At a certain point she stands at the center of the big window, the one that overlooks the Tiber and Rome. She reaches her arms straight up, pressing her hands and her forehead against the glass, and then just turning her head ever so slightly, she says with a sweet smile, “Come here. It’s so pretty you could lose your mind.”