hen Virginia bought Federico’s painting at the art show, she slipped a note inside his hand. “Do you still want to paint me?” Although the note didn’t specify when or where, or even if it was a joke, the fourteen-year-old unilaterally decided that he would go see Virginia that same night.
At around nine o’clock, we approached the villa by sea in a green rowboat we had rented at the harbor. It was a windless evening. The only lights to guide us came from the dim lamps on the Piazzetta of Portofino; the villa’s park was already dark, but I knew it by heart. It was here where I had spent many summers with Marinella’s family, including the twins, when they were little. The park occupied the entire hill. It started up there, at the top of the hill, by an anonymous rusty gate, passing through the cypresses’ garden labyrinth—at the center of which (according to the evil tongues) was the statue of one of the patriarch’s mistresses; it then passed a hidden swimming pool, which had been built for some grandmother (as per the etiquette, at the seaside there should be no pool, and if there is one it should be invisible), and it bordered the tennis court (the park’s belly button) before winding all the way down for another two hundred feet to the spiaggetta, the private beach.
“I don’t want to break inside that villa,” I said. “It brings back bad memories.”
I told him about Marinella.
“If you really want to get rid of your bad spell, if you want to move forward, you have to look backward,” Federico said. “You have to deal with your past.”
I tied the boat to a large rock covered in yellow seaweed. The fourteen-year-old painter stretched out his hand so that I could help him jump off, but he dragged me straight into the sea with him.
“Fuck, Rosso! I told you that deaf people have no balance…”
Completely soaked, we began walking up the large imperial staircase. There were 999 steps to reach the top of the hill. I started to count them, and at each step, a different memory came flying back.
Steps 1–15: Grandmother Margherita sitting down on the terrace for lunch at two o’clock sharp on a bright July day. She had a glass of Pimm’s to her right, with a thick slice of peach. On the white linen tablecloth, the forks’ glittering tines were facedown, since the family insignia was engraved on the back. The fork teeth were curved and smooth, just like the bay of Portofino.
Steps 27–35: Grandmother Margherita looking around, a transparent smile for everyone and everything her gaze landed on, but only for a second: the young waiter who was dressing the salad; Cherry, her fox terrier, barking at something; and the twins, Virginia and Ginevra, in their white summer sailor suits with blue stripes, vestite alla marinara, joining the children’s table at the far corner of the terrace.
Steps 47–59: The nannies would arrive and sit at the children’s table too, trying to be as invisible as possible. Then Giovanni’s children would arrive, then Clemente’s, Edoardo’s, Clara’s, and Laura’s. It was easier to find your way in Henry VIII’s garden labyrinth than into this family tree, which included more than sixty-four first cousins.
Steps 66–69: Finally Grandmother Margherita’s two sons would arrive, Clemente and Giovanni, the patriarch. Yes, thirteen months’ age difference would make one the patriarch—the head of a business empire and to some extent of a country—and the other one just “the brother.” Clemente would often initiate the bickering by inquiring after each family company’s performance. “How’s cement doing, Giovanni?” “Only 99 percent pure,” the patriarch, known for his dark humor, would answer—an allusion to the custom of burying enemies in cement, where their body parts made up the remaining 1 percent. “Cement is doing better than our banks, and the banks are doing better than our newspapers, but not too many checks are coming this way these days,” Clemente summarized.
Steps 69–70: “And where’s Marinella?” Giovanni would ask, demanding his favorite daughter.
Steps 70–97: Of course Marinella was late.
Steps 102–108: As usual, Giovanni, the patriarch, was wearing a red Battistoni tie with his light linen suit, and his white hair framed his boyish, regal face. Its stillness expressed, at the same time, an extraordinary selfishness and that slight melancholy of those who aren’t allowed to have feelings. He had collected as many successes in business as losses in his private life. He did not know how to hug a child, and he had never done it, yet a joke of his would make the Stock Exchange roar or tumble. When he squinted, his wrinkles gathered around his tanned cheeks, like a group of teenagers in front of an ice cream parlor.
