“Mother,” I said, touching her lightly on her shoulder. Under her satin nightgown I could feel her warm skin. Wake up Mother, it’s time.” But I couldn’t remember what it was time for. I shook her lightly but she wouldn’t open her eyes. I don’t know what made me realize that she didn’t hear me, that she wouldn’t wake up no matter how much I shook her or how loudly I yelled in her ear. I ran out of the room, almost bumping into Luisa who was waiting right outside. “She won’t wake up,” I screamed, my body hot and cold in turn. My heart was thumping like a giant frog. My knees shook so hard I could barely stand and waves of shudders passed from my head to my feet. Luisa was calling pronto soccorso.
When the men came with the stretcher, they took one look at her and the empty pill bottles next to her bed, scooped them up without even a word to me, and took her away.
“Someone stop them,” I cried out. “They’re taking my mama away.”
My memory is playing tricks on me. The true horror of that scene was that I felt nothing except a mild wish not to be disturbed, a feeling that someone else should take care of this, that I was too young, too completely unready. It was wrong. It ought to be erased. But I remember no other feeling. I don’t think my heart thumped anymore. No, I was preternaturally calm. A sort of blankness fell over me like a cape.
I moved and spoke but I didn’t feel, not at all. I stood fascinated by her purple eyelids, but felt no curiosity—nothing but a pale cloud-like vacancy where feelings should have been. Isn’t that strange? My brother was away on camping trips for prospective leaders on the Left, and before he came home I stood in front of a mirror and practiced my expressions. Horror: mouth open and distorted, eyes wide. For grief, I remembered how I felt when my dog died. Then my motions had been perfectly natural. I sobbed and tossed my head. I begged to dig his grave myself and carried him to it, wrapped in a blanket. Now I screwed up my face and tried to force tears from my eyes, but they stayed dry. I felt nothing at all.
I was afraid that my brother would notice—that I would somehow be excommunicated. He would point out my heartlessness. In fact, if my friends had called and invited me to a party, I would have gone. Laughed and joked, eaten until my stomach hurt. But Mario was wrapped up in his own feelings, unless like me he was numb. I never asked him, and we never spoke of it.
Last night I wandered for hours in different landscapes. One was a ruined city. You could tell it had once been beautiful from the arches still standing, entrances now to nowhere. One arch had signs of fire along the top. The stones were blackened. I stood at the entrance wondering if I should walk through it. There were so many arched entrances I was afraid I’d get lost. Perhaps if I counted. I’d go in the third. I turned around and tried to memorize the arch I was going through but it was just like all the others. I’d have to remember it was the third from where I was standing. I had no pencil or paper the way I do now to write down the things I know I’ll forget. I have pads, I have different color pens—they are scattered everywhere in our apartment. This morning I found one behind the classical statue of an athlete near our bed. Another in our little kitchen alcove next to the salad twirler. But in my dream I had nothing to help me. Nothing and no one. Still, something propelled me. It turned out there was a whole city alive in the ruins—scavengers and homeless men lying in their tattered blankets against the walls, worn boots on their feet or under their heads.
I remember how Hannah had told me about the importance of boots in the camps. If someone’s boots were stolen they’d probably die. They made every effort to hold them together—with bits of string, or if they had holes they’d stuff them with paper. In our brutal world today, people more than ever need their boots.
Hannah told me that during the long march through Germany at the end of the war, her boots fell apart and she walked barefoot, her feet infected and full of pus. And no one in the villages threw them bread. She tried hard not to return their hate but couldn’t accustom herself even to the sound of German. It made her sick.
In my dream I was suddenly afraid someone would rob me. Still, I counted to three and went under the third arch into a narrow street. I tiptoed past the sleepers. Then the scene changed and I recognized the landscape with its vine-covered hills. I was in a green field near our tower—part of an old palazzo outside of Todi. I knew if I got there I’d be safe. Our family had owned it for generations. It had protected the peasants from marauders in the Middle Ages. We even have a heraldic device, a lion couchant with crossed spears. I moved towards it but was immediately lost in tall grass. A woman’s voice suggested I turn left, but I was too afraid. Grass was everywhere, mounded into shapes like freshly dug graves. There was no clear trail. An animal appeared, a bobcat, lean and sinuous. I threw it some bread to keep it away, but instead it came towards me, its eyes glinting red. I woke, heart pumping.
