by Arthur Japin
The Monteverde doctors eventually decided I was strong enough for some recreation. I was hoisted out of bed, plopped down in a wheelchair, and pushed in endless circles around the hospital grounds. This ritual was repeated each morning and afternoon. En route, I feasted my eyes. A colorful group was convalescing in the garden. Some were sitting on benches singing simple songs with their nurses. Others practiced moving on the lawn, like jugglers warming up for a show, who keep going even when everything goes flying out of their hands. Most had suffered the same affliction as I had, and were recovering from a stroke or some other brain condition. Patients from the neurological and psychiatric wings entertained themselves together like healthy people on an excursion to an amusement park. Since I couldn’t play ball games or fly a kite, I was regularly parked in the gazebo. Through the bars of the fence, you could just make out the dome of St. Peter’s and the towers of the court. The other paralyzed patients were there to keep me company. We sat among the greenery like flowers gone to seed. Most of their mouths were agape, as if fate had struck them down in midsentence. Some looked around with big eyes, astonished that their film had become a photograph.
I knew that look.
As a young man, before I came to Rome, I briefly worked as a nurse. It wasn’t meant to be. I can’t stand the sight of my own suffering, let alone that of others. It was just to avoid military service. I was given a white coat and put to work in the psychiatric hospital in Bologna.
I had been there for less than a week and was starting to wonder whether I wouldn’t be better off at the front when a colleague called me into his office.
“If you hear music a bit later,” he said, “don’t be surprised. It’s a new patient.”
As soon as I stepped back into the corridor, I forgot his words. It was Wednesday, my turn to give Signora Fèfè her bath. I’d grown used to the sight of her sitting outside her room, crying day and night, but I dreaded the prospect of actually touching her. I was eighteen and didn’t know how to undress such a sorrowful woman. I talked to her as if she were a baby and tried to distract her by tickling her with the sponge, but nothing helped. Finally, I got so nervous that I could think of only two options: crying along or hitting her until she shut up. That was when she stopped and looked at me with surprise. She hadn’t done that before. I was afraid she’d read my mind, but something in the distance had attracted her attention.
“Here comes the band!” she gaily blurted.
Then I heard it too. It sounded like a military drum fanfare. I wrapped a big towel around her and we ran out into the corridor to see it.
The music was coming from a single person, the new patient, a youth who could imitate every instrument with no more than his mouth and his limbs. He was a virtuoso, and his music sounded almost exactly like the real thing. He marched through the hallways, as blissful in his universe as Fèfè was miserable in hers. They had withdrawn into a facet of themselves, the place they had found to go on living.
I took the woman’s hand and led her back to the bathroom, where I patted her dry. She started crying again. I decided to serve out my time as a nurse on that ward.
The insane are not slaves to fashion. The years don’t change them. They have an individualism you don’t find in the normal world. An individual is limited to a single self. The insane take it a step further and are limited to their obsessions. I have often been called mad. My obsessions are not only my reality, they are the basis of my films. I have drawn heavily on my experiences as a nurse. Later too, I often visited mental institutions. Everywhere I met the same characters. Their world terrified me, but it also inspired awe. It takes so much courage to let go of reality. I love their faces most of all. They hide nothing. That’s why you see the same grimaces in institutions all over the world. They move me because they are eternal. Beauty is fleeting, but ugliness is timeless.
I used the boy who was an orchestra in one of my films, fleetingly. The actor played him brilliantly but couldn’t hold a candle to the original, so we had to hire a military band to achieve the desired effect. I often think of him. He lets me know that the imagination is more than an escape. It is also a weapon. Even now, all I have to do is close my eyes to hear him approach.
