When Quentin Taratino introduced me to my father: The first tribute to Anthony Steffen, king of the European western [Part 2]

For the career, he left my mother and devoted himself to art, but discovered 20 years later that he had made some deadly mistakes that he regretted until the end: the ending of La La Land, is the carbon copy of my parents' story. However, my mother had forgiven him and, thanks to the balm of that undeserved forgiveness, my father preserved his original human lucidity. Mom, the day she knew that her love was going to die in Rio de Janeiro surrounded by nothing, despite being 15 years younger, she instantly aged another 15 years and decided to die too, letting herself go a few years later, "as a dead body falls". "I'm actually a happy woman," she told me on her bed at the Gemelli Polyclinic, "Because I married the man I loved and I have four beautiful children: I had everything."

My father's birth to heaven marked an unforgettable week. When Dad yelled at us on the phone that he was sick, I arrived in Rio just in time with my brother Luiz, who had arrived a few days earlier to see if it was all true: Django the Bastard was really in a wheelchair, the oxygen mask and breaths like Darth Vader, so much anger in his heart and treacherous and caricatured people around. As little Skywalkers we tried to fight equally against his imperfect wickedness, making our way with machetes into his rebellious past. I brought a carioca priest for extreme unction and, once his soul was armored, we put a laptop connected to the internet in his lap to give him an unprecedented surprise.

"Dad, listen to me: this is Google. I know you don't know what it is, Luiz explained it to you many times in Rome: you write your stage name on it. Here dad. Then you will have a surprise. Don't you remember?"

"Oh! Manuel! Of course I remember who I am! Daddy is just tired!" 

Antonio de Teffé, still envious for having suffered extreme unction in spite of himself and for a hot laptop on his knees, bent over that bright screen and slowly beat ANTHONY STEFFEN, then froze, for a moment his breathing stopped and his eyes became those of a 6-year-old boy devoured by wonder. Google was uploading his entire past of an artistic life before him: posters of all his films, one by one, translated into all the languages of the world, even Japanese and Finnish, came to life under his stunned gaze:

"A coffin for the sheriff" (1965), "Why do you kill again?" (1965), "Seven Dollars on the Red" (1966), "A Few Dollars for Django" (1966), "A Thousand Dollars on the Black" (1966), "Ringo the Face of Revenge" (1967), "Killer Kid (1967), "A Train to Durango" (1967), "Gentleman Joe, Kill" (1967) , "The Gunslinger Marked by God" (1968), "The Dead Are Not Counted" (1968), "A Long Line of Crosses" (1968) , "His Name Screamed Vengeance" (1968) "A Stranger in Paso Bravo" (1968) "Diango the Bastard" (1969) "Garringo" (1969) "Arizona went wild and there he killed everyone" (1970), "Here comes Sabata" (1970), "A Man Called Apocalypse Joe" (1970), "Shango the infallible gun" (1970), "W Django" (1971), "They believed him a saint's shank" (1972), "Tequila" (1973)...

"Did I do all this? Also in Japanese? Check out the Django the Bastard poster in Japanese! That's cool... I would like to call Garrone. But maybe he's dead, better not that then makes me sad. Sergio Garrone was a great but who will remember him. Oh, and priests don't have to set foot here anymore. They say strange things."

Dad spent a whole afternoon looking at and looking at all the posters, thousands, becoming better and better in the face, until he finally turned into the Antonio he met mom. And we remember him like this: gathering the remaining strength, he looked at me and my brother Luiz formulating his last sensible words as he stretched his arms out of bed, upwards, towards our faces: "My loves".

Almost 15 years have passed since that June of 2004, and now the friends who really loved him appear in my life, people like the artist French Curd Riedel first promoter of the Blu Ray tribute, the legendary Italian directors loved by Tarantino like Enzo Castellari and Sergio Garrone and many others.

[My last photo of my father in Rio]

People who tell me about it through the eyes of those who really knew him, far from that criticism that Tarantino wanted to criticize so elegantly in "Once Upon a time in Hollywood" through a very subtle dialogue in the car between Brad Pitt and Di Caprio, an exchange of jokes almost for insiders that is interpreted exactly the opposite and that sounds more or less like this:

PITT: It's been a long time since I've been a full-time stunt double and as I see it, going to Rome to shoot movies is not the great death sentence that you apparently think it is. DI CAPRIO: Come on, have you ever seen one of their westerns? They are horrendous! It's a total farce! PITT: Yes? It's how many have you seen, one? DiCaprio: Enough, okay? Nobody likes spaghetti westerns..."