by James Salter
Slowly, street by street, in fragments, it became familiar, like an immense jigsaw puzzle, one piece and a little later another fitting snugly into place. I recall it as a period when I had plenty of money. Eventually I was driving a white Fiat convertible bought brand-new, darting through the piazzas, swinging up ancient, wide avenues, peeling façade on one side, breathtaking view on the other.
On a June evening I had been introduced to a woman whose apartment might be for rent—I had not yet found one at the time. She was small, well-dressed, and untrusting, French-Canadian as I found out. In her brow was a furious vertical crease. Gaby was her name—Gabrielle, I suppose. She was seductive and at the same time disdainful; life had taught her hard lessons, among them to think always of money and to hate men.
She had been convent-educated in Canada, at Ursulines des Trois Rivières. I pictured gloomy buildings amid legendary dark pines. Her mother had gone there and her grandmother before that. She had slept in the very same bed they had, on a narrow mattress of straw. Girls were supposed to do that, she explained. To this day she slept as if in a coffin, straight and unmoving. Bathing at Trois Rivières was supervised—a white sheet fastened to a sort of neck ring was draped over the tub to defeat curiosity and assure modesty. She washed the linen collar of her woolen uniform every day and studied religion and religious history, accompanied by prayers. Many girls married millionaires, she said, as if the rigors of their confinement made sensuality and the desire for material things increase, even grow wildly. One girl married a Canadian Croesus, another, Georges Simenon.
In her own case the result was a passionate interest in human frailty. She rejoiced, somewhat bitterly, in the weaknesses and secret vices of Moravia, Italy’s most famous writer; Visconti, the two handsome boys he had taken into his house after they had been in his La Terra Trema, they were dressed in uniforms and posed as servants; John Cheever (who had lived for a season or two in Rome); Pietro Germi, who left his wife for a young actress and had been betrayed by her in the most humiliating way; Thyssen, the rich art collector; countless others.
She told me with satisfaction the story of the singer who had begun as an actress, a shy, sweet girl who was given the chance to sing in a revue. She had to sleep with the star of the show, of course, and afterwards the producer, but they kept cutting her part. She went to bed with the star’s brother because that might help her, and finally it had to be the stage manager. He took her to some house, a large one, and upstairs into a room. It was dark. “Take off your clothes,” he told her. When she had done this, he said, “Put these on,” and handed her a pair of high-heeled shoes. Then he had her get on her hands and knees on the bed. Suddenly the lights came on. There were other men in the room, all the previous ones, the star, the producer, the electrician. It was to be a kind of party and they came towards her laughing.
Gaby had been pursued, of course—that was one of the roots of her obsession. The workmen on the street who, seeing her pass, raised their hands as if forming them around her buttocks and cried admiringly, “Beato lui …”—blessed be the man to whom that belongs. The Sicilian prince who, as they were dancing at a ball, took her hand and said, “Here. What do you think of it?” having placed his naked member in it. The lecherous journalists and lawyers … it was unspeakable, though a moment later she wished she were twenty again, she would do all the things she had been afraid to.
She mentioned Corinne Luchaire, a prewar French star. “She was Göring’s mistress.”
I vaguely recalled a slender, beautiful blonde. “His mistress? Not really?”
“Of course!” she hissed. “Don’t you know anything?”
Corinne Luchaire, she said, had been arrested in her apartment in Paris by the French Resistance and kept there all night while forty-one men raped her. She spent three years in jail. At her trial, her lawyer read aloud the entire Maupassant story of collaboration, Boule de Suif—the whore, the soldier who came to see her, didn’t she know he was a German? “No, he was naked.” I had never read the story, which was the first Maupassant ever published, and even now I am not sure if her version was correct, but it is the one I remember.
What she was exactly, I never discovered—writer, publicist, researcher of some sort, but withal, a Scheherazade who colored Rome for me with stories told in a slightly accented English; she hadn’t learned it until she was seven and the “th”s were missing. “Ortodoxy,” she pronounced it, and for “with” she said “wid.” She rained images on me, some of them so intense they remain in my flesh like wounds.
