by Pino Corrias
And it went on:
My finest film is the one that nobody can see. It exists in the scenes that I cut from the scripts. In the actors I don’t hire, in the benefits I don’t pay my film crews, in the money I skimp and save.
I steal and I don’t understand all this scandal. A clockwork scandal, if you ask me. The political use of scandal. The media pillory. And if we wanted to be true guarantors of civil rights, every scandal would be considered innocent until proven otherwise, through appeal up to the supreme court, through due process and taking into account all extenuating circumstances.
Because after all, we ought to have a little more patriotic pride, you nasty sons of bitches, seeing that now we export scandals around the world, like olive oil, pasta, and tomato paste. We lead Europe with sixty billion euros, half of all the corruption on the continent—I don’t know if I make myself clear.
I steal and I call it the real economy. I call it adrenaline, a lust for life. Look at the dreary face of a Finnish producer, without bribes, and look at the cheerful face of one of ours who makes films full of belches, farts, and cheating wives: this is life! And look at the bellies and jaws of our politicians, of our businessmen, of our bankers, of our Mafiosi—yes, their jaws and bellies too—as they marry off daughters, celebrate lavish public contracts, visit Padre Pio and the Maldives. Once again: this is life! Listen to the laughter. Admire the digestion.
Pay no attention to those who say: There’s plenty for everyone. It isn’t true. I steal a hundred lives in order to live my own. And believe me, I don’t give a flying fuck about the other ninety-nine lives. You should do the same, if you can.
The monologue continues at rap velocity, with syncopated percussion backfiring and spare change falling into the cash register, and it was feverishly popular online. Diffused by dozens of social networks and darkened by thousands of comments that demanded strict penalties and harsh suffering for this filthy rich son of a bitch, this bastard, this piece of shit thief, rapist, pimp, former king of producers now spinning into a ruinous taildive, serves you right, you son of a bitch, fuck you, you deserve to die.
The downward trajectory suddenly comes to a halt when Oscar, quietly, but with four lawyers at his service, is released from confinement at sunset, “because he no longer represents a threat of contamination of evidence,” and is loaded into a police car to evade the attention of lurking TV cameras, and is taken into house arrest at his palatial mansion on the Aventine. A development that then and there fills him with a blend of euphoria and a looming sense of foreboding. And the foreboding bears itself out the minute he sets foot in the villa, when he senses the void.
Not some existential void, but a physical void, because of how Helga managed to spirit away the finest paintings and the costliest artworks, the slash by Fontana, the flowers by Warhol, the butterflies and the shark by Hirst, Burri’s combustion, and even the tree by Penone and the Bonalumi, all under judicial seal, but not the almost entirely white Manzoni, which hangs there on its vertical stage, a reminder of that long-ago humiliation, his own personal fatal flaw, and in short, the hero’s wound inflicted with that throwaway line (“When you find another fool, sell it to him”), which once again burns him, since Helga clearly left it there as her own personal contribution to the ulcer that has just begun to flower in his stomach. And then his collection of watches, all vanished, including his very first pink gold Vacheron Constantin and his last Patek Philippe. All gone, along with the three Filipino houseboys, the housekeeper, Miriam, the entire array of silverware, the damned bulldog, Napoleon, the cat without a name, and another one of his beloved Jaguars.
In the black thoughts summoned by the void, suddenly there also yawns before him the revelation of the grimmest of all possible coincidences. In prison, he counted his detention one day at a time, but only now does it dawn on him that his grimy time behind bars lasted nineteen days. The same number of days as Eusebio Reverberi, sixteen years ago, as if it were a plan, or even worse, a destiny, that in order to culminate was required to respect that exact span of time, whereupon it could proceed to lay out a suitable aftermath. Like, for instance, summon three Brazilian hookers, and have them stuff three grams of coke up his ass, and then take off toward some hyperuranion, leaving his heart behind him, along with all his dreams of glory, Cinecittà included.
