by Pino Corrias
This is how he plans to honor the sad loss of Jacaranda Rizzi: by multiplying the movie’s box office, first tenfold, and eventually a hundredfold. This is the big chance he’s been waiting for. The stratospheric earnings that are going to allow him to make the great leap forward. He can already envision the first ten films that he’s going to produce on his own—no, make that with the Americans: Bye-Bye, La Dolce Roma, Anvil Film is setting sail into the great open waters. He can feel the bow wave, he can glimpse the ass of the Rex under full steam: that’s part of what he’s going to buy.
As for the missing suicide note, well, he’ll write it in Jacaranda’s name. A note without a lot of frills, without any fancy phrases, like this: “I just don’t feel like it anymore. Have fun without me. And try not to gossip too much about me.” It’s terse, detached, and sad. Try not to gossip too much about me resembles something he’s heard somewhere before, but where?
Andrea wanders aimlessly around the apartment. It’s been such a long time since death passed so close to him. He remembers his father’s dead body lying facedown on the floor of their home, even though all these years later he couldn’t say if he really saw it or just imagined it. And then his mother’s face, white as a sheet, the last night in the hospital, encapsulated in her oxygen mask, already so far away from him, though he sat next to her, holding her cold hands in his, no longer even recognizing the feel of them, but unwilling to let them go, convinced that in that grip of skin and fragile bones and infinite memories and endless fear lay the last thread still linking him to his mother. And linking his mother to life.
Those two deaths were part of his story, and now so was Jacaranda’s. The others that he had seen on the asphalt of crime reporting, or the horrible deaths in the rubble of Chechnya, were fragments, flashes in black and white, vignettes that had passed before his eyes, only to be sterilized in the ink of a narrative that made sense of everything that completely lacked it.
But there’s no way to distance ourselves from the deaths that concern us. Andrea knows that, because he felt them enter into him, become part of the time he breathes, marking a before and an after. And now Jacaranda’s peach-colored skin, which he’d seen from up close while they were eating at the Brasserie Lipp, the gold chain around her throat, the fine blond hair on the back of her neck, backlit, her morose smile, will forever be a part of him.
The radio stations broadcast the news, the online editions of the newspapers publish the biography “of our dear Jacaranda Rizzi,” lists of her movies, interviews from the archives, television footage of “her beautiful, flourishing career,” the story of her loves and losses, the testimonials of friends, male and female, colleagues in tears, inconsolable directors. And then the chagrin of the film critics: “She was so young,” “She was so pretty,” “She was such a good actress,” all of them predictable and foreseen. So zealous in serving the lives of others that they feel a sort of authentic regret when those lives shuffle off this coil.
One critic notes “the macabre coincidence” of the film’s premiere, and another writes about how “treacherous fate will have its way.” And what if it had been a murder disguised as a suicide? What if this was a Mafia vendetta?
Andrea knows that this isn’t going to stop until the day of the funeral, the supreme obscenity of the applause that he can already picture to himself, in the nave of Santa Maria in Montesanto, the church of the artists in Piazza del Popolo. A serial apotheosis that is renewed from one corpse to the next. The last time he went there was with Oscar for Mariangela Melato, and he hadn’t even wanted to go in; all he’d needed was a single glance at the crowd thronged out front. The universal exposition of sunglasses and Prada overcoats. The pack of photographers. The high theatrical performance of collective grief. Which is, after all, a way of celebrating with tears the circumstance of all of us still being alive, and savoring in blessed peace the remorse for someone else’s death.
