Matteo Curtoni

RETURN TO THE STORYTELLERS HOMEPAGE

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A railroad smell of ancient iron and stone and evaporated urine under the afternoon’s experiments of asphyxia. I walk for a while through a street stench of old concrete and unwashed skin that doesn’t exactly belong to me. A couple of junkies crawling under a bridge in a tragic dance, a stoned ballet I could even find amusing in other circumstances.

A decayed prelude to passion lost in cold air.

*   *   *

The shades are drawn and it’s night and Ophelie’s apartment is lit by a greasy rainfall of neon. Ophelie’s not her real name, not that it matters. She gets drunk and rants happily about the erotic use of leeches, dark and purple clothes falling on the floor and she lies about wanting to be hurt and spanked because she’s such a nasty disobedient girl and she needs some discipline, and I end up screwing her from behind, pulling gently at the rings in her nipples.

She falls asleep with my sperm cooling between her buttocks. I kiss her sharp shoulder blades and finish the wine.

A broken crate used as a bedside table, funerary candles on the floor and a tin box full of rusty razor-blades, an old cardboard file holding a series of vintage photographs: eyes lost in sepia cracks, austere mouths and poses, some boldly naive nudes. Under a table I find a small collection of dolls, their eyes painted with black lacquer, mouths sealed and molten in deformity by a lighter’s flame. I stand watching Ophelie’s naked figure while she sleeps our remains of passion away, the dark velvet collar hanging loose around her neck, torn by the fake urgency of my kisses. The bites I’ve left on her pallor are fading: temporary evidence of an unconscious attempt at cannibalism, perhaps.

I try and imagine her as a fragile, wounded creature but it’s a fancy of dust I cannot cling to for long. And I’m already bored.

I start picking up my clothes, I dress knowing it will end in tears.

*   *   *

The street again: and above me, in the dark, a thunder makes promises it cannot keep. Somebody’s laughing and screaming, a wildly painted face dancing in the half-dead headlights of a van lost in a shroud of bleak graffiti. Flaming hearts and tortured saints, wide-eyed foetuses wearing intricate jewels and amputated hands red with stigmata and absurdly elaborated cuts. Trying to be silent I walk on a sharp, square background of dark copper and graphite and windows weak and useless against the cold.

I shiver in my clothes, blowing smoke on my fingers to warm them a little.

In the street’s dim fluorescence, their eyes reveal briefly a corrupt shade of yellow and I notice fragments of bone in a girl’s lurid hair, along with crawling ants and tiny manufacts of silver. One of them smiles at me as I pass and I feel like I’m swallowing a handful of sand and a sticky, frigid fluid. Teeth like a graveyard of rotting ivory, shining through decay a scent of charred wood and horrid liquor and things I couldn’t put a name to even if I wanted. Another couple of blocks, a hurried shape in the murk inhaling the ground’s sick fragrance, the gasoline ghosts that rise from the sidewalk: me.

The subway feels like home. I bathe in the waiting crowd’s suburban paranoia.

And a short while later I start feeling slightly better.

*   *   *

Back home, I wash my face with incandescent water and erase Ophelie’s two messages from the answering machine, not wanting to remember the exact sound of her voice. But details keep haunting me, as usual: the way she sat cross legged on the bed while rolling a joint, faded panties, tank top so consumed I could see her nipples, guess the color of her tattoos. The way she closed her purple painted eyes as she swallowed my cock, slowly, as if not interested in seeing anymore, satisfied with the presence and taste of my flesh inside of her -

Her sad gray eyes incarnate the short-lived illusion of a mirror that could show me the intricacies of hunger, the comforting sound of an old, flaccid pocket of loneliness being ripped open for the last time. But rarely things last that long and I fall asleep on the couch hugging my strange harvest of moments and flashes and twisted shards of feelings.

*   *   *

I’ve been told that they get high licking on dirty needles, that sick blood is their perverse equivalent of amphetamines, that they collect medicines far beyond their expiry date that they swallow like candies: waiting for something better, for nightfall.

