The News From Spain

"See? You say you"re not serious, but you are."

"You"re a very annoying person."

"Yeah, but you get me. n.o.body else gets me. And I get you."

"Stop it, Johnny."

He rolled toward her, stretching out his arms. "You know I"m right." His face was soulful, pleading.

She relented, and laughed.

She went with him to Barcelona. What, was she going to remain steadfast to her waitressing job? Defend her commitment to sketching the b.u.mps and crevices of the dusty stones that made up the walls of the castle of Burgos? She was still reeling from her mother"s death, but a little better now. Awake, at least. She found a little apartment above a music store (mistake: the walls and floor, even the furniture, throbbed with ba.s.s notes all day and half the night), and a job in a gallery, where all she had to do was wear short skirts and black tights and answer a phone that never rang. Johnny stayed with her some nights, not others. He was silly, extravagant. Everything he did was a little, or extremely, embellished. One night she went to bed with him and woke up alone: on the kitchen table she found a card with a big letter E painted on it in gold. Very sweet; she smiled and forgot about it. But on her way to work another day, she happened to glance at the wall next to the token booth in the subway, and she saw a big golden E gleaming in the middle of the other graffiti there. She started noticing this gilded E all over the city, all along her route to work: on the sidewalk outside the cafe where she stopped for a quick coffee every morning, on the poster-filled brick wall next door to the gallery, and a very small one painted low on the stairway that led up to the front door.

He played the mandolin, and made up songs to sing to her. He liked to hold her in his lap and tell her an entirely preposterous version of what he had done that day-a.s.sa.s.sinations, s.p.a.ce travel, stem-cell experiments, icing cakes for a royal wedding. He loved food and stayed skinny. He burped, farted, talked fast, said what he thought, asked for what he wanted, and was the happiest person she"d ever been to bed with. He was right there, not showing off, not acting, just happy. He was someone she might not have fallen in love with if she"d been older than twenty-four-but she was twenty-four, and she was crazy about him.

His movie was finished and got a lot of attention at festivals. Then it was released and it got even more attention. Johnny didn"t seem surprised at any of this, but Elvira was; she had privately thought the successful-director thing was a kind of fantasy, more real than the wedding cakes and a.s.sa.s.sinations but basically along those same manically buoyant lines. Now he was rich, he was traveling. He didn"t ask her to come with him and Elvira didn"t ask to go. Her work had become interesting-not the gallery job, which still paid her bills, but the painting. She"d graduated from stones to big pieces of buildings: the corner of a roof, a piece of bas-relief above a doorway, intersecting with the sky or a piece of pavement, and sliced off at unexpected angles by the edge of the canvas. She"d gotten her work into a group show, sold a couple of things.

Then one night she got into the bathtub with a stack of magazines-something Johnny had taught her; he said that reading in the bath was one of life"s supreme pleasures-and in the front section of Hola! she saw a picture of him with an actress. Wow, she thought, you made the tabloids. That"s penetration.

Bad word, as it turned out. The caption said that Johnny was "linked" to the actress.

And that he was divorcing his wife of six years in order to marry her.

There was a smaller, black-and-white inset photo of Johnny with a different woman, whom the caption identified as the wife-his second wife.

Elvira got out of the bath and went over to the phone, naked. She stood there, dripping, with the phone in her hand and realized she had no idea where Johnny was, and no way to reach him. It was ten o"clock at night. She dialed his office and left her name and number on the switchboard answering machine. It"s an emergency, she said. Please track him down and ask him to call me. She had been seeing Johnny for nearly three years, and this was the first demand she"d ever made. She had been incurious, independent-had noticed him noticing other women, but had never worried or even wondered about whether he did more than look. Work was the big thing in her life, work and then Johnny; she"d a.s.sumed that his life was a lot like hers.

