by Dalya Bilu
The city welcomed them with blue skies and human warmth. The Rosa exhibition received glowing reviews. For a week they toured the city, from the Fountain of Trevi to the Coliseum to the Baths of Caracalla, where they saw the opera Madama Butterfly under the open sky. And when they came back to the hotel and Shmuel took a big handkerchief out of his pocket and wiped away Rosa’s tears, which flowed without stopping, she told him that she was so happy that she would rather kill herself like poor Madame Butterfly than live for a single minute without him. And when Shmuel whispered that he would do the same thing if God forbid she died before him, she felt that her happiness was complete, even though Joseph caught up with her even in distant Rome, and when she said what she said to her new husband, he bared his nicotine-corroded teeth in a mocking smile as if to say: Let’s see you do it.
On the second day of the exhibition the Genius, as the famous director was known in Cinecittà, turned up to see it. For five minutes he looked at Rosa, his bald head flushed, the tuft of his surviving hair dyed blond and sticking up like the crest of a parrot, and his eyes popping out of his head. Then he told her with a help of an interpreter that she was “the most woman he had ever seen in his life,” called her affectionately, “My fertility goddess,” caressed her breasts with his eyes, invaded her dress with his looks, swallowed his saliva, and whispered to his assistant: “She’s worth five women to me.” After the excitement had died down a little, his eyes, armed with lenses as thick as the bottoms of wine bottles, penetrated hers, and with a heartrending groan, as if stricken by a wave of pain, he told her that he was in the middle of making a new movie, and that he would like her to take part in one day’s filming, which for her sake he was even prepared to move up. All she had to do was hover in the air, held up by an invisible harness, dressed in a white toga, and shower the heads of the people looking up at her adoringly from below with rose petals.
Rosa looked at Shmuel, who asked the interpreter how much she would be paid, and on hearing the reply agreed immediately without asking his wife’s permission.
When they returned to the hotel an argument broke out between them.
“How dared you agree without asking me first?” she screamed, her waterfalls of flesh quivering with anger. “Since when am I some kind of object for you to shift from place to place? What do you think, that I’m a circus elephant to be put on show? It was only to spare you embarrassment that I didn’t bawl you out on the spot, and now you’ll pick up the phone immediately and tell that genius that I don’t agree. There’s a limit to everything. To float in the air dressed in a toga, indeed! This time you’ve gone too far.”
Shmuel turned pale with fright, cleared his throat, and said weakly: “Rosaleh, we could live for a year on the money he offered you without my having to sell a single painting. Think about it.”
Rosa turned a deaf ear to his pleas based on pecuniary considerations, and was only appeased after he told her that if she appeared in the movie she would be known to many millions of people all over the world. In the end she said that she would agree to float over the heads of her worshipers dressed in a toga, but only on condition that they showed her the toga first.
After lengthy negotiations the Genius unwillingly agreed to her conditions. The contract was signed, and Rosa received a check with an advance of an immense sum ending in tens of zeros. “Don’t forget that they’re lire, not dollars,” Shmuel said, and tried to dampen her enthusiasm when she embarked on a shopping spree in the most glamorous department store in Rome, buying everything she could lay her hands on: white cashmere sweaters, leather bags and shoes for her daughters, and mountains of toys for Angel and her grandchildren. When she tried to replenish Shmuel’s wardrobe, he refused and said that he was quite content with the clothes he had.
