Director's Cut

by Arthur Japin

  “Take it easy now, my little darling, it won’t be long now.”

  The flashes begin at unpredictable intervals, slowly at first, here, then there, but soon, from every direction, there comes a barrage of light.

  I break off the obligatory post-Oscar photo session because all that flashing is making me sick. As the tension fades, I start to feel my body again. I don’t have a headache, but my head feels like an overinflated balloon. I feel like returning to our hotel immediately, but Gelsomina looks beautiful and, more than anything else, I want this to be her night. I realize it’s not quite responsible, but we plunge into the festivities anyway, along with Marcello and the mother of his daughter, a great French actress who needs cheering up because she was nominated but didn’t win. People come up to Gelsomina all evening. They compliment her for having such a wonderful husband and claim they could feel our love when I addressed her in my thank-you speech. They are invariably Americans, but it doesn’t occur to Gelsomina to doubt them, and I know how important it is to her to show our love once again, indisputably, before the eyes of the world.

  It’s already morning by the time we get to bed.

  “Ah, my Snaporaz, what a life we’ve had!”

  I take her in my arms. Too happy to make love, we listen to our breathing. It’s been synchronized for half a century.

  “Can’t you believe in God now,” she asks, “after all this?” She soon falls asleep. I kiss her once again without waking her, but almost in the same instant Gala springs to my mind. I can’t compare them, but she too will be proud. I send her a kiss and have no doubt that it will reach her. Even this far away, she will feel my love. I feel it myself, surging through my veins, as if trying to burst free. Love is pounding in my temples. The excitement keeps me awake. What can it mean? I jump out of bed, once again too quickly, and have to stand still for a moment until the room stops spinning. Then I pull open the curtain. A whole battery of lamps flash. When I can see again, I make out a crowd of paparazzi. I was the one who came up with them. I put those people on the Via Veneto. I hung cameras around their necks and used them in my film. They have pursued me ever since. Can there be any better proof that reality is no more than an imitation of the imagination? The journalists must be standing on a cherry picker, because our suite is on the top floor of the Beverly Hilton. Someone is holding up a sign reading CONGRATULATIONS, SNAPORAZ! I wave, somewhat muddled, glad that, despite the heat, I’d put on my pajama coat. I pull it down as low as possible. My besiegers slide open the window and bombard me with questions. I try to close it again, but they’re too strong for me. Someone steps into the room. It’s Philastus Hurlbut. I tell him to leave, but he refuses and insists that I come for a ride on his Snaporama right now, in the middle of the night. I grab him by the collar and drag him to the door. When I open it, I see a red scooter waiting in the corridor. It’s not a real one, but a carnival wagon, part of the attraction he envisages. There are another twenty identical wagons behind me, and all kinds of people, adults and children, are climbing into them with the paparazzi, shouting impatiently for me to hurry because they are curious and want to get started.

  “Tiruli, tirula,” they sing.

  Their nervous excitement is infectious. Danger really is seductive; otherwise nobody would ever get on a roller coaster. I hesitate. In my entire life, I have never resisted temptation, so why would I start now, right at the very end?

  “Pitipo, pitipa!”

  I climb onto the Vespa in my pajama coat. The vinyl seat is cold on my bare bottom. I glimpse myself in the mirror. My head is a balloon. It’s about to burst. I want to untie the knot and fly away, but the scooter is already moving. My life’s work reduced to a couple of minutes. The paparazzi’s cameras flash off the chrome. Pins prick my stretched skin. Blinded, I ride away from the room where Gelsomina lies sleeping and, with horrifying speed, disappear forever down the black hole of the hallway.

  PART FIVE

  Director’s Cut

  You see that it’s dark.

  You hear that it’s quiet.

  That’s not to say there’s nothing to see or hear.

  It’s a piece of unexposed film. The camera is rolling.

  You see the absence of light.

  You hear the lack of sound.

  That’s how I’m experiencing myself now. Where I am, I am no one. I still am, I’m just no longer someone. I’m not dead; I don’t believe that. Dead means not living.

