Director's Cut (26 page)

“Nobody's perfect,” Fulvani growled while measuring up one of the young man's legs by pinching it firmly from knee to groin.

“At Theater School. Every morning. Grands jetés in particular are …” Maxim stuttered, seeing Fulvani's face fall. “And skating, of course,” he added, lowering his voice an octave to erase any suspicions of a pink tutu, “we skate whenever we get the chance.”

“The Dutch!” groaned Fulvani. “When it gets cold, they head for the water. Who could possibly understand them?” Shaking his head, he released Maxim and turned to Gala.

“Darling, the moment has come. You know what I mean. Snaporaz is inordinately interested in you.” His itching fingers floated in the air as if he were about to pinch her as well, but with a sigh of respect for so much beauty, he let them drop into his lap to get a grip on himself.

“Inordinately?” Hardly able to believe it, Gala seized the hand that Maxim extended as if to keep her from tumbling backward. “Inordinately? Did he really say that?”

“This is hardly the moment to bicker over one little word. The point is, he wants to use you. And can you blame the great man? Such fine specimens! And by the way,” asked Fulvani, leaning back in his chair and studying Maxim as he lifted up Gala, spun her around, and planted a leisurely kiss on her neck, “do you ever do it in company?”

The elated couple grinned at him as if they had misheard. In fact, Fulvani's brazenness would have been swept aside by their jubilation if he hadn't taken the trouble to clarify. “Another man in bed with you, perhaps a woman? Even if just to watch. When you're that richly endowed, don't you have a duty to share with others? Just to watch, surely there can't be anything wrong with that?”

•  •  •

Maxim puts Gala down and in seconds is ready to drag Fulvani out from behind his desk, but the agent has already stood of his own accord, ignoring Maxim's threat so blatantly that the young man starts to wonder whether he's imagined the impertinence.

“All I have to say to you, young man, is that a major American studio is coming to shoot a TV film about an Olympic ski champion. We're talking about the lead here, so let me ask you again: do you ski, yes or no?”

“Like the best of them,” lies Maxim, who has to wear crampons at the first sign of frost.

“He could slalom before he could walk,” says Gala, to lend her support.

“Lovely.” Fulvani observes Maxim's eagerness with a triumphant smile. “If you have no other objections …”

Silence descends. No one asks what they might object to.

“I knew I could talk you into it. The procedure is simple. I send Maxim to the Americans and I arrange an appointment for Gala. Tomorrow or the day after, as soon as possible. Probably at Snaporaz's office in his house on the Via Margutta. He'll chat with you, take a couple of photos, at the most a few test shots for the lighting. Don't mention the financial side, the maestro isn't involved in that and, anyway, negotiations are—as you've noticed—my strong suit. He wants you, and money won't be a problem. Yes, it looks like your adventure really is about to begin. Just one thing, I would like to watch …” His breathing gets heavier. He grabs Gala's arm and strokes the inside of her elbow with his coarse fingers. She can smell his breath. She feels herself going cold as she racks her mind to discover what she has done wrong. Has she given him a false impression? Feverish words race through her head—they always do when she panics—sentences from previous meetings, images from their last encounter. She grabs at her blouse. Should she have buttoned it up further? Either way, she's given the wrong idea. Now she's got to live up to it: otherwise, he'll be disappointed. Stay calm, she tells herself: whatever else happens, I can't let him think I'm childish. He can't think I'm out of my depth. What if he tells Snaporaz how I always back out of things? A man like that, a great director who hangs out with the world's most statuesque women like kids playing hide-and-seek in the street, what would he think if he heard I'm scared
to play along? “I don't want an unsophisticated girl like that” is what he'll say! Now I've landed this role and I don't know if it's been forced on me or if I accidentally auditioned, but now that I've got it, I have to perform. I'm in a play again. With Maxim as my partner. We've done this piece before. We know what scene he's expecting, we've rehearsed it, we've got an eager audience, so what are we waiting for?

The idea that it's just a temporary role helps her relax. The stage fright will disappear the moment she steps into the spotlight. Fulvani feels her body yielding and pulls it up against his.

