by Edoardo Nesi
He spent his days in the office with the light off and his head empty, his right hand resting on the telephone waiting for the only call that didn’t arrive. And every so often he promised himself to call Citarella to tell him he’d be at the site the day after tomorrow, but he didn’t do it out of fear the call would tie up the phone line he needed so desperately to keep free. He always went home late, after dark, kicked about by his guilt.
Even his appearances at the tennis club grew rare, and when he found himself struggling to beat one of the juniors, he feigned tennis elbow and announced to his friends at the top table that, as a result, he would not be back in time to play the tournaments and team competitions that year. Then he stopped going to the tennis club altogether.
He spent the nights walking through the house in his underwear and socks, brooding and recriminating. He convinced himself he had never truly been understood. Not by anyone. Ever. He was a decent, sensitive man, he told himself, full of noble sentiments that he had always been forced to hide beneath a warrior’s armor.
What kind of Beast am I, he muttered in the dark living room, surrounded by framed photos of his victories. A soldier in ferocious times, that’s who Cesare Vezzosi was, forced into inexcusable hardships by having to spend every day in the arena, constantly surrounded by opponents as hungry as himself, if not more so, painfully misunderstood even in his own home, where he had to make do with pretending to feel passion for a woman who did not love him, and whom he no longer loved.
In the depths of one of his darkest nights, he decided he would have to confess to the Historic Baby Doll that he loved her, and could not live another day without her. Yes, he had to tell her everything. Every single thing.
Tell her that when he left the Den after making love to her, he felt like a lion and the whole world was his for the taking. That being next to her made him forget all those years of listening to his heart beating slow, of wearily taking care of his family and work, of being celebrated for victories that weren’t real victories.
Tell her how he was certain that, as an old man, he would end up on a balcony watching people passing in the street below, alone and absentminded, with a white shirt open down to his stomach in the summer and wrapped up in plaid in the winter, and that he would only smile at the rare moments when he remembered those afternoons spent making love with her, when they were young and crazy and didn’t realize that the life ahead of them was bright and free like the Autostrada del Sole.
The morning after, he woke up and drove to the office at full speed. When he arrived he had to get rid of Citarella, who had dropped by again to ask about the building site: “Don’t come around here no more!” he yelled to the painter, and walked into the office slamming the door behind him. He then waited for the cathedral bells to strike eleven, put the telephone in his lap, and dialed the number for the beauty salon.
After three rings the Historic Baby Doll answered with her shrill voice, “Excelsior Beauty Salon, good morning,” and, overcome by emotion, all he managed to say was his name: “It’s Cesare.” She asked him where he had been all that time and when could they meet because she was dying to be with him, and Cesare barely managed to contain himself, his heart suddenly pounding in his ears, his dick already stiffening in his trousers, so immediately happy that all he could stammer out were a few truncated words, and he had to force himself not to throw in a tattered “I love you.”
The few hours that separated him from the appointment grew interminably long. Lunch at home seemed never-ending, and his excitement brought him to apply the immortal rule of Porfirio Rubirosa, the one that recommends an early afternoon wank to those who have an important appointment in the evening. But when the Historic Baby Doll finally entered the Den without apologizing for being late — it was already nearly five o’clock — Cesare embraced her warmly, without giving her time to even take off her coat, and when he caught the scent of her hairspray he was so moved and turned on that he started to kiss her with all the passion he had never shown her, and touched her most intimate parts with a delicacy that soon became frenzy, and screwed her better than he had ever done, and she had never reached orgasm so many times, and so completely.
When they had finished, the Historic Baby Doll curled up like a cat next to his undersized left arm and showered him with caresses and kisses. He smiled with his eyes closed and enjoyed each of those endearments, which he had hardly been able to bear before, and began to fantasize about how she would react to the declaration he was about to make. Would she cry, overcome by joy? Or maybe she would faint out of happiness? How do you revive a woman who has fainted? Is it enough to slap her delicately, as in the movies?
He smiled and was about to start talking when she spoke.
— You weren’t really angry the other night when I told you about my boyfriend, were you, Cesare? Because I thought a lot about it, and I don’t want you to be angry when you’re with me. Never, never, never. For me, you are and always will be the guy for the good days. At the beginning I was upset, I really was, but I eventually understood: you’re right, that’s how it should be, and so I want to be the same for you. Your girl for the good days…
Suddenly filled with desperation, Cesare had to close his eyes, and when he reopened them — who knows how much time had passed — she was watching him, worried, her large eyes blinking.
At the sight of the uncertain smile that unfolded across her face, Cesare forced himself to smile and told her that no, of course he wasn’t angry, and she was right. Of course she was right. He drove her home and waved at her as she got out of the Alfetta, cooing. Then he set off and drove aimlessly along the roads that slowly started to empty, knocked out by the heartbreaking notes of Fausto Papetti’s saxophone.
It was over. She was leaving him. She would have given him time to get used to the idea: another fuck, maybe two, and then it would all be over. Cesare burst into tears like a child, sobbing and hiccupping. He had to stop in the middle of an elevated supermarket parking lot that he couldn’t even remember driving to, and it took him the whole of Papetti’s tape to get himself together, while mothers and small children walked past the Alfetta in droves, laughing and pushing their clattering shopping carts filled with stuff, without so much as looking at him.
