The Return Page 8

  Before long, they were married. At first, Paco would tell anyone prepared to listen what he thought of Clara’s photos and paintings. And Clara thought that Paco was intelligent and had good taste. As time went by, however, Paco lost interest in Clara’s esthetic efforts and wanted to have a child. Clara was thirty-five and at first she wasn’t keen on the idea, but she gave in, and they had a child. According to Clara, the child satisfied all her yearnings—that was the word she used. According to her friends, she was getting steadily worse, whatever that meant.

  On one occasion, for reasons irrelevant to this story, I had to spend a night in the city where Clara was living. I called her from the hotel, told her where I was, and we arranged to meet the following day. I would have preferred to see her that night, but after our previous encounter Clara regarded me, and perhaps with good reason, as a kind of enemy, so I didn’t insist.

  She was almost unrecognizable. She had put on weight and although she was wearing makeup her face looked worn, not so much by time as by frustration, which surprised me, since I’d never really thought that Clara aspired to anything. And if you don’t aspire to anything, how can you be frustrated? Her smile had also undergone a transformation. Before, it had been warm and slightly dumb, the smile of a young lady from a provincial capital, but it had become a mean, hurtful smile, and it was easy to read the resentment, rage and envy behind it. We kissed each other on the cheeks like a pair of idiots and then sat down; for a while we didn’t know what to say. I was the one who broke the silence. I asked about her son; she told me he was at day care, and then she asked me about mine. He’s fine, I said. We both realized that unless we did something, that meeting was going to become unbearably sad. How do I look? asked Clara. It was as if she were asking me to slap her. Same as ever, I replied automatically. I remember we had a coffee, then went for a walk along an avenue lined with plane trees, which led directly to the station. My train was about to leave. We said good-bye at the door of the station, and that was the last time I saw her.

  We did, however, talk on the phone before she died. I used to call her every three or four months. I had learned from experience not to touch on personal or intimate matters (a bit like sticking to sports when chatting with strangers in bars), so we talked about her family, which, in those conversations, remained as abstract as a cubist poem, or her son’s school, or her job at the office; she was still at the same place, and over the years she had got to know about all her colleagues and their lives, and all the problems the executives were having—those secrets gave her an intense and perhaps excessive pleasure. On one occasion I tried to get her to say something about her husband, but at that point Clara clammed up. You deserve the best, I told her once. That’s strange, replied Clara. What’s strange? I asked. It’s strange that you should say that—you, of all people, said Clara. I quickly tried to change the subject, claimed I was running out of coins (I’ve never had a phone of my own, and never will; I always called from a phone booth), hurriedly said good-bye and hung up. I realized I couldn’t face another argument with Clara; I couldn’t listen to her working up another one of her endless justifications.

  One night, not long ago, she told me she had cancer. Her voice was as cold as ever, the voice in which, years before, she had announced that she was going to compete in a beauty contest, the voice in which she recounted her life with the detachment of a bad storyteller, putting exclamation marks in all the wrong places, and passing over what she should have gone into, the parts where she should have cut to the quick. I remember asking her if she had already been to see a doctor, as if she had diagnosed the cancer herself (or with Paco’s help). Of course, she said. At the other end of the line I heard something like a croak. She was laughing. We talked briefly about our children, and then (she must have been feeling lonely or bored) she asked me to tell her something about my life. I made something up on the spot and said I’d call her back the following week. That night I slept very badly. I had one nightmare after another, and woke up suddenly, shouting, convinced that Clara had lied to me: she didn’t have cancer; something was happening to her, for sure, the way things had been happening for the last twenty years, little, fucked-up things, all full of shit and smiles, but she didn’t have cancer. It was five in the morning. I got up and walked to the Paseo Marítimo, with the wind at my back, which was strange because the wind usually blows in from the sea, and hardly ever from the opposite direction. I didn’t stop until I got to the phone booth next to one of the biggest cafés on the Paseo. The terrace was empty, the chairs were chained to the tables, but a little way off, right near the seaside, a homeless guy was sleeping on a bench, with his knees drawn up, and every now and then he shuddered, as if he were having nightmares.

