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Overview
In an unnamed and post-apocalyptic African republic, militiamen seize a scavenger as he is digging for roots, or anything that will nourish him and keep him alive. He is traded and ransomed and ends up in the hands of another group, whose members include a pregnant woman whom he is forced to carry in a wheelbarrow on a nightmarish and seemingly endless overland journey. This story alternates with the diary entries of a white schoolteacher who, embittered by the horrific state of his country, is preparing to leave. Before he can do so, however, he must confront his own demons and personal failings. Both narrators are in danger and both are apparently helpless to control their fates. When these two plotlines brilliantly and surprisingly unite the result is electrifying, shocking, and brilliant.
With sparse and heartbreaking prose Ian Holding asks vital questions about personal responsibility, choice, and truth.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781609450540 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Europa Editions, Incorporated |
| Publication date: | 10/25/2011 |
| Pages: | 218 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.36(w) x 8.26(h) x 0.66(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Gondolier, carry me back to Napoli.
— FRANCO CALIFANO
And without any of us even noticing, it all began because, unfortunately, one of us had talent. Me!
What else can I say? You spend so much of your life telling yourself: it's okay. But it's never okay to say it's okay. Or almost never. And I'd be done before I even started if it wasn't for this unhealthy vanity of mine galloping along inside me, faster than I could ever hope to go.
I'd like to be pellucid, but it wouldn't do a bit of good.
Three dry retches and now tiny dots of clammy yellowish sweat speckle my lowering brow, my brow, the brow of Tony Pagoda, alias Tony P., with my overcharged and ferocious forty-four years of life — these years that I carry inside me, years I don't choose to count, because if I do count them, I suffer so. Because all your life you wish you could just be a kid — it's no fun getting old. No, fun isn't what you'd call it. But, whatever you call it, you have to take care of this business of living. In a series of slow-motion four-wheel drifts.
But forget about it, I'm just one of those guys, the kind that people who think in terms of idiotic labels like to classify as a "lounge singer." But I'm more than just some label. I am a man.
Now that I think about it, though, with 20/20 hindsight, wouldn't it have been better to be a label?
I'm luxuriating in this first-class dressing room, as big as the living room in my apartment back in Naples, surrounded by all this red velvet that makes my head spin and my eyes blur, as I wait to go onstage for the single most momentous concert of my entire sumptuous career, a career that — as everybody knows — I have constructed, brick upon brick. I fall to my knees and do my best to hold in the mineral water that's trying to get from my stomach into the washbasin, I make the sign of the cross, hands clasped, fat fingers studded with gold rings. My palms stick together like a pair of sweaty magnets. I'm drenched with myself, right now.
I pray, rummaging and stumbling through the distant memories of my first communion, but I come up with nothing, not even a miserable Our Father. Cocaine, if you sniff it and snort it for years at a time, every blessed day, will massacre your memory, you'd better believe it, and not just your memory. And I've been doing coke joyfully, without a break, for twenty years. Then you kid yourself that it's not so bad; in the district of the mind, you consider your memory to be a die-hard, a last-ditch holdout, you savage the evidence, you ring down the curtain of enchantment, a curtain of powder. Enchantment, as well as astonishment, but the glitter and flash is fading. The stench of the new, unexpectedly.
Before you know it, you're hurtling into a world of atrocious pain, gastric juices and saliva flowing frantically, and there, distractedly kneeling before you, in a flaccid genuflection, is your soul. This invisible monument.
That's not the way to dig down and extract a prayer from the viscera of your soul, but while we're on the subject I do recall something I said years ago to a reporter, this babe with a pair of tits that were nothing to complain about: "Okay, maybe the Lord in person sent Sinatra his voice, but mine, I'd say more modestly, was handed down to me by San Gennaro." That's what I said.
Back then, I was all leopard-print conceit. And if this concert is a success, then I think I can be just a little bit conceited again today.
I get back on my feet and another surge of peristalsis rises within me like a goddamned rodeo. Here comes gin & tonic number three trying to regain the light of day. No, I don't sniff coke when I sing. Maybe Mick Jagger can indulge in that shit, when he howls, runs, and shakes his ass, but what I do is sing, so I need to feel my uvula snap like a snare drum and my vocal cords vibrating — they're like a guitar, to me. And this impulse to retch has a specific origin, because out there, in a front-row seat, in the majestic auditorium of Radio City Music Hall, suffocating in vast quantities of alcohol and experience, is none other than him, The Voice, waiting to listen to my performance — me, this Neapolitan who is a nobody in the States, but in Italy, Germany, Russia, Spain, Belgium, Holland, Brazil, Argentina, and Venezuela, it would appear that I generate sparks with each volley of LPs that I sell. Like a machine gun popping them out of the record stores. That's right.
They're waiting for me. And if there's one thing I know how to do in this life of ours, it's how to make people wait for me. Reckon it all up, and I'm so good at making people wait that, in the end, I'll never get there. Which is another story entirely.
