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.
“The saint of the guesthouse!” says Geppi, crossing herself.
“A pimp!” roars Maxim.
“Well, then he’s a colleague,” Marcello laughs. “I too have the task of delivering the signorina to the harem of Italy’s greatest living pasha!” Seeing the questioning looks, he adds, “My friend Snaporaz, the only man who makes work of his dreams. Work that will finally commence today.” He looks at his watch and offers Gala an arm. “In forty-five minutes, to be precise. In Cinecittà. There’s a lot of traffic on the Tuscolana around lunchtime, so if you’re ready?”
“But I don’t know a thing about it,” she sputters.
“Neither does Snaporaz. He starts every film with a blank slate. We drift through the mist for days on end. It’s terrifying to work in that void, but just when we start to despair, his genius blossoms.”
“But are you sure he’s expecting me?” asks Gala, walking through the garden.
“We’ll surprise him.” Marcello holds his car door open for her.
“No! He’ll say, ‘What’s that girl doing here?’ Maybe he doesn’t even want me.”
“Believe me, he wants you.”
“He never called.”
“Did you call him?”
“That’s different.”
“He didn’t have the nerve.” Marcello shrugs, pulling the agonized face Italians use to illustrate something they consider obvious. “He was afraid of spoiling his own surprise.”
As soon as the car is out of sight, Maxim picks up their backpacks with a frustrated sigh and walks inside to unpack them.
“O Dio,” exclaims Geppi, who can’t stop waving, “if I still had my figure, the world would have nothing left to complain about!”
I have my arm around Gelsomina when they walk into Studio 5.
“Ouch!” she shouts when, from the shock, my fingers tense into a claw. To mask my confusion, I kiss my wife on the top of her head. For no reason. As if she were a child. Or a dog. It’s ridiculous, but Gelsomina knows exactly what it means and looks up to identify her rival.
“Well, look what we have here!” she says.
I raise a hand to Gala and Marcello, mumble as if I’ve been expecting them, and quickly bend back over the table where I have spread out my latest sketches for the film. I pretend to be explaining my ideas to Gelsomina. In fact, there’s only one thing on my mind.
I should have known Marcello would pull a stunt like this. He means well. He’s my oldest friend. He gets into trouble and I help him out of it. I tell him what’s bothering me and he smiles, brushing it all aside. I wouldn’t have it any other way. I can do my own worrying. Our friendship is unconditional, deeply rooted in mutual incomprehension. Marcello thinks life is a big joke and believes that if only they made up their mind people could all bluff their way through it as carelessly as he does. Now and then, he tries to lend them a hand. This is not his strong suit. I ought to be grateful that he didn’t get Gala to leap out of a giant tiramisu at a dinner celebrating my wedding anniversary. He undoubtedly believes he’s doing me a favor, even though all I want at a moment like this is for the earth to split open and swallow me up. To make things worse, I can feel all too keenly how embarrassed Gala is. I could succumb beneath the double burden.
“And I get to waltz around in baggy pajamas?” asks Gelsomina. She snatches up a drawing that is anything but flattering.
“You’re in a nursing home,” I say. “You expect Versace?”
She flaps the drawing back and forth under my nose, as if it’s stuck to her fingers like flypaper.
“This woman can’t talk and her memory’s gone. She’s lost her past and her future. Her style’s the last thing she’ll give up.”
When I’m too slow to give in, she actually threatens to shred my design: the very woman who, the moment I take my eyes off her, asks the grocer to return my shopping list so that she can save it for posterity in a calfskin scrapbook!
“Don’t forget …” She grabs my wrist, pulls me toward her, and continues in a whisper, “This woman was born to the stage. She has emotions and sensibilities the other patients lack. She was used to expressing herself. When she was happy, she sang. When things went wrong, she fought her way back to happiness. And that woman is now standing eye to eye with her old love for one last time.”
Our faces touch. I feel her breath as if we’re making love. It frightens me.
“You should know that,” she says. “You invented her. If she can no longer succeed in telling the love of her life what’s going on inside her, she’ll do anything to show him what he means to her.”
And in that instant she lets go of me, casually straightening my jacket as if we were at a reception. She lays the drawing back on the table and continues, businesslike, “Her appearance is all she has left. It’s the last language she speaks. I’m not saying she has to be beautiful, but she’ll definitely want to spruce up, with the courage of despair.”
