Director's Cut (46 page)

“I'm sorry about interrupting your party,” Maxim says as they climb into the limousine.

“I'm not,” Pontorax laughs, exiting the parking area in the wrong gear. “My wife thinks I share her predilection for big parties. That is a misunderstanding. One of many between men and women. I love beautiful women, of course, but this whole Brazilian rage leaves me cold. My wife happens to have gone to all this trouble. I prefer not to disabuse her. That's less painful than the truth.”

The wind is too strong. Some of the lanterns have caught fire in the sky. The tails ignite like fuses and the kites go up in flames. Smoldering scraps float down on the mountain road on every side of the car.

“The more we love a woman, the less we see her as she is,” says Pontorax. “We think we know what our lovers want, but we could just as easily be wrong. Whose fault is that, the one who misunderstands or the one who no longer bothers to correct the misunderstanding?”

“I have to go to him!” Gala exclaims, breaking loose of Maxim's embrace. She leaps from the hospital bed and holds her face under the tap. In three minutes, she is dressed and ready to go. She takes the news that Snaporaz is in a coma as a general takes a mobilization order. No tears, no doubt. She wants only one thing.

Maxim recognizes it.

“Everyone loves someone,” says Dr. Pontorax in consolation as he gives Maxim money for the return trip. “It's an endless chain. Sometimes we're lucky enough to be briefly coupled with one that fits. You have to recognize those moments and cherish them.”

Back in Rome, Gala closes the door of her chapel behind her every morning and walks to the Castel Sant'Angelo. There, she takes bus 982 to the end of the line and walks the rest of the way through the fields. She registers at the hospital gate, where they ask her name and her relationship with me.

“We're close,” is all she says.

Then they ask her to wait some distance from the main building in an external parking lot reserved for everyone who wants to see Snaporaz or hopes for news of his condition. The crowd grows daily, though none of them will ever be admitted. Beer and water vendors, pizza and ice cream sellers start showing up around ten. Even the Cinecittà souvenir stand, with its Snaporaz mugs, scarves, and key rings, has relocated
here. Business is brisk, especially around noon, when the crowd swells with civil servants from the city who've come here for lunch and housewives treating their children to a day trip. Every Sunday afternoon, there is a Mass to pray for my recovery. Touring coaches have started to include the hospital on their routes, and ever more couples seeking an alternative backdrop for their wedding photos have been sighted. To ease the waiting, the hospital management has set up loudspeakers that constantly blast music from my films.

I hear the noise from my wheelchair in the gazebo. An elderly patient lifts her hospital gown like an evening dress and dances for hours on end, a blissful expression on her face.

The whole time I'm imagining Gala's out there waiting. It's enough to drive you mad. Her fingers through the wire netting. It cuts into her flesh. How can she know that there's nothing to worry about on my account? Nothing would make me feel better than to see her and reassure her, but I have no way of expressing that to anyone.

Interest fades as evening falls. The families go home, the vendors pack their wares, and around seven thirty, in midbeat, someone kills the music. Gala walks back to the gate, gives her name, and asks if there's any news. They tell her to try again tomorrow. At that, she walks off through the fields in the last light of the day.

Maxim is waiting for her at home. Since they got back from Sicily, his life has consisted of looking after Gala. He has taken on the task of feeding her properly. He brings bread and fruit in the morning for her daily trek to her lover. Then he combs the markets of Rome for grains and high-fiber vegetables, which he prepares in the afternoon according to a strict diet that gradually compels her bowels to start functioning independently, supported by a course of vitamins and expensive medicines prescribed by Dr. Pontorax.

The skiing debacle taught him that actors are completely interchangeable. Despite all their investments in their egos, they're easier to replace than a part of a set someone's spent a couple of hours hammering together. Maxim should have realized that when he saw the photos covering the walls of Cinecittà. He still couldn't go down a new path until the old one had been brutally cut off. As he recovered from that blow atop the steps to the Ara Coeli, he thought he'd reached a dead
end. He mourned the life he had envisaged but, gradually, as his grief faded, the fog of his ambition slowly lifted too.

“And?” Every evening when Gala comes home, he asks the same question, “Did you get in?”

If she doesn't feel like talking about it, he serves dinner. When she starts to cry, he comforts her. This briefly makes him feel that he matters to her. Then she starts talking about Snaporaz, about how perfectly he's always understood her, how his genius reflects on her when she's with him, how it always makes her feel bigger than she actually is.

Maxim doesn't contradict her. Her sorrow hurts him, so why would he want to make it worse? He holds his tongue out of love for her. But his silence only helps prolong this hopeless situation.

Wouldn't it be more loving of me, he sometimes wonders, to tell her that the love between her and Snaporaz isn't all that unique? Shouldn't I grab her by the shoulders and shake her until she realizes that she's not the only beautiful young woman standing in the parking lot with her fingers in the wire fence, and that all those others think they've got the same right to stand by Snaporaz's sickbed?

But he loves her too much to hurt her. Or is he too cowardly to risk the truth?

So he says, “Yes, your relationship is unique, and every day it lasts is something to be grateful for,” whereupon they turn on the television or sit out the evening with books until it's time for Maxim to return to Parioli.

