Something Great and Beautiful

by Enrico Pellegrini

  “You want to go to America, Primrose?” said Don Otto to the flower he kept over the oven and that he watered lovingly every morning. “No, I don’t think that Primrose wants to go to America.”

  CHLOÉ VERDI

  May 4, 2009, New York

  hat’s the first thing Rosso Fiorentino did after he came up with the idea for the company? Did he start diligently working on a business plan, review precedents, run a market analysis…or did he consult a fortune-teller?” There was more laughter in the courtroom.

  ROSSO FIORENTINO

  July 5, 2006, Rapallo, Italy

  After I left the bakery this morning, I walked up to Sant’Ambrogio, where the fourteen-year-old painter lives. It was six-thirty, and I tried not to smile as I walked in the early morning mist. Even so, at times, I nodded at a cypress or did a tip-tap dance between two light-purple bougainvilleas. There was that smell of dry pine needles in the air. I had spent an all-nighter at the bakery but felt like sprinting all the way up the hill.

  Federico rented out the second floor of a small orange house that had once belonged to Ezra Pound. Because his parents disapproved of his passion for painting, he had found a way to become financially independent: when he wasn’t on ransom-collecting missions with the Octopus Gang, he provided bad-luck removal services in exchange for a generous fee. Besides being a painter, Federico loved the stars. In the third grade, he was already reading books about celestial mechanics and could operate his own telescope. As a result of certain fortunate coincidences, as well as an in-depth knowledge of horoscopes, word eventually spread that in Rapallo there lived a young blond boy who could skillfully remove one’s bad luck. Before important exams, especially toward year-end, his fellow fifth graders would stop by to see him. More than once, tennis coach Mario Costa came in from Zoagli to have his tennis balls “greased.” People said that in 2003, Genoa, the local soccer team—one of the oldest in Italy —was able to remain in the Second Division thanks to Federico’s “oil.”

  After my car accident, various people suggested that I see a shrink or even an exorcist, to have my alleged bad luck removed—farmi togliere il malocchio, as they said. I refused; it seemed cheap to me. But now that I was starting a company, I realized quite reasonably that I needed to have luck on my side.

  When I reached the boy painter’s house, I saw him through the open windows of his studio. He was already walking in front of his canvas. In just one hand he was holding two thick oxtail brushes, a thin marten one, and a super-thin 0.0 squirrel brush to touch up the details. When I called his name and he didn’t answer (as expected; he’s deaf), I decided to let myself inside. He was painting a contemporary version of Saint George and the Dragon. It was impressive to see a fourteen-year-old boy taking so many steps back and forth in front of a canvas. I counted: sixteen steps a minute, a mile per hour.

  “I want to be lucky,” I said. “But I don’t have money to pay you.”

  “That’s okay,” Federico said, cleaning his brushes with a cloth soaked in turpentine and then laying them down on the table next to the painting. “If you’ll help me take my paintings to the show in Levanto tomorrow, I’ll remove your bad luck for free.”

  He disappeared into and then returned from the kitchen—five square feet in the far corner of his studio—pushing a small tray. I felt as if I were at the dentist when I heard the squeaking of the little wheels on the floor. The tray held a white soup bowl, a bottle of water, pink sea salt, a pair of scissors, a box of matches, and a tiny glass pitcher of his rare and famous oil. Federico had put something on his head—a cross between a doctor’s cap and a fedora—so that his curly blond hair wouldn’t get in the way. After making some strange movements with his hands and arms, he poured the water into the soup bowl and added two drops of oil. He looked inside.

  “Oh yes, you have bad luck,” Federico nodded, pointing at the large balls of oil that had congealed at the bottom of the bowl. “Otherwise the oil would be floating up. Let’s see what I can do.”

  He first touched the back of my neck and my forehead. Then he cut off my bad luck with the pair of scissors and lit a match to burn it. Finally, he threw four handfuls of pink sea salt in the water, to prevent the bad luck from growing back.

  He peered again into the bowl and shook his head.