She introduced me to Fellini, with whom she collaborated in some way. She brought him stories. “Talk to me, talk to me”—he wanted nothing in writing; he was inspired by listening, he said. It was often remarked that there were, at the time, only two real artists in all of Europe, Picasso and Fellini. Picasso was ancient and remote. Fellini was a man who sat in shirtsleeves and resembled his photographs, rumpled, with black hair growing out of his ears, like a lovable uncle.
I met him at the studio where he was working. The conversation began in Italian; he did not speak English, he apologized, but soon we had drifted into it. I had recently been to the Vorkapich lectures at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. They were essentially a tribute to Slavko Vorkapich, the master of the kind of montage used in the 1930s and ’40s: pages of a calendar falling away to indicate days or months passing, the wheels of a train, then a car, then perhaps an ocean liner to show travel over great distances. The entire film world of the East Coast had attended the lectures, I said. It was difficult to obtain a seat, and of all the directors whose work had been chosen to illustrate concepts, Fellini was the one most often used, with Eisenstein second. Fellini gave a modest nod. He seemed grateful, the honor. He had only one question. “Who is Vorkapich?” he wanted to know.
On a slip of paper he wrote his telephone numbers—if there was anything in regard to which he might be of some help, he urged me to call him. I was not in Rome long enough, however.
She introduced me also to Zavattini, the dominant writer of Italian postwar films—Shoeshine, Umberto D, The Bicycle Thief—whom I was prepared to greatly admire. He was bald, and wore a baggy blue suit of the kind that has buttons on the fly. He was disheartened. “The cinema has failed,” he said.
I was particularly interested in another person Gaby presented, Nany Columbo, who owned a boutique and had been a mannequin in Rome and Genoa before the war.
“Do you speak English?” I said.
She shook her head. A pity.
The Italian girl I was writing about and whose reality, as on a sheet of photographic paper, was only slowly forming—for a while I imagined a younger Nany Columbo in the role. What ruined girls, she explained in Italian, was all the luxury around them. She said it as if she had lived through it herself, with easy resignation. Everything about her seemed authentic, every word the bare truth. When her husband came home from the war, she said, she was living in the country with her son. He came walking down the road. She looked awful. Her hair was awry, her dress shabby. She pushed a bed in front of the door, she said, and ran upstairs to fix herself up before he could see her.
In the countryside a few hours north of Rome there were vineyards below the big houses; a man with his dog working in a field; wood piled up by the doorway. The serene terraces of land with their views of hills and groves were unchanged since the twelfth or thirteenth century. In ancient churches the Piero della Francescas were slowly fading, like the close of an act, from dark walls.
The thing I failed for a long time to understand was the connection between the vineyards, the great houses, the cloisters of Europe and the corruption, the darkness, the riches. They have been always dependent on one another, and without each other could not exist. Nature is ravishing, but the women are in the cities. There was one night in Rome, one morning really, about two, when a man walked into a café near the Piazza Navona with two women, one blonde in a blue-and-green silk dress, the other girl even better-looking
. He was in evening clothes. They sat down; the waiters began to stir. He smiled and after a moment he uttered two words, but with his entire heart: “Beautiful party.”
——
I am turning the pages in a small, greenish notebook, half the size of a postcard, with a Spencerian Notes printed on the cover, bought probably in a dimly lit shop near Via Bocca di Leone in the summer of 1964. In it are the invariables: people, telephone numbers, restaurants, clubs, places to dance, piazzas, beaches, wines, unique things like the location of the cardinals’ door through the keyhole of which the dome of St. Peter’s could be seen floating above the edge of the garden, exceptional streets, and the names of two Italian whores who worked at the bar of a large hotel—actually one was a South African.
From these ample hints I can almost re-create the period, many dialogues, faces.
