Authors: Ottavio Cappellani
Sicilian Tragedee (20 page)
Pirronello’s flash goes off again, just to be sure:
Same scene as before except that this time, where Turrisi’s neck had been, is the profile of a guy with a forelock and a pair of teardrop Ray
·
Bans.
Same scene as before except that this time, where Turrisi’s neck had been, is the profile of a guy with a forelock and a pair of teardrop Ray
·
Bans.
Cagnotto’s on his knees.
He’s fooling with the CDs. There’s a hint of nervousness in the air and he wants to put on some music.
Who the hell is always messing up his CDs?
Cagnotto’s expression softens from annoyance to tolerance, he’s just remembered that it is he himself who is always messing up his CDs. Bobo is extremely methodical about these things. He needs to remember to attach a sticker, something written; these burned CDs all look the same. He picks one, makes a
who knows?
face, and puts it on the CD player.
who knows?
face, and puts it on the CD player.
The
Ride of the Valkyries
comes on.
Ride of the Valkyries
comes on.
Everyone turns to look at Cagnotto.
What the fuck, the
Ride of the Valkyries.
The CDs fall from Cagnotto’s hands. The
Ride of the Valkyries
is his music for intimate occasions. It’s like someone has just discovered his collection of porno DVDs.
Ride of the Valkyries.
The CDs fall from Cagnotto’s hands. The
Ride of the Valkyries
is his music for intimate occasions. It’s like someone has just discovered his collection of porno DVDs.
Betty, sitting alone on a sofa, begins to tap her foot to the music. She’s staring, with great interest, at a candied apple.
Carmine comes in, all out of breath. He sits down, looks at her.
Betty hands him the apple as if she wanted him to taste it.
Carmine looks at the apple, looks at Betty, looks at Pirronello.
Pirronello’s flash goes off:
Carmine stares at the camera fearfully. Next to him is a bright red apple.
Carmine stares at the camera fearfully. Next to him is a bright red apple.
It’s a shame that in a photo you can’t hear music, thinks Pirronello.
The Summer Sunset Sends Torrid Waves over the Amphitheater of San Giovanni la Punta
The summer sunset sends torrid waves over the amphitheater of San Giovanni la Punta. People are taking their places, lingering to chat.
The chief press officer of San Giovanni la Punta is in heaven. Two days ago he hadn’t been anything like chief press officer. But Paino had wanted to do things right, yes, he had, so he had scrounged up some kind of contract, he had hired Tafuri, who covered the San Giovanni la Punta soccer matches for
La Voce della Sicilia
, three euros per article, and he had offered him the job of chief press officer for the city. He even told him he would get him benefits. Tafuri hasn’t understood what kind of a contract it is, contracts with the public administration are complicated, but hey, shit, this is a government job! His grandmother is elated; his wife has gone to the manicurist to get
her toenails painted. Paino had even made sure there was a little box of business cards in his office:
Fabio Tafuri, Chief Press Officer for the City of San Giovanni la Punta.
For the time being, Paino had said, he would have to make do with the telephone number of the receptionist, but he was going to get his own internal line. Tafuri looks around even though there’s no one else in the room, apart from a lectern they’ve moved from some middle school classroom to serve as a desk, pulls an envelope out of his pocket, and for the first time in his life snorts cocaine. White powder on the lectern like the white powder on the desk of a PR ace in Los Angeles. Warm air scented with jasmine wafts through the window.
La Voce della Sicilia
, three euros per article, and he had offered him the job of chief press officer for the city. He even told him he would get him benefits. Tafuri hasn’t understood what kind of a contract it is, contracts with the public administration are complicated, but hey, shit, this is a government job! His grandmother is elated; his wife has gone to the manicurist to get
her toenails painted. Paino had even made sure there was a little box of business cards in his office:
Fabio Tafuri, Chief Press Officer for the City of San Giovanni la Punta.
For the time being, Paino had said, he would have to make do with the telephone number of the receptionist, but he was going to get his own internal line. Tafuri looks around even though there’s no one else in the room, apart from a lectern they’ve moved from some middle school classroom to serve as a desk, pulls an envelope out of his pocket, and for the first time in his life snorts cocaine. White powder on the lectern like the white powder on the desk of a PR ace in Los Angeles. Warm air scented with jasmine wafts through the window.
Cagnotto, surrounded by agitated types all wanting to ask him something, is looking at a tubular metal construction about ten feet high, positioned in the center of a gravel-covered open space, the stage, in the middle of the amphitheater.
Paino comes up smiling. “Have you seen how many people there are? They don’t get crowds like this at Monte Carlo.” Paino thinks, Monte Carlo! He must tell Tafuri.
“By the way,” says Paino, “the chief press officer of the city is ready to talk to you whenever.”
“What’s that?”
“What?”
“That.”
“That?”
Cagnotto nods.
