by Pino Corrias
Andrea remains standing, facing him. “Well, I have an even better one.”
Oscar tilts his head in understanding. “Ah, yes, tell me the story, I might even like it, and if so I’ll buy it. Remember that I’ve already given you an advance of five large, though.”
Andrea ignores him and goes on. “It’s the story of a guy who comes up from the street. He becomes the gofer of a producer. Once he feels he’s ready he gets him into trouble with an underage female that he’s already screwed, has him arrested, pushes him into the abyss to steal his soul, his profession, and his Jaguar.”
Oscar’s face remains impassive. “That’s exactly how your Jacaranda told it to you, and now you come and repeat like a good parrot. No, I’m not buying it. I don’t like it.”
From the other end of the room, Milly makes an exasperated noise. “Now cut that out!”
Oscar pours himself a drink, clucks his tongue, and says, “Quit busting my balls, fatso.”
She gives him a hard glare. “One of these days I’m going to stick it up your ass, trust me.”
Oscar bursts out laughing in her face. “But I already did that to you, or don’t you remember?”
She gives him the finger.
He swings around now and focuses on Andrea. “So let me tell you the other parts that you evidently haven’t heard yet. Eusebio Reverberi had squeezed himself dry, down to the last drop. He was done for. He was a dead man. He’d run well past the closing credits, I don’t know if I make myself clear. His movies weren’t making a penny of box office anymore. He was just stealing money from his financiers and ideas from me. The coke had burned through his hard palate and his brain. And the whores were eating his heart. All I did was I cleaned up after him.”
“Of course. Custodian of the year.”
“Fuck yourself. As for your girlfriend Jacaranda, she was looking for a quick way to climb. I taught her the fastest way of all: descend.”
“Fuck, she was just sixteen!”
“So what? I didn’t ask her to spread her legs. There was a line waiting outside. They were selling tickets outside. That was her shortcut to heaven.”
“Did you take her there?”
“What?”
Andrea raises his voice and asks again, “Answer me, did you take her there?”
“Why should I even remember? There were dozens just like her. All of them looking for candy. All of them with braids, white panties, and condoms in their teddy bears.”
Andrea tries to grab him by the shirt, Oscar steps aside, Milly screams, the shirt tears: “Did you take her there to Reverberi’s house, yes or no?”
“Fuck, my shirt!”
“Yes or no?”
Oscar is beet red. “I don’t know. Yes, maybe yes! Are you happy now? What the fuck does it change? If it’s a crime, well, by now the statue of limitations has run out.”
Waves of fury make Andrea clench his jaw. Then the adrenaline subsides, replaced by weariness for this filthy world. He goes over and sits down in one of the armchairs. “You threw open the door for her. You shut her in. Then you screwed your friend Reverberi by making that anonymous phone call.”
Oscar is sweating, he takes a deep breath and considers whether to grab him by the neck and keep him from unearthing those long-buried years. But he’s afraid that the damage has been done, that the phantoms have been raised, and that Jacaranda’s death is only the first of many consequences. He looks at his torn shirt, he starts unbuttoning it. “You don’t know shit. I didn’t make that phone call. Eusebio had plenty of enemies, but I wasn’t one of them. Now do me a favor and go fuck yourself.”
Andrea turns around and heads downstairs; he’s had enough of that party. When he’s halfway down the hallway, heading for the secondary exit, his cell phone rings. “Is this Andrea Serrano? Would you have ten minutes you can spare me?”
The Farewell in a Digital Story
Half an hour later they’re both leaning against Ventura’s car two intersections away. The street running past Martello’s house is barricaded, as it is at every party, by the city police, with signs reading FILM SET, which seems more like a caption than the privilege that it is. Those signs are there to keep the parking places clear for the guests, a thoughtful gesture from the municipal traffic commissioner, a former Fascist enforcer, to his longtime friend Oscar, who on summer weekends takes him and his little wifey, both of them with the eyes of wolves, out for rides at forty knots aboard the Magnum Marine all the way to the island of Ponza, and after a nice swim stuffs them full of amberjack at a reserved table at Acqua Pazza.
