Not Your Cinema Paradiso
Winner: The Conger Beasley Jr. Award for Nonfiction
Selected by Jason Brown
Elisabetta La Cava
The first time I heard Papá rage was the evening of the defecation incident.
“They shit in my theater,” he said, pouring whiskey on ice. Cine Anauco had a partially open ceiling, a view of the stars. The half-roof was a grand idea for a theater, but shows were often interrupted by rain, or flying debris. This time, someone had defecated into newspaper cones, tossed them over the outer wall into the cinema. Literally—shit rained over moviegoers.
He grabbed his worn-out deck of Neapolitan cards and began a game of solitaire. I recognized the details of his worry, the selfcontained misery. Word got around fast in our town, and the Anauco would soon shut down. No one would want to take that kind of chance.
In Venezuela, we’d become movie people. It’s how my family committed to dinner at eight. I was no longer a city girl, nor my father a vessel for music. We’d joined a repetitive motion that circled, like film returning to the same scene, bearing the same emotion. My father came home every evening after ticketing the seven p.m. showtime. The table would be set by then, my mother in the kitchen preparing dinner. There was always the sound of keys at the front door, the unlocking of the deadbolt.
I was eleven and entranced by my father—the way he engaged his hands, carefully placing his cards on the white tablecloth. Sitting
across from him, I sampled a share of his burden, imitating the shifting of dishes to one side. I shuffled my own deck, accompanied him in his time of release. The word solitaire did nothing to lessen my chatter.
“There’s a dance recital on Sunday,” I said. “At the Naval Base.” Ours was a kind of subtitled language, lines which didn’t perfectly match the movements of our scene. A few seconds later, Papá smiled. He was still at work. I was the string to pull him forward, away from the chores he’d left undone.
We’d stopped moving forward, were headed nowhere. By 1979 there were four operating cinemas managed by my family. There had been five, but the drive-in at Playa Quizandal had temporarily shut down. People had driven off with too many of the speakers, imported equipment which took months to replace.
“Animales,” Papá uttered the night the entire system shortcircuited.
It was a job he hated, the movies, which produced constant predicaments, difficulties inherent with the handling of instincts and the hassle of cash. My father was at work even when he wasn’t, attending to his people, counting heads inside his theaters, ensuring the proceeds at the ticket office matched the people inside.
“Ladrones,” he said whenever he caught someone stealing. On those evenings, he came home with his black hair in disarray and recounted every Bolívar.
During the day, Papá stacked coins and sorted bills at his large Formica desk. The lighting in his downtown office was offensivefluorescent, the safe in the back large enough to hold two men standing. It safeguarded his Bolívares, small bills which transformed into large ones at the ticket office.
No day of the week could be counted on as good, but my father hated Mondays especially, going into noticeable depression
every Sunday evening. I could tell because he said nothing. He knew he’d wake up to Lunes Popular—a day required by law, a day when movie tickets were half-priced, when bad things could and would happen.
There would be physical disputes over adulterers. A glitch in the film would incite a full revolt. Maybe the movie was missing thirty consecutive seconds of sound, spoiling a most important kissing scene. Then the whistling would start, produce more whistling, invoking fist fights.
“On my way,” Papá sometimes said during dinner. Things seemed to always happen after he got home. He’d become a sort of fireman, always on call, always on his way to put out the flames of our town’s lower passions.
At the downtown Metropol, the whistling often started because of the bats. No one could figure out where they hid during the day. But at least once per week, the creatures came out of hiding and flew past the screen. They went after hair, sunk their tiny claws into our patrons’ heads.
By the time American films made it to my family’s theaters, they had traveled many hands, many operators, reliably defective machines. The tapes were often damaged. Maybe they’d caught themselves inside an old projector. If I remember correctly, during the showing of 10, a long interruption concealed Bo Derek’s chest in the beach running scene. There had been a patch job in the film, with spots popping on and off the screen. Then during the sex scene, the movie skipped, and viewers lost their minds. The commotion produced the type of riot involving knives, and there was even a stabbing. Mostly though, there were gashes in the vinyl seats.
Whenever something major happened at the cinemas, there were refunds. This maddened my father who’d already picked up the cash, arrived home, and started a game of solitaire. On those
occasions, he skipped dinner altogether, and I waited up to hear what happened.
“No one died,” he said the time several men were electrocuted. The source—faulty wiring, paper towels clogging the toilet, sewage water traveling the marble floors. Someone touched the metal post, got stuck, then a human chain formed in trying to save one another. A clerk had the sense to cut the power off thus releasing the chain.
