James Salter - Burning the Days

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 and 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.

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.