Sicilian Tragedee (17 page)

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Authors: Ottavio Cappellani

BOOK: Sicilian Tragedee
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Cagnotto Is Having His Toenails Trimmed by Bobo
Cagnotto is having his toenails trimmed by Bobo. He’s stretched out on the zebra-striped sofa with an ice bag on his head. “I can’t bear Caporeale anymore. That ingrate! Oh, God, my head, what time is it?”
Bobo puts down the nail file. “Three-thirty. Polish?”
Cagnotto leaps up. “Are you crazy? It’s late! How do I look?”
Bobo, seated on the ottoman, looks up at him with admiration. “You look gorgeous.”
Cagnotto’s wearing a black silk dressing gown lined with red over red silk pajamas.
Around his neck is a pink feather boa.
Cagnotto smiles. “I’d better take this thing off or they’ll think I’m gay.” He takes it off and hides it under one of the sofa cushions.
“Idiot,” says Bobo, smiling.
Cagnotto touches Bobo’s nose with the tip of his index finger, then pulls back quickly.
“Hunk.”
This morning they had called from
La Voce della Sicilia
asking if
they could send a reporter for an interview about his new play. Cagnotto had gotten the call on his cell phone while they were at the Matador. If only they were giving him fewer problems, the actors, he would have invited the reporter to come directly to the rehearsal. He would have had her talk to Caporeale, to Cosentino, to Lambertini. But they were still thinking out the interpretation and Cagnotto was afraid the actors would say something dumb. And so he had said into the phone, “At home?” as if on the other end of the line they were asking to come to his house. “Fine, then, if that’s what you want, at my house.” Cagnotto had repocketed the phone, spreading his arms as if to say,
They insisted on coming to my house.
 
 
The doorbell rings.
Cagnotto throws himself on the sofa.
Bobo gathers up the pedicure equipment into a towel and runs to hide it away, yelling, “Get the door!”
An aging retainer wearing white livery crosses the sitting room. He walks kicking his legs forward as if he can’t take another minute in this house full of crazies.
“Yes?”
The old guy pushes the buzzer and then opens the apartment door to wait for the elevator.
Bobo comes running back in shouting, “Get the door!”
The old guy’s look is impenetrable.
Bobo, very nervous, asks, “Did you open?”
The old guy, in front of the elevator, nods slowly, twice.
“Baby!” Bobo runs over to Cagnotto.
Cagnotto is imitating Paolina Bonaparte as sculpted by Canova in the style and posture of Venus.
“What are you doing?”
“Huh?” says Cagnotto with a start.
“What’s this
look
?”
Cagnotto doesn’t understand. He checks to see that the dressing gown and pajamas are in place.
“Sit up!” Bobo orders.
Cagnotto stares at him.
“Sit up!”
Cagnotto sits up.
“Cross your legs.”
Cagnotto crosses them. He puts his hands together on one knee. He looks up.
Bobo runs to a table, grabs a book, runs back, and slaps it into Cagnotto’s hand.
Cagnotto nods, takes the book, and begins to read with his elbow on his knee. Then he makes a funny face, looks at the cover,
Madame Bovary
, a look of horror crosses his face, but once again he fakes an interest and begins to read.
Bobo races to the other end of the sitting room, where there’s the “musician” setting with the piano. He leans on the piano.
He hears the door of the elevator open.
He hears the reporter say “Good afternoon,” to the old guy.
Bobo springs.
He manages to meet the reporter just as she’s stepping into the apartment, but on the run, as if he were just passing through by chance. “Oh, good afternoon.”
“I’m the report—”
“Yes, I know, I know. Follow me. You’ll pardon me then, I’ll be off.”
The reporter follows him, looking around.
Bobo sends Cagnotto a look of anguish.
The reporter is a cross between a harpy and a wife, you can see that she’s just been to the hairdresser because she had an appointment with a director, and you can see that the hairdresser was pitiful. The typical mix of envy and resentment. She walks like a drunk on her high-heeled wedge sandals. Bobo can hear her rolling across the
floor behind him. Her sweat stinks of nervousness and rancor. Bobo wishes Cagnotto would lift his head from that book so he could warn him with his eyes.
Cagnotto continues to read with great interest.
