by Pino Corrias
In the front row, in a prime spot, the undersecretary for entertainment, Roberto Neri, tanned and fit, has taken pride of place, with a sweet-smelling entourage of blond assistants and the keys to the gates of Cinecittà in his pocket. Next to him sit another half-dozen Roman bankers and CPAs with whom Martello has dealings, and among them are the men who financed the film, the happiest few there that evening, even though they can’t let it show for fear of committing a gaffe and stirring envy.
There’s Angelina Casagrande, who in the afternoon calmed herself down and is now dressed to the nines in a black Von Dutch dress and silver René Caovilla shoes decorated with mink pom-poms and river stones. After her massage at De Russie, she met with the lawyers, who for the past two days and nights have been war-gaming Helga’s imminent assault on Oscar’s personal fortune, which, after all, is also hers, and just how much damage she can really do (“the slut”) by unleashing who can even guess how many private investigators in search of their treasure. All the more so now that a certain Commissario Raul Ventura has caught a whiff of something and is circling the money trail, too.
There’s the entire cast of No, I Won’t Surrender!, with the lower-ranking members clearly intimidated by this overarching display of wealth. Accompanied by their whores, two Russian investors, who are openly courting Oscar to become involved in their plan to build a cinema multiplex with twenty-four screens between Rome and Ostia. A former rock star who’s since become, simultaneously, a Buddhist and a methamphetamine dealer. A Roman Catholic monsignor with reddened skin, the result of psychosomatic eczema. A homosexual fashion designer skinny as an anchovy, his face camouflaged by the jungle of cosmetic incisions, his body now displaying all the elasticity of a wind turbine that, when it turns, it all turns. A bald, black-clad, megalomaniac architect, accompanied by his wife, who’s gone completely hysterical from the doses of amphetamines that she takes to lose weight, even though she’s just downed a double shot of Campari and gin, doing her best to see if she can drown in it.
Oscar is saying, “This isn’t a party and it isn’t a funeral. It’s an opportunity to gather, all together, in the presence of the great mystery that can only ever make us feel alone. The mystery of our sell-by date, of the sand that continues to drizzle downward—” A buzz of superstitious disapproval among the guests. “I know, I understand you, it’s always hard to hear that what awaits us all is that great leap into darkness. The mystery from which no one ever returns. But we are movie people! We make movies! We manufacture a way out, ladies and gentlemen, friends all. And that way out will still be there even when we, knock on wood, are no longer around, if not actually dust in a few years, or relegated to someone’s memories, or even an unpaid debt, ha ha! And every film we make will be just one more lasting sign that we haven’t passed through this world entirely in vain. This evening we’re paying homage to a great actress who is no longer here among us, among her fellow actresses and friends, among her working companions, even if she really no longer is here.” A pause to gaze out at the faces looking up at him. “But instead, my friends: she is here!” He says it in something approaching a shout, beckoning for the applause that is beginning to spread somewhat hesitantly, only to grow as Oscar greets it with a smile of gratitude. He continues: “I sense that she is here with us, and you sense it too, I feel certain. Just as I’m certain that Jacaranda hasn’t left us, that she’s just shooting a movie far, far away from here, maybe a love story, and before long she’ll be back among us, isn’t that right friends?”
“Yessss!” they all reply in chorus.
“And we’ll all be here to wait for her. Won’t we?”
“Yeeeees!” The applause surges again, and a few tears even roll down the cheeks of the more fragile attendees, among the drunkest and highest of the guests.
