The Double Life of Liliane Read online

  The Double Life

  of Liliane

  Also by Lily Tuck

  The House at Belle Fontaine

  I Married You for Happiness

  Woman of Rome: A Life of Elsa Morante

  The News from Paraguay

  Limbo, and Other Places I Have Lived

  Siam: Or, the Woman Who Shot a Man

  The Woman Who Walked on Water

  Interviewing Matisse: Or the Woman Who Died Standing Up

  The Double Life

  of Liliane

  a novel

  Lily Tuck

  Atlantic Monthly Press

  New York

  Copyright © 2015 by Lily Tuck

  Jacket design by Abby Weintraub

  Cover photographs courtesy of the author

  In all cases where it has seemed appropriate, I have tried to reach the owner of the copyright for photographs and textual material included in this book. Any error or omissions will be corrected in future printings.

  All photos in this book are the property of the author, with the exception of the image on page 43, reprinted with kind permission of Critical Past; the image on page 51, photographer unknown, image provided courtesy of the Gustavo Vidal Collection; public domain images on pages 46, 154, 173; and images on pages 100 and 180 taken from Shutterstock.

  Page 170: “Perfidia,” original words and music by Alberto Dominguez. English words by Milton Leeds. Copyright © 1939 and © 1941 by Peer International Corporation. Copyright Renewed. Used by Permission. All Rights Reserved. Page 213: Lines from “The Love Letter” by Frederick Seidel, reprinted with kind permission of the author. Page 230: Lines from “Autre Éventail de Mademoiselle Mallarmé” by Stéphane Mallarmé, taken from Six French Poets of the Nineteenth Century, edited by A. M. Blackmore, E. H. Blackmore. Oxford University Press, 2009. Reprinted with permission of Oxford University Press.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [email protected].

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN 978-0-8021-2402-9

  eISBN 978-0-8021-9089-5

  Atlantic Monthly Press

  an imprint of Grove Atlantic

  154 West 14th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  groveatlantic.com

  To my grandmother, Lily Solmsen, who told me stories

  And to Elisabeth Schmitz who made them better

  Part fact part fiction is what life is. And it is always a cover story.

  I wrote my way out.

  —Jeanette Winterson

  I believe one has a public life, a private life and a secret life.

  I have written a lot about my public and private lives.

  On my secret life, I have not written a single word.

  —Gabriel García Márquez

  The Double Life

  of Liliane

  Prologue

  As a child I am often sick. Something to do with my heart. Pale, I lie on the examining table, with only a sheet to half hide my nakedness, as Dr. Fischer presses his cold stethoscope against my ribs and tells me to breathe.

  “Breathe normally,” he says.

  Then, “Take a deep breath. Again.”

  Dr. Fischer is old. His hands shake a little and are covered with brown spots.

  He listens.

  Lub—the first heart sound is the closing of the atrioventricular valves.

  Dub—the second heart sound is the closing of the semilunar valves.

  Lub dub lub dub lub dub lub dub lub dub lub dub

  Dr. Fischer listens for lud dub ta—a protodiastolic gallop sound—and for ta lub dub—an atrial gallop sound. He also listens for heart murmurs that make a whooshing sound generated by a turbulent flow of blood. These can be benign or they can be abnormal.

  Dr. Fischer is a kind if not entirely gentle man. His eyesight is failing, perhaps the reason he is awkward and a bit rough. The way he presses too hard on my collarbone.

  “An innocent murmur,” he informs me.

  I am a little afraid of Dr. Fischer, but I summon up the courage to ask him: “Am I going to die?”

  “No.” Then, reconsidering, he pats my arm and says, “Yes, but not for a long time.”

