Director's Cut (47 page)

Taking film reviewing to the next level, they declare me brain dead the morning after the broadcast. Overnight, two more strokes finished the job.

Gelsomina is very brave. She climbs into bed with me and throws one leg over my body just as she always does. Then, as if she's fallen asleep, she lies still. The nurses don't dare disturb her.

The medical director arrives around midday. As discreetly as possible, he mentions that in similar cases people sometimes opt not to prolong the patient's life artificially. With an exalted expression, as if trying to sell her a Caribbean cruise, he describes the process of natural dehydration. Shocked, Gelsomina summons her confessor, who sets in motion such mighty machinery that the medical director does not again show his face for the remainder of my stay.

Fiamella arrives to see Gelsomina, explaining that the journalists are at the gate and an announcement can no longer be delayed.

“Why?” asks my wife. “He's
my
husband.”

“But he's their Snaporaz.”

She insists on addressing the crowd herself and requests a few minutes to pull herself together. She walks out. She makes a short statement and answers questions from the press. She suddenly stops. She shields her eyes and stares into the crowd as if into the sun. Between the constantly flashing cameras, she has spotted Gala. With a wave of her
hand, Gelsomina indicates that she can no longer go on and turns on her heel.

“How long have you been there?”

“Since nine.”

Gelsomina stares out the window of the visitors' room.

“Every day,” says Gala. “Since he's been here. I come around nine o'clock and stay until dark.”

Now the two women look at each other. For a moment, the older woman's pain makes the younger forget her own. She takes Gelsomina's hands and presses them to her cheeks. Gelsomina sees her sincerity. Briefly, there is communion. Then the wife extricates herself and turns away.

“There are others,” says Gelsomina. “He always managed to make them believe that they were the only one. We all wanted to believe it! Yet there were always others.”

“Never like you.”

“No.”

“And no matter what you think of me, I never forgot his love for you.”

Gelsomina still has her back turned to Gala.

“Why do you think we always believed him?” Gelsomina asks.

“Because he believed himself. He was completely sincere. Every single time.”

“Yes,” Gelsomina says. “Yes, he was always sincere. Even when he was lying. His imagination was his religion. And if he sincerely believed something, who are we to doubt him?”

“I never did.”

“No,” my wife says, somewhat surprised, “me neither.”

“He just didn't love
real
life.”

“He liked to observe it, as long as it didn't interfere with his imagination. That's very difficult for those of us who only have a real life.”

Gala moves up beside her and they look out the window together.

Two silhouettes in front of the window.

“Go to him now, if you'd like.”

Inside the frame: the outlines of two cartoon characters—one beginning, one rounding off an oeuvre.

They stare at the commotion in the distant parking lot.

“What do you think,” Gelsomina asks, “are there any others out there?”

“Does it matter?”

Finally, they quickly glance at each other. Then Gala walks to the door.

“‘Everything gets smaller when you share it, except love.' That's what he said.”

The old woman against the light.

“Do you understand that? Is our sorrow any less because we both feel it?”

The day before he leaves for Holland, Maxim walks through the city. Everywhere he encounters places where he was happy. He stands pensively before walking slowly on, as if he expects something to call him back, but hope has everywhere become a memory.

That's how he walks into the Galleria Doria Pamphilj, wanders through the rooms, and slumps down in an alcove opposite the
Apelles and Campaspe
. Just then, Sangallo enters, shuffling hastily, rushing down the corridors in his inimitable style. Maxim's spirits revive and he jumps up to greet him, but the viscount brushes past without noticing him. Sangallo touches one of the busts to make sure he has Innocent X before him. Just when Maxim is about to step up to him, a young man appears. He is as tall as Maxim and is wearing the long, shiny leather coat. High cheekbones, long neck, head thrown back with a certain arrogance. The new protégé even wears his hair in the style Maxim had when he arrived in the city. The youth laps up the viscount's anecdote.

Maxim knows the story.

He is overcome by a deep calm. The coincidence gives him an almost mystical feeling, as if the cycle of passion's death and revitalization had stopped for the slightest instant and restored everything to its proper balance.

Without announcing his presence, he leaves his old friend behind with his new pupil.

“Found?” echoes through the high-ceilinged room. “In a
hand
bag?”

•  •  •

“I left Gelsomina and walked down the hall to his room,” Gala relates. “In front of the door, I changed my mind.”

“After going to all that trouble?” Maxim asks incredulously.

“I went to all that trouble to see Snaporaz one more time. I only realized when my fingers were on the doorknob and I was trying to steel my nerves—I realized that whatever I'd find inside wouldn't be him. He wore a hat because he hoped people would think there was a full head of hair underneath it. That's not the kind of man who wants you to see him with tubes coming out of his windpipe.”

Maxim leans back. This is their last evening together. They're eating at an outdoor café on the Campo de' Fiori. He studies the way she speaks, afflicted yet still calm.

“Everything I need to know about him is in my head. That simple fact struck me as if he himself were grabbing me by the shoulders, mocking me for being too dumb to figure it out sooner: Snaporaz is the last person in the world who would want to be seen as he really is. I pressed my hand against the closed door and then left.”

Before, in her sorrow, she would have shrieked, flown off the handle, drowned her fears, danced herself into a frenzy. In Maxim's arms.

