A Private Venus

by Giorgio Scerbanenco

  He got to the Via dei Giardini and had no difficulty finding somewhere to park the Giulietta because during those scorching August days the metropolis was considered uninhabitable by a large number of its citizens, who, for some reason, found it perfectly habitable in fog, smog, and snow. Even at the Alemagna, he had the place—the bar counter a few dozen metres long for the drinks, a counter a dozen metres long with sandwiches of egg, salmon, caviar, the two counters of pastries and ice cream in quantities reminiscent of Versailles and the Tuileries—almost completely to himself, apart from two other customers who floated like him in the mountain-cold yet unrefreshing air conditioning.

  He ate three substantial sandwiches and drank a beer, without daring to look too closely at the five assistants and two cashiers, all women, just as he never looked too closely at anyone, only at inanimate things, provided they weren’t dolls or toy dogs with eyes that frightened him as much as human eyes frightened him. However, he did spend some time looking at the assistant on the pastry counter, a specialist in pralines who was somewhat behind with the fashion, with her bouffant hairstyle: the one she wore that day was not the most bouffant, the previous week he had seen one even more bouffant, and the size of that hair suddenly gave him the urge to go back to the park and this time stop. But it was only a sudden whim, the various hidden censors inside him blocked that resurgence of passion and suggested something more spiritual: going to Florence and back, along the Autostrada del Sole, trying to beat his own record of the month before, which was already a very short time. He would eat in Florence and get back to Milan in time for an aperitif. He liked the idea and immediately left the Alemagna.

  In the Via dei Giardini, the Giulietta, improbably, was the only car parked in a stretch of about twenty metres near the bus stop. He paid the parking fee to the man in the peaked cap, who immediately walked back into the shade, and he was about to squeeze himself back into his car when he heard that voice.

  ‘Excuse me.’

  He turned. A girl in a sky-blue suit, with large, perfectly round dark glasses, was smiling at him, but with a hint of anxiety about her mouth, which apart from her small nose, was the only part of her face that was visible, covered as it was by those large glasses and by her brown hair that descended over her face like two half-closed curtains.

  ‘Excuse me, signore, I’ve been waiting for a bus for half an hour, I have an important appointment and I’m already late—could you possibly give me a lift to Porta Romana?’

  Davide Auseri nodded and opened the door for her. She got in and sat down composedly, placing on her knees a light brown leather handbag which looked more like a large man’s wallet, and he set off.

  ‘What street exactly?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, right at the end, if you’d be so kind.’

  ‘Of course, I was going that way myself.’

  ‘I’m so pleased, then I won’t be making you waste too much of your time.’

  His guest’s knees were not completely uncovered, but they were visible and he could look at them as he drove.

  ‘I know it was shameless of me, but you can never find a taxi when you need one.’

  Maybe it was her voice that put him on the right track, but not only the voice. He was a solitary man, and solitary men think a lot. Above all, even though he was no expert, he had the impression that the bus that went through the Via dei Giardini didn’t go to Porta Romana. And right next to the bus stop there was a taxi stand, and he had seen a long line of them. All the traffic lights in the centre had been on his side, and now he was in the Piazza Missori. The closeness of the girl and the sight of those knees, not to mention the heat, must have made his censors give up the ghost.

  ‘Do you like travelling by car?’ he asked her.

  ‘Very much, with a good driver.’ Her voice continued to change, its softness had turned inviting.

  ‘I’m going to Florence, along the autostrada. We can be back by six this evening, seven at the latest.’

  ‘Florence is a bit far.’ The softness of her voice had diminished a little, but she made no mention of the important appointment she was supposed to have had.

  ‘We’ll be back before dinner,’ he said. All his censors had vanished by now, and the real Davide Auseri emerged from the depths of his subconscious.

  Her voice turned a little harsh. ‘I wouldn’t like to be dumped in the middle of the road.’

  ‘I don’t do things like that.’ His voice, too, had turned harsh, it even slightly resembled his father’s voice.