Steps 113–234: “Come in…,” Marinella had said. This was the first time I’d met her. I pushed open the half-shut door to the room from which her voice came. A cigarette lay burning in an ashtray. Once in a while she put it to her mouth and squeezed it between her lips, and two white dense columns of smoke issued from her nostrils, as if from those of a dragon. But she was the most beautiful dragon.
Steps 247–316: Our first dance. “And what about Franz?” I asked. “That again! Are you in love with him?” Marinella said laughing. “I like someone else.” “Whom?” I dared to ask. “You really are a bit thick!” she said, and kissed me. “Whom do you think?” she asked embarrassed. I was staring at her unreadable eyes, her chapped lips, and the tiara shining on her white forehead. And I couldn’t believe it.
Steps 397–435: The only time we ever made love. “You’ve changed,” Marinella said, looking at me. “I did it for you. You for the better and I for the worse,” I said, smiling. And we made love. I could hear her heart beat, the beautiful, steady rhythm of her heart. I held her big toes as if they were the buttons that piloted the world.
Step 666: Franz’s warning. “You shall not desire your neighbor’s wife. You took her from me, someone will take her from you.”
Steps 667–690: Our last party. On the top floor, two blue spotlights from the Orient Express illuminated a gold bathtub. We began to spin around the dining room table hand in hand. We spun around for hours and my temperature was rising. “You’re sick, let’s go home!” Marinella said, taking my hand. “Come on, let’s go home and make love again!” The guests were singing.
Steps 690–998: Marinella was sitting by my side in the car. My vision was blurred. Badly lit curves disappearing into the dining room tablecloth. A dark street unrolling in front of me and, at the same time, the bubbly amber of the champagne. The waiters under the hot chandelier uncorked new bottles. It seemed like the corks were rolling around the asphalt. Then the punch spilled and the wheels skidded. The pitcher began to roll and the brakes locked. The steering wheel, like a chicken thigh, flew out of my hand. In half a second, the car slammed against the guardrail, reared up, and flew into the air. When it landed everything was quiet.
Step 999: There was a pound of brain matter on the asphalt.
Without realizing it, I had reached the top of the hill. I was standing in front of the statue in the garden labyrinth in honor of the patriarch’s mistress. He had built a business empire and a country, while I had taken Marinella from him, and then from the world, with a wrong turn. Can I do worse?
hat are you doing here?” Virginia asked the fourteen-year-old painter, opening wide her bedroom windows.
Federico was standing on the balcony of her room, still dripping, holding his satchel. We had managed to avoid the Dobermans that were barking excitedly at the moon and climbed up the kitchen’s gutters. I knew the route. While Federico presented himself, I hid inside a secret closet that connected the bathroom to two other chambers: Virginia’s bedroom and the room that once had been Marinella’s. I had hidden so many times inside that closet playing hide-and-seek, or spying on girls getting changed, that I knew the cracks in the wood by heart. The smell of mothballs and vinegar was ever the same.
“You’d rather we do it another time?” Federico asked.
“Now that you’re here, you may as well dry yourself,” Virginia replied, throwing a towel in his face.
Then she walked back inside her bedroom, leaving the window open.
“Thanks for coming today,” Federico said, following her inside, and somehow managing to slip out of his wet pants even as he walked. Near his navel, his tanned stomach still seemed to give off the heat from the sun. “You should have seen the curator’s face when you both arrived.”
“Shouldn’t I be the one stripping down to my underwear?” Virginia laughed. She was now sitting at the head of the long table that occupied her room. She wore a white linen shirt, on which her father’s initials were embroidered in dark blue thread, and a pair of white pants with tortoise-shell buttons. Her room had almost no decorations or clutter of any kind, except for a backgammon table whose pieces suggested an interrupted game.
She stretched her fingers and crumpled the tablecloth slightly. “I want you to paint my hands.”