“The reporter is here …”
Cagnotto is deep into the book.
Bobo is standing in front of him.
Cagnotto lifts his eyes distractedly.
He sees Bobo’s face.
He opens his eyes wide.
Bobo sends him a forced smile.
Cagnotto remembers to smile.
Bobo steps back. “The reporter …”
Cagnotto looks at the reporter.
Cagnotto looks at Bobo.
He thinks he’s going to pass out.
The journalist holds out her hand.
Cagnotto stares at the hand as if it were a piece of decaying sushi. He says, “Please sit down,” pointing to a chair on the other side of the room.
The reporter says thanks and runs her hand through her hair, filling the room with the smell of crappy hair spray. She sits down on the sofa right next to Cagnotto.
The old guy appears. “Would you like something to drink?”
“A coffee,” says the reporter, wiggling a behind as big as Piazza Europa and settling into the sofa as if she intended to sit there for the rest of her life.
Betty Is Stretched Out on the Sofa on Her Stomach
Betty is stretched out on the sofa on her stomach, her hand limp on the carpet. “Carmine, will you calm down?”
Carmine is pacing nervously around the living room. He jumps into an armchair and perches on the edge. “Okay, shit, just tell me what are you up to, why are you up to it, and what made you do it?”
“Lay off.”
“No, I won’t lay off because there has to be a reason, people don’t do things without a reason. So what’s your reason?”
The hand comes to slowly, it rests on the carpet and pushes down weakly. Betty sits up, moving like a tree sloth. Now her two little hands lie limp on the sofa cushions, palms facing up.
Betty gazes with interest at the arrangement of objects on the table. She looks thoughtful. Laboriously, she leans toward the table, moves a bust of Socrates made of quartz to the right and a Big Ben made of colored glass to the left.
She falls back on the sofa, lifts her legs, one by one, and places her two little feet in the space she has cleared.
She looks at Carmine, exhausted. “Carmine, it’s not so complicated.”
Carmine is still looking at the bust of Socrates.
“What am I supposed to do? It’s not like Turrisi totally turns me off. And what’s more, if they want me to, I can even marry him, but, like, when I’m old and decrepit, like, I don’t know, thirty. You have to be crazy if you think that I want to get married at my age, like the little girls down in San Cristoforo.”
“And you can’t find a way to make this clear to Turrisi, who doesn’t get it?”
“Carmine, you’re a gay guy, you don’t know about
guys
. You know about gay guys but that’s different.”
Carmine looks annoyed, as if he’s about to go down with a hysteric fit.
Betty, calm, puts the brake on. “If I let Turrisi know I don’t go for him he’ll never stop insisting. He’ll think I’m doing it because I’m a female, and because I’m a female, that I don’t understand.”
“And actually you do understand?”
Betty looks down at Carmine from an immense, galactic distance. “My father and Turrisi both want me to get married. They’ve been enemies all their lives. And now that they’ve discovered that there’s oil in Ispica, well, guess.”
“Oil?”
Betty nods. “Luckily there’s oil. Because in this business neither Turrisi nor my father can afford to do something stupid. They’re picking up the land at auction.” Betty smiles. “Public auction, get it?”
“Auctions?”
Betty nods with an expression that says,
Auctions, can you believe it?
“Auctions, what’s so strange about that? That’s how you buy things when there are several people who want to buy them.”
The immense, galactic distance increases by light-years. “Carmine, let me tell you. You really don’t understand fuck-all.”
Carmine, puzzled, tries to think about this business of auctions.
Betty sighs, rolls her head back, and looks at the ceiling.
Turi Pirrotta comes into the living room and finds his daughter sprawled on the sofa with Carmine on the edge of a chair, looking at her with a puzzled face.
“Aha!” says Pirrotta. “We’ve now got to the point where my daughter has to be
consoled
.”
Carmine snaps around to look at Pirrotta, not knowing what to say.
Betty slowly turns her head the other way and rests her cheek on the back of the sofa.
Pirrotta stares at Betty, the way it looks to him his daughter has turned her head to one side so as not to let her father see she’s crying.
Pirrotta looks at Carmine scandalized. “We’ll see if I let this continue. We’ll see!”