“Romeo and Juliet’s balcony, and below it, Friar Lawrence’s cell.”
“No, it looks like the thing they put up when they restore a building, but there’s no building behind it.”
Paino looks at the tubular scaffolding and nods. “As I said. An allegory, in short.”
“A what?”
“Allegory,” says Paino smiling.
“Of what?”
“Oh, well, that I couldn’t tell you. I’m the culture commissioner, you’re the director. Aren’t you the one who did the sketch?”
“I, the director, say take it down immediately. I didn’t think you were going to make it out of metal pipe.”
Paino goes
no
with his head. “Impossible, we paid for it and now we have to use it. We can’t fool around like that with public money.”
no
with his head. “Impossible, we paid for it and now we have to use it. We can’t fool around like that with public money.”
The man from the bar down in the piazza comes up, a white cap on his head. “Excuse me.”
Paino and Cagnotto look at him.
“In the toilet down at the bar. Something’s going on. Could you come quickly please, all my clients are leaving and the owner’s going to take it out on me.”
In the bar there are customers with little pastries and big pastries, with ice-cream cones and ice-cream cakes, with granitas and brioches, all of them anxious about and interested in the shrieks and sounds coming from the toilet.
Paino and Cagnotto look back and forth at each other. Paino shoots off in the direction of the toilet, very nervous. Cagnotto shoots off with greater equanimity. Lambertini’s scenes before opening night are famous. Lambertini, the scene she makes before opening night above all in a new venue where she’s never acted before, she does it for several reasons. To prepare the audience, to attract attention, to provide journalists with an anecdote so that the next day, writing up the story, they will steal space from the other actors and give it to her. She does it because it’s fun, and finally, she does it because, before opening night, Lambertini is hysterical for real.
Lambertini has a chair and is bashing the machine you use to dry your hands, shouting, “I am Lambertini-i-i-i!”
The amphitheater, pride of San Giovanni la Punta. Built ten years ago of concrete and gravel. Come to rest in the public gardens like the mother ship of ET. Designed by Surveyor Intelisano, brother of Chartered Accountant Intelisano, who’s responsible for the Baroque accounts of the city of Noto. Twenty rows of seats in reinforced concrete that soar over a gravel-covered open space where beauty pageants have been held, Martoglio has been performed, and the most famous DJs of Radio Etna International have appeared. “The amphitheater of San Giovanni la Punta: the missing link between ancient Greek theater and rogue construction in reinforced concrete,” says the Contessa.
Paino is very proud of this definition. Reinforced concrete is the very essence of Sicily’s terrific economic success.
Sooner or later they’ll appreciate it; sooner or later, the amphitheater of San Giovanni la Punta, tourists will be coming to see it.
Times change, maintains Paino. Even the Baroque, when they first built it, scandalized people, he says.
Seeing Paino and Cagnotto come running, Lambertini finally calms down. She surveys them with contempt, puts the beat-up chair back in front of the washbasin, sits down, and says, “Obviously, I’m not going up there.”
“Where?” says Cagnotto, all understanding.
“There, on that thing.”
Paino says, “Where? On the balcony?”
Lambertini nods
yes
decisively, crossing her legs and getting ready to sit there for a month until the matter is resolved.
yes
decisively, crossing her legs and getting ready to sit there for a month until the matter is resolved.
Paino nods, he’s in complete agreement with Lambertini.
Cagnotto begins to shake his hands and his head as if he’s trying to calm down from a hysteric fit that’s overtaking him. He looks at
Paino with disdain and says calmly, “Elizabethan theater was like that, Rosanna.”
Paino with disdain and says calmly, “Elizabethan theater was like that, Rosanna.”
“Oh, yes? There were
tubes
?”
tubes
?”
Cagnotto goes
no
with his head. “No, there were no structures made of scaffolding. But there were …”
no
with his head. “No, there were no structures made of scaffolding. But there were …”
Paino nods.
Will you stop nodding when you have no idea what I’m talking about?
Paino nods as if to say,
Sure, I’ll stop nodding but I agree.
Sure, I’ll stop nodding but I agree.
“There was
abstraction
,” says Cagnotto, finding the right word.
abstraction
,” says Cagnotto, finding the right word.
“That’s right!” says Paino.
Cagnotto sends him a dirty look.
“Abstraction, allegory,” says Paino.
If you shut up I’ll take care of this,
says Cagnotto’s expression.
says Cagnotto’s expression.
Yes, yes, sure, I’m listening.
“Know how they changed scenes in the Elizabethan theater, Rosanna?”
“Of course, they used posters.”
Cagnotto is annoyed.
He had been sure that this business about the posters was going to convince her. On the Elizabethan stage they changed scenes using posters, on which they wrote “woods” and the stage became a forest, they didn’t need to use a single tree. If in Elizabethan theater all you needed were posters, just think what a splash you could make in Elizabethan theater using scaffolding. But instead the scaffolding, it seemed, continued to bother Lambertini. “That’s right,” says Cagnotto, trying to buy some time.
