“Look, I really don’t know,” Gala says. She sips her sambuca. Maxim is trying to figure out whether she’s really forgotten what went on between her and Fulvani. The seizures can rip whole chunks out of her memory. But he’s skeptical. She won’t look him in the eye. Maybe she just doesn’t want to talk about it.
In the rear of the establishment, the only place to eat in Trastevere past midnight, the lights go on over a small stage. A young woman clambers onto it. She is fat. It’s hard for her to get up there. Two musicians take their position behind her, an elderly accordionist and a young boy with a tuba.
Gala lays her hand on Maxim’s and shrugs.
“Maybe it’ll come back, maybe it won’t.”
The woman on the stage plants her fists on her hips and bursts into song. Gala and Maxim don’t understand a word of her Roman dialect.
“What kind of person would just throw those slides on the table?” Maxim asks eventually.
“You’re the one who always says I shouldn’t be ashamed of them.”
“You shouldn’t. But there’s a time and a place.”
The singer is followed by an elderly couple. The woman’s costume is trimmed with ostrich plumes. The man makes a show of casting off his cape and reveals a gold lamé body stocking. Now and then the woman calls out something, whereupon her husband twists his wiry body into a pose. He maintains it for a few seconds, in the utmost concentration, as if performing a superhuman feat. Then he relaxes, skips on the spot, and calls, “Hop-la!” He does the discus thrower, the rape of the Sabine virgins, and something that looks like a dying Gaul.
The novelty soon fades. Sniggering, Maxim looks aside at Gala. She is crying.
“I did it for you,” she says, “stripping for those photos. Why else?”
They watch the movements of the man in the gold long johns.
“How can you say that?” Maxim asks without looking at Gala. “You do things like that because you decide to. The craziest things.”
“Insane,” she agrees. Her voice sounds completely serious. “Completely bonkers!” As if she’s summing up their whole life and has now finally reached a conclusion. “The two of us are completely insane.”
“Things nobody else dares to do. You just do them. I see you doing it and I think, ‘God, I love that lunatic’” Maxim is now tearing up too, moved by the idea of daring to deviate from what other people expect.
“You were only too happy to come to Rome with me,” says Gala coolly. “Those photos made it possible. I always saw them as our tickets here. I flung them into the fray because I thought they might help us.”
The magazine with the nude fairy tales had been out for two days when Maxim laid it on Gala’s parents’ table. He came with her because he was scared Jan Vandemberg might attack her. It wouldn’t have been the first time. Her father’s urge to protect her was so strong that he was inclined to slap her around to spare real injury. Once he had grabbed a piece of burning wood from the fireplace and flung it at Gala’s head because she refused to wear a helmet on a scooter.
This time he did not react at all.
“You could at least have a look,” said a disgruntled Gala.
“As far as I’m concerned, that magazine is an open coffin,” Jan replied, without raising his eyes from his newspaper. “There’s no point looking. The damage has been done.”
The magazine lay there untouched until it was time to clear the table for dinner. When Gala picked it up to make room for the place mats, Jan snatched it out of her hand. For a while, all they heard was the sound of his turning of the pages and puffing on his pipe. Only when Gala was called into the kitchen did he glance at Maxim over the edge of the magazine.
“Well, sir, a lot of men will enjoy this. One could even argue that it’s noble of you to show the world what you could have kept for yourself.”
Before Maxim could react, the family came in and sat down. Jan immediately rose, ripping the photos out of the magazine one by one.
“Look, Anna,” he said, showing his wife, “this is what we produced. Fairy tales.” He walked over to the fireplace, threw in the pictures of his daughter, and watched the flames until the last piece of flesh had turned to ash.
“The hope of the old goes up in smoke to provide clouds upon which their children can build castles.”
He picked up the carving knife. Before plunging it into the roast beef, he closed his eyes and said grace. “Lord, bless this meal and watch over the woman I love and the strange creatures that accidentally crept out of her. Amen.”
Laocoön is wrestling with a rubber snake. The man in the golden tights wraps up his act.
“A true artist,” the owner of the trattoria says tenderly as he lays the bill on the table. “Used to be world-famous. A body like Apollo. He could do classical poses without a net. High on the trapeze, swaying back and forth on the tightrope. No one else was up to it. He’s too old to fly now, but he can still do the poses.”
“Impressive,” says Gala. She really is moved, but the man doesn’t believe her. He shrugs and snatches the notes from the saucer in a huff.
“Even out of water, a fish gasps for air. Or should he give that up too?”
Entertainment’s not cheap. The surcharge is so high that Maxim and Gala have to dig out their last telephone tokens to pay for the meal. They don’t have any lire left for the bus, but so what? This is Rome. They’ve been ripped off, but the night is warm. Cheerfully they turn down the first lane toward the Tiber. Gala glances up and sees the sign with the name of the street. Just in time. She sees it in a flash, before the lights go off. In this street, in the adjacent streets, in what looks like the whole neighborhood.
