by Arthur Japin
If only I were braver, she tells herself. If just once I dared to jump, then nothing could stop me.
She looks plaintively at Geppi, who shrugs. “What can I say? There isn’t enough room on all the walls of the Vatican to hang up the exvotos from the foreigners Signor Gianni has helped out.”
Gala only begins to sense the danger she’s exposed herself to when she sees the smoke rising from Etna. During the flight to Sicily, first class, with champagne, she played the part of the international call girl. Now, in the train circling the base of the volcano, the moment she’ll really become one is fast approaching. Gianni, who always delivers his best products personally, drops the mask of friendship, giving her final instructions like a company director talking to an errand boy.
“Don’t be subservient, but don’t get overconfident, either. Never be too cheeky, but don’t be too childish, either. No unnecessary objections, but under no circumstances do anything you don’t want to. If you remember that, you’ll enjoy it more. If the client sees you enjoying yourself, he’ll be satisfied.”
He stops to glance at Gala, who removes an imaginary pencil from behind her ear and mocks his instructions by writing them down in shorthand on a nonexistent pad, the tip of her tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth.
“Sparkle, the way you do so well, but be careful not to overshadow him. Never take the initiative, but don’t be too compliant. Don’t be scared. Relax. Set your pride aside and be yourself.”
“What if my pride is part of myself?”
“Impossible. Pride is a refuge for people whose self-image clashes with the truth. A rickety bridge between dream and reality, unanchored on either side. Pride’s the first thing you’ve got to get rid of if you want to learn to enjoy yourself.”
Disliking his tone, Gala looks out over the Strait of Messina. Silently, she tries to list all the things she’s proud of, but she’s so insulted that even the most obvious elude her.
“Don’t put on airs,” says Gianni. “You’re too self-confident to be proud.”
The train arrives at the bathing resort.
“And from now on, stay away from me,” he orders. “We can’t give the impression that we’re together.” He dawdles behind on the platform, shaking his head in admiration at the sight of his protégée’s swinging hips. Unaware of the structural defect behind this provocative miracle, the pimp says a quick prayer of thanks to Our Lady of Perpetual Help for sending him a personal retirement scheme, who is now disappearing slowly between the palms on the boulevard, the insides of her thighs gliding past one another.
At the appointed time, Gala stands atop the steps of San Leone. Down by the beach, a seated man is waiting under a parasol on the deck in front of a room hacked out of the rock on one side of the hotel. As soon as he sees her, he stands up to greet her.
Holding the railing, Gala’s hand trembles. This surprises her, since she feels nothing but icy calm.
The man is wearing an expensive tailor-made linen suit, perhaps a bit much for a first meeting, but a hint, nonetheless, of how dashing he was in his youth. He thinks he sees the girl’s eyes gliding over him approvingly. Gala is actually squinting, to force the glare of the sun on the waves into her black patch, so she can see more of his face. It is dark and manly, slightly troubled. She guesses he’s around sixty. When he smiles, she sees clearly that he is nervous.
“That’s a load off my mind!” she says, and means it, but he takes it as a compliment he must return. Afterward, they sit down. His butler opens the champagne and serves the first course.
Just before the bomba bianca is dished up in flaming maraschino, the man abandons his caution. He introduces himself as Pontorax, though that sounds more like a drug than a real name. He tells her that he is a neurologist, the head of a private psychiatric clinic in Catania.
“That’s funny,” laughs Gala. “Besides my parents, no one knows me better than neurologists.” At that, she lays bare her medical history for him.
“Ah!” he cries in admiration, “the blessing of the sibyls!” And he tells her how the oracles of Apollo were chosen for their epileptic sensitivity. “They looked at the sun and provoked their trances by moving their hands back and forth in front of their eyes.”
He shows her how. She imitates him, but he immediately grabs her hand and stops her, concerned. The touch lasts a fraction of a second longer than normal. To her surprise, Gala does not mind. The man is gentle and seems genuinely sympathetic.
