EXCERPT

"We can die if all we've done is love." - Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet


It was dusk when I came to Venice. It was dawn when we left.

The time in between has ceased to exist.

It was another age, as remote as the age of empires.

And the writing left over from it is an indecipherable scrawl and tangle of tenses.

You saw how she looked at you.

What about how you looked at her?

There was no camera to record that. Nor can your sentences record it.


As I stepped out of the shadow of the arcade running along the Piazza San Marco, I saw Amanda Crespi sitting alone at a caffe table. She was wearing a thin black cardigan, and was holding herself tightly across the breasts with one arm while smoking a cigarette held delicately, European-style between two middle fingers of the other hand. Her dark sunglasses reflected the sky. When I appeared in them, she merely smiled.

Sit, she said. Although pitched like a request, in the delicately searching voice of a young girl, this was not a request, but an order. Then she turned her head away to cough into her elbow. When she finally looked up at me, her eyes were full of tears, and I realized that the coughing must have caused her some physical pain; she had thrown her sunglasses onto the table, and was laughing a little between after-spasms.

I pulled out the metal chair with a screech and sat. I saw a waiter detach himself from the doorway of the Caffè Florian and start over to our table, holding his tray aloft.

My darling, that jacket—it’s awful.

I laughed.

Why?

Oh, it doesn’t suit you in the least, darling.

There was the waiter, hovering, his profile edged by blinding sunlight. I wondered if he knew just who it was seated across from me, and decided he wouldn’t care. He placed a glass of thick, clear liquor on a paper napkin in front of Amanda Crespi.

You can take this away, darling, she said, lifting her coffee cup on its thin saucer. He took it with a shrug, placing it on his tray. I asked in Italian for a coffee. He swung away without a word, striding off through the orderly ranks of caffe tables.

Amanda Crespi was laughing again. She pulled her face into a frown to try to stop, but couldn’t. She bent over, holding herself, as I tried to compose my face into an expression that would make her stop.

Oh you’re only making it worse, darling, she said. She reached over the table and placed her cool fingers on my wrist. So let’s discuss what you came about, before I lose it entirely.

I didn’t say what I thought, which is that I would have been delighted to see Amanda Crespi lose it entirely. I told her why I had come up from Rome. And who had paid my airfare.

She squashed out her still burning cigarette in an ash tray and looked me in the eyes with merry anguish – or sarcastic despair, or nonchalant rage.

It’s been ages since I even thought about him.

Well, he thinks about you all the time.

Does he?

She sat back, reflecting, then picked up her grappa and drank it down in one swallow.

Will you tell him I was drinking again when you saw me?

I shrugged.

You’re a lovely looking young man, she said in her hoarse, brutally seductive undertone.

The waiter was heading for us. We went quiet while he approached, his heels clicking. He slid a saucer with the cup of coffee on it from his tray to the table and stood back, holding the tray at shoulder level, and Amanda blinked up at him and said, Grazie, meaning, That will be all, please go, and he said, Prego, meaning, I couldn’t care less about anything you people do, think, or say—it’s all the same to me.



What were you like as a boy?

I looked at her.

Very serious.

She laughed.

I don’t doubt it.



We left the Piazza together, walking between the columns at the San Marco landing and up onto the Ponte degli Paglia, or Bridge of Straw, looking at the expanse of bare riva with the lagoon splashing and glittering on one side and the grand hotels looming on the other, and Amanda Crespi reflected aloud that this bridge was not only where the boats carrying straw used to tie up, but also where the bodies of drowned Venetian citizens were laid out to be claimed by relatives. I asked:

How did they drown, usually?

They fell from bridges. Or they were knocked from their fishing boats during a storm. Perhaps there were some who drowned themselves in the canals, despairing of life.

She smiled. Radiantly.

*

Signore Vitelli’s villa is bordered by a line of ink black cypresses. The sky is aflame with harsh noon sunlight as I crunch up the gravel driveway. The maid lets me in. I find Signore Vitelli, in a white linen suit, slowly pacing the loggia. I look past him into his garden, squinting to make out the details of an ornate fountain in which a statue of a nude woman wrestles a sea serpent, a stream of water bubbling out of the sea serpent’s mouth.

He says nothing until the maid pours the coffee, holding the handle with a napkin, the coffee sluicing from a silver spout. He doesn’t blink, he doesn’t rustle. His shoes shine. His linen trousers are razor-creased. The maid goes out with her head bowed, leaving behind barely a trace-scent of Sicilian lemons. I listen to a door close somewhere in the bowels of the villa and look out at the fountain, its streams of water shooting into bright Tuscan air.

Signore Vitelli stirs his demitasse with a little spoon and sets the spoon in his saucer. I’m sweating. His legs are crossed like a cricket’s about to serenade the gathering dusk. He unfolds himself suddenly and stands up straight to pace to the window. He is dark against the tall, arched window with its glaring trefoils -- his thin, faded features vanish quite suddenly, extinguished like the sun when it slips below the mauve hills. It’s not sunset, yet, though, when he begins to tell me all about Amanda Crespi – it is a cicada-loud afternoon in the hills above Florence, and Signore Vitelli’s garden is crowded with broken statues of priapic gods and their dwarf consorts.

He seems to dislike all women, but Amanda Crespi, I believe at first, he dislikes more than most or even all the others.


Signore Vitelli’s given name is Roberto. We met at one of those Roman cocktail parties where scandals are sown and characters cynically assassinated between sips of Brunello. He used to produce films and now he makes wine and sometimes he gives money to charity. He has done many things in his life. He has a predictable weakness for writers, even obscure ones.
He and Amanda Crespi were married in 1966. They rode on his motorcycle all over Italy. Everywhere, he says, gesturing with both arms to the north and south. We went to Turin, we went to Palermo on the dusty roads, vroom vroom.

Amanda Crespi, nineteen, clinging to his waist, laughing.

I had her to myself, absolutely, Roberto Vitelli cries. My fresh one and only love. She was the most beautiful woman I have ever seen. She tasted of pollen, dust, honey, and citrus. We drank wine, we danced under the moon, oh how glorious. She leaned out of an arched window into the light, naked, her breasts like plums, and laughed. We never had a son, although I wanted one desperately.

Still later, Amanda Crespi left Italy for America, where she made movies with the likes of Robert De Niro and appeared at the Academy Awards in a sheath glittering like fish scales. She bought a small house in the dusty hills and sat on her veranda, watching lizards skim the top of the wall. There was speculation that she was drinking –certainly, she was using pills. In the scripts that kept landing in her lap, her part was no longer that of the mistress belting her white trenchcoat outside the hotel room, but the embittered wife chain smoking by the window.


His father was Sicilian and his mother from Corsica. He has no tolerance for fools, and I suspect he counts me as one of their vast number. I don’t attempt to prove otherwise – I’m beyond any special pleading for myself. I let people think what they will of me, and smile. I think he’ll come around when he finds that I am not fussy. I give him the straight answers his elaborate manners demand. I don’t try to equal him in elegance, in circumlocution. I let him talk and I keep my responses to a strict minimum. I can feel his respect growing, perhaps grudgingly, over the afternoon.

He talks and paces, fingering his watch. In the pauses, I can hear a gardener’s shears clipping the shrubs lining the gravel pathway. Once, I get a glimpse of their wielder: an old man in blue coveralls, his cheeks covered with white stubble.


My sense of his feelings changed as Signore Vitelli spoke at length of Amanda Crespi’s films. Also of her ease, her solemn beauty, her inimitable grace. He described her alcoholism and hellish cures she’d undergone. How she had nearly died from her drinking. It wasn’t clear to me why they ever divorced.

Over the years she sacrificed much of her fortune and more than once endangered her life for political causes. Here he added with a tight smile that he himself had been a card-carrying member of the Italian Communist Party since 1966. He had introduced his ex-wife not only to the works of Marx, but even more significantly — to Nietzsche.

I was reading Thus Spake Zarathustra when we met on an empty beach in Sardegna and I fell in love with her. We read it together, all over Europe. By firelight, under the stars in Tunisia. Ecco la.

He suddenly took down from a bookshelf a battered paperback and thumbed to a page. He held the paperback out to me, open. I peered at it and made out the following passage underlined in red ink: We free spirits build our nests in the tree Future. And the eagles shall bring us food in their beaks.

He clapped the book shut.

There. A Communist. Well, maybe an Anarchist. But alive and passionate. In every way a profound free spirit.

It often happens to me that I am moved yet cannot think of a single thing to say.



As the light faded out he poured us small glasses of his own grappa. We touched the rims together, clink, to salute Amanda Crespi.

Then he touched my shoulder and said I must now always call him Roberto.


