Shylock's Daughter: A Novel of Love in Venice (7 page)

Björn, master magician that he is, knows all this. He allows us to wallow in the opera as far as Leporello's famous aria
Madamina
,
il catalogo è questo
, but just as it is coming to a close, he blasts our sense of the familiar by taking us backstage where the rehearsal pianist, the son of the director, has gone entirely mad and is claiming himself to be Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. He insists that he has rewritten the opera in such a way that Don Giovanni does
not
go to hell at the end but instead becomes a saint and goes to heaven, and he demands that the singers perform it
his
way.

There is a palpable feeling of unrest when Björn cracks open the opera like this, but what the audience does not yet realize is that another phenomenon has been occurring simultaneously. All the empty seats and the standing room places have been filling up with punk teenagers from the Lido, who have infiltrated the theater (Have they bribed the guards? Have they overpowered them?) in a frenzy to see the mad maestro about whom there has been such speculation in the press. They are waiting in the aisles, faces cool beneath their spiky orange hair, each of them a gun cocked and ready to go off.

Have I been the only member of the jury to see the kids creep into the theater? I can feel their heat and unrest as they breathe all around us. I can feel their desire to disrupt the proceedings and rout their elegant elders.

Why have the proper matrons in their Valentinos said nothing about this? Why do people say nothing when they sit in a theater and smell smoke? Herd instinct? Fear of being the first troublemaker? Some deep reversion to childhood that overtakes us as members of an audience in a darkened room?

The film goes on. The Mozart figure begins raving about the unfairness of Don Giovanni's final punishment and how
his
happy ending to the opera is really more just, more true, more fair. In front of me, the witchy woman with the large right eye begins to cackle, then turns and catches me in her glittering gaze. “Beware, Jessica,” she mutters, or do her lips merely form the words?

It is my very own Grigory who starts the riot.

“Decadent capitalist rubbish!” he thunders, standing and turning to storm ostentatiously out of the theater. “Free the film festival!” he shouts. And, as if on cue, a chorus of teenagers repeats: “Free the film festival!” (Only some, of course, heighten it to “Fuck the film festival!”) Whereupon masses of them, letting out war whoops and whistles, begin to leap over the seats and storm the mezzanine where Björn, Lilli, the actors, and the rest of the jury sit quivering with fear. The insanity in the film has suddenly become real.

Whatever Grigory's reasons for making the protest (to appease the ancient politicos in the Kremlin at home, to ensure his next trip abroad, to silence those naysayers who claim he has lost his political nerve), the punk kids have surely been waiting for just such a signal to go wild. They scream and throw things, jostle the panicky parental figures in the audience, light joints, drop matches, and run whooping and whistling through the aisles.

The passive audience turns into a stampeding mob! Countesses in their glitter, counts in their “smokings,” actors and actresses in their tuxes and sequins, all scramble and try to flee the theater as if the
ancien régime
were newly overtaken by the
sans-culottes
. But the side doors are sealed, and the kids, emboldened by Grigory's apparent support—for the moment he is their hero and he seems once again the young revolutionary he never really was—storm the mezzanine as if to kidnap Björn. (What they wish to do with him is not clear.) All the while Mozart's music keeps pouring forth. Lilli takes charge of a very shaky Björn and begins to escort him to the rear of the mezzanine. Leonardo da Leone follows, trying at the same time to restrain Grigory's outbursts and to protect Björn.

I experience a moment of sheer terror when I realize we could all be crushed or killed or burned in this melee. But then I use my old stratagem of impersonating a brave character I myself have played. What would Lady Macbeth do? Would she succumb to fear? What would Rosalind or Portia do? Dress up in men's clothes and solve the crisis! Well, then, I shall do no less—even in spike heels, a Merry Widow, and a Victorian gown!