Imprisoned by evil thoughts as well as by house arrest, Oscar Martello is not allowed to do anything more than to wander aimlessly through those silences. Forbidden to make phone calls. Forbidden to go out. Forbidden to meet with strangers, save for his crashingly boring lawyers, who scurry back and forth, along with the lawyers of Angelina Casagrande and her highly placed protectors, urging on him the greatest possible caution, take our advice, sooner or later it will all be taken care of, we need only wait for that zealot of a hardliner to take his eye off the ball or find some other bone to chew on.
But Oscar Martello is no bone. And he wouldn’t be living on top of the Superworld if it wasn’t intrinsic to his nature to do whatever the fuck he pleases. And so on his second night of house arrest, he calls Andrea on one of Helga’s old cell phones, a phone he uses when he doesn’t want to be recorded, waits for Andrea to answer (“Hello? Who is this?”) just to make sure he’s home, and then shows up directly on the landing outside his door, at two in the morning, to bark at him, “You left me all alone, you filthy sons of bitches,” but with his hands in his pockets, his legs slightly splayed, in a foul temper though inoffensive, or at least seemingly so, and dressed with great elegance, a midnight blue suit, white dress shirt, black leather overcoat slung over his shoulder, a gray silk scarf.
Andrea gazes out at him, entranced, from the doorway. He’d throw him down the stairs if he could. He’d like to erase him from the frame. Instead, who knows why, he steps aside and invites him in. “You’ve got a lot of nerve to show up like this.”
Andrea’s Dream
During the days when Oscar was behind bars, the rain had continued to flood Rome. This piece of early summer was over. The Tiber rose twenty feet, flooding its broad banks.
Andrea Serrano had returned permanently to his home, and from there he could look down and watch the river waters flow past, carrying trees and mud. Signora Margherita, his next-door neighbor, had kissed him on both cheeks, as if he were a grandson back from a long trip. She’d told him, “I’m so sorry about that poor girl. Whatever can have happened to her? And you, are you all right?” It was so surprising to hear those words of ordinary everyday kindness that Andrea was on the verge of tears. In his microworld, people used words as sharpened stones to be wedged inside the lives of other people, as weapons to feed cruel emotions, cultivate envies, unveil secrets, insinuate, defame, mock, humiliate. And almost never to ask, understand, and console. Only old Signora Margherita, there on the landing, was still capable of handling with the proper care that example of age-old kindness, which had so surprised him. And which had also, to a small extent, consoled him.
Massimiliano Testa found him a gig to write a TV movie, quick and dirty. “To help you make ends meet, what do you say? Are you still interested in making ends meet?”
“How much?”
“Thirty-five thousand, but you have to split it with Ivano Dotti.”
“Oh, no!”
“I know.”
Ivano Dotti, a.k.a. Invain-o, a former denizen of Oscar Martello’s stable of talent, is a screenwriter who might even be good at his work, but he’s touchy, pompous, whiny, and when he’s off track, he’s capable of writing idiotic things like, “Alessandra was traveling with just one piece of hand luggage: her heart,” or else, “The lights of Los Angeles were the new guardians of his loneliness.” And he’d defend those lines to the bitter end. You needed a hammer and chisel to get those things out of the scripts and psychiatrist to console him for the loss.
“What kind of story is it supposed to be?”
“A romantic comedy involving a sex therapist and an impotent painter.”
“Are you
kidding?”
“No. The producer is Tripla Film, ten thousand euros on signature.”
“Delivery?”
“The script in sixty days.”
Seeing that he was climbing back up out of the very abyss, everything seemed acceptable, the gray sky, the rain, even working with Invain-o. And even the idea of an affair between a nymphomaniac sex therapist and a guy with a limp dick.
“I’ll think it over.”
“Good boy. And don’t be a stranger,” he said.
