After Auschwitz: A Love Story (11 page)

What matters to me now are the things that nourish love, the rest is the victory of stone and the enemy and death—the victory of stone and the mud and the terrible ground.

Hannah enrolled me in a film club of some sort and I started going through some of the films that inspired me in my early days when I was still an assistant director, when Fellini's masterpieces
La Strada
and
Le Notti di Cabiria
exploded like bombshells. I still thought of myself as a Communist but I had something of a double standard. Communist in politics, but never able to stand doctrinal art. I found it exhilarating that film didn't have to be only about social problems. Fellini kept some of the best of neo-realism's heritage, the sincerity and belief in humanistic values, but his own vision was metaphorical, mysterious, poetic.
La Strada
was about an inner journey. Its ending so profound you couldn't put it into words. I played it over and over, each time seeing new things. It makes me happy
that I still can feel its power. It even infuses me with a temporary strength. Every time I get to the part where Giulietta Masina, running away from the circus, stops to examine a bug—she has a curious enigmatic smile—I start to cry. I know what is coming. As if by magic a troop of musicians appears and she follows them into town where a religious ceremony is taking place. It is a mysterious event that suggests her faith in life and makes her a sort of secular saint. Masina was Fellini's wife, of course. I wonder whether the circus strongman's complete inability to understand and value her character related to Fellini's marriage. He places her next to a circus strongman, a brutal and unsympathetic character. But Fellini allows even this creature a moment of truth when he cries at the end, after she dies. He finally understands her worth.

I am circling around a subject that frightens me. How to die without faith. Isn't it the main role of religion to help us accept our mortality? Going on to a better place with a loving father and, if you are a Catholic, a Virgin Mother who will always plead your case with the supreme authority. It sounds boring, frankly.

I want, need, long for the love of people here, of my Hannah.

We are having a weekend in the country. I am in the living room on the small sofa that was in Mother's room in Todi, with the fur rug over my knees. Hannah comes up from the rustic kitchen with a glass of juice. She won't let me drink wine anymore because it makes my memory worse. That's a real loss. She sits next to me and snuggles close to make it up to me. We are watching
La Strada.
After a while the film's words tire me and I turn the sound down low, but I still get pleasure from the images, especially the ever-changing expressions on Masina's face. I like to think I'd have recognized the love there, seen how special it was. I put my arm around Hannah and pat her
hip, my favorite part of her. It's as though all her womanliness resides there.

“Do you remember my film,
Night in Florence?”
I ask her.

“Of course,” she says, “I like it very much. It's so sensual. Beautiful.” She tugs her braid, brushing it absentmindedly against her neck. I always used to untie it myself and spread her hair over her shoulders before we made love.

The film, one of my first solo efforts as a director, was about a young Jewish woman engaged to a famous professor whom she had admired for his intellect. For their honeymoon he takes her to Florence and she falls in love with the statue of David in the main square. She realizes that all the professor's descriptions of Michelangelo's life and the making of this statue aren't worth the passion she feels looking at the curves of David's buttocks, his sex, his slim ankles, his curls. After they spend an excruciating day touring other masterpieces, the professor announces, as though he is conferring a huge favor, that he wants her to work for him typing and taking notes—he is writing on the Italian Renaissance. That night she packs her bag and runs away with the desk clerk, a man with a handsome profile and no English.

“I've always liked it too,” I say wistfully. “I wish I'd had the courage to continue with more like that instead of those social comedies that I can't even bear to watch now.”

“The audiences liked them,” she says with an ambiguous smile.

She caresses my cheek. She gave up her reluctance to write about Auschwitz several books ago and became known as a witness. A critic once referred to her work as a sort of sacred text no more open to criticism than the Bible. Her last book though—and I don't know why I haven't mentioned this—was about us, her and me. In it, she saw her love as a “splendid disaster,” but one she would always cherish. I am proud of her, of course, but though I always urged her not to spare my feelings, the portrait she paints of me isn't flattering. And no
one would think of treating my work as sacred text. Feeling under-appreciated tires me out. Why brood? In a few years I'll be dead and my films forgotten. That's the trouble with Art—you're either someone or no one … or at most a minor someone.

