The Scent Of Rosa's Oil

by Lina Simoni

  As is often the case in Mediterranean towns, before two weeks went by, an oddity had become a fixture of the neighborhood. Shopkeepers and passersby quit wondering and gossiping about the bearded man seated on the ground and even occasionally stopped by him with a cup of espresso or a shot of white wine. Next to the corner of the piazza where Cesare sat day after day was a bar called Grifone, which used to be the Stella Maris, the bar where Angela and Clotilde had long ago picked up sailors. The owners had changed since that time, as had the bar’s name and the crowd that frequented it every day. The Grifone always closed before midnight, and the customers were mostly from the port crowd, longshoremen and coal-heavers who stopped there at the end of their shifts for a drink and to wind down. They became accustomed to the presence of the man outside and occasionally said “Hi” to him even though he never replied. He looked so bad by then, with his long beard and dirty clothes, that no one, other than the Luna girls and Rosa, ever realized that he was the former mayor. Roberto Passalacqua came by every evening to take him home. “You’re not coming back here tomorrow,” he’d say, pulling him up from the ground. “She doesn’t care about you, isn’t it obvious?” All Cesare would do was shake his head and cry. Not even Maddalena’s frank suggestion that he go home and wash had been able to convince him to stop staring at Rosa.

  Two months later, worried about Cesare’s health and the stability of his mind, Roberto walked up to Rosa’s stall. “I need your help, Miss Rosa. The mayor keeps babbling about a scent he smelled in your room at the Luna and won’t quit coming here unless he smells it again. I understand that you don’t wish to talk to him, and I have no idea what scent he’s talking about, but if you do know what he wants, please do something. He’s getting sicker every day.”

  “It’s an oil I don’t sell,” Rosa said. “I don’t even bring it to the stall. Sometimes I rub my wrists with it, though you can’t smell it here, in the open air and with the odors of the other oils.” She paused. “Some people claim it smells of apples,” she added. “I think it smells of Azul.”

  “Azul?”

  Rosa nodded.

  “Whatever that is,” said a perplexed Roberto, “could you please bring the oil with you tomorrow? So the mayor can smell it and perhaps make peace with his desires?”

  “I’ll bring a rag with some of the oil on,” Rosa said. “All right?”

  The following day, Rosa arrived at the stall with her merchandise and a square handkerchief of white cotton whose corner she had dipped briefly that morning in the flask filled with her perfect oil. Cesare was already on the piazza, by the Grifone, staring at Rosa’s stall as usual. An hour later, Roberto arrived. “Good morning, Miss Rosa,” he said.

  “Here,” Rosa said, handing him the handkerchief. “Take this to your mayor. He can keep it and smell it all he wants. This fragrance is stubborn. It will last a long time.”

  Roberto took the handkerchief and crossed the piazza. “Mayor?” he called, placing the handkerchief under Cesare’s nose. “Is this the scent you have been talking about?”

  As Cesare dipped his nose in the white cloth, his eyes lit with a glimmer Roberto had never seen before. He sniffed, and sniffed, and sniffed, then pressed the handkerchief against his heart. He would leave the piazza later that day, leaning on Roberto’s shoulder, and spend the next two months inside his house, holding on to the handkerchief day and night.

  As soon as Cesare and Roberto walked away from the Grifone, a group of longshoremen arrived and entered the bar in a single line. One of them stopped suddenly at the bar door. He was in his late twenties, tall, strong, and tanned, with deep, penetrating blue eyes.

  “Come on, Renato,” one of his friends said, “let’s have a drink.”

  “In a minute,” Renato replied. He stood outside the Grifone a few moments, inhaling. The sun was shining, and a breeze was blowing from the east, ruffling his wavy brown hair. He looked to his right, to his left, and behind him. He took a deeper breath, then entered the bar with a decisive gait.

  “I smelled a strange odor outside,” he told his friends.

  “It’s the smell of Genoa,” one replied, laughing. “You know, fish, salt, and beautiful women.”

  Renato shook his head. “It was something else. Something”—he paused—“unreal.”

