The Italian Lover

by Robert Hellenga

  It was Miranda’s turn to make a lemon face. “There’s a big cunnilingus scene with Zanni in the movie. I can’t imagine how Michael’s going to film it. I’m supposed to hold a piece of chocolate between my teeth and Zanni sticks his head under the covers and, you know, till I come, and then I bite down on the chocolate.”

  “Good Lord. Tell them you won’t do it.”

  “It’s in my contract.”

  “In your contract?”

  “All this stuff. How much breast. Nipple. Pubic hair. One cheek, two. How much of your crack. Everything. They can’t show everything because they’ll lose their R rating, but they shoot everything, and then they cut and paste—jump cuts, head-and-shoulders, close-ups, soft focus.”

  “Just one of those things you have to accept because it can’t be changed?”

  Miranda nodded.

  “The old serenity prayer,” Margot said. “They’ve got it in Italian too. But cunnilingus isn’t in the book anyway. Where did that come from?”

  “Yes, it is. You wrote about it. Don’t you remember? You called it an unexpected gift. You said it reverberated like the throat-singing those Tibetan monks do.”

  Margot laughed. “I’d forgotten about that.” She was flattered by Miranda’s attention—the kind of crush a young girl might have on an older married woman. And she was happy to give advice, but in doing so she surprised herself. Why was she so cautious, so eager to warn Miranda?

  “If you’re going to fall in love,” Margot said, “wouldn’t it be better to do it wholeheartedly, not holding anything back, instead of trying to accumulate a checklist of interesting and exciting experiences?”

  “What about you and Sandro?” Miranda asked.

  “That was different.”

  “What about your mother and Bruno Bruni?”

  “That was different too.”

  “Well, this will be different too.” Miranda laughed.

  “I suppose it’s always different,” Margot said.

  Galileo Codex 72 was on the director’s desk at the Biblioteca Nazionale. The codex contained, among other things, about two hundred loose sheets with Galileo’s manuscript notes on his discoveries in mechanics, notes that would shed light on the shift from Aristotelian to classical physics. Normally, independent conservators like Margot had to bid on jobs sight unseen—here are ten books, here’s what needs to be done, submit your bid—but the Galileo codex was something special, and there was grant money available from American institutions, the Smithsonian and the National Science Foundation. Margot and the director and Miranda, who’d stayed with Margot instead of going to the Bargello, were looking at the manuscript, which was full of diagrams and freehand drawings. “It’s like the physics book I had at Smith,” Miranda said.

  It was hard to concentrate with the director and Miranda looking over her shoulder, but Margot was excited and enjoyed showing off her knowledge as she examined the codex. “You can see the traces of a previous conservator,” she said. “Probably someone in the eighteenth century. Look at these tears that have been mended and these holes and losses that have been filled using too much adhesive on paper that was already too thick. All these unsympathetic mends will have to be removed using controlled applications of distilled water.” She pointed out several “unsympathetic” mends in the first gathering. “It looks like a kid did it,” she said, running her finger over one of the mends. “It’s not impossible,” she went on. “This might have been a child’s job in an eighteenth-century binding shop.”

  The director, a handsome man in his fifties, took Miranda out for a coffee while Margot prepared her condition assessment— identifying the format, materials, and construction of the codex; determining the extent of physical damage and deterioration; examining the structural components; deciding on treatment options. When they came back, she thought five minutes had passed, but it had been over two hours.

  In the evening they went to the Bebop Club. Woody played a set with Marisa Lodovici and her band and then persuaded Miranda to get up on the small stage and sing the chorus of “Sweet Home, Chicago” with him, and then a couple of old hymns—“Amazing Grace” and “Nearer My God to Thee.”

  The next night, Tuesday night, Miranda wanted to watch a movie.

  “All the English-language films are dubbed into Italian,” Margot said. “No subtitles.”

  But Miranda wanted to watch L’avventura. She knew it so well she wouldn’t need subtitles, she said.

  Woody laughed.

  “What’s so funny?”

  “Antonioennui.”

