Répondez s’il vous plaît. It was May 1993 and I hadn’t seen Olivia again for nine long years. I certainly wasn’t expecting to receive that invitation. At first I was tempted to toss the little rectangle of hard cardboard into the trash, without a second thought. Manon Morganti is pleased to invite. I read and reread my name written beneath—Valerio Carnevale—in lovely calligraphy, with a fountain pen. For her granddaughter’s eighteenth birthday. And at the center, in garishly oversized characters: Olivia. I didn’t know how to picture her to myself, this young woman just about to reach her majority.
Olivia had always forced me to reckon with my sense of time. Every time I saw her, I somehow felt obliged to deal with a piece of history, together with her. The diagram laid out by our distancings and renewed proximities, who knows why, always seemed to entail a settling of accounts of some sort, and sometimes it wasn’t even especially personal.
My simplest doubts were bound up with two words printed at the bottom of the card, on the right: Black Tie. I knew exactly what they meant, because my mother had worked her fingers to the bone so that she could enroll me in the classical high school, and to be exact, one of the finest schools in Rome, where she informed me that I’d have the opportunity to rub shoulders with the city’s crème de la crème. And in fact, that’s exactly what had happened, though in point of fact that crème turned out to be dregs, people who were only interested, when all was said and done, in narcotics, even worse than back in the borgata, but that’s just how that went. To make a long story short, invitations like that one were common enough in my own class at school. Just not ones that were addressed to me.
“But I don’t own a tuxedo.”
“I’ll lend you mine.” Costantino Bernasconi, my classmate, was urging me to go. “Who can say, maybe she’s turned into a complete babe.”
He, too, was the scion of a great and wealthy family of builders and, more or less like Olivia Morganti, he had chosen me above all the others. A coincidence? I was convinced that it wasn’t one. In all likelihood, without even realizing it, it had been I who chose him. After all, deep down, the magnetic laws that attract human beings are always somewhat mysterious.
Certainly, it had been Costantino Bernasconi who came over to me on that September morning, when no one knew anyone and everyone was entering a completely new and unfamiliar place, still free of names and all the baggage they carry with them, when—for a vanishingly brief time—everyone is just a face, fear in the eyes or flashes of enthusiasm, alive and real and open to the possible, before society can force us into a role that we frequently haven’t even decided on for ourselves. It had been Costantino who’d asked me if he could sit next to me. But out of the thirty classmates, perhaps I had been the one who’d invited him with a special glint in my eyes.
For that matter, it’s true that our desires have subterranean powers that often override our more conscious intentions. Sometimes they can see farther than we can, they can recognize what we fail to, and without bothering to check with us, they just go ahead and make decisions on our behalf. After all, that first day of school, I was returning with a lurch from the borgata to a decidedly bourgeois world. What else could I be hoping for, if not to meet a second Olivia Morganti, capable of rendering the transition sweet for me?
If, that first day of school, Costantino Bernasconi had decided to sit, say, next to Rebecca Antinori or Gaetano Cavallari, I would have been unable to tell you this story today. We all know how the great wheel of fortune, spinning past deeds done and undone, works in life, and it’s always a slightly stunning exercise to review its revolutions, working backward. Now, however, as I write, a doubt seizes me: But did I already want this story to unfold back then? And did I want it so deeply that I unleashed my desire into the air, making it explode into thousands of microparticles capable of surrounding another person and their desires, themselves in search of a destiny? Perhaps my future was so powerfully designed in my imagination that Costantino Bernasconi could never have taken a seat next to Rebecca Antinori or Gaetano Cavallari, because he had no choice but to meet me and change my own future path.
A man’s imagination is his destiny. If you ask me, character doesn’t matter, it’s not enough to say: I’ll do one thing and another thing will happen, because life goes where it will and tricks you endlessly, and you do one thing and another ninety-nine things will happen, but not the thing that you were expecting, so there’s little or no reason to trust in your own character or the character of other people. If, on the other hand, you imagine being someone, through some very twisted path—through the ninety-nine things that you neither wanted nor foresaw—you actually will arrive at the hundredth thing, the one that you had in mind in the first place.
“So? Do you or don’t you want my tuxedo?”
“Sure, but you have to come, too.”
