by Lina Simoni
“What are those two doing in our building?”
“I thought prostitutes lived only in brothels.”
“The value of our property will go down, I can assure you.”
“Let’s call a lawyer. There must be a way to evict them.”
“Maybe now that they are here, they’ll find an honest way to make a living.”
“Don’t count on that. Once a whore, always a whore.”
“Did you see how they dress? As if it were carnevale.”
“What am I going to tell my children?”
“What a scandal. One block down from the cathedral.”
Heads high, Angela and Clotilde ignored the gossip. They nodded greetings to their new neighbors, who pretended not to see them when they walked by; and they always had a smile for Miss Benassi, the first-floor spinster who led the neighbors’ march against their presence and kept a vigilant eye on the men of Via San Lorenzo to see if any succumbed to temptation. “I’m watching you,” Miss Benassi said one day as Angela and Clotilde walked by her door, “and all the people who go up the stairs. You leave our husbands alone! They deserve better company than yours.”
“Our husbands?” Clotilde said. “I didn’t think you had one, Miss Benassi, but I must be mistaken.”
Despite the hostility, Angela’s and Clotilde’s business blossomed like never before. They became known as “the queens” because of the beautiful dresses they wore, their regal demeanor when they walked in the streets, and the special treatments they gave clients who booked them regularly and for long shifts. By then, Clotilde had become an expert in the art of pleasuring men, surpassing Angela in creativity, audacity, and sense of humor. Her thoughts about hell and her mother looking down at her and dying all over again at the sight of her daughter in the arms of all those strangers had disappeared. She had a life of her own, being paid by men instead of doing things for them for free. “I’m proud of that,” she told Angela one day, “and if I am proud, surely my mother is, too.”
The brothels’ owners didn’t like their success one bit. Neither did the neighbors, who called the police on them at every occasion: a loud noise coming from the apartment, too much garbage left in the street, questionable individuals walking up the stairs. The policeman in charge of that block, however, was one of the queens’ clients, so no one ever managed to catch Angela and Clotilde in the act. One morning, Pietro Valdasco, the owner of the Ancora, one of the largest brothels in town, exasperated by the competition, showed up with two men at the queens’ place and turned it upside down. “It’s only the beginning!” he screamed, as Angela and Clotilde sat terrified on the kitchen floor. “It’d be much safer for you,” he hissed in their ears, “if you left town.”
Given that their business was completely illegal, Angela and Clotilde couldn’t press charges or even report the threat to the police. They mentioned it, though, to their policeman friend, who told his buddies at the bocce run, who told their brothers, cousins, and coworkers. At every telling, the story was inflated. By the time it reached the port and found its way inside the sailors’ bars, it had become a tale of great violence, with blood gushing from wounds and broken bones. Everyone at the Stella Maris was appalled.
“What kind of person would threaten two such beautiful ladies?” the owner cried out.
“I wouldn’t want anything to do with this Pietro Valdasco,” a sailor said, “today or ever.”
A second sailor joined in. “A business that uses such despicable practices should be closed.”
As a result, Pietro Valdasco lost clients and spent many hours cursing himself for what he had done. Later that month, he waited for Angela and Clotilde in the street, holding a bouquet of spring flowers. “I apologize,” he told them when they came out of the building, “for what I did to you. I must have been crazy that day. Why don’t you work for me? I’ll treat you like the queens you are.”
“Thank you,” Angela said, not taking the flowers, “but we don’t work for criminals.”
“And so you know,” Clotilde added, “there’s no criminal or threat on earth that could convince us to leave this town.”
Two weeks later, in a café, the queens ran into Ildebrando Balbi—Signor Balbi, for short—the five-foot-tall, bald owner of the Carena, a newer brothel located on Piazza delle Oche. “I’d be honored to have you two join the Carena,” he told them as he gallantly bowed, then made them an offer that sounded good to Angela and Clotilde for more than one reason: it included a guaranteed salary, something neither of them had ever seen; Signor Balbi was a polite, straightforward man who had never in his life threatened anybody; they were sick of the looks of contempt the neighbors gave them at every occasion; despite the apology and the flowers, they were scared of Pietro Valdasco and his men; they had been scammed by dishonest clients more than once, so by this time they clearly understood that it was easier and safer to work in a brothel than out in the bars at the mercy of adventurers and sailors. “I’m so glad you decided to work here,” Signor Balbi said the first time the queens set foot in the Carena. “With you two on board, we’ll make mincemeat of the other brothels.”
They worked at the Carena for eight years, without incident, and, as Signor Balbi had predicted, they boosted his business by bringing in a steady stream of new clients. Then, with the help of a close friend, Clotilde took over the Luna, a rundown, unsuccessful brothel, managed at the time by a drunkard and owned by a merchant up to his ears in gambling debts. Immediately, the Luna underwent a facelift. After a thorough scrub, the graniglia floors were polished, the musty chandeliers replaced, and the walls freshened with a new coat of whitewash. The front of the building also came to life when the marble door frame was restored and the entrance kept beautiful with a wreath of fresh flowers. On the day of the Luna’s grand reopening, Clotilde spoke to Angela and the eight girls she had hired. “From now on,” she said, “everyone will call me Madam C.”
