Director's Cut

by Arthur Japin

  At that very moment, a young blond officer emerged from the Via della Croce, carrying a big packet of waffles under his arm, from Forlari’s, the best in Rome. Delicious sponge pastry, icing all round, filled with brandied raisins—wonderful. I jumped off the back of the truck and ran up to him with outstretched arms. “Wolfgang, Wolfgang!” I shouted with great emotion, as if we had lost touch with each other a long time ago, throwing my arms around him as if I’d missed him terribly. One truck slowed for a moment, but no one opened fire. Then it drove on, the poor boys herded in the back like sheep headed for the slaughterhouse. The officer dropped his waffles in fright, trying to explain to me that his name wasn’t Wolfgang. I apologized and walked into the Via Margutta as calmly as I could. I entered the first antiques shop I came to. It was a small shop, but I spent an hour frantically studying its wares. I think the owner understood. He didn’t say a word. I just walked back and forth between mirrors in enormous rococo frames. The whole time, I could only think one thing: I’m saved, I’m saved!

  Ever since, I’ve put my faith in the moment. The tighter a person is squeezed, the better his solutions.

  Gala stays in her room for days, as if the war were raging outside instead of in her head. All this time, she waits by the telephone. She tries to read but can’t concentrate. She tries to sleep but can’t stop thinking. She tries to be angry with Snaporaz. She is angry with herself because she knows she’ll forgive him the moment the phone rings.

  It doesn’t ring. Or rather, it rings only once. It’s Maxim. He’s made it to the mountains and wants to tell her all about his adventures. He detects agitation in her voice. He doesn’t impose, wishes her goodnight, and hangs up, knowing she wants to keep the line free. At the end of day three, Gala finally thinks of food. There’s nothing in the house. She dashes out to the supermarket just before closing time. Altogether she’ll be gone for no more than ten minutes. The chance that the director will call in that time is negligible. Gala nonetheless panics in the checkout line. She pushes through in such a wild hurry that she can’t find anything smaller and astonishes the checkout girl by throwing down a fifty-thousand-lira note and then running off without waiting for the change.

  It’s almost seven! What a ridiculous time not to be home. All Italians are at home at seven o’clock. If Snaporaz wants to call, of course he’ll choose a time when he knows that every normal person is sitting in their living room. What possessed her to go out now, of all times? She takes off sprinting, only to teeter on her high heels. She kicks them off, stuffs them into a bag, and ignores the traffic to run barefoot across the Piazza Ungheria, all the while cursing her own stupidity and then Maxim, who could have done this shopping if he hadn’t been off sliding around on those stupid skis. While she runs, her panic becomes dejection, and though she doesn’t slow down for the sharp gravel on the garden path, she is now so thoroughly convinced that she has missed Snaporaz’s call that she sticks the key into the lock without listening to see whether she might catch a final tinkle. She flops down on the bed, opens a bag of chocolates, and wolfs them down without so much as tasting them.

  She’s sound asleep when the telephone finally rings. It’s eleven thirty at night and she’s lying fully dressed on her bed between the shopping bags. It rings seven or eight times before she wakes with a start. She shoots up. In two seconds, all the words she has spent the last couple of days rehearsing fall into place: a cool greeting, then a joke to give a relaxed impression, followed by something warm and affectionate before at last consenting to whatever the great man might propose. She reaches for the receiver but, just when she is about to pick it up, she hesitates. After all, she shouldn’t seem too keen. She lets it ring twice more; she doesn’t want me to think she’s hanging around at home waiting for a call. Whatever the reason, when she finally answers, I have just hung up.

  “I’m a silly old man,” I tell myself. I’m actually relieved I didn’t get her on the line and make a fool of myself with the guarded declaration of love I have been practicing before the mirror. I knew it: a woman like Gala doesn’t sit home waiting for a bald old man. She’s zooming around the city in an open sports car, pursued by a horde of admirers on motorinos. She’s dancing to the rhythm of the bongos somewhere in Caracalla’s baths, her silhouette visible under the arches, harried by the flames of a gypsy who is juggling with fire.