Funeral Rites with Pastries
Dinner is the most enduring ritual of this permanent cinematic newsreel that is La Dolce Roma. It comes from the hunger of the postwar years, when even the picnic baskets of Cinecittà were precious troves, when actors had the calloused hands of the former bricklayers so many of them were, actresses mended their worn nylon stockings, and roast chicken was a rare Sunday treat. In the years of political opulence, the ritual bulked up, enriching itself by a thousand other proteins, contented to stuff its maw not only with cinema, but also television, photographers with flash guns, clientelism, familism, factionalism, but never losing its initial and primary vital function, the pleasure and delight of nourishment. That is why—in contrast with the constipated meals of Milan, where advertising executives and fashion models snort more cocaine than roast pork—Roman dinners call for lengthy mastication of pastasciutta, long and short, with meat sauces, ground meats, and roast meats, occasionally large fishes served on platters with sauces, fine-grained fries of anchovies with lemon or freshly shelled shrimp called crudità di gamberi, vegetables raw and cooked, boiled and sprinkled with lemon or boiled and then sautéed with garlic and chili peppers, great fat round mozzarellas like the August moon riding over the Colosseum, Roman pizzas, Neapolitan pizzettas, Genoan focaccias, Turinese breadsticks, sweet buns, wood-fired baguettes, multigrain biscotti. And then there are the sweets. The sweets!
“Hooray, here come the sweets, come on!” The glorious finale of any self-respecting dinner, with a brightly colored array of fruit mini pastries, cream mini pastries, Neapolitan pastiera tarts, gelato, semifreddo mousses; and then there are the chocolates, hot and cold, in wafer or in chips, with or without whipped cream, the puddings, the crème brûlées, the spumonis, the marmalades, the little dry puff pastry confections, the moist ricottas topped with candied orange peels, sweet raisins, dried fruit with honey, vanilla beans, and powdered cinnamon, Sicilian cassata, Tunisian sesame treats, resulting in a manifold display of delicacies from every latitude, as a compendium of all the various weaknesses of the character, of the soul, and of the palate, but without the tedium of guilt or restraint, which is, after all, the holy vocation of La Dolce Roma. Those thousand faces rendered immortal by the portrait photographers of Dagospia’s Cafonal—the bible—the photographers who narrate the festive Roman ruckus, who celebrate in every shot the luxuriant scandal of those groaning banquet tables and exhibitions of foods and gaping mawfuls of teeth ingesting every mouthful, dripping sauce and sugo, revealing every detail, including the cavity-ridden molar of the divine diva and the sweaty politician, the senile old contessa, the formerly starving poet who chews all alone, in the corner, the only one to give truth its due, capable of whispering into his own ear, “We’re all just horrendous, haven’t you noticed?”
But a dinner complete with funeral rites like the one conceived by Oscar Martello in his palatial mansion was something that hadn’t been seen before, if not in the occasional Caribbean embassy, perhaps in Haiti, obscured by the shadows of extraterritoriality and the mysteries of voodoo rituals. Especially not at a dinner honoring and commemorating an actress whose body covered with violet skin still lies in a fluorescent-lit room in the Amsterdam morgue, and who in the meantime has become the top box office draw of the entire movie season, just to point out how death can come as a surprise for the living. Especially in this unfortunate case of youth scattered to the winds—or rather, dumped into the black waters of a Dutch canal—with all the evidence still pinwheeling through the air in relation to the reasons for her suicide; that is, if suicides really ever have reasons, explanations, rather than being a predisposition that finally comes to pass, a vice that perfects itself, leaving aside the suspects, the men in her past and her present, numbering among them none other than the man holding the dinner, the immensely wealthy and arrogant Oscar Martello, who is proud and pleased to summon the entirety of La Dolce Roma with a single line of ink: “Nine P.M.—I await you in my home—Aventino—Rome, RSVP,” répondez, s’il vous plaît. With this overblown conceit of not even bothering to put
the entire address. But to do justice to the truth, who, among the inhabitants of La Dolce Roma, doesn’t know where “that tremendous son of a bitch Oscar Martello” lives?
This is what an overwrought and torrential Milly Gallo Bautista has just finished spouting out to Commissario Raul Ventura, both of them sitting among the red furnishings of the Caffé Doney, the down-at-the-heels heart of the Via Veneto, swamped with Russian tourists, Romanian hookers, and Calabrian wiseguys: anyone and everyone from the vast world, except for real Romans.