Under a nicotine moon I stop out of pure curiosity, noticing a girl who seems vaguely capable of speech.

You smell strange, she says, a pale glow exuding from her skin, the street of darkened tenements like an artificial spine buried in tarmac. And she laughs like a demented child when she realizes it’s snowing. Icy flakes hang on my hair, on the gray-black coat I’m shivering in.

How strange?, I ask offering her a cigarette, eying her two companions that lie immote on the ground and stare at the sky through the torn tin roof of the shack, like breathing corpses crowned by stones and dying grass.

Her fingers shake violently as she tries to shield the lighter’s flame from the wind, but the trembling in her limbs seems to amuse her, mysteriously. She bites off the filter and spits it out in the shadows, smoke soaking her words when she speaks again. Just strange, she says, like strange meat.

I pretend to laugh, she shrugs, cut momentarily in two by a passing car’s headlights. I’ve been told the strangest things about the way they can touch you, the way their hands can make you feel for a while and I don’t know what to believe and probably it doesn’t matter -

We smoke in silence, snow and cold air filling the empty spaces of this bizarre conversation. The hard leather of my shoes is an essicated echo on the whitening sidewalk.

*   *   *

Still snowing and I’m bored of darkwave sadness and printed words of wisdom and the tv’s screen is a square junkyard of unappealing plastic. I dress in the same clothes I was wearing the other night, a part of me trying to recreate past experiences, correct them, make memory a better place for my flesh, maybe; and then I get back to Ophelie’s without really knowing why. The coffee I drink in a microscopic bar on the other side of her street tastes like sawdust and sugar.

The bartender has the hollow eyes and faded lips of a recovering drug-addict, she’s playing absentmindedly with a plastic rosary, a disproportionate Christ on a tiny fluorescent cross. The woman seems to draw breath to speak but she says nothing and I pay and walk out inhaling ancient stone and melancholy shades of concrete, finding a vague comfort in the geometry of my lurid birthpalce.

Ophelie has company but she’s so drunk she comes to open the door anyway. She’s naked.

Vaginal secretions on her tongue when she kisses me on the threshold, I’m not sure she’s even recognized me. But a heartbeat later she whispers my name and leads me in the apartment’s heavy smell of pot melting with stale air, with sweat and the cheapest wax money can buy.

Her arm is slick under my fingertips, unnaturaly hot but it could be just my imagination.

I was sad and Sibella came to console me: she points to a black transparent shirt over an otherwise naked body, skinny beyond belief. I’ve never seen the other girl before, no reason to be surprised anyway. I take off my snow-covered coat, it falls on the floor in a humid heap of melting crystals.

Sibella is giving a drunk blowjob to a bottle of wine, red fluid dripping from her chin, her erected nipples. Her eyes focus on me shortly but it’s obvious that what she sees is not of great interest for her. She smiles around the glass bottle’s neck and I sense her eyes on Ophelie’s naked body like disincarnate fingers.

A moist whisper in my ear: wanna join us?, taking awkwardly my hand and placing it on her wet, warm cunt. My fingers, tempted to enter her already open flesh, remain on the surface, just rubbing her somewhat shyly. I don’t know why but I shake my head and answer: maybe later. Doesn’t matter, she says with a blurred laugh, shrugging.

She staggers away from me, I lick her smell off my fingers and I watch her crawl on the dirty Oriental rug, laughing again, raising her hazed stare on Sibella and murmuring something about being her bitch, her slave.

The other girl produces a coarse giggle, the bottle slips from her hand and falls on the floor without breaking.

Scarlet stains on wood, a candle extinguishes sizzling in wine.

She lets Ophelie lick her feet and suck her toes, swallows her small ringed tits and slips two skeletal fingers in her wet cunt, up her ass and laughter is slowly substituted by moans and low cries.

And my cock throbs painfully in my pants and I watch them, fascinated by the strange, surreal grace of their drunken movements, drinking myself sick: Sibella astride Ophelie releases her bladder, an acrid spray of faded piss on her chest and belly and then she bends to kiss her, to whisper things in her mouth, spit dribbling from her lips mixed with words I cannot grasp.

