His full name was Sidney Edmond Jocelyn Prosper Sforza, and he was born in February, in Paris, at the start of the First World War. His grandfather raised him while his papa was in the trenches and mother beside herself worrying. The old man was of uncertain origins; he would only say that he had no royal blood and had come down from a restless northern land, which little Sforza took to mean that the country itself was mobile, like a lily pad, leaving him determined to track it down and hop aboard when he grew up. He developed a fondness for maps, though they were not to be trusted, showing states stiff and static as jigsaw pieces rather than arcs and orbits and educated guesses. He started a collection and just as soon forgot it; later a few were framed and hung at the Tout Va Bien.

Zeydie Sforza had been in show business; Prosper could say it was in his blood. The old man had made a fortune traveling the cities of Europe, enjoying his greatest successes playing the grotesque stage Jews who were at that time as familiar to theatergoers as Harlequin or Pierrot. He’d spoken through enormous wax noses, wore molting purple ermine, and carried bags of clamorous iron coins. His audiences were terrorized, hiccoughing with laughter, and he became exceedingly popular. Demand was so great that he hired a real Jew to sort the invitations he was receiving. Soon Sforza was so acclaimed that he was suspected of cheating: of being an honest-to-God Heeb himself, putting one over on the goyim. He retired immediately and settled in London, where he met Prosper’s grandmother, an Italian immigrant selling scarves on the street. She married him despite his age and race and thus began the family tradition of assuming that he had been Jewish all along—the wag. By the logic of the period, this made her and her children equally suspect-even to themselves-and they accepted this stigma with the uncurious good humor that, along with a certain tendency towards prognathism, was their real paternal inheritance.

Zeydie gambled away much of his fortune and fled to the continent to escape a constellation of debts and bad checks—an act his grandson would be doomed to repeat. He and his wife arrived in time for the end of the Franco-Prussian war and lived through the Commune of 1871, a disaster Flaubert blamed on universal suffrage, commenting, “What a throw-back! What savages!” Sforza was an enthusiastic communard and ate dog without complaint during the siege of Paris. He got his wife with child for the new society and wept when Versailles took the city back and bloodied it with reprisals.

With what little money remained he bought the three-story building on the Left Bank that would house the Tout Va Bien in fifty years’ time, to help his son make a start in the trade of his choice. Sforza the Younger set himself up as a designer and caster of movable type, specializing in Greek and Hebrew characters, while the paterfamilias walked from Paris to Modena to bury his wife. He returned by train, went up to the top floor, and absented himself from worldly affairs in a rococo wing chair with velvet upholstery and the heads of sea lions carved on the armrests. He remained for years in a paralytic melancholy from which he only recovered when he was given a credulous grandson.
By this time the type business had folded. Scholars and their publishers found themselves peculiarly unable to trust a Jew to make letters for their Bibles and Odysseys. The storefront and workshop were rented out to a small-time printer and publisher of inferior limited-run translations of erotic ghost stories from the English and Spanish. Sforza the Younger got himself hired there, in that husk of his old business, setting type he found garish and casting clean sturdy stereotype plates from his work to facilitate rapid turnover. Proper proofing and spacing pleasant to the eye were all secondary concerns to the proprietor, who spent the bulk of his production budget seeking out new manuscripts and translators—putting a premium on texts written by “liberated women” who preferred to remain anonymous, and literate world travelers who could tell him where and what a perineum was without hesitation. He was a connoisseur.

Prosper’s father began to pursue the proprietor’s daughter, who made sporadic visits to the shop with her mother, a sweet-natured woman who’d been led to believe that her husband made his living reviving classics of Symbolist poetry. The daughter was taller than Sforza by a head, wore her hair in the oriental style, and had broken off her last engagement on account of the fiancé’s smirking at her solemn request to give a man she mistook for the ailing Oscar Wilde every cent he might have on his person.
Sforza’s intentions were not wholly honorable; Mme Connoisseur was lovely as a lamppost, but it was her family’s press he was after. She might have realized this sooner if an inexplicable preoccupation with Sforza’s rumored Jewishness had not overwhelmed her celebrated perspicacity. She began to dream at night of being Queen Esther, or Judith with her sword, and heard secret voices telling her that her real homeland was the desert. So strong was the compulsion to become something unfamiliar, she persuaded herself she had always been a Jew at heart; that Sforza had been provided so she might again find the path to a righteous life. She had never seen a circumcised penis—had in fact only seen her father’s (and perhaps one other), and medical circumcision hadn’t yet been accepted by your poorer sort of bourgeois—so now burned to see one, making it out to be a novelty, and telling Sforza just that, being a liberated lady of her father’s design. Sforza stole money from the elder Sforza to get the operation and as a result drove Mme Connoisseur mad with desire by turning indifferent to her advances on account of the pain. It lasted months, and by the time he’d healed, his fiancée had been thoroughly depraved by the wait. He succeeded in impregnating her on their wedding night, but not in satisfying her curiosity, as Sforza was ashamed of his slapdash mutilation and refused to let her see or feel. Monsieur Connoisseur died on a bench waiting to rendezvous with a rich Swiss woman who had promised to bring him a manuscript that would make his fortune, and Sforza’s mother-in-law moved into the building, the legal owner of the business but content to let Sforza have his head.