“The flashing rays,” he continues, “disrupted the temporal lobe of the brain, the center of creativity. The women fell to the ground in a convulsion and spoke in incomprehensible riddles. Now we treat it; in those days, kings traveled months to hear their prophecies.”
After lunch, they board a small yacht anchored just off the beach, where she finds several brand-new swimsuits hung up, waiting for her. While they sunbathe, Pontorax’s acquaintances come by in yachts, and when they sail on again, the dottore entertains her with anecdotes about his eccentric friends.
In the middle of one of his stories, Gala is overcome by an intense emotion she finds difficult to place. Her breathing quickens, and it’s all she can do not to cry. It can’t be true, she thinks. I can’t be moved by a guy who pays to look at me in a swimsuit?
The dottore notices the change, but is tactful enough not to mention it. He pours her a cocktail and toasts her silently, just by looking at her, then resumes his story, allowing her to return to her thoughts.
What moved her was seeing the life in his eyes flare up when he looks at her. She quietly imagines the melancholy returning as soon as the old man turns back to the waves. The thought sets her mind at peace, inspiring a languid desire to give herself over to this game. She feels cheerful, and when she quickly closes her eyes, enjoying the warmth and the movement of the sea, she looks almost completely happy. Of course, it is the natural desire of age for youth that puts her at ease, though at first she doesn’t realize that. She only feels that she’ll never have to rattle off a poem or outdo him in cleverness in order to appeal to this man. She has won him simply by being who she is. Grateful, she rolls over to reward him with a better view.
The dottore is a gentleman who would never lay a finger on her uninvited, and who keeps his suit on all afternoon, though the financial nature of their encounter still makes their relationship unambiguous. She feels the inequality that obtains between master and slave, yet she couldn’t say who was who. Until very recently, she would have recoiled from the situation, but rather than feeling alone, she is very much at one with him. Gala tries to remember whether she’s ever been with a man in a situation like this before, with the cards so clearly on the table. It is new to her, but she can still predict all possible moves, as if she knows the game. Her role is as clear as his. This clarity makes her feel she’s breathing again after a long period underwater. He’s using me, she tells herself, but he needs me too; and that simple realization finally gives her the strength to reverse the roles.
The wood beneath her feet is scorching as she stands up and stretches. She walks up to her first client and kisses him on the cheek before running to the edge of the deck and diving.
The winner is not the little boy carrying the trophy, but the person who presented it.
They moor late in the afternoon, strolling down the main street, where branches of all the Via Condotti designers cater to the Mafia bosses’ wives. The dottore suggests that she pick out a few dresses in one of the boutiques; she consents because it confirms the nature of their relationship. Afterward, they visit a jewelry store, where she points out the tiniest earrings available. After all, it’s about what she is, not what she gets. Outside, he offers her his arm. That evening, they dance on the hotel terrace. Their bodies touch for the first time. She presses her stomach against his. Dr. Pontorax, who looks wooden, turns out to be surprisingly nimble to music. During the third rumba, Gala kisses him on the mouth, quickly but full of promise, and when he briefly closes his eyes with pleasu
re she gets an unmistakable sense that she’s the one in charge.
When his chauffeur appears to take her back to the airport, Gala assumes there’s been some mistake. She looks at the dottore, seductively at first, then pouting, but no matter how large the fish swimming around in his net, the fisherman has no intention of hauling it in.
Gianni is waiting for her in the back of the limousine. He tears open the envelope that is handed to him and pays Gala her agreed-upon fee. He then quickly counts the rest.
