Luca Bellino

LOS ANGELES, 1921

“Avemariapienadigraziailsignoreècontetuseibenedettafraledonne...”. 

Wooden chairs croak and stretch in a circle. Young women cloaked in black chew a single prayer to infinity.

In this piece of yellow soil, Sabatino Rodia advances west into the sunset, a bag on his shoulder and Irpinia in his pocket. At twenty years old he bears the wrinkles of the hunger of the ocean, the cracks of thirty days at sea and the calluses of thirty days on land. He advances listening to the sounds of home, a lullaby of the Madonna that expresses the first smile of the new world.

The American dream is blessed by the mother of Christ in this nascent city, a circus without a big top. It’s called Watts, there’s a track, a thousand cows, four houses and a hundred Italian women praying the rosary. Sabatino advances with his eyes closed and looks for his aunt among the black figures, looks for her eyes framed in the dark veils of Irpinia, in this colony of missionaries that is not yet Los Angeles.

At the end of the prayer, he embraces his aunt who moves away, afraid of this resurgence of the past, of this man who was a child that greeted her at the port of Naples. A missing hug is the first sign of this land that welcomes you with closed arms.

In the evening at dinner, two words and a half empty plate: “My mother. My mother wrote to you.”

He waits for the response from Uncle Augusto, red with wine and command, master of this shack and of his future. “Your mother asks me to make you work, and what can you do?”

“Everything,” Sabatino laughs at himself. Uncle Augusto spits out a grape.

The junk shop uncle, skin as dark as night, voice wiped dry by the sand that rushes into his mouth mixed with Mexican tobacco. He buys and sells objects, lives off the desperation of others, whether it be a linen sheet, a grandfather clock, or a gold tooth from old Italian grandmothers. Sabatino starts working for him. He goes around the blocks of Watts, but they are too poor to throw anything of value away. He goes all the way into the city, into the oil districts, or he expects them to decommission Hollywood sets to raid from the disused scenography. He walks for hours, with a wooden cart, four wheels more square than circular, and a basket filled with things, stuff and junk. Sabatino collects caps, broken dishes, frames, chandeliers, in piles and without logic. He barely has time to cross the threshold before he is assaulted by Uncle Augusto’s scolding: “I want valuables, not this junk, this is munnezza! Idiot!” Offenses repaid with a half empty plate every night, and a room that contains a bed, a tired body and a thousand rejected objects, piled up in bags and boxes, divided and sorted by material, size and quality.

The cinema gives Sabatino his first gift of the new world: an almost new gramophone, polished wood and a polished copper cylinder, leftover from the end of a film shooting, or just the distraction of a lazy wardrobe department. Sabatino had never seen one, only illustrations and stolen stories on the ship. He hides it at the bottom of the cart, covers it with all the things he has already collected and goes back to eating that half plate of pasta that his uncle accuses him of stealing from him, from his poverty and from his America.

He empties the cart as he does every night and, in the morning, gets back on the road, with the gramophone at the bottom of the case, well hidden from his uncle’s view. He stops halfway between Watts and Los Angeles, yellow soil and a tree that is an invitation to rest. He pulls out the object that is not junk, fumbles uncertainly, worried about breaking it. Then a sound, a razor-sharp metallic scream.

Frightened, he backs away. He laughs at his fear and instinctively turns the crank that sticks out from the wooden box. A voice, music, and words, and it continues to turn, the voice goes faster, overlapping itself. To Sabatino it sounds like women reciting the rosary multiplied a thousand times. He slows down the swirl of the hand and crank, and a single voice radiates in the yellow soil of the west: the spinning disk reads El trovador, Antonio Garcia Gutierrez, Giuseppe Verdi. Watts’s square, an empty space dividing the wooden houses of the Italians. Uncle Augusto’s store, the pharmacy belonging to Arnaldo the nolano, Gianni from Macerata who sells fruit and flour, and then Besozzi, who sells hats, just as the square slopes down into an avenue of dwarf palms. Sabatino crosses that space of emptiness every day with his cart that resounds with knick-knacks, cacophonous music that wakes those who sleep, and annoys those who chit-chat. He arrives in front of Uncle Augusto’s store and unloads everything, under the nervous eye of the square. Uncle Augusto does nothing but feel ashamed of his nephew who looks like a clown, with that skin cracked by the sun, by the comings and goings between the city and the store.

