Director's Cut (29 page)

“How was it? What was he like?”

“Timid,” she says, “as if I was the first.”

“I've been bringing him someone every Friday,” laughs Gianni, “for as long as I can remember.”

Although she feels a pang of jealousy, it puts things back in perspective. It's commerce. Someone has bought a pound of tomatoes at the market and only a fool would give it a second thought, she tells herself, putting on a pair of headphones and closing her eyes.

“How about next Friday?” Gianni asks as he picks Gala's suitcase up from the carousel at the Rome airport and carries it to the baggage compartment of the bus that will take her back to the city.

“I'm busy,” she says tersely.

“That's a great shame.” Gianni stays outside, speaking through the window she slides open. “I bring him someone every week. Always fresh. Always someone else. You're the first he's asked back.”

She looks at him through the window. He's serious.

“The first in all these years.”

She doesn't answer. She couldn't have anyway. But once the bus has turned onto the autostrada, she gives herself over to tears so intense that the couple in front of her think she's just said farewell to a lover.

Maxim zips open the bag and fishes out the haute couture.

“Sicily?” he exclaims, throwing the frocks into a corner and studying the earrings. “Are you insane?”

“Nothing happened.”

“As if that makes it so much better.”

It is the anger of a father who finds his daughter the day after she's run away from home. First he embraces her, glad she's not hurt, and then he shakes her furiously, as if she's applied for a job as a white slave in Bahrain.

Suddenly he falls silent and looks at her. There is something in her face.

In all the years that he has loved her, he has hardly ever yelled at her. He's not like that. But on those rare occasions when it did happen, he always regretted it immediately: because she didn't fight back like a tigress, as she did with her father, but like a kitten pushed out of its litter, so entangled in excuses and rationalizations that he couldn't help but forgive and comfort her, taking her side so unconditionally that at the end of it he started to think she'd been right all along.

This time, however, she is calm and self-assured. She describes her experiences as if she has ridden on the back of a cricket to the land of Pinocchio. She smiles. It annoys him. All that drinking cocktails and floating in the bay! He should be happy for her, but the smile is too much. All crazy countesses and shabby American trust-fund kids buying up islands off the coast. A fabulous adventure, of course, and he doesn't resent it at all. But what's with the smile? He can't stand it. It just gets wider every time he speaks; there's something haughty about it, as if she'd just learned a secret about him.

That night, Maxim makes a point of turning over in bed, and they sleep with their backs to each other, but in the morning they breakfast
together at Rosati with silver spoons and porcelain plates. In the Via Frattina, they buy new clothes—first for him, then for her—and at the optician's on the
corso
they both buy sunglasses with the classic slick Italian look. They hire a Vespa and spend the rest of the afternoon zooming around the Circus Maximus like Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn. Just before closing time, Gala goes into a bank and transfers the first installment of Maxim's debt to the Dutch state. From the few thousand lire that are left, they pay the admission and towel rental at Salvi's old Moorish bathhouse, hidden behind the facade of the Trevi. There, lying in sweltering rooms on warm sheets of marble, they rediscover each other in a feeling of bliss. Grateful for their regained liberty, they swap back rubs. But by the time they wash each other off in the cool water from the Acqua Vergine, fed by Agrippa's aqueduct from the mountains, their thoughts are already diverging.

Gala feels unexpectedly satisfied that she's blown every penny, as if doing so has lightened the shadiness of her previous day's activity and cleansed her taint of vague discomfort. A gnawing worry wells up in Maxim at the idea that now they're no less poor than before. Tomorrow morning, he won't be able to read the
Messagiero
until someone discards it in the street, and in the corner bar the
cornetti con crema
will stay in the glass case.