Oscar savors the reaction, and when he’s had enough, he throws his arms wide. “All right, all right,” he says, “now, drink, eat, and enjoy yourselves. Jacaranda is looking down on us from on high, I feel sure of it . . . It would be so nice if anyone who has something to say about Jacaranda would now come forward with a memory to share.” A great many hands shoot up, so many that Oscar immediately changes tack. “Ah, there, you see? There are too many of you. Let’s just tell each other our memories and entrust them to just one person . . . Where is the director? Fabris, where are you? Here you are, my good friend.” He sees him, he harpoons him by the shoulder, and he gazes at him with an imperturbable smile, while he struggles to resist the impulse to squeeze him until he crushes the bones. Fabris hesitates, returning the hatred, but in the meantime smiles back. “Would you like to add something in conclusion, I imagine?” But Oscar’s question is really an order. “Here you are, ladies and gentlemen, the great director Attilio Fabris! Our box office champion!”
Once the master of the house has left the spotlight, half the audience turns its back on this Fabris (“Who the hell is he, anyway?”), scattering into smaller groups in search of waiters, alcohol, finger food, and conversation, each individual battling only for his or her own survival. Oscar enjoys the scene, and to whoever asks him he replies, yes, all things considered, this Fabris is a great big nobody.
Jacaranda Hadn’t Told the Whole Story
Andrea Serrano is there. And he looks down on the funeral party from on high. He recognizes the hairdos of the special occasions, the buzz and hum of the Filipino waiters in red jackets tonight, flitting from flower to flower with their trays; he catches a whiff of the blend of perfumes that the small crowd emanates as an olfactory signal of their own exquisite existence to the rest of the world.
He’s entered the villa with Milly Gallo Bautista, and to keep from meeting anyone else before it’s the right time, he has immediately moved off down the side hallways, to the stairs that lead up to the highest floor in the turret, Oscar’s Castle.
The study is furnished in wood and sage-green velvet. There are four windows, which look out over the world at large. There is a messy desk, a green leather sofa, two chairs, two armchairs, bookshelves crowded with DVDs and those absurd little statuettes they give for awards in excellence in television (cats, sea horses, honeybees, dolphins: the “teledickheads,” Oscar calls them), which, along with the fireplace tools standing by the now-cold hearth, are all weapons lying ready for their impending clearing of the air.
When he called Milly to ask for a ride, the fat woman finally answered. She told him no problem—“Where do you want me to pick you up?”
An hour later, she showed up at the Janiculum Hill, where the usual thousand or so tourists were milling around in the throes of photographic fervor, admiring the specialty of the house: the sunset. She was riding in a metallic silver Audi A8, with a tattooed skinhead chauffeur, tinted side windows, and leather seats the color of crème caramel so cozy and comfy that Andrea sank into the upholstery, after hours of walking around Rome.
She had him sit next to her, in the back seat.
He told her, “I’m happy to see you,” but he was lying.
Milly hugged him and looked him right in the eyes. “She loved you. She told me,” and she was lying, too.
They got comfortable in their respective places. Milly was emanating a mixture of Chamade perfume and sweat. She was holding both his ears between her soft, fat fingers, as if she were about to shake him, or bite him, or kiss him.
“You were in Amsterdam with her. Do you know why she did it?”
Milly gets emotional. “Maybe because she was too frightened of what was awaiting her.”
“She told me that she couldn’t wait to get that burden off her chest.”
She sniffs. “I know. But then she imagined the consequences. The press would treat her like some insane liar. They’d dig into every chapter of her life. And Oscar would destroy her with waves of lawyers and lawsuits. She was tired, she was fragile. And I didn’t understand that.”
“You shouldn’t have left her alone.”
“I know that.”
“You should have prote
cted her.”
“I was stupid, I was impulsive. It’s just that she had exhausted me with her doubts, her pills, her weakness. I can’t stand weakness. So I reacted. We fought. She turned and left and told me she never wanted to see me again, so I went back to Rome. I was a bitch.” This version—right down to the heartfelt overtones—was brand new for her. She’d just made it up, and she liked the sound of it.
Andrea sat motionless, listening to her. It struck him as an acceptable truth. He knew from experience that all relationships in La Dolce Roma emit sparks when they cross the boundary of the other person’s sphere of privacy. And they usually stop outright when they start looking too much like a plea for help. Because, if you answer that plea, you’ll have a momentary friend and an enemy forever: gratitude feeds feelings of guilt, and feelings of guilt, over the long run, feed hatred.
