‘Papa,’ he whimpered, covering his face with his hands. He needed to stay quiet, he knew, to prevent his mother from intervening. The last time she’d done that, she’d lain motionless in bed for three days afterwards, her bruised eyes staring unseeingly at the ceiling.
His father seized him by the seat of his trousers and tore them down, leaving his underwear hanging at his hips. Then Papa pulled off his underpants, too, the elastic snapping painfully at his skin. Lorenzo tried to crawl away, but the steel-capped boot slammed into his bare buttocks, once, twice, three times. As the pain ploughed into his hips, his thighs, his lower back, Lorenzo screamed and tried to cover himself.
He heard his mother’s wailing, and then the blows stopped. After a moment of quiet, Lorenzo gingerly pulled himself up onto all fours and looked around for his father, just in time to see his purplish face and swinging boot. There was a bolt of excruciating pain to his testicles, and he fell face-first to the floor.
‘Now, I want you to open your magic bottle and throw its loving contents all over your fear …’ Pak Tony’s voice hauled Lorenzo back into the room, and he sat up, his heart thumping wildly.
Pak Tony was sitting on the yoga stool, his eyes closed. Everyone else lay obediently supine, presumably dousing their fears with bottled love, but Lorenzo could not return to the place the meditation had taken him. There were some things magic bottles couldn’t fix. As it was, Lorenzo had been fortunate that only one of his testicles had been removed and his fertility remained unaffected. When Lavinia hadn’t fallen pregnant as quickly as she hoped, it had been the first test they’d taken. To Lorenzo’s surprise, his result had returned normal.
Pak Tony opened his eyes now and Lorenzo felt dangerously exposed, certain that the facilitator could discern, somehow, the years of denial, flashbacks and fear. That he could intuit, too, how Lorenzo’s carefully constructed life was as flimsy as a silken spider’s web strung across a busy thoroughfare.
‘As you smother your fear with love,’ Pak Tony continued, gazing at Lorenzo, ‘you will notice that it becomes weaker, or disappears altogether. This bottle of love is infinite; it recharges with every use. All you have to do, whenever you feel afraid, is to open the bottle and douse your fear. You can inhale the scent, feel its healing power, and use it to help yourself and others. Your fear may be very old, and it may be very strong, but it cannot last forever. Love is always stronger than fear.’
Lorenzo lowered his gaze, dismissing these glib words. In the real world, it was not so easy. His beloved nonna Marisa, his maternal grandmother, had never witnessed his father’s ‘passions’, as Lorenzo’s mother had obliquely called them. Even when Lorenzo was hospitalised and an orchidectomy performed, his mother had concocted a tale about him climbing a tree and falling spreadeagled onto a fence—telling the hospital staff, the surgeon, nonna Marisa, Lorenzo’s teacher and even Lorenzo himself.
Aged just six, Lorenzo couldn’t understand why his mother told a story that wasn’t true. When he’d found himself alone with his mother, he gazed at her, the question in his eyes. His mother had looked away, mumbling that some truths cannot be spoken in public.
From this, Lorenzo had concluded that the adult world was an ugly, contrary domain, to be avoided for as long as possible.
He’d certainly avoided his father, who’d seemed shaken by Lorenzo’s injuries at first and sworn off alcohol. But then, as Lorenzo had recovered and the lure of grappa proved too great, Papa’s rages returned. Only once or twice a year, his mother insisted, never enough to be habitual.
As a teenager, Lorenzo had sometimes wondered what nonna Marisa might have done had he told her what really happened in their home. He’d even fantasised about it, picturing how, on reading Lorenzo’s letter, she would burst into outraged tears, immediately pack her battered leather suitcase and catch a connecting train to Milano Centrale, sit fuming all the way to Roma Termini, then arrive in a late-night taxi at the door of their apartment in Salario. How she would barge in like a whirlwind and call his father all the names Lorenzo could not—like bastardo and schifoso and farabutto —and then assume calm command of the family.
First, she’d send Papa to Monsignor Fattori in Vatican City for a lengthy dose of penitence. Then she’d send Lorenzo’s mother on holiday to Cinque Terre, where the briny ministrations of the sea would repair her body and soul. Finally, Lorenzo and nonna Marisa would sit together in the kitchen, making pasta fresca and ajo with chopped garlic and dried red peppers in olive oil. They would live like that for weeks, cooking and laughing and conspiring, until Papa returned all haggard with contrition, and Mama returned tanned and relaxed, and the three of them would thank nonna Marisa, their angel of intercession, and put her back on the train for San Cristoforo.
