Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost

by David Hoon Kim

  “We lay on the bed, fully clothed, holding hands and staring into each other’s eyes. I think we spent the entire night like that. It was the happiest night of my life. Even the feel of his hand in mine was almost too much. I couldn’t get enough of his smell, his face, the sound of his voice, the shape of his feet. Everything about him was more beautiful and more perfect than I could have imagined a person could be before meeting him. In the beginning, neither of us knew who the other was. How much simpler it would have been if we had never found out! Somehow, his wife—and not long after that my husband—discovered what we were doing. Jens’s wife is heiress to a large family fortune, which complicates everything. The father-in-law—Karl—told Jens that it’s either the inheritance or me. For the past year, we’ve been meeting in secret when we can, in hotels outside Denmark. Jens uses his business trips as an alibi, but I’ve always known that our days together were numbered.

  “One afternoon, at a restaurant in Salzburg, I noticed a man at the next table hanging on our every word. I knew he was Danish from the way he spoke German to the waiter. Jens thought I was seeing things that weren’t there. To me, it seemed exactly the kind of thing Karl would do. He certainly has the means. Since then, I’ve been seeing his men everywhere. You’re the first I’ve confronted, and it turns out that you might be the only one I was wrong about. Then again, maybe Jens was right all along.”

  She mentioned some other things, and there were a few digressions, but that was the gist of what she said, as far as I can remember. Suddenly, she stood up. “I’m sorry. I have to go.” She surveyed the waiting area. Earlier, I had caught her glancing at her expensive-looking watch. “Your friend will show up with his daughter.” She looked down at me and smiled. It was a wistful, melancholy smile. “I have a feeling.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “To catch my train.”

  Though in that moment I wasn’t sure there was a Jens at all, I said to her, “He might still come.” But she shook her head.

  “No, I’ve waited too long as it is. I won’t wait any longer.”

  In no time at all, she was swallowed up by the crowd. Where was she going, I suddenly wondered, scanning the main hall. Back to Denmark? What exactly had she and Jens planned to do in Rome? I considered going after her. But to what end? She had made her decision. Now I had to make mine. I began walking in the opposite direction, towards the exit. René’s apartment wasn’t far from the station; I could take a taxi to the via San Quintino and wait for him there, at his front door. I would camp out all night if I had to. Just then, I saw a man making his way through the moving bodies. I’m not sure how I knew it was him. In truth, I didn’t. (I still don’t.) But he had her face, her dark-blond hair and hollow blue eyes. I thought about calling out to him, but I hesitated too long and he ran past me, oblivious. I saw him disappear down the corridor marked AI TRENI. At that moment, someone shouted my name. It was René. He was standing at the other end of the waiting area, a white helmet balanced under his arm. And with him, two years older but still recognizable, was my Gémanuelle.

  The Specialist of Death

  The other week, on French television, they’d shown my godchild Gémanuelle’s second film, The Specialist of Death, directed by Renato Amorese, a.k.a. the Prince of Cannibals. My initial impulse had been to avoid watching it altogether, but I couldn’t pass up a chance to hear her voice again (she had dubbed herself in French), though I turned off the television before the final, climactic scene. It was only a film, and not a terribly original one at that, but the sight of Gémanuelle’s—or rather, her character Maya’s—lifeless body was more than I could bear. Even with the original Italian version, I’d never been able to get through the ending.

  * * *

  Despite the spring evening—unexpectedly warm for Paris— I was in a funk by the time I arrived at my friend’s new place for the housewarming party. René, after selling the old apartment near the place des Vosges, had recently moved into a modest two-bedroom in Belleville. The lack of furniture, the bare white walls, the unopened boxes made everything resemble a not-quite-built set. I hadn’t told him about the television broadcast, hoping it might have gone unnoticed.

  I spent most of the night picking up after my friend—half-finished bottles of beer, the watch he kept taking off, even his wallet (a continuity Polaroid of Gém dressed as Maya in the little plastic window)—all the while making sure he hadn’t left a dwindling cigarette in the crack of a sofa. When René finally brought it up, I was standing near the doorway, outside the zone of attention, like an usher or a waiter or a ghost.

  “Did any of you see it? The Specialist of Death. My daughter’s second film.”

  René was addressing the group gathered around him—former FAO colleagues of his, acquaintances from his many social circles, a few of Gaëtane’s friends who hadn’t defected to her camp in the aftermath of the separation. I wondered how many of them had watched the film and were keeping quiet.

