‘Sounds ominous,’ she remarks, to which he replies with a hammily enigmatic wrinkling of the eyebrows.
‘Ciao tutti,’ he says, and they watch him jog along the Corso as if hurrying to catch the post.
12.6
The career of Tommaso Galli might be said to have begun on an afternoon in June, 1871, when his father, in celebration of Tommaso’s sixteenth birthday, took him to a production of Vittorio Alfieri’s La congiura dei Pazzi (The Pazzi Conspiracy). Gianpaolo Galli, a notary, felt an especial affinity with Alfieri, in part because of the dramatist’s devotion to the cause of liberty, in part because of his love of horses, a love which Gianpaolo shared, and to which he gave voice in many of the poems that he composed of an evening, when his wife and children were asleep. Gianpaolo Galli dreamed of publishing his poetry, and in his poetry he dreamed of his childhood in the Pisan hills – an idyll, as he now recalled it, of freedom and virtuous poverty. His father, though he could barely read or write, had known hundreds of lines of Tasso and Ariosto by heart, which he had recited to the young Gianpaolo as other fathers would recite nursery rhymes, and Gianpaolo had in turn read them to his children, of whom one – Tommaso – had come to respond to poetry with an enthusiasm that more than compensated for the indifference of the notary’s other offspring. That Tommaso might become an actor, however, seems never to have been considered until that day in 1871, when, at La congiura dei Pazzi, he suddenly recognised his destiny. ‘Watching those actors,’ he wrote many years later, ‘I understood, as clearly as if I were standing before a mirror for the first time, what it was that I was.’
Quick-witted and handsome, Tommaso was the favourite of both his parents. They had always indulged him and they did not oppose him strongly when he informed them that he was determined to make a career for himself as an actor. It had been assumed that he would follow his father’s profession. The life of an actor promised no prosperity, his father warned him, before confessing that neither did the life of a notary. His mother, whom life had not dampened as much as it had her husband, prophesied success and fame, a fame as great as that of Tommaso Salvini. Her Tommaso was a better-made young man than Salvini. His voice was beautiful: it was the voice of an angel, Father Simone had told her, though he had added – foreseeing where the admiration of so many girls would lead the young man – that Tommaso had, unfortunately, the face of angel too.
The beautiful face and voice eventually, in 1879, obtained for Tommaso Galli a contract with a Florentine company that was to tour with an adaptation of Sardou’s Séraphine. This position lasted only a few months: he was dismissed after becoming involved with the leading actress, a young woman whose uncle, the manager of the troupe, so strongly disapproved of the liaison that he ejected his niece’s lover on the very day he discovered what was going on. The dismissal occurred in Bologna, where, by the start of the next season, Tommaso found employment with a company that took him back to Florence, then on to Rome, Genova, Verona, Padova and Venice. The following season, with a different ensemble, he appeared in no fewer than twenty theatres, from Naples to Milan. He worked for ten companies in as many years, specialising in amoroso roles. From time to time the critics took note of him. His voice and fine figure were praised, though a certain stiffness of gesture was remarked upon.
Though he was a competent actor rather than a remarkable one, Tommaso Galli never struggled to find employment. He was attractive and had a certain panache. He had ideas about stagecraft that were adopted by several of his managers. And he proved to be adept at editing and rewriting material to better suit the taste of the audience. For example, a number of speeches written by Galli were interpolated into his company’s production of Romeo and Juliet, in the final act of which, in what many held to be an improvement upon the original, Juliet momentarily revived to give the dying Romeo one last embrace. He proved to be an exceptionally effective publicist: full houses became the rule for shows in which Tommaso Galli was involved. And, having inherited his father’s scrupulous eye for detail and distaste for profligacy, he showed himself to be of invaluable assistance in the administration of the company’s budget: more than one manager was happy to entrust to Galli the paperwork of the multitudinous taxes to which the travelling players were subject.
