Gianandrea Ferrajoli passed away two years ago, on September 10, 2021 – the one thing I never want to do is write about him in the past tense
Abbreviations, a book by Fandango, Rubirosa, and the peacock touch
Once I called him Giana – Gianandrea tilted his chin to the right, looked at me askance – you never call me Giana, he said. He had taught me not to use abbreviated names. He didn’t call Margherita Marghe, for example. He could use nicknames, which amused him, sometimes diminutives, surnames in reference – but no, he didn’t use abbreviations. Many called him Giana – he told me that at first, he had tried to avoid it but had given up eventually – but not you, please – he said.
In Rome, I presented the novel published by Fandango when in fiction I recounted the months we spent together in New York when we were 25. I asked him to read a few pages, in front of the small audience that had gathered in the bookstore – he was more nervous than I could have imagined. There’s a video of him reading those lines in Rome – I had removed it, and I didn’t think I still had access to the channel. A few days ago, I tried to search better – now the video is online. Black and white treatment, amateur video – but the voice is clear. The character inspired by him was named Porfirio, it was a remind of Rubirosa.
I was reading an article by Giangiacomo Schiavi about the story of some guys between Saint Tropez and Rome who knew how to take more women to bed than others. Gianandrea would have become friends with them, would have beaten them on the field one by one, and then belittled them, snubbed them, saying that they had no intellectual point, and that they were just stereotypes. If I had told him about my theoretical prediction, Gianandrea would have dismissed me, saying that I was always living in a fantasy – one second later – smiling between the fake shy and the fake naive, he would have agreed.
In Rome, one evening in front of the Palazzo della Civiltà – when I was an editor at L’Officiel – a photography was taken, a group portrait of a bunch of Italian men. Gianandrea is in the center, the other six arranged equally. I told him to move a bit to the right, the center would be a fold in the page binding – he did, but – like a gravitational force – Gianandrea remained in the center. We fix it in post-production.
Le Pain Quotidien, New York, Bleecker Street
Tall, dark complexion – once slender, lately massive. I never understood how handsome he was – I realize it later. Gianandrea lives what I and the rest of ordinary people still seek in movies – and I’d like to avoid writing about him in the past tense. New York, on Fifth Avenue – we are 25 years old and we are having lunch at Le Pain Quotidien, not far from Washington Square. To spend these months here in US, we both are using the mundane excuse of an NYU master’s degree that neither of us takes seriously. We don’t have much money. We’re sitting there having a sandwich, I don’t know why we end up talking about facial skin. I ask him why he doesn’t use some cream for pimples – Gianandrea freezes, sandwich in hand – «it’s the worst insult I’ve ever received» he says. He has a sense of humor useful not to be ridiculous, not to stop at appearances, to recognize the scallywags, to send all the good manners to hell when needed. As for pimples, it’s not like he had that many.
It was January 2005. I had decided to move to New York – I told him on the phone, Gianandrea said I’m coming too. I leave and can’t believe he’s really coming. A week later, he’s there. I open the door to a studio on Bleecker Street, and Gianandrea is outside with his suitcase. We go to the landlord, find another micro-apartment for him in the same building. That place on Bleecker Street is temporary, just a base taken from Europe for the first few days. We decide to look for an apartment and share it.
Some say no. It’s not a good idea, Gianandrea and I sharing an apartment – Emanuele, I remember, was the most perplexed, the one who had warned us the most not to do it – maybe because he was the only one who had spent a lot of time with both of us – and therefore knew how different we were in character and habits. Gianandrea in full disorder between hormones and energy – me rigid in my stupid and proper routines. Francesca arrives in New York, checking on us, between cynicism and naivety, realizes that it works.
I was a pathetic child – Gianandrea taught me to laugh at it. We painted our eyes black – whether it was demon or thunder, Gianandrea gave me a sense of protection. Sunday afternoons, we walked to the Hudson. Under the Magnolia Bakery sign, he points out how in English, ‘gn’ are just two close consonants. When we go to the East Side, the snow falls a meter high. Among the various nonsense, we manage to talk about heraldry. And then – his stories. Gianandrea goes to the Caribbean for a week – with someone whose name I don’t need to remember – he brings home a girl from Utah, but once there, she says she’s a Mormon. When he breaks up with Amanda, for obvious reasons, he tells me that «she hates me to death, she wants to force me to be with her, with vulgar American tramp manners» – or again, when he doesn’t like someone: «that boyfriend of hers, she needs bigger bags to carry dog soaps and car cleaners, as well as self-cleaning brushes». Every two months, the same message: «I need your phone number please, I lost my phone». I told him it was really not possible that he had lost his phone again – Gianandrea replied that only Minardi loses more phones than him, and he doesn’t like second ranks. Mercy God, the Cloud was invented.
