Shylock's Daughter: A Novel of Love in Venice (2 page)

Some artists need to wallow in self in order to create. I, on the contrary, was always fleeing myself—the very opposite of the writer's craft. When the lights come up on the stage, when you are isolated in the little circle of heat and brightness that insulates you from the crowd, you are also insulated from past and future. There is only that moment and the character that consumes you.

You feel the audience also as a source of heat, and there is the heat within you—panic, ambition, dread—that propels you into the part, that makes you embrace it as if somehow, through it, you could find home, mother, completion, peace.

I had begun with Shakespeare—with Shakespearean roles, that is. Shakespeare was my home, my substitute mother, also my escape. In high school I discovered the sonnets. In college I acted Juliet, Portia, Cordelia, Rosalind, even Lady Macbeth (though I was much too young and green to understand her). But I had never acted my namesake, Jessica. It was ironic that I had been named for Shylock's daughter, named for her by a WASP mother who also loved Shakespeare. The name Jessica is all the rage nowadays with four-year-olds, but in the forties it was still an odd name—almost as odd as Nerissa or Cordelia. I always found it strange that I, who felt almost like an imaginary Jew (the very definition of the outsider), should be named for the young Jewess who renounces her faith and her father for a facile Christianity and a foppish young man.

Now, after all these years, I was going to get to play my namesake, for
Serenissima
was nothing less than a filmic fantasy based on
The Merchant of Venice
. My director, the nearly mythical Swede Björn Persson, had announced it as his last film—the climax of a career that had included a film about Tchaikovsky, a film about Byron, many films drawn from his own tortured Swedish life, and, just recently, a brilliant and controversial film about Mozart. It was rumored that in
Serenissima
Shakespeare himself was to appear as a character representing the director, as Prospero represented Shakespeare in his last play—but that remained to be seen.

Björn was legendary for never allowing even his most celebrated international stars to see the script before commencing to shoot. You worked with Björn because it was an honor to work with Björn, because he was an artist in a world in which artists were an endangered species, and because you knew that the script you would receive when you arrived on location would be a masterpiece—or at least an ambitious and beautiful failure, more interesting to be seen in than most “successes.” You worked with Björn because there was no way to turn Björn down. He was hypnotic, a svengali, a genius. When he talked to you, when he looked into your eyes with his luminous blue-gray ones and explained your role to you, or anything in the world to you for that matter, you felt yourself to be the only person alive on earth, the only actress, the only woman, in all of time, in the entire galaxy.

This movie of
The Merchant of Venice
was critical to me in a way other actresses my age will immediately understand. It was my last chance to play the lover before I entered that desperate no woman's land between
innamorata
and grandma, that terrifying no woman's land from forty to sixty that all actresses wander into sooner or later. It was true that I had staved off the inevitable longer than most because I looked young—but it was only a matter of minutes, I felt, before the best roles would vanish, and with them my career. So I was looking forward to working with Björn again, though his very presence gave me pain.

I had had my obligatory fling with him—if an affair with Björn could be called anything so frivolous as a fling—several years ago, when we were both between marriages (his sixth and seventh, my third and fourth), and it had left me raw and amputated for a year. But there was no way I wasn't going to work with him again. He was undoubtedly the greatest director of our time, and saying no to him would have been like saying no to Shakespeare if you were an Elizabethan actor. He was brilliant, maddening, mercurial—alternately gregarious and reclusive. He required a woman to care for him like the giant baby he was, to keep the world at bay when he was working, to nurse him through breakdowns, depressions, fits of writing or blockage, starts at films that never got off the ground.

Though he was the most loving and maternal of directors on the set, in life he used up all the air in a room; his genius permitted no one else's to exist. He fell in love with creative women and then tried to strangle them or make them into nurses, killing in them the thing he first had loved. It was an impossible dilemma which he had not been able to resolve until the age of sixty. Nowadays he was married to a wife who understood, possibly even enjoyed, all of this—wife number seven—a beautiful, green-eyed, gray-haired matron who sailed through the world like a great galleon of the sixteenth century, accepting Björn's awards in foreign countries, nursing him through bouts of writing in their hideaway in the south of France (Villa Persson, it was called), understanding his need to be a genius who transformed women into nannies.

