by R. M. Koster
“See what you’ve done!” screamed Schicksal. “You let him get hurt! Oh my God, Dennis, must I do everything myself? I ask for gladiators, and they send me gigolos, so I send Shelly for gladiators, and he brings me drag queens, so I have to go looking for gladiators myself, and when I find two, this moron lets the best one get hurt. Oh my God!”
“I believe he’s only a bit stunned.”
“Stunned?” Schicksal rubbed his forehead. “Oh my God!”
“And I rather prefer the other one myself.”
“You do?” Schicksal turned to the interpreter. “You. Moron. Whatever your name is, tell that fellow to come over here. You like him, huh?”
“Well, he’s all right. They’re both all right, I suppose. Have to see them in costume, of course.”
Schicksal looked at me. He was a round little man with kinky red hair and flabby hands with red hairs on the knuckles. He poked my pectorals like someone inspecting a steer. “Real muscles. Ask him if he’d like to be in the movies. Tell him if he looks okay in costume, we’ll give him ten thousand pesetas a week.”
“Fifteen,” said Custer, who since no one was paying attention to him, had got up and come over. This was about two hundred and fifty dollars.
“Oh my God!” screamed Schicksal. “Right away they want to be stars. What’s gotten into these people, Dennis? I remember when this was a nice, simple country where you could make a picture without going over the budget. Now it’s gouge, gouge, gouge. Spain is ruined, Dennis. Bronstein and Spiegel have ruined Spain.”
During this lament I turned and walked away, because I was a fully accredited member of the diplomatic corps not some gym bum, and I didn’t like to be poked, and the farther I get from Tinieblas, the more patriotic I become and the less I care for gringos like Schicksal, who could keep his movie and his gladiators. But when Schicksal saw me go, he screamed, “All right, all right, tell him it’s all right, we’ll give him fifteen, you too [to Custer], we’ll give you both fifteen, if the test’s okay,” and Custer whispered, “Don’t get pissed off, Kiki, this’ll be fun,” so we became gladiators.
Schicksal was making Dorieus the Spartan, with Chip Trill and Monique Mandragore and Elena Delfi and Sir Osmond de Vere and a large chunk of the Spanish population. He’d built three Greek cities south of Madrid and already begun filming when he decided he needed gladiators. Schicksal is the kind of executive who puts together an excellent organization, hiring top talent and giving it free rein, and then, when things are purring along smoothly, plunges spasmodically into the operation, disrupting everything. There were no gladiators in the book he’d bought or the script he’d had written or, according to his Danish historical consultant, in the ancient city of Sybaris, but Schicksal had to have some. As Housman tells it, he drove out from Madrid one morning, watched a couple of takes, screamed for everyone to stop, and called a conference.
“There’s something missing,” he said.
“Vulgarity,” said the Irish playwright who’d written the script.
“No,” said Schicksal thoughtfully. “Decadence. We need gladiators. Shelly, tell that Spanish actors’ union to send me some gladiators.”
Then he began to spin things out of his head, glancing over his shoulder at his secretary to make sure she was getting it all down. He keeps relays of secretaries to take down everything he says.
“Chip, you’ll be gladiator.”
“He’s supposed to be a Spartan prince,” sneered the Irishman. “The son of King Anaxandrides and rightful heir to the throne.”
“So he’s a Spartan prince who’s been captured by pirates and sold to a Sybarite slave dealer who forces him to become a gladiator. My God! Do I have to write this thing, too? You’re a gladiator, Chip, and after the banquet scene Elena’s restless. You’re restless, Elena. What you want is a little schtup, but Ozzy’s out goosing slave boys, so you send for gladiators, and they bring in eight or ten and you have them strip and pick two, Chip and some other guy, and make them fight, while you lie on a couch getting your rocks off. Got that, Dennis? They fight naked, except for helmets.”
“Arnie, I’ll have to check that with my agent,” said Trill. “I don’t know about flashing my ass across the silver screen.”