  I

  Liliane’s double life begins at New York’s Idlewild Airport when she boards a Trans World Airlines L-749 Constellation, the first commercial plane to cross the Atlantic nonstop thanks to its additional fuel tanks. The flight from New York to Rome usually takes from fourteen to sixteen hours depending on the wind, but on account of engine trouble, the flight Liliane takes is longer. The passengers are made to disembark and wait in Gander for several hours—the airport is a metal Quonset hut with no shops or cafeteria—until another plane arrives. As Liliane gets ready to board a second time, too late, she remembers that she left the cardboard box with the cheesecake in the overhead compartment above her seat in the first plane. A day earlier, she and her mother had bought the cheesecake at a delicatessen on Fifty-eighth Street as a gift for her father. It was to have been a surprise. A few days before Christmas, it has begun to snow heavy wet flakes in Gander. How old is she then? Nine? Ten? She is wearing a red coat and she does not want to go to Rome.

  Already, Liliane misses her mother. Her beautiful mother whose looks have been compared to Greta Garbo’s and Marlene Die­trich’s. One time, when Liliane’s mother got lost looking for the Third Avenue Bridge in Manhattan in order to avoid paying the toll on the Triborough, a policeman stopped her and, after taking a good look at her, asked if she was Marlene Dietrich and Liliane’s mother replied that if she was Marlene Dietrich she would not be driving out of her way and getting lost to save twenty-five cents.

  Liliane does not look like her mother, she looks like her father.

  When next the plane lands, the sun is out and it is the bright following day. They have crossed the Atlantic and are in Shannon, Ireland. Looking out the window as the plane taxis, Liliane catches a glimpse of a rabbit in the grass along the runway. At the sound of the plane, the rabbit stands on its hind legs, then turning, hops quickly away.

  In the terminal, Liliane walks back and forth looking at the shops. In one, a souvenir shop, a four-leaf clover inside a round plastic charm dangling from a key chain catches her eye. A good luck charm. All of a sudden, she wants it, only she has no money. The saleslady is busy making change for a customer who has bought a wool cap and, on an impulse, Liliane takes the four-leaf clover key chain. The saleslady must suspect something for she looks up as Liliane is slipping the key chain into the pocket of her red coat, but just then the customer who bought the wool cap says something to the saleslady and she gets distracted.

  The passenger seated next to Liliane is a middle-aged man who, during the flight, smokes, drinks several glasses of scotch, and is friendly.
He tells her that he has a little girl who must be about the same age as Liliane and that her name is Jennifer. Jennifer wants a special kind of doll for Christmas, the man tells Liliane. A doll baby who drinks, wets, and says mama. The man speaks a lot more about Jennifer—what she does and what she says—and it soon becomes apparent to Liliane that Jennifer is quite a bit younger than she and Liliane loses interest in her. She falls asleep, and during the layover in Paris, she is asleep in her seat—she has not taken off her red coat and her hand is in the pocket, holding the key chain with the four-leaf clover charm attached to it. She is unaware that the passenger next to her has disembarked or that there has been a change in the crew. The new stewardess who has come on board does not want to wake her.

  Jennifer is eating great mouthfuls of cheesecake. Her face is covered with cheesecake, some of it has gotten into her hair. “Stop!” Liliane shouts at her, she is close to tears. “Stop!” she shouts again, “the cheesecake is for my father!”

  Liliane is still sleeping when they get ready to land at Ciampino, Rome’s airport, named after the commune of Ciampino, which in turn was named for Giovanni Giustino Ciampini, a seventeenth-century ecclesiastical archaeologist. Had Liliane been awake she might have seen, out of her window, how the plane flies directly over the ruins of several Roman aqueducts. And had she been a little older and studied Roman history at school, she might have known how by the fourth century BC, due to the rapid growth of the population and thus the need for a greater water supply, the Romans had begun to build aqueducts that carried water all the way from springs in the Apennine Mountains. In addition, she might have known how by then the Romans had also figured out that the aqueducts’ gradient had to be about a one-foot drop per two hundred feet in length so that the water could flow fast enough but not too fast to wash out of the aqueduct.

  The stewardess, a pretty blonde, tries to brush out the wrinkles on Liliane’s red coat and to adjust the plastic barrette that holds Liliane’s hair in place as she gets ready to leave the plane.