We sit in his library with the antiquated projector spluttering between us – when it breaks, Roberto sighs and gets up to rethread the reel. It's as if he's been doing this all his life. He lights a cigarette, and blue smoke wafts through the projector beam. We are watching Marguerite Duras' Venice, a little seen film starring Amanda Crespi, who floats through most of it nude. Nu. That odd flatness of her diction – it's as if Duras wrote the script only for her. For her voice. (Later, I examined her copy of the script, which Roberto had kept all these years. It is dense with insertions, and much of it has been scored like a piece of music.)

In a scene close to the end, Amanda Crespi goes out onto a balcony and we see her from behind standing nude in soundless bursts of rain. She reaches behind her and smoothes her wet hair back. Suddenly I feel so embarrassed it's like being grief-stricken— the eroticism of these shots is so cruel it takes my breath. I glance through the bright beam at Roberto’s profile. He is sitting calmly, his eyes fixed on the screen. His nostrils stream smoke.


Roberto stood in the fog. He had almost disappeared. His arm was raised; he was pointing at something I couldn’t see. We were both drunk on grappa. His voice rang with emotion.

Look! he cried.

I strode over and looked: an old motorcycle leaning against the gnarled trunk of an olive tree, the chrome fenders rusted, the tires worn balloon-smooth, with dead leaves scattered on the ripped leather seat.

*

I’m packing my crates of books. From outside, the shouts of ragazzi and the clatter of motorbikes in the stone street. I’ll buy some oranges on my way to the train station and carry them in my luggage to eat in Venice. It will be cold there, already misty with almost-winter—the canals will ripple with a damp wind from the Adriatic that skims the marshes and penetrates the stone walls of the clustered buildings as if they were made of paper. Venice, perched like a colony of storks on poles driven down into the mud of innumerable islets. A city of moldering, dissolving but still not quite discredited, glory.

I am preparing to send the box containing my typewritten novel by mail back to the States, wrapped tightly in a black ribbon. It’s nothing, it’s even less than that. How could I have labored for so long to bring forth into this world nothing? Yet I did, to my endless chagrin. I breathe the bitter air of Rome in the early morning as I struggle with my bags to the Stazione Termini. I’ve locked the door behind me and left the key under a flagstone. There’s nothing to keep me here but exhaustion and abject submission to fate.

*

From the porthole-window of a jet as we dived out of the ragged clouds I saw Venice unfold like a rose or a fish-hieroglyph, dense with cupolas and towers. Moments later, as the jet’s wheels screeched on tarmac. I saw that the lurching landscape outside the windows was autumn brown; a red-tiled house stood alone in a field by the runway.

My motorscafi passed under a bridge so low the driver and I both had to duck our heads. The people on the bridge were dark shapes surrounded by light-dazzle. We foamed along at a slow putter and the driver called out in a ringing voice at each turn before steering us around the crumbling wall.

Once, we pulled over close to a riva to let another motorboat pass. A suntanned man in a straw hat and a young bareheaded woman in a tight sweater and dark skirt were seated in the back, and as they passed the woman’s eyes met mine. I smiled. She looked away, wiping stray hair from her face. The side of the boat had stenciled on it in gold letters: C I P R I A N I.

When we emerged into the Bacino I had to look away from the glittering waves, blinded. I saw outlined against the sun a vast domed church with a brick tower on one side and a broad walkway with boats moored to it. As we veered I lost my balance and caught hold of the gunwale to keep from falling. I shaded my eyes and, looking to the other side, saw the pink marble Doges’ Palace and the Campanile and the tall marble columns on the Piazzetta. It was a picture I knew from many paintings and postcards, but now these buildings seemed to be constructed not only out of brick and marble but also from diffused sunlight and solid blocks of shadow. The shining wake of a vaporetto made us rock. San Marco! shouted the driver. I saw the Basilica with its confectionary domes and turrets, pigeons flying in eddies about a flagpole. Then he eased down the throttle and we cruised into the mouth of the Grand Canal under a shining golden statue of a woman set on a globe held by two straining atlases of gilded bronze.

Greeted by Fortune, in Venice.


The Campanile collapsed, slid into rubble, in 1901. A picture was actually taken of it falling. All the bells but the Marangona were destroyed. That was well before Proust arrived with his mother. This place was already documented by thousands of picture postcards. Hundreds of paintings of Venice in all styles – realist, impressionist, modernist – hung on museum and drawing room walls throughout the world. Some painters still preferred to paint the Doge’s Palace. Others came to search out the poor quarters of Cannareggio and to paint the ragged children and the handsome young women draped in black shawls.

At the turn of the last century Bostonians, if they had the means, all went to Venice. Isabella Stewart Gardner rented a palazzo along the Grand Canal and held gay fetes there. Henry James liked to stand on her balcony smoking a cigarette and watch the lit up gondolas pass below. There was a massive outcry in Boston newspapers and consternation in Boston society when the Commune of Venice instituted the first water-buses. Called vaporetti because they were steam-driven, they chugged and churned along the Canal, swamping the imarcaderi and elegant water-entrances with waves.

As I stared at the gleaming stones of a calli I remembered paintings by John Singer Sargent of these back streets and little campi and the black-shawled Venetian women, the gleam of naked arms and round, soft cheeks. Seeing those paintings with their carefully recreated gleams of light and the superbly realized texture of clothing and the tactile sense of women's pale skin in the Gardner Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, I had been sensually aroused and had longed to go to Venice and to meet and possibly to fuck their great grand-daughters if any still remained in that city. I imagined being Henry James or Whistler or Sargent and strolling about with cane in hand and monocle in eye, a gentleman of the world. A man of letters.


My head felt dull and tight and I shivered as I walked around the Piazza San Marco, shattering groups of pigeons into flurries of wing-beats in the gray air.

In a narrow calle near what was once Ruskin’s house, I had to turn my body to let angle past a young Japanese woman in a tight dark-blue skirted Air Japan uniform. She was walking quickly and she dipped her head in a shy smile.

*

After the Venice Film Festival in September many tourists linger, crowding the squares and the narrow lanes between the larger campi and the churches boasting paintings by Titian and Giorgione; the caffes are full, and it is difficult to move from room to room in the Accademia. Then, in October, the city begins to empty out, and in November the rain and the fogs give Venice a stricken, humbled appearance, and there is a sensation of desertion and a palpable melancholy and it is like being shut in for the night in a vast museum. In November and early December you can move easily through Venice, and it is only on the Piazza San Marco that you see many people together. Although on some evenings even the Piazza is bare except for the pigeons and in the late mornings only a few tables outside the Quadri and the Florian are occupied, and the people sitting at them over coffee cups seem to be staring off into an impossible distance. The acqua alta floods the streets and the Piazza with depressing regularity and boards are laid across some of the streets and most Venetians splash to work wearing thick rubber boots.

*

I took a room in a hotel I found at the end of a dank calle, in a crumbling house with green-painted shutters. The hotel room was furnished in the stiff, bourgeois Venetian style, with graying carpets and a colored glass chandelier and a single thin wardrobe. Through the walls, the thunder of toilets and voices speaking English and German. When I pushed open the shutters to admit a few gleams of dusty light, I found myself looking into a small courtyard with a moss-blackened birdbath in the center. My window faced the boarded up lower windows at the rear of a palazzo.

I sat on the bed in my underwear. By bending a little, I could see the sky between walls. It was brilliant but clouding over. Then I heard a deep, booming bell. It shook the atmosphere, seemed to vibrate the walls of the cheap room. I lost track of how many times it boomed. Something strange happened inside me as the bell went on clonging. All the hairs on my body stood up. I lay on the hard bed with my neck on the bolster and shut my eyes. It seemed to my skin that the air was cooling slightly. Soon I heard the brief rattle of a burst of raindrops. There was a pause then the rattle began again and grew to a steady roar. I got up and looked out the open window. Pigeons were crouching under the birdbath and rain drops were pinging into it. The light had turned grainy and the dampness seemed to cling to my skin.

Go out, I told myself. I sat shivering on the hard chair at the writing table. Go out. You're in Venice. I decided to put on thin trousers and a white shirt and go down to the bar I had seen adjoining the lobby. I would have a drink. Yes, I thought. That's it, that's the thing to do. Even though I felt cowed by the idea of speaking Italian. I assumed the bartender must speak a few words of English. I'd wish him a buona serra and I'd ask for something to refresh me. It is only now that I can find humor in the intimidation and even fright that I experienced at the thought of speaking to the bartender in Italian.

