by Lily Tuck
Most nights, too, if he is not otherwise occupied, Rudy dines with Sergio Amidei. Sergio Amidei wrote the screenplays for most of Rudy’s films; he also wrote many others, including those for Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City, and Stromboli. Like Rudy, Sergio Amidei is a bachelor. He always brings his bulldog, Cesare, to Nino’s. Despite his thick leather collar studded with spikes, Cesare is old and gentle and every night he is fed a sumptuous dish of pasta in the kitchen. Often one or more friends of Rudy or of Sergio Amidei join them at their table. One evening, Anna Magnani dines with them and Liliane is shocked to see Anna Magnani chew with her mouth open and speak with her mouth full of food.
By far Liliane’s favorite of her father’s films is Le Ragazze di Piazza di Spagna (released in English as Three Girls from Rome). The film opens with a group of tourists—one of whom is played by Rudy—getting off a bus in front of the Spanish Steps. Assuredly leading the way, Rudy and the other tourists enter an eighteenth-century residence that has been converted into a museum, where the twenty-five-year-old Keats died of tuberculosis on February 23, 1821. The museum contains a large collection of paintings, letters, and manuscripts that pertain to Keats and Shelley as well as to Byron, Wordsworth, Elizabeth and Robert Browning, and Oscar Wilde. The memorabilia includes a lock of Keats’s hair, Keats’s death mask, and fragments of Shelley’s bones. The film then moves on to the curator of the museum, played by Giorgio Bassani (the author of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis). From his office window, he observes three pretty girls who regularly come and sit on the Spanish Steps to have their lunch, and he narrates their stories.
One of the reasons Liliane likes the film is that she watches it being shot. Standing behind the big klieg lights—the film is shot on location—she watches how Lucia Bosé, Cosetta Grego, and Liliana Bonfatti sit together on a parapet on the Spanish Steps, their shapely legs dangling in the air while the makeup lady runs back and forth in between takes to comb their hair, apply more lipstick, or rearrange the folds of their clothes. In fairly straightforward and predictable fashion, the film follows the troubled romances of the three young women, seamstresses in a fashion house located on Piazza di Spagna. The tough, street-smart Liliana Bonfatti falls in love with a jockey, despite his short stature; betrayed by her lover, Cosetta Greco meets a kind taxi driver played by Marcello Mastroianni—in one of his first big roles—and, in turn, they fall in love; Lucia Bosé plays a young woman who has moved up in the world from seamstress to fashion model, the source of friction and drama between her and her handsome boyfriend, a truck driver, played by Renato Salvatori. But, mainly, Liliane loves the film on account of Lucia Bosé. She is enchanted by her grace and beauty and wishes she could grow up to look like her. (Later Lucia Bosé will give up her acting career to marry the Spanish bullfighter Luis Miguel Dominguín.)
For this, her first Christmas in Rome, Liliane’s father gives her a dress. Made of fine Italian cotton, the dress has smocking on the front and puffy sleeves and is babyish. To please her father, Liliane wears the dress on Christmas Day, but vows never to wear it again. Instead of packing it in her suitcase when she is getting ready to leave Rome, she shoves the dress out of sight underneath the white armoire. Cleaning, one day, she guesses, Maria will find it.
Mice find the dress and build a nest in it.
Liliane gives her father the key chain with the four-leaf clover charm she stole from the souvenir shop at the Shannon Airport. She is glad to be rid of it.
“For your car keys,” she tells him. “Good luck,” she adds.
Her father already owns a key chain for the silver Lancia—an elegant one with an Indian head eagle ten-dollar gold piece, designed by the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens—and he is not superstitious. Nor is he religious. As far as Liliane knows, he does not pray or believe in luck or God.
II
Except for Liliane’s mother who calls her Liliane—she also calls her ma chérie, my darling, or ma petite chérie, my little darling—and who speaks English with an indeterminate European accent, which could be German, French, or even Scandinavian (she is incapable of pronouncing a j, it comes out sounding like a y—yelly, yunior)—no one—not Liliane’s new stepfather, not her teachers, nor her school friends—can pronounce her name the French way, the prettier way. They call her Lillian or LilyAnne or, worse, Lil.