It's a wave of applause that reeks of nostalgia for songs like "'O sole mio" and "Munasterio 'e Santa Chiara," a wave of applause rising from the clapping audience of sixty-year-old Italian-Americans and washing over the still-empty stage, awaiting the usual triumphal entrance. My entrance!
I know this audience of Italian-Americans like I know the cheeks of my ass. It's an audience that's been fed a steady diet of television signals beamed in from Italy, raised on dagger thrusts of melancholy reflux. You can trust these people.
My longtime piano player, Rino Pappalardo, rings the bell of my dressing room, then he knocks at the door, his well-trained hand dense with a red coral horn to ward off the evil eye. It's time.
"Just a minute!" I hiss, with a single vocal cord, as I survey and analyze my naked, misshapen belly, swollen and matted with hair. I glance at myself in the mirror, with the proud little wink that has demolished so many girls in its time, and I notice with just a hint of concern — not now, of all the fucking times! — that my dark brown eye, the eye of a man about town, has become wrinkled and inopportune. Yes, perhaps, but still sly and opportunistic, cynical and romantic all at once. I hold my breath, and strain to suck in my swollen gut. With dispiriting results. I tuck in the silk shirt of my tuxedo, and then take a good determined look at myself in the mirror, edged by too many white lightbulbs, priestly and hopeful as I am by nature, and it's all just an orgy of emotions, fear, anguish, and excitement.
Rino keeps at it, and knocks again.
"Okay, little sisters, I'm coming," I say.
I lustily and hastily throw back gin & tonic number four.
We advance down the neon-lit corridor that leads to the stage, like a mayor flanked by his city council, me at the head of the pack, Rino Pappalardo, Lello Cosa on drums, Gino Martire on bass, Titta Palumbo on guitar. All of us dressed in tuxedos, all of us defenestrated from our customary world, all of us drenched with excitement, with the filthy knowledge that this concert is bigger than any of us — bigger than all of us put together. Deep down, Titta is no doubt thinking that we don't even know how to read a note. But deep down. Our success is built by ear.
"I could use a drop or two of Ballantine's," Cosa whispers to Martire.
"Maybe he's in the audience," Martire responds with a hint of terrorized irony.
"Who?" Lello Cosa drools back dully.
"Mr. Ballantine, the man who owns the distillery that bears his name," ripostes Gino Martire.
"Shut your fucking latrines," I command. And no one says a word.
"Four," Lello Cosa hollers raucously, and the bass drum kicks into action a little slower than usual in 4/4 time. He catches up to the usual tempo on the second round. From offstage, I glare furiously at Cosa. During the interminable intro, twenty-four seconds long, I ruminate mercilessly that this hall is bigger than I remember it, but there's something wrong with my saliva, too much drool, and in fifteen seconds I'll be onstage, I'll make my entrance, even sooner than that, now: Fuck you, drool; fuck you, drool. Begone, saliva.
My blood pressure has stabilized at values you'd expect from a gecko: something like eleven over forty. A medieval pallor spreads over my face. Whatever. My entrance is jaguaresque, feigned distraction I'd call it. But I'm a past master at entrances, an archangel on the subject, I could write treatises, manifestos ... the applause makes my jaw twitch, the clapping sounds like the day after, it's a grace of the Christ Child that my drool subsides momentarily, and as I rip into the microphone with all thirty-two teeth, I smile out at the overjoyed audience, howling in chorus as they recognize and accompany "Un treno per il mare."
As the intro comes to an end, I start singing. And after two amorous utterances, a savage wave of applause bursts forth from the Italian-Americans. Still too much saliva, I ruminate, dazed by waves of emotion, but I fuck them anyway, that's how it is every time, the love always stuns them, no one will ever know, they'll never know that ... too much saliva, too much saliva.
Now, the parietal walls of my brain are slamming back and forth like shutters left unlatched in a typhoon. My eyes frantically search for Sinatra in the front row, I can't find him, where the fuck is he sitting? I'll bet he didn't come at all, the scrawny faggot!
I launch into the second verse half a second late, I recover quickly and complete a mediocre performance of "Un treno per il mare." I end with a grazie followed by a thank you and as I say it, I spy a purple-faced Sinatra. Go for it, Tony, I whisper to myself, and Tony goes for it as "Una cometa nel cuore" sails out over the heads of the audience, one of those numbers that would slice, dice, and julienne even the heart of a Swedish serial killer. Two chords in, and I've demolished the walls of emotion.
And I wander off into a nondenominational reverie: when you demolish the walls of emotion, life becomes a Christmas ornament.
Now, strutting and arrogant like the parrot named Portobello from Italian television, I'm perched four notes higher up, on the insane high note of the refrain, and I challenge even Diamanda Galás to do anything of the sort, it's so powerful that the walls of Radio City are quivering like a harp played by an asshole, and the Italian-American audience members shatter their callused, hardworking carpals and metacarpals as they applaud, while their garrulous wives keep their big salty tears within easy reach of their pupils. Their eyeshadow melting, dissolving like so much cheap margarine. Stuff that plays havoc with your heartbeat if you've ever fallen in love so much as once in your life. And who hasn't fallen in love at least once in their life?
