Difficult Loves

by Italo Calvino

  “The hell it does! Look, Caisotti, the date is on the contract. You’re required to let us have the apartments on the last day of December this year.”

  Yes, and then again, no. December 31st, agreement, contract. . . . It appeared that in one place the contract stated that the apartments were to be ready in eight months, and in another, “by December 31st.” However, legal opinion was that they needn’t worry, since there was no reason to suppose it would take long to get the affair approved. Moreover, they said, Caisotti is the kind of man who always gets his way. He’d got his hooks into the boys in City Hall.

  Quinto and Caisotti said good-bye as they left the notary’s office. Quinto was already wondering if he hadn’t slipped up somewhere.

  12

  Work started late. There were a couple of men on the job; they were digging the ground in preparation for the foundations. One was a lean, dark, bad-tempered fellow who wore nothing but a pair of shorts, with a handkerchief tied around his head like a pirate. He was a born idler, always taking time off to smoke or play around with the maids. Every now and then, with a heavy sigh, he would pick up the shovel that he had left sticking in the ground, first spitting on the palms of his hands. The other was a great bull of a man with red, cropped hair; he kept his head down as though he didn’t want to see anyone or hear anyone, though in fact he was a good-looking fellow, in spite of his savage, bewildered expression. He laid on with pick or shovel as though he were a bulldozer, and if he replied to the other man’s witticisms, it was only in sullen, inarticulate grunts. “A fine worker,” commented Caisotti, who paid a visit now and then to see how things were going. This was in answer to Quinto’s objection that with only two workmen the job would take a year. “He does the work of three men. Keeps at it for hours on end, without a break. Only wish I’d got a few more of his sort.”

  The main events of the summer were these: A dispute with Caisotti about the mounds of earth that were blocking the road. A two-week break in the work when he had to transfer all his men to another site, where he was badly behind schedule. And his failure to meet the first payment.

  Quinto was enjoying himself. He was always on the move; seeing Canal to get him to write a warning letter to Caisotti; seeing the notary about details of the registration of the contract – there was always something not quite in order; seeing Travaglia and getting him to the site to check that everything was going according to the terms of the contract – in fact, the foundations were hardly laid; seeing Caisotti to hurry him on or complain about something. Quinto’s professional friends were always ready to lend a hand, and though they didn’t take him too seriously they were amused to see him finally face to face with practical problems. Travaglia did not spare him a good deal of ironical witticism, the notary provided tactful advice, and Canal, all professional rigor, stuck his heels in and wouldn’t give an inch.

  Relations with Caisotti were more difficult, more indirect, but when Quinto did manage to get hold of him, he felt that he was enjoying the richest rewards that the project had to offer. Moral rewards, that is, since the question of the material rewards due to follow was shot through with an anxiety, a shiver of danger, which Quinto recognized – now that he was experiencing them for himself – as the spice of private enterprise. He felt morally rewarded when, for example, an exchange of phrases with Caisotti revealed the mutual respect between capitalist and contractor – the meaningful look rewarded him (“we’re in this together”), the flicker of confusion on Caisotti’s face, which meant that he had played his cards well. Their approaches were brusque. “Look here, Caisotti,” Quinto would open aggressively, bearing down on him while he was sitting alone at his usual sidewalk table in front of the Caffè Melina, scowling at a coffee cup or an empty glass (business was obviously going badly), “what’s this all about, eh?” Caisotti would reluctantly bring Quinto into his field of vision, then look away again as though he’d rather not have seen him. Quinto, rising a little self-consciously to his theme, would then proceed to justify his complaint. Caisotti would continue to look straight ahead of him, biting his lips as though he were keeping back a violent outburst and just managing to transform it (by means of the jerky movements of his head that followed next) into a general sense of discouragement and distrust. His replies were always wide of the mark, but loaded with an absolute lack of esteem; they were often so insulting as to preclude all further possibility of discussion. The gloves were off now, and the cups and saucers rattled as Caisotti’s fists, compact as small footballs, pounded on the table. In these exchanges, Quinto noted with satisfaction, it was Caisotti who seemed anxious to keep his voice down and prevent anyone from overhearing what they were arguing about. Then they would both calm down and act as though the barrier separating them had been removed. They talked about the future, about what they both had to gain from going ahead with the venture. They talked like partners, like equals. The motley, busy crowd that filled the street pressed up against their table. From where they sat, they looked across a gay, vulgar flower bed down to the sea front.