Could it be that Milly, in the face of that declaration of weakness by Jacaranda and in view of her hysterical intemperance, should simply have decided to take off, leaving her to her fate, and then issue statements of regret for what she’d done, in her silver Audi A8?
Milly blew her nose and fixed her makeup. From the minibar she extracted two small bottles of ice-cold vodka and glasses, and poured for two as the car slid into traffic. Looking at herself in the mirror—and throwing back the first gulp—restored her full self-awareness. She’s had it with playing the penitent: “Why is it that all of a sudden you need my help to get into the home of your friend Oscar the Giant Pig?”
“Because I don’t know if I still want him to be my friend.”
“You’ve been hanging out with him for what, six years, five? And you still hadn’t noticed what he was like? Or else as long as he was ripping off others, but not you, you were fine with it?”
“There were a lot of things I didn’t know.”
“Maybe because you didn’t want to know them, but they were circulating, and how.”
“A lot of lies and exaggerations were circulating, too.”
“Not really. Truth be told, your ex-friend never wanted for a thing, and he made damned sure of it. Think about it. He stole ideas and scripts, threatened directors, and blackmailed actresses. He purloined apartments in collusion with priests, pilfered construction permits with all the mayors of Rome and even with the camorristi of Sperlonga. He bought other apartments from people gasping under the burden of debt and never bothered to finish paying for them. He sued plenty of people even though he knew he was in the wrong, and he won those lawsuits by hiring lawyers who bribe judges. Is that enough, or do you want me to tell you about when he earned his first money by dealing cocaine at parties?”
Milly had poured out more drinks; she was feeling fine even if she felt unsteady on the curves. “And did you understand the story of Jacaranda, or does that seem made up to you too?”
Andrea feels like an idiot. He says, “She told it to me that last night in Paris. No, I didn’t know anything about it.”
“Well, that fucking story marked her life. And I’m betting that Jacaranda only told you half the story.”
“What do you mean, ‘half the story’?”
“Think about it. You’re a big boy.”
They were traveling at walking speed along the Tiber toward the synagogue. Before long they’d turn up the Viale Aventino and then continue uphill through the succession of curves. “Half the story” could mean only one thing: that the truly odious part had been left out. And the truly odious part was also the most obvious part: sex between a sixteen-year-old girl and a producer in heat, maybe two horny producers. Rubbed down and polished by both of them, “like a waxed floor,” as they say in Hollywood. Which was, after all, the oldest story in the books: sex in exchange for the mirage of a career.
“Jacaranda told me that it was the newspapers that whipped up the scandal and that she hadn’t . . .”
Milly looked at him, almost enchanted at the sight of such naïveté. “Fuck, it’s a good thing you covered the crime beat for ten years, isn’t it? And that you write detective shows for TV. So you’re saying you’ve never heard of young girls raped by their fathers, uncles, or even film producers, at age sixteen, or fifteen, or fourteen?”
Andrea had felt a stabbing surge of grief and rage. “Well, she could have told me about it and I wouldn’t have—”
“You wouldn’t have what? You wouldn’t have judged her?”
“No, I certainly wouldn’t have judged her. I’m only sorry that she didn’t trust me.”
“Jacaranda never trusted anyone. Over the years, she grew more and more closed. She was terrified at the idea of losing other people’s respect.”
Andrea was stunned. “Then why are you telling me about it? Just to make me feel like an idiot?”
“I’m telling you because deep down you seem like a decent man. Because I want you to know just how fragile Jacaranda was. And so that you can help me make that swine pay for what he did.”
