Cooking With Fernet Branca (17 page)

Darling
Marja,
I
shall
keep
you
posted
on
this
ludicrous
saga.
Meanwhile
I
was
relieved
to
hear
you
were
so
firm
with
Timi.
Well
done.
He’s
not
someone
you
should
be
emollient
with.
The
news
that
he’s
spending
August
in
America
is
even
better.
He’s
sure
to
meet
someone
he
fancies
more
than
you.
Well,
you
know
what
I
mean!
This
boy
Mekmek
sounds
like
a
good
ally
for
you.
Just
don’t
spoil
him
too
much
too
quickly.
But
who
am
I
to
advise
you?
I’m
hardly
a
brilliant
example
of
a
successful
romantic.

Your
loving
sister

Marta

Very early one morning Filippo Pacini calls for me as arranged. Somehow I squeeze myself into his red Pantera. It’s like getting into a canoe. It’s such a
filmic
car, wonderfully dated, one feels one ought to be Sophia Loren. I should be wearing a sleeveless dress with long white gloves and a picture hat and present a spectacle of helpless chic, letting the equally filmic Filippo hand me in with maximum male gallantry, with me in giggly mode sitting down with a bump and a little feminine squeak. Or else I should be wearing a severe dark suit and get briskly in unaided, with the air of someone equally used to slipping behind the steering wheel. Fat chance. And anyway, I doubt Sophia Loren was brought up on a diet of
kasha
and
shonka.

‘My father’s flying up from Rome,’ says Filippo as he blasts round the steep hairpin in Casoli. I have a fleeting impression of a war memorial with bronze figures caught in the act of hurling grenades, though I suppose they might be Casoli’s traffic safety officers reduced to apparent slow motion by the speed of our passing. I snatch a glance at this heir to the
Pacini fortune. Not at all like Cary Grant, as it happens; more like a very young Gregory Peck. I can bear that.

We are on our way to the main set of
Arrazzato,
whose construction is apparently almost complete. The same could be said of my score. In a sudden burst of inspiration I have put a lot down on paper very fast and can now relax a bit. My computer skills have also come on this last month, thanks to my sweet geek Simone who is patience itself. I don’t for the life of me understand how any of it works, but by dint of writing myself copious memos and sheets of instructions I can do what I need, including e-mailing Pacini
père
bits of my score as sound files. He does seem very pleased so far, which is the main thing. He keeps on saying this film is going to be his masterpiece, but then this is an industry where egos seldom take a back seat. At least I can claim its score is also my masterpiece to date, being much better than
Vauli
Mitronovsk
and really quite catchy. I’ve got a tango tune that Prokoviev would be proud of: apparent shmaltz but with something very putrid underneath. Pacini claims he’s haunted by it and already it has become the sound of his film (and this before the screenplay has even been finalized, apparently).

Before we reach Pisorno Studios Filippo stops at a bar for coffee, which is just what I need at this hour. There are very few people about. The holidaymakers must all still be in their hotels among the dusty pines, sleepily tackling breakfast and nursing yesterday’s sunburn. He helps me out of his car with a graciousness that makes me feel sorry for him that I’m not Sophia Loren, merely a dumpy East European with a gift for tunes. I do like Italian mannerliness. I’m afraid Voynovian manners are a little rough and ready. Pretty rough and eternally ready; which is why Father automatically suspects ulterior motives when men here are just being polite. It’s an awful thing to think about one’s own parent, but he more and more strikes me as a barbarian, a thought that never occurred to me until I came here.

‘You’re very silent,’ Filippo says. ‘I’m sorry it’s so early.’ He dabs fastidiously at his lips with a paper napkin. ‘But it gets so hot later on.’

‘I was just wondering whether Sasi will be waiting for us.’

‘La signora Vlas has not been invited. Your Italian is so good these days we decided we wouldn’t be needing her services. Were we right?’

‘So far as I’m concerned.’ This is excellent news. My compatriot and I were not destined for close friendship. The mock-refined vowel sounds of her Bunki accent are enough to spoil anybody’s day. Nor am I grand enough for her, not by several orders of social magnitude.