I was at the Hassler one afternoon and the women were talking about travel and food. A director’s wife had her coat draped over the back of her chair. In proud black letters behind her neck, the words: GIVENCHY, PARIS. She was not the same one who, in Sophia Loren’s apartment, admiring a wall of ancient frescoes, said, “Your decorator really did a fabulous job.” The star said afterwards, in Italian, to another woman, “What can you expect?”
In a hotel one evening I sat with Scott Fitzgerald’s onetime mistress, Sheilah Graham, and two magazine writers. Money was the sole topic, how much they earned, how much it cost to live. I tried to visualize the younger, unhardened woman Sheilah Graham had been, the unexpected gift for the broken writer. Love is your last chance. There is really nothing else on earth to keep you there. Nothing of that seemed to remain.
One of the writers was a film critic, the other was a tall woman in her forties who had braces on her teeth. She didn’t like Italy. As for France, it was hideously expensive, she said. She hated France. It dated from the time she saw the French army leaving Indochina, “My dear, that was something, I assure you.” France was not even a beautiful country; she had never seen a view there that she remembered.
“Where have you seen views?”
“Oh, India, Ceylon. That’s where you see views,” she said.
I was seated one night in a restaurant and two women sat down at the next table. One was American, older, with thin hands, and the other young, blonde, with a striking figure. Her first words were a complaint that she was “sitting downhill.” The waiter hurried to bring her another chair and smiled at me in an aside.
They had just been to Capri and were talking with animation about it. Soon they were tasting a dish I had ordered and I was testing their wine. The younger one’s glances were open and friendly. I could read palms, I told them—I found myself eager to touch her, to hold her hand. “Tell me your name,” I suggested.
“Ilena,” she replied. In the riches of that smile one would never be lonely or forgotten.
I examined her palm with feigned authority. “You will have three children,” I said, pointing to some creases. “You are witty—it shows that here. I see money and fame.” I felt her fingers pressing mine.
“You are an ass,” she said gaily. “That means nice, no?”
Ilena may have been her name or it may have been the name she simply wore like a silk dressing gown one longed to peel back. Warmth came off her in waves. She was twenty-three years old and weighed sixty-two kilos, the absence of any part of which would have been a grave loss. She was, I learned, the mistress of John Huston, who was in Rome directing a film. She had also been the companion of Farouk, the exiled king of Egypt, and in that sense one of the last of an infinite number of royal properties reaching back to the pharaohs. She had met him at the dentist’s office. He was there with his lawyer, she said, a detail I felt no one could invent. They discovered they lived not far from each other and began going out.
Farouk’s days started in the evening. Like a true playboy, he rose late. She described him for me. He was amusing. He liked fine cars—he had a Rolls and a Jaguar. He loved to eat. I thought of the large men I had known, many of them good dancers, graceful, even dainty. Was it true of him? “Darling, we never danced,” she said.
It was clear she had been fond of him. They had traveled to Monte Carlo together, to the chemin de fer tables where, a prodigious gambler, he was known as the Locomotive. The night he collapsed and died in Rome in a restaurant on the Appia Antica she was allowed to leave by the back door before the press arrived.
Whether or not she was an actress or ever became one, I do not know. Of course, she wanted to be—she had already played great roles.
We had a drink, the three of us, at the Blue Bar and a gelato on the Piazza Navona. On Via Veneto she stopped to talk with a group of elderly Italian businessmen. It was lovely to watch her. Her legs, the silk of her print dress, the smoothness of her cheeks, all of it shone like constellations, the sort that rule one’s fate.
We dropped the American woman at her hotel, the Excelsior. Sitting in the car, in the driveway, I turned to Ilena and said simply, “I adore you. I have from the first moment.” In response she kissed me and said, “To the right.” It was late and she had an early appointment at Elizabeth Arden’s; she wanted to go home.
“Are you married?” she asked as we drove.
“Yes.”
“So am I.”
It was to a man in his eighties, she explained. I recognized the story from the newspapers—she had married him to get a passport. He was in an old people’s home, an istituto. She went to visit him there, she said. Then, agreeably, “Would you like to come?”