For a half second, enough to make me shiver, she looks at me.
“Fine,” I say. “Arrange it with wardrobe.”
Her hand slides quickly up her neck to check her wig, and then Gelsomina walks up to Marcello, hugs him, and introduces herself to Gala.
Maxim, in Parioli, empties out the backpacks. He puts their underwear in a bucket
to soak. He hangs up a shirt and a dress in the wardrobe. He pulls her diary out of a side pocket, runs his fingers over the Chinese silk, then replaces it in her bedside cabinet. He arranges his shaving kit in the bathroom and leaves her toiletries bag on her pillow. He lies beside it, maybe because he’s worn out from the trip, maybe because he’s bored.
One by one, my regular crew members arrive: Ruggero, Nicola, Fiamella with Tonino, Gianfranco, Alberto … Some of them haven’t seen each other since my last film, three and a half years ago. The glory days, when our dream factory operated day and night, are over. Only the youth of the magnificent woman Marcello has brought gives us the brief illusion that nothing has changed. They reminisce, get a little something to eat, and together we raise our glasses to Vinzo, my faithful grip, who has left us, wishing him a beautiful spot in the wide frame up above. The whole time, I’m vainly trying to catch Gala’s eye. She seems comfortable, chatting with everyone, animated but determined not to impose. I can’t approach her immediately because I’m constantly talking to the people who, one after the next, keep coming up to me. They know I prefer these initial consultations informal—if I wanted to play the chairman, I’d have gone into politics. Anyway, there’s not much to say. The film exists in my head and it will soon exist on celluloid. The two might be completely different and the journey from one to the other is as unpredictable and inimitable as life itself. I prefer to tell everyone my story separately, eight or ten times in a row. I open my notebooks, show them the portfolios with sketches. One points to this part of it, another to that, asking what it means. As always, I don’t have a clue and make up something to save face.
That’s how a squiggle that could have been anything acquires a meaning. It is given a place. Suddenly one idea belongs with another, maybe even inside the same particular scene. And just like that a certain development emerges from my chaos. The more I describe it, the more I have to make precise choices.
Finally, only a fraction of the visionary whole remains, but because the parts that are selected belonged to that whole, traces of the rest still cling to it, though these are different for every person. No one recognizes himself in everything; but everyone can see something of himself in smaller things—just as I sometimes enjoyed the posters and the photos of the stars in the glass cases outside the Fulgor more than the films inside. The posters let me make up my own stories. I don’t say that my ideas improve with every choice, but they’re none the worse for them, either. They’re alive, if nothing else. The joy and sorrow I feel upon seeing my own work must be something like what God feels when he gazes down from His red, plush-lined box at a command performance of His Creation. My satisfaction with the little that has accidentally emerged is as great as my frustration about everything I intended to create but never got the chance to develop.
The meeting comes to an end after a couple of hours. Gelsomina goes off to Castelgandolfo to visit her sister. She gives me a kiss and wishes me abundant inspiration. The others follow, and Marcello, with a wink, leaves me alone with Gala.
“Galina,” I say. “Galina, why on earth do you want to be an actress?”
I show her my plans and tell her I’m sorry I don’t have a bigger part for her. She looks carefully at one sheet after the other. From the way she picks up the drawings and slides them across her field of vision, I can tell that she has eye problems. She offers no judgment but bursts into laughter at the sight of one of my caricatures. My heart leaps like a dog that’s been tossed a bone.
“These drawings are only to picture things for myself,” I say apologetically. For the first time, I’m embarrassed by my lack of technique, ashamed it’s all so sketchy. “The film’s always been inside my head, even before I knew it existed. Thousands of films screen there every day of the week, but the projector isn’t on. All I have to do is make the light.”
“Just as an untold number of sculptures in the marble of Carrara will never be freed from the mountain,” Gala says. “The sculptor points one block out in the quarry because he sees its potential, but behind it thousands remain hidden forever.” She shivers. “So many things will never be seen.”
“There’s always someone,” I say, putting my arm around her reassuringly, “to think of those others when he sees that one …”
This is one version of the buildup to our first kiss. It’s equally possible that those firm, resilient breasts of hers brush up against me every time she bends over one of the drawings. Feeling her stiffening nipples, at last I can no longer stand it and jump her. There’s probably a little truth to both versions or—to stick to the philosophical jargon that has won me so many women—both images coexist and can be recognized in the other.
