James Salter - Burning the Days

Five minutes. We are waiting, we hundreds of millions, staring intently at the faintly blackened site from which they will go. My heart is no longer beating, it seems to have stopped, to have prepared itself for the end. Fifteen tons of fuel a second, the announcer is saying. Fifteen tons, and its own weight besides is unimaginable. The morning is hot and airless at the Cape. Birds fly past the rocket, unaware of its potency. Three minutes.

The days of flying that have borne them to this, the countless, repetitive days. The astonishing thing is that we are empowered to bequeath history, to create the unalterable: paintings, elections, crimes. In fact they are impossible to prevent. One of the most memorable acts of all time is about to occur. Two minutes.

I had an Italian mistress, O very fine, who would fly places to meet me. She was slender, with a body brown from Rome’s beaches and a narrow pale band, as if bleached, encircling her hips, the white reserve. She wore a brown leather jacket and had black hair, cut short. I had a luxurious corduroy suit, soft as velvet, from Palazzi on Via Borgognona. She had bought it for me as a gift. She was the antidote to, among many things, the sickening hours surrounding the launch and intolerable days after. I had taught her a catechism, or rather together we had composed one, which she could recite in perfect English, the flagrant words sinless in her mouth, the innocent questions and profane responses, and the low, inviting voice in which they were uttered. One minute.

We were silent that night with the television still on, light shifting on the walls in the darkened room. I was watching, transfixed by it, as well as by the cool, unhurried act we were engaged in. As a boy I had imagined grown men achieving scenes such as this. Tremendous deliberation. Reverent movement, oblivious, assured. She is writhing, like a dying snake, like a woman in bedlam. Everything and nothing, and meanwhile the invincible rocket, devouring miles, flying lead-heavy through actual minutes and men’s dreams.

I have never forgotten that night or its anguish. Pleasure and inconsequence on one hand, immeasurable deeds on the other. I lay awake for a long time thinking of what I had become.

—

I was a poule for ten years, fifteen. I might easily have gone on longer. There was wreckage all around, but like the refuse piled behind restaurants I did not consider it — in front they were bowing and showing me to the table.

Robert Bolt, who had been a schoolteacher and then a play-wright, was as talented as any writer of his generation. David Lean, for whom he did celebrated films— Lawrence of Arabia, Zhivago —had been known to bring him thousands of miles to discuss changing a single line, and honors were heaped at his feet. The best script I had ever read, he had written, an astonishing version of the Bounty mutiny and its aftermath, filled with original images and scenes. It was a work of high ambition. In the course of things it was never made.

Aging and far from his house in Surrey with the river drifting past, separated from his wife, he found himself in the derelict tropics, the occasional friend of a childlike actress, Mia Farrow, who was acting in a movie on a nearby island at the time. As an offering to her he rewrote pages of dialogue, and she was able to present them to the original writer as her own suggestions. In the end, tiring of this, she handed a sheaf of pages over, confessing all. The writer was a close friend of mine, Lorenzo Semple, and far from being annoyed, asked if he could meet Bolt, whom he greatly admired.

A dinner took place. It was in a shabby Chinese restaurant with unmatched dishes and a dirt floor. Bolt came wearing a palmetto hat. He was drunk. The talk was of writing, of course, though becoming less and less coherent as the evening went on. Bolt was somehow able, nevertheless, to bring out an important point. In writing films, he cautioned, in writing films, yes, there was one thing that should never be lost sight of.

“What is that?” Lorenzo asked.

“The money, my boy,” Bolt said, “the money.”

There were writers who made good use of it. In Los Angeles, on Summit Drive, I sat at lunch with an elegant man in his forties; I’ll call him Edoardo. He came from the Veneto, the most civilized area in Italy, as he said, where even the farmers, though drunkards, were cultured after fifteen centuries of elevated life. Venice, the region’s great city, had for ages been the light of the world.

A tall Swedish girl with a Russian name, Natasha, was serving us — veal gratinée, fresh garden peas, cucumbers in a sour-cream sauce. When she had slipped out, I asked casually, “Is she the cook?”

“Yes. Cook, everything,” he said offhandedly, returning to the subject. “When London had two hundred and fifty thousand people, Venice had three hundred and fifty thousand. Shakespeare laid four of his plays there, The Merchant of Venice, Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It, and Romeo and Juliet.”

He was throwing in Arden and Athens as locations, but I was only hesitant about one. “Romeo and Juliet?”

“Well, in Verona, but that’s nearby.”

I was captivated by him, the grand house, the Rolls-Royce in the covered driveway, the gardens. He seemed like Uncle Vanya to me, a shrewder Vanya, hardworking, knowledgeable.

I happened to mention d’Annunzio. He knew everything about him, his uncle had been in d’Annunzio’s squadron in the First World War and even looked like the poet, small, ugly, and bald. D’Annunzio had used him as a decoy. When he wanted to go to a hotel with some woman he would have the uncle sit in the villa, reading by the window.

We drank white Burgundy. The Swedish girl, graceful and silent, served a bowl of fresh raspberries and strawberries in cream. D’Annunzio, who died in the 1930s, had been the most celebrated writer of his time — the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth — with a life of colossal breadth, the most notorious since Byron’s. He was the lover of Duse and countless others. He had written Mussolini’s famous speeches. Becoming old, he withdrew into a pantheon of his own design, the Vittoriale, above Lake Garda, where a kind of opera continued. He dressed in a monk’s outfit and had his servants, all attractive women, dress as nuns. The next day he would be in a commodore’s uniform and they were sailors.

“There are at least twenty d’Annunzio scripts in Italy,” Edoardo said. “They’ve been trying for years to make a film about him. I remember the day he died. I was at school and a boy came up and said, ‘No school today!’

“ ‘No school?’

“ ‘The poet is dead.’

“ ‘Hooray,’ I said.”

It was like Rome in Edoardo’s house, Monte Mario, the terraces and pools. Sometimes in the evening, he said, they sat outside, he and the Swedish girl, looking out over the city. He was king of this Eden, gentle, wise, with a kind of classic ease and moderation, a single young novitiate beneath his wing — a man past the panicky appetites of youth, serene, able to savor, unhurried even if beset, like all men, by infinite desires.

“Edoardo?” said someone who knew him well when I mentioned his name. “He’s the most unhappy, dissatisfied man I know.”

“Impossible.”

“He’s an artist manqué. He thinks he’s wasted his talent on movies, which he detests. Actually, he’s never written any good movies — they’re all trash except for one he did for Germi. Oh, he’s a fabulous raconteur, especially in Italian, but he hates his life and is filled with self-disgust. He considers himself the only intelligent person in Italian cinema, and since he’s the only one who reads, he’s been able to make a career of taking de Maupassant stories and passing them off as his own. He’s never married. He’s the saddest man I know.”