* * *
On their last day in Rome a long limousine drew up outside the hotel, and Rosa squeezed into it, giggling with delight. She vividly remembered the day she spent in Cinecittà. They dressed her in a wide, pleated white toga and combed her hair in elaborate ringlets, and when she looked at herself in the mirror she remembered with an ache the ringlets her mother used to make her when she was a child. Afterward they put her into a strong leather harness hidden under the folds of the toga, and hoisted her into the air on a crane. At first she screamed in terror, her ears went deaf, and she couldn’t hear the Genius’s directions, translated into Hebrew by a young Israeli who was studying medicine in Italy and supporting himself in bizarre ways. The instructions relayed to her by a microphone set in her left ear made no sense to her at all. Only after three hours, when everyone was about to give up in despair, did she adjust to her airborne position, and at the Genius’s request she scattered yellow rose petals on the crowd of extras wearing Roman army uniforms and gleaming helmets adorned by silly-looking red plumes. The crowds gathered below gaped in astonishment at the spectacle of the flying matron as she dipped her hands into her golden pouch and showered them with handfuls of sweet-smelling, velvety rose petals.
Rosa giggled at the sight of the Roman soldiers with their heads, shoulders, and open mouths full of yellow petals. And when the technicians wanted to bring her down she pleaded to stay in the air a little longer, and demonstrated impressive rowing movements that made the flesh under her arms shiver and shake. When her feet touched the earth at last, she thought of her late husband Joseph and how she would have loved to see him now, looking up at her as she realized his most secret dream, a dream he never dared put into words, to act in a movie, any movie at all, never mind one directed by the Italian Genius. If he were still alive, she thought, how proud he would have been to show her movie in Cinema Rosa, even if it wasn’t a sad one.
When she returned to the hotel and tried to explain to herself why she had so enjoyed being in the air, she felt once more the sensation of weightlessness and freedom she had felt in the sky and remembered with longing the days when she had been lighter. When she shared her feelings with Shmuel and asked him if he didn’t think she should start cutting down on what she ate, he scowled and said angrily: “Don’t you dare. All your beauty is in your size.” And Rosa submitted and bowed her will to his.
And when the movie came to Israel and was shown in the theaters, people lined up to see “our Rosa” acting in an Italian movie, and greeted her flight through the air with cries of admiration and rhythmic clapping, while the film critics sang her praises and those of the brilliant Italian director.
* * *
In the days following their return to Israel, Rosa’s attitude toward Shmuel underwent a radical change, and she became impatient and hostile. She soon found herself raising her voice to him for no reason, scolding him, finding fault with everything he did, feeling ashamed of his paint-stained hands and clothes, and arguing with him almost daily. Rosa couldn’t understand what caused the bad blood between them. Even when she racked her brains and tried to reconstruct the story of their relationship from the beginning, she couldn’t understand what had brought about the rift in their marriage, spoiled things between them, and caused her to hate her husband and regret that she had married a man she hardly knew. Sometimes, when she contemplated the ruins of her herb garden, she was convinced that it all began with the killing of her plants by the water he rinsed his brushes in. When she bumped into the paintbrushes standing in their tins and jars and pails all over the house, she was sure that they were to blame, and on Friday nights, when she sat down to eat alone with Angel, she blamed her husband for estranging her children from her.
But above all she felt that her love for him had turned to hate because of his rejection of Angel. With terrible pain she had witnessed the pitiful attempts of the child who never grew to please Shmuel and come close to him. With tears welling despairingly in her throat she would watch every day as Angel said good-bye to him at the door, called him “Daddy,” and tried to cling to his leg with her little arms. With an involuntary movement he would push her away, as if she were suffering from a contagious disease. He never hugg
ed her or picked her up in his arms, never took her out for a walk, never asked her how she was, never praised her or bought her a present, not even on her birthday. In the heavy silences that descended on the house then, Rosa would see Angel shrinking and trying to efface herself, and a bitter lump would block her throat.
And when at long last she poured out her heart to Rachelle, her friend told her that one day she had seen Shmuel striding down the street with Angel tottering behind him on her little legs, trying to catch up with him and begging him to slow down. “Shmulik, wait for me, Shmulik, wait for me!” Rachelle imitated Angel’s piping voice. And he ignored her, as if he saw and heard nothing, even when she fell down and grazed her knee. Even when she cried he didn’t turn his head or pause; he went on walking as if nothing had happened, leaving it to strangers to pick the little girl up and bandage her wound. Rachelle told her that she had kept the incident from her because she didn’t want to grieve her, or to come between a husband and wife, but once Rosa herself had brought the subject up, she felt it was her duty to tell her the story. Before she went home she added that a lot of people in the neighborhood had seen what happened, and they had asked her afterward how Rosa could stay married to such a heartless man.
