Линн Коуди - Best Canadian Stories 2020

“Hm. You might want to make something new, bring it in on tape. Mirazappa was very specific, says he wants something classical, chamber-sounding. Says Bach a lot, but I think Bach is the only composer he knows.”

“I can do that.” Renga would need to pay for six hours of studio time and a cellist, an engineer as well. And write something new, but that was never the problem.

“Why d’you like Morricone so much? I know why I like him, but you?”

“I hate voices, what they do in popular music. It’s why I couldn’t stand to go to India. You write for the movies there, you’re a slave to the playback singer, the stupid melody they want. Morricone, he makes voices behave. Forces them to be music. There’s a line, structure, something written on piano, a theme the flute will pick up when the voice can’t reach. Either that or he just makes them yelp in the recording booth, at the right pitch, the right time. That I like. It’s how voices should be used.”

“Right. For me it’s the whistling. You know he laughs in all the wrong places if he’s around when they edit? Really threw Sergio off the one time I was there, for Buono Bruto . Ennio’s in his own world, takes a few things from the script, from discussions, then goes and does his themes.” Massimo gazed off as he said this, watching condensation form in one particular depression in the ceiling, which the waiter had already walked over to poke dry with a mop once that evening. Renga too was feigning an experienced carelessness, which worked well when he was selling his cock and mouth, and seemed to be effective currency in the movie world as well. Being present as Ennio saw his score matched to film for the first time was swoon-material, as the linen-draped manipulator across from him knew. The story was almost definitely a lie, or something Massimo had stolen at a party.

“I’ve heard that, yes. So when can I meet Mirazappa?”

“You meet him after you give me the music. I’ll pay for half the recording and the musicians. We’ll call it a little gamble. Fifteen percent if Mirazappa likes it, and you give me a few free nights if he doesn’t. He won’t want to see you if he doesn’t like the music. And he really prefers working with Italians. Didn’t want to cast any Americans or Brits, but he did because he had to. You he doesn’t have to use. So we have to make him want you. Got an Italian name for the credits?”

“Reinaldo Pazone.”

“You serious?”

“No,” said Renga, too happy to defend his carefully-arrived-at pseudonym. He gave Massimo his real address, something he rarely did with a client, and left the bar after promising to meet back there the next day—unless Massimo wanted him for another hour that night?

“I’m fifty-two,” Massimo said. “I’d just fall asleep.”

Massimo watched the departing boy, who’d reached for his wallet when the bill came with something approaching genuine grace. He walked that way as well, with the elegance of the unwatched. Renga didn’t act like a whore. At least not like one who charged his extremely reasonable rates.

The need to shower overtook Renga as soon as he turned away from Massimo and headed up the stone steps into the afternoon. Under his light, stained shirt and cotton pants, Renga’s flesh felt tacky, and the heat would soon turn this into viscous stickiness. It was an unpleasant, tactile part of a job he mostly enjoyed.

The apartment he occupied, on Via Prospera Santacroce, was in cruel proximity to Titania a Roma, the studio he was supposed to be recording in by now—passing out charts of themes and careful indications, cueing violinists and guitarists, getting ready to scream at anyone who bucked his instructions. Aside from his keyboards, the flat was a couch, a mattress, two heaps of clothes, and thirty-seven unwashed teacups. There was a slight form on the mattress, a normal-sized head on the pillow and a narrow comma under the sheet: Enzo, who had a key and often napped here after a night with a client. Renga didn’t wake him, heading straight to the shower to wash Massimo’s skin and fluids away.

He’d wake Enzo up by testing a theme that had occurred to him a few weeks ago, one that might fit Mirazappa’s film. A massively heavy Fender Rhodes organ and a Roland Piano occupied the never-cooked-in kitchen, which was above the building’s boiler room and the only place in the apartment where he could make sufficient noise to properly feel out his ideas. He’d even made some baffling walls out of egg cartons and Styrofoam, shutting the keyboards into a soft room-within-a-room that was tropically hot on summer days like this.

Renga enclosed himself and took his place at the bench. He turned the Rhodes on, pressing the keys as the tubes warmed up. Enzo moaned from the other room, probably in pain from another night of feeding his body to sadists. Enzo only made sounds when he turned over in his sleep, which meant that he was facedown now. On his back, a river-map of junior lash-marks intercrossed with a few raised maroon scars that had been very expensive indeed for the man who had put them there.

The name ‘Enzo’ was arbitrary, a career pseudonym that had overtaken his birth name, ‘Magnus’. A Swedish–Turkish mix, he was used to discussing his racial origins in the terms of a dog’s pedigree, leaning toward purity and legacy for some clients, muddying his blood for others, even telling one client, a Catalan, that he was Renga’s half-brother. This was the one who had left the marks.

Enzo had looked young that night, extremely young. All sorts of plays on fascist dominance had been acted out on the flesh that coated his bones like frost on grass. Many of his clients came straight from the old guard; Mussolini’s closeted friends, former Futurists and politicians who had eventually washed up in the business and film worlds of Rome, either making regulations or doing their best to break them. The role Enzo had come up with, literal whipping boy to a fallen elite and its acolytes, justified the emaciated body he’d created long before he took on his name and career.

Renga wouldn’t have been able to name Enzo’s disorder even if he’d recognized it as sickness. The skinniness looked like a business strategy to his fellow hustlers, a committed shaping of his most essential resource to provide an experience that was unique in the city, and therefore highly valued. He could sew, too, and had effectively modified a number of formal jackets and surplus army garments into a variously-sized Nazi and Blackshirt collection. He kept these in a dedicated wardrobe that stood locked in his own apartment, while his own costumes—rags, licked with blood in distressing areas—were stuffed into a suitcase under the living room couch. When Renga and Enzo went out together with clients, something they did often with new ones, to create a certain level of security, Enzo ate off Renga’s plate. A few cherry tomatoes at the end of the meal usually sustained his friend and trainer.

Clients, including the Catalan, liked talking about general topics over meals, perhaps trying to make it seem as though they were taking out some foreign junior partners or courting actors for a production. Enzo had a different character at the table, wise, witty, presumably the opposite of the cowering pant-pisser he played in the client’s room. More educated than Renga, as he was constantly reminding his colleague, he called this the geisha part of the job.

“Most physical beauty is an accident, but maintaining it is as hard as keeping two cars in perpetual collision,” he said, talking to Renga at their dinner with the Catalan. Another dark room, this one oddly empty, as though the Catalan had paid for several tables to be kept clear around them.

“That sounds wise and stupid at the same time,” Renga answered, deferring his conversational place to the third man at the table. Their tall North African waiter, idle since they’d been served their last bottle, had started to circle the edges of the room. He was using a long spoon to snuff every second candle, drawing the walls closer in.