After his wife was delivered of her second child—Prosper—she insisted on being converted ritually to her husband’s faith to ensure that any further offspring would be Jewish from birth, knowing more now than any Sforza about the subject. Prosper’s father rescued a Czech rabbi stranded in Paris after a local boy fluent in French had wooed away his congregation, paying him to come into the maternity ward and do the necessary at her bedside with no questions asked. He congratulated Sforza and sensed no imposture. The police stopped him at the Belgian border and locked him away, returning all his francs to Zeydie Sforza, who by this time had recovered his wits and advertised for the return of his money-which had continued to dwindle as Sforza the Younger’s masquerade incurred new expenses. Madame Sforza never bore another child, and the rabbi’s relatives assumed he had become too successful to bother keeping in touch.

Prosper’s father had the press to himself for five years. He gave it his family’s name and expanded its bailiwick to include ribald woodcuts from India, translations of off-color Restoration poetry, and photogravures of female music-hall stars with short biographies and reproductions of their autographs in crimson ink, stamped by hand on every plate and dried by the sugary breath of his little daughter Pasquale. When war seemed inevitable, Sforza gave his wife no peace—despite the risk of opening old wounds—trying to make her pregnant in time to exempt him from conscription. He bought himself a year and a son in this fashion only to see his business flounder in wartime and then fold completely after the late M. Connoisseur’s widow discovered her granddaughter reading aloud from the Earl of Rochester’s “Signor Dildoe” to a dolly she’d named Theodora. Sforza was taken to court for deceiving the owner of his business and Theodora chucked in the Seine as a synecdoche for sin. Madame Connoisseur emigrated to Quebec; Sforza protested to the magistrate that he was being punished for a deception initiated by his father-in-law, then joined the army to avoid his creditors. His letters from the trenches are masterpieces of both calligraphic technique and urgent, limpid prose; I have thirty mimeographs here from the Holocaust Museum in New York City where the originals were archived, mistakenly, after Prosper Sforza’s death. In the end Papa was removed from the front after taking a beating at the hands of his comrades, who caught him pulling a dead German girl in a blue pinafore out of the puddle in which he’d thought she was drowning. (She had already been shot.) They crooked his nose and corrected his childhood malocclusion—too late to miss all but the last six months of fighting.

The youngest Sforza grew up in love with his sister, with whom he never quarreled. She did all she could to avoid him, but with no parents present to complain to and no place to hide, there was nothing to keep toddling Prosper from following her everywhere she went, even into the outhouse and bath. He brought her pebbles from their allotment garden after shining them with his shirt; also wrapping-paper he’d found blown into drains, pigeon eggs, and the torn-off lower corners of posters. He’d abide her every tirade and tantrum with sweet, smiling beatitude. Eventually, however, and not for the last time, the persistence that was second nature to him wore down his target’s resolve until she gave up all pretense to privacy or individuation and doted on the little lothario. She even agreed to marry him when he was old enough to support her, and to help him find a way to get them both back onto the floating island Zeydie Sforza had toppled from, back in the last century, when they’d used wax for false noses and not celluloid.

He turned sixteen in 1930. No part of Pasquale’s body remained a mystery. He shifted his attentions to a fourteen-year-old neighbor whom he thought would let him fuck her if he showed her the unbound back-stock of his father’s old company, dusty in a closet on the third floor, since refurbished and rented out as flats. He found it quite impossible to relax in the company of a pretty woman he’d never touched. His discomfort in such situations made him petulant and fidgety, and he had no sympathy for other boys’ anxieties regarding the opposite sex. He found his schoolmates backward and preposterous and never hesitated to tell them what was what. Pasquale in the meantime had come through a crippling depression obsessed with having children and leaving France forever. She found and married a vacationing Canadian banker and went to hunt for her maternal grandmother in the New World.