That evening she tried to talk to him about his attitude to Angel and about the incident Rachelle had told her about. Shmuel answered her rudely and impatiently, saying that that he was the way he was, that he couldn’t change his behavior, and that the child would have to get used to it. Rosa was unable to reply, because everything she wanted to say was choking her.
And the last, precious scrap of happiness fell away from her and dropped to the floor, where it melted into a reeking, murky puddle of disappointment.
That night she sat for hours next to Angel’s bed and tried to calm herself with the help of the peaceful breathing of the sleeping child. Only when she heard Shmuel snoring did she get into bed and turn her back to him. From then on she stopped talking to him, except for the few words necessary to the running of the household.
Shmuel tried to placate her. He stopped eating garlic before going to bed and painted her in the most flattering way without making her pose. When she refused to be appeased, he brought her her favorite delicacies to eat, and when this too failed, he used Angel as a last resort.
One day Rosa returned from visiting Rachelle and to her horror she saw Angel sitting naked in front of him, her long fair hair covering her body, holding a bow and arrow in her hands, while Shmuel gave her orders such as “Don’t move,” “Smile nicely,” and “Show your teeth.” Thrilled by the sudden attention he was paying her, Angel did her best to obey his commands and tried with all her might to please him. Rosa looked in horror at the canvas and saw Angel on it in the shape of a plump, pink, dimpled cupid. Her humps were hidden under downy little wings, her fair hair illuminated the painting with a glowing light, and the face revealed through the curtain of her hair was the most beautiful face Rosa had ever seen in her life, perhaps the most beautiful face that Shmuel had ever painted. When she looked harder at the painting, however, she noticed a tiny male organ, erect and uncircumcised, added with a few brushstrokes to the bottom of her daughter’s body.
Shrieking like a banshee, she set about him, beating him and stabbing him with the paintbrush she snatched from his hand, until her shrieks and the terrified Angel’s screams brought the neighbors running, and they dragged her off him, leaving red finger marks on the white flesh of her arms. With his body riddled by holes, his legs covered with blue bruises from her kicks, and his face with red scratches, as if all the cats of the neighborhood had gone to war against him, he said to her humbly that night in bed, after she had refused to talk to him all day: “All we wanted to do was give you a nice surprise for your birthday, Angel and I. I wanted to paint you a pretty cupid to strengthen our love.” Exhausted by rage Rosa looked at him pityingly and said: “Never mind that you painted her in the nude, you pervert; never mind the wings, but a penis? You gave her a penis, you maniac!”
“Have you ever seen a cupid without a penis?” he asked in all innocence.
This was too much for Rosa to bear, and with one hefty kick to his behind she turfed him out of the bed and onto the carpet.
From that night she no longer wanted him, and she exiled him from her bed. Lonely and pathetic, Shmuel would wander round the house looking for a bed on which to lay his head. But Rosa remained stubbornly blind to his suffering, ignored the fawning, hangdog looks he sent her from his moist gray eyes, and devoted herself to cleaning the house and scouring the windows and floors until they shone.
“Of course you’d rather kill yourself like poor Madame Butterfly than live one minute without your husband,” Joseph said to her with a wicked smile. “Well, let’s see you! You’ve been sleeping without him for two weeks now, and you don’t seem to be suffering too much. In one blow you got rid of him.”
