Two days before the awards ceremony, while Caterina was washing her hair in the sink, the phone rang. A nasal voice announced herself as someone’s assistant who was in charge of the event.
Caterina felt a thrill go down her spine, managed to grab a towel and wrap it around her dripping hair, while the woman was saying something about arrangements for a pickup in a limo. She struggled to find a piece of paper and a pen to jot down the details. The thought of the limo, the image of her waxed and bronzed legs stepping out of it in her powdery pink high heels, occupied her mind for a handful of seconds, obliterating what the woman was saying.
“… pick you up at eleven fifteen, so we’ll make sure you’ll get to the theater by noon. Do you think that will give you enough time?”
“Yes, sure. Forty-five minutes will be plenty.”
She was about to add “It’s not like I live in the jungle” when her brain did a quick rewind.
“What do you mean noon? Why noon?”
“I’m sorry, I forgot to tell you this year we’ll be running on a different schedule. The ceremony takes place at noon.”
“Why?”
“We changed it to daytime this year. It won’t make any difference, really.”
Caterina tightened her grip on the phone.
“No difference? Well … you mean … Is it no longer black tie?”
“No, it’s a daytime event,” the woman said gaily, “so no worries on that score, it’ll be a much more relaxed dress code.”
There was a pause.
“Hello? Are you there?” the woman said.
“Yes, yes, I’m here.”
“I said you don’t have to worry about getting all dressed up,” the woman reassured her. “The ceremony this year won’t even be televised.”
“What? Why?”
“Budget cuts. It’ll be a smaller affair. But we think it’ll be a much warmer ceremony without the TV presenter, the cameras getting in the way and all the tension that comes with a live event.”
“Sure … yes … of course.”
“The car will be downstairs at eleven fifteen, then. Congratulations again, Ms. De Maria, we will see you there.”
Caterina hung up but didn’t move from the chair.
That year, due to the disastrous financial situation of the Italian economy, was in fact the only year in its history when the David Awards ceremony was downgraded to daytime, an untelevised, wholly unglamorous affair. Because of this, the nominees for major categories, used as they were to receiving their awards in tuxedos and evening gowns, were incensed. In return for the affront, none of them dressed as if they gave a hoot at all. Men showed up in crumpled linen jackets and sneakers, women in unassuming dresses and flats. It was a kind of “fuck you and your pathetic award ceremony” attitude that people had as they walked up onto that stage. In the absence of a camera nobody bothered to make a speech, to smile, or to thank his or her producer or mother. Even the statuettes looked like trinkets that year.
Caterina’s short did indeed end up winning for her category. She was one of the very few who didn’t restrain her enthusiasm. She held her statuette up high, like she had seen actresses do at the Oscars, smiling to an imaginary audience, in her friend Tina’s flowery dress and a pair of old platform espadrilles.
Pascal sat in the sparse audience (less than half the usual guests had attended given the inconvenient time and the lack of a red carpet) and he took several pictures with his phone of Caterina holding her statuette (the next day, when Pascal and Caterina Googled her name linked to the David Awards ceremony and found no images, they realized that his were the only existing shots of that glorious instant).
Once it was all over, the nominees and the press were offered a cocktail backstage—another sad ordeal of tiny plastic containers filled with microscopic sushi and cucumber mousse—but everyone dashed off in a hurry. Balti was one of the first to leave. Caterina saw him wave a hand in her direction from the other end of the room, but she wasn’t certain it was meant for her. She waved hers back, just in case, and watched him disappear, arm in arm with yet another interesting woman who looked both brainy and sexy. After their encounter in Venice she hadn’t yet summoned the guts to call him, and at that very moment she decided she wasn’t going to.
After a boozy late lunch with Pascal, Caterina came home and opened the closet. She unzipped the Chanel bag for the umpteenth time and looked at the dress. Despite everything, there it was: still hers. She quietly closed the door. One day she would wear it. She knew she would. Now she needed to work hard, to make that day happen. She refused to think of that day in Venice as a missed opportunity or, even worse, as the biggest shopping mistake of her life.