After searching in his folder for a sheet that wasn’t wet, Federico began drawing. Although his stroke was typically clean and smooth, even when he drank an entire bottle of 140-proof grappa, that night his pencil seemed alive, bouncing in his hands like a techno dancer.
“What do you want to be when you grow up?” Virginia asked, snatching the unfinished drawing out of Federico’s hands. She looked at it attentively without saying anything. She had moved the ch air so that he could sit next to her.
“I want to be a painter,” said the painter. “And you?”
“Promise not to laugh,” said the sixteen-year-old girl, weighing a backgammon piece in her hand. She looked Federico in the eye. “You see, there are many fathers who want to save their children. I want to do the opposite. I want to save my father.”
“Why, what’s wrong with him?”
“He’s unhappy.”
“I’d save my sister, if I wasn’t an only child,” said Federico. “My father’s a ball buster.”
Virginia turned the backgammon piece over in her hand. Suddenly her eyes were a darker blue, almost violet, and seemed to be looking at a distant object. Then she put down the backgammon piece and distractedly pulled out two bills from a desk and handed them to Federico as payment for the drawing.
“My older sister, Marinella,” said Virginia. “She died in a car accident.”
Through the closet door’s crack, I felt my own breath. I thought she was looking rig ht at me.
Federico restored one of the bills to the table. “I only charge one hundred per drawing. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to upset you.”
How could he forget, how could he fuck up so badly? I had told him about Marinella. Or maybe it wasn’t a fuckup at all?
“What do you want to do when you grow up?” Virginia asked herself. “I want to be a lawyer, a journalist, an acrobat…And you, what about you? I want to save Dad…”
As if she were trying to chase away unpleasant thoughts, Virginia performed a few ballet steps in the room, just as Marinella had done the first time I met her. Virginia stretched her arms and kicked her legs haphazardly, in her white pants with the tortoise-shell buttons. Then she took the painter by the hand.
“As requested…Here, to thank you for the focaccia…,” Virginia said leaning against the wall. She closed her eyes as if she were standing before an imaginary firing squad. Then she loosened her shirt, exposing two ivory breasts. “Are we even now?”
Federico looked for another pencil because this one continued to dance in his hand like a techno dancer gone crazy.
“Didn’t we say naked?” he found the courage to say.
Virginia undid the first tortoise-shell button of her pants. On her stomach there was a buttery, golden glow of after-sun lotion. The swimsuit tan lines appeared, then the panties’ elastic. With a single gesture, she took off the rest. Federico’s hand was now trembling so much that you had no idea what the hell he was drawing.
As she walked naked across the room, her image became larger and larger within the crack in the wood until she came to where I was. I could now hear her breathing behind the wood. Or was the breath mine? Then the closet’s copper handle turned, and the door opened wide.
“Why are you hiding?” she asked me.
CHLOÉ VERDI
May 4, 2009, New York City
inally in America! Where you came to cause so much trouble,” said the prosecutor, twirling his pen and looking at me. “So how does one get to be hired by the best Wall Street firm, Ms. Verdi? How did you become a Chicago boy?”
CHLOÉ VERDI
September 2006–May 2007, Chicago
es, I, Chloé Verdi from Genoa, Italy, I made it all the way to the world’s number one university for Nobel prizes…and for suicides per semester.
We shuffled awkwardly past some severe portraits of the Seventh Circuit judges and walked into our classroom at Chicago Law on our first day. The other students were all dressed casually in shorts and sneakers, and yet something about each of them—a grimace, a trait, a tic—suggested that they had passed many selection processes to get here: the small whip in Ferdinand Calice’s smile, Mauricio’s fingers that jotted down notes faster than a Dictaphone. Only Shimoto’s face seemed too nice to be that of a future lawyer.
“One day you’ll be partners in a law firm, Nobel prize winners, prime ministers,” said Professor Leifsteen walking into our classroom. “But you’ll always be Chicago boys. Now let’s get straight to work. Let’s see…”
As the professor moved his finger around, we all held our breath.