“Don’t be ridiculous! It’ll be the biggest thing since Lamarr in Ecstasy! Then you kill this other gladiator, Chip, and by this time Elena’s creaming all over the place, and she makes a play for you. You dip your hands in the other guy’s blood, Elena, and smear it down across Chip’s chest.”
“Are you sure you don’t want me to drink a little? Like a vampire?”
“That’s it, honey! After you smear him with blood, you kiss his chest and get some on your face and then kneel like you’re going down on him. First you resist her, Chip. You remember Monique back in Croton, but then Elena gets to you, and you throw her a hump.”
Then he didn’t like the gladiators the union sent or the ones Shelly Barb found, so he went gladiator-hunting in Madrid and came back with me and Custer and a Brazilian negro who played soccer-football for the Atlético and two Basque jai alai players. Meanwhile the Dane, very melancholy by this time, went detailhunting in Herodotus, flushing out ideas for our nationalities and costumes. Felix, the football, became a leopard-skinned Ethiopian; Custer, an Assyrian with bronze helmet and iron-studded club. One Basque was a Persian with a jacket of aluminum fish scales; the other, a Scythian with pointed hat and battle-ax. Trill had his horsehair-crested helmet, his round shield, and his spear, while I was Olorus the Thracian—so the gladiator-master presented me to Queen Aphrodisia—with my foxy headdress, my light shield, and my short, thick sword. That’s how I looked when I first saw Elena, surrounded by klieg lights and cameras in the lost city of Sybaris.
Elena’s reddish-brown hair was dyed black for that picture to contrast her with Monique Mandragore. She is taller than she looks on the screen and more slender, and with her gold-brooched robe and mask of molten depravity, she was every inch Queen of the Sybarites. Like all true artists, Elena has no fixed personality. She is too sensitive to the accidents and possibilities of life to let herself petrify into one person. Instead she keeps an intricately carved rosewood chest full of the materials of humanity—passions, cravings, sentiments, philosophies—and from these, with great care and imagination, she constructs her roles. Which, once fitted and sewn on, transform her utterly-lusty queen or, as now, facing me over her breakfast tray, faithful lover. And her sorcery is such that anyone playing a scene opposite her is transformed as well. She murmurs, “Ci ricordi?” with that sad, gay smile, and I know she remembers and has been faithful, and more, much more, that I am still the kind of man such a woman is faithful to. So that day outside Madrid, as she was the queen, I was a barbarian warrior, ready to kill or die for her.
The magic of Elena’s creations lies partly in their unity and order and economy—not one glance or mannerism, however beautiful it might be in itself, that isn’t necessary—and partly in the way they fit, so once she has prepared one, whether for the camera or for what is called real life she doesn’t lightly strip it off, which would mean tearing hidden seams. She wears it until she’s tired of it or, in the case of movie parts, until the picture’s finished. The roles she created for our private life were always pleasant to play opposite: variously wise, generous, demanding, passionate, and clever but always proud and loving, aiding, testing, and comforting the adventurer. But it was sometimes annoying to be with her when she was working. I visited her in Rome while Aldo Marchese was directing her in his Strindberg movie, and flew back to Paris after two days of sneers, smirks, and insults, for which I received profuse telephonic apologies and an assent that it was best for me not to see her until that film was done. So after our day’s work in Sybaris—a dozen rehearsals and as many takes of the scenelet, three minutes long in the movie, where the gladiators were brought in—she remained Aphrodisia, a passionate queen whose ennui demanded that she be treated like the most ordinary woman for an hour or two.<
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Now despite what my friend Custer had said, I was not enjoying my film career, mainly because I had been without action for too long and felt flabby-souled and blotchy and wasn’t enjoying anything. The movie set, which might have seemed a magic realm where toads were kissed into princes, was to me an encampment of phonies, a pasteboard slum full of trulls and cowards with no more relation to the heroic and marvelous than Schicksal to the King of the Maccabees. While Custer wore his spiked Assyrian helmet proudly even when motorcycling to and from Madrid, I felt self-conscious. Picked as Trill’s opponent and put to rehearsing with him, I was at first listless, then, when chided by Housman, furious. “You’re supposed to be fighting for your life, old man,” and I stepped inside Trill’s spear and belabored his shield till it looked like a washboard. He gave the part to Custer then, and I was just as glad. It was ridiculous for me to be killed, even in a movie, by a dimple-kneed pretty boy with capped teeth and shaved armpits who had never been in a real fight in his life.
