The Scent Of Rosa's Oil

by Lina Simoni

“Does that mean that I can go to the second floor?” Rosa asked, half naughty, half surprised.

  “Only in the morning.”

  “And you want me to go shopping all by myself?”

  “Do you think you can do it?” Madam C asked.

  “I don’t know,” Rosa whispered.

  “Angela did it when she was your age. She delivered the clothes her mother mended.”

  Rosa squared her shoulders. “I can do it.”

  “Good. Just stay on our shopping route.”

  Rosa brought her right hand to her temple. “Sissignora,” she said, giving Madam C a big smile.

  She settled into her new routine with ease. She woke up at eight in the morning, helped Santina for an hour with the cleaning chores, had colazione in the kitchen with the girls, and then went to see Madam C, who gave her a daily list of things to buy. “Got it,” she’d tell Madam C as she rushed out of the Luna into the street. Her first stop was the vegetable stand, where she picked out fresh vegetables and ripe fruit; then she moved to the fishmonger cart, where she made sure the fish she bought didn’t smell of the sewer; and then she was off to the bakery, her favorite stop, where she stood in line longer than necessary to smell the fresh bread and pastries before buying. She walked back to the Luna slowly, with her shopping bags full and her gait that of a proud soldier on the way home from war.

  During her morning missions, Rosa discovered how much she loved to stroll in the caruggi alone and that she could do it without losing her way. She had followed Madam C in that maze since she had been able to walk, so that unknowingly she had built a map in her head of all the streets. Sometimes she took detours from the shopping route to go smell the spices at the Sottoripa markets, by the port, with all the ships nearby. She suspected by then that where those ships were going there were no talking birds or rainbow-colored leaves and no hut where her father lived in poverty and fished to survive. It wasn’t that important, she found out. Dreams were dreams, thoughts that lasted as long as one believed in them, and if her dreams of talking birds, rainbow leaves, and a hut by the water had been undone, surely there must be something across the ocean to replace them, something that would make the trip there worthwhile. In those days, she was reading avidly the books Madam C had bought for her. They were mostly books of sea adventures, which scared her sometimes, but also taught her about navigation, stars, storms, and sailors’ lives, making her longing for a sea trip even stronger. In the meantime, she felt so good inside when she could just look at the ships and smell the spices, and then walk the caruggi on the way home. “I’m Angela’s daughter,” she said to herself with her head held high.

  CHAPTER 3

  Over the years Madam C had put a great effort into keeping Rosa removed from the Luna’s activities and out of the clients’ sight. The long hours spent in the kitchen, the prohibition against visiting the second floor, and the strange sounds that came from the parlor had nonetheless fueled Rosa’s curiosity early in life. Around the time she had turned five, when the second-floor prohibition was still strictly imposed, Madam C went shopping occasionally on her own in the morning, leaving Rosa behind. On those occasions, Rosa would follow Santina up the stairs, asking her questions about the various cleaning utensils and offering to help her carry them around. On the second-floor landing, Santina would turn to Rosa with severe eyes. “Thank you very much, Rosellina,” she’d say, taking back whatever the girl was carrying. “Now go back downstairs before Madam C comes back and finds you up here.”

  Rosa nodded, but the moment Santina turned her back and began cleaning she’d run down the corridor and hide in one of the girls’ rooms. At the sound of her footsteps, the girls who were awake would gather in that room and play a game that made Rosa laugh every time.

  “Santina’s coming,” one of the girls would warn.

  “Get in here, quickly,” another would say, opening the door of a small closet.

  Rosa would run into the closet with her breath quick in her throat.

  “All clear,” someone would whisper a minute later, knocking on the closet door.