No sooner have I re-inserted myself into the Panther than we are turning in at the familiar gates of the fascist villa. Or rather, completely
un
familiar. Our tyres ping and crunch up a gravel drive between neatly trimmed oleanders and the car stops in front of a dazzling white house. There is a balustraded verandah shaded by a striped awning that gives a view of rich lawns ending in glimpses of the sea between a pair of cypresses. The parking space behind the house is full of vans with muscular young men in jeans and T-shirts unloading film equipment. Aluminium boxes with handles are stacked in heaps.

‘But …’ I begin foolishly.

‘It’s not the same house,’ he explains. ‘That’s next door and we haven’t touched it. This villa’s identical because Pisorno Studi deliberately built them as a matched pair. My father has decided he now wants a pre-war flashback, so we’ve restored this one and left the other. Then and now, you see.’

‘Incredible. Was this house in as bad condition as the other?’

‘No, luckily. There was a caretaker living here until recently. He was supposed to keep an eye on all these villas but it was obviously impossible and he was too old anyway. We’ve spent the last month making this place look new. Wonderful what a coat of paint will do. It’s all a bit
finto,
though; one oughtn’t to look too closely. Inside, we’ve only restored the room with the verandah for internal shooting. The rest of the house is pretty tatty but it’ll do temporarily for our production offices. The real money went on landscaping. Can you believe the lawn was laid only fifteen days ago? And that left-hand cypress down there towards the sea? I think it’s plastic or something. The one on the right’s genuine but my father wanted two of them. Something about the fascist bourgeois ideal of symmetry. What do I know? I was born in nineteen eighty. The umbrella pines are original. All these oleanders are new. Well, they’re transplants, of course, and as this is exactly the wrong time of year for transplanting things we’re giving them intensive care until the flashback’s in the can. There’s a squad of gardeners here practically mainlining the shrubs with fertilizer or adrenaline or whatever it is you do to keep them alive for a week or two. After that they’re on their own.’ A blue and white helicopter clatters into view. ‘That’ll be Papa now.’

The helicopter banks and settles behind the house and presently the great Piero appears. His checked shirt and Stetson consort oddly with the reading spectacles dangling on his shirtfront from a cord. I now realize something about him reminds me of John Huston in
Chinatown
: just a faint flash of the reptilian patriarch, though nothing like as old and craggy. He comes to a halt in front of me and crinkles his eyes.

‘Behold, Filo,’ he says. ‘This is the person about to make cine history. The lady composer of a master score. My God, how long we’ve waited for this!’

He slips an arm warmly about my shoulders and I smell an agreeable scent like old libraries. I’m grateful that last night I skipped Mili’s goose grease and her statutory two hundred strokes of the brush. No amount of folk specifics can ever change my hair’s colour from its undistinguished mouse but no one could deny it’s looking lustrous without – I hope –  giving off that faint barnyard smell I have always associated with childhood and which is so characteristic of provincial
Voyde girls. Despite myself I glow a little beneath his praise while giving a deprecatory shake of my head.

‘Better wait until it’s all done before you become extravagant,’ I tell him.

‘I have one hundred per cent confidence. Two hundred. Before you began, let’s say I was eighty per cent confident. But now – it’s magnificent. That tango of yours is lethal. Talk about hooks! I’m driving my poor wife nuts with it. She says I hum it in my sleep and now she’s talking openly about divorce. Anyway, how do you think this place is looking? Don’t you expect to see Il Duce and la Clara having breakfast on that verandah? And then down to the beach where Mussolini will indulge the photographers with a bare-chested run and Petacci will stand with her dimpled knees, gazing out to sea? Come, I must show you the beach and what we’ve done there.’

He leads the way across the lawn, the rest of us falling in with him obediently. I notice our party has been unobtrusively joined by a man and a woman with clipboards and alert expressions. They had better not miss anything the great director says.

‘Has Filo mentioned this flashback idea of mine? He has? Our storyline has become still richer. I wanted to bring in some real fascist background, you see, because I don’t think Italian cinema has reminded us enough of that extraordinary period, that strange mix of cultural aerobics and disease. You’re going to say
The
Garden
of
the
Finzi-Continis
, and I’m going to reply that the film wasn’t really about fascism, it was about an aristocratic family retreating from political reality behind the walls of their estate. A rather hackneyed theme, though always one that gives plenty of opportunity for a nostalgic wallow. The exact nature of the external threat scarcely matters; pretty much anything would have done, from typhoid to totalitarianism. I want that authentic fascist righteousness on its own, unopposed. I want the bourgeois values, the revival of Latin, the purging of foreign phrases from the language, the
telefoni
bianchi
of it all.’