Back in Rome, while Hannah waters the plants on the terrace, I try to catch up with time. It moves so fast these days, I'm flooded with memories. My life with Hannah—Hannah herself—has returned to what it/she was at the beginning. My sense of time is confused. The sun catches Hannah's hair as she moves and I remember the glorious gold it used to be. Now I can't remember ever seeing it turn.

When I was young my pony had the most magnificent mane flowing down over his withers. It glinted gold like Hannah's hair when I rode under the cypresses over to the arena. No, the arena I am remembering wasn't at our country place, it was in Rome where every spring they had the big horse show, and riders from all over the world would come. I didn't ride in the show but I had lessons in the arena wearing my new jodhpurs and my tweed jacket. My boots shone like mirrors. My teacher was an old German, very strict, who used at shake his whip at me when my knees weren't tight enough or my shoulders sagged or I lost a stirrup going over the jump.

I wish I was still able to ride. There was something wonderful about the closeness, the warmth of affection when my pony greeted me with a soft whinny, nuzzling in my hand for sugar or a carrot. Then adjusting my body to the gait, the languorous slowness at a walk, drinking in whatever is growing, buzzing, singing—feeling the seasonal fog, the heat of the sun, the light, moist air.

Hannah used to tease me, saying that my sympathy for the liberal democrats would last just as long as I wasn't caught in a traffic jam next to tens of blaring radios. But still, my summers as a child in Todi playing with the peasant children did give me a genuine sympathy and liking for them and a whole
range of others who were close to the land. And later, it was part of Hannah's attraction. My tutor put an end to my play with the village children when I was about eleven. Hannah brought them back to me. Her frankness and strength, the will that got her through the camps were qualities I had seen in the village children. They weren't coddled when they were sick; they were strong-bodied, clever at all the things that kept them alive: carding wool, cutting hay, swimming in icy water to save a younger comrade who had slipped off the bank. Hannah tells me I idealize them—though in her village stories she does too.

What a difference from the dancing classes in Rome. There the little girls all wore taffeta dresses and white gloves, their glossy curls drawn back. My little girlfriend in Todi wore patched skirts and ran barefoot through the fields. She was especially bold. We wrestled in the new hay, and once she kissed me. I used to come and watch her milk their family cow. I would beg her to let me try. Her father would beat her if she did, she said. She pretended to be angry with me and would squirt warm milk into my face. Later I borrowed my brother's bike for her, and we would bump along the dirt roads, occasionally stopping to steal some fruit from our neighbor's trees.

I was out for a walk with Hannah just now and we ran into my old friend Peter. He is in charge of all the dubbing of foreign films, and his studio is ten minutes from us on Via Margutta. He came up and hugged Hannah and then me. Usually she would have called out a name: “Oh, Pete, how good to see you,” but for some reason she didn't. I was looking at his face. I knew I knew him, but I just couldn't remember who he was. Not just his name and his profession but also his wife's and children's names were lost. I hoped it didn't show in my face but I am afraid it did. If I had seen him in his studio I think it would have come to me, but on the street like that….

After what seemed like an eternity Hannah asked about his wife, Linda, and his name came back to me: Peter. I was so
frightened that I couldn't stop trembling and had to take a hot bath when we got back home. While I was soaking, I looked up at the clock on the wall—an antique that had belonged to my grandfather—and had trouble reading the time. Wasn't sure if I was looking at the big hand or the little one. Which one told the hour? I wasn't sure, and as I tried to figure it out I remembered that at dinner at Othello's last night I couldn't figure out the tip and, worse than that, I couldn't add it to the main part of the bill. I seem to have forgotten arithmetic. No, I won't say that. I just need to concentrate.

