I had to wait a long time to be able to have an appointment with her.
Now that I am here, I am not sure that I will be able to articulate a word.
I tell myself that this wait, in substance, is fair. It has its logic: the diva makes herself wait and then throw me a memory, an anecdote that makes me dream, that makes me curse the fact of not having lived in her time: the 60s, in Rome; the time of reconstruction and the economic “boom” when, in Italy, everything seemed possible, where dreaming and waiting still had a meaning.
The times when, still, “Life was Sweet. ”
I walk through long corridors. A soft neon light illuminates my steps. Smell of disinfectant. The rooms are all the same. A nurse tells me that “The Lady” is there, in that room.
She is sitting in a wheelchair, straight and still blond hair, soft white skin, the one that, it is said, has convinced Federico Fellini more than any.
She is Anita Ekberg, the last diva.
Before, women did not bathe in fountains.
Afterwards, everyone has imagined that they took Marcello Mastroianni by the hand and carried him under the waterfall of the Trevi Fountain.
It was a possible dream. It was 1960. A lifetime ago.
Do you want to know if I feel alone? -tells me-. Yes I am. But I do not regret. I have loved, I have cried, I have laughed, I have felt crazy with happiness. I have won and I have lost. I don’t have a husband, I don’t have children and, now, I’m alone here.
That “here” means a nursing home in the Roman Castles, where the 80-year-old Swedish actress has been living for a long time. some time after both femurs were broken.
As she tells me that the operations were effective, she is struck by a lightning bolt that illuminates her extraordinarily vital blue eyes:
And to think that Fellini liked it as much as I walked. I went in and out of the Trevi Fountain thousands of times that night without ever getting tired, without ever stumbling. Marcello, on the other hand, was cold and, to warm himself, he drank a whole bottle of whiskey. So it fell three times and they had to dry it up. In the end, the technicians decided to put fishing boots under his pants.
There is the memory – I think – that the photography of Italian cinema of those times offers me; with stage technicians who joke, smoke and in typical Roman dialect they joke with Matroianni: “A ‘Dottó … artro che Dolce Vita !!” (Hey, Doctor, what is this “sweet life” going to be!)
Outside it starts to rain. The drops water the glasses. It is still cold in this Roman spring. Everything seems unreal, because this woman in front of me, the beautiful and fatal goddess of “La Dolce Vita”, besides being in a wheelchair due to the double fracture suffered, does not have a penny.
He has asked the Federico Fellini Foundation, in Rome, for help.
His beautiful house, near Rome, has been totally looted by thieves. They have stolen everything, jewelry, money, furniture and she, that woman who made millions of men lose their minds – among others Frank Sinatra or the billionaire owner of the FIAT, the lawyer Gianni Agnelli -, cannot find the economic means to survive.
Anita Ekberg looks at the clock. Maybe he’s tired and it’s time for me to go.
No -he tells me-. It is a conditioned reflex. I look at the clock because here time seems to not pass. The days are endless. I don’t watch television because I don’t like it – he whispers it to me with his German r -. It’s drab, like the news. Until recently they spoke on TV about your rude and vulgar Pemier. But … why did Italians vote for him during all these last years?
I don’t know what to answer him. Perhaps I could get lost in a long and intricate speech, terribly Italian. I look at her and I reimagine the Italian “Dolce Vita”, which no longer exists.
Not even for this woman who has had to ask for financial help because, from her past, she only has Memories.
Memories, memories … -he says with a certain nostalgia-. In 1950 I won the title of Miss Sweden; Then I did the King Vindor movie “War and Peace” and then I was the lead in Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita”. To put it in two words: I was beautiful. I know.
Then he participated in an infinite series of films, many of them – I think – forgotten: with Alberto Sordi and Vittorio De Sica, among others.
Would you go buy me a hot cappuccino? -he asks me.
I get up and go back down the same corridor in the opposite direction. The same smell of disinfectant, the same dim light.
The coffee machines are downstairs.
When I return with the hot cappuccino – what a good cappuccino is just A memory – Anita Ekberg-Silva is no more.
I remain standing.
The nurse looks at me: You are not the first journalist who comes to visit the Mrs. Ekberg to this nursing home. And the Lady always does so. – She tells me, looking at her nails- She asks for a cappuccino and then disappears … She tells us that she prefers that everyone stays wanting her.
I’m one of those people. I am left with my desire to know their memories, their anecdotes of a time that has passed and that, here, in gray Rome, seems to have nothing sweet.
© LA GACETA
Cristiana Zanetto – Journalist for Italian print and television media.
Note originally published on these pages on June 3, 2012.
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