In fact, the bartender treated me as a dignified guest. Frowning, his eyes smiled. He stood in his stiff white jacket cleaning glasses behind the bar and as I sat down asked me in English what I would like this evening, just as if I'd known him all my life. I asked for a Prosecco since this, as I'd read, was a typical Venetian apertif. I sank into a plush armchair and he brought me a glass dish of potato chips and a fluted glass which, standing beside the low table, he poured with a flourish full of sparkling white wine. He then bowed to my Grazie and, with a quiet,Prego, returned to his glass-wiping. I drank the foaming Prosecco slowly and ate the potato chips one by one. So this, I thought, is how real Italians are and this is what Italy is really like. Pleasant and dignified and concerned with the intelligence of taste and cultivating clear moments of life.


This was no city for ideas, I thought, it was a city for dreams alone and for living one's dreams into the day and beyond it.


*

When I began to write I bought notebooks and tried to write my own stories but I didn't know the first thing about structure or about voice or style. I simply had images in my mind that interested me.

*

Several men and women who arrived at the zinc counter after I did were served first. Then the bartender had no excuse not to make my espresso. He did it with a few rapid, economical movements. He set the demitasse in its white saucer on the zinc and slid it to me, then slid over a container of sugar with a spoon sticking from it. I nodded. The solemn ritual of the morning espresso.

As I poured a few spoonfuls of sugar into my foaming espresso, an old man in a beautiful suit jacket approached the bar. His gnarled fingers placed the register slip on the zinc. Without glancing at it, the bartender set a wine glass on the counter and, taking from under it somewhere a large bottle, poured the glass brimming full of white wine. The old man drank the wine in two large gulps, set it on the zinc, wiped his mouth with a napkin, and left. I drank my espresso and followed him into sunlight. The street was already crowded. Most of the people I saw were Italians rushing to work. Some were carrying briefcases. The Italian women all clacked along in high heels. I was glad that I had worn my suit jacket and I attempted to walk confidently and without stopping at the shop windows. Yet my head kept turning to look at the women.


*

That night as I walked in the labyrinth a raw thunderstorm burst over Venice with a crash like the glass ceiling of a ballroom falling in. The stark freezing gusts of rain gave me a feeling of being on the deck of a ship, and the little restaurant that appeared out of the darkness looked from far off like a ship’s stateroom – handsome, clean, brilliant. I rushed to it. I wanted to celebrate being thirty-three and alive a Venezia, soaked and laughing to myself like a demon. I dashed across a step-arched bridge. There was a broad window, lighted, and inside tables wearing white linen robes and a glimpse of soot-black rafters and a black-vested maitre d’ standing pensively just inside the entrance looking out. A vivid discharge of lightning made the street flash. The stone walls were slick with rain. The broad awning showered raindrops. I ducked through the rain curtain and placed my hand on the cold brass door handle and opened it and slipped inside. I stood with water running in fast drops, like strokes of a pen, down my face until the maitre d’, a smoothly elegant young man, grave-faced and dark haired, white shirt cuffs showing from the sleeves of his suit jacket, brought me a towel. I wiped my brow with it and the sides of my jaws and then rubbed it briefly over my stiff wet hair. Prego, he said, indicating a table in the corner covered by a white linen cloth. I smiled, handing him the towel. Grazie. He nodded and led me to my table, pulling out the chair for me.

Was it because of the sudden downrush of icy rain? Or the clean high-raftered place smelling deliciously of roasted chicken? Or was it the lucid taste of the dry, cool red wine as it spread its fruit and its ripeness on my palate in an unexpected rush of fragrance? Who knows why I felt that warm sensation—kindness, expansive gratitude for the world—gather just above my eyes, and imagined that as I glanced around me I was beaming from my forehead a sensation of pure happiness. Even with a frown on my face it was clear, it must have been, that I was taking pleasure in everything.

I took out my little notebook and unfolded it to a white page. My hair was still dripping down the nape but the drops were now warm. The rain was hitting the cobblestones a few feet away from where I sat, beyond the pane of glass in which I was reflected—pensive, leaning forward, a dark-haired young man in a white shirt cramped at a small table in a Venetian trattoria. The raindrops burst like sparks. I wrote a few quick scratching sentences in the notebook and clapped it shut. I did not want this pleasure to dissolve. My mind was beaming off in all directions. Then it came to me that the accumulation of details is not senseless. What else is there to remind one of the pleasures one has taken?

*

Morning. I go out onto streets still brutal with dark. I walk the winding calli with a strange combination of happiness and trepidation and yearning. My footsteps are light, more than half echo. As I round a corner the sun dazzles me. The shadows recede into doors and archways. The paving stones are wet. Venice reeks of tide, sewage, seaweed.

I settle at a caffe table on the Fondamenta Nove. Boats are chugging past into the Rio Gesuiti. Launches, barges, market boats heaped with crated vegetables. The sun burnishes the flagstones and makes the lagoon scintillate like a jewel. A yawning waiter brings me a caffe latte and a breakfast roll. The coffee mixed with milk and topped with a foam layer is so hot it starts tears to my light-blinded eyes. I tear off an end of the roll and soak it in the concoction of coffee and milk. I shiver as I chew the roll. It tastes good soaked in the coffee.

Then an early-rising couple stroll past me along the fondamenta in rumpled clothing. Her heels click. She is wrapped in a thick oversized sweater and she clings to his arm with both hands and presses her cheek to his shoulder. They’re both Italian, I can tell by the way she uses her eyes to smile and also by the size and splendor of his watchband. They stop and stand for a moment leaning together as he shades his eyes with a hand to gaze at the cemetery island of San Michele, now partly obscured by the drifting fumes of a garbage scow.

I flip to a blank page. The sun is warming me through my shivers. Soon I feel the faint heat on my neck. I am scribbling fast with a stub of pencil. I stop to shave some of the wood with my pocketknife and sharpen the lead to a point. By the time I look up again, the lovers have vanished.

I have an appointment at twelve o’clock on the Piazza San Marco.


One night during the Gulf War I turned the TV channel to a news program showing a vast anti-war rally in the streets of Rome and saw a middle-aged but still ravishingly beautiful woman in a brilliant red scarf and a black suit shouting into a megaphone. Only a few of her sentences were translated—fiery slogans. She was shouting herself hoarse in the cold. I recognized her although at first I could not have said from where. Then the caption floated up under her angry, ravishing, hoarse-voiced image.

I remembered. I had seen a dozen of her movies at various points in my life – most on television, a few on the screen. Some were classics. Others pointedly obscure. She had co-starred with many of the greatest actors in the great era of films, the late ‘60’s and early ‘70’s. With no great effort I could pull up out of memory images of Amanda Crespi running down a beach away from William Holden, lighting her cigarette on a match held by Burt Lancaster, lying peacefully in bed under a white sheet with Alain Delon –

It stunned me to think that she was still alive. And I thought: Here is a human voice, a human being.


Not long after, I happened upon Rome, Next Spring on late night TV. I watched all the way through with growing wonder.
William Holden gives a minimal, impassive performance of great dignity, and Amanda Crespi is – well, cracked. Laughing like a cracked bell, dancing in the rain in the ruins of Pompeii, sitting calm and composed at a Roman caffe table in a white dress, or merely looking sidelong out of those astonishing eyes, with perhaps just a trace of a solemn smile – she manages to manifest volumes of yearning, lust and despair without self-indulgence or so much as a shred of hysteria.

This film is probably Amanda Crespi’s best known – one of those international co-productions shot at Cinecitta studios in Rome – and it won her an Oscar for her performance as young, impoverished Contessa for whom the aging American sergeant, played by William Holden, falls hard. I didn’t know it then, but the script follows the basic plot outlines of Hemingway’s Across the River and Into the Trees. A decision had been made by someone to set the story in Rome rather than in Venice. Perhaps the budget did not allow for certain kinds of difficulty, like shooting a night gondola ride through the heart of that watery labyrinth—truly a nightmare for the lighting technician. Instead there is a horse-drawn cab ride through the Borghese gardens. James Salter, a writer I admired for his handsome style, had worked on the script.

The next day I went to the video store to rent every Amanda Crespi movie I could find. There were at least a dozen. I watched them in chronological order, deeply engrossed. I saw Amanda Crespi, blushingly young in her first film, fill out, becoming voluptuous (though never to the extent of Anna Magnani or Sophia Loren or even her close friend, Claudia Cardinale) then begin mysteriously to age. But nothing could make her beauty dwindle, not even the punishment of the drugs she had taken or her copious drinking or the renowned indulgence in unfiltered cigarettes that left her sounding a little like Jeanne Moreau before she was thirty. She was steadily growing into much more than a sublime beauty—she was becoming a truly fascinating character, in her own right, outshining all but her greatest roles.


