I. “Raffaella Carrà. The Red Button”

Passport

1. Literary project: “Disco”
2. Project tagline: “From Dance to Freedom!”
3. Author and copyright holder: Iskandar Kadyrov
4. Format: Eight Heroines · Eight Stories · Eight Discos
5. Genre: Literary fiction, literary parable
6. Age rating: 18+
7. Story: I. “Raffaella Carrà. The Red Button”
8. Concept: Disco as a state in which music gives a person back the sense of being alive; each heroine gave the world her own disco and her own freedom of choice: of style, color, mood, euphoria

Teaser

A novella about a red button that can stop a broadcast, and a body that cannot stand still.

Announcement

A Saturday broadcast, a red button within Signor Mancuso’s reach—and a woman who steps onto the floor to check her marks. A carnival parable about a body that cannot stand still.

About the project

“Disco” is a literary project by Iskandar Kadyrov, written as parables about music, the body, and freedom. Eight novellas about heroines, each of whom gave the world her own disco: her own rhythm, her own color, her own way of stepping into the light. Every story has its own laws: its own genre, its own voice, its own view of freedom. This is not an encyclopedia of a genre or a ranking of stars. These are eight authorial variations on what happens to a person when music gives back the feeling of being alive. Real names stand for cultural phenomena; the plots and scenes are works of fiction.

Each of them gave the world her own disco.

Hashtags

#DISCO #FromDanceToFreedom #RaffaellaCarra #IskandarKadyrov #LiteraryUniverse #TheArchitectureOfMeaningHouse #LiteraryHauteCouture #ContemporaryFiction

Studio Three of the television center held so many beautiful things that a single Saturday would not have been long enough to look at them all.

And it happened to be Saturday. The whole country was at dinner, pasta cooling on plates, and everyone with a working television waited to see what would surprise them tonight.

The spotlights hung from the ceiling like small suns that had been ordered not to set until the broadcast was over. The cameras rolled across the floor on heavy wheels, like circus elephants that had wandered into a ballet by mistake. Cables wove between sets that portrayed either a festive cake or a spaceship sent in search of the perfect mood. Above the cake-ship hung a mirror ball: motionless for now, it gathered darkness into little silver squares and kept it in reserve, like a piggy bank. Colored reflections trembled on the walls. The mirrored surfaces of the props caught them, broke them into pieces, and threw them back, so that the studio already seemed to be dancing, though the orchestra had not played a single note.

It smelled of hairspray, hot dust, coffee, and an approaching celebration.

Not everything in the room was beautiful, however. On the control desk sat a small red button.

It did not sparkle, and it did not try to please anyone. In that building it was the only object that knew exactly how to stop the fun.

Its guardian was Signor Mancuso, a man with a face like a freshly pressed tablecloth. For twenty-two years he had never pressed the button, and he was prouder of this than some men are of their children, their medals, or their houses by the sea. Before every broadcast he took out a handkerchief, breathed on the red dome, and polished it to a shine—not out of love for beauty but out of duty. It, too, shone strictly on duty.

The handkerchief went back into his pocket with the air of a man who has completed an important ceremony. Then Signor Mancuso placed his feet in what he privately called the regulation stance: heels together, toes apart, knees obedient. His foot had stood that way for twenty-two years. The foot was perfectly content with the arrangement.

Today the handkerchief lingered in his hand longer than usual. A note from the Committee for Public Decency lay on the desk:

“Shots from the shoulders up are recommended. Everything else should, where possible, be considered absent.”

Decency, after all, is remarkably durable. Nobody invites it and nobody feeds it, yet it always arrives first and takes the best seats.

“Five minutes!” shouted the director, Marcello.

Nando, the camera operator, read the note twice.

“How exactly does one film a woman whose everything else is considered absent?”

“Professionally,” said Marcello.

“That doesn’t explain anything,” said Nando, but he took hold of the camera.

She came in without an announcement, the way an orchestra enters at a carnival, and the studio, which a moment earlier had merely been beautiful, suddenly remembered why it had been built.

Her golden bob swung in the doorway like a bell announcing a feast. The spotlights, which had been loitering lazily along the ceiling, turned their hot faces toward her, and the sequins on her costume caught twelve beams at once and handed them out to the walls, the faces, the lenses, the buttons on jackets. A ripple of light ran across the cake-ship. The mirror ball shivered faintly, like a dog that has heard its name. Signora Rosa, the makeup artist, who had seen everyone under the sun pass through those walls, quietly sat down on a crate of props.

Raffaella said nothing. She smiled at the studio, one smile for everyone at once, as wide as a piazza, and went to check her marks.

One with her toe. Another with her heel. A third with a brisk turn that sent her sequins flying like a school of goldfish and then let them settle slowly. She knew each chalk cross to the centimeter: she had rehearsed so many times that the chalk had long since become part of her feet. Lightness, as everyone knows, takes heavy work. It is simply not customary to tell the audience.

“Thirty seconds,” said Marcello.

Signor Mancuso laid his palm beside the red button the way one rests a hand near a sleeping dog: not touching, but making clear who is in charge here.

The red ON AIR light came on. For the moment it was the only red thing in the studio that was behaving itself.

The trumpets came in.

Not an orchestra but a festive invasion. The drum struck as if someone had decided to beat the dust out of an entire continent, and the sound rolled through the studio in a hot wave: through the floor, through the cables, through the chairs, through the ribcages.