I count Sibella’s ribs, the all too visible pattern of bones and junctures under the skin. The burning in my crotch is barely sufferable and when I look more closely I notice she’s wearing a grotesque wig.

*   *   *

Later (Ophelie asleep on the floor, the neck of the bottle still stuck in her swollen cunt, an instrument whose use has been voluntarily forgotten) Sibella dresses in black and grayish rags.

She caresses my cheek with a crust-covered hand and I stare at her thin figure as she walks out the door, strange meat out in the snow.

*   *   *

Gently I remove the bottle from Ophelie’s flesh and when I hear its soft, moist smack I ejaculate in my underwear. Uncaring of the stink of piss and wine, I kiss her forehead and caress her damp hair and beside her face I place the tin box that jingles with razor-blades. A morbid suggestion, the first thing she will see when she’ll open her eyes. Before I leave, I steal one of her dolls laced with black lacquer and hide it in a pocket of my coat.

*   *   *

Milan is an inhospitable landscape of cold embers. I light a cigarette and wonder how soon the snow will steal from me the smell I sense on myself, on my clothes, on my hair, in my mouth. The shack is empty, a sanctuary of neglect, and I caress the splintered wood with the back of my hand leaving traces of Ophelie’s taste like a votive offering. I walk out in the white steel glow of the street, sad thoughts of redemption swirling in my head along with piss and spit and red wine.

A stray dog wandering on the sidewalk shoots me a suspicious glance, sniffs something in the air, disappears in an alley of icy dust and garbage.

You smell strange, I whisper to myself, catching my darkening reflection in a closed shop’s window. And then I start walking, headed home.

by Matteo Curtoni

Yeah, I really thought I would. Dammit, I was *sure* I would. I fell in love with the story from day one and there was no reason in Heaven or Hell why I shouldn’t stick to it, write the whole bloody thing and deliver to my publisher precisely what I had planned to deliver. But that’s not gonna happen. Sure, I’ll deliver my novel sometime before the end of July but it won’t be pre-cisely the novel I had planned at first. Because there are things that you cannot possibly know about the story you’re going to write when you’re still working on its synopsis.

This time mine was quite detailed for my usual standards. With twenty pages about plot, fifteen pages about characters and ten pages about setting I thought I knew all I needed to know about my novel and I felt satisfied with it. Definitely. But as satisfied as I was, those pages were only bones and I guess that bones cannot tell us much about the way flesh, tissues and muscles and skin will feel once they’ll start crawling on them.

New characters I didn’t know a single thing about (I had only vague impressions about who they could be and how they would fit into and/or influence the story) started knocking on my door very, very soon and when I let them in I knew that a huge part of the novel had to change. It just had to. And it changed, in an amazingly smooth way. No painful reworkings of the original plot – it felt as if it should have been this way since the beginning, since I was still dealing with bones and waiting for flesh. I tell you, I’m even more in love with it now.

Sometimes I suspect that it’s not even characters or new ideas that end up changing your story but that it’s the actual process of writing. Writing always finds a way of changing your plans, subtly sometimes – maybe so subtly that you may even think that you *did* stick to your synop-sis – sometimes in a more radical and not so subtle way. Writing, yeah.

I believe that creativity is always hungry for a certain amount of anarchy, that authors who really care about what they write need to be surprised by their own stories.

I guess that’s the reason those characters came knocking on my door.

I’m glad they did.

I’m glad that writing didn’t let me stick to my synopsis.

Because the novel I’m writing now feels like a much better one than the one I thought I’d write.

Bones can tell you where you could be headed, but it’s flesh that tells you where you’re really going.

Best,

M.

THE KEY LIME PIE-EFFECT
by Matteo Curtoni

“I haven’t had a key lime pie in ten years.”
“When ya had it, did ya like it?”
“I was a completely different person ten years ago. Let’s give key lime a day in court. And a large glass of milk.”
– from Natural Born Killers

I know – being worried about readers’ reception is essentially silly. And I feel it’s even sillier when you’re not exactly worried and you’re still hard at work on a novel that’s coming out in January 2009. But these days I’m wondering about some of that stuff. Just wondering. About the difference between my earlier stories and the stories I’m writing now.