I fell back to sleep almost at once, but no sooner was I asleep than I had another dream. In this one, I was being slowly pushed towards a well. I tottered on the stone edge. Terrified, I awoke and called out for Hannah. “Hannah, Hannah,” I said in a strangled voice, “I fell into a well. I was covered in mud. In my eyes, in my mouth, everywhere.” She took me in her arms and comforted me, shushing me like a child, rocking me against her breasts. “It was just a dream,” she said with a hint of severity. She hates it when I talk about a dream as if it were real. She doesn’t understand how real it is for me, wandering like Alice, changing my size and shape. Powerless.
Our bed is just a platform set under the eves in our attico, where the one sleeping on the inside will bang his head if he get up too quickly. The ceiling there is that low. I can’t remember the right word for the protrusion with a window at one end. Starts with a g I think—goal, ghost, growl, ground. Ah yes, gable. I’m not much of a carpenter but this bed was one of my most successful achievements. Since we both read a lot before going to sleep, I screwed two small lamps onto the gable’s sides.
When we were first married, we used to sit there, cozy as birds in a nest. And since our backs were to the window, I put a mirror on the frame so we could see a reflection of the view behind us. The window holds a splendid view of the Gianiculo. The dark green forests marching up the hills, the ancient walls, and the papal palace at the top. After I moved back to our beloved apartment in Rome, when my prostate weakened and I had to get up several times in the night to pee, we turned the bed sideways with me on the outside with a clear route to the hall and the bathroom. But now—whether it’s been weeks or months I’m not sure—since I walk in my sleep, Hannah moved me to the inside where she will notice if I try to move.
I used to find our maid Erminia staring at the mirror suspiciously. I’m sure she thought it was there for nefarious purposes—to reflect the tangle of our naked bodies when we made love. Alas, I can’t do that much anymore. Now at most she holds it and squeezes gently. Is it an act of charity, I wonder? If I try to enter, it goes soft. But still, it is sweet.
“Go to sleep now,” she repeats.
“I’ll try.” I say, but I know I won’t be able to. My nightmare images merge with hers. I think of the way she lived at Auschwitz and how even when she was dropping with fatigue she had to be aware of what was going on around her—some-one being suffocated in her bed for her rations, or her boots. Alert to the approach of danger, I can’t imagine what she went through though for years. I’ve tried to, tried to depict parts of her experience in my films. But I always stopped before the gates to Auschwitz—there is a region that shouldn’t be touched. It would invite participation in the Nazi crimes—sadomasochism, even pornography—inviting us to peer with the guard through the small window into the showers where people were being gassed. The only thing Hannah would let me film was her life “before,” in an impoverished Romanian village that would have been of little interest if we didn’t inevitably imagine the box cars waiting with their open doors.
In those transports, people died every day. I’m sure I would have gotten a cough or a stomach ailment—shit out
my insides. I was always something of a sissy. Even when I had a headache or a bad tooth I was afraid, complained, needed to be tended. My only danger now is my failing brain. Looking up at the huge worm-eaten beams above my head, I wonder if my dreams are messages. Watch out, they are telling me, you are about to fall. Notice how you shuffle off balance when you walk, almost falling when you hit a tiny crack in the pavement. The well, the mud, show me where it will end. All my efforts to remain alert, to be vigilant—will fail.
What matters to me now are the things that nourish love, the rest is the victory of stone and the enemy and death—the victory of stone and the mud and the terrible ground.
