It wasn’t working.
“Is that a riddle?” Anna asked Anja, who either pretended not to understand the question or was taking her typical eternity to answer it. Anna looked up at the sky in exasperation. To Frank, she said in Italian, “I asked her a simple question, ‘Where did you grow up?’ and she told me: a volcano. What does that mean? Is she playing a trick?”
“She might have said ‘Malmö’?”
“No, not Malmö. My ears work fine. A volcano.”
“It was a metaphor,” said Anja to Frank, when Anna stepped away to link arms with Tenn. “I am sorry, I am not making a good impression on your friend. When I get nervous, I try too hard to be clever. She is very large to talk to. When she was describing one of her films to me—I think it was a film she was talking about, it might have been a story from her childhood?—I was remembering that when I was a young girl, my father gave me a book about volcanoes, a very scientific book with a section of history about Pompeii and Krakatoa. I used to pretend that there was a big volcano buried beneath our town, and that its mouth was directly beneath our house, and that I could control when it would blow up and melt everyone but me and him. It was more of a hope than a fantasy. When my mother or one of my teachers made me angry—usually my mother—I would stand very still and close my eyes and concentrate to try to make it explode. This made them crazy, me so calm with a little smile on my face. I was imagining a big bang was about to come and then they would all fly up into the sky. It was this I was trying to tell Anna to explain what it was like at home for me, but when I get nervous the right words do not come, and she is not a patient person.”
“You don’t seem nervous in the least,” said Frank.
“I’m never nervous with you. With the rest, I am acting.” She said this with that same little smile he recognized from the passport. It now had a faint sadness to it. “You’re not acting, too?”
“No,” said Frank. “I’m happy. This is a beautiful restaurant. My friends are with me. We have a project. Why not be happy?”
He and Tenn were putting too much pressure on her, Frank thought, for no good reason other than their impatience and his own unrelenting, unquenchable boredom. Was he so desperate for a purpose in life that he’d turned himself into Pygmalion, concocted an improbable future for this girl, and then set her on a path that divorced her from her own mother? What did he know, really, of Anja’s true talents and desires, or of Bitte’s character, other than what Anja herself, a child of seventeen, had constructed for him?
That was what he’d gone to her apartment to tell her the morning of their last day in Portofino: that her cynicism, the longer she nurtured it, would only keep her lonely and self-satisfied and small. He’d wanted to hold himself up to her as an example of a life free of the rot of cynicism, to remind her that despite knowing the horrors of war, the shame of sexual difference, the disappointment of failure of all stripes, he still trusted everyone who came along, he still gave over his heart, body and mind to them freely. This may have kept him scattered, or bored, or exposed, but it did not make him bitter. He’d gone to her apartment on the Via del Fondaco to make sure Anja knew he was happy, and that happiness was what he wanted for her, too.
Anna’s ex-lover, Don Umberto, appeared and explained that they had two options for dinner seating at the Fontanone: a long table in the garden, where it was warmer but more fragrant and panoramic, or a round table on the first floor of the sixteenth-century villa, where it was cooler but a bit loud.
“We want both,” Anna told him. “We will have antipasti in the garden—the good stuff, not the cubes of mortadella you chopped up last week—near the fountain where it is cool. Then we will be five people for dinner at nine thirty inside at the back table in the corner, under the round window. I explained this to you yesterday.”
“Certo, Signora,” said Umberto. “I wanted to be absolutely sure.” The tips of his dark curls were matted with sweat at his temples. He put his hand on the small of Anna’s back. “Now let me take you to meet the fish.”
