EPILOGUE

Memento Mori *

Carmine Forte was born on November 26, 1908 in Italy, the son of a humble coffee shop proprietor, and died in his sleep almost 100 years later, on February 28, 2007, as Charles Forte—an English baron, founder of an extensive chain of hotels known as the Forte Group. Forte emigrated from Italy to Scotland as a four-year-old and at 26 he opened a coffee shop on London’s upscale Regent Street. He quickly went on to expand his catering and hotel business, received a knighthood in 1970, and was dubbed a baron in 1982. And, of course, Lord Forte and his wife became renowned as diligent collectors of paintings and other art works.

In June 2012 Forte’s heirs asked the London auction house Christie’s to sell part of the deceased’s collection. The sale offered various objects from the couple’s lavishly appointed home in Belgravia. The many items displayed at a preview on the walls of four of Christie’s spacious exhibition rooms, and in suitable cabinets, attested to the Fortes’ refined tastes and the breadth of their artistic interests: from Russian Imperial Porcelain, through Venetian landscape paintings to the chair the lord sat on when at his desk. The crowning glory of the auction was a sad testament to potential capital-government ties: the gifts Forte received from Umberto II, the last king of Italy who ruled for a mere 34 days in 1946, left following the vote that made Italy a republic, and never returned.

The sale of the collection of items that had given the Fortes such pleasure when they were alive was slated to begin at 10:30 A.M. in the main hall of the auction house. Fifty or so chairs were set up in the room for anyone interested, and two long counters on the sides of the room were manned by 12 Christie’s employees ready to take the telephone orders of unknown clients who had seen the items at the auction preview and wished to remain anonymous. At auctions of this sort most of the deals are handled over the phone, so the buyers do not see each other. Several of the paintings up for sale were hanging on the walls of the room. Among them stood out the pair of Venetian landscapes painted by Francesco Guardi, a 16th-century painter whose distinct style made it easy for generations of forgers to imitate his works, to the point where he became more prolific after his death than when he was alive.

Ten-thirty on the dot, the deft auctioneer from Christie’s takes his place at the podium, and in his hand is the wooden gavel without which an auctioneer at a public auction house has no existence. Over the auctioneer’s head is a big screen that displays each item on the block and the latest bid on it. The bottom part of the screen converts the bid from pounds sterling, in which the auction is held, into five other currencies to ease the suffering of those who got rich without knowing how to translate the British currency rate into the one in which they count their fortune. The auctioneer gets ready to present the first item, a pair of grand wall ornaments from the 19th century, originally from Veneto, Italy, starting at a modest price of £5,000. The experienced traders always sit in the back row, where they can more comfortably observe the fascinating dynamic that suddenly heats up in auctions of this kind, when two buyers want the item and each raises his bid, often well beyond his initial intention. The adept auctioneer does not waste time on the inexpensive items. These are gone in 30 seconds and also include the great bargains for amateur buyers who want to dip their toes in the waters of the sumptuous lake in which the rich bathe, without having to pawn their home to do so. Pricier items preoccupy their auctioneer and buyers for about a minute. The sale of especially expensive items that attract experienced traders and professional collectors entails telephone consultations, an understandable hesitation before the fateful decision and a few deep breaths. A total of about three minutes per item.

Ten forty-five, a dozen people are in the room. One of them, a corpulent man wearing a suit and a blasé look, is waiting for an item he desires—a reddish tortoiseshell armoire with ebony and brass inlay, which has a starting price of £12,000. The catalog goes into detail about the groups of French artisans who made it and waxes eloquent in describing the history of the handsome item.

One can only imagine the excitement of the lord’s wife when she first saw it, probably at another public auction. The armoire fails to soar beyond the upper realm of the auction-house experts’ assessment and falls like a ripe fruit into the hands of the heavy man at a price of £17,000, which undoubtedly would have led the late lord to reconsider his much-discussed departure from the world had he known this would be the fate of the precious objects he collected.

