«In 50 years never far away. The illness? He reacted up to the last day»- Corriere.it

In this house, for twenty years, no one has ever entered. «Apart from the doctors, only me, Cristina, Monica’s and Mirella’s secretary, who looked after her. No one else, ever.” Roberto Russo, the man in front of me, was for forty-nine years the life partner of Monica Vitti, who passed away a year ago. We are in the room where the most popular actress in our country, loved all over the world, spent the years of the new millennium, far from the hustle and bustle of this fast and clamorous time. Sitting on that black leather armchair, Monica saw the passing of the days, the seasons, the years. She and Roberto came to live in this house in 1987. Her previous one had burned down and in any case she didn’t like it «because Michelangelo Antonioni, the other important man in her life, lived upstairs. She could feel him dragging his leg in her house after he’d had his stroke, and it made her suffer.’

How did you meet Monica, I ask Roberto. «We were on the set of Teresa the thief. I was 25, she was sixteen older than me. She was the lead actress, I tapped the clapperboard. In short, I was a train driver. I’ve done everything in cinema. I lived in Torpignattara and one day they came to shoot a film. He needed two children. I didn’t miss the opportunity. Then I was a machinist, an electrician, a toolmaker, an interior decorator. I loved working on set. I didn’t have schedules. They paid me more because I worked twice as hard. Then I also worked as a still photographer, director, producer.
In short, during that film, based on a book by Dacia Maraini, I completely lost my mind. I haven’t understood anything since I saw it. But I was the clapperboard and she was the star. She was engaged. I had never seen a woman of that intelligence, that sympathy, that beauty. She was like the movies she made: she knew how to make people laugh, make them cry, make them think. Our story, which lasted almost half a century, was the adventure of a symbiosis. You met her and you know it: if you were even just five minutes with Monica you were screwed, she bewitched you, taking you from everywhere, you didn’t want to leave. And I never left. I’ll tell you this: we never parted for a second. Just think that in fifty years I have slept away from her only one night, for a prize that I had to collect. Monica and I never closed an eye that night».

One can imagine what the mischievous arcades of the glittering world of entertainment could say about this union: the celebrity and the clapperboard, the sixteen-year difference, Cannes and Torpignattara… “I’m still madly in love,” he says in a strangled voice. this emaciated man, with his usual fine features and a small plaster on his chest, the residue of a minor heart operation: “Since February I’ve missed a heartbeat every moment.” He shows me a photograph of Monica on the armchair in front of me, in this silent living room, a large space in a house of one hundred square meters. It’s Monica in the last period of her life, just as no one, except those three people, has ever seen her. I met her for the last time, like everyone else, more than twenty years ago. Then she, like a sickly Salinger, stopped showing herself. And now, while Roberto looks for her picture on her cell phone, I try to remember her as she was.

Many images overlap in the mind: those of Claudia from Antonioni’s film — «L’Avventura was Monica’s favourite. And mine too», says Roberto — La Tosca by Luigi Magni, Adelaide Ciafrocchi in Drama of Jealousy, Goddess Dani in Stardust, Assunta Patanè in The Girl with the Gun. I see her again with that sensual and cultured face, irreverent and ironic. She, with a popular, refined, unusual beauty. Now Roberto has found it, photography. Show it to me. It’s Monica, with her wonderful cap of blond hair and her face full of freckles and sunshine. But a photograph has no words. So I ask Roberto when he realized that something was wrong with Monica. “Monica was a great actress, don’t forget that. She masked the gaps that were multiplying in her mind. She was great. She leveraged that, deep down, a little forgetful she had always been her. She knew all of her scripts by her memory, but maybe she didn’t remember where she’d left her house keys. She has always been like this. But our life in symbiosis meant that every little slip of one was felt by the other. I had noticed that something was not right as always. That her memory was leaving her, slowly but, for me, visibly. I took her to a famous doctor. She unleashed her camouflage skills and in the end this luminary invested me saying that Monica was fine and that I was the one who had to be examined. Another time I took her to be tested at the clinic and she got angry. She asked me how she came up with it, that she was fine and her tests confirmed it. I apologized and told her that I had done it to get rid of the fear».

I ask Roberto if he ever had the feeling that Monica realized that something similar to the computer memory leak of 2 was happening to her001 A Space Odyssey. Roberto swallows and says that «Yes, once he said to me: “Roberto I don’t remember this thing, it’s an easy thing. How come? What is happening to me?””. Monica did not have Alzheimer’s, but a degenerative disease called “Dementia with Lewy bodies” given by an accumulation of proteins in the brain that causes serious disturbances in attention, speech, motor faculties and induces apathy. But Monica made an effort to react right up to the end. She didn’t stay in bed, she got up, supported by the three companions of all those days, she had herself washed and dressed – Roberto says that she “at ninety years old she had beautiful legs” – and she sat down in that black armchair. The one in front of my eyes, the one in the photograph. Both Cristina and Roberto are keen to say that, despite the reduced relationship faculties that she had, she made herself understood very well.

Cristina Loss, the actress’s secretary since 1988, recalls that if by chance she and Mirella had something to reproach Roberto with, Monica would burst out in a resounding «Noooo», as if to defend him. And then that if he was in another room she would look for him, she would call him. “How did he do it?” I ask. Cristina replies with a smile that Monica did it by saying just one word: «Dad…- Roberto says that Monica called him that from the first moment, as an ironic reaction to those who said that he was younger than her. “The night before he died, we realized something was wrong. Monica was not like always. The next morning I called the ambulance but there was nothing to do, we stopped at the nearest hospital… From there I called you to tell you to break the news. Monica made me live a beautiful life, every day filled with happiness and love. It all started on that set. Didn’t I tell you that at a certain point, since I couldn’t see her and not be able to tell her that I loved her, I abandoned filming. But after a few days they called me back to tell me they wanted me to go back to the set. I understood in that moment, the most beautiful of my life, that it was Monica who wanted me near her».

Close… And how long have you been with her, since when did the disease get tougher? I know, but it’s important that this beautiful person say it. And he says it as if he didn’t want to do it, but deep down he’s proud of the words he’s about to say: «For twenty years. Twenty years here with her. To never let her be alone, to never let her miss anything. Twenty years without ever leaving the house except for shopping or for a walk around here. I defended Monica for her, her desire for privacy until the end, I tried to make her laugh when she could, and always held her hand. And I would do it again, I would do it again every day of these twenty years that I don’t separate from the other thirty. They’ve all been wonderful, because they’ve all been with her.” I wonder if Monica, before the great silence, had written anything. Cristina — a woman who looks a bit like Monica, has lived with them all these thirty-five years and still calls Roberto with the “lei” — she says, looking at the computer screen: “Mr. Roberto look here …”. Roberto reads, is moved and then shows me the words written by Monica shortly before retiring into her world: «My great love, my beautiful love, love love love, how beautiful it is to live with you, work with you, argue with you , make peace with you, build with you, be afraid and cry and laugh. Nothing is beautiful without you.”