  The girl took off her glasses and threw back her hair, her eyes were a little tired and a bit afraid, but her expression was sweet, almost innocent, and she said innocently, ‘I’ve always wanted to go to Florence, but going this way is a bit scary.’

  A girl who pretends to be waiting for a bus, next to a parking space, and is actually waiting as patiently as a fisherman for whichever man, young or old, comes to collect his car, as long as he’s alone and makes it clear he doesn’t have any urgent business to attend to, shouldn’t be scared of much, but she seemed genuine enough.

  ‘It’s the first time someone has ever said they’re scared of me.’ They were almost at the end of the Corso Lodi and he had to make up his mind. He gently stopped the car and with a distracted, elegant gesture, without showing either wallet or money, managed to take a couple of notes and pass them into the handbag, or wallet, that she was holding on her knees, keeping them clutched in his hand in such a way that the transfer happened without any vulgar banknotes being seen. In many cases, money is a quick-working tranquilliser, an antidote to fears, anxieties, and states of depression. The Davide that had emerged from his subconscious, dripping with instincts, knew that.

  ‘Let’s go,’ she said, but her voice remained harsh, and even a little bitter now. ‘There are lots of ways to get to Florence, clearly I had to go like this.’

  Until they got to the tollbooths on the autostrada he drove slowly, and for another ten kilometres or so after taking out the ticket he kept up the same dull pace, but he was just psyching himself up. She had put her glasses on again and let the curtains of her hair fall, and was intelligent enough not to lean on his shoulder. ‘Go faster, I like it.’

  He humoured her, pushing the Giulietta to its limit, the autostrada was fairly clear, but she didn’t see him make even the slightest mistake, or be the slightest bit careless, and despite the figure on the speedometer she didn’t have the slightest feeling that she was at risk.

  And he didn’t say a word. She must know men: she didn’t tell him that she really liked driving like this, she didn’t tell him anything about herself or ask any questions about him, in short, she had no desire to make conversation, having understood that he was one of those men—maybe they were the best—who do only one thing at a time. For now he was driving, and only driving. She didn’t like one-man bands, like those performing dogs that played the drum with sticks tied to their tails, the cymbals with their paws, and bells with their heads. That constant, calm silence was good for Davide, it unblocked him completely, his deepest instincts strained in him like cats closed up in a basket for half a day: hot, aggressive, precise. He wasn’t interested any more in whether or not he broke his record from Milan to Florence and back, as his superego had first suggested, and at the service station in Somaglia he stopped outside a hut festively bedecked with flags.

  ‘Let’s have a drink.’

  Obeying silently, she followed him, they were thirsty and drank a mint cordial, strong and iced.

  ‘Near here there’s a nice walk by the river.’ He had been here once before, alone, and had realised it was a place that was good for certain things, but he had never thought he’d one day bring a girl here. And yet here he was, with a girl.

  Leaving the car in front of the cheerful little hut, they left the area of the service station. There was a road that led to the river, then there was a path that went alongside the river, and then there were tracks that disappeared amid tall bushes and secluded underg
rowth. As they walked along the river, she took off her glasses and wiped the lipstick from her lips with a Kleenex, rolled up the little square of soft tissue and threw it in the water: she followed it with her eyes as it floated on the current until he took her by the arm and led her into the bushes.

  Being perhaps the more practical of the two, she was the one who chose the place, squatting on the ground in the most sheltered spot. He stood there, smoking a cigarette, and watched her as she took off her sky-blue jacket, under it she had a bra and she took that off, too, and then he, too, took off his jacket, which, outside the house, he only ever took off to make love.

  On the way back, she could still see the Kleenex, it had caught in a clump of grass by the water, and she stopped to put on lipstick. ‘You’re nice,’ she said to him as she did so. ‘When I saw you in the Via dei Giardini, I wasn’t sure whether to approach you, you look like the kind of man who’d ruin a woman, but I needed fifty thousand lire.’ She put the lipstick and her mirror back in her handbag and started walking again. ‘We can eat here,’ she said.

