“Ilena,” she replied. In the riches of that smile one would never be lonely or forgotten.
I examined her palm with feigned authority. “You will have three children,” I said, pointing to some creases. “You are witty — it shows that here. I see money and fame.” I felt her fingers pressing mine.
“You are an ass,” she said gaily. “That means nice, no?”
Ilena may have been her name or it may have been the name she simply wore like a silk dressing gown one longed to peel back. Warmth came off her in waves. She was twenty-three years old and weighed sixty-two kilos, the absence of any part of which would have been a grave loss. She was, I learned, the mistress of John Huston, who was in Rome directing a film. She had also been the companion of Farouk, the exiled king of Egypt, and in that sense one of the last of an infinite number of royal properties reaching back to the pharaohs. She had met him at the dentist’s office. He was there with his lawyer, she said, a detail I felt no one could invent. They discovered they lived not far from each other and began going out.
Farouk’s days started in the evening. Like a true playboy, he rose late. She described him for me. He was amusing. He liked fine cars — he had a Rolls and a Jaguar. He loved to eat. I thought of the large men I had known, many of them good dancers, graceful, even dainty. Was it true of him? “Darling, we never danced,” she said.
It was clear she had been fond of him. They had traveled to Monte Carlo together, to the chemin de fer tables where, a prodigious gambler, he was known as the Locomotive. The night he collapsed and died in Rome in a restaurant on the Appia Antica she was allowed to leave by the back door before the press arrived.
Whether or not she was an actress or ever became one, I do not know. Of course, she wanted to be — she had already played great roles.
We had a drink, the three of us, at the Blue Bar and a gelato on the Piazza Navona. On Via Veneto she stopped to talk with a group of elderly Italian businessmen. It was lovely to watch her. Her legs, the silk of her print dress, the smoothness of her cheeks, all of it shone like constellations, the sort that rule one’s fate.
We dropped the American woman at her hotel, the Excelsior. Sitting in the car, in the driveway, I turned to Ilena and said simply, “I adore you. I have from the first moment.” In response she kissed me and said, “To the right.” It was late and she had an early appointment at Elizabeth Arden’s; she wanted to go home.
“Are you married?” she asked as we drove.
“Yes.”
“So am I.”
It was to a man in his eighties, she explained. I recognized the story from the newspapers — she had married him to get a passport. He was in an old people’s home, an istituto. She went to visit him there, she said. Then, agreeably, “Would you like to come?”
We stopped that night on a street near a dark piazza, across from a little place where she had often gone with Farouk at four or five in the morning for apple strudel. It looked closed, and I waited while she ran across to say hello to the woman who was the proprietor. After a while she came back. “She was so happy to see me,” she said animatedly and added, “She’s very nice.”
We went on to Parioli, where, in a somewhat dubious building on Via Archimede, Ilena lived. The apartment was small and drearily furnished, but on the wall was a large picture of John Huston that had appeared in Life. Lying on the floor were books that Huston had given her to read. He might just as well have given her a chemistry set or a microscope. “You must never stop learning,” he told her — she could do him perfectly. I could hear his rich, rolling, faintly cynical voice pronouncing “Mount Lungo” in his documentary on the battle of San Pietro, a village in ruins after the war, given over to weeds and sheep droppings. There is a cemetery atop Mount Lungo from the heights of which one can see twenty miles, all the bare stony slopes up which men fought.
“Never stop learning,” he repeated. “That’s very important. Promise me that.”
“Of course, John,” she answered.
In an album were many clippings of the two of them, Huston with a white, patriarchal beard. He was a coccolone—someone who likes to be babied. He was also crazy, she admitted, and very tight. “To get a thousand dollars from him is so difficult,” she said.
The portrait she painted over a period of time was of an indomitable man who nonetheless was lonely. He would call on the phone, “What are you up to, baby?”
“Nothing.”
“Come right over. Right away.”
He was in the autumn of a life of activity, a life that had not always been lived in accordance with reason. He had no friends, she said, and hated to go out. He was living in a suite in the Grand Hotel on a diet of vodka and caviar. She would call him. “John, do you want some girls?”
“Bring them around,” he said. “We’ll have some fun.”
She brought three, one of them eighteen years old — she liked young, tender girls, she explained, in the late afternoon was best. “Darling,” she said to me after describing a scene that might have taken place at Roissy, “you’re a writer, you should know these things.”
Huston had fought at Cassino, she told me, as if in justification.
“No, he didn’t.”
“But he did. He’s told me stories.”
“He was a film director. He never fought.”
“Well, he thinks he did,” she said. “That’s the same thing.”
I liked her generosity and lack of morals — they seemed close to an ideal condition of living — and also the way she looked at her teeth in the mirror as she talked. I liked the way she pronounced “cashmere,” like the state in India, Kashmir. Her cosmetics bag was filled with prescriptions, just as the shelf in her closet was crammed with shoes. Once we passed a big Alfa Romeo that she recognized as belonging to a friend, the chief of detectives in Rome. She had made love with him, of course. “Darling,” she said, “there’s no other way. Otherwise there would have been terrible trouble about my passport. It would have been impossible.” I only learned in time that there was, besides Huston, also an Italian businessman supporting her.
She didn’t like Negroes, Arabs, or certain cities, often that she had never been to. Above all, she hated bohemians. “Darling, they’re so filthy.” I admired her poise. On the telephone, to someone she did not know who had been given her number, she merely said, “I’m sorry. I have to go.” I heard that on several occasions.
The things she said seemed to come straight from what she knew or felt, as easily as one might pick up a fork. There was no hesitation or propriety. She said things I wished I might have, things more direct.
She was also, I hardly need add, difficult, especially about eating. “I have to have something to eat,” she would say, becoming more and more nervous. “If I don’t get something to eat, I’m going to cry.” And reading the menu in a kind of desperation, “What shall I order?” When it came, she was likely to send it back. “I can’t eat this.” The restaurant never made a fuss. The crucial question was whether or not the dish contained butter or had been cooked in it. She absolutely could not eat butter. She had to be extremely careful, she said.
Once we sat down in a restaurant and while she went to the ladies’ room I read the menu. As I did, I realized there was nothing on it she would like, and besides, the place seemed dull and nearly empty. I rose as she returned, and said, “Come. This is not good.” She obeyed without a word.