The Italian Lover

by Robert Hellenga

  “Later, he follows her to a restaurant and sits down at her table and renews his offer. She gets up and runs out of the restaurant.”

  The coffee arrived at Plot Point One. Trays with little cups of espresso, each cup expertly covered by a napkin. Packets of sugar. The PAs served the coffee.

  “In the convent Margot discovers a book of Renaissance erotic drawings, pornography. Sixteen different sexual positions. This is the plot point that hooks us into Act Two.

  “Act Two,” Michael went on. “The abbess takes Margot under her wing and asks her to sell the book on behalf of the convent. This is the through-story that shapes the confrontation. The bishop wants the book, and Margot needs help. She turns to the man who has been pursuing her: Sandro. Sandro is middle-aged, a widower, an art restorer. The book has been damaged by the water from the drainage pipe. Margot restores it in Sandro’s apartment; they look at the pictures together; he undresses her in front of a cheval glass; they go to bed. She’s too uptight to respond, so Sandro finds a piece of chocolate in a dresser drawer. He unwraps it and tells Margot to hold it between her teeth but not to bite down. He performs cunnilingus till she orgasms and bites down on the chocolate.

  “In the subplot Sandro offers to save the fresco in the convent.”

  Miranda interrupted again: “Has this fresco been damaged by water from the drainpipe?”

  “No,” Michael said. “It just needs to be restored. Okay?” He waited. He knew that Miranda didn’t like the screenplay, but there was nothing he could do about it. There was nothing she could do about it either.

  “Sandro restores the fresco in the convent,” he went on, “and then helps Margot trick the bishop, who wants to get his hands on the book. But then Sandro steals the book himself, because he needs some money if he’s going to marry Margot. When Margot figures out what’s happened, she demands the book back and then dumps Sandro.

  “All Margot has to do now is sell the book at Sotheby’s to save the convent, but the bishop figures out that he’s been tricked and calls in the Vatican Police, who try to get the book away from Margot. Technically the book belongs to the church, not the convent. This is the plot point that hooks us into Act Three.

  “Act Three. Margot takes the book to Sotheby’s to auction it off. The Vatican Police are waiting for her, but Sandro shows up just in time to rescue her. At the auction he bids on the book himself, even though he doesn’t have any money. He risks everything for Margot. Margot forgives him. He proposes. She says yes. He stops bidding just in time. Margot will get the money for the convent, and Sandro will show her how to live.

  Miranda again: “Michael, why does Sandro bid on the Aretino in the first place? If he wins the bidding and can’t pay, then he’s in big trouble and nobody gets any money. It doesn’t make sense. They’d have to have another auction. In the book . . .”

  “I’m reading the script,” Michael said, “not the book.” He looked around. “At the end,” he said, “they get married in the Palazzo Vecchio. Margot’s father comes to the wedding and plays his guitar. It’s very life affirming.”

  Michael thought that the first read-through, although not inspired, went smoothly enough. Some of the love scenes—especially the cunnilingus scene—were a little hard to negotiate, but that was always the case with love scenes, and he expected that Zanni would soon seduce Miranda and then they could work things out between them. He could see that she was a little afraid of him, but that was okay. She’d need to use her fear, hang onto it. It would give her an edge. He still hadn’t figured out how to frame the cunnilingus scene. It would be easier to listen to Miranda’s objections and make it a regular love scene, but he didn’t want to take the easy way out. Besides, how many great cunnilingus scenes are there in movies? Not many. He wanted to give audiences something to remember.

  The lunch that Piccolo Mondo delivered to the convent was unacceptable to the Italians, who’d never seen sandwiches wrapped in plastic before. Esther was upset and sent the sandwiches and the Piccolo Mondo truck away.

  Zanni offered to make polenta while Esther left to order a meal at one of the restaurants in the piazza. The Italian department heads and crew recognized a cue and started clapping as Zanni pantomimed a starving man, rubbing his stomach and opening his mouth wide to mimic hunger pangs. Suddenly at his feet an enormous pot appeared, which he filled with cornmeal and water and then began to stir with a large wooden paddle. He was getting hungrier and hungrier, rolling his eyes, inhaling the smell of the polenta, brushing off a fly that buzzed round his head. He continued to do battle with the fly and to stir the polenta. In the end the polenta turned out to be nothing more than a starving man’s fantasy. Only the fly was real. Zanni’s hand shot out; he caught the fly and ate it.

