by Arthur Japin
“Tomorrow,” Maxim hisses to Gala in Dutch.
“How unfriendly,” says Gala. The door opens with a buzz.
“Say ‘Holland’ and every Italian will say ‘Petrus Boonekamp.’”
Fulvani can’t believe that Gala and Maxim have never heard of the delicacy. He pours some for them.
“Not for me,” Maxim says, but Fulvani insists. “You can’t sell it if you don’t know what it tastes like.”
Fulvani has arranged an audition for them for a Petrus Boonekamp commercial.
“Tall, well built, blond, just the Viking they’re looking for. Ten a.m. tomorrow in De Paolis. And then, at two, a test for the Fiat Lancia Christmas lottery. Repeat after me, ‘Puoi vincere!’”
“Puoi vincere!”
“The job’s in the bag,” laughs Fulvani. “And don’t forget, I get twenty percent of everything, okay? I only ask fifteen from amateurs.” Then he turns to Gala. He rests an encouraging hand on her back. “Your friend is lucky. He stands out here. Since the days of the Normans, men like him have been rare below the Alps. But you, my beauty, you could just as easily be Neapolitan. A pearl in the crown of that city, true, but still, there are others to be had. Have you considered dying your hair?”
Gala looks sideways at Maxim. She bends down to pick up her bag. He knows what she wants to get out of it. He shakes his head. Fulvani notices, picks up their portfolio, and starts to leaf through it.
“Wonderful material,” he says after a while, shaking his head. “It has it all, but still, I miss something … something to grab the attention of those men, the kind of thing that would appear among the thousands of photos a director gets on his desk and make him jump to attention.”
Gala’s hand slips into the bag.
“I wouldn’t,” Maxim says urgently. Gala looks at him. Caught. Like a child who has to hand over her toy, she pulls a face at him, ugly, pretending to be angry. Fulvani is sitting right there and can see everything, but that seems to have slipped her mind. As if everything that disappears behind that black window really were gone.
Maxim shrugs. She’s already pulled the slides out of the envelope and is holding them in her hand.
“Perhaps you ought to look at these.”
He takes the transparencies between thumb and index finger and holds them up to the sun, which is setting in the suburbs across the Tiber.
“Please, children,” he says amiably, “not so formal.”
Eight slides. Eight fairy tales with Gala in the lead role. As many days’ work went into them, sparing no trouble or expense. A new set was built for each scene, each employing stylists to arrange the expensive fabrics and props. In the middle, Gala. As Snow Queen and mermaid, selling matches and wearing a red riding hood, in Ali Baba’s cave and in the clouds of Magonia. The editors of Bunny really went to town. The thousand and one nights of Gala Vandemberg!
She had just made an outrageous movie with a rising Dutch filmmaker and, as an up-and-coming starlet, she was in no position to make too many demands. The money wasn’t the point. The one thing she insisted on was Maxim’s presence at every photo session. She was unsure about the whole adventure and wanted his opinion on every detail. The first morning, he’d intervened a few times. Concerned that in her nakedness she should look as unattainable as possible, portraying her as the master of the situation, not as a slave. But even before the lunch break, he sensed that it was a lost cause. When Gala came to him, on the verge of tears, to show him the thick blue eye shadow the Spanish makeup artist Pedro had deployed to transform her into Cinderella, he disguised his aversion and reassured her. What else could he do? She’d signed the contract. There was no way back. The most important thing was to avoid making Gala more insecure than she already was. He insisted willy-nilly that it suited her, that it went with the general atmosphere, and that it was particularly tasteful. He kept it up. Even the next morning, when seven horny dwarves with fake beards and pointy red hats were waiting for them.
A dejected Maxim sat off to one side through the remaining sessions. After all, it was what she wanted. They’d discussed it extensively beforehand. When Gala caught his eye, he smiled supportively and otherwise tried not to think about it.