  My address book only contained one other number in Clara’s city. I called it. After a long time, a woman’s voice answered. I said who I was, but suddenly found I couldn’t say anything more. I thought she’d hang up, but I heard the click of a lighter and smoke rushing in through lips. Are you still there? asked the woman. Yes, I said. Have you talked to Clara? Yes, I said. Did she tell you she had cancer? Yes, I said. Well, it’s true.

  All the years since I had met Clara suddenly came tumbling down on top of me, everything my life had been, most of it nothing to do with her. I don’t know what else the woman said at the other end of the line, hundreds of miles away; I think I began to cry in spite of myself, like in the poem by Rubén Darío. I fumbled in my pockets for cigarettes, listened to fragments of stories: doctors, operations, mastectomies, discussions, different points of view, deliberations, the activities of a Clara I couldn’t know or touch or help, not now. A Clara who could never save me now.

  When I hung up, the homeless guy was standing about five feet away. I hadn’t heard him approaching. He was very tall, too warmly dressed for the season, and he was staring at me, as if he were near-sighted or worried I might make a sudden move. I was so sad I didn’t even get a fright, although afterwards, walking back through the twisting streets of the town center, I realized that, seeing him, I had forgotten Clara for an instant, and that was just the start.

  We talked on the phone quite often after that. Some weeks I called her twice a day: they were short, stupid conversations, and there was no way to say what I really wanted to say, so I talked about anything, the first thing that came into my head, some nonsense I hoped would make her smile. Once I got nostalgic and tried to summon up days gone by, but Clara put on her icy armor, and I soon got the message and gave up on nostalgia. As the date of the operation approached, my calls became more frequent. Once I talked with her son. Another time with Paco. They both seemed well, they sounded well, at least not as nervous as me. Although I’m probably wrong about that. Certainly wrong, in fact. Everyone’s worried about me, said Clara one afternoon. I thought she meant her husband and her son, but “everyone” included many more people, many more than I could imagine, everyone. The day before she was to go into the hospital, I called her in the afternoon. Paco answered. Clara wasn’t there. No one had seen her or heard from her in two days. From Paco’s tone of voice I sensed that he suspected she might be with me. I told him straight up: She’s not here, but that night I hoped with all my heart that she would come to my place. I waited for her with the lights on, and finally fell asleep on the sofa, and dreamed of a very beautiful woman who was not Clara: a tall, slim woman, with small breasts, long legs, and deep brown eyes, who was not and never would be Clara, a woman whose presence obliterated Clara, reduced her to a poor, lo
st, trembling forty-something-year-old.

  She didn’t come to my apartment.

  The next day I called Paco. And two days after that I phoned again. There was still no sign of Clara. The third time I called Paco, he talked about his son and complained about Clara’s behavior. Every night I wonder where she could be, he said. From his voice and the turn the conversation was taking, I could tell that what he needed from me, or someone, anyone, was friendship. But I was in no condition to provide him with that solace.

