Cooking With Fernet Branca by James Hamilton-Paterson

poleaxed by drink: eyes shut, mouth open and the matelot shirt plastered with sweat to his unmuscular chest. There is a certain pathos about this neighbour of mine but I refuse to dwell on it.
    In mid-afternoon, not thirty seconds after I have put a double bar-line at the end of my sketch, Piero Pacini himself rings from Rome, newly returned from America. Filippo has told him that the proposed set meets with my approval and he hopes this is true. They are due to start shooting there in six weeks’ time and am I feeling inspired? I tell him that not only am I feeling inspired but I have already written something that I hope captures the place’s sinister, derelict atmosphere. Piero is – or affects to be – ecstatic and promises to despatch by courier a copy of the script as it stands so far with the music requirements marked and roughly timed. I ought to get it tomorrow and should begin to think in terms of an overall leitmotif, the same technique I used so effectively in Vauli Mitronovsk.
    ‘But I don’t have to tell you, Marta darling,’ he says. ‘You know I can’t bear those scores that make films sound like an American TV series. Those style-less bridge passages to stuff up the cracks between the scenes are anguish to me. My films never subordinate the aural to the visual. Now, when can I hear what you’ve written?’
    ‘Well,’ I say, a little flustered, ‘I’ve only sketched out some pages to establish the film’s characteristic sound. It’s just in short score at present.’
    ‘Fine. Send me the disc.’
    ‘I’m sorry …? Er, disc? It’s written on paper – you know, music manuscript. Score paper?’
    ‘You mean you write in ink ?’
    ‘It’s the only way I know,’ I say stiffly, managing to stop myself adding that it was a method that had served both Beethoven and Stravinsky quite well. ‘What did you think?’
    ‘Oh my,’ says Pacini. ‘I naturally assumed you work on akeyboard with a computer. I thought everyone did these days. You play something, it automatically notates it, and then you fiddle around with the instrumentation until you get the sounds you want. Then you put it on a disc and send it off.’
    ‘I’m afraid I’ve never used a system like that,’ I tell him, feeling a hick. ‘I just do it the old-fashioned way. I know the sounds I want and write them like that from the start. I don’t need to “fiddle around”.’
    ‘Of course you must stick to the method you know,’ says Pacini encouragingly, managing to imply that I pluck my quill pens from the nearest goose, ‘although it’s inconvenient if I can’t hear it immediately. I like to shoot with the music ready. I am not like other directors,’ he adds disdainfully, ‘who shoot a film and then bolt some music onto it. For me the aural and the visual are concurrent and influence each other at the moment the film is made.’
    Clearly he has used these words hundreds of times in as many interviews. All of a sudden I’m conscious of standing in a centuries-old kitchen filled with my own private disorder, an ex-Soviet-bloc composer who was trained in a traditional way in threadbare circumstances. I feel shame at being so far behind the times. I even begin to panic lest the great Piero Pacini loses faith in me as too untechnological to work with.
    ‘I’m sure I could learn,’ I offer gamely.
    ‘Of course you could. I may courier a system up to you with the script. I’ll get my people onto it. Now I must leave you. Even this late we’re still having casting difficulties with one of the minor roles, can you imagine that?’
    He rings off, leaving me obscurely chastened like a student who has unaccountably disappointed her favourite teacher. Still, I tell myself, he’s not going to change his composer at this stage, not the way the great Pacini works, not unless he reschedules the shoot and everything. And besides, my music is going to make his film … But now I’ve caught a little of his fretfulness and am