She was a brilliant woman—this Lilli Persson—as brilliant in her way as he was in his, and she understood the fine (all but lost) art of cosseting genius. Without her, nothing would get done in Björn's life these days—not
Serenissima
, not his plays, not the operas he sometimes mounted at Stockholm's Royal Opera House.

I was both terrified and elated at the prospect of seeing Björn again. Björn had turned my life inside out and then departed with Lilli. It was not, God knows, that I wanted to
marry
him. I was not masochist enough for that. It was just that he had stirred me to the bottom of my being and then fled. It also struck me as a sort of karmic joke that we should meet again in Venice, that chimera, that city of illusions where reality becomes fantasy and fantasy becomes reality. Perhaps it is because Venice is both liquid and solid, both air and stone, that it somehow combines all the elements crucial to make our imaginations ignite and turn fantasies into realities.

Each time one comes to Venice, it reflects back another self, another dream, as if it were partly your own mirror. The air is full of the spirits of all those who have lived here, worked here, loved here. The stones themselves are thick with history. They whisper to you as you walk the deserted streets at night. Cats leap out as if they were the embodied spirits of all the dead ones who created here or died here: Byron, Browning, Ruskin, Turner, Tintoretto, Mahler, Stravinsky…Shakespeare. Was Shakespeare ever here?

I had read and re-read
The Merchant of Venice
on the Alitalia flight from New York (a studio jet had carried me from Burbank to Teterboro, a helicopter from Teterboro to JFK), searching for some clue that he
was
.

But the play was equivocal, Anglicized, unclear. At first it did not seem to bear the unmistakable scent of Italy as Browning's work or Byron's bears the scent, as Ruskin's and Henry James's work bear the scent, reflecting in the very rhythms of their prose the rise and fall of the sea.

Was Shakespeare here? Remember those “lost years” in his life—the years no one can account for, the years after he marries Anne Hathaway and has three babes, but before 1592, when an envious Robert Greene mentions him as “an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers…in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country…” What was he doing then? Apprentice player? Schoolmaster in the country? No one knows. Then there were the plague years, 1592 and 1593 particularly, when the theaters in London were closed and players had to tour the countryside to earn their bread—or might he instead have voyaged to Italy with Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton, his patron and (some say) lover?

Who knew? Shakespeare scholarship was rife with petty academic rivalries, outrageous suppositions, the mad hypotheses of good brains gone bad in college libraries, eaten by the maggots of paranoia and thwarted literary ambitions. Stratfordians said “the Bard” (How I hate that orotund, pretentious epithet!) was a simple glover's son; anti-Stratfordians made him earl of this or that, because in their snobbery they could not believe that our greatest poet could lack a title. Piffle.

It was all as Joyce's Buck Mulligan had said, “He proves by algebra that Hamlet's grandson is Shakespeare's grandfather and that he himself is the ghost of his own father.”

But what if Shakespeare had been here? Venice, then as now, was the end point of exotic English travels, a place of resort for lusty young men with poetic and bisexual ambitions, a city of sin, decadence, and glamour, a place to expose oneself to new viruses when one's own plagues were either too weak or too strong, a city of fabulous courtesans who wrote poetry, a city of Jews, usurers, Moors, moneylenders, a city of feuding noble lords who dressed in all the pearls of the Orient, who rode the civic waterways in curious boats whose toes turned up like slippers, but who commanded the entire Adriatic, Aegean, and Mediterranean with galleasses and triremes rowed by hundreds of sweating slaves.

How could Shakespeare
not
be drawn here—with his golden-ringleted earl, “the onlie begetter of the Sonnets,” the patron to whom he dedicated the greatest stroke poem of all time, that “book of one hand” (as the French say)
Venus and Adonis
? Venice, then as now, was the city of sex and sin to which two lusty young men might sail in a great, wide-beamed Elizabethan galley, searching for future plots and poetry beneath the golden lion of St. Mark…

My suite at the Excelsior is grand. All the members of the jury have grand suites. Having been duly met at the Aeroporto Marco Polo by members of the Biennale committee toting gaudy, cellophane-shrouded bouquets of roses, we have been ushered in state (a private silk-curtained state
motoscafo
, that is) to the fairy-turreted, fake Byzantine fantasy that is the Excelsior.
Paparazzi
accost us as the
motoscafo
docks at the private landing. I am wearing the requisite giant tortoise-shell movie star sunglasses and, of course, the
paparazzi
beg me to remove them.