  Joanna Silvestri

  for Paula Massot

  Here I am, Joanna Silvestri, thirty-seven years of age, profession: porn star, on my back in the Clinique Les Trapèzes in Nîmes, watching the afternoons go by, listening to the stories of a Chilean detective. Who is this man looking for? A ghost? I know a lot about ghosts, I told him the second afternoon, the last time he came to see me, and he smiled like an old rat, like an old rat agreeing listlessly, like an improbably polite old rat. Anyway, thank you for the flowers and the magazines, but I can barely remember the person you’re looking for, I told him. Don’t rack your brains, he said, I’ve got plenty of time. When a man says he has plenty of time, he’s already snared (so how much time he has is irrelevant), and you can do whatever you like with him. But of course that isn’t true. Sometimes I get to thinking about the men who’ve lain at my feet, and I shut my eyes and when I open them again the walls of the room are painted other colors, not the bone white I see every day, but streaky vermilion, nauseous blue, like the daubs of that awful painter, Attilio Corsini. Awful paintings I’d rather not remember, but I do, and that memory flushes out others, like an enema, other memories with a sepia tone to them, which set the afternoons wavering slightly and are hard to bear at first but in the end they can even be fun. I haven’t had that many men at my feet, actually: two or three, and it didn’t last, they’re all behind me now—that’s just the way of the world. That’s what I was thinking, and I would have liked to share it with him, even though I didn’t know him at all, but I didn’t say any of this to the Chilean detective. And as if to make up for that lack of generosity, I called him Detective, I might have said something about solitude and intelligence, and although he hastened to say, I’m not a detective, Madame Silvestri, I could tell that he was glad I’d said it; I was looking into his eyes when I spoke, and although he didn’t seem to turn a hair, I noticed the fluttering, as if a bird had flown through his head. One thing stood in for the other: I didn’t say what I was thinking, but I said something that I knew he would like. I said something that I knew would bring back pleasant memories. As if someone, preferably a stranger, were to speak to me now about the Civitavecchia Adult Film Festival or the Berlin Erotic Film Fair, or the Barcelona Exhibition of Pornographic Cinema and Video, and mention my triumphs, my real and imaginary triumphs, or about 1990—the best year of my life—when I went to Los Angeles, almost under duress, on a Milan-LA flight that I thought would be exhausting but in fact it went by like a dream, like the dream I had on the plane (it must have been somewhere over the Atlantic): I dreamed that we were heading for Los Angeles but going via Asia, with stops in Turkey, India and China, and from the window—I don’t know why the plane was flying so low, but at no point were we, the passengers, at risk—I could see trains stretching away in vast caravans, a mad but precisely orchestrated railway mobilization, like an enormous clockwork mechanism spread out over the region, not a part of the world that I know (except for a trip to India in 1987, which is better forgotten), and there were people embarking and disembarking and goods being loaded and unloaded, all of it clearly visible, as if I were looking at one of those animations that economists use to explain how things work, their origins and destinations, their movement and inertia. And when I arrived in Los Angeles, Robbie Pantoliano, Adolfo Pantoliano’s brother, was waiting for me at the airport, and as soon as I saw Robbie I could tell he was a gentleman, quite the opposite of his brother Adolfo (may he rest in peace or do his time in purgatory, I wouldn’t wish hell on anyone), and outside there was a limousine waiting for me, the kind you only see in Los Angeles, not even in New York, only in Beverly Hills or Orange County, and we went to the place they’d rented for me, a unit by the beach, it was small but sweet, and Robbie and his secretary Ronnie stayed to help me unpack my bags (though I said really I’d prefer to do it on my own) and explain how everything worked in the unit, as if I didn’t know what a microwave oven was—Americans are like that sometimes, so nice they end up being rude—and then they put on a video so I could see the actors I’d be working with: Shane Bogart, who I knew already from a movie I’d done with Robbie’s brother; Bull Edwards, I didn’t know him; Darth Krecick, the name rang a bell; Jennifer Pullman, another stranger to me, and so on, three or four others, and then Robbie and Ronnie left me on my own, and I double locked the doors as they had insisted I must, and then I took a bath, wrapped myself in a black bathrobe and looked for an old movie on TV, something to relax me completely, and at some point I fell asleep there on the sofa. The next day we started shooting. It was all so different