“So,” he said, “Signor Consistency. You don’t think my script is any good. My film will be a gross failure!”
“I didn’t say that.”
“No. But you think it. Which is worse.”
I stood up to leave the room and made it as far as the doorway from which I could see Mafalda down the corridor in the kitchen, at a great distance from the stove, where she stood stirring a pot with a long-handled wooden spoon, evidently listening. She darted out of sight.
Djanko grabbed my arm, stopping me. “The scene stays in,” he shouted into my ear.
“Fine. I’m going to take a bath.”
“It stays in,” he growled at me.
“Do whatever you want, Djanko. It’s your goddamned movie.”
“Do you know why it stays in? Because it’s beautiful. That’s why.”
“It may be beautiful, but it’s not true. ‘Truth is beauty, beauty truth.’ ” I quoted Keats’ most mooted dictum at him.
“It’s beautiful, therefore it must be true!”
“It’s untrue and therefore it cannot be beautiful,” I said, in small, flat, hard little words.
The color rose up his neck, chin, face rapidly. He let go of my arm and hauled off and slapped me so hard I fell against the bookcase with the impact. Stunned, I crumpled to my knees.
Valentina and the Pig leapt up from their chairs and grabbed Djanko before he could strike me again. Jiri remained ice quiet in his chair, whimpering just a little. Mafalda rushed into the room, took one look at me, helped me up, muttering “Barbara! Barbaro Slavo! at Djanko and half carried me out of the room with amazing strength and dexterity into her bedroom where she found rosewater to mist on my face and spirits of ammonia for my nose.
Two minutes later, I stalked out of the Hassler suite. The others were in the library loudly arguing.
I didn’t get back until almost a day later, but I doubt if a lover has ever had a better excuse for the old question “Where were you?”
Angry then sad, after I’d left the hotel I wandered around the city until I found myself in a piazza that I seemed to recognize—no wonder, the Stollywood Harlots lived nearby. It had been a few weeks since I’d seen them, and while Cicely was away in London, Tina and Donna were home and more than willing to commiserate with me about “those rotten European men” and to offer advice and cheering up. It was early evening when—following cocktails—we went off arm in arm to Ruggiero’s, our favorite haunt on the Via Veneto, for dinner. Within an hour of being in their company I’d almost forgotten about Djanko and our problems.
Kit dropped by and said he knew of a party outside of Rome and we all hopped into his convertible to get there. By now I’d been to a score or more of these international jet-set shindigs and knew the people and the scenes. I was far more comfortable than I’d been wandering around Ulrica’s villa. This party proved to be more boring than usual, but getting back home was a true adventure.
I left the party with Tina and Donna in the fire-engine red Triumph TR-3 Contino Eddie (in “Alex” for the weekend) had given Tina. We were all stuffed into the small front seat of the sportscar, all astonishingly high on vodka and hashish, which had been available in huge quantities during the party.
Tina drove wildly and badly. The Autostrada sobered her up a bit and she began an animated conversation about their roles in Djanko’s film, detailing how Djanko and I would make up later on. “No nookie,” Donna declared, “until he apologizes publicly. In fact, I think we should all go on a nookie strike!” which somehow was hilarious beyond recounting and caused the Triumph to slither across two lanes at a time.
A minute later we were driving off the ramp, but it was a ramp for cars coming up. We just missed a car coming at us— horn blaring indignantly, the driver purple-faced with ire—and Tina shouted, “I’ve got to turn around or we’ll be killed.”
Going fifty miles an hour downhill on a curved ramp, Tina executed a U-turn. She’d raved about the Triumph’s handling before and I guess she actually expected the car to succeed in this farfetched maneuver. In fact, we spun around neatly, then promptly stalled. Just in time for another car coming at us—and now behind us—to screech out of control to a stop, tapping our left rear bumper, and adding precisely enough thrust to propel the Triumph into and through the meshwork guardrail.
All three of us screamed going into the air and then screamed again as with a rude swoosh of branches we tore through the forest of trees on the side of the Autostrada. Lucky for us the Triumph had stalled or I don’t know where we would have ended up. After some fifty yards or so we slammed neatly between the trunks of two stout trees which reverberated like elastic bands with an accompanying rustle of leaves and branches— one of which ripped off the TR-3’s back plastic window.