When the soap residue and skin flakes wash through the marble rosette into the drain, they bear not only the last of the day's euphoria but also some of the couple's reservations. Gushing through the old pipes to the square, they drain unnoticed into a corner of the monumental fountain, between the colossal statue of Oceanus and the seahorse to his left, rushing over the rocks and splashing into the basin, where they sink to the bottom. There they dissolve, only momentarily stirred up by a few sinking coins that a group of singing nuns from Salzburg toss over their shoulders in the hope that, after their yodeling concert in the Sant'Ignazio, they might return to the Holy City.

For almost a week, Gala and Maxim live the way they're used to living, hungry but with fashionable sunglasses. They don't mention Sicily. With every passing day, however, Gala's desire to take up the challenge a second time grows, as though she can face their daily tribulations a bit
easier in the knowledge that a solution is at hand. Every day, she comes up with a few practical, financial reasons to return to the island, but in reality she can feel something much bigger beckoning her.

When she was small, death looked her in the eye, leaving his black window behind as a constant reminder. He drew a line around her life with thundering fireworks. Since then, she's known exactly how far she can go, and the price she will pay for transgression. But even in the frightened moments before a seizure, sinking away in darkness, not knowing whether she will ever return to the surface, she has never felt those limits as a threat to her life: to the contrary, they encourage her, just as thinning out a herd strengthens the stock.

When her life still had a chance to take off in any direction, the territory was limitless, so that she could only give any bit of it a quick glance. As soon as the safe area began to shrink, she got to know it thoroughly, deeply, intensely, discovering unsuspected possibilities in herself and feeling invulnerable within them. Her affliction gave her life a framework. Within it, she was shown to her utmost advantage, just as correct framing lends a film shot its tension.

Following her Sicilian adventure, she once again experienced the tension between limitation and protection. As long as her trip lasted, her duties were clearly delineated. All she needed to draw upon was one aspect of her nature: her femininity. And there, she needed to satisfy clearly defined standards. She reached the ceiling of her potential when constrained in this way. Or was it the floor? Either way, if someone had told her the day before that she'd ever let herself be so restricted just in order to please a man, she wouldn't have believed it. But compelled by circumstance, she had made herself docile, meekly doing what was demanded. Within these limits, she was astounded to discover a new, unsuspected freedom.

She loved Maxim because she felt completely at ease with him. He never asked anything beyond the familiar world they had built together. In that sense, they were equal. He looked up to her and admired her and took care not to challenge her in any way at all. He wasn't like other men. They always made her feel that they were superior, strong, self-contained, spurring her to constantly prove them wrong by surpassing them in everything she did. For them, she tried to be everything at
once: witty and intelligent, wise and amusingly hotheaded, strong and sultry.

So the
dottore
was a revelation. He asked only one thing of her. The lines were clear. Within this terrain, she was completely free. She even had the upper hand. The clarity of what she needed to do to satisfy him pleased her. After all, a similar clarity had once saved her.

From the moment that little Gala came home from the hospital, Jan Vandemberg became the old tease she knew so well. To reassure his daughter that nothing had changed, he was pitiless, seizing every opportunity to castigate her, to force her back into shape. His taunting could even be nastier than before, but in one area he left her at peace: he never again asked her to perform with quotes like a circus act, not even for his most important guests. So great was his fear that his favorite daughter would again lose her footing in a pool of words and sink away.

No longer a frightening duty, the epigrams of Propertius became privileges she could grant or withhold. Her father learned to earn them. In exchange for a gift of some kind, she would grant him one of these favors. Now that she made him pay dearly, he was much more grateful for a few words of Cicero than when she gave them away to please him.

Maxim is one step ahead.

“I've been worried over nothing, haven't I?” From behind his dark glasses, he's been studying Gala's radiant expression for some time. In the last few days, she seems to be sitting straighter, talking with more confidence, prouder than ever before. This drastic adventure truly seems no more difficult for her than it was for him to put on Sangallo's black coat. And there's more, he tells himself. It hasn't just been easy for her, it even seems to have done her some good.

“If only I could be sure,” he insists, “that you're not getting in too deep.”

“I'm old enough and smart enough to know what I can handle,” she assures him.

