Your Face Tomorrow: Poison, Shadow, and Farewell Read Free Page B

wasn't sure if such frivolous films would have made it into your country. During the dictatorship, I mean.'
    'The only thing we weren't cut off from was the movies. Franco loved films and had his own projection room in the palace of El Pardo. We saw almost everything, apart from a few things that the censor strictly forbade (they weren't forbidden to Franco, of course: he enjoyed being shocked, the way priests do, at the vile deeds committed in the outside world from which he was protecting us). Others were cut or had the dialogue changed in the dubbing process, but most movies got shown. Yes, I think I do remember Jayne Mansfield. I can't quite recollect her face, but I can recall her general appearance. She was a voluptuous platinum blonde, wasn't she, very curvaceous. She made comedies in the fifties and possibly the sixties. And she had fairly big boobs.'
    'Fairly big? Good grief, you clearly don't remember her at all, Jack. Wait, I'm going to show you a funny photo, I have it here.' Tupra had little difficulty in finding it. He got up, went over to one of the shelves, wiggled his fingers about as if he were trying the combination of a safe and then took from the shelf what seemed to be a hefty volume but which turned out to be a wooden rather than a metal box, disguised as a book. He took it down, opened it there and then, and rummaged for a couple of minutes among the letters kept inside, heaven knows who they were from, given that he knew exactly where to locate them and kept them so easily to hand. While he was doing this, he tapped the holder of his Rameses II cigarette and nonchalantly tipped ash onto the carpet, as if it didn't matter. He must have had servants. Permanent staff. Finally, he carefully removed a postcard from an envelope, using his index and middle finger as tweezers, then held it out to me. 'Here it is. Take a look. You'll remember her clearly now, as clear as clear. In a sense, she's unforgettable, especially if you discovered her as a boy. You can understand Mulryan's fascination. Our friend must be more lecherous than he seems. Doubtless in private. Or in his day perhaps,' he added.
    I took the black-and-white photo from Tupra—like him with index and middle finger—and it immediately made me smile, even while he was commenting on it in words very similar to those going through my own head. Seated at a table, elbow to elbow, in the middle of supper or before or possibly afterwards (there are a few disorienting bowls), are two actresses famous at the time, to the left of the image Sophia Loren and to the right Jayne Mansfield, whose face ceased to be vague the moment I saw it again. The Italian, who was herself far from flat-chested— she had been another dream for many men, a long-lasting one too—is wearing a dress with a very modest neckline and she's giving Mansfield a sideways look, but making no attempt to conceal the fact, her eyes drawn irresistibly, with a mixture of envy, perplexity and fright, or perhaps incredulous alarm, to the far more abundant and far barer breasts of her American colleague, which really are very eye-catching and prominent (they make Loren's bust seem positively paltry in comparison), and even more so in an age when augmentative surgery was unlikely or certainly infrequent. Mansfield's breasts, as far as one can judge, are natural, not stiff and hard, but endowed with a pleasant, mobile softness—or so one would imagine ('If only I'd encountered breasts like that tonight and not Flavia's rock-hard pair,' I thought fleetingly), and must have caused a tremendous stir in that restaurant—whether in Rome or America who knows—the waiter who can be seen in the background, between the two women, maintains a praiseworthy impassivity, although we can only see his body, his face is in shadow, and one does wonder if

he isn't perhaps using his white napkin as a shield or screen. To the left of Mansfield is a male guest of whom one can see only a hand holding a spoon,