I didn’t want to go to that party all alone. I wouldn’t know anyone there. And most of all, I didn’t want to go back into that world—the world I came from?—without the support of my new world, and all its everyday reassurances. When people talk about equilibrium as something internal, sometimes it makes me feel like laughing. Maybe so. There exists a kind of equilibrium, very delicate and complex (perhaps because it doesn’t depend on us alone), but there’s absolutely nothing internal about it: it’s the equilibrium of the worlds we belong to. And that’s what I was worrying about.
“Are you kidding? To the Morganti home? Papa would kill me,” Costantino laughed, “it’s their fault he’s under house arrest.”
Nothing could have surprised me more. What role had the Morgantis played in the arrest of Beppe Bernasconi? Among other things, it was a topic that Costantino never talked about, as if it had never happened. In fact, at first I hadn’t even realized that his father was under house arrest. I went over to his house practically every weekend, but precisely because it was the weekend it wasn’t strange to see Signor Bernasconi sitting in his bathrobe in front of the TV or in a terry-cloth robe lying by the pool. No one had explained to me that this was different. Most of all, no one seemed especially concerned about things. The aperitif was served at seven in the evening, on the dot, as usual, champagne and salted peanuts and a few expensive cheeses, or else a selection of fresh vegetables and olive oil dip—crudités or pinzimonio, when the Cavaliere was on a diet, because Signor Bernasconi was an engineer by education but Cavaliere del Lavoro, literally, a knight of labor, by honorific, as Costantino’s mother never tired of reminding us, especially when we both brought home failing grades in ancient Greek. And immediately afterward dinner was served, a frugal meal but only because it was important to stay light at the evening meal. Carbohydrates at lunch and proteins for dinner, ideally lean meat or fish, and lots and lots of vegetables. Not like at my house, where we’d be served a steamer trunk full of pasta just to prove the opposite, that there was plenty of food so everything was all right and dinner was supposed to be a moment of satisfaction for us all. That same steamer trunk full of pasta was certainly welcome to my friend Costantino, tall and skinny and muscular, “a growing boy,” as my mother often said, and he invariably and willingly polished it off whenever he came to my house, with a ravenous appetite. It took him five seconds to empty two bowls of spaghetti aglio e olio, which my mama would set before him with a wink, knowing she was making him happy, since at our house no one ever worried about bad breath or excess calories. And the sweet young wine—the vinello—that Zio Vittorio brought us by the plastic jerrican from a vineyard in the Castelli Romani was easy and delightful to drink, with no need for all the complicated ceremonies involved in extracting and sniffing the cork.
“Of course! Wait, don’t tell me you didn’t know?” Costantino chomped relaxedly on his chewing gum while he copied off the blackboard two dates that our history teacher had felt the need to underline, with a certain hint of emphasis in her voice (“ ’89 and ’93, guys, you need to learn those dates, they’re crucial, they changed the history…of the eighteenth century”).
I shook my head: “No, I never knew that.”
“It happened when they scooped up Giulio Morganti. You know the way the magistrates in the Clean Hands investigation did things, right? Tell me other names, and I’ll reduce your sentence. You talk and I’ll make deals. Anyway, when he received his indictment, that turncoat named us. There’s no way I can go to his daughter’s birthday party. My father would not only stop my allowance, he’d garnish my pension.”
In the meantime, the teacher called out for us all to turn the page. After a collective rustling of pages, we all sat staring at Jacques-Louis David’s Death of Marat. The painting had unleashed a stormy debate. One young woman had raised her hand. The usual teacher’s pet, top of the class, who always wanted to have her say. Which would have been reasonable enough if not for the fact that her father was a member of parliament, up to his neck in the recent scandals inasmuch as a member of the proverbially corrupt Socialist Party.
“Teacher? This painting makes me think of Bettino Craxi as he leaves the Hotel Raphael and people throw a hail of coins at him.” Bettino Craxi was the leader of the Socialist Party.
“Only a deep-seated anger is capable of producing epic images, so in a certain sense, I sort of agree,” the teacher ventured to respond, uncomfortably. “These are acts that out of the depths of history ultimately sublimate themselves into a perfect composition. But epic images have one defect: they’re so clean and simple that they can muddle the mind. A vendetta, precise in its trajectory, is so easy to memorize that it condemns us to remember for all time itself, and not the mile after mile of subsequent smoking rubble. Only because certain ruins are too filthy and too dusty and too vast to fit inside a perfect composition.”