The following year, thanks to a clever financial maneuver, some funds for the arts flowed back into the budget and the awards ceremony resumed its original grandeur, along with the live TV show. The prior year’s austerity had been a hitch, a single interruption in its long history, and soon everyone forgot that it had ever happened.
In the years that followed Caterina managed to shoot one more short film about a community of Sikhs tending cattle near Bologna, and tried to get her first long feature off the ground, but she never succeeded.
In the course of the following years potential occasions for wearing the Chanel became fewer and fewer. It was either too warm for summer, or too green for winter. There had been a couple of weddings but the dress always looked too dazzling for a simple civil ceremony or a reception in a country restaurant. There had been a few film premieres, the opening of a play or of an exhibition in a museum, but none of the people who went to these events would wear anything as shockingly elegant, so each time she opted for a more comfortable outfit. With time she got so used to the Chanel bag hanging in the closet that it became just another thing living in there, so familiar that it had become invisible. It became part of the furniture, and with the furniture it followed her to another apartment when her new boyfriend, Riccardo, asked her to move in, and on to another one when, three years later, he asked her to marry him. For a moment she considered wearing the dress at her own wedding.
Her sister and her friend Tina had studied the ensemble of dress and shoes while she modeled them once again in the bedroom.
“It looks a bit funny. I am not sure why,” her sister had said, tentatively.
“Maybe a bit tight on your hips?” Tina had suggested.
“And anyway, you should wear something brand-new the day of your wedding. What the hell, right?”
Caterina hurried out of the dress self-consciously. It was true she had gained a bit of weight, especially around her midline, but at the time she didn’t know yet that she was pregnant with the twins.
Whenever she checked the dress—more and more rarely now after the twins were born—she noticed how the feathers had lost their softness and had become brittle, how the fabric had lost some of its luster. She began to think of the Chanel as an old virgin—untouched but no longer fresh. Every time she zipped up the bag, it felt as though she were laying it back in its coffin.
It took a while before one day, sitting in her kitchen and feeling particularly depressed, she rang Pascal in Paris and told him she felt like a total failure. In the meantime, shortly after he’d moved in with his lover in the Marais, he had been cast for a minor role in a successful TV series as an Italian ma?tre d’, and that had been the beginning of a steady career as an actor. She told him she couldn’t think of herself as a filmmaker anymore, but just as a mother of two.
“You are not a failure,” Pascal said while munching on something. “Maybe you are not meant to make another film. That’s all.”
It felt like a shock and a liberation at the same time to be hearing this.
“Wow, I feel like I just received a punch in the jaw,” she said, uncertain as to whether she should agree with him and accept this truth or try to fight it a little longer.
“It’s not the end of the world, you know, there are other things in life you can do.”
“What are you eating?”
“Fromage and crackers. I think you’d be brilliant at a million other things.”
“Such as?”
“Darling, I’m not a tarot reader. All I’m saying is that if in all these years you haven’t been able to make another film as impressive as your first, then maybe you should move on.”
Pascal could always be brutal, but wasn’t that exactly the reason she had called him?
“I still have the goddamned Chanel!” she cried. “I feel guilty every time I look at it.”
“Why guilty? Just wear it.”
“Where to? I doubt I’ll be asked to go anywhere that formal ever again.”
“Caterina. You should wear it to the supermarket and have fun with it.”
“That’s ridiculous and you know it.”
“You are making too much of it. It’s just a dress, it’s not a coronation mantle.”
Caterina thought of herself wearing the Chanel through the aisles of the Esselunga supermarket, or when going to pick up the twins at kindergarten. Of wearing it nonstop till it became a uniform, so that people would begin to think of her as the woman in the green dress. She would be considered an eccentric, of course, though by wearing the dress to death out of sheer willpower, she would not only extract from it every euro it had cost her, but also exhaust its fibers till it would have to simply give out and die of consumption, lose its feathers, become more humane, turn into a lifeless threadbare rag and no longer intimidate her. She would win by humbling it. It was an idea, a way of looking at the dilemma.
But she knew she didn’t have the guts to engage in that kind of battle.