Episode Details

I have a confession to make. A friend of mine who still lives in Lausanne taught me a long time ago the only attractive thing about the internet, something that has brought me infinite joy over the years, to wit: being a ruthless pirate of content in the form of the many films, books, and series I couldn’t afford while I was a digital nomad living on the road without two cents to rub. Certainly, I admit it was against the law and looked awful for an author. Where were the principles to protect the sacred copyright? I tell you where... In the dustbin of history! Now that I have money again, the copies I order on Amazon are the ones of my revered Maestros, always in the original language because I’m fed up with cheap translations. One must learn from the best; Goethe learned Spanish to read Calderón and Cervantes, for instance. 

The curious thing was that my friend inherited a fortune. And yet, he was a monumental cheapskate. But with me, while we were inseparable best friends, he was splendid beyond measure. Nonetheless, we parted ways due to his annoying habits and countless shenanigans that subsequently made me lose my temper and good nature. Most of the time, I miss that rogue. I still have in my drawer a hot manuscript about his iconic mother–Paule Rizzo, a Parisian mannequin of Coco Chanel from the late fifties–that someday I shall top it off with a proper epilogue.

Among all the satisfaction that being a ruthless pirate brought about, I have to write up a delightful surprise. As if I would do in a logbook while sailing in the middle of nowhere with my eccentric friend, when we used to cast off with the fair weather, and during the warm nights, we slept with the sails jibed, battered for the breeze into the deep, while glowing ship cruisers were setting their bow to the island of Minorca.

It’s about how Gus Van Sant’s Feud series about Truman Capote ended. My peers didn’t upload the season finale because, in the penultimate episode, he died in the arms of Joanne Carson, and they thought the story was already told. For two days, I was clicking over and over to no avail at the Pirate’s Bay, and the season finale wasn’t there. I read the recap in the New York magazine media column Vulture where the praise of the line-up of actresses went to Demi Moore, and I quote, “Her Ann Woodward may have been the swan we spent the least amount of time with, but my God, did she make every gesture and every scathing line feel like an event.”

This morning some pirate uploaded the long-awaited season finale, and while it was supposed to be a bland posthumous fantasy, it instead struck me as a moving work of art, one that put me on the verge of tears. Am I getting old? Or maybe I’m still mourning my late father, my own private black swan. If he could read me without any further consideration would dispatch me with the same derogatory adjective that Truman’s mom did. Frilly. Oh yeah, all of us have something to forgive and to be forgiven. No doubt about that.

I live very close to Palamós, at that time a small fishing town where Truman–always accompanied by his partner-in-life Jack Dunphy–sought for three semesters, alternated with their cottage in Verbier, near to Lausanne, at the top of the Swiss Alps, the necessary peace to write his most accomplished manuscript, In Cold Blood.

On April of 1962, they tried Corsica for a change but in the very hotel they stayed at, they were robbed of $500, the equivalent of over five grand in today’s money. And quickly they went back to Spain. Local oldtimers who treated him, remember Truman with a bottle of gin under his arm yelling “My lady friend died!” at the newsstand the day headlines screamed that Marilyn Monroe had fatally overdosed. 

And if this series of setbacks were not enough, a frightening wildfire just outside the villa they had rented almost cost them their lives, because, in that rocky Mediterranean shore, the pine groves