But when Elena appeared, all was transformed. We were gladiators and she the queen and the set a fabled city, despite gum-chewing technicians and hovering makeup men and a jungle of electronic gear. I was confident of my sword, which I thrust out toward her again and again as the slave master presented me, and hoped, with that illusion of freedom and possibility which animates our lives in the face of all intimations that the script is already written, the queen would choose me as her champion, while again and again she appraised me, looked away with regal contempt, then glanced back in questioning desire. And when Housman called the final cut, I went up to her and asked her out as one asks an attractive shop girl or a girl met casually on some resort beach, and she shrugged with an air of “Your invitation’s presumptuous if not insulting, and I never do such things, but since I’ve nothing better planned …” And said she’d pick me up in forty minutes on the highway south of the set.
She was half an hour late and gave me just three seconds to jump from my car to hers, a sleek Italian sedan which she drove at terrific speed, though I’m sure she could hardly see for her dark glasses.
“Where are we going?” she asked after a while, and I told her to keep on. I stopped her at a posada past Toledo on the Andalusia road, where she gave herself to me with the kind of abandon Schicksal hoped to get from her in her scene with Trill, enjoying and pleasuring me wonderfully without ever relinquishing her role of queen who had decided to be a woman for a while with a slave whom she allowed briefly to be a man. Sometime after midnight, while I was sleeping, she rose, and dressed, and drove away, leaving me to wake pierced by wild regret and longing.
Next day on the set we neither spoke nor gave any sign of recognition, for a queen’s dalliance with a slave is not prolonged past sunup, but at the first rehearsal of the scene where Aphrodisia inspects the gladiators stripped, as she ran her hand across my chest, it became instantly clear to fellow players, cameramen, script girl, director, and host of gaping extras that Olorus the Thracian had a bone on. Elena acknowledged this proof of affection with a smile so sweet and humorous that I remembered my Roman school days and, while the crowd squawked and tittered, recited:
Amor, ch’a nullo amato amar perdona,
Mi prese del costui piacer si forte
Che, come vedi, ancor non m’abbandona.
(Love, which no loved one will from loving free,
Seized me so strongly with its sweet delight
That, as you see, it still remains with me.)
She looked at me with new interest and said, “Bravo!” and I was about to whisper, “Tonight,” when I decided that it had been quite perfect, queen and slave, star and bit player, and recalled all the things I’d spoiled grabbing for second helpings. Much later Elena told me she’d had the same feeling. That day we spoke no more.
That afternoon Felix, the Basques, and I were paid off and sent back to the twentieth century, but four weeks later, when all Queen Aphrodisiac’s scenes had been filmed and Elena was about to leave for Italy, I met her at some countess’s cocktail party. The social gap between us had vanished, I having risen from slave to diplomat, she having fallen from despot to actress, and we soon realized that what had appeared a self-contained lyric was, in fact, the invocation to a longer poem.
We went to Italy. She had another film to make and there was nothing at my embassy which couldn’t be left to a clerk. But while we were waiting to change planes at Milan and, fatigued by our journey, we sat in the airport restaurant, sipping unwanted aperitifs and drawing back into ourselves after the excess of intimacy, the almost forced exposure of body and soul common to the first days of a love affair, I glanced toward a table by the door and saw my mother dipping into a silver pillbox for some saccharin for her tea. It was like one of those dreams in which a long-forgotten schoolmate, still in short pants and cap, comes dribbling a soccer ball across the lawn of a house built just last year and, without noticing your business suit and thinning hair, calls you out to play, for my mother dropped the pills into her cup and looked up at me with the same weary stare with which she would greet me when the maid reported that I’d refused to eat or been pestering Alfonso. Then, just before the cock crowed and she changed back into a perfectly commonplace European gentlewoman, she saw Elena, and she smiled.