He didn"t call. What could he have said? And what could she have said-you a.s.shole, you s.h.i.thead, you p.r.i.c.k? She left more messages at his office, always at night; if she couldn"t talk to Johnny she wanted to talk to a machine, didn"t want to have to deal with a real person who would only mirror back to her how crazy she sounded. You a.s.shole. You s.h.i.thead. You p.r.i.c.k. You b.a.s.t.a.r.d. You liar. She went to the gallery; she came home. She smoked. She drank so much that one night she was standing at the kitchen table and the next thing she knew she was lying on her back on the bathroom floor, with blood on her forehead. She considered smashing the mandolin, which he"d left on the floor of her bedroom. She took a piece of paper and wrote on it, "Don"t marry him. He lies," and wondered how to get it to the actress in Hollywood. She felt sorry for the wife. She studied their faces in Hola! The actress was pale with red hair, fresh and certainly lovely, but with narrow blue eyes and a determined little mouth. A killer, Johnny. You"ve picked yourself a killer. Good. The wife was softer, older and, Elvira thought, more beautiful. Dark hair, dark eyes. An open face, an open-collar shirt. A man"s shirt? Johnny"s? With the tip of her forefinger she traced the planes of the wife"s face. She got out a pad and some charcoal and made a sketch. She did another in pen and ink. She went in to her studio-she hadn"t been there in weeks, since the night of the bath and the magazine-and spent a couple of nights painting the wife"s face in oil, on a piece of board. Then she did the actress. That long white neck, that slash of lipstick.

A man came into the gallery one day just before it closed. Johnny, she thought (wistfully? Vengefully? She wasn"t sure); but then she saw that it was in fact one of Johnny"s friends-someone who worked in the office, a guy Johnny had known forever, a Johnny wannabe, wearing a Johnny-esque leather jacket and skinny jeans. "You"ve got to stop calling," he said.

"Oh, really? Why is that?" Elvira asked. "Did Johnny send you?"

"Let"s go get a beer. I want to talk to you. Really. I think I can put this whole thing into some perspective for you."

Tired, curious, lonely, and very much wanting the beer, she went with him. They sat at a sidewalk table under an umbrella. Elvira drank, smoked, shivered, listened to him, and at the end of it said, "And this is supposed to make me feel better?"

"My point is, this is just how Johnny is. Always has been. Always will be. He just loves women."

"Someone who really loved women wouldn"t need to f.u.c.k so many of them."

"Okay, you"re right. Part of it is the chase, the game. But look, he stayed with you two years-"

"Three."

"All right, even better. Three years. He must have cared about you to stay that long, right?"

"But according to you, he was s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g around behind my back that whole time. What did you tell me? How many did he sleep with when you guys were filming in Germany last summer?"

He held up his hand. "Stop shooting the messenger. I"m only the messenger."

"Well, thanks for the message," Elvira said, and she got up and left before he could make a pa.s.s at her.

"He gave me numbers," Elvira told Rosina, years later. This was several months into their friendship. They were driving together in Elvira"s car, out to the country, where she had invited Rosina to come for lunch. "Actual numbers. They kept a list, he and Johnny. This many women in Turkey, this many in Germany. It was statistical. But crazy too. The numbers were delusional. A hundred in France, six hundred and forty in Italy. "Stop," I said. "This is too much for me." And you know what he said?"

"What?"

"He said, "And you haven"t even heard the news from Spain yet." "

Rosina laughed; and Elvira did too, driving in that car with a good friend on a summer afternoon almost thirty years after these things had happened.

4.

Here is a story: something I have not put into my memoirs. At least, not in this form, not yet. I have written six volumes so far, telling different stories, or changing and improving on the stories I have already told. My goal is entertainment, not veracity.

I had been living in Dresden, engaged in translating the Psalms and sleeping with my landlady and her two daughters. Each had her own attraction. The mother was avid, grateful, adept, and guilty; we played many operatic scenes of renunciation and reconciliation. The daughters were plump and rosy, and of course one was dark and one was fair, one tall and one tiny, one brazen and one aloof and trembling. But it was the triad that I found most alluring, far more than any of the three individually. The meat, the wine, and the sweet: together they make a satisfying dinner.

One night, very late, I came home to find my servant waiting for me in the street. He warned me not to go inside. The landlady, in one of her fits of penitence, had appealed to her brother for protection; and this brother, a gambler known for his violent temper, was waiting for me in my bedroom, armed, and in a rage all the more fiery because he himself had designs on one of his nieces. I heeded the warning and left that night for Vienna, taking with me only what I had in the pocket of my cloak: a little money and a letter from a Venetian poet and librettist praising my verses.

