James Salter - Burning the Days

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.