  “What? No one?”

  He glanced around him, waiting, and I could tell from his posture that he was already drunk. By the time Specialist came out in Italy, Gaëtane’s liaison with Renato (who had directed all of Gém’s films) was already public knowledge, third-page fodder for the Italian gossip rags. My friend had moved back to Paris while Gaëtane had stayed in Rome. Now he was living off the revenues from his daughter’s films (where he was credited as “associate producer”), though his share didn’t include royalties from the syndication rights sold to the M6 Group in France and Switzerland.

  The silence was total. Months earlier, at one of Renato’s parties, he had broken down weeping in front of the guests, and I was dreading something similar tonight. It had started out innocently enough at the time. With the aplomb of a first-rate actor, René had praised The Prince of Cannibals, Renato’s latest work and the sequel to Specialist, making comparisons to Antonioni and Argento—and then, in the same breath, to Uberto Lenzo and Regolo Deodati—burying the film under so many elogious and dithyrambic names that no one was likely to find it again. Those who hadn’t seen the film had probably come away from my friend’s performance telling themselves that the only thing better than a masterpiece was an unrecognized masterpiece.

  “Not one person?” René said, surveying the room now. “You can’t expect me to believe that not a single person here has seen the film that killed my daughter?”

  * * *

  René had seen all of Renato’s films, including the ones made during the cannibal craze that swept through Italy in the late seventies and early eighties. His Cannibal Garden Party, with its astonishing cinéma-vérité realism, the first tablet of a triptych alongside Cannibal Masked Ball and Cannibal Wedding Ceremony, had nearly gotten its director dragged before a tribunal. Even after his actors came forward and proved that they were alive and well, accusations of animal cruelty involving tortoises and monkeys continued to plague him to this day. Activists spray-painted his house, left death threats on his answerphone. He had spent most of the eighties and nineties trying to wash out the blood, rid himself of the stench of viscera, churning out a number of comedies, musicals, Westerns and pornos. At the start of his collaboration with René, he hadn’t made a film in over twenty years.

  For a time, the two men had gotten along. After all, it was René who had brought Renato out of retirement, that purgatory of obscurity. They had met at a strip club off the via Veneto. (No use hiding it now.) The next morning, René had brought him a script that he’d written, and Renato liked it, wanted to film it, perhaps because The Impossibility of Crows was an amalgam—minus the cannibalism—of his previous works, which my friend knew by heart. Finding investors, thanks to his network of contacts and his innate talent for gathering others to his cause (Renato himself being a case in point), was not nearly as hard as convincing Gaëtane of the film’s merits, or that it would be good for their daughter’s budding career. Renato’s sulfurous reputation as the Prince of Cannibals didn’t help matters any, of co
urse, but the promise of a starring role in a real film with a real director—a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, as René put it—wound up swaying her, and she even forgave him for taking Gém to the audition without telling her. (She didn’t yet know about the strip clubs.)

  In the beginning, my friend was at the set every day, sitting in on shoots, watching the rushes, eating catered meals with Renato in his caravan. He insisted on addressing Renato as “maestro” until the latter told him to stop. Their camaraderie was bolstered by their names, René and Renato, each “reborn” in his own way through the film. René took a permanent leave of absence from his post at the FAO to act as producer for Impossibility, and Renato dreamed of making his big comeback. Their first film together did well, showing at festivals in Shanghai, Abu Dhabi, Knokke-le-Zoute and Pyongyang.

