As I stared, I sensed many other eyes pursuing her. A hushed silence had fallen over everything. Everyone watched as she traversed the bleached sunlit piazza with quickening steps, desperate to get off the public stage.
A thought hit me. Maybe it was significant that she worked in a watch shop? In some way my feelings for Gradisca related to time, its passage.
All my life was about waiting, waiting for a wife who never came home.
Gradisca, in her shop of pendulums and chimes.
Gradisca, peering at her watch, waiting to go home.
Gradisca, herself a time-piece, a woman most likely longing for a child before it was too late.
With Gradisca there was an opportunity to halt the passing of time. To live, instead. To be in the moment and never again have to be out of step. A form of immortality, almost.
The third time I went in to see Gradisca I felt she was prepared for me. As soon as I entered the pristine shop with its expansive, polished marble floors, as soon as I slid across the floor towards a revolving plastic tower of sunglasses, she made her way over to me.
Not eagerly, exactly, but attentively.
There was something sluggish about me, as if time was dragging indecently at my capacity to speak. I managed to say in very poor Italian that my eyes were hurting. I needed some shades. She nodded and indicated I should sit down. Then she faced me squarely, gazing thoughtfully at my face before gently removing my glasses.
“These!” she said, carefully slotting a pair of futuristic frames into position.
I looked at myself in the mirror, twisting and turning and wishing I could suavely whip out some cash and buy them. But they weren’t me, to be honest, nor did I have very much cash. In the end, I simply put my old, scratched glasses back on and told her what I really needed was a new watch. My old Japanese model was unreliable.
She crossed the marble floor and slid open a drawer, picked up a wristwatch and dangling it in the air for me to see; then gestured for me to come and have a look.
But I shook my head, overwhelmed by my inability to speak in a language she could understand. My mind was bursting with little comments, jokes, remarks I would have liked to tell her. Instead, all I had was my large, ungainly body and my empty hands.
“No. Grazie.”
There was a hollow silence, a silence that seemed to cry out for something to be said, so she politely asked: “Qualcos’altro?”
I shook my head and started backing away. I was just about to turn round when she launched a smile that punctured and passed clean through my ventricles.
The intricate expressiveness of that smile overwhelmed me. First, this was certainly some attempt on her part to communicate despite our verbal differences. I felt she was aware of our communication problems, hence she had to try and say something with her smile. And she certainly had. With that smile she told me everything.
Of course it could only have been in my mind. Our eyes must have met for a mere fraction of a second. Then I walked out. I was boiling with desire, but the lava was bubbling far below the surface, and there was a thick plug of rock on top.
One day I would blow up.
Later that day I was in the ice cream bar talking to Rafaela, my landlady, a pleasant-looking woman in her late forties with large crystal earrings, untidy hair, Birkenstocks, always with a selection of crap drawings she tried to sell you. At a quarter to five, fifteen minutes before the shop was opening, Gradisca sauntered in. At first she didn’t see me. I was talking to Rafaela, discussing something fairly practical, like a faulty water meter or similar, but I was unable to take my eyes off the other side of the bar, where Gradisca was performing a sort of dance, by which I mean she was whirling in front of the mirror, buffing her hair and making sure her tight-fitting t-shirt looked right. Now and then she would look over at the girl at the counter, making some joke or casual remark. The two of them seemed more than close, almost like members of the same family.
From time to time she lifted her eyes and glanced in my direction with enormous intensity. I noticed because I could see her reflection in the mirror and I was able to study her face as she was watching me. Even more unexpectedly, she kept glancing nervously at Rafaela. Perhaps wondering who this rival might be?
I was vaguely aware of Rafaela saying things to me, but I was in another world. Gradisca left the mirror and walked out, passing close to where we were standing. We smiled at each other. “Bona sera,” I said.
She looked relieved and reciprocated.
In the next few days I just occasionally glanced through the windows as I passed. Sometimes I saw her standing there. On one occasion I passed just as she was bending forward to pick something up. Her rump was towards the window. I couldn’t avoid feasting my eyes.