‘So how will it fit into your story?’

‘OK. Lando’s father who owns the trawler fleet? It was his grandparents who owned this villa. They were thoroughgoing fascists, believed in it utterly. Lando’s father has inherited the house – that’s what we see next door, derelict – and Lando realizes it’s the ideal place for his Green drop-out commune. He’s a blank about Mussolini and the fascist period, of course. No one of his generation knows a thing about all that, or gives a toss.’

‘Your idea being?’

‘My idea being that of establishing some punchy parallels. I want to show that, contrary to what you might think, there is a deeply bourgeois streak in Green idealism. I also want to show that it takes very little pressure to tip that into fanaticism, whereupon certain behaviours become remarkably fascist. An old theme, you’re thinking. Obviously I don’t want to be polemical. I shall simply let it emerge by means of the metaphor of this villa’s decay: that something of the political stupidity and rankness of 1938 was somehow built into its fabric where it has lingered and re-surfaces in 2003 to corrupt Lando’s idealism.’

‘I see. And the erotic, er, excesses?’

He gives me a shrewd sidelong glance. ‘Those, my dear, are what happen when people lose their sense of purpose. I imagine that was the point of Pasolini’s
Salò,
only he became sidetracked by his own pathology. As a result the film itself is quite unwatchably disgusting and tells us little about fascism and entirely too much about Pasolini’s fantasies. I can assure you
Arrazzato
will be on quite a different level.’

Truthfully, I’m a little surprised by Pacini’s simplistic reading of history, human nature, sexuality, whatever. It reminds me of the sweeping wisdom of our Voyde schoolteachers telling us about the inherent contradictions of capitalism, how it went against man’s natural socialism and therefore could only ever be imposed under duress. The events of 1989 quickly revealed this as dire nonsense even if we hadn’t
already known. But when that happened and Voynovia was left without the purposefulness that Soviet ideology had presumably given us, did widespread fucking and abominable debauchery break out on all sides? Sadly, no. For a day or two we held tipsy street parties and sang old national folk songs with tears streaming down our faces. Then we grimly set about trying not to starve.

But here we are at the sea which lies seductively, twinkling and dimpling like a courtesan welcoming all comers.

As I already know, this coast is a fairly continuous stretch of sandy beach, arbitrarily divided in the summer season by the differently coloured umbrellas and low plastic fences of various resorts and hotels. Looking up the coast towards Viareggio I can see the nearest gaudy beach furniture about half a kilometre away beyond a corroded fence. This stretches down the beach into the sea and effectively excludes curious holiday-makers from the derelict lots of Pisorno Studios. Southwards, the beach soon thins and frays and ends abruptly in the container terminals, fuel jetties and gantries of Livorno’s industrial port which, owing to their size, loom startlingly close.

The part of the beach on which our party is standing is a scene of some activity. To our right a bulldozer is heaping rocks and sand to form a low arm running down towards the tide line. Nearby, a shed-like building has been constructed of cement blocks to which a couple of men are applying a rough coat of plaster. Up on its rafters two more men are cobbling together a crude tiled roof.

‘OK, so this is where some of the beach stuff will be shot but we have other locations lined up.’

Pacini is clearly in his element, dressing nature to look like a set that resembles nature. I am irresistibly reminded of Potemkin villages.

‘That bulldozer is making one arm of a cove,’ he explains. ‘Just a low spit of land with scrub and a couple of pine trees. That way we won’t be able to see all those beach umbrellas up the coast. This building’s going to be an old fisherman’s house. We’ll age it, patch up some holes in the roof with rubbish, hang some sun-bleached shutters askew, that sort of thing. That will take care of our north-facing shots. The south-facing stuff will be exactly what we can see now: the industrial skyline of today’s Livorno. Very stark, very
now
as it contrasts with that holiday blue Mediterranean. I like the shape of those cranes and ship hoists. I also love the effects of oil on water. I want occasional rainbow sheen as well as that blunted leaden look, so we’ll arrange some small offshore spills. Nothing polluting, of course. Just light oil that will evaporate within hours.’

