Director's Cut (15 page)

“What were you actually thinking?” asks Gala. She's still standing there in the same dark street. By the flame of his lighter Maxim has discovered a box of Asti Spumante in the courtyard of the trattoria that just overcharged them for their dinner. The kitchen door is open. Inside, people are running back and forth between the arrested refrigerator and the oxygen cylinder for the lobster-filled tank.

The coincidence goes to Maxim's head and makes him reckless. He tries to open one of the bottles with his teeth.

“What was I thinking about what?”

“When you were looking at me in the photographer's studio.”

His teeth scrape the neck of the bottle. He swears.

“There are two sides to everything, you know,” she continues, “in front of the lens and behind the lens.” Her voice has a sudden urgency. We're both a bit drunk, Maxim thinks, but we still make more sense than anything about this day. He replaces the bottle, then picks up the whole box, weighs it in his arms, and decides they have a right to it. He puts away the lighter. Suddenly Gala grabs him. She shakes him. He feels her nails digging into his arm through his shirt.

“From now on, we're on the same side of the camera, okay? The two of us. The same side of the camera, promise? Promise me!” Her grip is so tight that he almost drops the box. The bottles clink against each other.

“Chi è? Chi è?!”
Someone comes running out of the kitchen. But Maxim and Gala are already walking on through the night. He puts the box on his shoulder so that he has one arm free to wrap around Gala's waist. Her stilettos click out a melody on the cobblestones of Trastevere.

“I thought,” says Maxim, “we already have so many dreams. Those fairy tales are just a few more.”

•  •  •

He can't sleep once he's finally in bed. Of all the extraordinary things that happened that day, one, the most innocent of all, haunts him. He didn't mention it to Gala and now he wonders why not. It was this: a little girl walking barefoot down one of the hospital's long white corridors. She is wearing shiny silk pajamas. When she passes the bench where Maxim is waiting for the neurologists to finish with Gala, she pauses, holding her head a little to one side and looking at him. She wonders why he's so gloomy when everything else is bathed in light. When he smiles at her, she dashes off. In the distance she grows smaller and smaller.

A little later two nurses run up. They're searching for her.

“Every day it's the same,” pants one.

“It's an addiction,” the other swears. They open doors left and right and peer into the wards.

Something about their tone makes Maxim decide not to help them. Instead he starts looking for the child himself. He walks down the hallway, looks back briefly, then quickens his pace. At the end he discovers two new corridors. These lead to others. He takes a few wrong turns, but quickly retraces his steps. It's almost as if he knows where to look. At last, he sees her, far away, facing a large window. The light shining in is so bright that he can only see her as a black silhouette staring out the window. The spotlights that illuminate the island in the Tiber for the tourists are as powerful as film lighting. One is aimed at the old hospital. The girl stares obsessively into the beam while slowly moving her hand back and forth in front of her face. Even when Maxim's running footsteps approach over the marble floor, she doesn't look up or around.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

“A game.”

“What's it called?”

“Looking into the light,” she says. She makes up the name on the spot. “Looking into the light and seeing things.”

“What kind of things?”

“I don't know. They're always behind me.”

“Behind you?”

“I feel them coming. I look around but …”

“But then you're already falling.”

“I knew you knew what game it was,” the girl rebukes him.

She moves her hand back and forth in front of her eyes ceaselessly, compulsively. The shadow flies back and forth over her face.

“Aren't you afraid to fall?”

“Course I am.”

“Why bring it on then?” Maxim grabs her arm in annoyance. Now she looks at him. Disturbed. She angrily wrenches her arm out of his grip and starts again.

“Because it feels good,” she says.

When Gala notices that Maxim can't sleep, she crawls over the big bed toward him and takes his hand.

“Tiruli, tirula,”
they sing until they fall asleep.
“Pitipo, pitipa.”

“One breath: that's how long beauty lasts. The rest is either memory or repetition.” Sangallo's eyes are wandering over Maxim's hair, studying how the light falls on it. “One breath, at the most, and even then only if we happen to be lucky enough to notice. A single moment of inspiration makes the body blossom; afterward, the worms know what to do.”

