A lake and a film set are both sites of trauma in today’s unforgettable Translation Tuesday showcase—a sensitive coming-of-age story by Italian author Michele Orti Manara in frequent contributor Brian Robert Moore’s effortless translation. An actress in a film set has been hospitalized; the narrator—a mere twelve-year old with zero acting experience—has been asked by her director-father to step into the role. Many unsuccessful takes later, the father makes the narrator revisit a distressing incident from her childhood—all in the name of coaxing the performance he needs.
What do people do when we’re not watching them?
We pretend so much in public that there’s no way to know what happens when we shut a door behind us and stay on our own with our things, our faults, our smells.
It applies to everyone, in any moment.
It applies to me, too, when after selling the last tickets for a screening I open the door to the storage room and go inside.
“Now what’s down there?” the late audience members must think while heading into the theater. A fleeting thought, because then the dark of the theater swallows them up, and the film starts.
*
When my sister and I are eleven and twelve years old—and feel the inevitable crazed desire to have the house to ourselves as much as possible—one afternoon, between a sip of fruit juice and a bite of a cookie, she asks our mother: “How come you don’t work?”
And our mother, who has in front of her three baking trays, a pot brimming with ragù and a continent of handmade pasta, says without turning around: “Because your underwear doesn’t wash itself, because the groceries don’t walk all the way here on their own legs, and because otherwise no one would have time to deal with these fucking lasagnas.”
It’s the first and last time a curse word slips out of her mouth in our presence. We take the hint and we stay good and quiet until they ring the doorbell two hours later—Dad has come home and, with him, three other men, directors like him or maybe producers, who all sit at the table and who, for us, are only first names, popping corks, cigarette ash in the folds of the tablecloth and anecdotes that, judging by my mother’s severe gaze, aren’t appropriate for two girls our age.
Years later we’ll recognize those men in magazines, on the television, aged and acclaimed as the best our country’s film industry has to offer to the world.
They ate elbow-to-elbow with my father dozens of times, sharing trays of fucking lasagna, maybe they even loved him. And yet none of them—not even the ones with whom my father generously shared the few crumbs of name recognition he managed to gather back then through hard work and passion—not one of them, when seeing the doors of success open before him, turned around to bring my father along with him.
Or maybe those doors were a little too low; maybe to go through them you had to bow your head, and he was the one who refused to do so, allergic as he was to compromises.
Hard to say, now.
And at this point, who even cares.
*
Eventually, just a few months after the episode with the lasagna, our mother gets sick.
I don’t know what the diagnosis was back then, but if it happened today I think it would be depression or a nervous breakdown. The fact is she doesn’t get out of bed anymore, she stops taking care of the house, and of us.
In that period our father is directing a film, convinced as always that this will be his lucky break, that the world will notice him and his talent. Giving up on it to look after his enfeebled wife and his two prepubescent daughters is not an option he takes into consideration (this is not a memory but a deduction that I can allow myself to make now, and about which I have zero doubt: there’s no one I can claim to have known deeper and with more infallible precision than my father).
In short, while our mother vegetates in her bed, for a couple of months my sister and I are on the set with him—or more precisely: for a couple of months we are entrusted to Silvana, an old costume designer who showers us with attention; and we, in return, grow fond of her as though she’s the grandmother we never had.
(After that period our mother will be reborn, even if it’s not clear to me how. What I said about my father didn’t apply to her: inscrutable and volatile, I never learned how to know her completely.)
In any case, the set: my sister is fascinated by Silvana’s work, she spends hours watching her sew and readjust clothes, and she listens to her explain everything about fabrics, the techniques, the tricks of the trade.
I, meanwhile, am not interested in the clothes; I’m interested in faces. The faces of the actors who listen to my father’s directions, who smile from a joke, and a few seconds later—action!—are terrified, crying, dying.
I try to practice doing the same in front of the mirror, happy, sad, curious, amused, afraid, and then everything all over again. But it’s not the same: I pretend, whereas they really change their state of mind, and what happens to their faces is merely a consequence of that.
More and more frequently I sneak into the makeup rooms, with the silent complicity of the makeup artists. And there I observe faces that grow pale, faces on which wounds sprout open, but most of all faces that, out of necessity for the script, age three or four times in a single day of shooting, from the actress’s sixty-year-old self to her successive incarnations: possessed, flayed, mummified.
After the first jump in age my father enters the makeup room. He doesn’t see me—or he’s not interested—and he simply looks at the actress reflected in the mirror, and says: “Perfect.”
“Should we do something for her hands too?” the makeup artist asks.
“No need,” he replies. “We’ll only frame her face and chest—it’s not worth it.”
The actress, as I’d already noticed earlier, has two beautiful hands: tapered fingers, with no blemish or irregularity, and, on her left ring finger, a ring with a red stone as big as a hazelnut (a ring that she owns, and which my father notices, considers perfect for the character and asks her to wear on set too).