In effect, Tommaso Galli was the joint manager of the company with which, shortly after Easter in 1891, he came to Castelluccio’s Teatro Civico, bringing a play – co-authored by himself – that bore a very close resemblance to Paolo Giacometti’s La morte civile. On the opening night Paolo Campani, on whose subsidies the Teatro Civico had come to be heavily reliant after two markedly unprofitable seasons, held a reception for the actors at the Palazzo Campani. Galli made an extremely favourable impression on the theatre’s chief benefactor – so favourable, indeed, that by the time he left the gathering he had been assured, in effect, that the managership of the Teatro Civico could be his for the asking. Tommaso Galli had a wife – Giacinta, who had been Juliet to his Romeo – and a child, and another child was due in October. The touring life no longer appealed to him. Within a matter of weeks, he became the manager of the Teatro Civico.
Under the guidance of Tommaso Galli, the Teatro Civico of Castelluccio enjoyed its most successful years. Making use of the contacts he had established during his decade of travelling, he attracted high-calibre companies to the town. The Teatro Civico, Galli proclaimed in a newspaper item soon after taking up his post, was to be ‘a theatre of a new and vital nation … a theatre of contemporary life.’ He staged works by Achille Torelli, Giuseppe Costetti, Roberto Bracco, Marco Praga, Gerolamo Rovetta and Giuseppe Giacosa, whose Tristi amori was one of Galli’s first offerings at Castelluccio, and whose Come le foglie was one of the last. He disliked declamatory acting, and encouraged a naturalistic style of staging: the Teatro Civico’s production of Torelli’s I mariti, in 1893, caused something of a stir by having an actor turn his back on the audience while speaking. The sets at the Teatro Civico became noted for their realism, and scene changes were swift and smooth, thanks in large part to stage machinery that Galli helped to design. He wrote plays as well. In 1895, at Milan’s Teatro Manzoni, he saw a production of Ibsen’s Ghosts, which inspired him not only to bring the great Norwegian’s work to the attention of his audience in Castelluccio but also to create dramas of his own, in a similar philosophical vein. He wrote two, which were published at Paolo Campani’s expense: La figlia di Matteo (Matteo’s Daughter) and Fiamme (Flames). They were not well received in Castelluccio, but the great Eleanora Duse, upon receiving a copy of Fiamme, sent him a complimentary letter.
Tommaso Galli worked so hard, as Campani wrote to a cousin, ‘that it was as if he thought the devil would take him were he to rest for an hour’. After fifteen years in Castelluccio, he was exhausted. He became ill: for days at a time he would be unable to eat anything except bread. One evening in September 1907, an hour before curtain-up, he could not be found in the theatre. A member of the theatre staff was dispatched to his house, but Giacinta had not seen him since breakfast. The play went on without him; still he did not appear. He remained missing until the next morning, when a shopkeeper came upon him, sitting on a bench by the Porta di San Zeno, as grey as a dead man, and weeping. A week later, he resigned, on grounds of poor health.
There were other reasons for his resignation. Receipts at the theatre had been declining. Ibsen was not to the taste of the landowners and mine-owners whose subscriptions were the theatre’s chief source of revenue, after Paolo Campani’s donations. The people of Castelluccio wanted Italian plays, as they had been promised, and they wanted stuff that was more uplifting than this Nordic gloom-mongering. Galli gave them a comedy once in a while, but not often enough. Paolo Campani had also started to take issue with his protégé’s programming, but whereas the general populace called for a leavening of their diet, Campani – who, as Galli wrote at this time, liked to regard himself as ‘a man of the future, to atone for his name and for the privileges he has inherited’ – wanted t
he opposite. Specifically, he wanted the people of Castelluccio to be elevated by ‘the divine D’Annunzio’, whose La gloria he declared to be ‘a masterpiece of sublime audacity’. Galli detested its ‘spurious profundity’, and argued his case with Campani with such passion that for a month afterward they did not speak to each other. ‘I have done all I can do here,’ he wrote to a friend in Rome, the day after the disagreement.
