The Italian Lover

by Robert Hellenga

Genres: Historical Fiction; Literary Fiction; Contemporary Romance

Synopsis

An exhilarating novel of romance, art, and food in Florence, featuring the beloved Margot Harrington, who graced Robert Hellenga's The Sixteen Pleasures. Margot Harrington's memoir about her discovery in Florence of a priceless masterwork of Renaissance erotica -- and the misguided love affair it inspired - is now, 25 years later, being made into a movie. Margot, with the help of her lover, Woody, writes a script that she thinks will validate her life. Of course their script is not used, but never mind -- happy endings are the best endings for movies, as Margot eventually comes to see. At the former convent in Florence where The Sixteen Pleasures -- now called The Italian Lover - - is being filmed, Margot enters into a drama she never imagined, where her ideas of home, love, art, and aging collide with the imperatives of commerce and the unknowability of other cultures and other people.

Release date: September 24, 2007

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 353

Sample

The Bebop Club

Saturday night. End of September. Florence, Italy. Margot Harrington excused herself from a table at Il Fiasco in Via dei Servi, saying that if she had another grappa she’d be too tired to walk home and that if she drank another espresso she’d never get to sleep.

It had been a long week of endless meetings, and she was tired of talking, almost sorry she’d brought up the subject of the film, which she wouldn’t have done except that everyone was sick of talking shop, and the conversation had slowed to a trickle. Besides, she was excited about it, so why not talk about it? A film about her. It was exciting.

She offered to pay for her share of the dinner, but Signor Alberti waved her away, inclining his head ever so slightly toward Mr. Bancroft, one of the sponsors of the conference, as if to say, Let the Americans pay. Margot said her ciaos and her good-byes and stepped out into the street. She could take a bus (too complicated), or a cab (too expensive), or she could walk. It was a lovely fall evening, almost crisp, almost midwestern.

The sidewalk in front of the Bebop Club on the other side of Via dei Servi was crowded with young people who were making so much noise that she almost didn’t recognize the song that was being piped out into the street:

Oh, baby don’t you want to go

Oh, baby don’t you want to go

Back to the land of California

to my sweet home Chicago

It was a song her father had sung, and now, on this cool September evening, it overwhelmed her, as if someone had stuck a knife in her ribs.

She’d lived in Italy for almost twenty-four years. She missed her parents, but they were dead, so she might as well miss them in Italy as in the States. She missed her sisters too, but one lived in California and one in Florida, so living in Florence she probably saw more of them than if she’d been living at home. In Chicago, that is. And they thought nothing of sending a niece or a nephew to spend a month or two or three with their aunt Margot in Italy; Aunt Margot, who taught them things that they hadn’t been taught at home. So what? If they wanted to know why she wasn’t married, she told them. Why not? She liked living in a big apartment in Piazza Santa Croce and running her own book conservation workshop, or studio, on Lungarno Guicciardini, between the Chiesa Presbiteriana and the British Institute.

MARGOT HARRINGTON

RESTAURAZIONE DEI LIBRI ANTICHI

And she didn’t want to live or work anywhere else, not London, not New York, not even Rome.

She got lonely from time to time, but she’d had a string of lovers, most of them married. Well, why not? That’s why she was so beautiful. She hadn’t been beautiful when she first came to Italy, after the big flood in 1966. She’d been mousy. Then for a while she’d been spunky, and then for a while she was handsome, and finally she became beautiful. If enough Italian men tell you you’re beautiful, you become beautiful. That’s why you see so many beautiful women in Italy. If they—her nieces and nephews—wanted to know why she had so many friends, she explained that too. In Italian. Chi ha l’amor nel petto, ha lo spron ne’ fianchi. A spur in the loins. Let them figure it out. They were going to have to learn about these things sometime. It might as well be in Italy, where human nature can be accommodated more easily than in the United States.

