by Edoardo Nesi
They rooted around in the back for a while before producing the fruit of Cesare’s guilt, the brand-new blue Vespa 50 Special with black seat that Vittorio had wanted so badly and which his father had suddenly decided to buy for him, dead set on ignoring the protests of Arianna, who had never agreed to discuss the possibility of buying her son a scooter.
— Vittorio! Vittorio! Come here! Cesare was shouting. Vittorio!
The Beast was back. A few days earlier, he had decided that the work on site had to be completed once and for all, and when he was given yet another excuse for yet another delay in the electric wiring of the factory, he swore at the top of his voice, got into the Alfetta, and literally dragged the electrician to the site. The next day, the wiring was finished.
He didn’t stop shouting until Vittorio came in the garden, still in his pajamas, bleary-eyed and half asleep, and when he saw his son’s eyes light up upon seeing the Vespa, Cesare hugged him and told him that was his gift. Then he started shouting for Arianna, who had seen everything and was furious and refused even to come out and say hi.
After a few minutes Cesare shrugged, shook his head, cuffed his mute son, jumped back on the truck, and ordered Barbugli to get going. The truck started up with a tremor, leaving behind it a cloud of thick black smoke that took more than five minutes to disperse.
Vittorio spent a while looking at the Vespa without so much as touching it, knowing that his mother was watching from her bedroom window, behind the shining leaves of the large magnolia.
When he was twelve Vittorio had been told of all the terrible deaths of his peers on a scooter — a real massacre, it seemed — and so he had never driven a Vespa. On the day of his fourteenth birthday, his mother had made him swear to God he would never drive one, and he hadn’t broken that promise. But now he owned one. Vittorio looked up, saw his mother watching him, held out his arms, smiled, and pointed at the shiny new Vespa, wordlessly asking to be released from his promise. Arianna disappeared from the window.
He got it started with the unnatural equine kick that had to be given to the pedal, and sat there for a long time admiring it, stuttering and immobile on its kickstand — the perfect image of his desire.
Learning to drive it wasn’t easy, but after many trials and tribulations, he managed it. Oblivious to the fact that his was undoubtedly the slowest Vespa of all time — its maximum speed, achieved on the waterfront at the very moment a crowd of young cyclists in training overtook him screaming cruel and offensive nicknames, was painfully below forty kilometers per hour — Vittorio was on it from morning until night, and used any excuse to drive it along the infinite waterfront that ran for hundreds of kilometers to Monte Carlo, kissed by the eternal sunshine of that gentle August.
He was so happy for that new, immense freedom that even Arianna had to smile when she saw him leaving home in his white Lacoste shirt and blue Bermudas, revving the gears until he reached his final snail-like speed, followed by a cloud of light-blue smoke. One day Vittorio even managed to persuade her to go for a quick spin along the seafront with him, and Cesare was very surprised and pleased by the pristine Audrey Hepburnian class with which Arianna sat sidesaddle, graciously holding the waist of their son, and did not think or realize that, even at thirty-eight kilometers per hour, they were moving away from him.
But the greatest fun they had in that summer of ’79 was going to the cinema together, almost every evening. After a day on the beach and a quick dinner, Arianna and Vittorio threw pastel-colored sweaters over their shoulders and walked through the pittosporum-lined, narrow streets of the small, not famous little seaside town to the open-air cinema that was right at the center of the town’s minuscule square. Arianna and Vittorio saw so many films together, from the end of June to mid-September, and what films!
The program was a brilliant helzapoppin’ of genres and inspirations, decided upon unilaterally by Valeriano, a surly, local cinephile who also worked as ticket collector and projectionist, and who intersected his elitist tastes with the episodic availability of the films, taking pleasure in showing movies old and new, good or bad, famous or unknown, without any apparent order or hierarchy. No film stayed for more than one evening, and there was just one screening, at nine sharp.
