The Other Language (10 page)

“Cate, you are there! I am looking at your name right now in the paper! No joke!”

She couldn’t scream or jump up, firmly lodged as she was between a large West African woman with a complicated hairdo and a man in a shabby jacket who was exhaling garlic fumes into her nostrils. She managed to wiggle out and get off at the next stop, bought the paper and, standing right in front of the newsstand, flipped through the pages. She skipped the earthquake, the war, the fall of the government, the catastrophic financial page and went straight to Entertainment.

There it was. Her name. She had been nominated.

She had played with the word for a few days. It felt like such a prodigious thing—to be
no-mi-na-ta
!—something akin to King Arthur touching her forehead with his sword and turning her instantly into a knight. Actually she had been nominated along with another four directors for a minor category—best short film—for the David Awards, the Italian version of the Oscars—like the Césars in France, the BAFTAs in England and whatever it’s called in Spain, all Cinderella versions of the real thing. But, because she’d never been nominated for anything before in her life, this felt like her greatest achievement so far.

Her short was a documentary about a team of synchronized swimmers training for the Olympics. Young girls who composed amazingly intricate patterns in the pool—six-pointed stars, budding flowers, comets and rainbows—but who, once in the locker room, became savagely antagonistic toward one another. The concept was harmony versus disruption, discipline versus unleashed emotions—a sensual, stark portrait of female competition. The
short had hardly any dialogue: Caterina had concentrated mostly on the composition of the shots, lighting, angles and a carefully engineered editing. The film was only thirteen minutes long, its budget just fifteen thousand euros, a surprisingly low amount that had been painstakingly put together by herself and her producer, Marco Guattari, a thirty-something energetic film buff and Ritalin addict with amazing focus and determination. Caterina had sold her vintage Beetle for four thousand euros and Marco had managed to borrow the rest from his cousin—an obsessive comics collector—who’d just won quite a crazily vast sum on a TV quiz show, answering a tricky question involving a lesser known Tintin adventure. The idea was to pay the cousin back once they sold the film to a network, but at the moment they didn’t feel pressed to oblige, as the cousin had vanished somewhere in Brazil, where he was apparently spending money left and right without a care in the world.

According to a few seminal bloggers, Caterina’s short had an uncanny quality. Her filming had been described as “stark and illuminating.” Another brief account was nestled in
Corriere della Sera
, within an article about upcoming filmakers. “The manner by which Caterina De Maria exhibits the female body in water—in a flowing ballet that alternates between gracefulness and herculean exertion, elegance and cruelty—has an almost Wagnerian quality. Are we meant to think of her swimmers merely as athletes, or as marine monsters? De Maria’s subtle and unusual work here marks a promising debut. Next time we hope to see her name linked to a full-length feature.”

To celebrate the sudden turn their lives had taken, Caterina and Pascal had decided to spend a long weekend in Venice, for a full cultural immersion, combining the Art Biennale and the Venice Film Festival on the Lido, two events that coincided that September
and attracted voracious international crowds. They shared a large double bed in a tiny pensione near Le Zattere that, despite its funereal lighting, the musty walls and the yellowing curtains, was outrageously expensive. Just as expensive as the stale prepackaged sandwiches they were forced to live on, sold at every corner to desperate tourists, and as the tickets for the Biennale and for the vaporettos that shuttled them back and forth between Venice and the Lido. But they’d decided to ignore the money issue, since this was a time of celebration. Although they hadn’t succeeded in eliciting a single invitation to any of the star-studded parties held nightly in glamorous and often secret venues, not even for a mere Bellini offered by a film distributor or for one free lunch, they still felt entitled to be there. Caterina’s nomination had upgraded both of them from outsiders to quasi celebrities.

Venice, of course, was playing its subliminal part, its time-honored postcard soul contributing to lift Pascal and Caterina beyond the realm of reality. The minute they stepped off the train onto the vaporetto at Piazzale Roma, they agreed—as absolutely everyone else does the minute they step off the train—that Venice was incredible, so incredible that one forgot it did exist and had a life of its own outside films and novels. The transition from the train ride in a stuffy second-class compartment to Venice sliding past in its algaeish green and gilded glory was so fast that all the clichés inevitably crystallized within that first nautical ride: there it was, a dissolute and dissolving city built on water, impervious to passing centuries, moldy and decaying, its canals strewn with gondolas and paddling gondoliers, where slow barges carried loads of wood, boxes of fruit and vegetables or stacks of furniture piled up high as they had for centuries, its skyline of palazzi and bridges identical to Canaletto’s and Turner’s paintings. A place where nobody could escape the cheap fantasy of one day renting an attic overlooking the Grand Canal to do something artistic, like writing a novel or beginning to paint at last.

