by Arthur Japin
I have no other explanation for Gala’s lack of appetite for food. Almost casually, the thought took root that she could control the uncontrollable. She began to deny her body food. The whole process was gradually set in motion, a few steps forward, sometimes grinding to a halt, then creeping forward again. The result mattered less than the deprivation she had to undergo for its sake. The more she persevered, the greater the challenge. Each fainting fit, every bodily weakness, buttressed her spirit, activating an inner strength she never called on at any other time. By burning herself up, she increased her own value to herself.
People with a limited understanding of women explain this as an attempt at self-punishment. All they are trying to do is reward themselves.
I only know this: in the procession of the nuns of San Vincenzo, my happiness was nothing more than a guttering flame in a storm. As long as I kept it going, I was in charge of the whole world and, more importantly, of myself.
No one knows better than Gelsomina how badly truth and I get on. When I come home that afternoon, she just looks at me. That is enough for both of us. She doesn’t talk to me about her illness. Why should I worry her with Gala?
On the way home I bought a big present. It’s wrapped in shiny cellophane. It’s for Gelsomina. It’s her birthday tomorrow. I love her. I want nothing more than to hear how she’s doing—Is she in pain? Does she have hope?—but I still can’t bring myself to ask. She’s sitting by the window reading. I look at her. I think of how little time we have left together. We’ll grow a bit older. Then immeasurable sorrow will come; the days will ebb a little longer for one of us. A surge of affection washes over me.
But while I am filled with one thing, the other is there too. Behind my love, in the distance, Gala lights up like a dazzling beacon, making all shapes disappear. I hear myself fantasizing like an old fool about a possibility of giving my life a new direction.
“Last year, I celebrated my birthday in Berlin,” says Gelsomina, looking up from her book. “This year here. Where will I be for my next birthday?”
I don’t know, but I’ll do everything in my power to be with her. I don’t tell her that. No one knows better than Gelsomina how much love it takes to keep your mouth shut.
The world of Gala and Maxim’s youth most resembled the final scene of a fairy tale. Evil was vanquished. Nothing was impossible. The harness of rules their parents had grown up inside was like a suit of armor cracked and dented by war. Their children stretched, shucked off the pieces, and an entire generation left the nest with more hope than humanity had ever known. Youngsters meeting in the streets of Amsterdam flew into each other’s arms, regardless of whether they’d ever met, and celebrated their freedom by throwing off their clothes. They rolled naked over the lawns of the municipal park, smoking, dancing, and drinking, overseen by police officers with colorful tulips in their caps. Young people embraced free love with the partners of their choice and without any risk of the snare of parenthood, thanks to new discoveries; and when, toward evening, they grew tired of enjoying themselves, they leapt into the canal and swam to the city square. Astonished people saw this new generation on television screens all over the world, sleeping unembarrassed at the base of a phallic marble monument, heads resting on each other’s stomachs, flanked by two stone lions who watched over their dreams. In their songs, they praised freedom and love as if the two were inseparable. They tossed roses to soldiers and kissed their enemies, as if love had never caused a war.
When Maxim and Gala reached adulthood, this idyll was at its peak. For years, they had observed freedom weaving around them, fantasizing about the party that was going on everywhere, like children lying in bed listening to the music and laughter downstairs. When each of them, separately, was finally big enough to join the conga line, it turned out that it came easier to Gala than to Maxim. She shot out of her father’s embrace like a piece of soap from a wet fist. His strict upbringing produced exactly the effect he had intended when, to her astonishment, she discovered that her contemporaries saw the provocative attitude and impregnable erudition that had always been her defense against him as overwhelming and charming. She slipped effortlessly into student life and breathed deeply of the recognition and freedom she had so long lacked, two qualities that, for her, would always remain irretrievably linked.
Maxim had never really missed freedom. He was born in a big house, the only child of frightened parents whose lives had been laid waste by the war.