He’s playing the Radetzky March. Beaming just as he did fifty years earlier in Bologna, he marches down the corridors of the clinic in Sicily. He passes Gala’s door. The noise wakes her. She thinks it’s a distant circus parade. Then she remembers where she is. Somewhere where anything’s possible. She is alone. She cautiously touches her face. Her head. She is no longer attached to any apparatus. She gets out of bed and feels the door. It opens. She sees the young man imitating the band at the end of the corridor. For a flash she catches his eye. The bliss on his face! She tries to follow but is intercepted by two male nurses, who escort her back to her room. That slight body between those two gorillas. The split in the hospital gown leaves her back exposed. Now that she’s barefoot, the curvature of her spine is clearly visible. Her hair is tangled. Her mascara runs when she cries. The nurses are friendly and promise to alert Dr. Pontorax. The oompah-pah dies away in the distance.
In the meantime, more and more flowers keep arriving, making my room almost impassable. They’ve added stands in the corners to accommodate them, but it’s not enough. They take them into the corridor at night. The white tiles, down the whole length of the hallway, are hidden behind tulips and roses. And a fresh load arrives every morning. With huge grins, the nurses carry them in: flowers, flowers, more flowers. Sometimes they read out the attached cards: some of the tributes have been sent from countries nobody’s ever heard of by people whose names are meaningless to me. And so I lie here among flowers of every conceivable variety, like a float on the corso, surrounded by all the flowers of the world.
“Missing?” asks Geppi.
“There was a struggle.”
“You think Gianni is capable of something like that?”
“You don’t?” Maxim asks scornfully.
Geppi turns down the gas and sits at the table with him. He is nervous. She takes his hands, awkwardly, as if it’s her problem as well. He pushes her away. He wants the pimp’s address, but she refuses to give it to him.
“Go ahead, keep defending him, like always.”
“I’m sure she’s fine,” she placates him. “Your Gala is enjoying a delicious dinner somewhere. By the sea. Under the palm trees.”
“Look who I am talking to about what it means to love someone,” Maxim says angrily.
She walks back to the stove and pours cream over the oyster mushrooms.
“That’s not in the cards for everyone,” she says calmly. “My Mario was even younger than me, and I’d just turned fifteen. One day, an uncle of mine showed up. He took me by the arm and led me away. My father walked with us until we’d left the village. I didn’t think he’d let me go. He stopped eventually. He didn’t know what to say. He held up his hand. Even before we’d left him behind, my father held up a hand and started waving. He stood like that until we reached a curve in the road and disappeared into the hills. I cried from fear. I screamed when they stuffed me into a wedding dress.”
“Why didn’t you refuse?” Maxim asks. He doesn’t have time for other people’s misery.
“Don’t you ever go to the movies?” Geppi shakes her head. “I’m talking about Calabria! If you give someone bad directions, your parents get your left hand in a box.” She dips her finger into the sauce to taste it, then wipes her hand on her apron. “Mario was a stranger. I was living in a town I’d never seen with a family who meant nothing to me. Then my baby was born. I gave him all my love.”
“You told me you didn’t have any children.”
“I always hoped my son would do me proud.”
She empties out a bag of tomatoes and tears off a piece of paper. She pulls a carpenter’s pencil out of a drawer. She sharpens it with a knife.
“But no matter how tightly you keep your eyes shut, you can’t pretend you’re asleep foreve
r.”
“Did he … die?”
Geppi shakes her head.
“He finally found a way to get out of that village.”
She licks the end of the pencil and writes something down.
“And he took me with him, the angel! Who am I to turn my back on him now? The way Gianni makes his money is nothing to be proud of, but it was our way out.”
She slides the paper over to him. Pontorax’s home address is written on it in big, rough letters.
That very evening, Maxim stands before a lava-stone mansion at the foot of Mount Etna. Only when he rings the bell does he realize that he hasn’t told anyone where he’s going. Why didn’t he alert the consulate? He spent his last penny on the flight. He doesn’t even have a plan. All he knows is that he’s not leaving the island without Gala. He hears footsteps behind the door. He feels in his pockets in vain for something he could use as a weapon. To be on the safe side, he does what men do in the movies and clenches his fists. Bring it on, he thinks. Ready for anything.
Except a samba party.