Monsieur and Madame Sforza never guessed that their son was behind Pasquale’s flight. They found him inscrutable and glib. Heartbroken, they decided to sell their building and use the money to travel. They settled in Modena and were shunned for being Jewish until World War II, when they were murdered for it. Prosper extorted a small sum from them before they left and did some traveling of his own. He walked and rode through Eastern and Northeastern Europe, repeating his surname to farmers and town registrars in Poland and East Prussia, trying to track down Zeydie Sforza’s place of birth. Eventually Prosper was forced to admit defeat. Bereft of other enthusiasms or interests, and frightened of what might be asked of him if he were to return to Paris and enter university, he resolved to drop off the face of the Earth. He settled in a township in Estonia tiny enough to escape the notice of any cartographer born west of the Danube. Content with a life of dirt and blood, gossip, manure, and provincial pussy, he read Longfellow and broke up marriages.

World War II arrives then like astigmatism and we lose Prosper Sforza for six years. I have here a sham British passport with his photograph. He has no military record.

When he reappears he’s been married and divorced and stories of his tragic wartime love for a beautiful and pitiless harpy have been incorporated into his patter. He has money, goes to Modena to have small monuments built in honor of his parents. He’s surprised to find that not a single native remembers them, and begins to doubt that they’d ever been there. At a poker game he meets two de-mobbed fascista cinéastes—lieutenants—bemoaning the near-annihilation of the Italian film industry and jealous that France had managed to turn out masterpieces even during the Occupation. There and then Prosper commits his tomb-money and more to starting a production company with his new friends, incidentally saving both from execution by the Partisans by involving them in a profitable, high-profile business enterprise before their warrants could be signed.

Prosper’s twelfth film (and Evelyn Nevers’s third), La Bocca Del Cavallo (The Scarlet Prize), was a conflation of the legends of the Trojan War and the Lady Messalina, in which Helen herself opens the gates of Troy to the Greeks, having exhausted every gallant within its walls during her week-and-a-half stay. The movie wrapped and went out to theaters without a hitch, but Sforza soon found himself distressed. In order to compete in the world market, his pictures were becoming more explicit every year. Pornography upset him. He only enjoyed his business when he could think of himself as showing beautiful naked women to people who would not ordinarily have had a chance to see them. He also liked the idea of poking gentle fun at sex, the great animating force of his life (and what everyone else was really after anyway, surely). He was just a curtain-puller at the raciest follies in town. Pornography should be stamped out. It made him want to cry. Women making their living that way, fucking strangers on film. The humiliation of it. The squalor. How was it different than prostitution? Could you even call it living? If he’d had the money he would’ve built a great big mansion for them all to live and rehabilitate in. He’d gather and protect them. But he was barely scraping by. His Italian partners told lies about him to the women on the set so they’d keep their distance. They wanted to edge him out, he figured, and take his house and take his star and get him sent to a concentration camp (he knew that these were still being run, they’d just been moved underground; how else to explain the stench that came out of his radiator? were they venting the ovens through his gas pipes? was the whole city being heated by burning Jews? Scratch an inch in the soil and Hell was there waiting).

He flew to England, as he always did when he felt low. In his hotel room at three A.M. he found himself watching a hypnotic short film on television, incoherent and pleasantly soporific, which then played on in his dreams until sunrise—like a succession of sinister Flemish still-lives tacked to the inside of his head. They reminded him of the inventories of victims’ possessions the papers had published during the trials at Nuremberg. He called the BBC and asked to have the names of the persons responsible. They assumed it was a legal matter and gave him Selwyn Wexler’s home address. He arrived at ten that morning at a row of thin, flat houses built by the Bank of England and knocked at a pink door until Myrna Krause in a damp black rumpled sweater and sheer blue pajama-bottoms opened up, eating cereal with a wooden spoon. Sforza heard music from inside akin to a Bach partita being bowed on elevator cables. He read the sweater, the cereal, and the music and decided that she’d been in the shower: she’d come out and naked put the needle down on some thin because cheap disc of hullabaloo she pretends to like and pulled on her pajamas to be halfway decent but got distracted because she’s an artistic type and poured milk into her bowl and sat munching until my knocking startled her and she still damp grabbed the first thing to hand to cover herself and answer. She asked if she could help him and he asked for Mister Wexler, thinking she might be his daughter. She asked which Mister Wexler he wanted and Sforza panicked. He wrote his number at the hotel on his business card and left it with her, showing his open palms as he backed down the three stone steps to the road. She closed the door and he chased after his cab, smitten. Surely so lovely an apple had held on for a shepherd in love. He told the concierge to forward his calls to the bar and settled in on red leather, with a view of the door, drinking beer. She was his first American.

