Burning the Days

by James Salter

  We sat on stools in the dark looking at the rushes, weighing cuts. Into the bright sunlight of West Fifty-fifth Street in the afternoon, to the Brittany for lunch. The film will have faces, illicit couples emerging from the “21” club, dizzying shots up sleek façades towards dark skies, while beneath it in calm tones the prophetic description, centuries old, of decay.

  This was the New York of Balanchine, Motherwell, and Mies van der Rohe, as well as Jack Smith, Yoko Ono, and George Kleinsinger, performers whom the years had yet to deplume. Kleinsinger was a composer. In his rooms at the Chelsea Hotel he had a tropical rainforest, uncaged birds hopping from branch to branch, fish in pools, fountains. Nearby was a gleaming black piano at which he was writing the music for an opera called Archy and Mehitabel. His daughter stood beside him and sang parts of it in a great, passionate voice, then returned to stretch out on the daybed beside another young woman, Kleinsinger’s fiancée.

  Yoko Ono was married to an acquaintance of mine who acted as her manager and dedicated himself to her career. She had been married before. He was somewhat ingenuous; she was not. They lived in one place and another, always struggling for money, and had a little daughter to whom he was devoted. I would see him in the Village with the baby in his arms and her bottle in a musette bag over his shoulder. His wife was above this. A performance artist, she radiated ambition. She was determined to have her chance, and in the end, in a very unexpected way, she found it.

  Daily Life in Ancient Rome was never completed. We did make ten or twelve other films, documentaries, scraped together, some of them eloquent. We traveled over the country together, flying, driving, checking into motels, in the mindless joy of America, beer bottles lying by the roadside, empty cans tumbling light as paper. I can see his hands moving in small, inviting circles as he explains himself and his requests to someone. He sketched broadly and only lightly filled things in. He could so quickly make himself liked. It is his curious charm that I am remembering, the pockets with money crumpled in them, some of which often fell to the floor, the migraine headaches, which eventually came in clusters, the familiarity with names of all kinds, the cars in need of repair, the essential loneliness.

  His older son, named for him, was hit by a car while riding a bicycle and died a few days later. It was at a time when we had already begun gradually to separate. Perhaps we had lost the power to amuse each other. We made one final film, on American painters: Warhol before his real recognition, Rauschenburg, Stuart Davis, a dozen others. From the small, asbestos-shingled house in Piermont he moved to Sneden’s Landing, an exclusive enclave where the houses, though passing through the hands of various owners, had their own traditional names. Disasters followed, principal among them the death of his wife.

  On envelopes addressed in his beautiful handwriting the postmarks moved west, to California, where, if it was to happen, he would at last become a director. He lived for a time in a house owned once by Greta Garbo, came back East for a third, unsuccessful marriage, and then retreated to Arizona and a ranch with the unlikely name of X-9. There the trail came to an end.

  ——

  I had a friend, knot-jawed and earnest—Hurley was his name—who lived in a snug, orderly apartment like a captain’s cabin on Sixty-first Street and who always used to ask, “But how did you meet them?” as if it were inconceivable. He also accused me—a cut slow to heal—of writing down everyone’s address in a little book as soon as I met them. Was there really a time when I was trying to meet people? Oh, yes. I was ecstatic at the chance, in about 1963, to meet Peter Glenville, an Englishman, a director who had directed Rashomon on the stage and the film Becket. He had an undeniable gift and lived like a prince.

  There were four of us at dinner, all men, in his New York town house. The meal was served by a uniformed maid. Glenville asked if I would be interested in writing a script, an Italian story he wanted to make. The mere proposal seemed a reward. He was showing his faith in me; he had tapped me, as it were. It was easy to see that he was discriminating—the house, the fine clothes, the tall, soothing companion, Bill Smith.

