Authors: Cesare Pavese
I saw Becuccio through the door and signaled him. He crossed under the portico and bent down to the window. While I talked with him, Momina asked Rosetta why we didn't go up into the hills. Becuccio told me the cases hadn't arrived yet. "You've got time for a drive," Momina said.
We set off. I saw Rosetta's face in the rear-view mirror. She sat there silent, sulky, stubborn. Sometimes I thought of her as very young, a little girl, the kind you try to persuade to say "thank you," but they won't do it. If you thought about it, it was terrible to have her with us this way and talk this way, terrible but also ridiculous, comic. I tried to recall what I was like at twenty, at eighteen—how I was during the first days with Guido. How I was before, when my mother used to tell me not to believe in anyone or anything. Poor thing, what had she got for it all? I would have liked to know what advice her father and mother gave to that only daughter of theirs, so crazy and so alone.
Momina jogged me with her elbow as we were going up Sassi. Just then it struck me that Momina was the real mother, the elder sister, the demanding and evil sister of Rosetta—Momina, who threw stones openly without even trying to hide her hand, who— like me with Becuccio—had nothing more to lose.
"Rosetta," I said, "do you have any friends besides Momina?"
"What's a friend?" she said. "Not even Momina is my friend."
Momina, absorbed in the curves, said nothing. It occurred to me that every year someone breaks his neck on the Superga road. We were going fast, under the high trees. When the ascent began to flatten out, we could look off at the hills, valleys, and the plain of Turin. I had never been to Superga. I didn't know it was so high. Some evenings from the bridge over the Po you could see its rising black bulk sparkling with lights at the top, like a necklace carelessly thrown on the shoulders of a beautiful woman. But now it was morning, it was cool, and an April sun filled the sky.
Momina said: "We can't go any farther." She stopped by a heap of gravel. The radiator was steaming. Then we got out and looked at the hills.
"It's beautiful up here," Rosetta said.
"The world is beautiful," Momina said, coming up behind us. "If only we weren't in it."
"We are the others," I said, looking at Rosetta. "It's enough to do without them, keep them at a distance, then living becomes a possibility."
"It's possible here," Rosetta said, "for a moment, for the time it takes to drive up. But look at Turin. It's frightening. You have to live with all those people."
"You damn well don't need to have them in your house," Momina said. "Money means something."
There was a hedge along the road and a heavy mesh fence behind it; farther down a group of trees and a large concrete tank, a swimming pool full of muddy water and leaves. It looked abandoned; the little iron ladder for climbing in and out was still there.
"Whose villa is this?" Momina said. "Look at the shape it's in."
"That's it," I said. "Fix this place up and invite anyone I liked. Go down to Turin in the evening and perhaps visit someone. That's how I would live if I were you. I'd have lived like that since I was a girl."
"You could do it," Rosetta said. "Better than we could. Perhaps you would enjoy it."
"One doesn't do these things," I said. "It's enough to imagine them. You've got to keep moving to fill up your day. I'm no longer young enough to live willingly in the country."
Momina said: "Seeing that nothing is worth anything, one should have everything."
"If you didn't already have your loaf of bread," I told her, "you would demand a lot less."
"But I do have it," Momina cried. "I do have it, my bread. What can I do about that?"
Rosetta said that even monks in monasteries renounce everything but their meals.
"We're all like that," I said. "Eat first, pray later."
Momina drove up to a curve in the road that overlooked Turin,- we pushed back the top and sat in the car, smoking. In the warm sunshine you could smell grass and the leather upholstery.
"Let's get going," Momina said. "Let's go and have a drink."
That afternoon a telegram arrived from Rome saying that madame would be in Turin the next day. The avalanche was beginning. Naturally Febo had escaped on his own business, and I couldn't get him on the telephone. I threw myself into it with Becuccio, we found two painters, it was dark and we were still hammering, checking the lights, opening and closing the curtains. The boxes arrived; shoeless like a countergirl, I dressed and redressed a window. At eight, Mariella called to remind me of the party at Loris's studio. I told her to go to the devil and went back to draping the walls, furious because I knew the work was useless, done for show; tomorrow madame would have it all done over. The agency that was to have sent the staff phoned to say that they couldn't send anyone until Monday. This was wasted time, too, because the hiring was up to madame,- she wanted all the candidates there at once, to pick and choose from, according to her own notions. Becuccio ran around docilely, phoned, opened cartons. Finally—the painters had already left—I threw myself down on a carton and looked at him desperately.