Far from the lights of the mansion, the sky is still full of stars, and the other villas on the Aventine seem to be dreaming untroubled dreams.
Ventura has watched Andrea stroll down that brightly lit sidewalk and has evaluated that studied elegance—a plum-colored corduroy suit, English shoes, a soft orange vest, and a vanilla-white shirt—as a token of membership, a sign that he too can claim a spot in the Superworld.
He lets him come even with him and then gets straight to the point: “Will you tell me why you went all the way to Paris?”
Andrea identified him at first glance as someone who always carries that police headquarters light on him, in the cut of his clothes and in his gaze. And so he tries to slow down. “It’s a long story.”
“Tell it to me anyway. I have plenty of time.”
“We were supposed to save a movie. We had invented a sort of game.”
“And that’s it?”
“And then things got out of hand and what we thought was a game turned into a tragedy. But I couldn’t tell you why.”
“Do you think smuggling cash out of Italy is a game?”
The question disorients him entirely. “What cash?”
“You tell me.”
Andrea looks at him in surprise. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, seriously. I thought you wanted to ask me about Jacaranda.”
“I’m not interested in Jacaranda Rizzi right now. I’m working on Oscar Martello and the money that the two of you illegally smuggled out of Italy.”
Ventura’s words once again change the whole picture for him. “Who did?”
“You two did. On that trip to Paris.”
“I don’t know anything about any cash.”
“It was in the three blue plastic travel bags in the trunk of your automobile.”
“Jacaranda and I didn’t have any—” but as he’s saying it, Andrea stops and his expression changes.
Ventura takes a deep breath. “So you see that now you remember?”
At that exact moment, Jacaranda’s farewell comes over the Internet. Both their cell phones ping out simultaneously, notifying them that a text has come in. Milly has just forwarded it to Andrea. Police headquarters has forwarded it to Ventura. The sender’s name has made them both jerk in surprise. They try to open the message, but the web is so bottlenecked that nothing is downloading.
Andrea breathes in, tries to slow his heartbeat, and calls Milly. “What is it?”
“Take a look at it. It’s more discombobulated than the other one. But still, it says things.”
It takes them several long minutes to download. It’s a selfie video a hundred seconds long, shot by Jacaranda in Amsterdam, scheduled to post and parked somewhere on her digital cloud or on some server two or three days ago, presumably shortly before killing herself. Given the content—an actress and superstar, giant box office draw, announcing her own suicide—it’s literally breaking the Internet.
Jacaranda appears sitting barefoot on the edge of a bed, wearing her usual torn denim jeans, her face white with tension, her eyes the color of honey, her blond hair swept back. Reciting her farewell message, she gets the tone and the pauses wrong, everything turns out to be dramatically slurred and, at the same time, utterly clear.
This is what she says:
I’ve decided to go away and leave it all behind me even life itself which has been nothing but covering myself with thorn branche
s which wound up suffocating me if I want to free myself from them I have to cut them off at the root and I’ll go away with the roots.
Many years ago they took my body I was sixteen years old and I won’t say I didn’t consent I was an accomplice I believed that the money and the success were worth it but if you’re seeing me now girls, please, please don’t do it.
In these matters there’s always a guy who casts a spell with his stories, in my case the guy was called Oscar Martello, and by using me he ruined a person I cared about and I let him do it.
Sincerely, I don’t know if I understood at the time how much harm I was doing I was stupid but it happened, that person, in part because of me, is dead now, his name was Eusebio Reverberi and maybe he too cared about me.
That betrayal was something I thought I could forget as I went my way but instead that betrayal no longer forgot about me, and year after year it became my great remorse until remorse became my sickness.
