A Private Venus (8 page)

‘Let’s have a drink.’

Obeying silently, she followed him, they were thirsty and drank a mint cordial, strong and iced.

‘Near here there’s a nice walk by the river.’ He had been here once before, alone, and had realised it was a place that was good for certain things, but he had never thought he’d one day bring a girl here. And yet here he was, with a girl.

Leaving the car in front of the cheerful little hut, they left the area of the service station. There was a road that led to the river, then there was a path that went alongside the river, and then there were tracks that disappeared amid tall bushes and secluded undergrowth. As they walked along the river, she took off her glasses and wiped the lipstick from her lips with a Kleenex, rolled up the little square of soft tissue and threw it in the water: she followed it with her eyes as it floated on the current until he took her by the arm and led her into the bushes.

Being perhaps the more practical of the two, she was the one who chose the place, squatting on the ground in the most sheltered spot. He stood there, smoking a cigarette,
and watched her as she took off her sky-blue jacket, under it she had a bra and she took that off, too, and then he, too, took off his jacket, which, outside the house, he only ever took off to make love.

On the way back, she could still see the Kleenex, it had caught in a clump of grass by the water, and she stopped to put on lipstick. ‘You’re nice,’ she said to him as she did so. ‘When I saw you in the Via dei Giardini, I wasn’t sure whether to approach you, you look like the kind of man who’d ruin a woman, but I needed fifty thousand lire.’ She put the lipstick and her mirror back in her handbag and started walking again. ‘We can eat here,’ she said.

Davide knew he wasn’t any good at bargaining, and, still without the vulgarity of any of those ten-thousand-lire notes coming into sight, he transferred from his wallet into her purse, once again, the rest of the sum required to reach the figure she had requested.

‘It’s too much, I know,’ she said. ‘Consider it a charitable donation.’

He didn’t like talking about money. ‘Where are you from?’ he asked.

‘Naples.’

‘You don’t sound Neapolitan.’

‘I studied elocution for three years, I wanted to work in the theatre, theatre with a capital T. I can recite some Shakespeare, if you like.’

They ate in the festive little hut on the autostrada. They exchanged a bit of superficial, generalised information about themselves: she said vaguely that she had come to Milan
almost a year earlier to look for work and hadn’t found very much, and he told her he was a clerk in a large office, which was true, after all, he worked for Montecatini, didn’t he?

‘A well-paid clerk, if you spend like that.’ He didn’t reply, so she asked him, ‘Do you still want to go to Florence and back?’

After the meal, the wild beasts that had defeated the censors in him were even freer. ‘I’d prefer to go to the river again,’ he said simply.

‘So would I,’ she replied.

They went to the river again and then came back to have a drink. She was the one who chose whisky: at the time, he preferred beer. After her second whisky he said, ‘Isn’t all that stuff bad for you?’

‘In theory, yes. In practice, as I’m going to kill myself tomorrow, I could drink vitriol now and it wouldn’t matter.’

Davide decided, trivially, that the girl was joking and that she had drunk too much, but at the same time he knew he was lying to himself, because deep down he had the feeling that the girl wasn’t joking and wasn’t drunk, she was a straight person, in her body, her character, and her way of speaking, she never said a superfluous or pointless word: if she wasn’t intending to kill herself, she wouldn’t have wasted time saying it.

‘That’s an idea we all get sometimes,’ he said.

‘Sometimes it isn’t only an idea,’ she said. ‘A few months ago I saw a book displayed in the window of a bookshop. By chance, I read the band across the cover. I can’t remember the exact words now, but they were something like: “As
soon as I’ve finished writing this book I’ll kill myself.” The author, who was a woman, had said that, and having finished the novel she did in fact kill herself. For her, it wasn’t just an idea.’ They were sitting by the window and every now and again looked through the blinds at the lanes on the autostrada and the cars flashing in the sun like photographers’ flashlights. ‘For me neither.’

He liked hearing her talk, and he even liked this unexpected topic, Eros and Thanatos are cousins, and he had a few ideas about life and death himself, ideas he’d never been able to talk about due to his lack of social contact, and he told her one now: ‘Of course living is difficult, whereas dying is very simple.’