  By the time he had eaten the fly, Esther had returned with several bottles of wine and the promise of pizza from Maistro Ciliego, just around the corner. What had struck Michael the most, he realized as Esther was opening the wine, was Zanni’s delight in himself, his pleasure in being Zanni. Michael had seen this in actors before—in Jack Nicholson in Five Easy Pieces and in Toshiro Mifune in Seven Samurai. But not like this. And he knew what he had to do—not when the film opened, not when the final cut had been printed, not when they wrapped, not when principal photography had begun, not tomorrow, not after the second read-through, but now, this very moment. He had to take pleasure in being himself, in being Michael. He had to remember that he was doing what he wanted to do; he had to remember that this was his vocation.

  Tribunale

  The examining magistrate’s desk at the Tribunale on Via Magazzini was piled high with papers in official folders. Rinaldo Romero and his father and their lawyer were already seated when Woody and his lawyer entered the room on the second floor, which overlooked a courtyard that now served as a parking lot for the police station at the back of the Badia. According to Woody’s lawyer, the examination of witnesses would probably not be carried out according to the provisions of article 244 of the Code of Civil Procedure but rather in a free-form discussion similar to the procedure used in criminal trials. The civil judge, in other words, would enjoy exceptional discretionary powers that could affect the balance of power between the parties to the proceedings. Everything depended on what evidence the judge was willing to admit.

  Rinaldo’s family wanted to reduce the case to a single issue: the tattoo on the dog. If the tattoo indicated that the dog was registered to Rinaldo, then there was nothing more to discuss. Open and shut. They had wanted Woody to bring the dog to the Tribunale.

  Rinaldo’s lawyer, Woody had learned from the commissario, had bribed the ambulance driver to change his story. This was Rinaldo’s trump card. The driver was now willing to testify that Woody had threatened him with a knife and prevented him from taking the injured Rinaldo in his ambulance. But if Rinaldo played his trump card, then the matter would be immediately transferred to the criminal courts, and various embarrassing consequences would follow. For Rinaldo as well as for Woody.

  Moreover, Rinaldo hadn’t counted on Woody’s aggressiveness. Woody had instructed his lawyer to depose the veterinarian, the commissario, witnesses from the restaurant in Piazza Tasso, Rinaldo’s girlfriend, who was now his ex-girlfriend. Woody had also solicited briefs from the Ente Nazionale Protezione Animali, and from the pubblico ministero in Bologna, and from Signor Secci, the president of the Association of the Families of the Victims of the Bombing of 15 August, and from the luthier on Via Verdi who had located a new resonator and a new cover plate for Woody’s guitar, which had been damaged by Rinaldo’s knife.

  These briefs, or carte, were what took up so much space on the examining magistrate’s desk.

  Rinaldo’s lawyer spoke first: Rinaldo’s family, he said, had made a good-faith effort to settle the matter out of court by offering Signor Woodhull a substantial sum as compensation. Signor Woodhull had refused all reasonable offers, however, and now, after all, it was really a simple matter of fact, not a matter of interpreta
tion or of philosophical disagreement: either the registration tattooed on the dog’s ear indicated that the dog belonged to Rinaldo or it didn’t. Signor Woodhull had been ordered to bring the dog, but he had not brought the dog. Res ipse loquitur.

  Woody’s lawyer objected at this point. Signor Woodhull had not been ordered by the court to bring the dog. He had been ordered by Signor Romero’s attorney, which was a very different matter. The dog’s presence was not necessary, in any case, because Signor Woodhull was willing to concede that the registration number tattooed on the dog was the same as the number registered in the name of Signor Romero. Moreover, if it was a simple matter of fact, then the principal fact was that Signor Romero had abused the dog. He had dragged her behind his car and, according to the brief from the veterinarian, he had abused her in various other ways as well. There were burn marks, evidence of knife wounds and of broken bones . . .

