Something Great and Beautiful

by Enrico Pellegrini

  At the end of the banquet, the digestifs were served; we were presented with a variety of almond teas, anise seeds, and laurel leaves, to be chewed until they became saliva and washed away the evening’s spices. My throat was on fire from the white pepper. Finally, we were invited to set off into the open countryside to meet the bride.

  We walked in a line, singing an Indian folk song. Now I no longer felt the spices in my mouth, just a pleasant energy. Farther ahead the moonlight glittered on the metal cages of the zoo. In the grass I could glimpse Chloé’s shadow; then she was strolling along next to me. For a moment, her eyes dropped down to study the scar on my chin.

  “Where are you from?” she asked.

  “New York,” I said.

  “I love New York!”

  I had just scored a thousand points.

  “Everybody loves New York, except those who actually live there.”

  “After I graduate in May,” she continued, “I’d like to go to law school and work in the U.S. Do you still live in New York?”

  “No, I’m at Genoa University, myself.”

  Her smile faded. “And why would you be there?”

  So as quickly as I’d won them I had lost my thousand points, but it didn’t really matter. I was taking a holiday from serious relationships.

  “I’m working on a novel,” I said.

  “Like the Maestro,” Chloé said, smiling again.

  It was odd to bump into her only now. Four years in the same city in Italy, same university, the same department even. Where have I been? I wondered. The grass below my feet seemed longer, damper.

  “Funny that we meet here for the first time,” she said, as if she were reading my thoughts. “Do you ever go to class?”

  I didn’t have to answer, for we’d just reached the edge of the field where Premi, the bride, was sitting under a tall banyan tree next to her mother. She had the red powder bindi painted on her forehead and her big dark eyes were sleepy. She was awkwardly tugging the bottom of her white sari between her legs as if she had to pee.

  “Damn, how old is the bride?” I asked.

  “Almost seven,” said Chloé, turning to the Maestro as if he was the one who had asked the question. “Dowry age. It could be a good title for your book.”

  Kamu, the eight-year-old groom, was sitting under a different tree, because he was not supposed to see the bride. He had a serious look and his small head proudly wore the brown heavy turban of the Punjabi.

  “Why would it be a good title?” asked the Maestro.

  “In India dowry goes up with age, so families try to marry off their daughters as soon as possible, sometimes even before they’re born,” the journalist explained. “The older they are the more you have to pay. Among the poor people of course. I mean, isn’t that why we’re here? Because you’re going to write about this?”

  “No,” said the Maestro as he walked along.

  he folk songs grew more distant, and the wet grass grew taller around us. The Maestro continued on as though he intended to reach the border of India, leaving the wedding party utterly behind, and we followed him. Why were we there then? To hide the sweat that trickled to his lip he pinched his nose. Now and then a flock of ducks awakened by our footsteps lifted up into the night sky.

  We arrived at the zoo, which was dark, but the gate was open and there was no security guard at the entrance. We followed the Maestro inside. The gravel crackled under our feet.

  We passed the metal cages, some of them empty, others filled with restless monkeys. I was reminded of the Maestro’s first book, in which a group of strangers run away together. When we reached the central cage, we found a marvelous white tiger stretched out across the ground. The moonlight was so clear we could see the dust on the tiger’s fur.

  “Can you imagine,” the Maestro said, “that on New Year’s Eve two drunken Australian students tried to put a garland of flowers around her neck? The next day the zookeeper found only the garland.”

  We stood still, astonished by the tiger’s beauty and size.

  “Shall we climb over?” he asked.

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” I said.

  “You have to take risks, Rosso, if you want to be a writer,” the Maestro said. He pointed at the scar on my chin. “You have to fuck up much more than that.” He turned to Chloé. “Are you afraid too?”

  The white tiger was sleeping. Her head was enormous.

  “C’mon, Chloé, you look like a tough kid,” said the Maestro, brushing his thumb along the inside of the journalist’s arm. It was then that I first noticed she too had a scar. A whole map of them, in fact, along her arm. “Unlike Rosso, here, every insult to your flesh has emboldened your spirit, am I right?”

