Director's Cut (25 page)

I dislodge her wig. Carried away by the game, I had lost sight of her fragility. It doesn't fly off completely, it just slides down the side of her head. I'm shocked. I always forget she's got it on. Enzo and the hair department at Cinecittà made it so beautifully, with so much love, that it's indistinguishable from real hair.

I apologize, but Gelsomina isn't embarrassed in front of me. She takes it off. Funny how those last strands are so much more precious to me than her full head of hair ever was. She replaces the wig as adeptly as the actress she is and kisses me anyway. But her face drops when she looks over my shoulder. The napkin has flown off the table. I make a grab for it, but it shoots up and swirls over the rooftops. Hand in hand, Gelsomina and I watch the woman from last night's dream blowing around in the sky. For a moment, it looks as if she's headed for the Pincio, but the wind shifts and the napkin falls at our feet like a dead bird.

A real cartoon character never ages. Unlike Gelsomina. She has been drawn by life. The skin droops, the lines have smudged on the page. She has weathered, and her colors have paled in the sun. The big head on that little body has become as wrinkled as a ball of newsprint in a wastepaper basket. I pick her up, unfold her, try to smooth her out with the palm of my hand. No one can ever have felt this much tenderness.

It is because they are decaying that we admire the frescoes of the great masters more deeply than the lords who commissioned them did on the morning they were unveiled. Only by choosing our own colors and completing the faded lines in our imaginations can we touch their essence.

I melt every morning when I wake up beside her, no less than I did fifty years ago. I feel her warmth. I touch her and pray that I might feel the same way in the hour of my death. Yet I am already dying. I lose consciousness. I sink away into the love where I myself cease to exist. I turn over and there she is: the spiky hair and those big, closed clown's eyes just above the blankets. I'd like to sob and squeak with joy, grab her, shake her, pull her out of bed, jump up and down together. No words can express it. I kiss her pert little nose, which twitches in her sleep as if I were tickling her nostrils with a straw.

I see her as a little girl, standing before a columbarium in the cemetery of the Ursuline Sisters in Bologna. The small tombs in the high marble walls bear no names, only years, one gleaming marble plaque for each year of her life. Ten columns wide, ten rows high. I bring her a ladder so that she can easily reach each age. In each tomb she opens, there is an urn with a copper plate marked with the year. When she lifts one of the lids, the ash billows up, and in the dust she glimpses herself as she looked in that year. She grabs one year after another, scattering it around. It's plain to see that never, not for a single moment, was she uglier or more beautiful than in any other. Because it has always been her, Gelsomina, my picture, my painting. The last tombs are still empty, gaping, unsealed holes in the wall. We crawl into one. Deep in the gloomy niche, I cuddle up to her and hear something rustling in the pocket of her coat. She has brought rum babas with her. We feed them to each other, sucking the liquor out of the cake. And that is how we wait, close to each other.

I wouldn't begrudge anyone this intimacy, but I refuse to believe that another couple has ever been, or ever will be, this close. There is not a moment when Gelsomina is not with me, not even when I'm in someone else's arms. How could it be otherwise? I exist inside her, and she in me.

It's strange how a love that keeps growing starts to hurt like sorrow. Perhaps because at the same time it grows you see the outline dissolving. You need to make haste to show the other how great your love really is. You can tell her every day how much you love her, but it gets to be like a nagging pain whose exact location you can never pinpoint when the doctor asks. Finally, you feel you have to scream your love out loud, because it's too big to capture in words, or even show in pictures.

Yet that's what Gelsomina has asked me to do. At first, I thought she was nagging me for a lead in my next film, just like all the other actresses, but then I realized that she wanted a memorial: a final testimony to our love. I'd done it before, celebrating my first rush of feeling for her, and then, in a subsequent film, my lust for her. Both came from within me. But recently Gelsomina asked for me to conjure a proof of my true love out of the light. I was stuck. If I can't tell the woman who's grown old
with me what really matters, how can I possibly have anything to say to the world?