  “Sorry, man. I wasn’t able to take it all out. You’ve got shitloads of bad luck.”

  eeking further remedies, at around seven o’clock in the evening the painter and I went to buy an offering—a bouquet of daisies from the local flower market—and climbed up the hill of Camogli. In severe cases of bad luck, Federico recommended the Christ of the Abyss: a bronze statue built in 1954 that was dropped to the bottom of the sea between Camogli and Portofino, to protect all the shipwrecks around the world. Locals said that if you hoped for something, if you really hoped for something to happen, you should bring an offering to the Christ of the Abyss. Then it usually happens.

  When we reached the top of the hill, we quickly undressed and approached the edge of a steep cliff. Federico put on his life jacket. Then he placed two large stones inside my bathing suit, just beside my testicles. The weight of the stones would drag me down to the seabed.

  “When you reach the seabed, drop the offering,” said Federico.

  I looked down below. I felt a knot in my throat. It was a forty-five-foot drop. I adjusted the position of my testicles inside my swimsuit.

  “I have to say ‘love,’ ‘fortune,’ and all the things I want to be lucky in,” I repeated, swallowing each word one by one.

  I usually prayed just to relax; I didn’t know if this was actually religious or only superstitious. I looked down again. I should actually have been praying to land in one piece. The Mediterranean Sea glittered in the last sun. From where we stood, it looked smaller than a pond.

  “And you have to say, ‘Find an art dealer,’ ” said Federico.

  “Why? I don’t need to find an art dealer.”

  “I need to find an art dealer.”

  “Can’t you find it with your own magic?” I asked.

  The boy shook his head. “He who is his own magician has a fool for a client.”

  We counted down from ten, then dove into the emptiness side by side. I felt my stomach in my throat, my nose in my toes, and the speed twisted our mouths as if we were cartoons. The sun was big and red and blinded me like a promise of glory.

  When we hit the sea, there was an immediate silence. While Federico was pulled up by his life jacket, I kept sinking. The rocks inside my bathing suit dragged me down. The water was lukewarm and bright, and there were all kinds of yellow and red fish around me. Then the current became cooler. The fish were fewer and fewer. I clenched the bouquet of daisies against my chest. Now I was starting to feel dizzy. I felt that pinch inside my lungs.

  Finally, from out of the abyss, a beard appeared, then two arms reaching toward the seas and the skies, and then all of the Christ of the Abyss became clear in its infinite whiteness. After dropping the offering at the statue’s feet, I swam up.

  nd, now you’ll find a dealer!” I shouted, coughing up some water. I grabbed on to what I believed were the painter’s shoulders to catch my breath.

  “Gagosian,” nodded Federico, enunciating the name of the biggest New York gallery. I now noticed that he was sitting on a rock.

  “Finding a dealer…is that your pickup line?” asked Ginevra, freeing herself from my grasp and splashing me in the face. “Is that how you pick up girls?”

  “What are you doing here? I’m sorry, from behind…,” I said. From behind I’d thought she was Federico.

  “Usually his pickup line is to offer girls a slice of focaccia,” Federico said from the rock, laughing.

  Another head came up out of the water, next to Ginevra’s.

  Damn, how long had I been down there? Where did she come from?

  “Well, we’d do alm
ost anything for that focaccia,” said Virginia, smiling.

  A hint of moon suddenly drew a white broken line across the sea. Then the twins went off swimming in a circle like two African dolphins. Again, they failed to recognize me, I thought, relieved. I climbed up the rock Federico was sitting on and sat beside him.

  “A portrait of those two would land you a slot at the Venice Biennale,” I said. “You may be on to something with your Christ of the Abyss.”

  Federico was drying his hearing aid, which was full of water. Somehow, even without hearing, he could follow my train of thought.

  “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about,” he said. “You know that I’ve never painted a girl naked.”

  “Yes, we need to fix that.”

  “I would like to paint Virginia naked.”