Umberto led them from the courtyard through an archway overflowing with red hibiscus. The garden was a maze of narrow stone paths thick with ferns and cattails and a rainbow of gaudy flowers imported from Africa and the Middle East. Thick slabs of cactus jutted up from beds of small white pebbles, blossoming amid the threats of thorns. Vines hung down from the trees, jungle-like, forming a kind of curtain they had to pull apart to reach the clearing in the center where, between two stout palm trees, stood a raised trough of shaved ice on which dozens of whole fish lay arranged in orderly rows. As they circled the trough, Umberto introduced each fish tenderly, as if they were members of his family. “Here is my beautiful sugarello, you can catch him only in summer; and here is the elegant branzino, he likes lemon and a little fresh rosemary . . .”
By the time they made it all the way around, Frank had grown hungry for each of them. How do you choose, when each has a delicious story and the same set of plaintive, uncomplaining eyes? Finally, to the single turbot, set apart from the others by his circular shape and tan coloring, fat and flat and grumpy, fond of orange and mint, he said, “You, right there, rombo chiodato, you’re my guy,” and Umberto scooped him up and whisked him off to the kitchen. It was not unlike walking through the Villa Borghese, the ragazzi on display on the low stone walls swinging their legs, waiting to be consumed.
The waiters arrived with trays of spritzes and the good antipasti: fried zucchini flowers stuffed with anchovies and ricotta, exotic varieties of mushrooms braised in white wine, calf’s liver and caviar on little toasts. Frank wore a linen suit with a striped bow tie, Tenn an open-collared shirt with a jacket and a silk handkerchief Frank had monogrammed at a shop in the Monti. The garden was filling up with other patrons—not eating quite as well, not as smartly dressed—and, as always, Frank was conscious of their curious, admiring stares, the whispers of delight when they identified Anna or Tenn. Frank might as well enjoy the pleasures of proximity, he thought: the warm flush on his face as the stranger at the next table searched his eyes and cheekbones for recognition, the chance she’d mistake him for someone famous and get a thrill. If Frank could not be the fountain, he could at least feel the spray.
Martin Hovland arrived in short pants and a wrinkled shirt with rolled-up sleeves. He had not dressed to impress Anna Magnani or anyone else at the Fontanone, which of course caused the gawking patrons to turn their curiosity and envy squarely on him, the pale doughy-faced man who strode over to that glamorous quartet and helped himself to their company.
Hovland wasn’t familiar with this restaurant, he explained, by way of apology for his dress, and he’d expected only to have the pleasure of a glass of wine with Signora Magnani before she flew off to her next engagement. He hadn’t expected a dinner party, or the presence of the great Tennessee Williams. Frank liked him immediately, as much for the surprise of his boyish bubbliness as his cherubic features and endearing stutter. He’d expected Hovland to be like Anja: stern and severe and suspicious, but instead he was charmingly deferential, even to Frank, in whom he took what appeared to be a sincere interest. Was he “in the business” as well? Were his family farmers in Sicily, and what did they think of the agrarian reforms proposed by the Italian government? Did he find it sad, as Hovland did, that the medium of film, unlike drama, could not accommodate improvisation or reimagination, that it was always the same film over and over and would never be anything but? His Mirror was not a “work” of art, Hovland said; it had stopped “working” the day it was finished; it was now a corpse.
“The work is the effect it has on the audience,” Frank offered.
“Yes, fine,” said Hovland. “That is what I’m supposed to feel as compensation. As consolation. But I’m not a generous man. I don’t care what the audience feels or doesn’t feel. If their hearts break or if they’re left cold, what difference does it make to me? I care only how my ideas are translated onto
celluloid. I care how they come together, my words and my cameras and my directions to the actors.”
“And if nobody watches your film of ideas?” said Anna, barging into their conversation.
“That would be a happy dream,” said Hovland, matching her Italian. “Releasing the film into the wild, signing the contract with the producer and the theaters, submitting myself to interviews by newspapers and critics and scholars, all of that is a necessary evil so that someone will pay me the money for the next one.” He shook his head. “Mark my words: one day, if I have enough in the bank, I will make films for myself only.”
“Will you be starring in them, too?” Tenn joked. “No actor I’ve ever met would want that job, no matter how much you pay him.”