“Brava!” He pats her thigh approvingly. It’s so much more than he expected that he slips her a tip as well. Despite the payment, she is overcome by such an astonishingly piercing sense of disappointment that she racks her brain for an explanation. She’s had an exciting day and earned her money without a hitch. She took a trip, she shone in pleasant company. All this time, she’s been the master of her fate. Her only frustration is that she’s been relieved of the task she’d been dreading. Dismissed, why? The dottore had enough. Something obviously failed to please him, but what? Where did she fall short? She’d been feeling so strong, but the direction was snatched out of her hands just before the final scene. Her insecurities come rushing back. She is as surprised as she was seeing the flamingos—who had been flying off on the dry Sahara wind, one by one, all day long—settling down as a single flock in the bay that evening. And for the first time that day, Gala feels dirty.
A new Russia-leather suitcase containing the dresses and other gifts emerges from the trunk of the car. She is in time for the last flight to Fiumicino and will be back with Maxim before midnight. She’s earned a month’s salary in less than a day.
“How was it? What was he like?”
“Timid,” she says, “as if I was the first.”
“I’ve been bringing him someone every Friday,” laughs Gianni, “for as long as I can remember.”
Although she feels a pang of jealousy, it puts things back in perspective. It’s commerce. Someone has bought a pound of tomatoes at the market and only a fool would give it a second thought, she tells herself, putting on a pair of headphones and closing her eyes.
“How about next Friday?” Gianni asks as he picks Gala’s suitcase up from the carousel at the Rome airport and carries it to the baggage compartment of the bus that will take her back to the city.
“I’m busy,” she says tersely.
“That’s a great shame.” Gianni stays outside, speaking through the window she slides open. “I bring him someone every week. Always fresh. Always someone else. You’re the first he’s asked back.”
She looks at him through the window. He’s serious.
“The first in all these years.”
She doesn’t answer. She couldn’t have anyway. But once the bus has turned onto the autostrada, she gives herself over to tears so intense that the couple in front of her think she’s just said farewell to a lover.
Maxim zips open the bag and fishes out the haute couture.
“Sicily?” he exclaims, throwing the frocks into a corner and studying the earrings. “Are you insane?”
“Nothing happened.”
“As if that makes it so much better.”
It is the anger of a father who finds his daughter the day after she’s run away from home. First he embraces her, glad she’s not hurt, and then he shakes her furiously, as if she’s applied for a job as a white slave in Bahrain.
Suddenly he falls silent and looks at her. There is something in her face.
In all the years that he has loved her, he has hardly ever yelled at her. He’s not like that. But on those rare occasions when it did happen, he always regretted it immediately: because she didn’t fight back like a tigress, as she did with her father, but like a kitten pushed out of its litter, so entangled in excuses and rationalizations that he couldn’t help but forgive and comfort her, taking her side so unconditionally that at the end of it he started to think she’d been right all along.
This time, however, she is calm and self-assured. She describes her experiences as if she has ridden on the back of a cricket to the land of Pinocchio. She smiles. It annoys him. All that drinking cocktails and floating in the bay! He should be happy for her, but the smile is too much. All crazy countesses and shabby American trust-fund kids buying up islands off the coast. A fabulous adventure, of course, and he doesn’t resent it at all. But what’s with the smile? He can’t stand it. It just gets wider every time he speaks; there’s something haughty about it, as if she’d just learned a secret about him.
That night, Maxim makes a point of turning over in bed, and they sleep with their backs to each other, but in the morning they breakfast together at Rosati with silver spoons and porcelain plates. In the Via Frattina, they buy new clothes—first for him, then for her—and at the optician’s on the corso they both buy sunglasses with the classic slick Italian look. They hire a Vespa and spend the rest of the afternoon zooming around the Circus Maximus like Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn. Just before closing time, Gala goes into a bank and transfers the first installment of Maxim’s debt to the Dutch state. From the few thousand lire that are left, they pay the admission and towel rental at Salvi’s old Moorish bathhouse, hidden behind the facade of the Trevi. There, lying in sweltering rooms on warm sheets of marble, they rediscover each other in a feeling of bliss. Grateful for their regained liberty, they swap back rubs. But by the time they wash each other off in the cool water from the Acqua Vergine, fed by Agrippa’s aqueduct from the mountains, their thoughts are already diverging.
