Wouldn’t it be more loving of me, he sometimes wonders, to tell her that the love between her and Snaporaz isn’t all that unique? Shouldn’t I grab her by the shoulders and shake her until she realizes that she’s not the only beautiful young woman standing in the parking lot with her fingers in the wire fence, and that all those others think they’ve got the same right to stand by Snaporaz’s sickbed?
But he loves her too much to hurt her. Or is he too cowardly to risk the truth?
So he says, “Yes, your relationship is unique, and every day it lasts is something to be grateful for,” whereupon they turn on the television or sit out the evening with books until it’s time for Maxim to return to Parioli.
Human reason can so strongly suppress imagination that, in all those nighttime wanderings through the city, Maxim only once comes face-to-face with himself. It happens on the Piazza Navona, just after the fountains have been turned off and the fortune-tellers have gone home. By the time he walks onto the square, it is deserted, except for a couple lying in each other’s arms before the statue of the Moor, oblivious to anyone else.
Maxim has almost passed them by when he recognizes Gala and himself. He turns around. They look like they’re in love. She’s wearing her leopard-skin jacket. His head is on her shoulder. Maxim goes up to within a few meters of them, but the two are so happy, so absorbed in each other, that he doesn’t seem to exist for them. New arrivals in the city, stretching out on the soft stones of the city squares that serve as their living room. They haven’t committed themselves to anything; everything still seems possible. Then she stands and strips down to her slip. She washes her arms and shoulders in the basin. She bends over it and dips her face in the water. When she straightens up again, she notices Maxim staring at her from a distance. It makes her laugh. She scoops up water with both hands and throws it toward him. Encouraged, he runs toward the fountain. Again she tries to splash him. For a second, he looks like he’ll go play with the young couple, but then he reconsiders and walks off without a word. He hurries away from the square. After all, Gala will be going out early the next morning, and he wants to be back at her place in time to prepare a high-fiber breakfast.
“Signora Vandemberg!” the man in the commercial shouts. He descends the dark stairs to the cellar. The woman he’s following doesn’t hear him. She is carrying a bucket of milk. In her long, spotted bathrobe, she walks past a row of cells. A bicycle stands behind the bars of one of them. The others seem to be empty.
“Signora Vandemberg,” the man sighs, “from Holland. She was the most beautiful woman in the world. Signora!”
Now she turns around.
The man was not exaggerating.
“Signora, let me carry the bucket for you.”
“Jij kunt het niet,” the woman answers in Dutch, “jij bent maar een jongen.”
He doesn’t understand the words but seems to grasp her meaning. Suddenly, he realizes what he’s got on. He’s wearing a blue sailor’s suit with a big white collar.
“But I’m the boss of a big company,” he argues, astonished. “I’m feared and respected.”
“Jij bent altijd een kleine jongen gebleven.”
Now the foreign language is too much for him.
“I’m sorry,” the man shouts desperately as she walks away with her bucket. “Can someone translate that for me?”
“I can,” a lion says. He emerges from one of the cells and translates the Dutch woman’s words. “You’ve always stayed a little boy.” Then the lion lays his head on the lap of the man in the sailor’s suit and begins to cry. The animal weeps slow, heavy, heartrending tears.
The whole thing takes less than ninety seconds and ends the way I wanted all the ads to end: the man wakes from his nightmare and falls out of bed with a thud. His snarling wife insists that he’d sleep better if he’d listened to her and entrusted his money to the Vatican bank.
I finished the cut just before I left for Los Angeles, but it hadn’t been approved, let alone scheduled for broadcasting. Come to think of it: I haven’t even been paid for it yet. In any event, the commercial suddenly appears on television. The timing has undoubtedly been influenced by the tremendous publicity surrounding my condition. A big advertising campaign in all the newspapers alerts people to “Snaporaz’s Last Dream.” That night, all of Italy is glued to the tube.
Gala watches with Maxim, completely unprepared. Finally, during the last commercial break in a game show, my ad begins.
The man descends the cellar stairs.
“Signora Vandemberg!” he shouts.
Neither of them realizes it straightaway. Gala doesn’t react even when she hears her name a second time. She doesn’t stir until the Italian actress does her best to render her incomprehensible Dutch lines.
“That’s you!” says Maxim. “That’s supposed to be you!”
“Jij bent altijd een kleine jongen gebleven,” she says with an outlandish Italian accent.
“My hair!” says Gala. “My walk! Even the leopard-skin bathrobe.”
“That is really too fucking much!” Maxim blurts. “The son of a bitch finally found a part for you, and he didn’t even let you play it!”
“And welcome back to More Is Less,” the presenter coos, “the quiz where contestants …”
Maxim turns off the television, the better to hear his own indignation.
“He used me,” says Gala quietly.
“He used you all right, but without really using you!”
“For the very last footage he ever shot.”
Gala slowly stands and walks to the terrace.
“That doesn’t mean we have to stand for it,” Maxim bellows. “If you want, we can stop them from broadcasting it again. Or at least make them pay for using your name, for violating your …”
He stops in the middle of his tirade. He sees Gala standing there. The church lights are shining through the stained glass, covering her with color. She has clasped her hands before her breast, staring at the stars like Saint Catherine of Genoa after her vision.