Pascal and Caterina had spent the first day strolling through the Art Biennale in the Giardini. They went from pavilion to pavilion following an orderly geographical sequence: France, Italy, England, then Germany and Scandinavia (Pascal had method, nothing was random under his direction). He was in a state of overexcitement, determined to gorge himself on as much art as he could in one go. He believed in expanding his knowledge with the hunger of a connoisseur constantly searching for yet another enriching item to add to his collection. Pascal believed in knowledge per se, as if the sheer act of recognizing an artist, his or her particular style, and therefore being able to cast him or her in the correct mental file, would contribute to bringing more order to the universe. He flew through the large pavilions in a state of ecstasy, naming different artists Caterina had never heard of, pointing out the differences between their old works and the new ones (derivative! fresh!), rushing her to see abstruse videos she didn’t really understand (staggering! so modern!), avoiding some installations like the plague (jejune! pathetic!), forcing her to sit for fifteen minutes in silence in front of an inexplicable sculpture (breathtaking!).

After a few hours Caterina began to experience a sense of overload, the first symptoms of art fatigue. The works started blurring together and her receptors weakened, like batteries dying out. She was jealous of the way Pascal seemed to be impressed by each work like photographic paper in a bath of acid. For long minutes at a time, she studied the elusive installations, longing to be fed the same nutrient, but she felt nothing other than a sense of being excluded. All she could think of was resting her aching feet and having a slice of pizza. Pascal gestured for her to follow through a small door and they entered a cubicle. The space was bathed in a lavender light. It wasn’t clear what the medium was: swaths of color that weren’t a painting as in a Rothko or Flavin’s fluorescent
tubes, but pure diffused light coming from above, as if the artist had managed to take a portion of the desert sky at dawn, and pour it into the cubicle through the ceiling. There were two other visitors sitting on the bench right in the middle of the room, completely silent and inebriated. They had clearly been in there having their own mystical experience for some time and they looked at Caterina and Pascal with scarcely repressed resentment, as squatters trespassing on their land. Caterina whispered an apology and sat quietly on the floor. She let herself drown in the pale blue mist that filled the room like a vapor. Soon she felt mesmerized by its nothingness, its lack of complication. A cloud of peace—that was maybe the idea. Pascal stood behind her, silent and impenetrable, but Caterina could tell he too was moved. Moved by what? she then asked herself. Was it the absence of structure, of subject; was it just its mystery? She knew better not to say anything. Nothing annoyed Pascal more than other people compelled to ask the meaning of contemporary artworks.

The next day Caterina and Pascal were patiently waiting in line at the cashier in a crowded café outside the Palazzo del Cinema after the midmorning screening. This was the busiest time of the day, when everyone’s blood sugar level was at its lowest and people were ready to pay up to nine euros for the crappy panini with congealed cheese that looked like melted plastic. They’d just seen a three-and-a-half-hour-long documentary about an aging rock star from the seventies, who had retired from the stage at the peak of his career, vanishing somewhere at the feet of the Himalayas searching for answers and then retreating to an island off the coast of Spain.

While Pascal was waiting to order their sandwiches, Caterina felt an undertow of despair envelop her for no apparent reason. She tried to shake it off, but the feeling clung to her like a spiderweb. It definitely had something to do with the documentary
they’d just seen. She kept thinking of the mega rocker’s last interview. It was a time when he already knew he had cancer and only a few months to live. He was speaking directly into the camera, staring straight at the audience with a bold expression, seated on a stool in the middle of his vast, beautiful Spanish garden under the shade of a tall walnut tree. Right behind him soft clumps of different grasses lay beneath a bamboo grove, their silvery and purple plumes dangling in the breeze. Here and there dots of bright color—anemones, daffodils, alliums—glinted among the flickering grasses so that the wild, open feeling of the garden suggested it had grown spontaneously, as if designed by nature itself. The man called it “my last and everlasting oeuvre,” which he had created in the last twenty years of his life. He had explained how looking after it had made him as deliriously happy as all the music he’d written over thirty years. It was a continuation of the same creative impulse, the only difference being that it hadn’t made him any richer. Here he had laughed.

“If anything, the money only kept pouring out. I guess that is karmically fair, isn’t it?” he asked, staring into the camera with his deep-set eyes.

One could see why just by looking at the magnificent landscape behind him: his garden brimmed with life just as his music had. Caterina felt a terrible sorrow for the man’s death, for his absence—the world needed more enlightened people like him—and sorry for herself, for getting older, for being mortal, for all the music she still wanted to hear, the books she intended to read, the places she had meant to visit, the things she had promised herself she’d learn one day (the history of Egypt, French, raku pottery, sign language, violin) and probably never would because time was beginning to feel like a fast express train that no longer stopped at all the stations.