The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories

by Jhumpa Lahiri

  I’m not a Catholic, even though my parents had me baptized (I could, in good conscience, declare that ‘I don’t remember the event’), and even though my three sons were baptized: to keep the peace, because it’s what Viola and my parents and my in-laws want. My point is, I don’t have the sense of sin that plagues Catholics. And I’m obviously a man of my time, by which I mean prey to the tensions and suggestions – contradictory, of course – of our age. Certainly I feel the influence of advertising, all the more pernicious the more subtle and clever it is. Now, the most widely advertised ‘item’ in Italy today is, precisely, sex. Literature, cinema, fashion and custom impose it on us continuously. My natural inclination to give in completes the picture.

  So without regrets and without complexes, one fine day I made up my mind and telephoned the number a friend had given me. I had only to mention his name, and the female voice, at the other end, invited me to appear, that very evening at five, in an establishment in the neighbourhood of Via Archimede, in the name of a certain Armida Ceccarelli, renter of rooms by profession. She was a woman of around fifty, jovial and still attractive. She welcomed me politely and immediately led me into the living room, where the girl, who said she was called Milly, was watching television.

  It was a Thursday afternoon, and so Passport, an English lesson with Jole Giannini, was on. I remember that the screen showed a mock-up of a greengrocer, and the professor was reeling off the various names. ‘Beans,’ she said in perfect English. ‘Peas, cucumbers, onions, garlic, avocado, artichoke.’ It occurred to me that articiocco is a term for carciofo, artichoke, widespread in various northern dialects, in an area, perhaps, of Lombard contamination. But I wasn’t sure and resolved to ask confirmation from a friend and customer, a philologist.

  The girl, Milly, was watching, interested, then Signora Armida returned with two small Turkish towels, handed them to us, and asked if we wanted to make ourselves at home, pointing to the door of her bedroom. The cost was ten thousand lire. Not bad. I realized later that half the amount went to the girl, half to the landlady. Before she left, Armida urged me to come again soon.

  After that I returned several times to the Via Archimede neighbourhood, always after calling to make an appointment. I ended up becoming friendly with the signora, who recounted her troubles – her widowhood, her rheumatic pains, her gossiping and nosy neighbours, the demands and hang-ups of certain girls. For my part, I managed to tell her my tastes, because I like women who are a bit short and plump, with curves in the right places, in other words. And I have to say that the signora always tried to please me and that we always got along until the day I read in the newspapers of a police raid at that address in the Via Archimede neighbourhood: they had jailed Armida Ceccarelli and also a Gennaro Lo Cicero, twenty-eight, her lover and business partner in the exploitation of the prostitution of others: under the Merlin Law it’s up to seven years flat. After that, I never heard about Signora Armida again.

  But in Milan it’s not hard to find another solution, so already, after a few weeks, I had another address, in the Viale Bianca di Savoia neighbourhood (an area I know because I went there once to put in some ads in the popular magazine Epoca), and a meeting with Signora Andreina. I never learned her surname and the number doesn’t appear in the telephone book. Anyway, there, too, it was ten thousand lire each time, half, as always, to the girl, and half to the landlady.

  Now, I usually go once a week, and that adds up to forty thousand lire a month. I don’t deny that the madam has the right to take care of her own affairs, but I think that the right to look after my interests is up to me. So, I thought, if I could cut the expense of the five thousand lire I give Signora Andreina and spend only five thousand on the girl, I would save twenty thousand lire every month, which I could use to rent a pied-à-terre somewhere. In fact I found one, with two rooms, for fifteen thousand a month, which I shared with a friend: even including the expenses for the cleaning woman, electricity and heat, it came to no more than ten thousand a month, and, once the minor expenses of setting things up were paid off, there was still money left over.

  So when at Signora Andreina’s I met a certain Linda, a girl of about twenty-five who worked as an operator at Stipel, the telephone company, whom I liked, and who also seemed to me intelligent, I asked for her number, and we agreed to meet outside. With her I inaugurated the pied-à-terre in the Bianca di Savoia neighbourhood: I had a record player there and a small bar, so that we could get in the mood first with a drink and a slow foxtrot.