In the interviews Amanda Crespi spoke without shame of her sexual life. In the style of the era she seemed to have shared her erotic favors without much compunction with hundreds of attractive people, both men and women, rich and poor, famous and ordinary.

Before getting her first break in films she had been a prostitute. In a BBC interview I saw much later on, she boasted of having been a whore at fifteen.

“I was an exquisite piece of ass,” she said.

The plain-faced matron interviewing her looked sharply uncomfortable.

“It was in Bologna,” she said. “Do you know what is the specialty of Bolognese whores?” Triumphantly: “Fellatio.”

For a fifteen year old girl, however ripe and voluptuous, it could not have been very much fun to perform fellatio on aging, obese Milanese industrialists. That career didn’t last long because she was discovered and plucked from her dangerous path by the wealthy producer, Harold Crespi, who put her into a high budget Cinemascope film without so much as a screen-test and married her soon after it was released.

How did prostitution work, at that time en Italia? She did not say anything about a pimp. Maybe she was one of those discreet giovanna (very young) masseuses who advertised discreetly in the Corriere della Serra. Or maybe she worked only out of certain nightclubs or hotel bars where she had cultivated understanding with one of the doormen. Or maybe she had invented the whole business. To shock.


She was 16 when she started in films – in Mario Costi’s epic, Machiavelli’s The Prince, she played a lithe, thumb-sucking sixteen year old whore. Living in the Rome of la dolce vita she “smoked pot everyday, fucked everybody.” Including other women? “Especially other women. Actresses, prostitutes, dancers.” (Transcript of interview pub. in Interview, March 5, 1979).

She had beautiful breasts. “I wore tight sweaters, tweed skirts. All the men wanted to fuck me. Directors wanted to fuck me, so they hired me for their films. I had my pick of the lot.” She used to drive an Alfa Romeo on the winding roads along the coast of Liguria. “I pushed it to ninety sometimes. I scared some people. I scared Visconti so much he pissed himself.” (Ibid).

She had a haunting winsomeness, a melancholy sensuality that seemed to explode directly from the screen into one’s brain. I still recall that searing shot of her stretched out nude on the sofa in the Marguerite Duras film, Venice as viscerally as if I had been the one holding the camera. “I destroyed myself giving that performance. I won’t even call it acting. I just destroyed myself on film, with the cameras rolling. After that I had to start taking pills to get to sleep. Pills and alcohol all the time. I didn’t want to fuck anyone anymore. I wanted to shut everything out.” (Interview pub. in Mirabella, August 9, 1991)


She was a leftist – a member of the Italian Communist Party. She had done work for the Palestinian cause. She gave away a fortune to human rights organizations. Once she donated so much for the relief of Vietnamese boat people that one of the volunteer ships sent to intercept and save the people clinging to swamped rafts was christened The Amanda Crespi.

I studied the glaring color Newsweek photographs of a thirty-five year old Amanda Crespi on a visit to a Palestinian refugee camp, posing with an AK-47 rifle held high over her head. She is wearing a T shirt with Arabic writing on it, tight blue jeans. The lean, boyish-looking fedayeen with her are grinning. She smiles at the camera lens with that enigmatic curve of her closed lips, but her eyes are, it seems to me, sad. In the interview she spoke, with tart sarcasm, of the Zionist claim to Palestinian land. “Of course. God gave it to them. It says so in the book he handed Moses, after setting the shrubs on fire.” For such bitter comments she was blacklisted for several years, she claimed, by Hollywood. “It is not accepted to hate Zionism. You can join a Jew-free country club, if you want, just don’t talk about the Palestinians as human beings. No, they’re only terrorists.”
But the blacklist made no real difference to her life. She didn’t want to do Hollywood movies anyway. She left America, where she had maintained a small bungalow in the Hollywood hills near the house where Sharon Tate was murdered – yet for most of the 1970’s she worked prolifically all over Europe and even did films in Tunisia and in Iran. She also spoke at UNRWA events, adding her stately, precisely enunciated commentary to slide-shows of devastated houses and torn-up olive groves. She was regularly denounced by the World Zionist Congress. She received death threats.

In 1979 Godard filmed Amanda Crespi in The Algerians—a film that, with typical Godardian perversity, seemed to have nothing to do with Algeria or Algerians, dealing solely instead with a sexual relationship between a disaffected suburban lycee student and a depressed housewife whom he meets in a supermarket.

After The Algerians, her film career was finished. She never made another movie.

*

The images flicker and fade. One replaces another. They penetrate my dreams. That, and the melancholy tones of her hoarse voice murmuring dialogue in precise French or singsong Italian. So much of Amanda Crespi's real allure is in that voice – lamenting, always moderately bored, intelligent – that the dubbed and heavily cut versions shown on American TV late at night never fail to disappoint.


She leans across the table to let me light her cigarette. Afterward, I’m stunned to realize I’ve picked up the lighter, ignited her cigarette, and snapped it shut in one flowing gesture, exactly like Michael Caine in Fugitive Moments. The lighter is engraved with my initials. It was her gift, bought in a little shop near the Rialto.

Thank you, dear.

She has the rasping intake of a veteran smoker. She breathes the smoke out of a side of her mouth.

You can stare at my breasts, if you like. I don’t mind. In fact, I rather enjoy it.

The waiter, handsome and lanky, comes over to pick up our bottle and pour us more wine. Well, there’s a face, she declares, as he returns to his station at the bar. I wonder if he ever expresses an emotion.

It’s true: his hasn’t changed once. Rigid, quietly self-possessed, but not unpleasant.

I turn the bottle to look at the label.

Don’t worry, she says, with a laugh. It’s not Robert’s.

No—it’s Antinori.

This is wonderful wine.

I didn’t produce it, I just made the money to pay. If you’d like, we’ll drink another.

Our waiter stands at the bar with his arms folded. The owner is writing, with a large fountain pen, in his ledger. I can hear the steady scratching of the nib.

Shall we make our exit? she asks. I stand and give her my arm.

As we totter outside, the waiter holds the door for us and—finally—smiles. I’m in love, Amanda Crespi says. He doesn’t show any sign he’s heard.

We lurch down an alley with streaked black walls. At the end is an archway beyond which we can see sunlight dazzling on the Grand Canal. She says that she hopes she’s going to get something out of her investment in all that wine and resplendent food. The bill, which I glimpsed just before she swept it away from me, was staggering.

Maybe a kiss, I tell her. If you’re good.


*


So, she says. How is Roberto?

The wind, which smells exhilaratingly of seaweed, slaps hair against her cheek and she holds it back with her long, tapering fingers. I feel an impulse to touch her. I laugh.

He’ll be gratified to know you asked.

I care about him very much.

Do you?

Oh, please don’t be so dull.

We walk to her hotel in amicable silence.

Come up for a drink, she says.

The desk clerk smiles with real depth of feeling at her as we enter the lobby, but when he sees me his lips tighten into a polite grimace.

No messages, he says to her as she passes him with an airy toss of her head, like the one she gives Robert Redford in the first shot of A Champion’s Grace.

Thank you, Gian-Carlo, she says.

He beams.

In her room, she slips off the cardigan and tosses it onto a sofa. She is wearing a pale blouse underneath. A chaste string of pearls. She paces back and forth across the room a few times, her heels clicking on the marble, before she impulsively picks up the phone and calls room service for a bottle of scotch.

Will that do? she says to me, holding her fingers over the mouthpiece.

I shrug.


We go out onto the balcony and look at the looming domes of Santa Maria della Salute as the sunset darkens it. She stands with an arm resting on the railing and tosses her hair back. This is the pose that best reveals her profile. It takes me back to the films—this combination of hardness and insouciance, indifference and provocation.

I’m getting a little cold now, she says.

I turn to go in.

No, she says. Come here and hold me.

I put my drink down. She keeps hers in one hand—the ice cubes rattle as I slip my arms around her waist. I pull her hard against me. I’m tempted to lift her off her feet—it wouldn’t be difficult. Maybe I should just throw her over the railing. In a cinematic flash, I see Amanda Crespi sinking beneath the dark water of the Grand Canal, its green black currents now cut into choppy waves by the wake of a lumbering vaporetto full of awed tourists. My last glimpse of her would be the pale glimmer of that silk blouse. She would lie still in the muck and trash at the bottom, wreathed in strands of seaweed.

When I let her go, she’s smiling.



Tell me about your loves. You must have loved many women. I can see that women like you.

How? I ask, curious.

It's in your eyes, she says. It's that simple. It's the way you look at us.

You're speaking for all women now?

She shrugs with a wince of one shoulder. Why not?


Everyone wanted to fuck me. It’s true. Even now, with my face ravaged, they all still want to. But not for what I am now. For what I was. Isn’t that funny?

