Excerpt from FELLINI’S ANGEL

A novel byby

 John Palcewski

On the street near my table a black BMW Sports Utility Vehicle slowed and stopped. The dark rear passenger window descended. A bald man with dark, penetrating eyes surveyed the outdoor tables, then looked directly at me. He turned and said something to the driver, then the door opened and he stepped out and came right over. I guessed he was in his late 70s, but his movements were quick, precise, almost youthful. His forehead was incised with three deep horizontal wrinkles crossed by two thinner vertical ones. His white shirt and shorts were bright in the sun, and his face, arms, bare legs and sandaled feet were deeply tanned.

“I presume you’re the Americano friend of Maria, who was told she’s the daughter of Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni,” he said.

“Yes. How did you know?”

Ezio Ingrassia laughed. “How could I not know?”

I gestured an invitation to sit down. He looked me over carefully, as if he were a physician in an examining room and I were his patient. I wondered who in hell he was, and what he wanted.

“Tell me, why did you give this story to the tabloids?”

I paused. What business was it of his? But then I didn’t detect hostility in his question, just curiosity.

“Maria asked me to find out if the story was true,” I said. “I tried to contact Sophia, but got nowhere. I thought she might respond to the publicity.”

“How much did these publications pay you for it?”

“Nothing.”

“Why not?”

“They didn’t offer, and I didn’t ask.”

“So you’re in this for love, eh?”

Before I could think of a clever reply, Ezio said, “I’ve been a friend of the Angelino family for decades. I know all about Giovanni, and Restituta, and what went on in the hospital in Napoli in 1964. If you want the whole story, I’ve got some things at my villa that you’ll find very interesting.”

“Solid evidence?” I tried to disguise my excitement.

“Yes. I’m a scholar, and I’m writing a book on a related subject. Come, let’s go, and I’ll show you.”

After a fifteen minute bumpy ride on a narrow road up the mountain, the driver pushed the button of a remote and a gate slowly swung open, and we pulled into a gray slate-tiled courtyard. Ezio’s villa was a blazing white stucco edifice three stories high, surrounded by massive palms. A gardener raked the soil of a tuffa-lined bed of various species of cactus and exotic flowering plants, and nodded a greeting to Ezio as we passed.

On the ride up I imagined the old man’s place would be dark and dusty with manuscripts, books, an old Royal typewriter, and a stack of scribbled index cards. But no. Ezio’s desk was a sleek, two-inch-thick glass slab supported by black tubular legs, and on it was a flatscreen PC monitor as well as two open laptops. All three screens were lit up, displaying the moving Windows XP screen saver. Near the keyboard was a gleaming silver iPod, and the tangled white wire of its ear buds. His stereo equipment was state-of-the-art, top of the line: a sleek McIntosh Labs 250 watts per channel power amplifier and audio control center, a Rega P3-24 turntable, and Superscope CD recorder and player, flanked by black, sculpted Nautilus 3LUXE speakers. And at the far end of the room, a Sony Grand WEGA 42-inch rear-projection TV.

Above a fireplace was a map of the Mediterranean, with Odysseus’s journey outlined in bright yellow magic marker. Flanking it were smaller maps of Ischia, Prodida, Ponza, Ventotene, Capri. On a low coffee table, also a glass slab but smaller, was a Carrara marble carving of The Three Graces, an assortment of Roman oil lamps, and a scattering of coins bearing the visage of Augustus Caesar. And books. Thousands of them on shelves in the study, and in the dining room, living room, and in wobbly stacks on the floor near the desk, near the armchair, near the couch. Histories in Ionic Greek, Latin, Coptic. Novels. Biographies.

He was Old King Nestor, who refused to yield to the sorrows of old age. He didn’t resist change, he welcomed it. He said embracing the new rather than clinging to the past actually kept him alive. He wasn’t about to sit on a bench at Forio Porto and wait to drop dead.

Ezio’s wife? She died ten years ago, he said. He’d recently hired a new housekeeper, Mariam, a 30-year-old Tunisian woman. Mariam, of course, is the Arabic name for Mary. Dark face, dark eyes, jet black hair. She served us espresso, and a plate of assorted pastries, which she’d baked herself. Mariam gave Ezio a knowing, self-assured look that suggested a lot more was going on between them besides desert.

“This is long and complicated,” Ezio said. “So pay attention.”

“Do you mind if I take notes?”

“Not at all.”

Ezio said Maria’s adoption story really begins with Pasquale

and Salvatore Angelino, Maria’s grandfather and grand uncle, who

grew up in Ischia. The two brothers went to the university in Milan,

where they met and befriended a hard-driving law student by the

name of Carlo Ponti.

“The Carlo Ponti?”

“Precisely.”

