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Authors: Ottavio Cappellani

BOOK: Sicilian Tragedee
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I’m a Salesclerk, Not an Object
“I’m a salesclerk, not an object,” says Bobo, turning once again to stare at the sea.
The sun sparkles tremulously off the crests of the waves. The rubber rafts, bobbing on the water, are melting under the sun. Some teenagers have parked their motorbikes on the concrete breakwater and now they’re competing to see who can make the biggest splashes with his cannonballs. One of them is doing cannonballs dressed and wearing a pair of trainers.
“Huh?” Cagnotto doesn’t get it.
“You heard me.” Bobo looks pleased with himself. He doesn’t even bother to look at Cagnotto. Yeah, he’s pleased with himself.
He told him.
But wasn’t it supposed to be me who told
him
? thinks Cagnotto.
What’s going on?
What’s happening, kiddo, is that you’re really beginning to make me lose my cool.
How dare you talk to me like that?
This is what I get for treating you like an equal?
Hey, this is the way it goes with
climbers
; it’s always a mistake to let them get too friendly. They get a kick out of mistreating their superiors, just because you let them get friendly and because you act like a civilized person.
“I heard what?” says Cagnotto with mounting rage.
“That’s right,” says Bobo, as if Cagnotto has finally understood.
Cagnotto raises his eyes to the heavens.
Bobo turns to look him in the face, his hands placed firmly on either side of his plate, his gaze decisive and firm, implacable. “You think I haven’t understood that you just want to have sex, you pig; you think I don’t get it that all this cultural blah-blah”—the word
cultural
comes out with a sarcastic snarl—“that I hear from you is only aimed at scoring a fuck? You think I don’t understand because I’m only a salesclerk?”
“But …”
“You think I don’t know about you famous directors, the way you think you have the whole world at your feet? The fuck you do. But there you go. There you go, there you go … I was waiting for it, you think I wasn’t waiting for it, I was saying to myself, Hey, I wonder when he’s going to offer me a part in one of his plays? You think I wasn’t waiting for it … hey … because I’m just a salesclerk, no? A salesclerk aspiring actor, no? So you can treat me like shit, give me all this cultural blah-blah”—the sarcasm rises to the level of disgust—“because I’m, like”—he mimes the face of an ingenue—“here to gobble up all the nice blah-blah you put out, because you’re a director and I’m a salesclerk and you don’t get it, you don’t get it, you don’t get—” Bobo’s voice cracks.
Bobo turns toward the sea, his chin pointed at the horizon.
But what’s going on? He’s crying?
Confirmation arrives with a delicate sniff.
Cagnotto is reduced to silence.
“Because of course you have forgotten”—Bobo is back with his
hands at the sides of his plate, head down, staring at his octopus salad—“that once you were just a kid crazy about Art … sure, because success has destroyed you, it made you abandon your ideals, it made you into a monster without feelings who doesn’t understand … doesn’t understand … doesn’t understand …”—Bobo raises his head, then lowers his eyes—“doesn’t understand that even someone like me … someone like me … can have feelings … can … can …” Bobo stops.
He waits without lifting his gaze from the octopus.
He hears Cagnotto say, in a faint voice. “Can?”
“Be in love with you.”
Bobo, gasping, starts to cry.
Cagnotto sits there with his head tilted to one side, his tongue lolling limply on his lower lip, his eyes looking as if the antidepressant has in that precise instant delivered all its punch.
 
 
On the highway back from Capomulini to Catania, Cagnotto still has the same expression on his face, while Bobo looks puzzled, if relieved by the outburst, which has calmed his nerves.
On the windshield the wipers are going back and forth, even though the sun outside is hot enough to fry an egg.
No, He Can’t Stand Her When She’s Like That
No, he can’t stand her when she’s like that. He just can’t, Carmine thinks. Really, every molecule of indignation in him rebels.