After their meeting, his father and mother agreed that happiness and Holland were incompatible. They swapped the country where war had devastated their lives for Italy, and married in St. Peter’s. The cities of their dreams were pale green, watery blue, pink; in the photo album, Maxim’s mother colored in the black-and-white life of Naples, Locarno, Rome, and Florence with Ecoline ink. Things couldn’t have been more beautiful. One photo shows her beaming, leaning out the window of Pensione Gasser in the Via San Nicolò da Tolentino, just behind the Piazza Barberini. Triumphant, she holds up a hand. In the setting sun, it casts a long shadow on the Roman wall, visible as a gigantic thumbs-up.
“That,” she always told Maxim, “was the moment we knew you were on your way.”
Soon after, winter won out over the wall heater. The parents had to think of their child. They went home and learned they were right.
Back in Holland, they shut themselves up in the house. In the hope of sparing Maxim their pain, they seldom took him out and only rarely invited people in, though other children almost never appeared. His father died young; his mother went out in the daytime, to earn a living; and Maxim had the house to himself. Isolated in the enormous attic, he constructed his own image of others and the world in which they lived. For a long time, this satisfied him. The possibilities of his own inner world seemed boundless, and that was why he took this for freedom. It was only much later that he realized that the real party was outside. When he threw open the shutters, he was so shocked by how violently real freedom attacked his imagined freedom that he recoiled and tried after all to creep away into his fantasies.
Despite all the students’ claims, they still valued the collective above the individual, in a way you otherwise find only in isolated mountain villages. Among them, Maxim’s behavior stood out as much as Gala’s, though he encountered incomprehension where she reaped admiration. If the others had been less self-obsessed, they could have easily coaxed him into their world. But they shrugged him off, announcing loudly that it was each individual’s duty to develop as an individual, regardless of how much lonely despondency might result.
Just when Maxim was about to commit himself permanently to this peculiar path, his eyes met Gala’s. She had always been kept on a tight rein, so she seemed free of all constraint; he, who had never been held back, despaired as to whether he’d ever dare to make a move.
“To flit from place to place! What a joy it is to move,” she said at that moment. “I would give my life for a night like this. To move!” And in these words, the two extremes recognized each other.
• • •
On the bed in their room in Parioli, Gala confides to Maxim the details of how she gave herself to Snaporaz: from the emotions that overwhelmed her when she felt the old man’s desire to the contractions of her lower body around his fingers. She laughs like a naughty child, shaking her head, blushing and gasping for breath, when she realizes that something she’d thought was impossible really has happened. A moment later, she shrugs off the realization, giggling at her own shamelessness. And all the while, she seeks reassurance in Maxim’s eyes, always wanting to know exactly what was right or wrong.
Maxim tells her everything is fine, though he can hardly take it all in. He struggles against a sorrow he can’t explain as his jealousy wrestles with his awe. This recklessness is precisely what he’s always admired in her, the thing he’s tried to emulate, which gave him the courage to face the world. How can he reproach her now for the very thing he’s always encouraged? Isn’t this what he’s alwa
ys aspired to? He is so preoccupied with himself that he can’t hear what she’s really asking.
“See?” he says after a while. “We can’t keep secrets from each other.”
“No,” Gala says, and decides not to upset him by recounting her meeting with Gianni.
Lightweight
People think that a man who loves more than one woman must divide his love between them. As if it’s a bottle that can fill only a certain number of glasses. The opposite is true. Love simply doubles itself. And again. And yet again. And every time there turns out to be enough for everyone. It’s a miraculous multiplication. But that’s the way it is with miracles: you don’t believe it unless you see it yourself.
