The Return (9 page)

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, lost, 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 the 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.