Cooking With Fernet Branca (29 page)

Pacini may be a smooth number but he doesn’t need things spelt out. ‘Have you ever thought of writing a film?’ he asks ingenuously.

‘Often, now you mention it. Though not long ago I happened to read a biography of you and ever since then I’ve been thinking more about that, to tell the truth. If you don’t mind my saying, the book hardly does you justice.’

‘No. My family would certainly agree. Especially Filo here. He didn’t recognize his father at all. I’m quite sure you could do better, Gerry.’

‘Immodestly, I think so too.’

‘I’ll have a contract drawn up right now. I can’t possibly go on working on
Arrazzato
with the constant threat of legal action hanging over the production.’

‘As I said, my quarrel is with Marta and not with you.’

‘But nor could I hire your valuable talents if I believed you still had an outstanding dispute with my composer. I may as well tell you, Gerry, that although she doesn’t yet know it I fully intend using Marta again.’

‘I’m glad to hear it. Obviously if she and I are to be colleagues at some time in the future I would make quite sure that any little misunderstandings were behind us. Really, I’m well on the way to forgiving her right now.’

‘Excellent. After all, don’t forget this film might easily make your voice famous, even a potential source of income, like the gentleman who did the whistling for Morricone’s spaghetti western scores.’

‘Or Florence Foster Jenkins massacring the Queen of the Night’s big aria? Terrific.’

Pacini nods unhappily, takes out his mobile phone, punches a number, gets to his feet and goes out onto the balcony, speaking rapidly. Filippo smiles another of those collectable smiles.

‘I think you’re a generous person, Gerry. My father’s very grateful, you know. This could have been a crisis for us.’

‘Nonsense, just a passing awkwardness. These things happen.’ I glance up at the wall above his head and catch the eye of a fascist
put
to
who I swear winks at me as his little rosebud mouth lisps the words ‘Kick ass!’

‘The lawyer will be here in an hour with a draft agreement‚’ Pacini announces as he comes back in, tucking his
telefonino
away. ‘Filo, will you please go and tell Mario to have everything ready for two-thirty on the dot instead of two? We can delay the shooting schedule long enough to settle this.’

And so it was. Within fifty minutes I had signed a document agreeing that Piero Pacini would assign me exclusive rights to a biography with an option on writing a script for a forthcoming film as yet untitled, this agreement to be dependent on the complete renunciation of any legal action intended or actual in connection with the musical score of
Arrazzato
and its composer. (Or many florid paragraphs to that effect.) In short, Samper has won. Thank you, Marta, you malevolent old baggage. Things have turned out quite well for me despite the worst you could do. But golly, what a day! It started with me being grilled by a
maresciallo
of the carabinieri and has now turned into something of a triumph. A good example, though I say so myself, of the advantages of preserving a cool head and a firm purpose.

What I don’t know, of course, is how this day is going to end.

With the agreement signed I feel more relaxed about things and am determined to enjoy myself. I mosey around the villa, eye the kitchens and the cellar, wander through the grounds and watch some more shooting on the beach. The film remains a complete enigma to me. Putting these few scenes
together with what little I have gleaned from Marta and Pacini I can’t begin to work out what it’s about, nor how it might be ‘lifted’ by Nanty’s guest spot with Alien Pie. But there, I’m not a famous director, just his future biographer.

Whether or not Pacini and his crew know where they’re going with
Arrazzato
they certainly set about it with terrific enthusiasm and conviction, which is very Italian of them. This prompts me to rueful reflection of how very un-English enthusiasm and conviction are: possibly the two things most notably absent from my own poor land, utterly lost as it has been these last fifty years. We’ve had our day and simply can’t think how to enjoy the evening … Ah! You can’t beat home thoughts from abroad, especially not after a good lunch by the ageless Mediterranean. Take heart, Samper (I tell myself sternly). Don’t get feebly Carlylean; make me laugh instead.
Cheer
me,
slobby
git!
The past is but an anagram: only rearrange it. How? Experiment, how else? Do something new with dull old ingredients.

