Among Women Only

by Cesare Pavese

  "It's not funny," Rosetta said quietly. "It's not funny and it's not kind. You were friends once."

  "Make her drink, make her drink," Febo shouted. "Then Rosetta can tell us about when everybody was friends with everybody..."

  We ate the way you eat in such places, and drank likewise. The host suggested mysterious old wines from those regions,- he and Febo winked at each other,- after each dish he asked if it had been to our taste. Even Rosetta livened up and joked; there was no more talk about Loris. Instead we made fun of the alpinists, who at that moment were eating cold canned meat in the hut Febo had designed, and Febo said with his mouth full: "At least they're eating in tasteful surroundings."

  "I wish Morelli were with us," Momina said. "He enjoys this kind of thing."

  "Who's Morelli?" Rosetta asked.

  "He's an old gentleman who's got his name linked with Clelia's," Momina said gaily. "But of course you know him."

  "Oh, in other words," Febo said, "the handsomest aren't here. Take what you've got."

  Closing time came, and with many smiles the host put us out. One good thing: we left it to Febo to pay him, by promise. I wanted to pay, but Momina said: "Nothing doing. He's already cost us too much, that character."

  We took Rosetta to Montalto. Her mother was still up, waiting for her. She met us tearfully, and while Febo kept trying to pull me into the back seat, Momina stood outside arguing and made her promise they would return to Turin the next day. I said goodbye to Rosetta, who gave me her hand through the window and shot me a glance at once rebellious and grateful. We left.

  "Why," Febo said, pushing his head forward between our shoulders, "why didn't they ask us to sleep at the villa?"

  "Too many women for only one man," Momina said.

  "Why be stingy?" he said. "Let's stop at Ivrea at least. I know a hotel..."

  I was surprised when Momina accepted. "Tomorrow we're going back to Montalto," she said. "And if we'd gone to the hut, we would have slept outdoors, wouldn't we?"

  When he was arranging for the rooms, Febo said: "Too bad they can't give us one for three."

  Momina said: "They'll give one for Clelia and me."

  We had hardly taken off our furs and washed (Momina had cold cream and perfume in her bag) when the door opened and Febo came in with a tray of liqueurs.

  "Service," he said. "On the house."

  "Put it down there," Momina said. "Good night."

  We couldn't get rid of him. After a while Momina sat on the bed and I lay down on the other side and wrapped myself in the covers. Febo, seated beside Momina, talked away. They discussed women, nightclubs in Turin. They said everything—absolutely everything —with a freedom strange in two people who still used the formal "you" and had only met that day. Febo, with great bursts of laughter, had thrown himself on the bed two or three times and ended by staying there. Momina stretched out beside him. Resigned, I drowsed off a couple of times, and each time I woke there they were, chattering together. Then I realized they were wrapped in the same blanket. At one point, after a sudden spasm from Febo, I aimed a kick at him that got tangled in the covers. Then I sat up on the edge of the bed and lit a cigarette. Momina hurried to the bathroom; Febo, his hair mussed, handed me a glass from the almost empty bottle.

  He was on me like a devil and tore off the covers. He squirmed a bit and it was soon over. Momina hadn't yet come back when Febo was on his feet beside the bed with his hair up like a dog's; he brushed it down with his hand.

  "Now will you let us sleep?" I said.

  When he was gone, I took off my dress and wrapped myself in the blankets. I drowsed off before Momina returned.

  14

  The next morning I was already downstairs drinking my coffee when Momina came down. I had left her with her face sunk in the pillow and her back bare as I had seen her the evening of the first party. She came down all fixed up, but dark around the eyes. She seated herself smiling, put down her bag, and said quietly: "We're a couple of early birds."

  She had some coffee and looked at me. "Shall we go?" she said, putting down the cup.

  "Shouldn't we pay first?"

  "It would be sweet, but do we have to?" She squinted at me with an absent air. "It would be a nice surprise when he wakes up. Brat."