  I like to start by taking the woman standing up, which is uncomfortable but exciting. We dance a little, then when I feel ready I break away and untie my shoes, while she takes off her dress. But I want to take off the slip or the girdle myself. I tell her: ‘Hold on, little girl. Let me do it,’ and I unhook her bra. Then I start to take her like that, standing up. Then I break away again and finish undressing, lie on the bed, invite her discreetly to take over, but not for long, because I like intercourse best. I tuck the five thousand lire in her purse while she’s washing up in the other room.

  With Linda, the telephone operator from Stipel, there was the beginning of an affair. One Thursday she was free, and since I had called her for the usual appointment she asked me to take her in the car to buy a few things and do some errands. It was June, and she was already planning her next vacation, and wanted to buy a bikini, a straw bag, sandals and other things I no longer remember. I drove, and we looked in several boutiques, and she even asked my opinion, before choosing the suit. We agreed that the one with white and green polka dots would look good. But there was no way to try it on, because the fitting room was occupied by a fat lady, so the salesgirl agreed to let us take the bathing suit home. If it fits when she tries it, she said, you can pay tomorrow, no trouble.

  We went back to the neighbourhood of Bianca di Savoia so that she could try it on. It was very entertaining: I began listening to Rachmaninov in the other room, while Linda changed, and suddenly she appeared before me in bathing suit and sandals, hips swaying; she took off Rachmaninov, put on a cha-cha she liked, and started dancing, just as she was. Then she had a drink, got excited, and I had the sensation that this time she had a real orgasm. I told a friend, but he’s a sceptical type, and he responded that maybe the wetness I’d felt was only the acid-foam-producing suppository, inserted for contraceptive purposes before the sex act. Actually I had an inflammation in the glans afterward, which would confirm my friend’s hypothesis, but it was still a satisfying experience.

  We decided to go away for a weekend together, as I’d once done with my wife, Viola, and we spent Saturday night in the same motel on the road to the lakes. Thus I was able to talk to Linda and get to know her a little better. She wasn’t happy with her job at Stipel, she said, especially because of a female supervisor who was old and sour, who made fun of her, blamed her for the delays in service and the malfunctions and the customers’ complaints. But, she added, now she was becoming friendly with a big shot there at Stipel, a certain Manera, fifty and married, and thanks to him she would find a way of getting even with that nasty old maid.

  She had talked to me about Manera at other times, partly admiring, partly mocking. Because he had strange tastes: for example, he would invite two girls to his house, besides Linda, have them strip and line up, crouching, under the window, between the wall and the curtain, so that only their rear ends were visible, sticking out. Then he’d enter, in tailcoat and striped trousers, a bowler on his head, parade past the bottoms with short steps, and, taking off his hat, say: ‘Hello, little asses!’

  Apart from that he was a gentleman, polite and lavish in his spending. He had even taken her with him to Campione, where they gambled until three in the morning. ‘Why don’t we go, too?’ Linda asked me one night. ‘Why don’t we spend a westend in Campione?’ I didn’t even correct her, and after that I stopped calling her, because I am certainly not the type to throw money away on the green baize, which seems to me in fact shameful and stupid.
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  Because he isn’t wrong, that friend of mine, when he says that I’m still basically a man from Pontremoli, that I haven’t forgotten how my grandfather and my father built up this little fortune, book by book, lira by lira, living on chick-pea pancakes and water from the fountain. In fact, every so often I get in the car and make the trip: it’s a lovely drive, below Monte Cisa and through the narrow valley, up to the old houses of Pontremoli, along the river. Above all, there’s always a chance you might find something, rummaging through the shops of the secondhand-book sellers. Or when they give the prize, and then publishers, writers and cultural figures come to Pontremoli, most of them from Milan. I spent a couple of holidays right nearby, at the quiet little beach of Bocca di Magra, which Elio Vittorini and the critic Giansiro Ferrata1 discovered after the other war.

