A Brilliant Darkness

On the Italian Riviera, near the French border—with the splendors of Monte Carlo not far off—is a shabby seaside resort that has seen better days. Once the playground of the Russian aristocracy and Alfred Nobel’s last home, Sanremo is now replete with modern bad taste mixed up with faded grandeur: a dodgy casino, a profusion of Russian prostitutes, beautiful crumbling hotels waiting to be merdified by the Hiltons of the world. Strangely, this is where I come to meet the last wheel of the Majorana cart: Pietro, Luciano’s youngest son. He’s led the life of a latter-day hippie: settling down meant opening a couple of bars in the Alps near the Austrian border (as far away from Sicily as is possible without leaving Italy, I note). He’s now retired from that. All his life he wanted to be an architect. So now he’s restoring a house, for himself, his wife, and his daughter to live in, one day.

Pietro and I drive out of Sanremo in a wreck of a car, past a sprawl of abusivi (illegal buildings) flanking greenhouses and agricultural patches. Artichokes and flowers are grown in fields overlooked by an ugly motorway, flying over the valleys on a concrete viaduct floating in noisy skies. But we’re headed for the misty mountains, and soon civilization peters out—the province of Liguria is crushed against the sea by indomitable peaks. As we hit fog banks, the road becomes rougher, eventually thinning to a mere walking trail. This is where we park the car.

Nearby, there’s a building site—the last house up the mountain. It’s his pet project. A mismatch of seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century structures, the huge farmhouse has been left to go to ruin for over fifty years. He’s been lovingly fixing it up, using only original materials—the right mortar, the right bone pigments—some of which have been used since the Roman times. The work’s been ongoing for three years; he tells me he doubts he’ll ever finish.

The top floor is mostly done: There are no windows, but it’s fully painted and has a roof. Inside, there are no walls or stairs, but the balconies have been completed—my God, the views! The little top room, carved out of the slanted roof, is to be his bedroom, overlooking the entire universe. But nothing else—five floors arranged over two houses—has a destined function yet. “We’ll see what we’ll make here,” is Pietro’s attitude. Plumbing and electricity will be added later, too.

Climbing over a small bridge linking the two houses, we enter a small chapel, filled with rows of Formica chairs: He bought them from a cinema that went bankrupt (“Maybe we’ll make a home theater in the chapel”). The altar is flanked by two giant cacti that used to be in one of his bars (“I became attached to them”). There’s no plan, no order, no priorities. None of this “we’ll first finish this floor to live in, then we’ll do the rest”; none of “here will be the living room, there will be the kitchen.” He’s going at it as a whole, expecting the house to impose its beauty upon itself as it grows, determining its own functions: a new way of doing architecture. He clambers around ladders and scaffolding like a cat; in the dusk’s failing light, I stumble and almost kill myself a couple of times. I can see the beauty that is struggling to emerge.

It definitely runs in the family, I think, recalling Ettore’s 1932 masterpiece. This house is the best insight I’ve ever had into Ettore’s scientific mind, specifically his 1932 unfinished symphony. There are supreme pieces of work that just don’t make any historical sense—Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, or Ettore’s little gem, for example. They exist outside time, for no rational reason whatsoever. This house makes no sense, either. And like the Rite of Spring, or Ettore’s paper, it’s beautiful in a crude, primeval way.

“My father was a puttaniere,” says Pietro, his appraisal of Luciano setting the tone for our conversation as we sit down at a seaside bar. It seems that Luciano introduced the whole young male family to the joys of sex, in the form of high-class prostitution—and not only that. I’m not sure Ettore and Salvatore qualified (perhaps they were too close to their mother for Luciano to have played it safe.) Pietro tells me that his father was also a playboy—he still sometimes meets old ladies who tell him they could have been his mother. Pietro then reveals a bevy of other scintillating details. For example, he explains that Dorina and Fabio Massimo slept in separate bedrooms. He provides extensive descriptions of the sexual mores at the vineyard of Passopisciaro. He tells me scandalous stories concerning the fauna that frequented Maria’s house in Rome. Here’s a man who doesn’t mince his words. I like that. He also has strong views on any matters related to Ettore.