On the other hand, Liliane’s mother, Irène, insists that everyone pronounce her own name correctly: Ee-wren and not the American way, Irene. And everyone—including her second husband, who speaks only English—does. Born in Berlin—she does not like to give out the year—Irène is the youngest of three sisters. The sisters are lovely but, of the three, Irène is the loveliest.
Ursula, the oldest sister, is the free spirit. At seventeen, she runs away from home and marries a German officer, whom she divorces to marry an Englishman, whom she also divorces to marry a third time.
I love you, I love you not, I love you, I love you not, I love you. . . .
Ursula, known always as Uli, goes to live on a sisal estate in Tanganyika (present-day Tanzania), a British mandate under the League of Nations, with her third husband. She wants to be a writer and she does in fact write occasional columns for the local Dar es Salaam newspaper. She also begins but does not finish several children’s books. But, in Africa, most of her time and energy is spent dealing with the household servants, who are numerous and often unreliable, learning to speak Swahili, and supervising the running of the school and local clinic on the estate; afterward, if she has time, she is driven a dozen or so miles on an unpaved road to the whites-only country club to play tennis and bridge—games she is good at and passionate about—and relax with a few, often a few too many, gin and tonics. She is also fond of animals and, over the years, she has had dogs, cats, a donkey, a mongoose, and a bushbuck as pets—the last the subject of one of the children’s books. Snakes, too, are plentiful on the estate but not as welcome. Once, for several days, during breakfast, Uli, unsuspecting, sits on a nest of cobra eggs—the typical hatching time is between forty-eight and fifty days—that lies under her chair cushion on the veranda.
Mara ngapi nimekuambia . . . Uli scolds the two houseboys —How many times have I told you to shake out the cushions on the veranda each morning?
Embarrassed, the two houseboys laugh.
The next day, the two houseboys catch the cobra, chop off its head, and bury the head far away from the rest of the body; otherwise, they tell Uli, the head and body will join up at sunset and chase them.
Uli’s third husband, Claus, is a descendant of a very old and aristocratic Baltic-German family that dates back to the twelfth century. His most colorful and reprehensible relative, Baron Roman Nikolai Maximilian von Ungern-Sternberg, also known as the Mad Baron of Mongolia, wrested control of Mongolia from the Chinese with his rogue band of Cossacks, Mongols, and Manchus and became a brutal warlord, persecuting both Russian Bolsheviks and Jews. Apparently, he devised the most horrific and cruel tortures for men, women, and children alike—there were beheadings, dismemberments, disembowelments, hangings from trees, tearing of limbs by wild animals, etc.—until he was taken prisoner by the Red Army and executed by a firing squad in 1921. As for Claus, Uli’s husband, he is a courteous, mild-mannered man and prescient about his country’s fate—during the Second World War, Estonia was occupied first by the Russians then by the Germans, then again by the Russians—and, in 1938, he decides to leave and go to Africa, where he finds work managing a sisal estate.
Located eighty miles south of Mombasa, near Tanga, a harbor on the East African coast, the 25,000-acre sisal estate Claus manages is owned by the London-based Ralli brothers: Zannis, Augustus, Zeus, Toumazis, and Eustratios, the original expatriate Greek merchants who amassed huge properties in the nineteenth century that extended all the way to Russia, India, and Africa. The sisal or agave plant resembles an overgrown pineapple and its rosette of sword-shaped leaves can grow up to two meters. The pl
ant has a seven- to ten-year life span and will produce from 200 to 250 commercially viable leaves in its lifetime. By the mid-twentieth century, over 100,000 acres in East Africa are under sisal cultivation and produce over 200,000 tons of sisal. Sisal is the gold of Tanzania.
Thanks to her brief marriage to the Englishman, Uli is a British subject and since Claus emigrated from Estonia to East Africa as a “stateless” person, they are not interned, as most Germans are, during the Second World War. For their safety, they never speak German to each other, only English.
Jersey, knickers, boot, bloody, pudding, bollocks. . . .
