by Robert Lowry
He got up too. He dressed easily, still looking at her all the time.
Not intending to say goodbye, she grabbed up her bag and started for the door.
“Wait a minute, Nina.”
She turned. He still seemed to be amused at her, not angry at all. He was putting on his shoe; his forehead was wrinkled as he looked up.
“I’ll walk back across town with you if you’ll just wait a minute.”
“I’m not waiting.” She shouldn’t even have stopped when he’d spoken. “I think I know your opinion of me.”
“Don’t be too sure about that, Nina—”
She cut off his sentence by closing the door behind her. No one was around in the apartment. She hurried down the steps and walked quickly across the courtyard.
Why had she gone with him in the first place? He’d made her feel as though she had to prove something to him, that was it. And she had tried to prove it by sleeping with him, But she was a fool—why had she needed to prove anything to an American soldier? She knew well enough how they felt about the Italians—all they wanted to do was bleed the poor Italians. With all their money they wanted still more! Yes, he thought he was so superior—as if he could even begin to understand the simplest Italian. He should talk about Italy, he should criticize the Duce and all the great things the Duce had wanted to do for his country. Let him go back to his country of gangsters and live off the fat of the land—Italy would still have more cultural achievements than the Americans could ever dream of having. Ours is one of the oldest and richest civilizations in the world, she thought, and he should talk like that—he dared talk like that to me!
By the time she’d arrived at the bar she’d sworn to herself never to have anything more to do with an American soldier. Any girl who does, she thought, is a traitor to her country.
As Nina slumped down on the bench beside the cash-register, Teresa leaned over and said, “You look upset, darling. Are you feeling well?”
“I’m all right,” Nina said. “It’s hot, maybe I’ve been walking too fast. Give me a glass of lemonade.”
She saw him the moment he came in next day at eleven-thirty, him and his tall blond friend. She immediately busied herself making change, but he came on over anyhow, saying, “Ciao, Nina.”
“Ciao,” she said coldly, looking through him with icy eyes.
He crowded around to the side of the bar where he could be closer to her. “You’re really angry, aren’t you, Nina.”
“I’m very busy,” she said. “I cannot afford to neglect my business to talk to you.”
“I thought you were an intellectual, Nina. I thought you could look at things objectively.”
She didn’t answer.
“Did I describe Fascists too well?” he asked. “Is that why you got mad?”
“Please go away,” she said. “Please do not disturb me. I am busy making money. I am busy making all the money that I can, so that I won’t have to sit behind a counter waiting on you—you rich Americans the rest of my life.”
“Then you’re going to marry your cash-register after all,” he said. “Should I start calling you Signora National Cash-Register right away?”
She didn’t say anything more to him, and he stood there silent for what seemed a long time. His friend beside him was looking disinterestedly out the door.
Finally Joe said, “I didn’t want to hurt your feelings, Nina Bonte. But then I didn’t think that talking about important questions like Fascism could hurt your feelings.”
She didn’t answer. But she began to wonder whether she hadn’t been a little foolish—perhaps lacking in humor. He had been sweet to her in the room yesterday. Making love to her he hadn’t seemed contemptuous, she had liked him then. . . .
“I’ve got to go now,” Joe said. “The thing is, Nina, my intellectual convictions don’t make me hate individuals. There’s always a lot to like in any individual.” He reached out and took her hand—squeezed it, but she didn’t return the pressure. “Goodbye, Nina,” he said. “Please don’t be angry. I like you too much to want to have you angry at me.”
Burt said goodbye to her too, and she watched them go out and down the street. Yet now that they were gone, perhaps for good, her confusion and anger were concerned not with Joe any longer but with the world in general, the times she lived in, the crazy atmosphere the war had created which suddenly she felt had made her lose the whole perspective of her life. What did she want? This bar, money, travel? All of it seemed empty now. Even the prospect of a rich marriage appeared not even worth hoping for. Her fierce days of money-making spread out behind her like a drab expensive sacrifice of her youth. What did she, Nina Bonte, want?
But the bartenders were holding out lira notes for her, and across the room the wholesale liquor dealer was waiting to talk to her. She made change, then motioned him over.
“Bad news, Signorina Bonte,” he said. “I can only let you have half of your order this week.”
“Why?” she demanded. “I’ve got to have it all—it’s hardly enough as it is. Where do you think the profit on this bar will come from?”
“I’m very sorry,” he said, looking into a small black notebook to convince her. “I’d do it if I could, but we simply don’t have it to give you. You know what deliveries are these days.”
“All right, all right,” she said. “Half then—but do better if you can.”
She’d have to locate another dealer—a real bother and probably costly. But think of the loss if she didn’t find the liquor to sell. What would happen if she couldn’t keep the bar open? What would her fate be if she no longer had this place to support her? She was so wrought up that she forgot to reply to the dealer’s “Arrivederci, signorina” as he went out.
That American could say what he liked, this life was superior to any other that had been offered her. And she’d better begin holding on still tighter to what she had, before someone came along and took it away from her. Yes, she’d travel someday. She’d light her cigarettes with thousand-lira notes if she chose. But even if she never became that rich she’d still be better off than most—than the thousands of girls who had to walk the streets of Rome offering themselves to the enemy in order to eat. She’d make money, as much as she could, and the rest of the world could go to hell for all she cared.