He decided he couldn’t let it end like that. And like all desperate people, he raised the stakes. The next day he rang the Historic Baby Doll and invited her to Monte Carlo for the weekend. Taken by surprise, not least because Vezzosi had only ever invited her to the Den, she answered how that would be wonderful, really wonderful, but that she wasn’t sure if she could come. What would she tell her boyfriend? Cesare swallowed hard and insisted, and the Historic Baby Doll got nervous, cut him short, and told him she would let him know. The next morning, however, she called him early to say that she would come. The night before she had argued with her boyfriend, and then she had never been to Monte Carlo and had always wanted to go.
Cesare had to spin Arianna an acrobatic excuse that she accepted without comment, fixing her gaze outside the window: there were problems at the building site, he told her, and they needed to visit a specialist in avant-garde masonry in Milan, but given the commitments of this famous expert, he could only meet him in the late afternoon on Saturday, and then, given how late it would be, he would sleep in Milan rather than driving back through the Apennines at night, which is always dangerous.
And so Cesare Vezzosi and the Historic Baby Doll left for Monte Carlo late one Saturday morning in a newly washed Alfetta, under freezing rain that followed them all the way there, and when they got to the hotel, there was a note for her at reception saying she had to call home immediately: her mother had suffered abdominal cramps that morning, just after they left, and so the Historic Baby Doll had to spend hours on the phone organizing help for her, while he watched the rain beating against the glass of the only window in that hotel room with a street view, which they had been forced to accept instead of the room with a sea view that Cesare thought he
had booked, and about which he had boasted the whole journey.
All these circumstances made the Historic Baby Doll nervous. At dinner, she didn’t at all like the bouillabaisse he had ordered for her, or the Beaujolais he had chosen to accompany it—“You don’t drink red wine with fish, Cesare, come on!”—and then she became very irritated when, having just set foot in the casino, Cesare immediately took her away because his old employers were sitting at the roulette table, squandering some of their undeclared earnings on gambling and prostitutes, half a dozen of whom encircled them hungrily, giggling like hyenas, each (Cesare couldn’t help noticing) undoubtedly and painfully more beautiful than the Historic Baby Doll, who, with the worry over her ailing mother, the strain of the journey, the squalor of their room, and a total lack of comprehension of how gambling could be fun, had taken very little care over her clothes and makeup, and had eventually decided on a sequined dress that was too tight, making her look both chubby and shiny.
So they went back to the hotel at half past ten, after a brief and tense walk along the seafront, which was being blown about by a cold wind that had no place on the Côte d’Azur in late spring, and they began to bicker over nothing until, at a certain point, the Historic Baby Doll fell silent and refused even to take his arm, bitterly resentful of having gone on that disastrous trip and plagued by guilt over the lie she had told her boyfriend.
Once they reached the room, after begging and pleading, Cesare managed to convince her to give herself to him, but partly because of the general anxiety and partly because of the bouillabaisse, he was not able to pleasure her, and to the frenetic babbling of excuses that flowed from his mouth, she responded that there was always a first time for everything.
So, at half past eleven, they miserably began preparing themselves for their first night together, and in the silence that had now grown impossible to break they had to take notice of all the odors and noises that followed their time in the bathroom. She pulled on a ridiculously long, pink nightgown with lace trims and hoisted the covers up to her face, turning her back on him and falling asleep almost immediately. Vezzosi stayed awake until dawn, watching the ceiling and listening to the yelping of cats scrapping in the alleyway. Even with her next to him in bed, he was already looking forward to seeing her again.
Totally incapable of breaking free from the maelstrom, over the following days he began to assail her with very affectionate, very badly judged phone calls. He no longer cared that the Historic Baby Doll had given herself to someone else: he was now fighting with the sole intention of delaying the moment of final separation, trying to keep alive the hope of fucking her just once more, if only to free himself from the thought of that unthinkable, shameful défaillance that continued to burn in his memory.
She always answered the phone, but no longer wanted to see him. She hated being begged, as he had lowered himself to do, and she always declined. Politely, of course. But she declined. Every time. And the day he sank to the level of inviting her to meet him for a coffee, the Historic Baby Doll lost it and asked him where the Beast that she liked so much had gone, and when Cesare — whose poor heart had fired up after that blow — answered that the Beast was on holiday, and that it was Cesare, her only real boyfriend, who wanted to see her if only for five minutes, and a coffee would be fine because couples always drink coffee together, the Historic Baby Doll’s voice hardened. This was also a first.
— Cesare, we have never been a couple, she said to him.
— We have never spent enough time together to build a lasting relationship.
—We had a great time, but it’s over now. Let’s try not to hurt one another. You’ve got everything you could want from life, Cesare. Don’t insist.
And she hung up.
He remained immobile for a few minutes, staring at the receiver, incredulous, his mind blank and his soul stripped bare, and he died. The Beast took his place, furious.
