Director's Cut (33 page)

Who would dare assert that it's only coincidence that Freud wrote his
Interpretation of Dreams
shortly after the birth of cinema?

Once Maxim departs for Cortina, Gala sits staring into space. She'd insisted, but she's still surprised that he actually went. This is her first night alone since they arrived in Rome. At first, she only feels emptiness, but then she discovers space inside it. Now, finally, she takes the time to think about her situation.

In her mind, she rewinds the scenes she acted out in the daytime in Tivoli with Snaporaz, replaying them from the beginning. She does it several times. With each showing, she concentrates less on their words
and interaction, discovering instead new details in the environment: how bright the sandy color of the Temple of Sibyl and how dark the slime on the underwater stones; the frightened fish that shoots off as she swims toward it; how her slip clings to her body when she gets out of the water and how the old man reverts to his age in that moment—and here she rewinds a little to see Snaporaz forgetting himself for minutes on end, mouth open and relaxed, beaming like a child watching a procession. He even claps! This time, she notices that the handkerchief he uses to dab her dry shows an imprint of her face. Smudges of lipstick and mascara. The funeral shroud of a clown. He holds it to the light for a moment and then folds it up. Before putting it into his pocket, he presses the material to his nose, sniffing it. Then, suddenly, the severe look returns to his eyes and she's an actress auditioning once again. All candor disappears behind his eyelids. Reality slams down between her and the film director like a safety curtain.

The crashing sound rudely interrupts her musings, as if the auditorium doors have been opened too early. Alone in her room in Parioli, she is overcome by a great sadness. She still thinks it's because she misses Maxim. She stands up, paces. The streetlights shine through the small window, round and high in the wall like a porthole in a below-deck cabin. For the first time, she feels the oppressiveness of the basement, the weight of the house above it.

In reality, she's mourning the little boy she fleetingly glimpsed at the water's edge, delightedly clapping his hands just before the old man's features returned. That's the moment, when she stopped being a playmate and reverted to the role of actress, that oppresses her; the fourth wall closing between them, a curtain upon which the scenery artist had painted a mask of Snaporaz, heavy lids and dead eyes on either side of an exaggeratedly severe, hooked nose.

Snaporaz doesn't call, and still she stays up all night. The longer the silence, the more passionate her longing to hear from him. She dozes off now and then.

“Galeone, Galeone!” comes a stifled call from behind the curtain.

Even in this drowsy state, Gala knows that Snaporaz isn't thinking, It's the middle of the night, I think I'll ring up that Dutch actress. But that doesn't stop her from awaking, cheerfully hopeful, every time one of the house's nocturnal visitors hurries down the gravel path. More
than for a role in his film, she longs with every hour that goes by for another chance to lift that severe curtain, even if that means hanging on the ropes with all her weight. Even if she doesn't yet realize it, she's no longer auditioning for his film, but for his life.

“The dew of love getting to you?” asks Geppi. Saturday is just dawning when Gala walks into the kitchen. Geppi fills the coffeepot and puts it on the stove.

“My mother always said that men spin their webs in the twilight, cobwebs so fine that you can't find them in the dark. But in the morning … ah! In the morning, very briefly, immediately after sunrise, just before the dew that clings to the threads has evaporated, you can catch a glimpse.”

The big table is full of copper pots and pans that need cleaning. Gala picks one up and starts to polish it.

“It was her way of warning me. ‘No matter how much you want it in the nighttime,' said Mamma, ‘always wait until morning.' When you see the web, it's too late. The night has passed and you're trapped.”

The pressure builds and the boiling water starts to press its way through the coffee.

“Ah, if only I'd listened to her!”

“I didn't sleep well,” says Gala.

“It shows.” Geppi presses the rattling lid down to hold in the steam and pours two cups. “Here, this'll take the rust off your edges.”

Gala assesses the damage in her hand mirror. What if Snaporaz were to suddenly call? She couldn't let herself be seen like this, hair tangled from tossing and turning, her eyes swollen as if she's been crying.