  Quinto would go home and find the red-haired workman busy at the foundations – the other man had left ahead of time; he was digging away like a madman.

  The appearance and the color of the site were changing. The dark, wet-smelling undersoil was being brought up into the light. The living green of the surface soil was disappearing under shovelfuls of soft earth and big, doughy clods heaped up along the trenches. Tangles of dead roots, snails, and worms showed on the walls of the trenches. Signora Anfossi would stand among the clustering plants and the flowers she was leaving to wither on their stems, the tall bushes and the branches of mimosa, and peer over the hedge to watch the mounds of earth growing day by day more numerous in the waste land which had once been her garden. Then she would turn back to her green.

  13

  “In the meanwhile, if you find anyone looking for an apartment or a shop, you can send him on to me,” Quinto said to the man in the Superga agency, after paying him his commission.

  “Send him on to you. . . . How do you mean?”

  “It’ll take a few months still, of course,” Quinto said. “The apartment building on my land – the one Caisotti is putting up. It’ll be ready by December?

  “December? Oh, sure.” The agent laughed.

  “Yes, December – it’s in the contract. We’ve got a reversion clause, you know!” Quinto was by now resigned to the fact that the apartments wouldn’t in fact be ready by December, but it annoyed him to hear it put like this, as a matter of course, by this individual who had nothing to do with the affair. “Caisotti has to hand them over by the end of the year.”

  “Sure, sure, the end of next year, eh! No good counting on dates when you’re dealing with a guy like Caisotti!”

  “Bit late to tell me this now, isn’t it? Who recommended Caisotti to me in the first place?”

  There was a woman waiting in the office, dark-haired, lean, tanned. “Did you say apartments?” she asked. “In what part of town? How many rooms?” She was about thirty-five, a Milanese or anyway from Lombardy. In her tight-fitting summer dress she looked too thin, even a little wasted, but there was a suggestion of energy, of impulsiveness, in her expression. Quinto looked at her. There was a certain refinement, a harmony of line, in her face and breasts and her bare arms.

  “No, no, Signora,” the agent said, “they’re not ready yet. Anyway, you want to buy an apartment and I gather these are to be rented.” He looked at Quinto.

  “That’s so, yes,” Quinto said, and the subject was closed.

  “Now, that new house I was telling you about, Signora,” the agent went on.

  “Good-bye,” Quinto said, going out. He was irritated by the way the man at once ruled out the possibility of the woman being interested in one of his apartments. He felt furious, suddenly, at not being able to discuss the matter with her: the number of rooms, the way they were laid out, the conveniences, etc. At his abrupt good-bye, she had looked at him questioningl
y, a hint of a smile on her face. An interesting woman, not good-looking perhaps, but interesting – very much a woman. What Quinto would have liked was not so much to talk to her about the apartments, but simply to talk to her. And in fact he had not moved far from the agency, as if he was waiting for her to come out. She did appear a moment later, and he went up to her. “Excuse me,” he began, “I just wanted to say – about those apartments, if you had thought at all about that part of town, the question of sale or lease is something we could discuss.”

  “Oh, thank you,” she said, “I really don’t know yet. As I was saying to the man, I simply wanted to get a general idea of the possibilities. We haven’t decided whether to take a place here or in Rapallo. My husband . . .”

  They walked along together.

  “You’re from Milan?”

  “Well, Mantua really.”

  “Ah, Mantua. Which part of the beach do you go to?”

  “Near the Serenella. Do you know it?”