“Yes, please!” said Anna, also laughing. “Take all my work and put it in the closet!”
Hovland laughed, too. He spoke in that same ebullient tone, without any of Visconti’s rage and pique, as if they were discussing the weather or recipes for cake. “If your work is not your reward,” he said, “your film on a million screens will not satisfy you. It might as well be in that closet, playing on a loop for your dresses and shoes.”
By then it was close to ten, they’d had more spritzes, and Don Umberto had led them inside the villa to the round table by the back window, where Anna directed the proceedings. She put Anja and Frank on either side of Hovland, Tenn directly across, and herself next to Tenn, as far as possible from the Dane, on whom she’d immediately given up. When it came to the matchmaking of actors and directors, it seemed, instinct was paramount.
Though Frank had explained to Hovland that Anja was at the beginning of her education as an actress, and that she had grown up less than fifty miles from Copenhagen in Malmö, and that she had orphaned herself for a career in film or theater, Hovland was so consumed by Anna and the men that he paid Anja only passing attention. Anja, too, was distracted. As Hovland talked—across the table to Anna, loudly, about the richness of the meals in France, where he was forced to spend far too much time in hotels—Anja’s eyes darted back and forth from the kitchen, though she noticeably did not turn her head in that direction.
“What is it?” Frank mouthed.
The color had drained from her face. “Nothing,” she said. She covered her shoulders with her shawl, though it was warmer in the villa, and gave Hovland, who still wasn’t addressing her, a thin, anxious smile.
Frank leaned back to look toward the doorway to the kitchen. Two dark-skinned boys, Southern Italians or Africans, bone thin in their stained white T-shirts and work pants, leaned listlessly against the wall. One carried a broom; the other had a rag draped over his shoulder. After Umberto barked something at them and walked off, the taller one put the broom between his legs and pumped it in his direction. He then absently swept the ceramic tiles while the other ran the rag over the windowpanes in the French doors that separated the kitchen area from the back room. The whole time, they kept craning their necks to watch Anja, their attention solely on her. She adjusted her shawl, brought a glass of wine to her lips, and when she looked away they stuck out their tongues, doglike, panting, at her. It was irrational to think that these were two of the same tribe from Testa del Lupo, hundreds of miles off, but as Frank studied them, and Anja watched him study them, that is who the boys became, for Frank and for Anja, their gaping mouths crowded with white teeth sharp as spears, their birdlike bodies smeared not with fish guts but with mud and sweat and spit.
“It’s all right,” Frank whispered to Anja. His impulse was to reach across and reassure her, but he was trying not to make a scene. “Ignore them. You’re safe here.”
Instead she slid closer to Hovland, away from the direction of the kitchen. Hovland was now shouting over the din to Anna that he’d never film in Copenhagen or Brussels again, that his heart was set on Rome. The part he was writing for his next film required an Italian actress without inhibitions, someone who wasn’t afraid to be loud, to play the wolf.
“Ah, another wolf,” said Anna. “An original concept.”
“They can’t harm you,” Frank said again to Anja, under his breath.
“I’m not scared,” she told him. She had her arms folded petulantly across her chest.
“You know it’s not them, don’t you? It can’t possibly be them.”
“What are you two gossiping about?” Hovland asked, interrupting his own conversation with Anna. “Is our young lady sweet on someone?” He looked over at the boys. The sweeper winked, and then they giggled and he pushed the window washer through the heavy wooden door into the garden. Hovland put his hand on Anja’s shoulder. “You’re too sophisticated for the kitchen help.”
“They’re children!” she said.
“You can’t be much older,” said Hovland.
“I am twenty-two,” she said, straightening in her chair.
Hovland squinted at her, then thought a moment. “Smart girl,” he said, and took a drink. “Your secret is safe with me.”
“I don’t understand,” she said to him.
“Those boys were staring, that’s all,” Frank said. “You can’t blame them.”