  Davide knew he wasn’t any good at bargaining, and, still without the vulgarity of any of those ten-thousand-lire notes coming into sight, he transferred from his wallet into her purse, once again, the rest of the sum required to reach the figure she had requested.

  ‘It’s too much, I know,’ she said. ‘Consider it a charitable donation.’

  He didn’t like talking about money. ‘Where are you from?’ he asked.

  ‘Naples.’

  ‘You don’t sound Neapolitan.’

  ‘I studied elocution for three years, I wanted to work in the theatre, theatre with a capital T. I can recite some Shakespeare, if you like.’

  They ate in the festive little hut on the autostrada. They exchanged a bit of superficial, generalised information about themselves: she said vaguely that she had come to Milan almost a year earlier to look for work and hadn’t found very much, and he told her he was a clerk in a large office, which was true, after all, he worked for Montecatini, didn’t he?

  ‘A well-paid clerk, if you spend like that.’ He didn’t reply, so she asked him, ‘Do you still want to go to Florence and back?’

  After the meal, the wild beasts that had defeated the censors in him were even freer. ‘I’d prefer to go to the river again,’ he said simply.

  ‘So would I,’ she replied.

  They went to the river again and then came back to have a drink. She was the one who chose whisky: at the time, he preferred beer. After her second whisky he said, ‘Isn’t all that stuff bad for you?’

  ‘In theory, yes. In practice, as I’m going to kill myself tomorrow, I could drink vitriol now and it wouldn’t matter.’

  Davide decided, trivially, that the girl was joking and that she had drunk too much, but at the same time he knew he was lying to himself, because deep down he had the feeling that the girl wasn’t joking and wasn’t drunk, she was a straight person, in her body, her character, and her way of speaking, she never said a superfluous or pointless word: if she wasn’t intending to kill herself, she wouldn’t have wasted time saying it.

  ‘That’s an idea we all get sometimes,’ he said.

  ‘Sometimes it isn’t only an idea,’ she said. ‘A few months ago I saw a book displayed in the window of a bookshop. By chance, I read the band across the cover. I can’t remember the exact words now, but they were something like: “As soon as I’ve finished writing this book I’ll kill myself.” The author, who was a woman, had said that, and having finished the novel she did in fact kill herself. For her, it wasn’t just an idea.’ They were sitting by the window and every now and again looked through the blinds at the lanes on the autostrada and the cars flashing in the sun like photographers’ flashlights. ‘For me neither.’

  He liked hearing her talk, and he even liked this unexpected topic, Eros and Thanatos are cousins, and he had a few ideas about life and death himself, ideas he’d never been able to talk about due to his lack of social contact, and he told her one now: ‘Of course living is difficult, whereas dying is very simple.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, although his observation was not about her. ‘But I don’t have any desire to die, and never have had. Listen, if I’m not boring you, I’ll talk for a few more minutes about personal things, then I’ll shut up.’

  ‘I’m not bored at all,’ he said, and it was true.

  ‘Anything can happen in life. Today I met you, you may be the man destiny sent me.’ Her big wide mouth was brushed at the corners by the curtains of her hair, and she wasn’t smiling. ‘If you take me away with you, for at least three months, a long way from here, and spend every minute with me, then tomorrow I won’t have to kill myself anymore. I know it’s absurd, but that’s the way things happen to me. If you like me, it won’t be hell for you. In appearance—only in appearance—I’m serious, sophisticated, elegant, you can take me anywhere and I won’t make you look bad. I know how to eat snails with the correct cutlery, without holding them between my fingers and sucking them as a friend of mine does. Even though you said you’re only a clerk, you probably don’t need to save money, but if you want to I can live on toast and Coca-Cola and I can sleep in boarding houses. But take me away from Milan for three months, at least three months, it ought to be much longer, maybe a year or two, but three months will do, and then I’ll see.’

