Director's Cut (34 page)

It took the whole weekend for me to summon up the courage to phone Parioli. I spent three days imagining all possible reactions, from fury to scorn to pity. In one of my dreams, Gala was down on her haunches beside a gigantic telephone, wagging her tail like the dog from His Master's Voice, but as soon as I mentioned my feelings for her, she growled and leapt upon the phone and crushed the receiver between her jaws like a chicken bone. The only thing I hadn't thought of was the possibility that she wouldn't answer. Whereas that was the most obvious of all. A girl like her has better options than a man who keeps his teeth on the bedside table.

“Gala!” I shout. “Answer, please, Galeone, my delicious Galetta!” But there is no reaction on the other end of the line. I'm momentarily relieved to have been spared the indignity of a rejection. I embrace Gelsomina and treat her to dinner at Canova's. For ninety minutes, I tell myself that it was a close shave and all for the best. I order asparagus from Pozzuoli when she settles on gilthead bream from Lake Lucrino. We laugh and say how much we love each other and how happy we are that we bumped into each other fifty years ago. It is heartfelt and overpowering. She's convinced that it was the work of God; I say it was Pum Pum the clown, whose tuba exploded with such a bang at the Winter Circus that my sweetheart jumped up out of her chair and thereby let me wrap a protective arm around her for the first time. For dessert, they bring us one of those pyramid-shaped cheeses from Sarsina. As I cut it, I'm overcome by the intense meaninglessness of our lives—not in the usual way, but as a sudden paralysis that drains away all hope and vigor, as if a hole had been punched in my midriff. Gelsomina sees it, of course. She notices every twist of my mouth and every artery that throbs in my throat or temples. She grabs my hand and squeezes it to comfort me. She thinks that, in the euphoria of being together, my thoughts have turned to our daughter, plunging me into grief, just as she still mourns for our little girl every day.

“We'll see her again! We'll see her again!” she whispers, choking.

Amid this madness, my heart leaps at those words. Defying my judgment, it fantasizes about Gala. She emerges with wet hair and lifts her hands to wave hello.

“Until then, love is all that matters!” Gelsomina comforts me, so moved that tears are trickling down her cheeks. Panicking, as if about to be consumed by shame, I wriggle free from her embrace and reject the love I do not deserve. In the process, I knock over my wineglass. The cheese floats off the table. We take advantage of the consternation that follows to make our escape. Outside, Gelsomina wraps her short arms around my fat body and lays her head on my shoulder. Holding each other, we walk home like aging lovers.

As soon as I can, I call my friend Marcello. I'll explode just like that clown's tuba if I don't talk to someone about Gala. Marcellino is in Paris with his mistress and their daughter. Though I try to explain the situation as frivolously as possible, he takes it very seriously.

“When an extramarital relationship takes more energy than it gives,” he says, “you have to stop it.”

“But we don't have a relationship,” I exclaim, telling him that all that's happened is that Gala wanted to swim in the rain.

I hear his tongue click against his teeth with concern.

“I've only heard you talk about a woman that way once before,” he says, and we both know who he means. “Have you told her anything?”

“There's nothing to tell.”

“That's the biggest threat to a wife, Snapo. You can't stop
nothing.”

I spend the rest of the afternoon trying to draw. I fill seven large pages with caricatures, sketches for a set, and ideas for a cartoon. One after the other, I tear them up. I can't do it, because, for the first time in my life, instead of wanting to create images, I want to dodge them.

Maxim now looks better than ever. It's insufferable. He's tanned as a stevedore and his hair has grown even blonder in the mountains of Cortina. He spent days skiing, and thanks to his training at the theater school he turned out to be a natural. When he walks into the room in Parioli, it's as if the sun follows him in, shining through the hall and gleaming around his shoulders like a halo; he looks like Ben-Hur arriving to visit his mother and sister in the leper cave. Nobody would be surprised if there were cellos and violins playing. He has missed his
friend terribly and longingly calls out her name. He tears the curtains aside and throws open the windows, but our hero is too late. Mouth open, eyes rolled back, Gala is lifeless on the bed she has soiled.