She, as always eccentric and very much up to the strength of her fame, decked out in an absurd pair of black palazzo pajamas with purple velvet hems, in perfect broken-grief style, with sunglasses to cover her puffy eyes and highlight the cascade of gold around her neck.
He, on tenterhooks for the flashy duds Milly’s wearing and the glances that she’s drawing, endangering what he had hoped would be a private meeting, but which now looks from one moment to the next as if it’s going to be immortalized by some passing camera flash.
She, already on her second healthy rum and Coke, with the addition of a nice wet rum baba and plenty of tissues, applied judiciously with her pudgy beringed fingers, to dry off, when and as needed, the tears and the snot.
He, still on his first sip of a sambuca with ice water on the side.
She, overexcited by her suffering and the impending dinner.
He, awaiting revelations.
She, well aware of the fact that she was the very last person to see Jacaranda alive in that lair of lesbians from which she had promptly fled, leaving her friend alone in Amsterdam: “I’ll never be able to forgive myself.”
He, consoling her by reminding her of the unpredictability, but also the inevitability of suicides.
She asks him, point-blank, “You want to see her?”
“Who?”
“Jacaranda.” Milly pulls out her iPhone. “Fifty seconds of video recorded in Amsterdam, the last seconds filmed of Jacaranda.” She taps, clicks, and says, “We were talking about ourselves. Without telling me, she turned on her cell phone and set it on a pillow between us and recorded. It pissed me off. But now it’s of no importance.”
The video starts up. Jacaranda appears at the edge of the frame, sitting in a red armchair with her legs crossed, cut tattered jeans, her voice slurred. She’s saying, “The truth is that I’ve never fallen in love with a man. Never, not even once.”
Offscreen, Milly’s voice: “And when you’re with one, what do you think about?”
“Nothing.”
“What do you feel?”
“Nothing.”
“And the sex?”
“And the sex is nothing, too. But I’m good at pretending. At least when it comes to that, I’m a great actress.”
“Then why do you go to bed with them?”
“With men? Because they expect you to.”
“That’s it?”
“I’m trying it out with women, but it works better when I do it by myself. What about you?”
“Well, I’ve ridden plenty of those horses, sweetheart. In lots of different ways, when I was young I . . . Hey, what the fuck! Are you recording me? Give me that . . . Turn it off. What the hell got into you, hey!”
The video sizzles and fades to black.
Jacaranda goes back to the afterlife.
A big tear wells up in Milly’s eye.
Ventura takes a drink.
Milly rattles on about the ultimate meaning of life.
Who can say why, but Ventura thinks about his Graz·yna, whose life was taken from her so cruelly, and the time that the two of them awakened at dawn on the high-elevation mountain meadows of the Valle Argentina, above Bussana Vecchia, and they’d made coffee that was so bad they’d had to laugh, and then they’d drunk cold water from the stream, as if they’d turned into children in a bygone century.
He tries to sound out the how and the wherefore of the thing that chiefly interests him, to hell with unstable actresses: “If it turns out that Martello pays your clients in cash without declaring it to the tax authorities, and you help us prove it, we’ll take that into account.”
She says, “Of course I’ll help you. I knew him like I know the back of my hand, the inside of my pockets. Or make that, the inside of his pockets. From the days when he sent plenty of skilled workmen, actors, and agents to pick up their salaries in cash in London in certain cubbyhole offices of shell companies, without receipts, without documentation of any kind. These days, the whole shadow economy is moving to Luxembourg.”
Ventura focuses and pushes a little: “And maybe you’d also know how he does it?”
“I imagine with the air taxi service of Angelina Casagrande, his partner. Or else old school, via mules, transiting through Switzerland.”
“What do you know about Angelina Casagrande?”
“That her money is dirty, that first she obtained it from criminal husbands, and then in the field of international aid. For every euro she lets drop down a well in Africa, she keeps a hundred for herself. Oscar has his own dealings, using her foreign connections.”
“What do you know about her business dealings?”
Milly widens her eyes. “Except for you, the same things that everyone in Rome knows: cash, cocaine, artworks.”
