Less has read (in the packet the beautiful women handed him before vanishing into the glasswork) that, while the five finalists were chosen by an elderly committee, the final jury is made up of twelve high school students. The second night, they appear in the lobby, dressed up in elegant flowered dresses (the girls) or their dad’s oversized blazers (the boys). Why did it not occur to Less these were the same teens by the pool? The teens move like a tour group into the greenhouse, formerly Less’s private dining room, which now bustles with caterers and unknown people. The beautiful Italian women reappear and introduce him to his fellow finalists. Less feels his confidence drop. The first is Riccardo, a young unshaven Italian man, incredibly tall and thin, in sunglasses, jeans, and a T-shirt that reveals the Japanese carp tattoos on both arms. The other three are all much older: Luisa, glamorously white-haired and dressed in a white cotton tunic, with gold alien bracelets for fending off critics; Alessandro, a cartoon villain, with streaks of white at his temples, a pencil mustache, and black plastic spectacles that narrow his look of disapproval; and a short rose-gold gnome from Finland who asks to be called Harry, though his name on the books is something else entirely. Their works, Less is told, are a Sicilian historical novel, a retelling of Rapunzel in modern-day Russia, an eight-hundred-page novel of a man’s last minute on his deathbed in Paris, and an imagined life of St. Margory. Less cannot seem to match each novel with its author; has the young one made the deathbed novel or Rapunzel? Either seems likely. They are all so intellectual. Less knows at once he hasn’t a chance.
“I read your book,” says Luisa, her left eye batting away a loose scrap of mascara while her right one stares straight into his heart. “It took me to new places. I thought of Joyce in outer space.” The Finn seems to be brimming with mirth.
The cartoon villain adds: “He would not live long, I think.”
“Portrait of the Artist as a Spaceman!” the Finn says at last, and covers his teeth as he ticks away with silent laughter.
“I have not read it, but…,” says the tattooed author, moving restlessly, hands in pockets. The others wait for more. But that is all. Behind them, Less recognizes Fosters Lancett walking alone into the room, very short and heavy headed and looking as soaked in misery as a trifle pudding is soaked in rum. And perhaps also soaked in rum.
“I don’t think I have a chance of winning” is all Less can say. The prize is a generous amount of euros and a bespoke suit made in Turin proper.
Luisa flings a hand into the air. “Oh, but who knows? It is up to these students! Who knows what they love? Romance? Murder? If it’s murder, Alessandro has us beat.”
The villain raises first one eyebrow, then the other. “When I was young, all I wanted to read were pretentious little books. Camus and Tournier and Calvino. If it had a plot, I hated it.”
“You remain this way,” Luisa chides, and he shrugs. Less senses a love affair from long ago. The two switch gears to Italian, and so begins what sounds like a squabble but could really be anything at all.
“Do any of you happen to speak English or have a cigarette?” It is Lancett, glowering under his eyebrows. The young writer immediately pulls a pack from his jeans and produces one, slightly flattened. Lancett eyes it with trepidation, then takes it. “You are the finalists?” he asks.
“Yes,” Less says, and Lancett turns his head, alert to an American accent.
His eyelids flutter closed in disgust. “These things are not cool.”
“I guess you’ve been to a lot of them.” Less hears himself saying this inane thing.
“Not many. And I’ve never won. It’s a sad little cockfight they arrange because they have no talent themselves.”
“You have won. You won the main prize here.”
Fosters Lancett stares at Less for moment, then rolls his eyes and stalks off to smoke.
For the next two days, the crowd moves in packs—teenagers, finalists, elderly prize committee—smiling at each other from auditoriums and restaurants, passing peacefully by each other at catering buffets, but never seated together, never interacting, with only Fosters Lancett moving freely among them as the skulking lone wolf. Less now feels a new shame that the teenagers have seen him nearly naked and avoids the pool if they are present; in his mind he sees the horror of his middle-aged body and cannot bear the judgment (when in fact his anxiety has kept him almost as lean as in his college years). He also shuns the spa. And so the old rubber bands are brought out again, and each morning Less gives his Lessian best to the “trophies” and “action heroes” of the long-lost manual (itself a poor translation from Italian), each day doing fewer and fewer, asymptotically approaching, but never reaching, zero.
Days, of course, are crowded. There is the sunny town square luncheon alfresco where Less is cautioned not once, not twice, but ten times by various Italians to apply sunscreen to his pinkening face (of course he has applied sunscreen, and what the hell did they know about it, with their luscious mahogany skin?). There is the speech by Fosters Lancett on Ezra Pound, in the middle of which the bitter old man pulls out an electronic cigarette and begins to puff away; its little green light, at this time alien to the Piemontesi, makes some journalists present conjecture he is smoking their local marijuana. There are numerous baffling interviews—“I am sorry, I need the interprete, I cannot understand your American accent”—in which dowdy matrons in lavender linen ask highly intellectual questions about Homer, Joyce, and quantum physics. Less, completely below the journalistic radar in America, and unused to substantive questions, keeps to a fiercely merrymaking persona at all times, refusing to wax philosophical about subjects he chose to write about precisely because he does not understand them. The ladies leave amused but without enough copy for a column. From across the lobby, Less hears journalists laughing at something Alessandro is saying; clearly he knows how to handle these things. And there is the two-hour bus ride up a mountain, when Less turns to Luisa with a question and she explains that the roses at the ends of the vineyard rows are to detect disease. She shakes her finger and says, “The roses will be taken first. Like a bird…what is the bird?”
“A canary in a coal mine.”
“Sì. Esatto.”
“Or like a poet in a Latin American country,” Less offers. “The new regime always kills them first.” The complex triple take of her expression: first astonishment, then wicked complicity, and last shame for either the dead poets, themselves, or both.
And then there is the prize ceremony itself.