The day after terrible events, usually on Tuesdays, it was best to stay clear of my father. That’s when the complaining increased. He’d gotten much worse about it. Just about every meal he ate turned into a problem on those days. Dishes were never salty enough. Pasta was always overcooked, not al dente, had too much garlic or too much sauce. He’d also become fanatical about the ironing.
“Look at this,” he said the morning after the electrical incident. He went to my mother holding up a shirt, pointing to the micro inch of distance between the seam and the crease of the collar. He explained—the points needed precise attention.
“Vaffambagno,” my mother said in Italian.
These were the problems I followed with interest, at times duplicating Papá’s gestures.
“Can I do what you do?” I asked. “Can you teach me?” I envisioned myself in his f uture, learning the ways of enterprise.
School was out and I followed my father on his daily rounds. He had his own office now. He’d moved out of my uncle’s soon after we moved to Venezuela. They’d had an almost immediate argument over who was helping who, and what one was doing for the other.
After everything I did, they’d both said to each other.
The city center was small, so most dealings could be done on foot. We crossed Plaza Concordia and entered the modern bank. My father looked especially handsome that morning. His white, pressed shirt made his tan pop.
“Buenos días señorita,” he said to the teller. My father called every office woman a señorita. The lady at the window wasn’t young.
“Buenos días Señor Carlo. You brought your daughter today?”
She had yet to pull her face from the magnifying mirror, was still plucking her eyebrows, but somehow managed to smile at me, and I smiled back. But I didn’t like her, nor did I like other tellers at other banks. The constant public grooming by these women repulsed me. Besides the polishing of nails, I also hated their hair, which seemed excessively long and shiny.
It was muggier than normal that day, and Papá’s reach spread like a spidery money blanket over the town of Puerto Cabello. We rushed to each airconditioned sanctuary—the arepera, another bank, the notary.
“Buenos días, buenos días, buenos días, Señor Carlo,” all women echoed.
My father signed documents to fulfill endeavors, all activities which required the handling of cash and the creation of paper trails. He initiated a monologue as we walked.
“This is how you get a loan. You go in every week. Let people get to know you.”
He told me he was especially good at handling people who managed the documents of business.
“No one knows how to do what I do.”
Then, we brought pastries to secretaries, and coffee drinks to bank tellers. All these women, who loved my father, in turn performed the favor of streamlining transactions for his benefit.
It was well before noon when we again crossed Plaza Concordia and reached Cine Rialto. The three old men by the stone benches stared at us. They were always there, no matter the time. Ever since I’d lived here, I’d seen them at that exact spot. They never ran out of things to say, or funny stories.
“Wait here,” my father said, then crossed the street to the ticket booth.
I’d been told the Rialto was my uncle’s theater, yet I sometimes accompanied Papá to pick up the cash. I knew the cinema showed adult movies by the posters on the bulletin board. But my father and I didn’t discuss specifics. He blamed the filthy movies on my uncle, and on the town.
“Marineros,” he said.
That evening, when again I asked about the Rialto, my mother said, “They bring prostitutes.”
She told me the cinema served merchant marines, sailors fresh off their ships. She had the ability to make the deviant sound progressive, claiming being German made her socially advanced.
I wanted to be like my father, thought highly of him, but knew something ailed him. He never went to the movies, and he no longer played hockey, or listened to music, things he used to love when we lived in Rome. He also didn’t enjoy the beach, or fish like other fathers. The thrill of recreation had left Papá entirely, even when running the town’s entertainment. The labor for the theaters was gladiator work, and he—a joyless extension of Hollywood.
“You need a hobby,” I said as I shuffled my deck of cards. It was August 1980; school was about to start.
“I need money.”
Papá and Uncle Dino decided to make peace by doing business together and opening a brand-new cinema. My chances to see American films seemed instantly amplified. Teatro Guaicamacuto was inside Cumboto Norte, walking distance from my house, and attracted a semi-polite crowd. From the outside, the modern cinema looked like a cardboard box, but the insides smelled new, and fancy red recliners sloped evenly toward the screen.
None of this mattered to my father. I’d started secundaria, turned twelve, and he still didn’t allow me to most showings.
“It’s garbage,” he always said.
He could no longer blame the people. He censured the films— any movie rated above an A. At my age, I should have been able to watch B movies.
I was understandably upset. I’d missed the premier of The Blue Lagoon. Never mind this film was rated C. It was the new blockbuster and everyone at school was talking about it.
