Snakes and Ladders

by Dirk Bogarde

  “You are sad, Bogarde. Va bene … but I change my mind, is my privilege, no? I make this not just the story of the Macbeths, it is the story also of the corrupted youth … so … we have to cut. Already the film is four hours; too long! And you will agree,” he smiled when he said it, “that you give the best back-to-camera performance that has ever been seen!”

  “But the big scene in my study, the one with Ingrid in the salon, the one after I have done the first murder … all gone, Luchino?”

  “All gone … were perfect, molto bello, molto, molto; but they distracted the story from the boy. He must be the pivot, not Friedrich, they had to go.”

  He looked sad enough for me to doubt his sureness; I tried once again.

  “And the big scene, walking through the house all alone. The big terror scene?”

  “Ah!” said Visconti, holding up a warning hand. “In that you were not good. Orrible. Troppo Mozart and not enough Wagner … capisci?”

  But at least I was proud of the film and prouder still that, however wet, I was in it. It had not been a wrong decision; just a lesson in tactics and acting.

  At dinner that night, in his house on Via Salaria, among white-gloved footmen, sparkling crystal, and excited and congratulating company, he became Emperor Supreme knowing that the smell of the film was good, and that the great efforts he had made had not, apparently, been in vain; leaning across the gleaming cloth, he placed his hand gently on my arm, “Salute!” he said warmly. “The Friedrich you have given me is the Friedrich I wanted; not so happy for you … but happy for me. And one day, you will see, I will give you a present. I will not forget; it will be a present, not a reward. Remember.” He raised his glass and took a sip of his wine. “I drink to that, Bogarde.”

  In the early part of June my parents arrived, and settled into the Blue Room, my father ravished by the brilliant light all about him, armed with sketch books and boxes of paints; my mother bewildered by the smells of pine and roses, the dizzying sun, the squalor of the squatters’ village below the hill, and the splendours of the city itself, spent a great part of the day, however, in the kitchen, discovering, with Antonia, the mysteries of pasta, which the latter had learned to make herself.

  “Aren’t women funny?” said my father, squinting over his easel at the hills. “Came all this way to see Rome and she spends all her time in the kitchen and says she hates cooking. Funny lot. Odd.”

  “As long as she’s happy.”

  “What else could she be? This lovely place. I suppose this is all quite usual for you, isn’t it? Breakfast on the terrace, the light through the pines, those cricket things singing away.”

  “No. Not usual. But cherished. I’m not even getting used to it yet.”

  “How many suitcases did you bring?” He raised gentle white eyebrows, mildly, and went back to his hills.

  “Ah. You remembered! More than two, I’m afraid, and the Rolls, and a record player and books, and all of this is a bit more than a flat. But it is a start in the right direction; I wouldn’t go back now, I can manage this much quite easily … somewhere warm, simple, easy to run.”

  He unscrewed a tube of paint carefully. “I think it was a good move.”

  “You don’t mind that I left?”

  “Left? Goodness no … an Englishman’s right still. As long as it makes you happy. I feel it wasn’t just work, was it? A bit political?”

  “A bit; yes.”

  “If they lose the next election?”

  “They’ll get back. I just hope they manage it better than we all did.”

  He mixed some colour on his china palette. “We didn’t do so badly …”

  “We think that. But the kind of life we thought we were fighting for in our wars was all the past really. The things we knew were worth keeping have all become class symbols now. They’ll never come back. We finished in ’39; I know that.”

  He mixed a little yellow busily. “I suppose so. You’ll be honourable, won’t you? Wherever you finally settle. Become a resident, you know. You won’t just flit about … evade things?”

  “No. Never.”

  “Because I wouldn’t like that.”

  “I promise you.”

  He turned away suddenly and cleared his throat; his face furrowed in concentration. “I can’t ever get the right green for olives. How did Cézanne do it? And Bonnard? It’s not green it’s blue, not blue it’s silver, not silver it’s, I don’t know, I can’t get it. Mother says all my olive trees look like broccoli. It is a worry.”

