A Private Venus

by Giorgio Scerbanenco

  For a moment he could hear sirens sounding the alarm, just like when he was a little boy during the war. ‘Try to remember: was the photographer supposed to hand over the exposed film to Alberta, or was he supposed to keep it for himself and send Alberta away? And are you sure, or do you have any doubts?’

  ‘I think I’m sure.’ Oh, that thoughtful little girl’s face of hers. ‘Alberta told me all she had to do was go to the studio, pose for the photographs, and that was it, she thought it was stupid to pass up all that money for a matter of principle and she was even going to take a friend of hers, Maurilia, and I told her that if she went and posed for those photographs I never wanted to see her again.’

  It was time to go, the barman and a large man who had suddenly appeared told them they were going to close. So he took his Livia Ussaro outside, pushed her into the Giulietta, but didn’t switch the engine on. Once the shutters of the bar had been pulled down, that stretch of the Via Plinio was quite shadowy and discreet.

  ‘I’m not going to let you go home to sleep if you don’t explain one point,’ he said, perhaps a little too seriously. ‘In Alberta’s handbag on the evening before the day she was found dead in Metanopoli, there was a Minox cartridge that hadn’t yet been developed. Do you know what that means?’

  ‘I’m thinking about it.’

  ‘Let me do the thinking. It means the photographer gave the cartridge to Alberta.’

  ‘Obviously.’

  ‘Right. But what was Alberta supposed to do with it? Did she have to take it to that photosensitive middle-aged man?’ How witty he was!

  Livia smiled, it was nice, talking like this in the semi-darkness of the car, the Via Plinio was more deserted than ever. ‘No, that’s not possible, I’m sure of it. Apart from anything else she couldn’t have known where the man who’d spoken to her about the photos lived; when a woman goes with a man like that he doesn’t normally give her his address. This one certainly didn’t.’

  ‘They may have fixed a place to meet so that she could hand the cartridge over to him to be developed.’ The hypothesis was almost ridiculous: when a photographer takes photographs, it’s normal for him to develop, enlarge and print them himself, without the person who wanted those photographs having to look for another photographer or make the enlargements himself, which would have been quite difficult for an amateur, given that the photographs had been taken on Minox film.

  ‘No, Alberta would have told me if she’d had to hand over the roll of film to that man. I questioned her for two hours, I was very afraid, I realised it was no longer private prostitution, that she was going downhill, that she was getting mixed up in …’

  He wasn’t listening to her, even though he would have liked to, because he would have liked to talk to her for weeks, about all her beloved ‘general topics,’ but he was imagining Alberta and her blonde friend going to the photographer, getting undressed, posing for the photographs, then taking the money and leaving. That was the logical sequence. Instead of which, Alberta had the cartridge in her handbag. What was she supposed to do with it? And why had the photographer given it to her?

  ‘You’re not listening to me, are you?’

  ‘No.’

  Humbly, generously, she said, ‘Ask me more about Alberta.’

  Yes, he did have other questions to ask. ‘After that time when she told you she was going to pose for photographs, what did Alberta say to you when you saw her again?’

  ‘I never saw her again. Nearly a week later, I read in the newspaper that she’d killed herself.’

  The path ended here. ‘We need to meet again, do you mind that?’

  ‘No, even if it’s only about Alberta.’ Then she betrayed her feminine weakness. ‘Why are you so interested in her? You never met her, you’re not even a policeman, in fact, you told me you’re taking a big risk, getting involved in these things.’

  At last he looked at her without thinking about Alberta. ‘I can tell you, Little Miss General Topics, it’s because of a general topic.’

  ‘And what would that be?’