This will be the third time in a month that the viscount has taken the young man to show him the city. And for the third time he's offered him the same long, black leather coat, draping the garment over his shoulders almost casually, as if trying to concentrate on the other things he needs for their excursion: an old map, a silver fruit knife, a bag of mandarins to perfume the car, and two crisp
rosette
with mortadella. He seems far more interested in these things than in the black coat.

It is an unusual article of clothing, shiny as an oilskin. The leather looks as stiff and rugged as a uniform, but it's actually very light, so supple you forget you're wearing it. It's extremely well made. Molded pads accentuate the shoulders, and the waist is cut to make the hips seem narrower. From there, the wide-gored flaps hang so far that, even on someone as tall as Maxim, they reach the calves.

“It's too hot today to play dress up,” Maxim grumbles. He is annoyed with the old man, though he doesn't know why.

The first time Sangallo tossed the coat over to him, he wasn't sure what to do with it. It was early November. There was a fair chance of a shower, but only a fool would have wrapped up like an old salt in a
westerly gale. Sangallo didn't notice his hesitation and had apparently forgotten the coat until the car pulled up in front of the building and they stepped into the elevator.

“Go on, put it on.”

“Maybe later, if it starts raining.”

“You've got to try everything once.”

“Fortunately we still have plenty of time.”

“Please,” insisted Sangallo, “in the interest of science.” His eyes smiled so sadly that Maxim didn't dare refuse. He had hardly slid his arms into the sleeves before the old man's face lit up like a praised child's.

“Don't forget the bottom button,” he added. “Keep the belt loose and turn the collar up a little.” He showed no more interest in it that day, but a week later, for the second outing, he held the coat out again, his eyes averted to a monograph about Piazzetta, whose painting
Giuditta
was on their program for the day. This time, Maxim threw on the garment without grumbling. It was airy enough. It was no bother, and if it was important to the old man, why not?

Now, the third time, Maxim has the coat on before he stops to think. He only reconsiders it once the viscount goes off on his pet topic.

“How can anyone enjoy something permanent?” Sangallo asks. “Something that is still attractive at a second glance, after that first sigh, is boring.”

Maxim hurls the coat into a corner. It's mid-December and quite warm.

“If it's all so fleeting,” he says, amazed by how sulky he sounds, “the shine must have gone off this by now as well.”

“Boredom bears a close resemblance to beauty,” Sangallo replies imperturbably. “It's all that's left when you cage something beautiful.”

Sangallo's tours of Rome are wild journeys of exploration. They shoot through the streets like boats tossed by rapids. Hour after hour, they cross old squares and ancient forums, following the inscrutable plan that the viscount abandons again on the slightest whim. He can unexpectedly change course, screaming for his driver to stop while already throwing open the door. The car has hardly had time to lurch to a halt before his tall, heavy body is shooting down an alley or through a gate, all as if he's in a tremendous rush, his large, shuffling feet scraping over
the pavement at a remarkable pace. By the time Maxim catches up, Sangallo is standing in a church or a ruin, before a mural or a marble statue, pointing at a single detail that moves him. Usually he tells a story or recites something. It could be a poem, a childhood memory, or a discourse on the history of art, but it might just as well be a Charlie Chaplin scene, executed with all the appropriate poses and walks. On their previous outing Sangallo was so moved by the light in one of the forgotten Caravaggios in the Santa Maria del Popolo that it was too much for him.

“There,”
he said in English, trying to hide his discomfort and nervously undulating his tie between his fingers like Oliver Hardy,
“that's another fine mess you've gotten me into!”

“That faun.” Sangallo points at a statue by Praxiteles. “That's Momo.”

“Momo?”

“Momo the faun. A childhood friend.”

After having torn through the Vatican museums, this is only the third room in which Maxim is allowed to linger.

“I remember him from the house of one of my mother's friends in Bergamo. He was at the top of the stairs. We stayed there by the lake in the summers. And when I went up the cool marble steps to my room at the end of the day, he was waiting for me with his powerful chest and the muscular arms he only uses to lift the panpipes to his mouth. See how he's inhaling? His sides are puffing. He could start playing right now.” The old man lays a hand on the stone midriff. A guard notices, but doesn't think of saying a word. Every museum attendant in Rome knows the viscount.