We didn’t know it yet, but she was right. My class, which graduated in 1993, would remember forever the crowd that scornfully tossed coins at Craxi but would quickly forget the fact that his friend Berlusconi had tossed millions at him, even though we had him around for the twenty years that followed. My class would remember the collapse of the Twin Towers—precise in its trajectory, to a fault—but would forget the square blocks of smoking rubble that ensued. But I was too taken up with my own private affairs to lend any real attention to this topic.
“Giulio Morganti was arrested? Really? What for?”
Eventually, Costantino started to get a little annoyed at my questions: “What are you so astonished about? The Morgantis weren’t a bit better than anybody else. If you wanted to be awarded contracts, you had to pay bribes, there was no other way of obtaining work, and everyone knew that. It was the way things worked, on a normal basis. Then, all at once, they all started treating us like criminals. As if we’d invented that system ourselves.” Then he turned around: “What are you doing, moralizing? You, with your father who was killed in prison?”
I was about to retort: He wasn’t my father, but come to think of it, this wasn’t right either, not only because Max remained a sort of hero in my eyes, albeit a slightly irregular one, but also because he had been a sort of father to me, and in any case, he was my sister’s father, my sister whom I adored and would never dream of offending. Ah, the family: that enormous cluster of worrisome concerns and tacit protections, especially a soul as Italian as mine.
“No, I wouldn’t dream of it. I was just asking.”
“Well, listen, take it from me, when you come over on Saturday, don’t start asking my papa questions. He’s already sick of spending all day every day in the pool”—at that he laughed. “He refers to this as his involuntary vacation. It might have been a rotten system, but he preferred working to doing nothing.”
Costantino explained to me that Beppe Bernasconi had even managed to bribe the court-appointed physician and obtain house arrest for an imaginary problem with his heart. The Biondi law did not yet exist, a measure stitched as if by a compliant tailor to fit people like him by the brand-new Berlusconi administration, not even a year later. During preventive detention for those charged with crimes of corruption, they weren’t going to let you get away with house arrest. You waited for your trial behind bars. In fact, that’s where Giulio Morganti was waiting for his. But Beppe Bernasconi, as usual, had outfoxed everybody else, which meant he wasn’t living in a prison cell of a few dozen square feet. No, he was living in a bathrobe, lazing by the pool or in the comfort of his living room, in front of a video cassette recorder (and his wife was happy to turn a blind eye if she stumbled across a few pornographic cassettes lying around).
At this point, the fancy little engraved invitation presented another problem, more complicated than the small Black Tie written at the bottom right, which had been tormenting me until an hour before. I was starting to wonder if it was right to turn down an invitation, now of all times, now that the Morgantis had fallen into disgrace, reviled both by the legal system and the press. I wondered how Manon was handling this. What an unacceptable injury to her pride, what a low blow to her perennially upthrust chin, what an intolerable humiliation to see her son’s photograph in all the papers. Judicial indictment and summons: it wasn’t hard for me to imagine her calf clad in a fine silk stocking, thrust halfway out the window, with a shout of Now-I’m-going-to-jump, and everyone trying to restrain her, laying firm hold on her arm tinkling to the sound of her forty Cartier gold bracelets, gifts from her late husband, one for each anniversary of their wedding, testament to a marriage perhaps not always happy, but glorious, no question about that (“It’s just a good thing that your father is dead and isn’t forced to experience this mortification”).
Another doubt flashed through my mind: Are they seriously throwing a party while the master of the house is behind bars? That, however, was a doubt that I pushed off to one side, it didn’t strike me as entirely legitimate. Perhaps this was simply normal, like paying bribes to be awarded a public works contract. Maybe everyone did it, throwing parties while fathers and husbands were under arrest—who could say? After all, we too, in our small way, were doing it. Half of my class was over at the Bernasconi home on Saturday evenings, ordering pizzas and renting movies, twenty or thirty at a time up in Costantino’s mansard, carefree and cheerful and blithely indifferent to the fact that there was a gentleman downstairs, invariably in his bathrobe, who was actually serving time.