The letter did its work. The court composer to whom it was addressed welcomed me and recognized my poetic talent immediately, so that my first meeting with the emperor, which I had hoped would be an opportunity to pet.i.tion him for a position, became instead an occasion to thank him for the one he had just bestowed on me. My life has been a series of inventions and reinventions, losses and reinstatements. This was perhaps one of the most successful, though it would not be the last.

At that time, Vienna was packed with composers, all clamoring for words. The Germans, the Italians, the French, and the English came asking me for stories, songs, dramatis personae. This week"s sensation would be forgotten next week; always there was the desire for more, for something new. My first efforts contained little that was good. When my work was praised and I replied, "It is nothing," I was speaking not out of modesty but as one who is telling the truth. As for the music, it, too, was mediocre. I listened in vain for beauty, originality, taste, but heard only caution and ambition. And blame-when a new opera failed I was denounced not only by my rivals but by my collaborators. My fellow theater artists-that nest of stinging ants-contended that the music, the scenery, the singing, the costumes, all had excelled. It was my words that were at fault.

I learned and improved. My royal patron"s faith in me was not misplaced. One of my operas met with tremendous approval, and I found myself in great demand at court and among the ladies. I was flooded with new commissions and amorous proposals, many of which I was forced to turn down but only in order to take full advantage of those I accepted. It was at this time that I lost my teeth, at the hands of a scoundrel posing as a dentist, enamored of a young lady who named me as her lover even though I had never met her. It was also at this time that I met, at a party, the small ethereal composer whose music owes its fame to several ears then in my possession: my own ear, which recognized immediately the quality of his music, and that of the emperor, which I had gained as a result of my recent great success.

The composer and I went to work. I sat up late, writing in my lodgings. The landlady"s daughter-how dull my life, and my story, would have been without landladies and their daughters-was a silent, luscious girl of sixteen who would come to me whenever I rang my bell, bringing coffee, cake, and herself. Ding-ding! I would ring and she would come. I was forever hungry and thirsty. She kept me from my work, but she brought me what I needed to keep working. In the morning, not rested but unfailingly refreshed, I would dress and call on the composer. He and his wife (who, I cannot resist mentioning as an aside, was the daughter of one of his former landladies) would listen with delight to the words I had written, delight matched only by my own when he played for me the music to which he had set my words from the day before.

Those were the happiest days of my life, working at something while knowing how exceptional it was, not yet having finished it but knowing how beautiful it would be when finished. Friends-musical artists-would drop by of an afternoon to listen to a small air on the piano, or to try out one of our new canzonettas. Bravo! they would cry. They were excited, they urged us to finish; but they were at a remove from us: eager spectators hanging over the fence. The composer and I were playing alone together with our characters and their yearnings and follies, in that delightful enclosure where the n.o.ble meets the ridiculous.

The reader will understand, and forgive me, if I embroider. The subsequent success of the work has perhaps colored my memory of its creation. Surely we quarreled? Surely we ventured down alleys that led nowhere? Surely the piece did not play itself out for us with perfect grace and ease as if we were its audience and not its makers? But it did. I vow to you, even allowing for a memory somewhat dimmed by age and sweetened by time, that it did.

And here you will permit me, reader, to digress upon the subject of memory. I have referred to previous volumes of my memoirs, through which perhaps the reader has already been gracious enough to roam, enjoying my earlier and somewhat varied accounts of my travels and accomplishments. I myself have not gone back to peruse them. They were written at a different period of my life-rather, at many different periods, inspired less by my need to remember than by my need for funds, and perhaps, if I am entirely truthful, by my wish for fame, and yet at the same time by a humble desire to share with others the many things I have seen and the many vacillations of my fortunes. Writing, and even more so, revising, has become my way of understanding and fixing my life, as a painter paints many layers and then fixes his colors with a glaze. Life is transitory. Words have the power to correct, conceal, and endure. Who that has read Casanova"s stories of his adventures can distinguish where his true glory lies: as an adventurer, or as a storyteller?