“Mr. Celestri,” he said, pointing to the last row. “Mr. Franz Celestri.”
We breathed out, relieved, and some students turned to examine the unfortunate one who had been called on…yes, Franz, once known as the master of parties, had made it to the University of Chicago too. Can you imagine we ended up in the same class? He was waiting for the professor to phrase his question but didn’t seem too concerned. The master of parties sat as comfortably as if he were sipping a sherry at a black-tie ball.
“What’s corporate governance law all about, Mr. Celestri?” Professor Leifsteen asked. The question would have been even more intimidating had I known he had invented this area of law, back in the seventies. “Tell me in your own words.”
“It was meant to prevent big, bad companies from doing big, bad stuff,” said Franz.
“Correct. So, what’s its purpose in more legal terms?”
“It’s useless.”
There was a moment of complete silence in the classroom. The professor seemed taken aback. Nobody had ever dared to say such a thing to him in thirty years. Not even Congress. Of course, he didn’t really mind when smart students challenged his theories.
“Interesting point of view, Mr. Celestri…,” he resumed. “Let’s see…, Ms. Chloé Verdi?”
I jumped in my seat. Now the class turned to look at me, the girl in the third row, feeling a bit too young and too tanned compared with the rest of the classroom. I lowered my eyes to my pen.
“What recent act introduced corporate governance into law, Ms. Verdi?” the professor asked.
Forty seconds went by. In Italy I had never heard anything about corporate governance.
“I wouldn’t know,” I said.
“Anybody?” The professor turned to two law students seated in the front but nobody volunteered. He looked again to the last row. “Let’s see if Mr. Celestri can answer this one. What act introduced corporate governance into law?”
“The Sarbanes Oxley Act of 2002,” answered Franz, “a federal law passed to fight back against major corporate and accounting scandals, such as Enron and WorldCom.”
“That is correct. Would you say that the Sarbanes Oxley Act is useless too?” asked the professor provocatively.
Franz took a moment before responding.
“The Securities and Exchange Commission was meant to add teeth to the act.”
“But?” asked the professor, sensing a
n objection in Franz’s voice.
“But it’s just mouthwash. It might happen all over again, and worse this time.”
“Let’s hope you don’t get an A in corporate governance, Mr. Celestri…for the sake of the U.S. economy.”
After class I headed toward the cafeteria. With books under my arm and my hair bouncing on the backpack, I felt that pleasant sense of protection one feels as a student. It was almost noon. I turned around one more time to take it all in. I still couldn’t believe I was there. The tinted windows surrounding the fountains shone in the already mild sun. From the outside, the University of Chicago was a black crystal cube that, like the finest minds, was dark by day and lit by night.
I walked by the Rockefeller-endowed buildings. The lawns were damp and the squirrels’ voluminous tails curled and stretched in the late September air. Then I exhaled—or was it a sigh? I’d come all the way there to be one-upped by Franz, the master of parties. I don’t know why I smiled. Even though I hadn’t managed to answer in class, I was in a good mood.
No, I didn’t know whether I wanted to be a lawyer or some kind of CEO when I grew up. But I’d always wanted this: to get into a U.S. grad school. Here lay the promise of the tallest skyscrapers, stolen kisses at dawn, salaries as long as telephone numbers. And especially, the possibility of doing something worthwhile.
When I reached the cafeteria, my roommate, Juncal, was outside waiting for me. She was a fun party girl from Madrid—just who I needed as a friend to loosen up a bit. She had ginger-red hair and murdered the English r. Unlike the other students, she was studying law not to get to Wall Street but to join a volunteer organization in Tajikistan.
“Are you coming tonight?” she asked me.
“I have to finish reading corporate governance.”
“Chloé, remember, pleasure before duty!” She raised her index finger. “With only one exception: always wear your panties.”
I laughed. “And why is that necessary?”
Something Great and Beautiful Page 6