So, in that summer of ’79, mother and son saw Grease, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Fantozzi, The Cat o’Nine Tails, Tommy, Jaws, Amici miei, Heaven Can Wait, Capricorn One (Arianna had trouble keeping Vittorio quiet during that movie, as he had started to complain loudly and wanted to leave, indignant that anyone could doubt Armstrong and Aldrin’s moon landing), Animal House, and then Barry Lyndon, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Saturday Night Fever, Four Flies on Grey Velvet, Halloween, The Warriors, and West Side Story, and Love Story, and The Deer Hunter, and Zabriskie Point.
They also saw the surfer film Big Wednesday, with which Vittorio fell in love and which he convinced his only friend Fede to go and see too, and Fede took along his sister Rebecca and his friend Marty, and they all fell for it and decided to go and see it again whenever it was being shown at a cinema they could reach on their Vespas.
So they started to follow the peregrinations of that single copy of Big Wednesday, learning not only each scene and every line by heart, but even all the celluloid’s imperfections, the scratches, the image jumps, the crackles, the boom of the volume saturation during the final scene of the great ocean swell.
They picked at their dinners while their mothers protested, then met up in the square and set off, and because the copy changed location every evening and at times it was being shown in the cinemas of even smaller towns perched high above the steep roads of the world’s smallest mountain chain, they even had to wrap up, as it was much cooler up there.
The only thing that mattered was arriving on time to see the waves slowly lapping the beach in the light of dawn, which permeated the opening scene, and hear the tale of the hot wind that blew down the canyons and was called Santa Ana, and be instantly absorbed once more in that sad and jubilant story of time lost in an unreachable Californian arcadia where time was counted in waves.
Once the film was finished, Vittorio and Fede and Marty and Rebecca returned to their Vespas without saying a word and started to slowly make their way home consumed by longing and melancholy and even nostalgia for days which were not that far away from them, and for characters who were young and blond and happy at the beginning of the story, but ended up old and lonely and failed — Matt and Jack and Leroy, the heroes who ruled that poor and splendid California that turned its back on the rest of the world to fix its gaze on the ocean, waiting for the big swell that one day will sweep away everything in its path.
Only when the movie was transferred to Liguria did the band of Vespa filmgoers break up, leaving the four of them to watch the pathetic waves, barely a few centimeters high, that arrived on the shore of the small seaside town, and Vittorio and Arianna began going to the cinema together again and had the good fortune to be there for the final show, the only one with a double bill: Superman and a short film by a French director they had never heard of.
After the Man of Steel had saved California and Lois Lane by flying around the planet faster than the speed of light, the screen abruptly turned white, then black, and a road began to unravel beneath a movie camera that had been fixed on the bumper of a Gran Turismo car which set off at dawn down the Champs-Élysées at blazing speed, toward the Arc de Triomphe.
The motor rumbled at full throttle and it was like sitting inside that speeding car that never stopped, not even for red lights, while it shot past other cars that seemed to be immobile. As it arrived at the Arc de Triomphe, the tires screeched madly and away it sped at full throttle toward the Place de la Concorde in a flurry of red lights that were totally ignored without the car ever slowing down, and after crossing the deserted square, the Gran Turismo launched itself down toward the Seine and then turned into the Place du Louvre, heading up toward the Opéra, and it never slowed, never, not even for an instant, and then it went
down narrow streets and on and on and on it ran on the pavé, brushing past ladies with poodles, passersby, pigeons, garbage trucks, until it stopped before a stairway that looked over the whole of Paris, and a blond girl in a light dress emerged and the driver ran clumsily to embrace her, and then the image froze and a title appeared:
C’ÉTAIT UN RENDEZ-VOUS FILMÉ PAR CLAUDE LELOUCH
When the screen turned black, the few remaining spectators — Vittorio and Arianna, and a couple from Milan in their forties — demanded loudly to watch the film again, so Valeriano ran it again and again until one in the morning, when he went to the stage and told the last remaining spectator that he would only show it once more, and that was all, so Vittorio chose just to listen to that brief yet prodigious film: he closed his eyes and relished the furious twelve-cylinder song of what was undoubtedly a Ferrari.