For the first minute everything went as it should. Smile. Turn of the head. Sweep of the arm. Nando held the camera precisely at shoulder level—exemplary, almost touching. Mancuso relaxed a little: they would get through this, he thought, without any written explanations.

Then the bass reached the ribs.

It was not a sound but a neighbor. It settled in everyone’s ribs at once and began tapping from inside, politely and insistently, like a man who has come for an answer.

The rhythm took a step. A small one, the kind you take to keep your shoes out of a puddle. Then a second. A third. A fourth, a fifth, and now the sequins no longer glittered but drummed, a rattle of light poured down the walls, and shoulders, hips, knees and arms began to speak in different voices of one choir. Raffaella did not merely move in time: she handed out the beat like candy at a party, to everyone, with no list.

Nando’s camera behaved like a courtier who has been ordered not to look at the queen, only for the queen to walk straight toward him. It did not break the note, no. It merely bowed a little. The lens, the most honest organ in the studio, discovered that the dance was happening below the shoulders as well, slid down to her hands, to her waist, to the narrow strip of light across the middle of the costume, and froze there with the expression of a subordinate who does not know whom to report to.

“Nando,” hissed Marcello into the headset. “Higher.”

“I’m trying. She won’t fit above the shoulders.”

And then began what no protocol had foreseen. For each person, in a different way.

Lucia, the assistant with the clipboard, was keeping the timings. At first she wrote the seconds neatly in a column. By the fourth minute the numbers had begun to wave, by the fifth they were skipping, and by the sixth they had lined up into a musical staff. Lucia looked at the page, then at her pencil, which was clearly leading a life of its own, and out of a sense of duty drew at the bottom a figure that looked like a treble clef.

Uncle Tino, the props man—sixty-one years old, bad back, twenty years without a single unnecessary movement—suddenly discovered that he had hips. He discovered them the way one finds a forgotten inheritance in the cupboard: not believing it, but with interest. He tried one. Then the other. While straightening the cake-ship he nudged it with his left side, and the cake, it must be admitted, settled into place better than it ever had with a screwdriver.

Signora Rosa did not get up from her crate. She beat time with her powder compact, and a cloud of powder hung over her in the spotlight like a small pink universe in which, rumor had it, they were dancing too.

The director, Marcello, tried to hold on to power. “Lights!” he shouted, and the lights trembled in time. “Camera three!” and camera three swung round half a beat late. By the end of the verse his orders had lost the rank of commands and become gestures: he stood in the middle of the control room conducting the studio without noticing it. Somewhere around the third minute he said, to nobody, “Good.” The word sounded like a surrender.

And then the mirror ball, which until now had hung peacefully like a moon lost in thought, slowly turned, although no one had touched it. Silver squares tore away from the walls and drifted across faces, tables, cables, across Uncle Tino’s bald head, across the red ON AIR light. Light began to sound. Music began to sparkle. The studio spun so willingly that it seemed to have been waiting for this since morning.

One man resisted.

Signor Mancuso was looking at the red button. The red button was looking at him. They understood each other better than any two people in the building.

The body is a poor employee for institutions built on prohibitions. It does not read notes. It does not sign forms. It simply hears the rhythm and answers.

Signor Mancuso’s right foot, which had been standing at the angle prescribed by its position, shifted almost imperceptibly. He did not notice. Then the knee trembled. Then the fingers began to dance—the very same fingers that for twenty-two years had kept faithfully a centimeter from the button. Now they were a centimeter away and in time.

Signor Mancuso noted: breach of discipline. The foot raised no objection.

His finger drifted toward the button like a compass needle toward north. And at that moment Signor Mancuso, for the first time in twenty-two years, asked himself a question not covered by his job description: what exactly was he trying to save?

From sequins? From a drum? From a woman who shows the country that shoulders have a continuation? He tried to imagine cutting the broadcast. A flower in a vase. Silence smelling of cold coffee. And millions of people suddenly staring at a vase.

Meanwhile the country pretended that nothing was happening. In Palermo a grandmother, still holding her knitting, began to knit in time, and her scarf came out with a drum pattern. In Milan a father put down his newspaper and assumed the look of a man caught reading what he was not reading. In Rome a boy who should have been in bed long ago slid off the sofa and tried to repeat the turn of the shoulder; it looked like the shoulder of a man who has just been stung by a wasp. And in a thousand other apartments people made the same pretense of merely reaching for a glass of water.

The finger stopped in midair.

The trumpets soared, the drum set down its full stop, and the sequins, flung up, drifted down without hurry. Raffaella froze exactly on her last cross. Rehearsal, as ever, had tied with inspiration—and won on a technicality.

A second of silence fell in the studio. All the Committee’s possible objections fitted into it.

The ON AIR light stayed lit. The red button had not been needed.

Signor Mancuso looked down. His foot—his own, regulation, standing to attention for twenty-two years—was tapping a rhythm that was no longer there. He did not try to stop it.

Then he raised his eyes to the desk. In the red convex drop of the button, polished by him to its long regulation shine, the whole studio was reflected: the turning ball, the scattered sequins, the cake-ship drifting by, Uncle Tino with his inheritance, Raffaella on her last cross. Everything in it was spinning. Only the button itself was not. It had turned out to be the stillest thing in the entire building.