Burning the Days (35 page)

They were going to open a club together in Tangier. He was a musician and painter. Africa was the place, he said. “You just set foot there and the earth, it goes right through you, like you start trembling.” His hands, infused, vibrated upwards. “Ain’t that right, Mommy? Maybe I’ll be prime minister someplace.”

She didn’t answer; she liked the idea of Africa, herself, someplace where it was easy to get money, she said, “I mean, that’s all over, here, you know.” It would be nice to have a summer crowd in someplace that was amusing; then in the winter, Lobo—that was his name—could paint. It would probably be a mistake, she decided in an added foresight, for him to become known as a singer or club owner first and a painter second because then, you know, people never quite erase that first impression.

——

It was a city of matchless decrepitude: muted colors, fountains, trees on the rooftops, beautiful tough boys, trash. A southern city—there were palms on the Piazza di Spagna and the sun incandescent in the afternoon. A venal city, flourishing through the ages—nothing so often betrayed could retain a shred of illusion. In the day it was beautiful. At night it became sinister.

Slowly, street by street, in fragments, it became familiar, like an immense jigsaw puzzle, one piece and a little later another fitting snugly into place. I recall it as a period when I had plenty of money. Eventually I was driving a white Fiat convertible bought brand-new, darting through the piazzas, swinging up ancient, wide avenues, peeling façade on one side, breathtaking view on the other.

On a June evening I had been introduced to a woman whose apartment might be for rent—I had not yet found one at the time. She was small, well-dressed, and untrusting, French-Canadian as I found out. In her brow was a furious vertical crease. Gaby was her name—Gabrielle, I suppose. She was seductive and at the same time disdainful; life had taught her hard lessons, among them to think always of money and to hate men.

She had been convent-educated in Canada, at Ursulines des Trois Rivières. I pictured gloomy buildings amid legendary dark pines. Her mother had gone there and her grandmother before that. She had slept in the very same bed they had, on a narrow mattress of straw. Girls were supposed to do that, she explained. To this day she slept as if in a coffin, straight and unmoving. Bathing at Trois Rivières was supervised—a white sheet fastened to a sort of neck ring was draped over the tub to defeat curiosity and assure modesty. She washed the linen collar of her woolen uniform every day and studied religion and religious history, accompanied by prayers. Many girls married millionaires, she said, as if the rigors of their confinement made sensuality and the desire for material things increase, even grow wildly. One girl married a Canadian Croesus, another, Georges Simenon.

In her own case the result was a passionate interest in human frailty. She rejoiced, somewhat bitterly, in the weaknesses and secret vices of Moravia, Italy’s most famous writer; Visconti, the two handsome boys he had taken into his house after they had been in his
La Terra Trema,
they were dressed in uniforms and posed as servants; John Cheever (who had lived for a season or two in Rome); Pietro Germi, who left his wife for a young actress and had been betrayed by her in the most humiliating way; Thyssen, the rich art collector; countless others.

She told me with satisfaction the story of the singer who had begun as an actress, a shy, sweet girl who was given the chance to sing in a revue. She had to sleep with the star of the show, of
course, and afterwards the producer, but they kept cutting her part. She went to bed with the star’s brother because that might help her, and finally it had to be the stage manager. He took her to some house, a large one, and upstairs into a room. It was dark. “Take off your clothes,” he told her. When she had done this, he said, “Put these on,” and handed her a pair of high-heeled shoes. Then he had her get on her hands and knees on the bed. Suddenly the lights came on. There were other men in the room, all the previous ones, the star, the producer, the electrician. It was to be a kind of party and they came towards her laughing.

Gaby had been pursued, of course—that was one of the roots of her obsession. The workmen on the street who, seeing her pass, raised their hands as if forming them around her buttocks and cried admiringly,
“Beato lui …”
—blessed be the man to whom that belongs. The Sicilian prince who, as they were dancing at a ball, took her hand and said, “Here. What do you think of it?” having placed his naked member in it. The lecherous journalists and lawyers … it was unspeakable, though a moment later she wished she were twenty again, she would do all the things she had been afraid to.

