The Other Language(16)
“No, not in love exactly. Although …”
She didn’t know how to explain why the story had stayed with her all those years and why it still pained her. It had to do with many things at once; the passing of time marring Jack’s once beautiful teeth; David’s expression when she swam off the island, the look of defeat and resignation of a child used to being left behind. And the expression on Jack’s face as he toasted to their reunion, when it was she who had turned her back to him in Piazza Navona.
“I guess what I mean is … in some ways I wouldn’t be who I am today if it wasn’t for those two. I wouldn’t even speak English. I doubt I would have married you,” she said.
She looked out the window at the vast expanse of the desert dotted by cacti under the cobalt blue sky, at the long trail of clouds hanging over the horizon, as if in a scene from an old western.
“They were my inspiration,” she said, and realized she was almost on the verge of tears.
“That can’t possibly be it,” her husband was saying.
“Why not?”
“We should’ve taken the left at the gas station fifty miles back. I knew it.”
He flapped his hand impatiently and pulled the car over.
“Just hand me that map, Emma.”
Chanel
It was early September, the air still balmy, the perfect weather for a Venetian escapade. Caterina and Pascal were sitting in a café across a canal divining their future, in a quiet campo off the beaten track, away from the tourists and the film crowd who had invaded the city for the festival. They sipped their frothy iced cappuccinos, basking in the sun, their eyes fixed on its refractions dotting the greenish canal with specks of glitter. They felt that for once things were beginning to look promising for both of them.
Pascal had just fallen in love with a man in Paris and was going to move there in the fall. His intention was to get a job in a restaurant at first, give himself a little time to learn French well enough so he could find an agent and start acting in French films. This was of course an utterly delusional plan, but Pascal suffered from a very particular kind of blindness: he never took into consideration potential obstacles that might be looming ahead of his designs. It wasn’t clear whether he simply ignored them or had a special technique for dodging them; the fact remained he did find success with most of the crazy schemes he pursued. Whereas Caterina—due to a more pragmatic approach to life or perhaps to a lack of self-confidence—didn’t trust her resources enough and spent much of her time worrying about futile things. Recently she had been worrying quite a lot about Pascal moving out of the apartment they’d shared for almost three years. Not only because she was going to miss him terribly and she’d have to replace him with another roommate (although nobody could replace Pascal), but because she feared that, along with Pascal, the scent of his positive take on life was going to fly out the window and follow him to France, abandoning her.
Then, unexpectedly something miraculous happened.
Only a week earlier, while she was stuck in traffic in Via Nazionale on the 64 bus, Pascal had rung her.
“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.