Myrna went back to breakfast having decided that Sforza was a salesman. She told Wexlers père et fils, who preferred eggs to cereal, that it had been nothing, no one, and only took the card out of her sweater half a day later, out of boredom at her ticket kiosk in the Underground. The card had Sforza’s name, phone number, address in Rome, and now where he could be reached in London. Myrna recognized the name. She often went out to the movies alone. There was now a painless rash on her chest where the card had chafed. She had no phone and so had to wait until her shift ended at midnight to tell Wexler that a man in movies had been to see them. He yelled at her for having let him get away and then took her out the next night for a moderately priced Italian dinner at which they drank too much wine and spent every penny he’d made from the television airing. They fell asleep together in the back of the family car, parked on the street, after Wexler had put Myrna’s jeans in the glove box and gone down on her, complaining obscurely as she licked his neck some time later that he felt like this massive crustacean.

Myrna made the call. Prosper had by this time summoned Evelyn because he wanted so much to sleep with the little American. He learned the disposition of her and Wexler’s partnership, the division of labor. Sforza asked what their plans were and got an earful of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, on whom Myrna was writing her thesis at Winnie’s instigation. Wexler had told her about the Rose Alley Ambuscade, when thugs purportedly in Rochester’s employ surprised John Dryden in a lonely place and beat him with cudgels: the titled author of existential smut assaulting the lowborn poet-laureate. If they were going to make a movie, a real movie, with actors and a plot and a string orchestra—which they weren’t sure they wanted to do—wouldn’t this make a good subject? To her surprise, Rochester’s work was not unknown to Sforza. He asked to meet with Krause and Wexler as soon as their schedules allowed. Myrna said that she worked nights till the weekend and that the three of them could talk then. Sforza asked her what she did for a living, and really, what station?

The meeting was set for Saturday, Prosper’s fifty-fourth birthday. Myrna had telephoned on Wednesday morning; Evelyn answered in bed and passed the receiver to Sforza over a tray of pears and Stilton cheese. Wednesday night he walked down to Myrna’s kiosk with champagne, paper cups, and two antique maps of London circa the Great Fire. (One of these was mislaid; it reappeared in a nearby tunnel twenty-five years later, blown onto the window of a train-car, and this resulted in the closing of Myrna’s tube station and the rerouting of circa a thousand passengers while a thorough archeological investigation took place. The bookstore at which he had purchased them, where they’d been kept for a century behind two-inch glass along with brittle issues of Strand and Yellow Book, first editions of Dickens, and privately printed and Englished Huysmans and Ducasse, had sent a runner to the bank to deposit his check as soon as Sforza was out of earshot. The bank was obliged to report the transfer of so large a sum from overseas, and a Whitehall man—an Earl himself, and founding member of a peerage-only Evelyn Nevers appreciation society—was thus informed that Sforza the notorious racketeer had returned, and apparently was not content to remain inconspicuous.

Myrna was alarmed by her suitor’s audacity but happy to have her shift made quicker by his company. She didn’t have the heart to tell him that it was Wexler who was the Restoration nut, and enthused in her way over how helpful the maps would be in writing the Rochester script. Prosper spoke of Evelyn and his wartime belle dame sans merci to excite her, Myrna of Selwyn and her college courses to keep Prosper at the proper distance. He asked if he could join her again the next night and Myrna said sure, why not, though she knew why not, and didn’t tell Wexler about her visitation when she got home. He didn’t notice her tipsiness, just played cards with Wexler Senior until his mother turned out the lights on them. The next night Prosper tickled her knee and squeezed her shoulder and brushed her hair away from her eyes. He refilled her cup when it was empty and was alarmed and excited by her bitter Martian smell in such close quarters. Her skin was slick and textured, unblemished, but in no place smooth.

Myrna enjoyed the simplicity of flirting with him. She wondered at herself that she could as easily be with such a man as with Selwyn—if she was with Selwyn. When he took her hand she stopped him and told him what she preferred. He complained that there was no room there in the kiosk, but she said that was just what she liked, no room. He took off his jacket and hiked up his pant-legs and felt like an old letch in the subway. She was rubbery and stiff like an appliance and he was appalled when he came while working on her. She sold a token to a woman who didn’t notice their game and he thought he’d better use the scene in Evelyn’s next movie. The adventure was repeated on Friday; later he’d learn the ink was just then drying on a warrant for his arrest. It made the memory irresistible. He assumed he’d never been happier.