Something Great and Beautiful Read online

  Copyright © 2018 Enrico Pellegrini

  Production editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas

  Text designer: Jennifer Daddio / Bookmark Design & Media Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from Other Press LLC, except in the case of brief quotations in reviews for inclusion in a magazine, newspaper, or broadcast. For information write to Other Press LLC, 267 Fifth Avenue, 6th Floor, New York, NY 10016. Or visit our Web site: www.otherpress.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

  Names: Pellegrini, Enrico, 1971– author.

  Title: Something great and beautiful : a novel of love, Wall Street, and focaccia / Enrico Pellegrini.

  Description: New York : Other Press, [2018]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018000923 (print) | LCCN 2018005184 (ebook) | ISBN 9781590519745 (ebook) | ISBN 9781590519738 (paperback)

  Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Satire.

  Classification: LCC PQ4876.E355 (ebook) |

  LCC PQ4876.E355 S66 2018 (print) | DDC 853/.914—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2018000923

  Ebook ISBN 9781590519745

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The views and opinions expressed by the characters of this novel do not represent the views and opinions of the author.

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  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Job 1: The Maestro, or How to Die in the Arms of a Beautiful Woman

  Chloé Verdi

  Chloé Verdi

  Rosso Fiorentino

  Job 2: Sachin, or the Art of Street Selling

  Chloé Verdi

  Rosso Fiorentino

  Job 3: The Octopus Gang, or How to Steal to Pay for Law School

  Chloé Verdi

  Rosso Fiorentino

  Job 4: Don Otto, the Baker

  Chloé Verdi

  Rosso Fiorentino

  Job 5: Federico, the Painter

  Chloé Verdi

  Rosso Fiorentino

  Job 6: Virginia, or Saving Dad

  Chloé Verdi

  Rosso Fiorentino

  Job 7: Chicago Boys

  Chloé Verdi

  Chloé Verdi

  Job 8: The Venus with the Singing Nipples

  Chloé Verdi

  Rosso Fiorentino

  Job 9: Dimitri Buvlovski, Wall Street Lawyer

  Chloé Verdi

  Chloé Verdi

  Job 10: Gino’s and the Waiter

  Chloé Verdi

  Rosso Fiorentino

  Job 11: Snow White, the Porn Star

  Chloé Verdi

  Rosso Fiorentino

  Job 12: Focaccia House: The Start-up

  Chloé Verdi

  Rosso Fiorentino

  Job 13: Focaccia House: Focaccia House Inc.

  Chloé Verdi

  Rosso Fiorentino

  Job 14: Going Public

  Chloé Verdi

  Chloé Verdi

  Job 15: Rosso Fiorentino, the Businessman

  Chloé Verdi

  Rosso Fiorentino

  Job 16: The Frying Pan/The Wedding

  Chloé Verdi

  Rosso Fiorentino

  Job 17: The Meltdown

  Chloé Verdi

  Rosso Fiorentino

  Chloé Verdi

  Job 18: The Verdict

  Chloé Verdi

  Job 19: Something Great and Beautiful

  Chloé Verdi

  Rosso Fiorentino

  Acknowledgments

  Of his bones are coral made.

  Those are pearls that were his eyes.

  Nothing of him that doth fade, But doth suffer a sea-change Into something rich and strange.

  —WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, THE TEMPEST, ACT 1, SCENE 2

  CHLOÉ VERDI

  April 29, 2009, New York

  hat does it mean to climb inside a white tiger’s cage? Challenge or carelessness?

  Or to kidnap a Labrador on the Italian Riviera in your orange bikini? Ridiculous or lucrative?

  And how did I get from there to Wall Street? Initially I’d hoped it was my brains, then I settled for my ass, but at the end of the day wasn’t it merely because I was born in Genoa and speak Italian?

  Already, these questions were assaulting my mind, my lungs, my heart, like busy bees.

  And how does it feel when you want to hear his voice, and you stare at the phone, and the damn thing doesn’t ring?

  Or when the phone rings and it’s your boss, and even though your law degree is just as good as his, he wants you to…organize a soccer tournament for the firm’s associates?

  Or it’s your boss and now he wants you to…what?…work on an IPO on the stock exchange, yes one of the biggest deals of the year, Ms. Verdi.

  Or when the phone rings again and it’s the police?

  And the prosecutor wants to know every little detail about your life? And he wants to turn over every stone in your past? Where did you meet him, why in India, what were you doing there, what was he doing there? And how did you get here?

  The bailiff summoned, “All rise!” and everyone stood up as Federal Justice Henrietta Pontia Pilgrims entered the courtroom. I had been subpoenaed to testify and I was the key witness and the seven largest U.S. banks had collapsed and the love of my life was facing 137 years in jail.

