Among Women Only (8 page)

"There's so damned much that doesn't make sense," Momina added.

We set off for Turin in a caravan, Rosetta with us; the mother with a maid and chauffeur in the big car sent up from Turin just for the trip. All morning, while waiting for the car, we had strolled around the villa and garden talking and looking at the mountains. Once I was alone with Rosetta,- she took me upstairs to a terrace where as a child, she told me, she would shut herself up for hours at a time to read and look at the tree tops. Down there—she said— was Turin, and on summer evenings she sat in that corner and thought of the seaside towns she had visited, about Turin and winter, the new faces she would some day meet.

"They often fool you," I said, "don't you think?"

She said: "You have to look them in the eyes. Everything's in their eyes."

"There's another way of knowing them," I said. "Working with them. When people work, they give themselves away. It's hard to fake on a job."

"What job?" she said.

So we rode to Turin while I thought to myself that neither she nor Momina knew what work was; they had never earned their dinner or their stockings or the trips they had taken and were taking. I thought of how the world is, that everybody works in order to stop working, but if somebody doesn't work, you get mad. I thought of the old Mola woman, the signora, whose work was to agitate herself over her daughter, to run after her, see that she didn't lack anything; and her daughter paid her back with those terrors. I thought of Gisella and her little store—"we're squeezed in upstairs"—and all to keep them from doing anything, to keep them on velvet. I became nasty. I saw Febo's face. I started to think of Via Po.

I went there before evening, after first taking a bath in the hotel. Nobody had come looking for me, not even Morelli. But on the table was a bunch of lilacs with a telegram from Maurizio. This too, I thought. Doing nothing all day, he had time to think of such things. It was just a month since I had left Rome.

I found Becuccio supervising the arrival of the crystal chandeliers. He wasn't wearing his gray-green trousers or the heavy sweater any more, but a windbreaker with a yellow scarf. The leather wristband was there, as always. His curly hair and white teeth had a curious effect on me. While I talked I was very nearly on the point of reaching out and touching his ear. It's the mountain air, I thought, scared.

Instead I became very cold with him over the lateness of the shipments.

"The architect..." he said.

"The architect has nothing to do with it," I cut in. "It's your job to keep after the suppliers..."

Together we checked the crystals and I liked the way his large hands felt about in the straw for the brackets and pendants. In the newly plastered room, under an unshaded bulb, the prisms shone like rain in the beam of headlights. We held them up against the light. He said: "It's like when you're cutting tracks with an acetylene torch." He had been a worker on the night shift for the trolley line—the usual story. Once I felt him taking my hand under the straw. I told him to watch out. "It's expensive stuff."

He answered: "I know."

"All right then," I said. We finished the boxes.

15

The people in Rome talked as though the shop would be ready by mid-March, but the vaulting on the first floor still had to be done. Working with Febo became difficult; he began saying that they didn't understand anything in Rome and that if I didn't know how to get my way he did. He came back from Ivrea with a foxy look; he never mentioned the bill at the hotel, but he began using the familiar
tu.
I told him I took orders in Rome but that in Turin I gave them, and how much did he want for his trouble. Keeping my voice down, I let him have it. The next day a bunch of flowers arrived, which I gave to Mariuccia.

But Rome was a headache. In a long evening phone call they gave me the news: the shop and windows were to stay the same, but the furnishings in the fitting rooms and the large salon on the first floor were to be changed; they were to be named according to the style of the decorations. We had to find mirrors, materials, lamps, prints, but they didn't know yet whether baroque or what. I had to tell the architect, make plans, take photographs, send someone to Rome. Suspend everything. Rugs and curtains, too.

"For the fifteenth?" I asked.

"Send the architect here."