“One day I saw a fisherman untangling his nets. He was standing up to the waist in the lake. ‘Momo!' I called out. That's how much he looked like the statue I loved. I imagined legs underwater, with split hooves and as hairy as a billy goat's. That day I walked into the water. I had just turned twelve.”

For others Rome might be a city, Maxim thinks, but for this old gentleman it is an enormous playroom, filled with mementos. Sangallo has moved on. He swings a leg over a cord strung across to keep out the public. Maxim catches up, running down a corridor built around the outside of the museum.

“Filippo? Why are we always in such a hurry?”

“Because time is trying to catch us. This is Rome. Stay vigilant! Today is abandoned before it can even become yesterday. The centuries tumble over each other like children let loose in a bakery, hurling pies at each other. You should have come earlier if you were planning on just plodding around. So I do what I can. I take you along. I point out things that are meaningful to me. If any of it interests you, you'll come back of your own accord. Later. Alone. But at least I'll have done what I could.”

An attendant unlocks the entrance to a long narrow hall, which they follow to a dark and indeterminate room where a muffled commotion, like the one behind the backdrop of a film set during the coffee break between shots, has replaced the devotional silence of the museum. It is smoky and crowded. Roman workers are relaxing with water and freshly drawn wine,
pizza bianca
and dishes of tomatoes, grapes, and citrus fruit. Among them are a number of Japanese: some wearing white doctors' coats, others with T-shirts with
NIPPON TELEVISION NETWORK
printed on them. With surgical masks over their chins and protective goggles on their foreheads, they are bending over a sketch with a small delegation of professors dressed in the latest Milanese fashion. When Filippo joins them, the academics greet him as a friend. A geisha in a business suit bows deeply and offers him a bowl, and he ignores the matter at hand to drink from it with a seriousness appropriate to a tea ceremony.

Only now does Maxim notice the folds in the walls. They turn out to be made of heavy material, hung up like the sides of a circus tent. The small room has been erected inside a much larger space. Here and there, he can make out sections of a construction forming the base of a tower of scaffolding. Far above, at a dizzying height, there is a plank floor. Maxim hears the buzz of hundreds of visitors, immediately behind the cloth walls. He recognizes the bright pink and the pale green in the small corner of the painting still visible far above, between the planks of the scaffolding and the small builder's hoist. He slides the tent cloth aside, slowly, like the curtain of a theater. He steps through it into the middle of the Sistine Chapel, directly below God, who, with a powerful gesture, though clad in a lavender frock, is separating night and day.

While tourists wander past, Maxim takes in the colors of the frescoes. They are deep, warm, and somber on one side of the scaffolding,
fresh, cheerful, and brilliant on the other, where Japanese television's cleaning project has already stripped the soot and grime.

Around the ceiling, the vaulting is filled with naked men and women. Young or old, their flesh is voluptuous and comforting. Together they seem like one great naked body that wants to embrace Maxim, the nudes bending toward him, as if to lift him up and rock him in their arms. Full of lust, ruddy, uninhibited as children, muscular as young men, soft as parchment, they cry, run, flinch back, cower, or twist their bodies like contortionists. Shameless. Yes, especially that: they feel no shame.

Maxim's head starts to spin. The pictures fade and then charge back even brighter. Perhaps he's been staring up too long, pinching a blood vessel in his neck. Whatever it is, they are dizzying, but he is enjoying himself so much that he can't bring himself to look away. His eyes shoot left to right across the narrow hips, full breasts, muscular buttocks, fleshy thighs. Arms reach out to each other without touching. He spins round and round, trying to see them from every side, whirling beneath a heaven full of desire. Without the slightest embarrassment. Suddenly, the whole spectacle is illuminated by a flood of light. Maxim stops abruptly, as if he's seen the souls shining forth from inside the bodies, but the surrounding space keeps spinning. For a second, he feels he's about to be lifted into the painting.