  CHAPTER 7

  It was as if an earthquake had roared through his life. The scent was inside him, clung to his guts and bones. He thought of it every moment, while he drank with his friends at the Grifone, while he loaded and unloaded cotton parcels, and while he ate and slept in the apartment on Vico Cinque Lampadi he shared with Marco, a coal-heaver, and Gabriele, a sailor. He was unable to relate that smell to anything real. And yet it felt familiar, as if he had known it all his life. “I’m going crazy over this odor,” he told Marco one night.

  “Put cardamom, coffee beans, and mint leaves in a pot with water,” Marco said. “When I lived with my mother, that’s what she boiled on the stove all the time, so she wouldn’t smell the stench of my sweat mixed with the coal.”

  “Smoke a cigar,” Gabriele suggested, handing Renato a wooden box with three colorful crowns stamped on its lid. “On the Caribbean island where I bought them, they call these perfume de los dioses, gods’ perfume.”

  With sad eyes, Renato said, “I can’t even think of not smelling this odor anymore.”

  In the morning, Rosa arrived on Piazza Banchi and laid her bottles on the planks as usual. As she lit the candle for the vaporizer, she heard loud voices and rhythmic clanking sounds. They were coming from the south side of the piazza, and when she got there, she saw across the street, at the foot of the pier named Ponte Embriaco, a crowd of men standing around a podium, cheering and clapping. A few meters away, two policemen watched. “What’s the commotion?” Rosa asked a passerby.

  “The longshoremen are on strike,” the passerby replied.

  That explanation didn’t do much for Rosa, who had never heard the work strike before. Intrigued, she crossed the street and joined a few observers who stood at the edge of the group. On the podium was a man, passionately addressing the crowd. He was Renato.

  “We need to fight for our rights,” he boomed. “We can’t allow the shipowners to take advantage of us.” He raised his hands toward the sky. “Let’s not go to work today! Let’s show the owners who we are!” There was long applause, and a few longshoremen in the front row chanted and drummed on wooden barrels. “The shipowners wouldn’t exist without us,” Renato continued. “They need us, but they don’t respect us! Let’s tell them that we want a guaranteed number of working hours and higher pay. If we stick together, they’ll have no choice!” Another round of applause.

  Rosa was fascinated. The energy of the crowd and the charisma of the speaker kept her there a long time, forgetful of the oil bottles she had left unattended on the planks and of the reason she had even come to Piazza Banchi that day. She was unable to stop looking at the man the whole time. His eyes shone with passion when he spoke, and whenever he looked in her direction her legs grew heavy and she felt as if her heart were being transfixed by knives.

  “Let’s all go home!” Renato shouted. “If even one of us goes to work today, the owners will know we are weak.” Then he screamed at the top of his lungs: “We are for real!” An ovation accompanied the word real, and the rhythmic drumming on the barrels resumed louder and faster as Renato left the podium and was soon lost in the crowd.

  “Who is he?” Rosa asked a man standing next to her.

  “Renato Corsi,” the man said. “He’s the longshoremen’s political leader.”

  The strike lasted four days. Each morning, as the longshoremen gathered in front of the port entrance to voice their demands to the shipowners, Rosa watched them from across the street, occasionally venturing closer. Every moment, she looked for Renato. When he was not on the podium, she could spot him easily amidst the standing crowd, talking to his coworkers, encouraging them not to give up the fight. He was all she could think of. In
the evening, when she was back at the distillery, all she wanted was for another day to begin, so she could see him again and hear his voice. The smell of her perfect oil, which used to make her see Azul’s hill when she closed her eyes, now made her see Renato. Lying on her cot in the flower room, she dreamed of touching his shoulders, his muscular neck, the curve of his lips, and his wavy brown hair. She imagined herself kissing his eyes and him holding her in a tight embrace. He was in every fiber of her body, and she could no longer sleep. She tossed and turned, breaking into sudden sweats, aware of the shivers that ran down her spine, the hardness of her nipples, and the dull pain inside her belly that was so much stronger than the butterflies she had felt when she had walked in her bedroom with the mayor.

  It never occurred to Rosa that the strike could end and Renato would not be at the port entrance to speak to the crowd. So on the fifth day, when she arrived on Piazza Banchi and heard no sound other than the voices of the shopkeepers, she froze by her stall in disbelief. She walked slowly to the port, which seemed to be in order as it had been five days before. “What happened to the longshoremen?” she asked.

