Director's Cut

by Arthur Japin

  Once again, that inexplicable emotion rises within him, and it annoys him, because it muddles his new image of himself. To get back into the role, he slips the fingers of the hand lying calmly between her legs into her, fiddling around inside. She wriggles a little, opens herself further, and pushes his head down. He briefly wonders whether this, too, is part of his duties, but when she pushes his face into her crotch, still swollen and dripping with lust, he no longer holds back, sinking his teeth into her with an intensity that hurts her but is nonetheless met with an astonished ecstatic scream.

  No matter how coarsely he sucks and roots about, his emotion only grows. When he sits up, his eyes are as wet as the rest of his face. Silberstrand dries him off and kisses him, less fiercely now, tenderly. Gratefully. She presses her lips against his eyes as if to drink his tears.

  In that instant, he disentangles himself. He walks among the bare tables and the potted palms, annoyed, indecisive, naked, trying to remember how they’d agreed on the payment. They did have an agreement, didn’t they? More or less, even if it was partly unspoken. He’d have to learn to be clearer if he wanted to carry on with this kind of thing. But the longer he put it off, the less he could face it.

  Silberstrand pulls on her dress and gathers his clothes. He looks through the glass wall while she drapes his shirt over his shoulders, pulls him against her, and rubs his sides, as if to keep him warm. He wipes the mist from the window to see something of the violence outside. The regularity of the lighthouse and the boulevard streetlights show nothing but the raging storm.

  “Will you take me to bed?” she asks.

  “I’ve got to get going.” Maxim takes his clothes from her and starts getting dressed.

  “At this hour? Don’t be silly. How were you planning to get home?”

  “I’ll take a cab.”

  “You don’t have any money.”

  “I will soon.”

  She shrugs.

  “Either way, we’re going to my room first. You can sleep for an hour or so, but then we’ll run through the whole piece da capo.”

  Maxim buckles his belt with exaggerated fastidiousness.

  “That’s what you want, isn’t it, you hot boy?” Silberstrand kneads his crotch. “Maybe a bit calmer the second time around.”

  “Again?” he says, doing his best not to see her beauty and her pride in provoking him. “Fine.” He takes a deep breath and speaks his lines as coolly as possible. “But then the meter starts running a second time as well.”

  The singer is still smiling, but he sees the pleasure slowly ebb from her eyes. She thinks she has misheard and shakes her head quickly to dispel a thought that seems so misplaced, but the truth comes crashing down just as she’s about to ask her young lover to repeat his words.

  “You want me to pay you.” She says it quietly because it hurts.

  Maxim feels it too.

  “We’re poor,” he explains. “It’s for medicine.”

  “You want me to pay you?” says Silberstrand, as if the reverse seems more plausible.

  “You’ve seen the state Gala’s in. If this weren’t an emergency, it would never have occurred to me.”

  “Oh God!” exclaims the singer, almost motionless. Her eyes are frightened, wandering despondently to a point far behind him, as if she sees a terrible danger approaching. “Oh merciful God, it’s come to this!”

  For a second she stands there paralyzed, bewildered by the truth.

  “I mean,” Maxim corrects himself, shocked by the intensity of her reaction, “of course it would have occurred to me to want to … um, with you, together … but, of course, completely free of charge … who wouldn’t want to be with a woman like you? But considering the shortage of funds. I thought … because you said, ‘I’ll reward you handsomely for the effort.’”

  Her back is straight as she roots through her handbag, her head proud and upright throughout, though it’s obvious that she can control her muscles only with the greatest effort. She finds a few notes and hurls them at his feet. Then she suddenly collapses, as if she’s been kicked in the gut, sinking to the floor, slow and jerking, like an actor in a film that’s coming off the reel. There she remains, curled up, almost lost in the puffy taffeta of the red dress, which spreads slowly over the marble, quietly shivering like Silberstrand herself. Maxim drops to his knees before her. He wants to hold her, soothe her with pleas for forgiveness, but she looks so fragile that he’s afraid she’d fall apart at his touch. Slowly she raises her face. It is twisted with sorrow. She suddenly looks so old, so soullessly desolate, that Maxim shrinks back a few steps. He is the one who has broken this woman. She throws her head back like a wounded animal, opening her mouth wide, like a wolf about to howl, and she does, with all her strength, but no sound issues from her. Maxim, who was about to cover his ears in expectation of the voice that can normally drown out a symphony orchestra, drops his hands in astonishment. Her neck muscles are bundled in thick strands, her larynx is vibrating, and the veins in her throat are standing out, but the singer emits nothing but silence.

  The only thing that swells is the storm, which fiercely buffets the glass construction with a number of quick gusts. Windowpanes bulge in their frames. They both feel the danger. The singer’s eyes follow the roar passing over them, but this cannot dissuade her from her soundless shrieking: to the contrary, she fervently notches up the tension of her inaudible tones, as if to make the champagne flutes vibrate.

  Just then, something slams against the top of the windows, five or six times, in quick staccato, before finally smashing through the glass with tremendous force. A large seagull, numb with fright and pain, falls into the middle of the room, trailing blood over the marble tiles. The sudden displacement of the conservatory’s air rips doors open all around, rushing to the lobby, to the boulevard, to the beach. Glass shatters. The palms’ heavy leaves are at the mercy of the wind. They wobble. One tree topples over, dragging a blossoming orange tree down with it. The gusts blow in seawater and sand that scours Maxim’s skin.

  Above all this, the gull is screeching. Silberstrand stands and walks over to the animal. She picks it up with two hands, strokes the head that flinches in fear and the beak that snaps at her. She presses kisses on the wounded body while combing its feathers for pieces of glass.

  From the boulevard, Maxim looks back. All over the hotel, lights come on and people peer from behind curtains to locate the source of the uproar. In the distance, he sees the singer who was the beginning and the end of his new career. Erect in the storm, the white seagull’s broad fluttering wings pressed against her heart, she stands among the glimmering shards of the winter garden.

  2

  “I know that girl,” Gelsomina exclaims one morning. We’re having breakfast on our balcony, and I’m sketching my dreams on a napkin. I always keep felt-tip pens within reach so I can scribble down the remnants of the night before they drown in the light of day. Gelsomina joins me under the parasol and slides my plate aside for a better view.

  “Betty Boop perhaps?”

  Like so many of the women I draw after they’ve appeared to me in the night, this character has a big head, high heels, and a small body with full breasts, but Gelsomina shakes her head.

  “She’s on your bulletin board at Cinecittà.” She turns the drawing around. “Is she in our film?”

  “Not as far as I know.” I give her a plunging neckline and a yellow dress with black leopard-skin patches.

  “Why the scarf tied around her head?”

  “She’s probably got a headache,” I tease, “from all your questions!”

  Playfully, Gelsomina snatches the napkin, even though she sees the drawing isn’t finished. I try to grab it back, but she won’t surrender it without a fight. She ties the napkin around her head and assumes the exaggerated pose of the young woman I’ve just drawn: one hand on the back of her head, the other on a hip she sticks out so far it looks almost deformed. She parades around, taunting me, and breaks into a run the mome
nt I give chase. When I catch her, she demands a kiss in exchange for the napkin. I bargain with her until she allows me to give her three. Gelsomina’s eyes are closed and her lips pursed when I suddenly jerk the napkin off her head.

  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 late
st 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.