  I was sent a typewritten outline and felt, upon reading it, disappointment. It was trash: A young man in Rome, a lawyer, meets and falls in love with a beautiful girl who is strangely evasive about her personal life. She is either only uncertain and innocent or—the evidence is flimsy but his suspicion mounts—a call girl. He marries her anyway, but incidents recur that are disturbing. I have forgotten the cliché climactic moment, but it causes her to attempt suicide and there is a final reconciliation amid the white sheets of the ospedale, or perhaps she dies.

  No matter what was done with it, I told Glenville frankly, it would never possess the least merit. He understood my misgivings, but still the theme of jealousy was interesting and the locale …

  The producer called from California. They were all “fans” of mine there. He had talked at length to Glenville. They were confident that I was the one to write the film. Forgetting everything, I inhaled.

  There is the feeling that directors are dependent on you. In reality they are only attendant, waiting to see what is brought back, with luck something plump in your jaws. You are at most a preliminary figure. Their view extends past yours to meetings, cajolings, intrigues. They are the ones who actually create things. How reassuring it is to be drawn along by their energy, to linger in their society, which seems luxurious and perhaps elevated, intimate with that of the stars themselves.

  I once sat near a victor at Cannes. He was in a buckskin coat and a sort of black peddler’s hat. The party was all young, and as he spoke, the girl beside him took his hand, fingers intermeshed with his, raised it to her lips, and began to kiss it in devotion. He continued to talk, his free arm extended like a pope’s.

  ——

  In Rome, ochre and white, uninterested in me, I had the name of a Count Crespi; Glenville had supplied it. He was cool on the telephone. I had to wait several days for an evening appointment.

  He came out of his office to introduce himself, tan, handsome face, ears close to his head, shattering smile. “I am Crespi,” he said, taking me into a small, plain room where he sat down across from me.

  As well as I could I told him the story of the film and he began without hesitation to suggest things. The girl, instead of being a model, which was rather a commonplace, might work at Vogue, where his wife’s former secretary, a very clever girl who spoke four or five languages … but Vogue was already a little too fancy, perhaps, he decided. A salesgirl in a boutique, he thought, or perhaps, yes, even better, a mannequin in one of the couture houses—Fourquet on Via Condotti, for example. “She may earn only eighty thousand lire a month but it’s interesting work, she meets people, a certain kind of person with money, taste. If she has something to attend, Fourquet will probably lend her one of his expensive dresses.”

  With heroic charm he began to describe the man in the film, the young, proper lawyer. Politics slightly to the left—“In Italy, everybody is, everybody except me,” he explained. The lawyer has a good car, he goes dancing, to the beach. He loves sport, like all Italians, though not as a participant, of course, and there is also something traditional—he still goes home every day to eat with his mother at noon.

  Crespi’s enthusiasm and willingness to provide details increased my confidence. There might be a tone, a manner in which it could be presented, which would redeem it. As we talked on, in response to certain things I said, Crespi began to shift his view, to see the lawyer as less sophisticated, not part of the new Italy where people in Rome, as Fellini had shown, had seen everything. Perhaps it might take place in a more provincial town, Piacenza or Verona. Yes, he said, he saw it as a really romantic story. The women would all be crying, he predicted.

  “But could all this happen in a town like Verona?” I said. “Are there call girls there?”

  “Of course. Everywhere,” he said. “It’s in all the papers. It’s the scandal of Italy. They advertise as manicure, with a chic address, senza
portiere. Columns of them. Look in Il Messaggero.”

  It was true. In Il Tempo as well. I sat reading the papers in a noisy hotel on the Piazza della Rotonda, the recommendation of which had also come from Glenville. The furniture seemed to be from an old orphanage. The floors were bare wood. Giovanissima—very young—the ads all said. Via Flaminia, Via del Babuino, senza portiere.

  As it happened, I didn’t go to Verona or Piacenza. I met other people and then others. I took the apartment of an Englishwoman—her pretty, botanical name, Lyndall Birch, was on a small white card beneath the doorbell—on Via dei Coronari, a narrow, homely street in the old part of the city. The apartment was an attico, three rooms and a terrace, reached by climbing six flights of worn marble stairs. Across the rooftops, hot and becalmed, the Crespis’ terrace could be seen, bounded by furled blue, palatial drapes. It was late June; the city was a furnace, the sun beating down on the ceiling. In the months that were to come I wrote lying prone on the apartment’s cool stone floor, the burning air above my head too thick to breathe.