During makeup she keeps her eyes closed, her head motionless and tilted back, but her hands never stop moving, her fingers playing an invisible instrument, drumming on the burgundy-colored fake leather of the chair’s armrest. Fingers that are the opposite of mine, which are so stubby, always dirty with something, their nails gnawed down to the quick.
I observe those fingers—so aristocratic—stay exactly the same while the face to which they belong crinkles little by little, a layer of makeup at a time.
While filming the séance scene my father changes his mind. He decides that closeups of the medium and of the other participants are no longer enough, in part because he wants the red eye of the ring to enter at least one frame, at all costs. He therefore asks the crew to come up with a way to film an overhead shot—and they grumble a series of curses, they do the best they can, and in the end they pull off an overhead shot in which the actresses hands are visible and then some, stretched out on the dark tablecloth. The average viewer, arriving at this point, still has in their eyes the ghostly face of the medium from a few frames earlier, and won’t notice her unaged hands.
I can’t think of anything that could better describe what my father was capable of when working than this episode: convincing two overweight grips to climb up on a ladder (one to film and the other to hold the other suspended by his belt) and pulling off a scene full of flaws and inconsistencies that no one will notice because they’re all too busy looking elsewhere. A magic trick with a busted top hat and a stuffed rabbit, and yet a magic trick that works.
When that day of shooting is over, I am once again in the room where the makeup artist is removing, one layer at a time, the various phases of possession from the actress’s face. First I had seen her age a little at a time, whereas now she gets younger, and I feel that this way of making a mockery of time encapsulates all the greatness of cinema. By extension, even my father seems younger when he’s on set.
It’s still seven years before the moment when my father will confront me with the choice between school and work, but at the end of that day I’ve already decided that I’ll follow in his footsteps when I’m older, that nothing interests me more than spending my life on set. Any task will do, I say to myself, so long as I can stay in contact with what I saw happen to that actress’s face.
I’d take back all of this only a few weeks later, but at no point in my life, not even as an adult, would I ever feel convinced of something with the same unshakable certainty.
*
One day, at the start of shooting, while he’s drinking a coffee that is in his words disgraceful, an assistant cautiously approaches my father.
“They want you on the phone,” the assistant says, twisting a lock of her hair.
On the phone is the mother of the little girl who was supposed to act in the scenes scheduled for that day, and who instead has been urgently hospitalized due to an attack of appendicitis. She’ll have it for at least two weeks, maybe three.
“Can you wait for her?” her mother asks.
“No we can’t wait, fuck no!” yells my father, who already feels hounded by accumulated delays, by the cost of the studio which is sending the film’s budget over the edge.
He slams down the phone and shuts himself in his dressing room without giving any additional instructions.
The crew and actors, without anything to do, spend the morning loitering around the set. The hanging costumes with no one in them, the rare latex film props which pop out of the cardboard boxes and are no longer scary.
Every now and then from my father’s dressing room arrives an expletive or the sound of something being kicked. And then, while they’re distributing the lunch baskets, my father reemerges, hyperactive, from his room.
“Eat quickly,” he says. “We lost the whole morning and we have to shoot the scenes with the girl by the end of the day.”
“So the girl is coming?” the assistant director asks.
“No,” my father replies, “she’s not coming. But we have another girl and we’ll use her. It’ll go great.”
When they told us that we’d go to work with him until my mother got better, things were made very clear: during some scenes, the scariest for girls our age, we wouldn’t be allowed on set. The incontestable decision over which scenes would be up to him.
“When I tell you to go out, follow Silvana, without any ifs or buts. I don’t have time, nor do I feel like repeating things to you a hundred times, understood?”
Understood, but now such precautions were apparently going to be sacrificed for the good of the film.
Silvana has me try on two nightgowns: the first is too long, the second is perfect. Then they put just a small bit of makeup on me, only a little light powder on my face and a little of the dark kind around my eyes. When the makeup artist has the third brush in her hand and I’m about to ask what it’s for, my father enters the room, takes my chin between his thumb and index finger, turns my head to the right and to the left. “That’ll due,” he says.
Then he takes me onto the set, with a hand between my shoulder blades that accompanies and at the same time pushes me—a gesture I know well, the one he always uses in moments when another father would give you his hand. He senses something, maybe realizes that he was too brusque earlier, that he didn’t even ask me if I felt like doing this.
“It’ll all go beautifully,” he says. “I just need you to do a couple of scenes—you’ll be great. Great.”
He never said that to me before, he’ll never say it to me again after.
