The Italian Lover

by Robert Hellenga

  Sunday morning. Beryl thought she might be experiencing a paradigm shift, a Copernican revolution, and she was going to church to find out, to find out if there was anything out there strong enough to balance the kind of bodily ecstasy she’d experienced the previous night in the matrimoniale of the little room in the hotel. She stood on the open deck of the vaporetto and let the wind muss her hair.

  Sunday morning. Palm Sunday. It would be a long service, the longest of the year. Her father’s service, at St. Andrew’s in Troy, always lasted almost two hours, but that was because her father had included all the old rituals he’d come across over the course of years. The tension would start building at Ash Wednesday and keep on growing till it reached a climax on Easter Sunday.

  Zanni had offered to take her to the English Church in Campo San Vio, but she had it marked on her map and wanted to find her own way. She took the bus from the hotel to the vaporetto landing, and the vaporetto to the Accademia. The streets on her map were not all named, but she’d crossed the bridge and found the church without much trouble—St. George’s Church. Diocese of Gibraltar.

  She couldn’t tell anything about the church from the façade, but inside it was pleasantly simple. The priest was already reading the collect from the old prayer book to a congregation of about thirty-five people, most of whom, she guessed from their clothes, were British tourists. She thought of her father, how his faith had increased as his congregation dwindled.

  The gospel of the palms was sung so beautifully by a young man in a red cassock and white surplice that Beryl’s whole body responded, reverberating like an echo of her orgasm the previous night. But it was only an echo, not the real thing. It didn’t convulse her entire being.

  She knew what her father would have said: “You cannot belong to Christ Jesus unless you crucify all your self-indulgent passions and desires.” It was just what Saint Paul had said to the Galatians, except Saint Paul hadn’t called the passions “self-indulgent.”

  But bodily ecstasy. What could it mean? No sermon could match bodily ecstasy, orgasmo. The priest spoke of acknowledging our sins, our shortcomings. However embarrassing, however painful, however shameful. But Beryl wasn’t embarrassed; she wasn’t in pain; she wasn’t ashamed. And this was what scared her. She should have felt guilty. She would have welcomed guilt, because then she would have known where she was. But she’d crossed the border into another country, and what frightened her was the thought that the border police might not let her go back again to her native land, might glance at the stamp on her passport and shake their heads.

  At the end of the service the congregation marched around the piazza—Campo San Vio—waving their palm fronds and singing “All Glory, Laud, and Honor.” A small crowd of Italians gathered at the newspaper kiosk to watch. Beryl did not go back into the church for the benediction. She had not found what she was looking for. She was already looking forward to fucking Zanni. She was imagining him waiting for her in the bed, or in the lobby, or the breakfast room, or the garden. Zanni, who could have been spending the week with Miranda Clark, a real beauty, but had chosen to spend it with her.

  “You got a philosophy of life?” Guido asked.

  “You mean like Zorba?” Miranda laughed. “Swallow life whole and take your clothes off and dance?”

  It was Monday night. Miranda and Guido were sitting at one of the small tables in the back at Vivoli, eating ice cream. They’d just watched Zorba the Greek, which had succeeded Revenge of the Pink Panther at Cinema Astro.

  “You’re not convinced?”

  “He’s only got one note,” Miranda said. “His son dies, and what does he do? Dance dance dance. Basil’s too uptight to say anything to the widow. What does Zorba advise? Dance dance dance.”

  “Do you like to dance?” Guido asked.

  “Yes, as a matter of fact I do,” she said. “I just don’t think it’s the solution to everything.”

  “When I asked my pop if he had a philosophy of life,” Guido said, “he thought I was in some kind of trouble!”

  “Did he have one?”

  “Sort of: Always be ready to go to work at call time; always have your tools in order; never walk in the ozone without a fall-protection strap; never repeat anything you hear on the set; don’t get too familiar with the people above the line.”

  “Is your dad in the film business too?”