“Between the two of us it would be better if he killed himself,” she replied with clenched teeth, and with strong movements full of hate she went on scrubbing the floor until she could see her sweating face reflected in the tiles and Joseph’s satisfied grin gleaming at her from the little puddle of water.
nineteen
BUTTERFLIES OF ASH
If Rosa had been able to predict the consequences of her decision regarding the paintbrushes that had taken over her house and filled every unoccupied space with their thorny decorations, she might have acted differently. It all began with Rachelle’s daily visit, and the ritual of sympathy and complaint in which they indulged when Rosa’s sorrow and despair overwhelmed her, and Rachelle listened patiently to her troubles and responded with warmth and good advice.
On this particular afternoon, while she drank her coffee and nibbled the salty sesame biscuits fresh from the oven, Rachelle watched Shmuel as he trailed drearily around the rooms. His body was hunched, as if he had spent the night lying on a bed of nails on the floor; his feet shuffled aimlessly in shabby slippers; his eyes were downcast as if searching for a lost coin, his mouth gave off a faint smell of garlic, and his paint-stained hands wandered nervously and suspiciously among the paintbrushes scattered throughout the house in their vases, tins, jars, and buckets as if he were counting them.
Curling her lips in a spiteful expression Rachelle said to Rosa: “Chuck them out.”
“Chuck what out?” Rosa stared at her friend.
“His paintbrushes. Aren’t you fed up with those demented flower arrangements in their crystal vases and mop pails taking over your house? Enough already! Chuck them out, and finish with the business.”
“It would kill him,” said Rosa, lowering her voice in case he was eavesdropping on their conversation.
“All the better.” Rachelle snickered nastily.
Rosa looked at her in horror, and then burst into hysterical laughter, spilling her coffee as she did so. With cookie crumbs soaked in lukewarm coffee spraying from her mouth, she kicked her legs in the air and laughed: “Why not? After all, I’ve still got another one to go.” And Rachelle, infected by her laughter, took up the refrain: “Another one, another one, one more butterfly to go! Fly down pretty butterfly…”
“Don’t be afraid. Come sit on my hand,” Angel chimed in happily, hearing the children’s rhyme.
“And fly away into the sky!” shrieked Rosa and Rachelle, and fell into each other’s arms, sobbing and weeping with wild laughter that left them gasping for breath.
“What were you laughing at like that?” asked Shmuel, coming into the kitchen in the evening and looking at Rosa and Angel eating their solitary supper, wondering what his wife, whose bed he had not shared for over a month, had to be so cheerful about.
“Girl talk,” Rosa said briefly, and urged Angel to finish the food on her plate.
“That’s not true, Mommy.” Angel corrected her with the honesty characteristic of children. “You and Auntie Rachelle were talking about butterflies.”
Glad to volunteer information, dispel the fog, and p
erhaps even please Shmuel, the little girl recited with her mouth full of bread, making the appropriate movements with her hands:
Fly down pretty butterfly,
Don’t be afraid.
Come sit on my hand,
And fly away into the sky.
“Butterflies?” Shmuel looked at her incredulously.
“Hurry up, swallow your food!” Rosa broke in, with the words of the rhyme in her daughter’s chiming voice echoing threateningly in her ears.
“We have to talk,” Shmuel said to her after she put Angel to bed and began to wash the dishes with a noisy, angry clatter.
“What’s there to talk about?” she retorted, her eyes on the sink full of dirty dishes.
“You avoid me, you don’t sleep with me, you won’t talk to me, and in the end you’ll throw out all my paintbrushes,” he said, as if he could read her thoughts and predict the future.
“If I do you’ll deserve it. I’m sick of those damned paintbrushes all over the house. Yesterday one of them nearly poked Angel’s eye out when she bent down, and I almost tripped and fell over a pailful of them. Apart from which, you killed all my plants with that filthy water of yours. And that smell of garlic again. I’m ashamed to invite my friends to the house with you stinking the place up. Look at your clothes, your hands. Aren’t you tired of walking around with all those paint stains? It’s high time you removed them with turpentine.”