Director's Cut

by Arthur Japin

  No longer a frightening duty, the epigrams of Propertius became privileges she could grant or withhold. Her father learned to earn them. In exchange for a gift of some kind, she would grant him one of these favors. Now that she made him pay dearly, he was much more grateful for a few words of Cicero than when she gave them away to please him.

  Maxim is one step ahead.

  “I’ve been worried over nothing, haven’t I?” From behind his dark glasses, he’s been studying Gala’s radiant expression for some time. In the last few days, she seems to be sitting straighter, talking with more confidence, prouder than ever before. This drastic adventure truly seems no more difficult for her than it was for him to put on Sangallo’s black coat. And there’s more, he tells himself. It hasn’t just been easy for her, it even seems to have done her some good.

  “If only I could be sure,” he insists, “that you’re not getting in too deep.”

  “I’m old enough and smart enough to know what I can handle,” she assures him.

  Maxim smiles at her. He’s proud of his friend. Isn’t this just what he’s always seen in her, from those very first words: Ah, movement! That first sentence, which freed him from the dungeon of his past. He sneeringly thinks back on the moments he doubted her, when, out of weakness, he mistook her lack of inhibition for shallowness, folly, or blindness, just because his own mind was too much enchained to believe that anyone could be as free of scruples as Gala.

  And today she surprised him again. What a woman! She tackles head-on something he’d never dare to, not after he made such a mess of it during that pathetic attempt with poor Silberstrand. He may have imagined himself to be liberated enough from his shame to undertake something like that, but all he has is borrowed freedom. His strength is nothing more than a reflection of Gala’s open mind. That’s why he always wants to be near her. She gives him the courage. Swept up by her, seeing her venture where he would never tread! He drinks in her presence like a magic potion, a life-giving elixir, without knowing or being able to guess its ingredients.

  By the time he asks if she’s planning another one of those trips, her mind is made up. She calls Gianni the same afternoon, and when they come home an envelope is waiting on the bed with a generous advance. They treat themselves to dinner.

  This time, Gala flies alone. Dr. Pontorax has rented a villa for the weekend, one tucked away in the foothills of Mount Etna. His chauffeur is waiting at the Catania airport. Approaching the runway, her plane swings low over the crater, where molten lava bubbles and glows. The red of the fire colors the thunderclouds in the night sky.

  It looks frightening, but the mighty volcano is reliably predictable, in fact: the treacherous ones are dormant. People build their homes against the walls of silted-up craters without realizing that the pressure is rising inside.

  In that instant, the thunderstorm that has been building over the slopes of Mount Etna bursts around the descending aircraft. Fascinated by the violence, Gala looks out of the window. Blinding bolts of lightning shoot past on every side of the cabin.

  Between the lightning, flashes of Maxim appear. It’s unmistakably him. In that same moment, he walks naked through their room and gets into bed. He feels inexplicably afraid. Abandoned. He squeezes his eyes shut, pushes his scruples aside. They harass him from a land of terrors he has tried to leave behind. Fighting, he tosses and turns and presses his face into the pillow. He claws the wall. And now he calls her, now that she can’t hear him: begging her not to go, shouting at the top of his voice, rattling off all the things he is afraid might happen to her, everything he was too scared to mention for fear she would laugh at him. The thoughts twist his stomach until he feels sick. He is so scared that she will love him less if she finds out how much he longs to keep her safe, tearing her away from the game of chance she craves and keeping her for himself, away from the unknown.

  Now, drowned out by the crash of thunder, he finally screams it. That he misses her and won’t sleep until she comes back. Now, only now, does he cry out, those few words that could have changed everything. But Gala can’t hear them.

  And so she takes the next step. It seems as if she is crossing a line, but she’s actually drawing one at last, making a clear choice. Out of all the paths she could have chosen, this is the one she is claiming as her own.

  I remember that one Sunday in the late autumn of 1934, when the elderly priest of the Chiesa del Suffragio announced that he had decided to exchange his beloved Rimini for a place in heaven, in order to spend the coming Christmas in the company of the Savior himself. Shortly after his death, he was replaced by Fra Cippo, a young Jesuit recently discharged from the strict Fossombrone seminary. He arrived before Advent and stepped into his new church just as the parishioners were busy decorating one of the side chapels as they had for decades, while everyone enjoyed a few jugs of altar wine and dipped into a basket of sweets. From the end of the summer, everyone looked forward to this old tradition, a popular celebration complete with singing and dancing. Too small to help, I was crawling around on the cool marble with the other children, but I can still picture the young mothers breast-feeding their babies on the wooden benches while their husbands decorated the altars under the artistic guidance of la Dumazima, the madam of the brothel in the Via Pisacane. As one of the few parishioners with a steady income in those difficult years, Dumazima donated a fixed percentage of her earnings every autumn to buy the most beautiful decorations the cane cutters of Imola could weave.

  At the very moment that the young priest came walking up the aisle with his suitcase in one hand and his horsehair habit in the other, a group of young fishermen had joined forces to lift one of Dumazima’s girls so that she could affix a garland between the arches of the chancel.