  He could tell her, in fact she was the one person in the world he could tell something like that without making her smile. ‘I don’t like swindlers.’ He then explained what he meant, he even had to generalise a bit to thank her for all the useful information she had given him. ‘Society is a game, right? The rules of the game are written in the penal code, in the civil code, and in another rather imprecise, unwritten code called the moral code. They may be debatable codes, and have to be constantly updated, but either you keep to the rules, or you don’t. The only person breaking the rules of the game that I can respect is the bandit with his rifle hiding in the mountains: he doesn’t keep to the rules of the game, but then he makes it quite clear he doesn’t want to play in good society anyway and that he’ll make his own rules as he wants, with his rifle. But not swindlers, no, I hate and despise them. These days, there are bandits with lawyers in attendance, they cheat, they rob, they kill, but they’ve already worked out a line of defence with their lawyer in case they’re found out and put on trial, and they never get the punishment they deserve. They want others to keep to the game, to the rules, but not themselves. I don’t like that, I can’t stand these people, just knowing they’re near, just smelling them, sets my nerves on edge.’

  She would have liked to continue this conversation, she loved hearing that kind of speech, but tenderly he asked her where he could take her and she replied, just to her front door, over there opposite the bar, and then told him that he could phone her whenever he wanted, she’d be very pleased to hear from him, and her voice was definitely not the voice of a frigid woman, but he had to go, he had left Davide alone too long.

  Davide was lying on the bed, fully dressed apart from his shoes, the light was on and he was awake. On the table were the bottle of Frascati, which looked empty, and the bottle of whisky, which was open but from which only a couple of spoonfuls at most seemed to be missing, in what must have been an extreme effort of will Davide had drunk less than a spoonful of whisky an hour, even though he’d had the bottle there at his disposal, as well as his doctor’s permission.

  He took the chair and moved it close to the bed. Davide made as if to sit up, it wasn’t right to lie down when his doctor was here, but Duca put a hand on his shoulder and made him lie down again. ‘Davide,’ he said, ‘we need to sleep.’ He had been happy with Livia Ussaro, and he was happy now with Davide Auseri, the psychotic only-begotten son of a leading engineer. It had been a happy evening. ‘We can’t spend our days and nights thinking about a woman, especially if she’s dead. You’re still thinking about Alberta, aren’t you?’

  Davide turned his face to the pillow: in his language, that meant yes.

  ‘It isn’t right, Davide.’ He was doing his job as a doctor, with passion, with happiness. ‘It isn’t right for someone of your age to be in love with a dead woman. I’m going to talk to you a little about her, because these past few days I’ve understood a lot of things. When you threw Alberta out of your car, you weren’t in love with her. When you read in the newspapers that she’d killed herself, you still weren’t in love with her, but you felt remorse. Later, the remorse grew in you, more every day, every time you got drunk, but it didn’t stay as just remorse. Over time, alongside the remorse another feeling was born. Let’s call it love. You kept thinking, “If I’d taken her with me that day, I’d have saved her life.” Then you went further, you started to think that if you’d taken her with you, not only would you have saved her life, but it would have been beautiful for both of you, really beautiful, not just making love so much, but something more. You’ve never had a girlfriend, you’ve never really been in love, the upbringing your father gave you, your father’s personality, have always crushed you. Alberta was the first woman who gave you this feeling of love, this need for love—after she was dead, unfortunately. I know this is all rather like street-corner psychoanalysis, but that’s the way it is: you keep thinking about Alberta because yo
u’re in love with her, and being in love with her what you can’t stand is the thought that she’s dead and you were partly responsible, am I right or not?’

  He had hoped it would happen, without really expecting it: but now he was pleased to see that Davide was beginning to cry. Even though he covered his eyes and no sound came from him, he couldn’t conceal the fact, because his large chest was heaving. Calmly, Duca went on, ‘Since the dead never come back, and neither I nor anyone else can bring Alberta here to you, alive, and have her cure you, as only she could do, then we have to do something else. The most important thing is to find the person who forced her to kill herself, or who killed her, and when we find him we strangle him. Just tell yourself that: we’ll find him and strangle him. I might leave the job to you.’ He had to appeal to his baser instincts, in order to save him. ‘It isn’t hard, you’ll see, and you won’t spend even one day in prison. We’ll find this person and you’ll strangle him, just like that, with your bare hands, you won’t even have to squeeze hard, I’ll explain to you some other time, as a doctor, when you can be sure you’ve strangled him, the kind of cracking you have to feel between your fingers as you squeeze, and after that cracking you can even relax your grip because there’s nothing more to be done. Of course you’ll say you were attacked, the person jumped you, he had a knife, a revolver, you were forced to defend yourself, you were about to be killed and you had to react. There’ll be irrefutable witnesses, Mascaranti for example, I assure you that you’ll be able to strangle that man without any problem. And I assure you it’ll happen soon, because we’ll find him soon, but now you have to sleep, you have to relax, to be ready for that moment.’ It wasn’t a nice little bedtime story, but the child he had to put to sleep was rather big and needed stronger stories. He, Duca, also needed a bedtime story, one about finding a photographer in the woods. He just had to find out who had taken those photographs, only that, nothing but that.