After the wake—grim and fake, at the Casa del Cinema in Villa Borghese, with the film critics playing their usual role as the bereaved, the fellow film professionals all happy not to be dead, and Milly Gallo Bautista in tears—Andrea dreamed of her. He remembered nothing about the dream except for the instant when, on the banks of the Seine, Jacaranda lit a cigarette, shielding the flame with one hand. The glow had illuminated her face like in an old black-and-white movie. She had looked at him as lovingly as any diva, and then she had exhaled the plume of smoke and had said to him, “Shall we go, my love?”
When he woke, he thought for a second that she was beside him. Instead he finds himself in his bedroom in Rome, in the only available real world, where she is gone forever and never uttered a phrase of the sort, certainly not with that unsettling grace. And instead of her face, there is a void. He’ll have to learn to treasure that void. To keep it for himself. To gaze at it slowly certain evenings the way you do with old photographs when you’re in the mood for nostalgia. And to put it away during the day, to keep it from spoiling, to keep from wearing it out. And then, without haste, he’ll have to forget about it little by little, until he can remove it from his thoughts entirely.
That’s what he promises himself, while deep down he is amazed at the depth of his grieving over a love story that lasted no more than a day, a dinner date, a one-way trip.
Since when has he become so fragile, so romantic? If, that is, we’re actually talking about romanticism, and not some banal narcissistic wound at the thought that he’d been unable to keep Jacaranda by his side, to give her the feelings of trust that might have helped her cling to life. Or perhaps it’s just the fault of the synapses that tend to break down with age, leaving him here so weak and bewildered.
The voids left by abandonment, his friend Ginevra, an expert at living life on the surface, used to say are the most persistent and painful ordeals. They can drag you down with no chance of recovery. Or push you toward the bridge that can get you back on the road.
He wants to get back on the road. And the bridge that he needs to find is an agenda, obligations to meet. He’ll agree to write that idiotic movie. He’ll make a call to good old Fernanda, a.k.a. Ninni, who loves him, before she comes back from London, and maybe he’ll even fly to join her and inhale a lungful of new life in the latest art galleries in East London, going to drink beer after six in the evening, while the traffic flows past the wrong way under the light, steady drizzle.
He’ll throw dinner parties. Maybe he’ll invite the underworld of the Superworld, a world where he feels more comfortable, bands of misfit screenwriters, all of them vodka drinkers, accompanied by their lovers and squads of black-clad cinephiles clogged up with darkness, full of stories that they’ve never actually lived. And he’ll invite new faces, new people, owners of other lives who will finally make his own life light up in their embrace.
Because deep down, this is what he’s looking for now, an embrace and a little light. And he thinks it without knowing that at that exact moment, Oscar Martello himself, abandoned by all good fortune, oppressed by the same void, is looking for the same thing. Even though on a much grander scale. And in the least ordinary way imaginable. That is, his way.
The Rumba Has Just Begun
“Maybe what I’ve got isn’t nerve. It’s desperation, ha ha!” says Oscar, stepping past Andrea and walking into his apartment. He’s completely wrecked and he staggers and weaves, he stretches out on an armchair, he closes his eyes.
“If they find you here they’ll arrest you and this time you won’t get out,” Andrea tells him.
“And your heart couldn’t take the pain of it, right?” he asks, veering from laughter to a snarl. He feels like a fight, but he’s too full of drugs to have the strength for it. “I’m just looking for a little coke, do you have any?”
“No.”
He looks at him. “If you had some, you’d give it to me, wouldn’t you? I’ll pay you.”
“Stop talking bullshit.”
“Why, I’ve always done it. I’ve always paid you.”
“Oh, go fuck yourself, Oscar.”
Instead of reacting, Oscar limits himself to opening his eyes wide. “Bravo. But this time you’re the last one to say it to me. After Helga. After that homely slut Angelina. After the television networks that have torn up all my contracts, inasmuch as I am now persona non grata, and those worms of lawyers of mine, who weren’t capable of keeping it from happening.”