• • • • •
I always tell the truth, but who would believe it? All my life I’ve been told that I exaggerate, whereas I only record what I see. People smile and shrug as if I’m joking. They shake their heads in disbelief, because they don’t see the interconnections in their own lives. Are they unable to do it, or just unwilling? They call my reality fantasy. It used to annoy me, but now I understand that there’s no point in getting upset about it. They just don’t see what I see. We listen with the same radio, but my receiver is tuned to a different station. I pick up other sounds, but that doesn’t make them any less real. For years, to accommodate others, I’ve even tried to dampen things. In reality, people are actually much more grotesque than I portray them; the things they experience are infinitely more extreme, less credible. They just don’t want to believe it.
So the street Gala and Maxim are walking down when the blackout occurs is called the Via della Luce. Why should I make that up? My story would be more plausible without it. I should have made up another name. The only reason I don’t is because it is an example of the coincidences that meet Gala at every turn.
“Did you see that?” she asks, bursting out laughing. “Did you see the name of the street?” Delighted, she throws her arms around Maxim’s neck. She’s always more astonished by things like this than he is. Over the years, Maxim has learned to accept that coincidences like this happen when Gala is around. It’s one of the things he loves about her. More than anything else, it makes him stand in awe of her. Minor details shrink from her presence to allow life’s essential themes to shine through. It reminds him of the frescoes in the city’s oldest churches: the colors have faded, leaving only the grooves of the original drawing in the plaster.
• • • • •
Along broadly sketched lines like these Gala will cut straight through the indescribable anthill of Rome to cross my path at last. That’s what’s so wonderful about the truth: it does things we wouldn’t dare make up. No, the only thing that’s really unimaginable, that might seem like something I’ve invented, the most incredible thing of all, is that people don’t see that I portray them accurately, showing their world as it is. We experience exactly the same things, in the same reality, but simply pick out different details.
Lying naked on her stomach on the downy back
of Andersen’s flying swan, Gala had seen exactly what was going on in Maxim’s eyes. They were making a fool of her, and he wasn’t warning her. The photographer asked her to tilt her pelvis a little. The lighting men aimed the spotlights to banish the last protective shadows. Along the sidelines were a few members of the editorial team who had chosen this day to see something of the sessions they were paying so dearly for. They were hot. An assistant slid a window open. The big bird’s feathers moved in the draft. Again the photographer instructed her to tilt her pelvis. This time he sounded even less patient. “Come on, babe, a little further, people want to see something.” One editor sniggered. Maxim was sitting between them. He must have heard it as well. But he did nothing. He just sat there with his legs crossed. Watching. He was ashamed. There was no doubt about that. Gala caught his eyes. Insistently. Her expression very clearly asked him to intervene, to help deliver her from this position. A few words would have sufficed. Then she could have grabbed a bathrobe and walked away from the set, but all he did was give her a reassuring signal with his eyes.
It was only a quick flicker of his lashes that broke the contact between them, but Gala suddenly felt abandoned. She wanted to scream with fear, but she knew that no one would hear her, and decided to save her energy, even though she had no idea for what.
Just as a calm certainty grows within a drowning man when he realizes that the last hope is lost, an awareness arose within Gala that compared to the struggle ahead the present conflict was unimportant. For a second, enduring this trial even seemed worthwhile, just to see how she could possibly survive it. Now Gala found an unsuspected source of strength, and a new consciousness was born somewhere deep beneath the waves of her abandonment.
The eyes of all the men who surrounded her—the photographer, his technicians, the makeup artist, the editors, and Maxim’s eyes as well—glided over her body, becoming entangled with the wind blowing over the canal and entering through the open basement window. They swirled through the room, playing over her throat, her flanks, buttocks, feet, calves, blowing up between her thighs and chilling her sex. The eddies caressed her skin, making the hairs stand up suddenly, shocked by the watery chill, only to immediately relax and lie down again, as if an invisible hand had smoothed them over.
With a stab, Gala experienced the menace of the male in its full intensity for the first time; she was astonished, as if the danger came from a completely unexpected source. She shuddered to think of the depths behind his mask. She did not fear the sorrow, the insecurity, or the pain a man inflicted by loving you—child’s play, compared to this unnameable something. She shuddered at the realization of the true perversion, the loneliness of the role men have to play, the part that everyone, themselves included, expects them to play with such abandon that if they have to they will destroy you to make you believe it. In a flash, Gala became aware that this natural, insurmountable inequality renders impossible any hope of fully abandoning oneself to the other.
This must be why every woman discovers sooner or later that, together with love, this menace has forced its way into her unnoticed.
When the photographer urged her for the third time to tilt her pelvis, his voice was anything but friendly. Gala let the tone sink in, as if letting the humiliation strengthen her, as if the memory of this moment would give her a weapon she could one day use to defend herself. The weapon was contempt. Like a magic spell it instantaneously robbed the men of their magic. “They’re using me,” thought Gala, “but they need me too. I can and I will turn the tables.” This was a powerful observation, but it was hardly a conscious formulation, anything but a strategy: it was a realization with all the innocence and openness of a newborn, shocked and bawling at the unknown.
She wrapped her arms tightly around the swan’s neck, pressed her abdomen against the feathers, and tilted her pelvis back as far as she could. She even raised her lower body to give the men a better view of her sex. Their breathing quickened. They slid back and forth against the walls uneasily. The camera didn’t stop clicking. Flashes of light shot over her retina. With these fireworks Gala celebrated her triumph.
“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.”
3
“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.