On a lazy Sunday, years earlier, when Gala was listening to a sermon on the radio with her father, her mother had asked Maxim to go for a walk in their garden with her. Just for him, she opened up her rose house to show him the special varieties she was growing for an exhibition. She taught him to distinguish scent groups with his eyes closed, just by the fullness of their bouquet. He gradually managed to pick out various spices in the faint smell: bitter first, then pungent and fresh, and eventually even a hint of apple. Just when he was starting to enjoy it, she asked, “Do you understand, Maxim, why we can never completely enjoy the things we love most?”
To avoid answering, he closed his eyes and hid behind the petals of a Rosa tomentosa. He recognized cinnamon.
“Always afraid it will be taken away from you.” Suddenly Mrs. Vandemberg grabbed both his hands. “Will you watch over her?” she asked imploringly. Shamelessly. “For God’s sake, will you watch over her?” Without giving him a chance to respond, she continued, with the clarity and passion of someone who knows she’ll never have this much courage again. “She trusts you. We don’t ask what she does or who with. I don’t have to know, if I can be sure you care about her. Will you look after her for us? Please. Her pills. I think of them every morning and every evening. But what’s she thinking? Does she remember to take them? Oh God, you have no idea, every morning, every evening. A child is just one more vulnerability. It makes you so sensitive that you feel you don’t have so much as your own skin protecting you from the outside world.” The moment she heard how she was letting herself go, her courage subsided. “Who else can I ask? You love her.”
Tears ran down her cheeks. He wiped one away with the back of his hand. That helped her regain her composure. She turned away, took a handkerchief from her sleeve, and dried her eyes. She pulled out one of the low wooden drawers and removed a pair of shears. Facing away from him, she started cutting off rose hips. Her hand was unsteady. Now and then, as discreetly as possible, she sniffled. Finally, she straightened up and weighed a few flowers in her hand.
“We’d save ourselves a lot of sorrow if we kept to ourselves.”
She cut a full, round flower off under the bud and stuck it through Maxim’s buttonhole.
“I’ll protect her,” said Maxim, “I promise.” It felt like a solemn oath. Like the promise he had once made to Gala. And sincere. “I’ll do everything in my power.”
Gala’s mother removed her gloves and held the greenhouse door open for him.
“Pleasure,” she said, “is something people can only derive from things that don’t really matter to them.”
By the end of the day, the heat from the spotlights made the photographer’s studio almost unbearable. Maxim woke from his daydreams with a start. He jumped up. Now that he was finally striding across the room, he felt the air moving over his sweaty skin. He resolutely positioned himself between Gala and the lens. From her perch on the beanstalk that had wrapped its tendrils around her, Gala looked at him with surprise. The moment had come for Maxim to intervene. His eyes glided down her body. It was dizzying. So much courage, so little shame! The crew stood waiting on the sidelines. Gala a naked goddess, an unattainable idol.
“Your nipples,” he whispered. Gala smiled at him, as grateful as a child, fully confident that Maxim would never let her look a fool. As her hands were fixed above her head in the plant’s tendrils, she turned her breasts toward him. He squeezed the nipples until they were hard and pointing straight at the camera again.
The telephone rings. Fulvani reluctantly puts down the last fairy tale. He looks at Gala and Maxim openmouthed, as if he needs to recover. Annoyed, Maxim snatches the slides off the table.
“That was Salvini,” Fulvani explains after he’s hung up. “Fiamella wants to see you.” He pulls out twent
y thousand lire and sends Maxim off to the bar in the Via di Ripetta for a bottle to celebrate their achievement. “Italian cinema can breathe again. You kids bring luck. At last: Snaporaz is preparing a new film!”
Not until he’s out on the street, with the slides drumming against his breast with every step, does Maxim become uneasy. Overwhelmed by the general jubilation, he has left Gala alone with Fulvani. He stops in midstride and is about head straight back, but how can he explain returning empty-handed? He sprints to the end of the street. He can see the bar from there. He looks back one last time.
“Does he sleep with you?” asks Fulvani.
“Why?”
“He guards you like a lover.”
Maxim is out of breath. He’s back at Skylight with the first bottle of wine he saw. He rings the bell. Waits. Rings again. The third time he keeps his finger on the button until something happens. The intercom. Fulvani, “Not now, Maxim. Come back in half an hour. Be a good boy: we don’t need you right now.”