  I’ve had fewer affairs than people think or the newspapers write. But they happened, and all were equally dear to me. Some must have been exceptional, but when I look back, they all start to seem the same. I was never heroic or shameless and self-assured like other men, but I was never cowardly or childish either. Self-confidence is something you expect in the young, but my relations with women have only grown simpler with the years. Romanticism aside, a man, as he grows older, does build up a certain routine. The awe and emotion you feel the first time a woman undresses before you is so miraculous that you assume that you will always feel it, no matter how often you are allowed to witness this mystery. You cannot possibly imagine a limit to the number of times that your lust will fight for precedence over gratitude and tears. But delight is finite. It slips surreptitiously away, and by the fiftieth or hundredth time, perhaps later, it’s gone. It’s not your desire that diminishes, just your astonishment that there’s someone who wants to satisfy it. The love is no less genuine, only your surprise at finding it reciprocated. This is not an act of will: quite the opposite, you’d much rather feel that youthful unease, that piercing doubt, as if everything depended on the other. You can pursue it in the arms of one woman after the other, more passionately every time, but each subsequent embrace only makes its absence more palpable. This is the source of the vague sorrow behind our smiles.

  It gets easier, requires less effort, every time. More casual, and you’re less patient. If this is boredom—and I doubt it is, because it’s still just as exciting and necessary—but if it is boredom, it’s the same mild variety you cannot help but feel, as you grow older, observing new generations; the weary tenderness with which you watch their endless energy discovering everything you yourself have long known and experienced and seen too many times. It’s not that you’re inured to it; you just don’t have the time. How many hours are wasted on doubt and diffidence, admiration and false modesty? With each passing year, I make less allowance for all that. Life just happens to be coming to an end, and that spurs you to get down to business. Why stand on ceremony when every creak of the springs sends you jumping up to make sure Death isn’t sitting at the foot of the bed? With its impatience, death reduces all love to the essence.

  But this time it’s different. It’s as if things are about to happen again for the first time. I’m so scared that I might miss out on the happiness being offered to me that everyone, even Gelsomina, becomes an annoyance. I’m rude, as if everything besides Gala were only a distraction from life. I lie awake nights, exulting in my nervousness. My heart skips beats, as if I’d embarked on a completely unknown adventure; as if I knew nothing more about women than that they have breasts like overripe pumpkins, like those of la Saraghina, who had to use both hands to lift them out of her blouse, one at a time, to show them to me and my schoolmates, who were waiting among the piled-up deck chairs on the beach.

  It took the whole weekend for me to summon up the courage to phone Parioli. I spent three days imagining all possible reactions, from fury to scorn to pity. In one of my dreams, Gala was down on her haunches beside a gigantic telephone, wagging her tail like the dog from His Master’s Voice, but as soon as I mentioned my feelings for her, she growled and leapt upon the phone and crushed the receiver between her jaws like a chicken bone. The only thing I hadn’t thought of was the possibility that she wouldn’t answer. Whereas that was the most obvious of all. A girl like her has better options than a man who keeps his teeth on the bedside table.

  “Gala!” I shout. “Answer, please, Galeone, my delicious Galetta!” But there is no reaction on the other end of the line. I’m momentarily relieve
d to have been spared the indignity of a rejection. I embrace Gelsomina and treat her to dinner at Canova’s. For ninety minutes, I tell myself that it was a close shave and all for the best. I order asparagus from Pozzuoli when she settles on gilthead bream from Lake Lucrino. We laugh and say how much we love each other and how happy we are that we bumped into each other fifty years ago. It is heartfelt and overpowering. She’s convinced that it was the work of God; I say it was Pum Pum the clown, whose tuba exploded with such a bang at the Winter Circus that my sweetheart jumped up out of her chair and thereby let me wrap a protective arm around her for the first time. For dessert, they bring us one of those pyramid-shaped cheeses from Sarsina. As I cut it, I’m overcome by the intense meaninglessness of our lives—not in the usual way, but as a sudden paralysis that drains away all hope and vigor, as if a hole had been punched in my midriff. Gelsomina sees it, of course. She notices every twist of my mouth and every artery that throbs in my throat or temples. She grabs my hand and squeezes it to comfort me. She thinks that, in the euphoria of being together, my thoughts have turned to our daughter, plunging me into grief, just as she still mourns for our little girl every day.