One of the plans I peddled for years without interesting a single producer was for a film about a polygamist. Gérard Philipe in the lead. He’s constantly running back and forth between the families he has to support. Eleven, twelve, thirteen … He tries to cut back, but he can’t escape it. The more love he gives, the more he receives. Because that’s just the way life is. And the more love he receives, the more he can return. And sure enough, soon there’s enough for yet another family. So why not start a new one? He loves them all equally, and there’s still enough love to go around. He drinks of love as the sea consumes water, from all sides, all the while pouring it back into the rivers. Finally, his confessor officially declares that it is a miracle of charity. The whole thing comes out when it’s reported in the Osservatore Romano, but the women forgive him, because none of them has any cause for complaint. In the final scene, the poor man ascends to heaven before the assembled ecumenical council, lifted upon the hot air from the kisses blown to him by his lovers.
• • •
I call Gala first thing the next morning to discuss the film. We start seeing each other every day. She comes to my office or I pick her up. We have lunch. We laugh. Mostly that: we laugh for hours on end and then kiss like children who’ve been playing together and have to go home for dinner. “Ciao, Gala Galla! Gallalina, ciao!” I call after her, because she has made my life so light, waving both arms above my head, and when she’s almost out of sight, I jump into the air a couple more times to see her that little bit longer.
We don’t make love during those first weeks. We both want to, but I don’t have the nerve. How often has my interest in a woman started to wane after doing the deed? Almost always. Giving in is the surest cure for adultery. Of course, every minute I’m with her I’m on the verge, but fear restrains me. Everything will be over if I stumble. I shall never have another new love. And so we kiss, innocently, granting our love the time to gather strength. If I lose Gala, then I’ll have lost everything.
Every adulterous episode in my life was followed by profound calm and intense desire to be faithful to Gelsomina. My old love would flare up, burning like a wound desperate to heal as quickly as possible. I used to think that guilt was the reason for this increased intimacy. Or was it gratitude for the memories I retrieved? It may even have been relief, like that of a tearful schoolboy coming down from the mountains after his first mission with the partisans and making out his village in the first light of dawn. But it’s none of these. It’s not even faithfulness. It’s simply weariness, temporarily sated by adultery. Surrendering to something sure. Part of me, secretly, longs to return to that certainty at once, just as in the night before battle a recruit in the trenches considers fleeing homeward. He doesn’t do it, because he considers courage more important than survival. In the end, in my life, that’s how I’ve pursued all my adulterous encounters.
Our restraint becomes unsustainable by springtime. Unnoticed, love has besieged us, and Gala and I feel it edging closer with each passing hour.
I pick her up one day at the end of May. The moment she gets into the car, we burst into laughter, because it can only be a matter of hours before the mounting pressure forces us to rip the clothes off each other’s bodies. I drive straight to the Appia and park at Cecilia Metella’s tomb. We keep up the charade a little longer, walking at least a kilometer hand in hand, me lugging the picnic basket, her wobbling down the ancient cobblestones on high heels. Finally, between the tombs of Marcus Servilius and Seneca, we head into the field. For the first time in my life, I love someone because there really is no other option left. Then we eat and drink and start over again from the beginning. At last I take the napkin she’s used to dry her lips and draw a caricature of the two of us: me pursuing her, aroused to priapic proportions, she already casting off clothes in preparation. “Phew, finally!” she shouts.
If I could only be like Marcello! He follows his heart. If I ask him about his conscience, he shrugs, answering that each of us is responsible for his own life. Unfortunately, I don’t believe this. Quite the opposite. In love, each is responsible for the life of the other.
Throughout the spring and summer, Maxim seldom crosses my path. He holds back and I wait in the car to avoid bumping into him. But when I pick up Gala and she opens the door of the villa, I sense him waiting in the shadowy hallway. I imagine him before our meetings: picking out her clothes, ironing them, laying them out for her. She is nervous about seeing me and he says something to reassure her right before I arrive. On two separate occasions, I even see his hand give her bottom an encouraging slap, as if spurring a horse on before a hurdle.
He loves her too, but he can’t be a man for her in the Italian sense of the word. In this country, a man who doesn’t want to possess his woman fully can’t count on much sympathy. Every once in a while, I bring the conversation around to their friendship, usually because I’m jealous and want her to bend over backward to assure me that it can’t compare to her feelings for me, but sometimes because I really do want to understand how people can become so completely one that they let each other go.