  I’m just absent.

  I’m not there.

  I’m missing.

  I’ve lost myself.

  In me and around me is emptiness. Not that I have infinite space. The framing is very clear. Only through feeling my limitations do I experience the nothingness within and beyond them.

  They are the first lines a cartoonist draws to divide up his page. His sheet of paper is no longer blank, but he has neither picture nor story.

  Let me start again.

  I’m lying in my own studio, Studio 5, where I shot all my films. Mounted on the wall behind me is an enormous canvas representing a blue sky.

  I’m lying in front of it.

  From the very first page.

  Those are the facts.

  I can’t vouch for the rest, because where I am everything is equally true and untrue. I made up this screenplay from beginning to end and wasn’t lying for a moment. The characters really existed. I was one of them. It is, taken as a whole, a faithful autobiography. The only question is: whose?

  Something that didn’t happen is not necessarily untrue.

  That’s cinema for you: you know it’s impossible.

  That doesn’t mean you can’t see it.

  Dreams are exactly the same. That’s why my life could never have happened anywhere except within these four walls.

  After the Oscar ceremony, I apparently became unwell. No doubt. I always said I wouldn’t enjoy the trip. I simply belong in Italy. So that’s where they shipped me.

  I opened my eyes in the clinic on Monteverde. I was lying in bed. On the ceiling above my head, there was an enormous painting of Gelsomina’s smile. At least that’s what I briefly thought, but it was Gelsomina herself, leaning over me, ecstatic to see my pupils constricting. She kissed my forehead and squeezed my hand, which she was holding as if it were an object whose ownership we were disputing, and which she had no plans to relinquish.

  I wanted it back, but I couldn’t get it to move. That squeezing was starting to hurt. I shouted indignantly that she had to learn to make do with her own hands, but I couldn’t bring out a sound. I tried again, but couldn’t move my lips or my voice box. I couldn’t even expand my chest to give breath to my fury.

  That was when I realized that the direction had passed to someone else.

  It still took days for me to figure out what happened. I’ve always been used to the strangest dreams pressing themselves upon me, but this time it had happened in reverse. I myself had ended up in one of those dreams. I sit inside like a spermatozoon inside an ovum, surprised at his luck. It was an incredible journey, but he alone made it in. But once he realizes that the ovum has closed off behind him, he starts swimming whichever way he can. He can’t believe that this is it. Happiness is always like that. The more he bumps into the cell’s wall, the more he wonders whether there weren’t any better eggs. Too late. The cell has already begun to divide.

  With all my might, I struggle to awaken from my coma. But reality has closed around me. All I can do is bump my head against it.

  I can’t possibly say how long I lay in Monteverde. It could have been a week, it could have been six months. The most unbearable thing about a coma is that everyone else knows more about what’s wrong than you do. They chatter away—“Watch what you say, madam, you never know how much they can understand”—but never think to tell you the time, the day of the week, or how long you have to go.

  Besides Gelsomina, I didn’t recognize a soul. Every day, a whole procession of nursing staff passed by my bed. They were alway
s the same ones, but I didn’t remember their faces. Eventually, I succeeded in remembering details, just as, in a circus cavalcade, you remember last year’s acrobat less for her spectacular stunts than for the way the Lycra folds sparkle in her crotch.

  I remember the calluses on the fingers of a night nurse and the goatee of a professor who did regular rounds with his female students. When they bent over me, the fabric around their buttons pulled so tight that I thought they were going to burst out of their white uniforms. I’m convinced that those girls didn’t come because I was so medically interesting, but only for a chance to gawk at me. I hurled obscenities at them in Romagnolo, but they didn’t hear a word and continued to practice catheter insertion.

  After the official announcement that I had suffered a stroke, the clinic was besieged. People climbed trees in the hope of a heartrending photograph. A journalist from Il Messaggero disguised himself as a nurse to steal one of my electroencephalograms, but the editors found it too shocking to print. I couldn’t care less. I see it as a compliment that a paparazzo like that wanted a souvenir of the brain from which he sprang. But I regretted the whole uproar for Gelsomina.