  3

  The taxi stopped at 78 Via Farini and Alberta and Maurilia got out. The front door of number 78 was large and a lorry was coming out, behind the taxi, then there was a tram ringing its bell, and only after an exchange of imprecations between the lorry driver, the tram driver and the taxi driver, did they reach the caretaker’s wife, who told them that Industry Photographic was on the second floor, the staircase beyond the courtyard, and they crossed that courtyard, watched hungrily by a number of men in overalls who were loading a lorry with metal disks and pursued by sibilant phrases from these men, indicating what they would like to do with the two girls if they could, propositions which in themselves weren’t unnatural or wicked, just ill-timed.

  On the second floor, the young man who opened the door was simply a young man in a white dressing gown, in other words, he had a face without any distinguishing characteristics, almost like one of those faces drawn by someone who doesn’t know how to draw at all, and the only things you could say about him were that he wasn’t old and that he wasn’t wearing a black dressing gown.

  He looked at them and didn’t say anything, they didn’t say anything, and he let them in. There were no windows in the first room, and the light was on.

  ‘This way,’ he said.

  The second room was a long, large room, there were two windows, but the blinds were closed, you could see strips of sunlight through the dusty panes, which were also closed, and the light was on in here, too.

  ‘You can undress over there,’ he said, indicating a corner with a table and chairs. ‘Don’t knock the chess pieces over.’ On the table there was a chessboard, with a dozen pieces, the others were in a wooden box.

  ‘Isn’t there a screen?’ Alberta asked, and immediately realised she was an idiot, of course there wasn’t. There was nothing that looked anything like a screen in that long gallery that was supposed to be a photographic studio, or any furniture for that matter, apart from that table and chairs which were infinitely, obviously temporary. It was all quite frightening: those closed windows, the lights on at eleven in the morning, that heat as dead as a tomb in the sun.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ the young man said, referring, apparently, to the fact that he didn’t have a screen. ‘But don’t worry, the doors are locked.’ He had reached the far end of the gallery, and his voice, a voice as nondescript as his face, echoed a little.

  ‘Can’t we open the windows?’ Alberta yelled towards the dark end of the room. Within a minute, both the girls were soaked in sweat, their clothes clinging to them.

  ‘Then more heat will come in, along with the stench of acetylene,’ the man with the nondescript face said, and all at once the end of the gallery burst into flame: he had lit the three standing lamps and the six lights on the ceiling. ‘I don’t know what they make down there, but they use acetylene, and the smell is ghastly.’

  ‘Who wants to pose first?’ he asked. ‘It’s all the same to me.’

  Maurilia was a blonde who laughed easily, got scared easily, was easy with everything. Now she was scared. ‘You start,’ she said to Alberta.

  Alberta undressed quickly, her dress, bra, and knickers ending up on a chair, she kept on her high-heeled shoes, not to make the photographs sexier, but in order not to have to walk barefoot on that floor.

  ‘Over here,’ the man said. In front of the floodlights was a background of clouds, an enlarged photograph mounted on a sliding door. ‘We’ll be quick, with this little camera, you’ll see.’

  Only then did Alberta see the heavy tripod, and on the tripod something resembling a cigarette lighter, which must be the camera.