The newspapers and the Internet took care of the rest. They fished out of the news files an old Carabinieri report concerning a certain Oscar Martello, “driver and all-purpose assistant in the film industry,” suspected of being a small-time coke dealer. They dragged up the old story of Eusebio Reverberi. And of course the matter of the “mysterious underage female,” who, after all these years, finally has her proper identity, the unfortunate Maria Rizzi, known to the moviegoing public as Jacaranda, may she rest in peace. They reexhumed the suspicions of illegal smuggling of funds out of Italy that were prompted by one of his first trips to London, suspicions that were ultimately laid to rest. The first investigations of his business relations with Angelina Casagrande, who is now collaborating with great alacrity in the hunt for Oscar’s money. They dusted off the first dossiers assembled by the Financial Police concerning the acquisition of artworks paid from one foreign account to another. The first banking investigations, with black holes the size of metastasizing cancer cells. And so on and so forth.
Oscar knows that the rumba has just begun. Soon everyone he’s kicked in the ass over the years will start piping up. The newspapers will broaden the scope of the story. His wiretapped conversations will come out, his unconfessable business deals, his lovers. Including the especially dangerous ones, who’ll put their ass out in the open air just to drum up a little free publicity. Then the politicians will pile on, insulting him, especially the ones whom he fed carelessly, tossing them a chunk of filet mignon at a time. The great vomitorium of the Internet will open wide, and hundreds of anonymous posters will spit out their slanders and libels, the weapons of the small and frustrated and the greatly depressed.
Then it will be up to Helga to haul the nets full of fish back to shore. And all she’ll have to do to crown the entire take is ask one small question: “And would you, Judge Your Honor, be willing to entrust my little girls to the paternal authority of such an appalling monster?”
Strip the flesh off his bones and forget about him, that’s what she’s going to ask them. There will be no way out for him. Or for his creation.
It’s just a matter of time.
And with those thoughts, Oscar sits down in one of the pink armchairs and watches the Tiber flowing past, intuiting at that moment that every river, but especially this one, which runs with its mud between the banks of History, is the caption of any and every life. “Do you think I don’t know how it’s going to end? We make films, we make children, we buy houses, we pay debts, we fall in love, we pull down our pants for a colonoscopy. And then, one night, all alone, we’ll end our lives like dead dogs, every last one of us.”
Andrea looks at him. “I don’t feel sorry for you. I don’t feel even a little sorry for you.”
“I don’t give a damn whether you feel sorry for me or not. All I wanted from life was a hot bath now and then.”
“You’re a pathetic liar.”
He rubs the back of his neck and ponders. “No, you’re right, I wanted everything from life. And you’re
a complete dickhead.”
“And you thought you could get it by betraying everyone, me, Jacaranda, and even Helga?”
“Don’t you dare talk to me about betrayal and Helga. I’ve told you once before.”
Andrea says nothing and waits.
Oscar levels his forefinger at him. “Did you think that she wouldn’t tell me, you damned piece of shit? Oh, she told me. The very same night she left me. And to think that between you and me, you were the one who was all clean and respectable. The one who knows how to read, knows how to write, brushes his teeth and washes his cock every morning. But instead you had the sheer nerve, the cowardice, and also the questionable taste to fuck your best friend’s wife. Your benefactor’s wife. The man who made sure you had enough to eat, with his own hands.”
Andrea doesn’t feel like talking about it, much less trying to justify himself: it happened by accident, it happened because he wasn’t thinking. And most important of all, it happened in another life, the life from before, the life that no longer means anything, not after Jacaranda and all the revelations that followed. And while Oscar is still trying to cling to it, Andrea knows that in this new life the things from before are no longer of any importance, including their friendship. And there’s nothing more to add. Quite the contrary. There’s only one thing to add, and if he were to utter it, this is how it would sound: “Go on, get out of here! Just go home!”