Carlo, as everyone knows, went on to make a fortune producing movies and other business ventures. Pasquale, too, over the years accumulated great wealth as a tradesman. But instead of retiring, Pasquale put all his efforts—and money—into a grand project that he felt would enhance the culture of Napoli, indeed southern Italy itself: A major reconstruction of the Teatro San Carlo, which had deteriorated and closed its doors. When Pasquale finished the long and expensive restoration, the opera house regained its place among the greatest in the world.

Pasquale had hired a lot of friends for the job, and to keep them employed he started up a summer opera season at the Floridiana, a beautiful garden overlooking the Bay of Naples. He then turned his attention to still another restoration, this one the Roman Teatro Grande in Pompeii, and produced the first Italian performance of Handel’s Julius Caesar.

Now, when Ezio was 17 he approached Salvatore and asked him for employment. Salvatore took him on as an assistant and it wasn’t long before they became quite close.

“So that’s how you became friends of the family?”

“Yes.”

Ezio said he had many, many good memories of the days of his tenure as assistant to the superintendent at the opera house. And he’d never forget one particular evening in February, 1960, during a performance of Il Trovatore. Franco Corelli, a famous hot-blooded tenor, had just finished singing a duet with Fedora Barbieri, a mezzo-soprano, at the end of the first scene. The couple stood, hand in hand, accepting the roar of applause. Then a man in the audience named Mario Improta shouted that Signorina Barbieri should remain onstage ALONE to receive the applause.

Now that was an insult to the volatile Corelli. Inflamed, he leaped offstage down into the audience, rushed up to Improta, and slapped his face. “I will wait for you outside after the show,” Corelli shouted, pounding the astonished man on his chest with clenched fists. Corelli then tried to draw his sword to inflict further damage, but he was finally seized and dragged away by stage hands.

The opera resumed after a half hour interruption. At the

conclusion of the performance, Pasquale brought Corelli and

Improta together backstage, and in a soothing, calm voice

persuaded the tenor that Senor Improta had intended no insult,

he was merely expressing his great admiration for Signorina Barbieri.

“Pasquale always was a world-class fixer, of both buildings and relationships, it was his nature,” Ezio said. “And it was a trait, by the way, that his son Giovanni inherited.”

“Giov“Yes.”

Ezio said Giovanni’s fixer tendencies were evident early on. After old man Pasquale finally passed away, Giovanni assumed the responsibility of looking after the family, which included not only his wife, Restituta, and their two sons, but also his mother, Columba, who was frail, and almost blind with cataracts. There also were Renato and Alberto, his two younger brothers.

Now, Renato got a well-paying job with a shipping company, and after a year and a half of hard work that impressed his superiors, he was promoted and sent to Argentina to oversee the Buenos Aires office. Renato faithfully wrote letters to Buonopane every week, and Giovanni would open them and, since Columba could no longer see, he read them aloud to her and the others gathered in the living room. It became a family ritual.

Then came a tragic event. Alberto, the youngest brother, was driving his motorino in Campagnano on the road from Buonopane to Ischia Ponte, which passes through one of the arches of the Pilastri, a 17^th century replica of a Roman aqueduct. When Alberto tried to pass a bus, he was crushed against the wall of the arch.

Columba was devastated, as were all the others. Giovanni could hardly bear to witness his mother’s profound suffering, to say nothing of his own.

Then, as if a curse had suddenly been laid on the family by a malevolent strega, word came of another catastrophe, not a month after Alberto’s fatal accident. Renato was killed in an explosion in his office, which everyone immediately thought was a terrorist attack, but it turned out to be just a gas leak. Giovanni listened to the news on a telephone call from Buenos Aires. He knew this would kill his mother, so he said nothing about it, and instructed everyone else to remain silent.

A week or two passed, and Columba kept asking him if a letter had come from Renato. “No? Do you think he is all right?” she said. “I’m so worried about him!”

Giovanni sat down at the kitchen table and scribbled quickly on a large note pad. Then feigning happiness he announced to Columba that Renato’s letter had finally arrived. “Yes, mama, the postman just delivered it!” Then he, as the ritual demanded, read aloud all the news from Argentina. He continued this deception until Columba finally died.

“A true fixer, following his father’s footsteps,” Ezio said.

Well, Ezio’s tale very quickly changed my estimation of Giovanni. Until then I’d projected onto him all sorts of negative traits. Like hard-headedness, rigidity, a need to always be in control, a major streak of intolerance for Maria’s spontaneous, natural behavior, and so on.

Ezio said that what what came next was even more fascinating. And it was more directly relevant to the issue at hand.

“You must understand that as the years went by, Carlo Ponti greatly admired the work his dear friend Pasquale had done with the restoration of the Teatro San Carlo and the Roman Teatro Grande in Pompeii and those delightful musicals at the Floridiana,” Ezio said. “Carlo wanted to come up with some sort of tribute or acknowledgement of those great achievements.”