  “Okay,” I said. I was in the state of mind I had been for the past twenty-four hours where everything seemed easy. Export foccacia to the United States? Have your bad luck removed by a fourteen-year-old boy? Dive into an abyss to meet the Christ? Anything was possible.

  The two girls had changed behind a rock and were now jumping from boulder to boulder, holding their wet bathing suits in one hand.

  “Come on, guys, let’s go have focaccia!” shouted Ginevra. Focaccia! A convincing display of the beauty of my great idea.

  When we arrived on the promenade, it was deserted except for a single pair of forgotten sandals. The night was blue and inspiring. In the twilight, the twins dried their hair, bending their necks to one side, squeezing the tips of their curls. The dirty sweet smell of focaccia was already emanating from Don Otto’s bakery.

  I knocked at the door a few times and eventually Don let us in. I ordered for everybody.

  Virginia took two slices, one for herself and one for her sister, then quickly and expertly closed the wrapper to keep the bread warm, while Federico passed around flyers for his upcoming show.

  “See, that sexually retarded baker does sell focaccia to you!” said Ginevra

  “How can we thank you?” said Virginia, looking at me, smiling, her mouth full, her fingers greasy.

  “Federico would like to paint you naked,” I said.

  “My friend is joking,” said Federico blushing.

  Virginia laughed, coughed, almost choked, revealing two small slightly crooked canines. In addition to being the richest in Italy, her family had one of the largest art collections in the world.

  “Totally naked?” she asked taking a deep breath. “Damn. I didn’t think a slice of Don Otto’s focaccia could be so expensive!”

  stayed at Federico’s that night; the next morning we had to leave early for the art show. I lay down on a blue chaise longue, which occupied most of Federico’s studio, and started writing. The windows were open, and in came the inebriating smell of garlic fields from the hills. The words were lining up on the page as if of their own accord.

  Federico was painting on the terrace, next to his telescope. Now and then he drank a shot of yellow grappa. Although he had started painting at seven that morning and the grappa was 140 proof and he was only fourteen, his stroke was clean, without interruptions, like the trail of an airplane that’s only just passed by.

  As he moved back and forth in the dark in front of his canvas, however, the painting itself began to take a different shape than he’d intended. Maybe because he was upset about something I had said. He wanted his Saint George to be strong and athletic, and to prevail over the dragon according to tradition. Yet at each brushstroke the dragon grew stronger, the scales on the neck looked sharper, its claws thicker and invincible, while the more he dotted the saint’s armor, the sloppier and more listless his Saint George became, until he was all bunched up over himself.

  “I asked you to help me get a dealer, not make me look like an idiot!” shouted Federico at me from the terrace.

  “If you want, I can put in a good word with Chloé as well,” I said.

  “Oh, don’t brag. Besides, she’ll end up with Franz.”

  I suddenly felt as if the dragon’s tail had whacked me in the face. All the euphoria of the day vanished.

  “It’s not going to fly with her,” said the painter.

  “She’s way out of your league.”

  “Because she graduated at twenty-two and I’m one exam short?”

  “Come on, Rosso. It’s a long time you’re one exam short.”

  hen we arrived in Levanto the next morning, the sky was dark gray and the sea was as rough as in November. We had to rent a Ducato minivan because Federico liked to paint immense surfaces and his canvases did not fit inside a regular car. If he could have, he would have painted the entire Torino-Savona Expressway (320 miles). Federico was so nervous during the ride to Levanto, he kept adjusting his hearing aid, which wouldn’t stop whistling.

  As I scrambled to arrange Federico’s paintings, imagining how a bona fide art mover would do this, the painter’s words from the night before continued to echo in my ears. She’s out of your league. Once upon a time, to make an impression on girls, you had to be invited to parties. Now it is all much less dignified, it’s all about salaries. If Franz is a better match, it’s because he’s on his way to being paid telephone numbers. How can you reduce a person to a bunch of numbers? As a response, a large explosion came from the van’s engine. The trunk’s door landed a few feet away, together with one of Federico’s paintings.