  “We’ll see her again! We’ll see her again!” she whispers, choking.

  Amid this madness, my heart leaps at those words. Defying my judgment, it fantasizes about Gala. She emerges with wet hair and lifts her hands to wave hello.

  “Until then, love is all that matters!” Gelsomina comforts me, so moved that tears are trickling down her cheeks. Panicking, as if about to be consumed by shame, I wriggle free from her embrace and reject the love I do not deserve. In the process, I knock over my wineglass. The cheese floats off the table. We take advantage of the consternation that follows to make our escape. Outside, Gelsomina wraps her short arms around my fat body and lays her head on my shoulder. Holding each other, we walk home like aging lovers.

  As soon as I can, I call my friend Marcello. I’ll explode just like that clown’s tuba if I don’t talk to someone about Gala. Marcellino is in Paris with his mistress and their daughter. Though I try to explain the situation as frivolously as possible, he takes it very seriously.

  “When an extramarital relationship takes more energy than it gives,” he says, “you have to stop it.”

  “But we don’t have a relationship,” I exclaim, telling him that all that’s happened is that Gala wanted to swim in the rain.

  I hear his tongue click against his teeth with concern.

  “I’ve only heard you talk about a woman that way once before,” he says, and we both know who he means. “Have you told her anything?”

  “There’s nothing to tell.”

  “That’s the biggest threat to a wife, Snapo. You can’t stop nothing.”

  I spend the rest of the afternoon trying to draw. I fill seven large pages with caricatures, sketches for a set, and ideas for a cartoon. One after the other, I tear them up. I can’t do it, because, for the first time in my life, instead of wanting to create images, I want to dodge them.

  Maxim now looks better than ever. It’s insufferable. He’s tanned as a stevedore and his hair has grown even blonder in the mountains of Cortina. He spent days skiing, and thanks to his training at the theater school he turned out to be a natural. When he walks into the room in Parioli, it’s as if the sun follows him in, shining through the hall and gleaming around his shoulders like a halo; he looks like Ben-Hur arriving to visit his mother and sister in the leper cave. Nobody would be surprised if there were cellos and violins playing. He has missed his friend terribly and longingly calls out her name. He tears the curtains aside and throws open the windows, but our hero is too late. Mouth open, eyes rolled back, Gala is lifeless on the bed she has soiled.

  He picks her up, not tenderly, but annoyed and impatient. He walks furiously into the shower, her limp body in his arms, and aims the cold water at her face. After a few seconds, he feels her chest expand with a jerk as she gasps for air. She seeks a foothold on the slippery tiles. She turns her face away to breathe, but he forces it back into the jet of water. She coughs, clears her throat, almost choking, but he is unrelenting. He’s played this role so many times. He covers her mouth with his lips and blows his breath into her lungs. He doesn’t loosen his grip until she’s adopted his rhythm. She is still too weak to stand, and he is exhausted. The water streams down their cheeks. Embracing, they slip down to the floor. There they stay, shivering and shaking from the cold.

  For a few days, it seems as if nothing has changed. Maxim and Gala are together all day long, just as they were in the first few months after their arrival. He spoils her in all kinds of ways. Until the pain has worn off and her wounded tongue can bear solid food again, he walks to Giolitti every few hours for a large tub of ice cream. She must have omitted her medicine for three or four days to suffer a grand mal of this magnitude, but Maxim doesn’t make the slightest allusion to her negligence. I have to support her, he thinks, just as she supports me. After all, I can just as easily accuse myself of anything I reproach her for. He doesn’t ask about Snaporaz, but she tells Maxim everything by doing her utmost not to mention him. And just this week, the director is on hundreds of walls all over the city. The news of his special Oscar has leaked out and they see him staring at them wherever they go from posters pushing the latest issue of Gente, whose lead article is a major interview with him. Every time Maxim sees one, he has to resist the urge to add vampire teeth, horns, and a forked tail.