We stopped that night on a street near a dark piazza, across from a little place where she had often gone with Farouk at four or five in the morning for apple strudel. It looked closed, and I waited while she ran across to say hello to the woman who was the proprietor. After a while she came back. “She was so happy to see me,” she said animatedly and added, “She’s very nice.”
We went on to Parioli, where, in a somewhat dubious building on Via Archimede, Ilena lived. The apartment was small and drearily furnished, but on the wall was a large picture of John Huston that had appeared in Life. Lying on the floor were books that Huston had given her to read. He might just as well have given her a chemistry set or a microscope. “You must never stop learning,” he told her—she could do him perfectly. I could hear his rich, rolling, faintly cynical voice pronouncing “Mount Lungo” in his documentary on the battle of San Pietro, a village in ruins after the war, given over to weeds and sheep droppings. There is a cemetery atop Mount Lungo from the heights of which one can see twenty miles, all the bare stony slopes up which men fought.
“Never stop learning,” he repeated. “That’s very important. Promise me that.”
“Of course, John,” she answered.
In an album were many clippings of the two of them, Huston with a white, patriarchal beard. He was a coccolone—someone who likes to be babied. He was also crazy, she admitted, and very tight. “To get a thousand dollars from him is so difficult,” she said.
The portrait she painted over a period of time was of an indomitable man who nonetheless was lonely. He would call on the phone, “What are you up to, baby?”
“Nothing.”
“Come right over. Right away.”
He was in the autumn of a life of activity, a life that had not always been lived in accordance with reason. He had no friends, she said, and hated to go out. He was living in a suite in the Grand Hotel on a diet of vodka and caviar. She would call him. “John, do you want some girls?”
“Bring them around,” he said. “We’ll have some fun.”
She brought three, one of them eighteen years old—she liked young, tender girls, she explained, in the late afternoon was best. “Darling,” she said to me after describing a scene that might have taken place at Roissy, “you’re a writer, you should know these things.”
Huston had fought at Cassino, she told me, as if in justification.
“No, he didn’t.”
“But he di
d. He’s told me stories.”
“He was a film director. He never fought.”
“Well, he thinks he did,” she said. “That’s the same thing.”
I liked her generosity and lack of morals—they seemed close to an ideal condition of living—and also the way she looked at her teeth in the mirror as she talked. I liked the way she pronounced “cashmere,” like the state in India, Kashmir. Her cosmetics bag was filled with prescriptions, just as the shelf in her closet was crammed with shoes. Once we passed a big Alfa Romeo that she recognized as belonging to a friend, the chief of detectives in Rome. She had made love with him, of course. “Darling,” she said, “there’s no other way. Otherwise there would have been terrible trouble about my passport. It would have been impossible.” I only learned in time that there was, besides Huston, also an Italian businessman supporting her.
She didn’t like Negroes, Arabs, or certain cities, often that she had never been to. Above all, she hated bohemians. “Darling, they’re so filthy.” I admired her poise. On the telephone, to someone she did not know who had been given her number, she merely said, “I’m sorry. I have to go.” I heard that on several occasions.
The things she said seemed to come straight from what she knew or felt, as easily as one might pick up a fork. There was no hesitation or propriety. She said things I wished I might have, things more direct.
She was also, I hardly need add, difficult, especially about eating. “I have to have something to eat,” she would say, becoming more and more nervous. “If I don’t get something to eat, I’m going to cry.” And reading the menu in a kind of desperation, “What shall I order?” When it came, she was likely to send it back. “I can’t eat this.” The restaurant never made a fuss. The crucial question was whether or not the dish contained butter or had been cooked in it. She absolutely could not eat butter. She had to be extremely careful, she said.
Once we sat down in a restaurant and while she went to the ladies’ room I read the menu. As I did, I realized there was nothing on it she would like, and besides, the place seemed dull and nearly empty. I rose as she returned, and said, “Come. This is not good.” She obeyed without a word.