For example, Stuffed Udder might equally well be Stuffed Adder: the good cook is as flexible as his raw materials are available. My udder recipe is basically something I borrowed during that Per Snoilsson trip to Senegal I mentioned earlier. There, it is de rigueur for First Communion, when they use camel. The Samper version uses cow with – as Nanty might say in business-speak – bells and whistles. The butterscotch sauce is its crowning glory. It’s all a matter of being on the qui-vive for amusing possibilities, for making interesting tracks that cross the well-beaten paths of stuffy cuisine at right angles.

Towards seven o’clock Pacini asks if I would like to stay to watch them do a night shoot. He explains they’re going to film the scene where the Albanian fisherman is rounded on and attacked by the Green commune. The principled youngsters have become wildly racist as the result of fascist contamination by the genius loci, by the strident anti-immigrant propaganda of the downmarket Italian media, and by the dumbing effects of going to a deafening Alien Pie gig. It all sounds like stupendous
tosh to me but Filippo says it could be interesting and besides, he can’t anyway fly me back until the shoot’s over. I therefore agree, and later find myself peaceably watching the sunset on the beach with a muscular technician named Baldo who has sprained his wrist and has been given time off. We share a bottle of Fernet Branca – oddly enough – that he has liberated from somewhere. As it grows dark I find my natural British reserve becoming seriously compromised. I feel the urge to bestow on the deepening twilight, the lilting sea and Livorno’s distant floodlit docks Sergio’s lovely farewell to Marilena from the end of Act 1 of
I
Testimoni
di
Genova
. The wicked Arabian magician Tazio, who lusts after Marilena himself, has told Sergio that the only way to be certain her love for him was predestined is to go to the Great Pyramid of Giza and take the measurements of the burial chamber, all of which are a sure prediction of the future. Reluctant but tragically dim, Sergio buys an expensive tape measure and sets sail for Cairo, though not before he has given Marilena his portrait. From the deck of the departing ship he sings his celebrated warning against loving a portrait more than its subject: ‘Le immagini sono a puro scopo illustrativo’.

When I finish this moving aria Baldo wipes his eyes on his sleeve and becomes most flattering. He says I must have a truly wonderful musical ear because I’m able to produce such a hilarious pastiche of the score of
Arrazzato
: an astonishing feat for someone who has only been on the set for a day. Others, too, have heard it and run up to collapse around us on the sand, rolling and laughing. The trouble is, when people are practically overcome with mirth, slapping you on the back and saying what a dazzling send-up it is, you have little option but to agree, no matter that the fervour of your own performance has brought tears to your eyes. It turns out that young Filippo Pacini is one of those who has overheard my performance. Although it’s now too dark to see much of his expression I gather from the way he’s nodding his head that he realizes I really did have Marta over a barrel, as the saying
is. There can be no further question where her inspiration came from, fraudulent old toper and plagiarist that she is.

But Filippo has been sent by his father to reclaim my admirers. They are needed to ready the sets for the sequence about to be shot. The Fernet seems to have melted away so I also get to my feet and wander across to the fake cove, although not with much hope of diversion. I’m assuming that night filming is going to be remarkably like filming by day, only darker. Pacini, who in deference to the night is now wearing his eyeshade backwards on his head, gesticulates at the centre of a group that includes a swarthy fellow wearing cut-offs, flip-flops and a threadbare T-shirt. He, I take it, is the Albanian: an illegal immigrant who began by teaching the eager Green communards how to fish by handlining but who is now about to fall victim to their racist ire. My muscular new friend Baldo, whose sprained wrist is most affectingly strapped up in dramatic swathes of pink plaster, informs me that the script calls for the Albanian to arrive running along the beach, looking over his shoulder at his invisible but audible pursuers. He stops and does a stag-at-bay in front of his house before making to escape inland towards the villa, but lights and voices appear from this direction, too. He dashes down to the water where his boat is drawn up, obviously hoping to push off and get away to sea, but the boat is stove in. Now in a panic, he runs into the house and emerges with an armful of distress flares, races to the very end of the artificial promontory and begins setting them off in desperate profusion. This is heavily ironic because it’s all too late, nobody is going to respond in time, the State is anyway seen to be indifferent and incompetent (cutaway of local coastguards sprawled in their offices, drinking wine and commenting languidly on the money people spend nowadays on firework displays).