from the way I remembered it. In two weeks we made four movies in all, with more or less the same team, and working for Robbie Pantoliano was like playing and working at the same time; it was like one of those day trips that office workers and bureaucrats organize in Italy, especially in Rome: once a year they all go out to the country for a meal and leave the office and its worries behind, but this was better, the sun was better, and the apartments and the sea, and catching up with the girls I’d known before, and the atmosphere on the set: debauched but fresh, the way it should be, and I think it came up when I was talking with Shane Bogart and one of the girls, the way things had changed, and naturally, for a start, I put it down to the death of Adolfo Pantoliano, who was a thug and a crook of the worst kind, a guy who had no respect, not even for his own long-suffering whores; when a bastard like that disappears, you’re bound to notice the difference, but Shane Bogart said no, it wasn’t that; Pantoliano’s death, which had come as a relief, even to his own brother, was just a detail in the bigger picture, the industry was undergoing major changes, he said, because of a combination of apparently unrelated factors: money, new players coming in from other sectors, the disease, the demand for a product that would be different but not too different; then they started talking about money and the way a lot of porn stars were crossing over to the regular movie industry at the time, but I wasn’t listening, I was thinking back to what they’d said about the disease, and remembering Jack Holmes, who’d been California’s number one porn star just a few years before, and when we finished up that day I said to Robbie and Ronnie that I’d like to find out how Jack Holmes was doing, and asked them if they had his number, if he was still living in Los Angeles. And although Robbie and Ronnie thought it was a crazy idea at first, eventually they gave me Jack’s phone number and told me to call him if that’s what I wanted to do, but not to expect him to be coherent, or to hear the voice I remembered from the old days. That night I had dinner with Robbie and Ronnie and Sharon Grove, who had crossed over to horror and even claimed that she was going to be in the next Carpenter or Clive Barker film, which annoyed Ronnie, hearing those two lumped together, because, for him, only a handful of directors came anywhere near Carpenter, and Danny Lo Bello was there at the dinner too—I had a thing with him when we were working together in Milan—and Patricia Page, his eighteen-year-old wife, who only worked in Danny’s movies, with a contract stipulating that only her husband was allowed to penetrate her, with th
e other guys she just sucked their cocks, and even that she did reluctantly; the directors weren’t too happy with her, and according to Robbie sooner or later she’d either have to change careers or her and Danny would have to come up with some really sensational numbers. So there I was, having dinner in one of the best restaurants in Venice Beach, looking out at the sea, exhausted after a hard day’s work, not paying much attention to the lively conversation at our table—I was miles away, thinking of Jack Holmes, remembering the way he looked: a very tall, thin guy with a long nose and long, hairy arms like the arms of an ape, but what kind of ape would Jack have been? An ape in captivity, no doubt about that, a melancholy ape or maybe the ape of melancholy, which might seem like the same thing but it’s not, and when dinner was over, it wasn’t too late for me to call Jack at home—people have dinner early in California, sometimes they finish before it gets dark—I couldn’t wait any longer, I don’t know what came over me, I asked Robbie for his cell phone and took myself off to a sort of jetty, all made of wood, a kind of miniature wooden pier exclusively for tourists, with waves breaking under it, long, low, almost foamless waves that took an eternity to dissipate, and I phoned Jack Holmes. I honestly didn’t expect him to answer. At first I didn’t recognize his voice, it was like Robbie said, and he didn’t recognize mine either. It’s me, I said, Joanna Silvestri, I’m in Los Angeles. Jack was quiet for a long time and all of a sudden I realized I was shaking, the telephone was shaking, the wooden jetty was shaking, the wind had turned cold, the wind that was blowing between the jetty’s pilings and ruffling the surface of those interminable, darkening waves, and then Jack said, It’s been such a long time, Joanna, great to hear your voice, and I said, It’s great to hear yours, Jack, and then I stopped shaking and stopped looking down and looked at the horizon, the lights of the restaurants along the beach—red, blue, yellow—which seemed sad at first but comforting too, and then Jack said, When can I see you, Joannie, and I didn’t realize straightaway that he had called me Joannie, for a couple of seconds I was floating on air like I was high or weaving a