Last Stories and Other Stories (9780698135482) (25 page)

So this is my place, said her hostess unnecessarily. Later I'll take you beneath the easel, because I'm going to paint you as a nude cat goddess. You see, we're going to have a funeral for Giulia and Lilith. Now, these are more of
my
cats. I'll introduce you later. Time to get ready. Here. What's your name?

Giovanna.

Giovanna, take this atomizer and spray perfume on all those heaps of catshit, so our killjoys won't dare complain. Oh, mama, there you are! I have a cat mask for you! Did you hear there's going to be a double funeral? Giovanna, this is my mama, Malvina. She's my best friend. Mama, this girl's in love with Rossetti, the one in the Giardino Pubblico.

Well, well, said Leonor's mama, smiling and fanning herself. Rossetti, of all people!

What do you see in him, anyway?

You see, Leonor, he's like my father.

Does that mean you want to fuck him? Yes or no? Anyway, don't let that
man
dominate the situation. Mama, darling, entertain this little girl while I change.

Malvina Fini stood in her sweeping black dress, smiling appraisingly at Giovanna as if at a suitor. She said: Are you interested in my daughter?

God forbid, signora!

The guests were already beginning to come. The sentimental ones wore black, the sluts wore leopardskins, and there were any number of pseudo- and quasi-feline poseurs. Knowing what was expected, Leonor's mama led Giovanna down through the easel into the place where the niches were inset with frozen faded figures as in old churches, the atmosphere thick with silence. Self-absorbed pale women were wading naked in dark water with their hair like veils. Giovanna loved it. She had never felt so free.

For this latest saturnalia, Leonor now dressed herself in the coarse
gauzelike covering of a Roman mummy, painted with ocher figures of cats and high-breasted girls in profile.— Splendid! cried Giovanna.

Thanks,
cara.

But where are all the men?

The men around me are dead, her hostess explained. They're too limited in understanding, too brutal to survive. Well, except for Arturo, of course. Arturo,
caro
!
You look fabulous in that pink dress! I mean to paint you with a tropical bird perched on your finger. Oh, and you brought cake! Is the Prince going to be late again? Do cut Giovanna a piece, and spoon-feed it to her, for the poor girl's made of bronze. Now here come some men. I'll make them entertain you; they'll love it.

And Giovanna, who had never eaten or drunk anything before, sat behind a pastel cake as elaborate as a cathedral, hoping this would never end—for it was much superior to the eternity she knew at the Giardino Pubblico “M. Tommasini”—until Leonor laughed and said: Go ahead,
cara
! Don't be a prude. Eat.

Do you like me?

That's impertinent. No, don't look at me like that!
I prefer cats. They're much wiser than we are. You wanted men, you said? All right, silly! They're waiting for us in that room!— And opening a door, she showed the wide-eyed bronze girl a convocation of shining-eyed gymnasts whose chests gleamed with constellations of medals.— Fuck them all if you like; just don't take orders. All right now. Come sit by me. The services are beginning.

Lilith and Giulia, the two most important cats of the hour, behaved very differently. Lilith stalked slowly about with her tail upraised, while Giulia was scarcely to be seen.

Here came the chief mourner, Leonor's cat Sappho, who had a way of craning her head over her shoulder when she meowed for food, showing off her white breast; and when she raised her ears she was like an owl with round yellow-green eyes. Leonor opened her arms. Sappho came in, digging her claws into Leonor's robe as she ascended. Giovanna did not know what to think. She had seen cats in the park before, but until now they had been nearly colorless to her; she never imagined that they could be so intriguing. Why they preoccupied her at Leonor's can be explained from the simple fact that she had never been indoors before, nor had
anyone treated her as a friend, although she remembered certain looks of Rossetti's which she had, perhaps, overinterpreted; I suspect that almost anybody could have won her over. Wide-eyed, she watched all those nude women around her; they were as white together as all the skirts of a flock of nurses, titillating themselves for lustral purposes; and thirteen nude ballerinas danced in honor of the two dead cats while thirteen naked nuns sang feline cantatas. Beside Giovanna, applauding, sat a visitor from downstairs: a high-breasted mummy lady whose necklaces were faded in many colors and whose white belly was cracked right down to her mons veneris. With a sad fragrance of cypresses Our Lady now appeared to bless the funeral with tears which hardened into good luck pearls. She stretched out her hands, and Giulia crept into them unwilling-seeming, as if she could not help herself. Then the Madonna drew her in, cradling her against the Christ child's cold stone head. Giulia began to purr. Then it was Lilith's turn. So both were rewarded and consoled for being dead.

After the words of praise were sung, Leonor found Giovanna a gymnast with whom to waltz, but although she tried to dance, she was too stiff; Leonor laughed at her, saying she might as well have been a wooden skeleton made for processionals! Leonor was dancing with her mama and Arturo, giggling like a schoolgirl. Then she threw herself down by the shore of a bubbling black pool, her cat Salome lying across her lap with her white paws dangling, the claws flexing in harmony with her purrings.

Giovanna, she remarked, I feel quite sensual toward you—but you love Rossetti, so there's good reason to keep my distance. Mama, should I teach her how women do it?