She pushed her way through the crowd on the narrow sidewalk, paid the ten thousand lire cover charge, and squeezed through the door. The Bebop Club wasn’t one of her favorite places. It was too noisy, too crowded, too big, like an enormous cave that opened up into other caves, like the Carlsbad Caverns in New Mexico. She had no idea how deep you could go and had no intention of finding out. She wanted to sit at a table in the main cavern so she could see the singer, who was still singing “Sweet Home, Chicago,” really belting it out, playing an astonishing guitar—silver or chrome, light reflecting off it, blinding. A young woman joined in on the chorus: “Come on, Baby don’t you want to go.” The guitar had the funkiest sound Margot had ever heard.

The singer was a big rough-looking white man with a beard and a big rough Mississippi Delta voice. He looked familiar, like someone she’d known a long time ago, but she couldn’t place him.

Now one and one is two

two and two is four

I’m heavy loaded baby

I’m booked I gotta go

And the girl joined in on the chorus.

Oh, baby don’t you want to go

Oh, baby don’t you want to go

Back to the land of California

to my sweet home Chicago

The man played a pretty fancy guitar break, and they sang the chorus once again, and when they came to the end they both started laughing.

The girl was Italian, Margot was sure of it. When he sang, the man sounded like someone from the Mississippi Delta, but he looked like a midwesterner. But then when he opened his mouth to introduce the next song, he spoke Italian with a Bolognese accent, and she thought she might be mistaken.

Margot would sometimes pick out someone on a bus and imagine this person, this face, these clothes, in an American context, and pretty soon she’d be convinced that whoever it was was a fellow American. Sometimes she’d say something in English and get a blank look. Not that Florence wasn’t full of Americans. But Margot had lived her life outside the American community. She had Italian friends from way back, from her class at the Liceo Scientifico Morgagni when she’d spent a year in Florence with her mother; and she had friends she’d made through her work as a book conservator at the Biblioteca Nazionale and the Archivio di Stato. And she was still friends with some of her lovers. It was amazing to her when she thought of it, of them—so handsome, so suave, so full of tricks in bed—because she could still reach down inside herself and find an innocent girl from Illinois. And she could still remember that all she’d wanted to do was re-create the life her parents had led, the life they’d lived in the big house on Chambers Street in Chicago, where her father had been an avocado broker on the South Water Street Market, and her mother had taught art history at Edgar Lee Masters, a small liberal arts college on the north side.

Most of the time she thought in Italian and dreamed and fantasized in Italian, but sometimes when a new lover was caressing her breasts for the first time and whispering in her ear, she’d be thinking of Christmas morning in Chicago or of sitting in the car with her mother and her sisters while her father made a few phone calls at his office down on the market. And maybe when he was done, he’d pry open a flat of avocados and take out one for each of the girls—Margot and her two sisters—and peel them one by one with his pocket knife.

I’m going away, Baby,

Cryin’ won’t make me stay,

The more you cry,

The more you drive me away.

Margot, who hadn’t found a seat yet, called out a request for a song, letting the singer hear her voice, letting him know that she was from the Midwest. “‘Sittin’ on Top of the World,’” she shouted. “Can you play ‘Sittin’ on Top of the World’?” And she saw him searching the audience for her. She waved.

“That’s in open D,” he said into the microphone, in English. “I’ll have to retune my guitar.” He said something to the vocalist while he retuned the guitar, and she nodded. “C’è l’ultima canzone,” the girl said, “da Illinois Woody.” There was a round of applause and Illinois Woody began to sing.

Margot squeezed in at a table full of young people. Someone had gotten up to get a drink, and Margot took the chair despite some grumbling. The young people went back to their conversation, though why you’d try to have a serious conversation in the Bebop Club was beyond Margot.

’Twas in the spring

One sunny day

My sweetheart left me,

Lord, she went away,

But now she’s gone gone gone

And I don’t worry,

’Cause I’m sittin’ on top of the world.

All you had to do to pick up an Italian man, Margot had learned, was look at him. But she wasn’t sure about a midwesterner. Illinois Woody. Besides, she didn’t want to pick him up, for heaven’s sake. She just wanted to talk to someone from the old country, to compare notes.