“Maybe, for once, you could see what he's brought us to,” he says as coldly as he can. He's not looking at her, but keeps his eyes pinned on a group of buskers making music in the middle of the square, on the steps at the base of the statue.

“Devo punirmi,”
they sing,
“devo punirmi, se troppo amai.”

Two clowns illustrate the end of a love affair with the help of an enormous club, a broken violin, and jets of tears that spurt up high into the air.

Maxim blames me most for destroying his own image of Gala.

You don't have to talk to me about images.

Put an actress in front of a bare wall and with the help of a single light I can transform her from a goddess to a witch. I illuminate her from every side. I toy with the shadows on her throat, beneath her eyebrows, under her nostrils. I arrange her like a shop-window mannequin—however I like. Until I'm satisfied. When I'm done with her,
she's exactly the same, but now she fits into the image I always had of her, even at night, when I summoned her in my dreams.

She is perfect because she looks the way I hoped she would.

That's it.

If the image doesn't match the one in your head, you've only got yourself to blame.

Gala was my fantasy, but she was the one who was ready to believe in herself. All I did was what I'd done to my city, Rome. I aimed the spotlight. I urged her to stay inside that narrow circle. I set her limits.

That is loving.

That is what makes two people lovers.

Within those narrow confines, I let her sparkle.

The characters in the commedia dell'arte wore no more than a single mask, but they could express everything—sorrow and joy, melancholy, pride, and despondency—with a turn of the head. The masks never changed, only the shadows. The actors spent a lifetime learning the nuances within a single face.

Now, in this light, Gala will discover all her possibilities.

“When I met you,” Maxim continues on the Campo de' Fiori, still without looking at her, “I could hardly believe that anyone could be that uninhibited. That strong and self-assured.”

“You thought so?”

“Your world was boundless. And you chose me, of all people, to take by the hand, to go off exploring together. Nothing held you back. You weren't afraid of anything! And you, of all people, made me feel that we were together, that together we'd do battle with the others, all the people I never understood. I just always assumed”—he looks at her—“I always thought that we'd stay on the same side of the camera.”

“It's easy to be uninhibited when you're not aware of the danger,” says Gala.

The clowns wrap up their show. One comes to their table to ask for money. In a single gesture, he raises his shoulders, his eyebrows, and the corners of his mouth by way of apology. Instead of tipping his hat, he thanks them by elegantly doffing his red nose.

Maxim and Gala spend the rest of the evening reminiscing. They declare how much they loved each other. They cry and drink and laugh
and walk home the way they used to, arms entangled. In her apartment above the church, they kiss, collapse onto the bed, and tear each other's clothes off. They make love, no longer as friends, but, for the first time, as a man and a woman.

Maxim leaves at first light, without waking Gala. He has an early flight.

My very first view of the world was through a shutter: the impressions were rushed, themselves as short as the exposure time.

In the following years, I was too busy growing up to think about it, but it came back to me when I was about six or seven. I was sitting next to my mother in the Fulgor watching a Buster Keaton short. The entire audience was roaring with laughter.

In the final scene, Keaton returns to his lonely existence on the prairie. He walks down a country road. He disappears in the distance as the eye of the camera closes slowly around him. The diaphragm contracts until everything goes black.

Suddenly I knew! That was exactly how the world appeared to me from the womb, just before I had to enter it. Right before I was born, the vulva opened several times. I clearly remember that round, pulsing frame around the walls of the room, the hands and faces in an uproar, everything drenched in a fierce white light that bounced off the sheets and stung my eyes. The preview was always very brief. The muscles contracted within seconds. Each time, the vagina's big black eye closed on the life that awaited me, just as, on that country road, the diaphragm closed around Buster Keaton.

THE END.

As soon as the lights flicked on for intermission, I told my mother. She whacked me on the back of the head, calling me a child of the devil who'd made the whole thing up. That taught me that the truth is not
better than a lie. I bawled so much that Claretta, who carried her tray of sweets and cigarettes down the aisle during the breaks, slipped me an aniseed ball to shut me up.

From the hospital, I am driven to Cinecittà. The gate is wide open. Instead of the usual two security guards, there's a whole phalanx, including retirees and men who have the day off. They walk me into Studio 5, as if, after all these years, I couldn't find it myself. The big hall is empty. They lay me down in the middle and leave me alone, as if I were simply resting between takes.

Eventually, the light above the side entrance flicks on. Gelsomina enters, all in white. She is flanked by National Guardsmen with faces so long they look like they're escorting her to the scaffold. Fortunately, my sister is with her, and our best friends follow. They take up positions around me, and with that a procession of Romans that will last for hours begins to file past me. Most of them are strangers, but the men stretch out their arms and the women and girls blow me kisses. Why didn't they do that when I was eighteen and ready to abandon hope! Others I vaguely recognize. There are taxi drivers who once gave me a lift, the salesgirl from the Via Merulana who used to sell me my garters, the waiters from the Canova. Someone has brought along a harmonica to play me a tune and a girl releases a few balloons, but most are fairly nondescript, the kind of people that, on a normal day's shooting, I'd have sent straight to costumes for the full treatment.

The story goes that the Emperor Hadrian once had a spherical mirror hung in the Colosseum, a mirror that reflected the entirety of the world. Now I feel like I'm looking into that mirror, seeing everything at once: what lies ahead of me and what I've left behind, from beginning to end.

The two are rather similar.

The preview finishes and the diaphragm contracts.

The black eye closes.