  “I’m thinking that if I start pulling out of the acting now, it would be a good idea. I never really wanted this to happen as it did. It was too much and too soon and too fast. I hate the struggling for power, the pushing and shoving, the battles to try and do anything decent … it’s too much of a fight now; I’m not a starry-eyed idiot any longer. I don’t think I ever was. Lost the glitter a long time ago.”

  “What would you do … write or something? Painting again?”

  “No, write. I want to start my book … I’ve done the first three chapters already up here. About Elizabeth and me and the Cottage.’

  “I’ve been looking out stuff for you as I promised. School reports, letters, that sort of thing. They might be helpful one day … What about money, can you manage?”

  “If I was very, very frugal and lived carefully.”

  He laughed at the word frugal and flicked me a shrewd look.

  “No Antonia, no Eduardo, no Rolls of course; a small house like this, small amount of land. I’d manage I think.”

  He brushed a ladybird off his paper, and applied a little brush of green. “It’s just green, isn’t it? What do you think? Green, not olive green.”

  “But not here in Italy. I think I’d go over to France. Wiser in the long run.”

  “Italy’s always been a bit of a mess,” he laughed shortly. “Charming people but all a bit volatile, not awfully stable really.” He started carefully blocking in a tree.

  Forwood came across the terrace with bottles and glasses, my father looked up in relief. “A little refreshment? Splendid … I’m having a dreadful time with my olives again.”

  Forwood set everything down on the table. “Margaret is about to be instructed into the mysteries of a real Bolognese sauce. She didn’t know there were chicken livers in it, or that you pound pine nuts for a pesto.”

  My father snorted. “She’ll have a hell of a job getting pine nuts in Haywards Heath, I can tell you. You’ve heard Dirk’s plans for becoming an old man, I suppose?”

  “Yes; I rather think he means it this time. He could manage; carefully. Maybe do one film now and again, just to keep the bank happy. We’ll see.”

  In the evening, after dinner, we sat out under the trees among the fireflies, the frogs chanting down in the field below the house, a warm wind rustling through the pines scattering needles into the pool.

  “What about film work though?” said my father. “Wasn’t there something with Jean Renoir? Now his father could mix the green I want. Used it in all his paintings, that olive green I can’t get, Margaret, you know? Renoir found it.”

  “And Renoir lost it,” I said. “I mean the film, well he didn’t lose it, but after the troubles in France last year everything got rather set aside. But there is a lot of work here; mostly commercial stuff, historical, police, adventure stuff, nothing I want to do. I’m not going back to that ever again. Not those films.”

  “Oh dear!” said my mother. “What a pity.” She lit a cigarette, a sudden spear of vermillion light among the fireflies. “I think you are very snobbish about those kind of films as you call them. I don’t know where you get it from; not me. If I had had half the chances you have had …” She dropped her lighter into her handbag and snapped it shut. “I’d have adored to have done the things you have; I just didn’t have the chance.” She leant back in her cane chair and it creaked a little. My father took up his brandy and patted her knee kindly.

  “Now, Margaret, we don’t wan
t to go through all that again, dear, you had a very good career as a wife and a mother. Did it quite brilliantly. Very good mother, dear.”

  She smoothed down her skirt and sighed. “Yes I know, Ulric, don’t patronise. But it wasn’t the career I had intended. Never mind, I won’t bore you all with me again … I have my memories, you know. But we did have such lovely times on those films. All the places you took us to. Padua, I’ll never forget, darling Padua; and that funny place, what was it called, where people sat in hot mud all day and you made a frightful fuss because the food was so bad in the hotel that belonged to the man who built Big Ben?”

  “Abano Terme. Yes, the trips were fun, but the films really weren’t; for me.”

  “Margaret dear, the man didn’t own the hotel, he only lived there years ago when it was his private house. You’ve got it muddled.”