  ‘Stand over there, on that rug.’ He stooped behind the cigarette lighter and started looking. ‘You choose the poses, it doesn’t matter very much, hide your face if you want, but you have to show it in at least five or six of the shots. Move about as you want, it’s like being in a film, come on.’ In his left hand he held the shaft of the tripod, making the Minox move imperceptibly in every direction he wanted, and in his right hand he held a wire with a button that worked the shutter. ‘Move, one,’ click, ‘there, stop, two,’ click, with each photograph that cigarette lighter closed and reopened, just as if lighting a cigarette, ‘move, stop, three,’ click, and so it went on, four, five, ten, twelve photographs, every now and again he suggested a more aggressive pose, but always in words that were restrained, clean, without vulgarity, ‘move, stop, twenty-six, that’s enough, now it’s your friend’s turn.’

  At the other end of the gallery, in the nauseating heat, Maurilia was afraid. Not of undressing. She wasn’t even sure what she was afraid of. Alberta knew her: on the surface she was a carefree blonde, she had immediately agreed to pose in the nude, but now she was looking at Alberta imploringly.

  ‘If you don’t want to do it, then don’t,’ she said irritably, she couldn’t stand stupidity and Maurilia was a champion of stupidity: flabby, morally shifty, sure to end up badly, although she, Alberta, tried to keep her from the slippery slope that led to walking the avenues every night, with a parasite a few metres away keeping watch over you only to take the money you just earned. But for now she was bound to her, as if they were married.

  ‘Look, you’re here now, just pose,’ said the young man in the dressing gown, who had heard these last words.

  His tone wasn’t threatening, at least on the surface, only sad, as if he was saying, ‘What a pity, she came here to pose for photographs, and now she doesn’t want to,’ yet Alberta heard something else in it. What the man who wasn’t old and wasn’t wearing a black dressing gown was actually saying, Alberta was sure, was, ‘Now that you’re here you’re going to pose, even if you don’t want to, because I want you to.’

  With a forlorn smile, Maurilia said, ‘No, no, no,’ she undressed and Alberta walked with her to the end of the room, where the man was waiting, in the shadow, against the flaming background of the floodlights.

  ‘On the rug, there, like that,’ he said, becoming quite pleasant again, ‘do whatever you like, just don’t come off the rug, but on it you can move, like t
hat, stop, one,’ and the clicks started again, ‘move, there, stop, two, move, not the same pose, something different, there, stop, three.’

  Alberta started to smell the hot, metallic smell of the floodlights, Maurilia’s nudity was irritating, at least for a woman: aesthetically, her body was overblown, poorly arranged, it seemed to have been constructed for one purpose only, a sexual one, her arms and legs and head and shoulders and hair seemed as much like sexual organs as the actual sexual organs. She stopped looking and thinking that she, too, had posed like that: seeing it from the outside, it was more indecent than she had thought. She turned back towards the other end of the room, partly so as not to be blinded by the floodlights, and only then did she notice that along one of the two longer walls there ran a narrow shelf on which stood, in a row, objects she couldn’t make out immediately, and when she did make them out her first thought was that they were toys: lorries, tipper trucks, tractors, other vehicles, maybe agricultural ones, each one about ten centimetres long at most. She picked up a silver tanker lorry, she was puzzled at first, but then it struck her that the imitation was perfect, these weren’t toys, they were industrial models.

  ‘They’re nice, aren’t they, but don’t touch,’ the young man said, he obviously had eyes in the back of his head, all the while continuing to take photographs, ‘yes, yes, move, there, good, stop, twelve.’

  Go on, she thought, what did she care about the models, she was drowning in the heat and the bad smell, and in her anger towards herself, but it was much more than anger, much more than contempt, much more than disgust, almost hate, and perhaps more.

  Finally the photographer said, ‘Move, stop, twenty-five,’ and for the last time there was a click, and Maurilia came and got dressed again next to Alberta, who was looking at the chessboard: it was an endgame study, white to move and win. Next to the chessboard there was a little English chess magazine: the young man was clearly a fan of the great game.