  “Yes, I go there every now and then.”

  “Well, whenever you’re next there, my umbrella is the one nearest the pier.”

  Quinto went there the next day. There was not much beach and it was packed with people. She was sharing her umbrella with a group of friends, among them a colonel. Quinto had to sit down and join in the conversation, which was a great bore. He was sorry he’d come. She was nothing much to look at in a bathing suit and she didn’t interest him the way she’d done the day before. The sea was rather rough and no one wanted to swim, but finally they decided they ought to go in and splashed about in the breakers, making a great deal of noise. There was a rope, half rotten and slimy-green with seaweed, hanging from a row of iron posts. Nelly was nervous and kept close to the rope. As each wave came, Quinto held her by the arm, from behind, to support her. A wave that looked as if it was going to be bigger than the others was just on them, and Quinto managed to get his hands on her breasts. It was in fact quite a small wave. She laughed and did not remove his hands.

  They spent the night together. To find a room, Quinto had to spend the whole afternoon searching; it was August and hotels and pensions were all packed. Finally he managed to find a place where they only asked to see the man’s papers. The room overlooked a busy street and Quinto, used to his cool house up on the hill, was hot and couldn’t get to sleep. It was not a proper double bed and they had to lie close together. They were naked, the sheet was sweaty, and the light of a street lamp shone through the open window. Nelly was sleeping with her back to him and he had to lie on the edge of the bed if he wasn’t to be pressed right against her. He thought about waking her up. Being the first time, their love-making hadn’t amounted to much, and he felt that perhaps it was up to him to start again. He would only have needed a little encouragement, but she was asleep and he was lazy and it suited him to think that she was the kind of person who didn’t mind much one way or the other – not at all the sensual woman he had at first supposed. He looked at the back of her neck; her skin was no longer fresh and her shoulder blades were bony. For years Quinto had gone only with women who slightly repelled him physically. This was a deliberate program: he was afraid of ties, he only wanted casual affairs.

  He started thinking about the project, about Caisotti, about the payments. . . .

  14

  There was no cement. That month, apparently, the usual deliveries had not been made and all the building jobs in the district were idle, or so Caisotti said. Travaglia did in fact confirm the story when Quinto went to ask him about it, but then he started to laugh and implied that while cement was not to be had in certain circumstances, in others – well, there was cement. It was a question, in short, of being willing to pay for it. A good many crews had suspended work, but only for a few days; most of them were now busy again. Only Caisotti had no cement; and this was the time to start laying the foundations.

  “A put-up job, you say! This is the last straw, with all I’ve got to put up with – you people coming here to give me hell!” Caisotti turned on Quinto aggressively when he came to inquire what was happening; but then, as usual, he calmed down and started being sorry for himself. “You think this is my idea of a joke?” he whined. “Keeping my men idle, machinery rented for nothing, losing the best time of the year, missing my delivery dates. . . . If they won’t let me have the cement, what the hell can I do?” Lately the man had become quite impossible to deal with. He had got it into his head that because he hadn’t yet been able to meet the first payment, the Anfossis were going around setting people against him.

  “Look here, Caisotti, you don’t pay us and you try and put the blame on us!”

  “Hell, man, I’m having a hard time. Happens to everyone, see. And you go and bring the lawyer into it. He hates me, that guy does; I’ve known it for ages. And you have to tell the notary all about me, and he blabs it to half the town. Yes, and your mother, she goes around saying that Caisotti doesn’t pay his debts. Then what happens? They all start pestering me and I don’t get my cement.”

  “So it’s true then. . . . You don’t have the cement because you haven’t paid for it!”

  Caisotti waved his fist in Quinto’s face. “Watch your step, mister,” he yelled. “I’ve had enough! I don’t pay for it, eh. . . .” They were standing in the most chaotic part of the site, amid piles of earth and planks left here and there. From the tool shed the red-haired workman emerged and stood, towering, behind Caisotti, his back slightly bent, his face expressionless, a cross between an angel and an orangutan.