  “My dad, my uncle, my cousins, my sister —”

  “Don’t get involved with people above the line,” she said. “You mean like me?”

  “Like you.”

  “Why not?”

  “Could be trouble.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like when you saw me smile at you when I was dollying in for a close-up and then you started to choke on the piece of chocolate, and then Zanni made everybody laugh by pretending there was a fly buzzing round his head. If you had complained that I was looking at you the wrong way —”

  “It wasn’t your fault,” she said. “It’s just that I was upset; it was so stupid.”

  “You can afford to get upset; I can’t. You could have me fired. You wouldn’t even have to give a reason. Maybe you don’t like my face.” He snapped his fingers.

  “Guido, I wouldn’t do that.”

  “I’m not saying you would.”

  “Sounds like you’ve adopted your dad’s philosophy of life. Maybe Zanni could fire you, but I don’t think Esther’d let me do it.” She laughed.

  “Take my mama, now,” Guido said. “She’s a deeply religious person. I respect that. Priests, the Virgin Mary, the saints, rosaries, crucifixes, all that stuff. When you’ve got religion, you don’t need a philosophy of life.”

  Miranda nodded. “Did you come up with anything?”

  “I thought that my philosophy of life would have to include getting laid a lot.” She looked at him, expecting a significant glance, but he was just talking, talking to her as a friend. “But I was already getting laid a lot. I was looking for something more. I started thinking maybe it was time for me to get married, that’s one thing, and then I went to Sicily to work on Cinema Paradiso. My uncle was the key grip. We shot the whole thing near Palermo, different places.

  “Maybe we should rent that movie tomorrow night and then I can show you something. You remember when they’re out in the country, chasing each other through the field of wheat? Just before the chase. They’re waiting for the light to change, a cloud passing in front of the sun, and the dolly grip has to take a leak. They’re waiting, and I can see that it would be great to catch the transition, you know what I mean? It’s light, and then the cloud . . . I’m just a macchinista, but I tell the cameraman, whose name was Roberto, to sit on the camera while I push it along the tracks. He doesn’t want to do it. Cameramen tend to be altezzosi, snooty. But the director—Signor Tornatore—tells him to go ahead. So I start pushing the dolly and he starts filming. Great opening tracking shot, but he took all the credit for it.”

  “So, you could see the light, and nobody else could?”

  “No, everybody could see the light. You couldn’t miss it. But I’m the one who knew how to push the dolly.”

  “So that’s your philosophy of life? You want to be a dolly grip? You don’t want to direct?” She realized that this was not a good thing to say, but Guido didn’t seem to notice.

  “A director? No, maybe a gaffer or a key grip. I could go either way.”

  “Those are jobs, not a philosophy of life.”

  “Maybe so.”

  “So you don’t want to direct. Do you want to act? Maybe write a screenplay?”

  “A screenplay maybe. I could see writing a romantic comedy—with no clichés.” He scooped the last little bit of his ice cream out of the cup with a little wooden spoon and licked the spoon. “But I’ll probably stay below the line. There’s nothing wrong with being a dolly grip. Some producers think they’re hiring you from the neck down—don’t think, just do. But it’s not like that. You’ve got to be on top of all the cam
era moves, right? The camera’s got to get from A to B to C, right? It’s not so simple, especially with a director like Signor Michael, who likes to keep the camera on the dolly all the time. It’s a Zen thing. You’ve got to answer to your own boss, the key grip, and to the director of photography. You’ve got to be in sync with the camera operator and with the actors, or they’ll blow a lot of shots. You’ve got to anticipate every move. You’ve got to know the dialogue so you know when to start moving or when to arm the center post for a high-angle shot. You’ve got to be calm when the talent’s freaking out waiting for someone to bring more film or a different lens. You’ve got to move fast or slow, A to B to C. It’s the only thing the DP can’t control directly. If he’s shooting with a 300mm lens he’s going to be scontroso, crabby, guaranteed. You’ve got to tune everything out—the producer’s mad because you’re in overtime; the PAs are trying to flirt with you; you’ve got to keep the talent in the frame; and everything, starting and stopping, has got to be smooth. That’s called feathering. That’s the toughest thing. Let me show you.”