The few people sitting in the hall soon witness the telephone struggle of the new rich who seek to acquire the scattering ornaments of an old moneybags. Item number 13 prompts a stir in the room. This is the first of four gifts that the last Italian king from the House of Savoy gave Lord Forte. It is an inkstand modeled as the Fontana dei Dioscuri in Rome. The little sculpture is made of lapis lazuli, porphyry and onyx, and its price climbs in less than a minute from £17,000 to £52,000, offered over the phone by an Italian buyer, a fan of royal houses, fountains or onyx stones.

The auctioneer, a master of timing and pace and an expert at utilizing the human vocal register, loses some of his effectiveness in the face of the telephone competitors who are not affected by the human dynamic that usually develops between those physically present in the public auction rooms. With mere words, the Christie’s staffers by the phones toss around in the air tens of thousands of pounds sterling with an enthusiasm reserved for those who have stepped for a moment into the shoes of one they would like to be someday.

The smartly dressed young Japanese woman, who has been sitting in the room from the beginning of the auction, readies herself for item 23—a simple glass table that she buys at the auctioneer’s opening price, £200, granting her the touch of nobility that brought her to the room in the first place. Item number 28, a prayer rug from Isfahan, rouses from his nap one who hitherto had seemed out of place in the lavish hall with his disheveled clothes. The seasoned rug merchant discovered beneath the shabby coat handily adds the item to the inventory of carpets in his possession. The lord’s spirit pervading the room cannot help but be saddened by the circumstances in which this beautiful object that had welcomed guests to his study is wending its way to foreign fields, to people he would never have associated with in his lifetime. Next, ten Russian papier-mâché boxes are snapped up, and afterward a long series of handsome items that had broadened the late lord’s mind in their time. His dispersing wealth goes to whoever bids highest in a room where there are not many high bidders.

A sneeze by a woman present in the hall nearly disrupts the sale of item 33, a mahogany wall clock. The auctioneer tarries briefly to ascertain whether the interruption was an agreed-upon signal on the buyer’s part to raise the bid. The tissue that the woman whisked out convinced even him that health comes before amassing property. The few people present in the room leaf through the catalog in their hands, trying to estimate how much time is left until the item they are interested in comes up for sale.

The average pace at which the auction takes place is under a minute per item. Dozens of years of collecting come to an inevitable end in three hours’ time. Most of the items go for near their minimum sale price. The only hope left is that these gave their owner a little joie de vivre, provided, of course, that he managed to find time amid his many preoccupations, including his other acquisitions, to enjoy them.

**

I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears … in … rain. Time to die.

Those are the last words of Roy Batty in the final scene of Ridley Scott’s wonderful film Blade Runner (1982). This unforgettable film text became known as the “Tears in Rain” soliloquy. Batty is a humanlike robot who speaks the sad words in a downpour, just before the programed expiration of his short life. The Dutch actor Rutger Hauer portrayed Batty and also wrote the replicant’s final words. Was Hauer speaking here as an actor about the humanlike robot he played in the film, whose memories were woven from glorious galactic battles, or was he referring to himself as a man and his personal memories: people he had met and loved, the rustling of leaves he heard in his childhood when the wind blew through the trees of the garden by his house, the special light of the weekly day of rest, or the peaks and nadirs of his career? All of them, he already knows, will be swept away like tears in rain.

Here’s the question I ask myself when I think of Roy Batty’s speech: in my life today, is there a way I can influence my future response to the question of the life I didn’t live? I’m not talking about derailing the prophecy of the Oracle from Delphi or rewriting the plot in the inevitable final chapter of a Greek tragedy. Since I’m unable to live the lives of others (because other people are already living them, to paraphrase Oscar Wilde), all that remains for me is to live my life with the sense of responsibility of someone who has received a one-time opportunity to create a meaningful life.

The name I chose for one of the chapters in the book, One Day, When I’m Younger, may express acceptance of the irreversible march of time, but it also signals the optimism of someone who realizes that our actions today shape the memories we’ll want to cherish at the end of our lives. In order to live a meaningful life, we should already consider the things we’ll regret on our death bed. We should recognize the limitations of our intellect and our susceptibility to bias, and adopt the humility that follows from this recognition and from an understanding of our limited place in the universe. If we also understand how similar we are to other human beings, we’ll be able to conduct ourselves with the inclusion, generosity and acceptance that offers hope to all of us, but first of all to ourselves.

*“Remember that you will die” in Latin.