James Salter - Burning the Days

“Yes.”

“So am I.”

It was to a man in his eighties, she explained. I recognized the story from the newspapers — she had married him to get a passport. He was in an old people’s home, an istituto. She went to visit him there, she said. Then, agreeably, “Would you like to come?”

We stopped that night on a street near a dark piazza, across from a little place where she had often gone with Farouk at four or five in the morning for apple strudel. It looked closed, and I waited while she ran across to say hello to the woman who was the proprietor. After a while she came back. “She was so happy to see me,” she said animatedly and added, “She’s very nice.”

We went on to Parioli, where, in a somewhat dubious building on Via Archimede, Ilena lived. The apartment was small and drearily furnished, but on the wall was a large picture of John Huston that had appeared in Life. Lying on the floor were books that Huston had given her to read. He might just as well have given her a chemistry set or a microscope. “You must never stop learning,” he told her — she could do him perfectly. I could hear his rich, rolling, faintly cynical voice pronouncing “Mount Lungo” in his documentary on the battle of San Pietro, a village in ruins after the war, given over to weeds and sheep droppings. There is a cemetery atop Mount Lungo from the heights of which one can see twenty miles, all the bare stony slopes up which men fought.

“Never stop learning,” he repeated. “That’s very important. Promise me that.”

“Of course, John,” she answered.

In an album were many clippings of the two of them, Huston with a white, patriarchal beard. He was a coccolone —someone who likes to be babied. He was also crazy, she admitted, and very tight. “To get a thousand dollars from him is so difficult,” she said.

The portrait she painted over a period of time was of an indomitable man who nonetheless was lonely. He would call on the phone, “What are you up to, baby?”

“Nothing.”

“Come right over. Right away.”

He was in the autumn of a life of activity, a life that had not always been lived in accordance with reason. He had no friends, she said, and hated to go out. He was living in a suite in the Grand Hotel on a diet of vodka and caviar. She would call him. “John, do you want some girls?”

“Bring them around,” he said. “We’ll have some fun.”

She brought three, one of them eighteen years old — she liked young, tender girls, she explained, in the late afternoon was best. “Darling,” she said to me after describing a scene that might have taken place at Roissy, “you’re a writer, you should know these things.”

Huston had fought at Cassino, she told me, as if in justification.

“No, he didn’t.”

“But he did. He’s told me stories.”

“He was a film director. He never fought.”

“Well, he thinks he did,” she said. “That’s the same thing.”

I liked her generosity and lack of morals — they seemed close to an ideal condition of living — and also the way she looked at her teeth in the mirror as she talked. I liked the way she pronounced “cashmere,” like the state in India, Kashmir. Her cosmetics bag was filled with prescriptions, just as the shelf in her closet was crammed with shoes. Once we passed a big Alfa Romeo that she recognized as belonging to a friend, the chief of detectives in Rome. She had made love with him, of course. “Darling,” she said, “there’s no other way. Otherwise there would have been terrible trouble about my passport. It would have been impossible.” I only learned in time that there was, besides Huston, also an Italian businessman supporting her.

She didn’t like Negroes, Arabs, or certain cities, often that she had never been to. Above all, she hated bohemians. “Darling, they’re so filthy.” I admired her poise. On the telephone, to someone she did not know who had been given her number, she merely said, “I’m sorry. I have to go.” I heard that on several occasions.

The things she said seemed to come straight from what she knew or felt, as easily as one might pick up a fork. There was no hesitation or propriety. She said things I wished I might have, things more direct.

She was also, I hardly need add, difficult, especially about eating. “I have to have something to eat,” she would say, becoming more and more nervous. “If I don’t get something to eat, I’m going to cry.” And reading the menu in a kind of desperation, “What shall I order?” When it came, she was likely to send it back. “I can’t eat this.” The restaurant never made a fuss. The crucial question was whether or not the dish contained butter or had been cooked in it. She absolutely could not eat butter. She had to be extremely careful, she said.

Once we sat down in a restaurant and while she went to the ladies’ room I read the menu. As I did, I realized there was nothing on it she would like, and besides, the place seemed dull and nearly empty. I rose as she returned, and said, “Come. This is not good.” She obeyed without a word.

There was a film festival in Taormina she went to. She had looked forward to it for days. I languished in Rome. The week passed slowly. I heard her distant voice — I did not know where Taormina was, exactly — on the telephone. “Oh, darling,” she cried, “it’s so marvelous.” She was going to have the same agent as Monica Vitti, she said excitedly. A director had promised her a part in a James Bond film. She was not staying at the San Domenico Palace, she was at the Excelsior. Tomorrow she would be at the Imperiale — I understood quite well what all that meant — and on Sunday she was going to receive a prize.

“Which prize?”

“I don’t know. Darling, I can’t believe it,” she said.

At last there was a telegram — I had felt I might not see her again— Coming Monday Rapido 5. Afternoon, and signed with her name. It was sent from Ljubljana — Yugoslavia.

I met the train. It was thrilling, almost miraculous, to see her coming along the platform, a porter behind her with her bags. Some things are only good the first time but seeing her was like the first time. I knew she would say “darling.” I knew she would say, “I adore you.”

The exciting days in Sicily, the festival, had left a glow. At a big reception, among scores of faces, she had seen, directed at her, the brilliant unwavering smile of a young man in a silk foulard, a wide smile, “like a killer’s.” She was wearing a white, beaded dress. Her arms were bare. Fifteen or twenty minutes later she saw him again.

The second barrel, as the lawyers say, was fatal. She said only, “Let’s leave.” Without a word he offered her his arm.

He had a beautiful car. The steering wheel was made of gleaming wood. They went somewhere but found it closed. That was enough. “Let’s go to bed,” she said. He said simply, “Yes.”

At the hotel the portiere would not let him go up to her room, “Non, non, signorina,” he said. She began to make a scene. She was going to another hotel, she threatened loudly. Finally the portiere asked, “Where is he?” and allowed them to go up. Thirty minutes later he was ringing the room, to no avail.

I listened with some unhappiness but without anger. They say you should not tell these things to the other person, but in this case it meant little, faithfulness was not what I expected.

“You’ll get to the top,” I told her almost reluctantly, “but you shouldn’t …”

“What?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I’ll tell you later.”

“If I don’t become too much of a whore,” she said.