For the first time in my life, I think, I was angry with my father. Or maybe it was the first time I made a point to be outwardly upset, or that I knew I was angry. It is possible I’d been angry with him my entire life. The morning after the premier, I accompanied him downtown. He was going to put the cash in the safe. The movie had done well, he said.
“I’m going to Isabel’s,” I told him with a touch of attitude while shutting the car door. Our family owned all the cinemas in town, and I was the only person not allowed to go to the movies.
I stopped by the storage room and picked up two posters from the shelves without asking permission, as if daring him. I was daring him. But my sudden rebellion must have left him speechless because he said nothing. He walked to the safe and started unbolting the locks and wheels.
Out of Pasaje Plaza, I turned right on Avenida Bolívar. I got my face on—eyes that tunnel-see, brows that tighten-fold, teeth
that clench. I fisted my hands snaking past the river of sweaty bodies streaming in the opposite direction. I shrunk my shoulders to avoid contact, gliding past the toy store, and the shoe shop, rushing ahead to reach dry land—Tienda La Tela.
Isabel’s mother smiled as soon as I stepped into the store. She was leaning over a glass counter filled with lace. Behind her, dozens of fabric rolls were stacked to the ceiling.
I said, “Buenos días Señora Maria.”
“Buenos días, linda. How’s your Nonna?”
She walked from behind the counter and gave me a hug. I could never understand how Isabel existed in such awful moods with a calm mother like hers.
The store seemed markedly cheerful that day. Clerks were lowering rolls and spreading textiles over countertops. Fabric stores, like flower shops, are generally happy places. Other than supplying what is needed for funerals, or the making of work uniforms, they are locales where hopeful dreaming happens. Shoppers may imagine themselves looking gorgeous in a new dress or crafting a baptism gown for a newborn nephew. I hopscotched down the tiled corridor as I’d done countless times, exited the commotion at the back of the store, and went up the narrow stairs.
No one was in the living room. Isabel’s brother too must have been asleep. I walked to my friend’s bedroom with a bit of hesitation. Any time before noon, I would have feared knocking. Not that time mattered here. Isa never knew what the time was. Hers was the darkest of bedrooms, like a vampire’s lair because it didn’t have any windows.
“Isa,” I whispered. But the air conditioner was loud. I raised my voice. “ISA.”
There was a groan, then a roar. “Whaaat?”
“I got you the posters.”
“Maldición, what time is it?”
But I had to ask. Isabel had gone to the premier. Her parents let her do whatever she wanted. Besides, I knew she’d eventually calm down. Black coffee with plenty of sugar always got Isabel into a reasonable mood. Isa hated milk. Dairy was the thing she never touched—butter, milk, yogurt, cheese. Isa hated cheese. What I couldn’t understand was why she loved ice cream. And not just any ice cream, only rum raisin.
“How was it?” I asked.
“They have sex.”
She unrolled the posters without making eye contact, bragging by pretending disinterest. How could she be so nonchalant? In one of the prints, Christopher Atkins had his hand on Brooke Shields’ face and looked at her with notable intensity. In the other, he held her by the waist. He was shirtless in both photos.
“Do they show it?” I needed acknowledgement, some kind of confirmation that sex had in fact happened on screen.
America was reaching, made of beautiful strangers completely outside my reach. My wanting was extraordinary. I’d covered my bedroom walls with posters of my desires—Leif Garrett with long blond hair, a Grease John Travolta in black pants. Xanadu— I’d learned how to roller skate like Olivia Newton John. I wanted to feel their freedom. I ached to press my body against someone beautiful.
I remember the morning well. February 1983, the Monday after the Airplane II premier. I walked into math class and Profesor Herrera was sitting at his desk with his belly bulging below a white polo three sizes too small.
“Come here,” he said. “Your cousin is handing out passes.”
He wasn’t asking a question, so I didn’t respond. In these types of situations, voicing anything could cause me to give up more than
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necessary. I already knew what he wanted. I’d overheard Renzo was brownnosing the Rat Pack by promising them movie passes for the entire school year. The Rat Pack—a pet name I like to use to describe Marcos Herrera, Tommy Perez, Freddy Mendez, Luis Montana, and Rosa Martinez, (the only woman and mean as hell). Together, they were the school’s superpower—all the sciences plus Castellano, all the hard subjects, the only subjects that mattered for college entry. Every student at our colegio feared them, and the teachers knew it. They swaggered through our hallways in their street clothes like they owned the place, which they didn’t. The Catholic brothers did, and they were much nicer.
