Ah, yes that’s what makes great areas of my brain flash red. The pain centers all firing at once as if I’d touched a redhot pan. Ouch!
I worry that no one will remember me.
It’s different with my older brother, Mario. Mario will probably die as if he were going on an expedition to the North Pole—afraid but excited at the adventure. If there is a cliff that you have to climb to reach posterity, he did it. I console myself that, except for certain geniuses, the rest will gradually fade out, interesting only to people like the young wife—didn’t she say she was getting some kind of a degree at NYU?—peering with her large bright eyes into the murky past.
Hannah took me to see a special exhibit of ephemera at the museum of the city of Rome, Palazzo Braschi. We went in a taxi and I noticed she kept fingering her cell phone. Though she hates technology—she still writes on an old Olivetti and refuses categorically to get a computer—the phone means she can go a little further afield and still feel comfortably in touch with the Ospitale. The show was brilliant, everything made out of papier-mâché, huge intricate creations all meant to be destroyed after the festivity. I spent much of my time looking at images of death, such as a crowned skeleton presiding over ruins.
It was hard for me to imagine spending so much effort creating something that would be blown up a few hours after it was finished. I’ve struggled all my life to make something that would last. Would it be easier to let go if I believed in God? We had a housekeeper once, a peasant woman from the countryside whose son was killed in a fight with a rival gang in Naples. Most people would be depressed and grieving for months, but Argelide—aptly named after a heroine in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso—prayed for about a week, bringing her Bible to work and having murmured conversations with Lord Jesus and then resumed her serene expression.
“Signor, I know he’s with our Lord,” she told me. “I know he repented and was forgiven.”
I can get as far as imagining a supreme being, having passionate conversations with a loving Father, prostrating myself with a certain self-satisfaction on the floor of Santo Spirito. But Heaven is so insipid. There is no way I would want to be in such a place. Singing out of tune in the heavenly choir. Angels poking each other with their wings each time I hit a wrong note.
Who am I fooling with my joking? Not myself certainly. I am terrified. Each flutter of my heart, incipient nausea, sweating on a cool day—any of these can convince me I am about to die. Since it happens to all of us, as the skeletons on the festival floats remind us, why this need to know when? To outwit the bony hand with its scythe?
I did notice something that cheered me up. A papier-mâché replica of a huge arch that was put up by Carlo V, Holy Roman Emperor, to celebrate his conquest of Rome in 1527. It was built just at our corner on Governo Vecchio, right where the old men sit in the morning gossiping and reading their papers in the little café that has the best cornetti. How delightful it would have been to watch from our terrace as the king progressed along the cobbled street to visit the pope. That’s what I love about Rome. Every few feet there is a historical gem. I look at my watch. I’ve gotten through two hours of the morning. In another hour Hannah will put away her manuscript and take me for a walk. I have the thought that if death came to get me, she would frighten him off.
Today I was watching three adolescent gulls on the terrace next to ours. They were practicing flying. The biggest one tried first. Running across the tiles precariously near the edge, he lifted his wings and immediately was transformed from an ungainly creature in the wrong element to a thing of beauty. Flap, flap and he rises a foot above the roof, then subsides and folds his wings. His siblings try next. The wind comes up, blowing sharply from the East. I turn to put down our terrace umbrella. It tends to fall over in a strong wind even without a storm. Once, at the beginning of summer, it blew over and smashed into our bonsai tree. The pot cracked right down the middle and the tree toppled over, exposing its tangled roots. It could have hurt anyone sitting there.
That’s how things work. You can’t anticipate them. I turn the crank and the umbrella folds down. The smallest gull, the one I’ve noticed is always last when its parent comes with food, always standing at a respectful distance, is starting out quite near the edge, stumbling along and then—if he’d been a boy I’d say he feels a need to prove himself—flaps boldly and without warning tumbles over the edge. Wasn’t ready, poor creature. I go in and tell Hannah that a gull has fallen.
“Don’t go down, you’ll just upset yourself,” she says.