  “Shit! Did you fuel it with gasoline instead of diesel?” Federico said, turning to me. “Either you’re an idiot or you still have bad luck.”

  I said nothing to that.

  While I was unloading what remained of the van, Mr. Carlito Fragola, the curator of the show, measured the paintings. He was Federico’s art school teacher and, on the side, organized shows to turn a small profit. He was a man in his early fifties, and wore a cotton jacket and had a ruddy face with frail brown eyes. I’m not sure I liked him. You could have put him in front of a canvas or a corpse and his facial expression would have been exactly the same. He didn’t seem to like art—maybe because it paid him little money—and he particularly disliked the grand figurative canvases like Federico’s because they were impossible to sell. What paid some bucks was conceptual art, which was now fashionable. He still had to allow Federico’s paintings to join the group show, as it was open to all of the school’s students.

  “Where’s the gallery?” I asked.

  “Via Magenta is the gallery,” Federico said, pointing to the sidewalk and the concrete. “Better to start on the street and end up at the Louvre than vice versa.”

  I browsed the other artwork on display, none of which seemed in tune with Federico’s large oil canvases: a Marlboro cigarette attached to a string; a T-shirt with a Lacoste crocodile crying; a perfectly white surface with a stain of Marmite on it.

  “No figurative representation. We only show conceptual work here,” said the curator, grimacing at Federico’s Saint George and the Dragon. “You have nothing smaller?”

  “The smallest is 460 by 240,” said Federico.

  “Then you may only show one painting.”

  Around five in the afternoon the first visitors began to arrive: the old men on their way to their first Negroni; kids, returning from the seaside, pretending as a joke to step on the artwork with their wet feet encrusted with sand; some fortune-tellers, friends of Federico’s. They all seemed absolutely uninterested, like the curator.

  At times, a visitor would ask for the sake of asking something, “Which artists are promising? Anyone in particular?”

  “Well, everyone…,” repeated the curator while idly rotating his raised hand. Then suddenly his hand splayed open.

  At the end of Via Magenta there was a small traffic jam as the dark midnight-blue Maserati drove in. A bus had slammed on the brakes. The riders on mopeds, which could pass on the right, slowed down in an attempt to peer inside the dark-tinted
windows. The old men stopped to watch too.

  “Did Flash Art run a piece on the show?” asked a surprised visitor.

  “Fuck, it looks more like Vanity Fair!” the curator said flabbergasted.

  After an imperceptible bow, the twins stepped out of the Maserati. Their appearance at a show, in Italy as elsewhere, meant the attention of journalists, who constantly followed them. And from out of nowhere, two reporters from La Stampa were already taking snapshots with their iPhones.

  The teenaged girls began walking slowly in front of the artwork, their hands behind their backs. They were standing right there, yet at the same time seemed totally out of reach; they were glancing at everything, yet without stopping in front of any piece. The curator excitedly followed them, asking questions nonstop, “Would your father like this one? Wouldn’t that make sense in his Damien Hirst collection?” He seemed to have rediscovered a love for the arts. “But why are you going so fast?” Walking straight past cigarettes on a string, the crying Lacoste, and the rest of that bizarre assembly of pieces, the twins were taking a second tour. “If I may…,” the curator went on, “It’s all about conceptual art nowadays.” To his surprise, Virginia slowed down in front of the only painting in the show.

  She moved her glance from the pale, defeated face of the saint to the green eyes of the triumphant dragon. Suddenly she froze. Her cheeks betrayed a blush of color. She wiped her chin with her hand. Did the dragon just kiss her? The curator nodded. “Of course, figurative—it’s the new conceptual.”

  CHLOÉ VERDI

  May 4, 2009, New York City

  n modern capitalism, beneath any great fortune lies a crime. In fact, here we have a plethora. But do tell us, Miss Verdi,” the prosecutor said, his eyes shining, “what are the skeletons in Rosso Fiorentino’s closet?”

  ROSSO FIORENTINO

  July 5, 2006, Portofino, Italy