chrysalis around myself, but then I realized and laughed and Jack knew why I was laughing without needing to ask or needing me to tell him anything. Whenever you like, Jack, I replied. Well, he said, I don’t know if you’ve heard that I’m not as well as I used to be. Are you on your own, Jack? Yes, he said, I’m always on my own. Then I hung up and asked Robbie and Ronnie how to get to Jack’s place, and they said I was bound to get lost, and shouldn’t even think of spending the night because we were shooting early the next day, and I probably wouldn’t be able to get a taxi to take me there, Jack lived near Monrovia, in a shabby old bungalow that was practically falling down, and I told them I wanted to go see Jack however hard it might be, and Robbie said, Take my Porsche, you can have it as long as you turn up on time tomorrow, and I kissed Ronnie and Robbie and got into the Porsche and started driving through the streets of Los Angeles, which had just begun to succumb to the night, the cloak of night falling, like in a song by Nicola Di Bari, or the wheels of the night rolling on, and I didn’t want to put on any music, though I have to admit I was tempted by Robbie’s sound system—CD or laser-disc or ultrasound or something—but I didn’t need music, it was enough to step on the accelerator and feel the hum of the engine; I must have got lost at least a dozen times, and the hours went by and every time I asked someone the best way to get to Monrovia I felt freer, like I didn’t care if I spent the whole night driving around in the Porsche, and twice I even caught myself singing, and finally I got to Pasadena, and from there I took Highway 210 to Monrovia, where I spent another hour looking for Jack’s place, and when I found his bungalow, after midnight, I sat in the car for a while, unable and unwilling to get out, looking at myself in the mirror, with my hair in a mess and my face as well, my eyeliner had run and my lipstick was smudged and there was dust from the road on my cheeks, as if I’d run all the way and not come in Robbie Pantoliano’s Porsche, or as if I’d been crying, but in fact my eyes were dry (a little bit red, maybe, but dry), and my hands were steady and I felt like laughing, as if my food at the beachside restaurant had been spiked with some kind of drug, and I’d only just realized and accepted that I was high or extremely happy. And then I got out of the car, put on the alarm—it didn’t feel like a very safe neighborhood—and headed for the bungalow, which matched Robbie’s description: a little house crying out for a coat of paint, with a rickety porch; a pile of boards that was practically falling down, but next to it there was a swimming pool, and although it was very small, the water was clean, I could see that straightaway because the pool light was on; I remember thinking that Jack had given up waiting for me or had fallen asleep, because there were no lights on in the house; the boards on the porch creaked under my feet; there was no bell, so I knocked twice on the door, first with my knuckles and then with the palm of my hand, and a light came on, I could hear someone saying something inside, and then the door opened and Jack appeared on the threshold, taller than ever, thinner than ever, and said, Joannie? as if he didn’t recognize me or still hadn’t completely woken up, and I said, Yes, Jack, it’s me, it was hard to find you but I found you in the end, and we hugged. That night we talked until three in the morning and Jack fell asleep at least twice during the conversation. Although he looked drained and weak, he was making an effort to keep his eyes open. But in the end he was just too tired and he said he was going to bed. I don’t have a spare room, Joannie, he said, so you choose: my bed or the sofa. Your bed, I said, with you. Good, he said, let’s go. He took a bottle of tequila and we went to his bedroom. I hadn’t seen such a messy room for years. Do you have an alarm clock? I asked him. No, Joannie, there are no clocks in this house, he said. Then he switched off the light, took off his clothes and got into bed. I stood there watching him, not moving. Then I went to the window and opened the curtains, hoping that the light of dawn would wake me up. When I got into bed, Jack seemed to be asleep, but he wasn’t, he drank another shot of tequila and then he said something I couldn’t understand. I put my hand on his stomach and stroked it until he fell asleep. Then I moved my hand down a bit and touched his cock, which was big and cold like a python. A few hours later I woke up, took a shower, made breakfast, and I even had time to tidy up the living room and the kitchen a bit. We had breakfast in bed. Jack seemed happy that I was there, but all he had was coffee. I said I’d come back that evening, I told him to expect me, I wouldn’t be late this time, and he said, I’ve got nothing to do Joannie, you can come whenever you like. It was almost like saying, It’s OK if you never come back, I knew that, but I decided