DESTINY DOES NOT EXIST
LONG LINES OF FLATBED AFTER FLATBED loaded with stacked rolls of fabric were crammed into every corner of the factory, and next to them dozens and dozens of upright rolls stood like battalions of robust little soldiers. This is what Ivo Barrocciai saw as he walked down the steel staircase that led from the offices to the warehouse. He heard the screeching of the forklift truck on linoleum, but couldn’t see it. He could hear Carmine’s voice instructing the workers, but couldn’t see him or them. All he could see was a sea of black or navy blue pieces of Prisca, the soft duvetyn which was so reminiscent of cashmere in its finesse and sheen it was hard to believe that not even a trace of that miraculous fiber could be found in it.
Ivo stepped onto the linoleum and was forced to slalom between the upright rolls, taking great care not to touch them, and smiled when Carmine Schiavo — head of the warehouse, originally from Ariano and a friend of Citarella’s, the first man employed by Ivo — appeared and shouted: “Hey, Ivo, either you stop selling rolls or you take us to a bigger warehouse. Look, I had to stand them all up, so they take up less space…”
Barrocciai smiled with relief. The telephone call from Carmine had worried him. So abruptly had he been summoned to the warehouse that he was afraid of one of those last-minute technical problems: a consignment of pieces that were too heavy or too light or the wrong color.
Being called just to see the warehouse filled to the rafters, however, did not worry him at all. He actually found it comforting. All those rolls had been sold. Carmine just had to ship them to the clients, in order to make room for more. It was a logistical problem and, as such, didn’t interest him. He decided to call his father: Ardengo had to see the full warehouse!
— Come on, Ivo, seriously, what are we supposed to do? We’ve got another hundred pieces coming in and nowhere to put them. And it’s raining outside. You tell me what I’m supposed to do…
— How about sending them to the clients?
— They’re going tomorrow, but the shippers are saying they won’t be able to pick up again today.
— What do you mean they can’t pick up today? Why not?
— Ivo, they’ve already picked up a thousand pieces from us today. They say they have to work with other clients too…
— Carmine, call them again. They have to come.
— They’ve just left. They filled two trucks. One guy sprained his wrist. They’re coming back tomorrow.
— Who broke his wrist? One of our guys or one of theirs?
— One of theirs. It’s not broken, it’s sprained.
— You’re a doctor now, are you?
— Ivo, let’s not get off the point…No jokes now, please. What about the new factory? The pharaonic thing? When will it be ready? Because we don’t know what to do anymore here…
While Barrocciai was shrugging it off, trying to think of a smart answer, an invisible forklift truck bumped softly, very softly, barely touching it, into a flatbed full of pieces that was leaning against the wall, and the smaller flatbed that had been placed on top of it started to pitch, first to the side, then forward.
Someone shouted “Watch out!” as the small flatbed slipped down and the pieces that were on it slid off, striking their upright sisters, which came crashing down as if tired of standing on their feet, one after the other and all at once, in every possible direction, like gigantic dominoes, and Ivo and Carmine had to move quickly out the way because each roll of Prisca weighed twenty-five kilos. They managed to take refuge in the old cubicle, and from there they watched the rolls tumbling over throughout the warehouse with a series of thuds that somehow fused together into a single, colossal, grandiose thud. Then an immense silence fell.
— Hey, guys, is anyone hurt?
A chorus of no’s, then a trembling voice.
— Ivo, I’m so sorry. It was me.
— Are you all sure?
A chorus of yeses.
— Sure. My God, what a wipeout!
— Good God! squeaked a female voice from the top of the stairs: it was Gabriella, surrounded by the ladies from the sales and accounts departments, some with their hands on their heads, some with their hands over their mouths, some crossing their hands over their chests, some just staring open-mouthed at the sight.
Finding himself imprisoned inside the cubicle by his own pieces right after having been threatened by the fruits of his labor, Ivo Barrocciai first felt embarrassed, then furious.