  Then, during the filming of Specialist, their second collaboration, Renato offered my friend a small nonspeaking part playing one of the henchmen who kill Maya’s parents. According to Gaëtane, he had done it in order to keep René occupied and out of his hair. The role was hardly a role, but it involved several minutes of camera time and this might have gone to René’s head. While in the background of a shot, he would check his gun repeatedly, or start wiping it down with a cloth, which led to a tiff with the identical twins playing the main villains Hugin and Munin, who (both) accused René of trying to steal their scene. Though Renato had to step in and arbitrate, wasting time placating a pair of disgruntled actors in identical crow masks (which made me question the utility of hiring twins in the first place), he forgave René—Renato was the forgiving type, according to Gaëtane—but then René told him that it didn’t seem right to be part of a group of men trying to kill Gém. She was his little girl, after all. Renato reminded him that in the scene it wasn’t Gém who was killed but her parents. (Renato later told Gaëtane that, on realizing his lapsus, he had immediately corrected himself: “… Maya who was killed…”) Exactly, René had answered, it’s like I’m killing myself. Did you know that Fernandel refused to die in his films? Not, he added, that I’m comparing myself to him. It’s not real, Renato tried to explain, you’re playing a role, your daughter is playing a role, we’re all playing a role. At which point René looked up from the prop gun he’d been cleaning and asked what role, he, Renato, was playing with Gaëtane. Laughing as though he’d made a joke, my friend then asked to play Gém’s father in the film. Renato, ignoring the barrel of the gun pointed at him, refused. René accused him of being ungrateful. After all, who had wooed the investors? Who had gotten Joey Starr to make a cameo appearance? The two men parted on less-than-good terms. That night, René felt a familiar tingling in his big toe, and by the next morning he was unable to leave his bed. The slightest contact with the sheets was agony. It was his gout, a hereditary condition in which the attacks were few and far between but, alas, unpredictable. (Prolonged tension and stress could also set it off.)

  A few days later, without René there to object, Renato decided to change the story’s ending. In René’s script, Maya emerges from the battle with Hugin and Munin wounded but victorious, and the last shot shows her, dazed and dirty, clothes torn, hair streaked with blood, standing before an abandoned shopwindow where an enormous birthday cake evoking the Vittoriano is displayed alongside a steak-frites with a stream of gravy tracing the path of the Tiber, a macédoine of fruits representing the seven hills of Rome and a pot-au-feu in the style of Arcimboldo’s paintings (Summer). Renato, unhappy with the ending, wanted Maya to be killed by the two corvi (as agents of Corvus are called, plural of corvo). He thought what René had written too sentimental, and lacking the tragic tone that he, Renato, envisioned for the story. It was only later, after the fact, that I learned what he had done. By then, of course, it was too late to change anything.

  * * *

  “I saw it,” I called out from the doorway. “I watched the film.” Everyone in the room turned to see who had spoken. A grimace, like an expression of panic, traversed René’s face, and I was reminded of an actor onstage forced to react to a line not in the script.

  “Henrik, mon ieuv,” he said, recovering. “Well, obviously, you’ve seen it. But, you know, I was asking the others here.”

  “No,” I told him, “I’m talking about the television broadcast. I watched it too, René. I haven’t forgotten the deal Renato made with M6, the one he cut you out of.”

  René’s smile flickered. “You see what he’s doing?” He appealed to the crowd, as though to take them as witnesses. “All evening he’s been following me around, keeping an eye on me. Because that’s what a good friend does. Isn’t that so, Henrik?”

  Heads turned from René to me, then back to René.

  “You’re making our guests uncomfortable,” I said, calmly, as he took a few unsteady steps in my direction, spilling his drink.

  “‘Our’? Since when are they your guests?”

  “René,” I said, “your daughter is still alive.”

  “Are you trying to steal my role? Is that why you’re here tonight? I thought I was the only one weighed down with guilt over the death of—”

  “She’s not dead, René. You can’t go around telling people that. It puts them on the spot.”

  “What can I say?” He leaned forward so the others couldn’t hear. “I’m not like you,” he whispered. “I can’t simply turn the page and move on to the next chapter.”

  “Is that why you cannibalized my life?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “The character of Niko.”

  His surprise seemed genuine.

  “Niko and Maya,” I went on. “You changed the names, but it’s obvious…”

  “You’re crazy.”

  “Am I?”

  “It’s a common trope. The old veteran and the young ingénue. Haven’t you seen The Professional? La cité des enfants perdus?”

  “René, I’m sorry that things turned out the way they did. Really, I am.”

  “I don’t need your apologies. Or for you to look after me. Any more than I did then. It was Gém who needed you. She was your godchild, and you let her down. You turned your back on her. She trusted you, Henrik! You were more of a father to her than me!” If he hadn’t been so drunk, I might have thought he really meant it this time. Turning to his audience again, he said in a normal voice, “This is Henrik, one of my oldest friends,” presenting me to the others as if I had just arrived, while everyone pretended not to see the tears streaming down his face. “He was there during the filming in Rome. Gém used to say that he was her bodyguard. The Italians thought he was one of those Hong Kong action stars. I told them, No, he’s from Copenhagen, believe it or not. You’d never think it, looking at him, but he grew up in Denmark and has a real way with kids!”