Another factor was the loss of his parents, to whom he had remained close. They had died in the previous year, within days of each other, and their deaths had prompted him to re-appraise his life. His dissatisfactions had come into sharper focus: ‘The truth is,’ he wrote to his Roman friend, in the same letter, ‘I have tired of the theatre. And I am almost as tired of this town as it is tired of me.’ It perhaps would have been truer to say that the town had come to disapprove of him. Many had been scandalised by the way he had conducted himself with a young actress by the name of Eugenia Mollica, who in 1906 had appeared at the Teatro Civico in Bracco’s Una donna. Tommaso Galli was enchanted by her, and made no attempt to disguise his enchantment. Shortly after Eugenia and her fellow actors had left for Florence, Galli went to Florence, ostensibly for a meeting with the manager of the Teatro delle Antiche Stinche. Some months later, he took a trip to Milan, where Eugenia Mollica was performing that week. Giacinta Galli bore these desertions with demure grace, and gave nobody any reason to think that she did not believe that her husband’s stated reasons for his absences were genuine, but many in Castelluccio were insulted and enraged on the wife’s behalf.
Giacinta’s serenity was well practised: the affair with Eugenia Mollica, if such it was, was far from being Tommaso’s first infatuation. At a ball in the Palazzo Campani he had met Ingrid Puppa, whose image he knew from the figures created by her husband for the interior of the Teatro Civico. He found her even lovelier than he had expected, and over the succeeding months he subjected her to many amorous declarations. His letters were returned; the husband objected, threatening a duel; Galli at last desisted. But the following year, again in Campani’s house, he was asked to accompany, on his mandolin, a singer from Forlì named Giovanna Edel, and the correspondence that was discovered among Giovanni Edel’s possessions many years later made it clear that in this instance the ensuing attraction was not unreciprocated. On another occasion, he was found in a compromising situation, in his office, with a pretty Swiss actress. There were others. They were mere flirtations, Giacinta maintained – ‘once an amoroso, always an amoroso,’ she remarked. ‘Tommaso is a genius, and for a genius there are different rules,’ she would say, and everyone knew that the excuse had been learned from her husband. Campani defended him in similar fashion. ‘If it were not for Tommaso Galli,’ he upbraided the accusers, ‘this town would lack all distinction.’ More than once, exasperated by the small-minded complainants, he would declare that Galli was like a son to him. Gossip had it that the elderly and unmarried man’s affection for the still handsome manager of the Teatro Civico was not paternal.
Tommaso Galli and his wife and children left Castelluccio in the autumn of 1907. In the week before his departure he told a journalist that, having seen La presa di Roma (The Taking of Rome), he had been galvanised by a new enthusiasm: ‘The Kinetograph is the future,’ he said. ‘The theatre is dying.’ He went to Rome, to work initially for the production company of Filoteo Alberini – maker of La presa di Roma, inventor of the Kinetograph and owner of Rome’s first cinema – then with the producer Arturo Ambrosio. Between 1910 and 1915 more than six hundred and fifty films were released by Ambrosio, and Tommaso Galli was involved in dozens of them, mostly as an adviser on design or direction. The rapid pace of production in the studios did not suit him, however, and the triviality of much of the material with which he had to work depressed him. In 1915, as his health deteriorated sharply, he parted from Ambrosio and devoted himself to drafting a number of scripts for more ambitious projects, several with Biblical subjects. None was ever filmed. Having become an admirer of Lyda Borelli, whose Rapsodia Satanica he saw six times in as many days, he wrote for her the outline of a film to be entitled Lilith. There is no record of her opinion of it. Later that year, following her marriage to Count Vittorio Cini, Lyda Borelli retired from the cinema. In the same month as Borelli’s wedding, Tommaso Galli and his wife returned to Castelluccio.
They had been back to the town at least once every year, as guests of Paolo Campani, and now they moved into an apartment on the upper floor of the Palazzo Campani. Occasionally the three of them attended performances at the Teatro Civico, which – thanks to the generosity of Paolo Campani – was still in business, barely, but the comedies preferred by the current manager were not to Galli’s liking, and the pain of his illness made concentration difficult. In September 1919 they saw a revival of Come le foglie; Galli recognised the sets, and some of the gestures utilised by the actors. At the interval the audience stood, as if at a signal, and began to applaud; it took Tommaso Galli a moment or two to understand that the applause was directed at him. This was the last time he was at the Teatro Civico: he died of stomach cancer on December 24th, 1919, in the Palazzo Campani. Paolo Campani died two months later, at the age of 93. Giacinta Galli lived for another fifteen years, and died in Modena, her place of birth.
