The Other Language(18)
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.
The rock star, his beautiful garden, his lovely songs, the pale blue room at the Biennale and the stark, pristine feeling it inspired, the Turner brume over the Venetian canals in the evening—it all came tumbling back like an ache. Caterina was surprised to realize that all the beauty she’d been exposed to in the last forty-eight hours had piled up inside her and had turned itself into a burden that now was weighing on her chest. Something began to give deep inside, like a building crumbling in slow motion, folding gently onto itself. Pascal had almost reached the cashier.
“Do you want prosciutto and Brie or tomatoes and mozzarella?” he asked her.
“Prosciutto and Brie, thank you. Oh, and a Diet Coke.”
True beauty eluded her and made her feel lonelier because she knew she would never be able to access it or grasp its fabric. It wasn’t something one could either pull apart like a doll, or study its components and reproduce. You couldn’t just learn it. The dying man had always had this gift and he had been able to pass it on to others, in different forms, throughout his life. This was probably why—though he had only a few months left to live—he was able to stare straight into the camera. He had given all that he had taken, his accounts were even.
Pascal placed the rubbery sandwich in front of her, tightly sealed in its plastic wrap.
“My gluten-free regime has gone out the window.” He sighed as he bit into his sandwich. “I feel so bloated already.”
Her short film was a laughable attempt at creating something poetic. She had been nominated, but what did it mean? Wasn’t it all a farce? A mediocre, worthless farce?
Right there and then, as her heart sank even deeper, her gaze landed on a handsome face. A young man holding a glass of Champagne standing at the counter next to a couple of interesting-looking women who spoke Italian with a heavy French accent smiled at her. Thick dark hair tied in a short ponytail, impeccable gray suit over a black T-shirt, round glasses with a thick frame. A studied Johnny Depp look. He excused himself, moved away from the women and maneuvered through the crowd toward her.
“Caterina!”
“Hey!” she waved joyfully. She had no idea who he was, though she had a feeling she ought to.
“Congratulations. I’m really happy you made it with the nominees.”
“Thank you, thank you so much. Yeah, that was a big surprise …,” she said shyly, her brain still in a blank.
“I just wanted to say that I loved your short and that I voted for you.”
“Oh my God! Did you? I’m so …,” she gasped, wishing his name would pop up any second, so she could relax. Was he on the jury panel for the awards? His face was vaguely familiar; she frantically scrolled an invisible contact list but nothing showed.