by Edoardo Nesi
Rather than being glad of all the attention that was suddenly coming her way, Milena suffered. She didn’t like that kind of popularity at all, and was living in a state of permanent embarrassment because she didn’t know how to react to being noticed wherever she went, and couldn’t bear those horrible catcalls in the street, especially when they came from men her father’s age.
Most of all she hated the fact that she was becoming a sort of prey. She wasn’t ready for the sudden immersion into vulgarity provoked by her becoming seriously hot pussy, as she was told increasingly often. She didn’t want to be hot pussy. She didn’t even want to be beautiful. She didn’t care about all that. She just wanted to be left alone.
Vittorio couldn’t believe his luck, and did nothing but silently watch as his girlfriend bloomed. By listening to her worries and holding her in his arms for hours while listening to Billy Joel, he embodied the polar opposite of the savage world that was starting to close in around her. In the kaleidoscope of Milena’s new world he had to remain the half-mad, romantic boy who read books no one else read and listened to music no one else listened to and understood her as no one else did.
MOTEL AGIP
IT IS THE FIRST SUNDAY OF MARCH, half past two in the afternoon, and Cesare has just announced that the three of them will soon be leaving for the seaside: he needs to visit the building site of a villa and talk with a few people. Arianna tells him they can’t. They had agreed to go to Florence, has he forgotten? He had promised her a walk on via Tornabuoni and a dinner at Buca dell’Orafo with Giorgio and Stefania.
He stares at her and seems to remember, then he nods and says they’ll have to change their plans. He wants to go to the seaside. Actually, he has to go to the seaside. He has an appointment, and doesn’t want to go alone.
Arianna says she doesn’t want to go to the seaside, because in the winter it really is too sad, and no one is there.
Cesare groans and raises his eyes to the ceiling. Vittorio says he can’t go either, because he has homework to do and then Milena is coming over.
Cesare sees them united against him and gets angry. He begins to shout, the veins of his neck suddenly bulging, and orders that they are all going to the seaside, damn it, and right away. Arianna protests that it’s not possible, they had a prior engagement, and you can’t just call it off like that, at the last minute. It’s rude.
Cesare gets even angrier, he beats his fist on the table and shouts that he is the head of the family and he is the one who makes decisions, and if he says they are going to the seaside, they are going to the seaside. And then he starts swearing. Arianna says nothing, nor does Vittorio. Cesare snarls that it is his house, and they are just guests. They should never forget that. His guests.
On other occasions — because he had already said once or twice that his wife and son were guests in his house — Arianna had always swallowed her rage and let it slide, but this time she gets to her feet, looks her husband in the eyes, tells him he really is a shit, grabs her trench coat, and leaves the house, slamming the door.
In the elevator she laughs to herself, proud to have finally made her voice heard. She gets in the Fiat 500 and sets off suddenly, with a long, involuntary screech of the tires that fills the empty street and reaches the third-floor apartment where Cesare and Vittorio stand in silence, staring into the void.
Arianna drives around aimlessly for ten minutes or so, allowing her anger to pass. Then she sees a telephone booth, stops, and calls Ivo at the only number she has, the one for his office.
It’s a Sunday and there is no way Ivo will ever be there, but she tries anyway, so that when he calls her again — if, that is, he calls her again, because more than a month has passed since his last call — she will be able to tell him, and herself, that she had at least tried, at least once.
Arianna almost jumps when, after just three rings, he answers directly — not the porter, not the receptionist: him, Ivo. He spouts a curt “Who is it?” but softens immediately upon hearing her voice, and when Arianna asks him whether they might get a coffee, he accepts immediately, hangs up, and declares over the sampling meeting he had called on a Sunday afternoon because the next morning he would be leaving for America, and that he had just initiated. He accompanies the astonished technicians out of the office with a flurry of awkward excuses and promises to call them from Manhattan, then he swiftly closes the factory, gets in the Pagoda, and meets Arianna at the bar of the Firenze Nord service station, where she had proposed they meet in order to get as far away from the town as possible without actually going to another one.
