Director's Cut

by Arthur Japin

  Eventually, the light above the side entrance flicks on. Gelsomina enters, all in white. She is flanked by National Guardsmen with faces so long they look like they’re escorting her to the scaffold. Fortunately, my sister is with her, and our best friends follow. They take up positions around me, and with that a procession of Romans that will last for hours begins to file past me. Most of them are strangers, but the men stretch out their arms and the women and girls blow me kisses. Why didn’t they do that when I was eighteen and ready to abandon hope! Others I vaguely recognize. There are taxi drivers who once gave me a lift, the salesgirl from the Via Merulana who used to sell me my garters, the waiters from the Canova. Someone has brought along a harmonica to play me a tune and a girl releases a few balloons, but most are fairly nondescript, the kind of people that, on a normal day’s shooting, I’d have sent straight to costumes for the full treatment.

  The story goes that the Emperor Hadrian once had a spherical mirror hung in the Colosseum, a mirror that reflected the entirety of the world. Now I feel like I’m looking into that mirror, seeing everything at once: what lies ahead of me and what I’ve left behind, from beginning to end.

  The two are rather similar.

  The preview finishes and the diaphragm contracts.

  The black eye closes.

  I am heading toward the prairie along a country road.

  I’ve seen enough of the city. The exposure time is up and the vulva contracts around me once more.

  The intermission before the feature is about to begin. Claretta will be coming by any minute now. Chocolates, sweets, cigarettes! The older boys are lying in the aisle to look up her skirt. What wouldn’t I give now for one of her lollipops!

  All the commotion today was only a taste of what’s in store for me tomorrow, in the Thermae of Diocletian. A media extravaganza, with Michelangelo’s church as a free set. Inside, there’s room for the government and a procession of celebrities the likes of which you’d normally see only on the Lido of Venice during the festival. Outside, thirty thousand people will cram together, overflowing from the Piazza della Repubblica into the Via Nazionale, watching the show on enormous television screens, where it will be regularly interrupted by ads for a postprandial liqueur and a new pasta brand that the sauce sticks to better.

  Gelsomina will have to listen to one speech after the next. She will hold her rosary so tightly that it will cut into her palm and leave a wound. The president, who just a few years ago was calling me a godless pervert in the Osservatore Romano, will sobbingly claim that Italy has lost her favorite son. As always in this country, elections are just around the corner, so afterward the statesman will descend from the pulpit and kiss Gelsomina on the cheeks.

  That will be the last straw. She’ll start calling for me with heartrending cries. Behind her enormous sunglasses, that white turban hiding her bald skull, she will look terrible. Yet no one who sees these images will ever know a more beautiful woman.

  Gala will be there all this time. At first, she’ll be outside on the square, but Gelsomina will personally ensure that the young woman she had to share me with is plucked out of the crowd and given a place. She’ll sit somewhere at the back of the church, where no one knows who she is, all alone, without a soul to whom she can confide the true nature of her grief. At one stage, Marcello will spot her from the front row and beckon her forward. She’ll pretend not to notice.

  After the hullabaloo is over, Gelsomina wants to touch me one last time. It’s all taken a heavy toll on her and she will not survive me long. She needs support. Before the eyes of the world, she bends down toward me and whispers, “Ciao, amore!”

  Thank you, darling, and for God’s sake stop crying!

  • • •

  I’ve finally been reduced to the place in which I’ve always felt most at home: my imagination. That’s all I am. I’m not even scared. What for? As long as you don’t know what something is, it could be anything.

  It’s dark. Everyone’s gone home. A pack of stray dogs lopes over the deserted grounds.

  Must it end like this?

  I can still hear the voice of one of the Japanese after hearing my proposal: “What!” he muttered. “That’s it? It all just ends, without any hope, without a new beginning? The least you could do is a tree about to bloom. Anything, even just a budding flower!”

  I’ll see what I can do.

  A door opens. Ciullo enters. He’s my right-hand man, my jack-of-all-trades. I’ve worked with him since my first film. His footsteps echo in the empty studio.

  “Hey, Ciullo! Good old Ciullo!”