Galli’s tomb is in the church of Sant’Agostino and his portrait hangs in the Caffè del Corso. He has a third memorial as well, which takes the form of a performance. The saint’s day of Saint Zeno has been celebrated in Castelluccio for centuries, but before 1903 the celebrations comprised little more than a special Mass and a communal meal in Piazza Maggiore. The present-day festival is largely Galli’s creation. It was Galli who devised the spectacle of the descent of the Falling Boy and the Angel, and the costumed parade, and the crossbow contest.
12.7
Gideon opens the door and looks at her for a second, saying nothing, but smiling as a man might smile at a daughter who’s about to leave home for good. Wiping paint from his hands with a rag, he stands aside. ‘Come in, come in,’ he says.
‘I really do have to be going,’ she tells him.
‘Plenty of time,’ he assures her. ‘Come in. Just for a minute.’
She follows him into the living room. At the table he stops and turns around to prop himself against it, still working the rag between his fingers. Inspecting his hands, he says: ‘I’m very glad to have met you. Or re-met, I should say.’
‘It’s been interesting,’ she says.
‘Itching to get back to the crowds and the fumes, I’m sure,’ he says.
‘Not quite itching,’ she answers. ‘But it’ll be good to be home.’
‘Of course,’ he says, ‘of course.’ You might almost think he’d rather she stayed for a few days more.
‘I’ve enjoyed myself,’ she says.
‘Bees excepted.’
‘Apart from the bees,’ she agrees.
He folds the rag and places it on the table. ‘Before you go,’ he says, and he reaches down to take something from the seat of the chair beside him. ‘A going-away present,’ he says, putting a small framed picture into her hand, its back facing upward.
She turns it, and sees herself, in pencil, sitting on grass, intent on the book that’s open in her hands.
‘I framed it myself,’ he tells her. ‘Robert would have done a better job.’
She tilts the picture to get the reflections off it. Much of the drawing – the grass, her dress, her legs – is lightly sketched, but the face and hands are crisp and dark; and the face, though it’s obviously herself, has a composure that she does not recognise as hers. ‘This is on the hill, isn’t it?’ she says. ‘The day we had the picnic.’
‘It is.’
‘But you didn’t do it then, did you? I’d have noticed.’
‘No, I did it then,’ he says. ‘I made improvements later, but essentially it was done on the spot.’
‘But how? You weren’t looking at me.’ Her perplexity pleases him, clearly. She doe
sn’t know what to think: he has been sly, and she is annoyed by the deception; and part of her is flattered, perhaps; and it’s a good drawing; and he means to please her with the gift – and to please himself, of course. ‘I look like I’m in church with my prayer book. Pious. I look pious.’
‘No you don’t,’ he tells her. ‘You’re concentrating.’
‘You’ve done some nip and tuck on the face, haven’t you? That’s what you mean by improvements.’
‘It’s you, truer than a photo,’ he says; it sounds more like a compliment than a boast.
She angles it one way and then another, seemingly a little unsettled by herself, but intrigued as well.
‘If you don’t like it,’ he says, ‘you could always sell it. It’s signed and dated on the back, so you could get a decent amount of cash for it.’
‘Thank you,’ she says, continuing to look at it, not knowing how to look at Gideon.
‘My pleasure,’ he responds, making out that it’s nothing of importance, then he puts a palm to her shoulder and turns her towards the door, as if there were a risk of their getting tearful were they to linger.
Robert starts the engine the instant they appear on the steps. Beyond the car, at one of the tables of the Torre, Marta from the restaurant is chatting with a young woman who’s recognisable, but not precisely, until she takes her glasses from the table to look at Marta’s phone, and then Claire knows her – she was in the museum, at the desk. Marta waves and calls out ‘Ciao’; her friend is too fascinated by the phone to take note of anything else.
Having opened the passenger door, Gideon is looking her in the eye; evidently he has something conclusive to say. His mouth opens, he breathes in, and he lets the breath out, closing the door. His arms go out and he advances. The embrace cannot be avoided: he gathers her to his belly and presses her tightly, one hand in the small of her back, the other between her shoulders; the pressure is peculiarly even and mechanical – it’s as if his torso were a bed of soft clay and he is trying to take an impression of her. Several seconds later he releases her, with some solemnity. The embrace has marked a sort of pact, it would seem, and he appears to be moved: the lower eyelids are moistened.
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