  After the rigors of monastic life, Fra Cippo took their devotion for debauchery. He was so shocked that he hid his face in his hands, summoning the help of all the angels. His first deed was to ban Dumazima, her girls, and all who lived off their sins, from entering the church on Sundays and holy feast days. He would hear their confessions on other days, but for safety’s sake he had a confessional moved from the church into the sacristy especially for them, to spare the Madonna and the Apostles catching even a whisper of the horrors that needed confessing.

  The next Sunday, however, saw la Dumazima regally ensconced in her regular spot. Upon noticing her, Cippo covered the monstrance with a cloth and refused to remove the consecrated hosts from the ciborium in her presence. When he commanded her to leave so as not to endanger the spiritual welfare of the faithful, she stood up. Despite being a robust, sturdy woman with strong arms, she trembled now and had to grab hold of the pulpit.

  “All I ask of Our Lord is what he offers us,” she declared loudly, “His mercy.”

  “But, madam,” boomed the priest, “the Christ child does not give his love away for nothing.”

  “That’s what he’s got in common with her!” someone shouted, to general hilarity.

  “But fall on your knees,” said Cippo, “show your repentance in the eyes of all and everything will be forgiven!”

  “Are my sins so much worse than the others’?” she asked despairingly.

  “The body is God’s temple.”

  “That’s true,” blared squinty-eyed Minaccio, as drunk as ever, “and I’ve worshipped there.” He was applauded from so many corners that Fra Cippo became even more implacable. He pointed at her, like Lot pointing at the burning city of Sodom.

  “This woman lets herself be used,” he cried. “Nothing in the world is worse than that!”

  “Is that so?” said Dumazima. “We’ll see about that.” And with her head held high, she strode down the aisle and out of the church.

  The following Sunday, her place was empty. It wasn’t the only vacant spot in the pews that week. It wasn’t enough to disturb Fra Cippo, but the next Friday he noticed that the faithful had rather a lot of legroom. A few little old ladies showed up on Saturday evening, and when he stepped up to the altar th
e next morning in his vestments, he discovered that his congregation had shrunk so much that he had to pinch an altar boy to make sure he wasn’t dreaming. As the congregation left the church, he asked whether something was going around, but no one dared answer. Inside, however, he found Minaccio dozing drunkenly in the transept, and bribed him with a drink to find out what was going on.

  Since her banishment, la Dumazima had grown bored, and since she had nowhere to go during Mass, she had started offering her services at a discount at those times. A significant number of her customers were taking advantage of a bargain too good to pass up.

  Their wives, some incensed by their husbands’ absence at Sunday breakfast, others troubled by their sudden appearance at times when they were accustomed to receiving their own lovers, blamed the priest for the disruption of their domestic lives. They resolved that until Fra Cippo repented, they would take their prayers and piety to Santa Rita’s on the Piazzetta Castelfidardo.

  The young priest was stubborn by nature; and although he chafed at the sight of the people standing on the cold square before the open doors of the crowded Santa Rita’s for Christmas Eve Mass, he stuck to his guns.

  That whole winter, his parish remained bare and quiet, and his fire-and-brimstone sermons echoed through the empty church with less conviction every Sunday. The collection bags were empty too, and he couldn’t keep up his monthly contribution to the diocese. That spring, he was called to account before the canonical college and threatened with a return to the strict regime of Fossombrone.

  Shortly afterward, he was seen walking down the Via Pisacane, where he asked for an appointment with Dumazima. No one knows what they discussed, but the very next Sunday the door of her house was bolted to those waiting outside. When she finally emerged, she was dressed for Mass. She passed among her admirers and, followed by her girls, headed for the church, attracting more and more attention on the way. Street urchins followed, and when she walked up the Corso d’Augusto people emerged from their houses. At the head of the procession, la Dumazima entered the Suffragio and took her place in the first pew. Fra Cippo, with a full house for the first time in months, said Mass without further comment. Dumazima was the first to kneel before the altar for Communion. When she stuck out her tongue, Fra Cippo closed his eyes before that instrument of the devil but laid the Eucharist on it all the same. Dumazima made the sign of the cross and let it melt. Only then did she rise, and for a moment—the story goes—the priest and the sinner smiled at each other.

  She had worn him down; ever after, we called him Cippolo or Cippolino. When he ascended the pulpit on that day, the priest spoke to us for the first time from his heart instead of out of the commentaries.

  “Such is the mercy of God,” he said, “that He has told me that I was wrong: only one thing is worse than being used …”

  At that, his congregation called out as one man, “Not being used!”

  Snaporaz’s Theory of Progress

  Death is the border of life. If it weren’t waiting for us there at the edge, we wouldn’t realize that we’re not just wandering around aimlessly but are heading somewhere. The border is what gives us direction. I see borders like that everywhere. They make us alert. They point to our limitations at the same time they show us all the marvelous possibilities within them. I have seen how a dictatorship unleashes new movements among the people. I have felt how oppression inspires the will to survive. I have watched our country flower forth from the devastation of war. I have seen love spring up from the ruins of hatred.

  It is borders that keep us awake.

  Limitation is what pushes us forward.

