Unsent Letters #20

A tale of film, sound, and time

Photo by Jeremy Yap on Unsplash, rendered black & white by me

Dear V.,

Mine is a strange relationship with cinema. I haven’t gone to the movies in years, and have no idea what’s showing. I certainly don’t know what the films of the moment are. Part of my distancing from cinema has to do with a certain contempt for Hollywood films, which I developed a while ago and has intensified over the years. I will spare you the details; they’re not that important. There are exceptions, of course. But that’s how it went.

And yet, this is not why I kept my eyes closed for the entire length of the film when I caved in and went to the movies with you, after much insistence. It’s not that I wanted to sleep and accelerate the passage of time, either. Although there were grounds for that. 

As a kid, I spent my summers in a little coastal town in Puglia. The drive there was excruciatingly long, with multiple stops along the way, but the place was so beautiful that we’d forget about the exhausting journey as soon as we'd set foot on its soil. Our house had once belonged to a gentleman named Riccardo Tomei, a close friend of my great-grandfather's. The story goes -- or at least that’s what I’ve always been told -- that Mr. Tomei became seriously ill at a relatively young age, and when it was determined that he had little time left, and no direct heirs, he named my great-grandfather as the sole beneficiary in his will. 

And so my great-grandfather inherited the house: a typical historic building located in the town's old center, with exposed brick walls and blue shutters, passed down over time to each subsequent generation. In its austerity, the house felt like a safe refuge that had always belonged to our family. Countless photos depicting beach scenes and children’s birthdays and party poses were framed and hung on walls or stood on furniture. There was an aura of positivity to the place, reinforced by a Latin inscription engraved in the marble above its front door that read ‘Hic secura quies, hic pax, hic gaudia vera’ (Here is secure rest, here is peace, here is true joy). Across the street, a small hotel named Pensione Doria, open from May to October, had the same guests every year. Its owner was an old widow, Mrs. Rosa Gallo, who lived on the premises, always had a smile on her face, and gave us children chocolates and candy. 

Well before I was born, they built an outdoor cinema next to the house. It was typical of small seaside vacation towns to have outdoor cinemas, back then. This one was named Cinema Sirena, and it was practically attached to our house. In fact, it was so close that I could easily reach its balcony by climbing out of my room’s window. I decided that waiting until the lights went out to jump in from my window, not paying the ticket, and getting to see films that often weren’t for kids, was transgressive enough for eight-years-old me to make it a recurring experience. Until, one night, I got caught. 

Understandably, my folks weren’t pleased. Not only was I forbidden to leave the house for two weeks, but I was also banned from going to the cinema for the entire summer, even if I entered through the main entrance and bought a regular ticket. In that two-week reclusion, I spent the evenings in my room lying on the bed, the window wide open, a gentle summer breeze caressing my face, and the sound of the cicadas filling the air. Then, the showing started at Cinema Sirena. But instead of getting bummed for not being there in front of the screen, I surprisingly enjoyed hearing the sound of it. Some of the films I knew by heart, so it was easy for me to imagine the scenes while hearing the sound. Gradually, though, they started showing new films. And my experience did not change: I could imagine scenes that I had never seen, and alter them based on my mood or feelings at that moment, much like when reading books. But unlike books, where authors describe the scenes, here I was left to paint them in my head. 

Cinema Sirena showed only vintage Italian films. There’s something enchanting in black and white Italian films from the late fifties or early sixties, with imperfect sound and voices resembling those heard from the receiver of a rotary phone. These weren’t films about the triumph of good over evil, about villains getting chased, caught, and punished in the midst of an ocean of blood, violence, and destruction. For the most part, they were about relationships, dreams, and the human condition. I grew accustomed to the sound of films by Federico Fellini, Mario Monicelli, or Dino Risi, to the soothing voices of Marcello Mastroianni, Sofia Loren, or Vittorio Gassman. I’d turn off the light, open the window, lie on the bed, close my eyes, and let my imagination loose. As the sound of the film prevailed over the cicadas, I slowly slid into another world, one where I myself dictated the scenography of spoken emotions, where cinema turned into a strictly personal sonic experience. 