  At that moment, the thought of spending three months with this girl, one girl just for him, something he’d never been able to do because of the network of complexes in which he was imprisoned, opened wide the windows of life for him, and through those windows he saw the three months, verdant, luxuriant, with her naked body gliding softly over those three months, as the car ran on, taking the two of them across an invisible map, Cannes, Paris, Biarritz, Lisbon, Seville.

  She sensed all this. ‘You mustn’t be afraid. I’m not what you might think, you’re not taking a streetwalker with you. I’m crazy, but that’s something else. Every now and again I need money, or else I need to feel like a spendthrift, then I go out and do what I did today with you, next to some bus stop, or a news stand, or there might even be someone following me. But it’s not my profession. It may happen two or three times a month, no more than that, though rather more often lately because I had to leave the job I was doing, and I can’t live only on the arithmetic and geography lessons my sister gets for me, apart from the fact that the mothers of those dunces never pay. I’m a criminal to myself, but I’m the kind of girl you can introduce to anyone, my father is a teacher in Naples, I didn’t want to tell you, but I have to give you my references, you won’t want to take with you someone off the street, and I’m not like that. My sister works for the phone company, she got me a job there, too, but I can’t stand it in those henhouses so I left. Then this thing happened, and I don’t have any choice: either you take me with you, or tomorrow I end it all.’

  ‘What thing happened?’ Her words had rooted him to the spot.

  ‘I’m sorry, darling, I can’t tell you. You’re a gentleman, that’s obvious from the way you’re dressed. I’m asking you what I ask you because I’ve seen that you’re a gentleman, I wouldn’t tell the kind of louts you find around here if I prefer milk or lemon with my tea.’ Then she fell silent, giving him time to think.

  And he thought. Despite all his sensitivity, he was deaf to the appeal of what could be defined as madness. Leaving for three months with a girl he had met only a few hours earlier, even he would call that madness, and in his world madness was in bad taste. But it depressed him, and he said, depressed, ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Why can’t you? Don’t tell me it’s because of the money.’

  No, maybe not because of the money, although he didn’t like spending his allowance and then having to resort to his father. ‘Not only because of the money.’

  Somehow, she could read his thoughts. ‘I understand. You can’t suddenly take off for three months, you have a family, maybe a girlfriend, you ought to tell your father, explain, make u
p some story: nobody’s ever free. I know all that, but all I can do is repeat the same thing. I’m not trying to blackmail you emotionally, you’re the dearest, most polite, most sensitive man I’ve ever met. But only you can save me. If you don’t, the only other thing I can do is slit my wrists.’

  ‘Why me?’ Her last words had made him tense: they sounded like a threat.

  ‘Because I don’t have anyone else. There’s no other solution, no other remedy. Either you let me get in your car and take me at least a thousand kilometres from here or I’ll do what I said.’ Her voice was normal, without emphasis, without drama: she was simply explaining, as if to one of her pupils.

  That was what struck him and started making him anxious. ‘I ought at least to sort things out with my father, I can’t be away for three months like that, there’s my work, too … Maybe we can meet again in a couple of days, maybe I can manage to—’

  ‘Darling, there’s no time. And even if there was, you wouldn’t come back. Either we go away now, immediately, and you let me stay away with you as long as possible, or there’s no point.’ She kept repeating the same grim dilemma. Then she fell silent again, leaving him more time to think.

  But maybe he had stopped thinking. The anguish had made him nervous, and nervousness makes us closed and unemotional, it gives rise to cold thoughts. Maybe this was hysteria, lucid hysteria. A normal woman wouldn’t just decide to kill herself one day and then ask the first man she meets to save her because she doesn’t want to die and to take her away. This was abnormal behaviour, and the suspicion that he was dealing with someone abnormal sent a chill down his spine. He didn’t know what else to say to her.

  She waited, smoked, looked inside her handbag, looked at the marathon runners of the autostrada coming in and out of the bar, opened her handbag again, looked inside, then said, ‘Please, let’s go.’