We’d braced ourselves for the thump of stopping and so none of us were hurt when we did stop. We were wasted perhaps, shocked out of our highs unquestionably, but unhurt. We were also fifty feet up, the TR-3’s front fenders stuck between two chestnut trees.
It took hours, several local farmers with ropes, much persuasion of Tina who was afraid of heights, melodramatic, tearful good-byes between the girls (in case one of them didn’t make it), and a great deal of swearing and screaming whenever the car shifted under us, to get safely down. When all three of us were safe, the car slid almost vertically, cracking branches beneath its ton-and-a-half weight, until it stopped, its headlights still burning but pointing now at the sky through what was left of the tattered tree cover just as the police pulled up, whistling sirens and blue roof lights aglitter.
Ten minutes later, the reporters and paparazzi appeared and bribed the police to allow them to photograph Contino Eddie’s sportscar wedged upright between two trees, its gleaming fenders illuminated by arclights.
Feted by the farmer family, snapped by the paparazzi, questioned by the reporters, written up in all the morning papers (and later in a weekly magazine), questioned more officially, if with ultra courtesy by the local police—after all we were miracles to be alive and Italians have a true respect for the Hand of Destiny—I arrived back at the Hassler at almost eleven in the morning, newspapers in hand to provide me with alibis.
Mafalda seemed to be out, probably at the Friday morning fish market, and at first I didn’t see Djanko. I made myself a cup of coffee and walked through the suite, finally deciding that he’d gone to the studio. Only when I sat down to look at the photos of me and the girls and the TR-3 did I notice him.
Djanko was sitting on the little balcony off the living room, wearing a jacket against the still cool morning air, his head in his hands. I’d never seen a more forlorn human being.
He greeted me as though I were a ghost: utter disbelief, then with wan smiles, and finally a big hug and mumbling into my shoulder. I dragged him inside and tried to show him the newspapers. They didn’t seem to register upon him, and I realized that he’d reverted to Croatian in his speech and so probably made little sense of the Italian printed words.
“Don’t you even want to know where I’ve been?”
“When you walked out,” he finally managed to say in English,” Bruno said to me, ‘Idiot! Italians you slap, they swear a vendetta. Slavs you slap, they start a revolution. Americans you slap, either they kill you on the spot or they go away forever. It’s a big country, America. Every day the newspapers there tell about men who wake up one morning and instead of going to work, they go away forever. They go west, all of them, to Wyoming, to Nevada and are never heard from again.’ I thought that you’d gone away to Nevada forever,” Djanko added, making the name sound as exotic as Katmandu.
“Without my passport? My visa?”
“You could always get new ones.”
“It almost seems like you wanted me to leave.”
“No, no, never.” He placed his head under my hand, as if I were to give him benediction, and while there he mumblingly promised never to strike me again.
I extracted a few other promises from him—among th
em a trip to the Dalmation coast of Yugoslavia he’d always talked about once the new film was in the can. So we made up, and despite Mafalda’s scandalization, we went to bed for the next three hours, letting her answer the phone and listen at the door. Where the Pig or Jiri or La Bernakovka had disappeared to I never discovered, though they returned after the weekend in full force. When Djanko and I finally did decide to get up that Friday afternoon, I turned from pulling up my trousers to see him still on the bed looking at me not as a fond lover three feet away but as though I’d just returned from a lengthy vista of plains and Rockies.
When he read the papers, Djanko was angry and thrilled and fearful, all too late for my safety. “How close it came to being true,” he mused.
Naturally he promised to take the disputed scene out of the script. I tried to get him to agree to write a new scene in place of the one cribbed from Vergil which would contain more lines for the girls, but he shushed me: the radio was on, playing a tenor aria of great mellifluousness and poignancy. We listened to it rapt, almost afraid to release our breath until it was over. The announcer identified the singer as Fritz Wunderlich whom I’d never heard of. The aria was from Ambroise Thomas’ Mignon, and was titled simply “Adieu Mignon” (or in his German rendition, “Leb Wohl Mignon”).
