Authors: Cesare Pavese
It's not an alley and it reminds you a little of Via Margutta in Rome. Momina's car had stopped in front of the bar and inside was confusion; the customers looked unfriendly. Of course we might have been girls from one of the houses across the street, but all together, at that time of night? Having a party with our patrons? I was merely thinking all this, but the boys, especially Loris, said it out loud. I saw that it was all a farce to amuse the boys and that we women were being taken for a ride. I couldn't understand Momina falling for it. But Momina and Rosetta had already sat down at the rusty tables and we made a circle; Mariella, the painter, and Nene sat down. As each of us came in, it became a little harder to talk and imagine why we were there. The owner shooed away two little men with mustaches who were drinking in a corner and rounded us all up near the tubs of privet near the door.
Before, coming into the street—few streetlights or windows— we noticed a stand and a man in white selling
torrone
and chestnut cakes. Then little groups of soldiers, of boys who disappeared shouting into a doorway, and in front of the doorway Fefé had given a little cough. It was wide, with inner glass doors, rather dark. I smelled the mixture of piss, acetylene, and fried food I knew from outside our own house in the evening when I was a child.
In the bar Nene was already complaining that she couldn't see the street from where she was. None of us saw it; there were curtains on the lower half of the windows. To see and enjoy the action, you had to stand at the bar and crane around, look out the door; in other words, you had to move. The hunchback and the elegant boy who had brought us to the bar laughed and agreed with Loris that a decent investigation of low life could only be made by a woman with the courage to lead it. Mariella had the jitters. Rosetta was quiet and a bit drunk, her elbow on the table.
The owner wanted to know what we were drinking. The place was low-ceilinged, wood-paneled, and smelled of wine and damp sawdust. Except for our noise and the silly conversation of our men, especially Loris, it was an ordinary cafe of quiet people. There was even a girl behind the bar and a soldier talking to her and watching us out of the corner of his eye. A place Becuccio might have come into at any moment.
Instead of answering the owner, our boys kept on shouting. I must say I was ashamed. I tried to catch Momina's or Rosetta's eye, to make them agree to leave. But Momina was shouting something, excited and annoyed with Loris. Rosetta didn't answer my glances. Nene had disappeared.
They talked and argued, they wanted
marsala all'uovo,
they said that at times like these,
marsala all'uovo
was the only thing. The small woman in satin laughed louder than the boys, egged them on, asked where Nene was, whether she had crossed the street. Perhaps she had joined the boys who were going in the door. The little woman eyed the soldier several times.
I expected what happened next. Nene returned. The wine came —red, out of the barrel—someone had
grappa,
someone anisette, someone Cynar. Loris said to Nene: "Madame, madame, show us the girls. The ones we have now are little pigs."
"Look who's talking," Momina said through her teeth.
Laughing and shouting, they said we should be tested and compared and have our points entered on a score card. So they started arguing which of us would make the best prostitute; for gifts both of body and soul, the hunchback added. Mariella, too, was discussed and she ended by getting angry and taking the score card seriously. She nearly fought with Momina. But the old painter said we were all meritorious, that it was a matter of time and tastes; the real criterion should be our price and the sort of place we worked in.
Someone tried to suggest theater and nightclub stages. "No, no," the hunchback said. "We're talking about real whorehouse houris." They kept it up for a while. Finally the boys were redder in the face than Mariella. They couldn't find a place for Rosetta. "Kid sister," they concluded. "Too innocent."
But they didn't stop there. "You've put it on the grounds of taste," they were saying. Now it was Fefé who had the jitters. Some of them had already gone to the door and were looking idiotically from us to the street. Momina also got up and went to the door. I heard them laughing and bitching.
"Look, look," they were saying. "An old man is going in. A whole group is going."
"Rosetta," I asked her coldly, "are you really having such a good time?"
Rosetta's eyes were more sunken than ever and she looked at me with a vague smile. Nene, playing patty-cake with her neighbor, suddenly hit him hard. Rosetta put her elbows back on the table and said: "Tomorrow's another day, isn't it?"
Momina came back from the door. "Those fools," she said, "those idiots. They've gone in."
Loris, the hunchback, and another boy had gone in. They had told Nene. She shrugged, emptied her glass, and took out her pencil. She wrote "pig" on the table. She looked at us, cynical, supplicating, drunk.
This time Mariella accompanied her to the toilet and I told Fefé and the painter, who smiled good-naturedly, to pay the bill. Then we got into the car with Momina and Rosetta and left. I got out very soon at Porta Nuova.
30
The next morning Becuccio brought Febo around to Via Po. It was an empty, useless Sunday, for we spent the whole morning retouching, switching lamps on and off, and smoking in the armchairs. Madame hadn't arrived; the usual story. I asked Febo and Becuccio to lunch at the hotel so I could be quiet and rest. They began to talk politics and Febo said there was no liberty in Russia. To do what? Becuccio asked him. For example, to put up a shop like ours and furnish it the way we liked.
Becuccio asked him how many people our shop would serve. Febo said numbers didn't matter because only a small minority had good taste. Becuccio asked if we two who had directed the work had been free to do what we liked. Febo replied that in Italy an artist was still free to do what he liked because the patrons who paid him had to consider public taste.