Every summer after that one, even as I grew older and faced no bans or prohibitions, I continued to experience cinema through its sound, by choice. I still remember by heart that passage from Fellini’s 8 ½, where Marcello Mastroianni, in a dialogue with Claudia Cardinale, says ‘Would you be capable of leaving everything behind and starting your life over from scratch? Of choosing one thing, one thing only, and being faithful to it, making it the reason for your life, something that encompasses everything and becomes everything precisely because your faithfulness makes it infinite. Would you be capable of that?’. To which Claudia responds, ‘And you, would you be capable of it?’. And he goes, ‘No, no; this guy can't. This guy wants to take everything, grab everything, he can't give up anything; he changes his path every day because he's afraid of losing the right one, and he's dying, as if he's bleeding out.’ 

Times got rough, and eventually my folks decided to sell the summer house. I was in college, in my early twenties. They sold it to a mysterious man who acted through an intermediary. The intermediary had to mention that he was buying on behalf of someone else, but never revealed the man’s name, as the transaction was completed by a company they kept calling ‘the special purpose vehicle’. Funds cleared, property was transferred, and everyone went their own ways. I can’t begin to convey how I felt about it. The best of my childhood and teenage life vanished with that event, forever. Among other things, that house influenced my relationship with cinema so profoundly that I resolved to stop going to the movies, from that day on.

But when you somehow managed to drag me out to go watch that film, last week, this whole story suddenly replayed in front of my eyes. And I was transported back to those summer nights, in the seventies, with the calm and reassuring voice of Marcello Mastroianni in the air. So the other day, on a whim, I took the car and drove all the way down to our old summer town, where I hadn’t been in thirty years. Something urged me to revisit those places, to see what they would do to me. 

Exiting the highway, the scent of jasmine was as intense as it had been back then, and as I was approaching the seashore, I felt a strange light-headedness. I got to center town late at night, my footsteps echoing on the cobblestone streets. Pensione Doria was still there, and open for business. Across the street, our old house stood as towering as ever, its blue shutters all closed. Next to it was Cinema Sirena, last showing already over, the poster of Il Sorpasso displayed beside the entrance. So they continued with old Italian films, I thought. Everything looked exactly like I last saw it three decades ago.

Behind the check-in counter at Pensione Doria, Mrs. Gallo stood wearing a floral dress and her usual smiling face. It took you a while, she said as I stepped closer. Thirty years, I heard myself responding. I was immediately captivated by the unusually soft coil mattress and the pale green wallpaper in room seventeen. Why was I there? I thought noncommittally as I fell into a deep sleep. I woke in the middle of the night hearing Vittorio Gassman’s voice in Il Sorpasso. ​​’Who cares about sadness. You know what the best age is? I'll tell you: it's the age you are, day by day,’ he said, in that famous car ride scene. I instinctively went to the window that I had opened before crashing on the bed, and saw the roofless top of Cinema Sirena illuminated by the light of the film they were showing inside. Weird, I thought: when I got here they were closed. Then, I went to the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. Me at age eight was looking back, from the other side. This is all a dream, I said out loud, heading back to bed. 

The next morning, I woke on a much firmer mattress, in a room that had no pale green wallpaper. Instead, it had plain white walls and simple hotel furniture. While I hurried downstairs, I noticed two modern elevators and burgundy carpeting throughout. A man greeted me wearing a standard concierge uniform, with a name tag on the coat saying Franco. In the grip of intense confusion, I stepped outside and turned around to read the name of the place I had just spent the night at. The writing Hotel Splendido was mounted on top of a nondescript, modern building. Across the busy paved street, a McDonald’s Drive-In lay in place of Cinema Sirena, next to an all-glass building that looked like a department store. I was about to run as fast as I could toward my car, determined to get away from that place, when I saw Franco, the concierge, step out of the hotel front door and approach me with a white envelope. This is for you, he said.

I quickly opened the envelope with trembling hands. It contained a white sheet with something written in blue fountain pen ink: 

‘Would you be capable of leaving everything behind and starting your life over from scratch?’. 

---

"Unsent Letters" is a series released every other week. These are imaginary letters to fictitious or real individuals who may or may not have influenced my life, not always mirroring actual events.

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