  “That’s not funny,” Miranda said. “But seriously, I didn’t like it either, the first time I saw it. You’ve really got to see it over and over again.”

  “Why would you want to? It’s torture. Nothing happens.”

  “You think nothing’s going on, but it’s all so subtle.”

  “We weren’t even sure they were sleeping together!” Woody said.

  “Who?”

  “Sandro and Claudia.”

  Miranda laughed. “What did you think they were doing?”

  “Well, in the hotel . . . She won’t make love. I thought he was chasing her . . . You know . . . the hunt.”

  “You’re thinking of the scene where Claudia says she feels guilty,” Miranda said. “That’s earlier. She still has some principles, some real feelings. The whole film is a critique of eros in art.”

  “The best scene is where she makes faces in the mirror. Everyone’s done that. But it’s still torture.”

  “You need to see it again.”

  “Torture.”

  “Antonioni’s a genius . . . You probably grew up on American films, like I did. You’ve got to realize that Antonioni was breaking new ground. It’s not entertainment. He invented a new language for film: tone, mood, light and shade, composition. It’s an exhausting film. So much is going on. No one understood it when it was first screened at Cannes, and two years later Sight and Sound called it the second-best film of all time after Citizen Kane. It was one of Susan Sontag’s favorite films. She called it the equivalent of the new novel.”

  “The characters don’t have any lives,” Woody said. “They don’t have jobs.”

  “That’s the point. They reach out to each other, but all they find is boredom, emptiness.”

  “That’s the fallacy of imitative form. Maybe life is boring, but art shouldn’t be. Jane Austen’s Miss Bates bores the people in the novel, but she doesn’t bore the reader.”

  Margot intervened at this point. She couldn’t help herself. She wanted to clear something up.

  “Miranda, is this what your life is like right now? Is this the way you see the world? I’m astonished. I’m really astonished. Look at you. You’re going to be the female lead in a feature film, you’re going to star with Giovanni Cipriani, and all you see is boredom and emptiness? Is that the way you feel here, with Woody and me? When you said you thought I could set you on the right track, I was flattered, but I didn’t take it seriously. But now I think I can help you out.” She laughed. “L’avventura my foot. Miranda, your life is full of love and excitement—this is your great adventure. Don’t miss out on it. Forget L’avventura; let’s watch Zanni in The Dogcatcher, L’accalappiacani. Zanni’s like Charlie Chaplin. You don’t have to know a word of Italian, you’ll see. Woody, you make the popcorn. Miranda and I will go and rent the film.”

  What Miranda wanted to do the next day was hang out in Margot’s studio, a long, L-shaped work space with four benches perpendicular to the windows (so that everyone got a view of the Arno). The large equipment was spread out along the back wall, where a special rack built over the back counter held the long-handled rolls and hand tools used for tooling leather. There was a small staff kitchen at the base of the L.

  Margot didn’t blame Miranda. She couldn’t divide her own life from this space. Her craft was not separate from her life; it was an intensification of her life. That’s what she’d learned from Signor Cecchi, the conserva
tor in Prato who’d helped her restore Aretino’s I modi.

  Miranda wanted to do the restoration scenes in the movie herself and had persuaded Margot to help her. Instead of doing her own work, Margot walked Miranda through the whole process. They opened up one of the last of Rabbi Kors’s books, a children’s book, with a lifting knife and put it in a nipping press and spread paste made of wheat starch and thinned out with deionized water over the spine to soften the lining.

  While they waited for the paste to soak in, Miranda explained creative visualization. “First you have to know what you really want,” Miranda said, “and you have to be specific; you have to visualize something specific.”

  “You mean Zanni?”

  “Exactly. Now you have to remember that you can’t control the actions of another person. All you can control are your own attitudes and actions.”

  “If you can’t control Zanni, how are you going to get him to do what you want?”

  “That’s the beauty of it. You don’t need to control anything. You let it happen. You train your mind to visualize whatever it is you want, and when your mind wanders, you call it back, like calling a dog. You let it happen by itself.”

