Among Women Only Read online

  AMONG WOMEN ONLY

  Cesare Pavese

  English translation of Tra donne sole, 1949, by R.W. Flint

  Contents

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  1

  I arrived in Turin with the last January snow, like a street acrobat or a candy seller. I remembered it was carnival time when I saw the booths and the bright points of acetylene lamps under the porticoes, but it was not dark yet and I walked from the station to the hotel, peering out from under the arches and over the heads of the people. The sharp air was biting my legs and, tired as I was, I huddled in my fur and loitered in front of the shop windows, letting people bump into me. I thought how the days were getting longer, that before long a bit of sun would loosen the frozen muck and open up the spring.

  That was how I saw Turin again, in the half light under the porticoes. When I entered the hotel, I thought of nothing but a hot bath, stretching out, and a long night. Especially since I had to stay in Turin for quite a while.

  I telephoned no one and no one knew I was staying at that hotel. Not even a bunch of flowers was waiting for me. The maid running my bath talked to me, bent over the tub, while I was exploring the room. A man, a valet, wouldn't do such things. I asked her to go, saying that I would be all right alone. The girl babbled something, standing in front of me, wringing her hands. Then I asked where she came from. She reddened brightly and said she was Venetian. ''One can tell," I said. "And I am from Turin. You'd like to go home, I imagine?"

  She nodded with a sly look.

  "Then remember that I've just come home," I said. "Don't spoil the pleasure for me."

  "Excuse me," she said. "May I go?"

  When I was alone in the warm water, I closed my eyes; they ached from too much pointless talking. The more I convince myself that there's no point in talking, the more I seem to talk. Especially among women. But my tiredness and a slight feverishness soon dissolved in the water and I thought of the last time I had been in Turin, during the war, the day after a bombing raid. All the pipes were burst, no bath. I thought with pleasure: as long as life contains baths, living is worth the effort.

  A bath and a cigarette. While I smoked, I compared the sloshing that comforted me now to the tense life I'd been leading, to the storm of words, my impatient desires, to the projects I'd always carried through, although this evening everything had come down to this tub and this pleasant warmth. Had I been ambitious? I saw the ambitious faces again: pale, marked, convulsed faces—did one of them ever relax for a peaceful hour? Not even when you are dying does that passion slow up. It seemed that I had never relaxed for a moment. Perhaps twenty years before, when I was a little girl playing in the streets and waiting excitedly for the season of confetti, booths, and masks, perhaps then I could let myself go. But in those years the carnival meant only merry-go-rounds, torrone, and cardboard noses. Later there was a fever to go out, to see Turin and run through it; there were my first adventures in the alleys with Carlotta and the other girls, when, hearts beating, we felt ourselves being followed for the first time: all that innocence had come to an end. Strange. The evening of the Thursday before Lent when father was growing worse just before dying, I cried with anger and I hated him, thinking of the holiday I was losing. Only mother understood me that evening, teased me and told me to get out from under her feet and go and cry in the yard with Carlotta. But I was crying because the fact that Papa was about to die terrified me and kept me from letting myself go at the carnival.

  The telephone rang. I didn't move from the tub, because I was happy with my cigarette. I thought that it was probably on just that distant evening that I told myself for the first time that if I wanted to accomplish something, or get something out of life, I shouldn't tie myself to anyone as I had been tied to that embarrassing father. I had succeeded, and now my whole pleasure was to dissolve myself in warm water and not answer the telephone.

  It began to ring again, apparently irritated. I didn't answer, but I got out of the bath. I dried myself slowly, seated in my bathrobe, and was rubbing face cream around my mouth when someone knocked. "Who is it?"

  "A note for the signora."

  "I said I'm not in."

  "The gentleman insists."

  I had to get up and turn the key. The impertinent Venetian handed me the note. I looked at it and said to the girl: "I don't want to see him. He can come back tomorrow."

  "The signora is not going down?"

  My face felt plastered, I couldn't even manage a frown. "I'm not going down. I want tea. Tell him tomorrow at noon."

  When I was alone, I took the receiver off, but they answered right away from the office. The voice rasped helplessly on the table like a fish out of water. Then I shouted something into the phone; I had to say who I was, that I wanted to sleep. They wished me good night.

  Half an hour later the girl had still not returned. This happens only in Turin, I thought. I did something I had never done before, as though I were a silly girl. I slipped into my dressing gown and half opened the door.

  Out in the corridor a number of people—maids, patrons, my impertinent Venetian—had crowded in front of a door. Someone exclaimed something sotto voce.

  Then the door opened wide, and slowly, very carefully, two whiteshirts carried out a stretcher. Everyone fell silent and gave way. On the stretcher lay a girl with a swollen face and disordered hair, shoeless but wearing an evening gown of blue tulle. Though her lips and eyelids were motionless, one could imagine her having had a lively expression. Instinctively I glanced under the stretcher to see if there were blood dripping down. I searched the faces—the usual faces, one pursed up, another apparently grinning. I caught the eye of my maid—she was running behind the stretcher. Over the low voices of the circle (which included a woman in furs, wringing her hands), I heard the voice of a doctor; he had come out of the door, drying his hands on a towel and saying that it was all over, to please get out of the way.

