A Private Venus

by Giorgio Scerbanenco

  He was starting to understand.

  ‘You do a reconnaissance. After seeing exactly where the Ulisse Apartments are, you have to find two things for me: a place where we can hide the car as close as possible to the building and to the main road, but without it being visible from the building itself. And the other thing is a secondary street which is near the building but isn’t the Via Folli. Or at least you have to be able to tell me if there’s neither a spot to park nor a secondary road.’

  Silence. They hadn’t heard the whoosh of car tyres for about ten minutes. It was almost two in the morning, they still had many hours to wait, and they were not the kind of men to sleep on the night before a battle.

  ‘My father liked playing solitaire,’ he said to Davide. ‘He must have left a few packs of cards here. Do you know how to play scopa?’

  ‘Yes.’ Scopa wasn’t much fun with only two players, but they had to do something.

  3

  Livia emerged from the front door of her building and got into the taxi. It was just after 1:30, the traffic was starting to thin out: many people preferred to eat at that hour. ‘Via Egidio Folli,’ she said to the driver.

  In the mirror she saw the driver giving the usual disgusted grimace: whatever address you give a taxi driver, he’ll think it’s a stupid destination. Why does anyone need to go to the Via Egidio Folli in their lives? Or to the Via Borgogna, for that matter? And maybe he was right.

  The driver continued along the Via Plinio, crossed the Via Eustachi, the Viale Abruzzi, turned into the Via Nöe and reached the Via Pacini. At this point Livia admired Davide’s driving skills, with which, of course, she was already familiar: the Giulietta with Davide and Signor Lamberti on board was ahead, always within sight, but never right in front of the taxi. Following a car by keeping ahead of it was a delicate operation in city traffic and Davide was performing perfectly.

  Despite the heat and the nervous tension which flustered her a little, Livia noticed another thing: her taxi was being followed. There was no skill in this discovery: she had noticed the car immediately in the Via Plinio because it had left at the same time as her taxi, and because it was a lovely car, a Mercedes 230, of a colour she liked, a bronze which verged on greyish brown, like caffè latte. She had seen it again in the Via Nöe, then in the Piazzale Pola and now in the Via Pacini. The little mirror she had in her hand as she painted her lips every now and again told her how faithfully the Mercedes was following her taxi and also how unconcerned its driver seemed about being spotted.

  The oral instruction manual she had been given by Signor Lamberti had covered that eventuality: ‘If you notice you’re being followed, ask the taxi driver to pull up at a news stand and buy a paper.’ This simple operation would tell Signor Lamberti that she had a friend behind her.

  ‘Could you stop at the next news stand, please?’ she said to the driver who, resigned by now, made no grimace, but stopped the car in front of the news stand at the corner of the Via Teodosio. Livia got out and was pleased to see the Mercedes stop a little further on. She was much less pleased to see the Giulietta disappear quickly at the end of the Via Teodosio. She knew Signor Lamberti and Davide were still protecting her, but no longer seeing their car unsettled her. She bought a fashion magazine and immediately got back in the car.

  In the Via Porpora, the driver asked, ‘What number in the Via Folli?’

  ‘At the end, just after the tollbooth.’

  The driver shook his head. ‘Then you’ll have to pay my return fare.’

  ‘Of course, don’t worry.’ Without ever turning her head to look back, using only her little mirror, she could still see the Mercedes perfectly well, it was just behind them now, gleaming in the sun, bronze, slender, and malign.

  ‘The Via Folli ends here, we’re in the countryside,’ the driver said. ‘Where is it I have to go?’ The stupidity of passengers had made him brutish: they never even knew where they wanted to go.

  ‘A bit further on, there’s a large building on the left.’ The road was running between cultivated fields and for a long stretch there were no houses of any kind: the illusion of being in open country was almost perfect.

  ‘That one there?’ the driver asked with a martyred air.