The transition from protected paid employee to business owner didn’t come easily in an area of town that boasted more brothels than churches and at a time when the bustling activity of the port and the large number of transients and foreigners that populated it brought along thefts, riots, and a variety of serious criminal endeavors. During the first week of business alone two Abyssinian men shattered one of the Luna’s first-floor windows and broke in at four in the morning; there was a fistfight in the parlor; and one of the girls came down the stairs one night screaming bloody murder and showing everyone the knife cut she had on her belly. Madam C and Angela dealt with the situation with their grits. They threw the Abyssinians out of the Luna with kitchen knives pointed at the men’s throats; they settled the fistfight with a few blows of their own; and they delivered the man who had scratched the girl’s belly to the police. “You come back,” Madam C growled at him with an icy glare, “and your balls will hang in my parlor as a trophy.” Soon the message spread that no one, local or foreigner, should mess with Madam C. Thereafter the incidents became rare, then only memories, and within a short eight months from its grand opening the Luna was a profitable enterprise. Angela helped all along. Three years later, one week after her thirty-third birthday, she took Madam C aside. “I will no longer be with the Luna clients,” she said with a serene smile.
Madam C frowned. “Why?”
Angela circled her hand over her belly. “Someone more important.”
Madam C dropped her jaw. “Who’s the father?”
Angela shrugged. “It’s my baby,” she whispered. “There’s nothing else to say.”
CHAPTER 2
“Get ready, Rosa,” Madam C said. She paused. “The smell of apples is still here.”
“For you,” Maddalena said, handing to Rosa the cardboard box she had brought in earlier from the street.
“Tonight you’ll truly look like a princess,” Margherita echoed, pulling the pink ribbon on the box loose.
Stella lifted the box lid and two sheets of tissue paper. “What do you think?”
&nb
sp; In slow motion, Rosa took out of the box a long white dress of silk and Brussels lace.
“It’s from all the girls,” Maddalena said, “although I did all the legwork, as usual.”
“I love you all,” Rosa mumbled.
“Try it on,” said Madam C. “It may need adjustments, and we don’t have a lot of time before the guests arrive. And you,” she told the three girls, “help me with the wine. Santo Cielo, we’ll never be ready for this party.”
The preparations for Rosa’s sixteenth-birthday party had been underway at the Luna for one week. Margherita, Maddalena, Stella, and the other Luna girls had been on long outings in the morning looking for the perfect dress for Rosa. Antonia, the cook, an old woman with a big mole on her cheek, had worked overtime in the kitchen for days preparing vegetable tortes, pollo alla cacciatora, and stoccafisso in umido for the thirty guests Madam C expected that night. Santina, the maid, who normally came to the Luna every other morning, had come every day that week to spruce up the first floor. In the parlor, she had scrubbed the walls to make sure the whitewash was clean, waxed the graniglia floor to make it shine, and washed the flowered curtains to remove the smell of smoke. Then she had cleaned every inch of Rosa’s bedroom twice. “This room has still a baby smell,” she told Rosa, mop in hand. “We need to scrub it off. When a girl turns sixteen, it’s a new life. No more baby smell for you.”
“Thank you,” Rosa said, grateful for the recognition of this important milestone, “but you seem to be the only one to notice. Could you explain that to Madam C?”
“Don’t worry,” Santina replied. “She knows.”
There was a baby smell in Rosa’s room because Rosa had slept there since her very first day of life, in the same double bed of wrought iron with a thick wool mattress, batiste sheets, and a soft white bedspread filled with goose feathers. Madam C didn’t believe in cribs. “Cribs are a wicked invention,” she had told Angela toward the end of her pregnancy. “Their only function is to keep mothers away from their babies. A man must have invented them, so he wouldn’t be bothered. Your baby will sleep in a bed with tall pillows on each side to prevent falls.” The double bed had been ready for Rosa for days in the room behind the kitchen—bedspread, pillows, and all. When the midwife had handed Madam C the newborn, Madam C had rocked her in her arms for a while. Then she had placed her gently on the bedspread, between the two lines of pillows, and sat on the bed next to her, caressing her tiny, soft, bald head and her forehead marked by three wrinkles. Rosa had fallen fast asleep.
Overall, Rosa was a quiet baby, at times absorbed in her own thoughts, at times staring at the people around her with large, startled eyes, as if she wondered where she was and why. She gave everyone big smiles. The Luna inhabitants were spellbound. Madam C, who had cried over Angela’s death for seven nights, held Rosa’s hands for hours and talked to her about anything just to see her smile. All the Luna girls took turns to bathe Rosa, sing her songs, and take her down the block to Mafalda, the wet nurse, four times a day. Puzzled by the number of different women who showed up at her house with Rosa, Mafalda, a housewife with huge breasts and two loud kids of her own, asked Madam C one day, “Who’s the mother?”
“I am,” Madam C said with pride. “Is Rosa eating enough?”
“She is. And she’s growing fast.”
“Your milk must be good.”
“It’s not my milk,” Mafalda said. “In all my life, I’ve never seen a baby surrounded by so much love.”