Fortunately, the side doors are opened and the panicky counts and countesses, players and playboys, can escape into the moonlight. Grigory makes his way through the crowd, pursued by screaming kids; Björn, Lilli, and Leonardo stagger bravely on, flanked by punk youngsters chanting, “We want Björn! We want Björn! We want Björn!” as if in a parody of something they have seen in an American movie.

I rush to Björn's side, take his other arm despite Lilli's obvious disapproval, and whisper to Leonardo that he must summon the security guards at once.

“How are you?” I ask Björn, who makes his gentle way like a bemused Hamlet, his elegance somehow untouched despite the frenzy all about him.

“‘In sooth I know not why I am so sad,'” he says, quoting the first line of
The Merchant of Venice
.

“‘Your mind is tossing on the ocean,'” I say. “‘There where your argosies with portly sail / Like signiors and rich burghers on the flood, / Or as it were the pageants of the sea, / Do overpeer the petty traffickers / That curtsy to them, do them reverence, / As they fly by them with their woven wings…'”

“Exactly,” says Björn, but his face looks ravaged.

“Think of the next film, Björn—our film,
Serenissima
. And think of what all this publicity will do for
this
film. It will make you rich!”

“Björn never wanted to be rich,” says Lilli. “He wanted to be respected.”

I laugh. “So did we all,” I say. “But this is
show
business!”

The security guards arrive and officiously take charge of Björn and Lilli. I am pushed out of the way. The air is thick with the resinous, sweet smoke of pot and hash. A fire under these circumstances would be disastrous.

For a moment I am locked within the grip of the crowd, pushed forward and back will-lessly by stampeding bodies. Then all at once a wave takes me, as if from the depths of the sea, and I am borne forward on it toward the door, down the teeming stairs where I clutch at the banister wildly, trying to keep my balance in my spike heels. Carlos Armada is behind me and he gallantly seizes my shoulders, steadying me on the stairs.

“Where is your Soviet escort?” he shouts.

“Ah, politics is his true love,” I say. “He is off somewhere making love to her.”

I toss this off as a joke, not knowing for the moment how terribly true it is.

Carlos says, “I survived the Civil War in Spain, Jessica, and I shall also survive the War of the Lido and the Biennale.”

Arm in arm, we allow ourselves to be pushed down toward the exit. All dignity is lost in the squirming, screaming mass of bodies. At last we reach the bottom of the stairs, and the doors of the theater are in view. At last we are pushed through them along with the whooping masses of kids. As we burst out into the street and the sea air hits us, I truly feel reborn.

There's a full moon over the Lido and the breeze from the Adriatic is fresh. Motorcycles roar by, but even they cannot spoil the sense of relief I have at being free.

For the first time we have a real event at the film festival, a real crisis, and the photographers are nowhere in sight. Where
are
they? Crowds of people are pouring out of the Palazzo del Cinema (later, I even hear that some people have been stampeded in the crowd and badly hurt), but there are no
paparazzi
at all to be seen now—only curiosity seekers and fans with little instant cameras snapping away at the fleeing countesses and celebrities.

“Jessica—to the beach!” says Carlos Armada. “Take the beach!”

My crusty old Spanish Civil War veteran indicates an alley leading to the water and pulls me by the hand, out of sight of the fans.

“Your shoes…take off those ridiculous shoes,” he says.

I obey, stopping to hitch up my gown and unbuckle the ankle straps of my come-fuck-me sandals. Carlos again steadies me.

“The Battle of the Biennale will never be won in such shoes,” says Carlos.
“Come!”

He shoves my shoes, one by one, into the side pockets of his tux and grabs me by the hand, making me run in my stocking feet all the way to the beach. My stockings are soon in tatters from the abrasiveness of the cement, but I am exhilarated by the adventure. Holding my voluminous skirt with one hand and Carlos's hand with the other, I run, laughing madly, to the beach. What a pleasure it is to be out of that stifling hall, out of that incipient riot, out of the tension of that last film.

“Come, come,” says Carlos, as we reach the beach, “how about a swim?”