Don’t insist? he asked the thin air.
Don’t insist? he repeated, louder.
DON’T INSIST? he shouted and stood up, smashing the receiver into the telephone and breaking both parts, then he pulled the cable out of the wall and threw the telephone toward the window of his office with all the strength of his oversized right arm, shattering the glass. He grabbed his appointment book and, hemorrhaging obscenities, ripped out the many pages in which he had written her number and destroyed them in the paper shredder, hoping that sooner or later he would forget that crude sequence of odd numbers that had been etched into his mind.
Then he stopped and burst into tears.
THE ARMY OF DREAMERS
ARIANNA HAD WOKEN up before dawn and couldn’t get back to sleep, so she had lain in bed without moving for an hour, not to disturb the snoring Cesare beside her. At seven o’clock she silenced the alarm clock, slipped out of the bed, and strode down the corridor to wake up Vittorio. She opened the windows of his room, chose his clothes, and made her way into the kitchen to prepare breakfast. She laid the table with a checked cloth, biscuits, melba toast, and butter and jam, and waited for her two men to arrive. They sat themselves at the table without saying a word, picked at their food, sipped their coffee, and then left with a few mumbled words of farewell, leaving her a prisoner of the empty, terrible freedom she had never wanted or asked for.
She stepped into the shower, washed her hair, applied the conditioner, and carefully rinsed it out. Then she wrapped herself in her bathrobe, dried her hair — first with a towel, then with the hair-dryer — brushed it, and then slowly dressed in a striped top and a skirt, only to find that it was still the early morning of a day in which she had nothing to do.
No visits to pay or errands to run. No shopping to do. No reason to go to the grocer’s or the bakery or the butcher’s shop. No laundry to do. Nothing. Her family did not need her anymore.
It was no longer necessary to support her husband, as had been the case in the early days of their marriage, when he would always moan that he couldn’t stand working for others and not for himself, or when, after setting up his own business, he realized that his competitors were much better prepared and had much better connections than him.
On the contrary, after the injection of enthusiasm for the unexpected assignment he had been given by Barrocciai, she was wondering if she shouldn’t start keeping an eye on him to make sure he didn’t cheat on her, if only it were possible to keep an eye on a whirlwind: he left in the morning with a frown on his face and was back in the evening with the same frown, and though he never told her anything about his day, he was always ready to criticize the meal — he who had never given much thought to what he ate.
Vittorio devoured his pasta and his grilled meat every day, without saying a word. He behaved well, he didn’t even curse. His hair was always tidy and he liked to dress classic. He didn’t hang out with the wrong crowd, never drove a scooter, and spent his afternoons closed in his room, reading science fiction. All the advice Arianna felt obliged to give him every day felt increasingly empty and comical, even to her. It was as if she had trapped herself in the caricature of the dumb mother who fails to recognize how much, and how well, her son has grown.
At parents’ evenings the teachers gave her very little time, sometimes she didn’t even get the chance to sit down. The boy was forever distracted, but he studied hard, got an A plus in conduct and was equally good in all other subjects, and he would certainly pass his ninth-grade exams with an A or an A plus, and they all recommended he go on to high school and then university, thank you and goodbye.
She was no longer needed.
When she turned on the television, she found herself looking at the whistling color test screen, so she switched it off and opened Letter to a Child Never Born by Oriana Fallaci, but only managed to read a few pages. She was listless, tense. She went back to her room and lay down on the bed, with Cesare’s raspy voice from last night’s argument still ringing in her ears.
If you’re bored, Ariannina, it’s only because you don
’t appreciate everything I’ve done for you…
Work? What do you mean, work? I don’t understand.
A shop? No way.
Who buys costume jewelry? No one!
I don’t want my wife to work, people will think we haven’t got any money.
No.
I don’t want my wife working as a shop assistant.
You’d be seen as a shop assistant, Arianna…
You need money to open a shop, you know that?
No. The answer is no.
You’d lose it all.
You’ve got no business sense.
It takes a professional to open a shop, not a bored housewife…
I’m not cruel. I’m your husband, and I’m protecting you.
From failure, Arianna. From certain failure.
You aren’t good at that sort of thing.
At being at home, yes.
At being a lady. Because you’re a lady, not a shopkeeper.
You’re good at spending money, not earning it.
You’re not talking to me anymore?
Why?
Well, good night, Arianna.
Tomorrow when you wake up you’ll see I’m right.
She turned in toward the blankets’ embrace, fully dressed, closed her eyes, and basked in the memories of those days when she knew what to do every morning and never had enough time — those few months in 1963 in which she had gone from being a girl to being a bride, a wife, and a mother.
Bitten by a sudden enthusiasm, she jumped up from the bed and ventured down to the basement to get the projector. She carried it into the house and placed it on the dining room table, then she went back down to the basement for the box of home movies, and after many fruitless attempts that pushed her to the brink of tears, she miraculously managed to project the film of her wedding onto the wall — ten minutes of brief, blurred scenes of men and women walking around in a garden, all shot by her father. She was so much younger and more beautiful, very happy and very pregnant, always smiling at the camera, waving every so often.