It’s been a quite long time since the last time I wrote a novel I really cared about and I really wanted to see published. It was called Una notte a mangiare smania e febbre, it came out in 2000 and (for Italian standards, mind you) sold reasonably well. It was a story about real-life vampires – about a group of pretty fucked-up twenty-something guys and girls doin’ an unidentified drug called “the fever” and behaving just like vampires. Some of them in a relatively conscious way, some of them not knowing anymore that they’re still regular flesh and blood, that they’re human and not vampires. Killing a lot of innocent people, having sex like there was no tomorrow, killing each other. A lovely no-future tale about sex and death, more or less. But as dark and nihilist as it was, I know it didn’t lack a sort of cupio dissolvi-kind of poetry. And readers loved that poetry, probably more that they loved the blood-and-sex-and-violence side of the novel – more than I anticipated.
Let’s put it this way: if it was a song if would have sounded like a Dead Can Dance song.
Or a Cure song.

None of it was planned, I just felt that way when I wrote it. People still love that book and keep asking me where they can find a copy even though it’s long been put out of print by my former pub-lisher. Of course my ego & I just love the fact that they still love it, that new readers keep feeling drawn to it and keep looking for it.

But that story was born eight years ago, and I was a completely different person then.
I’ve written a lot during the following eight years, but a lot of stuff that I didn’t feel like sharing with a single living soul. I had my reasons, most of them way too much tortuous and/or painful to be discussed here. I’ve translated a some great novels (and a bunch of mediocre or plain shitty ones as well but let’s not get into that now), I’ve published a couple of side-projects under pen names and with one of them I had a damn lot of fun (I blogged for a year and a half impersonating one of my pen names and it all was just plain crazy) but apart from my nonfiction true crime pieces and some short fiction, I didn’t publish anything using my real name. During my “publishing hermitage”, needless to say that, things changed for me and my stories. Lots of things. Influences changed, I changed. And, inevitably, stories evolved. But the readers that are still pretty much in love with Smania e febbre have no idea about it all, about how much and in what terms my writing evolved.

That’s what I’m wondering about these days. Because South of Hell – my new novel about a mod-ern-day Sawney Bean Clan – is very, very, very different from Smania e febbre. It’s harsh and ter-ribly angry, and any dark kind of poetry is nowhere in sight, as far as I can tell. South of Hell is cyn-ical and dirty and pissed off at society in a way that eight years ago I couldn’t possibly anticipate I would ever feel someday.

And (let’s stick to music) this novel doesn’t sound at all like Dead Can Dance or the Cure.

It sounds like the Cramps.

Or like Johnny Cash on acid.

Or both.

So here here comes the key lime pie-effect.

I’m not really worried because this is the book I’m in love with now, the one I feel like writing and I feel the urge to write. But I wonder about the readers who might expect to find more of the same stuff that they found in Smania e febbre. Because they won’t find any of it – except a brief cameo of a couple of characters that survived the events of the other novel and they’ll both be very different from what they were then.

Key lime pie tasted very different eight years ago for me.

Well, I guess we’ll just find out how much different it will taste for readers as well.

And writing’s the only way to find out.

In the meanwhile, let’s have a glass of milk.

A large one.

Best,
M.