Illinois Woody finished the song and put his guitar in the case. He pushed his way through the crowd toward Margot, and as he approached she remembered where she’d seen him.

“I know where I’ve seen you,” she said. “I saw you on Rai Due, on the anniversary of the bombing in Bologna, the strage. You were one of the speakers. You really gave the government hell. In fluent Italian too. Your daughter was killed in the bombing, wasn’t she? I’m so sorry.” She put her hand on his arm. “I didn’t mean to blurt everything out like that.”

“It’s all right,” he said. “It was a long time ago.”

They ordered drinks. A beer for Illinois Woody, white wine for Margot.

What Woody told her about himself was that he’d come to Bologna in 1987 for the trial of the terrorists who’d put a bomb in the busiest train station in Italy on the busiest day of the year—the bomb that had killed his daughter; that he’d lived with an Italian woman in Bologna for a couple of years; that he’d taken a teaching job at the American Academy of Florence; and that he was hoping to go home at the end of the year. Back to Illinois. St. Clair.

Margot wasn’t sure where it was.

“Between Moline and Peoria,” he said.

Margot told Woody, making it sound more certain than it actually was, that a producer was interested in doing a film based on the book she’d written about her experiences when she first came to Italy after the big flood in 1966—her discovery, in the convent where she was working, of a unique copy of a book of Renaissance erotic drawings, Pietro Aretino’s I modi, and her subsequent love affair with an Italian art conservator. It wasn’t for sure, she said, which is why she probably shouldn’t be talking about it, but you never knew, did you?

Woody said you didn’t.

She was irritated with herself for bringing up the film because she knew she was doing it mainly to make herself interesting, as if she weren’t interesting without the prospect of a film. She thought she was very interesting. In any case, the book had been optioned when it first came out, fifteen years ago, by MGM for Emma Thompson, and then by Esther and Harry Klein, and then by a string of other companies whose names she didn’t remember, and she’d gotten quite a bit of money, but nothing had come of it, and by now her agent had retired. She didn’t know if she should look for another agent or not. The woman who wanted to produce the film—the same Esther Klein who’d optioned it after MGM—was coming to Florence next week, so if she wanted an agent she’d have to do something right away.

He didn’t ask her about the book. What he asked instead was if she ever thought about going home.

She shook her head.

“Ever get homesick?”

She shook her head again. “Never,” she said. “Not till tonight.” This was not strictly true, but it wasn’t strictly a lie either.

“Really?”

She nodded her head yes.

“Why’s that?”

“It just hit me, when I heard you singing ‘Sweet Home, Chicago.’”

“It’s a Robert Johnson song,” he said, “but everybody’s got a version—Johnny Shines, Elmore James, Taj Mahal.”

“My father sang all those songs,” she went on. “‘Key to the Highway,’ ‘Sittin’ on Top of the World,’ ‘Come Back, Baby.’”

“Is your father still living?”

She shook her head no. And then she laughed. “He died in India. My mother had been dead for years, and he fell in love with an Indian woman at my sister’s wedding and moved to Assam. Up in the north.”

“I know where it is,” Woody said. “The Romans got silk from the Brahmaputra Valley, but they didn’t have a name for Assam. That’s where all the tea comes from.”

“Right. Nandini—that’s the woman he fell in love with— owned a big tea garden.”

“So, things worked out for him.”

“Yes. But I wish he’d lived longer . . .” She shrugged. “The sad thing is that I wish he could be buried next to my mom. She’s all alone in Graceland Cemetery. I know it’s a stupid thing, but he loved her so much . . .” She started to tear up, and then she started to laugh again. “It really is stupid, isn’t it?”

The band started another blues song, “Vicksburg Is My Home,” and the young woman sang, “I’m gonna leave Chicago, go back to Vicksburg, that’s my home.”

“She’s pretty good,” Margot said.

Woody nodded. “Her name’s Marisa,” he said. “She’s one of my students. She doesn’t speak English very well, but she sings like Ida Cox.”