  So we left. She said no more. We got into the car in the garage and were immediately in the country.

  "It's early to go to the Molas. Let's have a breath of air. Do you know the Canavese?"

  So we drove around a Canavese completely hidden in fog and passed through two or three villages.

  Her eyes on the road, she said suddenly: "A good girl, Rosetta, isn't she?"

  "What's this story about Loris?"

  "A year ago," Momina said, "when Rosetta was painting. She took lessons from him. Then she quit. Loris was in the house all the time... You know Loris."

  "Like our friend last night," I said.

  Momina smiled. "Not exactly."

  "You don't mean he's... ?" I ventured.

  "What?" Momina exclaimed, looking at me closely. "Oh, that... No. Old gossip. I would know."

  "A difficult girl... Suppose a farce like last night had happened to her."

  "But she went to the hotel alone," Momina said. "She told me. She doesn't fake with me. Only Adele sees love at the bottom of everything... Rosetta understands these things."

  "Well, what did she poison herself for?" I asked. "At her age?"

  "Not for love, I'm sure of that," Momina said, frowning. "She lives the same life I used to lead, the same all of us lead... We know all about the Febos..."

  She was silent awhile, intent on the road.

  "I don't know," I said, "but they make a lot of trouble. It would be better if there weren't any."

  "Maybe. But I'd miss them. Wouldn't you? Imagine it. All of them sweet and dignified, all nice and respectable. No moments of truth. Nobody would ever need to come out of his den, to show what he really is, ugly and piggish as he is. How would you get to know men?"

  "I think you like to enjoy them." I got that far and then stopped. I saw that I was being a fool, that Momina was worse off than I and laughed at these things.

  But she didn't laugh now; she whistled, a light, contemptuous whistle. "Shall we go back?" she said.

  The humming of the motor was making me drowsy and I thought about the night, about Febo's red hair. The light mist under the sun gave me a sense of freshness, and suddenly there came into my mind the tiled dairy bar I had entered alone so many mornings before hurrying to the shop, while Guido was sleeping satiated in my bed.

  "Well, why do you think Rosetta did it then?" Momina suddenly asked.

  "I don't know," I said. "Perhaps ..."

  "It just doesn't make sense," she said curtly. "She looks at you with those frightened eyes... keeps closed up ... She's never discussed things with us. You know what I want to say..."

  When we got to Montalto the shutters were still closed, but a chilly sun was flooding the garden. Momina was telling me how strongly she was overcome at times by disgust—not just a nausea from this or that person, from an evening or a season, but a disgust with living, with everything and everyone, with time itself that goes so fast and yet never seems to go. Momina lit a cigarette and sounded the horn.

  "We'll discuss it another time," she said, laughing.

  The gardener opened the gate. We rolled up on the gravel. When we got out in front of the steps, the mother, frightened, appeared at the door.

  "There's so damned much that doesn't make sense," Momina added.

  We set off for Turin in a caravan, Rosetta with us; the mother with a maid and chauffeur in the big car sent up from Turin just for the trip. All morning, while waiting for the car, we had strolled around the villa and garden talking and looking at the mountains. Once I was alone with Rosetta,- she took me upstairs to a terrace where as a child, she told me, she would shut herself up for hours at a time to read and look at the tree tops. Down there—she said— was Turin, and on summer even
ings she sat in that corner and thought of the seaside towns she had visited, about Turin and winter, the new faces she would some day meet.

  "They often fool you," I said, "don't you think?"

  She said: "You have to look them in the eyes. Everything's in their eyes."

  "There's another way of knowing them," I said. "Working with them. When people work, they give themselves away. It's hard to fake on a job."

  "What job?" she said.

  So we rode to Turin while I thought to myself that neither she nor Momina knew what work was; they had never earned their dinner or their stockings or the trips they had taken and were taking. I thought of how the world is, that everybody works in order to stop working, but if somebody doesn't work, you get mad. I thought of the old Mola woman, the signora, whose work was to agitate herself over her daughter, to run after her, see that she didn't lack anything; and her daughter paid her back with those terrors. I thought of Gisella and her little store—"we're squeezed in upstairs"—and all to keep them from doing anything, to keep them on velvet. I became nasty. I saw Febo's face. I started to think of Via Po.