by Matteo Curtoni

I don’t know if it’s the same for some (or all) of you, but my stories are hungry. They’re always hungry and some of them are more than hungry – they’re ravenous. Of course they’re hungry for  love and attention, for the hours I spend working on them. But the hunger I’m talking about now is something different. It’s the hunger for the things that stories want to find inside my head when I’m writing, I guess. They sink their teeth into paintings and photographs that I just vaguely remember sometimes, into songs from obscure or not-so-obscure bands that I happen to find on Myspace, into pages from authors I love or I loved a long time ago, into pieces of news half-heard on the radio while I’m having a coffee in a bar. Anything, really. But I don’t think it’s up to me to look for the words and sounds and images that they need to feed on, so I let them find all that stuff where and the way they want – and I must admit that usually chance helps them with their hunger more than I could ever hope to do, even if I decided to try.
These days I’m writing a new novel called A Sud dell’Inferno – which means South of Hell – that’s coming out in January 2009, here in Italy. It’s set in Milan and deals with a sort of modern-day Sawney Bean Clan. (By the way, mesdames et monsieurs, if you’re not familiar with the deeds of Sawney Bean and his lovely wife Black Agnes Douglas, I warmly recommend you to check out their terribly amazing story.) And South of Hell is really, really ravenous… indeed one of the most ravenous stories I’ve ever written. While I was still working on the plot, it devoured Johnny Cash and Rob Zombie, 16 Horsepower and O’Death and The Flesh Eaters, passages from Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and William Faulkner’s Sanctuary that had been haunting me for a long time and still haunt me today,  Harvey Bennett Stafford’s Muerte! – Death in Mexican Popular Culture and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Russ Meyer and Daniel Pennac’s Le Dictateur et le Hamac. It chewed and swallowed so many true crime stories that its belly’s still aching to this day and later it ate news about the fires that every goddamn summer turn some of Southern Italy to a wasteland of ashes and smoke and even ate some scenes from Chris Nolan’s Dark Knight trailer.
I told you: it’s a ravenous book, and that’s one of the reasons I’m so fond of it.
Now that I’m working on it full time (until last week I was working my head off translating The Mike Hammer Collection Vol. 1 and I didn’t have much time for anything else) it keeps feeding and feeding and I guess that’s appropriate enough, since hunger is one of its central themes.
I never, never try to find out why a certain story’s hungry for the things it feeds on. It would be a waste of time, probably, and I guess that it would feel somewhat unfair. I just let them chase their appetites the way they want, without asking questions, without investigating too much. I’m sure it’s not a matter of influences – literary and/or creative influences are something deeper and older and much more complex for me than the banquets that stories consume inside my head. Rather, I think it’s a landscape that stories ask me to create for them, a landscape made of pages and sounds and hints and fragments, that won’t necessarily be visible or perceptible between the lines once the novel will be written but that somehow creates a much more deeper focus on the creative process of writing.
Sorry, ladies and gentlemen, I gotta go now.
There’s a ravenous novel that’s demanding for my attention.
Bon appetit to all your stories.
Best,
M.

(Admin note:  Matteo will be here with a longer piece next month, same time.  This time I caught him by surprise, and he didn’t have as much time as he wanted.  I asked him just for a short introductory piece…and here you have it.  He’s an Italian author who writes in English as well as his native tongue, a translator, and a great guy.  Enjoy! – DNW)

 

by Matteo Curtoni

I’m not sure I know who the Good and the Bad really are, but I can tell you something about the Writer. That much I can do, and I think I should since it’s my first post here. The Writer is 34, he’s Italian and he’s always loved language so much (or so obsessively, you’ll be the judges) that some years ago he decided that writing in his native tongue was not enough. Just not enough. So he started writing stories in English as well. Those stories won a couple of contests and the Writer got noticed by an Italian publisher. The publisher offered him a contract. Of course the novel he wrote for the publisher was in Italian but it was based on one of the short pieces he’d written in English because, hey, linguistic schizophrenia needed to be fed somehow. The novel was quite sick, dark and weird but it sold reasonably well anyway. Since stories and novels or ideas for stories and novels unfortunately aren’t accepted as currency, while working on further indignities he’s planning to subject his readers to, our man makes living out of translating. From English to Italian. He’s translated novels by Joe Hill, Douglas Coupland, Katherine Dunn, James Lee Burke, just to name a few, and he considers himself damn lucky for the opportunity to translate their works. He keeps wondering about the Good and the Bad and about what the hell they’re doin’ inside his head, but he has reason to suspect that they’re studying French. Sooner or later he’ll find out, anyway. Last but not at all least, he’s terribly happy for the chance to contribute with his words here. Hope you’ll enjoy them, ladies and gentlemen.

 

–Matteo Curtoni