Margot was glad when it was time to go, which they both knew without either one of them having to say it. Woody helped her on with her coat. He got his guitar and said good-bye to the band members. Margot buttoned up her coat as they started down Via dei Servi toward Piazza Santissima Annunziata on the way to the bus stops at San Marco.

“I live in Piazza Santa Croce,” she said as they entered the piazza. “You?”

“Other side of the river. Piazza Tasso.”

“We could walk together,” she said, knowing that if he walked her home she’d invite him to come up. “I could carry the guitar partway.”

But what happened was that as they entered the piazza a car came out of a little side street with a dog tied behind it. The car turned into the piazza, which was used as a parking lot during the day, and began to circle Giambologna’s statue of Grand Duke Ferdinand, going faster and faster till the dog, which was running for its life, lost its footing and was dragged on its side behind the car, which swerved to the right and stopped in front of the statue of the Grand Duke. A man and a young woman got out of the car, and the man started cursing the dog. “I hope this will teach you a lesson, you miserable piece of shit. You fucking lazy bitch.”

“He’s got a knife,” Margot said. “Look.” The blade of the knife gleamed in the streetlights. “Let’s get out of here.”

But Woody, his guitar still in his hand, was already running across the piazza. “What the fuck is the matter with you?” he shouted in Italian. “You stupid asshole.”

The man with the knife turned to face Woody. Medium height, expensive jacket. He held the knife in both hands, held it low, with the point sticking up, moving it up and down in front of him, pulling it upward with all his might as Woody, using the guitar as a shield, crashed into him and knocked him over. The man tried to scramble to his feet and to hold onto the knife at the same time, but the knife was stuck in the guitar case, and he lost his footing when he tried to pull it out. Woody glanced at the young woman, who was keeping her distance, and then kicked the knife man in the head. The knife man fell back on the pavement. The woman screamed. Woody kicked the man again and then again. He kicked him in the ribs and in the head. Real kicks. Margot was afraid he’d kill him. She was tempted to run away, but at the same time she was excited. “Stop,” she shouted. “Stop, you’ll kill him.” She could see that the dog was covered with blood. She couldn’t tell if it was alive. It was a medium-size black Lab. She ran to Woody and grabbed his arm.

Woody knelt beside the dog. “Call one-one-three. Get an ambulance. There must be a vet clinic that’s open all night. I’ll stay with the dog.”

“Let’s get out of here.”

“We can’t leave the dog.”

“What about the man? What if he dies?”

“He deserves to die. Get going.”

Margot started to run toward San Marco, but Woody shouted at her and pointed toward the Hotel Le Due Fontane, on the other side of the piazza. She asked the man at the desk to call Pronto Secorso and then she sat down in a chair in the lobby and put her head in her hands. She was having trouble breathing and her fingers were cold. “You’d better call the police too,” she said. She waited while he called the police.

The ambulance was already there by the time she went back into the piazza. Woody was arguing with the driver, who didn’t want to take the dog in the ambulance.

“We can’t take a dog,” he was shouting, “it’s not permitted. You should have called the Guardia Medica Veterinaria.”

Woody was shouting back: “There’s no time. You can see this is an emergency. Help me get the dog on the stretcher. There’s a clinic on Via Masaccio. I walk past it every day. I think it’s open till midnight.”

The woman—knife man’s girlfriend?—got into the car and slammed the door and started the engine.

“Jesus Christ,” Woody shouted. The dog was still tied to the car. Woody had to put his foot on the guitar case to get enough leverage to pull the knife out. He fell back a step when the knife came free but managed to cut the rope as it was tightening around the dog’s collar. The car screeched out of the piazza and disappeared down Via della Colonna.

“Porcamadonna,” the ambulance driver said. “What about the man?”

“Call another ambulance.”

The driver took a look at Woody and Woody’s hands, which were covered with the dog’s blood, and at the knife, and at the dog lying on the ground. He nodded to his assistant, who helped Woody get the dog on the stretcher. And then he radioed for another ambulance.