The scene unfolds in a bedroom, which could be mine if I were an only child. Mauve bedsheets and a doll resting on the pillow, a desk with a few books and a framed photo on it, a closet, a chair with a dress hanging on its back, a kind of chest propped against the wall. The room has no ceiling, and only three walls. In the place of the fourth, there are a dozen people—assistant director, director of photography, technicians—dark silhouettes with eyes staring at me, silhouettes that whisper and expect something that I’m not sure I can give.
And then there’s Silvana, sitting in a corner on a foldable chair, with her hands lying slack in her lap and a stage light pulling her out of the shadows. I can see her face: she smiles, reassures me.
“Do you remember when we went to the lake, two summers ago?” my father asks me, he, too, a dark shadow in the group now.
“Yes.”
“And you remember how your sister lost her bracelet and started crying, and Dad jumped out of the boat to get it? And so you started to cry too, because you were afraid that Dad wouldn’t come back up again?”
“Yes.”
“Great. What we need today is for you, when I say so, to think about that again—for you to feel like that again. Do you think you can do that?”
There, that was the trick: reevoke the things that hurt you in the past. That’s why my faces in the mirror looked false and those of the actors looked real.
“I think so,” I say.
“Perfect. So, we have to shoot two scenes. At the beginning of the first you’ll be outside that door. You have to open it, as if you’re playing hide-and-seek. At this point you’re not scared yet, okay? Mostly you’re curious and excited about something that you think you’ll find on the other side of the door. You open it slowly, you walk in and look straight in front of you. All clear?”
“Yes.”
“After shooting that, we’ll stop for a second, we’ll change a couple of things, and when we start again you’ll think of that day at the lake. Let’s give it a try. Okay, everybody, let’s shoot this thing.”
They aren’t his hands, the ones that take me by the shoulders and lead me out the door; it’s not his voice that tells me, “Stay here until we tell you to go.”
And while I’m standing there, motionless, the shadows move, get into position, lower the lights. The room is now immersed in a bluish half-light, a simulated night which allow the eye to see what’s happening, while the hallway where I’m standing lights up with an orangish-yellow tint.
There’s a clap of the clapperboard, and then, “Action!” a voice shouts, then my father starts directing me as if I were a dog.
“Walk up to the door, like that, you’re curious, you want to know what’s behind it, slowly, like that, now open it a little bit at a time, perfect, start to enter but stop in the doorway, a little bit more, a little bit more, now take two steps forward, one, two, stop! Stop there! Cuuut! Excellent,” my father says. “It’s good for me, we’ll use that one.”
I search for his face but I have a spotlight pointed at my eyes. I have to content myself with the satisfaction I hear in his tone of voice.
Silvana mimes a silent applause with her hands, looking proud and almost moved. I feel good, I feel I’m in my place, more and more convinced that my destiny is in film. I think of my sister who must be playing seamstress in a dressing room while little Arianna is here, the center of attention—she’s an actress now, glowing, great and talented Arianna.
Then the next scene starts.
“Stay where you are,” my father says, while all around the silhouettes move, do things I can’t see, fill the room and, dragging the camera behind them, come to a halt two meters in front of me.
I can no longer see Silvana. I’m hot, the nightgown pinches at my back.
The camera moves closer, a dark, expressionless eye.
“Now stare right in front of you, and think of the lake, okay? Think only of that, then we’ll add what scares you in the film later, in editing.”
Clap, action.
And so I try to return to that afternoon, muggy like the air inside the studio, and the slimy smell of the lake, my father’s head, sunburnt where his hair is thinning, his head sinking into the water, I think of it and I stare into the camera…
“Cuuut,” my father shouts. “Arianna, you can’t look straight into the camera—if you do, the scene won’t work!”
I don’t think they’re shooting at this point, but if they had been, on the film there’d be me hiding my head against my shoulder—my trademark, my signature whenever someone criticizes me.
And my father, who knows me at least as well as I know him, comes out of the shadows, walks up to me and gets on his knees.
“Nina,” he says, and the diminutive is not by chance, “it’s my fault that I didn’t tell you before, my fault. Now, listen. Look straight at a point, a little to the left of the camera, and think of the lake, okay?”
“Okay,” I say, with the sensation that he’s more concerned about the scene coming out well than about my emotional well-being.
Then the ritual starts over again, everyone in their place, roll camera, and I repeat to myself in my head: a little to the left, the lake, a little to the left, the lake—but the more I repeat it the more I concentrate on the repetition and not on what I need to do, and when I realize this it’s already too late, because my father is already yelling.
“Cuuut! Arianna, you have to concentrate, damn it. Come back to earth—actually, come back to the lake, alright!”
And we start from the beginning, everything has to be done all over again. It’s like one of those nightmares in which things repeat themselves and you can only watch it all happen.