Or perhaps the party was just a superb act of defiance and provocation on Manon’s part. After all, she’d been through war and starvation and death and was determined to accord minor human mishaps no more than their due, considering them as little more than petty tragedies, whoever might be to blame. Passing misfortunes that would just have to step aside and leave the limelight to the one and only truly important event, by no means passing and transitory, because a recurrence is a recurrence, and you only become a grown-up once, and that date never rolls around again: her beloved granddaughter’s birthday. A birthday that was to be commemorated and observed in grand style, if only to ward off misfortune, because while things might not have gone as wished for the rest of the family, such was not to be the case for her Olivia: that girl had a golden future ahead of her, to be inaugurated with streams of champagne and lots of fireworks. And dark times were not to be allowed to dim the splendor foreseen for her.
But panic had engulfed me when I came to the third and final doubt, when I’d started to wonder if it was right to go to the home of the Morgantis after they’d accused my father of being a thief. All because of a watch.
“And he didn’t even know the difference between a Patek Philippe and a Swatch, that half-baked fool, that lesso,” Mama would say, and immediately after that she’d start off on one of her usual tirades about how my father never let her have enough money. She was angry with him because in the end, Papa hadn’t bought a taxi at all, he’d just gone on working as a gardener at a hospice for the elderly, where he wouldn’t even be able to end his days, because being godforsaken and forgotten in that hospice was just too darned expensive. Here my mother would take advantage of the opportunity to remind me that I must never become “a loser like your father,” her eternal refrain. And I would froth in rage because this story about winners and losers was an obsession with her, a sort of ongoing, perennial sword over my head.
After Max’s death, my mother had also gone back “to working as a scullery maid” (she used that phrase intentionally, to make me feel the burden of her sacrifices, and the corresponding importance of redemption, which of course was my responsibility). Except that she hadn’t wound up surrounded by old people, godforsaken and soon to die, like my Papa, because she was more conniving. Her old people weren’t hospice bums, but a couple that lived in a beautiful apartment in Trinità dei Monti, a property that they were still trying to decide whom or which charitable agency to leave to, seeing that they had no heirs.
My mother had buttered them up to within an inch of their lives. She, who constantly preached pride, had for years taken me every Sunday to eat lunch with them, leaving my sister at home because Marta, the daughter of a borgata criminal, had in her DNA a ferocity quite different from mine, and was unwilling to kiss anyone’s ass, even when she was small.
When the two old people finally died, Mama had discovered that the apartment hadn’t been left to us at all, in spite of their promises, but instead to a religious institute, because a parish priest had worked harder than she had. Thanks to a small bequest, however—twenty million lire in the money of the time, which was hardly a trifle—her efforts hadn’t gone entirely unrewarded and she’d been able to keep me in school, up to university.
Répondez s’il vous plaît. Perhaps the only sensible thing to do was to phone my father and ask him for advice. He might very well be a loser and an asshole and a beaten man, as my mother always said, but he was also the only person I could trust.
“Papa? Do you have five minutes?” I’d just come home from school, I still had my backpack slung over my shoulders.
I would need to be sensitive in laying out this matter, but at the same time thoroughly sincere, and careful not to be tempted into convenient omissions, otherwise my doubts would seem ridiculous, when they were actually deadly serious, and even somewhat grievous. The result of that effort was a tangled welter of explanations and suppositions in which I, too, completely lost my way. Still, my father understood all the same. And he replied with two brusque sentences.
“Don’t worry about me. You go ahead to that party.”
I was touched. Still, that wasn’t enough. What about all the rest?
“When all is said and done, people are who they are, and there’s nothing you can do about it.”
This is a summary, in all his simplicity, of all the justice and injustice in the world. Something to be accepted, “when all is said and done,” as he always liked to say, about anything and everything, to the extent that it had become a regular interjection. When all is said and done, I ate the mortadella. When all is said and done, old people are courteous, that’s just a fact of life. When all is said and done, I have my pension. Then there was “what can you do?” another typical interjection of his, which was useful in retrenching a set of demands or expectations. It was midway between his “what can you do about it?” and his “what more do you expect?” The Emilian accent gave it a good-natured fillip, but it remained an unconditional surrender. It’s raining, what do you expect. I have a backache, what do you expect. I’m all alone, what do you expect.
And when all is said and done, I went to the party. What can you do?