  “Put your hands down, Caisotti, do you mind?” Quinto said. “Starting a fight will settle nothing.” Never had the man appeared to him so much an unarmed hero in a hostile world, taking them all on single-handed. He was pleased with himself, too, for having responded to Caisotti’s brutal outburst with only a sense of cold superiority; he was aware all the time that he was the one who had the situation under control. And in fact Caisotti quickly put his hands in his pockets, as though ashamed of his outburst, and muttered something under his breath. Then he turned his anger against the big workman, finding some excuse to bawl him out. The man stood there in silence, listening, head down.

  Quinto remained master of the occasion. But Caisotti neither paid up nor did he push the work ahead.

  Then there was the argument about the pipes. They had been uncovered during the digging and then left lying where they were. According to the terms of the contract, everything recovered from the site belonged to Caisotti. But Signora Anfossi, seeing the pipes apparently thrown away and left to get rusty, leaned over the hedge one day when he was there, and asked him if he meant to do anything with them.

  He was in one of his black moods. “What do you expect me to do with your pipes?”

  “Well, then,” she said, delighted, “if you’re not going to do anything with them, they’d be useful to me in the garden. I’ll send someone to get them.” And so next day she sent the gardener for them and got him to fix up a system of pipes to water a bed of narcissus. This had happened more than a month previously. Then one day she had looked over the hedge (she heard Caisotti moving about on the other side) and she made some comment or other about his failure to meet the first payment or the work being behind schedule. In her quiet, composed way, she never lost an occasion, as she moved about the garden, looking after her flowers, to make some little wounding remark. He had mumbled something, not wanting to be drawn, and they both kept on with what they were doing. That seemed to be the end of it, when suddenly Caisotti started shouting furiously, “It’s theft, Signora Anfossi, theft, I say! I’m going to report you to the police! That’ll teach you to go about stealing people’s pipes! First you sell and then you steal back what you’ve sold. Fine way for the gentry to behave!”

  “You must be mad,” Signora Anfossi said, shaking her head.

  That was the day Ampelio came home. He had been attending a conference of chemists in Germany. Quinto was upstairs; he heard him talking to their mother, then go out again. She ca
me up to Quinto’s room. “Quickly, you must go after Ampelio and stop him. I’m afraid he’s going to do something silly. I told him that our nice Signor Caisotti had reached the point of calling me a thief, and Ampelio said, ‘Where is he, where is he, I’ll bash his head in!’ And he went off to look for him.”

  Quinto ran out into the road after his brother; he was some way ahead, walking fast. “Ampelio, Ampelio,” he shouted. “What’s the matter with you? Mother’s frightened. Where are you going?”

  Ampelio kept on walking, not bothering to turn around. “I’m going to bash his head in.”

  “Look, do we really have to take everything Caisotti says seriously? He’s quite irresponsible. . . .”

  “I’m going to bash his head in.”

  “That won’t help, Ampelio. I nearly poked him myself the other day. The bastard’s trying to create difficulties in order to put off the deadline. If you start a quarrel, you’ll be doing him a favor.”

  “But in the meantime I’ll have bashed his head in.”

  This might have been the moment to raise a different type of objection, namely that Caisotti had a pair of shoulders like a brick wall and fists to knock down a calf, while Ampelio was a university teacher who didn’t weigh much over a hundred pounds. But neither of them raised this point; it probably didn’t even occur to them. Quinto, puffing along behind Ampelio, developed a different line of argument. Their relations with Caisotti were in a delicate phase, he said; they had to use tact, diplomacy, pay no attention to his tantrums. The great thing was to be flexible. . . .

  “Flexible!” said Ampelio. “Paid off pretty well so far, your flexibility, hasn’t it? There’s not one brick on top of another.”

  It was Quinto’s turn to lose his temper. “God! I like that! I’ve been chasing Caisotti for months and now you suddenly turn up and start taking a strong line! Hail the conquering hero!”