Gala feels unexpectedly satisfied that she’s blown every penny, as if doing so has lightened the shadiness of her previous day’s activity and cleansed her taint of vague discomfort. A gnawing worry wells up in Maxim at the idea that now they’re no less poor than before. Tomorrow morning, he won’t be able to read the Messagiero until someone discards it in the street, and in the corner bar the cornetti con crema will stay in the glass case.
When the soap residue and skin flakes wash through the marble rosette into the drain, they bear not only the last of the day’s euphoria but also some of the couple’s reservations. Gushing through the old pipes to the square, they drain unnoticed into a corner of the monumental fountain, between the colossal statue of Oceanus and the seahorse to his left, rushing over the rocks and splashing into the basin, where they sink to the bottom. There they dissolve, only momentarily stirred up by a few sinking coins that a group of singing nuns from Salzburg toss over their shoulders in the hope that, after their yodeling concert in the Sant’Ignazio, they might return to the Holy City.
For almost a week, Gala and Maxim live the way they’re used to living, hungry but with fashionable sunglasses. They don’t mention Sicily. With every passing day, however, Gala’s desire to take up the challenge a second time grows, as though she can face their daily tribulations a bit easier in the knowledge that a solution is at hand. Every day, she comes up with a few practical, financial reasons to return to the island, but in reality she can feel something much bigger beckoning her.
When she was small, death looked her in the eye, leaving his black window behind as a constant reminder. He drew a line around her life with thundering fireworks. Since then, she’s known exactly how far she can go, and the price she will pay for transgression. But even in the frightened moments before a seizure, sinking away in darkness, not knowing whether she will ever return to the surface, she has never felt those limits as a threat to her life: to the contrary, they encourage her, just as thinning out a herd strengthens the stock.
When her life still had a chance to take off in any direction, the territory was limitless, so that she could only give any bit of it a quick glance. As soon as the safe area began to shrink, she got to know it thoroughly, deeply, intensely, discovering unsuspected possibilities in herself and feeling invulnerable within them. Her affliction gave her life a framework. Within it, she was shown to her utmost advantage, just as correct framing lends a film shot its tension.
Following her Sicilian ad
venture, she once again experienced the tension between limitation and protection. As long as her trip lasted, her duties were clearly delineated. All she needed to draw upon was one aspect of her nature: her femininity. And there, she needed to satisfy clearly defined standards. She reached the ceiling of her potential when constrained in this way. Or was it the floor? Either way, if someone had told her the day before that she’d ever let herself be so restricted just in order to please a man, she wouldn’t have believed it. But compelled by circumstance, she had made herself docile, meekly doing what was demanded. Within these limits, she was astounded to discover a new, unsuspected freedom.
She loved Maxim because she felt completely at ease with him. He never asked anything beyond the familiar world they had built together. In that sense, they were equal. He looked up to her and admired her and took care not to challenge her in any way at all. He wasn’t like other men. They always made her feel that they were superior, strong, self-contained, spurring her to constantly prove them wrong by surpassing them in everything she did. For them, she tried to be everything at once: witty and intelligent, wise and amusingly hotheaded, strong and sultry.
So the dottore was a revelation. He asked only one thing of her. The lines were clear. Within this terrain, she was completely free. She even had the upper hand. The clarity of what she needed to do to satisfy him pleased her. After all, a similar clarity had once saved her.
From the moment that little Gala came home from the hospital, Jan Vandemberg became the old tease she knew so well. To reassure his daughter that nothing had changed, he was pitiless, seizing every opportunity to castigate her, to force her back into shape. His taunting could even be nastier than before, but in one area he left her at peace: he never again asked her to perform with quotes like a circus act, not even for his most important guests. So great was his fear that his favorite daughter would again lose her footing in a pool of words and sink away.