Director's Cut (36 page)

“What possessed me?” she asks herself, weeping with impotence and rage. “For God's sake, how could I have let it come to this?”

Until the day I grew too fat to wear a swimsuit, I was always too skinny for one. For years, they called me Gandhi or Beanstalk. When I was sixteen, I watched the others impress girls by parading virtually naked over the beach in Rimini. I didn't dare. In response, I began dressing exorbitantly in three-piece suits with scarves and summer gloves. I studied pictures of Leopardi and D'Annunzio, men who never bared so much as their Adam's apple yet attracted women in droves. On even the hottest days, I strolled up and down the boulevard with a flower in my lapel. Under my arm, I carried a pad on which, for thirty lire, I would draw caricatures of the seaside visitors.

On those summer evenings, the Grand Hotel was like an enormous gleaming oasis between the peeling pavilions and the bleached awnings. The people who stayed there were rich and glamorous. Like me, they avoided the beach: you could not only be too scrawny for it, you could also, it seemed, be too stylish. The suitcases the bellboys carried into the hotel bore stickers with the names of fairy-tale cities and regions, and when the lights went on, the hotel, with its domes and towers, was transformed into a palace like the ones I imagined in Cairo, Lebanon, or Las Vegas. There was no way we local boys would be allowed in, but I spent hours sitting on a wall across the road, fantasizing about suicides and nights of insane passion, about duchesses who had lost everything playing faro, about the blackmail and rapes going on behind the drawn curtains on all those floors. When guests came out on their way to limousines or the casino, I would accost them, but it was unusual for anyone to take the time to pose for me. I didn't mind not earning much because it cost me nothing to listen to the band on the terrace play American songs all evening, or to watch characters who matched the ones in my dreams appear at the balustrade: men in tuxedos, women
with plunging necklines whose curves gleamed in the light of the lanterns. I sketched them. They held champagne glasses or each other, and the women offered the men their lips.

On one of the warmest evenings of August, I was sitting in my regular spot when a lady beckoned from the terrace. She probably wasn't yet thirty-five, but in my eyes she was old. She asked if I'd like to draw her. While the headwaiter looked on as if perfectly aware of how scrawny I was under my padded shoulders, I started sketching. This was the first time in my life that I had entered the Grand Hotel, and as far as I knew it would be the last. I took my time. She asked me what I'd like to drink and ordered it. I took more care with the drawing than I did with the usual caricatures of traveling salesmen's girlfriends I did on the boulevard. Her eyes were deep set and melancholy. Twice we were suddenly forced to stop. She asked me to look away, and I heard her cough painfully several times. She was wearing jewels, and I echoed their gleam in her eyes and lips. The effort with which I looked at her brought a smile back to her face. Her eyes revived, and I felt them studying me. She burst out laughing at the way the tip of my tongue showed between my teeth when I concentrated. For a moment, I thought I could see her as a girl, dancing all night with admirers, her head back, her full blond curls bouncing in time to the music.

When I showed her the result, she took the pad from my hands with surprise. She studied it for a moment, then, without warning, leapt up and ran out into the garden with it. I found her in a bower of jasmine. She'd been crying, and she seemed about to start up again when she saw me. I didn't know what to do and on impulse I kissed her. She could have screamed and had me arrested, but instead she let me go on. And I went on. In her room, we made love without stopping to think and for hours were familiar in a way I had not thought a man and a woman could be. After these perfect hours, we reluctantly disentangled, but even before I reached the lobby I felt the blood draining from my legs. A bucket of shame doused the flaming euphoria from one moment to the next. The sight of her happiness and the intimacy of our union were still vivid in my mind's eye, but I was convinced of my own inadequacy, sure I'd made a fool of myself in every way. Till my dying day, the choir would chant “Gandhi!” My mind tried to reassure my wavering heart, if only long enough to get me past the hotel staff and to the revolving
door. I ran straight to Marcellino, who even then was my bosom buddy. He spent the rest of the night assuring me that it was all the other way around, that the woman I described could usually only dream of a young lover like me, that I had done her a favor, that she would be the one worrying that she had failed to give a youth the passion he needed. It didn't help. I lay on my bed for days, heartsick thinking about everything I should have done differently. Not until I met Gelsomina did I recover my confidence in bed.

