Asia Argento returned to speak – for the last time, she said, interpreting her will, Mara Venier – about the dramatic final moments of her ex-partner Anthony Bourdain.
And he did it on TV, on Domenica In, trying to emulate what came out in a new unauthorized biography of the versatile chef, Down and Out in Paradise: The Life of Anthony Bourdain, written by Charles Leerhsen, which To be released in the US by Simon & Schuster on October 11th.
With Bourdain, Argento had a beautiful – but also painful – love affair that lasted two years. And Argento decides to talk about this story, repeating its depth and depths, its beauty and its dramatic ending. An epilogue on which the biography focuses, which publishes the text messages Argento and Bourdain sent to each other in the hours leading up to the suicide. Including the last exchange:
Is there anything I can do? Bourdain asked.
Don’t piss me off, Silver replied.
Okay, that was the last word Bourdain texted her.
Who brought these messages to the author of the biography? Argento initially wonders. Answer: The vultures around him. Because so many people took advantage of him.
Argento then tells her story, which – he explains – I have already said all about. We had a free relationship, we were an open couple. So there was no reason for Bourdain’s jealousy over the release of some photos showing Argento with another man in Rome. Well, Bourdain himself wrote to Argento, I am not jealous, you are not my property. You are free like I said, like I promised. But you were ruthless with my heart.
And the last exchange? Me, explains Argento, I told him “don’t break my balls”. He had been drinking, had problems with alcohol like me. It was strange that evening, his voice was thick, he was stubborn. But I was happy, the next day I should have started the X Factor: a finally happy, important step after spending difficult years on #metoo and the Weinstein case. He was drunk that night, but it had happened other times. And I also knew that he was with his best friend: so I said to myself: stay with him, he will let off steam with him. Unfortunately he didn’t see us again.
I found out the next morning what happened after the last message, says Argento. Her agent called me, she was very cold, cruel. I ran out of suitcase to go to the X Factor and he just said to me, “Anthony is gone, dead. He took his own life”.
According to Argento, there was a plan by Anthony’s entourage to blame me. Warning: I was the first to blame myself, impossible not to avoid. I assume this guilt. But I think to say that a person takes their own life in a fight is an understatement. never like that Anthony was a very intelligent man, albeit a very fragile one. We had fought many other times. But when someone’s depressed – and he was, like other messages he sent to his wife – when you’re sick, when you have problems with alcohol, like Anthony had and like I had back then… There is one Lesson we all need to learn. Suicide is an extreme gesture: but whoever commits it does not really want to die. He just wants to find relief from depression. When a person is often ashamed in this situation, he is not asking for help: and indeed he has not asked for help.
As written here, the biography presents the portrait of a man haunted by “despair beyond despair,” as William Styron said in his book Transparent Darkness, a Bourdain isolated from friends and ex-wife and daughter obsessed with physical form, under the influence of anabolic steroids, alcohol, client of prostitutes, far away from the everyday life of the then eleven-year-old daughter.
I fought to be born again, to get up, to walk again, says Asia Argento now, who also explains that she has been sober for a year and a half now. I wanted to tell Anthony, if only I could, that tomorrow really is another day, that the wonderful life must come to an end.
No further comment on the biography, which Bourdain’s brother Chris called defamatory fiction and urged the publisher not to publish it. Just one, last, on the message Morgan – with whom Argento had a long love affair, and a daughter – dedicated to her after posting the text messages with Bourdain on social media. The love between her and me really existed, we loved each other, and when we say “I love you”, even when the desire is gone and the story is over, it stays forever. I could never say or do anything against my daughter’s mother, and even if I’m no longer in love with her, she will always have my respect and complicity, Morgan wrote. I didn’t expect this message from Marco (Castoldi, Morgan’s real name, editor’s note), said Asia Argento. It felt like a caress to me.
October 2, 2022 (change October 2, 2022 | 20:21)
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