She shouted at Maurizio to wipe off a table, she pointed out a soldier waving his hand to Alessandro, she grabbed big lira notes and gave smaller ones back for them, she got off her stool and served drinks herself when demands grew too great. So that by the time Teresa appeared at one-thirty, Nina was exhausted and her heart was pounding in her throat.
But she’d recovered from her mood—the exertions had really made her rather happy. Money-making is a satisfying thing, she thought back at home, resting on her bed. It’s the most satisfying thing I do.
She slept for a couple of hours, but when she awoke she still felt tired, prey to a strange uneasiness. Joe’s curious, smiling face came vividly into her mind and she tried to recall some of the things he’d said but found she’d forgotten everything. Lying there in her room with the shades drawn she had the strange conviction that he’d wanted to say something important to her but had not found words to say it. How anxious he’d been to know her. And she couldn’t believe that he’d only wanted to take her to bed. He had wanted something more of her—something that she had perhaps refused to give him.
But it was all too confusing, too vague. She herself was confused and vague. It was only possible to work hard and make money—and hope that someday she would find what she wanted, if she ever knew what it was.
She got up and washed her face in cold water. She didn’t think of the soldier again, for her mind was hard at work on the problem of where to find additional quantities of liquor to sell to her thirsty liberators.
V. PFC JOE HAMMOND
“All right, sinner, go on in,” Burt said.
Pfc Joe Hammond, sinner, looked at the green lightbulb above the door and then went i
nside, leaving Burt on the street. He’d never been in one of these before, though the army with a million lectures, movies and posters had drummed the general procedure into him.
It was a dismal, poorly lighted room divided approximately in half. The rear half was lined with open booths, five on each side, and the front half was practically empty except for a table, two chairs and a shelf on which were medical supplies. Two civilian attendants were sitting at the table, talking; the small sandy-haired one got up.
“You want a pro?”
“Yeah.”
From the shelf the attendant took a paper with white salve on it, a spatula with a glob of soap-paste, and some paper towels. He led Joe back into one of the booths.
Joe read the directions printed on a piece of paper pasted above the washbasin, took off his trousers and underpants and started in.
“Was she a hot piece, Yank?”
Joe looked up into the sly bony face of a Limey corporal who was standing in the next booth. There was something funny about his eyes—as if he’d just been given several sharp blows on the head with a blackjack.
“I thought I was tangled up with a meat-grinder,” Joe said.
The corporal said heh-heh. “Same here, got bloody drunk this morning and ended up in a house taking on a pair of them.”
“How are you getting along?” the sandy-haired attendant asked, looking down at Joe’s hand rubbing in the salve. There was intelligence in the puffy face and bulging eyes.
“Fine,” Joe said. “You speak English all right, don’t you.”
“Yes. I am not Italian, you know. I am Polish, a medical doctor.”
“With the British?”
“Not now. I was here in Italy when the war began and the Italians imprisoned me. The English liberated me and I enlisted in their army. Now after eight months I am a civilian again. But you see what I am forced to do to make a living.”
“You’re important to me,” Joe said.
The little Pole smiled, showing two teeth missing. “Yes, you wouldn’t want to catch syphilis, would you? However, with the new cure it’s not too bad. Penicillin. You Americans gave us syphilis originally and now five hundred years later you have pardoned yourselves with a cure.” There was a touch of sarcasm. “Very just, very just.”
Before Joe could answer, the doctor had turned away.
He washed his hands, put his clothing back on and left the booth. The Pole was talking to his Italian assistant and didn’t answer Joe’s so-long.
Going out the door he had to make way for three negro GIs coming in. They were singing “Hold That Tiger” and laughing in high whelps.
Burt was waiting for him down at the corner. Something there in his hand—a red carnation.
“Here, my friend,” Burt said. “Here, I give you back your lost virginity—in essence if not in fact.”
Joe took the flower and smelled it and felt lousier than he would have admitted. “My lost virginity needs a drink,” he said.
VI. GIANNA ARAGNO
Every night around seven in that mad unhappy September of 1944, the lust that had lain dormant all day, hiding away from the sun in the secret places of the great city, seemed to ooze forth. From doors and windows it came, from the Colosseum where in the lions’ caves whores waited for what their pimps would bring them, from the crumbling palaces of the Caesars where girls crept with their soldiers, from the ground of the big parks where couples would lie tonight. A warm gray haze descended over Rome like a perfumed veil, and through it, hard and undeniable, punched the urgent red fist of desire. Those who felt it most were the soldiers who filled up the hotels and rest-camps in the town—men slightly berserk with the thrill of their seven-day furloughs and five-day passes, guys gone goofy with the idea of finding a modern undamaged city again complete with women who were clean and obtainable, who smiled at you when you spoke, who came to you like you came to them, urgent and slightly mad with the war. Rome, divided by its quiet Tiber, marked with brooding ruins like chancre scars on a painted modern body, secure in its acceptance of what would inevitably come, was like a grand old whore itself, warm in September, ready to give soldiers far from home what they needed.