  The sorrow exacerbated her own condition, but she still came to see me every day. She was veiled, to deprive the photographers of their entertainment. To make things even more dramatic, our fiftieth wedding anniversary arrived. On that day, she tried even harder to make herself beautiful, even though she had no idea whether I could actually see her. She bent over me and slowly raised her veil coquettishly. Perhaps she hoped that the shock of her beauty would succeed where the medical intervention had failed. The machines did not, however, indicate any increase in brain activity. Disappointed, she sat beside me, pulled the sermons of Antonio Vieira out of her bag, and seized the opportunity to read to me from them.

  “It’s your anniversary,” I say every year, “not mine.” It’s a joke, but she’s never laughed. Because it’s true. The marriage is hers, not mine. This year, of all years, I had resolved to surprise her by saying that this time, just once, since she insisted, it could be our wedding anniversary. Just to see her face. I did try, but it was too much. She didn’t even look up from the holy words on her lap. I couldn’t bear it and concentrated all the will power I could muster on my tongue.

  “Spri bilissiti,” was all I managed. “Spri bilissiti!” But it seemed to mean more to her than all the expensive jewelry I had given her over the years.

  From then on, my memory began to recover. The first to come back in her full glory was Gala. She appeared with wet hair clinging to her bare shoulders. I regretted my paralysis more than ever. Every day, I tried to recognize hers among the faces appearing at my bedside. I saw many dear friends, but no sign of Gala. If everyone I had ever known was coming to visit, where was she? I eventually started to wonder whether she had really existed. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d imagined someone so vividly that I accidentally set an extra place at the table. The sudden idea that Gala might not really exist made me depressed and lonely, which was so disastrous in my condition that I suffered a relapse and was forced to spend days in intensive care. That is where I began to concentrate on Gala’s story.

  Just as I build a feature film around a brief dream, I constructed a life from impressions. It was easy for me to summon up my memories of the episodes of our own love, but I added scenes from before I knew her, like her very first seizure at the flower auction, to understand how she came to love me so much. I effortlessly invented all of the foregoing, even the many scenes of Maxim and Gala, which I could not possibly have known about. Their thoughts popped into my mind perfectly formed, as if they were characters in one of my films. That’s how close my camera got to them. When I saw them lying in bed, I saw their imperfections in sharp focus. I even discovered stretch marks on the side of the male body I have never seen naked. These young people have become so real that it’s impossible for me to believe that Gala and Maxim are merely part of one of my innumerable unfinished projects. Much of what I imagine about them must be true.

  Now, in the time I have left, all I have to do is synchronize their story with mine.

  “If you expect something, you’re just setting yourself up for disappointment,” Sangallo explains on the way home from the Sistine Chapel. The experience has shaken the viscount so much that he has canceled lunch at the Checchino. In his apartment, he tosses his coat onto the sofa and disappears into the kitchen.

  Maxim had to insist on accompanying the old man upstairs. He can’t understand the viscount’s sudden sorrow and feels like he needs to cheer him up.

  “But what’s so disappointing?”

  “I had hoped to see more, but I saw less,” Sangallo explains, returning with a lovely old Chianti. He clamps it between his legs but doesn’t have the strength to pull the cork. The bottle slips out of his grip. He curses. He’s hurt himself. He turns away to conceal his struggle to keep himself under control.

  “You saw less of the whole, but all those details!”

  “No,” says Sangallo, “you don’t understand. It’s my eyes. They’re deteriorating. Deteriorating fast. Soon I’ll have to see paintings the way I listened to symphonies when I was a child: by imagining the separate notes and combining them as beautifully as I can in my mind.”

  “How awful,” says Maxim. He picks up the bottle, opens it, and pours the wine, but the dislodged sediment has spoiled it.

  “The cornea is falling apart like an old rag. That’s all there is to it. I try to accept it. Some days it’s easier than others. I have a little time left. I try to make the most of it.”

