Among Women Only (3 page)

"He was here a minute ago," said the first. "He's probably in the square." He went back to his stirring. "Go get Becuccio," he said to the other.

Becuccio arrived, a young man in a heavy sweater and army trousers. He grasped the situation right away, a wide-awake type. He shouted at the two to finish the floor. He took me around by the stairs and explained the work that had already been done. They had lost several days waiting for the electricians; it was useless to finish the shelving when they didn't know where the wires were going. The supervisor wanted them covered up; the utility company said no. I looked him over while he talked: he was thickset, curly-headed, and showed his teeth when he smiled. He wore a leather wristband.

"I want to telephone the supervisor," I said.

"I'll do it," he said right away.

I was wearing my cloth coat, not the fur. We crossed the Via Po. He took me to a cafe where the cashier welcomed him with an obvious smile. When he got a reply, he handed me the receiver. The supervisor's heavy, rasping voice softened as soon as he learned who I was. He complained that Rome hadn't answered one of his letters; he even brought up the Building Authority. I cut him short and told him to get here in half an hour. Becuccio smiled and held the door open.

I spent the whole day in the smell of lime. I went over the plans and the letters, which the supervisor shuffled out of a frayed leather briefcase. Becuccio had improvised an office for us on the first floor with a couple of boxes. I checked on the work to be done, paid the bills, talked to the utilities man. We had lost more than a month.

"As long as the carnival is on..." the supervisor said.

I said curtly that we wanted the shop ready at the end of the month.

We went over the bills again. I had first questioned Becuccio and knew how things stood. And I had come to an agreement with the utilities man. The supervisor had to agree to get the job done.

Between discussions I walked through the empty rooms where the whitewashers were now working on their feet. Another pair showed up in the areaway. I went up and down a cold staircase without a railing, cluttered with brooms and cans; the smell of lime—a sharp mountain smell—went to my head so that I almost thought this was my own building. From an empty window on the mezzanine I looked down on the crowded and festive Via Po. It was nearly dusk. I remembered the little window in my first workroom from which you looked out in the evening when you were making the last stitches, impatient for closing time and your happy release. "The world is large," I said aloud, without exactly knowing why. Becuccio was waiting discreetly in the shadow.

I was hungry. I was tired from last night's party and Morelli was probably waiting for me at the hotel.

I left, saying nothing about the next day. I spent half an hour among the crowds. I didn't walk toward the Piazza Vittorio Veneto, noisy with orchestras and merry-go-rounds, because I had always enjoyed spying on the carnival from alleys and half shadows. Many Roman holidays, many buried occasions, many follies came back to me. Out of all this, only Maurizio remained crazy Maurizio, and a certain peace and equilibrium. There remained also my wandering idly about like this, mistress of myself, mistress of my time in Turin, stopping where I liked and arranging what I liked for the next day.

As I was walking, I began to think of that evening seventeen years before, when I had left Turin, having persuaded myself that a person can love another more than himself; yet at bottom I knew quite well that all I wanted was to leave, to step out into the world, and I used that excuse, that pretext, for taking the step. The absurdity, the blissful ignorance of Guido when he imagined he was taking me away to support me—I was aware of all that from the start. I let him argue, let him try, and finally let him do it. I even helped him, I left before closing time to keep him company. That would be my envy and bad temper, according to Morelli. For three months I was happy and made Guido laugh: Had it been any use? He hadn't even been able to ditch me. You can't love someone more than yourself. If you can't save yourself, nobody can.

But—and here Morelli was not wrong—in spite of everything, I had to be thankful for those days. Wherever he was, dead or alive, I owed my good luck to Guido, and he wasn't even aware of it. I had laughed at his extravagant language, at his way of kneeling on the carpet and thanking me for being everything to him and for liking him; and I said: "I don't do it on purpose." Once he said: "People do their biggest favors without knowing it."

"You don't deserve them," I said.

"Nobody deserves anything," he had answered.

Seventeen years. I had at least as many more ahead. I was no longer young and I knew what a man—even the best—was worth. I reached the porticoes and looked at the shop windows.