Who were the whores of Rome? They were as dissimilar as war could make women—some old and eager, smart for the thousand-lira note, some so young and sad that even the lusty evening air appeared to wound them; even the eyes of the obscene crowds of soldiers who paraded the streets seeking them out seemed to spoil them again.
There were hundreds of the latter and she was one of them—never accepting herself for what she was, slipping along through the crowded streets to the park to pick up her soldier for the evening, hoping that somehow her days and nights would be given some kind of miraculous dignity out of all the insults the city prepared for her. She hurried up Via del Tritone now, a slim tall girl in a dark blue dress with a brown belt around the waist. Few soldiers called to her, for she did not beckon them with the usual mascaraed eyes and bloody lips. And she moved along too quickly. Her face was not beautiful: perhaps the eyes were not large enough, the nose too long and slightly arched, the mouth not full enough unrouged, and the whole effect elongated—a Modigliani woman. Yet in the face of Gianna Aragno was an elegance heightened by suffering, a sadness and simplicity of feature that had been purified through a hundred generations from the earliest days of her people.
Gianna Aragno did not walk or look like a Rome whore, but that is what she was.
Somehow tonight she felt it more than ever before. Perhaps the first cool hints of approaching fall in the air depressed her. How well she remembered fall in Livorno two years ago, before the war had been brought to Italy. That period seemed now like an impossible part of the past she would never be able to regain. Her father and brothers had all been gone, but her mother and two younger sisters, Carolina and Iva, had still been there, the four of them living in their own house, eating together and knowing each other. And there had been a boy, Leo, a year younger than Gianna, who would come to the house looking clean-washed and embarrassed and stand with his cap in his hand while she helped her mother prepare supper. Or sometimes he’d sit with her, furtively holding her hand when her mother’s back was turned. To think that she had been that young once, to think that she was twenty now and young no more. She had fled to Rome when the guns had come close to Livorno. Her mother hadn’t wanted her to go, but she’d gone anyhow, hoping that in Rome there’d be work for her—she could sell in the stores or wait tables in a restaurant. And she’d held several jobs in stores, but none of them had lasted very long and she’d earned almost nothing. She had rented a room from a family who lived in an apartment house near the Piazza Venezia—an elderly man, his young wife and their child, a boy thirteen. They’d been good to her, they hadn’t pressed her too much for rent on penniless days. Then the Americans had methodically knocked out all of Rome’s communications and the Germans had methodically collected and eaten all the food in the city—and Gianna Aragno had methodically grown thinner and thinner those months before Rome was finally conquered. She had accepted her starvation as something inevitable, only wishing that the war would end so that she could go home again, yet never really believing that anything so good could ever come true.
And when the American tanks had shoved into Rome, into the besieged and starving Eternal City, Gianna Aragno had followed the example of three hundred thousand other hungry Roman girls—she’d let the hearty well-fed Americani pick her up and feed her and make love to her. July and August—those were wild months of amore for the girls of Rome, and of eating too. It was as if Rome’s women and their conquerors were mutually eager to end the incomprehensible war by mating hungrily in all the city’s parks and rooms . . . while the girls put down their five-hundred-lira dinners adroitly in the intervals.
Now it was another day in Gianna Aragno’s life. Seven o’clock in the evening, yet she’d eaten nothing since this morning—and then only some American sausages out of a can, the same sausages she’d bee
n eating and learning to hate ever since the Allies had come. She’d straightened her room and read a love story this morning, and this afternoon she’d gone to a movie with some of the money a soldier had given her yesterday. She was really hungry now, so starved that she didn’t think she could live another night without a full meal, and she was walking quickly up the hill to the park, feeling in her bones that she was foolish, that it was too late for the restaurants to be open, that she had better go back to her room and eat more out of the unfinished can, sleep, and tomorrow go out to the city and give herself to it for a warm meal and whatever additional generosity prompted the conqueror.
But really she didn’t want to go back to that room, really she couldn’t bear to. The cough which she’d developed a month ago hadn’t bothered her for several days now. Yet spiritually she was more lonely, more lost than ever. Such sadness weighed on her chest that she felt physically ill, and burning relentlessly in her was an inexplicable need to throw herself to the city’s men and forget her name, her birthplace, her hunger.
Yet there were no takers. True, one or two soldiers spoke to her, but they held back when she smiled only slightly and went straight on. She couldn’t bring herself to encourage them more, though all around her other, flashier girls, who gave back snappy answers when approached, were finding their men for the evening, their soft laughter helping to fill the hollow bowl of the city which at this hour seemed to have become completely feminine, the smell and sound of women everywhere.
She went past the line of carriages waiting to take soldiers and their pick-ups down the avenue to hotels and apartments, and through the arch of the old Roman Wall. The park was bustling with activity. She heard a jazzband playing in the enlisted men’s club, drowning out the orchestra in the Italian open-air theater behind it. GIs were milling everywhere—talking in groups, eyeing girls, walking with their pick-ups toward more secluded parts of the park—and the vendors of postcards and trinkets lining the street up to the club were finding it difficult to catch their attention.