  They could see it already. Signor Lamberti had described the street and the Ulisse Apartments to her over the phone, just as Davide had described them to him after going there by bicycle.

  ‘Yes, that’s the one.’ She glanced in the little mirror, she could still see the Mercedes behind her. She wasn’t afraid any more, she knew Signor Lamberti and Davide were close, closer than ever. Next to the sky-grey building which rose in the middle of the cultivated fields, all by itself, because of some clever bit of property speculation, there was an old farmhouse, more than a hundred metres from the main road, peeping out from a small wood, and that was where the Giulietta was, amid the greenery, in the open air but invisible, and that was where her friends were, also in the open air in the scorching heat of the hour, equipped with a modest but useful little telescope with which they could enjoy a view of the whole Ulisse building, with all its twelve floors and a little of the countryside around, so green and sunny, and yet so disturbing.

  ‘This one?’ the driver said as he stopped, even though there couldn’t be any doubt: it was the only building amid all the fields, a twelve-storey sky-grey tower, gigantic and futuristic, vaguely reminiscent, in its isolation, of those monumental Aztec temples that emerge here and there in the wilderness. It was a building intended for human habitation, but nobody, or almost nobody, was living in it yet, even though all the apartments were already sold: people need to invest their money, they don’t want to keep their money in the mattress like their grandparents, so it was complete, finished, equipped with every facility. Around it there was a large concrete parking area, with white lines to demarcate the parking spaces, only the cars were missing.

  ‘Yes, this one,’ Livia said. She got out and gave him a five-thousand-lire note, she took the change, leaving him a lot of coins, all the while looking around without turning her head, but the Mercedes had stopped a long way back, almost at the bend. It was a perverse kind of discretion.

  The Ulisse Apartments did not have a caretaker. There was a large directory with buttons to press, and behind each transparent square was the name of the occupant. Livia pressed the one that had the words Publicity Photographic on it and almost immediately she heard the Entryphone crackle.

  ‘Come right up, second floor,’ a colourless voice said, and the crackling stopped. The glass gate opened with a click and at that moment Livia Ussaro felt like a fox putting its paw in a trap.

  On the second floor, a young man in a white smock admitted her without saying a word and pointed to an internal door, and she found herself in the usual square room you found in so many apartments. The shutters on the two windows were hermetically sealed, and so were the windows, but there was air conditioning, and it felt all right. You couldn’t say that the room was furnished. In a corner there were three standing lamps, off at the moment, in front of a much enlarged photograph of a high, decorative wave of the sea, presumably used as a background. In the opposite corner there was a big tripod with a kind of cigarette lighter on the top of it: Signor Lamberti had explained to her that this was the Minox. On a chair, the last and final piece of furniture in the room, there were some small-format magazines, and on top of them there was a chessboard, and on the chessboard a box with pieces, a black knight protruded from the box like a horse’s head from a stall in a stable.

  The first thing the young man in the white smock said was, ‘You can get undressed in the bathroom, if you want.’

  Although Livia was looking at him closely, she realised she wouldn’t be able to describe the man, or his voice: it struck her that it would be like trying to describe the contents of an empty box.

  ‘Yes, thank you,’ she said, but she didn’t move, she was clutching her handbag and fashion magazine to her dark red cotton dress.

/>   ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.

  ‘They told me I’d be paid,’ she said, politely but firmly.

  ‘Yes, of course, but let’s do the photographs first.’

  ‘I’m sorry, we can do the photographs afterwards.’ This was one of the instructions in Signor Lamberti’s oral manual. The aim of it was to remove any lingering suspicion, if there was any: a girl who wants the money first is someone who cares only about herself and isn’t playing a double game.

  The young man in the white smock didn’t smile, didn’t say anything, simply left the room, and came back almost immediately with five ten-thousand-lire notes which he handed over to her in silence.