  “Did you bring a hat, little girl?” the pretty blonde stewardess asks. “You haven’t forgotten anything?” (Later, the stewardess will tell the handsome co-pilot she is sleeping with how, to her way of thinking, it is nearly criminal of the parents to let a child so young fly by herself. She will say this as she adjusts the little gray cap adorned with a silver badge in the shape of a wing on her neatly coiffed blonde head. And, furthermore, she continues, smiling now, if she herself were, one day, to have children, she would never ever let them travel alone.)

  The next day, during the layover, while the co-pilot and the pretty stewardess are crossing Piazza Venezia on their way to the Forum, they helplessly watch as a young man drives by on a Vespa and grabs a woman’s purse, knocking her to the ground.

  “Oh, my god,” the stewardess says, as she starts to take a step toward the woman.

  “It could have been you,” the co-pilot says, taking her arm and pulling her along to the Forum.

  “I think I hate Rome,” the stewardess says.

  Liliane’s father, Rudy, has furnished the guest room in his Rome apartment with her in mind: the bed, the armoire, the bureau are little and painted white (and, for the next eight or nine years that she will come visit, the furniture in the room will remain the same). The apartment is in a modern seven-story building located on Via San Crescenziano, a small street named after Saint Crescentinus. A Roman soldier, Saint Crescentinus had converted to Christianity and was said to have slain a dragon, which led to many conversions. Nonetheless, in AD 303, he was beheaded. He is the patron saint of the city of Urbino and his relics are supposed to cure supplicants of their headaches. Via San Crescenziano runs into Via Salaria, which stretches across the entire width of Italy, from Porto d’Ascoli on the Adriatic coast all the way to Rome. Via Salaria is so named because the road was originally used by the Sabines to transport sal (Latin for salt) from the Roman saltworks at the mouth of the Tiber to their home in the Apennines. At present, Via Salaria joins highway SS4, which, in turn, joins highway A1, the Autostrada del Sole, the longest of Italy’s highways—the 754 kilometers connect Milan via Bologna, Florence, and Rome with Naples. Also, since Liliane’s father’s apartment is not far from the open countryside, prostitutes line Via Salaria, at all hours of the day and night, waiting for customers to pick them up.

  In the living room, the blue velvet sofa, the green glass coffee table, the two matching stuffed chairs, and her father’s ornate mahogany desk are all new. Except for a large Venetian glass ashtray on top of the coffee table—her father smokes a pack of cigarettes a day, Chesterfields he buys on the black ­market—there are no books or magazines or other objects to give the room a lived-in look. The only personal object in the room is the statue of a lion that sits on her father’s desk. It is the Golden Laurel Award he received at the Venice Film Festival in 1950 for a film called Donne senza Nome (Women without Names) starring Simone Simon and Françoise Rosay and set after World War II, in a displaced persons’ camp, where the lives and freedom of three women and a newborn child are at stake. The actresses playing the women detainees speak in many different languages—­Italian, English, French, Serbo-Croatian, and German—and the film’s location scenes were shot in Puglia, in the town of Alberobello, famous for its distinctive houses with cone-shaped stone roofs. A few years later, Rudy will put a framed photo of Liliane next to the statue of the lion. The photo—a photo she does not like (it looks posed and her hair at the time is too short)—will be taken by a well-known photographer, who is a friend both of her father and of Marilyn Monroe. (The photographer and his wife are also friends of Audrey Hepburn and the photographer’s wife likes to tell Liliane how, at lunch one day, when she was heavily pregnant, she asked Audrey Hepburn not to take off her coat and reveal her tiny waist and Audrey Hepburn didn’t.)