  The stretcher disappeared down the stairs, as someone said: "Easy now." I looked at my maid again. She had already run to a chair at the end of corridor and returned with the tea tray.

  "She was taken sick, poor girl," she said, coming into my room. But her eyes were shining and she couldn't contain herself. She told me everything. The girl had come to the hotel in the morning —from a party, a dance. She had locked herself in her room; she hadn't gone out all day. Someone had telephoned; people were looking for her; a policeman had forced the door. The girl was on the bed, dying.

  The maid went on: "Poisoning herself at carnival time, what a shame. And her family is so rich... They have a beautiful house in Piazza d'Armi. It'll be a miracle if she lives..."

  I told her I wanted more water for my tea. And not to dawdle on the stairs this time.

  But that night I didn't sleep as I had hoped to. Squirming in bed, I could have kicked myself for having stuck my nose into the corridor.

  2

  The next day they brought me a bunch of flowers, the first narcissi. I smiled, thinking that I had never received flowers in Turin. The order had come from that owl Maurizio, who had thought of surprising me on my arrival. Instead, the thing had gone wrong. It happens in Rome too, I thought. I imagined Maurizio, unh
appy, wandering aimlessly down the Via Veneto after our goodbyes and between the last coffee and first aperitif filling out the order form.

  I wondered if the girl of yesterday had had flowers in her room. Are there people who surround themselves with flowers before dying? Perhaps it's a way of keeping up one's courage. The maid went to find me a vase, and while she helped me to arrange the narcissi, she told me that the papers hadn't mentioned the attempted suicide. "Who knows how much they are spending to keep it quiet? They took her to a private clinic... Last night they investigated. There must be a man mixed up in it... There ought to be a law for getting a girl..."

  I said that a girl who spends evenings at parties and instead of going home goes to a hotel is considered able to take care of herself.

  "Oh, yes," she said, indignant. "It's the mothers' fault. Why don't they stay with their daughters?"

  "Mothers?" I said. "These girls have always been with their mothers, they grew up on velvet, they've seen the world behind glass. Then, when they have to get out of a mess, they don't know how and fall in deeper."

  After which Mariuccia laughed, as if to say that she knew how to get out of a mess. I sent her out and got dressed. In the street it was cold and clear; during the night it had rained on the sludge and now the sun shone under the arcades. It looked like a new city, Turin, a city just finished, and the people were running about, giving it the last casual touches. I walked under the buildings in the center, inspecting the big shops that were waiting for their first customers. None of those windows or signs were modest and familiar as I remembered them, not the cafes or the cashiers or the faces. Only the slanting sunlight and the dripping air had not changed.

  And nobody was just walking, everyone seemed preoccupied. People didn't live in the streets, they only escaped through them. To think that when I used to walk those central streets with my big box on my arm they seemed like a kingdom of carefree people on vacation, the way I used to imagine seaside resorts. When one wants a thing, one sees it everywhere. And all this only meant suffering and barking my shins. What did she want, I wondered, that stupid girl who took Veronal yesterday? A man mixed up in it... Girls are fools. My Venetian was right.

  I went back to the hotel and saw Morelli's lean, unexpected face before me. I had forgotten him and his note.

  "How did you find me?" I said, laughing.

  "It's nothing. I waited."

  "All night?"

  "All winter."

  "That must mean you have plenty of time."

  I had always seen this man in a bathing suit on the Roman beaches. He had hair on his thin chest, gray hair almost white. But now his silk tie and light-colored vest had changed him completely.

  "You know you're young, Morelli?" I said.

  He bowed and invited me to lunch.

  "Didn't they tell you last night that I don't go out?"

  "Let's eat here then," he said.

  I like these people who joke without ever laughing. They intimidate you a little, and just for that you feel safe with them.

  "I accept," I told him. "On condition you tell me something amusing. How's the carnival going?"

  When we sat down, he didn't talk about the carnival. He didn't even talk about himself. Unsmilingly, he told me a little story about a Turin salon—he gave the name: nobility—where it happened that certain important gentlemen, while waiting for the mistress of the house, stripped down to their shorts and then sat in armchairs, smoking and talking. The hostess, astounded, forced herself to believe that this game was now the fashion, a test of one's spirit, and had stayed there joking about it with them a long time.

  "You see, Clelia," Morelli said. "Turin is an old city. Anywhere else this stroke of wit would have come from boys, students, young men who had just opened their first offices or got their first government jobs. Here, however, elderly people, commendatori and colonels, play such tricks. It's a lively city..."

  Expressionless as ever, he leaned forward, murmuring: "That bald head over there is one of them..."

  "Won't he take me for the countess?" I said lightly. "I'm from Turin too."

  "Oh, you're not in the same set; he knows that."

  It wasn't entirely a compliment. I thought of his gray-haired chest. "Did you undress, too?" I asked.

  "My dear Clelia, if you want to be introduced in that salon ..."

  "What would another woman do there?"

  "She could teach the countess strip tease... Who do you know in Turin?"

  "Busybody... The only flowers I got came from Rome."