that Jack needed me and that I needed him too. Who are you working with? he asked. Shane Bogart, I said. He’s a good kid, said Jack. We worked together once, I think it was when he was just starting out in the business; he’s enthusiastic, and he doesn’t like to make trouble. Yeah, he’s a good kid, I said. And where are you working? In Venice? Yeah, I said, in the same old house. But you know old Adolfo got killed? Of course I know, Jack, that was years ago. I haven’t been working much lately, he said. Then I gave him a kiss, a schoolgirl’s kiss on his narrow, chapped lips, and I left. The trip back was much quicker; the sun was running with me, the California morning sun, which has a metallic edge to it. And from then on, after each day of shooting, I’d go to Jack’s house or we’d go out together; Jack had an old station wagon and I rented a two-seater Alfa Romeo, and we’d drive off into the mountains, to Redlands, and then on Highway 10 to Palm Springs, Palm Desert, Indio, until we got to the Salto
n Sea, which is a lake, not a sea (and not a very pretty one either), where we ate macrobiotic food, that’s what Jack was eating then, for his health, he said, and one day we stepped on the gas in my Alfa and drove to Calipatria, to the southeast of the Salton Sea, and went to see a friend of Jack’s who lived in a bungalow that was even more run-down than the one Jack lived in, Graham Monroe was the guy’s name, but his wife and Jack called him Mezcalito, I don’t know why, maybe because he was partial to mescal, though all they drank while we were there was beer (I didn’t have any—beer is fattening), and the three of them went and sunbathed behind the bungalow and hosed each other down, and I put on my bikini and watched them, I prefer not to get too much sun, my skin’s very fair and I like to take care of it, but even though I stayed in the shade and didn’t let them wet me with the hose, I was glad to be there, watching Jack, his legs were much thinner than I remembered, and his chest seemed to have sunken in, only his cock was the same, and his eyes too, but no, the only thing that hadn’t changed was the great jackhammer, as the ads for his movies used to say, the ram that battered Marilyn Chambers’ ass; the rest of him, including his eyes, was fading as fast as my Alfa Romeo flying down the Aguanga Valley or across the Desert State Park lit by the glow of a moribund Sunday. I think we made love a couple of times. Jack had lost interest. He said after so many movies he was worn out. No one’s ever told me that before, I said. I like watching TV, Joannie, and reading mysteries. You mean horror stories? No, just mysteries, he said, with detectives, especially the ones where the hero dies at the end. But that never happens, I said. Of course it does, little sister, in old pulp novels you can buy by the pound. Actually, I didn’t see any books in his house, except for a medical reference book and three of those pulp novels he’d mentioned, which he must have read over and over again. One night, maybe the second night I spent at his house, or the third—Jack was as slow as a snail when it came to opening up and telling secrets—while we were drinking wine by the pool, he said he probably didn’t have long to live: You know how it is, Joannie, when your time’s up, your time’s up. I wanted to shout, Make love to me, let’s get married, let’s have a kid or adopt an orphan or buy a pet and a trailer and go traveling through California and Mexico—I guess I was tired and a bit drunk, it must have been a hard day on the set—but I didn’t say anything, I just shifted uneasily in my deck chair, looked at the lawn that I’d mowed myself, drank some more wine, and waited for Jack to go on and say the words that had to come next, but that was all he said. We made love that night for the first time in so long. It was very hard to get Jack going, his body wasn’t working anymore, only his will was still working, but he insisted on wearing a condom, a condom for that cock of his, as if any condom could hold it, at least it gave us a bit of a laugh, and in the end, we both lay on our sides, and he put his long, thick, flaccid cock between my legs, kissed me sweetly and fell asleep, but I stayed awake for ages, with the strangest ideas passing through my mind; there were moments when I felt sad and cried without making a sound so as not to wake him up or break our embrace, and there were moments when I felt happy, and I cried then too and hiccupped, not even trying to restrain myself, squeezing Jack’s cock between my thighs and listening to his breathing, saying: Jack, I know you’re pretending to be asleep, Jack, open your eyes and kiss me, but Jack went on sleeping or pretending to sleep, and I went on watching the thoughts race through my mind as if across a movie screen, flashing past, like a plow or a red tractor going a hundred miles an hour, leaving me almost no time to think, not that thinking was high on my list of priorities, and then there were moments when I wasn’t crying or feeling sad or happy, I just felt alive and I knew that Jack was alive and although there was a kind of theatrical backdrop to everything, as if it were all some pleasant, innocent, even decorous farce, I knew it was real and worthwhile, and then I put my head in the crook of his neck and fell asleep. One day around midday Jack turned up while we were shooting. I was on all fours, sucking Bull Edwards while Shane Bogart sodomized me. At first I didn’t realize that Jack had come onto the set, I was concentrating; it’s not easy to groan with an eight-inch dick moving back and forth in your mouth; I know really photogenic girls who lose it as soon as they start a blow job, they look terrible, maybe because they’re too into it, but I like to keep my face looking good. So my mind was on the job and, anyway, because of the position I was in, I couldn’t see what was happening around me, while Bull and Shane, who were on their knees, but upright, heads raised, they saw that Jack had just come in, and their cocks got harder almost straightaway, and it wasn’t just Bull and Shane who reacted, the director, Randy Cash, and Danny Lo Bello and his wife and Robbie and Ronnie and the technicians and everyone, I think, except for the cameraman, Jacinto Ventura, who was a bright, cheerful kid and a true professional, he literally couldn’t take his eyes off the scene he was filming, everyone except for him reacted in some way to Jack’s unexpected presence, and a silence fell over the set, not a heavy silence, not the kind that foreshadows bad news, but a luminous silence, so to speak, the silence of water falling in slow motion, and I sensed the silence and thought it must have been because I was feeling so good, because of those beautiful California days, but I also sensed something else, something indecipherable approaching, announced by the rhythmic bumping of Shane’s hips on my butt, by Bull’s gentle thrusting in my mouth, and then I knew that something was happening on the set, though I didn’t look up, and I knew that what was happening involved and revolved around me; it was as if reality had been torn, ripped open from one end to the other, like in those operations that leave a scar from neck to groin, a broad, rough, hard scar, but I hung on and kept concentrating till Shane took his cock out of my ass and came on my butt and just after that Bull ejaculated on my face. Then they turned me over and I could see the expressions on their faces, they were very focused on what they were doing, much more than usual, and as they caressed me and said tender words, I thought, There’s something going on here, there must be someone from the industry on the set, some big fish from Hollywood, and Shane and Bull have realized, they’re acting for him, and I remember glancing sideways at the silhouettes surrounding us in the shadows, all still, all turned to stone—that was exactly what I thought, they’ve turned to stone, it must be a really important producer—but I kept quiet, I wasn’t ambitious the way Shane and Bull were, I think it has something to do with being European, we have a different outlook, but I also thought, Maybe it isn’t a producer, maybe an angel has come onto the set, and that was when I saw him. Jack was next to Ronnie, smiling at me. And then I saw the others: Robbie, the technicians, Danny Lo Bello and his wife, Jennifer Pullman, Margo Killer, Samantha Edge, two guys in dark suits, Jacinto Ventura, who wasn’t looking into the viewfinder, and it was only then that I realized he wasn’t filming anymore, and for a second or a minute we all froze, as if we’d lost the capacity to speak and move, and the only one smiling (though he was quiet too) was Jack, whose presence seemed to sanctify the set, or that’s what I thought later, much later on, remembering that scene again and again: he seemed to be sanctifying our movie and our work and our lives. Then the minute came to an end, another minute began, someone said it was a wrap, someone brought bathrobes for Bull and Shane and me, Jack came over and gave me a kiss; I wasn’t in the other scenes they were shooting that day, so I said let’s go and have dinner in an Italian restaurant, I’d heard about one on Figueroa Street, and Robbie invited us to a party that one of his new business partners was throwing; Jack seem