Yet although I have never reread these earlier volumes, I recall them well: with pride but also, I will confess here, with confusion and some unease. I recall that I have written elsewhere, in one of those earlier volumes, the phrase "Those were the happiest days of my life." I wrote that about the days I spent working on a different opera, with a different composer. At the time I lived those days, it was true. At the time, years later, when I wrote it, it was true. But now, fifty years after my time writing operas in Vienna, and thirty years after the publication of my first volume of memoir, I find myself considering and reconsidering these events and declamations yet again. Time and judgment collaborate to produce farce, and farce in turn contains much truth; major characters upon the stage may turn out to be lackeys in disguise, while the figures we have overlooked in the midst of much frenetic action unmask and reveal themselves as divinities. The piece I wrote with Martini that gave me such joy and triumphant gratification at the time of its creation and performance has been largely forgotten, while the ones on which Mozart and I worked are held in increasingly reverent esteem. I will not say that I have revised my memory accordingly, because I am not so easily swayed by the fickle judgments of others. But I have learned that memory is inconstant, which is perhaps its greatest danger and yet also its greatest virtue, the way in which it most truly mirrors our experience upon this earth. I have written within this very hour, of my collaboration with Mozart, "the happiest days of my life." If my wife were to walk into the room right now and ask me which of my days have been the happiest, I would tell her truthfully: "All the days I have spent with you."

Having mentioned my good friend Casanova, I will end this digression by relating to you an amusing story that concerns him, and myself, and our respective (and, if I am honest about the way I regard it, competing) voluminous memoir series. The astute and indulgent reader may perhaps remember that in the third volume of my memoirs (which, I again a.s.sert, deserve to be, though have inexplicably not been, as widely read and celebrated as his) I spoke of a visit to my old friend, who was then living near Prague. My wife and I were on our wedding trip; she was fascinated to meet Casanova, and he, having of course an eye for female beauty and charm, both of which my wife exhibited in abundance, was extremely taken with her.

Writing of this visit in my memoirs, I refer to this gracious lady as "my wife," which she was. But I have heard that Casanova, recounting the same incident, speaks of a visit I made to him near Prague with my mistress.

What accounts for this discrepancy? Faulty memory? The shifting quality of experience, which allows the same scene to appear differently when viewed by different eyes? In this case, reader, there is no need to ponder these solemn questions about the inherent and treacherous pitfalls of memoir. The answer is much simpler. While I had intended to present my wife to Casanova with pride in my new married state, the sight of my old friend and fellow libertine made my courage falter. I remembered the many nights when he and I had gone out hunting together, the many conquests, the many mornings when we would stagger back to an inn or slip out through a back door, loudly a.s.suring each other that we were two of a kind. I opened my mouth to request the honor of presenting my wife, and instead uttered words as far removed from matrimony as the devil is from heaven. Casanova was charmed; and my wife, who possesses not only beauty but also wisdom and humor, did nothing to disabuse him of the impression I had, in that moment of cowardice, conveyed to him. I invite you to laugh with me.

5.

One night Rosina and Elvira went together to a dinner party given by a couple who had just bought two of Elvira"s architectural paintings.

With the main course, the conversation turned to inheritance. A tall woman-an anesthesiologist who herself seemed sleepy-said that her cousin had just died without leaving a will, and that it was a mess. "His children are squabbling with the second wife, everyone wants everything, they"re fighting over the paperbacks, over table linens. It"s unbelievably ugly."

The man sitting next to her said that he dealt all the time with people who were trying to figure out how to allocate their estates. He was an archivist; he worked for one of the university libraries. "Famous people-writers, politicians, but also people who just have ordinary lives. We"re interested in all of it-all the papers, all the artifacts. Even the things that don"t interest us now may prove interesting in the future. If people aren"t sure what to give us, I say, "Give us everything. Just put it all in boxes and we"ll take it." "

"I have things in a box that I"m not sure what to do with," Elvira said. Rosina was startled: they had known each other for many years by then; it was the first time Elvira had ever mentioned this box. And the first time she"d spoken since they"d sat down to dinner.

"What kind of things?" the archivist asked.