“Go, go to Besozzi’s and get yourself a hat. A lightweight hat. Otherwise, you’ll roast.” He throws a banknote among the caps and stones and Sabatino leaves. The display case frames sixteen hats arranged in four rows, a mirror on the wall divides it from the door, which opens onto a wooden counter: flat caps, sombreros, panamas, and straw hats, ordered by size and color. Sabatino, the customer, doesn’t know how to be a customer and mutters a few incomprehensible words. The Great Besozzi stretches his head beyond the door and points at the mirror. The master of hats speaks with a body as massive as the mountains beyond the plain. Sabatino leaves, flat cap on his head, a straw hat in his hand. He takes off the flat cap and puts on the straw hat, yellow straw and black ribbon: he convinces himself that it is perfect, it will be his hat, and Uncle Augusto will be proud of such an elegant nephew. Then a girl appears in the mirror behind him and laughs, laughs with enthusiasm, laughs at him. Sabatino turns around and slams the straw hat on the ground, yellow straw hat on yellow soil: “What is it? What do you want from me?” Sabatino doesn’t know how to be a customer and has a hard time being a man.

The girl fakes a serious face, very serious: “Beautiful choice. Good taste. Refined and simple.” She doesn’t hold back any longer and burst out laughing. “Eleonora! Come inside! What are you doing? Be quiet,” thunders the Great Besozzi.

Sabatino leaves, frightened by the scream and by the woman, head down and straw hat on the ground.

He takes refuge in the room of a thousand objects, empties the bags, scatters everything on the floor, breaks the already small pieces of his collection into a thousand pieces. Then he takes the cart, empties it and at the bottom he sees the gramophone. He can’t resist and takes it out. He hides in the sandy yard and turns the crank. The entire Watts is flooded with Trovador starting with his uncle, who is already in bed, thinking about his trade. “What is that? How is it even possible that the one good thing you found… you keep it to yourself?” This is the excuse that Uncle Augusto has been waiting for to send him out of the house, he who used to steal bread and work, he who starves his America.

Sabatino is alone in the Watts’ night. He, the cart, a thousand bags of thing, and his gramophone.

He sleeps in the street listening to El Trovador, he begins to hum, he slowly learns the words by heart: “Miserere d’un’alma già vicina alla partenza che non ha ritorno; Miserere di lei. Bontà divina, preda non sia dell’infernal soggiorno.” Verdi becomes his therapy, his salvation. Without a home, job, family, or language to speak.  

“What can you do? Everything,” repeats the hunger that demands to be heard. He has learned to look for objects and nothing else. He needs a job and a half-full plate. Sabatino goes by the construction sites that color the city. At the sixth attempt he is greeted by Fernando, unkempt beard, eyes hidden by eyebrows that look like clouds, black like a the black of a prayer veil.

“¿Quies eres?” “Sabato, my name is Sabato. From Italy.” Fernando sneers, “Saturday… Saturday!”

Sabatino becomes Saturday. Days and days of raising and painting walls, he is good like few before him, even better than all the Mexicans born in the Los Angeles construction sites.

Humming, he builds a house, on a piece of land repaid by work, a room for himself and one for his objects, the gramophone, and a single record, always the same one.

Fernando takes him to dance halls, to the cinema, to see women and to listen to music that is not Verdi. But Saturday always thinks of Eleonora, of the straw hat he never bought, in the Besozzi’s store on the square in Watts. She’s grown up now, he tells himself, he has a house, a job and experience.

