Wu Ming Page 5

  Then, above the music, a male voice stood out from the others, breaking the spell of the dance. ‘Right, that’s enough, I’m going to smash his face in!’

  While still concentrating entirely on the rhythm, Pierre became aware that something was wrong, that the rising murmur was not only one of admiration, and that the phrase that had just rung out didn’t herald anything good. He took advantage of a pirouette to turn and look. At that very moment a thick-set man broke away from the grip of two people who had been holding him back, and marched threateningly towards him. The Filuzzi King extended his twirl by a turn and a half, and ended up right on top of the man, exploiting the effect of surprise and the run-up to knock him over. Things heated up. Brando took a punch to the eye without seeing who was hitting him, Gigi threw his tie around the neck of a short-arse from behind, while Sticleina was already on the ground wrestling with someone much bigger than him. Inevitably, some peacemakers tried to restrain the beasts, get between them, to hold back the hotheads.

  ‘Come on, guys, there’s no need for this!’

  ‘Hey, we’re all here to enjoy ourselves.’

  ‘Bòna, Pirein, Pompetti’s calling the cops!’

  The shoving and kicking lasted no more than ten minutes, enough time for the most frenzied to give and receive at least one punch, but also enough for cooler heads to persuade the musketeers from Bar Aurora to make their way home and the Pratello guys to calm down.

  ‘They didn’t hit you nearly hard enough.’

  Nicola had always been a light sleeper. Perhaps whatever it was that gnawed away inside him kept him awake. Perhaps it was the war. From the doorway to the room he looked at Pierre with a mixture of scorn and commiseration.

  Pierre sank even deeper into the armchair, loosening his tie. ‘And yet they know me well enough not to try it on with me again. Sons of bitches.’

  He dabbed at his injured mouth with his handkerchief.

  ‘If our mother was here she’d give you what for, I can tell you that. And you’re asking for a kicking, chasing skirt all the time.’

  Pierre was too tired to talk, but whenever he tried to shut up, his anger got the better of him. ‘You leave our mother out of this, understand?’

  ‘You come in at this time of night with your mouth smashed in, and tomorrow you’ll be half dead behind the bar. If aunt Iolanda didn’t keep on at me to keep on at you, I’d give you a good kick up the arse and there’s an end to it.’

  ‘And leave aunt Iolanda out of it too!’

  Nicola’s hoarse voice was filled with disgust. ‘They’ve broken their backs bringing you up, and I hope you’re satisfied. It’s almost a blessing that our mother’s dead!’

  Pierre exploded. ‘Shut up! What do you know about it? What the fuck are you always on about? Always judging, always banging on. So I like pussy, so what? I like dancing and I’m good at it and everyone admires me, you know? They look at me. And isn’t there some satisfaction in that as well? But take a look at yourself, always behind the bar, always pissed off. Anyone would think you were ninety years old!’

  ‘The bar is our bread and butter, fine, and if you don’t feel like working, then you can bugger off. Clear off, away with you, on your bike, go to dad in Yugoslavia and he’ll give you a decent job, breaking rocks! Go on, a bit of military service would do you the world of good if it wasn’t for your heart murmur. Head murmur, more like.’

  ‘Oh, go fuck yourself. What do you expect dad to do? We haven’t heard a word from him since March, we don’t even know if he’s still alive! But you don’t give a toss, do you? You’ve got to work, you’re serious, you . . .’

  Nicola disappeared into the darkness of the bedroom, and Pierre stayed where he was, almost lying on the armchair. He was stiff and tired and he couldn’t feel the right-hand side of his mouth. He was gripped by great sadness, as he was every time he had an argument with his brother. He didn’t hate him, he knew he wasn’t really a bad person. According to aunt Iolanda he was afraid of loving people, afraid that they would leave. However, when he was a little boy, Nicola had seemed like a hero to him, one of the people you boast to other people about: ‘My brother was in the 36th partisan brigade.’ He still remembered that when the Germans had shot his brother he had wept with rage and pride. He had had to have an operation, and since then the pins in his leg had become the indelible mark of the war. As Pierre had grown up, the contrasts between them had come into being. Pierre felt that until he left home that conflict would never be resolved.