  Someone answered, “They’re back to work. Seems that the shipping companies gave them what they wanted.”

  She stood by the port entrance a while, in the same spot where the podium had stood for four days, hearing the echo of Renato’s voice and seeing his shadow everywhere. Back at the stall, she could hardly think or move as the day went by. The energy and good humor with which she usually promoted and sold her products had disappeared, and by seven o’clock in the evening she had sold only two candles and one small bottle of Paradise Oil. That night, she inhaled her perfect oil as usual, but when she closed her eyes, all she saw was a deep darkness that filled her heart with fear.

  Without asking, Isabel knew that something had happened to Rosa in the past week. “Life can be tough at times,” she told Rosa in the morning. “Don’t be too hard on yourself, and you’ll see things clearer.”

  “I don’t know what to do,” Rosa murmured.

  “Remember?” Isabel said. “I ask Azul in this situation. And you asked your mother for advice before. Works every time.”

  “Angela,” Rosa prayed as she left the booth and headed for Piazza Banchi, “I beg you, help me see Renato again. Go find him for me, wherever he is, and tell him to go to the oil stall because there’s a girl with red hair there who’s crazy about him.”

  Renato didn’t go to the oil stall that day, only to the Grifone, around three in the afternoon. Rosa saw him open the bar door and walk in. “I’ll be right back,” she told her customers, then crossed the street. In front of the Grifone, she looked casually through the bar window and soon spotted Renato seated at the counter, engaged in a conversation with other customers. A man was busy behind the counter. Rosa knew he was Paolo Disarto, the bar owner. She stood still, listening to her heart racing. The bar, she could see clearly, was full of men, and even though the Grifone was a respectable place, Rosa knew by then that a woman who walked alone into a bar was labeled a prostitute and treated like one. All things considered, she thought it prudent to remain on the piazza, near the Grifone, and wait for Renato to come outside. When he did, she stepped close to him and said, “Hi.”

  Paralyzed by her emotion, Rosa had not really spoken. Her lips had moved, but her mouth had produced no sound. So Renato, who was in the company of his friends, walked away without noticing her, and she watched him turn the street corner and disappear.

  That evening, as she was closing down her stall, she spotted Paolo Disarto out in the street, quietly smoking a cigarette by the bar door. She walked up to him. “I’m looking for Renato Corsi,” she told him. “I know that he comes here.”

  “He does,” Paolo Disarto said.

  “Can you tell me where he lives?”

  “I don’t know where he lives. I know that he works at the cotton warehouse. Why do you want to know?”

  Rosa pondered a moment. “It’s nothing,” she said, then returned to her stall.

  “The girl who sells oils across the street asked about you yesterday,” Paolo Disarto told Renato when he came in with three other longshoremen the following day around noon.

  Renato’s friends laughed. “Lots of girls are after Renato these days,” one said. His name was Giacomo.

  “Which girl are you talking about?” Renato asked.

  “See for yourself,” Paolo Disarto said, pointing to his left. “She’s outside, staring through the window right now.”

  Giacomo patted Renato on the shoulder. “Let’s go meet her,” he said, pushing Renato toward the door.

  The four longshoremen stepped outside. “Hello,” Giacomo said, giggling and looking at Rosa. “We hear you’ve been looking for our friend Renato.”

  “I know her,” the oldest of the four said. “She’s a prostitute. She was raised in a brothel.” He was Clarissa’s father, the one who had exclaimed “Santa Maria” and then spread the rumors about Rosa when Clarissa had told him that her classmate with red hair had attended Miss Bevilacqua’s school.

  Renato looked at his friends and waved his hands in the air. “Of all women,” he said, “prostitutes are the ones I’d never want to meet.” He turned around and walked back inside, followed by Giacomo.

  “How much to touch your hair?” Clarissa’s father asked.

  “And how much to kiss your breast?” echoed the fourth longshoreman.

  Her cheeks aflame, Rosa stepped back in a haze till her back hit the cart of a fishmonger who was passing by. “Watch your step, miss,” the fishmonger shouted. “This fish cost me an arm and a leg today!”