Pirrotta goes out yelling nasally, “Wanda! Where the fuck are you, Wanda?”
Carmine is silent.
Betty, who is trying to work the crick out of her neck, says in a low voice, “There’s fuck-all he can do about it.”
Shit, Listen to This
“Shit, listen to this.”
The reporter had begun with an architectonic description of Cagnotto’s apartment, a house “designed to be inhabited by the intellect” where “minimalism has been abandoned in favor of ethnic color …”
“Are you listening Bobo?”
After this came an overview of his work.
“Get it, Bobo? They’re doing an overview of my work.”
An overview that used words like
contamination
,
avant-garde
, and
experimentation, an artist who wouldn’t be out of place in New York
.
“I certainly wouldn’t be out of place.”
And then it continued with the interview itself, in which Cagnotto’s words were faithfully reproduced.
“Good work! Now, this is journalism. Not like those guys that put stuff you don’t want in your mouth. Bobo, has anybody ever put stuff you don’t want in your mouth?”
Cagnotto had spoken of “theatrical neorealism, capable of bringing
the Italian cultural Renaissance to international prominence. Pasolini, De Sica, Pirandello! Romeo is played by a sixty-year-old actor to suggest, in stage terms, the eternal adolescence of the
idea
.”
(Caporeale had called up, furious. “I’m fifty-nine years old and if you keep this up you can get Lambertini to grab
her
prick. Why didn’t anyone interview the actors?”
“You’re sixty-four.”
“Fuck if I am.”
“No, I mean, like Pascoli, theatrical fiction is the genuine reality that can draw the young into the world of culture.”)
The article went on to say that “Shakespeare’s relevance must be credited not to Shakespeare but to those directors who know how to reinterpret his work.”
“Shit, did I really say that? Let’s hope the English don’t hear about it. But okay, if the reporter thought it was true, and wrote it in the paper, it must be true. Right, Bobo?”
Paino had called to congratulate himself for the article. He was proud of the way they had played up the event. He had been the one who got in touch with the paper. Cagnotto had said to Bobo, “The credit is all mine, what does Commissioner Paino have to do with it?” And in fact Commissioner Paino had nothing at all to do with it, the credit belonged to Commissioner Falsaperla and his phone call.
Paino had suggested he give a dinner. Commissioners like dinners, especially when they’re given by other people. “We’ve got to cultivate the terrain,” he said. Create interest. The article was a starting point. They had to move fast. He was wasting his words because Cagnotto, the idea of giving a dinner, he had already had all by himself, you think he wasn’t going to give a dinner on the day there was a front-page article about his Shakespeare?
The Contessa had called to congratulate
herself
for the article. The credit was due to her
raccomandazione
. She had also asked if she could invite some of her friends. Cagnotto replied that it would be an honor for him.
In the “Victorian” sitting area, Cagnotto dictates, “So write this, Bobo: ‘Rotten Apples.’ And tell it to the shop down below where they make those candied apples. Next comes ‘Human Kindness Ravioli with Pork Sauce.’”
“Human kindness?”
Cagnotto nods. “Human kindness as in ‘the milk of human kindness, ’
Macbeth
. We can’t do veal intestines because they give the calves powdered milk now and they don’t taste of anything, so that if we want human kindness we will have to eat ricotta ravioli with pork sauce. Oh, and then we’ll have a cheese course and we’ll call it … um … Mad Cow Lady Macbeth, and on the menu we’ll write, ‘Come to my woman’s breasts.’” Cagnotto makes like he’s offering a woman’s breasts. “Oh, and the menu should be printed, like, on parchment and rolled up with a red ribbon and sealing wax stamped WS. What else? Oh, yes, obviously, Merchant of Venice Ham, sliced thick, and a sparkling wine, I don’t know, a Lambrusco or a Sangiovese, nice and fizzy, and on the menu we’ll write, ‘Toby Belch, from
Twelfth Night
.’ What else? Oh, yes, our heroine. See that table there?”
Bobo looks at the table.
“Okay, that one I want served with Marzipan Juliet and on the menu write, ‘Good thou, save me a piece of marchpane,’ and tough shit for anybody who doesn’t understand the reference. Tell Prestipino that I want the marzipan in the shape of poison vials.”

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