  “I’m not muddled! It’s the same thing, isn’t it? I don’t know why you have to make everything so complicated, you two … it’s no fun really; it’s negative thinking.”

  Forwood laughed in the soft blue light. “Trouble with your son is that whenever he’s not working he becomes negative. He’s very positive when he is working though.”

  My mother reached for her glass and took a thoughtful sip. “Well, I think he’s been damned lucky, if you ask me,” she said. “And that’s positive.”

  * * *

  They were both right. I remembered the conversation a few weeks later going down in the evening to feed Peppino’s fifteen white pullets which now occupied the hen-run. Not working made one introspective, slightly neurotic, and certainly negative. The temptation to accept, just one, of the fat scripts which now cluttered the small room I used as an office, was very great. They were all commercial so there would be no battles to get them off the ground … but the very thought of playing yet another light weight, another bantering hero, another elegant Englishman, filled me with dread. I had made a definite decision which had very possibly cost me dear; I must stick to it, pick the mint and feed Peppino’s chickens, do the daily marketing, amuse the team who came to stay, chill the wine, and try, in between the chores, to get on with my writing; I was finding it pleasanter to look backwards rather than look forwards. A danger signal which I chose to ignore.

  The fifteen pullets came cluttering round me as I went into the run, craning necks, leaping, flapping scrawny un-fledged wings. I scattered the corn and kitchen bits in a wide arc and saw Peppino running towards me through the pines, holding his battered hat with one hand, the other waving a piece of paper.

  “Telegrammo! Telegrammo!’ he cried and thrust it folded through the wire. He didn’t stop, and with profuse, if unintelligible, excuses turned round and ran back down the hill towards his train to Viterbo, still holding his hat.

  I sat on the upturned bucket, kicked a chicken bone among the cannibal hens, and opened it. “Thinking of you. Stop. Desperately sorry about Judy. Stop. Know how much you loved her. Stop. Hope she has found her rainbow now.” The signature was one I vaguely knew. Past tense. Past tense. The pullets blurred before me. The triteness hurt as deeply as my own knowledge of failure. I had broken the promise I had made her and turned my back. I hadn’t walked away facing her smiling as she feared, I had done a far worse thing, I had left her and closed the door behind me. Rejection. What crueller weapon could I have found to use. And why? The demands had been too many and too strong for me to support; she had gone her own way, as she always said that she would, and I had determined to go mine. As she spiralled slowly downwards into her particular black well of despair and fear, I had ignored the outstretched hands imploring help. How can one halt a blazing meteor in its fall? It was no consolation; I walked up to the villa filled with shame, but also filled with a fury at the waste, the sheer bloody waste, of a husked-out, rejected, once glorious life destroyed by the cinema.

  At least fury was positive, so positive indeed that when Visconti telephoned an hour later he knew that I was angry.

  “You don’t want to speak to me?” His voice was mild.

  “No, I love to speak to you.”

  “You sound molto furioso. You are ill?”

  “No. Forgive me; a telegram with bad news, personal. Nothing …”

  “Ah! I have bad news too. From the Warner Brothers in America. They like very much our film but they wish to make more cuts in it than I agreed. They will butcher me, my work, everything for the dollar. I hate this business: it is always the money. Will the film be understood in Wisconsin? If you do not make money you are rejected like robaccia, capisci?”

  “Yes, very well.”

  “Can you make me an English lunch perhaps? This week? I will bring my very nice cousin, Ida Cavalli. You will like her and she will like some Pudding Inglese. Is possible? I want to speak with you also …”

  Antonia’s reputation for making an English trifle was almost the main reason that Visconti ever braved the dangers of the journey from Via Salaria to the Via Flaminia. He ate it in great quantities making Antonia’s cheeks flush with sheer delight. But he hated the journey always. “Ecco! You must drive through Inferno to find Paradiso, only an Englishman would have found this house. It is a miracle!”