"The public means people," Becuccio replied, "and you said the public doesn't count because only a minority has good taste. Well then, who decides?"
"The brightest decide," Febo said.
Becuccio said he knew that very well and that was the trouble. It was the last time I talked with him. He stayed a short while after Febo left, and asked if I were returning soon to Rome. I told him to let me know if he should ever pass through Rome. He didn't ask for my Rome address. He smiled, held out his hand (he had left the leather wristband at home), and left.
I was alone all day and took a walk around my old section of Via della Basilica. Now the little square, the doorways, the tiny shops frightened me less. Porta Palazzo had been renamed Piazza della Republica. Along the empty alleys and in the courtyards I watched little girls playing. Toward evening it began to drizzle, a cool rain smelling of grass, and I finally reached the Piazza Statuto under the porticoes. I went to the movies.
Madame arrived at night by car with her husband and everyone else. They always do that. The phone woke me up, I thought it was Morelli, they upset the whole hotel. I had to get dressed and have coffee with them and hear about a storm in the Apennines. It was dawn when I went back to bed: I was happy because my responsibilities were over.
They stayed on the next floor in the same hotel and I had no more peace. At mealtimes, in Via Po, in the car, I was always with someone. Madame liked the furnishings, more or less,- she wanted handrails for some of the stairs, and once she suggested moving the shop to Via Roma. Then she set out for Paris with two designers and left word for me and her husband to get the opening ready for Easter. I spent the days telephoning and seeing mannequins, studying programs, acting as secretary and head of the business. Morelli appeared, and also some women who wanted discounts, favors, jobs for homely daughters and acquaintances. There was a dance at the hotel where I saw Momina and Mariella again.
Then madame returned from Paris with some new models and Febo. That damned nuisance had gone to Paris on his own, had been charming and won her over and persuaded her to put on a musical revue to present the new models. Soon musicians and impresarios began to show up at the hotel and Via Po,- it wasn't Turin any more; luckily these things never went very far because the next day someone would think of something different; I stopped bothering with it and spent my days at the shop.
One day I said: "I wonder how Rosetta is?" and telephoned Momina.
"I'll come and see you," she replied. "I don't know what to say. The fool went and killed herself again."
I waited for the green car with my heart in my throat. When I saw it at the curb, I left the shop, and Momina slammed the door, crossed the portico, and said: "I've had it."
She was as elegant as ever, wearing a feathered beret. We went up to one of the salons.
"She's been missing since yesterday. Half an hour ago I phoned and the maid told me that she had gone on a trip with me."
There was no mistake. Neither Nene nor Mariella had seen her. Momina didn't have the courage to telephone Rosetta's mother. "I still hoped she might be with you," she murmured with a faint smile.
I said it was her fault; that even if Rosetta hadn't killed herself, it was her fault. I told her I don't know what. I was sure I was right and could stand up to her. I insulted her as if she were my sister. Momina stared at the rug without trying to defend herself. "I'm annoyed that they thought she was with me," she said.
We telephoned Rosetta's mother. She wasn't home. Then we drove around to all the shops and churches she might have gone to. We went back to the villa, where we intended to telephone her father. But it wasn't necessary. As I was getting out of the car, I saw her mother approaching, fat and black, under the trees along the avenue.
All that day we stayed with the shouting, distracted parents, telephoning, waiting, running to the door. I must have been deaf and blind; I recalled Rosetta's words and looks, and I knew I had known that this would happen, had known it all along, and hadn't paid any attention. But then I said, could anyone have stopped her? And I thought, maybe she has run off the way you did with Becuccio.
Then people began to come. Everybody said: "They'll find her. It's just a question of time." Mariella came up with her mother, acquaintances and relatives, someone from the police. It seemed like a reception in the big airy room under the immense chandelier, and everyone asked how anyone like Rosetta who had such a need to live could want to die. Somebody said that suicide ought to be forbidden.
Momina talked to everybody, mordantly but courteously. There was even a woman who wanted to grill me about my work and talk about the shop's opening. People in corners began to give opinions about Rosetta's story. I couldn't stay any longer. Madame was waiting for me.
All evening the mother's frightened eyes and the father's bewildered, ferocious face stayed in my mind. I couldn't help thinking how much he resembled Rosetta. Momina was supposed to telephone me but didn't. I was in conference with the designers and Febo, but I got up and telephoned.
The maid told me, weeping, that Rosetta had been found. She was dead. In a rented room on Via Napione. Mariella came to the phone. She told me in a broken voice that it was so. Momina and the others had gone to identify her. She herself couldn't; it would have driven her mad. They were bringing her home. She had taken poison again.
At midnight I learned the rest of the story. Momina came to the hotel in her car and told me that Rosetta was already at home, laid out on her bed. She didn't seem dead. There was only a swelling of the lips, as if she were angry. The strange thing was her idea of renting a painter's studio, having an armchair, no less, drawn up so she could die in front of the window that looked toward Superga. A cat had given her away—it was in the room with her, and the next day, miaowing and scratching the door, it had made them open.