  * * *

  After René’s gout had him nailed to the bed, I began to accompany Gémanuelle to the studio at Cinecittà. In the beginning, a car came for us every morning, a black Mercedes 6.9, along with a uniformed driver whose resemblance, down to the ébouriffé white hair, with an engraving of Schopenhauer was like something out of a dream. Through the window of the living room, I would see the car parked in the courtyard, waiting there like a giant black bird. By then, Gaëtane had already left for work; it was just Gém and me at the table. I told her that in Danish breakfast was called morgenmad, “morning food,” making the mistake of writing it down first. Despite hearing me say the word out loud, she continued to add an extra syllable, so that I finally told her we could call it brækfest, easier to pronounce and which meant, literally, “vomit party.” (She found that more to her liking.) Then, with no explanation given, the Mercedes disappeared—and the driver, too, naturally—and I had no choice but to take Gém to the studio myself. René had his scooter, and there was the old Citroën Méhari—used mostly for weekend trips—but as I didn’t know how to drive, Gém and I took the tramway.

  We must have made a strange couple. It would seem that, even in a city as dense as Rome, we often stood out.
In the tram car, I would glance around and find at least one passenger openly eyeing us. Everywhere we went, we drew stares, some of them nonplussed or openly hostile. Gémanuelle’s hair was very clear, very blond, and mine, well, was not. Did it look like I was kidnapping her? Once, a uniformed carabiniere approached us and, ignoring me, asked her in bad English if she was lost. Answering him in Italian—which she spoke perfectly, without the slightest trace of a French accent—she explained that she had only dyed her hair, which was in reality black, the same as her friends (pointing to the crows in the plaza). She hadn’t forgotten our little game. As we were walking away, she asked me if René and Gaëtane were going to divorce and who she would live with, in that case. I was thankful, for once, that she didn’t have Maya’s telepathic powers.

  At Cinecittà, I would accompany her to the dressing rooms where she had her own little corner, a canvas chair with her name printed across the back. I was just supposed to make sure she was being taken care of, but I usually stayed longer, if only to observe Gém in action. She had a gift, no doubt about it: I saw her get through intense, dialogue-heavy scenes without losing concentration, holding her own among actors several times her age. She wasn’t simply parroting the lines she had memorized but really listening and reacting, like a seasoned professional. Even though René had done his best to keep her ignorant of the true nature of the film, with the story he had fabricated especially for her, I am now convinced that she was perfectly aware of what she was doing, of all the violence and death and mayhem she was causing with her telekinetic powers. (How could she not wonder why she was being told to imagine “something sad” or “something scary” or “something really terrible” while a fan blew her hair back and a makeup artist applied fake blood to her nostrils?) Her talent as an actress became all the more apparent during her scenes with Niko, the movie version of myself, as I had come to think of him, though I might have been the only one to see the resemblance. After all, the actor who played him looked nothing like me, and one might say that, physically at least, he was my diametrical opposite. Niko is a drifter who, after the death of Maya’s parents, becomes her guardian and mentor and friend. He is the one who teaches her to hone her powers so that she can use them to her advantage against the evil minions of Corvus. A few times, I caught members of the crew blinking back what could only have been tears. I alone knew what she was doing: it was like watching the two of us together, pseudo-father and pseudo-daughter, when René wasn’t around to spoil the fun. Maya and Niko’s first meeting—in the ruins of the Basilica Santa Maria, involving fifty cats on a soundstage—needed to be done in one continuous take, and the atmosphere on set was tense. Knowing that Maya cannot yet control her powers, Niko wills himself to remain calm, emptying his mind of excess thoughts: she must grasp, without interference, his deepest intentions … The sequence, which ended with Maya collapsing into Niko’s arms, had everyone cheering and applauding as soon as the cameras stopped. But no one thought to bat an eye during the scene—later deleted—where Maya asks Niko if he will become her father when all this is over and they’ve defeated Corvus. To which Niko replies that he always wanted a daughter, a family, which he’d been deprived of, growing up in an orphanage. (“We’re both orphans,” Maya says. “We can choose each other.”) When the cameras stopped, I had to leave the room and splash cold water on my face, which seemed to me, in the lavatory mirror, the face of a dead man, a ghost.