Betty’s got a dreamy-hypnotic-nutty look on her face as if she has just, who knows? … discovered a treasure, found out that the human race is not as evil as it seems, as if she has only realized just now, with surprise and joy tempered by a note of diffidence (revealing a strong character loyal to her own ideals) that the man sitting before her is not only worthy of her attention, capable of penetrating her critical awareness, but also actually capable of charming her and of (really!) teaching her something, taking her with the strong and masculine arms of experience, imparting useful knowledge gained in the years that separate them (not many, not as many as you might think), years that only reinforce the conviction that no one who doesn’t have the experience, the history, and the intellect of Mister Turrisi could ever be an acceptable interlocutor with whom to share in that moment the friendship that Betty is always so reluctant to concede.
Give me a break, thinks Carmine.
What we have here is the pure archetype of a slut dressed up as ninety pounds of tits and sandals.
It can’t be true that Betty is conversant with such depth and sensitivity. Where does she get this stuff?
It must be that Betty has a plan. Carmine is sure of it.
“Carmine, dear, could you make a note of this book that Mister Turrisi is recommending?”
Carmine, ever patient, takes his BlackBerry out of his inside jacket pocket and turns toward Turrisi.
Turrisi is laughing up his sleeve.
Carmine sees Turrisi, immobile, his Brylcreem, his little mustache, his expressionless face, and yet he knows Turrisi is laughing up his sleeve, he knows it from the voice Turrisi uses as he says, “
Gangs: The New Aristocracy
.”
“
Gangs: The New Aristocracy
,” he repeats, barely concealing his disgust as he relays the title of the book into the handheld’s voice recorder.
Betty nods happily. A kind of luminescence lights up her face.
“As I was saying,” continues Turrisi, polishing his mustache with the corner of his napkin, “this British historian draws interesting parallels between the family as we know it in the Mafia sense, and the nobility. Contracts, rituals, formality, even the state marriages that bind together highborn European families. It’s a fascinating window on the upper classes through the centuries.”
“It certainly sounds worthy of consideration,” says Betty.
What kind of fucking language is this? And how would she know?
“Carmine, did you hear that?”
Wow, she’s even talking to me, politely now, making me part of the discussion. It sure wasn’t Wanda who taught her these table manners. And it sure wasn’t her father, either.
“Yes, I did. Very interesting.”
Turrisi nods, while, with no regard for Carmine’s reply, Betty’s attention is once again riveted on Turrisi as she asks, “Is there any truth to what I’ve heard that Soho can be dangerous?”
Is there any truth?
“Only after a certain hour of the night, and never if you’re with me.”
Betty smiles, lowering her eyes.
I can’t stand this, I’m getting up, I’m going to drown myself in the lobster tank, and don’t rescue me.
“Certainly, if it were possible, that would be nice … but I don’t think my father …”
Your father would walk up Via di San Giuliano on his knees if it meant getting you off his ass.
Betty gives him a kick under the table. “Oh, yes, her father is, um … an old-fashioned guy.”
There he goes again, laughing up his sleeve.
“But I know your respected father very well …”
Her respected father. Who? Turi Pirrotta, known in his youth as Riddu the Cement-Mixer because when he got off work at the building site he would drive down to the bar in his cement-mixer and could never find a place to park?
“ … and, I must say, I approve of his approach. I would of course never dream of asking you to come to London. I merely wanted to show how much pleasure the thought gives me. While manners and good form prevent us, as well they should, from behaving in inappropriate ways, there is nothing to stop the mind from pursuing beautiful thoughts, especially when they are based on good intentions.”
All
right
. Not
bad
.
“You would never dream of it?”
There it was, that little pinch of maliciousness calculated to operate subliminally on the male gender.
“Ah …” Turrisi conveniently changes the subject, having achieved what seemed to him at that moment the maximum victory that decency, queen of the occasion, could concede.
Don’t make me say something vulgar.
In the car, after lunch, Carmine, deflated, puzzled, outraged, and curious, asks, “So what are you up to?”
“Me? Nothing.”
“Okay, explain.”
“What?”
“The whole performance.”
“Performance?”
O Sometimes Insufferable Pomposity!
O sometimes insufferable pomposity! thinks Cagnotto, whose soul has opened up and taken flight. The whirlpools of a thousand wishes stir in him: conversations, disagreements, ripostes, attractions, and repulsions. Contests, concerts, deceptions, subterfuges, mirages. Dictates, contradictions, hypotheses, theses, and antitheses (syntheses are a bit scarce). Plots, subplots, surprises, illusions, dismay. Oh, how he had misjudged the sincere love of a young man just taking his first steps on life’s path.