But that childhood fantasy had never come to pass. He’d never written the letter, and nonna Marisa had died when he was fifteen.
His relationship with his parents had limped along. Until finally, after marrying Lavinia, he’d dispensed with pretence altogether and abandoned contact with his father. He’d remained in touch with his mother, however, catching up with her whenever he passed through Rome. Always on neutral territory outside the family home.
‘I want you to imagine something different now,’ Pak Tony said, drawing Lorenzo’s attention into the room again. ‘I want you to think of a time in your life when you have succeeded.’ The facilitator gestured to the yoga mat, and Lorenzo decided to lie back down. As an international leader in fashion photography, Lorenzo wouldn’t have trouble imagining success, and he needed to expunge from his mind the other painful memories.
Closing his eyes once more, Lorenzo conjured a very different version of himself, now in his early twenties. Some fifteen years ago, in his final year of an interior design degree at the Istituto Superiore di Architettura e Design in Milan. Living a student’s life, far enough away from his parents’ home in Rome. Managing to support himself with the money nonna Marisa had bequeathed him and a part-time internship at Fashion Milan.
It was an ordinary Monday morning in the magazine’s office. Lorenzo was busy putting the final touches on the lighting of the indoor set for a ten-page spread on youth haute couture when he heard the editor approaching.
‘What did you say?’ she bellowed. ‘Ginevra is sick?’
Lorenzo heard the editor’s assistant murmuring in her best placating tone.
‘Ginevra is a dog!’ exclaimed the editor. ‘What about Martino then?’
More low murmuring, followed by an explosion, nearer now. ‘And what do you propose, porco?’ the editor screeched. ‘The shoot is tomorrow. Three of Italy’s leading labels are involved. We can’t just get any miserable piece-of-shit photographer!’
Calmly, Lorenzo stood up from behind the chaise longue where he’d been adjusting the fill light. ‘I can do it,’ he announced, looking the editor in the eye.
For a moment, she stared at him as though a bug had just spoken. In the silence, he opened his satchel and boldly passed her his portfolio.
‘Shot over three years with a fifty-millimetre lens,’ he explained as she leafed through the images. He had nonna Marisa’s bequest to thank for his fancy camera, too.
The editor raised an eyebrow. It was an audacious suggestion, but Lorenzo noticed her face changing as she scrutinised his photos.
After several minutes she said, ‘Alright. But if you fuck it up, you’ll be making coffee for the rest of your career.’
‘Certamente,’ said Lorenzo, unintimidated. Professional success was secondary, after all, to the visceral thrill of the work he loved best.
The following day, when Lorenzo lifted the camera to his eye, he felt omnipotent. The lens transformed his prepubescent models—an eleven-year-old girl named Valentina and a twelve-year-old boy named Pietro—into seraphim of the firmament. Their perfection was breathtaking: the dimple at the corner of Valentina’s mouth, the blonde mane that tumbled down her back and billowed about her slender hips; Pietro’s tanned limbs covere
d in fine, downy hair, and an enigmatic smile that hinted at the possibilities of manhood. Despite being draped in ostentatious accessories, their purity outshone all.
The shoot continued for six hours, until the models’ minder intervened; a grandmotherly woman wrapped Valentina and Pietro in white fluffy robes and bundled them off into a hire car with tinted windows. Lorenzo collapsed into a chair, exhausted yet elated and curiously titillated.
The labels were delighted with the results, as was the editor. ‘I’m changing the terms of your internship, Lorenzo,’ she told him a week later. ‘You’re wasted in design. You’re doing photography from now on.’
That was Lorenzo’s first taste of success, and it hadn’t stopped there. He’d stayed at Fashion Milan for a further five years, widely touted as a rising star of fashion photography. Not long after his twenty-eighth birthday, he accepted a job at Vogue Italy. There, it was everything he’d heard and more: the untenable hours, the volatile egos, the extravagant cocaine parties. Lorenzo loitered at the edges as an interested observer, eschewing the drug-induced highs in favour of weekends spent developing his first private exhibition.