  At dinner one night in a country restaurant I tried to follow the conversation and bursts of laughter. It was all wicked and in Italian. I could make out occasional coarse words. We were in the the garden, grouped around an animated woman named Laura Betti. She was a singer and actress. Pasolini and Moravia had written lyrics for her songs and she performed all the Kurt Weill—Bertolt Brecht repertory in Italian. She talked constantly that night, a cigarette between her fingers. Her laugh was irresistible. Smoke poured from her mouth. She was blonde, a bit heavy, perhaps thirty years old, the sort of woman who proudly wore a latent sadness.

  We were in the ancient world, it seemed, in the cool air, the darkness beneath the vines. The empty carafes of wine were replaced by others, the green bottles of minerale. There were six or seven of us. They were talking about everyone and eating from one another’s plates: about the famous actress who liked to make love in two ways at the same time, you could always recognize such women, Laura Betti said, by the way they looked over their shoulder with a knowing smile; about the madwoman who walked the streets singing in a ruined voice, a confused song about her great love who had taken her in his arms, the beauty of Jesus, and the little boy’s dove she touched with her tongue. It was all about love, or, more properly, desire. Rome to them was a village that had no secrets. They knew everything, the names of the four countesses who had picked up an eleven-year-old gypsy girl one night and brought her to the house of a noted journalist to see him have his pleasure with her.

  The script I was writing, they asked, what was its nature? Though feeling it sounded naïve, I described it. Perhaps it should not take place in Rome, I suggested—someone had mentioned Piacenza.

  “Bologna,” Laura Betti said. “That’s where it could take place.”

  “Bologna?”

  “It’s marvelous,” her husky voice declared. It was the city she was from.

  “Bologna is famous for three things,” she said. “It’s famous for its learning—it has the oldest university in Italy, founded in the twelfth century. It’s famous for its food. The cuisine is the finest in the country. You can eat in Bologna as nowhere else, that’s well known. And lastly, it’s famous for fellatio.” She used another word.

  “It’s a specialty,” she said. “All the various forms are called by the names of pasta. Rigate, for instance,” she explained, “which is a pasta with thin, fluted marks. For that the girls gently use their teeth. When there used to be brothels there was always a Signorina Bolognese—that was her specialty.”

  The girl who worked in a publishing house and the one from Milan gave no sign of having heard. At nearby tables couples were talking in the darkness. I was impressed by Laura Betti’s cool frankness, her poise—it was my novitiate.

  I went to Bologna. Beside the wooden doors of the main station as the train pulled in, a woman was waiting. She nodded and smiled. I knew her name, Camilla Cagli. She was Bolognese; her husband was a lawyer. Laura Betti had called her and asked if she would be able to show me the city, and of that long day it is her smile I remember, the ease of her company, the natural grace. We walked beneath the arcades, talked of life in Bologna, and visited the huge house, the palazzo now become apartments, in which she had been born. For a few hours one is wrapped, even enraptured, in intimacy.

  She had been married before, to a man of good family, but it was an empty marriage of bridge games and idleness before the war. She had been lucky and gotten a divorce—almost unheard of in Italy—during a brief period when the Communists were in power.

  In the end, however, it was not in Bologna but in Rome itself that it all unfolded.

  ——

  In Rome, the heat bore down. Dark Sicilians rose at two in the afternoon. The Tiber was green and stagnant. On Sunday mornings the highway to the sea was jammed with cars, the music from hundreds of radios beating the blue, exhausted air.

  Three or four times a week I traveled up via Flaminia and across the bridge to the apartment of an American woman who was giving me Italian lessons. Her children closed the door to the living room and left us alone. Dorothy Brown was my tutor’s name. We sat on the couch and studied. The vocabulary was not that of school. “The Italians are more interested in the culo than the fica,” she told me, writing down the words. “There is even a verb for it, inculare. The girls all prefer it to preserve their virginity.” Her boyfriend, she said, had done it this way with his cousin since they were both fourteen. Molten images: the dark, shadowed room, the youthful limbs, the faint smooth rustle of sheets.