Only now, my face hidden in the fingers from which Gala is slowly fading, do I realize how intimately, how equally, age and youth yielded to each other long ago in the Grand Hotel.

Today I am the town's most famous son. There is an enormous bronze bust of me beside the elevators in the lobby. I've finally discovered what it commemorates. The most moving thing about intimacy is sharing not your pride but your shame.

If only I could explain all this to reassure Gala, my Galeotta, who moves away on the far side of the wall before descending into a metro filled with commuters. She wouldn't hear me above the voices shouting in her own head. Maybe later, when my monument to her is complete.

For now, her panic is strangely resigned, as it was that time she was riding the pastor's wife's knee while desperately searching for Homer's words: she knows she's going to fail and accepts the forfeit of love and the merciless punishment. That kind of certitude almost feels like security.

“You haven't gone into business for yourself, I hope?”

The metro doors are closing as Gala feels the hand on her neck. She tries to turn around, but Gianni tightens his grip, briefly, with a false playfulness, and when he lets go he leaves two bruises. With a grin, he flops down on the seat across from her. Gala slaps his face viciously. An old man takes his granddaughter by the hand and leads her to the next carriage.

“Either you and I work as a team,” says Gianni, “or you'll never work again.”

“Fine,” says Gala, “I'll never work again.”

“That's not how it works.”

“I don't know what you mean,” Gala answers. She pretends to look out through the window, which, in a subway tunnel, is not very convincing. Gianni catches her eye in the glass.

“I invested in you because I believed in you. Our working relationship and your beauty are closely related.” She looks straight at him. His smile is just as friendly as the first time they met, but his breathing is short and sharp. His voice lowers menacingly. “If I end one of them, I'll end the other as well.” He suddenly shoots forward, grabs her face with one hand, and squeezes hard. “Then at least I can be sure you won't be whoring around behind my back.”

The injustice brings all the power back that love has squeezed out of her. After all, when a man lashes out at her she's on familiar territory.

“You're insane!” she says, planting her nails in his flesh and wrenching his hand away. He studies the cuts on his hand, lifts it to his mouth, and sucks out the blood.

“Am I? Geppi was kind enough to tell me that you were here. You were picked up and delivered.”

“For a work meeting.”

“Everyone has their own little name for it.”

“You're fucking jealous, aren't you?” She doesn't doubt for an instant that she's got this man's measure. “Of Snaporaz!” and she laughs in Gianni's face.

“Just a director's work meeting with a starlet … all the better,” says Gianni scornfully.

He gets out at the next stop.

“Don't forget,” he calls from the platform before the doors close. “Sicily wants you.”

And yet—incomprehensible—a smile glimmers through her anger when she hears those last words.

Laxatives. Everywhere: pots, powders, strips, enough milk of magnesia to flush out a whole regiment. The room in Parioli is strewn with them.

Gala freezes in the doorway. She couldn't wait to tell Maxim about her adventure, but now it dries up on her tongue. He's lying on the bed reading Billy Johnson's autobiography. He says hello, casually engrossed in the ski champion's life. She kicks off her shoes and sits down next to him.

“You're nuts,” she says while quietly studying the display. “How much did this little joke cost you?”

“You use so much of this crap,” Maxim replies spitefully. “I thought you might need a reserve.”

“You shouldn't look through my things.”

“You shouldn't hide things from me. How long have you been using this crap?”