The second weekend of July, I decide to take Gala to Rimini. I feel the need for her to see where I come from. She needs to know where I played and loved, and I want to introduce her to those of my childhood friends who are still alive. I only wanted my previous mistresses to love the man I’ve become, but it’s important for me that Gala love the boy I was as well. It’s too hot to travel in the daytime, so we arrange to eat at Mario’s on Friday afternoon before taking advantage of the cool evening to drive to Pennabilli, where we can spend the night at my friend Tonino’s.
We’ve just taken our seats when Mario comes to tell us that a young man wishes to speak to Gala. It’s Maxim. Out of politeness, I invite him to join us, but he refuses to sit down. He talks to Gala in their own language, but I understand that the small package he gives her contains the pills she needs and has once again forgotten. Is it any wonder I can’t stand him? I don’t like dogs or missionaries who work with lepers either. Why don’t they ever think about other people? I’m only human. That much dedication makes me feel small but aggressive. Something about martyrs arouses my contempt. Maybe Maxim annoys me because he’s so horribly reminiscent of Gelsomina. Is he religious as well? I wonder. I wouldn’t have felt more uncomfortable if she herself had appeared at our table. Thank God, the saint of the pillboxes retreats again without further ado.
“Do you know what it is, more than anything else?” Gala sighs, watching him with eyes overflowing with love. “Maxim and I are too alike to be a good couple.”
I can’t compare my love for Gala to any of my previous infatuations, except with the first, the love of my life, Gelsomina. Each gesture, each touch of the one recalls the caress of the other. I don’t think this has anything to do with Gala. I don’t believe that her love for me is any different from the love the others felt. It has to do with me. Each whispered word resonates with fate, as dramatically as it did that very first time. Then, because I knew that everything was about to begin; now, because I know that this is the end.
“You know what?” she said after that first lunch in Tivoli. “It’s raining. No one’s under the waterfalls. Let’s go swimming.”
This will be my last unbridled passion. There cannot possibly be
any doubt about that. My last chance to experience the tempestuousness of youth. It exhausts me, this passion of hers, but I do my best, I put on a bold face. And when I finally lay my hand on hers, as subtly as I can, trying to restrain it when I feel its caress beginning its descent from the gray hair on my chest, I do so with a sorrow that tears me apart, and the thought always flits through my mind: Ah, shall I let her have her way with me, because who could ask for a more beautiful death? But I stop her and tell her she’s wearing me out. She smiles, kisses one of my nipples, and lays her head against mine.
“Of course!” I exclaim. “Galla, come on, it’s cold, wet autumn weather, let’s take off our clothes!” It’s astounding to do what you want without a second thought, surrendering completely. That’s what I want. No shame. Together you’re so much stronger than anyone else, because no amount of reasoning can hold you back. That is what I am granted one last time.
That’s my only excuse.
One day, as we lie beside each other after making love, she suddenly bends over to kiss me on the forehead.
“You’ve always been a little boy!” she whispers.
I bury my face between her breasts, hanging full and heavy. I kiss them, bite them, put my lips on them and blow as if I’ve got hold of a tuba. Like an idiot, I make all those mad noises so that she won’t see that I can’t hold back my tears. My immaturity is my joy and my curse. My pride and my downfall. The treasure I draw on, my daily source of the will to live. I stride forth like a child, with the idea that the really important things are just about to begin. But it’s also the reason I could never be completely one with Gelsomina. She was like me, irresponsibly maladjusted to life. We saw that in one another and played together until the day she realized that the thing we’d always expected would never come. From then on, she didn’t need a playmate. She needed a man. Especially after the loss of our daughter. I couldn’t be that man for her. Since then, we still play the game, but she plays it like a parent with a child: Gelsomina puts on a show of false naïveté, seeing through my every move and letting me win. I accept my victory, but it gives me no pleasure because I feel that her love is so much greater. For her, winning is not as important as seeing me happy.