‘Yes,’ she said, although his observation was not about her. ‘But I don’t have any desire to die, and never have had. Listen, if I’m not boring you, I’ll talk for a few more minutes about personal things, then I’ll shut up.’

‘I’m not bored at all,’ he said, and it was true.

‘Anything can happen in life. Today I met you, you may be the man destiny sent me.’ Her big wide mouth was brushed at the corners by the curtains of her hair, and she wasn’t smiling. ‘If you take me away with you, for at least three months, a long way from here, and spend every minute with me, then tomorrow I won’t have to kill myself anymore. I know it’s absurd, but that’s the way things happen to me. If you like me, it won’t be hell for you. In appearance—only in appearance—I’m serious, sophisticated, elegant, you can take me anywhere and I won’t make you look bad. I know how to eat snails with the correct cutlery, without holding
them between my fingers and sucking them as a friend of mine does. Even though you said you’re only a clerk, you probably don’t need to save money, but if you want to I can live on toast and Coca-Cola and I can sleep in boarding houses. But take me away from Milan for three months, at least three months, it ought to be much longer, maybe a year or two, but three months will do, and then I’ll see.’

At that moment, the thought of spending three months with this girl, one girl just for him, something he’d never been able to do because of the network of complexes in which he was imprisoned, opened wide the windows of life for him, and through those windows he saw the three months, verdant, luxuriant, with her naked body gliding softly over those three months, as the car ran on, taking the two of them across an invisible map, Cannes, Paris, Biarritz, Lisbon, Seville.

She sensed all this. ‘You mustn’t be afraid. I’m not what you might think, you’re not taking a streetwalker with you. I’m crazy, but that’s something else. Every now and again I need money, or else I need to feel like a spendthrift, then I go out and do what I did today with you, next to some bus stop, or a news stand, or there might even be someone following me. But it’s not my profession. It may happen two or three times a month, no more than that, though rather more often lately because I had to leave the job I was doing, and I can’t live only on the arithmetic and geography lessons my sister gets for me, apart from the fact that the mothers of those dunces never pay. I’m a criminal to myself, but I’m the kind of girl you can introduce to anyone, my father is a
teacher in Naples, I didn’t want to tell you, but I have to give you my references, you won’t want to take with you someone off the street, and I’m not like that. My sister works for the phone company, she got me a job there, too, but I can’t stand it in those henhouses so I left. Then this thing happened, and I don’t have any choice: either you take me with you, or tomorrow I end it all.’

‘What thing happened?’ Her words had rooted him to the spot.

‘I’m sorry, darling, I can’t tell you. You’re a gentleman, that’s obvious from the way you’re dressed. I’m asking you what I ask you because I’ve seen that you’re a gentleman, I wouldn’t tell the kind of louts you find around here if I prefer milk or lemon with my tea.’ Then she fell silent, giving him time to think.

And he thought. Despite all his sensitivity, he was deaf to the appeal of what could be defined as madness. Leaving for three months with a girl he had met only a few hours earlier, even he would call that madness, and in his world madness was in bad taste. But it depressed him, and he said, depressed, ‘I can’t.’

‘Why can’t you? Don’t tell me it’s because of the money.’

No, maybe not because of the money, although he didn’t like spending his allowance and then having to resort to his father. ‘Not only because of the money.’

Somehow, she could read his thoughts. ‘I understand. You can’t suddenly take off for three months, you have a family, maybe a girlfriend, you ought to tell your father, explain, make up some story: nobody’s ever free. I know all
that, but all I can do is repeat the same thing. I’m not trying to blackmail you emotionally, you’re the dearest, most polite, most sensitive man I’ve ever met. But only you can save me. If you don’t, the only other thing I can do is slit my wrists.’

‘Why me?’ Her last words had made him tense: they sounded like a threat.

‘Because I don’t have anyone else. There’s no other solution, no other remedy. Either you let me get in your car and take me at least a thousand kilometres from here or I’ll do what I said.’ Her voice was normal, without emphasis, without drama: she was simply explaining, as if to one of her pupils.

That was what struck him and started making him anxious. ‘I ought at least to sort things out with my father, I can’t be away for three months like that, there’s my work, too … Maybe we can meet again in a couple of days, maybe I can manage to—’

‘Darling, there’s no time. And even if there was, you wouldn’t come back. Either we go away now, immediately, and you let me stay away with you as long as possible, or there’s no point.’ She kept repeating the same grim dilemma. Then she fell silent again, leaving him more time to think.

