Don't Save Anything: The Uncollected Writings of James Salter(57)
“It’s a specialty,” she said. “All the various forms are called by the names of pasta. Rigate, for instance, which is a pasta with thin, fluted marks. For that the girls gently use their teeth. When there used to be brothels, there was a Signorina Bolognese—that was her specialty.”
But I remained in Rome. The heat bore down. Dark Sicilians rose at two in the afternoon. The Tiber was green and stagnant. On Sunday mornings, the highway to the sea was jammed with cars, the music from hundreds of radios beating the blue, exhausted air. Rome was a city of women: you saw them everywhere, women in expensive clothes at the Hassler or the Hotel de Ville; women travelling with their husbands and without; young women claiming to be actresses—who knows what became of them; pairs of women in restaurants reading the menu very carefully; women stripped of illusion but unable to say farewell; women who owned shops and went to Circeo in the summer; divorced women who had once had a life in Trastevere; girls who looked unbathed, sitting in skimpy dresses in the restaurants, with young white teeth; principesse born in Vienna, living in the solitude of vast apartments; and aging fashion editors who seldom strayed far from the Hilton.
Against them, the legions of men: the handsome scum; men whose marriages had never been annulled; men who would never marry; men of dubious occupation; men from the streets and bars, of nullo, nothing; men with good names and dark mouths; swarthy men from the South, polished and unalterable, the nail of their little finger an inch long.
One June evening I was introduced to a woman whose apartment might be for rent. She was small, well dressed, and untrusting—French-Canadian as I found out. Gaby was her name—Gabrielle, I suppose. She was seductive and at the same time disdainful; life had taught her hard lessons, among them, I sensed, to think always of money and to hate men. The result was a passionate interest in human frailty.
She rejoiced, somewhat bitterly, in the weaknesses and secret vices of those in the film and literary worlds: Moravia, Italy’s most famous writer; Visconti; John Cheever (who had lived for a season or two in Rome); Pietro Germi, who left his wife for a young actress and was betrayed by her in the most humiliating way; Thyssen, the rich art collector; countless others.
She told me the story of a singer I’d met once. She had begun as an actress, a shy, sweet girl who was given a chance to sing in a revue. She had to sleep with the star of the show and afterward the producer. But they cut her part. She went to bed with the star’s brother and, finally, the stage manager. He took her to a house, a large one, and into a room upstairs. 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 very 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, and they all came toward her laughing.
Gaby told the story of Corinne Luchaire, a prewar French star. “She was G?ring’s mistress.”
I vaguely recalled a slender, beautiful blonde. “G?ring’s 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 de Maupassant story of collaboration, “Boule de Suif”—about the whore who didn’t know that the soldier who came to see her was German. “He was naked.” I had never read the story, which was the first de Maupassant ever published, and even now I’m not sure if Gaby’s version is correct, but it is the one I remember.
Gaby had been pursued, of course—that was one of the roots of her obsession. 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 her hand. The lecherous journalists and lawyers. She rained images on me, some of them so intense they remained in my flesh like wounds.
She also introduced me to Fellini. 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, a god, was ancient and remote. Fellini was a man who sat in shirtsleeves: he resembled his photographs, rumpled, with black hair growing out of his ears, like an unsuccessful uncle.
I met him at the studio where he was working. The conversation began in Italian; he did not speak English, he apologized. 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 a kind of montage used in the nineteen thirties and forties: pages of a calendar falling away to indicate days or months passing; an ocean liner, then a train 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.
On a slip of paper he wrote his telephone numbers—if there was anything that might be of some help, he urged me to call him.
I was sitting 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, blond, with a striking figure. They had just been to Capri and were talking with animation about it. Soon they were sampling a dish I had ordered and I was tasting 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. “Tell me your name,” I suggested.