The fourth time I entered her shop was important. I had a sense of wanting to achieve something that fourth time. I had some vague idea of asking her for dinner, or a drink. Where, though? There weren’t any restaurants around. And what bars did she like?
Or might I cook for her?
The day before, I had seen her strolling down the Corso, occasionally glancing into shop windows, moving towards me from about a hundred meters away. I stared at the ground to avoid catching her eye, thinking to myself that as we got closer I would look up and smile at her. Then I’d stop and try to start up a conversation.
Ten seconds passed, then I looked up.
She’d gone!
At first I was disappointed. I realized she must have gone into a shop.
Then it occurred to me that she had probably wanted to avoid me. But why? A whole range of possibilities arose in my mind. Was she being elusive to enflame me and test my mettle?
Another thought occurred to me. Maybe she didn’t know what to say to me, just as I didn’t to her?
In either case, now I knew she was aware of my presence. I wasn’t just someone with a burning interest in wristwatches.
So, as I was saying, the fourth visit was significant, because now we both knew that there was something in the air. As I walked across the cool stone tiles, she was watching me with a tentative smile. She had a slight edge to her. I felt she was expecting me to do or say something. I lost my nerve and stood before her, uncomfortable in my own body. I seemed incapable of lightness in her presence.
Finally, at a loss, I asked for a cheap quartz watch with a rubber strap. Even my voice seemed to have lost its normal timbre. When I was paying I noticed my hand was trembling. I took fractionally too long getting my money out and when I slotted the wallet into my inside pocket I got it caught in the frayed silk lining.
She seemed to be watching my every move. There was a kind of weariness about her, and I realized I had overstepped the mark in some way. Not by saying anything, not even really by doing anything. Just by being. By existing in her presence I had made her weary.
I said goodbye and left. Later that day I bumped into her again in the street and she quite blatantly dived into a souvenir shop to avoid me when I was only some ten meters in front of her. I walked past and told myself it was now crystal clear why she had been avoiding me. She didn’t like me, found me unpleasant and heavy-footed with my poor command of Italian, my awkward northern manners. It was an embarrassment, this fawning passion I had developed for her. I decided never to bother her again, and never to go into the watch shop again.
That would have been the end of the story, except there were some other convolutions. First, I met her sister, because she started working in the ice cream bar. I didn’t know for sure if she was Gradisca’s sister, and I didn’t ask. But they looked the same. The sister was like her twin, except she looked older. I had a feeling she was married and more settled. Every day a guy in a vintage roadster picked her up.
It was a two-seater, so I never saw Gradisca get a lift with them.
I never saw Gradisca with anyone. Only when she was working in the shop was she actually with someone else. Sometimes I saw her talking to people in the street, but I always had the impression they were acquaintances to meet for an aperitif.
Never a man, holding her possessively.
Gradisca’s sister had more solidity about her. She wasn’t ethereal. Beauty must have been a family trait, but even though she looked more matronly I fancied she was actually younger than Gradisca.
Oddly enough, I found the sister very easy to talk to. Not like Gradisca at all. She had a basic command of English; I made jokes and we had some half-reasonable times in there, just talking about ice cream or how to mix drinks or what sort of cakes we liked with our coffee.
One day while we were talking it hit me! Jesus, what an idiot I had been.
Gradisca had a boyfriend. Obviously!
A girl like that, poised and well groomed and gorgeous with it. Of course! How could I have ignored this most obvious explanation of all?
My speculation didn’t lead anywhere, until one day after too many drinks I told a friend I had developed a crush on a woman in town.
“Tell me who?” he said, interrupting me with a delighted grin.
“She works in a shop.”
“Which one?”
“The watch shop.”
He chuckled. “Gradisca? Excellent!”
“Go on!”
“Everyone likes her, and she knows it.”
I told him about our trysts in the shop, how I felt there was something between us, then my puzzlement about the way she had avoided me in the street.
“You can’t just expect a woman to stop and talk to you in the street, can you? You don’t even know her. Anyway, Gradisca’s a bit of a special case. And she has a boyfriend.”