He picks her up, not tenderly, but annoyed and impatient. He walks furiously into the shower, her limp body in his arms, and aims the cold water at her face. After a few seconds, he feels her chest expand with a jerk as she gasps for air. She seeks a foothold on the slippery tiles. She turns her face away to breathe, but he forces it back into the jet of water. She coughs, clears her throat, almost choking, but he is unrelenting. He's played this role so many times. He covers her mouth with his lips and blows his breath into her lungs. He doesn't loosen his grip until she's adopted his rhythm. She is still too weak to stand, and he is exhausted. The water streams down their cheeks. Embracing, they slip down to the floor. There they stay, shivering and shaking from the cold.

For a few days, it seems as if nothing has changed. Maxim and Gala are together all day long, just as they were in the first few months after their arrival. He spoils her in all kinds of ways. Until the pain has worn off and her wounded tongue can bear solid food again, he walks to Giolitti every few hours for a large tub of ice cream. She must have omitted her medicine for three or four days to suffer a grand mal of this magnitude, but Maxim doesn't make the slightest allusion to her negligence. I have to support her, he thinks, just as she supports me. After all, I can just as easily accuse myself of anything I reproach her for. He doesn't ask about Snaporaz, but she tells Maxim everything by doing her utmost not to mention him. And just this week, the director is on hundreds of walls all over the city. The news of his special Oscar has leaked out and they see him staring at them wherever they go from posters pushing the latest issue of
Gente
, whose lead article is a major interview with him. Every time Maxim sees one, he has to resist the urge to add vampire teeth, horns, and a forked tail.

To escape Snaporaz's eyes, Maxim leads Gala into subterranean Rome. Their days there are happy. They discover the Mithraeum beneath the San Clemente and explore the cellars of Caracalla. In the sacred catacombs along the Appia, they shake off the guide and the group and wander through endless corridors, as unruly as I was in '32, when I strayed from my parents there and got lost. Shrieking with
excitement, they follow the flame of a cigarette lighter deep under fields until they reach the tenements of Tor Marancia, where they finally emerge through a trapdoor beside a
soprintendenza
shed in the Via Annunziatella.

Once their eyes have adjusted to the daylight, the first thing they see is the
Gente
poster, but Snaporaz's grin is already hidden behind a leaflet for Circus Orfei, whose current attraction is Mimil the clown. Gala seems indifferent to what's left of Snaporaz. To make sure he's got the old Gala back and that things between them are the way they were before, Maxim takes her out of town for a few days. Arm in arm, they wander through the excavations in Cerveteri, cheerful and carefree as the Etruscans portrayed there in their tombs, dancing and diving and swimming with dolphins. In Volterra, Maxim and Gala linger before one of countless urns on which a couple are depicted entwined on their deathbed, grinning with satisfaction, and as if reading their script my main characters whisper something to each other: that they would be happy if they too could enter eternity just as contented and united.

“It's him,” shouts a frantic Geppi. “In my house! He's inside, but he could walk outside any minute now.” She's wearing a moth-eaten party dress that clings to her like a sausage skin. Copper mirror in one hand, rouge brush and kohl pencil in the other, the concierge patters through the basement searching for the best light. She elbows the raggedy Maxim and Gala, who have just returned from a long weekend among the tombs near Pitigliano, out of her way.

“One of your lovers visiting again?” Maxim teases.

Geppi lowers her mirror and looks at him solemnly.

“Not just my lover, but the lover of all Italian women.” Her makeup gleams in a ray of sunshine. Her skills as a cosmetician date from her days supplementing her income with part-time employment in Testaccio funeral parlors. “Marcello's visited our bedrooms more often than our husbands, if only in our dreams.”

“Marcello …
the
Marcello?”

“More often than our husbands, I tell you, and with more passion! Good Lord, just the thought makes me sweat like a whore in church.”

She turns her back on Maxim and lifts up her hair. He gets to zip up the dress that fitted her in her youth.

“But why is he visiting you?” asks Gala.