Maxim smiles at her. He's proud of his friend. Isn't this just what he's always seen in her, from those very first words:
Ah, movement!
That first sentence, which freed him from the dungeon of his past. He sneeringly
thinks back on the moments he doubted her, when, out of weakness, he mistook her lack of inhibition for shallowness, folly, or blindness, just because his own mind was too much enchained to believe that anyone could be as free of scruples as Gala.

And today she surprised him again. What a woman! She tackles head-on something he'd never dare to, not after he made such a mess of it during that pathetic attempt with poor Silberstrand. He may have imagined himself to be liberated enough from his shame to undertake something like that, but all he has is borrowed freedom. His strength is nothing more than a reflection of Gala's open mind. That's why he always wants to be near her. She gives him the courage. Swept up by her, seeing her venture where he would never tread! He drinks in her presence like a magic potion, a life-giving elixir, without knowing or being able to guess its ingredients.

By the time he asks if she's planning another one of those trips, her mind is made up. She calls Gianni the same afternoon, and when they come home an envelope is waiting on the bed with a generous advance. They treat themselves to dinner.

This time, Gala flies alone. Dr. Pontorax has rented a villa for the weekend, one tucked away in the foothills of Mount Etna. His chauffeur is waiting at the Catania airport. Approaching the runway, her plane swings low over the crater, where molten lava bubbles and glows. The red of the fire colors the thunderclouds in the night sky.

It looks frightening, but the mighty volcano is reliably predictable, in fact: the treacherous ones are dormant. People build their homes against the walls of silted-up craters without realizing that the pressure is rising inside.

In that instant, the thunderstorm that has been building over the slopes of Mount Etna bursts around the descending aircraft. Fascinated by the violence, Gala looks out of the window. Blinding bolts of lightning shoot past on every side of the cabin.

Between the lightning, flashes of Maxim appear. It's unmistakably him. In that same moment, he walks naked through their room and gets into bed. He feels inexplicably afraid. Abandoned. He squeezes his eyes shut, pushes his scruples aside. They harass him from a land of terrors he has tried to leave behind. Fighting, he tosses and turns and presses his
face into the pillow. He claws the wall. And now he calls her, now that she can't hear him: begging her not to go, shouting at the top of his voice, rattling off all the things he is afraid might happen to her, everything he was too scared to mention for fear she would laugh at him. The thoughts twist his stomach until he feels sick. He is so scared that she will love him less if she finds out how much he longs to keep her safe, tearing her away from the game of chance she craves and keeping her for himself, away from the unknown.

Now, drowned out by the crash of thunder, he finally screams it. That he misses her and won't sleep until she comes back. Now, only now, does he cry out, those few words that could have changed everything. But Gala can't hear them.

And so she takes the next step. It seems as if she is crossing a line, but she's actually drawing one at last, making a clear choice. Out of all the paths she could have chosen, this is the one she is claiming as her own.

I remember that one Sunday in the late autumn of 1934, when the elderly priest of the Chiesa del Suffragio announced that he had decided to exchange his beloved Rimini for a place in heaven, in order to spend the coming Christmas in the company of the Savior himself. Shortly after his death, he was replaced by Fra Cippo, a young Jesuit recently discharged from the strict Fossombrone seminary. He arrived before Advent and stepped into his new church just as the parishioners were busy decorating one of the side chapels as they had for decades, while everyone enjoyed a few jugs of altar wine and dipped into a basket of sweets. From the end of the summer, everyone looked forward to this old tradition, a popular celebration complete with singing and dancing. Too small to help, I was crawling around on the cool marble with the other children, but I can still picture the young mothers breast-feeding their babies on the wooden benches while their husbands decorated the altars under the artistic guidance of la Dumazima, the madam of the brothel in the Via Pisacane. As one of the few parishioners with a steady income in those difficult years, Dumazima donated a fixed percentage of her earnings every autumn to buy the most beautiful decorations the cane cutters of Imola could weave.