  So he sat there on the armchair, pressing the handkerchief to his mouth and thinking about where he could go, without a lira, without a passport, and with a knowledge of the world that extended from Modena to Marina di Ravenna.

  Chapter 5

  Statement made on 8.1.1954 to Police Commissioner Cinquegrana concerning the disappearance of an expensive television set of American manufacture from the military base of the Allied forces in Agnano, Naples

  My name is Salvatore Pagano, born in Naples on 21 July 1934. My mother’s name was Carmela, but everyone knew her as Nennella, particularly in the Vergini. The district, I mean. The Vergini district.

  I don’t know who my father was, and that’s all I’m saying.

  But my friends, the horsemen of Agnano and other friends as well, call me Kociss. Ok, Totore ’a Maronna as well, but mostly Kociss. Don’t you get it? Kociss, with a ‘k’, fine, it’s not a letter we have in our alphabet, but the Americans and the foreigners do. K, I mean. What, don’t you know the great Hungarian footballer Kociss?!

  Am I a footballer? No, but it doesn’t matter a damn, number one because I really do know how to play the ball, even though I’m almost twenty, because the way I got the name has nothing to do with the ball, or rather, well, it does, but it’s different. Ok: you know that great team they’ve got in Hungary, who are going to slaughter everyone in the World Cup in Switzerland this year? Ok: they’ve got these players in Hungary and there’s one who scores goals with his head, how can I put it? He’s proverbial. He and Puskas score goals by the cartload, it’s crazy. And this one does almost everything with his head, I’ve never seen anything like it. Kociss.

  So, you’ve got to know that, ok, some friends and other friends too, you know how friends are, they muck about, and at the end of the day they call me that because they say that when I’m arguing with some clueless nutter, which hardly ever happens, let’s be clear about that, at the end of the day, the rare occasion when it does happen and we’re just ordinary people if you catch my drift, then the curses are flying and one thing leads to another, if you get my meaning, and anyway when all’s said and done they say I hit them with my head, but it’s only ever happened once, twice at the most, you know what friends are like, and they say that I knock them out, so that’s how I got that name. But that wasn’t what was important, because apart from anything else I’m here to tell you that I had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with that wretched nuisance of a television set.

  Chapter 6

  Palm Springs, California, 18 January

  Sharpen the blade on the strop fixed to the wall, moisten the soap in the bowl with hot water, remove any loose bristles from the badgerhair brush, soap your face, pass the razor across your face, slow down as you get to the cleft in your chin, remove any remaining soap with the hot flannel, inspect your face for remaining hairs. Cary shaved with his right hand, enjoying every moment of that morning liturgy, followed by the holy vestition: suit and shirt commissioned from Quintino of Beverly Hills, matching tie and socks, no suspenders because Cary’s socks wouldn’t dare slip down his calves. Derbies or full brogues on his feet.

  Archie, who was left-handed, brushed his cheeks with his left hand. Two days without shaving, and without any wish to do so. Grizzled, troublesome, bristly stubble.

  Lingering in that pose he felt against his lower lip what remained of one of those old calluses from his days as an acrobat, a bump of dry and whitish tissue, nearly thirty years old.

  Every morning the manicurists filed and cut, spread unguents, softened Cary’s hands, hands that every woman in the universe would have wanted under their skirts or busy unbuttoning their blouses, but the callused tissue was beginning to grow again, a memory of his previous life, the past of Archibald Alexander Leach.

  Hands on the floor in hundreds of somersaults, friction on the ropes for a thousand vaults, luggage transported from one town to the next, hundreds of little theatres and music halls, putting on make-up, jumping. Bob Pender and his Knockabout Comedians. Tightrope walkers, clowns and conjurors, every evening and matinee facing the working classes of the kingdom.