“I have to give him his due,” Maxim says darkly when he realizes that he’ll have to surrender his place forever. “He really is the absolute master.”
“His last ideas,” whispers Gala. “He dedicated his last images to me.”
They stand beside each other in silence. On the other side, the theater lights go out.
“I’m going home.”
“Already?” Gala looks at him. “Come on, it’s still early.”
“No,” says Maxim. “I mean I’m really going home.” And after a long silence, he adds, “It’s time.”
Taking film reviewing to the next level, they declare me brain dead the morning after the broadcast. Overnight, two more strokes finished the job.
Gelsomina is very brave. She climbs into bed with me and throws one leg over my body just as she always does. Then, as if she’s fallen asleep, she lies still. The nurses don’t dare disturb her.
The medical director arrives around midday. As discreetly as possible, he mentions that in similar cases people sometimes opt not to prolong the patient’s life artificially. With an exalted expression, as if trying to sell her a Caribbean cruise, he describes the process of natural dehydration. Shocked, Gelsomina summons her confessor, who sets in motion such mighty machinery that the medical director does not again show his face for the remainder of my stay.
Fiamella arrives to see Gelsomina, explaining that the journalists are at the gate and an announcement can no longer be delayed.
“Why?” asks my wife. “He’s my husband.”
“But he’s their Snaporaz.”
She insists on addressing the crowd herself and requests a few minutes to pull herself together. She walks out. She makes a short statement and answers questions from the press. She suddenly stops. She shields her eyes and stares into the crowd as if into the sun. Between the constantly flashing cameras, she has spotted Gala. With a wave of her hand, Gelsomina indicates that she can no longer go on and
turns on her heel.
“How long have you been there?”
“Since nine.”
Gelsomina stares out the window of the visitors’ room.
“Every day,” says Gala. “Since he’s been here. I come around nine o’clock and stay until dark.”
Now the two women look at each other. For a moment, the older woman’s pain makes the younger forget her own. She takes Gelsomina’s hands and presses them to her cheeks. Gelsomina sees her sincerity. Briefly, there is communion. Then the wife extricates herself and turns away.
“There are others,” says Gelsomina. “He always managed to make them believe that they were the only one. We all wanted to believe it! Yet there were always others.”
“Never like you.”
“No.”
“And no matter what you think of me, I never forgot his love for you.”
Gelsomina still has her back turned to Gala.
“Why do you think we always believed him?” Gelsomina asks.
“Because he believed himself. He was completely sincere. Every single time.”
“Yes,” Gelsomina says. “Yes, he was always sincere. Even when he was lying. His imagination was his religion. And if he sincerely believed something, who are we to doubt him?”
“I never did.”
“No,” my wife says, somewhat surprised, “me neither.”
“He just didn’t love real life.”
“He liked to observe it, as long as it didn’t interfere with his imagination. That’s very difficult for those of us who only have a real life.”
Gala moves up beside her and they look out the window together.
Two silhouettes in front of the window.
“Go to him now, if you’d like.”
Inside the frame: the outlines of two cartoon characters—one beginning, one rounding off an oeuvre.
They stare at the commotion in the distant parking lot.
“What do you think,” Gelsomina asks, “are there any others out there?”
“Does it matter?”
Finally, they quickly glance at each other. Then Gala walks to the door.
“‘Everything gets smaller when you share it, except love.’ That’s what he said.”
The old woman against the light.
“Do you understand that? Is our sorrow any less because we both feel it?”
The day before he leaves for Holland, Maxim walks through the city. Everywhere he encounters places where he was happy. He stands pensively before walking slowly on, as if he expects something to call him back, but hope has everywhere become a memory.
That’s how he walks into the Galleria Doria Pamphilj, wanders through the rooms, and slumps down in an alcove opposite the Apelles and Campaspe. Just then, Sangallo enters, shuffling hastily, rushing down the corridors in his inimitable style. Maxim’s spirits revive and he jumps up to greet him, but the viscount brushes past without noticing him. Sangallo touches one of the busts to make sure he has Innocent X before him. Just when Maxim is about to step up to him, a young man appears. He is as tall as Maxim and is wearing the long, shiny leather coat. High cheekbones, long neck, head thrown back with a certain arrogance. The new protégé even wears his hair in the style Maxim had when he arrived in the city. The youth laps up the viscount’s anecdote.
Maxim knows the story.
He is overcome by a deep calm. The coincidence gives him an almost mystical feeling, as if the cycle of passion’s death and revitalization had stopped for the slightest instant and restored everything to its proper balance.
Without announcing his presence, he leaves his old friend behind with his new pupil.
“Found?” echoes through the high-ceilinged room. “In a handbag?”
• • •
“I left Gelsomina and walked down the hall to his room,” Gala relates. “In front of the door, I changed my mind.”
“After going to all that trouble?” Maxim asks incredulously.