The girl who opens the door shakes her maracas to the rhythm of the mambo. She is a mulatta, dressed in two half coconuts and a filo dentale. Swaying her hips to a rhythm of her own invention, she leads the way, as Maxim does his best to follow the string between her buttocks.
In the back garden, a Brazilian carnival is in full swing. On the hillside terraces, Sicilian high society is dancing to the music of two samba schools that have been flown in from Recife with all their members and costumes.
“Welcome to the world of Cacão brasilão!” Mrs. Pontorax greets Maxim with a caipirinha as if he’s just another guest. She is plump, wearing the white bandanna and lace dress of a Candomblé priestess. “It’s my husband’s favorite TV show.”
“I need to speak to your husband urgently.”
“Is it about chocolate? Otherwise he’s not interested. Chocolate breasts, chocolate butts … Since that show started, he can’t think of anything else.”
A conga line interrupts her.
“I’m looking for a woman.”
“Well, feel free!” Mrs. Pontorax shouts while joining the end of the line. “There are plenty of beauties here tonight. The host of Cacão brasilão in person! Raffaella? Raffaella?”
Maxim forces his way through the guests, most of whom have opted for a colonial theme, which amounts to men in white linen suits and women with gold slave bangles. Wandering among them, naked extras are decked out as the indigenous gods of Bahia, wearing horns and skin painted red or blue. They jab at the merrymakers with tridents and hurry them along with thick leather whips.
Maxim finds the dottore near a pond at the bottom of the garden. He is unwinding in a swinging hammock, apparently drowning in the large open neck of his blouson. As soon as he realizes who Maxim is, he struggles to his feet, hindered by the hundreds of rustling, colorful ruches on his sleeves. The little man looks so unhappy in his gaucho outfit that Maxim abandons his resolve to use violence. What’s more, the doctor seems to brighten up when he asks about Gala.
“I have bad news for her,” says Maxim. “You must have heard. About Snaporaz.”
“Oh, is she a film lover?”
“Snaporaz is … He’s a friend of ours. I wanted to tell her before she hears it from someone else. Is she here?”
“She’s at my clinic. You know about her condition?”
“Her seizures? Yes, of course, I know all about them. Has she had one?”
“Late yesterday. I kept her under observation last night.”
“That was very kind of you, but it wasn’t necessary.”
“I thought it was.”
“We don’t need any advice.” Maxim sounds annoyed. “We’ve lived with her illness for years. I take full responsibility for her health.”
“Then you must blame yourself,” says Pontorax compassionately.
“Why?”
“Because it’s not just her neurological condition. Gala is malnourished.
Haven’t you noticed? There were even signs of dehydration, primarily due to excessive fluid loss in the feces.”
“The laxatives. She’s addicted to them. I know. I tried …”
“You failed,” interrupts Pontorax. “Dehydration disrupts brain function. The body reacts as it would in a crisis. It manufactures substances to lower the level of consciousness. In combination with her other medication, it can cause disorientation, anxiety, and depression.”
“I want to see her.” Maxim seeks Pontorax’s arm among the ruches. “Please. I have to go to her,” he begs. “I love her.”
The doctor appraises him.
“I can understand that,” he says. He offers Maxim an arm and leads him through the crowd that has gathered on the terrace, where a group of street kids from Rio is launching kites. They’ve tied small paper lanterns to the tails to make the cheerful colors stand out against the evening sky.
“I’m sorry about interrupting your party,” Maxim says as they climb into the limousine.
“I’m not,” Pontorax laughs, exiting the parking area in the wrong gear. “My wife thinks I share her predilection for big parties. That is a misunderstanding. One of many between men and women. I love beautiful women, of course, but this whole Brazilian rage leaves me cold. My wife happens to have gone to all this trouble. I prefer not to disabuse her. That’s less painful than the truth.”
The wind is too strong. Some of the lanterns have caught fire in the sky. The tails ignite like fuses and the kites go up in flames. Smoldering scraps float down on the mountain road on every side of the car.