“Don’t patronize me,” I say and head for the front door. Making sure not to fall, I go cautiously down the steps to the creaky old lift. I hate using it by myself because it sometimes gets stuck between floors, and once we had to wait for over an hour for the mechanic. But at least Hannah knows where I am. If it takes too long she’ll worry and check. Inside the lift I reprimand myself for my anxiety. I used to be confident. Now every potential disaster frightens me, from the collapse of the economy and the victory of that clown Berlusconi to the blister on my little toe that might turn into a life-threatening infection.
I walk—shamble would be more accurate—out the big front door that is getting almost too heavy to open—and see the gull, seemingly not injured at all, standing on the sidewalk in front of our palazzo. Like all young gulls he is a sort of fawn white. He cocks his head and looks at me with his red eye, then looks upward, as if wondering how he can get back. Our friend Arianne who lives on Campo di Fiori says that the fish man she uses on the square has a gull that comes every noon when the market is breaking up to collect his scraps.
I wish I’d brought something to offer him but I’m quite sure he wouldn’t let me pick him up. He starts rushing at the wall flapping his wings, but only lifts a few feet. Then he waddles disconsolately down the street towards the café. Maybe he’ll pick up some stale cornetti. Every few steps he tries another assault on the wall—a little the way an adolescent boy, powered by testosterone, might try to go against gravity. There was nothing more to do.
“Well?” Hannah asked when I came into the living room. I felt flooded by a sense of shame, as if I were the one running at the wall and failing to rise. Life is made up of so many tests.
“His wings look powerful,” I said. “But he has always been a little smaller than his siblings. I guess he just wasn’t ready. Maybe he was just trying to impress his mother.” Hannah didn’t laugh. She patted my hand, then sighed, and glanced down at her Olivetti. It was clear she wanted to get back to her work.
There was no point in going to my room and riffling through my aborted poems. I went back to the terrace and leaned over the wall. Our remaining gulls were napping between the red roof tiles, the mother sitting serenely on a chimney surveying the sky for threats to her offspring. After brushing off the tiny red spiders that ran along the edge and had adhered to my sweater, I leaned over a little further.
How easy it would be to simply tumble. Just by leaning over until your head pulled you down. Ever since I heard about the suicide of my friend Gina’s daughter, I had wondered how she got the courage to jump out of her bedroom window. It was uncanny the way she’d made it a form of theater, dressing herself all in black with high heels, making herself up. I couldn’t believe it at first when her mother, Gina, called us.
“I have some bad news,” Gina said. “Bianca has jumped again. This time she made sure an awning wouldn’t save her. She jumped from her bedroom window.”
I signaled Hannah to pick up the extension. “The police woke me at five this morning and told me there was a girl down in the piazza. I ran into Bianca’s room and saw at a glance the bed hadn’t been slept in and the window was open, its white curtain billowing like a sail in the breeze … our bird had flown.”
We had just seen Bianca a week before, taken her out to dinner in fact. Though she was still on crutches and in pain, she seemed so full of life, telling us that after jumping once, being seriously hurt and in a coma for weeks, and seeing
all the people in the hospital who had lost limbs or had frightful wounds, she began to feel grateful for another chance at life. She wanted to move out of her mother’s apartment on Campo dei Fiori and get a little place of her own.
“But don’t you still need help?” I asked. Bianca still had a rigid corset under her clothes that made it almost impossible to reach or bend.
“My mother doesn’t help me. She wouldn’t even tie my shoes when I asked her the other day. She drinks you know. Seriously. And she resents the burden—told me this wasn’t the way she’d planned her retirement.”
We’d been friends with Gina for forty years or more, and apparently we didn’t know her. She had always spoken of her daughter Bianca with cloying tenderness, insisting on calling her micino—kitten—although she was over thirty. Gina tried by every means to keep Bianca in the apartment. I had always thought it was Gina’s fear of being alone after her pretty-boy husband left her. She still doted on him though he has remarried. Carlo had left her for a scholar of D’Annunzio—our proto-fascist poet—a handsome woman with jet black hair who reminds me of the sultry female in the Charles Addams cartoons. Gina has never been pretty but she has a keen mind laced with wit. Her satiric poems, posted on Pasquino’s statue are legendary.
