Two Pieces by Selby Wynn Schwartz
Associate editor Zoa Coudret on today’s bonus stories: Selby Wynn Schwartz has crafted little windows into the past that buzz with excitement and mystery. These two shorts, which draw inspiration from multiple genres, are full of beautiful sentences that reward readers who are willing to slow down and linger.
The Long Nineteenth Century
In 1883, Guglielmo Cantarano published a study of a twenty-three-year-old Italian he called X. In excellent health, X went whistling through the streets and kept a string of girlfriends happy. Even the Dottor Cantarano, who disapproved, had to admit that X was jovial and generous. X would throw a shoulder to a wheel without complaint, could make a room roar with laughter. Any soldier stalking his enemy, any sailor adrift on the salty horizon, would want a companion as brave and merry as X.
But X was not a willing housewife. X remained unmoved by squalling infants, would not wear skirts that swaddled the stride, had no desire to be pursued by the hot breath of young men, failed to enjoy domestic chores, and possessed none of the decorous modesty of maidenhood. Whatever X was, Cantarano wrote, it was to be avoided at all costs.
Thus X was locked away in an asylum and Italian mothers were instructed to watch for signs of deviance in their daughters. Even those who had normal breasts, Cantarano cautioned, might turn out to be like X, whose apparently standard genitals had not prevented the attempt, late one night, to set the family home on fire.
At this point you might wonder how anyone survived the long nineteenth century in Italy.
R was distinguished by her mania for writing letters, Cesare Lombroso reported, and by the way she strolled under the windows of women. As a child, R had fancied herself a brigand, a bandit, a captain of the trees at the edge of the park. Now thirty-one years of age, R was an artist. R cropped her hair decisively and painted in the mornings. It was noteworthy that R could not be bothered to chatter or ornament herself, and in general found men empty. Cesare Lombroso, who was a criminologist in the positivist vein, put this down to the fact that R’s father was a neuropath and her mother a verifiable lunatic. Her brother, too, was very queer, Cesare Lombroso wrote.
But Cesare Lombroso was pleased to find R, who was such a good case study. R appeared on pages 423 and 424 of Cesare Lombroso’s La donna delinquente, la prostituta e la donna normale, published in 1893 in Torino. Translated into English in 1895 as The Female Offender, the book did not reach to pages 423 and 424, because any mention of sexual practices or non-mammary organs had been cut out by the translator. It was thus a short book that offered little practical guidance on how to become a delinquent woman.
Sometimes when a century goes on too long, it becomes taut and thin, showing its age. In the worn, pitted years at the very end of the nineteenth century, an intrepid few found their way through. Partly they read books the wrong way round: a case study in criminal perversity was a survival guide. Partly they wrote letters, those scraps of longing. And when the world was so bitter and narrow that there was nothing else for it, they burnt it up as best they could, leaving only an ashen X where their bodies had been.
The Secret to Dressing Yourself (with Help)
When Fregoli was born in Rome he was very short. It was 1867.
Rome has always been full of lizards. They are called lucertole, which has within it the word for light, just as lizards themselves do. Mostly they are lucertole campestri, lizards of the country, but they find in Rome the pleasure of sunlight on walls of cities destroyed a thousand years ago. There is nothing like a nice afternoon on the bones of a dead city.
The tail of a chameleon is two-fifths of its body, and prehensile, like fingers. Chameleons can see in ultraviolet light. In general, the males are more ornamental. They have excellent eyesight and like to decorate things. One eye can be peering into a darkness so black it dooms all thought to desire while the other eye is looking around quizzically at the flower arrangements. It is not clear why anyone would have thought that a chameleon looked like a lion. But that is what they were called in Greek: lions on the ground.
It took Fregoli until 1889 to acquire the nickname Il Camaleonte. If only he could have rearranged the letters like hats he could have been a leone, a lion stern and noble. But he was not the type to sit in front of libraries. He was a bright blur. He could lose two-fifths of himself and keep moving.
Fregoli left Rome for Livorno with one valise. In the valise he carried a mustache, a straw hat, a dress, a gentlemen’s jacket, a lady’s wig, and one pair of black pants so faded that they looked red under the stage lights. He doused them in water to darken them. He stood wet in the wings. He changed color.
In Livorno the theater was called Eden. It was a paradise of men with moustaches. But Fregoli, who had a bad cold, could hardly appreciate the other moustaches. He coughed in his dressing-room.