He summons up courage and knocks on the door of the Besozzi house. “I would like to, I would like to… take your daughter… to the movie theater.” Mrs. Besozzi, subtle as a ship’s mast, nods her face and says no with her mouth. There is a father to listen to, another master on Saturday’s road.

The Besozzi’s store closes at dusk, then screams all night, the screams of a man denying, of a woman praying. Dawn brings silence. In the morning the mast of a Venetian woman says yes, but only once, and then never again, but the face nods with conviction.

Fernando spends the day giving advice, “Saturday… you must understand that women are like scarecrows. They are helpless, but they are scary.”

This is the time of Rudolph Valentino, an Italian from Puglia, a distorted mirror of the emigrant’s anguish, a pitiless comparison of the failure of every Italian.

“Valentino is handsome and strong, the ideal man that we should become—Fernando tells Saturday.—Take her to see Valentino, she will fall in love with him, and with you.”

Saturday remains thoughtful, imagining himself handsome and strong, the right man. Rudolph Valentino is his age, he was born a hundred kilometers from his native Irpinia, he is the man he could have been, and until now has not been.

In the room of objects, Saturday finds a railway man’s jacket, he makes a tie out of a piece of cloth, a belt out of a rope, and he is as handsome as he would ever have imagined. Eleonora looks simple and careless, and no longer laughs at this boy who has changed his name. Eleonora enters the cinema for the first time, covers her eyes in fear, wipes her tears with her linen handkerchief. She believes she is finally seeing the world. And she falls in love with Rudolph Valentino, the sensual tango dancer.

On his return Saturday is quiet. Eleonora is overflowing with words. “He is wonderful, he’s the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen. I didn’t think it was possible for such beauty to be embodied in an Italian!” Saturday keeps quiet in humiliation. Then he lightens up: “I also dance like Valentino, and I’m already in Watts’ square. I also dance the tango.” Eleonora laughs, and there is no grater provocation for the humiliated man than the laugher of a woman. He hugs her tightly, clumsy, as only a ridiculed man can be. The dizziness of turns, then the tumble. Saturday falls on top of Eleonora in the dust of the square. The door of the Besozzi house opens instantly. “Better for you to run away overseas… Bastard of an Italian! My daughter, you wanted my daughter like that!”

Eleonora runs in tears to embrace her father. Saturday remains on the ground, in the center of the square, without even the tears of a Miserere.

Fernando is optimistic: “Everything will work out. Don’t be in such a rush. Just make her understand thar your tango is not just a dance, but life itself.” The wisdom of a Mexican construction worker.

Saturday locks himself in the room of objects, dividing them into sections: here are the stoppers, there the ceramics, the iron in one corner. He looks at the gramophone, but he no longer needs Verdi.

He goes back to the cinema every evening and memorizes Rudolph’s dance: the smoky dance hall, Valentino approaching his antagonist, the close-up with the cigarette falling from his barred mouth, and then the fist, the antagonist slams it to the ground, the tango starts, Rudolph and his woman become one body. The applause of the dance hall. The bow. And the kiss. Saturday is now convinced: he can face the Great Besozzi and beat him and win Eleonora back. Like Rudolph Valentino.

He crosses the square, enters the store: he goes to apologize or beg forgiveness, to look into his eyes and convince him of his love. Instead, he stays quiet and trembles. Eleonora peers out from the back and starts at him. “Go away,” the Great Besozzi does not leave time to say anything, to anyone.  Saturday doesn’t know how to be a man.

Saturday empties the room of the objects, loads them on the cart and takes them to the square, in the center, in front of the hatter. He takes the gramophone and turns the crank. “All’erta, all’erta!... nel trovator, che dai Giardini move notturno il canto, d’un rivale a diritto ei teme.” This is how Il trovatore starts, “Gelosia le fiere serpi avventa in petto!” This is how Saturday feels when he begins to dig the foundations of the Watts Towers. He digs and digs, grinds lime and sweat.