  They arrived for lunch a few days later, as if they had crossed China in a cart. Dusty, unbelieving, exhausted. We had a splendid lunch and spoke mostly about the wickedness of Warner Brothers and the cuts they wished to make in the film. Contessa Cavalli was a plump, cheerful, chain-smoking woman of about the same age as Visconti. She coughed constantly, wheezed like a bellows and spoke perfect Nanny-English. “I have emphysema, it is fatal,” she said with great good nature, “but they tell me it will take a long time, and so why do I worry? And therefore I don’t. We can’t have Mr Glum about the house, can we? We must all die one day.” She rummaged in her bag for her cigarettes and handed Visconti a small, wrapped packet, which she found there apparently by mistake.

  “This is yours?” she asked him. He took it in one hand and weighed it carefully.

  “No. Is for Bogarde here.” He placed it by my hand on the table. “A present; not for anything, but for the Pudding Inglese, certo … for that.”

  I took it, wrapped in ribbon, a gold and black paper. “You should give this to Antonia perhaps, she makes the trifle.”

  He laughed and pulled the almost empty glass dish towards him: “I take a little more, Ida? You will have a half with me?” But she refused, laughing at his gluttony, and as he started to eat I held in my hands a paperback copy of Death in Venice.

  “You know it?” He was smiling over his spoon.

  “Yes, ages ago.”

  “We make a film together, you and me. You like?”

  “Yes. When?”

  “Spring, I think, March maybe; maybe early summer. Venice is difficult later with tourists. I must have the light of the sirocco.”

  “It is sure? Certain?”

  He laughed and placed his spoon neatly in his bowl. “No, not certain. For me is certain, but there are many problems. There is money, it will be expensive; it is difficult, only one man, one beautiful child; is not Box Office, you see? I must speak with the Warner Brothers, maybe if I say yes to some more cuts they will say yes to this. But you will be von Aschenbach?”

  “Yes. No conditions. Am I too young?”

  “Why? He says no age, after fifty only. You know it is about Mahler, Gustav Mahler? Thomas Mann told me he met him in a train coming from Venice; this poor man in the corner of the compartment, with make-up, weeping … because he had fallen in love with beauty. He had found perfect beauty in Venice and must leave it in order to die. If you ever look upon perfect beauty, then you must die, you know that? Goethe. There is nothing else left for you to do in life. Eh! We will shoot from the book as Mann has written it, no script. You will trust me this time?”

  “I trust you.”

  “I watched you the first day in ‘La Caduta degli Dei’, remember? You made six shots for me all different, the first day? No dialogue, just the mind. I saw
. And I knew that I had found my actor. Voilà! I promised you a present, I drank to it, and now you accept it. Molto bene, but you must do nothing else whatever until we do it. Promise? No Fliano, no Resnais, you wait for me only? Capisci?”

  “Positive. I’ll wait for you as long as you ask.”

  He nodded approvingly and pushed his bowl away from him. “You must start right away to learn. You must hear all the music of Mahler, everything. Play it and play it. We make a study of solitude, of loneliness, if you hear the music you will understand, and you must read, and read, and read the book. Nothing else. You must live the book. I will tell you nothing finally. You will know. Because Mann and Mahler will have told you; listen to what they say and you will be prepared for me. When the time comes.”

  Which was anybody’s guess. It might be never at all. There was every possibility of that. But I was now working. I had nearly ten months, if there was a possibility of starting in March, to prepare. The negativity which had so irritated my poor mother was now replaced by an active positivity which would have exhausted her. I thought how strange it was that everything was slipping into shape gently after all. If Forwood hadn’t forced me to run up and down the Spanish Steps in a pair of somebody’s eyeshades; if Arnold and Zelda hadn’t suggested me to Jack Clayton and Visconti had not been present that night in Venice; if I hadn’t spoken to a blue macaw in a cage in Salzburg—but there were too many ifs in life. Like the doors, one must not question them; accept them and never regret them. And there was a very long way to go before anything could be certain. But I must reject that thought too and do as I was told to do; prepare myself so that if the time came I should be ready.