“They must have recognized Anna,” said Tenn.
“No,” Anja said, sharply. “It was me who recognized them.”
“Che cosa ha detto?” asked Anna.
“You know those boys?” Hovland asked.
“Yes,” said Anja. “They came here to devour me.” The color returned to her face. “I’ve seen them before. All my life I’ve seen them.” She pulled the shawl tighter, lowering her head.
“What is she talking about?” Hovland asked.
“Should I tell them about it, Frank?” Anja asked.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“It’s not a pretty story,” Tenn said.
“We don’t need more pretty stories,” Hovland said.
“It’s a hideous story,” Anja said. She was shivering now, or at least pretending to. The line between her reality and her act was never clear. It never would be. “No one will believe it, but it is all real. It is the world in which I live.”
“E dai!” said Anna, throwing down her napkin on her plate of half-eaten pasta. “Out with it already! Before the fish comes.”
The boys had been following her from the moment her mother, Maja, brought her to Turkey on holiday, Anja explained. They ran alongside the car that brought them to the hotel. They stood in the doorways with fans and candies. They lurked behind the pine trees at Patara beach, spying on them as they lay innocently on the sand. Briefly—Anja could admit this now—she and her mother enjoyed the boys’ attention. They never expected that the boys would follow them on their hike to the ruins, that they would gather in such large numbers, that there could be so many of those vampires, ten at first, their faces ever-changing, and then more and more appearing, like ravenous birds swooping down from their nests in the pines. Her mother should not have allowed them to stay so late in the day; they should not have fallen in love with the light on the ancient columns, the sound of the sea waves crashing far off but clear as if they were at their feet; they should have noticed they were the only ones left, that the shadows had overtaken the field. They sucked her blood, Anja exclaimed, through terrified tears, and here she paused to linger on Hovland’s startled face. Then, keeping her head still as a statue, she locked eyes with each of them around the table, as if daring them to disbelieve her.
If it were not for the group of Americans who had come upon them—navy men on a weekend furlough, they learned later, at the filthy little hospital in Kaş, but to Anja and her mother they were angels sent by God Himself—Anja would still be there, she said, lying facedown in the dirt, chunks of her flesh bitten off, left for dead, wailing.
“And Maja? Your dear mother?” asked Frank. “What became of her?”
“She is as good as dead,” said Anja, matter-of-factly. “Confi
ned to an asylum outside Zurich.”
“Extraordinary,” said Hovland.
“Yes and no,” said Anja. Her tears had dried, and with her composure came a kind of defiance. Even Anna, who didn’t catch all the words or their meaning, who watched grudgingly, envy and admiration warring within her, could see the effect Anja’s delivery was having on the men, and on Hovland in particular. The fish they’d chosen with such care sat on their plates untouched. “As I said, this is my every day. Until it was no longer a metaphor, I did not realize how I lived as a girl, how all girls live, surrounded by boys so hungry they would eat you alive at their first chance. So I am grateful now to be a woman—are you not grateful, too, Anna?—to be older, to be moving toward invisibility.”
“You are far from invisible,” Hovland said.
“Oh,” said Anja, blushing, as girlish in that moment as Frank had ever seen her. With expert precision, she lifted the delicate translucent spine from the center of her branzino and placed it on the side of her plate. “I have to wait a few years, then.”
It turned out she didn’t need their education at all.
Much later, it was Tenn who called it “the night Anja bloomed,” and that is how they came to refer to it: she gave her first performance onstage at the table under the round window at the Osteria al Fontanone. She’d acted out her own version of the story of the horror at Testa del Lupo as if she’d memorized it in lines of poetry she’d written herself, from the crumbling statues strangled by weeds to the purple darkness falling fast over the cliff to the boys’ sharp hot teeth tearing into her thigh. Was it a surprise that she’d cast herself as the damsel in distress, the strong American navy men as heroes, and her mother as the dog?
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