On the very first day of this assault, the heating in Gala and Maxim’s room in Parioli is switched off. Geppi is implacable. She claims that the owner—no, not Signor Gianni, but his boss, an elderly count from distant Monterotondo—came by personally to seal the locks on the heating of all tenants in arrears. That same night she did knock on the door to give them a set of blankets and the advice to hand the rent over to Gianni before he came up with his own—and here she lowered her voice to a whisper—“proposal.” Gala and Maxim cuddle up, but on the third day they awake so early, so chilled to the bone, that they have to find a hotel lobby on the Via Veneto to warm up in.
The way they stroll through the revolving door dissuades anyone from asking what they’re doing there so early. They settle down in front of the fireplace with a couple of newspapers.
“At last, people with guts!”
Gala looks up.
A young woman, tall, blond, beautiful as a model, is standing at the silver dish with the warm cider that has been set out for the hotel guests. She scoops up a bowlful and blows the steam off it with pursed lips.
“I always say, if you’re going to do it, then don’t be ashamed of it.”
“I have no idea what we should be ashamed of,” answers Gala.
“Exactly, but if I had a dollar for all the ones who come in here staring into space and run off afterward with their heads hanging …”
“How absurd.”
“The front desk doesn’t like us hanging around, but if you ask me, between the three of us, we’re the big hotels’ most important attraction.”
“The three of us?”
“Of course! They owe us at least one of those five stars.”
“Why?”
“Do you think a single one of those businessmen would check in if we weren’t hanging around?” She flops down in an armchair and kicks off her shoes. She stretches. Her fur coat falls open wide enough to show a skirt, probably designed in the Via Condotti, but definitely too short for the weather. A bellhop whistles. She pokes her tongue out at him.
“You’re mistaken,” says Maxim, trying to ascertain whether she’s wearing panties. “We’re only here to warm up.”
“Warmth, friendship, longing for the womb, I’ve heard it all and nothing surprises me anymore.”
“Just to warm up a little,” Gala explains, “not to … well, not professionally, like you.”
The young woman takes a mouthful of cider and tries to work out whether two old pros are trying to take her for a ride.
“Then you really must be mistaken.” She shakes her head in regret. “You don’t look like you need to be cold in this city. Unless …” Suddenly a bitter note emerges in her voice: “Unless you think you’re too good to earn your living with pleasure.”
Amid the rush of apologies that come tumbling out in response, Gala says, “I’ve thought about it.”
Maxim looks at her.
“Big deal,” he exclaims, not to be outdone, “we’ve all thought about it. That’s not the point,” but he stares at her to see if she’s serious.
Gala averts her eyes.
“I’ve had offers.”
“You?”
“Why not?” she adds indignantly. “Do you think I’m too repulsive?”
“From who?”
“I turned him down.”
“Who??”
“I turned him down, but you know, in different circumstances …”
There is something provocative in the look they exchange. Gala knows he likes how she says such things. He knows she does it to get him going, and the dumbest thing he could do would be to act narrow-minded.
“I’m glad to hear it,” the young woman interrupts them, “you’re open-minded. People have such wrong ideas about our profession. Especially when you’re operating in this class.”
“This class?”
“Interesting men. Not just cheap tricks, but men who travel the world, politicians, guys with influence and opinions. They don’t want a dummy, they want someone on their level. It starts as an intellectual challenge—fast, stimulating, and nine times out of ten that’s as far as it goes. The cliché of call girls is complete nonsense. Most of us are students or have good jobs.”
“I thought that was the cliché,” says Maxim.
The young woman stands up. She belts her fur coat.
“Maybe I’ve gotten you wrong. This is only for the extras. Extra clothes, extra adventure. If it’s a matter of paying the gas bill, the street corner will do.”
She rummages through her purse and throws two of her agency’s cards down on the table.
“Do yourselves a favor …” Before heading into the morning, she runs her fingers through her hair and puts on a pair of sunglasses. “There’s only one thing worse than being used.”