“Not in
this
,” I say, thinking of the three thousand pounds I paid for the Zandra Rhodes—and that was two years ago, when the pound was still relatively firm.

“No, no, never part a lady from her gown—except with her consent. But look here…” He indicates one of the white cabanas belonging to the Excelsior—and even produces the key. “How do you think I have survived this festival—except by bathing all these films away!”

He opens the cabana and gestures for me to go first. “There's a bathing suit in there for you if you wish.”

The cabana is quite civilized. There's a large wooden hanger for my gown, a mirror, a white Lastex bathing suit (his girlfriend's, I guess), a hotel bathrobe, some towels. The old exhibitionist in me considers, then dismisses, the possibility of prancing about on the beach in that fabulous black Merry Widow—but no, it would be just my luck to meet a
paparazzo—
or a shark attracted to the glitter of my garters. (I have never quite gotten over the movie
Jaws
.)

When I emerge, Carlos takes over the cabana and changes into his suit. He has a good body despite the natural softening produced by eight decades of gravity, eight decades of war, eight decades of poetry. But poetry proves to be a great preservative. Carlos has the vitality of those few chosen artists on whom the Muses smile; like Picasso, like Henry Miller, he has the
joie de vivre
of a young man. Art keeps one young, I think, because it keeps one perpetually a beginner, perpetually a child.

Carlos runs to the water, bidding me follow—and dives precipitously into the waves.

The sight of this hardy octogenarian plunging into the Adriatic (where Byron used to swim) quiets my fears both of pollution and of sharks—and I follow.

The water is amazingly clean, and the moonlight makes the swim eerily beautiful. The moon is looking out for me, I think, and I remember to thank her for my life, for my curious gift. Spared again. Once more the White Goddess, my muse, is looking out for me. But what of Björn? And what of Grigory? Well, that I shall know soon enough. Meanwhile—swim, Jessica, swim.

As I reach my arms out in the inky, moon-splashed water, I think again of Antonia, whom I taught to swim when she was only two, at a “waterbabies” class at the
92
nd Street “Y” in Manhattan. Whatever I am doing—swimming, watching a movie, dreaming, acting—I think of her, and my fingertips ache.

Carlos walks out of the water looking for all the world like an ancient satyr. I follow. He is beaming at me.

“You know, Jessica,” he says, “even at eighty, you want to be alive!”

“I believe it,” I say.

He puts a wet hand on my shoulder and walks me to the cabana. For a moment our eyes meet and we contemplate carnality. He runs his index finger along my lower lip, caressing its curve as if he were touching those other, lower lips. We kiss. His kiss is very young for one so old and we are both stirred by it. So much so that we draw back, in surprise, from the intensity.

“My mistress would be very cross,” he says, looking hungrily at my breasts, “not to mention my wife, my comrade in arms…Better not.”

“Better not,” I say, drawing a deep breath and deciding not to complicate my life with passion. “But you certainly are an old lion.”

I kiss him fondly on the cheek, then look up at the moon, my mother, who approves.

A little while later I slip back into the hotel, wearing a CIGA toweling robe, a towel around my head, big black sunglasses (belonging to Carlos), and cradling my folded gown in my arms like a baby. I run up the stairs unrecognized despite the crush of people. With hidden hair, with face bare of make-up, no one seems to know me.

Something exciting is afoot in the press suites I pass on the second floor, but I cannot tell what it is. I see huge banks of lights and hear the murmur of hundreds of voices. A great number of people are milling about outside the double doors. Whatever the event is, it is apparently S.R.O. One voice is amplified above all the others. Do I detect Grigory's slithery Russian syllables?

Afraid to linger and be unmasked, I continue up to my suite, lay my precious Zandra Rhodes out on the bed, and take a shower to wash off the moonlit Adriatic. Then I carefully make up my face, change into an elegant Missoni knit dress, slip on another pair of come-fuck-me pumps (purple glove-leather Maud Frizons, these), and head downstairs again.