  “All I can say is that it’s a good thing that most people’s fantasies don’t come true. Can you imagine —”

  “Fantasies are important. They show us what we really want. They give us hope. They help us initiate positive life changes. Fantasizing about a goal is the first step toward making it come true.”

  “Do you know what I’m fantasizing about right now?”

  “You’re fantasizing about the Galileo book.”

  “Codex.” Miranda was right, but Margot didn’t want to admit it. “I’m fantasizing about an espresso,” she said. “I’ll make a pot right now. Just a small one. Let’s go in the kitchen.”

  As they were waiting for the water to boil in the little Alessi caffettiera, Miranda suggested that Margot try some creative visualization. “You should fantasize about the Galileo. Send good intentions about it out into the universe and it will come to you.”

  “I’ve submitted a bid to do the restoration work, along with half a dozen other conservators.”

  Miranda reached across the small table in the little staff kitchen and touched Margot’s hand. “I know I’m not as wise as you,” she said, “but I do know some things. You mustn’t let any negativity into your thoughts. I want you to form a picture in your mind of the manuscript or codex, or whatever it is, right here on your own workbench, waiting for you to start working on it. Will you promise to do that?”

  Margot laughed. “I can’t stop picturing it there,” she said. “But we’ll see.” The caffettiera began to sputter. Margot turned off the gas. “The coffee’s ready.”

  After they’d drunk their coffee, Margot showed Miranda how to scrape off the paste with her bone folder and peel back the starched spine lining from the sections. “Be careful not to scrape away any of the paper,” she said. “Now you’ve got to pull the text before the sections dry out.” Margot opened the text block at the center of the first section, lifted up the threads with a pair of hemostats, and clipped them with scissors. She closed the section and pulled it away from the text block. “If you did this dry,” she said, “you’d tear off the backs of the sections. You think you can do it?”

  Miranda nodded.

  Margot watched while Miranda pulled the next section.

  “That will keep you busy for a while. If it sets too dry, you’ll have to apply more paste.”

  After the flood, after being dumped by her Italian lover, after the sale of the Aretino at Sotheby’s, Margot had worked at the Certosa Monastery for two years, overseeing a triage operation that had rescued thousands of valuable books from the city’s library and abandoned thousands of others that were beyond repair. After that she’d apprenticed herself to Signor Cecchi in Prato, even though she’d already worked for several years with Paul Banks at the Newberry Library in Chicago and was an experienced conservator. For three years she took the train to Prato every day, five days a week, never quite realizing that Signor Cecchi was famous throughout Europe for his conservation skills and for his own one-of-a-kind leather bindings. When Signor Cecchi died, his wife gave his hand tools to Margot, and the abbess at the convent arranged to buy the large equipment: the large board shears and the guillotine for cutting paper and boards; the big standing presses and the finishing presses and the job backers. And Margot had set up a studio in the convent itself where she supervised the work on the books in the convent library. When the convent was closed after the death of the abbess, Francesca Postiglione—her ex-lover’s wife—had helped her move her studio to a palazzo on Lungarno Guicciardini.

  Margot had always tried to emulate Signor Cecchi in everything, tried to convey the same deep love of his work to the nuns who had worked for her in the convent, and then, later, to the young people, mostly young women who’d begun to enter the profession since the flood, whom she took on as apprentices. And this is what she tried to convey to Miranda as they washed the pages of the rabbi’s book in deionized water that Margot warmed up on the stove in the little kitchen. The deionized water would remove the soluble acids in the paper. She expected Miranda to become impatient with the repetitive task of laying out the open quartos on sheets of wet-strength paper, placing them in the deionized water in the photographic trays, changing the water at half-hour intervals. But in fact it was Margot herself who soon became antsy. “‘It takes too long to wait,’” she said. “That’s what Woody’s daughter used to say.”

  “Cookie? The one who was killed?”

  Margot nodded.