  At noon the boyfriend comes, an aristocrat from the south, small and self-assured, friendly with the children. We have lunch en famille. A maid serves. On her bare upper arm is a vaccination mark the size of a plum. “Marco, mangia,” the boyfriend coaxes the youngest child—eat. “Come fa crescere?”—How are you going to grow big? The sun has emptied the midday streets. Around the Pantheon the cats are dozing beneath parked cars.

  Like so many in Rome, Dorothy Brown seemed in a kind of exile. I somehow connect her with California. She had a chance in Rome—there is always a chance, even during revolutions and hard times—though good looks are hardly a guarantee.

  Women seemed drawn to Rome, perhaps because of its decadence and the famous avidity of the men. There were women in expensive clothes at the Hassler or Hôtel de Ville; women traveling with their husbands and without; young women who claimed to be actresses—who knows what became of them; pairs of women in restaurants reading the menu very carefully; women stripped of illusion but unable to say farewell; women who owned shops and went to Circeo in the summer; divorced women who had once had a life in Trastevere; English girls who said, Oh, not this week because they weren’t quite right—the doctor was sure it was nothing; girls who looked unbathed, filthy even, sitting in skimpy dresses in the restaurants, with young white teeth; principessas born in Vienna, living in the solitude of vast apartments; and aging fashion editors who seldom strayed far from the Hilton.

  Against them, the legions of men: the handsome scum; men whose marriages had never been annulled; men who would never marry; men of dubious occupation; men from the streets and bars, of nullo, nothing; men with good names and dark mouths; swarthy men from the south, polished and unalterable, the nail of their little finger an inch long.

  Amid this cast there were somber sights: the English prime minister’s daughter, who was an actress, walking unsteadily through the restaurant, bumping into tables. She had narrow lips and an actress’s always available smile. She was living with a black man on the Via del Corso in an apartment with high ceilings, no furniture, and the smell of incense. The front doors were lined with steel and had well-machined locks.

  The apartment belonged to a Mafia figure, the black man confided, a very important man. “You know all those statues around Rome that have no heads? Well, he has the heads.”

  But it would be very comfortable when it was fixed up, she assured me. She had long red hair an
d pale skin on which there showed clearly a bruise on her cheek and another on her arm. Churchill, her father, was still alive. She sat down on the lone sofa with a drink.

  “You’ve really got one there,” the black man commented.

  “No, I don’t,” she said.

  “Oh, you sure do.”

  “Have I?” she said sweetly.

  On a magazine cover on the floor was a photograph of her that had him in the background. She picked it up. “It’s the best article we’ve ever had done,” she said, “really, the most sympathetic, the most truthful. It’s awfully good.” In the light her hair seemed thin and wrinkles surrounded her eyes.

  They were going to open a club together in Tangier. He was a musician and painter. Africa was the place, he said. “You just set foot there and the earth, it goes right through you, like you start trembling.” His hands, infused, vibrated upwards. “Ain’t that right, Mommy? Maybe I’ll be prime minister someplace.”

  She didn’t answer; she liked the idea of Africa, herself, someplace where it was easy to get money, she said, “I mean, that’s all over, here, you know.” It would be nice to have a summer crowd in someplace that was amusing; then in the winter, Lobo—that was his name—could paint. It would probably be a mistake, she decided in an added foresight, for him to become known as a singer or club owner first and a painter second because then, you know, people never quite erase that first impression.

  ——

  It was a city of matchless decrepitude: muted colors, fountains, trees on the rooftops, beautiful tough boys, trash. A southern city—there were palms on the Piazza di Spagna and the sun incandescent in the afternoon. A venal city, flourishing through the ages—nothing so often betrayed could retain a shred of illusion. In the day it was beautiful. At night it became sinister.