And just when I was starting to create this last monument for Gelsomina, Gala sashayed into my office at Cinecittà. At first I merely thought she might come in handy in a bit role in my homage, one of those anonymous and interchangeable girls like the ones Busby Berkeley arranged in geometric patterns to create his living kaleidoscopes. I sought figures—like the water nymph Bernini placed in the pedestal of a fountain to gaze admiringly at the towering Neptune above her—to exalt Gelsomina. Gala, if I ended up deciding to use her at all, would have simply been one of many tones that could lend color to Gelsomina. Why didn't I see how she would dazzle? I know it all too well, how passing time disintegrates the edifice until at last the nymph is fished out of the Tiber, then placed in a museum to be admired as a masterpiece. In every fragment the observers can, after all, guess at the whole.

And she's really there, hanging on my office wall, the girl I saw in my dreams, the one with the big cartoonish head. I pluck her portrait from the
hopeful fines fleurs
on my notice board. It's a close-up, but I can make out a leopard-skin print on the jacket flung over her shoulders.

I strain to recall our meeting, but can visualize neither last night's dream nor our encounter in the flesh. I lean her photo against the base of the office lamp in front of me and get to work. She keeps her eye on me all morning, and when I come back from my coffee break I read what's written on the back. Her name is something impossible that hurts my throat when I try to pronounce it. An address in Parioli is scrawled next to it, and the name of her agent.

“Just watching!” an astonished Fulvani exclaims. “Surely there can't be any harm in that?” He drops his chin to his chest and stares intently at the Dutch couple, scanning their faces for the least sign of consent, like a dog in front of a freshly filled bowl, trembling with subservience but incapable of hiding its tail-wagging excitement. Sitting across from him, Gala and Maxim clasp hands under the table. Each is waiting for the other to react, but minutes elapse without their moving so much as
a finger. Their palms take on the same temperature; their fingertips become indistinguishable. Just when they turn to each other for support, they are so completely merged that they can no longer sense each other's thoughts.

“Unless,” Fulvani pouts, turning away as if to conceal his disappointment, “unless, of course, you think that people should be ashamed of those moments when they're at their most beautiful?”

The scene is none too original and will fail to surprise anyone except those who act it out. It's a film-industry staple, and a hilarious new variant does the rounds at every party. Everyone hopes that things like this occasionally happen, but no one is personally acquainted with anyone villainous or naive enough to get caught up in such an adventure. Of course, Gala and Maxim have heard of these practices, but they laughed off the idea that decisions involving such large amounts of money could be made so frivolously. Soon, when it's all behind them and they're outside again, they'll run down the Via Angelo Brunetti doubled over with laughter. Still laughing, they'll run up the Pincio until they can no longer hold it in, whereupon they'll collapse in front of the Casina Valadier. There, giggling and spluttering while they order one expensive cocktail after the next, they'll slowly realize that, beneath their hilarity, which refuses to subside all evening, they feel no shame at all, but rather pride. Their bond has only been strengthened by this latest stunt.

When I called Fulvani that morning to tell him I wanted to screen-test Gala, I detected an ominous note beneath his usual obsequiousness. Was he annoyed that I was interested in one of his favorites? Impatient because he couldn't wait to use the lasso I'd given him to haul in his prey? At any rate, I remember I suddenly saw him sitting there on the other end of the line like a drooling Pantalone, bent over the telephone, sniggering as he used his spit to set a curl in his long goatee. That's how I'll show him when we shoot the scene.

After hanging up, I sketched myself as a big battleship bobbing up and down on the waves: the deck formed by my stomach is covered with bikini girls. Dancing wildly, they do their best to attract my attention, until I start shaking with pleasure. Then they tumble over my railings and plunge into the sea. My wake is full of sharks, feasting on everyone I've rejected.