  Now I have to tell about one evening when, passing near Largo Cairoli, I was stopped by a flashy hooker, and I went up to her room with her. After the sex act we chatted a little – she was a mature but talkative woman – and so I learned that she had actually moved from Pontremoli, after this war, and had settled with her husband in Milan. Thanks to her work, and saving, she had managed to set up a small apartment in the Porta Ticinese neighbourhood, and now she continued to work, just to finish making the payments on the furniture and the sewing machine. She explained what the bedroom was like, the armoire with three mirrors and the marble-topped night table. She invited me to come and visit her, promising that for the occasion she would organize some ‘numbers’.

  That was the word she used, and, curious, I telephoned her one day and made an appointment for seven. It was a nice bourgeois apartment, well kept, clean, with the bathroom tidy and a small poodle and the coffee-pot always ready in the kitchen.

  ‘Oh, here we drink coffee from morning to night,’ said this woman from Pontremoli, whose name was Signora Anna. The room was as she had described it: she showed me a book of French pornographic photographs, and left me there while she phoned the neighbour upstairs, who was to take part in the famous ‘number’. After that I returned several times to Signora Anna, who arranged the number, always calling on a different friend. Between the two of them they wanted ten thousand lire, and that was fine with me. Usually Anna participated only in the foreplay, then when she saw that we were getting into it she got dressed, leaving to the other the responsibility of finishing the job, and she returned near the end to change the sheets. I was very happy with this arrangement, and I even gave her the phone number of the bookshop, so that she could notify me. One evening around seven she called.

  ‘Pierclaudio,’ she said (in fact, my name is Pierclaudio), ‘there’s a brand-new model.’

  ‘What sort of model?’ I said, not having understood right away.

  ‘A niece of mine. Seventeen years old. A real jewel.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘So we’ll see you?’

  And we made an appointment for the next day. The niece, named Rita, was really sweet, slender, blonde, modest in her printed calico house dress. We went to the room together. Anna helped the niece undress, showed her off front and back, praising her features, then left us. Meanwhile I, too, had undressed and was lying on the bed. I nodded to her to join me. When she was at the foot of the bed, and had already put one knee up (because women get in bed knees first – I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed), she stopped and said:

  ‘Would you like to have some fun or should we move on to the material act right away?’

  I was a little puzzled, and I wondered if Rita had said ‘material act’ or ‘material fact’.

  I said: ‘What?’

  ‘No, I meant, do you want us to do something material right away or should I entertain you?’

  After a while I was about to enter her, but she interrupted me again. ‘Excuse me,’ she said and naked as she was went to the door, opened it and called out:

  ‘Mammaaa!’ and then again: ‘Mammiiina! Mammina, the rubber!’

  Anna arrived, smiling, holding the envelope with the rubber, put the head into it, asked me if everything was all right, explained to me that Rita, her niece, was afraid, so young, of getting pregnant and losing her figure. I must admit that I was disappointed, partly because, given Rita’s youth and freshness, Anna, with the rubber, wanted fifteen thousand lire instead of the usual ten, and she had added nothing of her own. I didn’t ask the girl if Anna was her aunt or, rather, her mother; anyway I never went back. Anna called me a few more times, but I always declined the appointment, making up an excuse, and now she, too, has stopped calling.

  Finally she got it, that business is business, it’s true, but I, too, have to think of my interests, and I can’t spend fifteen thousand lire for a girl, as young as you like, but cold as a fish, and afraid of getting pregnant besides. No one understands that fear better than I do, but, on the other hand, if a woman wants ten or fifteen thousand lire for a single sex act, which lasts at most half an hour, all-inclusive, she ought to run some risk, no?