Well, here I am talking about Gina in a faintly superior tone of voice, perhaps even blaming her for wanting to keep her daughter near, for not wanting to be alone as she ages, when I myself would be devastated if I were solo solito. Isn’t that why I asked Hannah to take me back? I like to think it was because of concern for her, wanting to be near her in case her heart went wild again. Her story of losing consciousness and then of losing the ability to speak scared me terribly. But my heart has its own jumpy rhythms and flutters. The big one could happen to me next time. My heart could clench up like a fist or go soft and floppy like a wilted cabbage. But is that a reason to anticipate by jumping?
Hannah would say absolutely not—under no conditions. It was a glorious sunny day, one that Tiepolo might have painted, when Primo Levi, a treasured friend of Hannah’s, called her confessing that he felt depressed, and was thinking of suicide. I was surprised at how stern she was with him. Told him he had no right to think of it. Where would that leave her and the other Auschwitz survivors? She beat her head with her hands when she heard of his death.
I notice that I want to connect everything by ellipses, nothing separate, because it all runs together in my mind now, with things popping up, one leading to another. It doesn’t seem to matter anymore exactly when or where … or at least that’s what I tell myself. If I had to be exact, well, I couldn’t go on.
This morning all I can think about are the clouds. I am sitting on the terrace in one of the canvas chairs. The bottom is torn, I notice, but don’t get up to change my seat. So many things are getting to be too much trouble. Even brushing my teeth sometimes seems too much. Habits are breaking up. But the clouds are beautiful. Huge snow-white cumuli. One looks like a character in a children’s cartoon with fat puffy arms and bottom. If I had grandchildren, I think I could get pleasure from watching them live, carrying on where I leave off. Now the gulls are circling in front of the clouds, white on white. Off to the left over the Palace of Justice, there is a shape that reminds me of the Jungfrau where we used to go for vacations when I was a boy, and where later, climbing with rope and pitons, I got away from the nastiness after Mussolini signed his pact with the devil. Black and white—the pure sky and the Fascisti down below.
Hannah brings me tea. She has a large green shopping bag with her.
“You’re going out,” I say accusingly.
“Just to the market. Don’t worry.” She turns my arm so that my watch is visible. “Not more than an hour. Back by noon and then we’ll go out.” She kisses the top of my head, caresses my hair. I have the impulse to tell her that I might not be here, wanting to frighten her, make her attend to me, watch me, cosset me. I can hear the lift going down, creaking like a freight train.
Late in the war, when I was in the Resistance with my remaining Jewish friends, we were always afraid of not coming back from a mission. I was lucky. Once, I was in the underground with Gabriella after her brother, Primo Levi, had been deported. She was carrying a huge green bag filled with antifascist leaflets. She used to walk all over Rome distributing them. They used her a lot because she didn’t look Jewish. Unexpectedly the Fascisti closed the station and started to question people on the platform. One of them wanted to look at what she had, but she said it was a present for her grandmother, and she was so much a lady, so dignified and proud … miraculously, he moved off. Back then, every moment of being alive was a victory.
Sounds of music from down on the street. Looking over the terrace wall I see a procession right beneath me with flags, people singing as they move along Corso Vittorio Emmanuele. There is a float with a woman and two lambs. Lambs—it must be the feast day of Sant’Agnese. On her birthday lambs are shorn and their wool made into the pallia the pope gives his archbishops. When I was small before my mother’s death, the disaster that ended my childhood, I loved Sant’Agnese, the magnificent baroque church in Piazza Navona. I loved the intricate dance of its curves and the plunging horse plashing in Bernini’s fountain in front.
