by Arthur Japin
A group of men in overalls has taken shelter beneath a tarpaulin strung between trees, waiting for their coffeepot to bubble above a gas burner. One embraces Sangallo. His name, Professor Baldassare, is not the only thing that reminds them of an old-style conjurer: he wears a monocle, has a Vandyke beard, and is followed by a blond assistant in a miniskirt. Beaming, she skips around him in the mud and hands him his props when he asks for them: umbrella, map, timetable, ballpoint, sketchbook, pointer. Hop-la!
They descend a short ladder to the excavations. Among the discoveries the professor points out, Gala and Maxim recognize an alley and the counter in front of the window of what was once a bakery. Next door, a stone phallus adorns the wall, a sign that this complex—which the professor has dubbed the House of the Bread Virgin—was once a brothel. They are standing on the round roof of what seems to be the most important discovery. The professor cannot mention it without beaming. The bathhouse, almost intact, must have been attached to the brothel. The concrete that has been hacked free from the lava is still covered with chunks of marble, and the rain is washing off the last clods of soil. The mud drips down the walls and over the petrified door, whose iron locks melted during the disaster in the year 79. Star shapes are slowly emerging in the damp cement beneath their feet. Inside, the bathers saw these stars illuminating planets on the ceiling of the dark steam bath, up to the moment that the lava filled the airholes and sealed the room in time.
The professor drums up his team. Grumbling, they leave their shelter and step out into the bad weather, where they meticulously follow the instructions of his assistant, who has put on a glimmering plastic rain hat for this number.
“Why are they working on Christmas?” asks Gala.
“In Italy, the past swallows an enormous amount of money. There are too many treasures and not enough cash, which gets distributed between two departments. First, the official one, from the government, which watches over and exploits excavated monuments and must make a profit, if only to pay its staff. So it’s always in search of new star attractions, like an amusement park. Baldassare heads up its rival. It’s made up of serious academics, a small but fanatical army who do their research as discreetly as possible. The government department tries to steal Baldassare’s grants, but every cut just makes him more inventive. Officially, he works with archaeology students from foreign universities, but unofficially he works with grave robbers and bounty hunters. Their illegal expeditions carry out important preliminary work that is beyond his official ambit. He constantly struggles to keep them on his side so that the real treasures don’t fall into the hands of the art collectors the professional grave robbers really work for. If he didn’t cooperate, the damage would be much worse. As soon as everything’s drawn up and recorded, he fills the site in again, before the government can turn it into an archaeological theme park. So he does his most important work when there are few prying eyes around, days like today …”
It clears up. The clouds part and reveal the volcano’s quiet summit, but the improvement in the weather does nothing to accelerate the excavation.
“Sangallo’s right,” Gala says a little later. To kill time, she and Maxim are walking through the vineyards on the slope. “Is it humanly possible to be happier than we are right now?”
“I don’t know. It feels like we’re working our way toward something, but our lives are actually at a standstill.”
“Happiness is never agitated. Don’t you think? Whereas sorrow never stops.” She hesitates. “Maxim, … this morning, what was that all about? Geppi hoping we wouldn’t be back too soon.”
“She rents out our bed.”
“Our bed?”
“When we’re not there, she rents it out.”
“That’s disgraceful.” She laughs indignantly.
“Probably by the hour.”
“And you let her?” she argues. “That’s a great idea.”
“We’re living there for next to nothing, I can hardly complain.”
“We have to look for something else.”
“We can’t afford anything else. Don’t worry. It’s just the mattress. The sheets are clean. For some reason, she’s decided we’re going on a trip.”
Gala sits down. She closes her eyes and turns her face to the sun. Maxim does the same.
“Gianni asked me.”
“What?”
“Yesterday morning at the market. All of a sudden he showed up on his motorino. Asking if I wanted to take a trip.”
“With him?”
“Who else? I don’t know. It took me by surprise. I didn’t hang around, I just walked away.”