“Could you fuck someone you didn’t love?” Gala asks on New Year’s Eve, cuddling with Maxim in bed.
Shared warmth is twice as warm.
“Why not?”
They’ve spread their long coats over the blankets they’ve pulled up to their chins.
“Do you?”
“I don’t fuck that many people,” Maxim replies.
They’re silent for a while. They don’t often discuss these subjects. In the quiet room, it’s easy to believe that people who love each other are each other’s lovers. But things aren’t that simple. Gala and Maxim grew up free enough to be able to believe one thing yet give themselves over to another. Those were times that virtually demanded that they develop separately in love, so that a chasm soon emerged in their intimacy, that unassailable dream, and what they got up to by themselves.
The rare occasions they mentioned these escapades were undeniably exciting. They had to work up the nerve to abandon the solidity of silence, and then to balance the desire to not wound the other with the need to match them. It’s an odd game, and those who play it can’t count on anyone else’s understanding.
That afternoon Maxim filled two liter bottles with barrel wine. One has already been dispatched. He opens two paper packets from the salumeria on the corso. One contains Parma ham; the other, olives. Oil drips on the sheets.
“Yes,” he brags, “I could do that. No problem. It’d be easier with someone who meant nothing to me.”
“Sure. Maybe even better. Maybe that’s it.”
He briefly wonders whether this is what she wants to hear, and whether it’s actually true.
“I’ve done it before,” he says, to convince himself. Sometimes he longs so passionately for shamelessness. It wells up in him like warm sulfur in a cold spring, seeping through old cracks in the crust of his consciousness. “People I don’t know at all, who don’t interest me, whose names I don’t even know. Without a single word. Sometimes without even looking at each other.”
“Women?”
“People I wouldn’t even think of talking to. Not even ‘Hi, how are you?’”
“Men?”
“Would a woman do something like that?”
It’s as busy on this festive night as it was quiet at Christmas. In every room, men are visiting girls. Gala and Maxim listen to their footsteps. In the hall. On the stairs. Above their heads. Doors.
Gala lays her head on his chest. She curls up and throws a leg over his. She’s looking away from him. It’s a game, but they wouldn’t dare face its possible consequences. It’s dangerous, like the trials of strength of her childhood. Maxim is a worthy opponent. She won’t back off: instead, she ups the stakes, hiding her face behind her hair.
“So you really don’t care if it’s a man or a woman?”
He knows what she wants to hear.
“Not when I’m horny.”
Gala doesn’t answer.
“You’ve slept with women.”
“A couple of times,” she says curtly. “Friends I’ve known for years. It’s familiar. It’s not the same thing.” Her head rises and falls with his breathing. She hears his heartbeat. Suddenly, she sits up, drinks her wine. She sits th
ere with the glass wedged between her breasts and her pulled-up knees.
“Any man, any woman? It doesn’t matter to you.”
“Of course it does.”
“A girlfriend, a complete stranger … You don’t care when you feel the urge.”
“Of course I care.”
“So when you do love someone?”
“That’s completely different.” He sounds annoyed, but grabs one of the coats from the foot of the bed and drapes it carefully over her shoulders. She pulls it tighter. When he speaks again, it’s gentler. Thoughtful.
“Friendship paralyzes lust. Love kills it. Being horny is wanting to own, take possession, be taken. Penetrating, forcing entry, imposing your will. That’s hunting, not love. I want to worship the one I love, not spear them.”
Gala looks at him over her shoulder.
“A lot of good that does her, the worshipped one,” she answers laconically, flopping back on the pillows with a sigh, playful. She spreads her arms, lets the glass slip out of her hand to the floor.
“I want to look up to her,” laughs Maxim, “not down on her!” He really means it. His own words have turned him on. He sits astride her, takes her wrists, presses them down.
“Loving, Gala, isn’t about simply fucking, it’s about admiring.”
She looks at him.