She was holding the cigarette delicately between two fingers. We were standing on the balcony watching the sun fade behind Santa Maria della Salute. I could hear voices shouting in Italian, and a sledgehammer hitting stone: toc, toc, toc.

Venice, she told me, was once a few scattered islands in the muck. Torcello was where people lived. Here, circa 10th Century AD, there might have been a few fisherman’s huts with smoke rising thinly from crude chimneys.

A little over a thousand years. Do you realize how little time that is, really?


I adore Venice in the winter. I pray for the deaths of all tourists. But I’m a hypocrite. I have the money to live gracefully here. If I had to survive on a pension I don’t know what I’d do. My wealth makes me immune to certain disasters and complications. It makes me a whore. I’ve always been a horrible whore. We’ll discuss my movies. Do you want to hear about Tarkovsky? No? Antonioni?

The wind was ripping at us. My breath made a stream of smoke.

Look, those domes – that’s Santa Maria della Salute. It was built after prayers to the Virgin saved Venice from a great plague. Bodies were stacked like cordwood along the Riva degli Incurabli and barges came to load them aboard, stiff as cordwood. Where are they buried? They are rowed to an island on the lagoon, where ditches have been dug. The bodies are dumped into the ditches. Kitchenmaids, metalworkers, mothers, children, husbands, wine-sellers, soldiers. The Sacred Order of the Brothers of Misery, in red cloaks, performs the rites. The people, gaunt and desperate, knelt in prayer holding votive candles. It was feared that Venice would disappear, like an image dissolving in water. Yet here she is. Do you hear those voices? The Venetian dialect. There’s a dictionary about this thick translating it into Italian and visa versa. In it even familiar words have a different usage. The Venetian term for canal is the same as Spanish for river. What is a campo? Everywhere else, a field, but in Venice it is a cleared space in the labyrinthine glut of houses with a vera da pozzo of age-worn marble in the center.

Half of Venice is under constant repair. You see the workmen on scaffolds, pushing wheelbarrows of stones, carrying beams. You hear the banging of sledgehammers. The churches are closed for restoration. A new trattoria opens on a sidestreet with a burnished facade and brilliant panes of glass. Only the local people know its name. Some Venetians never leave their own neighorboods—a little campiello, a few sidestreets, a fetid canal—except to go to work.

Do you see those maids? They make good money, better than their husbands make, changing semen-stained sheets in the Hotel Danieli, the Metropole, and the Gritti. You write. Why don’t you compose a little anecdote about such a woman. You can call it “The Afternoon of a Venetian Chambermaid.”* Nothing amusing will occur in it, just a clear description of her afternoon, especially that at lunch she goes to sit on a park bench in the Viale Garibaldi and smoke a cigarette under the yellowing leaves of the plane trees. And she hugs herself tightly, like this, with only one arm while smoking. You can say that in the damp cold air of Venice the cigarette smoke does not rise but descends and crawls along the gravel as it disperses.

She laughed. A rich clear laugh that concluded in a spasm of hard coughing.


It’s odd but Venice is the only city I dream of when I am in it. In Venice I dream only of Venice and rarely of myself. I am always someone else. Nobody recognizes me. Maybe that’s why I come here and why I find it so difficult to leave. I am no celebrity here except during the Film Festival in August when I appear at the Lido and climb the red-carpeted steps of the Grand Hotel, smiling to the photographers in a rain of flashbulbs.

I exist in this city as an outsider. A foreigner can never enter Venetian society– you have to have been born in this place, bawling and bloody, baptized with stagnant water from a stinking canal. Here the dead are still alive. They are alive in the tides, the wind, the little streets, the names of the bridges and squares. Walking soberly through the dripping calli you encounter the dead, because their footsteps are still ringing on these flagstones, and their traces are everywhere. One voice echoes a thousand. The bang of a wooden shutter against a stone window – it's the same sound as in the depths of the 13th century. Only the racket of televisions is different. Everything is in everything. The past, the future, it's all present, though words can't describe this fact. The dead and the living both appear, and live without effacing each other. And the lives long or short teach us the same lessons in grief or in exultation.

Sometimes I would like Venice to return to a cluster of muddy islands in rivers of silt, swamped by the high tide, exposed by the low. But instead we have these palaces of sculpted marble and bridges inverted by their reflections. It's always the same palace, same bridge. And where is time, really? Where is history? In the image. But the image blurs. Rain falls onto it, making it sparkle.

In winter Venice glides in mist, like a great ocean liner made out of decayed churches and crowded stone houses with red-tile roofs. You hear clinks of silverware and voices from the high arched windows of the great palazzi and yellow light leaks into the fog from cracks in shutters. Venice was dead as a ghost when Napoleon got here. Since then it has been a beautiful, salutary tomb. The silence of a few stray footsteps ringing in an alleyway and then the sea-fog and then nothing.
I think I’m just tired. Let’s go inside.


I suddenly saw Amanda Crespi at nineteen, her oval face shining like a hallucination on the posters for Bresson’s La Vie Absolu. I remembered her pure skin and searching green eyes and delicate ears, no earlobes, with slits in them.

I watched as she raised her hair, swept it from the sides of her face, and pinned it at the back. Wondering: In which of the movies in her oeuvre have I already seen her perform the same quick, precisely calibrated gesture?


Some of her films may have been profound, but she herself is infinitely more touching in person. Although her face is ruined it is still capable of shocking me with its beauty, of provoking a rough and scouring desire. I am worn out with desire for the woman she once was.

*

Once, I stood in an echoing hall with a high, glassed roof watching a little Cambodian girl in traditional clothes, gold jewelry clinking on her slim arms, perform a ritual dance to drum and flute music – solid steps and ethereal gestures. The stark, grieving expression on the girl’s face did not change until the music and the dance ended in a tableau vivant with the girl’s arms curved skyward and her face upturned. Then she let out a fleeting, embarrassed smile before ducking behind a red velvet curtain.

Afterward I strolled up and down the steep, brick-paved streets of Beacon Hill behind the gold-domed State House. It was spring, and the cherry trees were in cloud-like blossom. My senses were alert, but the deep grief I had felt while watching the girl dance persisted in me and made every sensation painful. The Cambodian girl’s dance had stunned me and made everything in my life appear insignificant. How could I pretend that I had anything to offer to the world even remotely comparable to the seriousness of that dance?

I think it was then that I decided I would go to abroad. To Rome.

I dreamt of brilliant air and of streams of water from the fountain jets splashing as a thin flowing film of water over the bronze manes of the horses and the naked bronze arms and breasts of women, the bronze green with age and the water shining as it streamed over the statues’ nudity. I would submerge myself in Italy and from my experience would arise images, like streams of brilliant water shooting from a fountain.

*

In Rome, I used to walk to the Campo dei Fiori for my coffee through sun-punished streets ringing with as-if-naked female voices, in a drowsy heat past magenta and earth colored walls, my footsteps clapping on the flagstones. And I remember the weight of the little notebook in the breast pocket of my jacket and the way the cuffs of my shirt itched at the wrists and the sweat cooling on the back of my neck as I stepped out of the rage of sunlight into a water-cold shadow to adjust the keys and change in my trouser pocket or to rest my eyes for a moment from the radiant glare, looking avidly at the broken, urine-colored plaster of a house wall, a leaning bicycle, a clay-potted plant, and at the white banners of laundry suspended high up in the clarifying murk where they might catch the few livid slanting rays of mid-morning.

My first winter in Rome was lonely and brutal. I recall sitting in a café in the Trastavere district, openly admiring a young woman seated alone at a table nearby as she compulsively fiddled with her white-blonde hair. She tossed it and smoothed it back and gathered it behind her nape. She had clear intelligent eyes with creases underneath them as if from smiling or laughing often. She wore a dark turtleneck sweater that hid and yet did not hide her breasts. I shut my eyes and no image, no trace of her clung to my mind. But when I opened my eyes there she was again – sly and young, voluptuous, busty, flipping the pages of Italian Vogue. She had on a black leather belt cinched tightly at the waist. I half-decided she must be waiting for her boyfriend but I did not want to believe it: I was preparing to ask her a question about Rome, in strained Italian, when sure enough he banged in out of the cold, bringing with him the smell of motorcycle exhaust. His hair was mussed and his ears bright red. He bent over the table to kiss her mouth hard and lingeringly until she blushed like a rose. Then slouched on the leather-covered bench beside his girlfriend, nuzzling her cheek, and murmured something into her ear. She let out a bell-laugh – ravishing and, for me, tragic.

It took me weeks to forget.