“What a rogue.” Maxim laughs.
“But what’s it supposed to mean?”
“You’re beautiful. This is Italy. All the men want to take a trip with you. Don’t worry, I won’t let you go …”
Gala looks at him.
“Never?”
In the fleeting instant in which they are nothing but each other’s eyes, Maxim’s head becomes a tumult, two scenarios playing out at high speed. He doesn’t want to consider either one.
“… unless you want to, of course,” he answers, because what do you have left if you put beauty in a cage?
When they return, the camp is deserted, the pan boiling away on the burner. Everyone has hastily assembled in front of the bathhouse. Five strong men are attempting to pry open the door with a lever. Exhausted workmen are relieved by students who follow the professor’s instructions, taking measurements and using scalpels and fine brushes to try to enlarge the gap between the door and the wall. It budges. Dust billows out of the chinks they’ve scraped open and swirls to the ground. For a moment, the door yields, then jams again. Each time it moves forward a little, it immediately sinks back into place, as if a rival team inside were pulling just as hard. The past refuses to let go, but the present is stronger. Unexpectedly, the grinding of stone on stone is followed by the sound of a powerful suction. Gala grabs Maxim’s hand. She feels the change of pressure in her ears, just as she does with the onset of the epileptic aura that precedes her seizures. Maxim feels the same. Others reach for their ears too, briefly, or they swallow like people in a train that has raced into a tunnel. Then, as if the other team has given up, the door shoots forward with unexpected ease. The men stumble and fall, the petrified door atop them.
The first air escapes. A gust caresses Gala’s hair, dry and poisonous in her throat. She gasps as if she’s about to cough, drinking a full draft of the second wave, the air that wetly flies into freedom, soft as a sigh of relief, sweet as candied orange. Immediately afterward, as everyone present is sniffing for more of the same, this storm too has evaporated, the atmosphere calmed. In this stillness, Gala and Maxim look at each other, openmouthed, beaming with amazement. And then it happens. Emerging calmly from the bathhouse comes the smell of oleander, rolling warmly through the December air until it rises and is scattered. Swirling through its midst comes eucalyptus and a dash of rose oil mixed with the powerful sting of birch, as penetrating as if the lids have just been removed from the pots of salve. Fearing that the slightest movement will disperse the shimmering cloud surrounding them, they stand motionless, but Gala sees that Maxim has closed his eyes, hand on his chest, head thrown back. Then come the perfumes, essences of geranium, honeysuckle, and vanilla, an acrid flood of musk. When these have been liberated, they fleetingly perceive the unmistakable hint of human sweat, as dull and dead as flakes of skin, sebum, and talc, immediately followed by oils, at first as soft as milk and then, sharper, sourer, the tang of fruit. Grasses arise, spicy, light as lilies, heavy as camomile and lavender. A few minutes after the capsule is opened, everything is gone. Only a little lavender, lingering close to the ground, wobbles up occasionally, as the people slowly begin to move. Sangallo stands immobile among them.
Inside, the bathhouse turns out to burrow deep under the hill. There are three large rooms, each filled for the main part with a basin—the hot, warm, and cold baths, separated by a
series of cells for relaxing or dressing, all hurriedly abandoned. A stand that was knocked over. Earthenware salve pots in a niche. Lids lying broken on the ground. The outside light hardly reaches the second room, but even there the marble soaks it up and emanates a gentle glow. Some of the decorative panels have come loose from the walls. Earthquakes have caused damage. In two places where the ceiling has collapsed under the weight of the soil, roots push in from every direction, but as they wander through the rooms, Gala, Maxim, and Sangallo see them as they were. Their footsteps echo dully off the domes and round walls.
Gala lies at the edge of a bath to try to absorb the experience. Maxim goes over to sit beside her. They don’t need words. They are both seeing themselves from a distance, not only experiencing the moment but seeing themselves in later years looking back upon it. Aware of themselves, of one another, breathing in that beauty, their diaphragms moving up and down to the same rhythm, just as when they’re asleep. Watching themselves from somewhere in the distance, seeing how small they are there on the edge of the bath, they feel they should be weeping, crying, but they can’t.
