Director's Cut (27 page)

I let her talk. She is animated, intelligent, full of joie de vivre. I recognize and understand her insecurity, but she is so relaxed, so much in charge of the conversation, that my own doubts grow. I also feel the usual sorrow of age when faced with the young. Gala lets her eyes rest on me without so much as blinking. Piercing and ogling at once, that look forces me to shrink away until I'm crawling around inside my outsized body like a baby searching his playpen for a toy.

I find it in the skin around her eyes. It is remarkably bad. Probably because she uses too much makeup too often, makeup that is heavy and
theatrical but not effective. She is perspiring lightly. In the course of the conversation, the color washes off and collects in premature crow's-feet.

I dip my napkin in water and wipe her cheek. It's our first touch. I keep dabbing, but don't really dare go much further. She takes the cloth from me and unquestioningly wipes the gunk off her face. Then I open the box of watercolors I take with me everywhere. On a saucer, I mix sienna and carmine. Using the butter that's on the table, I make a paste. I remove the gilded brush that Gelsomina gave me for my sixtieth birthday from its traveling case and apply the color around her eyes with delicate strokes.

As requested, she chatters on, amused, while I study the result. I draw her eyebrows as quotation marks, giving her an expression of surprise, and extend her lashes like sunbeams. Finally, I mix a color for her lips and apply it until she looks sulky.

She picks up a knife and looks at herself in the blade.

“But that's Gelsomina,” she exclaims. “It is, the spitting image!”

I deny it, but Gala pulls a face that does indeed resemble the character I created for my wife in my first box-office success. It ruins my mood.

The first time I touched Gelsomina, I was making her up as well. I asked if I could cut her hair along the edge of an inverted flowerpot and she trusted me. She didn't even resist when I rubbed soap on the wisps to make them stick up. It was wartime, and there wasn't any powder, so I took a handful of flour and dusted her face by gently puffing on it. While I sought out her features with my white breath, she was pale as a kabuki actor. Her cheerfulness didn't seem exuberant at all, I told her, but restrained. She wasn't just showing off her mischievousness for effect, but expressed the loneliness of an entire life in a single smile. I saw a solitary tear well up in response, a tear that picked up so much flour on its way down her face that if only I'd had some boiling oil I could have easily made a dumpling of it by the time it fell from her chin.

I remember with how much love I then accentuated her upturned nose with a dab of red. That, more or less, must have been the moment when I swore solemnly that Gelsomina would never have to feel alone again. Yet over the years I've sent enough dough rolling down her face to serve a restaurant.

“What's the story with that friend of yours?” I ask Gala.

“Why?” She starts, because I haven't tried to hide my displeasure.

“That fellow who was with you in my office.” I act surly. I'm used to taking my melancholy out on others. She flinches like a child expecting to have his ears boxed by the parish priest. I see it, but I can't stand the thought of her walking home to tell some guy I don't even know about the old man who made a fool of himself over her.

“Just tell me, do you live with him?”

I see that she's shocked; I can almost hear her brains rattling in search of a satisfactory answer.

“With that queen?” she asks airily, averting her eyes for the first time. I'd think she was lying, if the twist in her mouth didn't betray such deep contempt. “Where'd you get that idea? He and I are just girlfriends. That's all.”

I like that, even if she's gone to the trouble of fabricating it. I stand up and tell her I've got work to do.

“See you later,” Gala says, summoning up all her courage to add: “Maybe at an audition?”

“This was your audition.”

As a gift, I give her the napkin with the drawing from my dream. She holds it up next to her face. The quotation mark eyebrows, the shape of the lips, the fanned-out lashes, the white linen. Gelsomina has already said it: “I know that girl.”

I'm halfway down the Via Capo di Ferro when I think I hear Gala shouting something after me. She sees me looking back and waves with the napkin.

I think I hear the words
“Ciao
, little boy!” but I don't think her lips quite match them.

“I've blown it! I'm such an idiot!”