"When my mother died my father got rid of all her things," Elvira said. "Very quickly. Everything. Her clothes, her books. He threw out all her papers. She was an artist, she did water-colors. He got rid of everything in her studio, and he gave all her paintings away. I think he was so afraid of the pain of seeing any of her stuff that he just tried to erase her completely." Elvira picked up her gla.s.s and drank more wine. "But I would have liked to have kept some of it. I wish I had some of her paintings, or even little things. The china animals she had on her dresser, her gloves-they smelled like her perfume. He didn"t even give us kids a chance to say if we wanted anything."

"That"s terrible," the hostess said.

Elvira shook her head, her face creased. She could get into these intense moods, Rosina knew, where she tried too hard to make herself understood. "I"m not saying this to be critical of him-not after all this time. But it started me thinking about: What happens to all those little things? The ugly china animals-"

"The sh.e.l.ls you picked up on the beach," the hostess cried.

"Who cares?" her husband said. "Who remembers? You"re dead. Someone comes in afterward, sees a bunch of sh.e.l.ls, and throws them out."

"But what if you picked them up when you were walking with someone you loved?" his wife said.

"Who cares?" he said again. The other guests looked away from them; something was happening between them that was too much for the dinner party.

Elvira ignored it. "So I started to put some things into a box. I"ve had it for years. I wouldn"t show it to anyone, there"s nothing in it that would mean anything to anyone else. But my question is, what do I do with it?"

"Bury it," the anesthesiologist said. "Take it out in the woods somewhere. Or leave instructions to have it buried with you, when you die."

"Give it to us," said the archivist.

"Leave it to someone who you know will treasure it," said the hostess, speaking softly but managing somehow to convey an air of miffed defiance of her husband. "Do you have any nieces and nephews?"

"If you give it to us, you know it will be preserved," the archivist said.

"But I don"t want to try to make sure it will be treasured, or preserved," Elvira said. "I want it to go to someone, but where I won"t have any idea what will happen to it. It needs to be a risk. I want to make a decision that somehow ensures the box just has to take its chances."

6.

Here is the rest of what Rosina knew, by now, about Elvira and Johnny.

They had not seen each other again for sixteen years, after she found out about the first wife and the second wife and the future wife and all the other women. Then they ran into each other at an artists" colony. "Well," he said when they first saw each other the day he arrived with a script he wanted to revise, "I"ve been wondering when this would happen." He reached for her hands and she automatically gave them to him.

What had he said next? She couldn"t remember. She remembered that the conversation had been very brief, that he"d been warm and confidential, that she"d been laconic almost to the point of sarcasm, and that she"d had a confused sense that he was evading her-her knowledge of him-by being direct. You see? his manner said. I am exactly what I appear to be. I"m not hiding anything. No tricks. "I follow your work," he told her. "I send away for the catalog when I know you"re having a show. And whenever I"m in L.A., I go and visit your picture at LACMA-the one with the-well, I don"t need to tell you which one it is."

Oh, come on, she thought, while at the same time unwillingly thawed by the flattery. Just as she was warning herself to be careful, he squeezed her hands, deepened his smile, and then let go of her and walked away. Don"t you dare try any of your s.h.i.t with me, she said silently to his receding back. She was amused to realize that if he didn"t try any of his s.h.i.t with her, she was going to be annoyed. Annoyed is okay, she told herself, just don"t let it get anywhere near despair.

All that first week, she watched him operate. At dinner he would sit between two women and somehow manage to gaze into the eyes of both of them. He had lost most of his hair; he had thickened and creased and roughened some, so that what had been tender and melting now looked tough and weary. But the eyes; the smile; the hands; the voice; the warmth; the keen, energetic, happy sympathy with whatever was said to him; the quick, jumpy humor-all his deadliest weapons-were the same.

It was interesting (more than interesting, intoxicating almost) to watch all this with detachment, to realize that after all this time she really was just a spectator. But he was making mincemeat of the women in the colony. One told her boyfriend from home, who had been planning to visit, not to come; she needed time to think. Another spoke of leaving her husband and small son. Whenever Elvira walked through the colony"s main living room, there were women draped on couches, crying; women hunched in the phone booths; women asking if anyone had any pills for a migraine. Elvira spent a lot of her time, when she should have been working, giving these women tea in her studio and trying to warn them, to explain Johnny to them. "I knew him a long time ago, we were together ...," she would say. The women listened to her eagerly, with tears in their eyes, wanting help; but the story didn"t help them, it didn"t stop them. The more she told it, the cheaper it felt.