‘Take a nice deep breath now.’ Pak Tony’s droning voice penetrated Lorenzo’s awareness once more. ‘What does success feel like? Who is there with you?’
Lorenzo exhaled, remembering it well. After two years of preparation, his private exhibition—titled Initiation—had opened. His parents had travelled from Salario for the launch party; Lorenzo’s eyes turned watery as he watched them move woodenly through the chic crowd. They listened politely to the speeches, to the professor of modern art gushing over Lorenzo’s work with words like liminal and avant-garde. Then they shuffled along the gallery’s walls, stopping before each image, their heads tilted at various angles, trying to understand.
Eventually, when there were no more photographs to examine, his father approached and shook Lorenzo’s hand. He kissed both of Lorenzo’s cheeks, but refused to meet his eyes. Lorenzo’s mother mumbled something about being too old and ignorant to truly appreciate contemporary art. They were going back to their hotel, she told him.
Lorenzo had dutifully waved them off outside the gallery. Promising to visit at Easter, wondering if his father still flew into rare but terrifying rages and manhandled his mother. Blowing his mother a kiss, he told himself, It’s not your role to protect her. But a voice inside his head demanded, Then whose is it? As he stood there, the sense of success that had filled Lorenzo before the launch began to deflate, like a leaky balloon.
His parents weren’t the only ones bemused by Lorenzo’s work, it turned out. Three days later, a stinging critique appeared in Metro Milan: ‘Lorenzo Ricci’s photography is visually arresting, but the ambiguous age of his models, typically half-naked or otherwise vulnerable in floating outdoor landscapes, positions this Vogue photographer’s private work in dubious territory.’ He’d paid it no heed, assuming that few people took notice of a free newspaper distributed in the underground, until the same review was syndicated across the Metro newspapers in Padua, Rome, Bergamo, Bologna, Genoa, Verona, Turin, Venice and Florence. Interest surged on social media, with high-profile bloggers posting commentaries entitled ‘Porn or Art?’, ‘Teen “Initiation” Controversy’ and ‘Making Purity Explicit’. National and international attention followed, with critics comparing Lorenzo’s natural studies of adolescents to the work of controversial photographers Sally Mann, Irina Ionesco, David Hamilton and Bill Henson.
When Lorenzo’s exhibition was mentioned in The New York Times just a week after the opening night, the editor-in-chief of Vogue Italy invited him into her office. Not to rebuke him, as he initially feared, but for a celebratory drink.
‘Salute!’ she bleated. ‘You’re a disruptor brand now, Lorenzo.’ She raised her glass of cognac and clinked it against his. ‘Did you plan it all behind our backs?’
Lorenzo stared at her for a moment, confused. ‘I just … followed my passion,’ he explained.
‘For what?’ asked the editor, lighting a Toscano. ‘Virginal eros?’ She guffawed into her cognac.
Lorenzo shook his head, loathing her. ‘For everything that you and I have ever lost.’
They chitchatted for an interminable fifteen minutes before Lorenzo set down his glass. ‘Thank you for the drink,’ he said. ‘I have plans this evening.’
Not long afterwards, encouraged by a flood of professional enquiries and his growing international reputation, Lorenzo left Vogue for a freelance career. The editor still wanted to employ him as a freelancer, which was eminently satisfying—and created a springboard to other lucrative contracts.
The following year, while shooting for Velvet magazine, Lorenzo met a costume design consultant named Lavinia. She was elegant, fiery, and possibly the only person in the European Union who didn’t have an opinion on his work. When he fished for her views over their first lunch together, she simply said in a bored tone, ‘Why is there so much discussion about it? It’s beautiful. Of course youth is alluring. I don’t understand the controversy.’
Lavinia’s indifference was a blessed relief, and perhaps one of her more attractive qualities—alongside her sultry good looks, lively personality and brazen lack of concern about anyone else’s opinion. As their friendship morphed into a relationship, Lavinia never once queried Lorenzo’s photographic preoccupations: the angular elbows and androgenous faces and enticing moles in unseen places. Lavinia was unmoved by it all, assessing it only in terms of its aesthetic value. Which prompted Lorenzo to wonder, for the first time in his life, if this might be the woman to wed. Indeed, from the perspective of many of Lorenzo’s friends, romancing the beautiful Lavinia Argento was proof of success in itself. Lying on the yoga mat, Lorenzo floated in his warm feelings of pride and comfort in having married Lavinia.
