Gennaro Mangiavento, stage name Jerry Vialdi, pulls past a line of tour buses along the Via Guglielmo Marconi. He parks his S.S.C. Napoli-sky-blue Fiat 500 and blesses it for its compact size:
At last, I can do without the Porsche Carrera. Now I’m finally my true self.
He looks at the people who have just stepped off the tour buses. The women are dressed in evening gowns at five o’clock in the afternoon, sequins glittering against sweat-sodden makeup.
Look at these rubes, here already. They can write articles about me in the New York Times, but the real money still comes from the usual crowd of ragtag losers. I flew all the way down to South America to bring back Sanjoval, with trumpet and all, but has it done me a bit of good? I promoted that minimal pussycat to the rank of poet with the aid of my beautiful voice and piano, and has it done me a bit of good? I’ve had women, men, and money by the shovelful, but has it done me a bit of good?
Vialdi sits in his car and remembers.
Right here is where I picked and chose among the rejected lyricists, because they treat me with respect inside the RAI building; they have no choice but to put on their smiles, and Zampani lets me use his studio which by now is practically mine, since he’s never there. When they came to see me to be hired, they’d say: I’m Antonio D’Antonio and I’m a writer. I’m Mario Coppola and I’m an experimental author. I’m Ferdinando Colasunto and I’m a poet. I always only had one answer: I’m Jerry Vialdi and I’ve got bad news for you: before I count to five you’d better be the fuck out of here. What the hell! Then the minimal pussycat, Gatta Mignon, showed up, a name I came up with personally, and short and rickety as she was, she opened her mouth and started to speak. She didn’t say I’m a poet, I’m a writer, I’m experimentally good at this or that, instead she said, “You are the voice that stirs desire.” That’s what she said. And I took her on, because as far as ugly goes, she was ugly, but once she started talking I forgot all about that; if I could forget the fact while I was looking right at her, then Pussycat Mignon, without her face before them, could have satiated vast populations with her words. We’d sell them like hotcakes. The exact opposite of Rosina, who decided she was done with me last year, the fool. If Rosina wants to maintain her credibility, what she has to do is keep her mouth shut tight: short red hair she has, a flaming brushfire that only needs to be kindled, along with first-class thighs and neck. I didn’t want to take her on at first because I used to go out on the town and run after women with her husband; I knew him well and it seemed wrong somehow. But then Rosina got my blood pumping and I decided to hire her anyway, because if there’s one thing I like it’s when one of God’s creatures can go head-to-head with me, or lose their heads entirely. Rosina never stopped hating me, which is always worth something: when she meets me now her eyes light up, even worse than that brushfire, and one of these days she’s going to run me down with the car I gave her. Mara, the pharmacist, represents a completely different level of danger, a far more ferocious one. Sometimes I make a date with her and then stand her up: frankly, Mara’s thighs and legs frighten me, inside her stockings she carries a violent madness. She’s particularly good at the work she does. One night, she saved me from an attack of vertigo. I called her and she came, and when I saw her standing there with the hypodermic needle in one hand, I thought to myself: here we go, this is the part where she kills me. Instead, she healed me. Not Julia, she’s a flower, a blossoming rose, a delicate jasmine bud in full season. Of course, there’s some tarnish on her bloom, because she’s seen more than a few seasons in her time. She never makes high-handed demands, she’s happy to take what we are for what we are; she’s a different breed of woman, she’s held onto her soul. I don’t know how she’s done it. I couldn’t say, but perhaps she alone can conjure my soul back into existence. In any case, the most womanly of them all is still Gigi, and when he gets his claws into me he never lets me go, he’s never even heard of the word soul or anything remotely resembling it. When he came into this world all he brought with him was his flesh; the spirit of the world beyond is something they clipped away along with his umbilical cord. He’s a stunningly handsome devil. Forget about brushfires, he’s got an eternal flame burning inside his chest. He’s an advocate of pure evil and bad weather, his mouth spews gold and sea salt.
Vialdi gets out of the car. The flashing headlights tell him that the antitheft system is doing its job.
A woman in her fifties with rhinestone-studded shoes walks up to him.
“You’re so good-looking, Jerry, you want to sign my record?”
“What do you have here, Signora? Did you dismantle the brakes on that bus?”
“What a charmer you are. You just have to make the dedication out to Annina.” You have to do this, you have to do that. Jerry Vialdi’s whole life has been a race to escape from what you have to and what I tell you to, and still they catch up with him. Almost invariably.
“I don’t do dedications.”
Before turning to enter the RAI building in Fuorigrotta, the ex-wedding singer and, later in his career, ex-neomelodic pop singer and, later still, ex-folk and traditional singer, and even later still ex-Ariston singer, then ex-star of musicals, until he finally became a sensitive singer winning the acclaim of the most discerning critics, turns and speaks to the looming horizon of the Polytechnic:
“If I’m ever reborn, I’m going to become an engineer and to hell with music and these ragtag losers in evening dress.”
At the front door, the security guard doesn’t bother asking for his pass, asking instead for predictions on the championship match.
“How’s it going to go, boss?”
“This year is the year, brother, but we can’t say it and we can’t even think it because it’ll bring terrible luck.”
Jerry Vialdi leaves nothing to improvisation; he even rehearses his smiles in front of the mirror. In his dressing room he checks his image; he twists his head to one side, swings one hand up to cover his chest, spreads his fingers wide and presses them against his sternum, then smiles:
“You are,” pause, “you are all my own warm heart of love.”
The concert is a success; the sole annoyance is the excessive applause, distinctly not to his liking: he wants to include a few of the better numbers in his next live album. Well, they have technicians to take care of that.
In spite of all the depth of his musical erudition, he inevitably hits the high point of the evening with the same song: a crass little ditty featuring words of furtive sex in a car and the subsequent return home to his cuckolded wife. The phrase Tu, solo tu, sei tu—you, only you, it’s you—of the refrain is the song’s earworm.
A bona fide piece of crap. What came over Pussycat Mignon when she wrote it? Who can say? But I surely never thought she could serve up such a generous helping of tripe! She turned in the lyrics four years ago. Let’s set it to some fast-paced tune, loaded with percussion and blam-blam guitar riffs, she said. I objected, it’s just too gruesome, I told her. You’ll make enough money to buy a penthouse with another penthouse on top of it, she told me. And she was right. When I moved into the double-decker penthouse in Pozzuoli with a view of the water I nailed platinum honors to the walls, tributes to an awful song and a fraudulent confection of percussion and blam-blam guitar riffs. And as usual, the money came and quickly left. Money: it scampers off on quick little cat’s feet, the elusive imp.
Jerry Vialdi strips off his basic black stage outfit and fine-tunes his street clothes of autumn-hued cashmere and corduroy trousers. The end of any concert still pumps him up to a boastful pitch and he channels it into a flood of beauty and rare courage.
He caresses his inside jacket pocket, whispers for later and drinks, with short sips, a foretaste of death.