  Call girls definitely have some advantages certainly. They are almost always cute and young, clean and probably healthy (we men, too, have to run a slight risk, I’ll admit). But usually you have to take them sight unseen, trusting the taste of the madam. Certainly, after you’ve met one you liked, you can return to her; but the trouble is that these madams don’t like to keep the same women around all the time. Partly because the client likes novelty, partly because after a while two women always end up quarrelling – always for some foolish reason, you know how women are – and then a girl who’s offended is quick to blow the whistle, or get someone else to blow the whistle, to the police. Behind the girl there’s always a man – a ‘boyfriend’, they say – and it’s he who goads her to go to the police when the madam has done a real or apparent wrong. Anyway, it’s well known that with the new Merlin Law the one who gets caught is the madam/pimp, never the girl.

  Then, there are the neighbours, who are envious and gossipy, and the concierges, generally female, who are stuck in the Hapsburg era and act like spies. If they always see the same woman going up the stairs, they begin to talk, and the rumour sooner or later reaches the right person. So the madam also makes sure to move house periodically, but stays in the same neighbourhood, so that, for a tip, she can keep her old telephone number. Thus the clientele remains the same, on the whole, but the girls change often, and, since they never go more than two or three times with the same man, on the one hand, they have no way of gaining real professional experience; on the other, they’re not concerned with satisfying their partner, and always try to hurry the session along.

  Anyway, satisfied or not, the man won’t turn up again tomorrow, and tomorrow his neighbour will fall for the same scam, let’s call it that. It’s a vicious cycle of professional decline: certain attentions, certain considerations, that you could count on in the old brothels have become a memory of the past. In fact, I was in favour of the Merlin Law, and during the debate in Venice that accompanied the showing of Adua and Her Friends2 I stood up to speak in favour of that honourable lady, whose tenacity was highly commendable.

  It’s unjust and obscene that in a country with a republican and democratic constitution, founded on work and not on exploitation, it is the government that exploits prostitutes. Other countries, truly civilized ones, have long since abolished regulation, both of brothels and the other kind, which, disguised as a health inspection, registered streetwalkers and exposed them to the continual risk of a police round-up. Those round-ups were almost as offensive as the brothels.

  Just arguments, all, and sacrosanct, and I am ready to defend them even now. And don’t say to me: ‘What will our soldiers do?’ People who say that couldn’t care less about how the soldier will eat, dress, live or about his pay and his rations. And don’t tell me that regulated prostitution was a social service, either. Because if you truly want to talk about a social service, then, per absurdum, let’s organize obligatory, forced prostitution, for all women older than twenty-one – all of t
hem, indiscriminately, none excluded.

  They’ll say that not all women older than twenty-one, indiscriminately, feel like being prostitutes. And I will answer that not all men of that age feel like being soldiers, either, and yet they certainly do it, since the social need, in fact the national and patriotic need, for military service is acknowledged.

  They’ll also say that the prostitute’s trade (giving oneself, for compensation, to the first comer) isn’t noble. And I’d respond that the soldier’s trade (killing, without compensation, the first comer) doesn’t seem noble, either. In other words, I supported and I support the Merlin Law, even if I see its limitations and deficiencies. Which are basically two.

  First: the higher prices. When brothels existed, two hundred and fifty lire was on average enough for a satisfying connection (at least for youthful clients, who ejaculate easily). Today the same thing, and complicated by the hassle of hotels etc., costs no less than three thousand lire. The unemployed man, the soldier (this time, yes), and the humble factory worker have no way of getting off for less. And one could even go so far as to say this: that the rise in prices has caused an increase in pederasty, and the manifestations of this have spread à ciel ouvert, in public places.

  Anyone who goes to the city park, or certain clearings on the outskirts, near the stadium or the reservoir, knows that decrepit prostitutes wander in those areas; they’re older than sixty, almost horrendous to look at, and for five hundred lire they service the less prosperous client, behind a plane tree, in the shelter of a wall, against an escarpment. Now, the men who frequent these old hookers obviously seek nothing more than seminal evacuation. If that’s their purpose, it’s hard to see what real difference there is between achieving it with the prostitute and giving in to some pederast. (We could add, to the choices, getting off autonomously, by masturbating: but that isn’t completely true, as I could explain if I had more space.)