When Maxim realized what it was he'd discovered in Gala's toiletries bag, he kept searching in disbelief, just to confirm his conviction that that was it. But there was a second jar of laxative pills in a handbag she rarely used. He found a third, with a heavy dosage and a huge list of warnings and side effects, between her mattress and the head of the bed, as if it had slipped down by accident. It was only when he found a small supply of an emetic that Gala had secreted under a loose plank behind the sink that he realized how serious things were. His first reaction was pity. He wanted to fetch her, hug her, rock her, whisper that she could always trust him with everything, that he'd understand whatever the problem was, that they could work it out together. At the same time, he blamed himself. He remembered holding one of those pots in his hands. Why hadn't he looked more closely when he had the chance? He'd wanted to look at the label, but had simply shrugged and put it back. On the other hand, he thought to reassure himself, what was all the fuss about? Laxatives are hardly heroin, after all. No, what upset him was that Gala was keeping secrets from him. That she was ashamed to tell him something. She, of all people, the very person who had taught him shamelessness!

Years ago, she'd walked in on him sitting on the toilet. She apologized and was about to turn on her heel, but he thought that two people who were so intimate should share everything. So she sat on the edge of the bath and acted out a Franca Rame monologue she was learning for an audition. He had never seen
her
shitting, but until a few months ago he had never given that a second thought. They had just eaten. He was getting into the bath when she entered to say that she had to go urgently. He nodded, splashing around unperturbedly, forcing her to request some privacy. He refused because he thought it ridiculous and couldn't be bothered to get out of the tub. She stomped off angrily, crossing the whole Borghese in order to take her time in a marble toilet
in one of the hotels near the Trinità dei Monti. She didn't return till evening, at which point she felt no need to explain her behavior. He brushed off her absence as yet another of the idiosyncrasies he loved even when they annoyed him. How could he have guessed that she was already vomiting up any meal that was too heavy? That day, he'd interpreted her peculiar behavior as her usual spontaneity and lack of inhibition, though it was instead merely compulsive. And she didn't trust him enough to tell him. He felt a pang of reproach. And he grew angrier the more he thought about her deception. She hadn't just shut him out, she had deliberately misled him. If she wasn't who she seemed to be in that most intimate area, what else could he be mistaken about?

He took the bottles to the pharmacy in the Via Scipioni—according to the labels, that's where she bought them—slammed them down on the counter as if the owner were on trial, and haughtily demanded an explanation. The chemist shook his head and said that they were medicines that should not under any circumstances be taken in combination or alternately. Two were even only available by prescription. He looked them up. They had been prescribed by a clinic in Sicily. The doctor's name was difficult to decipher, but when Maxim suggested Pontorax, the chemist agreed. So she'd taken a complete stranger into her confidence; Maxim almost fainted with rage when he madly imagined her sitting back with that guy in an old-fashioned privy. He asked the pharmacy for all the laxatives he stocked. Initially the man refused and explained the state that someone who took all those drugs would end up in—dead intestinal flora, internal bleeding, loss of sphincter control, and colonic adhesions—but when Maxim insisted that it was for him and his family, seven children who ate nothing but white bread, the man gave in, especially when it became clear that Maxim was paying cash. He spread their last money out on the counter. He regretted it as soon as he was back on the sidewalk, but now there he is, lying there with Gala, in a room full of suppositories.

She blushes. He didn't know she could. He'd rather not have known. Now she looks like she's about to cry. He doesn't want her like this. He wants the Gala he's always known. He takes her hand.

“Can't you get off them?”

She shakes her head.

“How long has this been going on?”

She shrugs.

“The camera adds two kilos,” she says quietly. “I wanted to get them off in advance.”

“You're gorgeous.”

“It's not how beautiful you are, it's how beautiful you feel.”

“If you don't feel beautiful, who does? Can't you see everyone watching you on the street?”

“Fulvani thought I was heavy.”

“Fulvani?”

“And Snaporaz definitely will. You know how particular they are in this business.”

“So you throw it all up? After every meal?”

“No!”

He confronts her with a label he has found.

“Every once in a while,” she admits, fixing her big eyes on him, just as she does during seizures.

“How could I not have noticed?”

“Because I'm so much smarter than you,” she says, smiling cautiously.