Marcos Herrera was one of the teachers I liked. Sure, as a human, he was completely inappropriate. The one time I’d brought my Walkman to class, he’d said, what in hell is that? He’d stretched my headphones over his moist watermelon head, so mesmerized by the invention that he disregarded I was listening to Donna Summer and not one of his salsa songs. He sat me at his desk, put me in charge of class, and took off with my gadget. It was common knowledge Herrera was a showoff. I was certain he was walking around pretending the Walkman was his. But that was back in fall of 1980. Walkmans hadn’t yet made it to Puerto Cabello. I’d bought mine that summer in Italy.
“What kind of passes?” I said.
Two years had lapsed since the Walkman incident, and I still felt like I had to give in. I was annoyed to say the least. I’d always made good-enough grades in math. I didn’t want this to change. If I ignored him, I worried Herrera would bring an end to my calculus genius, at least on my transcript.
That evening, Papá listened. It was barely eight o’clock and he had poured his first whiskey.
I said, “Poor thing, can’t afford to take his family to the movies.”
I didn’t want to explain that my cousin had started a giant mess and that we were stuck.
The saga continued the following morning during physics.
“It’s not fair,” Profesor Mendez said out of nowhere. He was not speaking to anyone specifically, but he said this loud enough so everyone could hear.
I turned to look at my cousin. One of us would get to him first. Freddy Mendez was the hardest of all teachers and he never smiled. He was also the shortest. Renzo made a run for his desk and reached it first by sliding on the polished floor as if he were heading to second base. He immediately started talking baseball.
“Magallanes has a good chance, don’t you think?”
Even then, Renzo was such good schmoozer. I was unable to compete. I was out, so to speak. I knew nothing about baseball, and Profesor Mendez was very much into Magallanes.
In the following days, there was a small uprising at the school. I would soon learn the nuances of running a small business, the bother of competition, the giving in to corruption in exchange for peace of mind. Each seat at Teatro Guaicamacuto became a bargaining kind of currency. Nearly every teacher seemed to expect a free way into the theater—everyone except the Catholic brothers who ran the colegio, who never deviated from propriety. Well, almost never. Two years prior, one of them had defected, fallen in love with a woman in town. Of course, all of us girls had known he wouldn’t stay celibate. He wore his white pants too tight. The denim was so revelatory. Even as seventh graders, we’d been incapable of taking our eyes off his zipper, hypnotized as he sat at the edge of his desk swinging his leg back and forth.
My hometown embarrassed me—teachers extorting students. Maybe I didn’t remember correctly. But at my Catholic school in Rome, I recalled an orderly world. Sober fabrics colored our sidewalks. Proper people went to the theater. Maybe I was too young to know things, but I certainly considered Rome better than this town.
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My cousin and I were now in a battle. We rivaled each other’s efforts as the children of opportunists that we were—offspring to economic migrants, people who move with the flow of currency. Possibly, it was only me that competed. I believed Renzo thought he was better than me because he was a guy, and because his dad had financially helped my dad. But I had things going for me, training from my father he didn’t suspect. I’d already taken over math. Renzo must have worried about other teachers because I recall us coming up with some kind of agreement. We met in the parquecito at the front of the school. The recently planted ivy had already crawled up the chain-link fence and over the trellis. We sat in the shade. I ripped a few pieces of paper and wrote the remaining subjects. I think I even included the school principal, but I can’t be sure.
“You’re good at English,” Renzo said, lifting from the bench that piece of paper.
“Fine, I need Spanish.” I hated Castellano. I never read in Spanish for fun. I rejected the subject out of principle, out of loyalty to Italian.
I’d become one with the bribery and I could not see my fault in any of it. I blamed the teachers and felt their victim. I told myself my hands were tied because of Renzo. I certainly didn’t think I had a choice. I walked into Spanish the next morning with my laminated pass for Profesora Martinez. She waved me off and told me she already had one.
“Renzo gave it to me,” she said, puckering her lips to point at my cousin.
The bottom of my stomach dropped, and I don’t think it was out of fear of failing. I had no words for betrayal back then. I noticed Renzo pretend-writing in his notebook. Then later during recess, I found out he’d gone behind my back and broken all our agreements. The teachers favored him. My father-daughter entrepreneurial thing was never going to work.
“You said you didn’t want Spanish,” I yelled at him after class. He’d sneaked out before the end of biology, but I caught up with him on the way home.
“That’s not what I said.”