As it happened, the opportunity came when Carlo and his co-producer Dino De Laurentis were financing the shooting of Federico Fellini’s movie, La strada, starring American actor Anthony Quinn, and Guiletta, Fellini’s wife. Fellini, of course, was a perfectionist, and numerous takes and other expenses threw the project hopelessly over budget, and production had come to a halt.

“All this is described in the Hollis Alpert biography, ‘Fellini, a Life,’” Ezio said, rising. He went to the shelf, ran his fingers along the row of spines, pulled out a book. It was bristling with bright yellow PostIt tabs. He flipped the pages.

“Page ninety three. Quote, Quinn became aware of Fellini’s troubles and went to ask De Laurentis for the money that was needed to complete the film…Ponti and De Laurentis took Fellini to a café and told him not to worry about any debts to them. ‘Let’s pretend they were a joke. Buy us a coffee and we’ll forget them.’ End quote.”

“Now, this isn’t in Alpert’s book, but it was very likely at this café meeting that Carlo came up with one of those ‘Oh, by the way’ things. Like: Listen, Federico, you could do me a great favor that won’t take any time or cost any money. Fellini, warily nodding said, okay, what? And Carlo said: I’ve got a great friend who has done much good in the world, and as a joke I want you to put his family name into La strada. Just the name, nothing else. And what choice did Fellini have? Carlo had him over a barrel.”

“So where does Maria’s family name appear in the movie?”

“It’s easy enough to find. On the DVD it is listed on the menu, as scene five. Give me a moment.”

Soon the menu appeared on the screen. Chapter 5 was entitled “Angelina, Gelsomina.”

Ezio said he’d also made some screen grabs from La strada. He summoned a pair of images. They showed Zampono standing next to his newly purchased assistant. At the bottom were the white English subtitles, his question and her answer:

What’s your name?

Angelina, Gelsomina.

“This is a traditional southern Italian thing, putting the last name first. And It’s common knowledge in the family that Carlo managed to persuade the great Fellini to insert their name. They just loved the irony and humor of it.”

There was still more, Ezio said. I continued scribbling, finding it hard to keep up. I didn’t have time to say that these revelations of his were putting chill bumps on my forearms. That this narrative was, at least to me, incredible in a most wonderful way.

Giovanni and Restituta had two fine, healthy little boys who ran all over the place, and in the fall and winter of 1963 Restituta was pregnant with what she insisted was a girl, she just knew it without having taken one of those fancy sonograms. When the time came, Ernesto chartered a yacht and took her to Ospedale Antonio Cardarelli, in the Vomero section of Napoli, high up with a magnificent view of the bay and the wide expanse of Vesuvius.

The occasion of joy quickly turned into grief, for the baby was stillborn. Restituta had been right, it was a girl. The doctors ordered her to stay for a few days for further observation, because they were concerned with her emotional state. She was distraught, and would not eat or speak. Giovanni did the best he could to console her.

And then imagine Giovanni’s surprise when, on the afternoon of the second day, he encountered a long-time family friend in the lobby. Carlo Ponti.

“We can only speculate what conversation those two had,” Ezio said. “But to get down to the bone of the matter, Restituta had just lost the precious daughter she’d always wanted, and was disconsolate. And Sophia, Carlo’s wife, had just given birth to a girl she named Maria, after her sister.”

But regarding Sophia, Ezio said, there were complications. It was a most delicate situation, actually. Before arriving at the hospital Sophia had already decided to give her baby up for adoption.

Carlo knew he wasn’t the child’s father. At that time he was the producer of Ieri, oggi e domani, being filmed there in Napoli, which starred Sophia and Marcello Mastroianni. In one of the episodes she played the role of a pregnant woman. They’d decided to spread the story to the fan magazines and tabloids that she wasn’t actually pregnant, but rather was using a prosthesis. They needed to keep the pregnancy secret, because Marcello was still married to Flora, and Sophia and Carlo’s marriage wasn’t yet formally recognized in Italy. A complicated mess all around.

But Carlo—despite knowing Marcello was the father—tried to persuade Sophia to keep the baby. But Sophia said ‘No, assolutamente no.’”

Why?

“Sophia’s reason,” Ezio said, “was simple, and she expressed it in a single sentence: ‘One day she will be competition.’ That pronouncement was often whispered in private telephone conversations Giovanni had with his sisters. He’d never get over how a woman could do something like that, putting her career above her own flesh and blood.”

Ezio liked to think that Giovanni came up with the idea of adopting Sophia’s child, because it was in his blood to fix things, he was very much his father’s son. Adopting would be the perfect solution, the sure cure for Restituta’s grief over the loss of her baby. What’s more, they could return to Ischia with a child they would call their own, and no one would ever know who her biological parents really were. It was a secret they’d keep forever.