Margot watched Woody put his guitar in the back of the ambulance and climb in with the dog. The police arrived as the ambulance was pulling out of the piazza, lights flashing. It wasn’t easy to explain what had happened without explaining why the man had been left lying in the piazza, but Margot did her best. There’d been a fight, she said. She’d been on her way to San Marco; she’d called the police from the hotel . . .

But why hadn’t the ambulance taken the man who was lying on the pavement? That was the question.

“There was a fight,” she said. “There were two of them. There wasn’t room.” A second ambulance arrived. The poliziotto took her name and address and phone number and went to assist the man on the ground.

Margot slipped away down Via dei Servi. She walked home to her apartment in Santa Croce. She walked down Via degli Alfani, past the Liceo Scientifico Morgagni, which she’d attended when she was living in Florence with her mother, and then down Borgo Pinti, past the apartment where they’d lived. She was ashamed of herself for everything: for boasting about the film; for planning to invite a man up to her apartment and into her bed—just because she was lonely and he was a midwesterner; for being afraid, and for being excited, and for wanting to run away instead of helping the dog. She thought of her old dog, Brownie, how brave he was when they took him to Dr. Vollman to have him put down because he couldn’t walk and couldn’t eat and couldn’t drink. Not even a sip of water. And especially, she was ashamed for being homesick. She kept circling back to this point, like a hunter lost in the woods, each circle getting a little larger. Once every few months at first, and then once a year, and then once every two or three years, and so on, till she’d forget about the circle and think that she was walking in a straight line.

First Reconnaissance

Esther Klein made her first recce in Florence at the end of September 1990. She flew economy class to Rome and bought a second-class train ticket to Florence. She had no financing, no director, no actors, but she had a script, and when Harry—her husband and partner for the last thirty years—had dumped her back in March, left her for a woman her own age, she knew she had to make this film. It wasn’t as if she’d never made a film before. It was just that she’d never done it without Harry to direct. An Esther and Harry Klein Production. That was their credit line.

The property she wanted was a book that had been knocking around for fifteen years. She’d picked it up cheap, years ago, after MGM had put it in turnaround, and she’d written a screenplay herself. Then Harry decided he didn’t want to do a romantic comedy, and they went on to something else and the option had expired, but Esther’d kept an eye on it. It had been optioned several times since then, but nothing had come of it, and now that she was on her own, she was determined to make it. What she needed were the rights to the book. What she wanted was a free option. Once she had the rights she could write her own ticket.

On the train to Florence she’d tried to keep a lid on her feelings. She’d wanted to make this film for so many years that she’d started to think of Margot as her daughter, the daughter she’d never had. She always told herself that her films were her children. All fifteen of them, all made with Harry. But sometimes she longed for a flesh-and-blood daughter, like Margot. She wanted Margot to have a lover like Marcello Mastroianni. Which was out of the question, of course, but when she imagined Margot, she imagined Julia Roberts or Meg Ryan; and when she imagined Margot’s Italian lover, she imagined Marcello Mastroianni: worldly, sophisticated, handsome, even in those big glasses he wore in 81/2. Or maybe Giovanni Cipriani, who would cover foreign sales and who had a significant American fan base, though he’d been denied a visa to enter the U.S. after making fun of President Bush and Dan Quayle in a skit he’d done at Harvard.

Esther had filmed in Italy before, but Harry had always been there to direct, and there’d always been people to look after the details, to take care of train tickets, to translate, to find bathrooms, restaurants, hotels. Everything had been first-class too. Now she had to settle for a two-star hotel near the station where the woman at the desk didn’t speak English very well. It was four o’clock in the afternoon by the time she’d unpacked her suitcase. She lay down on the bed and slept for four hours, and then she went outside and followed a street till it came to the Arno, which didn’t look like much—hard to believe it could have flooded the whole town—and ate at a place called Dante’s Pizzeria. She asked for pepperoni on her pizza and got big chunks of green pepper, which she didn’t care for. Dante Schmante.