*

I worked mornings in the Trastavere caffe. Sometimes, rather than writing a coherent piece of a story of or my novel, I merely jotted down phrases, images that came to me, brief observations. I was happy, sitting at my table with the notebook spread open and a pencil poised above it. The faster I wrote, the faster I thought. Something about the activity of writing soothed me as it strengthened the beam of my attention. And while writing I was aware, in poignant bursts, of voices rising and falling, people sitting at tables, entering or going, waiters carrying trays, the barman wiping glasses dry, etc. The entire rhythm of Roman daily life seemed to flood into the caffe, along with that vast sky, scintillating with light even on days of overcast, of which one is always aware anyplace one goes in the Eternal City. I spoke little Italian and understood less but I brimmed full of happiness to hear the clamor of voices and the clatter of coffee spoons. This was a place without a television: a rare oasis in Italian life. The padrone kept his radio turned down low, so the popular songs with their insipid lyrics didn’t dominate the atmosphere but provided a wailing counterpoint to the riot of other sounds.

I met Iphigenia in this cafe where I went to write most afternoons, out of the brutal heat that soaked my shirt through with sweat. In the coolness ringing with noise and voices shouting in Italian and laughter while outside the traffic fumed, hooted and roared. A cafe with tables set outside under the awning and a view of ancient buildings and the green-brown sluggish Tiber. Sometimes I walked from the cafe to the Pantheon a few streets away, ducking under archways, and went inside the vast structure looking awed up at the sky through the opening in the dome and once as I stood there a steely column of rain drifted down to shatter like glass on the marble floor. I shivered. That must have been in the winter. Anyway. As I was saying, I met Iphigenia inside the usual Trasvatere cafe where I had taken over a table for the afternoon to write in my notebook and when she spoke to me first I didn't hear her because I was bent over the page scribbling furiously. Then I looked up and saw this pale girl with tousled honey blonde hair and pursed lips smiling and leaning toward me and I realized she had just said something in Italian then in English. She was in a filmy dress and was darkly tanned and stunning, and so the erotic feelings came in a vivid, choking rush. We began to speak, me in my mangled Italian, no I don't recall the dialogue only the feeling of the sweat on my forehead and Iphigenia's beaming childlike sensual beauty illumined by a ray of sunlight that shattered and recomposed each time the glass entry doors swung. She said that she was meeting someone, and my heart sank, but that someone who later sauntered into the cafe apologizing for her lateness, carrying a green leather bag over her shoulder, all in dark chic clothing with thin golden sandals strapped on her fine-boned feet, turned out to be another alluring young woman, dark haired and intense and taller than Iphigenia: Donatella. She held her hand straight out for me to shake.At first, I could not focus on anything but Iphigenia's lips and her beautiful green eyes and the rapid expressions that flowed across her face distorting it with smiles and laughter then rendering it breathtakingly clear and symmetrical, like the turnings of broken glass within a kaleidescope. But suddenly I became aware of both Donatella and Iphigenia equally, looking from one to the other with a feeling of joy and wonder, each girl a startling pair of eyes, an alluring voice (Donatella's a bit huskier than Iphigenia's pure alto) and a wild flow of expressions and rapid laughter interspersed with those repeated, leaning-forward, intense, serious, hushed queries about the substance of my writing and what I was doing in Rome at their cafe and how long I had been in the city and what I planned to do with my life, would I remain in Italy, did I have a Roman girlfriend yet. I wondered if the two were lovers. There was something so cheerfully wicked about them. Or was the wickedness just my wishful fantasy. Then Donatella went off to the w.c. leaving her crumpled bag under the table and I was suddenly aware of Iphigenia's bare, tanned knees and the soft curve of her neck where the skin was silken and the scent of her flesh. I almost reeled from the erotic clamor of my senses. I think it might have been then that she touched me for the first time, putting her fingers over my hand where it lay on the table, next to my now-shut notebook, stroking the knuckles delicately and making all my skin shiver, bringing the saliva to my mouth and sending a bolt of sensation to my penis. She asked in a teasing voice if I would write something about her someday when I wrote about Rome and maybe something too about her friend the beautiful enchanting Donatella and I said yes yes, I would. Certo. I do not know how or in what words we made our date to meet apart from Donatella but at one point in the afternoon I remember Iphigenia's and Donatella's heads close together whispering, then laughing girlishly and almost wildly, as I turned from the waiter after ordering us three glasses of white wine. Also I remember the cool Donatella's solemnity in shaking my hand once she and Iphigenia finally rose to go. After letting go my fingers she placed the hand I had shaken on the strap of her shoulder bag, arm across her soft up-swelling breasts, and smiled at me beamingly in her Roman beauty and I could not think of what to say except Addio. I stood, leaning across the cluttered table to say this formal goodbye to them both, but even as my lips pursed to speak I remember Iphigenia moving forward in a rush and putting her soft hands on my shoulders and kissing both my cheeks, and how they blazed with those kisses. I let her kiss me, blinking, but otherwise stood like a statue. I could feel my penis growing hard, Iphigenia's very lightness and delicacy summoning up this rude and pointed sexual arousal. They left quickly, which was a mercy to me, as I was startling to clownishly bulge out the leg of my summer trousers, and I saw them lean together as they reached the sun-blazing street and Donatella put her arm around Iphigenia, squeezing her so hard she tottered. I sat down, the sweat growing cold on my skin, and looked at the fine black dregs in my espresso cup. I picked up the cup and drank. It was bitter. I shivered at the thought of fucking Iphigenia and Donatella together. Why not?

*

I see her first through the glass doorway. She’s wearing a trenchcoat and high heels and her face is heavily made up, and appears tense, almost desperate. When she enters the lobby, it’s like an electrical charge – all the men present snap to attention. She is already tall and her heels make her tower; I think of a verse in the Song of Solomon, comparing the beloved to “the tower of Bathsheba.” Her wide smile – devastating to the men observing us – causes me to spring to my feet. I am not even in control of my body, I am barely aware of myself, as I hurry across the lobby to her. We embrace and I kiss her cheeks and lead her to the table. When I ask if I can take her coat she shakes her head and, smiling like a woman with a secret, says in an odd little voice that she’d prefer to keep it in. The moustached bartender, approaches. She asks in a strong, slightly hoarse voice for a Prosecco. Then we look at each other. What are you drinking? A Negroni. Can I taste? Yes. I picked it up and handed it to her. She put her fingers over mine and held the glass, bowing her head slightly, to her lips. She sipped. Umm. A faint smudge of lipstick discolored the rim of the glass. As soon as she had the Prosecco, we toasted, clinking rims. It’s good, she said. She was looking around. The maitre d’, a handsome man, stood ramrod-stiff, writing with a fountain pen in the ledger. It’s nice here. My excitement was rising, rising to a brutal pitch. I scratched the backs of my hands. Suddenly my whole body seemed to be itching. Are you sure you want to leave your coat on? I asked Iphigenia. I mean, it’s warm in here. She smiled, looking straight into my eyes. Si. Don’t worry. Aren’t you going to show me your room? I stood, almost with a lurch. Ipigenia drank the last of the Prosecco in her fluted glass, set it down carefully, and stood gracefully, slipping her arm under mine. Turning my head, I asked Vicenzo to place the drinks on my bill. He nodded. We walked at a smart pace the few streets to my flat and climbed the spiral staircase. It took a long time to get the key to work. Iphigenia stood with her lips curved in the enigmatic smile. Oh. It’s happening. You’re going to do it. Yes. Yes. I shut the door and put on the latch and, as I turned, I saw the trenchcoat slide from Iphigenia’s shoulders. She was naked – no, not naked, she was wearing thin gray silk majorette shorts and a lacy bra. Her breasts were round and full and her hips bare and supple.. Underthings she must have bought in one of those quiet little shops with the efficient, attractive salesgirls where all the lace bras and panties and silk dressing gowns were kept in sliding drawers, nothing at all on display. A gold crucifix hung on its chain into her cleavage. We kissed – a hard, long and spine-tingling kiss. She kicked off her heels as her tongue searched in my mouth. Do you want this? Si. Every few bursts of kissing we had to come up for air, and Iphigenia made grasping sounds when I pressed my mouth to her breasts, one after the other, sucking her nipples through the lace of her bra and biting the smooth sides – once, I felt the crucifix on my lips, and I took it between my teeth and I bit it lightly. We both shivered. Do you want to fuck me? She asked in English. I laughed. What’s funny? I was holding her waist; she pulled back slightly to look at my face. Nothing. Nothing.