This time I get off to a good start. I focus on the imaginary point, I feel I can hear the rustling of the film in the camera, I feel I can see it, a strip of shiny road getting continuously shorter between me and the end of this day which is dilating into infinity, I return to the lake, I’m there, and in that moment my father yells: “The lake, Arianna, Dad is drowning and you’ll never see him again, Dad is abandoning you, he’s leaving you all alone!”
It works.
When he shouts cut, Silvana comes up to me and compliments me, and so do another two or three people in the crew. I thank them but I can’t free myself from this disquiet, from the thought that it wasn’t the memory of the lake that guided me: the horror that was in my face didn’t derive from the fear of never seeing my father emerge again, but from the fear of disappointing him once more, here and now, of forcing him to interrupt the scene again.
Instead, he’s satisfied—he says that the scene is good, and that I’ve finished. Everyone has finished, at least for today. They start to take things down while I’m still there, pinned to the ground, without anyone telling me what to do. The room, my bedroom in the film, in just a few seconds cease to exist; only the floor remains.
Back in the dressing room, I’m once again with Silvana, who slips off the nightgown from my head, and when it rubs against my nose I smell the odor of mothballs, of face powder and of sweat that isn’t mine.
I put my clothes back on, and when I leave the dressing room my sister is there, staring at me, jealously, without speaking.
I don’t speak either. I don’t tell her that I wasn’t the one who asked if I could act and that in any case it was horrible, that it made me feel like a rare and deformed animal inside a glass case.
I don’t say anything because it wouldn’t even manage to wipe that glowering look from her face, and because I’ve spent so much time envying her that at least we’re equal for once.
*
As soon as I finish high school, my father asks me: “What do you want to do, study or work?”
“Work,” I say, since I’ve already had enough of school for a while now.
“And what kind of work?”
“I don’t know, anything.”
“Don’t think that you’ll have much to choose from, if you stop going to school.”
“It’s all the same to me,” I say. “Working in a store would be fine, or as a cashier in a supermarket.”
“Well, the best horror film of all time is set in a supermarket,” he says, lighting a cigarette.
But he doesn’t make it long enough to concern himself with what I’ll do, because two months later, during an altercation with someone from the production company that financed what in his opinion will be without a doubt his masterpiece, my father drops dead from a heart attack.
At his funeral there reappear the people who ate at our table for years. They are interviewed, they praise my father’s talent, his vision; someone, in a sudden flash of sincerity, references his temper, too.
I hate them, each and every one of them.
But seeing them again makes me smell that scent once more, it reinjects me with that frenzied desire to work in film. A part of me believes it’s destiny, another doesn’t believe in destiny but that makes no difference, because she doesn’t believe in anything.
And so, while my sister ends up at the register in a supermarket, my mother uses my father’s fame—albeit a posthumous, niche fame—as a reference for me, and obtains a few job interviews.
In the end, only an old friend of my father turns a blind eye to my lack of skills and makes me an offer. He owns a few movie theaters in the city, and in one of them they’ve recently had an opening for a cashier.
The pay isn’t bad, ingratitude is a sin—I accept.
After a few months I discover that at the movie theater where I work, under the stairs that lead to the gallery seats, there’s a storage room. Floor-to-ceiling shelves, dust, mouse shit in the corners, a few cockroaches running to hide the second you turn on the light, and hundreds, maybe thousands of posters for films that were shown in that movie theater from when it first opened.
In the twenty years I’ve worked as a box office cashier, I’ve spent almost all of the dead time between one showtime and the next—and a good portion of my lunch breaks too—in that little room, rummaging through that immense archive lacking in any kind of criteria. I pull out a folded poster, open it, cough, read the names of the director and the actors. Some films I remember, others I’ve never even heard of. When my break is over and I go back to the box office, I leave dusty fingerprints on the tickets I sell, on the bills I handle.
And I just wait for the next screening to start—I wait to go back to the storage room and fish out another poster, and then another, with the stubborn conviction that sooner or later I’ll find in my hands one of my father’s films. Maybe even the very one in which I made my only appearance as an actress.
When I’m alone in that little room, when no one is looking at me, I think of Dad drowning, and I try to save him as best I can.
Translated from the Italian by Brian Robert Moore
Michele Orti Manara was born in Verona in 1979 and lives in Milan. He published the collection Il vizio di smettere (Racconti, 2018), the novel Consolazione (Rizzoli, 2022), and the story L’odio migliore (Tetra-, 2023). In January 2024, his second collection titled Cose da fare per farsi del male (Giulio Perrone Editore) was released, from which this story is taken.
Brian Robert Moore is a literary translator from New York. His translations from the Italian include A Silence Shared by Lalla Romano, Meeting in Positano by Goliarda Sapienza, and Verdigris and You, Bleeding Childhood by Michele Mari. He is the recipient of honors and awards such as an O. Henry Prize, a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship, and two PEN Translates Awards.
*****
Read more on the Asymptote blog: