Read Shylock's Daughter: A Novel of Love in Venice Online

Authors: Erica Jong

Tags: #Fiction, #Historical, #Romance, #Time Travel

Shylock's Daughter: A Novel of Love in Venice (5 page)

BOOK: Shylock's Daughter: A Novel of Love in Venice
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Nor is my longing for my daughter diminished by the films themselves, for the other great myth enshrined in the films I see is the myth of childhood—childhood innocence, to be precise. In one Russian film, two adolescents keep traversing a frozen lake, looking for a sunken cathedral. When they find its golden onion dome, frozen in snow and ice, they remember childhood summers when they used to dive in this very lake, swim into the tower of this submerged cathedral, and pull on the bell cord underwater, creating an eerie symphony of underwater chimes. Through frame after frame, the girl holds one ear to the ice, listening for this summer symphony. (The girl is about Antonia's age and indeed looks like her—copper hair, freckled nose, a little girl's lanky yet pot-bellied body.) Again and again the filmmaker cuts to the boy, swimming like a merman underwater, pulling the bell cord. Childhood, like a bell, calls us back again and again. “Ding-dong bell,” says Shakespeare. Full fathom five thy childhood lies, of its bones are coral made.

There are wonderful moments, wonderful images, in all these films, but in general the level is mediocre to low. So many have labored so long and so hard to produce films that don't quite work. The colossal effort of it all! I know that making a film, even a bad one, is like orchestrating an entire world war. The script has to be written and rewritten, the money raised, the cast found, the locations scouted, and thousands of logistical arrangements fulfilled. Through it all, hundreds upon hundreds of egos have to be stroked (or bullied) lest the whole enterprise collapse. You have to be a great general to be a film director, as well as a great visionary. Today, Napoleon would be a film director, and Custer, and Robert E. Lee. And yet all this effort, all this cajoling, caterwauling, casting, and casting about for completion bonds and last-minute infusions of cash can easily come to naught if the essential theme is too paltry, too unworthy of all this effort. Great films need great subjects and there are few enough minds that can conceive of great subjects in these small times. Björn is one. And Björn always goes back to the classics. Mozart and Shakespeare—these are his muses. He knows that in a spiritually bankrupt time, an artist should at least know enough to go back to the classics.

Another day's screenings over, the jury yawns, stretches, thinks of food. We trudge back to our rooms at the Excelsior, dodging photographers, trying to remember what we have seen. Dozens of phone messages are jammed under our doors, along with schedules of the next day's cocktail receptions for directors. Björn Persson and Lilli have still not appeared. The international press speculates on the meaning of this. One of Björn's films is due to be screened the next day and the director's whereabouts are unknown.

This is pretty much how the beginning of the festival felt. The badness of the films, combined with my nine-hour jet lag, created in me the sensation of being trapped in a nightmare—and not even an exciting nightmare, but an extremely boring and repetitious one. We got up at eight-thirty, attended films all day and all night, then returned to our suites exhausted. Except I've neglected to mention that as the days passed, and Grigory Krylov escorted me to the screenings and back home to the hotel again, it started to appear in the press that we were lovers. At least, pictures of us together kept cropping up in the papers and little innuendoes in the gossip columns created the illusion that we shared a bed as well as a flashbulb.

This didn't bother me particularly since, as an actress, my whole life is illusion, and
I
knew I was not Grigory's lover. Besides, when I was younger and a sex symbol, I'd had the experience of perfect (or imperfect) strangers coming up to me on the streets of New York or even London or Paris and saying in the appropriate language: “You are disgusting—whore!” and spitting at me. I never knew then whether my roles were at fault (for a while I played prostitutes in my American films) or whether the very fact of a woman being a public personage, an artist, an earner of money, created this reaction in certain frustrated souls. Needless to say, it had unnerved me when I was younger, but now that I was older (and presumably wiser) I had a healthy disregard for the causal connection between my actual behavior and what was publicly reported of me. So I gave little thought to my increasing involvement with Grigory in the public prints. At this rate, we should be married by festival's end—a horrifying prospect.

On the fifth night of the festival, Björn's film of
Don Giovanni
(in which Mozart and his father both appear as characters in a sort of framing tale for the opera) was due to be presented, and still Björn and Lilli had not arrived. I began to worry. The press was reaching a fever pitch of speculation regarding Björn's mental health, I was being pelted with telephone messages (which anyway I had no time to answer because I was always in screenings), and Grigory was becoming a gigantic pain in the ass about our newsprint love affair.

“Jessichka,” he'd say as he escorted me back to the hotel from the last screening, “since anyway we are lovers in the eyes of the world, do you not think it is our fate to consummate this passion? It could be kismet,
La Forza del Destino—
no?”

“No.” I'd laugh. “A newsprint love affair can never break my heart, but a real one is another matter…I'm afraid I'll fall in love with you and all will be lost.”

So I said to salve his ego, but in reality I was not only through with love but through with sex. Life was so much simpler without it. My head was so much clearer. And I could concentrate on my work. At night I went to bed with volumes of Shakespeare ranged around my pillow and no lover to jealously kick them onto the floor. I cherished my solitude, my books, my maidenly envelope of cool, clean sheets, my guardian white roses. What could Grigory Krylov offer me but thorns?

I had not come to this delight in solitude and chastity easily, as you might imagine. I had lived much of my life for love—with results as predictable as they are common: heartbreak, yearning, drinking too much, and stoical decisions never to love again, no sooner made than broken. But this time I was not merely determined but indifferent. Love was my addiction and I was weaning myself away from it one day at a time. Oh, it was safe enough to sleep with Shakespeare—or so I thought at the beginning of my stay in Venice.

The night Björn's
Don Giovanni
was to be presented (with or without Björn) was the night of the Red Cross Gala, when
Le Tout Venise
came across the lagoon dressed in their best glitter—the ladies in Valentinos, Krizias, Givenchys, Yves St. Laurents; the gentlemen perfectly dressed by those elderly private tailors who still can be found (if not in great abundance) in Italy.

I had bought a black Zandra Rhodes ball gown in London, with great leg-of-mutton Victorian sleeves (Princess Di's virgin wedding and Victorian wedding gown had inaugurated a whole new Victorian age—it seemed), and I was looking forward to wearing it to the gala. It was being lovingly pressed by a sweet little laundress at the hotel who had seen my films and who even kindly offered to resew some of the fallen paillettes and black pearls “in honor of my art,” she said—a term that sounds less soppy in Italian.
Onore dell'arte—
a thing still known in Italy, though less and less as the American tyranny of the bottom line takes over even here.

The last afternoon screening had finished rather earlier than usual that day, and the Red Cross Gala was due to begin only at eight-thirty or nine. So while my glorious Zandra Rhodes was being pressed, I betook myself to the bar to order a cappuccino in a quiet corner—an act of courage, really, since I might be besieged there.

I found a little round table in a sort of nook that overlooked the sea, and positioned myself so that I faced away from the bar and toward a plate-glass window that gave out on a
terrazzo
usually teeming with
paparazzi
and autograph-collecting
bambini
, but at this moment empty because of the odd hour. Everyone was either eating or getting sloshed at private happy hours in bars, press suites, or hotel room rendezvous.

I sipped my cappuccino contentedly, savoring the sweet foam. If only we could live for the little moments that linger only fleetingly on the taste buds, I thought, life could be so fulfilling. The trouble is: we want too much. Grand passions, great historical movements, the need to possess things, people, houses. Sometimes, I think that I have always been happiest in transit—in rented houses, or while flying from one place to another. I know that I have been happiest between marriages—when all was possibility untapped and nothing was nailed down, when tomorrow the prince of princes, the poet of poets, the lover of all time, might walk through the door and lift my life to paradise.

With this thought, I laughed aloud at myself over my cappuccino. Imagine having such a romantic notion while claiming to be the arch antiromantic of all time. And yet the two are very close, aren't they? Romanticism and antiromanticism, flip sides of the same coin? Though I had been married and married, my heart always leapt in assent when Gloria Steinem said she had never married because she “couldn't mate in captivity.” Marriage seemed to be like castling in chess—a useless move that saved neither the king's life nor the game.

“May I?” came a voice.

I looked up to see a young man with brown and luminous spaniel eyes, shaggy brown hair, an aggressively badly cut tweed jacket such as German intellectuals wear in München or Berlin (to show their contempt for frippery), and a pleading mouth. I recognized him as one of the German delegation, a young man who wrote films for—or coproduced with, or fetched schnapps for—one of the great German directors here to receive a prize, but whether this young man was called Rainer or Karl or Wolfgang, I swear I could not remember.

“Wolfgang Schnabel,” he offered, refreshing my recollection. “May I?”

“Of course,” I said, sighing.

“But, I interrupt your thoughts?”

“No, no,” I said. (What woman has thoughts that cannot be interrupted by a man?)

“So,” he said. “Your first film festival?”

“And last,” said I. “It's too much work, and the films aren't good enough to merit all this time—except, of course, the ones out of competition, like your director's.”

“Of course,” said he. “But we come for other reasons. To meet our
Kollegen—
colleagues—to raise money for future films, to be inspired by beauty…”

Here he looked deep into my eyes.

“And I do not mean—how say you—celluloid beauty but the real beauty, the
Modell
for beauty, Venus herself or Aphrodite…”

(He pronounced it “Afro-ditty.”)

“Ich meine—Dich
. I mean you…”

I grew embarrassed by this German blarney. Was it just a pass, or was it the real German schmaltz, a yearning, young Goethe besotted with poetry and art? For Wolfgang looked to be about twenty-eight or twenty-nine, the prime age for hungering young men who fall in love with cinema queens. Don't be a cynical pill, Jessica, I said to myself. Maybe this young Werther is really aching for you—
Schatzi.
They do that aching thing so well in Germany. But I also wanted to giggle. Love,
Liebe
,
amour
,
amore—
it was all a trap to make you crazy, to make you obsessed. I knew where it led: cock above art. Yearning for that special, sweet rod that would make the world go away. Well, I liked the world—with its cappuccino, its candy-chandeliered hotel suites, its
motoscafi
, its screening rooms, its temporal amusements while we waited for eternity to begin. Down with love if it meant annihilating all of that.

While I mused, Wolfgang burned his eyes into my own.

“I have no words,” he said. “You are the wonder of this festival.”

“No,” I said. “You are too kind.”

“Not kind at all,” he said, “or, as your poet says, ‘a little more than kin and less than kind.'”

Shakespeare again. Why did Shakespeare seem to be everywhere in the air? Was I drawing him to me with my thoughts of him? For I believed in such magic. I knew an artist was a sort of witch and I had had other proofs of my witchiness in the past. Well, if I were a witch, I was a
good
witch,
una fata—
not
una strega
, or bad witch, as the Italians say. What a civilized language Italian is to have such distinctions!

Wolfgang persisted: “Your eyes are astounding—never from your photographs could I have guessed. Not even your films do them justice…”

“Thank you,” I said, blazing my eyes at him the harder, trying to make time melt and Wolfgang become my Shakespeare, if only for a moment. For it is part of my craft to make every swain fall in love with me. I do it for sport, for craftsmanship, on a bet, on a dare. My heart fills, my thighs ache; my silk panties moisten; the sense memories of love make me feel that I feel love though I love not—or only love my art—ah, my first acting teacher, Arnold Feibleman, would be proud of me! As would dear feisty Vivian Lovecraft, my mentor. To make someone believe you are in love when you are not—this is my craft, my witchery. For, as I gaze into Wolfgang's eyes, I fall in love with the image of my beloved self that I see there. Oscar Wilde was right: an actress is a little more than a woman, an actor a little less than a man. I cannot help myself, I am in love with the Jessica that Wolfgang is in love with! I am besotted with my craft, like a witch who turns a mouse into a lizard only to prove she
can
. Poor mouse, poor lizard, what do
they
know? Acted on as they are by the powers that be, what do they feel when time stops and the fur turns scale? Poor creatures.
Poveretti.
We witches, we actresses, are as wanton boys to flies; we kill them for our sport—

Stop it! I think.

Stop it. You'll mislead this boy and then you'll be sorry. You'll have to pay in bed. And then he'll make
you
pay. You'll start out blithe and end in bondage.
Basta.

BOOK: Shylock's Daughter: A Novel of Love in Venice
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