He said: "I quit an hour ago. This is Saturday."
"You skunk," I said. "You, too. Go away."
"Want to have a bite to eat?" he asked.
I shook my head, looking around. Then he slowly lit a cigarette and came and put it in my mouth. Opening the cases, he had cut a hand. I told him to have it disinfected.
He came back with a package of oranges and bread. We ate seated on the cartons and while we ate we looked around and appraised the results. Everything possible had been done, the only thing left was for Febo to take a look at the salons, and then we could clean up.
Becuccio said: "We even have time for a quick trip to Val Salice."
I looked seriously at him, smiled, and said that such things don't happen twice. He came close to me and took my chin. For a couple of seconds we looked at each other. Then he let me go and went off.
I said: "There's an artist giving a party. Those girls are going. Would you like to come?"
He looked at me hard and curiously for a moment, then shook his head.
"No, boss," he said. "I don't circulate any higher than the middle classes. It's no use."
He promised to look for Febo the next day and send him around to the hotel. He kept me company up to Loris's door, then went away without insisting.
28
It was lucky that Becuccio didn't come up. They had covered a coffin with a pall daubed in black and placed four lit candles around it. They were discussing Paris, and naturally Momina was having her say. I asked what was going on. Nene, dressed in red velvet, told me offhandedly that Loris was celebrating the death of his second period and was going to give a polemic speech. But the noise was fierce, and Loris, cowering on his bed, was ruminating privately over something, smoking with his eyes closed. There was much smoke and many faces I didn't know. There was the old painter who had come with us to Saint Vincent, there was the little woman in satin with the libidinous eyes, there was that Fefé of the first evening, there was Mariella, blond and noisy. I didn't see Rosetta immediately; then I found her smoking in the embrasure of the window; a short, somewhat hunchbacked man stood in front of her and she was caressing a kitten in her arms.
"How are you?" I said. "Is it yours?"
"He came in from the roof," she said. "Nobody invited him."
The studio looked fairly neat; bottles and glasses and plates of antipasto and candy were arranged on a table near the washbowl. Everyone had a glass, either in hand or on the floor. I thought that Nene must have worked almost as hard as I that day, but for her it would all be over in the morning.
The party was beginning to sound well oiled. I kept apart, found a place to sit and drink and leaned my head on the wall. Mariella's voice dominated the rest, talking about a Parisian theater and a Negro dancer, not Josephine Baker.
"Eat, eat!" exclaimed Nene, preoccupied.
Fefé came over to light my cigarette, quizzing me with his little eyes.
"And that squire of yours?" he asked.
"I'm not a horse," I replied.
He grinned as before. He put his hands in his pockets, planting himself in front of my chair. "Too many women here," he said. "I wish you were the only one."
"No, no," I said. "You need to see people. One always learns from people."
"Ask me to your shop. Everyone's talking about it."
"Of course. Consider yourself a customer already."
But he was stupid and didn't know how to go on. He grinned and asked me if I liked cats. I told him I preferred liqueurs. He poured me a glass, kissed the rim, and handed it to me. "Drink it. Drink it, if you want," I said. He ended by drinking it.
I listened to the hunched fellow talking with Rosetta. He was an aged boy with a wrinkled face. He was talking about the Negroes who had deserted toward the end of the war and hidden out near Pisa in the pine wood of Tombolo. He was saying to her: "They were always drunk or on drugs. At night they had orgies and pulled knives. When a girl died, they buried her among the pines and hung her pants and brassiere on the cross. They went around naked," he said. "They were true primitives."
Rosetta stroked the cat and looked me over.