“You could touch her,” says Sangallo, from the doorway. No one knows how long he’s been watching. He whispers conspiratorily. “Why not? Just for a moment. Two bodies touching. Just for the image. The idea. In the interest of science.”
“I touch her when I feel the need to,” Maxim says, feeling gauche and strident, his voice hollow in the empty room.
“The body conquers eternity. Two young people. Here. In this light. From where I’m standing. Unimaginable, you together, and only me to see it.”
“Come on, Gala,” says Maxim. He stands and pulls her to her feet. And then, with gratuitous cruelty, “Before we know it, he’ll pull out the shiny black coat.”
“You’re quite right,” quips Sangallo, “tara-rom-ti-ra-ta-ta,” but he looks as surprised as if he’s just then realizing something. “I’m years older than you!” He gulps for air, twice, three times, deep and then deeper, as if the oxygen has only just reached him and he’s catching up on something he’d forgotten.
Gala rests her hand on Maxim’s neck.
“Come on,” she whispers, “don’t be like that,” and she twirls a strand of his hair around her finger until it hurts. “We can do him a little favor in return, can’t we?”
“You’ve been summoned.”
“By him?”
“To his office. I don’t know what’s gotten into them. They want to see you. Unimaginable.”
Gala is so shocked she drops the photos they’ve just had developed, one of herself and one of Maxim, immortalized at the entrance of Cinecittà. They float through the room on the breeze.
“Between Christmas and New Year’s? Unheard of!” Fulvani screams into the receiver. “When all of Italy is eating and praying?”
Early the next morning, Gala and Maxim are at the gate. This time, a guard stops them, only to apologize after one quick call. The grounds look abandoned, but some people have turned up to work. They’re hanging around in small groups, listless as cleaners at a train station hours before the first train is due to leave. The kiosk in the middle is open. Someone is drinking a cappuccino at the bar, but the chairs are upside down on the tables. Gala orders two vodkas. Maxim decides to ignore it.
The offices above Studio 5 seem deserted, but the low-level official is manning his desk. His face lights up when they come in. He takes their portraits down from the notice board and, holding the drawing pins carefully in his hand, opens the door to the next room, identical to the first. He pins the photos up again inside it and closes the door with a bow.
Before noon, this ceremony is repeated no less than five times. The same chairs and the same desks, but closer to the core. Only twice do they meet someone en route. The first is Giorgio Salvini, the casting director for this production, a friendly but absentminded man, who doesn’t ask about their experience or photos but simply wants to know whether they too love the circus, at which point he starts reminiscing about his boyhood. After a while, Maxim cautiously interrupts to ask whether he knows anything about Snaporaz’s film.
“Nobody ever knows anything about Snaporaz’s films,” he answers, surprised. “Not before they’re shot. Anything can happen, each and every day, so even if you wanted to you could never say what’s going on.”
“And is there a possibility of a role for us?”
“Definitely. Until the very last moment, everything is possible.”
“We were asked to come today …”
“See?”
“… for an interview.”
“Yes, and I’m enjoying it very much,” Salvini says, launching into a story about how he hooked up with an itinerant troupe of saltim-hanques when he was fourteen.
The next meeting is more formal. Gala and Maxim are in the last room, heads resting on their hands and backs aching from the cheap chairs, when a young blonde throws open the door, laying a pile of manuscripts on a desk marked with her name. Fiamella obviously wasn’t expecting visitors.
“Who let you in?” she asks loftily, and their explanation fails to warm her up. “I have no idea who came up with such an idea. Someone’s playing a joke on you. Snaporaz isn’t even in the country.”
She glances at their portraits on her notice board and shrugs.
“And even if he was …” She tears off the photos and gives them back, flapping them in the meantime like useless scrap. At last she opens the door, not to usher them into the next room, but to dispatch them into the hallway, steps away from where they’d begun hours before.