I can even see Frank Sinatra, in the front row, adjusting his gabardine trousers, laughing, amused at this display of vocal potency. His amusement is marked by a sense of moderation, accustomed as Frank is to an aloof self-restraint, but he's another story, it takes a lot to surprise Frank, a man who knows this merry-go-round we call life inside and out, forward and back. And now I nail him in a closeup, none other than Frank, our gazes meet, in an orgiastic delirium of boundless admiration between colleagues.
I'm on Mt. Olympus, Christ on a crutch, or at the very least, I'm in Frank's clan, I ponder.
I'm just a few steps away from paradise now, singing like a demigod, now, and feeling like a demigod, by God, I'm God Himself with my eyes closed and my head tipped back, heavenward. And if God could be seen, probably, He'd be holding my mike, for me, for Tony Pagoda. Alias Tony P.
And so, like a Charlie Chaplin of popular music, I take a stroll arm-in-arm with Our Lord, from ten to midnight. New York time. On the stage of Radio City. Sinatra, drunk as a skunk, sure isn't sleeping. He's not even catching a catnap, and that, where I come from, is what we call results. Clear, unmistakable results.
In any case, a whirlwind of musical notes, phrasing, and syncopated thoughts tumbles through my meditative cranium and I think to myself that if I don't go for it now, when am I going to go for it? I give the audience a serving of "Quel che resta di me" and decide that my balls are cubic.
I scatter into the ethereal darkness "Un giorno lei mi penserà" and decide that my balls are hexagonal.
I drown my audience in its own tears with a heart-piercing "Non c'ero, amavo" and think to myself that this success, by God, will last for the rest of my life, all my life ... and so — Tonight: Whores, American whores tonight, New York is full of them.
And then I ham it up — the way only I know how — with "Lunghe notti da bar," and as I sing I slip a hand into my jacket pocket and with my fingers I fiddle with my little three-gram bag of cocaine. Two thousand people out there, and each of them notices when I bat an eyelash, but not one of them knows that with my naughty little fingers, I'm playing with my drugs, tonight I'll have American puttane, all this is swirling around in my head, like a milkshake in a blender.
I'm having fun. To a certain extent, I'm mocking these sixty-something Italian-American lovers of mine: If you all think that right now I'm naked, naked in my emotions, my sincerity, at the mercy of the stubs of the tickets you bought, then you're way off track, that's not how it is, even with all your eyes on me you'll never know my secret, the secret of my fingers, playing with the forbidden, with the illegal. For that matter, you never know anything, about people or things, for the simple reason that you can never see a thing or a person in its totality, if you can see a person's face, you can't see their back, you never have more than a rough, partial view of everything. Lives, after all, are nothing but attempts, and for the most part half-assed ones.
And I, in my turn, peek out at my spectators moving in their seats and I see glistening eyes, the hands of elderly couples intertwining to reiterate how right it was to spend thirty years in a marriage — No, spending our lives together was not a mistake, it was a life, a hell of a life, filled with unexpected ambushes in the night, assaulted and swamped by displeasures and disappointments, but it was worth it all, and I see the wide asses of mothers shifting with emotion in their seats — they've done it all, everything imaginable, but that's not something you're supposed to say, on the other hand, the priest absolved all us mothers. Now I'm on the verge of hallucinations. I see tradition, folklore, hopes, strong wills, these fucking Italian-Americans, it's all a separate, unique world. Super-Tony flies high on the notes of "Lunghe notti da bar." Surveys tell us that people violate the standards of morality more now than they used to, it's not true, it's just that nowadays people talk about it, in the old days people kept it secret. My head is jam-packed, cluttered with surveys.
And I hand out encores like so many advertising flyers at a subway stop.
In the dressing room, Titta feels lighter, he's lost five pounds worth of tension, now, as he trades hugs and kisses with Lello, Rino, Gino, and Yours Truly. They shout and sing a stadium fight song as if they'd just won the Italian championship. Sweaty and happy. I look at them indulgently, but I don't sing, I'm the bandleader and I have to play the role of the guy who knew the whole time that this New York thing was going to turn out fine. Jenny Afrodite, my manager, rushes into the dressing room, with his square-cut insignificant little face, with the stubborn lock of hair that dangles obsessively over his forehead, and the little diamond stud penetrating his left ear, making him look, tops, six months younger, and he stills the chorus with a phrase that rings out like a thunderclap right after you've fallen asleep.
"Boys, Sinatra's outside. He wants to say hello."
A fragile silence falls. An existential silence.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Everybody's Right"
by .
Copyright © 2012 Paolo Sorrentino.
Excerpted by permission of Europa Editions.
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