They greet without embracing, not even air-kissing. They just smile and sit at a table with a blue tablecloth and make small talk, drink their coffee, and when Arianna puts out the Marlboro she had lit, Ivo suggests they might stay a little longer. She asks where, he smiles and points to the Motel Agip, and when Arianna turns to look at that white giant with 150 rooms, she thinks that she is still very angry at Cesare and doesn’t want to go home, and the idea of ending up with Ivo in that perfectly clean hotel frequented mostly by traveling salesmen doesn’t seem in any way squalid or degrading to her. It’s not beautiful or romantic by any stretch of the imagination, but it has the great virtue of being right in front of them, comfortable and clandestine, just a hundred meters from her white Fiat 500 and his light-blue Pagoda, so Arianna smiles and says, “Why not?”
They walk into the hotel arm in arm, wearing dark glasses, laughing at their secrecy and joking about being incognito. Ivo consigns five thousand lire into the hands of the porter and asks him if he is a curious man. The porter pockets them rapaciously and assures Ivo he is not.
They get into the elevator and Arianna’s eyes sparkle, and Ivo kisses her as soon as the doors close. Their top-floor room is bright and spacious, and they kiss again without even locking the door or shutting the curtains, then in the light of the dying day they slip onto the bed, still fully dressed, and she is moved to tears when she realizes how much Ivo desires her: the childlike enthusiasm with which he greets the sight of her marmoreal naked form as he slowly undresses her, the sighs of pure admiration when he can finally look at her pussy up close, the delicacy and thoughtful slowness with which he kisses all her body.
Then, after they have made love, Arianna starts to talk relentlessly as if freed from a vow of silence, and says that she is very happy that this has finally happened, and it’s all because of him, because he was tenacious and never discouraged by all the times she had told him no, sometimes even rudely, and when Ivo says that she has never been rude, she stops him and says that yes, of course she was rude, many times, and also distant, hard, cruel, yes, unjustly cruel for a long time, months and months, and then she tells him how sorry she is about it, and how glad that he had perfectly understood that every time she said no, she did not mean never, and that he just needed to be patient and keep trying without ever feeling insulted or forgotten or let down, because sometimes that’s all you have to do with women.
And Ivo doesn’t have the heart to tell her that tenacity has nothing to do with it, that he just wanted her and had never stopped wanting her, every day; that he had never decided to court her respectfully and wisely — he had simply had to learn to accept being kept at a distance, if that was what she wanted; that he had never used a particular strategy or set of tactics to seduce her, because he knows no strategy at all.
Ivo doesn’t tell her that each time he had called her in all those months, he had just given in to a need, and doesn’t tell her that every telephone call was like a knife’s blade being plunged into his pride, pushing him to forget about her.
He doesn’t tell her that every time he heard her voice monosyllabically answer the phone, he told himself that he had to be a complete fool to keep on calling her, and that some days his disappointment was so strong that he decided he wouldn’t call her anymore, but those days never amounted to more than a week before the need to hear her voice once more — even if she was tired or in a bad mood �
�� started up stronger than before. He doesn’t tell her that after almost two years he had given up on her, and resigned himself to searching for fragments of her in the women he met on his travels around the world.
He just kisses her mouth soft as angora, and they hold one another and stay like that, listening to each other breathe, whispering sweet nothings in that warm bed in an unfamiliar room, and watch through the window as the sunset sets Florence aflame.
When Arianna slips the keys into the door and enters home, Cesare and Vittorio are standing in the entrance hall, waiting for her. Cesare apologizes, and says he did not go to the seaside. He also called Giorgio and told him he did not feel well. She said she went to see a movie in Florence, Kramer vs. Kramer, and understood an awful lot of things. Vittorio smiles and goes back to his homework. Cesare shrugs and goes back to the living room to watch the second half of the soccer match, leaving Arianna standing there, next to the door, still wearing her trench coat.