Oh, how desire and will have been subverted by foul cynicism.
Wasn’t Bobo perhaps right?
From the depths of his instinct, Bobo had understood and articulated all that Cagnotto had concealed from himself.
Were his instincts pure? No, sir.
Were his passions sincere? Nope.
Cagnotto thinks of Richard Gere. In
Pretty Woman
, overwhelmed by the uncomplicated affection of that ex-prostitute who is going
around with his credit card insulting shop clerks, and repenting of his onetime arrogance, he tells his coworker, as he piles one glass upon another, “Hey, when I was a kid I liked blocks.”
There you go, Cagnotto feels something like that.
Cagnotto curses Art even as he blesses Bobo’s authentic feelings. He thinks of how he was as an adolescent, when the simplicity of a line of verse could work its way into his heart, keeping time with his hopes.
And then?
The anxiety to say something new has alienated him from that state of grace.
Ambitions, jealousy, backstabbing: the theater thrives on the opposite.
The more lofty the ideals onstage, the baser the sentiments behind the scenes.
To pan a work because it is by a rival, to praise someone else to win favors, to declare that congenital idiots are masters. To waste time on empty words. To bow once to the public, once to the critics, and once to the powers that be. Is this all that is left of the young Cagnotto?
Cagnotto swerves to avoid a pedestrian.
Deep in thought, he doesn’t notice the insults flying.
He remembers lines of verse, a poem, words scrawled by an innocent soul.
What crime was he about to commit?
My God.
Cagnotto is driving erratically, true to his thoughts.
All that avant-garde and experimental theater, just to cop fame and success, so he could spend his nights with malevolent strangers?
Is this where he wants to take Bobo?
Is this what he wants to teach him?
How to become alienated and lose the innate illumination of the truth?
Cagnotto slams on the brake. A kid on a scooter points with both hands at his prick, as if to say,
Dickhead, you suck
.
And in the name of what? A concept of the theater that even he, to be honest, has yet to understand.
No.
If there is a true path here, it is that of the master who bows to the apprentice, admiring the freshness of his thinking.
Yes.
It is to Bobo’s thinking that he should now attend. He will take it in hand, like a little bird, a tender young hostage to the beauty of nature. And he will nurture that
thought
so that it will bud, flower, express itself, and explode with all its delicate power.
Cagnotto wets his lips, shifting into top gear.
That’s what he will do.
Back to the days of innocence.
Cagnotto will uproot the weeds of modernity that are suffocating the garden (maybe it is still thriving!) of his inspiration.
He must get back to the classics.
Yes, the classics.
No doubt about that.
Absolutely.
Metaphorically (and not just metaphorically before he had signed a contract with the region to finance his productions) the underground Cagnotto had spit, pissed, and vomited on the classics.
“Oh, how I love anew these people who are called common”—who was that quote from? Goethe? Cagnotto can’t remember.
Yes, the common people.
Oh, what damage had been done to the classics by the avant-garde, the ranting when they should have been speaking to the common people. Had theater been born to address the elite?
No, never.
Shakespeare. Who did Shakespeare write for? For whores, thieves, and delinquents.
And Greek theater? The people ate peanuts watching Greek theater. Well, maybe not peanuts because peanuts hadn’t been invented yet, but they were munching on something.
Certainly, the interpretations of the classics needed to be rethought, brought back to the original letter and spirit. It will be necessary to reinvent a language and gestures that are plain and genuine, that will bring the message of the theater to ordinary folk.
He parks the BMW X5 on the sidewalk without even braking. He waves at the bread man who’s smoking a cigarette in the doorway of the bakery.
He runs to his own building.
He rings the bell.
Then he realizes he is downstairs and grabs the keys in his pocket with a smile on his face.
He’s got to tell Bobo about his decision right away, keep him up to date on his spiritual evolution.
Okay, he thinks in the elevator, shall I call him right away or shall I wait fifteen minutes?

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