This new fragment of the truth, which he was now turning over in his mind, actually didn’t strike him all that hard: it was the logical conclusion to the never-ending story of access to fresh flesh in the meat lockers of La Dolce Roma. That constant flow of work for the youngest women stepping into the spotlights for the first time—with the perfection of their bodies and their gazes already well trained, ready for anything, armed with desperate determination, plus stiletto heels, smiles, plunging necklines, all of them believing themselves to be stronger than the sense of weariness that will follow—to take the seats already warmed up by the older women, the used-up ones. Who in the meantime have toughened up, like the skin on your feet, calloused from the hard work of supporting the body’s weight. And now they need ointments, treatments, cosmetic surgeons, alcohol, tranquilizers, psychoanalysts, and even gurus from some sect, to ward off depression and win themselves a favorable position in the archives, perhaps with a second or third marriage, the last one on the shelf.
Sixteen years ago, Jacaranda too had set sail for the usual island of dreams. And it had taken her as many years, from one success to the next, before going down in a shipwreck. She had built herself a career as a professional actress, she’d smiled on a hundred or so magazine covers, told practically nothing but lies, supposing them to be harmless. Instead, the dirt from their tiny wounds had infected her a little at a time.
Now Andrea is looking out the window of Oscar’s study, and he has a complete vision of the ritual that is being staged out on the terrace. He would have liked to have made his presence known at the very instant that Oscar had thrown wide his arms and asked if anyone had a memory to share. He has plenty of memories to talk about concerning Jacaranda’s honey-colored eyes, about Oscar’s latest con jobs, and, for that matter, his earliest. But he doesn’t want to confront all those faces down there, which would turn in his direction. He wants to confront only one face.
A Two-Bit Romantic Story
Clinking glasses and a buzz of conversation has scattered the crowd after Oscar’s homily, and the people are sorting themselves out among the blooming lantana plants. The waiters are opening the dining rooms with trays full of raw fish and salads already laid out on tables, with wines, hard liquor, ice buckets, savory pies, risottos, mozzarellas.
At the window, Andrea has lost sight of Oscar’s light-colored jacket.
Milly has found a box of chocolates and bottle of whisky. She’s opened them both. She serves herself. She gets wound up: “I’m going downstairs now, and I’m going to find him for you.”
“Tell him that I’m here waiting for him.”
Milly takes a drink, clenches her jaw, gets to her feet. “With pleasure.”
When they find themselves face to face, high up in the tower, the clash is rapid and harsh. With half a bottle of vodka in his body and the coke pumping in his brain, Oscar is the first to attack: “I don’t recall inviting you here. In fact I told you to stay locked up at home. I would have come to see you. We needed to agree on a few things first, if I make myself clear. Hey! Do y
ou mind telling me what the fuck you’re looking at?”
Andrea is in front of him and doesn’t move. “Agree on what? She’s dead, asshole.”
“You came all the way here to give me the news? Well, talk to her psychiatrist about it,” he says, pointing to Milly, who has once again redone her makeup and is now darting flames from her mascaraed eyes. “Or else ask yourself whether what happened isn’t your fault.”
“My fault?”
“What the fuck! I’d asked you to help me launch the movie, not to screw the star and shatter her brain into pieces.”
As always, Oscar so overstates things that he leaves Andrea frozen in astonishment. Then he retorts, “You’re a son of a bitch! I don’t even know why I’m listening to you. You know perfectly well that—”
Oscar greets his outrage with open arms, the way priests do when they’re pretending to be goodhearted. “I don’t know a damned thing. Except for what you can see with the naked eye: that you, Andrea Serrano, spent a whole week with her, that you certainly plied her silly with questions; that you certainly commiserated with her for her damned awful youth instead of telling her, look to the future, sweetheart, the world’s moving along, so hop aboard. And that in the end, when all is said and done, you made a mess of everything, the way you do with the screenplays that I have to toss in the trash.”
He looks him right in the eye, turns the half Cohiba, now dead, in his fingers. “Yours is a two-bit romantic story, but at the end the suicide heats it all up. Maybe I’ll use this story to make a movie.”