  “And then?”

  Sangallo’s mouth droops in an exaggerated frown. He slips a big flower into his lapel, lets his shoulders slump like a Pierrot’s, and starts a Marcel Marceau impression. He sticks his arms out in front of him and measures out an imaginary room that is closing in on him. The expression of surprise on his scared face is so vivid that Maxim bursts out laughing. The viscount pretends that the laughter has attracted his attention in the darkness and comes toward him with his hands outstretched. The old fingers touch the young face. Engrossed, they glide over the forehead, down the cheekbones and the dimples in his cheeks. Then Sangallo acts out sudden recognition and curls his lips up into the widest of smiles.

  They stand there like that, stomach to stomach, still smiling. The show is over but Sangallo’s fingers are still touching Maxim’s face. They start to move again. At first, just trembling. Then cautiously caressing, brushing through his hair and coming to rest on his neck. The old man’s fragility is irresistible.

  “I sat at so many long tables as the youngest,” says Sangallo. “Between the courses, I was too impatient to remain sitting. I ran around and crawled between the legs of the adults. At so many parties and meetings I was the junior. What went wrong?”

  There is nothing Maxim would rather do than comfort him. He feels a strong urge to accommodate him. It would be so natural. He could kiss Sangallo now. It would be easy to do and would make the old man so very happy.

  But he doesn’t. It’s almost unforgivable, but he isn’t yet strong enough to put himself to one side.

  At that moment, the older man takes the initiative, pulling Maxim up against him and pressing his lips against his.

  Maxim pushes him away gruffly.

  “No!” he snaps. Then, when he’s free again, more gently, “I’m sorry.”

  He walks to the corridor and presses the button for the elevator. While he is waiting, Sangallo appears in the doorway behind him.

  “Don’t worry,” he says. “I’ll stay the same person I’ve always been, it’s just the world around me that’s disappearing.”

  “Poor Rome!” sobs Geppi. “First Hannibal and now this!”

  She has collapsed amid the potatoes she was peeling on the kitchen table when the news reached her. When Maxim comes in, she looks up and stretches her hands out to him. He has no choice but to hug and comfort her. She comes up to his navel.

 
“Like autumn leaves our loved ones fall from the tree. All the people I have lost: parents, sisters, brothers, and finally … ah, such is life. You know it’s coming and if you can’t take it you shouldn’t have been here to begin with. One leaf after the other, until nothing remains but the bare trunk, not as lovely, but a lot stronger. And now this! This is really something else. What did we do to deserve it? Oh, Rome, poor old dear! This time they’ve taken an ax to the root.”

  She presses her wet cheeks against Maxim’s stomach. He picks potato peel out of her hair. She assumes that everyone knows why Rome is mourning, so it takes Geppi a while to realize that the young man doesn’t know about Snaporaz’s stroke.

  “Immediately after the Oscar ceremony! That’s right, it was just on the news. Collapsed in Marcello’s arms!”

  Maxim can think only of Gala. He must get to her before she hears it from someone else.

  “Ah, why didn’t the angels take me instead!” Geppi laments, as he tries to extricate himself from her grip. “I’ll pray for his recovery. The man has a Midas touch. And those gorgeous black curls of his!”

  “Black curls? But, Geppi, Snaporaz has been bald for years.”

  “Bald?” She pushes him away with contempt. “Already they’re sullying his name!” She raises a finger in the air and shouts after Maxim, “I tell you, our Snaporaz is tall and slim and incredibly handsome. Ah, our poor, poor dreams: who can save you now?”

  Gala doesn’t pick up the phone or open the door, so Maxim uses her spare key to enter her chapel. Has she heard already and left in a panic, or has she been away longer? Her bed hasn’t been slept in. Her suitcase, along with her best clothes, is gone. Everything indicates a planned departure. When did he last see her? Why didn’t he drop by yesterday evening? In less than five minutes, he has searched the room. He finds pieces of stained glass on the balcony.