Among Women Only Read online

  I arrived in the Via della Basilica and didn't have the courage. I passed in front of that courtyard and caught a glimpse of the low vaulting of a second-story bedroom and of balconies. I was already in the Via Milano; impossible to go back. The mattress maker looked at me from his doorway.

  I told Morelli something of all this at the height of the party when it was nearly morning and one kept on drinking and talking just to hold out a little longer. I said: "Morelli, these people dancing and getting drunk are well-born. They've had butlers, nurses, maids. They've had country vacations, all kinds of protection. Good for them. Do you think that any of them could have started from nothing—from a courtyard the size of a grave—and got to this party?"

  And Morelli patted my arm and said: "Cheers. We arrived. If necessary we'll even get home."

  "It's easy," I said, "for the wives and daughters of wealthy families to dress the way they're dressed. They've only to ask. They don't even have to sleep around. Give you my word, I'd rather dress real whores. At least they know what work is."

  "Do whores still dress?" Morelli said.

  We had eaten and danced. We had met many people. Morelli always had someone at his shoulder who was saying loudly: "Be seeing you." I recognized some names and faces of people who had been in our fitting room in Rome. I recognized some gowns: a countess wore one with a peplum which we had designed and which I myself had sent several days before. A little woman in ruffles even gave me a tiny smile; her escort turned around; I recognized him, too; they had been married the year before in Rome. He bowed deeply and gravely in recognition—he was a tall, blond diplomat—then he was jerked away: I suppose his wife brought him to his senses by reminding him that I was the dressmaker. That was when my blood began to boil. Then came a collection for the blind: a man in a dinner jacket and a red paper hat made a comic speech about the blind and deaf, and two blindfolded women ran around the room grabbing men who, after paying, could kiss them. Morelli paid. Then the orchestra began playing again and some groups got noisy, singing and chasing one another. Morelli came back to the table with a large woman in rose lamé with the belly of a fish; a young man and a cool young woman who had just stopped dancing and suddenly dropped on the divan. The man immediately jumped up.

  "My friend Clelia Oitana," Morelli was saying.

  The large woman sat down, fanning herself, and looked at me. The other, in a low-cut, clinging violet gown, had already examined me and smiled at Morelli as he lit her cigarette.

  I don't recall what was said at first. I was watching the younger woman's smile. She had an air of having always known me, of mocking both Morelli and me, although she was only watching the smoke from her cigarette. The other woman laughed and prattled nonsense. The young man asked me to dance. We danced. He was called Fefé. He told me something about Rome, tried to glue himself to me and squeeze me and asked if Morelli were really my squire. I told him I wasn't a horse. Then, laughing, he pulled me closer. He must have had more to drink than I.

  When we came back, there was only the fat woman, still fanning herself. Morelli was making his rounds. Fish-belly sent the bored young man off to find something, them patted me on the knee with a neat little hand and gave me a malicious look. My blood boiled again.

  "You were in the hotel," she whispered, "when poor Rosetta Mola was taken sick last night?"

  "Oh, you know her? How is she?" I asked immediately.

  "They say she's out of danger." She shook her head and sighed. "And tell me, did she really sleep in that hotel? What girls. Was she in there all day? Was she really alone?"

  Her fat, dancing eyes bored in like two needles. She was trying to control herself but didn't succeed.

  "Imagine! We saw her the night of the dance. She seemed calm enough... Such distinguished people. She danced a great deal."

  I saw Morelli approaching.

  "Listen, did you see her, afterwards? They say she was still in her party dress."

  I mumbled something: that I hadn't seen anything. A furtiveness in the woman's tone prompted me to hold back. Or perhaps just contempt. Everybody came up, Morelli, the brunette in violet, that unpleasant Fefé. But the old lady, opening wide her large sharp eyes, said: "I was really hoping that you had seen her... I know her parents ... What a shame. To want to kill oneself. What a day ... One thing is certain, she didn't say prayers in that bed."

  The brunette smoked, curled up on the divan, and looking at us mockingly said to me: "Adele sees sex everywhere." She blew out smoke. "But it's no longer the fashion... Only servants or little dressmakers want to kill themselves after a night of love..."