There was a time when I couldn't sleep for thinking about everyone I've had to disappoint. I was young and recognized my own enthusiasm in the wide eyes that looked at me. “Where would I be now,” I asked myself, “if no one had given me a first chance?” Then one night I ran through all the rejections I myself have received and awoke to the realization that those very roads, the ones that had been cut off, the chances I didn't get, were what made me who I am. After that, I slept like a baby. No rose flowers without being pruned. That may be why, less than a second after I'd pictured myself tossing a bouquet of Dutch tulips to Fulvani's shears, I'd forgotten Gala again, as if she'd never visited me, either in real life or in my dreams.

“Should you really come?” Gala asked Maxim after Fulvani had summoned her. She was sitting at the mirror, nervously adding a gold stroke above her peacock-blue eye shadow just to be on the safe side, something she normally did only before going to discos.

“We've come this far together. I'm supposed to leave you behind now?” He could feel that she didn't want him there. A few days before, she'd said as much, hinting—“Look, that's just how Italian men are”—that he was in the way. After a couple of nights, his initial sorrow hardened into stubbornness.

“I can't help noticing that this guy always invites you over during his secretaries' lunch break,” Maxim said. “It's because they're like that, Gala, that I can't let you go there alone again.” To make up for his insistence, he walked all the way to the bar on the Piazza Flaminia to fetch her a bottle of vodka, but when he got back he asked, as always, “You sure you really need it?” And, as always, Gala answered that she was more relaxed after a couple of swigs.

“Funnier.”

“I don't believe that you could be much funnier than you are,” he said. She stopped teasing her curls to look at him.

“That's sweet of you,” she said, “but when I'm nervous I'm dull and boring; I get scared that I won't be able to say something funny, and that's enough to make me stare like a donkey.”

“I've never seen you do anything but scintillate.”

“Yes,
you
!” she snapped, as if he'd turned down a dead-end street. In a burst of impatience, she grabbed a pair of scissors and sliced off
a trouble some curl. The results were so upsetting that anything else Maxim had to say was drowned out by the jeers of Snaporaz that already echoed through her head. She imagined the director stopping her screen test, face twisted with disappointment, so vividly that tears leapt to her eyes. And she was galled that Maxim still thought consoling words could ease her insecurity. He didn't realize that she longed for a scolding, a vicious gibe, to unleash her fighting spirit, to push her, in top form, into the arena.

“No, I don't have any taste,” an aggrieved Maxim mumbled as he smoothed her wisps with a little spit, “to like you when you're not completely bombed.”

Gala made a point of grabbing the bottle of vodka, sucking it half-empty in only a couple of swigs.

Even pressed against each other in the rattling elevator that was taking them to Skylight, their mood still hadn't thawed, though with every passing floor they noticed their breathing had synchronized, as it did when they shared a bed.

“He insisted on coming,” Gala sighed to Fulvani, as if bemoaning the end of her career. The man opened the elevator door. To her chagrin, she realized she was trembling at the thought that he too might now be disappointed in her. Her shivering passed through the elevator cage, creating a short rattling inside the shaft. Fulvani's smile was wide and amiable, but she played it safe, raising her face to let the older man kiss her on both cheeks for the first time. But he scarcely took the time to enjoy it, apparently more interested in Maxim.

“I'm so glad to see you, my boy.” He slapped a clammy hand on Maxim's neck and pulled him to his chest. “As if you sensed it …”

“Considering past experiences,” Maxim said belligerently, “a chaperone seemed advisable.”

“There's no doubt that two heads are better than one.” Fulvani didn't seem to have heard his hostility. “United we stand, I always say!”

Maxim pulled back from the embrace, more leery than ever.

“I just called that house of yours to ask if you could come with Gala, my handsome young fellow, but you'd already left.”

“You don't say,” Maxim replied, so tetchily it earned him a dig in the ribs from Gala. “What a coincidence.”

“Perhaps it was simply meant to be,” Fulvani beamed, “and that's what it's starting to look like. I have good reason to believe that the Baby Jesus has lent me not one but two prize Dutch cows from His Christmas manger, but before I start milking, first tell me this, star athlete, how well can you ski?”

“Ski?”

“Or are you going to tell me you developed thighs like that just from riding in bed?”

“He danced,” said Gala, coming to his aid.