A cylinder rises in clusters. He looks at the corks in the cart’s basket. Green caps from beers drunk with Fernando or picked up outside a dance hall. He surrounds the base of the cylinder with these green circles. Another case in the basket, decorated tiles, blue and red, he mixes them with the cylinder, slowly he climbs the first tower, but Eleonora does not look out the window. Another pour of lime, of stones, caps, and tiles. And then a bridge to join them, and another tower, higher and higher. Saturday doesn’t stop and Eleonora doesn’t look at him. Verdi raises his notes to the sky, in this square of yellow sand that is slowly colored by the towers of Babel, by arches, tunnels and spires, by a thousand colors, by a thousand materials.

Then one day, a black car opens its door in front of the Besozzi’s store.

A cowboy hat emerges, then a bearded and rotund man. The ceremonious hatter bows as he passes. Saturday observes from the top of a staircase, now at the tenth meter of the highest tower. A few hours pass and Eleonora leaves, a few steps away, the door slams in the faces of the square and the Italians, Saturday disappears in the dust kicked upby the wind and the car that screeches and drives away with Eleonora inside. Leaving Watts.

Saturday comes down the ladder, stops the gramophone, and sits down. For a minute he stares at Besozzi’s store. “Nothing has changed,” he tells himself. He climbs back up the ladder and continues to build his towers.

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LOS ANGELES, 1944

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Twenty years of towers: jute doormats pressed into the concrete, steel pipes, the bottoms of bottles used to decorate the arches, rubble, shells, and cans of Canada Dry stuck on the walls like candied fruit. What remains of a wasted world, and of the time of a man who wanted to project his love into the eyes of the others? Seven interconnected structures, two of them 30 meters high, with no logic, no apparent consistency.

They start to call them the Watts Towers, the miniature model of everything, by an unknown author, neither artist, nor architect, nor engineer. An Italian. One of the many who lived here in the ‘20s, in this city that is now a neighborhood of Los Angeles, a black neighborhood, the blackest of all.

In 1944 there is war overseas. The neighborhood counts the dead and Great Besozzi sells cockades harnessed in mourning. The Italian homes of Watts pray for their dead children, and Eleonora has a husband who will never return from Italy. She is the one who returns to Watts, to sell hats in the neighborhood that used to be Italian. Saturday is still there, building towers, not even the war had stopped him.

Eleonora greets him dressed in black when Saturday enters the hat store with conviction. “A straw hat,” and nothing more. Eleonora hands him the hat without laughing, Saturday doesn’t even try it on, and walks away beyond the door, beyond the square, beyond Watts.

Saturday leaves, with the straw hat on his head.

The towers remain there so that Eleonora can look at them.

The war ends and Los Angeles explodes with vitality and wealth. The Watts towers are threatened by progress and the bitumen that is to cover the square. Demolition, the watchword of the new, victorious America. There is no one who remembers the rosary recited in the square, Rudolph Valentino is the detritus of silent cinema, the new talking heroes who promise each other love are Vivien Leigh and Clark Gable.

Demolition, but for Eleonora the towers are the only thing left on her fragmented world, of a clumsy tango, of a love never born. She sets out to protect them: citizens’ committees, collection of signatures, picket lines in front of the City Hall. She proposes a fence and a plaque, and the authorities are convinced. Surrounded by asphalt and gangs of black children enraged with this America that does not keep its promise, as twenty years ago, when Sabatino arrived with Irpinia in his pocket, and a language to learn quickly.

Whoever arrives in Watts stops in front of the towers. Eleonora sees the tourists from the hat store and approaches. “A man wanted to declare his love, but he didn’t know how to do it. So, he built the towers.” She turns her back on these people who think she’s crazy and walks to the store.

Then she turns around one last moment, “It’s all thanks to Rudolph Valentino”. 

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USA- California – Los Angeles

ITALIA – Campania – Irpinia