“I went to all that trouble to see Snaporaz one more time. I only realized when my fingers were on the doorknob and I was trying to steel my nerves—I realized that whatever I’d find inside wouldn’t be him. He wore a hat because he hoped people would think there was a full head of hair underneath it. That’s not the kind of man who wants you to see him with tubes coming out of his windpipe.”
Maxim leans back. This is their last evening together. They’re eating at an outdoor café on the Campo de’ Fiori. He studies the way she speaks, afflicted yet still calm.
“Everything I need to know about him is in my head. That simple fact struck me as if he himself were grabbing me by the shoulders, mocking me for being too dumb to figure it out sooner: Snaporaz is the last person in the world who would want to be seen as he really is. I pressed my hand against the closed door and then left.”
Before, in her sorrow, she would have shrieked, flown off the handle, drowned her fears, danced herself into a frenzy. In Maxim’s arms.
“Maybe, for once, you could see what he’s brought us to,” he says as coldly as he can. He’s not looking at her, but keeps his eyes pinned on a group of buskers making music in the middle of the square, on the steps at the base of the statue.
“Devo punirmi,” they sing, “devo punirmi, se troppo amai.”
Two clowns illustrate the end of a love affair with the help of an enormous club, a broken violin, and jets of tears that spurt up high into the air.
Maxim blames me most for destroying his own image of Gala.
You don’t have to talk to me about images.
Put an actress in front of a bare wall and with the help of a single light I can transform her from a goddess to a witch. I illuminate her from every side. I toy with the shadows on her throat, beneath her eyebrows, under her nostrils. I arrange her like a shop-window mannequin—however I like. Until I’m satisfied. When I’m done with her, she’s exactly the same, but now she fits into the image I always had of her, even at night, when I summoned her in my dreams.
She is perfect because she looks the way I hoped she would.
That’s it.
If the image doesn’t match the one in your head, you’ve only got yourself to blame.
Gala was my fantasy, but she was the one who was ready to believe in herself. All I did was what I’d done to my city, Rome. I aimed the spotlight. I urged her to stay inside that narrow circle. I set her limits.
That is loving.
That is what makes two people lovers.
Within those narrow confines, I let her sparkle.
The characters in the commedia dell’arte wore no more than a single mask, but they could express everything—sorrow and joy, melancholy, pride, and despondency—with a turn of the head. The masks never changed, only the shadows. The actors spent a lifetime learning the nuances within a single face.
Now, in this light, Gala will discover all her possibilities.
“When I met you,” Maxim continues on the Campo de’ Fiori, still without looking at her, “I could hardly believe that anyone could be that uninhibited. That strong and self-assured.”
“You thought so?”
“Your world was boundless. And you chose me, of all people, to take by the hand, to go off exploring together. Nothing held you back. You weren’t afraid of anything! And you, of all people, made me feel that we were together, that together we’d do battle with the others, all the people I never understood. I just always assumed”—he looks at her—“I always thought that we’d stay on the same side of the camera.”
“It’s easy to be uninhibited when you’re not aware of the danger,” says Gala.
The clowns wrap up their show. One comes to their table to ask for money. In a single gesture, he raises his shoulders, his eyebrows, and the corners of his mouth by way of apology. Instead of tipping his hat, he thanks them by elegantly doffing his red nose.
Maxim and Gala spend the rest of the evening reminiscing. They declare how much they loved each other. They cry and drink and laugh and walk home
the way they used to, arms entangled. In her apartment above the church, they kiss, collapse onto the bed, and tear each other’s clothes off. They make love, no longer as friends, but, for the first time, as a man and a woman.
Maxim leaves at first light, without waking Gala. He has an early flight.
Camera!
My very first view of the world was through a shutter: the impressions were rushed, themselves as short as the exposure time.
In the following years, I was too busy growing up to think about it, but it came back to me when I was about six or seven. I was sitting next to my mother in the Fulgor watching a Buster Keaton short. The entire audience was roaring with laughter.
In the final scene, Keaton returns to his lonely existence on the prairie. He walks down a country road. He disappears in the distance as the eye of the camera closes slowly around him. The diaphragm contracts until everything goes black.
Suddenly I knew! That was exactly how the world appeared to me from the womb, just before I had to enter it. Right before I was born, the vulva opened several times. I clearly remember that round, pulsing frame around the walls of the room, the hands and faces in an uproar, everything drenched in a fierce white light that bounced off the sheets and stung my eyes. The preview was always very brief. The muscles contracted within seconds. Each time, the vagina’s big black eye closed on the life that awaited me, just as, on that country road, the diaphragm closed around Buster Keaton.
THE END.
As soon as the lights flicked on for intermission, I told my mother. She whacked me on the back of the head, calling me a child of the devil who’d made the whole thing up. That taught me that the truth is not better than a lie. I bawled so much that Claretta, who carried her tray of sweets and cigarettes down the aisle during the breaks, slipped me an aniseed ball to shut me up.
From the hospital, I am driven to Cinecittà. The gate is wide open. Instead of the usual two security guards, there’s a whole phalanx, including retirees and men who have the day off. They walk me into Studio 5, as if, after all these years, I couldn’t find it myself. The big hall is empty. They lay me down in the middle and leave me alone, as if I were simply resting between takes.