Gala flops down on the bed in Parioli.

“It was all there for the taking, and I missed every opportunity!”

Maxim tries to cheer her up, but she won't to be consoled.

In the Via Margutta, Gelsomina doesn't ask a thing until we're getting into bed.

“And was it the woman from your dream?”

“I couldn't help thinking of you.”

When she sees that I mean it, she pats me on the cheek as if I were a child.

“A dream of a woman, then.” She does a sultry impersonation of la Lollo to drive off her melancholy. “Those are the most dangerous, Signor Snaporaz, you mustn't forget that!” With that, she rolls over and turns off the light.

An hour later, I wake with a start. A drunk is staggering down the street. He's yowling out a song from my childhood, one I've never heard outside of my home ground. To keep him from waking Gelsomina, I get up to close the windows, but she doesn't notice a thing. His voice scrapes over the rooftops like the hooves of an obstinate donkey. I step out onto the balcony to catch every word. He crosses the Piazza del Popolo, and I try to make out whether his singing is headed for Parioli.

When I creep back into bed with Gelsomina, she, still fast asleep, wraps her arms and legs around me. This trust alone would be enough to make me love her. She presses her head against my chest, holding me tight, as someone who can't swim clings to an inner tube.

That's how I fall asleep. I search all night, but the only person I find is my mother.

“I do understand that,” she says. We're picnicking on Rivabella, Rimini's lido, me in the sand, in knitted bathing trunks, and her on a boardwalk, seeking shelter in the shade of a deck chair. She peels an apple and puts the pieces on a napkin for me.

“When I was pregnant with your sister, I thought I could never love anyone as much as I loved you.” Her toes play with the sand. She stretches out a hand to me, but I can't reach it.

“I already loved you so unbelievably, so incredibly much, that I thought it was physically impossible to find more love to give. You were everything to me. But the instant I saw her, it happened. Immediately. I loved her just as much without loving you a jot less.” With a clack, she adjusts her chair to lie flat. She takes the napkin and throws it over her eyes. “That's how I learned that the love you share immediately doubles. No reason for panic. There's enough to go around.”

A gust catches her napkin and carries it away. I try to see her face at last, but along the whole coast beachgoers from Bellariva to Rivabella have lost their napkins to the unexpected whirlwind. Hundreds swirl past. The fluttering white cloths hide my mother completely, and when they finally spread out over the sea, like gulls, she has suddenly disappeared.

First of all: none of what happened to Gala afterward had anything to do with me. I didn't even know about it. The few times I met her, I didn't notice anything. There were no signs of the outrageous things the poor child had to endure. To the contrary: she seemed to have blossomed, to have grown stronger, every time I saw her, prouder, more sure of herself. In my most enthusiastic moments, I even took credit for that, as if she were enjoying my reflected glory, rather than the other way around. Who would have thought … And even if I'd suspected it, what could I have done? Would I have gotten involved, or would I have been so shocked to realize how much havoc I wreak in other people's lives that I would have washed my hands of her? Perhaps I would have seen what now—now that I'm forced to look back on it all—seems so obvious: that her humiliation gave my own screenplay a perfect finishing touch.

In fact, I was having problems of my own. My Japanese backers unexpectedly pulled out. They were shocked by my failure to stick to agreements. I never stick to agreements, but apparently no one had told them. I'd ordered sets and costumes, only to reject them all afterward. We shot meters and meters of film trying to filter the light in Studio 5 to capture the glow I remembered on Gelsomina's face from a spring morning shortly after our daughter's death.