5

In the evening Morelli took me to the salon. I was astonished at the number of young people there: they always say that Turin is a city of the old. It's true that the young men and girls formed a circle apart, like so many children, while we grownups, clustered around a sofa, were listening to an irritable old lady with a ribbon around her throat and a velvet mantle tell some story I don't recall about Mirafiori and a carriage. We all fell silent before the old lady; a few were smoking rather furtively. Her caustic little voice would stop whenever anyone came in, to allow greetings to be exchanged, then resume again at the first pause. Morelli, his legs crossed, was listening very attentively, and another man stared at the rug with a wrinkled forehead. But after a while I realized that you needn't pay attention to the old lady. No one thought of answering her. Half-turned on her chair, some woman would be whispering
sotto voce,
or another would get up and walk across the room to others.

It was a beautiful room, with glass chandeliers and a Venetian floor that you felt under your feet through the rug. A fire was burning to one side of the sofa. I sat motionless, examining the walls, the upholstery, the elaborate candy dishes. There was a bit too much of everything, but the room was all of a piece, like a jewel box,- heavy curtains covered the windows.

I felt someone touching my shoulder, speaking my name, and saw in front of me, tall and gay, our hostess's daughter. We exchanged a few words and then she asked me if I knew various people.

I said no in a low voice.

"We know you come from Rome," she said loudly into an unexpected silence, "but last evening you met a friend of mine. Don't deny it."

"What friend?"

Those two women at the party—I knew now. But her aggressiveness bothered me.

"You must have met Fefé at least?"

"I'm surprised that he remembers. He was drunk as a carter."

This reply won her over completely. I had to get up and follow her to the circle of young people at the entrance. She told me their names: Pupé, Carletto, Teresina. They shook hands, either bored or very very serious, and waited for somebody to speak. The flood of words with which the blonde had torn me from the sofa did not keep me from feeling an intruder even here, although I had known for quite a while that in these cases there is always someone worse off. I cursed Morelli and felt my heart drop; I saw the life of Rome, last night's party, my face in the mirror that morning. I consoled myself with the Via della Basilica, knowing that I was alone in the world and that, after all, these were people I might never have met.

The blonde was looking at us blankly and, it seemed to me, disappointedly. Then she said: "Come on, somebody say something." For all her twenty years and such a desire to laugh, it wasn't much. But I didn't know Mariella and her tenacity—she was the granddaughter of the old lady on the sofa. She looked around and exclaimed: "Where's Loris? Somebody find Loris. I want Loris right away." Someone went to look for Loris. The others began to talk, one kneeling against a chair, another seated; a young man with a beard held the floor and defended an absent friend against the girls—a certain Pegi who had been shoveling snow on the avenues that winter, out of eccentricity the girls said, to engage himself the young man said.

"Engage himself, what does he mean by that?" I thought, as Loris arrived with his head down. He wore a black bow tie and was a painter. The suspicion crossed my mind that he owed his importance among those people wholly to his bow tie and heavy eyebrows. He had a sullen look, like a bull.

He smiled briefly. Mariella dropped into a chair and said: "Come on now, let's discuss the costumes."

When I finally understood what it was all about—a girl screaming a little louder than the rest set herself to explaining it—I pretended ignorance and smiled impassively. Mariella and the others were all talking.

"Without costumes and scenery, it just won't work."

"You're all a bunch of hams. What you want is
Carmen."

"It would be better to have a masquerade."

"The poetic word should echo in the void."

"But how many of you have read it?"

I glanced across the room where the irascible old lady held forth to her circle. The men in the flickering firelight kept their eyes on the carpet; the women moved restlessly and the first cups of tea had appeared in their hands.

Loris was saying slowly: "We don't want to repeat the traditional theater. We're not so civilized. What we want is to give the naked word of a text, but we can't do it without a
mise-en-scène
because even now in this room, dressed like this, between these walls, we are part of a
mise-en-scène
that we have to accept or reject. Any ambiance at all is a
mise-en-scène.
Even the light..."

"Then let's give it in the dark," a girl shrieked.

While Loris was talking, Mariella got up and went off to supervise the serving and then she called the girls. I stayed with the others and that Loris who was silent and smiling disgustedly.