  To escape Snaporaz’s eyes, Maxim leads Gala into subterranean Rome. Their days there are happy. They discover the Mithraeum beneath the San Clemente and explore the cellars of Caracalla. In the sacred catacombs along the Appia, they shake off the guide and the group and wander through endless corridors, as unruly as I was in ’32, when I strayed from my parents there and got lost. Shrieking with excitement, they follow the flame of a cigarette lighter deep under fields until they reach the tenements of Tor Marancia, where they finally emerge through a trapdoor beside a soprintendenza shed in the Via Annunziatella.

  Once their eyes have adjusted to the daylight, the first thing they see is the Gente poster, but Snaporaz’s grin is already hidden behind a leaflet for Circus Orfei, whose current attraction is Mimil the clown. Gala seems indifferent to what’s left of Snaporaz. To make sure he’s got the old Gala back and that things between them are the way they were before, Maxim takes her out of town for a few days. Arm in arm, they wander through the excavations in Cerveteri, cheerful and carefree as the Etruscans portrayed there in their tombs, dancing and diving and swimming with dolphins. In Volterra, Maxim and Gala linger before one of countless urns on which a couple are depicted entwined on their deathbed, grinning with satisfaction, and as if reading their script my main characters whisper something to each other: that they would be happy if they too could enter eternity just as contented and united.

  Little Chicken

  “It’s him,” shouts a frantic Geppi. “In my house! He’s inside, but he could walk outside any minute now.” She’s wearing a moth-eaten party dress that clings to her like a sausage skin. Copper mirror in one hand, rouge brush and kohl pencil in the other, the concierge patters through the basement searching for the best light. She elbows the raggedy Maxim and Gala, who have just returned from a long weekend among the tombs near Pitigliano, out of her way.

  “One of your lovers visiting again?” Maxim teases.

  Geppi lowers her mirror and looks at him solemnly.

  “Not just my lover, but the lover of all Italian women.” Her makeup gleams in a ray of sunshine. Her skills as a cosmetician date from her days supplementing her income with part-time employment in Testaccio funeral parlors. “Marcello’s visited our bedrooms more often than our husbands, if only in our dreams.”

  “Marcello … the Marcello?”

  “More often than our husbands, I tell you, and with more passion! Good Lord, just the thought makes me sweat like a whore in church.”

  She turns her back on Maxim and lifts up her
hair. He gets to zip up the dress that fitted her in her youth.

  “But why is he visiting you?” asks Gala.

  “Not me, sunshine; no, the days that men were connoisseurs are gone forever. But it’s almost as good: he’s here for you. Just for you! Imagine, Marcello here to pick you up! Oh, the things that Signor Gianni manages.”

  “Gianni’s sent him?”

  “Who else? Now tell me again that our benefactor isn’t a saint?”

  Gala grabs Maxim’s arm. After the familiarity of their friendship, the idea of having to live up to expectations comes as a shock. She soon gathers her wits. The territory might not be safe, but she has long since scouted it out. She knows what to do. There’s no time to waste. Her nervous frisson is what an understudy feels a few hours before the performance when she’s asked to save the day by replacing the lead. She snatches Geppi’s mirror, holds it a little to one side to coax her reflection out from behind her black spot, and sees her worst fears confirmed.

  “He can’t see me like this.”

  Gala nervously plucks at the wisps in her hair. The idea of appearing unprepared before a film star and heartbreaker like Marcello makes her forget that there’s more hope for her than for Geppi.

  “Just look at me, it’s out of the question. What will he think?”

  “Out of the question,” Maxim growls, “and I’ll tell him so.” Her insecurity nettles him. Just when he thought he’d recovered the Gala he loves—just when she was finally becoming herself again! For the past few days, on their trip, he was free to be proud of her, as he always had been before. He’s been showing her off. When they walked arm in arm, he enjoyed the looks of passers-by, and when they shouted “Complimenti alla mamma!” Maxim gloated, as if he personally had brought her into the world. And when, as happened several times a day, drooling boys climbed off their scooters, or middle-aged gentlemen got out of their racing cars, he didn’t intervene but waited avidly for the shrewd and disdainful barbs Gala unleashed. As the rejected men slunk off kneading their crotches, he demonstratively claimed his love with a slow French kiss, arrogant and satisfied as if the compliment had been his.