  I went there before evening, after first taking a bath in the hotel. Nobody had come looking for me, not even Morelli. But on the table was a bunch of lilacs with a telegram from Maurizio. This too, I thought. Doing nothing all day, he had time to think of such things. It was just a month since I had left Rome.

  I found Becuccio supervising the arrival of the crystal chandeliers. He wasn't wearing his gray-green trousers or the heavy sweater any more, but a windbreaker with a yellow scarf. The leather wristband was there, as always. His curly hair and white teeth had a curious effect on me. While I talked I was very nearly on the point of reaching out and touching his ear. It's the mountain air, I thought, scared.

  Instead I became very cold with him over the lateness of the shipments.

  "The architect..." he said.

  "The architect has nothing to do with it," I cut in. "It's your job to keep after the suppliers..."

  Together we checked the crystals and I liked the way his large hands felt about in the straw for the brackets and pendants. In the newly plastered room, under an unshaded bulb, the prisms shone like rain in the beam of headlights. We held them up against the light. He said: "It's like when you're cutting tracks with an acetylene torch." He had been a worker on the night shift for the trolley line—the usual story. Once I felt him taking my hand under the straw. I told him to watch out. "It's expensive stuff."

  He answered: "I know."

  "All right then," I said. We finished the boxes.

  15

  The people in Rome talked as though the shop would be ready by mid-March, but the vaulting on the first floor still had to be done. Working with Febo became difficult; he began saying that they didn't understand anything in Rome and that if I didn't know how to get my way he did. He came back from Ivrea with a foxy look; he never mentioned the bill at the hotel, but he began using the familiar tu. I told him I took orders in Rome but that in Turin I gave them, and how much did he want for his trouble. Keeping my voice down, I let him have it. The next day a bunch of flowers arrived, which I gave to Mariuccia.

  But Rome was a headache. In a long evening phone call they gave me the news: the shop and windows were to stay the same, but the furnishings in the fitting rooms and the large salon on the first floor were to be changed; they were to be named according to the style of the decorations. We had to find mirrors, materials, lamps, prints, but they didn't know yet whether baroque or what. I had to tell the architect, make plans, take photographs, send someone to Rome. Suspend everything. Rugs and curtains, too.

  "For the fifteenth?" I asked.

  "Send the architect here."

  I didn't send him, I went myself. The next evening, after a bath in my own apartment, and after airing the rooms, I was walking on familiar cobblestone. Two miserable days of sirocco followed during which I saw the usual bored faces and nobody came to the point. That was the Rome I knew. Halfway through a discussion some man, some woman would come in, start talking, jump up, and say: "But you have to think of this..." Somebody was always missing, the person who had called the conference. Madame was on the point of summoning Febo, then gave up the idea. We had our best talk at a table in the Columbia while the others were dancing. All I managed was to convince her that it was best to open definitely in May with the summer models, but I got an idea of what they had in mind. One of them had said that Turin is such a difficult city. I explained that there are limits to what you can do even in Turin.

  Maurizio, too, got bored unexpectedly. He thought it was his duty to wait for me, stay beside me, follow me. He ostentatiously didn't mention Turin. I didn't mention Morelli. I was conscious of being much more alone in Rome, climbing those streets or dropping into Gigi's for coffee, than I had been in Turin in my hotel bed or in the Via Po. The last evening we came in late under a wind that shook the street lamps and rattled the shutters. I didn't tell him that certain hints from madame had made it clear that they were putting me in charge of the Turin shop and that I wouldn't be able to come back to Rome. I told him to stay in bed the next morning and not come to the station.