  CHLOÉ VERDI

  May 4, 2009, New York

  ndia, Ms. Verdi?” asked the prosecutor for the Southern District Court of the State of New York, looking at his notes and then pausing to stare at my lime-colored skirt. In one glance he made me feel that it was both too bright and too short. “How did you first meet the defendant Rosso Fiorentino in India?”

  ROSSO FIORENTINO

  February 8–10, 2006, West Bengal, India

  was dropped off at the edge of a village an hour outside of Calcutta and found myself standing inside a backyard in the middle of nowhere. It was a hot and humid afternoon and there was only one cloud in the sky; for some reason it reminded me of a blank check.

  Everyone was preparing to celebrate the Meindith, the first day of a Hindu wedding. When I asked, a weak, bony hand pointed across the yard to the Maestro, possibly the greatest writer alive—the man I had applied to work for and whom I’d traveled so far to meet. I would soon discover that my job to serve him would only last one single night.

  “What can I do for you?” I asked immediately upon our introduction, in order to make a good impression. “What would you like, Maestro?”

  “A gin and tonic,” he said.

  I hurried to the far corner of the yard, where s
omeone from the Maestro’s hotel had set up the “bar”: two bottles of gin standing on a wooden bench next to a pile of melting ice.

  “Is it Hendrick’s?” the Maestro asked when I delivered him the drink.

  “Gordon’s,” I said.

  “It’s Gordon’s?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do they have piña colada instead?”

  “No.”

  “The hotel didn’t bring my piña colada?”

  It was hard to tell his age because of his tanned cheeks and his playful, yellow, seersucker jacket. He did not look like one of those Westerners who goes to India in search of something spiritual. A thick coat of gel made his white hair positively shine in the daylight.

  “How old are you, Rosso?” he asked, tucking in his shirt.

  “Twenty-four,” I said.

  He studied my face for a moment.

  “And how old were you when you acquired this badge of valor?” he said, pressing his thumb against the scar on my chin.

  “I prefer not to talk about it.”

  “That’s fine. But do tell me. What made you respond to the ad?” Companion for renowned writer in India, it had read. Travel and living expenses covered. Otherwise unpaid. “You can speak plainly,” he said. “Nobody else responded.”

  “I want to be a writer,” I said.

  “Okay,” said the Maestro. “What’s plan B?”

  he shadows grew longer and the white moon slowly brightened. Women in orange saris, toes sticking out of their sandals, lay large banana leaves across the floor where the guests would eat. The village houses had no electricity and the evening sky began to glow over their darkening rooftops. My big cloud was breaking up into many white scraps, as if the check had bounced.

  “Would you like to try a dosa, Maestro?” Sachin asked, handing the old man a completely burned pancake.

  Sachin was the Maestro’s driver and tour guide, who had picked me up at the airport. With his small stature and voluminous hair, he looked like a miniature of someone, an eighties rock star, perhaps. He was five feet one inch of pure ambition. What he lacked in height he more than made up for in confidence, but he had a tic: whenever he was tense, he looked up as if something was about to crash on his head.

  “I would like another gin and tonic,” the Maestro said, rearranging his jacket. The last button of his shirt had come open and I noticed a blue plastic bag under it.

  “How are you feeling?” I asked.

  “Empty,” the Maestro said smiling. “That beautiful sense of emptiness I felt as a kid.”

  And all of a sudden, as the celebration took shape around us, the Maestro began to speak, as if he had to tell us his whole life. Emptiness, emptiness, he spoke a great deal of how he considered emptiness a virtue, almost a privilege—he remembered how his first experiences had tumbled nicely inside of him—an empty, clean self—with a distinct echo: his first kiss at sixteen with Leslie on the Brighton Beach promenade; his first reading of Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises; writing his own first novel.

  Women in bright saris were starting to dance, but Sachin and I both gave the Maestro all of our attention.

  “I chose not to get married,” he said with untamed pride, “and not to have children, because I wanted to be the best novelist of my generation.”

  He believed that in order to write well, you needed to be perpetually infatuated, ever on that dizzying edge of falling in love, and because, at some point, such limerence fades away, as a writer you could never be in a single relationship for too long. But sometime in his mid-thirties, he told us, despite his bachelorhood, the world began to fade on him, to lose its echo, its bright edges, its power to inspire. The more memories, prizes, romantic adventures piled up in his stomach, the more that beautiful sense of emptiness turned into numbness. For the past ten years, he told Sachin and me, he’d felt like an old mansion sagging with too much furniture.

  “It’s not that I was indifferent; I was full.”