Hannah enrolled me in a film club of some sort and I started going through some of the films that inspired me in my early days when I was still an assistant director, when Fellini’s masterpieces La Strada and Le Notti di Cabiria exploded like bombshells. I still thought of myself as a Communist but I had something of a double standard. Communist in politics, but never able to stand doctrinal art. I found it exhilarating that film didn’t have to be only about social problems. Fellini kept some of the best of neo-realism’s heritage, the sincerity and belief in humanistic values, but his own vision was metaphorical, mysterious, poetic. La Strada was about an inner journey. Its ending so profound you couldn’t put it into words. I played it over and over, each time seeing new things. It makes me happy that I still can feel its power. It even infuses me with a temporary strength. Every time I get to the part where Giulietta Masina, running away from the circus, stops to examine a bug—she has a curious enigmatic smile—I start to cry. I know what is coming. As if by magic a troop of musicians appears and she follows them into town where a religious ceremony is taking place. It is a mysterious event that suggests her faith in life and makes her a sort of secular saint. Masina was Fellini’s wife, of course. I wonder whether the circus strongman’s complete inability to understand and value her character related to Fellini’s marriage. He places her next to a circus strongman, a brutal and unsympathetic character. But Fellini allows even this creature a moment of truth when he cries at the end, after she dies. He finally understands her worth.
I am circling around a subject that frightens me. How to die without faith. Isn’t it the main role of religion to help us accept our mortality? Going on to a better place with a loving father and, if you are a Catholic, a Virgin Mother who will always plead your case with the supreme authority. It sounds boring, frankly.
I want, need, long for the love of people here, of my Hannah.
We are having a weekend in the country. I am in the living room on the small sofa that was in Mother’s room in Todi, with the fur rug over my knees. Hannah comes up from the rustic kitchen with a glass of juice. She won’t let me drink wine anymore because it makes my memory worse. That’s a real loss. She sits next to me and snuggles close to make it up to me. We are watching La Strada. After a while the film’s words tire me and I turn the sound down low, but I still get pleasure from the images, especially the ever-changing expressions on Masina’s face. I like to think I’d have recognized the love there, seen how special it was. I put my arm around Hannah and pat her hip, my favorite part of her. It’s as though all her womanliness resides there.
“Do you remember my film, Night in Florence?” I ask her.
“Of course,” she says, “I like it very much. It’s so sensual. Beautiful.” She tugs her braid, brushing it absentmindedly against her neck. I always used to untie it myself and spread her hair over her shoulders before we made love.
The film, one of my first solo efforts as a director, was about a young Jewish woman engaged to a famous professor whom she had admired for his intellect. For their honeymoon he takes her to Florence and she falls in love with the statue of David in the main square. She realizes that all the professor’s descriptions of Michelangelo’s life and the making of this statue aren’t worth the passion she feels looking at the curves of David’s buttocks, his sex, his slim ankles, his curls. After they spend an excruciating day touring other masterpieces, the professor announces, as though he is conferring a huge favor, that he wants her to work for him typing and taking notes—he is writing on the Italian Renaissance. That night she packs her bag and runs away with the desk clerk, a man with a handsome profile and no English.
“I’ve always liked it too,” I say wistfully. “I wish I’d had the courage to continue with more like that instead of those social comedies that I can’t even bear to watch now.”
“The audiences liked them,” she says with an ambiguous smile.
She caresses my cheek. She gave up her reluctance to write about Auschwitz several books ago and became known as a witness. A critic once referred to her work as a sort of sacred text no more open to criticism than the Bible. Her last book though—and I don’t know why I haven’t mentioned this—was about us, her and me. In it, she saw her love as a “splendid disaster,” but one she would always cherish. I am proud of her, of course, but though I always urged her not to spare my feelings, the portrait she paints of me isn’t flattering. And no one would think of treating my work as sacred text. Feeling under-appreciated tires me out. Why brood? In a few years I’ll be dead and my films forgotten. That’s the trouble with Art—you’re either someone or no one … or at most a minor someone.