  Rinaldo’s lawyer objected: “This is not a criminal proceeding against my client. It’s a proceeding to determine who owns the dog. If Signor Woodhull stipulates that the number tattooed on the dog corresponds to the number registered at the regional canine registry, then there’s nothing to discuss. The dog should be returned to its rightful owner. As you know”—he turned to Woody’s lawyer—“under Italian law, a dog is a cosa, a thing. My client may have punished the dog for misbehaving, but that is his right. It’s true that article 727 of the penal code contemplates the crime of mistreating an animal, but in point of fact an animal is considered by law to be a cosa, not a living being. Public morality and common sentiment do not apply in the case of animals.”

  Woody’s lawyer rose to his feet: “Not only is there a strong movement afoot to repeal article 727, but the law itself is open to interpretation. Ownership gives the right to enjoy and dispose of things within certain limits established by law.” The lawyer put a great deal of emphasis on the phrase entro i limiti, a point that led to a long debate about the definition of property.

  The judge had still not indicated what she was going to admit as evidence. She asked Rinaldo’s lawyer once again why this wasn’t a criminal trial. If Woody had in fact threatened the ambulance driver with a knife . . .

  But Rinaldo’s lawyer interrupted her: “Thank you, your honor, for bringing us back to the point. This is not a criminal trial. All these depositions, all these carte, are irrelevant. The only thing that’s relevant is whether the number tattooed on the dog corresponds to the number in the registration. The accused has already stipulated that it does correspond. Res ipse loquitur.”

  The judge, however, declared that this was only a preliminary hearing. She needed to look at the depositions.

  Woody’s lawyer assured him that it would be at least nine months before they could take the dog away from him.

  Instead of going back to the American Academy and eating lunch in the cafeteria, Woody went to his favorite spot in Florence, the Etruscan wing of the Archeological Museum, which involved only a slight detour. He’d been struggling with the Etruscans for years. After the trial of the terrorists in Bologna, after the guilty verdicts, after an ugly episode in Regina Coeli Prison in Rome, where he’d almost strangled the bomber, Angela Strappafelci, Woody had visited the Etruscan cemetery at Cerveteri, had entered the Tomb of the Reliefs—the dog, the goose, the mysterious eggs, the naked slaves stooping to the wine jars, the happy couples embracing under their sheets of stone, the couple about to engage in anal intercourse. And he’d experienced a sense of profound relief. He’d bought all the books and had read them, but of course what he wanted to know was not to be found in Haptonstahl’s Etrusker Grammatik nor in the Notizie degli scavi di antichità, which he read in the Biblioteca Nazionale. Nor in D. H. Lawrence’s Etruscan Places, though Lawrence pointed the way, pointed toward a time when the whole universe was vitally alive and our business was not to figure out what we believed but to open ourselves to this vitality, to draw it into ourselves.

  The guard at the ticket window—the one he’d met on his way to the Questura—asked about the dog, but Woody had to be back at the Academy at one o’clock for his mythology class and didn’t have time to chat. He ran up the stairs to the Etruscan exhibits on the second floor. Past the stone sculptures and cinerary urns in Rooms IX and X; past the famous bronze Chimera, which the Medici, who had invented Etruscan ancestors to balance the claims of the Pope, had adopted to establish their power; past the special exhibit on the third floor, curated by Professor Roncalli from the University of Naples, whom Woody had met after a public lecture. (Roncalli was overseeing the excavations at Severiano.)

  What he wanted to see was simply a flat stone and a table from the Etruscan site at Severiano. The stone itself was raised a little bit above the floor, but not much. This was not a popular exhibit because there wasn’t much to it—just a flat stone and a stone table that reminded Woody of the trainmaster’s desk that his wife had bought for him when the old Burlington depot was torn down.

  This stone altar and table were the domain of the haruspex, said to be descended from Tages, the grandson of Jupiter. He was represented as a shepherd—a figure from an even earlier culture, from outside the community—who came with the seasons, or who brought the seasons by his coming, like the musicians Woody and Margot had heard the other night in the piazza, who come down from the mountains in the Abruzzi at Christmastime. The altar didn’t represent a threshold between this world and the invisible world, it was the threshold, though no one, not even Roncalli, was sure just how it worked. Except that the haruspex stood on it, probably while examining sheep’s entrails for signs at the stone table.