  It was drizzling in Turin. Everything was chilly, melancholy, foggy; if it hadn't been March, I would have said November. When Febo heard that I had come back from Rome, there he was, grinning, with a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, but he wasn't very sure of himself. When I told him about this business of the baroque, he grinned happily again.

  "So now, Clelia," he said softly, "what will you do?"

  "I'll look for a decorator who knows baroque," I said.

  "Turin is full of baroque. It's all over the place, but never baroque enough..."

  "They know that in Rome," I said, "but they don't know what baroque is ..."

  "Let's do it like this," he said, and began throwing off sheet after sheet of rapid sketches.

  He smoked and sketched all evening. He was good. I watched that red, bony hand, scarcely aware that it was his. It annoyed me that he should know so much, young as he was, and make light of it all, as if his talent were so much money he had accidentally found in his pocket. He told me earlier that he had gone to architecture school only on days when he knew a certain girl would be there. He had learned his trade while traveling the world with his mother, a crazy old lady who furnished and refurnished houses the way she would open and close a beach umbrella. He explained gaily that there was no need to change anything in the rooms, we had only to go to the antique dealers, and it needn't all be baroque —some could be provincial, in the worst taste—but we had to arrange the things well, give them proper stage lighting. He knocked himself out laughing and tried to kiss me. We were in the hotel lobby. I let him kiss my hand.

  The next day Morelli appeared, excited, asking where I had been for so long. I told him he had to help me because the young of Turin were really in poor shape and we old people had to stick together. I asked him if he knew the antique dealers, if he knew anything about style in furniture.

  When he understood what I wanted, he asked if I were setting up house in Turin.

  Then I took him to the Via Po and showed him the rooms.

  "Your painter friends, what do they say?" he asked.

  "If they only understood paintings ..."

  "Here the pictures will be the mirrors," he said seriously. "No need to let your customers disappear. There's no painting that's worth a beautiful woman undressing."

  He accompanied me to the antique stores on the Via Mazzini and meanwhile we talked of Rome. "It would be easier in Rome," I said. "Rome is full of old houses being broken up ..."

  They weren't fooling in Turin either. Those shops were the honey and we the flies. You could hardly move among the mountains of stuff—ivory pieces, peeling canvases, grandfather clocks, figurines, artificial flowers, necklaces, fans. At first glance everything seemed old and decrepit, but after a while you could see there wasn't a piece—not a miniature, not an umbrell
a handle— that didn't make your mouth water. Morelli said: "They aren't showing us the best. They don't know who we are." He looked me over and said: "My wife should be here."

  Crossing the street, he asked: "What do you think of all this stuff?"

  "It hurts to think that when you die everything you own ends up like this in other people's hands."

  "It's worse when it ends up like that before you're dead," Morelli said. "If our beautiful friend were here, she would say that we also pass from hand to hand, the hands of those who want us. The only thing that saves people is money, which passes through everybody's hands."

  Then the talk shifted to women and houses and to Donna Clementina, who was a girl when some of those parasols and guitars and mottled mirrors were new. "She knew how to set herself up. No man could have claimed to have her in hand. These boys make me laugh, these girl friends of Mariella who have the vices but not the experience... They think it's enough to talk. I'd like to see them in twenty years ... The old lady got where she wanted to go ..."

  We went into another shop. We didn't talk baroque. I told Morelli that it was better to see a palace, a house, and find how things should look in their natural setting. "Let's go to Donna Clementina's," he said. "That evening there were too many people, but the porcelains alone are worth ..."

  16

  We arrived just as some women were leaving; they stared at me. Twenty years ago my route never went through that quarter of Turin. We found Mariella and her mother, who had just had tea; the grandmother—unfortunately—was napping, she was preparing for the evening, when a certain Rumanian violinist was coming to play and she wanted to be present. A few friends were expected, would we care to join them?

  Mariella looked at me reproachfully and while we were going into the room with the porcelains she scolded me for not having told her in time about the trip to Saint Vincent. "Come this evening," she said. "Rosetta and the whole crowd will be here."