After Auschwitz: A Love Story by Brenda Webster Page B

myself I saw in her eyes: liberator, magician of the possible.
    When I met Hannah in her early twenties she had a rudimentary knowledge of Italian, spoke Romanian and Yiddish, and only knew enough Hebrew to pray. How it excited me in those early days and years to introduce her to art and the books I loved. At first she was hesitant. Her mother had rebuked her innumerable times for sitting in the house reading poetry instead of praying. She would tear the book from Hannah’s hand. Angry at what she called her fantasies. Without poetrylife would be insupportable, Hannah said, her head on my shoulder.
    â€œWhy didn’t Mamma know that?”
    She had forgotten all she knew in Auschwitz, even the songs. I felt I was participating in a rebirth.
    I had no doubt about what I wanted to offer her first. I went right to Dante. I’d always felt that the fifth Canto of the
Inferno
was, though spiritualized, extremely erotic. I pictured reading it and then tumbling into bed. I drew her over to the couch and opened my book with its sensuous red leather cover. We sat shoulder to shoulder reading the wonderful stanza where the poet summons the lovers Paolo and Francesca to tell how they were undone by love. Their punishment of course is to never be separated, blown like morning doves by the wind. Francesca explains to Dante that when she and Paolo read about how the great lover Sir Lancelot kissed his beloved’s longed-for smile, Paolo, Francesca’s own love, lost restraint and “kissed me on the mouth, all trembling:”
    Quando leggemo il disiato riso
    Esser baciato da cotanto amante
    Questi, che mai da me sia deviso
    La bocca mi bacio, tutto tremante.
    I wanted to say something about poetry and love. I caressed her shoulder, kneaded it with my palm, waiting for her to melt into me as she had so many times before. But unexpectedly she burst into tears. Later I realized that it was the words
che mai di mi sia deviso
—“who will never be parted from me”—that reduced her to tears. They moved her so much because she thought of us that way too. As eternally loving, never abandoned or abandoning.
    Love was the only religion Hannah had held on to. If I die first, I have no doubt that she’ll dress in black like the Sicilian women, mourning me for the rest of her life. I’m ashamed to admit that it gives me a moment’s pleasure tothink of extending my power over her, but then I feel a frisson of fear and my hands go cold. Too much, too much wild intensity. In the past it became frightening when I had to leave for any reason, to work on a film or go to a conference or read. Then she would accuse me of wanting to get away from her story.
    Once I went out to meet Monica Vitti for dinner to talk about a film we were planning to do together. It was a balmy summer night and we were in Piazza Navona talking after dinner and having a cigarette. Because of the music—a jazz group was improvising and the fountains plashing—it was hard to hear. I was leaning forward, trying to tell Monica something, speaking directly into her ear, when I suddenly caught a glimpse of Hannah standing in the shadows craning her neck, trying to see more plainly. Her fists were clenched, and I thought for a moment she planned to attack.
    She told me later that she felt betrayed by Monica, who was her friend as well. That she had in fact wanted to kill her, calling her every possible name: whore, piece of shit. But what enraged her most was that I was content and self-contained existing without her. It was right after that incident that I decided to take her back to her village and do a film about it and her. I also doubled my attentiveness, if such a thing were possible.
    There was a story in the
Herald Tribune
—which I still read occasionally to have something to talk about with our American friends—about a woman Marine who discovered that her boyfriend had been cheating on her. Powered by rage and