  A terrace off the living room gives on to Villa Ada. Originally owned by the House of Savoy, the Italian royal family, a large part of the park is public and boasts an artificial lake and many different types of trees, including a rare Tibetan metasequoia. At Liliane’s father’s request, the maid, Maria, has bought a few plants for the terrace—bougainvillea and geraniums—and she waters them daily, careful to make sure that the water does not spill over onto the terrace below. When Liliane is older—instead of coming to visit her father at Christmas, she comes in the summer for the month of July—she spends hours out on the terrace sunbathing in her bikini. From there, too—if she stands at the far end of the terrace—Liliane can see into the windows of the apartment of the building next door. The apartment belongs to Gualtiero Jacopetti, the dashingly handsome director of Mondo Cane, the controversial film made up of a series of lurid and macabre scenes—a woman in New Guinea suckling a baby pig, risky rituals involving poisonous snakes, the running of the bulls in Pamplona with people getting gored. The film was nominated for several awards and spawned several sequels known as “shock­umentaries.” As for Gualtiero Jacopetti, in 1955 he was jailed for having had sex with a fourteen-year-old Gypsy girl named Jolanda Calderas, whom he was later forced to marry.

  Leaning out of his apartment window, Gualtiero is watching Liliane as she sunbathes.

  “How old are you?” he asks her.

  In the morning, before her father leaves for work, he and Liliane breakfast in the dining room. Her father has a hearty appetite and eats a large meal—coffee, milk, bread, butter, ham, cheese, and fruit. She and her father, who is from Germany originally, speak French together.

  “Papa” is what she calls him.

  French is Liliane’s first language, but, since at home now she speaks only English; her French is rusty and she finds it harder to express herself in it. In addition—and she will find this to always be true—she feels like a different person speaking French and not like her ordinary self. The difference is hard to explain but whether she speaks French or English at breakfast makes little difference. Busy eating, Liliane and her
father are mostly silent.

  Maria, the maid, serves them. Maria is short, dark, and unobtrusive. She makes up the beds, washes, cleans, shops for Liliane’s father and, in turn, for Liliane, when she is there. Since at first Liliane does not speak Italian, she cannot communicate with Maria. She can only say grazie and buon giorno and arrividerla. She does not know anything about Maria—whether she is married, a widow, or has children, or, perhaps, even grandchildren. Nor does she know how old Maria is. As far as Liliane is concerned, Maria could be any age. Even when Liliane is older and has learned to speak Italian, she still learns nothing about Maria or Maria’s life. Liliane’s father knows nothing about her either, or, only, that Maria is honest—onestà.

  After Liliane’s father leaves to go to work, Maria goes to the market and Liliane is alone. It is not clear what she does for the next three or four hours—hours that she has no memory of—until Maria returns and telephones for a taxi to take Liliane to meet her father at his office.

  Pronto! Pronto!—Hello! Hello!

  Liliane can hear Maria shout into the telephone, repeating the address, then the directions: dopo Piazza Priscilla—after Piazza Priscilla—prima da Piazza Viscovio—before Piazza Viscovio.

  Subito . . . subito—right away . . . right away, she also entreats.

  Very often, Liliane has to wait a long time outside her father’s apartment building before the taxi arrives. Very often, too, the taxi does not arrive and Liliane has to go back upstairs and Maria has to telephone a second time.

  Pronto! Pronto! Maria starts up again.

  Her father’s office is located on Corso d’Italia, an avenue that runs parallel to a section of the Aurelian Wall, known as the Muro Torto (Twisted Wall), which extends through the Villa Borghese from Via Veneto to Piazza del Popolo. According to one popular legend—of which there are many—the place where the wall stands marks the spot from which Saint Peter defended Rome. Another less savory account claims that the wall was the burial site for robbers, whores, and rebels—among the latter, two men were decapitated in 1852 and, apparently, their ghosts can be seen from time to time holding their bloody heads in their hands. Less dramatic but no less irritating to the drivers, cars are said to invariably run out of gas when approaching the wall. Liliane’s father’s office is on the top floor of the building and although there is an elevator, the elevator requires a coin to operate it; since the elevator is old, the necessary coins are no longer in circulation, and Liliane’s father has to go out of his way to a special bank to buy them. As a result, everyone who works in the office, except for occasionally Liliane’s father, who suffers from attacks of gout, walks up the five flights of stairs. The office has high ceilings and is spacious and sunny; the walls are hung with colorful framed posters advertising the films Liliane’s father has produced.