As I laid her flat on the bed bed I had a vision of the dead Christ being laid on a sheet on the ground. Crouched over Iphigenia I kissed her arms and her exposed throat and her breasts. I kissed her long, bare midriff, and her smooth hips. She mooaned slightly, like a pigeon, as I kissed her I placed my body over hers and, as I stared at the crucifix between her breasts, felt her soft hand positioning me, and then she placed both hands on my buttocks, raised her hips a little, writhed, and then clamped her legs tightly around my legs, pulling me in. We struggled together. Sweat dripped from my hair. I shut my eyes as Iphigenia licked my neck, fastened her lips and teeth on one of my earlobes. When she pressed her mouth to mine and forced her tongue into it, I let go. I cried out into her mouth.

*

Iphigenia asked me to get the cigarettes out of her coat pocket. She watched me walk over and crouch naked by the crumpled trenchcoat. They were French cigarettes in a blue package, Gauloises. Look for the matches, she said. I did. She had a pack from the Hotel Eden. I tossed the pack and matchbook onto the taut sheet between her legs. I sat on the edge of the bed and watched her as she slipped a cigarette out of the pack, placed it between her lips – but when she reached for the matchbook, I snapped it up and, smartly, tore loose and struck a match lit for her. She bent forward to touch the flame to her cigarette. She drew in smoke sharply. I shook out the match and tossed it into the glass ashtray on the bedside table. I don’t usually smoke, she said, with a vague comical shrug.

As I leaned forward, she took the cigarette from her mouth and held it to mine. I drew in the rough smoke and breathed it out through my nostrils. It’s good after sex, she said with a slight laugh.

Jealousy is a disease of the mind. If you had no imagination you could not be jealous. Iphigenia’s comment, by creating in my imagination a clear picture of her sharing a cigarette after sex with another man, gave me a rush of adrenaline. After a moment, feeling unable to control my expression, I turned away from her.

Hey, she said. Look at me. I did. She pushed herself forward, holding the cigarette away from our faces, and kissed me. I shut my eyes. The sensation of her lips lightly sweeping back and forth on mine so aroused me that my arms and legs began to tremble. She went on touching her lips so my lips, so lightly that the sensations were shivers, apprehensions rather than sensations.


After my orgasm I lay still for an interval, I do not know if it was long or short. My breathing thinned. Iphigenia was holding me gently. She breathed out as I breathed in. We were stuck together by sweat. The fine hair in her armpits was damp.

She rubbed her forehead on my chin. Va bene? she asked. My body was still heaving, my breath cracked. My lips were parched. Si, I said. How many? she asked, when we were tucked under the crisp sheet, facing each other. What? She giggled. How many women? Have you -- you know. I touched her breasts. Fingered a nipple. It was soft. The crucifix hung against the pillow. She was smiling. Finally, I said, I'm really just interested in you right now. She smiled dreamily. Are you ready to go again? I lifted the sheet to show her. Bellissima, she whispered. Come here. I could not get enough of the smoothness, the roundness of her nude body. She turned over and slid a pillow under her stomach. Fuck me like this, she said. Go on go on. Pronto. I placed myself against her. Wait, she said. Not there. Down. I slid into her easily. I felt her shiver. Agh, she said. Inside, she was squeezing it; I thrust and withdrew, and she said, Harder than that. Per favore. Soon I was making the headboard shake. She cried out. I let go again and the explosive shiver rushed up my spine --


Die. I was dead. No, you're alive. Alive to light swimming on the ceiling. It was dawn. Was it? I fell asleep and listened to radio voices. They turned into the calm voices of my mother and father.


Was that good? she whispered. I could only hum against her spine in answer.


If I get pregnant, she declared later, clear-voiced, long pause, I'll kill you.


She smiled at me as she woke. Almost featureless while asleep, she might have been any woman in the world, but as soon as she smiled she was so clearly herself that my penis prickled to attention. No, no, she said, laughing, she had to shower and dash to home to change, then hurry to the office.


I shut my eyes. I heard the shower squeak on and the crack and splash of water on tiles and then it shut off and after a moment she emerged rubbing her hair between folds of my towel. Aren’t you showering today? I spent only moments in the shower, soaping my body quickly and squatting to let the hot water rinse it off at once from all over my body. Iphigenia was sitting on the edge of the bed in her trenchcoat buttoned to the neck. At the corner bar we stood in a crowd of working people to drink our coffees.

She wouldn’t let me walk her to the bus. No, she said. I must rush. She stood on her tiptoes to embrace me and we crushed out mouths together. You’re stronger than you look, she said. She was smiling and her eyes were light dazzling green and her hair soft from having been just blown dry. I was became hard again as Iphigenia she brushed the backs of her fingers over my beard bristles. Go shave, you savage, she said. Tonight? I asked Si, ragazza mio.

I watched her striding swiftly with her hands stuck into the trenchcoat pockets. Clack clack clack. Then she turned a corner. I listened until I could no longer hear the staccato footsteps.


I spent the day in bed, measuring time by the bells and the swelling or falling roar of traffic. I felt no desire to do anything. That day I masturbated twice, catching the semen in a washcloth. As the temperature rose the air flowing through the shutters became charged with the stench of exhaust fumes and by afternoon I was bathed in sweat.

In the dusk Iphigenia was sitting with her friends at one of the outside caffé tables. She was in a spare peach colored dress, her arms bare and the crucifix aglow in setting sunlight on her smooth pale skin. And with her was Donatella, to whom she had just finished telling everything.

*

Donatella sometimes spent afternoons with us sitting in caffes or strolling the narrow Roman streets under arcades that ended at the sunlit spray of fountains. She was wearing a mouse-gray velvet dress with thin straps on her bare rounded shoulders when I first saw her, but later I became accustomed to seeing her in silk pants that fit her narrow buttocks tightly and sleeveless blouses that revealed tufts of light hair at the unshaven armpits and the blunt nipples in their coin-sized aureoles. She carried a green leather bag she’d bought impulsively on a trip of Florence and in it were magazines, tissues, paperback books. She had a smug widely smiling mouth that spouted obscenities suavely and with great satisfaction and aplomb. She once took off her heels under the metal grated table and I watched her stretch her shapely, slender toes in the speckled light-shadow against the Roman pavement. Donatella and Iphigenia worked together at the offices of the magazine and I imagined they’d shared men.

Donatalla’s married lover, Fabrizio, often took her away from Rome and since Iphigenia lived with her family we used Donatella’s place to make love and to lie in together on the twisted sheet sharing a piece of fruit. One bite me, one bite you. Iphigenia did not want to stay with me in my stark rooms, it was a dirty neighborhood she insisted but it was not too bad for a writer, after all one had to save money.


Each time we left the flat Iphigenia took the befouled sheets home with her to wash.


Alone in the narrow bathroom I examined Donatella’s combs and her pill jars and opened her perfumes and creams and sniffed them. It was not long before Iphigenia asked me if I liked Donatella, and if I felt any stab of desire in her presence, and I hummed against her flowing, flower-scented hair that I might have felt such a desire once or even twice, and Iphigenia writhed as if in pain under the sheet and bit my shoulder.

Ow.

You deserved that, she said into the booming Roman dusk. The clamor of traffic seemed to flow right over our sweating bodies.


In the pulsating heat of the Roman summer we were often too listless, too drained by sex, to leave Donatella's flat, or even to abandon the wide luxury of the bed and the high, arched ceiling of the sleeping alcove where we stretched out naked, sweating, our bodies making limp contact only at the toes, ankles, thighs or fingertips, drowsing off at weird intervals throughout the afternoon only to wake with sudden, wry smiles – I remember Iphigenia's teeth ablaze in her tanned face. I remember her peeling us an orange.


*


Dusk. Yet because of the palazzo’s tree sized windows the great rooms are still swimming with light. Clamor engulfs you as you step over the threshold. Waiters are moving through the crush of people with trays of hors d'oevres held in white-gloved hands. Signore Vitelli booms his part of a conversation in a far corner. His smile radiates from the skin about his eyes; sharply etched crow's feet are its signature.

An art show? A diplomatic fete? I should be more careful in my diary about noting the facts. I think it was sometime in the autumn – I remember yellow plane leaves scattered on the gravel driveway.

Iphigenia and Donatella had already arrived. Iphigenia was eating a strawberry. She pressed a piece of it into my mouth with her tongue as she clasped me in sun-browned arms. Then she held a champagne flute to my lips. It foamed as I drank.
Donatella, her armpits glamorously unshaven, sat on the arm of the sofa while Iphigenia perched in my lap. I saw Signore Vitelli casting us interested glances. People were speaking to me and I missed words at random as Iphigenia traced figure eights on my nape.

Once I strolled over to the bar and when I returned the two were sitting tight together on the green leather sofa, slim brown- rms clasped sedately about each other – Donatella's clanking with bracelets. Iphigenia's auburn head rested on Donatella's shoulder and the darker one was petting her face lightly, like the face of a statue. And the gauzy window curtains blew in around them.