Either way, this is what happens next: her breathing quickens as soon as our mouths find each other. Her head tilts back to offer me her throat and she pulls her blouse open with both hands to let my lips descend. At the same time, she puts my hand between her legs, impatiently, grips it tight, briefly and fiercely rides it. It’s over in two minutes. She’s lying on the table, bare bottom on my drawings, shamelessly staying there as I nudge her legs apart for a better view of the glistening droplets pearling out of her. They roll down her thighs. Underneath, one of the little characters I’ve drawn from my dreams slurps them up, blurring with delight. I, on the other hand, am dressed impeccably throughout. Could there be any better proof that this is no fantasy? Quite the opposite! She makes no attempt whatsoever to please me. If I weren’t enjoying the view so much, I would even feel used. She sits up, looks at me with big, moist eyes, and thanks me with a kiss. She takes my hand, presses it against her cheek, still sitting just the way she was. At last, she stands up, straightening her dress to show that playtime is over. As I wonder whether I’ve ever been the one to walk away unsatisfied, I try to look as aggrieved as possible, but that makes no impression at all.
She pours us both a glass of wine, clinks glasses, and beams as if we are equally sated.
“To love!” she says, but I have no idea if she means it. She soon insists on leaving. I walk her all the way to the gate.
“Maybe I act,” she says, “because we’ve already had to leave so many possibilities behind in the stone.”
“But that’s the difference between sculptor and sculpture,” I call out after her. “One has to wait for someone else to see something in it; the other is free to shape himself.”
I walk to the bathroom to wash my hands, but at the sink I reconsider and decide to carry her with me for the rest of the day. In the mirror, I see the young man who fled into the antiques shop in the Via Margutta during the war.
“I’m saved!” he repeated to himself, walking back and forth between the gilded rococo curls. “I’m saved, I’m saved!”
Maxim wakes from his afternoon nap. The first thing he sees upon opening his eyes is Gala’s toiletries bag. He picks it up and shakes it, a routine gesture after years of checking whether she has enough pills. He hears them rattling in their jars. Lots. More than enough. Reassured, he puts it back and turns over again. For five or six seconds he rests, then opens his eyes wide. He grabs the bag and unzips it.
Galley Slave
Gala is hardly through the gates of Cinecittà when the truth hits her, as abruptly as if someone yanked up the rear wall during a sensitive scene and let in the sunlight and the furious traffic on the Tuscolana. It can’t be more than fifty paces to the entrance of the metro, but she suddenly lacks the strength to get there. The fury around her unleashes a storm inside her.
“What have I done?” she says out loud. Seeking support from the studio complex, she presses herself up against the wall like a child playing hide-and-seek just around the corner from the gate. She evaluates and examines words and caresses that happened without thinking at the time, and in so doing only judges herself. For each gesture, every sentence she uttered, she now comes up with ten others, better, pithier, more intriguing, more important, funnier.
The thought that Snaporaz might be standing on the other sid
e of the wall at the same time, like her reflection, palms on the plaster, does not cross her mind. For her, everything the director has done or said is beyond dispute. The only reason she considers his behavior at all is to try to detect his ulterior motives. The more rationality she tries to impose on her sensuality, the more convinced she grows that Snaporaz could only deplore, deeply, her and her behavior. It must have been a tremendous strain for him to maintain his friendly facade; now, at this very moment, he must be on the phone telling Marcello what a deep and horrific disappointment that milkmaid was. Her intellect tells her that you couldn’t find a man in the world who would not look favorably on a young woman who has just thrown herself at him, but in her heart she knows that she has fallen short again. She had come so close, only to see her big chance go up in flames.
“What possessed me?” she asks herself, weeping with impotence and rage. “For God’s sake, how could I have let it come to this?”
Until the day I grew too fat to wear a swimsuit, I was always too skinny for one. For years, they called me Gandhi or Beanstalk. When I was sixteen, I watched the others impress girls by parading virtually naked over the beach in Rimini. I didn’t dare. In response, I began dressing exorbitantly in three-piece suits with scarves and summer gloves. I studied pictures of Leopardi and D’Annunzio, men who never bared so much as their Adam’s apple yet attracted women in droves. On even the hottest days, I strolled up and down the boulevard with a flower in my lapel. Under my arm, I carried a pad on which, for thirty lire, I would draw caricatures of the seaside visitors.