I suddenly feel all this is none of my business. The Potemkin beach, the messing about with history, this mapping of periods onto compass points: it’s all a bit trivial. The only thing that really counts for me in a film is its psychological plausibility. I have never yet been convinced by ultra-realistic sets and an implausible storyline. But occasionally the reverse has been true, and one has willingly overlooked polystyrene rocks or a faint vapour-trail briefly crossing one corner of a Renaissance sky. Pacini meanwhile has wandered over and is giving instructions to the builders. He makes emphatic gestures. The men are sullen, their faces closed. For the first time a doubt is beginning to appear in my mind like the tiny smudge of smoke on the horizon that heralds a huge bulk carrier invisible just beyond. Of course I am still excited about working for Piero Pacini; but now that I have written most of the score and am drawing a salary as one of the team, the original thrill has slightly dulled. One’s career serendipitously moves up several notches and with almost sinister alacrity one adjusts to it. How long before I start demanding a red Pantera of my own and a toy-boy to drive around in it?

The inner smudge of smoke is what the great Pacini has left in the wake of his new plot outline. I note that his political
explanation referred exclusively to this historical flashback of his. Nothing, presumably, is to be changed in the contemporary scenes of the rest of the script as he gave it me six weeks ago. I suppose everything is in the filming and the sound effects and the score; but debauchery on the page could all too easily translate into outtakes from
Salò
on the screen. When Pacini has finished with the builders I put this point to him as we stroll back towards the villa.

‘I quite understand your fears,
cara
,’ he replies. ‘You must have confidence. You’ve seen my other work. Has it ever yet struck you as vulgar or pathological?’

‘
Nero’s
Birthday
treads a pretty thin line in places.’ This is dishonest of me. I have never seen
Nero’s
Birthday
. I am extrapolating from my
dudi
neighbour’s enthusiasm and from what a shocked Professor Varelius of Voynograd University apparently told Father about the film.

‘It’s the line’s thinness in which the true art lies,’ Pacini assures me. ‘Even the Vatican City gave
Nero
an R rating.’

‘R?’

‘Ragazzi.
Suitable for boys accompanied by a priest.’

‘And
Mille
Piselli
?’

‘That we filmed almost entirely
in
the Vatican.’

The real truth? The real truth is that I have never yet seen a single one of Piero Pacini’s films. Not one. He was just this amazingly famous name, this internationally renowned director who praised my score for
Vauli
M
. How else was a starstruck Voyde composer supposed to react? Catapulted into Pacini’s glittering circle, I affected a nonchalant sophistication so as not to seem the country hick out of touch with the latest products of the Western art world. I never deliberately pretended to know his work. Familiarity was simply assumed and suddenly it was too late to rectify things. If one was caught up in the great Pacini’s entourage how could one be anything other than a groupie? Well, I’m not about to confess now. By the time
Arrazzato
is firmly on my CV nobody need ever know.

‘But I have to be absolutely clear about the meaning you’re attaching to the debauchery that overtakes your commune,’ I tell him as he stops to pat the plastic cypress tree.

‘It’s brilliant,’ he is saying. ‘There’s this company in Rome that will make you any tree you want. You suddenly need a giant redwood for your set, they’ll do you one. But not cheaply. For
Brame
discrete
I needed a hundred cherry trees in bloom. We were shooting in June. Imagine trying to find a cherry orchard blossoming in June. But this company came up with a hundred fibreglass cherry trees so damned realistic they even fooled the bees. I’m sorry, you were saying?
Mean
ing
? You want to know the meaning? The psychology of the breakup in
Arrazzato
?’

‘Please.’

‘Nihilism,’ says Pacini fiercely. ‘The meaning is nihilism. The dumb, druggy
nothingness
of the modern age. In
Salò
Pasolini was dressing up De Sade as fascism to give hard-core filth the gloss of intellectual respectability. In my view torture and shit-eating are fairly resistant to intellectual fig leaves. My film, by contrast, will show that the
only
way to counter the sheer vapidity of consumer preoccupations in a world where ideology is extinct is to adopt a principled stand. In this case, Green politics with specific targets: factory ships, dead dolphins, all that stuff. But when this principle, this political will, this
cause
if you like, becomes eroded from within by extraneous social tensions such as racism, everything collapses back into the jiggy gratifications of our time.’

This is the first time I have seen Piero anything other than suave and I suddenly find myself thinking that passion suits him better than being the urbane maestro does. It’s surely how he must have been when he was starting out. Plain earnest.

