Unsent Letters #32

The Bohème

Photo by John Jennings on Unsplash, rendered black & white by me

Dear H.,

A long time ago, Paolo Corsani, a decent man in his late sixties who had lost almost everything due to a concatenation of negative circumstances that descended upon his life with the fury of a katabatic wind (a story that would make this letter far too long to recount), pulled a black Montblanc from the breast pocket of his jacket to sign a contractual agreement that would allow a financial investor to inject a considerable amount of capital into his company, thereby diluting his own stake to nearly nothing. Founded by Paolo’s great-great-grandfather four generations prior and solely owned by his family ever since, the company was an award-winning Italian niche design furniture maker, whose most iconic pieces had been exhibited at the MoMA, as well as other equally prestigious venues, multiple times.

I had met Paolo when his company was already on the edge of the precipice, and he came, hat in hand, to the firm I was working at to ask for money and strategic advice. We couldn’t provide the former, but in the end reluctantly agreed to give the latter a shot, with the understanding that, should we conceive a promising turnaround plan, we would help him find an investor to buy into it and provide the funds. I won’t go into why the company was in distress here; it would be too complex and frankly it’s not that important. Suffice it to say that we got to work for months on end, around the clock, with Paolo and his people, to craft a new future for his company. A new future that would rise, phoenix-like, from its own ashes after the inevitable pain of redundancies and plant closures, and blood, sweat, and tears.

Paolo was tall and chubby, with wavy black hair swept back, small round metal-rimmed glasses, and a propensity for perspiration that may have stemmed from a certain self-consciousness, a sense of inadequacy immediately perceivable upon meeting him. He was delicate and gentle, probably not what it takes to run a globally renowned company. An architect by education and a lover of beauty in its most unlikely forms, he would shyly ask for permission to speak whenever he had something to say, as if preoccupied to disturb. And when he spoke, he had to be seated with a sheet of white paper in front of him, as his words were always accompanied by sketches and doodles and beautiful little drawings. I wish I had kept all those pieces of paper, but I have never, in my entire life, realized the importance of things at the precise moment they were happening. It’s something I’ve always processed afterward, sometimes years later, when they were irremediably gone. You know that, we talked about it at length -- you were one of those things.

I had never heard him curse or talk behind someone’s back. I had never seen him lose his temper. Toward the end of things, when he had already been forced to sell almost all of his personal property, he told me that his most remarkable failure in life wasn’t losing control of his family’s business, but having to let all those people go, many of whom he had known for decades. Paolo was a good person. I lost count of how many long nights we spent around his dining room table, working on his company’s rescue plan. Long nights that would have been shorter, had he not had the habit of digressing to talk about his passions, his interests, what made him feel good, jumping from one subject to the other, and in so doing establishing connections invisible to most, with the naturalness typical of a fascinating mind. I enjoyed being in his company, and hearing his beautiful rants. A passage from a novel that I read a while back reminded me of this trait of his: the hallmark of the modern mind is that it loves to wander from its subject.¹

One night, while in the middle of one of his digressions, he reached into a drawer and pulled out some pictures of his house in Tangier, Morocco. I hope I can keep this one, he said. This place is so dear to me; my dad bought it after the war and I spent all my summers there as a kid. When he passed, I inherited it, redecorated it, and made it my place of return, a refuge for my soul. If things turn out well, I’ll invite you there, or give you the keys so you can go whenever you want. It’s really a magical place, he concluded, handing me the photos. I didn’t know what to say, besides being touched by his generosity and quietly thanking him, my eyes fixed on the photos I held in my hands. The beauty of the house was enthralling. Whitewashed walls and checkerboard-tiled floors lent it an air of timelessness. Large windows carved into stone opened onto an immense expanse of blue sea, while white-painted wooden doors revealed glimpses of books, paintings, Moroccan fabrics, and antique furniture, all blending in delicate harmony. But things didn’t turn out well, and Paolo had to sell the Tangier house too.

I remember that it was a warm and cloudless spring afternoon, when we all gathered to close the deal with the financial investor. They didn’t want Paolo or any of his loyal first-line managers to remain involved with the business. We are turning the page to a new era for this iconic brand, they declared in a press release, and recruited new management. The company is still there, even though it has changed hands three more times since that afternoon. Supposedly, it’s in good health and profitable, but it’s always hard to know for sure when a company isn’t publicly listed. What I do know is that its products are not even a faint shadow of those from the Corsani era: they look cheap and just all-around bad. Pieces I’d never buy myself.

When Paolo finished signing the many pages of the contract, to lighten the mood a bit, I said Nice Montblanc. He passed it between his fingers, admiring the shiny black lacquer, then handed it to me. Keep it, it's yours, he said with a half-smile. A memento of this sad day for me, but happy for you, since you and your team worked hard and well, and you deserve every penny of the fee you'll earn for organizing this deal. Then he leaned in and said quietly, I hope you'll use it to write beautiful things, or at least ones less ugly than this contract. I wonder what happened to Paolo Corsani, I’d always think whenever I’d open the first drawer of my office desk and see his Montblanc. For some remote reason that I can’t recall, I had decided to keep it there after that day and never use it.

Time went by, and I received the news -- I forget from whom -- that Paolo had passed away a couple of years after he closed that deal, something I hadn’t known, as I hadn’t heard from or about him since. And five years ago, after two decades, I left the firm. Last week, I received a call from their office manager, who said that they had only just realized that, when I left, I hadn’t taken the contents of my desk drawers, which they had stored in a box somewhere, waiting for me to get in touch and claim them. Would you like us to have it delivered to your place, they kindly offered. When I opened the box, the first thing I saw was Paolo’s Montblanc. It was all opaque and smudged, having sat in that drawer for years, in less-than-ideal conditions, next to who knows what else.

Is there any way to get this cleaned, I asked the lady at the Montblanc store in Via Vercelli. I’m afraid there isn’t, she replied. Try with some warm water and a microfiber cloth, and see if anything comes off, but please don’t use any detergent or polish or what have you. Those things ruin the lacquer. By the way, she continued, that’s a nice model. The Bohème, it’s called, and we don’t make it anymore.

I decided to hold on to the Montblanc as it is, but I wondered why the office manager at my old firm had called me only last week, after all these years, to tell me my belongings were still with them -- and why, just the other day, I received a large package in the mail with no sender address, containing a photographic book titled Houses of Tangier. I recognized the first house in the book immediately: its photos were the same ones Paolo had shown me that night so many years ago. In one of them, there’s a close-up of the top of an old coffee table, placed between two gorgeous white sofas in a sitting room, where a Bohème Montblanc, identical to mine, lay.

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"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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1. “The Secret History”, by Donna Tartt.