  "A night and a day," Fefé said.

  "Nonsense. Three months wouldn't have been enough... As far as I'm concerned, she was drunk and mistook the dosage..."

  "Probable," Morelli said. "Or rather, it's certain." He bent toward the fat woman. Instead of taking her by the arm, he touched her shoulder and they went off, he joking, she bouncing.

  The brunette spun around in a whiff of smoke, gave me a hard look, and praised the cut of my dress. She said it was easier to dress well in Rome. "It's another society. More exclusive. Did you make it yourself?"

  She asked this with her dissatisfied and quizzical air.

  "I don't have time to make my dresses," I snapped. "I'm always busy."

  "Do you see people?" she asked. "Do you see so-and-so? Do you see such-and-such?" There was no end to the names.

  "So-and-so and such-and-such," I said, "don't pay by day the debts they contract at night. And as for her," I went on, "when too many bills come due, she escapes to Capri..."

  "Stupendous!" the brunette shouted. "What nice people."

  They called her from the crowd; someone had come. She got up, brushed the ashes off her dress, and rushed off.

  I was alone with Fefé, who looked at me dumbly. I told him: "You're thirsty, young man. Why don't you circulate?"

  He had already explained that his system of drinking was to stop at the various tables, recognize somebody at each, and accept a drink. "You mix your drinks. However... You dance, and there's your cocktail."

  I sent him away. Morelli arrived, and that thin smile of his.

  "Like the women?" he asked.

  Then it struck me that the party didn't mean much to me, and I began to tell him what I really felt.

  4

  But before leaving me that evening Morelli gave me a lecture. He said that I was prejudiced—I had only one prejudice, but it was a big one: I thought that working to get ahead, or even just to get by, was as important as the qualities, some admittedly stupid, of well-born people. He said that when I talked enviously of certain fortunes I seemed to be taking it out on the pleasure of life itself. "At bottom, Clelia," he said, "you wouldn't think it right to win a football pool."

  "Why not?" I said.

  "But it's the same as being well-born. Just luck, a privilege..."

  I didn't answer; I was tired, I pulled his arm.

  Morelli said: "Is there really this great difference between doing nothing because one is too rich or doing nothing because one is too poor?"

  "But when you get there by yourself..."

  "So..." Morelli said. " 'Get there.' A sporting program." He barely moved his mouth. "Sport means renunciation and an early death. Why not stop along the road and enjoy the day? If you can. Is it always necessary to have suffered and come out of a hole?"

  I kept still and pulled him by the arm.

  "You hate other people's pleasures, Clelia, and that's a fact. You're wrong, Clelia. You hate yourself. And to think what a gifted person you are. Cheer up, make other people happy, forget your grudge. Other people's pleasures are yours, too..."

  The next day I went to the Via Po without announcing myself or telephoning the contractors. They didn't know I was already in Turin. I wanted to get an unrehearsed idea of what had been done and how it had been done. When I came into the wide street and saw the hill in the background streaked with snow, and the church of the Gran
Madre, I remembered it was carnival time. Here, too, stands with torrone, horns, masks, and colored streamers filled the arcades. It was early morning but the people were swarming toward the square at the end of the street where the booths were.

  The street was even wider than I remembered. The war had opened a frightful hole, gutting three or four large buildings. Now it looked like a big excavation of earth and stones, a few tufts of grass here and there; one thought of a cemetery. Our store was right here, on the edge of the blankness, white with lime, still a doorless and windowless shell.

  Two plasterers wearing white paper hats were seated on the floor. One was dissolving whitewash in a bucket, and the other was washing his hands in a lime-caked can. My arrival didn't seem to affect them. The second of them had a cigarette stuck behind his ear.

  "The supervisor is never here this early," they told me.

  "When does he come?"

  "Not before evening. He's working at Madonna di Campagna."

  I asked if they were the whole gang. They surveyed my hips with mild interest, not raising their eyes very far.

  I stamped my foot. "Who's in charge here?"

  "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."