‘
Arrazzato
is about tension,’ he goes on, ‘the effort constantly required not to slump back into the baby-world of self-indulgence where the brain is permanently switched off and the appetites are permanently switched on … Have you
got it now?’ He turns to me almost belligerently. ‘It’s bleak. It’s unbelievably bleak. It will be my bleakest film to date. Over these last six weeks it has been defining itself ever more clearly in my mind and it’s your music that has done much of the clarification, Marta.’

‘It has?’

‘You grasped more of what I was aiming at than I myself knew. That’s what’s so brilliant. You must have picked it up from the script when even the writers themselves hadn’t got it clear despite the script conferences we’ve been having practically every day. You’re a genius,
cara
.’

There really hasn’t been enough flattery in my life, I think as we reach the white villa. But there has been quite a lot of pretentiousness recently. Pacini leads the way indoors and, tripping over cables, we enter the room with the verandah. It is empty but decorated.

‘We’re still waiting for the period furniture to arrive,’ he explains. ‘To say nothing of the white telephones.’

There are trompe l’oeil oval shields on the walls painted to look like rounded stone and inscribed with Latin mottoes such as
ARX OMNIVM NATIONVM
. The one on the wall opposite the balcony is a little larger than the others and surrounded by cherubs bearing it aloft in a swirl of ribbons and flowers. These disgusting creatures are not in the usual Renaissance
putti
mould with chubby limbs and fat cheeks. Somehow the painter has managed to endow them with a suggestion of incipient musculature like that of toddlers who have come under the ægis of a drill sergeant. The next step in their careers will involve their being fitted with tiny steel helmets. It is brilliantly sinister iconography. The era’s motto is also there in Italian –
DIO, PATRIA, FAMIGLIA
: those three great intolerables. Pacini, meanwhile, has gone out onto the balcony and is leaning on the balustrade surveying his fake domain.

‘But there’s something else I’ve left out,’ he says as I join him. His tone is heavy. ‘I’m telling you this because you’re one of us now and I should be sad indeed if you mentioned it
to anybody else, especially
journalists
.’ He hisses this word venomously and it is clear that the great Piero has had his run-ins with the press. ‘Like any director in Italy these days –  like practically any director outside Hollywood, come to that – I’m considerably dependent on American money and distribution, and Americans have ways of making their desires known. “All foreign films start under a handicap,” they told me last year in LA with commendable frankness. “Like, they’re foreign. Now your reputation precedes you, Mr Pasini” – they always call me “Pasini” – “but even so let’s be realistic. You’re never going to fill every last movie seat in Idaho. But the seats you do fill, we want them
damp
.”’

Piero Pacini regards me bitterly.

‘I imagine it’s much the same everywhere these days,’ I murmur sympathetically. I remember he had started out on the set of
A
Fistful
of
Dollars
. ‘But even if Italian cinema isn’t what it was, directors like Sergio Leone still had to struggle for funding in their day, didn’t they? And presumably there was money around then.’

‘Yes, but even then it was beginning to dry up. Sergio became successful because he had the brilliance to put new life into a clapped-out genre. But now we’re ruined. We’ve been ruined by the giant studios that only make films full of special effects for teenagers. There are no adults left in North America. Even Cinecittà is a shadow of what it was, selling off backlots and props like crazy. It’s tragic. So when those bastards in LA said they wanted damp seats, some sort of orgy scene in
Arrazzato
became inevitable. Our task is to make it a meaningful orgy, OK? So now you know the deal.’

And all I can think amid these hard-luck stories of an industry’s demise is the paramount importance of prolonging Father’s ignorance of this project until it’s safely too late. The very phrase ‘a meaningful orgy’ echoes in my head. I try to comfort myself with the reflection that any blame for a film’s content can hardly attach to the person who wrote the soundtrack. Plenty of films are let down by lousy scores but
nobody ever accuses the composer of having been complicit in the moral tone of the screenplay, do they?

The real problem Piero Pacini leaves me with is that, at least when it comes to social arguments, he seems not to be very intelligent. Can it be that the eminent director is a bit thick? He appears to think that when idealists collapse only nihilism remains. But just because a few members of a supposedly Green commune turn out also to be racist, drunk or lascivious, I should have thought it hardly invalidates environmentalist arguments against the damage done by commercial fishing. Oh well, that’s showbiz. I’m far more convinced by the financial bind the man’s in. That’s an altogether better pretext for an orgy.