  Pender said, ‘Come on, boy, you’ve got to earn your keep. There’s more to the theatre than just walking on your hands!’

  From the wings, while the extraordinary magician David Devant was performing on the stage, Archie gazed enraptured at the eyes of the younger members of the audience, which quivered in the flickering limelight. Archie read those eyes, the surprise, the dreams, the temporary escape from a life of shit and work. Eyes of young people already cheated of their own futures, but prepared to react with a shrug of the shoulders and a fuck it, in their slightly worn out Sunday best, not stiff or formal, but cheeky and sniggering in the queue for the tickets, children once more at the sight of the flying acrobats and an illusionist’s sleights of hand.

  The eyes of the little boy from Bristol who had, one fateful afternoon in August 1910, been hypnotised by the mimes and stunts of Bob and Doris Pender, so much so that he wanted to follow them, to be an actor, to leave an elusive father and the void of a vanished mother. In the Empire and in the Hippodrome the lights go down . . .

  The ragged-trousered Englishman had crossed the Atlantic to accomplish a titanic enterprise: to climb the highe
st mountain as though faced by a hillock, a pathetic hump, a slope, moving one foot behind the other without bothering to think.

  Cary Grant.

  How astonished he had been, in the late thirties, the man of the new century. Astonishment went hand in hand with awareness: who had never yearned for such perfection, to draw down from Plato’s Hyperuranium the Idea of ‘Cary Grant’, to donate it to the world so that the world might change, and finally to lose himself in the transformed world, to lose himself never to re-emerge? The discovery of a style and the utopia of a world in which to cultivate it.

  Meanwhile there was an Austrian dauber out there winning a career and followers, whose speeches hit the hearts of the Volk ‘like hammer-blows’, and a distant clang of weapons heralded the worst: the clash of two worlds.

  Against the world of Cary Grant, the dauber had finally lost with dishonour, in a puddle of blood and shit.

  Without a doubt, the Russian winter was partly responsible, but one thing was certain: the New Man, at least for the time being, wouldn’t be having to tuck his trousers into two-foot-high leather boots to march the goose-step.

  The New Man, if there was such a thing, would be reflected in Cary Grant, the perfect prototype of Homo atlanticus: civil without being boring; moderate, but progressive; rich, certainly, even extremely rich, but not dry, and not flabby either.

  Even some of the most vehement enemies of capitalism, of America, of Hollywood, were willing to concede that the baby was one thing, the bathwater quite another.

  Cary Grant, born a proletarian and with a ludicrous name to boot, had defied fate with the ardour of the best exemplars of his class. He had denied himself as a proletarian, and now he was bringing dreams to millions. If one individual could achieve it, there was no reason why the rest of the working class shouldn’t have it as well.

  Cary Grant was a living demonstration of the fact that progress existed, and had been going in the right direction at least since Cro-Magnon man. Socialism would crown this impressive series of results with social justice, harmony among human beings and the liberation of all creative energy. In a classless society, anybody could be Cary Grant.

  Well, not really. That’s what a few intellectuals might have claimed. Neither the proletariat nor the bourgeoisie really gave a damn about historical materialism. Simply speaking, they admired Cary Grant and they wanted to be like him.

  That day Archie Leach turned fifty. The two last years had been the worst.

  And how hard they had been for Cary! Three box office flops in a row. The decision to retire from the screen. A holiday in the Far East with Betsy, which hadn’t been sufficiently restorative. The exhausting quest for palliatives, yoga, new reading matter, the perennial intoxication of self-improvement but without the moment of truth, without setting foot on-set. A difficult relationship with Archie, who also used his body and came to get it back in periods of crisis and disorientation. A difficult relationship with Elsie, who had made a surprise reappearance in his life fifteen years previously.

  As to Betsy, she was madly in love, she did her absolute best to keep his spirits up, she had hypnotised him to stop smoking, quite the best wife he could have had. But it wasn’t enough. It was never enough.