Eventually the Albanian is cornered by his pursuers at the end of the spit, ritually hacked to death and his torso raped for no obvious reason other than that of cinematography. There follows a general orgy to be backed by Alien Pie’s soundtrack and intercut with Mussolini-era newsreel footage. The girls are
driven to erotic frenzy by the violence, using rockets in a most improper fashion (see the film’s title). A dead seagull is found and spitted on someone’s erect cock, its wings held out on either side to simulate flying.

Well,
really.
You might think Albanians get quite enough of this sort of primitive violence in their own country, with their blood feuds and whatnot. And anyway, you don’t have to kill illegal immigrants. Why not punish them instead by taking them on compulsory tours of the Uffizi, obliging them to attend interminable courses on the iconography of Renaissance art, making their
permessi
di
soggiorno
contingent on a thoughtful essay about the Etruscans? Pretty soon there would be hardly any illegal immigrants in Italy. They would all have stampeded elsewhere, principally to Britain where there isn’t enough culture left to constitute a threat to them.

But as for the great Piero Pacini, what can he be up to? I’m beginning to wonder if I want to write this fellow’s biography after all. It will obviously involve wading through some pretty murky depths, very different from the skittering shallows in which my sporting heroes posture and prance. Indeed, short of having been Pasolini’s psychiatrist I can hardly imagine more specialized employment. Oh, well. Samper will find a way; he always does.

I’ll say one thing for Pacini: he knows his job and likes to get a move on. I gather he prefers to get as much as he can in a single take. Marta’s score starts up, a sort of sinister tango. The chased and bayed Albanian sprints about on the sand, looking over one shoulder, cameras tight on his terrified face, other cameras panning over the scene. The whole area is lit with great floods covered in a sort of pink cheesecloth which, together with the right filters on the camera lenses, apparently gives the effect of moonlight. Eventually, after much to-ing and fro-ing, the moment arrives for the scene with the distress flares. For this Pacini will need close-ups of fingers fumbling with a cheap disposable lighter, the thin T-shirt trembling to his thudding heart and gasping breaths, the fuse igniting,
then pull back for the fiery whoosh of the rocket and its burst of starshells against the night sky. A large polythene bin is carried into the fisherman’s dilapidated house. The bin is covered with stencils saying ‘Explosives’, ‘Danger’ and so on, as well as being criss-crossed with adhesive red and yellow warning tape. I’m glad to say they’re being careful, keeping their store of flares safely under cover and removing only enough for each shot. Before sending up the first flare Pacini makes what are obviously pre-arranged calls on his mobile phone, presumably to the local police and coastguards, warning them that whatever they may shortly see is a false alarm: genuine filming of fake distress.

There is no question, these rockets are terrific. They scoot up with blazing orange trails and burst silently into brilliant red flares that sink slowly earthwards on little parachutes, winking out before they reach the ground. But try as he may, Pacini can’t seem to get exactly the shot he wants of the Albanian’s face when he lights the fuse. The rockets go up and the flares come down and soon everyone loses interest in them and concentrates instead on the Albanian. Between shots he is instructed to run on the spot so as to be suitably breathless while Pacini towers over him giving him instructions in a gravelly voice. The man nods, the lighter flicks, the rocket goes up, the flares come down and still it’s not right.