Back in Rome, while Hannah waters the plants on the terrace, I try to catch up with time. It moves so fast these days, I’m flooded with memories. My life with Hannah—Hannah herself—has returned to what it/she was at the beginning. My sense of time is confused. The sun catches Hannah’s hair as she moves and I remember the glorious gold it used to be. Now I can’t remember ever seeing it turn.
When I was young my pony had the most magnificent mane flowing down over his withers. It glinted gold like Hannah’s hair when I rode under the cypresses over to the arena. No, the arena I am remembering wasn’t at our country place, it was in Rome where every spring they had the big horse show, and riders from all over the world would come. I didn’t ride in the show but I had lessons in the arena wearing my new jodhpurs and my tweed jacket. My boots shone like mirrors. My teacher was an old German, very strict, who used at shake his whip at me when my knees weren’t tight enough or my shoulders sagged or I lost a stirrup going over the jump.
I wish I was still able to ride. There was something wonderful about the closeness, the warmth of affection when my pony greeted me with a soft whinny, nuzzling in my hand for sugar or a carrot. Then adjusting my body to the gait, the languorous slowness at a walk, drinking in whatever is growing, buzzing, singing—feeling the seasonal fog, the heat of the sun, the light, moist air.
Hannah used to tease me, saying that my sympathy for the liberal democrats would last just as long as I wasn’t caught in a traffic jam next to tens of blaring radios. But still, my summers as a child in Todi playing with the peasant children did give me a genuine sympathy and liking for them and a whole range of others who were close to the land. And later, it was part of Hannah’s attraction. My tutor put an end to my play with the village children when I was about eleven. Hannah brought them back to me. Her frankness and strength, the will that got her through the camps were qualities I had seen in the village children. They weren’t coddled when they were sick; they were strong-bodied, clever at all the things that kept them alive: carding wool, cutting hay, swimming in icy water to save a younger comrade who had slipped off the bank. Hannah tells me I idealize them—though in her village stories she does too.
What a difference from the dancing classes in Rome. There the little girls all wore taffeta dresses and white gloves, their glossy curls drawn back. My little girlfriend in Todi wore patched skirts and ran barefoot through the fields. She was especially bold. We wrestled in the new hay, and once she kissed me. I used to come and watch her milk their family cow. I would beg her to let me try. Her father would beat her if she did, she said. She pretended to be angry with me and would squirt warm milk into my face. Later I borrowed my brother’s bike for her,
and we would bump along the dirt roads, occasionally stopping to steal some fruit from our neighbor’s trees.
I was out for a walk with Hannah just now and we ran into my old friend Peter. He is in charge of all the dubbing of foreign films, and his studio is ten minutes from us on Via Margutta. He came up and hugged Hannah and then me. Usually she would have called out a name: “Oh, Pete, how good to see you,” but for some reason she didn’t. I was looking at his face. I knew I knew him, but I just couldn’t remember who he was. Not just his name and his profession but also his wife’s and children’s names were lost. I hoped it didn’t show in my face but I am afraid it did. If I had seen him in his studio I think it would have come to me, but on the street like that….
After what seemed like an eternity Hannah asked about his wife, Linda, and his name came back to me: Peter. I was so frightened that I couldn’t stop trembling and had to take a hot bath when we got back home. While I was soaking, I looked up at the clock on the wall—an antique that had belonged to my grandfather—and had trouble reading the time. Wasn’t sure if I was looking at the big hand or the little one. Which one told the hour? I wasn’t sure, and as I tried to figure it out I remembered that at dinner at Othello’s last night I couldn’t figure out the tip and, worse than that, I couldn’t add it to the main part of the bill. I seem to have forgotten arithmetic. No, I won’t say that. I just need to concentrate.
No more leaving it to my automatic pilot. I may even get a brain gym. If you practice the exercises on your computer regularly, they say your memory can improve dramatically—if you’re lucky that is. Or maybe I should just get together a file of small photos of close friends with their names and professions: a small dictionary of the people who matter. For the others in a more distant circle it will be enough to say, “Forgive me I’m blocking your name … a senior moment.”
After Auschwitz: A Love Story Page 8