According to a census taken in 1952, of the 17,885 Europeans living in Tanganyika, 12,395 or nearly 70 percent are British; Greeks are the second largest group, followed by Italians (many of them former prisoners of war who elected to stay), then Dutch, German, Swiss, and American.
In the mid-1950s, Irène comes from America to visit Uli in Tanganyika. What a joy this is! The two sisters have not seen each other in how many years? Fifteen? Twenty? Not since before the war!
“You have not changed a bit,” is how Uli greets Irène, whom she still calls by her childhood nickname—Rehlein, a diminutive meaning “little deer.”
“Nor have you,” Irène replies. Only she is not being truthful. Uli has aged. The African sun has hardened and darkened her skin, her blonde hair is streaked with gray, she has gained weight and walks with a pronounced limp—a problem with her hip.
“Still so beautiful,” Uli continues. She cannot help admiring her youngest sister. “Your hair,” she says, “and always so slim and elegant.
“But you must be tired after your long journey. Here, let me take you to your room,” Uli also says, taking Irène by the arm.
The guest room on the sisal estate is very plain. The bed is covered with a local cotton bedspread that has a bright yellow and green pattern; over it hangs a mosquito net; a noisy electric fan dangles from the ceiling. The carpet in the bedroom is, of course, made out of sisal and hard on Irène’s bare feet. There is a small wooden desk and next to it a wooden chair; the windows of the bedroom are shuttered and shut tight at night. Nonetheless, Irène has a hard time going to sleep, both on account of the time change and the strangeness of the place; and she can hear the night watchman shuffling outside as he makes his rounds guarding the house. The bathroom is far down the hall.
But Irène has spent nights in less comfortable rooms than this one. The one that comes to mind right away is the room in which she spent the night with Liliane’s father, Rudy, at the camp in Marolles. Situated under the eaves of an inn, the room was filled with discarded furniture, trunks, rusty, broken tools. The bed consisted of a mattress on the floor; instead of sheets there was a stained quilt that smelled of a disinfectant. Despite her reservations, Irène had made an effort and wore a pink silk nightgown.
Irène takes several photographs during her stay on the sisal estate—snapshots. The ones of Uli sitting on the veranda—no doubt in the same chair that hid the cobra eggs—are blurry and out of focus, often her back is to the camera (perhaps Uli senses that she is no longer as pretty or as photogenic); a photo of Claus shows him wearing khaki shorts and a short-sleeve shirt and standing robustly in a field, pointing to the sisal plants. Perhaps he is explaining to Irène, his sister-in-law, how the fibers, called cordage, taken from the plant leaf and extracted by a process known as decortication, are used to make rope as well as carpets, low-cost paper, handicrafts, and—but is Irène listening to Claus? Is she interested in the sisal plants? But perhaps, too, Claus is flirting a little with her. In the photo, Claus looks to be a handsome man.
There are photos of Bibi, the nurse-midwife; Juma, the cook; Nyatta and Andrea, the houseboys; Pita, the gardener. There is a sweet photo of the schoolchildren standing to attention in front of their desks, in honor, no doubt, of the blonde visitor from America; another photo shows half a dozen sisal workers standing behind a long wooden table, stripping or decorticating the sisal fibers that run along the length of the leaves.
As children the two sisters were not close—mostly on account of the difference in their ages (when Uli left home to marry the German officer, Irène was twelve). Now, in Africa, things between them are different, more equal. They can reminisce and laugh about their childhood: their lack of education (neither one finished high school); their passion for sports (they both played field hockey, they both were and still are avid tennis players); their moody, unhappy mother, Louise, who left them in the care of an indifferent governess each winter to go to the South of France; their stern father, Waldemar, a Prussian officer—but they do not reminisce or laugh about how, when they were little girls, he made them sit on his lap, bouncing them up and down to arouse himself.
Little Rehlein, pretty little deer—caught.
Safer to delve further back to their paternal grandfather, and Uli asks, “Didn’t Opapa take out Kaiser Wilhelm’s appendix?”