"Johnny," she said to him one night, "you have to stop this."

They were standing outside together on the terrace, smoking. It was the one time Elvira allowed herself to smoke all day, and the one time she allowed herself to be with Johnny-these little moments after dinner, in the darkness, when he came up to her and asked to b.u.m a cigarette.

"Really," she said, when he didn"t answer. "You"re hurting people."

How had that led them back into each other"s arms? Elvira couldn"t remember, she told Rosina.

But it was very gentle, rueful. It was older-but-wiser s.e.x. It was two old opponents laying down their arms. It was the unicorn putting his head down in my lap. It was me being immune to all the old bulls.h.i.t, and falling for a whole new set of bulls.h.i.t. It was believing I knew him through and through, and that that would keep me safe. It was thinking that out of all those women, I was the one who had endured for him, and that maybe it had been my job to endure all the others. It was loving him, even though there wasn"t much about him that I could respect or admire.

In the end I did get hurt again. Not as badly, it wasn"t as violent as the first time. I had been curious to see: Can I do this? Will having my eyes open make it possible to do this? And in the end the answer was no, not really.

I"m not sorry, though, that we tried again. We tried for about a year. I know what he"s like. But I"ve never been happier than I was when I was with him.

Here"s something else, something I have never talked about and don"t like to think about. While I was there, at that colony, I did paintings of some of the women, the ones Johnny was fooling around with. I was fooling around, too, just experimenting with these little portraits. (Although I did sleep with two of the women-another experiment. And another story.) It made me remember, though I hadn"t thought about it in years, the pictures I"d done of Johnny"s wife and that actress. Those two I had painted in a rage, in despair, wanting to confront those women, to own them, to swallow them, to take them over-I don"t know what it was; it was crazy. The portraits I did at the colony came out of something quieter, more deliberate. Curiosity. Still obsessive, I suppose-in some way I was trying to see through Johnny"s eyes, to be Johnny, to find what animated each of the women. The tough little performance artist with the dyed-black hair. The nervous young playwright. The eighty-six-year-old sculptor-Johnny kissed her in the laundry room while she was moving her clothes from the washer to the dryer; she had a serene, lively face, and such lovely, smooth skin.

Anyway, when I got home, I kept doing little oil sketches of women"s faces. Sometimes if I"d been with Johnny and noticed him looking at a waitress or someone we walked past on the street, I"d paint that person. Or friends of his, actresses he"d worked with, anyone I thought he might have made a pa.s.s at. But mostly I just painted anonymous women, from life or from photographs in magazines. The point after a while wasn"t Who had Johnny slept with? It was Who might Johnny sleep with? Who would he want to sleep with? In other words, all women. Each woman. What would Johnny see, if he looked at this one, or this one?

It sounds crazy, I know. But I was happy, doing those paintings.

It didn"t keep being about Johnny. After a while the work wasn"t about him anymore; I barely thought of him when I did it, except as a kind of joke: Hey, Johnny, your horrible friend gave me your big catalog of women; well, here"s mine. But I was in love with the pictures themselves, the fun and interest of doing them, all those women.

The next time I had a show, I planned it as usual around the architectural paintings. Those have always provided a living for me-good in some years, in others pretty scant. But there is a long alcove off the main s.p.a.ce in the gallery where I show my work, and I decided to fill it with some of these small pictures of women. The show got only one review, a short one, which praised the large paintings but referred to the portraits as "trite, solipsistic wallpaper" and suggested I stick to painting buildings.

I should have a thicker skin by now, but I guess I don"t. Those were thin-skinned pictures.

7.

And what Elvira knew by now about Rosina: A few years after she and her husband had divorced, she had fallen in love. The handyman, who had adored her all those years ago, had returned from the army. He looked her up, and came to visit her in the apartment where she was then living in Seville. She began the affair out of a kind of tired, residual, martyrish spite toward her ex-husband, even though they weren"t in touch anymore. You thought this is what I was doing? Fine, then, I"ll do it.

But the young man was kind, loving, steadfast.