  After that point, he’d only published a novel every ten years or so; his inability to feel a shiver, to laugh from his belly and not from his nose, to really cry, and most importantly to fall in love (although he tried to have sex regularly, he specified) made it impossible for him to write.

  “Now, though, after the surgery in June, something has changed,” he said, groping the little blue bag inside his shirt. It felt as if deep in his guts, someone in his very body, “the movers,” he called them, had begun carting stuff away.

  He then spoke to us about death, although I’m not sure I understood everything. I guess this was his bottom line: we spend so much of our lives thinking about it that it almost becomes like a real job. “We’d better make the most of it,” he said. “This dying.” It seemed he had something particular in mind, though I had no idea what. Perhaps, I thought, looking from him to Sachin and back again, the night will tell.

  t eight o’clock in the evening the women began to sing as they danced in the backyard, careful not to step onto the banana leaves where the banquet would take place. They moved lightly in a circle, in observance of local rituals, and sang a song mocking the future groom. There was no instrumental music—only their clear, breathy voices. The women were all dressed with great care, but some had open wounds on their faces—some skin disease, no doubt—and flies would land four or five at a time on those whose flesh was still raw.

  “Can you hand me my notebook?” said the Maestro, suddenly smiling. I followed his gaze. A red kneelength skirt, unsuited for the occasion, was crossing the backyard. The young woman stood out in a thousand ways, including her casual T-shirt, her fair skin, and her briefcase, which she carried with the uncertainty of a freshly minted newsroom intern. Long, black curls fell on her shoulders like a stream of lava.

  “You’re going to write, Maestro?” Sachin asked excited. Then he looked at me. “Are you deaf or what, Rosso? Come on, give him his notebook. You’re as slow as a glacier in the Himalayas.”

  The Maestro stood up and headed to the pile of melting ice we called the bar. I followed silently. The dark-haired girl was now sitting on the bench, wearing a press badge. CHLOÉ VERDI, it read. She crossed her legs in a professional way, only to uncross them a second later as she bent over to retrieve a sheet of paper that had fallen onto the ground.

  “No thanks,” Chloé said as the Maestro pushed a drink toward her.

  “It’s a gin and tonic.”

  “I don’t drink.”

  The Maestro tried to make eye contact but she looked straight in front of her. He gave a friendly snort while holding the bag inside his shirt; he always seemed afraid it might open.

  “Are you waiting for your boyfriend?” he asked.

  “If you’re here to pick up girls,” she said, “then yes.”

  round nine o’clock the banquet began. The backyard looked out onto the open countryside and just beyond that, absurdly, a zoo. Our table was set with Sheffield silverware and a linen tablecloth from our hotel, while the other guests sat on the floor, each eating from a large green banana leaf. There was one empty seat at our table. The father of the bride continued to smile in our direction, no doubt because the governor of Calcutta had paid for the entire wedding and given him three thousand rupees to invite the Maestro and his following. The father of the bride looked young, twenty-four or so, he could have been my age.

  Finally he rose and came to our table. He too had a large wound on his cheek. A little snarl of flies settled upon it as he stopped walking and stood before us, though he didn’t seem to mind. Chloé Verdi, the dark-haired journalist, was standing just behind him, holding her briefcase.

  “This mahili is asking for the Maestro,” he said. “She says she is a journalist.”

  “With Repubblica,” said Chloé.

  “Please have a seat.” The Maestro stood up politely and pointed to the empty place next to him, and with a smile
said, “You must have decided I look like your boyfriend after all?”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be rude,” said Chloé, her cheeks flushed. “I usually recognize the people I see in newspapers…But your face—it’s different in the photographs, more…”

  “Younger?” asked the Maestro.

  She sat between Sachin and the Maestro. As her fingers cut the naan, the warm buttery Indian bread, her eyes still didn’t seem to know where to go. Their color was of an uncertain green with a bit of yellow, like two beautiful drops of petroleum.

  “How long have you been writing for Repubblica?” asked the Maestro.

  “Not very long. I’m finishing school in Genoa.”

  “But how old are you?” asked Sachin.

  “Twenty-one,” said Chloé.

  “They’ve sent an intern to interview the Maestro?” Sachin said horrified.

  “I understand the Maestro never gives interviews.”

  “But he just told us his life story,” I said.

  “Maybe so, but word is he doesn’t like reporters,” she apologized, tucking back her hair. “So the paper couldn’t send a correspondent out here just to carry his luggage, if that ended up being the case. So they sent me.”

  “And that’s why we’re sending Sachin off to bed,” said the Maestro. “So that he doesn’t ask silly questions.” He did, too. Despite his temper tantrum, Sachin was driven back to the hotel where we stayed.