she had loved me I should have talked about it to her, and talking about it to her meant, really and truly, accepting it.
I went out one morning in order to go and see the director with whom I was working on script No. 1 for Battista. I knew it was the last time I should be going there, because there were now only a few pages left before the end, and this thought cheered me: at last this toil was on the point of finishing and I should again be my own master for at least half the day. Besides, as always happens with filmscripts, two months of work had sufficed to imbue me with a profound dislike for the characters and the story of the film. I knew that I should very soon find myself at grips with a set of characters and a story destined quickly to become, in their turn, no less intolerable; but in the meantime I was escaping from the first set, and the prospect of this was enough to bring me considerable relief.
My hope of approaching freedom caused me to work, that morning, with unusual facility and inventiveness. In order to complete the script, not more than two or three points, of little importance, required touching up; upon these, however, we had been hesitating for some days. But, carried away by my inspiration, I succeeded, from the very beginning, in guiding the discussion along the right lines and solving, one after the other, all the outstanding difficulties, so that, after barely a couple of hours, we realized that the script was really finished, this time beyond question. In the end—just as happens with a certain kind of interminable, unnerving mountain excursion, when the goal, by now despaired of, appears suddenly at a bend in the path—I wrote down a sentence of dialogue and then exclaimed in surprise: “Why, it can finish here!” The director, who was walking up and down his study while I was writing at the desk, came across to me; he looked over my shoulder at the page and then he too said, in a surprised, almost incredulous voice: “You’re right, it can finish there.” So I wrote the words THE END at the bottom of the page, closed the copybook and rose to my feet.
For a moment we said nothing, both of us looking at the desk upon which lay the portfolio, now closed, containing the completed script—indeed rather like two almost exhausted mountain-climbers looking at the little lake or rock which it has cost them so much toil to reach. Then the director said: “We’ve done it.”
“Yes,” I repeated, “we’ve done it!”
This director was called Pasetti and was a fairish young man, angular, thin, precise and clean-looking, with the appearance of a meticulous geometrician or accountant rather than of an artist. He was about the same age as myself; but, as always happens with script-writing, the relations between him and me were those of superior and inferior, for the director always has greater authority than any other of the collaborators. After a moment he resumed, with his characteristically cold, awkward pleasantness: “I must say, Riccardo, I must say, you’re just like a horse that smells its own stable. I was certain we’d have to work for at least four more days...and now we’ve polished it off in two hours. It was the prospect of the cash, was it?—that inspired you!”
I did not dislike Pasetti, in spite of his mediocrity and his almost unbelievable psychological obtuseness; and there had grown up between us a relationship that was in a way well-balanced, he being a man without imagination and without nerves, but conscious of his limitations and fundamentally modest, while I was all nerves and imagination, morbidly sensitive and complex. Adopting his facetious tone and joining in the joke, I answered: “Of course, what you say is quite true—it was the prospect of the cash.”
Lighting a cigarette, he went on: “But don’t imagine the game is finished. All we’ve done is the main part of the job; we’ve got to revise the whole of the dialogue...You can’t rest on your
I went out one morning in order to go and see the director with whom I was working on script No. 1 for Battista. I knew it was the last time I should be going there, because there were now only a few pages left before the end, and this thought cheered me: at last this toil was on the point of finishing and I should again be my own master for at least half the day. Besides, as always happens with filmscripts, two months of work had sufficed to imbue me with a profound dislike for the characters and the story of the film. I knew that I should very soon find myself at grips with a set of characters and a story destined quickly to become, in their turn, no less intolerable; but in the meantime I was escaping from the first set, and the prospect of this was enough to bring me considerable relief.
My hope of approaching freedom caused me to work, that morning, with unusual facility and inventiveness. In order to complete the script, not more than two or three points, of little importance, required touching up; upon these, however, we had been hesitating for some days. But, carried away by my inspiration, I succeeded, from the very beginning, in guiding the discussion along the right lines and solving, one after the other, all the outstanding difficulties, so that, after barely a couple of hours, we realized that the script was really finished, this time beyond question. In the end—just as happens with a certain kind of interminable, unnerving mountain excursion, when the goal, by now despaired of, appears suddenly at a bend in the path—I wrote down a sentence of dialogue and then exclaimed in surprise: “Why, it can finish here!” The director, who was walking up and down his study while I was writing at the desk, came across to me; he looked over my shoulder at the page and then he too said, in a surprised, almost incredulous voice: “You’re right, it can finish there.” So I wrote the words THE END at the bottom of the page, closed the copybook and rose to my feet.
For a moment we said nothing, both of us looking at the desk upon which lay the portfolio, now closed, containing the completed script—indeed rather like two almost exhausted mountain-climbers looking at the little lake or rock which it has cost them so much toil to reach. Then the director said: “We’ve done it.”
“Yes,” I repeated, “we’ve done it!”
This director was called Pasetti and was a fairish young man, angular, thin, precise and clean-looking, with the appearance of a meticulous geometrician or accountant rather than of an artist. He was about the same age as myself; but, as always happens with script-writing, the relations between him and me were those of superior and inferior, for the director always has greater authority than any other of the collaborators. After a moment he resumed, with his characteristically cold, awkward pleasantness: “I must say, Riccardo, I must say, you’re just like a horse that smells its own stable. I was certain we’d have to work for at least four more days...and now we’ve polished it off in two hours. It was the prospect of the cash, was it?—that inspired you!”
I did not dislike Pasetti, in spite of his mediocrity and his almost unbelievable psychological obtuseness; and there had grown up between us a relationship that was in a way well-balanced, he being a man without imagination and without nerves, but conscious of his limitations and fundamentally modest, while I was all nerves and imagination, morbidly sensitive and complex. Adopting his facetious tone and joining in the joke, I answered: “Of course, what you say is quite true—it was the prospect of the cash.”
Lighting a cigarette, he went on: “But don’t imagine the game is finished. All we’ve done is the main part of the job; we’ve got to revise the whole of the dialogue...You can’t rest on your
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