Among Women Only (9 page)

"Let's hope Mariella doesn't find us," I said. "I'm afraid the Rumanian won't do much treating."

"In all those people, somebody will offer to pay," Rosetta said.

Then I said it was funny but in Turin I had to avoid people. So many painters, inflated nobodies, musicians, a new one everywhere you turned—not even in Rome were people so continuously on holiday. And there was Mariella, too, who wanted to act at any cost. You wouldn't think there had ever been a war...

Rosetta, twirling her brandy glass, smiled from the chair. "She's talking about us too," she said quietly. "Why do we lead such lives?"

"I don't know," I said. "It seems to me that so much noise isn't worth the effort."

Momina, who hadn't yet sat down, paced restlessly between us and the bar. "Nothing's worth the effort," she said. "Before the war, you could travel at least."

Then she threw herself into a chair and put her hand down to take off her shoes.

"I'm afraid it's not done here," she said. "Haven't you got a couple of comfortable chairs in your room?"

We went up in the elevator. I watched Rosetta's movements. We came out in the corridor and she looked at me sideways; I nodded as if to say that it had happened here.

"All these corridors are alike," she said, keeping her eyes on Momina.

"Like the days of the year," Momina said. "All the doors are alike, and the beds, the windows, and the people who sleep here for one night... You need Clelia's courage to live here ..."

"Or hers," I said, meaning Rosetta.

"Listen," Momina said, without turning around, "now that they're bringing up our cognac, if you like we'll put out the lights and you can tell us how you ended up here and made a mistake on the dosage... I still don't believe..."

Suddenly Rosetta stopped, very pale, clenched her fists and bit her lips. But we were at the door, and I said: "Let's go in." Rosetta went in silently. No one spoke between the moment we sat down (Momina threw off her shoes) and when the waiter put the tray on the table, and I became aware that Rosetta's eyes were filling with tears. Momina hadn't noticed anything.

"Aren't you going to sit down, Rosetta?" she said.

Rosetta shook her head angrily, went to the door, turned out the lights, and replied in a hoarse voice: "There, it's done."

For several moments, only the red tip of Momina's cigarette showed in the dark. One heard the distant rattling of a trolley. I began to make out the lighter rectangle of the window.

"Are you mad at me?" Momina said mockingly.

I could feel Rosetta's effort to control her voice. She didn't succeed. She stammered slowly: "You shouldn't laugh..."

"I do it to buck you up," Momina said coldly. "I do it for your own good. Try to be intelligent. You are, you know. What happened? I've done nothing. Have I insulted you? Have I told you to do this or not do that? I've only helped you to see clearly the messes you make... Does that scare you? I understand suicide ... everyone thinks of it... but one has to do it right, make it real... Do it without recriminations... Instead, you act like a dressmaker's assistant who's been abandoned..."

"I... hate you," Rosetta stammered, breathing heavily.

"But why?" Momina said, serious. "What have you got to reproach me for? For having been too much to you, or too little? What does it matter, we're friends."

Rosetta didn't reply and Momina didn't continue. I heard her breathing. I put my glass down blindly in the dark. I murmured: "Sit down."

She sat down. I realized I could talk. Then I said that though it was no affair of mine, seeing that we were together I also had a right to talk. I had heard all kinds of stories about what she had done, and none was true. "If it's something between the two of you," I said, "say what you have to say and be done with it."

Momina twisted around in the armchair, looking for a cigarette. The light of her match nearly blinded me, I caught sight of her short hair over her eyes.

"What is it? Have you made love together?" Neither replied. Momina began to laugh and cough.

17

"You can't even say that's it," Momina took up again in a querulous voice. By that time I could finally make out their faces. "It's a good thing you put out the lights, dear. Can't you see that you've made a personal matter, a hysterical drama, out of something that might have been good and had some sense? Did you hear what Clelia said?"

She had heard, and must have been burning red. I don't think she was still crying or afraid. "You two have nothing to do with it," she said harshly, in her unreasonable voice. "I'm twenty-three, I know what life is. I don't have it in for anyone. Let's talk about something else, if you don't mind?"