  Chloé climbed up with one hand. With the other she tried to keep her red skirt down, pressing her fingers against it, in order not to flash her white underwear more than necessary. Once she reached the top, she jumped inside the cage with one graceful leap. Behind her, the Maestro was climbing slowly, panting, clutching the bag under his shirt. He would give back all the prizes he had won in his life if only it would stay closed.

  In a moment, there they were, both inside the cage and only a few steps away from the animal.

  “I wanted to be next to a white tiger,” said the Maestro.

  The tiger’s coat appeared almost yellow. Her mouth revealed two dry gums.

  “It’s sedated,” Chloé said. “I hope.”

  The Maestro uncapped a bottle of Drakkar Noir he kept in his yellow seersucker jacket pocket and took in a deep breath of the cologne. An absurd and desperate habit of his, I would learn, one I imagined quickened his spirits, returned him from the dullness—the fullness—of his present moment to that electrifying emptiness of his youth.

  “It’s harmless now,” Chloé whispered, staring at the elegant beast.

  “Like me,” the Maestro said.

  “Oh, I don’t think so!” Despite the danger, Chloé couldn’t help laughing. Then she whispered again. “I think it’s best if we head back now. Tomorrow the wedding starts early.”

  When we arrived at the Maestro’s hotel, which overlooked the village, it was one o’clock in the morning. Sachin, Chloé, and I were all also staying there. The servants were replacing the torches in the garden. The flames’ intermittent light made the sprinklers glitter. As we reached our floor, two guards in pearls uniforms stood with crossed lances in front of each room. It was painful to imagine that just a ten-minute drive separated those elegant guards from the flies landing on the raw flesh of the women’s cheeks.

  The Maestro’s male nurse was waiting in the anteroom of his own quarters.

  “Don’t look, Rosso,” said the Maestro.

  The nurse, lithe and efficient, began to treat the wound over the Maestro’s abdomen right away. The surgery in June had opened a hole in his colon; the blue plastic bag was attached to it. The nurse emptied the excrement from the bag.

  “Why the tiger’s cage?” I asked. “What was that all about?”

  The old man shrugged.

  The windows were open. Outside, the sprinklers ticked. The moon was so red and clear you could count its craters.

  “I think I like her,” said the Maestro. “Don’t you think she’s cute?”

  Leaves and branches from the garden outside cast large shadows on the wallpaper above the Maestro’s bed.

  “What, Chloé’s not your type?” asked the Maestro, observing my silence. “Can I go for her?”

  “She’s all yours.”

  It was a deal. We shook hands.

  “Please don’t look!” the Maestro repeated.

  After arranging the blue plastic bag over his artificial anus, the nurse gave me a nod to accompany him to the door. I followed him.

  “I must speak with his next of kin,” he said just inside the doorway. He s
miled sadly.

  “The Maestro has no kin.” I said it simply. It was a fact. He had no one.

  The nurse looked me in the eye, then handed me the old man’s blanket. It was covered in blood.

  t was late, of course, but the Maestro ordered a bottle of Riesling and a lobster, since the moon had just turned full. He thought that lobsters tasted better right after a full moon; they were meatier because they had eaten all night long.

  He said that deep inside his stomach, over the last hours, “the movers,” as he called them, had been working hard.

  Outside, the entire village seemed to be awake. Dozens of young boys and girls stood on the flat rooftops. They steered their colorful kites, careful not to tangle the lines in the sky. A small group broke off and ran after a red monkey that jumped from one gutter to another.

  “What can I do for you tonight, Maestro?”

  The Maestro pressed the bottle of Drakkar Noir hard against his lips, under his nose, and then fluttered his fingers before him as if he wanted to point to objects beyond the walls of his room: the white tiger; the raw flesh on the women’s cheeks; Premi and Kamu; and all of the hunger of the world.

  “Do what I couldn’t do,” he said. “Do something great and beautiful, Rosso.”