When she asks if fillet and salad are okay for dinner, she gets no response.
A GREAT, INEXPLICABLE SHOW
IT WAS THE DAY OF THE ASCENSION, a splendid Sunday in May, and the Citarella family were quietly walking home after Mass when Dino asked if they could visit Barrocciai’s factory.
Pasquale turned to look at Maria, surprised and pleased. He had never taken the boys to the site, nor even Maria, because he had never thought it would be of any interest to them. He didn’t know, and certainly couldn’t have imagined, that they had already asked their mother several times and she — uncertain whether Pasquale would like the idea — had always answered that it was not the time yet, and they would have to be patient.
So when they arrived home, they got into the Fiat 128 and set off. Pasquale didn’t stop talking for a second, inundating them with anecdotes about the construction and all of the strange requests made by Barrocciai, who sometimes seemed completely mad but was actually an intelligent man and a very good person indeed, because in all those years, not one payment had been late, not even by one day, not for a single person, not even when there were monumental fuckups, and God knows there were a few of those! There were dozens of them!
He turned down the great straight road that was now via Nicola Tempestini and pointed to the impressive white facade of the factory. Dino said it looked like a ship’s sail, Tonino said it looked like the page of a book and that he would like to write on it with a gigantic fountain pen.
Pasquale explained how they had finally managed to get it so white: at first Ivo had wanted it finished with brickwork, but when he saw it, he said it looked too English, so he ordered the brickwork to be painted white; then, when he saw it white, he said it wasn’t white enough, and pulled from his pocket a strip of bright white cloth and said that color was called optic white, and he wanted the factory’s facade that exact color — as bright as that, as splendid as that.
— Boys, you don’t know how long it took me driving all over Tuscany with that rag in my hand…
They got out of the 128 and Pasquale pointed to the row of cypress trees. They come from Bolgheri, he said, a very special place, and he explained the difference between male cypresses, like those—“straight as a rod, with branches that grow upward” — and the female cypresses, “which are all bushy and wild, with branches going all over the place.”
As the boys stared in admiration at the iron fence that ran the length of the factory’s perimeter, Pasquale told them that at the beginning, Barrocciai said he wanted to have the whole fence built in wrought iron by a Florentine artisan, but then Vezzosi managed to persuade him to buy it by the meter from a metalworker in Northern Italy because the Florentine artisan would have cost him a fortune, and Ivo, rather than thanking him for saving him money, got angry and said that he hadn’t got this far to save money, and left the office, slamming the door.
When Maria asked him if the terra-cotta flower boxes that could be seen just beyond the fence ran all around the factory, Pasquale started laughing and said yes, and they even had their own automatic watering system: “I think it’s electronically controlled,” and then he told them how Ivo had fixated on the idea of planting strange plants with names he had never heard of, like cedar, pistachio, and tamarind, and the gardener didn’t know what to do because they were all exotic trees and couldn’t grow in a flower box.
— Do they also work Sundays, Pasquale? I can hear a noise…
— Since the day they opened, they only stop on Sunday afternoons, Maria. Ivo has got so much work! Good God, he has it coming out of his ears! And not just him! There is work for everyone, more than you could imagine…
Maria closed her eyes to try and distinguish each individual sound within that muffled, Schönbergian cacophony that emanated from the half-opened doors of the factories around Ivo’s. It wasn’t easy: it would have been hard work even for a textile technician to isolate the single instruments playing in that great concerto, because the metronomic crushing beat of the looms mixed with the whirring and clicking and clacking and dragging of chains from the spinning mill, and the whirring hiss of the twisters fused with the vibrations of the warpage, and all of these sounds fused with the compact, continuous growl of the finishing machines.