Today my sickness is ending and with it I too am ending my name is Jacaranda Rizzi get someone to tell you my story my misbegotten love affairs I’m an actress and because of that some of you may think you know me but it’s not true I don’t even know myself.
The audio ends. The frame veers for a moment into the vague whiteness of a light that might perhaps be that on the ceiling in the room, and then darkness.
Andrea is done watching and he’s on the verge of tears. Ventura puts away the iPhone, sticks his hands in his pockets, and says, “Maybe we ought to take a look-see at what’s going on in there.”
Andrea stops him. “Does Oscar know about your investigation into the money?”
“Maybe he does, maybe he doesn’t. But seeing that I’ve just told you about it, I’ll be talking about it with him too.”
“I don’t give a damn about the money.”
“Really?”
“I loved Jacaranda.”
“You’ve told me that already.”
Andrea is thinking about how quickly Jacaranda’s world closed down, and how little her face, as recorded in that video, matches the face he remembered. Aged by years in just a hundred seconds.
He sees her again at the Brasserie Lipp, sitting across from him at that tiny table, closer than if there had been no table. The waiter had cleared away everything and brought them the hard liquor. Her fingers were knit, her face was luminous, her voice was tired. She was saying, “I’ve been bought and sold a bunch of times. And you want to know the funny thing? I was always the one who set the price.”
The image vanishes.
“I shouldn’t have let her go. I should have gone to look for her, gone to Amsterdam to get her.”
“So why didn’t you?”
“For the stupidest reason, you want to hear? Because she had written on the mirror in the bathroom, ‘Don’t try to find me.’ ”
Ventura feels a yank at his heart. Graz·yna had used the same words. He knows exactly what Andrea Serrano is feeling. And he knows that he’s not lying.
“It’s time to go back to your producer.”
“He’s not my producer anymore.”
“Since when?”
“Since tonight.”
“That’s a good decision. Shall we get going?”
“Actually, I was planning to go home.”
“No. I really don’t think so.”
In the villa, lots of other people are simultaneously receiving on their smartphones the same video, chain-posted and propagating horizontally as the juiciest novelty of the evening, an unprecedented development taking place before the eyes of one and all: the dead woman, just commemorated, who takes the lectern at her own funeral to mock and ridicule the officiant.
Beyond belief—if it wasn’t La Dolce Roma.
The guests emit a buzz of noisy chatter.
The guests have a good laugh.
The guests text and post and text and post, all of them bowed over their smartphones, without even touching each other, as if it were some sort of game. But it is a game.
Unleashed by this unforeseen plot twist, all their resentments against Oscar the bandit bob to the surface. They believed—the guests had—that they were being invited to take part in an innocuous but advantageous ritual, to sit without obligation at the steam table of righteous sentiment. And instead the small-time celebrities of Roman nightlife, dressed to the nines, suddenly find themselves chewing over the remains of a suicide at the home of her persecutor. And this is not strictly speaking a good thing, but it is certainly a juicy piece of gossip, and starting tomorrow it’s worth putting on your CV.
War & Peace, trained as they are to catch the slightest whiff of blood in the air, immediately start taking pictures of the most prominent guests and archiving the pictures in the new file—“Here’s Who Was There That Night,” bound to sell at decent prices.
Undersecretary Neri is the quickest to react: “Remaining in the home of Signor Martello can mean only one thing: complicity.” And he orders the withdrawal of his retinue of blond assistants, with handbags and overcoats all grabbed on the run, everyone out the door without so much as goodbye to anyone. A couple of lawyers trail after them. The skinny fashion designer flounces out too. Other guests scatter out onto the terraces, while the more curious take their places in the living rooms, clustering around to savor the scene.
Oscar appears, drunk and furious.
Oscar walks long distances between sofas filled only with people who are looking at him.
Oscar wishes he could just kick them all out. He’s lost Helga, he’s lost his little girls, and now he’s getting ready to lose all the rest.