“Not me, sunshine; no, the days that men were connoisseurs are gone forever. But it's almost as good: he's here for you. Just for you!
Imagine, Marcello here to pick you up! Oh, the things that Signor Gianni manages.”

“Gianni's sent him?”

“Who else? Now tell me again that our benefactor isn't a saint?”

Gala grabs Maxim's arm. After the familiarity of their friendship, the idea of having to live up to expectations comes as a shock. She soon gathers her wits. The territory might not be safe, but she has long since scouted it out. She knows what to do. There's no time to waste. Her nervous frisson is what an understudy feels a few hours before the performance when she's asked to save the day by replacing the lead. She snatches Geppi's mirror, holds it a little to one side to coax her reflection out from behind her black spot, and sees her worst fears confirmed.

“He can't see me like this.”

Gala nervously plucks at the wisps in her hair. The idea of appearing unprepared before a film star and heartbreaker like Marcello makes her forget that there's more hope for her than for Geppi.

“Just look at me, it's out of the question. What will he think?”

“Out of the question,” Maxim growls, “and I'll tell him so.” Her insecurity nettles him. Just when he thought he'd recovered the Gala he loves—just when she was finally becoming herself again! For the past few days, on their trip, he was free to be proud of her, as he always had been before. He's been showing her off. When they walked arm in arm, he enjoyed the looks of passers-by, and when they shouted
“Complimenti alla mamma!”
Maxim gloated, as if he personally had brought her into the world. And when, as happened several times a day, drooling boys climbed off their scooters, or middle-aged gentlemen got out of their racing cars, he didn't intervene but waited avidly for the shrewd and disdainful barbs Gala unleashed. As the rejected men slunk off kneading their crotches, he demonstratively claimed his love with a slow French kiss, arrogant and satisfied as if the compliment had been his.

Now, five minutes after they get home, Gala is already starting to dissolve before his eyes, like a dream in the morning light. He sees her courage, the only courage he has, ebb away as she allows herself to be intimidated by a name. Maxim is angry at the famous stranger for her sudden self-doubt, almost as angry at him as with Gala herself.

“Where is this guy?” he shouts combatively.

“When I said our princess wasn't in, the charmer insisted on leaving
a note. I took him pen and paper, along with a slice of freshly baked onion tart …”

At that moment, the door opens and Marcello strides into the hall. His face is older than it looks onscreen—he is wearing glasses with heavy bone frames and a trilby to hide his balding spot—but his movements are as supple as on the morning he swung his legs over the side of the Trevi Fountain. The presence of a film star rarely fails to make an impression. Even people who've had time to steel themselves for the miracle tremble when the flat mask that's bombarded their subconscious becomes flesh before their eyes. All of them feel it, and a silence descends, as if one of the stone apostles in St. Peter's Square had just breathed in the Holy Spirit and descended among the believers using his robe as a parachute. After fifty years, Marcello is used to it, and patiently lets them catch their breath.

Geppi is first.

“Ah, Marcello!” she sings. “Marcello in my house.” She puts one hand on her hip, the other behind her head, a pose she remembers from the days of burlesque. “When I was born did anyone think it would come to this?”

“Highly unlikely, signora,” the actor answers so charmingly that the old woman doesn't feel slighted in the least when he walks by her to greet Gala with outstretched hands.

“I'm starting to understand what all the fuss is about,” he says, Gala's nerves hidden as always behind a sultry facade. Who but Maxim could guess that her tongue is only darting out because her mouth is dry with fear, and that she bites her lower lip only to conceal its trembling? Gala will bait a man to keep him from attacking her. The same voluptuous terror once moved her to climb onto her father's desk. It's a nerviness that prays to be released from further daring. The result looks so provocative because every man senses that there is an anxiety behind the seductiveness, begging for reassurance. This is not lost on Marcello.

“That's why my friend wants to gamble it all at the last minute.”

“Fine friends you have!”

Marcello looks at Maxim like a panda appraising an ant trying to argue its right to honey.

“If Gianni were my friend,” Maxim says, backing down, “I'd at least want him to be a little bit discreet.”

“Who's Gianni?” the actor inquires.