  "They're waiting for you in Rome?"

  I shrugged. He was clever, Morelli, and he knew Maurizio. He also knew that I liked a good time but paid my own way.

  "I'm free," I said. "The only obligation I recognize is the one you owe a son or a daughter. And unfortunately I have no children."

  "But you could be my daughter... or does that make me too old?"

  "It's me that's too old."

  Finally he opened up and smiled with those lively gray eyes. Without so much as moving his mouth in a smile, he filled with high spirits, looked me over appreciatively. I recognized this, too. He wasn't the kind to run after dolls.

  "You know everything about this hotel," I said. "Tell me about yesterday's scandal. Do you know the girl?"

  He gave me another long look and shook his head.

  "I know the father," he said. "A hard man. Strong-willed. A sort of buffalo. He motorcycles and goes around his factory in overalls."

  "I saw her mother."

  "I don't know the mother. Good people. But the daughter is crazy."

  "Crazy crazy?"

  Morelli darkened. "When they try once, they try again."

  "What do people say?"

  "I don't know," he said. "I don't listen to such talk. It's like wartime conversation. Anything may be true. It might be a man, a revulsion, a whim. But there's only one real reason."

  He tapped his forehead with a finger. He smiled again with his eyes. He held his hand on the oranges and said: "I've always seen you eating fruit, Clelia. That's real youth. Leave flowers to the Romans."

  That bald character of the story muttered something to the waiter, threw down his napkin, and left, fat and solemn. He bowed to us. I laughed right at him; Morelli, expressionless, waved.

  "Man is the only animal," he said, "who labors to dress himself."

  When the coffee came, he still hadn't asked me what I was doing in Turin. Probably he knew already and there was no need to tell him. But neither did he ask me how long I was staying. I like this in people. Live and let live.

  "Would you like to go out this evening?" he asked. "Turin by night?"

  "First I've got to have a look at Turin by day. Let me get myself settled. Are you staying in this hotel?"

  "Why not come to my place?"

  He had to say that. I let the suggestion pass. I asked him to call for me at nine.

  He repeated: "I can put you up at my place."

  "Don't be foolish," I said. "We're not children. I'll come and pay you a visit one day."

  That afternoon I went out on my own, and in the evening he took me out to a party.

  3

  When I returned in the evening, Morelli, who had been waiting for me, noticed that I had gone out in my cloth coat and left the fur behind. I had him come up and while I was getting ready I asked him if he spent his days in the hotel.

  "I spend my nights at home," he said.

  "Really?" I was talking into the mirror, my back turned to him. "Don't you ever visit your estate?"

  "I pass over it in the train on my way to Genoa. My wife lives there. Nobody like women for certain sacrifices."

  "Married ones, too?" I murmured.

  I could tell he was laughing.

  "Not only them," he sighed. "It hurts me, Clelia, that you should go around in overalls bossing whitewashers ... However, I don't like that place in the Via Po. What do you expect to sell there?"

  "Turin is really an old woman
, a concierge."

  "Cities grow old like women."

  "For me it's only thirty. Oh, well, thirty-four... But I didn't pick the Via Po. They decided in Rome."

  "Obviously."

  We left. I was glad that Morelli, who understood everything, hadn't understood why I went out that day in a cloth coat. I was thinking about it when we got into the taxi, and I thought about it later. I believe that in the hubbub of the party, when cherry brandy, kummel, and meeting new people had made me restless and unhappy, I told him. Instead of going to the Via Po, I had gone to the hairdresser—a little hairdresser two steps from the hotel— and while she was drying my hair I heard the sharp voice of the manicurist behind the glass partition telling how she was awakened that morning by the smell of milk spilled on the gas stove. "What a mess. Even the cat couldn't take it. Tonight I'll have to clean the burner." That was enough for me to see a kitchen, an unmade bed, dirty panes on the balcony door, a dark staircase seemingly carved out of the wall. Leaving the hairdresser, I thought only of the old courtyard, and I went back to the hotel and left my fur. I had to return to that Via della Basilica and perhaps someone might recognize me; I didn't want to seem so proud.

  I had gone there, after exploring the district first. I knew the houses, I knew the stores. I pretended to stop and examine the shop windows, but really I was hesitating: it seemed impossible that I had been a child in those crannies, and at the same time, with something like fear, I felt no longer myself. The quarter was much dirtier than I remembered it. Underneath the portico on the little square I saw the shop of the old woman who sold herbs; now there was a thin little man, but the bags of seeds and the bunches of herbs were the same. On summer afternoons the shop used to give off a pungent smell of countryside and spices. Farther down the bombs had destroyed an alley. Who knows what's become of Carlotta, the girls, Slim? Or of Pia's children? If the bombs had flattened the whole district, it would have been easier to face my memories. I went down the forbidden alley, passed the tiled doorways of the brothels. How many times had we run by those doorways? The afternoon I stared at a soldier who came out with a dark look... what had got into me? And by the time I was old enough to dare to discuss such things (and the district had begun to make me less afraid than angry and disgusted), I was going to my shop in another part of town and had friends and knew all about it because I was working.