Donna Angelina Casagrande tracks him with a long gaze until she feels her eyelids tug, then she speaks resentfully to the banker breathing beside her: “Too much rancor and too much noise is bad for business.”
Attilio Fabris wanders through the crowd filming everything with great brio; it’s all first-rate stuff for his vendetta and for his next film, once all his bruises have healed and he can finally get a new producer.
Milly Gallo Bautista is sitting in an armchair and, full of rum, she’s finally crying over the milk spilled. After all, it was she who took Jacaranda to Amsterdam, believing she was saving her from that swine Oscar, never imagining that the gray skies of Holland would be the last straw, shattering that frightened little heart and making the irreparable well and truly irreparable.
Andrea has come back and now he’s sitting next to her.
Many of the main lights in the other living rooms have been turned off, replaced by needlelike LEDs—from painting to painting, from sculpture to sculpture—to offer greater intimacy in the dim light to the guests gathering in small knots to converse.
Commissario Ventura roams freely like an explorer among the exotic parrots and the oversize ferns on the terrace, worried that his netting might be swept away by this new groundswell of clamor, along with his prey. Now that Oscar has publicly besmirched himself with the crime of having shut Jacaranda’s eyes forever, accusing him of tax evasion and illegal exportation of capital funds outside the country strikes him as being in poor taste. Even though these are the only crimes, since the days of Al Capone, that can at least ensure a stay in the national prison system and a bit of social censure; not so much for the commission of the crime as for the weakness of having allowed oneself to be caught.
Now behold the great Oscar Martello, who, in spite of his rage, never forgets his golden rules of screenwriting, and so in the moment of darkest affliction of this entire evening’s entertainment complete with funeral, he therefore organizes the turning point, the hero’s redemption, or at least the redemption of his party. He orders his housemaids and waiters to turn back on the main lights in the living rooms, one by one. To turn up the music. To throw open the doors. To move in single file from the kitchens toward the sofas with an orgy of trays stacked high with gelato, cassatas with candied fruit, and mini pastries.
The sugary distractions work perfectly. The depression passes: Here com
e the sweets!
A Film with Three Blue Plastic Travel Bags
Sweets are forgetfulness. They are the enchantment that dissolves bad thoughts. That makes everyone regress to the carefree innocence of childhood, makes them cluster around groaning tables, even outside, on the terraces. It attracts them around an edible form of happiness that also makes their hearts race, the way flags do when they flutter in the wind, the way national anthems do when they blare out over the crowd: the sweets of La Dolce Roma. In that festive interlude—while Oscar Martello, having successfully pulled off the plot twist, has gone back to his tower study, and Andrea with Milly is following him, and Ventura has left behind him the crowded terraces to make sure he doesn’t lose them—no one notices the way the sky is changing color. That the sky is now a contagious black.
Andrea is the first to speak: “Fuck, I’d love to know if you feel even the slightest sense of guilt.”
Oscar looks at him, his unbuttoned shirt hanging out of his trousers, his face a wreck. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Ventura intervenes, fed up: “If you like, I’ll be glad to explain, but not here.”
Oscar struggles even to focus on him, or at least so it seems. “What do you mean by that?”
“That maybe it’s time for all of us to go have a nice long chat, but at my place, police headquarters.”
“I’m not going anywhere with anyone, half the world of Roman cinema is here in my home, I don’t know if you missed that fact. And you’re not even on the guest list.”
“Would you like me to call a couple of squad cars?”
“Would you like me to call the chief of police?”
“Go right ahead. Maybe you could explain to him the reasons for that trip to Paris.”
“What on earth are you talking about?”
Andrea breaks in: “Cut it out, Oscar. After sixteen years, you’ve pulled the same trick with me and Jacaranda!”
“I’ve pulled what same trick?”
“Betrayal. The same betrayal! You brought us onstage and then you locked the door behind us.”