And so on. The imaginary Sicilian aristocrats in the house directly across the Gardens from the Golden place—provisionally, Vito and Blanca Tagliabue, Baron and Baroness of Selinunte—were still mysterious to me, but I was in love with their ancestry. When I pictured them stepping out of an evening, always in the height of fashion, to attend a ball at the Metropolitan Museum or a film premiere at the Ziegfeld or to see the new show by the new young artist in the newest gallery on the West Side, I thought of Vito’s father Biaggio, who
on a hot day near the south coast of Sicily, lightly tanned and in the prime of life, strides out across the wide expanse of his family estate, which went by the name of Castelbiaggio, holding his best shotgun by the barrel while resting the weapon on his right shoulder. He is wearing a broad-brimmed sun hat above an old burgundy smock, well-worn khaki jodhpurs and walking boots polished until they shone like the noonday sun. He has excellent cause to believe that life is good. The war in Europe is over, Mussolini and his moll Clara Petacci are hanging from their meathooks, and the natural order of life is coming back into being. The Barone surveys the marshaled ranks of his grape-heavy vines like a commanding officer taking the salute of his troops, then moves forward rapidly through wood and stream, up hill and down dale and then up again, heading for his favorite place, a little promontory high above his lands where he can sit cross-legged like a Tibetan lama and meditate on the goodness of life while looking out to the far horizon across the glinting sea. It is the last day of his life as a free man, because a moment later he spots a poacher with a full sack over his shoulder crossing his territory and without hesitation he raises his shotgun and shoots the fellow dead.
And after this it would be revealed that the dead youth was a relative of the local Mafia don, and the Mafia don would declare that Biaggio too must die to pay for his crime, and then there would be agitations and protestations, and delegations from the political authority and also from the Church, arguing that for the Mafia don to kill the local milord would be, well, extremely visible, extremely hard to ignore, it would make more trouble for the Mafia don than would be comfortable for him, so for the sake of his own ease perhaps he could forgo this murder. And in the end the Mafia don relents,
I know all about this Barone Biaggio, hmm, about his suite in the Grand Hotel et Des Palmes in Palermo—what is it? Suite 202 or 204 or maybe both?—he goes there to party and to whore, hmm?, which is fine, it is our place, we go there for the same reasons, and so, if he goes there today and stays there for the rest of his fucking life we will not kill the little fucker but if he tries to set foot outside the hotel he should remember that the corridors are crawling with our guys and the whores work for us as well and before his foot touches the ground of the square outside the building he will be dead, his bloodied head with the bullet in his forehead will hit the ground before his fucking shoe. Hmm? Hmm? Tell him that.
In the screenplays and treatments for screenplays that I carried around in my head the way Peter Kien in Canetti’s Auto-da-Fé carried whole libraries, the “baron in the suite” remained imprisoned in the Grand Hotel et Des Palmes, Palermo, Sicily, until his dying day, forty-four years later, he went on partying and whoring in there, food and drink was brought to him every day from his family’s kitchen and wine cellar, his son Vito was conceived there on one of his long-suffering wife’s infrequent visits (but born where his long-suffering wife preferred, in her bedroom at Castelbiaggio), and when he died his coffin left by the front door, feet first, surrounded by an honor guard composed of most of the staff of the hotel, and several of the whores.—And Vito, disillusioned by Palermo, by the Mafia and by his father too, grew up to make his home in New York, and became determined to lead the opposite life to his father’s, utterly faithful to his wife Blanca, but refusing to spend a single evening stuck alone with her and the children at home.
I fear I may have given the reader an unnecessarily poor impression of my character. I would not wish you to think of me as an indolent fellow, a ne’er-do-well and a burden on my parents, still in need of a real job after getting on for three decades of life on earth. The truth is that, then as now, I was and am rarely out on the town at night, and I rose and rise early in the morning in spite of being a lifelong insomniac. I was also (and remain) an active member of a group of young filmmakers—we had all been to graduate school together—who, under the leadership of a dynamic young Indian-American producer-writer-director called Suchitra Roy, had already made a host of music videos, embedded internet content for Condé Nast and Wired, documentaries that appeared on PBS and HBO, and three well-regarded theatrically released, independently financed feature films (all three had been selections at Sundance and SXSW and two had won Audience Awards) in which we had persuaded A-list performers to work for scale: Jessica Chastain, Keanu Reeves, James Franco, Olivia Wilde. I offer this brief CV now so that the reader may feel in good hands, the hands of a credible and not inexperienced storyteller, as my narrative acquires what will be increasingly lurid characteristics. I also introduce my work colleagues because their running critique of this, my personal project, was and continues to be valuable to me.
All that long hot summer we would meet for lunch at our favorite Italian restaurant on Sixth Avenue just below Bleecker Street, sitting out at a sidewalk table wearing substantial sun hats and Factor 50, and I would tell Suchitra what I was doing and she would ask the tough questions. “I understand that you want your ‘Nero Golden’ to be something of a mystery man, that’s fine, I see that that’s right,” she told me. “But what is the question his character asks us, which the story must finally address?” At once I knew the answer, though I hadn’t ever quite admitted it even to myself until that moment.
“The question,” I told her, “is the question of evil.”
“In that case,” she said, “sooner or later, and the sooner the better, the mask must begin to slip.”