We thought our lives were over. We were staying in Borgo Pace, Marcello's country cottage, really no more than a shed with a well halfway up the Alpe della Luna, in order to mourn without paparazzi in the shrubbery. We'd scarcely slept and lay in bed, not daring to speak to each other as we waited for the morning. Finally, a blackbird broke the silence. Gelsomina threw open the shutters. There was a frost. The sun was low. Its rays were refracted pink by the ice encasing the blossoms. The effect came as such a surprise to my love, my brave darling, the meaning of my life, that she relaxed. After weeks of being twisted with grief, her mouth fell open. Blood streamed back into her lips. All those frozen buds, moving in the breeze, gave off prisms of light. The colors danced over her face and sparkled in her eyes. I wrapped a blanket around our shoulders. Cuddling together, we were standing at the open window looking out at the miracle when I suddenly realized that our love had survived, not despite the cold, but because of it. I felt Gelsomina's hand searching for mine.

Of course, I didn't tell Gelsomina that I was chasing the enchantment of that morning with my twenty-five thousand watts and forty-eight red filters, but it only took her one glance at the first rushes to guess. Without a word, she looked at me and nodded her approval. She's an old hand, and she stepped back into the light, without betraying her emotions in the least, uncomplainingly staring into the spotlights for four days, from early in the morning to late at night.

As soon as the technicians found what I was looking for, the reality paled so pathetically beside my memory that I dumped the whole scene.

Gelsomina was inconsolable, just like the Japanese. If they'd gotten their hands on Van Gogh, they would have made him paint those big yellow flowers from memory so they could save on florist bills. When the envoys from Nippon realized I wasn't going to use any of the footage I had spent a week shooting, with the entire crew on full pay, they thought I was throwing away their money. They couldn't understand that not filming is filming too. That a writer is thinking while drawing little characters on the page. That there's an electrifying tension in the silence before a composer jots down a note.

But even when I explained that my greatest successes had evolved just that way, they failed to warm to my working methods. Now they
want me to write the script first, like everyone else, so they can calculate the filming costs. I patiently explained that I don't work that way. I only get distracted by thinking about what I want to make beforehand. Each thought sets off a hundred more. They still want me to lay out every shot in advance on a storyboard. Hundreds of precise images are worth more to them than one vague idea in my head: whereas that single image contains the whole.

I have a rough idea. When I go to bed, I try to focus on the thread of the story I want to tell, then I let my dreams get to work on it, and the next morning I know exactly what I want to see. Then I go to my studio. Everyone has to be ready, in full makeup, hair, and costume. I want them to be there waiting, just as a painter needs to be able to unscrew the caps of his tubes of paint before he can pick up a brush. Something comes of it or it doesn't. Try explaining that to a nation whose every smile is planned in advance. I felt the least I could do was try to convince them. For Gelsomina's sake. We flew to Tokyo, and our film was postponed indefinitely.

“Postponed!” Maxim exclaims. “Snaporaz is postponing your film?” He snatches the skis out of the prop manager's hands. “And he's only just telling you now?” He strides through the fake snow and strikes an athletic pose. He crouches to pretend he's zooming down a mountain. “Right when we're where we want to be!” For greater credibility, he makes swooshing and swishing sounds as he rounds the curves. That's about all there is to his screen test for the American ski drama,
The Billy Johnson Story
. The instructions are unclear, the lines are corny, and nobody knows anything about the background of the character he's supposed to be portraying. As if that's not bad enough, nobody has any idea how many weeks before shooting starts. Meanwhile, they're not even reimbursing his metro fares. The video camera is operated by the doddering Zoppo, who has been wandering around Cinecittà so long that people assume Mussolini included him in the original design. As soon as the tape is full, the old man removes it from the camera, sticks Maxim's name on it, and wordlessly departs to mail it to Los Angeles. Maxim slides the goggles onto his forehead.

“Postponed? We'll see about that!” Except around his eyes, his face is made up in an orangey brown that makes him look like he's spent too much time under a sunlamp. He storms out of the test studio and marches threateningly to Studio 5, but everyone who has anything to do with Snaporaz's film has long since been sent home on leave.

“And what are Gala and I supposed to live off, Snaporaz?” he shouts, shaking his fists at the drawn blinds on the first floor. The students who have been employed to crawl around painting the grass red for the film adaptation of
L'herbe rouge
interrupt their work to applaud.