“Do you know for certain, or are you just guessing?”
She heaves a sigh of irritation. “I’m not an investigator, you know.” She thinks about it, bursts out laughing, and points a finger at him. “But I can help you to find some good leads. Tomorrow come to the dinner; if you need, I can help you get in—you can definitely have some fun there.”
He tries to remain impassive. “You have a strange way of saying things without saying them, Signora.”
Milly is flattered. Milly is drunk. Milly is reciting, or actually, singing, “To say, not to say, perchance to dream . . .”
Milly is out of her mind, and Ventura puts up with her. “Go on.”
“I can only tell you that there’s going to be a big surprise.”
“At the dinner?”
“Exactly.”
Ventura is starting to get irritated. “Signora, this isn’t a game, this isn’t a movie, there’s an investigation under way concerning money that appears and disappears, illegal patrimonies, and—incidentally—a woman who has died in circumstances that remain quite unclear, many miles away, while you were with her.”
Milly blows her nose. And she takes her time before clarifying: “Don’t be unjust with me, Commissario. I took her to Amsterdam to protect her. Then I made a mistake and left her alone. I haven’t slept in two days and two nights. I loved Jacaranda like my own daughter.”
“Then let’s try to respect her memory with the truth.” He can’t believe his own ears, as he listens to himself.
Ma Milly drinks it down to the last drop: “You can be sure of that. I think that there’s going to be a reckoning at the famous dinner.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“That at a certain point the comb hits the knots, Commissario. It happens in everyone’s life, even Oscar Martello’s. Andrea isn’t going to keep his mouth shut.”
“Andrea Serrano?”
“I think that this time he’s going to grab him by the neck.”
“Does he or doesn’t he have anything to do with his business dealings?”
“No. But you have to look at the whole picture. Andrea has something to do with Jacaranda. I think he was in love with her.”
“And so?”
“So now he’s furious at Oscar for how he treated her.”
“Get to the point.”
“And now maybe he’ll pull out some old story of Oscar and Jacaranda that is really less than edifying for Oscar.”
Milly winds up by taking a sip of her rum and Coke.
Milly needs to smoke.
Milly wants to leave, but she still isn’t done. Now she can talk about what she cares most about, but without entirely exposing herself, as if she were doing
it in Andrea’s name, not her own: “It’s an old story, but it’s worth the time. Have you ever heard of Eusebio Reverberi?”
Oscar’s Homily
At the far end of a terrace covered with flowers and flickering candles, under a heart-shaped wreath composed of ten dozen red roses, a luminous phrase enjoys pride of place: “We miss you, Jacaranda.” Before an audience of sixty or so people already pumped full of alcohol, pills, and emotions, Oscar Martello is declaiming his homily, in a sand-colored suit with a light-blue silk dress shirt and white French-style calfskin shoes: “The cinema,” he is saying, “has many arms, many heads, but just one heart.” The wind buffets his bandit face and then continues along, caressing the shoulders of the women in plunging necklines, for the most part actresses, who gaze upon him, enchanted by his impressive market value, especially now that Helga, the Argentine slut, has left the field wide open. Slender women, still ready for the race, many of them with small tattoos on their ankles but great plans for the future in their heads, sprinkled throughout the ranks of manly jaws that chew, arms crossed, all of these manly men broadcasting a not particularly reassuring demeanor, their stomachs trained to digest the rocks of power, and when necessary also ready and willing to hurl them at their fellow men, whether those are the first or the second stones to be cast.
There are directors and actors, all of them poised to express exquisite emotions before the camcorder wielded by Attilio Fabris, readmitted especially for the occasion; Fabris is working the crowd in search of tears to pack into his video condolences for Jacaranda, to be titled Letter with No Return Address to a Friend. Less prominently situated are the producers and the lawyers who are evaluating the movie’s box office—record ticket sales of another €6 million on the second weekend, with average box office of more than €4,000 a screen, almost freakish in these times of grim downturn—but they only whisper about it among themselves, as if they were talking about hookers in church.