“And so, that thing they built out there in the amphitheater, you call that a poster?”
“We can put one up,” says Paino.
Cagnotto and Lambertini glare at him.
“A poster, I mean. On scaffolding, posters are fine, they often put them up, like, to say ‘don’t walk under’ or ‘falling objects.’”
“Right, and then maybe you’ll get them to make me a paper hat, know what I mean? Like a boat, made out of newspaper,” says Lambertini, miming a hat shaped like a boat made out of newspaper perched on her head.
“A hat?” Paino doesn’t understand.
“Commissioner, allow me,” says Cagnotto.
“Go ahead, go ahead.”
“Rosanna, listen,” Cagnotto resumes, “neither is Caporeale the right age for Romeo.”
Lambertini screws up her face and squeezes her eyelids as if to say to Cagnotto,
Okay, you make even a hint of a suggestion, I mean a hint, that I’m not the right age for Juliet and I’ll show you what a hysteric fit is.
Okay, you make even a hint of a suggestion, I mean a hint, that I’m not the right age for Juliet and I’ll show you what a hysteric fit is.
“Let’s put it this way: the only real element in the Shakespearean mise-en-scène, that is the Shakespearean mise-en-scène that I have in mind, is you.”
Lambertini relaxes her eyelids but not the rest of her face.
“Let’s say you’re the only character on the stage who is anchored to tradition, otherwise, you know, and I’m being serious here, that I wouldn’t have chosen you, if I chose you it’s because you have a good classical foundation, like in the ancient Greek theater of Siracusa.”
Lambertini lifts her head slightly as if to say,
Go on.
Go on.
“Caporeale, Cosentino, the stylized balcony, they represent the artistic pact we make between representation and audience,” Cagnotto goes on, “that magical theatrical folly in which everything is something other than itself.”
“Precisely,” says Lambertini, who doesn’t understand fuck-all but likes it when they say
difficult
things, especially when they say difficult things talking about her.
difficult
things, especially when they say difficult things talking about her.
“You represent the line of continuity between Shakespeare and our time.”
“So if I go up on the scaffolding, I’m the only normal one?”
“Exactly!” says Cagnotto.
Lambertini, it seems that this thing that she’s the only normal one, she likes.
She gets up, smooths down her skirt. “Fine, I’m going to put on my costume, but I want wisteria.”
“Wisteria?” asks Paino.
“Yes, Commissioner”—Cagnotto steps in—“some wisteria. Can’t you get some wisteria as”—Cagnotto thinks of a term that will speak to a commissioner—“as a
floral ornament
for the scaffolding?”
floral ornament
for the scaffolding?”
“Ornament? No problem. We’ll get it right away with Interflora.”
Lambertini comes out of the toilet smiling, on Cagnotto’s arm.
Cagnotto too is smiling broadly.
Paino streaks out of the bar, announcing to his fellow citizens, “Sorry about the delay but we have to wait for the ornament.”
His fellow citizens nod seriously,
Of course, if the ornament’s not here, the show can’t go on.
Of course, if the ornament’s not here, the show can’t go on.
Lambertini apologizes to the customers in the bar. “Pardon me, pardon me, it was my voice and body exercises, the Swarovski method of releasing tension.”
“Holy Mary, she’s got a method like the crystal swans,” says a very elegant lady at the bar, although her ice-cream cone is dripping on the taffetta rose that decorates her enormous bosom.
Caporeale, in his own small way, is freaking out inside the tent pitched next to the amphitheater to serve as a dressing room. “I’m not going out.”
Cosentino is in his stage costume, all ready to go on. He’s wearing bloused trousers in red and blue stripes that close at the knee. A vest with wide shoulders from which emerge the orange sleeves of a shirt that’s also bloused. “But they’re great, these costumes!”
“Yours is!”
“No, no, mine is great, but so is yours.”
Caporeale comes out of the tent, also wearing a shirt with bloused sleeves. He’s holding a jacket on a hanger in front of him to cover his lower half.
“Stop that!”
Caporeale removes the jacket and says to Cosentino, “And what’s this for, to emphasize my great punch line?”
Caporeale’s wearing the white tights of a nurse or a bride, and at crotch level, a codpiece that greatly enhances his private parts.
“Shit! For sure, Quattrocchi’s going to want to marry you now!”
Caporeale turns on the point of his dainty floral-patterned shoes and marches back into the tent.
“Just kid-ding!”
Tafuri doesn’t notice he’s sweating. The piazza of San Giovanni la Punta “thronged” with people, the amphitheater with its “ornament.” Tafuri’s taking notes in a notebook in preparation for the press release that will mark the emergence of San Giovanni la Punta as … what was that city the commissioner had mentioned? … ah, yes, Monte Carlo.
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