Maxim is too astonished to answer. For a moment he thinks it’s a joke and presses against the door. It doesn’t open. He pushes the button again. The same voice. Angry this time.
“Are you dense? You know what’s going on. Fuck off.”
Maxim rings yet again. His blood seems to drain into a reservoir that has suddenly opened inside him. The light on the intercom dims. He can push the button as much as he likes. The system is switched off. There is no response.
Maxim tries to get hold of himself, concentrating on the dizzy feeling in his head. Then he runs back to the corner. He races across the Piazza del Popolo to the bar where he made the calls that morning with Gala. He phones Skylight. Fulvani answers.
“I want to speak to Gala.”
“She doesn’t want to speak to you.”
“I’ll call the police.”
He hears rummaging in the background. Then bumping. Are they struggling? He screams into the receiver. Then Gala’s voice comes.
“It’s all right, Maxim,” she says in Dutch. Then in Italian, “Do what he says.” And, “It’s nothing terrible.” Then he’s cut off.
Maxim calls the police. He tells them everything. Stumbling over his words. Actors. Bunny. Nude fairy-tale characters. Snaporaz. They don’t take him seriously. He can come into the station. Tomorrow morning. Preferably with the slides.
He runs back to the Via Brunetti. He kicks the door. People look out of windows. Some swear at him. He keeps it up, kicking, cursing, hoping some neighbor will call the police. But the shutters all close. Someone shouts down at him to go away and sleep it off. He’s still holding the bottle he bought with Fulvani’s money. His fingers are blue, tense with fury. He relaxes. Leans against the wall. Enraged, sobbing, he slumps to the ground.
An old lady walks by, followed by her maid.
“It must be that time again,” the old lady says when she spots the young man next to the door.
“Snaporaz?” her maid asks with a sideways glance at Maxim.
“He only has to think of a new film and actors start migrating from all over the world, like birds that have caught a whiff of spring.” The lady shakes her head. “The scientists are mystified.”
In front of the big door of the palazzo, the maid puts her plastic bags down to look for her keys. Maxim jumps up. The heavy wooden door slowly closes behind the women. He blocks it with a foot. The elevator stops on the third floor, halfway up. Maxim waits until he can’t hear anything in the stairwell: no footsteps, no keys, no doors. He walks up to the fifth floor, creeping up the last flight. He saw that in a movie once. It’s ridiculous, because once he reaches the door of the casting agency, he has to make them hear him. He shouts.
“Gala!”
He tries the doorbell, but it’s turned off here as well.
“Gala! Gala!” he yells, hurling himself against the door with all his might. And again. Roman doors are sturdy. Since the Visigoths first arrived, Romans have secured them with an iron bar. Then he realizes: there was one downstairs at the back of the front door too. He could use it to force his way in. He takes the elevator down to get it. Halfway between the fourth and third floors he hears something. Someone is walking down the travertine steps above him. In a hurry. Suddenly the elevator stops. Maxim tries the alarm, but the electricity has been cut. He’s dangling halfway down the shaft in a brass cage.
The blood is churning through his temples. The impotence raging inside him is so fierce that he is afraid he might faint. He feels the tension in his every fiber, as if his will were about to erupt through his skin. Amid all this fury, he hears her. She’s calling him. As silent as it is, he hears it very clearly. He tugs at the sliding iron doors, in vain, then discovers a hatch above his head. He shoves it open, hoists himself up, steps up onto the mechanism, and kicks open the door to the floor. Then he runs downstairs, grabs the iron bar, and walks back up slowly and thoughtfully to muster his energy. On the top floor he jams the iron bar into a crack and levers it like a crowbar. In that same instant, Fulvani opens the door.
“Thank God!” he says. “You’ve come at last!” He’s in such a panic that he even seems relieved to see Maxim, grabbing him by the shoulders and pulling him in. “Hurry up. She’s in my office.” Then his astonished gaze moves from the crowbar to his door.