  They moved from room to room in stealthy steps, and the game was for Rosa to visit every room without Santina ever seeing her. Of course, Santina knew exactly where Rosa was the whole time, but kept sweeping and mopping and never said a word, figuring that as long as she pretended not to know what was going on she wouldn’t be in trouble. In the rooms, the girls talked to Rosa, played with her, showed her their personal belongings, letters, objects, amulets, and jewelry. There were nine small bedrooms on the second floor, four on each side of the corridor and one at the end of it. Each bedroom was furnished in the same frugal way: a twin bed, a nightstand, a chair, a small table, and a shallow closet carved in the thickness of the old external walls. Despite the uniformity of the furniture, no two rooms looked or felt alike, with the different objects the girls had in them and the different odors. To Rosa, each room was a world apart, and in each one of them, no matter who was the inhabitant, she felt comfortable and safe, even more so than in her own room. “When I grow up,” Rosa told the girls every time, “I want to have a room on the second floor, too. Just like yours.”

  The girls would shake their heads. “Don’t you ever tell Madam C. She’ll go nuts at the idea.”

  One of them would add, “Madam C goes nuts for lots of reasons. She’d better not find Rosa here.”

  Until two years later, when she would read Rosa’s essay at Miss Bevilacqua’s school, Madam C never found out that Rosa spent time in the morning on the second floor. The girls could see the street from the two rooms that had windows on the front, and when someone spotted Madam C turn the corner of Vico del Pepe and approach the Luna door, they shipped Rosa in a hurry to the third floor. “This girl has a clock in her head,” Madam C said of the fact that she always found Rosa playing quietly on the floor of her sitting room whenever she returned from her morning walks, no matter the hour. “How does she know?”

  All along, but especially after she had stopped going to school, Rosa had picked up conversations among the girls that made her wonder about the relationship between what was going on at the Luna and the Romero kids’ game. Annaclara, Francesca, and Carla talked often about their clients, how stingy one was, how old another one looked, how good a third one was at playing the game. “When I’ll have my room on the second floor,” Rosa said one day, “I’ll play the game, too. I bet no one will beat me.”

  “I’m sure of that,” Annaclara said with a big laugh. “Meanwhile, eat some more pasta, girl. Or you’ll be eight years old all your life.”

  “You can’t stay eight years old all your life,” Rosa laughed back.

  “Maybe not all your life,” Carla said. “But you can be eight for a long time. I was ten for six years because I never ate my meals.”

  “And I was six for five years because I talked too much,” Francesca added, placing a hand on Rosa’s mouth.

  Annaclara left the Luna one week before Rosa turned eleven. Rosa didn’t eat for three days. Six months later, Francesca and Carla also left. New girls came, but Rosa couldn’t bond with them in the same way. She withdrew from the conversations, took longer than necessary to do the morning shopping, spent long hours again watching the ships and dreaming. “Puberty,” Madam C explained to the girls who worried. “Never comes easy.”

  Rosa was almost twelve when Margherita arrived. “And who might this gorgeous young lady be?” Margherita said, faking awe, when Madam C introduced her to Rosa.

  “I’m Rosa,” Rosa replied, blushing.

  “With hair like yours, you should be a princess,” Margherita said, stroking Rosa’s curls. “I think I’ll call you Princess Rosa.” She paused. “If you don’t mind.”

  “I don’t mind at all,” Rosa said with the biggest smile anyone had seen in years.

  Margherita looked at the books piled on the kitchen counter. “Do you like to read?”

  Rosa nodded.

  “Wait for me in the parlor, Princess
Rosa. There’s something I’d love to show you.” She went upstairs and returned one minute later carrying her book of poetry. Rosa had never seen a book like that before. It was much bigger than her adventure books, with a soft leather cover and thick, sturdy pages, so unlike the pages of her books that often fell out after the second reading. They sat down next to each other and Margherita began to read, stopping every four lines to explain the meaning. Rosa was entranced, as Margherita had been years earlier listening to the man on the bench read to his love. All of Rosa’s books were adventures, where heroes died chasing monsters, soldiers fought mighty enemies, and storms stranded sailors on far away islands. She had never read anything about love. “We’ll read one page every day,” Margherita said, amazed by Rosa’s interest in such complicated words. “And when we’re done reading all the poems, we’ll start over. Before one month”—she pointed at the book—“you’ll be able to understand all this on your own.”