"At least tell us what it feels like. Whom one thinks about at that moment. Did you look in the mirror?"

She didn't talk mockingly now, but with a baby voice, as if she were playing a part. Even before, when they put out the lights, it seemed like a scene in a play. Again the thought came to me that there had been absolutely no one on the stretcher that evening.

Rosetta said she hadn't looked in the mirror. She didn't remember if there were any mirrors in the room. She had turned out the lights then, too. She didn't want to see anything or anybody, just to sleep. She had a tremendous, a terrible headache. Which suddenly went away, leaving her stretched out and happy. How happy she was. It seemed a miracle. Then she woke up, in the hospital, under a lamp that hurt her eyes.

"Disgusted?" Momina murmured.

"Uh," Rosetta said. "Waking up is horrible ..."

"I knew a cashier in Rome," I said, "who went crazy from seeing herself all the time in the mirror behind the bar... She got to thinking she was somebody else."

Momina said: "One should look at oneself in the mirror... You've never had the courage, Rosetta."

We talked on like that, about mirrors and the eyes of a person killing herself. When the waiter came with another tray, we turned on the lights. Rosetta's face was calm and hard.

The telephone rang. It was Mariella and she wanted to know what had happened. She couldn't make out what I said because at her end an orchestra was blaring. I looked questioningly at the two women. I shouted into the phone that I had come home because I was tired. That they should dance and enjoy themselves. That it had been a pleasant evening.

Then Rosetta used the phone. She called her house. She said: "Mama, I'm coming home now." Momina put on her shoes and they went away.

The next day Rosetta paid me a visit in the Via Po. She came in smiling uneasily, in her leopard coat. Febo was upstairs with Becuccio, taking measurements. "You certainly don't want to meet our friend," I said. "Will you go shopping with me?" She waited for me in the large room while I shouted upstairs that I was going out. Seeing Rosetta so young, standing there beside the window, I thought of Mariella: "Mariella would make a first-class cashier."

Walking under the porticoes, I told her that I had thought of giving her a job. She smiled. "I've got an idea," I said. "A shop staffed by your most distinguished friends. Would you come in on it? The best names in Turin... One at the cash register, one behind the showcases, others in the fitting rooms ..."

She took up the joke. She said: "Who would come to buy? There'd be nobody left."

"Your servants, perhaps ... People without names."

"We wouldn't know how to do anything..."

"Who knows? Like charity parties ..."

"Oitana, I envy you," she said. "It's nice to work as you do."

"Sometimes it's hell. There's always a boss."

"Maybe that's what work is. Having someone to tell you what to do or not to do. It's a salvation."

"Try telling your maid that."

She hesitated. "Yesterday," she said. "I was a fool." I didn't interrupt. "... One says and does many false things ... You know what I mean. I'd like to be someone else, like that cashier in Rome... even crazy like her. You shouldn't believe what Momina says ... Momina is exasperating at times."

"She's been more discreet than I have." I hesitated, holding her eye.

"You, Oitana, know a lot about life ..." She searched for words. "You wouldn't think much of two women who talked the way we did last night, would you?"

She had stopped stubbornly and was devouring me with her eyes. Yesterday evening, in the dark, she must have been as red as this.

I made her move on. I said that as long as a woman can still blush, you can't say much against her. (She excused herself, saying: "I blush over nothing.") I told her that everything is all right as long as you don't impair your health and don't get ugly ideas in your head. I asked her if that was why she had taken the Veronal.

We had stopped in front of the florist on the Via Pietro Mica. It was easier to talk. I said: "Shall we send Mariella some flowers, for yesterday?"

"Let's," she said.

We chose lilies of the valley. While the woman arranged the green, I said to Rosetta: "At your age they aren't vices. Vices come later."

"I don't think I have any," she said wryly. "It would be better if I did."

When we returned under the porticoes, I asked her what game we were playing now. She hadn't tried to kill herself for that?