“Not about real life,” she says, “but about a dream.” The mockery slowly drains from her face and she frowns, suddenly furious, shaking her head, trying to fight him off. Maxim only realizes the game is over when she shrieks and shakes her head so violently that it slams against one of the bedposts. Shocked by her ferocity, he immediately lets go.
“You can’t enlarge people into idols. That’s cruel.”
“Why should I leave them small?” he splutters, grasping at a defense.
“The smaller you are, the bigger the world. The more imperfect a person is, the more chance he has to develop.”
He lays his hand on her head where she bumped it.
“You’re drunk.”
They sit there, unsure what else to do, like children who have gone too far and are waiting for someone to rescue them.
“An ideal is a caricature. Instead of accepting the ugly parts, you blow the beautiful things out of proportion. How can anyone ever live up to that?”
For a second, Maxim thinks she’s crying. Her head twitches against his hands a few times, but he doesn’t say a word. He doesn’t move, and when she continues speaking she’s calm.
“It’s awful when someone makes you prettier, or better, or bigger. His unconditional faith in you makes you all the more aware of your shortcomings. He doesn’t see you as you are but as you could have been. That’s where a lot of people’s anger comes from. Only when you’re soaring in someone else’s eyes do you realize you’re really stuck in the mud. That’s the ‘mire’ in admired.”
After New Year’s, week after week passes without a sign of life from Snaporaz or even his lowliest minions. The disappointment lies like a boulder in the stream of Maxim and Gala’s Roman life, collecting more silt each day. They don’t talk about it, trying, each in their own way, to bypass the growing island of frustrated expectations. Maxim, as usual, takes the safe side. He can’t yet admit it to himself, but he’d rather go back to the Netherlands. The wound of his rejection is not healing, and he’s only remaining for Gala’s sake. Since it doesn’t look as if she’ll end up any better than him, he wants to spare her further sorrow. If it were up to him, they’d spend their last lire enjoying the city and then go home at the start of springtime, a dream poorer and an experience richer. They’d be more satisfied with their Dutch lives, and in a few years they could look back at their adventure and laugh at their naïveté.
Gala, meanwhile, is consumed by doubt. Frame by frame, she runs through the scene in the office above Studio 5.
She keeps thinking that Snaporaz must have changed his mind. “I was too boring. I should have said something funny, witty, brazen. Something to stimulate him, even to annoy him, anything that would have made an impression. I had my chance and of course I blew it, ‘cause I’m just a silly little girl, a born disappointment! But … well, the great man showed some interest. Yes, he really was interested. It might have been only for a second, but there’s no doubt he was. So it must have been something later that made him change his mind. Too fat. Of course. I’ve got to go on a serious diet. But he loves voluptuous female flesh. Maybe not fat enough? Should I put on some weight? Or maybe I’m too ugly. Too weird-looking. My head is too big anyway. That’s it, my head’s just too big for my body. It’s a little grotesque. I look like a cartoon woman, but, you know, he loves extreme characters. Maybe I’m not extreme enough? I’m probably just too ordinary. That’s why he’s not interested in Maxim: he’s too handsome, and there’s nothing special about being good-looking. But I’m not good-looking—I’m just too boring, is all, so he’s shoved me aside with all the other dime-a-dozen actresses …”
She goes down a brambly path of self-recrimination, and when she finally surfaces, she’s clinging to one overpowering, painful idea.
“I should have gone alone,” she reproaches herself. “Without Maxim. Since Snaporaz wasn’t interested in him, he’s not interested in me either. He thinks we’re a couple, of course, whereas if I’d gone by myself … He’s an Italian man, after all. He doesn’t notice you unless he thinks you’re available. Maxim is a sweetheart, he means well, but in a situation like that he’s a ball and chain.”
The loneliness of this thought shocks her out of her weeklong reverie. She’s disgusted with herself and pities Maxim at the same time. When she finds him again in the middle of the rapids, she seizes his hand as if she’ll never let go; thus, after rounding the obstacle each in their own way, they are, temporarily, closer than ever before. But, strangely enough, Gala, unlike Maxim, never feels the slightest aversion to the man who caused all this turmoil.