Carlo and Sophia agreed, so it was settled that day.

Nine years later, more difficulty. Giovanni was approached by a very nervous woman named Pupella Ponziani, who said she had a cousin who was a nurse at Ospedale Antonio Cardarelli. She said she knew all about the big adoption secret involving Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni and Carlo Ponti, and she was thinking of selling the explosive story to, say, La Republica, or any number of other high-circulation publications. No telling how much they’d pay. She’d be willing to keep her mouth shut, that is, were Giovanni to give her an adequate incentive.

Giovanni paid the woman a substantial amount of money. Two years later, though, Pupella came back. She’d run into some bad luck, all the money was gone, and she needed more. That’s when Giovanni, trembling with rage, ordered everyone to pack up. He would move the whole family to West Palm Beach in America, where this despicable, greedy, morally bankrupt woman would never locate them.

Maria had told me many times she could not understand why,

out of the blue, Giovanni did that disruptive, disturbing thing to

the family. He’d built up a successful wine-making operation,

he was among the most highly respected businessmen on the

island. Why turn his back on all of that? Nobody in the

family really wanted to leave, and they didn’t see that things

would be good for them in America. They didn’t know the

language. They’d be outsiders, aliens.

Well, Giovanni had his perfectly legitimate reason, which of course he never shared with any of them.

“Let’s shift gears,” Ezio said. “And talk about Marcello.”

I looked up from my notebook. “I hope I won’t run out of pages!” I said.

“Don’t worry, I have plenty.”

Ezio slid another DVD into his Superscope, and the screen came alive with the black and white opening of La dolce vita, the noisy helicopter with a statue of Christ suspended beneath it, moving slowly over the cityscape of Roma.

“You are familiar with this?”

“Yes.”

“Marcello never needed much directing from Fellini because those two could have been twin brothers. They read each other’s minds, had the same dreams, even! Which is why Fellini gave him that role in 8 ½. In it, Marcello actually WAS Federico, desperately trying to figure out how to make 8 ½. A movie about making a movie that was itself the movie!

“Anyway, I want you to look carefully at the scene at the beach restaurant, do you remember it?”

“Oh, yes. I remember.”

Ezio cued it up.

“Where are you from?” Marcello asks Paola, the waitress.

“I’m from Umbria, near Perugia,” Paola replies. “My father works in Anzio, that’s why I came here. After Christmas, though, I’m either going to Ostia or to Rome…”

Marcello asks her to turn in profile. She hesitates, but complies.

Then a few moments later:

“You look like one of those little angels from the paintings of an Umbrian church,” Marcello says.

Paola blushes.

I might have informed Ezio that when I met Maria for the first time, I earnestly told her she reminded me of this little angel. But at the moment my head was buzzing from the barrage of information Ezio was hurling at me, and my hand was aching from my furious scribbling.

“This film was made three years before Maria was born,” Ezio said. “But it strikes me as a sort of eerie prefiguring of what was to come to pass in Marcello’s real life. Paola is the ultimate symbol of purity and goodness. Qualities we all should aspire to, emulate. Marcello may know this, but he’s incapable of acting on it. ”

Ezio pushed the fast forward button, brought La dolce vita to its final scene.

“Here, at the beach, after Marcello and the rest of the party inspect the big ugly fish that had just been caught, he sees Paola waving and calling in the distance.

“At first he does not recognize her, and he can’t hear what she’s saying. She mimics typing, which is what she’d asked Marcello about in the restaurant at the beach. Perhaps Marcello would now teach her how to type.

“But Marcello still doesn’t understand.

With a click of Ezio’s mouse the image froze. He then went through that final scene frame by frame.

“Study Marcello’s face,” he said. “It says everything. About him, about all the unfortunate choices he’d made and was about to make.”

I nodded, yes, yes, YES.

“This is Fellini’s genius. He gets into the very soul of a character in a way that is inexplicable, beyond analysis. Marcello’s raises his hands, he gives a slight shrug of indifference. He can not understand what Paola is saying, or more probably he merely does not want to understand.

Marcello covers his face, as if ashamed, and he finally turns away, and heads back to his career as a gossip journalist, pursuing glamorous movie stars, aristocrats, politicians and the night life on Roma’s Via Veneto. He thus abandons Paola, precisely as he was to abandon his daughter Maria.

“Paola watches Marcello walk away. Is she disappointed, or angry? No, her smile is knowing, understanding, accepting. Love in its purest form.

“Then she turns slightly and looks directly into the camera. Another stroke of Fellini’s genius. That expression of hers! How do you describe it? You don’t, you can’t, you just feel it piercing your heart.

“Fade to black. Roll credits. Then…”

Fine.