Rosetta, surprised, said that she had no idea herself why she went to the hotel that night. In fact she had gone in happy. She was feeling relieved after the dance. For a long time, nights had made her shudder, the idea of having got through another day, of being alone with her disgusts, of waiting for morning, stretched out in bed—all became unbearable. That night, anyhow, was nearly over. But then, precisely because she hadn't slept but paced around the room thinking of night, of all the stupid things that had happened at night, and now she was alone again and couldn't do anything, little by little she became desperate, and finding the Veronal in her bag...

"Wasn't Momina at the dance?"

No, Momina wasn't, but at the hotel she, Rosetta, stretched out in bed, had thought about her a great deal, had thought about many things Momina had said—Momina who was even more fed up with life than she, but who laughed and said: "I'll wait for good weather before killing myself. I don't want to be buried in the rain."

"I," Rosetta said, "didn't have the patience to wait any longer."

"But you haven't quarreled with Momina?"

"No, we argue sometimes, like last night, but we're good friends. Momina's the only friend I have."

For what that was worth. I said sharply: "Only a friend?"

She looked at me, thin, with her cat's eyes. She began to blush faintly, then nervously got control of herself.

"What are you trying to make me say, Oitana?" she said. "Is it necessary? But I'm not ashamed. You know how it is with girls. Momina was my first love. A long time ago, before she got married ... Now we're just friends, believe me."

18

I had to believe her. I asked her why she didn't think about marriage. She shrugged her shoulders, said that she knew men. "Perhaps not all of them," I observed.

"It's not necessary," she said.

"Don't tell me you're like Momina—afraid of having children."

"I like babies," she said. "But they ought to stay babies. When I think that afterwards they grow up and become people like us, I get mad... Don't you think?"

"I don't have any," I said.

We left, promising to meet again, but I was sure she wouldn't come back. Rosetta had come to see me either from ingenuousness or because she didn't think much of me, but now she must have realized that it was impossible to keep our distances. We always came back to the same subject.

I went to Milan to inspect some glass tables and shelves with Febo, who borrowed a car for the trip. Everything went well, except that on the way back, when we stopped to light our cigarettes, Febo, with the look in his eyes of that night in Ivrea, let his hands start wandering. I gave him such a black eye that I thought I had blinded him, but starting off again, he behaved himself; I told him the world was large and one shouldn't make love with the people one works with. He watched the road sheepishly. I asked why he didn't try again with Momina, or even find himself a wife among Momina's friends. Rich and educated people who knew how to paint and put on plays. He looked at me, amused. He stopped the car. Oh, oh, here we are again, I thought. "Clelia, Clelia," he said, without touching me, "be my wife this evening."

"Is that a serious proposal?"

"We're already husband and wife. You socked me."

"I can be your mother, if you like."

"Yes, yes." He clapped his hands. "Yes, Mama. Will you take me to the fields to gather snails?"

However, we stopped to dance at a pavilion in a town outside Turin and Febo began to quarrel good-naturedly with a young couple who were dancing and had blocked our way. They threatened to give him another black eye. It was astounding the way Febo, blond and hairy, took chances in that country place where he didn't know the dialect. I told him to cut it out, and had to pull him away. Then he suggested dinner in some dive and asked me if I didn't like to break out sometimes and raise hell.

"That's not hard," I said. "What's ugly is making a dive the center of your life."

"Well then, let's do something ugly," he said.

We found a little joint at the end of Corso Giulio Cesare in Turin. At first Febo kept quiet and thought only of eating. But the host wasn't the hairy fellow at Ivrea and didn't have much in the kitchen. A red-eyed girl in slippers brought us our food, looking hard at my stockings, while the others there, an old woman and some truck drivers, watched us. The room was cold, freshly plastered, and already dirty; I thought how in my time this was all countryside, open roads and countryside.

"The things we do are truly unpleasant," I told Febo.

He tried to liven up and find the wine good. Behind the bar, the girl kept her red eyes on us. The others were now playing cards, smoking and spitting.

When we had finished the omelet, I suggested we go. "But there must be a place near here ..." he said. When we went out, it was dark. A wind blew against the red neon signs along the avenue. "This city has its own kind of beauty," Febo said. "You don't understand, you live too much with the gentry."