My parents only went to church on special occasions like a baptism or a wedding, but at around the age of seven I became captivated by a book of saints’ lives that I found in my father’s library. I seem to remember it had a brief forward by Mussolini. By a strange coincidence, Mussolini had been my father’s patient as an adolescent. Il Duce probably gave him the book as a gift. In a way, Mussolini was responsible for my going into film. My father took us to Switzerland after the Allies landed because he didn’t want to be involved in Mussolini’s Nazi Republic, and, to amuse ourselves, my brother and I attended a series of lectures by the great director Vittorio de Sico. That was the unofficial end of our medical studies though we stayed in the program for another two years to please our father.
How much of my life was dictated by a wish to please him! To make him proud I think I even entertained the idea of martyrdom for some heroic cause, like the saints in the little book.
Reading the leather bound Saints’ lives, I learned that Saint Agnese was killed because she wouldn’t marry the king’s son—or was it because she refused to pray to pagan gods? She was beheaded because when she was tied to a stake, the fire wouldn’t burn. Though I had no clear idea then of what it meant to be a virgin, I found myself oddly excited at the thought of Agnese being dragged naked though the streets of Rome to dirty her in some mysterious way. But it was Saint Lucie, the one with her eyes on a plate, that particularly fascinated me. How did her Roman torturers get them out, I wondered. If they gouged them with a metal instrument, wouldn’t they have splattered? She looked so serene in the picture, and had another pair of eyes still in her head.
At the height of my religious fervor, I begged my parents to let me try out for the boys’ chorus, the voci bianche. I had quite a good voice … very pure and strong. It wasn’t until I was grown and reading about the priests molesting boys that I remembered being fondled by a young priest after Mass. It had bewildered me at the time because I actually liked the priest and looked up to him for his piety. Afterwards I felt guilty. As if I had somehow encouraged him to touch me that way. I was afraid something was very wrong with me. I hesitate even now to write it down. Not even Hannah knows about it.
What image of myself do I want to leave? Does it matter? Does anyone really care? If I look myself up on Google, there are three pages of references. At least fifteen of my film posters are displayed. All those sexy films—you can still order them and see them. Sophia Loren, Monica Vitti, Gina Lollobrigida, Anita Ekbert—I even had an affair with her. A woman that had all of Italy panting. I’d like to suggest that it was the serious aspect of my films that made me so successful, but it is really the more salacious ones for which I’m best known.
I remember the film where Vittorio Gassman
comes to terms with being blind. How I wish I’d directed that one. You can’t get much more serious than that.
I close my eyes and pretend I’m blind. I touch the edge of my desk, feel the smooth wood, white ash, to lighten my moods. The blotter is soft, no hint of its color. I infuse it with a deep blue. Then my hand moves to the cup where I keep my collection of pens and pencils, saved from years of travel. The Hotel Waldhaus pen has a particularly chunky body and there is the cushioned pen I got for my arthritis, but the others are indistinguishable.
I move my hand to my Luxo lamp. Perched like a small inquiring animal, its light is unavailable to me now. I think the first thing I would get if I lost my sight is voice recognition software. They say it isn’t difficult, though the computer must be trained to recognize where words stop and start. You must be very patient and patience is not something I’m good at.
After a half hour of not being able to see, I stop. For a few minutes I actually feel blessed to still have my sight. I look out my window, gulping in the visual splendor of Borromini’s bell tower in the distance. I should do that every morning instead of drinking coffee, which gives me stomach pains and makes my heart race.
For a moment I forget what day it is. It feels like Monday. The day housewives used to wash their clothes. But when I look at the calendar, I see that the days are marked off until Thursday, so it isn’t Monday at all. It’s Friday. It just occurred to me that when I talked about pretending to be blind, I should have put it in the past tense because how could I have written it down with my eyes shut? I am finding dates and tenses and calendars difficult. I even worried that I had gotten the dates wrong in my page about finding the book of saints’ lives. When did Mussolini come to power exactly? I don’t know anymore and I used to be so good at dates.
“Renzo,” Hannah taps me on the shoulder and I look up hoping she has come to kiss me, to encourage me to face my day. “Do you remember that the studentessa with the big eyes is coming to interview you today?”
After Auschwitz: A Love Story Page 4