Signore Vitelli finally advanced to shake my hand. His was large and rough. He had a weathered boy-angel look about him that I remembered from the magazine photo spreads. We discussed his winery. I don't know how it happened but in my next image we are standing together outside the glassed doors on the loggia and he is gripping my shoulder, his fingers intense.

Tell me about your girls.

I laugh to disparage this vision.

They're not mine. They just settled on me, like tufts of blowing milkweed. They floated down and I happened to be sitting there when they landed, scribbling in my little notebook.

Your notebook. Are you a journalist?

I shook my head.

Scrittore.

Ah! he groaned. A writer. What do you write?

Right now, a novel.

About what?

I shook my head.

Non so. Possibly about Rome.

He laughed. Then after a brief pause Signore Vitelli asked, his voice deepening, if I would like the opportunity to talk sometime with his ex-wife, the movie star Amanda Crespi.

Certo. I would be – (I sought the word) overjoyed. Grazie.

He waved a hand.

Leave me your address in Rome. I will write to her.

*

I glanced out the window. Another vaporetto was chugging past with a few passengers sitting in the lit up inside. Dusk merging sky and sea.

Amanda Crespi was smoking; I had not seen her light the cigarette. I pressed the button of my tape recorder and the spool inside it began to churn. I placed it on the glass coffee table between us. Then I sank into a chair and sat back with my eyes shut.

Talk, she said. Oh it's so vain and so gruesome. The past. Who cares? She breathed out smoke. You want to know about my movies? Or about who I slept with once upon a time long ago?

I smiled.

I don't know.

What will interest your readers? Maybe a little bit of both. Should I tell you about me as a little girl? How I became a whore, then a famous actress? It was all a great and sordid accident.


Do you plan to stay on in Venice for the winter? I ask.

No.

She bends forward and crushes out the cigarette.

The Gritti is too expensive. And everything else in Venice is too uncomfortable, too damp, too ruined. Tourists will settle for anything. Tourism makes prices soar as accommodations worsen. Every winter I stay in Venice for three weeks, maybe one month. Right now I have an agent arranging for me to buy a house in Sicily. Do you know it? This is a small house near Palermo. The people who own it now call it a villa but it is just a farmhouse, it has sheds for animals.

Why Sicily?

Oh. She laughs. Sicilians really do not give a fuck. About fame, about movies. They care about money, yes, and sweets. I can go to the market in Palermo and no one recognizes me. Why don't you come to visit? We will pack a little basket with a few bottles of Sicilian vino bianco – Sicilians have good wine, brilliant wine sometimes, but they don't make an effort to distinguish good wine from great wine, they're not snobs – and some bread and lemons and fresh sardines, and walk up a path under the pines where it is cool and we can sit on the bare ground and watch the sea while we eat and drink the wine until we're very sleepy, and then you can turn on your tape recorder or take out your pencil and notebook and make me talk all about my life as a whore.


Do you know that in 1969 the grand palazzo where Visconti filmed The Leopard with Burt Lancaster and a young Claudia Cardinale – such a delightful girl, prankish like a kid – was smashed by a big earthquake, and collapsed all but for the façade. Gone. Lampedusa once boasted that it took an hour for the maid to open all the windows in that house, an hour and a half to shut them.

For most of two thousand years Sicily was ruled by Arabs who loved the fertile land full of streams and rivers the pine forests the orange and lemon and hazlenut trees. Grandly fertile because of the volcanic activity of Mt. Etna. The Arabs had schools and harems and astronomical observatories in Sicily and their poets praised it as the nearest place to Paradise. The Sicilian lemons are extraordinary.

Tell me about Claudia Cardinale.

Ah. The beast shows his teeth. I am sure as you’ve seen her films you know that she is beautiful. When I knew her she was ripe. She had just ripened and was still a girl. Deeply seductive with wide mysterious eyes you drown in. What a piece.

Did you fuck her?

No, darling. No. No my darling. She had not those tastes. My English is going to pieces. Maybe I’ve finally done it – had too much to drink. Claudia. Claudia. Even the name – it excites me. It calls up such visions. Some people said we were like cats, after each other’s eyes. Vile rumor. We were like sisters. I spent hours one night in a hotel room in Taormina braiding her hair. She was half-naked and she moaned when I touched her. I kissed her neck where the artery pulsed. Burt Lancaster was in love with her. She spurned him. He came to me in tears. A beautiful ruin of a man. Why wouldn’t Claudia have him? What must one do? What must one say? He could have had me but he wanted Claudia. I told him to put on his best suit and comb his hair and then go to the Wunderbar on a terrace overlooking the dark blue Ionian sea and wait for us. I went to Claudia’s room and knocked. Yes? It’s Amanda. She opened the door. She was holding a sheet to her breasts. In the bed behind her sprawled a pretty Italian boy. As I stood in the doorway smiling at him he turned his body so that the sheet fell from him and I saw his naked figura looking like it could have been painted on a Greek jar. Ai, he said, Claudia amore, bring your friend here. Do you want to come to bed with us? Claudia hissed at him to shut up. Zitto! Go into the bathroom, she said. Shave. Do something. Let us talk. He rose lazily and sauntered into the bathroom, glancing at me over his shoulder. Ecco, Claudia, I said. Here it is. Signore Lancaster is in love with you. He came to me tonight with tears in his eyes. He wants you. It’s burning him up. She shook her head, gave a grimace of contempt. He is a man, I told her. Not like this boy you have here. The faucets were running and I didn’t know if he could hear me. He might have been kneeling with his ear pressed to the keyhole. Signore Lancaster is a man of delicacy, I told her. Take him to bed. He will handle your body like a rose. She bit in her lower lip and sucked on it and stared at me with that expression she has of thinking about one thing in the world very intensely, or maybe of nothing at all. So that you who are standing before her might as well have disappeared. Fine, she said. I go. But only once. Only tonight. She let the sheet fall. Where is he now? I told her. I sat on the bed watching her dress. She put on a silk blouse, a skirt, high heels, pearl earrings. Our eyes met in the mirror and we both smiled. The boy came out of the bathroom. He stood there naked. His face was full of anguish. Claudia, he moaned, Claudia. She flipped her hair and gazed at him for a moment quite seriously and then left, click click click down the hotel hallway. Come here, I said to the boy. He stood before me; in his eyes tears were forming. Let her go, I said. I’ll comfort you.

At dawn I passed Claudia in the hotel lobby. She looked dazzling as ever. She had refreshed her makeup. In front of the bellboys, we gave each other a kiss on the mouth.

But it never went further than that?

No. Wait. That night Burt Lancaster found me at a table in the hotel bar. He thanked me – he was gentile. Beautiful sad manners. What shoulders. What kind eyes. We ordered champagne and sat together smoking and when he held out his lighter to light my cigarette I touched his wrist with my hand. That awe inspiring shiver. The shiver of the real. He was more than grateful to me. He felt desire. Claudia had made him promise but now after thinking about it he also wanted it very badly for himself. He said that he had been afraid of me before but now he saw that was ludicrous. In the room I put out all lights. I said that I would not mind if he called me by the name Claudia. Did he understand? He wept. He obliged me – he called me by her name. Claudia. Claudia. For the whole night.

As she finished her story, she breathed out a long plume of smoke, and then shut her eyes and let her head fall back on the sofa cushion.


*


The Sicilian hill town was not populated by ghosts but only by stones. The houses were of stone and so were the streets. Only the doors and shutters of the houses and the wide doors of the cathedral were of wood. Stone steps led down under stone porticos to lower stone streets cramped as alleyways enclosed by high stone walls.

I stood at a window, a mere aperture in a stone wall with green shutters, and saw a girl’s slim arm holding a match that flamed and she lit an oil lamp and carefully replaced the glass chimney then blew out the match. I saw her soft cheek and a gleaming eye in the shadows and then she turned, startled, and seeing me she stepped back into the darkness. I saw the whites of her eyes flash as she stepped back and was gone. I walked down the street quickly, turned a corner, and continued through the square past the church and a closed caffè. My shoes scraped and slipped on the round stones of the street. My breath steamed in the wintry air. When a cloud enveloped the village the light turned pure white and dazzling, and I shut my eyes to preserve them.

That night I listened to wind beating against the mountain. At dawn the rising sun gave a weak light that strengthened into a red dazzle. I never saw the girl again. I felt sure I would recognize her but I stayed in the hill town until two o’clock and nothing. Then I boarded a bus that pulled up before the tabachi in the stone square gushing exhaust fumes. On the way down the mountain through layers of cloud the bus rattled as if about to come apart. It jerked and jolted my head against the soiled antimacassar.