It is after one of these failures I notice something mildly interesting. I’ve been spending much of the time watching the display instead of the actor because the flares against the night sky produce an agreeably psychedelic effect that may well have something to do with Fernet Branca. Indeed, the gorgeous red hanging in the night sky for thirty seconds is a good deal more interesting than the Albanian, a dull-looking fellow who has anyway turned out to be Moroccan. I’ve been watching the moment when each flare goes out and noticing that often there is still a spark left glowing dully as it drifts the last fifty metres to earth. Some fizz into the sea, most vanish into the night. But I’m watching one that has landed on the roof of the fisherman’s
house and suddenly glows a little brighter. That’s interesting, I think: that’s not what you’d expect with tiles. I suppose it must have landed on one of those sheets of plastic that have been so stylishly deployed to cover holes in the roof and simulate threadbare poverty. In which case, surely it could melt its way through and even perhaps fall into –

Retrospectively, I deduce this is my last constructive thought for several minutes. According to next day’s newspapers the explosion is well audible in Viareggio and the ensuing pyrotechnic display visible from Massa, some say La Spezia. Like everyone else within a hundred metres of the house I’m knocked flat on the sand amid a total confusion of orange roaring. The sky is a burst kaleidoscope of whizzing red lights. My ears are made of felt and packed with wool. Slowly, slowly the thought ‘Samper has survived’ assembles itself like an unlikely word in the hands of a Scrabble player. I drag myself upright and find I’m naked from the waist up. Disaster. That was a very nice Cerruti shirt I’d slipped on in honour of Filippo this morning – I
think
it was this morning but things aren’t functioning properly, time included.

The scene is lit by fire, most of it from the summer-dried undergrowth fringing the beach. The house itself is now roofless, its empty doorframe and window embrasures flickering with flames within. It looks as though we’ve been saved by superior bricklaying: the stout, low walls are mainly intact, suggesting most of the blast went straight up. People are everywhere struggling to their feet. The Madonna is ritually invoked; the Moroccan actor is appealing to – or maybe thanking – Allah. Somebody finds a mobile phone lying uninjured on the sand and has the presence of mind to call for ambulances and fire engines. There seem to be remarkably few serious injuries. Among the worst is Pacini himself, the back of whose head and shoulders are badly burned, his hair crisp and the remains of his plastic eyeshade welded to it. Filippo is kneeling beside him, tears streaming down his face and glinting in the firelight.

‘Are you hurt?’ I ask solicitously, but he just shakes his head.

Soon most people have recovered enough to busy themselves with meaningless tasks such as stamping out embers that are harmlessly burning out in the sand and exchanging hysterical jokes when they meet. The first emergency vehicle to arrive is actually a police helicopter. It is quickly joined by a cacophony of fire engines and ambulances and the scene becomes still more frenetic and dishevelled. People in uniform sprint about, shouting. A stretcher appears, Pacini is loaded into the helicopter with Filippo in attendance and they disappear upwards into the night. So much for my lift home.

As I’m sure this whole narrative has testified from the start, there is something in the Samper character that makes him shy away from fuss and drama. Having survived, I discover that all I really want is to trot away up the beach into the sheltering darkness and leave the arena to those whose profession it is to enjoy such things. There’s another good reason, too, which is that by some bizarre fluke Pacini’s sound system is still working and from behind the livid scene of disaster rises the awful travesty of my own voice going ‘
Uffa
…
buffa
…’ in a demented falsetto. Accordingly, I sidle over towards the bogus promontory, scramble up and over it, and slip away along the line of surf in the direction of Viareggio. For some reason my teeth won’t stop chattering. I have a brisk wash in the sea before resuming my walk. The eminently sane, salt taste restores my senses more than a little. When I turn back to the scene I’ve just left – which despite the fire brigade is still considerably ablaze – it’s just in time to see an extraordinary thing. The two tall cypress trees are standing up to their knees in incandescent scrub and brushwood. One is just beginning to catch fire, the flames running up it like a bright liquid under pressure. The other, though, simply begins to – and I can scarcely believe what I’m seeing – to
bend
very slowly from the waist, as if it were an elderly butler greeting a monarch. As I watch, the bend accelerates into a grovel and the cypress wilts like a dildo in a smithy, its crest coming to
rest on the ground. Curious, I think as I trudge woozily away up the beach with my ears singing. Most curious.