Things That Happened Before the Earthquake
Chiara Barzini
To Luca who makes everything possible
And to Stefania, Andrea, and Matteo for always being up for an adventure
One gets the impression that people come to Los Angeles in order to divorce themselves from the past, here to live or try to live in the rootless pleasure world of an adult child. One knows that if the cities of the world were destroyed by a new war, the architecture of the rebuilding would create a landscape which looked, subject to specification of climate, exactly and entirely like the San Fernando Valley.
NORMAN MAILER “Superman Comes to the Supermarket”
part one
departure
1
I was looking at my grandmother, sitting cross-legged and topless on El Matador Beach in Malibu, and remembered that we used to make out. She would stick her tongue out and I had to lick it. She called it the “tongue-to-tongue game.” A soggy dumpling asking to be joined by mine. I couldn’t say no. The smell of her saliva repelled me. I didn’t like this activity, but I was told I should do it because she was old and I was a little girl. We played the game until I was eight. That day on the beach the vision of her pendulous naked breasts seemed as out of context as her tongue in my mouth did when I was little. I wondered what it was about my family. Why we could never make it right.
I sat on a rock in front of the waves—tall, ferocious waves. Even though it was summer, it was freezing. The beach was empty. I hated my parents for bringing me there. They were both sprawled on the sand, leaning their heads against a pole that held a SHARK ALERT sign. Their bathing suits were in a heap on top of a Positano-style sarong. They lounged nude as if they were in a beach town off the Mediterranean Sea. The wind thrust sand and towels in my face. It was so strong, I couldn’t even hear my brother’s voice close to me, but our parents were content, like that was just exactly what they had in mind when they moved to California. It wasn’t what I had in mind.
My mother took four soggy cream-cheese sandwiches out of her bag and a gallon of warm water she’d bought at the gas station a few days earlier and left in the car. The water tasted like plastic.
“Lunch!”
She invited my brother and me over and kept smiling even though we were visibly angry. This made us angrier.
“No thanks.”
We’d rather sit here and hate you, was what we thought.
They moved into the shade, nibbling on their soggy sandwiches, chunks of cream cheese getting stuck in their pubic hair. Grandma graced us by putting her shirt back on for the duration of the picnic. I didn’t want to be there. I wanted to be where the young people were, at the skate park we had passed on the highway coming in. If I was to live in that labyrinth of a city, that vast region, I should have the right to be with people my own age. But no, we were supposed to have lunch together, like a real Italian family.
It was August of 1992. Three months before standing on that windy beach, our father had announced we would be moving to Hollywood to become rich and famous. What he didn’t tell us was that we’d be moving to the vast and scorching basin that sprawled seamlessly for miles north of Los Angeles, the San Fernando Valley.
“Don’t you want to go where it’s always summer?” he asked my brother and me during a shoot for a commercial for canned meat in Rome.
Our entire family had been cast to be the national face of Italian Spam. This was encouraging, according to our father. A rich destiny awaited on the other side of the ocean. None of us had ever acted except as extras in our father’s films, but the commercial’s producers insisted.
“You are perfect for our product! You look like you’re related!” they screamed during our audition.
We were promised extra money for this reason.
“It’ll be practice for Hollywood,” our father said when we got the parts.
In the commercial we had to act like a traditional Italian family: a sporty fifteen-year-old daughter, a kooky younger brother, and two unconditionally loving parents. We had lunch together on a terrace overlooking Saint Peter’s Basilica—no waves, no sharks. The stylist put Band-Aids on my nipples because they got hard in the breeze. Girls were not supposed to have erect nipples. Our mother, Serena, dressed like a southern Italian housewife, a casalinga from the fifties, prepared a big salad topped with cadaverous red meat that had been duly molded, painted, and sprayed by the “food stylist” to deliver what the director called “a glorious, meaty glow.”
It smelled like dog food.
“Who’s hungry for thinly sliced vegetables on a bed of chopped meat?” she asked on camera.
“Me! Me! Me!” my brother and I cried, raising our arms to the sky.
“Time for a healthy lunch!” our father exclaimed, skipping over to the lavishly decked-out table after putting away the pot of azaleas he had just finished trimming.
We chewed the meat and spat it in a bin by our chairs after each take. I liked acting as a perfect family. I liked seeing my father play a patriarchal role, watering plants on the aristocratic Roman terrace the production company had rented for the shoot. In real life he rejected authorities and institutions. He wore pink and aquamarine shirts, called himself an anarchist, and practiced yoga and Transcendental Meditation. Now he was forced to wear ordinary dad clothes and say ordinary dad things. In my mind that really was our practice for Hollywood. We needed to learn how to become a normal family.
—
When I told my Roman schoolmates we were moving to America they all gasped. I should refuse to move to an imperialist country. America was evil. That was the bottom line. Ours was a politically active institution. Every year students conducted a sit-in on the school grounds to protest government decisions about public education. The real activists printed pamphlets and screamed communist slogans into megaphones. The rest of us liked the excuse of sleeping away from home. We camped in sleeping bags inside the freezing gym, smoked hash, and talked about “the system.” Nobody washed for days. Halls were littered with cigarette butts, posters, and empty cartons of pizza—our only sustenance. Most of the boys had anxious Italian mothers who snuck home-cooked meals through the gates. They didn’t want to look like mama’s boys so they ate their food alone in the restrooms.
One night Alessandro, the school’s most popular political leader, woke us up in the gym and ordered everyone to follow him to the principal’s office.
“Get the girl who’s moving to LA!” he screamed.