“Jessica! Jessica!” they call. “Coulda you pleeza remove the
occhiali?
” (It is astounding how the use of one's first name evokes intimacy—even if used by a total stranger.)

I dutifully remove the
occhiali
, strike my best angle, and smile. If my forty-three years of being photographed have taught me anything, they've taught me my best angles—though, of course, I only confess to being thirty-four—simply reversing the digits like a dyslexic. I don't
believe
a woman should lie about her age, but in my profession, it's a question of survival. Admitting to thirty-four, I'm still offered roles I would never be offered if I admitted to forty-three—ridiculous, but true.

I am helped out of the boat by a toady in white (oh, Venetians are so groveling if they think you're important, so maddeningly indifferent if they think you're not), and my fellow members of the
giuria
follow me out of the boat and strike poses on the dock for the
paparazzi
.

I toss my hennaed chestnut hair, open wide my “fabled” gold-brown eyes, smile with lips recently reslicked with pinkish lip-gloss, and try to act as if I
feel
beautiful—although I have never mastered that art. Like most women, when I look in the mirror I see the flaws in my beauty, not the beauty, however much it has been praised. And I hate the photography ritual, though I accept it as part of my job. Much as I
try
to enjoy it, I cannot quite get past the feeling that my soul is being stolen by the cameras. My soul feels none too attached to my body these days anyway. Every August I experience severe distress as the anniversary of my mother's suicide arrives (on September first, to be exact), but this year it has been worse than usual. It is twenty-eight years later and somehow I still cannot believe she is dead. She did not actually die in Venice, but she might as well have, for it was in Venice that she entered her final hopelessness and depression. If her soul is lingering anywhere, it lingers here in this city of mirages, and not in the humid canyons of New York.

The other members of the
giuria
are posing with me—and the
giuria
is heavy with literati this year: a flamboyant Russian poet with arctic Siberian eyes of icy blue; a famous octogenarian antifascist Spanish surrealist poet with long white tresses and a dishy, young girlfriend; a dark-mustachioed German playwright of the radical sixties who bristles—prickly as a porcupine—with ideology, politico-aesthetic theories, and Marxist epigrams; a frail, freckle-faced Nobel laureate who began his life in a shtetl in Poland and is ending it “in Svizzera” (having, in between, written his major books in Brighton Beach); a very vague aristocratic painter from some nebulous country like Belgium, who is trailed by a beauteous Japanese wife in kimono and two exquisite Eurasian daughters of eleven and thirteen. And then there are the film types: our president, a famous brooding intellectual Italian film director with a strange tic like St. Vitus's dance; an even more famous anti-intellectual Italian film director with an actress-wife and an actress-mistress in tow (the mistress and the wife appear to be the best of friends: they share a suite, while the famous film director will soon be seen dallying with starlets on the
terrazzo
and the beach); a famous Swedish actor (also set to be in
Serenissima
) who is an old lover of mine (like my Swedish director, due to arrive in a day or so); and a variety of others who are not yet in evidence.

My photo duty done, I break free of the crowd and am ushered up to my room, informed that
i bagagli
will follow. I am carrying the cellophane-shrouded roses, but my room is already full of other roses: one bunch from the president of the Biennale, another from the managing director of the hotel, another from the president of the
giuria
. I open each card eagerly—hoping it will prove to be a bouquet from a lover rather than an obligatory bouquet from an official who is duty-bound to proffer obligatory
fiori
. Alas, this is not the case. I have no lover at the moment—and this is purely by choice. But apparently the female of the species is psychologically constructed in such a manner that she cannot open the card in a bouquet of roses without wondering whether some new and delicious lover will soon enter (stage left) and audition for a role in her autobiography.