“The more we love a woman, the less we see her as she is,” says Pontorax. “We think we know what our lovers want, but we could just as easily be wrong. Whose fault is that, the one who misunderstands or the one who no longer bothers to correct the misunderstanding?”
“I have to go to him!” Gala exclaims, breaking loose of Maxim’s embrace. She leaps from the hospital bed and holds her face under the tap. In three minutes, she is dressed and ready to go. She takes the news that Snaporaz is in a coma as a general takes a mobilization order. No tears, no doubt. She wants only one thing.
Maxim recognizes it.
“Everyone loves someone,” says Dr. Pontorax in consolation as he gives Maxim money for the return trip. “It’s an endless chain. Sometimes we’re lucky enough to be briefly coupled with one that fits. You have to recognize those moments and cherish them.”
Back in Rome, Gala closes the door of her chapel behind her every morning and walks to the Castel Sant’Angelo. There, she takes bus 982 to the end of the line and walks the rest of the way through the fields. She registers at the hospital gate, where they ask her name and her relationship with me.
“We’re close,” is all she says.
Then they ask her to wait some distance from the main building in an external parking lot reserved for everyone who wants to see Snaporaz or hopes for news of his condition. The crowd grows daily, though none of them will ever be admitted. Beer and water vendors, pizza and ice cream sellers start showing up around ten. Even the Cinecittà souvenir stand, with its Snaporaz mugs, scarves, and key rings, has relocated here. Business is brisk, especially around noon, when the crowd swells with civil servants from the city who’ve come here for lunch and housewives treating their children to a day trip. Every Sunday afternoon, there is a Mass to pray for my recovery. Touring coaches have started to include the hospital on their routes, and ever more couples seeking an alternative backdrop for their wedding photos have been sighted. To ease the waiting, the hospital management has set up loudspeakers that constantly blast music from my films.
I hear the noise from my wheelchair in the gazebo. An elderly patient lifts her hospital gown like an evening dress and dances for hours on end, a blissful expression on her face.
The whole time I’m imagining Gala’s out there waiting. It’s enough to drive you mad. Her fingers through the wire netting. It cuts into her flesh. How can she know tha
t there’s nothing to worry about on my account? Nothing would make me feel better than to see her and reassure her, but I have no way of expressing that to anyone.
Interest fades as evening falls. The families go home, the vendors pack their wares, and around seven thirty, in midbeat, someone kills the music. Gala walks back to the gate, gives her name, and asks if there’s any news. They tell her to try again tomorrow. At that, she walks off through the fields in the last light of the day.
Maxim is waiting for her at home. Since they got back from Sicily, his life has consisted of looking after Gala. He has taken on the task of feeding her properly. He brings bread and fruit in the morning for her daily trek to her lover. Then he combs the markets of Rome for grains and high-fiber vegetables, which he prepares in the afternoon according to a strict diet that gradually compels her bowels to start functioning independently, supported by a course of vitamins and expensive medicines prescribed by Dr. Pontorax.
The skiing debacle taught him that actors are completely interchangeable. Despite all their investments in their egos, they’re easier to replace than a part of a set someone’s spent a couple of hours hammering together. Maxim should have realized that when he saw the photos covering the walls of Cinecittà. He still couldn’t go down a new path until the old one had been brutally cut off. As he recovered from that blow atop the steps to the Ara Coeli, he thought he’d reached a dead end. He mourned the life he had envisaged but, gradually, as his grief faded, the fog of his ambition slowly lifted too.
“And?” Every evening when Gala comes home, he asks the same question, “Did you get in?”
If she doesn’t feel like talking about it, he serves dinner. When she starts to cry, he comforts her. This briefly makes him feel that he matters to her. Then she starts talking about Snaporaz, about how perfectly he’s always understood her, how his genius reflects on her when she’s with him, how it always makes her feel bigger than she actually is.
Maxim doesn’t contradict her. Her sorrow hurts him, so why would he want to make it worse? He holds his tongue out of love for her. But his silence only helps prolong this hopeless situation.