“I wish he’d play it again,” I said. And as though he’d heard me, the announcer did: Djanko and I moved into a silent, immobile embrace to listen.
Later on, I joked about the incident, saying, “I’ve never even been to Ne-va-da.”
OUR ARGUMENT NEVER CAME UP among the others. But on Monday morning, when we were all gathered for lunch at the studio, Djanko pointed to my watch. “Look Jiri, Valentina, Bruno, all. Lovely, no?”
The day after my return, Djanko had insisted upon buying me the ridiculously expensive gold watch. The clerk at Bulgari had opened up the back to show us how every gear and cog and wheel inside was either a gold alloy or pure gold.
I’ve mentioned before how much gold Djanko had already foisted on me. My keys to our suite at the Hassler Hotel had been put on a golden keyring; he had Ginori take all the brass fittings off the forest-green Gladstone weekender I’d picked out and had them replaced with gold. I had to have one gold ring, he insisted (I didn’t even wear a school ring), and he found a slender ancient white-gold one I couldn’t be too offended by. What, I owned no watch? I’d never be on time: I must have a watch. Soon watches in all sizes and shapes—from vest pocket pointers to standard wristwear—had filled my little leather visa kit. My cigarettes were always getting broken, so I had to have a metal cigarette case—gold again. I was always losing my Zippo lighters, always asking for a match, so naturally I had to have one, then two, then six, gold lighters. And a gold-plated fountain pen, of course. Once he’d broken down my resistance, I was inundated in the stuff: I hadn’t known how heavy, clanking, clunky and awkward all that gold could be. Finally, I put my foot down: I had nowhere to put it all, it was ruining my leather kit. Naturally Djanko had a solution to that too: He bought me a silver and gold jewelry case. The Stollywood Harlots had taken to calling me “Our own little Danae” every time they saw me with some new bauble, a not so subtle reference to the imprisoned mortal woman in Greek mythology wooed by Zeus who slipped into her bedroom window as a shower of gold.
With the Bulgari upon my wrist being admired by all, I began to realize that what I’d taken merely for a reconciliation gift was far more than that. Djanko bought me gold because the Pig bought Valentina gold and that was how one treated courtesans, no matter their gender or upbringing. The watch and all the other gifts he’d given me were still fetters attaching me to Djanko so I would not dare go off to Nevada. I also realized that the jewelry amounted to the same thing as Jiri sniffing my underwear—for what? the Elixir of Youth? the Holy Grail? some uniquely American alchemical secret? The Bulgari was supposed to be compensation, but could I ever be compensated for Djanko introducing me to strangers as his fidanzato (fiancé) Americano, and answering me in sweet desperation, “But Carissimo …” as though every statement was grounds for dispute. “Let him wait,” he’d once told an assistant director when I’d appeared on time at the studio to drag him off to a business dinner he’d wanted to—said he had to—attend.
But although all these little betrayals and Djanko’s need to chain me to him, to cover me in gold until I was too weighed down to breathe, could be kissed away temporarily, my principles were another matter.
It would take months for the poison of the Bulgari to fully seep into my system, months while Jason went before the cameras and occupied all of Djanko’s time. If the script writing had gone easily enough, except for that one hitch, the shooting seemed to take forever. The two stars—an established Italian leading man for Jason and an up-and-coming starlet as Medea— turned out to have an almost chemical dislike of each other and held up production while their arguments were settled. In addition, the Jason became intensely jealous of Angel, who, as Hercules, earned applause on the set and whom everyone was sure would emerge from the film as a new Lex Barker. Once they’d filmed all they could in the studio, they went on location and everything went wrong. Storms at sea held up shooting. Locations selected for crucial outdoor scenes proved completely unsuitable and had to be altered. There were mishaps and labor strikes. Djanko was gone days, then weeks at a time. When he returned he went into the editing room and remained there, fighting with the editor and the Pig over every scene. He had La Bernakovka call to tell me not to hold dinner for him, then not to wait up for him at all. He would arrive home long after I’d gone to sleep, and would be vague, annoyed and anxious during breakfast—most of which he spent reading the film trade dailies or yelling into the telephone.