  He walks straight across the studio and pulls open the sliding door. The daylight shines in, a thin stripe that then widens across the full breadth of the studio. The panorama is blinding. My eyes are no longer used to it.

  “Silence, filming!” someone shouts. “Camera?”

  “Rolling.”

  “Sound?”

  “Speed.”

  “Five, four, three …”

  I invented Rome, Gala. Now you invent yourself.

  “… and action!”

  AFTERWORD

  Federico Fellini’s funeral took place as described. The legendary Italian director died in 1993 after having lain in a coma for some time. Whenever Fellini inserted himself into one of his films, usually played by Marcello Mastroianni or Paolo Villagio, he gave himself the name Snaporaz.

  His very last film footage was devoted to a short commercial for a Roman bank. “The Dream of the Lion in the Basement” turned out to be in honor of a certain Signora Vandemberg, and was just as described in this book, complete with the Dutch dialogue read by an Italian actress wearing leopard skin.

  I recognized the leopard skin! And I knew the woman portrayed. She had a very similar name and was the friend that I had gone to Rome with in the mideighties, in the hope of landing a role in one of Fellini’s films. When we arrived at Cinecittà she was wearing a jacket with that exact same print.

  I’d met her in 1976 during the first rehearsal of The Mannequins’ Ball, when we were both studying Dutch literature in Amsterdam, fell in love with her, and have loved her ever since.

  I now believe that Fellini also genuinely loved her, but for a long time I didn’t want to see that. I was too young, too disappointed, or perhaps simply jealous. I especially blamed the famous director for taking the magnificent, strong, independent woman who taught me, as a young man, to live without caring in the least what other people thought, and slowly but entirely making her dependent on him, to the point that she finally was reduced to living in a tiny cell above a church in which he had installed her, doing nothing more than sitting by the phone, waiting for his call.

  I wondered how it was possible for love, which normally makes people stronger, to make someone weaker, her world smaller.

  To answer the question I decided to write a novel. Along the way, as I was getting into the head of a character who had a lot in common with the Italian master, I started to better understand his great, childlike, genial mind, as well as his motivations.

  Before sending the novel to my publisher, I, of course, showed it to the woman who had inspired one of the main characters and who is still living in Rome in the very same tiny room. She didn’t ask me to change a word, even when she found her depiction unrecognizable. There was no need to. This is a novel. Certain facts from our lives, and people that played roles in them, were the basis of this fiction; I went to work with the facts just as I had in my other historical novels, but they are not the same as the people I knew, just as I, luckily, am not Maxim.

  “When you tell people about your book,” said my friend in Rome, “just say that you had a very different experience than I did. I remember it as a happy time.”

  A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Arthur Japin, born in Haarlem in 1956, studied theater in London and Amsterdam and spent years acting on and writing for the stage, the screen, and television. He has sung with the Dutch National Opera and recently hosted his own
television show.

  Japin’s first novel, The Two Hearts of Kwasi Boachi (the true story of a pair of ten-year-old African princes given as presents to the Dutch king), was made into an opera by the British composer Jonathan Dove in 2007. Japin has won many major literary prizes, including the 2004 Libris Literary Prize for In Lucia’s Eyes (a novel about Casanova’s first love). Both of these titles have been adapted as stage plays and are set to become major motion pictures. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages. He has taught at New York University and divides his time between Utrecht and the Dordogne.

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Translation copyright © 2010 by David Colmer

  Revised translation copyright © 2010 by Arthur Japin

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Originally published in the Netherlands as De droom van de leeuw by Uitgeverij De Arbeiderspers, Amsterdam, in 2002. Copyright © 2002 by Arthur Japin.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Japin, Arthur, [date]

  [Droom van de leeuw. English]

  Director’s cut : a novel / Arthur Japin ; translated from the Dutch

  by David Colmer. — 1st U.S. ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-59311-5

  I. Colmer, David, 1960– II. Title.

  PT5881.2.A59D7613 2010 839.31′364—dc22 2009040989

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The author has emended the original Dutch text and revised the translation for this edition.

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