“Can you spare a day?” I asked Elena. “I’d like to go to Como.”
“Yes,” she said. “Let’s go. The lake is lovely.”
“I wasn’t thinking of the lake. My mother died in a sanitarium there. If you’d rather go on to Rome …”
“No. I’d rather go with you.”
And I went out to ransom our bags from the airline and hire a car.
We slept that night at Como and found the sanitarium the next day. No one remembered my mother. I saw her records and her grave, a plain stone with her dates, 17 Luglio 1904–14 Febbraio 1941, among a dozen equally plain stones in a hedged plot inside the hospital grounds. No dreams, no spirits, but in the car riding back to Milan, Elena said, with her eyes turned away toward the countryside beyond the driver’s window:
“It’s strange. My father was killed in Libya the same day that your mother … and I dreamed of him last night. I didn’t see him, of course, because I can’t remember how he looked, but I dreamed that he was with us and that he liked you.”
I felt a shiver and was silent for a moment. Then I told Elena what I had seen in the airport the afternoon before.
We had the blessing of two honored ghosts. My divorce wasn’t valid in Italy, but the frontier was less than an hour away, and we were married by a Swiss judge that same evening.
22
Elena sets down her cup with a sigh of delight. “What wonderful coffee your father grows! Now I know I’m in Tinieblas again.”
“You still like it here?”
“You know I loved it before I saw it because it’s your country. And when you brought me here, I loved it …”
My modest fatherland revealed itself a labyrinth of histrionic treats, a place where life itself was a festival of movies, all with yummy parts for Miss D.—the problem comedy where she shone as light-bringer and emissary of European culture; the technicolor transplant of La Chartreuse de Parme, with Miss Delfi as a tropical Sanseverina, guiding her lover along the corridors of power; that gripping melodrama Coup! in which her role mushroomed marvelously from the early frames, till, Tosca-like, the luscious diva pleaded for the life and liberty of her unworthy mate; and, of course, the role of her life, the one she never got to play, First Lady, which would have surpassed the celebrated performance of Miss Grace Kelly, since Tinieblas is a real country (with starving peasants and evil exploiters whom La Delfi would inspire her Prince to feed and crush respectively), not a papier-mâché enclave, a casino with side streets, from which strife and suffering are prophylactically shut out.
“… always love it, though last night, when we passed the hospital, suddenly I hated it. I remembered all those people sweating, shouting, and pushing, and General Puñete’
s bodyguards pushing with their machine guns, and the men who were supposed to be your friends whispering politics while the doctors were taking bullets out of you. Oh!” She clasps her arms over her breasts and looks into the pool. “How I hated this country, and hated you for making me come back!”
“I don’t make you.”
“I know, caro. You have to do this, with me or without me, and I help you out of love, not constraint. And the secret of marriage is to understand what the other person really has to do and then help him do it. These things are clear on a sunny morning, and that this will always be your country and I shouldn’t hate it.”
“You can hate it if you want. It’s a shitty little country.”
Elena looks at me with concern. “How have you been, Kiki? Last night Marta said you’ve been depressed.”
“It’s Marta who’s depressed. Not me. Keeps hounding me to leave. Alfonso, too. Are you going to start?”
“Would you like me to, Kiki? So you can prove you’re as stubborn as ever?”
“No it gets tiring. Tell me something.”
And she begins about the movie she’s just finished, which is terrible and will make lots of money, and continues to the others she has to make on her contract to Schicksal, flashing scorn at the trite scripts, making deft little épée cuts at her fellow players, gifting me conversation Life would pay five figures for, but she has closed down the universe of her smile by mentioning the hospital, or I have smashed it by imagining she saw Tinieblas as a movie set and me as a supporting actor, or it has simply collapsed, as universes do all the time, in a series of descending diminished sevenths: