by Arthur Japin
The first time Sangallo tossed the coat over to him, he wasn’t sure what to do with it. It was early November. There was a fair chance of a shower, but only a fool would have wrapped up like an old salt in a westerly gale. Sangallo didn’t notice his hesitation and had apparently forgotten the coat until the car pulled up in front of the building and they stepped into the elevator.
“Go on, put it on.”
“Maybe later, if it starts raining.”
“You’ve got to try everything once.”
“Fortunately we still have plenty of time.”
“Please,” insisted Sangallo, “in the interest of science.” His eyes smiled so sadly that Maxim didn’t dare refuse. He had hardly slid his arms into the sleeves before the old man’s face lit up like a praised child’s.
“Don’t forget the bottom button,” he added. “Keep the belt loose and turn the collar up a little.” He showed no more interest in it that day, but a week later, for the second outing, he held the coat out again, his eyes averted to a monograph about Piazzetta, whose painting Giuditta was on their program for the day. This time, Maxim threw on the garment without grumbling. It was airy enough. It was no bother, and if it was important to the old man, why not?
Now, the third time, Maxim has the coat on before he stops to think. He only reconsiders it once the viscount goes off on his pet topic.
“How can anyone enjoy something permanent?” Sangallo asks. “Something that is still attractive at a second glance, after that first sigh, is boring.”
Maxim hurls the coat into a corner. It’s mid-December and quite warm.
“If it’s all so fleeting,” he says, amazed by how sulky he sounds, “the shine must have gone off this by now as well.”
“Boredom bears a close resemblance to beauty,” Sangallo replies imperturbably. “It’s all that’s left when you cage something beautiful.”
Sangallo’s tours of Rome are wild journeys of exploration. They shoot through the streets like boats tossed by rapids. Hour after hour, they cross old squares and ancient forums, following the inscrutable plan that the viscount abandons again on the slightest whim. He can unexpectedly change course, screaming for his driver to stop while already throwing open the door. The car has hardly had time to lurch to a halt before his tall, heavy body is shooting down an alley or through a gate, all as if he’s in a tremendous rush, his large, shuffling feet scraping over the pavement at a remarkable pace. By the time Maxim catches up, Sangallo is standing in a church or a ruin, before a mural or a marble statue, pointing at a single detail that moves him. Usually he tells a story or recites something. It could be a poem, a childhood memory, or a discourse on the history of art, but it might just as well be a Charlie Chaplin scene, executed with all the appropriate poses and walks. On their previous outing Sangallo was so moved by the light in one of the forgotten Caravaggios in the Santa Maria del Popolo that it was too much for him.
“There,” he said in English, trying to hide his discomfort and nervously undulating his tie between his fingers like Oliver Hardy, “that’s another fine mess you’ve gotten me into!”
“That faun.” Sangallo points at a statue by Praxiteles. “That’s Momo.”
“Momo?”
“Momo the faun. A childhood friend.”
After having torn through the Vatican museums, this is only the third room in which Maxim is allowed to linger.
“I remember him from the house of one of my mother’s friends in Bergamo. He was at the top of the stairs. We stayed there by the lake in the summers. And when I went up the cool marble steps to my room at the end of the day, he was waiting for me with his powerful chest and the muscular arms he only uses to lift the panpipes to his mouth. See how he’s inhaling? His sides are puffing. He could start playing right now.” The old man lays a hand on the stone midriff. A guard notices, but doesn’t think of saying a word. Every museum attendant in Rome knows the viscount.
“One day I saw a fisherman untangling his nets. He was standing up to the waist in the lake. ‘Momo!’ I called out. That’s how much he looked like the statue I loved. I imagined legs underwater, with split hooves and as hairy as a billy goat’s. That day I walked into the water. I had just turned twelve.”
For others Rome might be a city, Maxim thinks, but for this old gentleman it is an enormous playroom, filled with mementos. Sangallo has moved on. He swings a leg over a cord strung across to keep out the public. Maxim catches up, running down a corridor built around the outside of the museum.
“Filippo? Why are we always in such a hurry?”
“Because time is trying to catch us. This is Rome. Stay vigilant! Today is abandoned before it can even become yesterday. The centuries tumble over each other like children let loose in a bakery, hurling pies at each other. You should have come earlier if you were planning on just plodding around. So I do what I can. I take you along. I point out things that are meaningful to me. If any of it interests you, you’ll come back of your own accord. Later. Alone. But at least I’ll have done what I could.”
An attendant unlocks the entrance to a long narrow hall, which they follow to a dark and indeterminate room where a muffled commotion, like the one behind the backdrop of a film set during the coffee break between shots, has replaced the devotional silence of the museum. It is smoky and crowded. Roman workers are relaxing with water and freshly drawn wine, pizza bianca and dishes of tomatoes, grapes, and citrus fruit. Among them are a number of Japanese: some wearing white doctors’ coats, others with T-shirts with NIPPON TELEVISION NETWORK printed on them. With surgical masks over their chins and protective goggles on their foreheads, they are bending over a sketch with a small delegation of professors dressed in the latest Milanese fashion. When Filippo joins them, the academics greet him as a friend. A geisha in a business suit bows deeply and offers him a bowl, and he ignores the matter at hand to drink from it with a seriousness appropriate to a tea ceremony.
Only now does Maxim notice the folds in the walls. They turn out to be made of heavy material, hung up like the sides of a circus tent. The small room has been erected inside a much larger space. Here and there, he can make out sections of a construction forming the base of a tower of scaffolding. Far above, at a dizzying height, there is a plank floor. Maxim hears the buzz of hundreds of visitors, immediately behind the cloth walls. He recognizes the bright pink and the pale green in the small corner of the painting still visible far above, between the planks of the scaffolding and the small builder’s hoist. He slides the tent cloth aside, slowly, like the curtain of a theater. He steps through it into the middle of the Sistine Chapel, directly below God, who, with a powerful gesture, though clad in a lavender frock, is separating night and day.
While tourists wander past, Maxim takes in the colors of the frescoes. They are deep, warm, and somber on one side of the scaffolding, fresh, cheerful, and brilliant on the other, where Japanese television’s cleaning project has already stripped the soot and grime.
Around the ceiling, the vaulting is filled with naked men and women. Young or old, their flesh is voluptuous and comforting. Together they seem like one great naked body that wants to embrace Maxim, the nudes bending toward him, as if to lift him up and rock him in their arms. Full of lust, ruddy, uninhibited as children, muscular as young men, soft as parchment, they cry, run, flinch back, cower, or twist their bodies like contortionists. Shameless. Yes, especially that: they feel no shame.
Maxim’s head starts to spin. The pictures fade and then charge back even brighter. Perhaps he’s been staring up too long, pinching a blood vessel in his neck. Whatever it is, they are dizzying, but he is enjoying himself so much that he can’t bring himself to look away. His eyes shoot left to right across the narrow hips, full breasts, muscular buttocks, fleshy thighs. Arms reach out to each other without touching. He spins round and round, trying to see them from every side, whirling beneath a heaven full of desire. Without the slightest embarrassment. Suddenly, the whole spectacle is illuminated by a flood of l
ight. Maxim stops abruptly, as if he’s seen the souls shining forth from inside the bodies, but the surrounding space keeps spinning. For a second, he feels he’s about to be lifted into the painting.
The break is over. The spotlights are back on. For the benefit of the restorers, as well as of the sponsor’s cameras, recording the whole process, batteries of lights have been set up on all sides as if it’s a TV game show. Workers nimble as acrobats on their way to the trapeze ascend the scaffolding.
“It’s a stew of nudes!” says Sangallo, who has come up alongside Maxim.
The Japanese shoot up in a lift beside the scaffolding.
“Sinful, worldly, and grotesque, that’s what Adrian the Sixth thought of them. He wanted them hacked off. What else could you expect from a northerner?”
Sangallo wants to keep moving, but Maxim, overwhelmed, can’t tear himself away.
“Hurry up a little,” says Sangallo. “You desperately need taking care of. Pampering.”
“A little longer.”
“Why would someone want to see everything in one go, if he could see part of it later close-up?”
“Close-up?”
“From very, very close by. ‘I’m old,’ I told Pietrangeli, ‘a chance like this only comes once every couple of centuries.’ Carlo is a friend of mine, director-general of Papal Monuments. It just happens that a delegation from the soprintendenza is visiting today, otherwise we’d be up there already. Never mind, we’ll go up some other time.”
Maxim imagines standing eye to eye with Michelangelo’s brushstrokes and, as if one thing went with the other, thinks of Gala.
“She has to come with us,” he says out loud. “Gala. I’ll introduce you.”
“Who?”
“Gala, my girlfriend! If we go up the scaffolding, she can come with us, can’t she?”
“Pietrangeli hasn’t promised anything. He’ll call me.” Suddenly Sangallo sounds tired. He looks around as if the whole museum, and Maxim too, has suddenly begun to bore him. He pushes his way through a group of Zimbabwean novices toward the exit.
It’s not the first time that Sangallo has cut off a conversation the moment Gala is mentioned. Up till now, it happened so unexpectedly that Maxim wondered whether he’d said something inappropriate. Only now does he realize that Gala’s name is all it takes to make the viscount uncomfortable, as if the sound alone distracts him from their being together. This annoys Maxim, because it clashes with his image of Sangallo: a rich, free spirit on intimate terms with great artists should be above the envy that dominates petty lives. But though elegant, courteous, gifted with the ability to make life sparkle and charm, Sangallo, of all people, has drawn a line. As if he wanted to be Maxim’s sole frame of reference for this city.
For Maxim, discovering Rome is only half his endeavor: the other half is Gala’s. Sharing it is the essence of their Italian adventure. Upon returning from his previous two outings with Sangallo, Maxim had immediately gone out with Gala. Until past midnight, they wandered the city while he showed her as many of the secret alleyways and forgotten springs that Sangallo had revealed to him as his memory allowed, trying to deliver the same anecdotes with the same flair, hoping to overwhelm Gala with impressions just as he had been overwhelmed. Even if they spent all their days wandering the city apart, at night Maxim still felt they’d spent all those hours together. He couldn’t help it. Whenever he enjoyed something, he imagined her reaction—giggling in surprise with that turned-up nose of hers, pinching his arm when overwhelmed, searching together for words to describe something that could only be felt—and he naturally assumed she felt exactly the same way. That’s how these things work. Even when alone, he is an indivisible part of the two of them.
When he finds the old gentleman in the museum shop next to the exit, he goes up to him.
“Listen, Filippo, as far as Gala is concerned …”
But Sangallo has already recovered his enthusiasm. Like a child that can’t make up its mind in a toy store, he has grabbed all the most beautiful objects. Beaming, he showers them on Maxim.
“As far as Gala is concerned, I want to be clear to you that she and I …”
A study on Lysippus’s Apoxyomenos athlete, a model of Bramante’s Tempietto, a replica of a chubby Etruscan cherub sitting on another’s lap, a catalog of the collection of ancient sculptures of animals, and a large, professional reproduction of Raphael’s Transfiguration, before which Maxim had stood studying the epileptic whose cure it depicted. He clamps it under his chin while Sangallo buys another book about the Sistine Chapel before the restoration and one about what it will look like afterward.
“Listen,” says the young man, who almost has to crane his neck to look over the gifts in his arms, “… that Gala and I …”
“Gala and you, you and Gala, I know all that already.” Sangallo adds new acquisitions to the pile in Maxim’s arms. “You must believe that I can hardly wait until I get a chance to see with my own eyes the delightful creature who has managed to enchant enchantment itself.”
He means it.
At least, he says it with the same enthusiasm he musters for an extraordinary brushstroke, but he doesn’t stop perusing the tables, presumably searching for a book about the chapel during the restoration.
“That must really be something special, Maxim. Gala and you. You and Gala. It only happens once or twice in a lifetime. Cherish it.”
This still sounds gruff to Maxim, almost like an order to shut up about it, as if he were really saying, “Cherish it in silence!” If he hadn’t been standing there awkwardly, loaded down with gifts, he would have reacted at once. But all he can do is follow the viscount to the car. The chauffeur relieves him of the gifts while listening to instructions to drive them to the Apelles restaurant in Ostia.
“Apelles was court painter to Alexander the Great,” mumbles Sangallo. “He painted a portrait of Alexander’s concubine Campaspe and fell in love with her. The moment Alexander saw the painting, he realized how much love had gone into it and gave her to him in marriage. More people should accept that other people’s passion can be greater than their own.”
Now, of course, I could keep pushing, thinks Maxim, and insist on picking Gala up on the way. He knows how generous Sangallo is with guests: “Try a little of this too, just taste this. Let’s simply order a plate of everything. So that you will have a full impression of Ligurian cuisine. Come on, just a mouthful … If only in the interest of science.” Gala, just like him, could use a meal like that. They hadn’t brought much money and for the last few weeks she and Maxim had been investing—some might say squandering—it all in their future. Photos, photos, and more photos, big and glossy and with the most expensive finish, for the best possible impression. They had to print business cards and CVs on cream-colored, handmade paper. They bought expensive, stylish folders to put it all in and stamps to mail it. And of course there were the gifts they kept having to buy for agents, cameramen, and directors, who arranged to meet at the most expensive outdoor cafés and always needed to rush off to another appointment, leaving the up-and-coming film stars to pay for the drinks.
After a few weeks, all they have left are the two modest checks from the Department of Social Security that arrive from the Netherlands at the end of the month. It’s barely enough to get by. They’ve already stopped buying the tomatoes and grapes that are their staple diet at the Campo de’ Fiori; now, they pick them up in the Via Rasella or at the stalls along the Via del Portico. They’ve also learned to rely on the farmers who sell basil and onions from their cars near the Porta Portese on Sundays; with a bit of luck, they can find homemade salami and jars of honey for under a thousand lire.
Maxim is keenly aware that he hasn’t eaten a thing since last night’s salad. Stubbornly insisting on bringing Gala might ruin his chances of a free meal. That would be dumb, especially because he’d also be ruining his chances to go to the famous restaurant on the river in Ostia. One lunch is better than none: he’s sure Gala would feel the sa
me way. And before any feelings of remorse can well up, Sangallo orders his chauffeur to stop yet again. He shepherds his protégé into a small print shop on the Via dell’Orso and asks the owner to get out an etching by Bartholomeus Breenbergh. It shows Saint Peter’s Basilica before Maderno hid it behind his facade.
With an exaggerated gesture, Sangallo brings the drawing up close to his face to study it.
“See,” he says, “this is the chapel we were just in. This is the passage we walked down.” He buys the print and, back out on the street, gives it to Maxim.
“So you don’t forget the layers under the face of this city.”
“Out of the question. No, really, it’s too much.”
“Breenbergh made these as souvenirs for his countrymen.”
“It’s too expensive. Magnificent, absolutely … but no, I don’t deserve it.”
“Back then, nobody took this one home. Do the artist a favor. Take it with you, just as the poor fellow always hoped.”
When the driver puts the print in the trunk with the other gifts, Maxim discovers the black coat. He looks at Sangallo, who blushes like a child caught red-handed. He shrugs and scratches his head like Stan Laurel when Hardy is about to bawl him out.
You just can’t get angry with the man.
“Do you think we can eat outdoors in Ostia, Filippo?”
“They have a terrace,” replies Sangallo, “but it is December.”
“Exactly,” says Maxim. He takes the coat out and slams the trunk. “It could get chilly.”
Maxim gets back to the Via Michele Mercati late in the afternoon. Gala’s not in their room. He tosses the day’s spoils—besides the print and the books, a chunk of ham and a jar of pomegranate jelly made from fruit gathered under the trees along the Via Appia—onto the bed. He looks for a note, but he knows there isn’t one. Gala comes and goes without plans or explanations. He wouldn’t have it any other way. How he loves how she does whatever she wants, self-centered enough to go out even when she knows he’s coming home weighed down with stories. She follows her whims without a second thought. And this afternoon, when he has so much to share with her!