Never leave the island – an apartment on Fifteenth Street, Gianandrea, and a Saturday night in New York
We lived that literature when you’re looking for a house in Manhattan. I searched through our emails from those years, found the acrimonious conversations between Gianandrea and a certain Lorena. Gianandrea teased her without Lorena ever realizing it. Amanda drove the car in New York and begged us: never leave the Island. We find a two-bedroom apartment on Fifteenth Street, between Sixth and Seventh. There are two rooms with two bathrooms – one is bigger than the other, I suggest we take turns each month – Gianandrea tells me that, as for an existential concept, he lives in the largest room in the house. I laugh, Gianandrea does too, but a little less – one month each is fine.
It’s Saturday night. We take a taxi, all the way up, Fifty-ninth and Fifth. We descend the stairs, pretentious, cocktails, loud music, Samantha Jones. A guy everyone adores because his grandfather was a banker embraces Gianandrea as if he were a childhood friend – but he’s ugly and uses scented deodorant. I arrive with Jenny, my date – Gianandrea sighs, wondering where the market for good girls is. Jenny brings a party of four waspy, young ladies – one of them has the West Coast accent, so we call her California (nicknames are fine, Gianandrea likes them).
Two waiters lead us to a table, and pour Cristal without restraint. Gianandrea sits next to Jenny. California starts chatting, she works in the Louis Vuitton press office, she is into small talks and she says Italy produces eighty percent of the world’s fashion – she doesn’t pronounce Biella correctly. Gianandrea gets up with Jenny, goes into the bathroom with Jenny. When he returns, I glare at him: «Couldn’t you have taken someone else, okay, male solidarity, pride, blah blah» – «To hell with it, this one started peeing, she wanted me to prepare a line for her». Even though Jenny was theoretically going out with me, Jenny is now his – I go back to sit at the table next to California, down what I have in my glass in one sip and put my tongue in California’s mouth – California pushes me away, «What’s Jenny gonna say» – I try again, and California goes along.
«Twenty-seventh between Ninth and Tenth» – we’re four scattered on the seats of a taxi, me next to California, Gianandrea next to Jenny. At the entrance of the Bungalow, the black dynamo calls me the VOGUE boy – because the first time, to get in, I had given him a Vogue business card I had stolen when I was an intern. Nicole Kidman and Clive Owen are here, uglier, smaller, and older, Madame de Pompadour, and El Morocco, Babe Paley – Gianandrea laughs the way only Gianandrea can. The Bungalow fills up, it’s half past three among the fake palm trees.
Gianandrea has the keys to a penthouse in Union Square – I don’t ask him why he has those keys. It’s eight in the morning. The two girls get in a taxi to Midtown. We decide that no, we don’t want to go to sleep anymore. From Union Square, we go along the usual Fifth Avenue, cross Washington Square with the February snow and squirrels at dawn. We take the subway. We board the train to Brooklyn, to the first stop after the bridge. We materialize among the strollers on a Sunday morning, statues and frisbees and wounds to death, poison for mice and tulip leaves. The wind on the sea and still the skyline – drunk, our shoes gleam in the morning. The magnet pulsates under the island, the energy blends into the blood. Fireworks, the wind applauds, we are young, and we are in New York. I don’t know if all these images are real or if they are hallucinations that Gianandrea made appear in my head.
Gianandrea at the Bulgari Hotel, roughness becomes a caress, Carlo Alberto’s voice
I turn forty years – that day, Gianandrea arrives before the others, stays overnight at my house in the countryside outside Milan. He entertains my father. When Emilie arrives, he gets befuddled – like my father – because Emilie is not wearing a bra, her volumes contradict aerostatics and it still seems a novelty. Gianandrea gives me three marble spheres, on three pedestals. One of the three is taller and seems to defend the others – whether it’s a giant or an angel.
I join him at the Bulgari. If Gianandrea stays in Milan, he lives there. I approach the table, and he’s sitting there waiting for me with a girl I only know by sight – Gianandrea tells her that I’m too snobbish for her, and it’s unclear who he’s making fun of, whether her or me – in any case: she leaves. We’re alone for a short time, but that carefree flow reappears immediately – there’s something sweeter, softer – as if Gianandrea’s roughness that will never be enough for me were a caress that evening. I did not imagined it was a farewell.
On August 1st, there was a full moon. Gianandrea is one of those few lions that continue to roam our cities and our lives. Male in the truest sense of the word – transparent in every vice, he possesses the restlessness that defines you, a subtle fervor, the certainty of his own place. A tailored suit and the continuous, constant struggle against stereotypes. In Venice as in New York, the party moves to his room at the Gritti – the doorman gets agitated because whoever arrives risks going crazy. The volume is loud – the doorman calls again, or maybe knocks – Gianandrea smiles, closes the door, yells to lower the voice.
Carlo Alberto was always in his stories. Ever since we met in New York, if there was someone who persisted in Gianandrea’s stories, that someone was Carlo Alberto. The same vocal timbre, identical. Through the microphone outside on the square in Rome, Carlo Alberto’s voice is thunderous, with an echo. Even sadness can give us a smile. It’s the evolution of everything a tear can become – the closing, which still touches the heart: «anyway, we’re not in Foggia».
Carlo Mazzoni
GIANANDREA FERRAJOLI – AUGUST 1, 1980, SEPTEMBER 10, 2021