I didn't send him, I went myself. The next evening, after a bath in my own apartment, and after airing the rooms, I was walking on familiar cobblestone. Two miserable days of sirocco followed during which I saw the usual bored faces and nobody came to the point. That was the Rome I knew. Halfway through a discussion some man, some woman would come in, start talking, jump up, and say: "But you have to think of this..." Somebody was always missing, the person who had called the conference. Madame was on the point of summoning Febo, then gave up the idea. We had our best talk at a table in the Columbia while the others were dancing. All I managed was to convince her that it was best to open definitely in May with the summer models, but I got an idea of what they had in mind. One of them had said that Turin is such a difficult city. I explained that there are limits to what you can do even in Turin.

Maurizio, too, got bored unexpectedly. He thought it was his duty to wait for me, stay beside me, follow me. He ostentatiously didn't mention Turin. I didn't mention Morelli. I was conscious of being much more alone in Rome, climbing those streets or dropping into Gigi's for coffee, than I had been in Turin in my hotel bed or in the Via Po. The last evening we came in late under a wind that shook the street lamps and rattled the shutters. I didn't tell him that certain hints from madame had made it clear that they were putting me in charge of the Turin shop and that I wouldn't be able to come back to Rome. I told him to stay in bed the next morning and not come to the station.

It was drizzling in Turin. Everything was chilly, melancholy, foggy; if it hadn't been March, I would have said November. When Febo heard that I had come back from Rome, there he was, grinning, with a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, but he wasn't very sure of himself. When I told him about this business of the baroque, he grinned happily again.

"So now, Clelia," he said softly, "what will you do?"

"I'll look for a decorator who knows baroque," I said.

"Turin is full of baroque. It's all over the place, but never baroque enough..."

"They know that in Rome," I said, "but they don't know what baroque is ..."

"Let's do it like this," he said, and began throwing off sheet after sheet of rapid sketches.

He smoked and sketched all evening. He was good. I watched that red, bony hand, scarcely aware that it was his. It annoyed me that he should know so much, young as he was, and make light of it all, as if his talent were so much money he had accidentally found in his pocket. He told me earlier that he had gone to architecture school only on days when he knew a certain girl would be there. He had learned his trade while traveling the world with his mother, a crazy old lady who furnished and refurnished houses the way she would open and close a beach umbrella. He explained gaily that there was no need to change anything in the rooms, we had only to go to the antique dealers, and it needn't all be baroque —some could be provincial, in the worst taste—but we had to arrange the things well, give them proper stage lighting. He knocked himself out laughing and tried to kiss me. We were in the hotel lobby. I let him kiss my hand.

The next day Morelli appeared, excited, asking where I had been for so long. I told him he had to help me because the young of Turin were really in poor shape and we old people had to stick together. I asked him if he knew the antique dealers, if he knew anything about style in furniture.

When he understood what I wanted, he asked if I were setting up house in Turin.

Then I took him to the Via Po and showed him the rooms.

"Your painter friends, what do they say?" he asked.

"If they only understood paintings ..."

"Here the pictures will be the mirrors," he said seriously. "No need to let your customers disappear. There's no painting that's worth a beautiful woman undressing."

He accompanied me to the antique stores on the Via Mazzini and meanwhile we talked of Rome. "It would be easier in Rome," I said. "Rome is full of old houses being broken up ..."

They weren't fooling in Turin either. Those shops were the honey and we the flies. You could hardly move among the mountains of stuff—ivory pieces, peeling canvases, grandfather clocks, figurines, artificial flowers, necklaces, fans. At first glance everything seemed old and decrepit, but after a while you could see there wasn't a piece—not a miniature, not an umbrella handle— that didn't make your mouth water. Morelli said: "They aren't showing us the best. They don't know who we are." He looked me over and said: "My wife should be here."

Crossing the street, he asked: "What do you think of all this stuff?"

"It hurts to think that when you die everything you own ends up like this in other people's hands."

"It's worse when it ends up like that before you're dead," Morelli said. "If our beautiful friend were here, she would say that we also pass from hand to hand, the hands of those who want us. The only thing that saves people is money, which passes through everybody's hands."