“Surely that's not how you do it?” Geppi snatches the mirror, spits on a copper frying pan, rubs it with her sleeve, and holds it up. “A mirror can only show you who you are, just a woman, whether you're beautiful or ugly, but that's all. The dents in this pan show all kinds of faces. It splits you into different people like a funhouse mirror. I could be any number of women.”

She sighs with satisfaction and holds the frying pan out to Gala.

“That's how I've looked at myself for years,” Geppi continues. “I used to imagine all the women I might become. Now I think about the women I could have been.”

Gala looks at the distorted faces staring at her from the dented copper.

“Why would I want a sharp image of a woman old enough to have to shave?” Geppi asks. “I'm free to put together something beautiful from this soup of distorted noses and melting chins.”

Gala's portrait is constantly swimming through the copper.

“The less you see of yourself, the more chances you have to become something.”

Gelsomina and I spent much of the war in her aunt's apartment. All the men my age had been called up to fight for il Duce. To avoid this fate, I stayed off the street as much as possible. I never emerged before dark. I spent a lot of time drawing. I entertained myself by fantasizing about all the things I couldn't experience in reality. But I was impatient. I felt that life was passing me by. One day, I decided to go for a walk to the Piazza di Spagna. And there, of all places, the army was searching for draft dodgers. I didn't spot them in time, and when I tried to turn back I found the street behind me was blocked off. We were forced up onto the Spanish Steps, where German soldiers were interrogating everyone. It took a long time because they spoke bad Italian and everyone pretended not to understand them. I tried to think, but couldn't come up with anything. I didn't say a word and got packed onto the back of a truck. If I didn't do something, I was done for. The truck started to drive. I was very calm. “If this were a screenplay,” I said to myself, “what would you have the main character do now?”

At that very moment, a young blond officer emerged from the Via della Croce, carrying a big packet of waffles under his arm, from Forlari's, the best in Rome. Delicious sponge pastry, icing all round, filled with brandied raisins—wonderful. I jumped off the back of the truck and ran up to him with outstretched arms. “Wolfgang, Wolfgang!” I shouted with great emotion, as if we had lost touch with each other a long time ago, throwing my arms around him as if I'd missed him terribly.
One truck slowed for a moment, but no one opened fire. Then it drove on, the poor boys herded in the back like sheep headed for the slaughterhouse. The officer dropped his waffles in fright, trying to explain to me that his name wasn't Wolfgang. I apologized and walked into the Via Margutta as calmly as I could. I entered the first antiques shop I came to. It was a small shop, but I spent an hour frantically studying its wares. I think the owner understood. He didn't say a word. I just walked back and forth between mirrors in enormous rococo frames. The whole time, I could only think one thing: I'm saved, I'm saved!

Ever since, I've put my faith in the moment. The tighter a person is squeezed, the better his solutions.

Gala stays in her room for days, as if the war were raging outside instead of in her head. All this time, she waits by the telephone. She tries to read but can't concentrate. She tries to sleep but can't stop thinking. She tries to be angry with Snaporaz. She is angry with herself because she knows she'll forgive him the moment the phone rings.

It doesn't ring. Or rather, it rings only once. It's Maxim. He's made it to the mountains and wants to tell her all about his adventures. He detects agitation in her voice. He doesn't impose, wishes her goodnight, and hangs up, knowing she wants to keep the line free. At the end of day three, Gala finally thinks of food. There's nothing in the house. She dashes out to the supermarket just before closing time. Altogether she'll be gone for no more than ten minutes. The chance that the director will call in that time is negligible. Gala nonetheless panics in the checkout line. She pushes through in such a wild hurry that she can't find anything smaller and astonishes the checkout girl by throwing down a fifty-thousand-lira note and then running off without waiting for the change.