  After an interminable year and a half, he was touched by the cautious desire to return to acting, casting complicit glances at the audience, having the opportunity to improvise those wonderful one-liners. But that desire had to do battle with the effects of a long depression, with a lack of interesting scripts, and above all with Archie’s disgust at the inroads being made by Joe McCarthy and his henchmen. A sense of guilt and embarrassment for his own indifference, for not protesting, for not defending the free world as he had done fifteen years before in the war against the Germans.

  For Archie, the Americans were now their own Germans. Chaplin in exile. The best writers on the blacklist.

  Cary was a long way from being a radical, let alone a communist, but how could he bear all those intrusions into people’s privacy, their political ideas: ‘Have you ever been a member of such and such a party, such and such a union, such and such a circle . . . ?’ What had come over everyone? Either you were good at your work or you weren’t, you were a good set designer, or director, or actor, or you weren’t. If the jokes were funny, if the love scenes were exciting, if the story had a beginning and an end, in that order if possible, then nothing else mattered.

  For at least a year Archie had returned to brooding over Frances Farmer, for whose fate everyone felt responsible, even Cary, and especially Cliff.

  After a few weeks Frances had come back to see them. They had had heart-rending conversations with her, which left them devastated. No, not the Frances of ’54, exhausted by the mental hospital. It was the Frances of ’37, the new, wild and beautiful actress, the girl who didn’t believe in God, the girl who had been to Russia.

  ‘You know, Cary, I don’t get you. Everything you do, the way you move, the way you speak in that accent that isn’t English and isn’t American . . . I can see it, you work hard on your character . . . No, not your character in this film, I mean a character you’re going to be playing every day for the rest of your life. I feel you’ve nearly got it, but . . . there’s one thing that doesn’t convince me, you know?’

  She talked like that during the coffee breaks on The Toast of New York, she turned to look at Cary, but it was Archie she was talking to, a cocoon about to pop.

  ‘I imagine they expect the same of me, my mother expects it, Hollywood expects it but . . . I won’t do it. Why not just be yourself?’

  The poor girl from Seattle. They had broken her into tiny pieces, all of them together: the producers, the politicians, the police, the gutter press, the bloody psychiatrists . . . and of course Cliff. The great playwright Clifford Odets, good friend of Cary’s, intellectual prick. He had seduced her with his big words, sound causes (a long way from home and with McCarthy still to come), the bust of Lenin on his bedside table, quotes from books. He had seduced her and dumped her, abandoned her to the vendettas of Hollywood, to the gossip columns of Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, to a bitch of a mother who would have her locked up.

  In a madhouse, just like Elsie.

  Archie couldn’t find peace, and he made Cary feel guilty as well.

  Just as she had been seventeen years before, the same blond hair, the shaved eyebrows, the body that hadn’t yet been raped, draped in a kind of shroud. She came back to them smiling, but reminding them that they had not once spoken out against her persecutors.

  Chapter 7

  Bar Aurora, 18 January

  ‘You see, in Italy, it isn’t the Italians who make the decisions, that’s what it is, I’m telling you. If it was up to me, I’ll tell you where I’d send the Allies . . . Oh yeah, you can say that we lost the elections in ’48. Course we did, with all the moolah that the Americans have given to the Christian Democrats and all the southerners following the priests. Down south that’s the way they like it. It’s what they’re used to: taking things easy, isn’t that right, Walterún? You tell us, you were born and bred down there.’

  Walterún scrutinises his cards, perplexed, ignoring Melega’s question. When political questions arise Walterún hardly ever intervenes, so much so that some people cast doubts on the soundness of his convictions. It’s all slander, of course, but it’s true that it is difficult to discover what he thinks about a pile of important questions, such as Italian Trieste, Germany or the coming of television.

  Today the main topic is Trieste, or rather it is Mauro Melega, the best boccette player in the whole bar, who is talking in his usual voice, too loudly, forcing everyone to listen to him, even if some of us, heaven alone knows, might like to concentrate on their own affairs. Then you know how it is: it starts with this and that and you end up talking urbi-et-orbi even about serious things, and in the end you can’t even remember how you started.