Then the talk shifted to women and houses and to Donna Clementina, who was a girl when some of those parasols and guitars and mottled mirrors were new. "She knew how to set herself up. No man could have claimed to have
her
in hand. These boys make me laugh, these girl friends of Mariella who have the vices but not the experience... They think it's enough to talk. I'd like to see them in twenty years ... The old lady got where she wanted to go ..."

We went into another shop. We didn't talk baroque. I told Morelli that it was better to see a palace, a house, and find how things should look in their natural setting. "Let's go to Donna Clementina's," he said. "That evening there were too many people, but the porcelains alone are worth ..."

16

We arrived just as some women were leaving; they stared at me. Twenty years ago my route never went through that quarter of Turin. We found Mariella and her mother, who had just had tea; the grandmother—unfortunately—was napping, she was preparing for the evening, when a certain Rumanian violinist was coming to play and she wanted to be present. A few friends were expected, would we care to join them?

Mariella looked at me reproachfully and while we were going into the room with the porcelains she scolded me for not having told her in time about the trip to Saint Vincent. "Come this evening," she said. "Rosetta and the whole crowd will be here."

"I haven't been seeing anybody. What are you all doing?"

"I can't tell," she said mysteriously. "You'll have to see to find out."

I pulled Morelli's coattail just in time to keep him from telling those gossips the story of my fitting rooms. Mariella's mother lit the showcase lights and told us something about each piece. She spoke of her great grandfather, of weddings, of aunts, of the French Revolution. Morelli told us the names of some of the pink, bewigged women in the miniatures hanging on the walls. There was a certain Giudetta—also in the family—who had lain under a tree in the royal gardens and the king of that epoch let cherries fall through the branches into her mouth. I looked closely and tried to understand these things, what they were made of and the artist's secret—the way you do with a dress—but I didn't get very far. The elegance of the figurines and the little painted portraits was made out of air, and without the names, conversation, and family stories that went with them, they weren't enough to create an atmosphere. I really had to rely on Febo.

So that evening we returned to listen to the violinist. I saw the fierce old lady again, with her shawl and her ribbon around the neck; I saw the circle of solemn old gentlemen, the lamps, the rug. Youth was less in evidence this time; they sat uncomfortably on the upholstered chairs. No Loris. Rosetta and Momina smiled at me from among the women.

The violinist played well, as violinists usually do on these occasions. He was a fat little man with white hair who kissed all the women's hands; it wasn't clear if he were being paid or had come as a friend. He laughed with his tongue in his cheek and looked at our legs. A lymphatic lady wearing glasses and a rose at her shoulder accompanied him on the piano. The women shouted: "Bravo!" All in all, I was bored.

Morelli clapped enthusiastically. When tea came, I looked for Rosetta and Momina. "As soon as the old lady gets up," we said, "we'll go too."

Mariella cornered me. "I'm coming too," she said. "Wait for me."

She ended by dragging along everyone, including the violinist. Outside the large entrance door the bespectacled lady started to shout. "The maestro wants to treat us." Everybody was speaking French.

In the car I found myself next to Rosetta. I said in the dark and confusion: "It's turned out badly. Ivrea was better."

"It's not morning yet," Momina said, getting in.

For the violinist, who was with the women and Morelli in Mariella's big car, treating us meant circling around the center of town, stopping in front of cafes, putting his head out, arguing, and then giving the signal to start off again. After three or four of these games, Momina said: "Go to the devil," and set off on her own.

"Where are we going?"

"To your hotel," she said.

We entered the salon gaily and noisily. Several people raised their heads.

"Doesn't it give you the shivers?" she said to Rosetta, who walked between us with clenched fists.

Rosetta smiled thinly. She said: "There's a possibility that nobody paid my bill. They might throw us out..."

"You never came back?" Momina asked.

Rosetta shrugged.

"Where shall we sit?" I asked.

The waiter brought us three cognacs. Behind the bar, Luis winked at me.