Maria asked herself where all that fervor came from — that activity, that irresistible desire to get up early and go to work even on Sunday which pervaded every square meter of their city and a large part of Italy, pushing so many to believe themselves capable of succeeding as entrepreneurs. Even her brothers, who had arrived from Panni to work as laborers, had set up their own business — a yarn-twisting factory. They who just a few years ago didn’t even know what a twisted yarn was, now were taking photos in front of their tiny rented shed next to a highly polished brass plaque on which they had inscribed RITORCITURA MONTECASTRO & C.
Wasn’t it a miracle that anyone could try his hand at opening a business? When had it ever happened before, in Italy, that you could disregard your destiny and choose to pull yourself out of poverty with your own hard work, freely, without having to ask for permission or handouts from anyone else? Isn’t freedom itself a miracle? Is there a logical explanation to the sudden, simultaneous flourishing of so many poor people’s most unbridled material dreams and ambitions? And what is it? How was it possible that from one day to the next, you suddenly felt authorized to have hope for the future?
Maria could not answer these questions, yet she could not believe it was simply a matter of being available to sacrifice and willing to work all day every day to the point of exhaustion. How could that be enough? How could they, all of them — Pasquale, her brothers Michele and Nicola, Vezzosi, even Ivo Barrocciai — be so suddenly and extremely good at working and making money?
There had to be another reason, but no matter how hard she tried, she just couldn’t find it, and so, amused by the sight of such a great, inexplicable show, Maria told herself that it must all be due to some kind of benign spirit that had capriciously decided to settle over their city and its people, bringing with it a load of work and good fortune, and redemption, and pride, and that flickering of faith in the future that she could see shining in the eyes of all the men and women living in the Green Zone.
But then she was struck by another thought. If it was all due to luck, then there was no guarantee that, one day, that invisible spirit wouldn’t mysteriously leave as capriciously as it had arrived and fly off to light up other cities, other nations, other people, taking away all the work and the good fortune and the hope. How would they live without it?
For a moment, Maria tried to imagine that same landscape wrapped in silence and desolation: the factory doors rusted and shut, the parking lots strewn with litter instead of the newly washed cars of owners and workers, the empty streets infested with potholes filled with putrid water. She was horrified, and had to move closer to her husband and hold him tightly until that vision disappeared.
No, it’s not possible, she told herself. The world cannot change so much for the worse that
the work of men like Pasquale wouldn’t receive any recompense, that the sacrifice of the poor wouldn’t be rewarded! It would be as if the world and all of its beauty had been created by chance, rather than by our Lord God! It would be the end of everything!
The boys asked about the ten-meter-wide asphalt path that ran around the factory: was it a racetrack? Pasquale answered that no, it was an avenue — or at least that’s what Ivo called it — for the trucks to deliver the bales of wool to the spinning mills, and Tonino said that if only trucks drove down there, then what was the reason for all those tire marks? Because trucks don’t leave tire marks…
Pasquale started laughing, then lowered his voice and told them that Barrocciai had bought himself a Ferrari, but that it was a secret: he kept it hidden in the warehouse under a tarpaulin, and only took it out on Sunday afternoons. Sometimes, at dawn, he drove it fast all around the factory, and Carmine would clock his time.
The boys begged in chorus to be allowed to see it, and Pasquale told them that there were still lots of other things to see at the factory, but they kept on insisting until he promised to show it to them. He opened the gate and they went in, and Pasquale showed the entire factory to his family. He showed them the offices and the production areas, and he enjoyed seeing his sons doubled over in mock fear upon hearing the thundering of the looms, or absorbed by the labyrinthine beauty of the bundle of threads in the warps. He showed them the caverns of the warehouses filled with bales of noil and all kinds of wool, even the one made from rags, which Barrocciai religiously referred to as recycled. He told them to smell the wool and put their hands inside the bales, as Ivo had taught him to do, and admired their faces, including that of Maria, as they lit up upon feeling the heavenly softness of angora and the roughness of alpaca, the silky smoothness of mohair and the miracle that is cashmere.