"There's something to be said for the darkness idea," a young man put in.

We looked at Loris, who was staring at the floor.

"Ridiculous!" said a small woman in a slipper-satin gown that was worth more than a lot of words. "One goes to the theater to see. Are you or aren't you giving a show?" She had libidinous eyes that laughed in the boys' faces.

The painter wouldn't stoop to this conversation and changing expression said crossly that he didn't want tea, he wanted a drink. Meanwhile the teacups were being passed and Mariella put a bottle of cognac on the mantelpiece. She asked me if we had settled anything.

"Must I decide?" I said. "I'm in the dark."

"But you have to help us," Mariella shouted. "You know all about fashions."

A general movement around the sofa indicated that something was happening. Everyone got up and moved back and Mariella ran over. The old lady was leaving. I didn't hear what she said, but a pretty maid took her thin arm and the old lady jabbed her cane on the floor, looked around tiredly out of bright eyes, and as the others bowed, the two went out slowly, with hobbling steps.

"Grandmother wants us to keep the doors open so she can hear in bed," said Mariella, returning fresher than ever. "She wants to hear the records, the conversation, the people. She's so fond of our friends..."

At the first chance I cornered Morelli and asked him what he meant to do now. "Bad-tempered already?" he said.

"Less than you; you've had a good dose of the old lady... However..."

"Don't speak badly of her," Morelli observed. "You don't see many like Donna Clementina. They died out some time ago. Did you know that she's a concierge's daughter; she's been an actress, a ballerina, a kept woman, and of the three sons she gave the old count, one got away to America and another is an archbishop. Not to mention her daughters..."

"Poor old thing. Why doesn't she retire to the country?"

"Because she'd so full of life. Because she likes to run her house. You should get to know her, Clelia."

"She's so old... it scares me."

"That's a good reason for knowing her. If you're afraid of old people, you're afraid to live."

"I thought you brought me here to meet those others ..."

Morelli looked around at the seated groups, the couples chattering at the other end.

He frowned and muttered: "Drinking already?"

6

There was no more talk of
mise-en-scènes
that evening. I saw Loris's bow tie fluttering about, but I drifted alone and Mariella must have understood because she took me among a group of women, including her mother, who were talking fashions. Did she think she was pleasing me? She went back to the subject of her friend at the first party, said that she would have liked to go but still felt too young. The stretcher and the tulle gown came back in my mind.

"Oh, you could have come," said the little woman in satin. "It was all quite proper. I know people who changed the place of their party right in the middle of it, for fun."

"Just a nice family evening?" Mariella said, grinning.

"Really, it was," another girl said.

"Playing post office in the dark, more likely," Mariella concluded, looking around. The older woman smiled, scandalized and happy. Mariella was by no means a fool; she was the presiding hostess and had been born to such talk. I wondered if she would have known how to make out if she had begun at the bottom like her grandmother. I remembered Morelli's lecture and stopped short.

We were talking about Morelli, as it happened, and the life he led. By mentioning Rome, some Roman villas, and a few carefully chosen big names, I silenced the most prudish of the group. I let them know that Morelli was at home in certain houses and that Rome was the only city it was never necessary to leave. Everyone came there. Mariella clapped her hands and said that we were having such a good time and that some day she would go to Rome. Someone spoke of Holy Year.

"Those poor things," Mariella said suddenly. "What are they doing? Shall we go and listen?"

So our circle broke up and the various groups swarmed around Loris's bow tie, who was holding forth to several eager girls. Just for sport, he and the others had drunk all the cognac and now were squabbling about some question or other—whether in life one could be oneself or whether one had to act. I was surprised to hear a thin girl with bangs, thick lips, and a cigarette mention the name of the brunette I had met the first evening, Momina "Momina said so, Momina said so," she repeated. After Mariella joined our group and all those distinguished gentlemen gathered around, a quavery voice went up: "When you make love, you take off your mask. That's when you're naked." While Mariella was passing drinks, I turned to Morelli. He looked pleased with himself, watching as though he wore a monocle. I caught his eye and when he was close I asked him
sotto voce
why they didn't send the drunks into the garden. "They'd be out in the open and wouldn't make trouble."