One day, La Bernakovka told me that although she hadn’t yet seen it, nearly full edited rushes of Argonautica—as the film was now being called—were being shown to distributors, publicity and advertising people connected with the studio. I thought it would be a good idea if I went to a viewing where Djanko wouldn’t be present, so that night I could tell him that I’d seen the film and encourage him to persist in his vision.
The film was good: grand and wild. Angel was a god as Hercules—his blond crew cut grown out, the tips of his hair, mustache, and beard frosted bronze like a living helmet. The Italian Jason wasn’t half bad. All the Argonauts were scrumptious, especially the two Greek twins who played Castor and Pollux. Medea was a bit too Martha Graham for my taste, but Tina and Donna were fine in their small parts, and Cicely was magnificent, beautiful as the goddess Aphrodite.
Indeed, I got a chance to see more of Aphrodite than I’d expected: I saw her in the scene where Aphrodite turned into a whirlwind and drowned the Argo’s helmsman. Djanko’s one concession had been to change the doomed steersman’s name from the Vergilian Turnus to the more Hesiodic Actaeon.
I remember sitting in the deep velvet upholstered chair of the studio screening room, watching the scene stolen from The Aeneid and thinking how curious it was that it no longer seemed as inappropriate as I’d been certain it would.
It wasn’t until I was driving back to the Hassler that I realized that the screening manager had called the film we were viewing “as close to complete as we’ll get short of the premiere.” Djanko had never for a second dreamed of taking the scene out of the film, despite our argument, despite his fears that I would run away, despite our reconciliation, despite his promise.
I was shaking so badly, I had to pull the car into a sidestreet; and finally get out, walk around. I even stopped at a cafe to have a cup of espresso to calm down.
A week later I left Djanko and Rome. I’ve never been back.
The afternoon I unpacked my bags in my West Village apartment, I discovered the gold Bulgari watch folded inside my navy turtleneck sweater.
For three or four days I thought of wrapping up the watch and mailing it back to Djanko in Rome. Then I thought of all those jewelry boxes probably still sitting atop the dresser in the Hassler suite and of the u
nintentional slap he’d get receiving the watch. So I put it away, behind socks and underwear, with my passport and birth certificate and college diploma where I’d never see it. Without a qualm, I’d already sold the single gold cigarette lighter and case—the only other of Djanko’s golden gifts I’d kept. But with the Bulgari’s reappearance I was in a quandary; although I was desperate for cash and knew it would pay expenses long enough for me to complete the first novel I’d begun to write, I was sure that selling the watch would also be a symbolic act, finally cutting all ties with Djanko. Did I really want that?
I was wrong. Even now, having written about him, hoping I’d exorcised him, I still see Djanko Travernicke on a set, hunched down in his director’s chair barely containing his fury and frustration as something impossibly wrong occurs; still see a pencil tapping his teeth at our script sessions, listening impatiently just before he bursts out “No. No. No!”; still see his golden shock of hair reflecting like an ancient Athenian’s plumed helmet in the illumination of some luxurious Via del Corso shop and his sea-green eyes light up as a salesman places upon my neck or wrist or finger something expensive and glittering and gold.
BACKWARDS
Richard Hall
THE BEGINNINGS ARE ALWAYS THE HARDEST. Learning how to walk when your legs are weak, how to run when your breath comes short, how to go to the bathroom without soiling your clothes. Of course, there are people here at the Happy Village to help you. I don’t always remember their names, so I make up my own. The Purple Blimp, who wheezes when she pushes my wheelchair up the ramp. The Angel, a young man who gives me my bath every morning and whose cheeks are as firm and round as nectarines. The Illustrated Man, whose tattoos change color according to the time of day. Mighty Mouse. The Piston.
Of course, the boredom is the worst part. Nothing happens. Sometimes I wheel myself out to the veranda to watch the sailboats on the Bay. I try to imagine what it might be like to sit in the scuppers, one hand on the tiller, the canvas beating overhead, the gulls crying. Yes, what will it be like when I’m younger—forty, thirty, twenty? It will be a world of excitement I can hardly imagine now.
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