“But, what …? Are you both insane?” While Fulvani tries to push the splinters back into the wood, Maxim goes into the office.
Gala is lying on the floor. She tries to prop herself up on her elbows, but her muscles scarcely react. Finally Maxim is calm. He has a minute, maybe one and a half, before she loses consciousness. He kneels beside her. She probably still recognizes him because she smiles at him, open and beaming, and starts describing the incredible things she can see. It’s little more than a baby’s babbling. Maxim listens intently, as if it meant something.
Fulvani comes in, nervous as a sinner before the throne of God.
“Nothing happened, honest, we were just having a nice chat and ka-boom, suddenly … I tried to get her to come to …” He slithers over to the cupboard where he keeps his booze and pours himself a double Petrus Boonekamp.
Maxim lays Gala’s head on his lap, takes his handkerchief, rolls it up tightly, and opens her mouth with one finger. Her tongue reacts immediately, curling around his fingernail. He pushes it down and clamps the cloth between her jaws. They wait it out like this. Together.
Are these two lovers, or aren’t they? Many have asked the question, but their curiosity has never been satisfied. Even I never got to the bottom of it, and I saw them together at close hand. Familiarity and a lack of inhibition can indicate indifference just as well as devotion. Who can understand someone else’s love life? Who understands his own? A song in Trastevere dialect has this to say about it:
Forget about the truth, Fanfulla!
Guessing flutters free from Coeli to the Borgo,
Knowledge lies under the bridge, a stone around its neck.
They have kissed, often and, above all, long. They necked in all the discotheques and public gardens of Amsterdam. On long summer evenings, they rolled under the bushes in front of Gala’s parents’ house and over the field where the circus pitched its tent when she was little. There is no spot on either’s body that the other hasn’t kissed. But is that what makes two people lovers?
In sickness and in drunkenness, they’ve cleaned up each other’s vomit without gagging and then crawled back into the dirty bed to spend the rest of the night dabbing feverish sweat from breast and brow. But whatever else they did in bed, convinced they were holding their dearest in their arms, they did not engage in sexual love.
They went much further. They told each other every intimate detail. How they made love, or wanted to, with others, how that felt, and how they could help each other to conquer others. They seemed to be trying to outdo each other in caressing the other’s naked back. Every tear, every word they shared, brought them both closer to and farther from each other. It melted their hearts to hear
these fragile revelations; when they were at their most vulnerable, each new disclosure felt like acid dripping into an open wound.
Isn’t that what lovers do?
But they never said the one thing they wanted to say. They didn’t expect to hear it, either, since they were sure they knew each other’s thoughts completely enough to be able to fill in the gaps themselves. They preferred to stick their tongues down each other’s throats rather than talk about apparently obvious things. So in all those years, they had never spoken a word about their love, but great loves don’t need that. Longing is safer than fulfillment. So if they’re not lovers …
Fanfulla, Fanfulla,
Forget the truth.
Hope keeps you alive,
Having is only for Death.
On the other hand, they are actors. It’s always possible that they’re simply acting for each other, so convincingly that they’ve started believing it themselves.
Gala comes to in an iron bed in an enormous ward in the Fatebenefratelli Hospital. Fulvani called them in a panic, and the brothers refused to let Maxim fob them off. They strapped her onto a stretcher and took her to the island in the Tiber for blood tests and an EEG.
The first things she sees are the wooden beams of the sixteenth-century nave. Waves of light surge over the dark rafters. It’s always difficult to know where madness stops and reality begins. It takes her a while to realize that the space is a ceiling, and that the reflection comes from a beam of light. One spotlight, aimed at the ancient bridge outside the hospital, shines onto the fast-flowing water of the Tiber. Then things speed up. Within a few minutes, she understands what must have happened. But it takes almost two hours before she is freshened up, able to carry on a conversation, and steady on her feet. Her head hurts, but she insists she doesn’t want to go straight home.
“I need to see some life,” she says.
With their arms around each other, the two foreigners walk off the island, out of the spotlights, and into the darkness of the night.