No more leaving it to my automatic pilot. I may even get a brain gym. If you practice the exercises on your computer regularly, they say your memory can improve dramatically—if you're lucky that is. Or maybe I should just get together a file of small photos of close friends with their names and professions: a small dictionary of the people who matter. For the others in a more distant circle it will be enough to say, “Forgive me I'm blocking your name … a senior moment.”

We'll both laugh. Inside, of course, I won't be laughing.

I've been thinking a lot about artists who have been battered by the world but still managed to create, like Munch or Van Gogh. Sometimes the strain was too great. You'd think that having created even one jewel such as the church of Sant' Ivo, Borromini would have felt safe, embodied forever in stone that seemed to dance around you as you stood inside. But he not only killed himself, he did it painfully, punishingly. Perhaps he thought of it as art, the sword he used, a ceremonial blade that would have pleased a Samurai warrior. Of course there is the art of living too, and man must choose, as Yeats so eloquently pointed out, perfection of the life or of the work. A blade in the gut perfects neither one.

Yeats insisted on keeping his journals natural, not honing them or imposing a structure, just following his thoughts.
He insisted on not even linking them for fear of surrendering to literature, when what he wanted was casual thoughts, an expression of his life. Isn't that what I want too? Whatever life is left to me.

Yesterday, Hannah brought home a new biography of the great painter Arshile Gorky, written by an Armenian compatriot of his. I wasn't up to doing more than flipping through it, but I got the impression that the author was making an elaborate plea for the importance of Gorky's Armenian heritage. Funny how when he was alive and poor his American patrons—friends of my friend Lucian—had to beg the museums to take a painting as a gift. Can you believe that in his lifetime only nine paintings were sold! And now that he's dead everyone wants to claim him. Poor man. But God, the paintings are beautiful. And after his last show, when that self-important critic Clement Greenberg gave him suggestions for improving his technique, only one sold. No wonder he was depressed. How would I fare with a colostomy? A broken neck, a prostate operation, my work destroyed in a fire? Badly, I think, though no one knows ahead of time just how much he can stand before he breaks. Perhaps the worst thing was that Gorky's wife retreated to her parents' home in Maine when he was at his worst, leaving him with his despair.

I came here to help Hannah after her heart attack but now I'd be lost without her. Lost. Dead in a month.

Towards the end Gorky needed his wife—Mougouch, as he called her—to be with him around the clock. If she was gone even for an hour his anxiety would drive him to the point of insanity. I shudder reading this. I sometimes have anxiety attacks in the middle of the night, but they can be quelled by moving closer to Hannah, sniffing her, reassured by the warmth radiating from her skin like a young animal. If she was out and I wasn't sure she'd come back, how excruciating that would be. Even if she is five minutes late coming back from a
lunch date, I have to struggle with my fears. What if she's had another heart attack and is even now being rushed by ambulance to the hospital? I can soothe that worry by remembering she has a cell phone with my number. Someone would call me. But what if I had cause to think that she was meeting another man, someone I knew well? Luckily we are old and even at my worst I can't imagine it, but Gorky was still young, and his wife was very beautiful. Besides, hadn't she told him about her weekend with Matta?

My mother didn't have betrayal as an excuse. My father adored her. But that's the thing about losing control of your thoughts. They proliferate inside your skull, sending out tendrils everywhere. Time changes into something murky, like mud. You have to swim through muck and you can't, and no one is there to help you so you load your pockets with stones and go down to the river.

I don't think that could ever happen to me. I've been inoculated against suicide. But other things frighten me. Becoming a fool, a Punch in a Punch-and-Judy show. At the gym under the Spanish steps—Hannah arranged for a taxi to pick me up twice a week—something upsetting happened. There was another old man who was mumbling to himself as he dressed. I couldn't really make out what he was saying but I was struck by his clothes. They looked like Armani sport clothes. Very trendy and too tight for his thighs. He could barely squeeze into them. A few minutes after he left, they made an announcement asking people to cover up, and soon his wife came into the locker room to search for his clothes because in the early stages of a memory disease, he had taken someone else's. His wife was mortified and could hardly hold her head up. You know how important the
bella figura
is in Italy.