  It was Friday noon. Woody had Room X to himself. He stepped over the velvet cord that cordoned off the altar. Then he stepped back. He was an academic. A man who obeyed the rules. But then he stepped over the cord a second time. He raised his left foot to place it on the altar, and then he put his foot down carefully, as if he were stepping onto a bathroom scale. Then his right foot.

  And he tried to peer into the future. He had compelling reasons to go home. Financial reasons. The job at the American Academy did not pay well and he had to supplement his income by playing at the Bebop Club and the Osteria dei Poeti on Via de’ Macci. He wanted to teach Ovid and Virgil and Homer in Latin and Greek at the college level, not in translation. He felt that his work in Italy was over, and he believed that Cookie herself, whose charred remains had been buried in St. Clair, no longer made her presence felt in Italy—not in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, nor at the University in Bologna, nor at the morgue on Via Irnerio where he’d cradled her broken, burned body in his arms for the last time. His daughters wanted him to come home, and his ex-wife, Hannah—now in her fifth year in the Ursuline convent west of Davenport—was seriously ill and wanted to see him before she died. He was afraid of this visit. The nuns were cloistered, and he’d spoken to her only once since she’d completed her novitiate, at the burial service for Cookie. He was afraid that Hannah had changed her mind about her vocation, that she wanted to escape. He couldn’t bear this, the thought of all those wasted years.

  There was the dog, Biscotti, and there was Margot. But he could take Biscotti with him. Dogs flew on airplanes. And maybe he could take Margot with him too. He was thinking of proposing. Maybe she could get a job in Iowa City. The University of Iowa had an important book conservation program. An hour and a half away. Even if she stayed in Iowa City during the week . . . Or the Newberry Library, in Chicago, where she’d started her career as a conservator. Farther away, but she could take the train and come home on weekends.

  Standing on the stone altar Woody felt, to his surprise, that he had entered a familiar place, felt that he’d been stepping onto this stone all his life. He stood at the altar as he had often stood at his trainmaster’s desk, writing his notes for his classes, or reading his Homer, or puzzling over a difficult passage in Aeschylus or Thucydides. But now he was standing on a threshold: his dad’s funeral, his first date, first cigarette, his first taste of alcohol
, his first ride on the Twilight Limited, his first Greek class at the University of Michigan, first sexual intercourse, the exchange scholarship to Iran, proposing to Hannah, the birth of Cookie, his first job at St. Clair, signing the papers for the house in the lawyer’s office on Cherry Street, the birth of Sara, the birth of Ludi, and then the strage in Bologna, Cookie’s death, Hannah’s breakdown and the divorce, Hannah leaving for the convent, the affair with one of his students that had turned the dean against him, selling the house and going to Bologna for the trial of the terrorists, playing his guitar for the first time in Gabriella’s trattoria, Gabriella herself, the job at the American Academy, Margot. He’d been standing on this threshold all his life. There was no end of new lives, renaissances, rebirths. But how many times can a man be reborn? He thought this might be the last time. The trainmaster’s desk was gone. The house was there, but other people were living in it now, raising their children. His own children had left home. Sara, who had three children, was an exhibit developer at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. Ludi was a vet in Florida. His wife had left him and was living in a convent. And yet they weren’t gone. Nothing was gone. Nothing had been lost. Not even Cookie and the trainmaster’s desk. And he had decided to go home. He was overwhelmed with happiness. He felt it along his pulse and in his heart. He would have been content to die at this moment, standing on the threshold of yet another new life, whatever it was going to be.

  He thought he heard a sound in the corridor. One of the guards. He stepped back over the velvet rail and glanced at his watch. Just enough time to get back for his afternoon mythology class: maybe he’d tell them about the vitality of the Etruscans instead of soldiering on with Oedipus.

  La Maremmana

  Beryl was sitting in the Osteria dei Pazzi with Michael and Zanni. Michael was finding reasons why he couldn’t do any of the things that Zanni was suggesting.