  At the end of the day they prepared a buffer—carbon dioxide that had been bubbled through a large glass container of magnesium carbonate powder and mixed with deionized water—to neutralize any remaining acids, and placed the quartos on drying racks to air-dry. Margot slapped her hands back and forth to indicate that they’d done a good day’s work. It was after seven o’clock.

  On the way home they looked in the lighted shop windows on the Lungarno. Leather goods, stationery, haute couture, beautiful mosaic tables that cost thousands of dollars. Above them they could see the lights of Piazzale Michelangelo. In Piazza Santa Croce they could see the lights in Margot’s apartment, and when Margot opened the big door to the palazzo, they could smell the garlic. Woody was making tomato sauce for pizza. The smell of garlic filled the hallway, as if Woody were some meridionale, a southerner.

  “Italian pizza’s good,” Margot said to Miranda as they took off their coats in the front hall, “but not as good as Woody’s.”

  There was a chunk of parmigiano reggiano on a cutting board on the kitchen table, and a bowl of fruit next to an open bottle of Chianti and three glasses. Margot thought it looked like a still life by Chardin, one of those paintings that make you see the beauty in the everyday things all around you.

  Woody was pitting olives. “So how’s Anna Karenina coming?”

  “I really love it,” Miranda said. “I just got to the scene where Levin and Oblonsky have dinner together in the restaurant, and the waiter keeps translating everything Oblonsky says into French. Oblonsky worries about the menu and then changes his plans when he learns of a fresh shipment of some kind of oysters. Levin’s not interested in the food.”

  “From Ostend,” Woody said. “The oysters. I love that passage.” He was spreading tomato sauce over the pizza dough in three small pans. “I admire Levin,” he said, “but I’m afraid I’m more like Oblonsky. What shall we eat? What shall we drink? That sort of thing.”

  “Oh no,” Miranda said, “I don’t think so. I think you’re more like Levin.”

  Margot could see that Woody was pleased to be compared to Levin, but not when Miranda added, “No sense of humor.”

  “What are you talking about?” Woody said. “I’ve got a highly developed sense of humor.”

  “Tell us a joke then, something funnier than Antonioennui.”

  “I can�
��t ever remember jokes. I’ve heard a million jokes, but I can’t remember them.”

  “You must remember one. If you’ve got a sense of humor.”

  “That’s enough, Miranda.”

  “But Levin’s so sweet,” Miranda said. “He can’t imagine fooling around with a woman. He can’t even understand what Oblonsky’s talking about.”

  Woody was filleting large anchovies that had been preserved in salt.

  Margot said, “I can’t imagine either one of them making pizza, can you?”

  And Miranda said, “No.”

  In the morning the bells from Santa Croce summoned the faithful to Mass. Margot could see a few old women entering the church. Miranda announced her intention of going to Mass.

  “But you said you’re not Catholic,” Margot protested.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Miranda said. “Why don’t we all go.” And for some strange reason they did. Miranda received Communion, though Margot tried to stop her. Margot and Woody sat in the back by the empty Dante tomb.

  Then they ate lunch at the Osteria de’ Pazzi on Via Verde.

  “I remembered a joke,” Woody said.

  “Let’s hear it,” Miranda said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You have to tell us, now that you mentioned it.”

  “It’s from when I was in junior high. It’s the first dirty joke I ever heard.”

  They waited.

  “This city slicker,” Woody said, “moved out to the country and wanted to start a farm, so he went up to a farmer and said, ‘I want to buy a rooster,’ and the farmer said, ‘We don’t call ’em roosters; we call ’em cocks.’ The city slicker says, ‘Okay, then, and I want to buy a chicken.’ The farmer says, ‘We don’t call ’em chickens; we call ’em pullets.’ The city slicker says, ‘Okay, and I want to buy a donkey.’ ‘We don’t call ’em donkeys,’ the farmer says, ‘we call ’em asses.’ So the city slicker pays for the animals, and he’s walking back down the road, and a woman’s coming toward him, and all of a sudden the donkey runs away. ‘Excuse me, ma’am,’ the city slicker says to the woman. ‘Would you hold my cock and pullet while I run after my ass.’”