  Without understanding what he meant, his words sounded like a lifetime mission.

  “No, what can I do for you now?” I said. “I don’t want you to be scared.”

  “I’m not scared,” the Maestro said smiling, although he was very scared. “It’s been the job of a lifetime to learn how to die. We just need to wait now and see how it is.”

  After meticulously picking off the pink meat from the large lobster, which was so sweet, he washed his hands and placed a palmful of gel in his hair. He then went out to the hotel’s corridor across the hall.

  “Are you still hoping for the interview?” asked the Maestro, trying to push away the two guards standing in front of Chloé’s door. He knocked energetically as he called out the question.

  After a few moments, the door opened and the guards stepped aside. Chloé came out into the hall, rubbing her eyes. She was barefoot, wearing a short cotton nightshirt with a pattern of yellow dragonflies. Suddenly the door next to hers opened wide.

  “You’re giving your first-ever interview to a twenty-one-year-old intern?” screamed Sachin in his pajamas in a state of shock.

  “She climbed inside a tiger’s cage,” said the Maestro. “You go back to sleep. Otherwise I will authorize the use of force.”

  As the guard pointed the lance at Sachin, he quickly got back inside his room. Chloé and I followed the Maestro down the hall and then to the car park.

  “Who’s driving?” I asked, since Sachin, the driver, was left behind.

  “You are,” said the Maestro.

  After my car accident I didn’t like to drive anymore, especially a 1985 Fiat Ritmo Abarth with electric features I couldn’t comprehend. I turned on the engine and concentrated. I drove with the windows down, the way the Maestro liked it. I drove so carefully that a guy on a bicycle and then two cows passed us. The road was pitch dark. Waves of light green dust and the scent of jasmine came in through the open windows. In the back seat, Chloé was still in her nightshirt, which she held down with both hands so that it wouldn’t blow into the wind. Her long black hair went everywhere. I concentrated on the road.

  When we arrived at the observatory, a cloud covered the moon. The same Maharaja who had built the palace we stayed in had built this observatory to count the stars. The instruments were made of gray stone, some dark and others aglow. A tree with large white flowers gave off a steady perfume. I parked by the entrance.

  “Goodbye, Rosso,” said the Maestro.

  “Goodbye?”

  “Remember, do something great and beautiful,” he said, taking the car keys out of the dashboard and closing the windows. A clunky hum followed. He was locking me inside.

  “And what would that be?” I asked. “What is that something great and beautiful?”

  “That you have to figure out yourself.”

  The Maestro and Chloé walked inside the ancient observatory, I could see them facing one another. It was funny, they sat in a concave hemisphere designed to measure the spring equinox. As Chloé would later describe it, he spoke slowly so that she could take down everything.

  He told her of the summer of 1945, when he bought penicillin for his grandfather who had pneumonia—it was the first penicillin to arrive from America and it was sold in ice blocks on the black market in Genoa. He spoke of reading Alberto Moravia’s Agostino for the first time, and how many oysters he ate the night he was awarded the Premio Cervara, Italy’s Book Award. He told of how beautiful his first kisses were, and how damn beautiful that first kiss at sixteen was, with that Leslie, again, on Brighton Beach’s promenade. For a while he had struggled because of her Indochina politics, but then she surrendered to his Russian politics.

  “Indochina politics…?” Chloé asked, confused.

  “Yes,” the Maestro said, “she gave up the North to defend the South.”

  Chloé raised her hands to her breasts, guarding them, then dropped them on her nightshirt. “Like this? And what are Russian politics?” she asked laughing.

  “Farewell to Moscow.”

  Chloé listened, and continued to ask questions, and was so taken she no longer took notes. She pulled back her hair as she did when she went out on a date. Almost without noticing, her lips had landed onto his.

  The Maestro gazed at the slow, black caress of her hair against her cheeks and at her eyes green like petroleum, and tried to summon his strength to say something, to use that old smile he had used for sixty years and which always worked, maybe to slip inside her nightshirt—who knew?