“We’re love experts at the Luna.” Madam C giggled. “You know that.”
Soon after Rosa’s birth, the schedule of the Luna underwent changes. Madam C moved the brothel’s opening hour from three to four in the afternoon, so there’d be time for Rosa to be brought back from Mafalda’s house and across the parlor while there were no clients lingering there. At the same time, the girls, who never got up in the morning before ten, now began to wake up at eight, ready to cuddle Rosa, wash her diapers, and take her out for a stroll in the passeggino. It was as if they had two faces, that of ruthless businesswomen who kicked men out of the bedrooms the moment their time was over, and that of unselfish, tender creatures devoted to the well-being of Angela’s daughter. The positive effects of the activities around Rosa spilled visibly into people’s lives: Rosa was calm and sociable; Madam C was relieved, as she didn’t bear the responsibility of raising Rosa all by herself; and for the girls, the time they spent with Rosa was a soothing break from their stressful work with the clients. They were happier than the prostitutes in other brothels. It wasn’t uncommon in those days to see men who had hopped from one brothel to the next for years become Madam C’s steady clients, fascinated by the relaxed, upbeat atmosphere they found at the Luna. They couldn’t have imagined, not even in their wildest dreams, that the reason for all that good humor was a child.
When Rosa began to crawl and experiment with climbing stairs, Madam C stated a few new rules for the girls. “The second floor is out. I’ll fire you on the spot,” she said in a tone that left no room for discussion, “if I find out that you let Rosa into your rooms. And after four in the afternoon she must stay in the kitchen or in her bedroom. We’ll take turns to keep her company till she’s asleep.”
The kitchen became Rosa’s evening world for a long time. She was fascinated by all the pots and pans, which she stacked on the floor to make strange buildings; she made music banging the stove with the silverware; she poured water in and out of cups for hours. Of all the girls who were at the Luna at that time, her favorite companions for those games were Marla, who taught her how to float pierced eggs in a pot filled with warm water; Lisa, who danced around the kitchen as Rosa drummed with spoons and knives; and Esmeralda, who told her tales of monsters, witches, and magic wands. The sounds of the parlor mingled in with the sounds of Rosa’s games: male voices, glasses tinkling, loud laughter. Odors seeped into the kitchen as well: strong, sweet perfumes, sweat, and the acrid smell of smoke. To Rosa, the sounds of her games and the lingering cooking odors became one with the odors and sounds of the parlor, and even many years later, when she no longer lived there, she’d still experience that strange combination of sensations whenever she’d think of the days of her childhood at the Luna. She’d also often wonder about love and loss, the two defining elements of her life, and how they had crept into her heart early, even as she drummed with the silverware and listened to Esmeralda’s stories. Transience came with the territory. By the time Rosa was four, other than Madam C, there was only one girl at the Luna who had witnessed her birth and had known her real mother. Marla had left around Rosa’s third birthday, Lisa and Esmeralda shortly after that. It was beyond Rosa to understand departures. Madam C explained to her that the girls who left had wanted to see the world and would return someday with beautiful presents for everyone, and new girls would soon be coming, who surely would love Rosa as much as the old ones. Rosa nodded in silence, thinking she’d give up all the presents gladly to be able to hold on to her friends, and what was the point of getting new girls when it’d be much easier to keep those who were already there.
It was shortly after Esmeralda’s departure that Rosa began to daydream. Madam C had taken Rosa on morning outings since she had been able to walk. They went shopping for food together and once in a while made their passeggiate longer, strolling all the way to the port. They’d look at the ships coming and going, the passengers embarking and disembarking, and the longshoremen loading and unloading merchandise on the docks. To Rosa, the port was magic. She loved to watch the ships detaching slowly from the piers and tooting their sirens in the air. She asked Madam C one day how far the ships were going.
“Some go very far,” Madam C explained, “to the other side of an immense sea called the ocean. The land there is called America. Others stay close by, just down the coast from here. They all have a great time speeding in the water.”
“Is America the place where Marla, Lisa, and Esmeralda went to see the world?”
“Maybe.”
“Can I go to America some day?”
“Sure you can,” Madam C said. “After you’ve gotten yourself an education.”
“How do I get myself an edu…education?” Rosa asked, having no clue what the word meant.
“By going to school, you silly girl.”
Rosa looked at Madam C with cheery eyes, thinking that whatever school was, she’d get it done quickly, and then she’d hop on one of those ships, those that went very far, and she’d go find all the friends who had left her, and when she’d find them all they’d have a big chocolate cake, like the one Antonia made on Sundays.
Antonia did not live at the Luna. She came every day from noon to four to cook dinner and lunch for the following day, and she had done that for years, since before Madam C had owned the brothel. In those days, Rosa liked to spend time in the kitchen in the early afternoon, watching Antonia dice and bake, amazed at the many uses kitchen utensils had beyond drumming, construction, and floating eggs. She thought constantly of Marla, Lisa, and Esmeralda exploring mysterious lands on the other side of the ocean.
“What are you thinking about, Miss Rosa?” Antonia asked once in a while, puzzled by the faraway look in Rosa’s eyes.