She mentioned Corinne Luchaire, a prewar French star. “She was Göring’s mistress.”

I vaguely recalled a slender, beautiful blonde. “His mistress? Not really?”

“Of course!” she hissed. “Don’t you know
anything?”

Corinne Luchaire, she said, had been arrested in her apartment in Paris by the French Resistance and kept there all night while forty-one men raped her. She spent three years in jail. At her trial, her lawyer read aloud the entire Maupassant story of collaboration,
Boule de Suif
—the whore, the soldier who came to see her, didn’t she know he was a German? “No, he was naked.” I had never read the story, which was the first Maupassant ever published, and even now I am not sure if her version was correct, but it is the one I remember.

What she was exactly, I never discovered—writer, publicist, researcher of some sort, but withal, a Scheherazade who colored Rome for me with stories told in a slightly accented English; she hadn’t learned it until she was seven and the “th”s were missing. “Ortodoxy,” she pronounced it, and for “with” she said “wid.” She rained images on me, some of them so intense they remain in my flesh like wounds.

She introduced me to Fellini, with whom she collaborated in some way. She brought him stories. “Talk to me, talk to me”—he wanted nothing in writing; he was inspired by listening, he said. It was often remarked that there were, at the time, only two real artists in all of Europe, Picasso and Fellini. Picasso was ancient and remote. Fellini was a man who sat in shirtsleeves and resembled his photographs, rumpled, with black hair growing out of his ears, like a lovable uncle.

I met him at the studio where he was working. The conversation began in Italian; he did not speak English, he apologized, but soon we had drifted into it. I had recently been to the Vorkapich lectures at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. They were essentially a tribute to Slavko Vorkapich, the master of the kind of montage used in the 1930s and ’40s: pages of a calendar falling away to indicate days or months passing, the wheels of a train, then a car, then perhaps an ocean liner to show travel over great distances. The entire film world of the East Coast had attended the lectures, I said. It was difficult to obtain a seat, and of all the directors whose work had been chosen to illustrate concepts, Fellini was the one most often used, with Eisenstein second. Fellini gave a modest nod. He seemed grateful, the honor. He had only one question. “Who is Vorkapich?” he wanted to know.

On a slip of paper he wrote his telephone numbers—if there was anything in regard to which he might be of some help, he urged me to call him. I was not in Rome long enough, however.

She introduced me also to Zavattini, the dominant writer of Italian
postwar films—
Shoeshine, Umberto D, The Bicycle Thief—
whom I was prepared to greatly admire. He was bald, and wore a baggy blue suit of the kind that has buttons on the fly. He was disheartened. “The cinema has failed,” he said.

I was particularly interested in another person Gaby presented, Nany Columbo, who owned a boutique and had been a mannequin in Rome and Genoa before the war.

“Do you speak English?” I said.

She shook her head. A pity.

The Italian girl I was writing about and whose reality, as on a sheet of photographic paper, was only slowly forming—for a while I imagined a younger Nany Columbo in the role. What ruined girls, she explained in Italian, was all the luxury around them. She said it as if she had lived through it herself, with easy resignation. Everything about her seemed authentic, every word the bare truth. When her husband came home from the war, she said, she was living in the country with her son. He came walking down the road. She looked awful. Her hair was awry, her dress shabby. She pushed a bed in front of the door, she said, and ran upstairs to fix herself up before he could see her.

In the countryside a few hours north of Rome there were vineyards below the big houses; a man with his dog working in a field; wood piled up by the doorway. The serene terraces of land with their views of hills and groves were unchanged since the twelfth or thirteenth century. In ancient churches the Piero della Francescas were slowly fading, like the close of an act, from dark walls.

The thing I failed for a long time to understand was the connection between the vineyards, the great houses, the cloisters of Europe and the corruption, the darkness, the riches. They have been always dependent on one another, and without each other could not exist. Nature is ravishing, but the women are in the cities. There was one night in Rome, one morning really, about two, when a man walked into a café near the Piazza Navona with
two women, one blonde in a blue-and-green silk dress, the other girl even better-looking. He was in evening clothes. They sat down; the waiters began to stir. He smiled and after a moment he uttered two words, but with his entire heart: “Beautiful party.”