  Isabel was pressing tangerine peels in the mortar when Rosa arrived. “Hello, Tramonto,” she said. “You’re early.”

  Standing near the stove, her back against the wall, Rosa bent her knees and slid down in slow motion. “I don’t want to live anymore,” she moaned as her buttocks hit the floor.

  “Why?” Isabel asked.

  “Because there’s no reason for me to exist.”

  “What about our trip to Central America?”

  “Maybe we should go now.”

  Isabel scratched her head. “Hmm, you can’t go to Central America if you don’t exist. So, which is which?”

  “You don’t understand,” Rosa moaned. “My life is horrible. Everyone is mean to me.” She was silent for a moment, then, “Now I know how the mayor felt when he stared at me all day long from across the street.”

  “I knew it!” Isabel said. “Who is he?”

  “I don’t want to talk about it,” Rosa mumbled.

  “After Francesco was killed,” said Isabel, “when I thought I wanted to die, I had no one to talk to. I would have given my right arm to have a friend. You know how hard it is to make it by yourself? You, on the other hand, are so lucky. You have plenty of friends: me, the Luna girls, Madam C. So stop complaining. And if you have a problem, tell us, and we’ll help you through it.”

  “You can scratch Madam C from the list of my friends,” Rosa said with a grunt. She stood up. “I’m going to look for flowers.”

  It became a major hurdle for Rosa to get back to her business and smile at the customers as usual. She saw Renato again a couple of times, entering and exiting the bar with the longshoremen. Not once did he or his friends look in her direction, not from curiosity, not by mistake. Invariably, their indifference brought back the same burning shame Rosa had felt in front of the Grifone when she had heard the words of Clarissa’s father. “Angela,” she whispered, looking at the sky, “you know that this is not right. What should I do? What would you do if you were here, in my place?”

  Maddalena and Stella came to see her one morning at the oil stand.

  “You don’t look good, girl,” Maddalena said.

  “I have a sore throat,” Rosa lied.

  “Add honey to your tea,” Stella said, “and throw pepper-corns behind your back three times.”

  Maddalena gave Stella a long stare. “Talk
to me, Rosa. How come you’re sick?”

  Suddenly, as she looked at Maddalena, Rosa had an idea. “I need a favor,” Rosa said when the two of them were alone. “Can I borrow one of your wigs? The black one. And some makeup, too.”

  “What do you have in mind?” Maddalena asked, surprised.

  “I want to meet someone,” Rosa explained, “but he must not know who I am.”

  “All right,” Maddalena said after a moment. “You can come pick up the wig and the makeup before I start working tonight.”

  Rosa shook her head. “I don’t want to go to the Luna. Could you bring everything to Isabel’s booth tomorrow morning?”

  “I guess I could,” Maddalena said and smiled.

  “What’s going on, you two?” Stella asked. “You’ve been chattering all the time I was smelling oils.”

  “On the day you arrived at the Luna,” Rosa said, “you told me that your bags of sand can predict the future.”

  “It’s true,” Stella confirmed. “Why?”

  “I’m about to play a trick on someone.” Rosa paused. “Only a disguise,” she added, noticing Stella’s worried face. “Can your bags of sand predict if the trick will work or fail?”

  “I’m not listening to this conversation,” Maddalena said, walking away.

  “I’ll give it a try tonight,” Stella told Rosa. “Give me something small that belongs to you.”

  That evening, in her room on the second floor of the Luna, waiting for her next customer to arrive, Stella took the two white sachets she kept on the floor by the bed feet. She arranged them on her table, untied the raffia strings that kept them closed, and flattened them against the tabletop. They became square cotton cuts, with beach sand in the middle. One of the cotton cuts was golden on the inside, the other light blue. She took the round earring Rosa had given her earlier that day and buried it in the sand on the golden square. “Amakasa deres,” she said, closing the sachet and tying the raffia string around its top. Then she shook it three times. When she opened the sachet again and flattened it into a square, the sand was in a perfect circle. At the center of the circle was Rosa’s earring. She repeated the operation with the second sachet, reciting the words “Moraka ubeme.” Again Rosa’s earring appeared in the center of the sand circle.