  Vivoli was still crowded, but Guido stood up and began to demonstrate with his chair. “You just sit there and I’ll move around you.” He looked down at his feet. “This floor would never work, too many bumps. You’d have to build a dance floor or you could lay down a track, but the track’s got to be level and the pieces have to come together in a straight line. That doesn’t always happen. Maybe the track’s been run over or it’s fallen off a truck or it’s been overtorqued. Signora Klein understands that. She’s paying for C-rails with skateboard wheels.”

  Miranda—and everyone else eating ice cream in the back at Vivoli—watched as Guido pushed the chair around the adjacent tables. “Some guys hate the square track,” he said, “but I like it because you can lay down a wider arc. Just hold still now, we’re moving in for a close-up. Turn toward me a little.” Miranda turned. Guido pushed the chair till he was almost on top of her. “With this crab dolly, you see, I can come right in on top of you, like when you were lying in bed in the cheval glass scene, just looking up at the camera and smiling.”

  Guido moved like a dancer, and Miranda was thinking that things had worked out for the best, that she’d rather be here at Vivoli with Guido than in Venice with Zanni.

  “I don’t blame you,” she said. “I mean, for staying below the line. I’ve just about had it with the industry. They’re the worst people in the world—lying, ass licking, backstabbing phonies. And the talent are the worst. They think that because they embody everyone’s dreams they should get special treatment. Look what they’ve done to The Sixteen Pleasures. Talk about clichés. Instead of a woman’s empowerment film, Margot’s going to marry Sandro. And that’s not even the worst. And I’ve gone along with it. I’m just as bad as the rest of them. Maybe I’ll go back to New York and do some real acting.”

  Guido just laughed.

  “I’m serious,” she said.

  “I know you are,” he said.

  Esther had been looking forward to the break, though it was costly and inconvenient. There was plenty of room in the convent, and Esther had been planning to throw a party for everyone, but the convent was empty except for Guido. The Italian crew members had gone back to Rome, and the American PAs had gone off with Italian boyfriends. Esther didn’t want to stay there when it was so empty. It was too spooky. If Miranda had been staying there it would have been different, but Miranda was staying with Margot and Woody. Esther managed to find a room at the Excelsior, which was charging six hundred dollars a night during Easter week.

  Esther didn’t mind Christmas. When she was a little girl in Fairfax (L.A., not Virginia), they’d had a Christmas tree. But Easter was oppressive, especially in Florence. The streets were so crowded you couldn’t walk. The lines at the museums were endless. You couldn’t find a place in a restaurant, not even at the kosher place next to the synagogue.

  Passover began on Saturday. Esther had nowhere to go for the Seder, and she couldn’t stop herself from thinking about Harry. How if Harry were here with her the crowded piazzas would seem festive rather than oppressive, that the break in the filming would be a special time for them to walk up to Piazzale Michelangelo or to get on a city bus and ride to the end of the line. To do nothing, or to do something, it wouldn’t have mattered. How, if Harry were here, he would take her hand and make a joke. One of his Lieberman jokes. She couldn’t tell them herself, but she could hear them inside her head: Lieberman clinging to a stick of a tree on the side of a cliff, the ground thousands of feet below him, shouting at the Red Cross helicopter that’s come to rescue him: “I gave at the office.” Lieberman clinging to the same tree, looking up and shouting: “Is anybody up there?” And the voice of God saying, “Lieberman, let go of the tree; I’ll look after you.” And Lieberman looking up and shouting: “Is anybody else up there?” That’s how Esther felt at the moment, standing outside Ruth’s Kosher Vegetarian Restaurant, looking at the menu in the window—Italian first courses and Middle-Eastern second courses. The menu was in English and Italian. She wouldn’t have minded some “cuscus” or some “pearch fish” in foil, and maybe a blintz, but she’d have to wait over an hour and she was hungry. She ate two slices of pizza, at two different places, on the way back to the Excelsior. The pizza looked good, but the bright-red topping turned out to be paper thin, like a layer of fingernail polish.

