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Effingham Fish
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Click through the channels just in time to see Martin Scorsese wind up telling me how fantastically fantastic it is, decide to stop. Starts out with a crowd of men waiting to be given jobs. The protagonist, Ricci, is given a job putting up posters in the city, with one stipulation: he must bring his own bicycle. On his way back home, he meets his wife, Maria, carrying two beaten buckets of water and tells her about the job; this is where it comes out that the bicycle he claimed was broken but could be repaired has, in fact, been long since sold.
"What would you have eaten?" Ricci asks. "I feel like a man in chains!" Without speaking, Maria strips the sheets from the bed. "You can sleep without sheets, no?" She dumps an entire bucket onto them to be washed.
The bottom of the turkey pot pie I have been eating is tough and tasteless, the result of multiple attempts to heat it. My rate of consumption slows.
Next scene: Maria hands the sheets through a small window to a thin, balding man with glasses. "There are six of them," she explains to him. "Part linen, part cotton. They were part of my dowry."
"But they're used," he counters.
"No, no," she says, "two of them are new." But they all came off the bed, didn't they? Ah well.
"7,000."
Ricci leans down from Maria's side. "Can't you make it a little more?"
The man spreads his hands in a gesture of helplessness. "They're used, they're used," he says. Turning to someone off camera, "Take them away." Turning back to the couple, a hint (but just a hint) of kindness sneaking into his expression, "7,500." Relief breaks over them like dawn over a wasteland. The man begins counting out several large bills.
I take advantage of this break in the action to head into the kitchen. The last remnants of pot pie are uneatable. What the faucet doesn't rinse into the garbage disposal, I scrape out with my fork.
Returning to my seat, Ricci and Maria are all smiles, wheeling a shiny, new bicycle out of a shop. I turn the TV off. I'm not good enough to watch this movie. Maybe later, but not now.
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020607
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