In the morning Esther walked around the narrow streets of Florence. She was planning to do the interiors in Eastern Europe, but there was no way to fake the Duomo and Giotto’s tower and the Palazzo Vecchio. Florence wasn’t a city adapted for films—no room for the trucks, too crowded. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad in winter—February and March. She’d seen Mario Monicelli’s Amici miei at Cannes, with Harry. She tried to remember other films shot in Florence but could come up with only a handful: William Dieterle’s September Affair, Brian de Palma’s Obsession, and, of course, A Room with a View. Ismail Merchant had told her once that he’d made A Room with a View for three million dollars. She hadn’t known whether to believe him or not. Three million was nothing. Even in 1985. All that period stuff. Shooting in England too. Harry had a huge budget for the piece of schlock he was directing at Paramount.

But Esther was still a player, even without Harry, a player with a reputation for bringing in her films on time and under budget in spite of Harry, who didn’t believe in budgets and time cards. She’d never be able to afford a flood, of course, but a broken pipe would get the job done, and they could dress up something to look like Sotheby’s and shoot the auction scene right in Florence. She’d like to block off one of the big piazzas—Piazza Signoria or Piazza Santa Croce—but that could be a major headache. Permissions would be expensive—you rent the piazzas by the square meter—and you’d need plenty of extras too, but she wasn’t going to do the flood, and she wasn’t going to do the sixties, so she wouldn’t have to worry about a sixties look. Just let the extras wear their own clothes. It wasn’t rocket science, after all. It wasn’t magic. You hired some actors, you filmed the script, you edited the footage, you put it up on a screen and invited people to watch.

Esther found herself in Via Tornabuoni, where Harry had bought her an emerald broach at Cartier, but nothing appealed to her. Nothing. Just the opposite, in fact. Everything looked ridiculous. Gucci, Ferragamo, Bvlgari with the annoying v, Armani, Prada, Pucci, Louis Vuitton. She was looking at her reflection in the window at Louis Vuitton. She’d never paid much attention to clothes. That was her signature, her persona—a tough old broad who didn’t give a damn what she looked like and who always told the truth, even when it made everyone squirm. That’s the way she’d always played it, and that’s the way Harry’d always liked it. At least that’s what she’d thought. But now Harry was gone, and the figure in the window looked matronly rather than tough. It wasn’t a good look, especially in Italy. The wardrobe consultant she’d hired after the divorce wouldn’t like it at all. She’d come to the house in Santa Monica, with its polished fieldstone entryway and red Italian tiles in the kitchen, and thrown out most of Esther’s clothes—lots of silk dresses and jackets with bulky shoulder pads, and Dynasty-inspired evening gowns that she’d bought on Rodeo Drive and never worn. She’d advised Esther to buy monochromatic outfits with diagonal lines and some texturing that would make her look slimmer and taller. She advised her to develop her clothing radar so she could zoom in on the things she really loved, but Esther hadn’t had the heart for it. If only Harry had run off with a bimbo, some floozy half his age, everyone, including Esther herself, would have known what to think.

She was going to meet Margot at her studio, at one o’clock for lunch, and she was hungry, even though it was only twelve. She was walking up and down the Lungarno on the other side of the river from the studio—she didn’t want Margot to see her—when her clothing radar registered a coat in a shop window, a coat made from different-colored leathers and trimmed with fur. It was really stunning. Simple, she thought, and stunning. And something inside her said Yes! in a loud voice. A woman wearing a coat like that . . . She was trying to see the price, but the tag was turned the wrong way.

A man came out of the store and spoke to her in good English. He was very nice and seemed to understand exactly what she needed. They went inside and she tried on the coat. It felt fantastic. She could feel his eyes admiring her. A woman wearing this coat could not fail in any endeavor. You could wear a coat like this to the Oscars. It would be a little unconventional, but that didn’t bother Esther. It was practical too. Lined with one of those new insulating materials. But the price. Horrendous. Over a million lire. Not that she was broke. But you needed a sense of proportion in these things. Harry would have told her to buy it. It’s only money. That was all very well for Harry to say. He was directing Diana Giulia in a disgusting studio blockbuster. It wasn’t the money that bothered her; it was the la. . .