Onstage, though, he was three thieves and a policeman. He was everywhere at once, in different hats. He was, in order of appearance, Elvira, her lover Enrico, her father Timoteo, the beautiful French ballerina Mimì, and a cook named Pasquale. There were no entrances and exits. No one ever touched anyone else onstage. There was only a glance, a blush, a bow.
After a show, Fregoli was doubted. People wouldn’t believe he was really Mimì. They didn’t know that there is a secret to dressing yourself.
At the stage door there were women giving Fregoli flowers. They were forever pinning white carnations to his jacket and telling him to remember them. Addio! Addio! Fregoli kept the flowers and left the women. It was easier to be sentimental about a white carnation than a blonde named Ernestina.
But the flowers looked good on camera. For example, in the film Fregoli retroscena, Mr. X comes into a drawing-room holding a bouquet. A gentleman, he takes off his hat and proffers the flowers to the lady on the upholstered armchair. She is wearing a dark gown with lacy puffed shoulders like antimacassars for a sofa and her hair is done up in a snood. You can tell she is a lady because she knows how to make that little moue when a gentleman offers her flowers. Their hands meet perfectly mid-screen.
The lady turns and bends down to place the flowers on the ornate carved table, and Mr. X rubs his hands together in evident delight. This lady is a spectacle front and back. She is better than a sofa. She is worth the flowers.
But when he tries to kiss her, she makes a great scandalized O with her mouth. You can’t kiss a lady like that with the door open. She wants this drawing-room bolted, she wants the flowers locked in. Obediently Mr. X rises and turns to fasten the double doors.
Actually, you should never turn your back on a lady.
In an instant the lady has cleaved her whole dress down the center to her waist, splitting it open, and heaved it off-camera. It is just one gesture, one quick torsion of the wrist, that rids a body of a dress. It can be done as lightly as waving goodbye.
Mr. X turns back to find Fregoli in a bow-tie that matches his own, barking with laughter on the upholstered armchair. All of the flowers have been in vain. It is no secret that Mr. X will henceforth hate cinema.
Fregoli backstage was marvelous. He could take off his trousers with one hand while singing both parts of a duet. Yet twenty-three dressers went everywhere with him, peeling off his skirts as he ran past, snatching his hats as they fell. There was a dresser for the feathered fan and a dresser for the frock-coat, a dresser for the false nose and a dresser for the ballerina slippers. He liked to have an audience in the front and an audience in the back.
Even when there was no time at all Fregoli would pause in his bowler hat at the curtained door to the stage, turn back to the dressers, and make a splendid bow. He would stop time and take it into his own hands for that instant, the second it takes to be marvelous to your dressers.
When this became a film it was called Il Segreto di Vestirsi (con Aiuto): The Secret to Dressing Yourself (with Help).
Fregoli would show the whole film to an audience and then he would show it backwards. How marvelous it was indeed to have a mobile swarm of men, constantly dressing and undressing him, swaddling and unbuttoning him, encircling him with their arms, holding his belts in their teeth.
In every backstage with Fregoli since 1891 there had been Romolo Crescenzi. Dressing Fregoli was a full-time job and Romolo did it discreetly for decades. Fregoli backstage would leave half the buttons undone. He would leave his dressing-room wearing only a silk slip. In his hands whole bouquets of flowers would disappear.
It was Romolo who decided whether to let the cinematographers into the wings, Romolo who kept Fregoli in petticoats and rum. Romolo didn’t go home again until 1913 when his mother was dying. Romolo was a sosia, a double. He was a modest shadow but he put his fingers under the hem of everything.
Fregoli disappeared from his biographies any story of Romolo Crescenzi. In fact Fregoli and Romolo for decades discreetly disappeared each other. Together they had mastered the secret to dressing yourself (with help). They changed form until there was nothing left but a faint streak on celluloid, like the warm breath of a ghost.
Selby Wynn Schwartz is the author of The Bodies of Others: Drag Dances and their Afterlives (University of Michigan Press 2019), which was a Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Nonfiction and won the Sally Banes Prize from the American Society of Theatre Research. Her creative writing has been published in Speculative Nonfiction and Lammergeier, and her next book—which won the Reflex Press 2021 Novella Award—is forthcoming in 2022.