——

I am turning the pages in a small, greenish notebook, half the size of a postcard, with a Spencerian
Notes
printed on the cover, bought probably in a dimly lit shop near Via Bocca di Leone in the summer of 1964. In it are the invariables: people, telephone numbers, restaurants, clubs, places to dance, piazzas, beaches, wines, unique things like the location of the cardinals’ door through the keyhole of which the dome of St. Peter’s could be seen floating above the edge of the garden, exceptional streets, and the names of two Italian whores who worked at the bar of a large hotel—actually one was a South African.

From these ample hints I can almost re-create the period, many dialogues, faces.

I was at the Hassler one afternoon and the women were talking about travel and food. A director’s wife had her coat draped over the back of her chair. In proud black letters behind her neck, the words:
GIVENCHY, PARIS
. She was not the same one who, in Sophia Loren’s apartment, admiring a wall of ancient frescoes, said, “Your decorator really did a fabulous job.” The star said afterwards, in Italian, to another woman, “What can you expect?”

In a hotel one evening I sat with Scott Fitzgerald’s onetime mistress, Sheilah Graham, and two magazine writers. Money was the sole topic, how much they earned, how much it cost to live. I tried to visualize the younger, unhardened woman Sheilah Graham had been, the unexpected gift for the broken writer.
Love is your last chance. There is really nothing else on earth to keep you there.
Nothing of that seemed to remain.

One of the writers was a film critic, the other was a tall woman
in her forties who had braces on her teeth. She didn’t like Italy. As for France, it was hideously expensive, she said. She hated France. It dated from the time she saw the French army leaving Indochina, “My dear, that was something, I assure you.” France was not even a beautiful country; she had never seen a view there that she remembered.

“Where have you seen views?”

“Oh, India, Ceylon. That’s where you see views,” she said.

I was seated one night in a restaurant and two women sat down at the next table. One was American, older, with thin hands, and the other young, blonde, with a striking figure. Her first words were a complaint that she was “sitting downhill.” The waiter hurried to bring her another chair and smiled at me in an aside.

They had just been to Capri and were talking with animation about it. Soon they were tasting a dish I had ordered and I was testing their wine. The younger one’s glances were open and friendly. I could read palms, I told them—I found myself eager to touch her, to hold her hand. “Tell me your name,” I suggested.

“Ilena,” she replied. In the riches of that smile one would never be lonely or forgotten.

I examined her palm with feigned authority. “You will have three children,” I said, pointing to some creases. “You are witty—it shows that here. I see money and fame.” I felt her fingers pressing mine.

“You are an ass,” she said gaily. “That means nice, no?”

Ilena may have been her name or it may have been the name she simply wore like a silk dressing gown one longed to peel back. Warmth came off her in waves. She was twenty-three years old and weighed sixty-two kilos, the absence of any part of which would have been a grave loss. She was, I learned, the mistress of John Huston, who was in Rome directing a film. She had also been the companion of Farouk, the exiled king of Egypt, and in that sense one of the last of an infinite number of royal properties
reaching back to the pharaohs. She had met him at the dentist’s office. He was there with his lawyer, she said, a detail I felt no one could invent. They discovered they lived not far from each other and began going out.

Farouk’s days started in the evening. Like a true playboy, he rose late. She described him for me. He was amusing. He liked fine cars—he had a Rolls and a Jaguar. He loved to eat. I thought of the large men I had known, many of them good dancers, graceful, even dainty. Was it true of him? “Darling, we never danced,” she said.

It was clear she had been fond of him. They had traveled to Monte Carlo together, to the
chemin de fer
tables where, a prodigious gambler, he was known as the Locomotive. The night he collapsed and died in Rome in a restaurant on the Appia Antica she was allowed to leave by the back door before the press arrived.

Whether or not she was an actress or ever became one, I do not know. Of course, she wanted to be—she had already played great roles.