ed reluctant but I convinced him in the end. So we went back to my place in the Alfa Romeo and talked and drank whiskey for a while, and then we went out to dinner and at about eleven we turned up at the party. Everyone was there and they all knew Jack or came over to be introduced to him. And then Jack and I went to his place and watched TV in the living room—there was a silent movie on—and kissed until we fell asleep. He didn’t come back to the set. I had another week’s work there, but I’d already decided to stay in Los Angeles for a while after the end of the shoot. Of course I had commitments in Italy and France, but I thought I could put them off, or I thought I’d be able to convince Jack to come with me; he’d been to Italy a number of times, he’d made some movies with La Cicciolina, which had been big hits—some with just me, and some with both of us; Jack liked Italy, so one night I told him what I was thinking. But I had to give up on that idea or hope, I had to wrench it out of my head and heart, or out of my cunt, as the women say back in Torre del Greco, and although I never completely gave up, somehow I understood Jack’s reluctance or his stubbornness, the luminous, fresh, honey-slow silence surrounding him and his few words, as if his tall thin figure were vanishing, and all of California along with it; in spite of my happiness, my joy, or what until shortly before I had thought of as happiness and joy, he was going, and I understood that his departure or farewell was a kind of solidification: strange, oblique, almost secret, but still a solidification, and the understanding, the certainty (if that’s what it was) made me happy and yet at the same time it made me cry, it made me keep fixing my eye make-up and made me see everything differently, as if I had X-ray vision, and that power or superpower made me nervous, but I liked it too; it was like being Marvilla, the daughter of the Queen of the Amazons, although Marvilla had dark hair and mine is blonde, and one afternoon, in Jack’s yard, I saw something on the horizon, I don’t know what, clouds, a bird of some kind, a plane, and I felt a pain so strong I fainted and lost control of my bladder and when I woke up I was in Jack’s arms and I looked into his grey eyes and began to cry and didn’t stop crying for a long time. Robbie and Ronnie came to the airport to see me off along with Danny Lo Bello and his wife, who were planning to visit Italy in a few months’ time. I said good-bye to Jack at his bungalow in Monrovia. Don’t get up, I said, but he got up and came to the door with me. Be a good girl, Joannie, he said, and write me some time. I’ll call you, I said, it’s not the end of the world. He was nervous and forgot to put on his shirt. I didn’t say anything; I picked up my bag and put it on the passenger seat of the Alfa Romeo. I don’t know why I thought that when I turned back to look at him for the last time he’d be gone and the space he’d occupied next to the rickety little wooden gate would be empty, so fear made me delay that moment, it was the first time I’d felt afraid in Los Angeles (on that visit I mean; there’d been plenty of fear and boredom the other times) and I was annoyed to be feeling afraid, and I didn’t want to turn around until I had opened the door of the Alfa Romeo and was ready to get in and drive away fast, and when I did finally open the door, I turned and Jack was there, standing by the gate, watching me, and then I knew that everything was all right, and I could go. That everything was all wrong, and I could go. That everything was sorrow, and I could go. And while the detective watches me out of the corner of his eye (he’s pretending to look at the foot of the bed, but I know he’s looking at my legs, my long legs underneath the sheets) and talks about a cameraman who worked with Mancuso or Marcantonio, a certain R. P. English, poor Marcantonio’s second cameraman, I know that in some sense I’m still in California, on my last trip to California, although I didn’t know that at the time, and Jack is still alive and looking at the sky, sitting on the edge of the pool with his feet dangling in the water, in the void, the misty synthesis of our love and our separation. And what did this man called English do? I ask the detective. He would prefer not to answer, but faced with my steady gaze, he replies: Terrible things, and then he looks at the floor, as if it were forbidden to say those words in the Clinique Les Trapèzes, in Nîmes, as if I hadn’t been acquainted with some terrible things in my time. And at this point I could press him for more, but why spoil such a beautiful afternoon by obliging him to tell what would surely be a sad story. And anyway the photo he has shown me of the man presumed to be English is old and blurry, it shows a young man of twenty-something, and the English I remember was well into his thirties, maybe even over forty, a definite shadow, if you’ll pardon the paradox, a broken shadow; I didn’t pay much attention to him, although his features have remained in my memory: blue eyes, prominent cheekbones, full lips, small ears. But describing him like that gives a false impression. I met R. P. English on one of my many shoots around Italy, but his face receded into the shadows long ago. And the detective says, It’s all right, don’t worry, take your time, Madame Silvestri, at least you remember him, even that is useful, now I know for sure he’s not a ghost. And I’m tempted to tell him that we are all ghosts, that all of us have gone too soon into the world of ghost movies, but he’s a good man and I don’t want to hurt him, so I keep it to myself. Anyway, who’s to say he doesn’t already know?