How easy it was for him, to cheat me and not care. We were all attached—to the movies, to our cursed circumstances. I’m unsure what our real grades would have been had we not gifted American films. Maybe we would have studied harder. Renzo did mediocre in physics, finishing the year with a barely passing grade. I had problems in that subject after; but did okay in chemistry. I don’t know how our family made a living during the years my cousin and I were in high school, given the number of passes we gifted. We certainly couldn’t deny anyone who asked. I think eventually, even the brothers received passes. It didn’t seem fair to leave them out.
I began to ask why, to question our town’s commonplace dishonesty. I began thinking I needed to leave this town. You know the type of town a girl has to leave by the naming of things. You start to notice how it borrows, doesn’t have a mind of its own. While you do your homework with your girlfriends, your cousin spends his afternoons surfing at Waikiki Beach. You realize even the cinemas have borrowed—their names, the lives on screen, lives that subtitles cannot possibly translate. I hated our pitiful distortions. Our imitations were nothing like the movies we watched. Even Sylvester Stallone would have been appalled at the fist fights during showings of Rocky. I retreated into bitterness. For the first time in my studious life, I became too angry to study. I was no longer interested in excelling at school, where everything was a lie. I embraced coasting. I thought—I can’t do things the proper way even if I want. That’s not how things work in Puerto Cabello.
My mother and father were also at odds, screaming constantly about money, about plane tickets, about too much whiskey. I sat watching them at our dining room table and became good
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at various games of solitaire. The crossword puzzle, the Rubik’s cube; they filled my mind with occupation. The scent of whiskey, the clink of ice across the table; they invaded my senses and calmed me. I began dreaming of a life beyond this town, beyond Venezuela.
We were a family good at counting, at people, at negotiation, but the theaters continued to decline. The cinemas could never be without a show, and even here there were politics. People wanted to see the latest release as soon as it was subtitled. The first viewing was always in Caracas. Then there was a race to get the films before other towns. The process was one that required speed and diplomacy, maybe even bribery. Once secured, someone would drive hours to pick up the heavy burlap bags. If lucky, we could procure the second or third round. Anything later would guarantee low attendance.
Unexpectedly, the nearby city of Valencia began to have more clout. An investor had brought innovative technology and built new theaters. They started getting the films before our cinemas every week.
“Come with me to that new mall in Valencia,” my father said one afternoon.
We drove thirty minutes uphill on the curvy highway. It was cloudy that day, and the trees hung heavy with dew. Neither me nor my father said much. He seemed too preoccupied. After the toll booth, we entered a newer section of town and drove past a flock of salons, coffee shops, and boutiques. Soon, we were at the new mall.
The underground garage was enormous. We stepped on an escalator, emerging into a bright, Miami-like atrium bursting at the seams with the latest fashion. The cinema was upstairs and about to open for matinee.
We saw it at the same time. There was a line down the hall. I looked at my father, who looked defeated. I knew what he was thinking. People seemed civilized here. They stood in line.
Papá stopped by the ticket booth to read the titles—Risky Business, Trading Places, Return of the Jedi—all the good shows. It would be weeks before he got those films.
And now we knew. People in Puerto Cabello who owned cars and could travel, all the proper people who paid full price, would end up coming here, to this fancy new mall. By then, only two of our cinemas were still operational, actually three. The Rialto was still going strong and required minimum maintenance. It lived in a world of its own, never in any financial danger as long as there was a working port in town.
A small-town girl needs to get out of town, especially if she came from a big city like Rome, was dragged to a town like Puerto Cabello, where she watches her father disappear and slowly lose his dream.
People talk of the cost of the movies. They say it’s a rip-off. They can’t afford this bare human necessity. The price is too high for a family. I think of the evenings I sat with my father, his whiskey on ice and quiet games. I consider how we’d left Rome so he could hate his job. I, too, think the price is too high for a family.
In 1928, my father’s father left the Italian South to make his luck in a prosperous Venezuela. In 1977, my father moved as well, to return to his family’s wealth. In 1985, I was hoping to get lucky, not have a reason for solitaire. I thought maybe if I made it out, I wouldn’t lounge in the loneliness of evening fears after an awful day at work, all so I could shift papers around, money around, have it all prove useless.
My father rode his wave high, quickly, then watched it flatten beneath him with the rest of the country. I’d already stopped
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imagining myself in his future, but I could not have imagined Venezuela breaking in half, my cousin a politician in a despised regime, and me, never again swimming at Playa Quizandal. All this, I could not have foreseen in 1985, but I left anyway. A girl has her intuition.