“Aha! That’s what I thought.”
“A boring fat doctor. No one can understand what she’s doing with him. Maybe she likes the money? But I also hear they’re just about to split up.”
“So she’s famous in town?”
“Everyone’s famous, even you,” he said. “People notice everything you do here. Gradisca used to be married, I know that. It didn’t work and she came back. I don’t have much detail on that, though.”
He paused then shook his head and smiled. “Today I saw her wearing this green knitwear thing that reached down to her navel more or less, and her lovely big ass was kind of screaming. She’s everyone’s fantasy but she’s in her own world. Like she’s playing a game. She comes into our bar sometimes, stands there having a drink and wiggling what she’s got, then leaves without saying much. I never go into her shop, though. My wife knows I have a thing about Gradisca, I’ve told her, there’s no point denying it. Everyone’s got a thing about Gradisca.”
“So what does she get out of it? Going to your bar like that?”
“It’s a kind of theatre. Like the struggle between us.”
“Who?”
“Boys, girls. The battle.”
Later, walking home, it occurred to me that his words were a sort of distortion. Not in their essential points of fact: I believed that Gradisca had been married, otherwise it would not make sense, anything about her. I believed that she had come back in disgrace. The other stuff about her looking for attention, being a cockteaser, struck me as off-the-point and also untrue. Gradisca had grace! All she’d done was walk into a bar! The truth was, I felt admiration for her, the way my friend had described her standing there, confronting the builders, the drinkers and shepherds.
In a way, she was saying to them: “Go home, toss off in your rooms, do what the hell you like, I can stand here, I can do anything I want, and if you desire me that’s not my problem.” I tried to imagine how it would feel to be a fantasy. Walking round, having all these women looking at me dreamily, eyeing up my bulging crotch, then coming up to ask for directions, smiling appreciatively at my every word.
No wonder Gradisca had turned slightly tricky. If everyone I met desired me, I would find it hard to choose. Not choosing anyone would be the most likely scenario. I would keep myself to myself. Or perhaps I would turn into a player, a fleshpot, always finding new women to distract myself with: tall, small-titted Cuban dancers, pallid Chinese women with shining tresses of jet-black hair.
When would my search ever end?
Oddly enough I think it would end the day I met Gradisca and we spent our nights close together with nothing between us but a film of sweat; and our evenings after she came home from work sitting on my terrace, eating melon and drinking Campari sodas.
ii) Gradisca’s Shadow
“…there is another side to the Don Juan character which is found in the fused Hebrew-Arabic-Castilian philosophy and concept of reality. This concept is simply that exterior reality has no existence in and of itself. One reaches toward it, and it recedes… Don Juan, thus, somewhat like the wandering Spanish pìcaro, clutches again and again at a phantom. In his case it is the phantom of femininity…”
(John Armstrong Crow, “Spain, the Root and the Flower”)
I
What is Gradisca’s shadow? It seems to have a life all of its own. An obscure Christian veil? Or guilt, obsession?
Every moment in our lives represents some choice that will affect everything.
Jung was right. We move through a world of mythical significance.
Behind every beautiful woman you desire, comes a question: Why?
After she has gone, you dwell in the footsteps she left behind. You compose songs on the shore, in honor of Urania who sailed away.
II
Sexual love is love, but love is only love if it is for The One, and by that I mean the beloved object.
The Platonic Love Ideal is an invention designed to focus the mind on the possibilities of Monotheistic Worship. The tribes of Judea invented the One God. In a universe inhabited by One Great Holy Ghost, Man would also have to find the One Beloved Woman (Object as Non-Object) and claim her by a ring on her finger.
The Greek Gods, each a facet of the Jungian diamond, receded. Men would no longer explore the variegations of the feminine serpent, nor the cloven-hoofed Satyr.
III
Beauty/sex is a shadow, because it promises something that is incomplete. Beauty/sex is only a beginning, a door. Men who follow it are men who prefer to loiter on the outside.