“Yes, then the Kaiser made Opapa grand ducal privy counselor and he became a famous doctor,” Irène says.
“But what I remember best,” Irène continues, “is the story our mother told us about how, one afternoon, she and her younger sister were playing in Sans Souci Park—the whole family had had to move from their home in Jena to Potsdam while the Kaiser was recuperating from the appendectomy in case something went wrong—and how he walked by and asked them if they were twins.”
“Oh, I remember that story,” Uli says with a laugh. “Our mother was so frightened at being addressed by the Kaiser that she said yes, although she and her sister weren’t twins.”
“And it is always easier to say yes,” Irène adds.
Irène, the most reticent of the three sisters, has said yes often—too often—when, probably, she should have said no. She blames the war. She blames having been left on her own, having to fend for herself. And she was too young, she was too . . . she cannot think of the right words to express her indignation, her sense of injustice of what happened to her. Of being abandoned.
Her husband was gone. A prisoner, he was interned in a godforsaken village in the Loire Valley, soon to be sent back to either Germany or who-knows-where in North Africa. On her own for the first time in her life, she had to ask for help from people she did not particularly like or trust. She had to depend on their goodwill, on their advice. She had to rely on them for money. For papers. For gasoline for the car, so that she, too, could leave. And, nothing, she learned, came free.
She was courageous or, maybe, just naïve.
On a sunny spring day in May 1940, tired of waiting—waiting for the German troops to march into Belgium, into the Netherlands and Luxembourg—Irène packed up her husband’s cream-colored convertible Packard with suitcases filled with clothes and valuables, several cans of gas she had hoarded, Liliane’s porcelain chamber pot, and food (bread, cheese, sausage, oranges); and with Liliane, her seven-month-old daughter, and Jeanne, the nineteen-year-old nanny from Brittany, she drove south. As a precaution, to be less conspicuous on the road she tied a scarf around her blonde hair.
Irène was unaccustomed to driving long distances—the gear stick was stiff and hard to shift—and she had hired a young man from her husband’s office to accompany her as far as Biarritz. His name was Jean-Pierre and he came in handy. Jean-Pierre took turns with Irène driving the Packard and he changed the flat tire they had en route. Although young, in his twenties, he helped shield Irène from the mocking remarks and lewd stares of the men they encountered along the way. For the time being, she had enough money, the necessary papers, the entry and exit visas, to drive to Portugal. Fortunately, too, Irène left a little ahead of the mass exodus—the first one, which began only a few weeks later, when the Germans finally invaded France, and the second and much larger one, later in June, when the Germans entered Paris and four million people left the capital and headed south.
Irène does not like to think about the tri
p. In fact, she has almost blocked it out of her mind. But then, from time to time, like a bad dream, she remembers patches of dark road bordered by trees whose trunks are ringed in white paint, a field of sunflowers all facing in the same direction, toward the sun, a shutter banging against the house all night in her shabby hotel room. During the entire journey, Liliane cries—a high-pitched animal wail. Nothing Jeanne does can console her. Later, it turns out—the thermometer forgotten in Paris—Liliane had a fever of 40 degrees Celsius.
In New York City, where she now lives with her second husband, Irène’s apartment is large and comfortable. Three bedrooms, two bathrooms, a library, a large living room, dining room, kitchen and pantry, two maid’s rooms—all furnished with English antiques and pretty chintzes, all in good taste. She also has help—a live-in cook, Helena, who is Finnish and, on occasion, drinks too much, and a cleaning lady, Brigid, who is Irish and who comes three times a week and does the laundry and the ironing. (The two women do not get along but their quarrels do not interest Irène and she ignores their complaints.)
Two mornings a week, Irène goes to an exercise studio. The studio—not a gym—is run by Nicholas Kounovsky, a charismatic Russian from Odessa, who devised a series of European-style fitness exercises based on six elements he calls “sixometry”: endurance, suppleness, balance, strength, speed, and coordination. Irène, naturally athletic and coordinated, quickly becomes adept at doing the exercises and can effortlessly raise herself up on the rings and hang upside down by her knees on the trapeze.