But maybe he had stopped thinking. The anguish had made him nervous, and nervousness makes us closed and unemotional, it gives rise to cold thoughts. Maybe this was hysteria, lucid hysteria. A normal woman wouldn’t just decide to kill herself one day and then ask the first man she meets to save her because she doesn’t want to die and to take her away. This was abnormal behaviour, and the suspicion that
he was dealing with someone abnormal sent a chill down his spine. He didn’t know what else to say to her.

She waited, smoked, looked inside her handbag, looked at the marathon runners of the autostrada coming in and out of the bar, opened her handbag again, looked inside, then said, ‘Please, let’s go.’

They got back in the car. Davide drove in silence, not very fast, and at the first station he left the autostrada, drove the long way round through secondary roads and came back to the entrance to the autostrada, but on the other side, the lane that led back to Milan.

‘No, no,’ she began to moan. ‘I don’t want to go back to Milan, take me away, take me away.’ Her childlike whining was completely unexpected in a woman like her, it was a sign of hysteria, he thought.

‘I’ll talk to my father tonight, maybe I can convince him and tomorrow we’ll leave.’ He was lying, the way a doctor lies to a seriously ill patient.

‘No, if you leave me we’ll never see each other again, take me away now.’ She started moaning even more loudly as soon as he got in the lane to Milan.

‘Calm down, I can’t now, don’t do that.’

‘No, take me away immediately, otherwise I’ll have to kill myself.’ She was rigid, distant, hidden behind her hair, yet imploring.

‘Please try and calm down, when we get to Milan we’ll talk some more.’ But now he was afraid, a woman having a crisis would make any man afraid, all he wanted now was to hold on until he could get rid of her without making a scene,
but at any moment she might start screaming, struggling, forcing him to stop in the middle of the autostrada, the traffic police would arrive: hell and damnation, you spend five minutes with a woman, and after it you find yourself smashed to bits, as if you’d fallen from the last floor of the Pirelli skyscraper. The woman had seemed so calm, and now this was happening.

‘Turn back, darling, take me away.’ It was the same continuous lament, the obsessive lament of a little girl asking for ice cream, mummy ice cream, mummy ice cream, mummy ice cream, mummy ice cream.

He decided not to answer her any more.

‘Take me away, for pity’s sake, or I’ll kill myself … Get out here, get out here, at this service station, turn back, take me away, for pity’s sake … Take me away, darling, if only you knew, if only you knew you’d take me away immediately.’

Davide tried not to listen to her, if he listened to her he would yield, if only to make her stop. He tried to distract himself, but there were not many things to concentrate on in the landscape, unless you were a lover of pylons. In the rear-view mirror he could still see that beautiful Mercedes 230, somewhere between coffee and bronze in colour, maybe he was wrong, but he had the feeling he had seen it behind them on the outward journey, too: he liked his Giulietta very much, but he’d have liked a Mercedes sports car like that one even more.

‘No, no, no, I don’t want to go back to Milan.’

He could talk to Signor Brambilla, who was in charge of the family finances, ask if he could get him a Mercedes like
that without his father seeing the accounts and going crazy. They had almost reached the end of the autostrada.

‘No, no, no, no, no, I’m going mad, turn back.’ She took her handkerchief from her purse as he pulled up at the exit toll gate, and while he was paying, the ticket collector looked inside and saw her wiping her eyes: she looked ridiculous with her big sunglasses pulled forward and her hair covering her forehead. Davide heard a click, something must have fallen from the handbag, but the frenzy of that scene, the ticket collector’s impassive, mocking look—“He took the girl for a ride, and on the way back she’s causing trouble”—was too much for him.

‘No, no, no, turn back, no, no, no, take me away.’

He braked abruptly, throwing everything to the right, almost into the fields. Around them, against a sky red with sunset, the buildings of Metanopoli burned dully, and that
no, no, no, no
was shredding his nerves, for the second time in his life—the first had been as a soldier when he had hit the fellow in the next bunk—he raised his voice and roared, ‘That’s enough, get out, I can’t stand it any more!’