He doesn’t impose these views on anyone—and so he’s totally devoid of arrogance. But he does state his opinions clearly and without doubt; a perfect antithesis to Ettore Jr.’s nihilism towards his uncle. Of course Ettore didn’t commit suicide in 1938: Sicilians just don’t do that; they love life too much. Of course Ettore’s tragedy was solitude: the generalized human inability to communicate, “out of fear, the irrational fear of exposing oneself.” Of course the cause of Ettore’s collapse between 1933 and 1937 was the death of his father. It’s obvious.

Fabio Massimo died in 1934, following a difficult period in Milan after some work-related problems in Rome. His death had a very strong effect on Ettore. For Pietro, there’s not a shadow of a doubt that this was the leading factor in his crisis. Pietro says that if Ettore could have communicated with anyone, it would have been his father alone. Dorina was too shallow and unyielding; his siblings too distant and self-centered. Ettore’s only source of human contact, of communication, was his father, Pietro tells me. And that lifeline disappeared in 1934.

Pietro lost his own father when he was four; he tells me that he hardly remembers Luciano. But his much older cousin Wolfgang-Fabio (son to Werner Schultze and Rosina) remarks that Pietro is just like Luciano, with the same mannerisms, language, and sense of humor. Before his hippie incarnation, Pietro was a timid kid with severe social problems. He says that the absence of his father was the key to his troubled years. When people talk about Ettore, they’re often echoing themselves, but Pietro, in his own tragedy, may well be reflecting Ettore’s feelings about the death of Fabio Massimo. Pietro’s eyes wet a few times as he admits to his very unhappy early days. He may now be terminally cool, in his pink jeans and antediluvian leather jacket, but he doesn’t bullshit himself—or me. He lived a very sad youth in the shadow of Luciano’s death.

Pietro and I drink freely, and the conversation lightens up again. If Luciano’s sense of humor was anything like Pietro’s, as suggested by Wolfgang-Fabio, I think I’d like to have met him. Pietro tells graphic stories about bad behavior during his brother Fabio’s wedding; he recounts even more obscene tales about the shooting of a film at Passopisciaro, scripted and directed by the Majoranas; and he provides a full account of how Luciano met his wife, Signora Nunni Cirino. He also paints an endearing picture of Maria and her unconventional drawing room at Via Salaria in Rome. Swearing was de rigueur—the kids loved it. One infallible regular was a famous painter who procured his models at the bus stop just outside. Imagine the pickup line “Can I paint you naked?” But it worked—and he did paint his models “after fucking them, and before introducing them to Maria’s soirees.”

Considering Pietro’s unusual openness, I’m not surprised that he is the only person I met who raised the issue of Ettore’s possible homosexuality. There is no hard evidence for or against it, but as with Segrè’s syphilis, if it were true, it would explain a lot. Pietro tells me a story that would illustrate much about Ettore, assuming he was indeed homosexual. By necessity, it would have to be of the closet variety, and this would have distorted his genius beyond recognition.

Pietro recounts that at one of his bars in the Alps there was a piano. One day a tramp walked in, ordered a drink, and asked if he could play. It was during a quiet hour, so Pietro thought, Why not? The tramp sat at the keyboard, and the next thing Pietro knew, he was left speechless by an outburst of Rachmaninoffian prodigy.

The tramp returned many times, always displaying the same remarkable metamorphosis from alcoholic loser to musical genius. Eventually Pietro became curious. Who was this guy? A misunderstood Mozart? Another cinematographic David Helfgott? After asking around the village, he finally discovered the story behind the genius-tramp. He was simply a man who hadn’t come to terms with his own homosexuality.