— Vezzosiiiiiii! he screamed. And then Citarellaaaaaaaaa!
Hearing him shout like that, everyone stopped still because no one of them had ever heard Ivo raise his voice. Then he shouted again.
— Can someone get us out of here? I’ve got two motherfuckin’ engineers to deal with, for Christ’s sake!
It was the first time he lost his cool in the factory, and that infuriated him even more. It was his fault, there could be no doubt about it, and this certainty fanned even more the flames of his fury, and Ivo erupted in an uninterrupted stream of profanities that every so often resulted in colorful and powerful expletives that sent the ladies rushing straight back to their offices and the workers running to help him with long, awkward steps, taking great care not to step on the fallen pieces now lying on the pavement like giant Shanghai sticks.
Ivo had been terrified to see all those rolls falling toward him as if in a revolt, but most of all he was furious to discover himself a superficial, negligent, distracted, careless slob. All he had thought about was selling, not the good of the company or those working in it. Dazzled by all those orders and the thousands of pieces, he hadn’t realized that there was a safety issue at the factory, a huge one, and probably had been for months. It meant nothing that none of the workers had been hurt and that in the blink of an eye all of the 352 fallen rolls were back on their feet, or that Carmine kept on apologizing while the young driver of the forklift truck was crying with relief in a corner.
This should never have happened, Ivo kept on saying. Not in his factory. He went back up the steel staircase asking himself if that wasn’t dangerous, too. He sat at the desk, took a sip from the glass of water a shaking Gabriella had brought him, asked to be left alone, and cursed some more, extensively, under his breath, with anger and passion, until he grew ashamed of himself and stopped.
He called Cesare at his office, hoping not to find him, but he did find him, and he started to shout. He told him he had almost died because of him, and he could not wait anymore and that he wanted to be in the new factory by tomorrow morning, and then he screamed that he wanted to know immediately why the factory wasn’t ready by September 1979 when he’d bought the land on Christmas Eve 1973, bloody hell, and thank God he did call Andrea Vecchio, otherwise there would still be radicchio growing in that motherfucking field, and then he swore at the top of his lungs.
When he stopped to take a breath, Cesare tried to mollify him, but Ivo wouldn’t have any of it.
— I don’t want to hear a single word, Cesare. It’s a miracle that me and the guys in the warehouse are still alive. I want you here in fifteen minutes!
And he hung up. When Cesare finally arrived, havin
g first stopped by the building site to pick up an extremely agitated Citarella, Ivo’s anger had subsided. His disappointment, however, had not. Trying to keep his voice as low and calm as possible, he asked the reasons for that unacceptable and shameful delay, and Cesare replied that if it only stopped raining, they would finish all the building work within a few days, perhaps even tomorrow.
Ivo answered by shaking his head over and over for a full minute, without saying a single word, once again furious because he had lost his patience when the wait was over, as children do, and then he found himself wishing that it wasn’t true, so that he could go on moaning about the delay and beat the desk with his fists and scream and shout about all of his sacrosanct rights.
He somehow managed to control himself, gave Vezzosi the coldest glare he could manage, and told him he bitterly regretted having ever trusted him with such an important job. He certainly wouldn’t have done it today. He told him he was thinking of getting rid of the lot of them and handing the work over to a real company, instead of a makeshift gang like them.
All Citarella could think about — his face red as an Irishman in the cold, his blood pounding at his temples — was when Tonino, just a few days ago, at dinnertime, had asked him if that factory they had been building for years was like a cathedral, because at school they had just learned about cathedrals, that it took a lot of people and a lot of time to build them, and Pasquale had answered yes, and said he was so proud of being one of those men building factories, which were the modern cathedrals.
Ivo asked Cesare to show him the contract, because for some reason he couldn’t find it, and his accountant didn’t have a copy of it, either. He told him he wanted to check if a penalty was due in case of rescission, and if so, how much, because he would happily pay an honest sum just to be free of them once and for all.