  Between Dante’s cryptic descriptions of Beatrice, Petrarca’s ecstatic words about Laura, and what she heard and saw in the brothel, to Rosa love became a mix of strange ideas. Many times over the years, during her evenings in the kitchen, she had placed an ear to the parlor door and a curious eye to the keyhole. On a few occasions, she had opened the door ajar. She had heard the men’s voices, the discussions about money, and what the girls whispered to the men, like “I love you so much,” “You are hot tonight,” “Come here, baby, and touch me all over.” Whatever that was, she thought to herself, it was nowhere close to the three-card game the Romero kids played in the street. She had never heard those kids say “You’re hot” or “Touch me” to the passersby. All they did was scream the same thing over and over to attract clients: “Find the queen, mister. Dieci centesimi to find the queen.” Not once had she heard any of the Luna girls ask the men to find the queen, and when she had peeked in the parlor she had noticed that the money the men handed to Madam C was not dieci centesimi, but much more. Then there were the stories about a husband and wife she had heard in school, including the fact that a husband and wife needed to be together for children to be born; the descriptions of the prostitutes, women who walked around naked, she had heard at Miss Cipollina’s school; and the evasive replies the girls and Madam C gave her when she occasionally asked questions about the game. For example:

  Rosa: “Do you only play the game when you are in love?”

  Madam C: “With this crazy sea, the fish will be bad tomorrow.”

  Rosa: “How many persons are you allowed to be in love with?”

  Margherita: “That I don’t know. What I know is that the number of questions you are allowed to ask is over the limit.”

  Rosa: “Does someone always have to win? Is there ever a tie?”

  Madam C: “A tie is what I’ll strangle you with if you don’t keep quiet, Signorina.”

  Rosa: “How long does it take to play one game? Do you always play it with no clothes on?”

  Madam C: “Remind me to buy more bedsheets tomorrow.”

  By her thirteenth birthday, Rosa had come up with her personal theory about love: for a man and a woman to love each other, the man had to have money and pay the woman before-hand. A man could love as many women as he wanted as long as he paid them. A woman could decide not to love a man if she was tired, like the girls and Madam C were sometimes. In any case, when women fell in love, they walked around naked. When a man married a woman, that woman became the only one the man was allowed to pay, and the woman could take money only from him. At that point, the man often wrote love poems for the woman, and the two became husband and wife. When a husband paid his wife, children were born.

  Madam C had conversations with Angela in front of the fireplace all along. “I’ll have to talk to Rosa one of these days. She’s no longer a child, you know. She asks questions, acts in funny ways. I’m scared.” The following night, she’d kneel in front of the fireplace again. “I wish so badly that Rosa could stay a child. But I’ll talk to her tomorrow, I promise, as soon as she gets up.” Any excuse was good for Madam C to delay the talk: that Rosa was still too young; that maybe she would figure things out on her own; that she was happy again now that Margherita was around, and who knew how she’d react if she knew the truth; that perhaps her puberty wasn’t over yet, and it was unwise to give a girl shocking news while she was battling such big changes in her body. “Non svegliare il can che dorme,” don’t wake up the sleeping dog, she told Angela one night. “It’s an old saying, and old sayings always give good advice.”

  Stella arrived at the Luna the summer Rosa was fourteen. She had one suitcase, so heavy Rosa thought it was filled with stones. “It’ll take two people to take it upstairs,” Rosa said casually but with a plan.

  “Then help me, girl,” Stella said, winking, “and I’ll show you what’s inside.”

  In her room, Stella opened the suitcase, and Rosa stared at its contents with surprise. The only other set of objects she had seen before that looked remotely like those was at the corner of Via di Scurreria, where Mr. Razzano, the robivecchi, sold used merchandise lined up on an old blanket set on the ground. As if by magic, out of Stella’s suitcase came dice, key holders, colored stones, sachets filled with sand, three images of the Madonna di Guadalupe, two balls made of lead, dozens of necklaces made with brown seeds, and an unspecified number of shells, crab legs, and dried fish bones. “They are my lucky charms,” Stella explained. “They go with me wherever I go.”