Enough already. They have a dream, and they’re not going to let it slip away without a fight. There’s no point in postponing the inevitable. They walk around to the side of the building, kick the garbage cans out of the way, and open the rear entrance of Studio 5. Nearby, they discover an iron fire escape, painted black to be nearly invisible against the black wall. As if on cue, their eyes glide up the stairs to the small glass room at the top. The old control room, built before the days of portable monitors, lightweight cranes, and radio microphones, protruding out of the wall eighteen meters up and seeming to float in the big empty studio. Thin blinds have been lowered on the studio side, but the low winter sun is shining straight into the office. Behind the glass, they can see the silhouette of a man pacing. That profile, that hair, that posture—straight back, weary shoulders: unmistakably Snaporaz.
He pauses in his thoughts, interrupted by the sound of feet ascending the iron stairs. He walks over to a window. With a snap he lets the blind shoot up, revealing him suddenly, like a lemon in a slot machine.
He pulls open the door. He’s bigger than they imagined. And older, but his eyes are still bright. He scrunches them, and his narrow black eyebrows, which don’t quite follow the line of his sockets, shoot up instead like tufts on either side and make him look angry. He’s actually quite friendly. Without a word, he lets Gala and Maxim tell him their story. He looks at the photos they push into his hands.
The young man.
The young woman.
He examines their portraits. He examines them, first through his lashes, then stepping back a little and opening his eyes wide to take in their bodies. Especially Gala’s. He comes up to her and does his best to look her in the eyes, but can’t take his own off her breasts, which are high and half exposed by her plunging neckline. When they swell with her breathing, they seem to be coming to greet him.
It would be impolite not to return the greeting.
“Ciao, belle poppe!”
These are the first words they hear from his mouth. Between these and the next comes a long silence in which he takes Gala’s hand and pinches her cheek as if she’s a little girl. Gala beams, but lowers her eyes. Finally Maxim clears his throat. Snaporaz looks up, evidently surprised that someone else has come along with those breasts.
“Forget it,” he tells him, already looking away. “You, I can’t use in any way at all. Not now, not ever.”
I was
wrong about that. I have a use for Maxim after all. He’s like the lantern in front of the teahouse. By placing him in the foreground in certain scenes, I can shape my picture of Gala, hidden behind him. Whether I like it or not, he is a part of her.
The doors are wide open. All kinds of things are blowing past. Images storm in, change shapes, melt down, fly off again. Everything is possible as long as you’re still making up the story. This is the phase of waking dream.
People think that it demands concentration, but the opposite is true: it requires complete abandon. It feels like bewilderment and touches on insanity. You have to dare to step back, let everything go its own way: one who tries too hard to fall asleep spends the whole night tossing in bed.
Within these thoughts, special rules apply. They are sealed in time. Just as I am. Their images exist outside of reality. They show everything and nothing at once. One cannot exist without the other; you need nothing to imagine everything. From this basis characters emerge, hundreds at a time, some growing sharper, others blurring yet again. It makes no difference: a few are strong enough to stay. You begin to play with them, like a little boy playing with the bubbles of olive oil floating in his soup, but the more you stir, the more they take on a will of their own, fighting their way back to the surface.
This is the phase I love most. The stage of excess and irrationality, of unlimited freedom. Nothing matters, none of what you think, nothing you grasp of everything that comes your way. Everything can still be changed. You are uninhibited, because not even the most extreme choices have any strings attached. The characters are still free. You can make them do and be whatever you like, because though you know them you still haven’t embraced them. You harry them with your imagination, like swinging a net at a butterfly, wanting to catch them but still enjoying their colors too much when they flutter away in fright. You keep putting off the moment you have to contain them, until at last you fear they’ll escape if you put it off any longer. Make the story your own, or give it up altogether. So you catch them. One by one. In your cupped hands, separating them, confining them, assigning them boundaries.