  This is the engine of the world. This is the force that gives us life. Every cell divides. It makes itself smaller in order to grow. I believe that all of evolution, the entire history of man, can be reduced to this single principle.

  Withdrawn in the immobility of my body, my mind flares up. I am ever more convinced that if fate so drastically cuts back our possibilities, it is only to make us bud all the more vigorously.

  God Limits Man

  At one time everything was possible. All was chaos. But one day God decides that enough is enough. And He immediately sets to work, as if already hearing the cavalcade of the whole circus approaching in the distance.

  He first limits the free intercourse of the elements. He gathers them into two bodies: heaven and earth. Then He abruptly forbids darkness and light to play together as carelessly as before. To each He allocates a place: confining one to the day and the other to the night. He dams the waters too, separating land and sea. On the land, He draws borders and divides it into parcels. He gives a name to the most clearly fenced-off area, the Garden of Eden, setting it apart from the rest. He restrains time as well, making stars to divide the infinite into days and years.

  Once the elements are thus secured, He creates living creatures, but gives them such feeble attributes that each must remain in its own environs: the fish are limited to the sea, the birds to the air, the mammals to the land. And even then He subdivides them. He creates each species according to its own nature and throws up barriers between them. He makes one group stronger and the other weaker, assigning each kind a place in a hierarchy that can only be abandoned at the price of expulsion and death.

  At last He kneels on the earth, scrapes some into His hands, presses it firmly together, kneading and shaping it into the form of a man. He pinches the clay a couple of times to make a nose and then, just like that, blows breath into it.

  He places this man in His Garden of Eden and watches him frolic around alone, aimless in so much freedom. Then God decides on a drastic measure. He creates a second person so that the first will no longer be free to flit around, willfully directing his attention to anything he likes. From now on, he’ll have to take her into account, and learn to choose between her and himself. But even then, the two still skip about everywhere hand in hand. As long as they are unaware of any borders, they don’t plan to go anywhere. Totally free and happy, the man and the woman are completely uninterested in any kind of progress.

  God, who really has done His best to get it right and boil everything down to human dimensions, is so upset that He takes a day off to think things through. Surely the result of all His effort can’t just be having to spend years watching them frolic aimlessly between the four rivers which He, to be on the safe side, has laid down around His paradise? As he ponders a way to force some development, God looks out over everything He has created. It’s an obvious improvement. First there was only chaos; now He has a choice between heaven and earth, land and water, light and dark, man and woman. At first anything was possible; now, at least, a number of things have been set down. How weird really, He thinks, the more you hem things in, the more things come to be. The more limitations you impose, the more possibilities you create.

  Only now, when He steps back to observe from a distance, does He discover a pattern: everything new comes from restriction! The earth arose by limiting heaven; land was created by pushing back water; darkness, by gathering light. As soon as you establish the one, the other appears. As if limits on the elements’ freedom forced them to assert themselves against the rest. Creation, He now realizes, is nothing more than the continual limiting of things.

  When things are divided, they multiply. They have less space, but that is exactly why they develop! This simple principle forms the heart of His new plaything.

  Before, He did all the limiting and dividing by Himself, but once human beings learn to make distinctions, they can set to work, godlike, on their own. After all, He’s got better things to do. What He needs is something to give progress a boost, something to get people moving on their own. The idea is so simple and so brilliant that He can’t understand why it’s taken Him so long to come up with it. Without further ado, He separates good from evil. By defining them, He creates them. Never could one have existed without the other.

  Now all He has to do is let those two in paradise know that henceforth their joyf
ul liberty is divided, that they have to choose between two new possibilities and be judged according to their choice. To play it safe, He points out a tree, one tree out of all the others, bearing the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil. At the same time—and this betrays a master’s touch—He forbids the eating of it.

  Lo and behold: His plan works. The ban itself immediately creates the desire to break it. Human thoughts are no longer free; they’re limited to good and evil. He’s hardly turned His back before these new powers join battle for the human mind. And when the man and woman can no longer stand it and taste the forbidden fruit, precisely as God expected, He feigns mortal offense and kicks them across the border.

  Dazed, the people turn to look at the limitation imposed upon them. With paradise forbidden, they begin to long for it, and start to create their own.

  “Well done,” He shouts after them. “Go forth and multiply!” He tries not to laugh, because what He really means is, “Go forth and divide.” That, after all, amounts to the same thing.

  And so humanity gets its start. God’s role in it is neither greater nor harsher than putting out a nightingale’s eyes to make it sing.

  Nor is the result less sweet to His ears. No sooner have the people had intercourse than their children are divided too, without any intervention from God. From now on, He only has to bother with them in passing—to relieve the boredom of a dull afternoon, for instance—and His interventions are invariably for their own good, limiting their freedom still more, in order to help them progress.

  Like the time He forces all life back onto an ark. Bobbing around amid the deluge, mankind not only develops a taste for animal husbandry but also the will to survive. Or His contribution to Babylon, in which He splits the language everyone understands and limits each nation to its own tongue, making everyone learn to mime and gesticulate. From Abraham He takes food; from Moses, land. He is like the banks of the river through which the history of nations flows.