‘And now we will start returning to our physical selves,’ announced Pak Tony. ‘I’m going to count back from ten to one; when I reach one, our meditation will be over. You will be fully present in your body, but feeling deeply relaxed.’
Lorenzo slowly resurfaced, becoming aware of the space and people around him once more.
When everyone was back in a seated position, Pak Tony asked, ‘Does anyone have any feedback on our first meditation session?’
The Australian woman with the agreeable face raised her hand. ‘I went to a completely different place.’
‘Me too,’ enthused the American. ‘And I sure need that bottle of love for my work at BAF.’
Pak Tony smiled. ‘You can take that bottle mentally with you anywhere and use it to extinguish your fear.’
‘I had trouble imagining that part,’ admitted the Frenchman. ‘When I am up in a high place, my body takes over. I am sweating and shaking. No imaginary bottle of love is going to stop that.’
‘Really?’ Pak Tony countered, his eyes dancing. ‘You might surprise yourself. Tomorrow we have our first fear safari, at Jimbaran Beach. You will have the chance to use your bottle of love while parasailing, Remy, and we will see if you are stronger than you think.’
‘Parasailing?’ Remy turned a pale shade of green. ‘Above the sea?’
‘Yes,’ said Pak Tony cheerfully. ‘Tandem parasailing behind a speedboat. Here is our updated itinerary.’ He took up his clipboard and began distributing the papers inside it. ‘Subject to change, of course. We’re moving with spirit, so we should expect the unexpected.’
Lorenzo studied it with some trepidation. Tomorrow’s schedule included fear safari, parasailing and something called passion talks in the afternoon. The next day featured a water cleansing ceremony, personal pow-wows, then an evening timeslot entitled group dinner: your odyssey.
Lorenzo grimaced at the idea of a group dinner. He was thirty-eight years old, with a well-developed social network; he didn’t need any new friends. But like it or not, for the next seven days he would be forced to coexist with five strangers, joining them for eclectic activities such as neurolinguistic programming, harnessing the collective
unconscious and spiritual sexuality.
‘Any questions?’ asked Pak Tony. ‘You will be familiar with most of it from the materials you received on booking.’
Not Lorenzo; it was Lavinia who had pored over the Fearless literature.
‘I have a question,’ the Englishman said, a little shakily. ‘I was a last-minute booking, so I haven’t read much about the program. Can you please explain what a “personal pow-wow” is?’
‘I was hoping someone would ask,’ said Pak Tony, rubbing his hands together with evident glee. ‘Here in Ubud we have a renowned spiritual healer, Littlefish, living among us. He is native Alaskan from the Yup’ik tribe, and usually he is booked up months in advance. But all of you will have the chance to spend forty-five minutes with him for a personal pow-wow, or consultation. It’s the launchpad for your odyssey, an individual challenge that will be set for you for the rest of the retreat. Your odyssey is designed to confront you and shift you into a space of deep transformation.’
‘Oh.’ Henry’s baffled face mirrored Lorenzo’s feelings exactly. ‘Is it essential? I was thinking of going birdwatching with Pak Ketut tomorrow afternoon.’
Pak Tony chortled. ‘It is essential.’
Henry looked crestfallen. Lorenzo wasn’t at all sure he was ready to discuss his ‘shadow side’ with a Native American healer.
The dishevelled Australian woman raised her hand. ‘What’s a passion talk?’
‘Passion talks are a chance for you to share something that puts fire in your belly, using a creative method. You can sing, dance, draw pictures; it’s all about expression of the soul. It’s not a professional presentation, so please don’t get nervous about it,’ Pak Tony smiled at Henry. ‘It shouldn’t be longer than five minutes.’
‘What’s this on day four?’ asked the American woman now, pointing at the schedule. ‘The intimacy workshop?’
‘It’s a wonderful opportunity to explore the healing power of touch,’ said Pak Tony, ‘and to get really comfortable with our bodies. Afterwards, we’ll break into two groups, for powerful manhood and womanhood rites. Releasing fear in the body is a precursor to letting go of it mentally and spiritually.’
Fearless Page 10