“Such a magnificent woman, such a handsome man. I thought that even the milkmaids in Holland didn't make a fuss over a little exhibitionism?”

“Enough with the innuendos!” Maxim puts his foot down, his eyes darting around in search of something he can knock over to punctuate his words, but everything looks too fragile.

“What innuendos? Babe”—Fulvani brings his lips close to Gala's ear—“did you hear any innuendos? I say exactly what I think, I'm open and honest about what I want, and I might have expected a little more gratitude.” He kisses Gala's earlobe and blows his warm breath on her neck while keeping his eyes riveted on Maxim. “No, my only sin is that I'm a man. Just like you, my friend. With the same desires. If you want to condemn me for that, I plead guilty!”

Gala groans softly, almost entreatingly, but it's impossible to say whether she's pleading to be released or to be taken. Her head tilts back slightly, coming to rest against Fulvani's chest, the kind of movement a bird might make in a cat's jaws—a struggle will injure her, so she knows that hanging limp is her only chance—but both men see it as a sign of surrender. Fulvani's eyes glisten in triumph, still fixed on Maxim's. Encouraged, he inches her dress up her thigh until his stubby fingers touch her skin and glide in under her garters.

“What do you want?” Maxim hisses in Dutch so that the Italian won't understand him. Gala is shocked by his cold fury.

“Do you really want this, or do I smash his face in? Speak up for yourself for once, for Christ's sake!”

She doesn't, abandoned as she feels: abandoned by Maxim, but also, and much more intensely, abandoned by herself, just as in that brief moment before a seizure she always betrays herself, in that instant when
she tries to grasp the last remnant of consciousness though she knows that within seconds she will so passionately long for the unknown that she'll voluntarily let go and meet the danger with open arms. And now, just as during her epileptic absences, she cannot reach Maxim. She suppresses the scream rising within her—she knows it won't help. Her consciousness is now separating from her body in a way that recalls her disease so strongly that she expects to see the fluttering red cape close around her at any moment. But this is no seizure. This time, there's no escape. She'll have to go through with it fully conscious. As she stares at the sun high over the rooftops, her pupils dilate, grow glassy, hide behind a layer of water, almost exactly as they do during the ecstasy of lovemaking. This is precisely what Maxim thinks he recognizes in her eyes.

“Then it's all up to you,” he snaps. His annoyance has gone far beyond their earlier disagreement. She thought he was mad at
her
, but he's really angry at himself. He's a man: how can he know that the deepest resistance sometimes looks like acquiescence? All he sees is her breathing quicken as she opens up to Fulvani. He curses the godforsaken lust that, against his wishes and despite his abhorrence, turns him on, watching the man about to finger her. Fulvani doesn't miss it.

“See,” he whispers into Gala's ear, sliding his fingers between her labia, “our ski instructor can't wait to join the fun. What do you think, shall we let him join in?”

She groans again, deeper now, more imploringly. This time it's clearer to all three of them, although it means something different to each: Gala is begging to be loved.

People say that fantasy expands our consciousness. I have learned that it contracts it.

And that contraction offers us an escape.

Throughout the whole scene, Gala stares at a tiny point in the distance. She's used the trick since early childhood. Few can hear the difference between cries of pleasure and cries of loneliness.

When her father was in one of his unpredictable moods and had her, in front of guests, do something impossible, or when he humiliated her for failing, she stared straight though the tunnel of recriminations she faced. Shining at the end was the reward of his love. She imagined herself
an Indian, running the gauntlet through an angry mob. This was the way she'd found to survive the mercurial temper that could lame her mother and sisters.

Gala sees only through the corner of her eye what actually happens that afternoon at Skylight. Of the male bodies that caress her, that she caresses, she only experiences what she allows herself. She doesn't allow enough for fear, aversion, or sorrow, not enough for a sense of violation, but just enough to see how absurd it all is and burst out in gurgling laughter every once in a while. Meanwhile, her consciousness, far ahead of her, is waiting at the end of the tunnel. That's how she keeps her balance, and possibly even taking some pleasure in the men, in the excitement of the unexpected, in her own courage. And in the role she fantasizes to get her through it.