  Fascinated, Rosa watched Stella spread the objects about the room.

  “The shells must stay close to the window,” Stella told her, “for good luck. And the sachets must stay on the floor, next to the bed feet, for them to retain their powers.”

  “Powers?” Rosa asked.

  “They can predict the future. And don’t you ever wear any of these necklaces, my dear,” Stella continued, waving her index finger. “If you do, you’ll never fall in love as long as you live.”

  Given the theory she had concocted about love, Rosa wasn’t so sure that never falling in love was such a bad thing after all. Later, Stella laid out for Madam C the condition for her to work at the Luna: “I don’t see clients on Friday. It would make my saliva turn sour.”

  The last Luna girl Rosa would befriend, Maddalena, joined the brothel four months before Rosa’s sixteenth birthday. She had run away from her Gypsy family back in Macedonia and crossed Italy east to west until, for no particular reason, she had decided to stop in Genoa for a while. She read tarot cards to people and told their fortune, which turned Rosa into a customer at once. “You will fall in love,” Maddalena said the first time she read the cards for Rosa, turning over the Lovers and the Ace of Cups. “And there’ll be changes in your life and you’ll take a long trip,” she continued as the World showed up next to the Fool.

  Rosa stared at Maddalena. “How did you know I want to go on a trip?” she asked.

  “These cards, my child, never fail.”

  The first time Rosa entered Maddalena’s room was also the first time Rosa saw wigs. Maddalena had six of them of different lengths and colors and kept them on small wooden stands lined up on her table. “What do you need them for?” Rosa asked, half curious, half suspicious.

  “Some men like me blond, others like me black. And certain men like me different each time.”

  “Can they recognize you when your hair is different?”

  Maddalena pondered a moment. “Some can, some can’t, some don’t want to. I love disguises.”

  Rosa stared at the wigs a while, dying to put one on her head, but couldn’t find the courage to ask Maddalena if she could try them. She kept thinking of those wigs all day long, trying to imagine how she would look with different hair, black and straight, or maybe wavy blond. It had never occurred to her before that one could change hair colors, and the more she thought about that idea, the more it seemed to her an amazing magic trick. She wondered if Angela would recognize her if she had blond wavy hair instead of her usual red curls, but he
r doubts lasted only a short moment because something inside told her that dead people knew everything and could see past wigs, walls, and even past the buildings that lined Vico del Pepe and the streets beyond it.

  She headed for Maddalena’s room on one of Santina’s off days, in the middle of the morning, when she knew the girls would likely be outside, either at the fountain washing clothes or walking around together for a breath of fresh air. Her plan was to try on every wig Maddalena had on the table and decide which hair color would make her look older, and that was the wig she would wear on the day Madam C would let her play the game. The door to Maddalena’s room was closed. As she was about to turn the handle, Rosa heard sounds: a man moaning, the springs of the mattress squeaking in a rhythm, and the man’s hard breathing as the squeaks stopped. She stood in the corridor a moment, listening to the fast beats of her heart, then ran downstairs and out of the Luna, and walked aimlessly about the caruggi until the port was in sight.

  The following morning, Rosa helped Santina with the chores as usual, but instead of following the maid from room to room, she lingered in Maddalena’s bedroom a while, lying on the bed quietly, trying to feel something different inside. She did the same thing the following day, and then again the morning after. Once, in Stella’s room, she took off her clothes before lying on the bed, then bounced her body up and down, trying to reproduce the squeaking sounds. She felt nothing worthy of notice for a while. One week later, lying unclothed on Margherita’s bed, smelling incense and scented candles, touching for the first time her hard nipples and softly squeezing her breasts, she felt a heat in her belly that she had never felt before. She left Margherita’s room and went upstairs. “I’m ready,” she told Madam C in a serious voice.

  Madam C looked at her with surprise. “Ready for what?”

  “To play the game.”

  “Nonsense,” said Madam C.

  “I’m not a child anymore.”

  “Yes, you are, dear. You have no idea.”