  On Tuesday she went to the Jewish Museum and tried to interest herself in the cases of books and documents and the ceremonial accessories and an eighteenth-century Sefer Torah from Venice, but it was the Seder table that got her attention. The table was covered with so many objects—like the table at her aunt Pearl’s—that she didn’t see how a person could eat. But they’d eaten, and her younger brother had read the Haggadah, and after the adults had drunk their fourth glass of wine they’d sung a song that involved a lot of animal sounds, and she always got to be the goat.

  She stood in line at Ruth’s again, and by the time she got a table, which she had to share with a family from Hamburg, they were out of the “pearch fish” in foil. There was going to be a Passover Seder at Ruth’s, but it was too late to sign up. She was desperate enough to call Margot to see if Margot could put her in touch with the rabbi, Rabbi Kors. Rabbi Kors owed her for koshering the freezer for his precious books. She wasn’t sure Margot would speak to her, but she called anyway when she got back to the Excelsior. “It would be a real mitzvah—a good deed—if you would put me in touch with the rabbi.”

  “Rabbi Kors?”

  “The one with the books.”

  “Esther, you’ve got a lot of nerve.”

  “Margot, I’m desperate. Believe me, I wouldn’t call you if I weren’t. The rabbi was a nice man, and he owes me.”

  “In Severiano?”

  “Didn’t you say there was an Etruscan site there? Maybe Woody would like to go?”

  “Esther, I’ll take you. I can’t stand to hear a grown woman cry.”

  “Baruch atah,” Esther said. “Bless you.”

  It was their third date in three days. They’d just rented Cinema Paradiso and were going to watch it in the common room at the convent, which Esther had had fitted up with a TV and a VCR and a couple of old couches.

  They’d bought some popcorn at the Old England Store on Via Tornabuoni and were popping it on the restaurant stove in the convent kitchen. There was no regular cooking oil, so Miranda used olive oil.

  “This is the way we do it in the United States.” There was no coffee table, but Guido, who’d taken off his shoes, propped his long legs up on an apple box. Miranda set a big bowl of popcorn on another and went back to the kitchen for napkins and apples. She sat down next to Guido so that their upper arms touched. She wondered if she could have him fired if she wanted to. It was a strange feeling. She held the remote and started the video.

  They had finished the popcorn by the time the opening credits were over. They washed their hands at the sink in the kitchen.

  There we
re no subtitles, but Miranda had seen the film when it came out and then again a year later. Salvatore loses his virginity on the floor between the seats of a theater. The prostitute (Teresa) laughs at his nervousness. Salvatore is very awkward, sweating profusely. The scene made Miranda nervous. She felt awkward and clumsy herself. She sat close to Guido and didn’t move.

  “I always wondered what happened to Elena,” she said.

  “Her story was cut in the American version,” Guido said. “There was too much explicit sex for you Americans. The story didn’t make sense after the cuts, but nobody cared. But it’s all here,” Guido said.

  Miranda couldn’t hold still. She held Guido’s arm. She snuggled. She put her hand on his leg.

  “Wait. It’s coming.”

  “What’s coming?”

  “My shot.”

  They watched the field. The camera started to move.

  It seemed perfectly ordinary to Miranda, but Guido stopped the film and rewound it so they could watch it again. “Look. You see how the camera moves? You see the light there? This isn’t a very good print, but you can see it. Isn’t that fantastic?”

  There was plenty of sex in the fifty-one minutes that had been cut from the American release—Salvatore’s sexual coming of age. “No matter what we do now,” Miranda said, “it will be a cliché.”

  Guido laughed. “Here? There’s nobody around, so it doesn’t matter.”

  “There might be.”

  “But there isn’t now.”