A tightrope walker doesn't look around. That is critical. He balances. It would be too much to look at the situation he's gotten himself into. He doesn't look at how far he can fall. He doesn't even look at the rope to see where to put his feet. His reality simultaneously exists and does not. In the same instant, he knows and doesn't know where he is. The equilibrist limits his vision to a small distant point. He concentrates on the destination. By constricting his consciousness, he reaches the other side.

This is my homage to love.

As soon as he recognizes me, the market vendor puts on a show. I feel like climbing up onto Giordano Bruno's pedestal and hiding under his bronze robes. While I hurry away, the man sings the entire jingle again by way of audition.

“I thought all your films were an homage to love,” Gala says.

I've forgotten what we were talking about. That's been happening to me a lot lately. It's because of the people. Crowds always confuse me. I know they mean well, with the attention they pay me. I seek their cheerful faces, but I feel like running away once I've found them.

“An homage to love,” she repeats.

I suddenly regret the whole thing. Why did I arrange to meet her in the busy Campo de' Fiori? Oh God, I'm afraid I know: to show her off, of course. And she knows it.

“I mean an homage to my love for a particular woman.”

“Your own wife.”

“Gelsomina.”

“Of course, she is divine.”

I look at the Dutch girl. She means it.

“She's the one who drew my attention to you.”

“Gelsomina?”

We duck into a side street and choose a table hidden between flower boxes in a corner of the Piazza Farnese. I sketch her throughout the whole conversation, but none of my attempts resembles her as much as the picture I scribbled after my dream. She seems delighted—no, moved—to learn that I met her in my sleep. She refuses to believe it at first, but I pull the picture out of my pocket and show it to her. She looks at it in silence. I think she's about to burst into tears, but then she jumps up. She wants to leave without another word. I grab her wrist, but she won't yield, and I have to beg with the ardor I usually deploy to chase other actresses off.

“Now I can only be a disappointment!” Gala exclaims, shaking her head. The thought upsets her so much that she doesn't realize that she is proving precisely the opposite. “This real encounter can never be as important as our meeting in the night. I should never have come. What possessed you to ask me?”

“Roast chicken,” is the first thing that occurs to me. “The best in Rome,” and I order two.

I'm used to people laughing in my company. At the first suspicion that I'm trying to be funny, they slap their knees, buckle over, but not Gala. She worriedly keeps weighing the pros and cons of our meeting. She reminds me of a cartoon character racing full speed through the air because he hasn't yet realized that he's dangling over an abyss.

The birds are brought out. I tear off a leg. Before sinking my teeth into it, I kiss it, very quickly.

“What are you doing?” she asks, and I start to tell her about my grandmother in Castelrotondo, who once told me about a chick who was really a prince.

“Like the frog prince,” I explain, “but with poultry. I was still young. That night we ate chicken and I got a terrible stomachache. I panicked. I thought my dinner was turning into a prince. Since then, I play it safe.”

At that, Gala throws caution to the wind, planting her elbows on the table and plunging her fingers into her meal.

“There's just one thing I'm worried about …” She raises a drumstick to her mouth, pouts, and carries out the test I have applied automatically since I was five years old. She doesn't do it to impress me: she's completely natural, and as if a native had taught her a useful foreign custom, her tongue shoots out between her lips, gleaming with grease, to lick up a drop running down her chin. She slurps at the gravy while she continues speaking. “However random they may seem, images in the subconscious are more reliable than those registered by the retina.”

Do I fall in love on the spot? Unlikely. Retold in this way, that's how it might seem, but I know myself. I lack the reserve of a northerner: the main thing is I want to go to bed with her. Preferably at once. I'm already adding her name in big elaborate letters to the bottom of a long list that I have, with great difficulty, fished out of the bottom drawer of my life. But as soon as I see myself appending her to the list of my conquests, I feel the paper tearing under my fingers. She seems so open and uncalculating that my horniness crumbles into endearment.