Human reason can so strongly suppress imagination that, in all those nighttime wanderings through the city, Maxim only once comes face-to-face with himself. It happens on the Piazza Navona, just after the fountains have been turned off and the fortune-tellers have gone home. By the time he walks onto the square, it is deserted, except for a couple lying in each other's arms before the statue of the Moor, oblivious to anyone else.

Maxim has almost passed them by when he recognizes Gala and himself. He turns around. They look like they're in love. She's wearing her leopard-skin jacket. His head is on her shoulder. Maxim goes up to within a few meters of them, but the two are so happy, so absorbed in each other, that he doesn't seem to exist for them. New arrivals in the city, stretching out on the soft stones of the city squares that serve as
their living room. They haven't committed themselves to anything; everything still seems possible. Then she stands and strips down to her slip. She washes her arms and shoulders in the basin. She bends over it and dips her face in the water. When she straightens up again, she notices Maxim staring at her from a distance. It makes her laugh. She scoops up water with both hands and throws it toward him. Encouraged, he runs toward the fountain. Again she tries to splash him. For a second, he looks like he'll go play with the young couple, but then he reconsiders and walks off without a word. He hurries away from the square. After all, Gala will be going out early the next morning, and he wants to be back at her place in time to prepare a high-fiber breakfast.

“Signora Vandemberg!” the man in the commercial shouts. He descends the dark stairs to the cellar. The woman he's following doesn't hear him. She is carrying a bucket of milk. In her long, spotted bathrobe, she walks past a row of cells. A bicycle stands behind the bars of one of them. The others seem to be empty.

“Signora Vandemberg,” the man sighs, “from Holland. She was the most beautiful woman in the world. Signora!”

Now she turns around.

The man was not exaggerating.

“Signora, let me carry the bucket for you.”

“Jij kunt het niet,”
the woman answers in Dutch,
“jij bent maar een jongen.”

He doesn't understand the words but seems to grasp her meaning. Suddenly, he realizes what he's got on. He's wearing a blue sailor's suit with a big white collar.

“But I'm the boss of a big company,” he argues, astonished. “I'm feared and respected.”

“Jij bent altijd een kleine jongen gebleven.”

Now the foreign language is too much for him.

“I'm sorry,” the man shouts desperately as she walks away with her bucket. “Can someone translate that for me?”

“I can,” a lion says. He emerges from one of the cells and translates the Dutch woman's words. “You've always stayed a little boy.” Then the
lion lays his head on the lap of the man in the sailor's suit and begins to cry. The animal weeps slow, heavy, heartrending tears.

The whole thing takes less than ninety seconds and ends the way I wanted all the ads to end: the man wakes from his nightmare and falls out of bed with a thud. His snarling wife insists that he'd sleep better if he'd listened to her and entrusted his money to the Vatican bank.

I finished the cut just before I left for Los Angeles, but it hadn't been approved, let alone scheduled for broadcasting. Come to think of it: I haven't even been paid for it yet. In any event, the commercial suddenly appears on television. The timing has undoubtedly been influenced by the tremendous publicity surrounding my condition. A big advertising campaign in all the newspapers alerts people to “Snaporaz's Last Dream.” That night, all of Italy is glued to the tube.

Gala watches with Maxim, completely unprepared. Finally, during the last commercial break in a game show, my ad begins.

The man descends the cellar stairs.

“Signora Vandemberg!” he shouts.

Neither of them realizes it straightaway. Gala doesn't react even when she hears her name a second time. She doesn't stir until the Italian actress does her best to render her incomprehensible Dutch lines.

“That's you!” says Maxim. “That's supposed to be you!”

“Jij bent altijd een kleine jongen gebleven,”
she says with an outlandish Italian accent.

“My hair!” says Gala. “My walk! Even the leopard-skin bathrobe.”

“That is really too fucking much!” Maxim blurts. “The son of a bitch finally found a part for you, and he didn't even let you play it!”

“And welcome back to
More Is Less,”
the presenter coos, “the quiz where contestants …”

Maxim turns off the television, the better to hear his own indignation.

“He used me,” says Gala quietly.

“He used you all right, but without really using you!”

“For the very last footage he ever shot.”

Gala slowly stands and walks to the terrace.

“That doesn't mean we have to stand for it,” Maxim bellows. “If
you want, we can stop them from broadcasting it again. Or at least make them pay for using your name, for violating your …”

He stops in the middle of his tirade. He sees Gala standing there. The church lights are shining through the stained glass, covering her with color. She has clasped her hands before her breast, staring at the stars like Saint Catherine of Genoa after her vision.

“I have to give him his due,” Maxim says darkly when he realizes that he'll have to surrender his place forever. “He really is the absolute master.”

“His last ideas,” whispers Gala. “He dedicated his last images to me.”

They stand beside each other in silence. On the other side, the theater lights go out.

“I'm going home.”

“Already?” Gala looks at him. “Come on, it's still early.”

“No,” says Maxim. “I mean I'm really going home.” And after a long silence, he adds, “It's time.”