It's almost seven! What a ridiculous time not to be home. All Italians are at home at seven o'clock. If Snaporaz wants to call, of course he'll choose a time when he knows that every normal person is sitting in their living room. What possessed her to go out now, of all times? She takes off sprinting, only to teeter on her high heels. She kicks them off, stuffs them into a bag, and ignores the traffic to run barefoot across the Piazza Ungheria, all the while cursing her own stupidity and then
Maxim, who could have done this shopping if he hadn't been off sliding around on those stupid skis. While she runs, her panic becomes dejection, and though she doesn't slow down for the sharp gravel on the garden path, she is now so thoroughly convinced that she has missed Snaporaz's call that she sticks the key into the lock without listening to see whether she might catch a final tinkle. She flops down on the bed, opens a bag of chocolates, and wolfs them down without so much as tasting them.

She's sound asleep when the telephone finally rings. It's eleven thirty at night and she's lying fully dressed on her bed between the shopping bags. It rings seven or eight times before she wakes with a start. She shoots up. In two seconds, all the words she has spent the last couple of days rehearsing fall into place: a cool greeting, then a joke to give a relaxed impression, followed by something warm and affectionate before at last consenting to whatever the great man might propose. She reaches for the receiver but, just when she is about to pick it up, she hesitates. After all, she shouldn't seem too keen. She lets it ring twice more; she doesn't want me to think she's hanging around at home waiting for a call. Whatever the reason, when she finally answers, I have just hung up.

“I'm a silly old man,” I tell myself. I'm actually relieved I didn't get her on the line and make a fool of myself with the guarded declaration of love I have been practicing before the mirror. I knew it: a woman like Gala doesn't sit home waiting for a bald old man. She's zooming around the city in an open sports car, pursued by a horde of admirers on
motorinos
. She's dancing to the rhythm of the bongos somewhere in Caracalla's baths, her silhouette visible under the arches, harried by the flames of a gypsy who is juggling with fire.

I've had fewer affairs than people think or the newspapers write. But they happened, and all were equally dear to me. Some must have been exceptional, but when I look back, they all start to seem the same. I was never heroic or shameless and self-assured like other men, but I was never cowardly or childish either. Self-confidence is something you expect in the young, but my relations with women have only grown simpler with the years. Romanticism aside, a man, as he grows older,
does build up a certain routine. The awe and emotion you feel the first time a woman undresses before you is so miraculous that you assume that you will always feel it, no matter how often you are allowed to witness this mystery. You cannot possibly imagine a limit to the number of times that your lust will fight for precedence over gratitude and tears. But delight is finite. It slips surreptitiously away, and by the fiftieth or hundredth time, perhaps later, it's gone. It's not your desire that diminishes, just your astonishment that there's someone who wants to satisfy it. The love is no less genuine, only your surprise at finding it reciprocated. This is not an act of will: quite the opposite, you'd much rather feel that youthful unease, that piercing doubt, as if everything depended on the other. You can pursue it in the arms of one woman after the other, more passionately every time, but each subsequent embrace only makes its absence more palpable. This is the source of the vague sorrow behind our smiles.

It gets easier, requires less effort, every time. More casual, and you're less patient. If this is boredom—and I doubt it is, because it's still just as exciting and necessary—but if it
is
boredom, it's the same mild variety you cannot help but feel, as you grow older, observing new generations; the weary tenderness with which you watch their endless energy discovering everything you yourself have long known and experienced and seen too many times. It's not that you're inured to it; you just don't have the time. How many hours are wasted on doubt and diffidence, admiration and false modesty? With each passing year, I make less allowance for all that. Life just happens to be coming to an end, and that spurs you to get down to business. Why stand on ceremony when every creak of the springs sends you jumping up to make sure Death isn't sitting at the foot of the bed? With its impatience, death reduces all love to the essence.

But this time it's different. It's as if things are about to happen again for the first time. I'm so scared that I might miss out on the happiness being offered to me that everyone, even Gelsomina, becomes an annoyance. I'm rude, as if everything besides Gala were only a distraction from life. I lie awake nights, exulting in my nervousness. My heart skips beats, as if I'd embarked on a completely unknown adventure; as if I knew nothing more about women than that they have breasts like overripe
pumpkins, like those of la Saraghina, who had to use both hands to lift them out of her blouse, one at a time, to show them to me and my schoolmates, who were waiting among the piled-up deck chairs on the beach.