  Livia took them and went into the bathroom. She undressed in a flash, without even closing the door. It was obvious the place had almost never been used, there were no toiletries, not even soap, just two brightly-coloured towels. As she left the bathroom she heard the young man swear, and from the way in which he uttered the swear word, a very vulgar one, she realised immediately, beyond any doubt, what he was: a homosexual, some ghastly new species. She thought that explained the colourlessness of his physical person, she thought it was like the monstrous colourlessness of the mutants described in science-fiction novels, exactly halfway through their mutation, when they still have the outer wrapping of humanity but their minds and nervous systems already belong to some ghastly new species.

  ‘What happened?’ she asked, conspiratorially, but politely.

  ‘It keeps flashing,’ the photographer said. In his hands he had one of the black leads from the lamps, it was broken and the plug was on the floor. ‘I have to fix it.’

  He hadn’t looked at her even for a moment: she would have liked to know what a homosexual thinks about the female nude. She saw him go out, he was away for a few minutes, then he came back with some Scotch tape and a pair of scissors, and standing there he started adjusting the lead, which had come away from the plug just as he had been inserting it in the socket. Standing by the chair, she watched him in silence, then she remembered that the manual had ordered her to make conversation, a woman who doesn’t talk is a woman who arouses suspicion.

  ‘Do you play chess?’ she said.

  ‘By myself,’ he replied. The mere word chess must have opened the secret doors of what, reluctantly, referring to such an individual, had to be called his soul. ‘Almost nobody plays it these days.’

  ‘I study the championship games, or I play with my father.’ It was true, or almost, not that she spent her days playing chess, but that her father had taught her the game when she was a teenager, and chess was very congenial to her character. She saw the young man raise his head for a moment and look at her, not as a naked woman, but as an entity that understood chess. But he didn’t say anything. So she continued, because it’s useful to show your adversary that you share the same passions, ‘Just a few days ago I saw a beautiful three-knight game in Le Monde.’

  ‘It wasn’t three days ago, it was more than a month ago, it was the game where Neukirch from Leipzig played white and Zinn from Berlin black.’

  ‘Yes, that’s the one, my father takes Le Monde because there’s a chess section, and he keeps every issue, it may well have been a month ago, I played it last Monday or Tuesday.’

  ‘I also take Le Monde for the chess section.’ As he fixed the lead, he seemed to be pondering whether he should suggest to her that they play a game of chess.

  ‘Do you remember the endgame? Black has had to move his king, then white moves his knight, threatening the bishop, black is forced to protect himself with the rook, but then white pushes the pawn forward and there’s nothing more to be done, the next move is checkmate.’

  ‘Yes, I remember very well,’ and again he raised his head, a hint of joy in his eyes, almost that of the classical music lover who suddenly hears his favourite piece being played, and at the same time surprise that a woman should know so much about the magical world of chess. ‘But I don’t like knight games, they’re too restricting.’

  ‘Too cautious,’ she replied, ‘but they say it’s only on the surface, at a certain point there’s always a battle in the middle of the chessboard …’ she said a few more phrases to complete the idea, but she had to control herself because she felt like laughing: here they were, a naked woman in a room with a homosexual fixing a lead, and they were talking about chess.

  ‘Just a moment, please,’ the photographer said. He had finished fixing the lead, but then something else had happened: they had heard the dull sound of a bell. The man dropped the wire on the floor, left the room, closed the door and in the hall picked up the Entryphone and lifted it to his ear.

  ‘Open up,’ a voice said.

  So he pressed the button that opened the front door downstairs and waited, after a minute the door opened and in the corridor he saw the man get out of the lift, in a very light hazel-coloured suit, a shade of hazel just a little lighter than his hair. He closed the door behind him.

  ‘How’s it going?’ the man asked. He, too, was young, but there was an air of suppressed violence about him that made him seem less youthful than the photographer.

  ‘I don’t like her,’ the first man said.

  ‘Why?’ The man spoke very quietly and very aggressively.

  ‘I don’t know, I just don’t like her.’