  But now his vision—and her gorgeous jaw line—were blurring.

  “You’re shaking!” Chloé said.

  With a final effort, the Maestro managed to block her hand from rescuing him, from unbuttoning his shirt and reaching to his little blue bag that had become part of him. He lay down on the cold ground next to her. Even if he had waited with fear and torment for this moment, even if it had been the job of a lifetime to get here, it now seemed simple. He almost felt stupid for having wasted so much time, so much energy, thinking about his death. He felt stupid and happy that it was so simple. This was how he wanted it, not on a bed, not in a clinic, but on a stone built to calculate the spring equinox and in the arms of a beautiful woman.

  CHLOÉ VERDI

  May 4, 2009, New York

  ood to know about India and where some funny, deranged thoughts of his might have come from…Can you now tell us about Rosso Fiorentino’s past in Italy and about street selling?” asked the prosecutor. There was a snicker in the courtroom. “Street selling, Ms. Verdi? Just what exactly was his business education?”

  ROSSO FIORENTINO

  July 2, 2006, Portofino, Italy

  hen my mother pulled open the blinds back in Italy, the noon sun invaded my bedroom and rested on the copy of our family crest, which was hanging on the wall in front of my bed. My eyes slowly adjusted to the sun. I liked looking at that crest—five burgundy stripes glinting against a background of gold—but it didn’t mean much anymore. After twelve underperforming generations, my father had long since sold our title, a common practice among Italian nobility in need of money, so that he could countinue to be a painter and play bridge. According to my mother, I was the one who was supposed to turn things around.

  “What’s all this smell of cologne?” she asked, waving her hand in front of her nose. “What are you still doing in bed at this hour? Is your big career plan to become a perfumer?”

  I hid under the pillow the small bottle of Drakkar Noir cologne I had purchased at the duty-free in New Delhi upon my return from India. I didn’t inherit any genius or inspiration from the Maestro, but it’s good, the
Drakkar. He was on to something. I had tried to inhale it the way he did, but had sprayed too much in my room.

  “What the hell are you doing with your life?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “ ‘I don’t know, I don’t know,’…you used to have a lot more to say.”

  That may have been true. I’d lived in New York until I was ten years old. My father, the artist, wanted to explore the New York art scene. When he lost his inspiration, we moved back to Italy and I enrolled in high school in Turin. On my nineteenth birthday, I woke up in a hospital, after a three-week drug-induced coma. I couldn’t remember anything except that a minute ago—a split second ago, it seemed—I’d been driving and that my girlfriend, my sweetheart, my love, Marinella, was beside me. Her body, her breath, her smiles and kisses and fingertips. I had seventeen fractures in my face, a hole in one lung, and my tongue was sliced through.

  “Are you going to look for a job today?” she asked.

  “Noblemen don’t work.”

  “Today, everybody works, you idiot boy!”

  My mother says that I strive to do absolutely nothing. But it’s not true that I’m lazy. Whenever I conceive an idea, a voice inside me that is more heart and gut than brain says immediately: Rosso, please. You can’t even steer a car.

  Before leaving my room, my mother handed me the mail. I opened it. My bank account read unequivocally: balance 611 euros.

  t around three o’clock I walked down the hills toward the Piazzetta of Portofino. The lion sun—as they call the sun here between two and four in the afternoon—was out and strong and everything seemed to be motionless, as if somewhere a real lion were wandering around. The air was dry and the palm trees barely moved. Even the maritime pines, with their cheerfully crooked branches, were utterly still.

  And then I saw it, the port of the dolphins. Portofino. Something in my blood was alive after all—my heart still skips a beat to this day every time I see those little houses painted orange. Yet those little houses are more expensive than a mansion in London, Dubai, or New York. Nietzsche called this part of Italy “the world’s belly button” and poet Ezra Pound played his best tennis here. During World War II, the SS commander of the Nazi army was ordered to blow everything up to stop the U.S. forces. According to the books, he couldn’t find the courage and sent the following telegram to Hitler: Portofino is too beautiful.