"Crazy things happened," he went on. "The Americans went after them but didn't succeed in driving them out. They lived in huts made of leaves. Such things never happened after any other war."
With his mouth full, Fefé put in: "It's a shame it's all over. It was a lovely picnic while it lasted."
The hunchback looked at him, annoyed.
"Are you shocked?" Rosetta said. "Did they behave differently from us? They had courage, more than we had."
"I understand the Negroes," Fefé said, "but I don't understand the women. Living in the woods like that..."
"They died like flies," the hunchback said. "And the men, too."
"They were murdered," Rosetta said. "By the cold, by hunger, by gunfire. Why was this?"
"Why not?" the hunchback said, grinning. "They stole. They killed one another. They filled themselves with drugs."
The cat escaped from Rosetta's arm. She bent over to pick him up and said: "The same things are done in Turin. Which is worse?"
They were screaming around the bed. Someone had lit a glass of brandy and was shouting. "Turn off the lights." Mariella's voice rose above the girls' uproar. Someone—Momina, I think—really turned out the lights. For a moment there was a confused silence.
I sought Rosetta immediately in the dark. It was like that night in my hotel room when she had turned out the lights. But everyone was saying: "How nice it is. Leave it like this." The four candles on the coffin and the little bluish flame that someone had put on the floor made you feel you were in a grotto. Then they shouted: "Loris! Speech, Loris!" But Loris didn't stir from the bed. Nene went to shake him and they struggled. I saw the two shadows moving on the vaulted ceiling, I heard Loris curse. It seems that only a few of the painters he had invited had come and he said rudely that there was no need to make a speech just for us. The funny thing was that everyone took him at his word, and they formed into groups again and someone sat on the floor. They began drinking again.
Mariella passed near me and asked if I were having a good time. She told me to look at the coffin—how theatrical it was, how surrealist—and she started again with her acting. Luckily Nene came after her right away to get her to carry around some food.
Rosetta looked upset and drank a lot. Now she was sitting with Momina at the foot of the bed in a group that was cracking jokes, pausing, and cackling over them. In the candlelight I tried to avoid Nene's eyes, - I had seen that they were swollen, I felt a crisis coming on, her anger rising because the party was turning out badly. The only thing to do was to get drunk, and soon she would be; yet she was still hoping that someone would arrive and liven things up.
Somebody suggested that we take a bottle and go out and sit on the Artillery Monument steps.
"Let's go boating," a girl said.
"Let's look for some women," a boy's stupid voice exclaimed.
Even Loris laughed at this from his bed, around his pipe.
"And we'll go find some men," a woman's voice said.
We had become ugly and out of gear. Or maybe it was the effect of Loris's painting, which nobody looked at. The old man with the Chinese mustaches began: "At Marseilles, beautiful women go to the portside brothels and pay to be hidden behind a curtain."
I was thinking that I ought to go to bed, that tomorrow would be a big day. Momina said: "Pay? Why? They do the houses a favor."
Loris, Fefé, the hunchback, and the other men shouted that it was a good idea to make the women pay. Nene joined our group. By now we made one large circle, including the cat on Momina's knees. Somebody was feeling my thigh. I told him to stop it.
"Listen," said a new boy I didn't know, "we can go back over the Po and into Via Calandra. We all know," he looked insolently at Momina and me, "that no woman willingly goes down that street. So let's all go together. To the cafe, naturally. You can see the customers going in and out of the brothels across the street. Agreed?"
29
Nene begged us to wait and see if anyone else might come, to eat, to sing something together. She told Loris not to be a pig. She wanted us at least to drink and wait until midnight.
"It
is
midnight," they told her. "Don't you see that it's already dark?"
"Afterwards we'll come back," Mariella said.
"Do we take the cat?" someone else said.
So that we could leave, someone turned on the lights and everyone looked confused. I lost sight of Rosetta and Momina and went downstairs with the hunchback and Fefé. The stairwell was in an uproar,- Loris's voice reverberated. I thought of leaving, but Fefé was talking nonsense to me and I couldn't see the others. In short, I followed them to the cafe in Via Calandra.