  ‘I never saw anyone. She came straight here without talking to anyone.’

  ‘I still don’t like her.’

  ‘There must be a reason.’

  ‘I don’t know. She wanted the money first.’ The photographer was whining a little now.

  ‘Strange, I wouldn’t have thought it. Sol said she was quite refined.’ He was starting to have his suspicions now, too.

  ‘Plus, she plays chess, like the one last year,’ the man said, confessing the real reason. The previous year, that damned brunette had tricked him to such an extent that they had had to move everyone out, all because of his weakness for chess. And now this one here was also an expert on chess, and had been about to charm him, she even remembered the Neukirch game, but at the same time she had made him suspicious, where did all these female chess champions come from, when most people today only knew how to do the football pools or collect the prize figurines in boxes of detergents and cheese?

  ‘I’ll take a look.’

  When they entered the room, Livia was in the corner, where the big photograph of the sea wave was, as if she was looking at the floodlights, but it was only so that she could be closer to the door and hear what was happening in the hall, although she hadn’t been able to hear anything. She was pleased to see this other man, almost young, probably a little short-sighted. He was another of them, they would both be caught in the trap, but she pretended to be nervous. ‘I didn’t know there’d be anybody watching,’ she said, ‘I don’t want anyone here apart from the photographer.’

  ‘Of course, you’re right, I’m going now,’ the man said in a gentle voice, ‘but first I’d like to ask you a few questions.’ With his hand he swept away, not gently at all, everything that was on the chair, chessboard, chess pieces, magazines, and sat down.

  ‘You’re drunk, I’ve never seen you before and I have no desire to answer questions from a drunk.’

  ‘But you’re going to answer, because you’re a nice person. Luigi, get a chair for the young lady.’ He turned back to her as the other man went out. ‘I’ve been told some nice things about you, I hear you’re a graduate. Is that true?’

  ‘Yes.’ The most important instruction Signor Lamberti had given her was not to cause trouble, to make sure that everything happened simply and calmly. If she insisted on not wanting to answer, it would be dangerous.

  ‘A graduate in what?’

  The photographer came back in with the chair, but she gestured, no, she would never put her private parts on anything belonging to these people, even though it wasn’t very pleasant standing there naked in front of the two of them. ‘History and philosophy.’

  ‘Do you
teach?’

  ‘No, I’m just a graduate.’

  ‘And how do you live?’

  ‘I do translations.’

  ‘From what language?’

  ‘I prefer to translate from English, but I can also translate from German and French.’

  ‘Do these translations pay well?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘In other words, not enough to live on.’

  ‘No. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here.’

  A pallid smile from the man. ‘That’s true. What does your father do?’

  The mention of her father, in this place, in this situation, so exposed to the fortunately not lustful looks of the two men, hurt her like a whiplash, but she restrained herself. It was obvious that they suspected her, and she had to convince them they were wrong. ‘He’s a watchmaker, he repairs watches, especially antique ones,’ she said calmly.

  ‘He must have spent a lot of money on you, you with a degree and all.’

  ‘I think he did.’

  The man touched his right earlobe. ‘But what I don’t understand is how a person with your class would want to do something like this.’ He seemed to be just chatting, as if in a fashionable drawing-room, so that it didn’t seem like the brutal interrogation it was. ‘I mean, you come from an honest family, your father has made sacrifices to let you study, you’re cultured and have a good education, you know four languages, you translate books that are probably difficult, I’ve even heard you’re an expert chess player. Don’t you find it strange that, for a bit of money, a woman like you ends up streetwalking late at night in the Corso Buenos Aires?’

  Perhaps the moment had come, as defenceless, exposed and dispirited as she was, to bring him up to date. ‘Maybe you never got beyond those girls in leather jackets standing by the jukebox, those scrubbers from 1960 with their long hair all straggly as if they’d drowned: according to you, they can streetwalk in the Corso Buenos Aires at night, but nobody else. I think you’re behind the times.’