In the opera house, Maxim goes through the daily rehearsals with the resignation of Napoleon confined to Elba forced to listen to his guard’s lectures on strategy. Swallowing his pride, staring into space, determined to remain above the folly, he paces across the cardboard Forum in a crepe de chine tunic that leaves almost nothing to the imagination.
He spends the breaks in the telephone booth on the Piazza Gigli. He calls agencies. His dissatisfaction has ignited his old passion for acting, also known as “hoping for work.” Anything is better than serving as human scenery.
In the afternoon, after going through the choreography—three steps forward, two to the side—he waits in the wings with the other extras until the stage manager calls. They are all tall, well-proportioned young Romans, dressed by Sangallo to bare their powerful neck and chest muscles and to expose their well-trained thighs almost to the groin. They all seem assured of their own worth. Enviously, Maxim watches their easy preening, their constant discussions of their own and the others’ beauty. They have no other interests. They don’t listen to the music. They don’t discuss anything significant. At first, Maxim felt like a truffle on a pile of gravel. “They have their looks,” he thought, “I have my talent.” But he gradually realizes that the other young men see him as one of their own and judge him according to their standards. The first time he’s asked to roll his chest muscles, he is so self-conscious that he is glad he’s just put on his T-shirt. In these surroundings, he feels his intellect diminishing in value; he wants only to measure up physically. When the group compliments him on his thighs, he’s flattered and explains the rigorous exercises that produced this result at the Amsterdam Theater Academy. When they ask him to stand beside the group’s gymnast for a comparison, Maxim positively enjoys it.
I can’t possibly be one of them, he thinks. It must be the bad lighting. But, well, I don’t want to be shown up either … With a certain pride, he closes his book and lifts up his legionnaire’s tunic.
The young men spend day after day like this, beneath the sweltering spotlights. Fresh air seldom p
enetrates the curtains that make an improvised room for the extras. Sequestered behind a set representing one of the Forum temples, they never appear before the choir or soloists without being summoned. In Italian opera, dominated by a hierarchy stricter than the Vatican’s, these worlds have been separated for centuries.
Perhaps that explains why Maxim jumps at the fresh wind that blows across their scantily clad bodies halfway through the second week of rehearsals. Annoyed, he turns around to find himself looking straight into the eyes of Liliana Silberstrand.
“So this is where they keep you hidden away!” says the mezzo-soprano. “I was beginning to wonder whether I’d only seen you in a dream!”
Silberstrand is the Swedish court singer and, rumor has it, the Swedish queen’s dearest friend. That would explain her style. Tall and slim, she is standing there with a hand on one hip. The light entering through the curtain she’s holding open with the other hand has cast a reddish brown halo around her.
“But no, these men are real.” She breathes in the smell of their sweat and closes her eyes with pleasure.
Silberstrand is singing Sesto, a role originally intended for a castrato. Until now, her man’s role has been indicated only by the silver breastplate pinned to her costume, which is otherwise identical to the extras’. But she has more serious ambitions regarding her metamorphosis.
“All right, so tell me: how does a man walk? How does he keep his hips so still? I want to be convincing, so don’t be shy, troops, make me one of you. What does a fellow do with his hands, and why must he sit with his legs spread? Is it the reason I think?”
The men couldn’t have been more stunned if the soprano had turned up in a bikini. Half are flabbergasted because they’ve never seen an opera singer who wants to act, the other half because the opposite sex is attempting to join them in disguise. At any rate, within seconds it’s every man for himself. Silberstrand delights in their attention.
“I already know how men drink,” she says, producing a bottle, pulling the cork out with her teeth, and spitting it into a corner. She raises it to her lips and then passes it around, all the while maintaining, as under all circumstances, the grace of someone about to take her seat for the Nobel Prize banquet. She wipes her mouth on the back of her hand.