Lolo, you're embarrassing her!

Am I? Arturo, let's start drinking! Where's that old man I like? You know, the one with the pet owl? Oh, and Gianluca arrives at last. How adorable he is!

Giovanna began to be homesick.

There was a certain lovely nineteenth-century Triestina in a high-collared white dress with a jungle of perfect leaves and flowers on her hat; she licked her lips at Giovanna, quite lustfully, but Giovanna was
not interested. Leonor inquired reproachfully: Baby, wouldn't you like to see
femininity triumphing over a city? Play with us; don't be a prude!

But before she could begin to bully the bronze woman, the Madonna said: Giovanna, everyone everywhere deserves happiness, even people in hell. Think of me as your mama who loves you. What would you like? Shall I ask Rossetti if he's willing to be your husband?

I want love, mama, any kind of love! I don't care anymore. And if he doesn't love me . . .

Now Giulia came creeping toward Our Lady, craving to be petted by that loving stone woman with the bloodstained forehead, and Our Lady lifted her up, embraced her until the Christ child began to open his eyes, then gently handed her to Giovanna. The instant she began to hold the cat, Giovanna experienced a hot feeling both in her bronze heart and between her legs.

So that's how it is, said the Madonna, smiling. Come downstairs with me. I'm going to introduce you to a lady who's a seventh cousin of mine. Would you like to be a cat goddess?

Will you decide for me, mama?

Well, then I think it's for the best. Leonor, darling . . .

But Leonor had already gone off to be pleasured by an ivory bird with a serpent's head.

Our Lady held her hand as they began to descend the stairs, and Giovanna found herself loving the dead cats more and more, not to mention the live ones; at the first landing she felt joyful tenderness for a certain woman's mummy which rested there upon her painted semblance within the white coffin; and the breath began to hiss within Giovanna's bronze windpipe because she lusted to know all the Egyptian cat-women who folded their arms across their animal-painted wooden breasts; smiling, upraising her lapis-bangled arms, a snake in a headdress lifted her golden head to bless Giovanna, and Our Lady said: Do you see?

One morning Lina (who never had any more cats, because they made her bulldog jealous) said to Rossetti: Marry me or make an end of it.— So he went back to his plinth, only to discover that Giovanna had abandoned it.
That was when he comprehended that she was the one he should have loved.— Lina's heart was broken, naturally, so Our Lady wept for her; the grey-green tear-streams flowed through the gutters and temporarily quenched the flames of hell. Meanwhile Octavian had already deserted his plinth; Maria Theresa had run away with an Austrian mountaineer; Massimiliano had strayed several times to give himself to pretty Croatian tourists; even marbleskinned Winckelmann had eloped with the bellboy of the Hotel Brulefer, so that Trieste's pantheon of park-heroes had begun evermore to resemble a fading fresco of apostles on the ceiling of a village church, the sky tarnishing toward a wintry blue-grey.

Entering the Caffè San Marco, whose twin brass coatracks might have been the skeletons of immense wine bottles, Rossetti rejoined the shadows of shutters and window-lines projected on the floor like eagles whose ribs were lyres. He wished to ascend the wide white steps of the Politeama with Giovanna at his side, although he might have wanted Giovanna solely because he did not know what else to want. At least his choices were as distinct to him as the opposing armies of spools and knobheaded cones in the ancient Egyptian senet game. Far away, across the length of the café, beneath the ceiling's breasty light globes, stood a mirror in which he could see himself and the old waiter below the reflections of the bridal-lace curtains. Rossetti sat down in the corner, and the waiter brought him three grappas. Just then, in one of the narrow silver-frosted panes—a rectangle of real life—he saw Giovanna, or someone much like her, but taller and stiffer, promenading hand in hand with Leonor Fini.

After investigating the way that after an extra grappa the coat stands at the Caffè San Marco begin to resemble horns and trombones, Rossetti, not knowing how else to act, reestablished himself at his post. When Leonor next encountered him, he was as well turned out, careful and lost in his own downward gaze, as a violinist.

All right, she said, I'll bring you to her, but only if you come in high heels, with a crown of feathers.

Be merciful, Leonor!

Rossetti, you're not nearly as masculine as you think. Lick up a little degradation; you might enjoy it. And you know what? If you do, both Giovanna and I will see you with different eyes.
Both
of us. Is that an enticement or what?

He murmured: I'm in your hands.

That's better, signor! Now come with me. I'm going to show you something. Maybe you've never been this way. Your elegant girls don't live up on the hill, do they?

Because he was so submissive now (and quite amusing in his high heels), Leonor did not mind helping him, although he slightly disgusted her—for in truth she used to enjoy his arrogance. Oh, well; there was nothing for it but to be as kind to him as to any maimed animal. Sensing this, he began to find her nearly as lovely as a nude amber woman. But then with a sadistic smile she giggled: Poor Octavian! and he saw that she had led him to the last surviving gate of Octavian Caesar's wall, which had long since became the Arco di Riccardo. High upon this relic, whose ankles and square toes were so deeply gnawed away that some people hesitated to walk through it, a cloaked and hooded little figure stretched out its sleeves, worn down to gruesomeness, its eyeless face like a peach pit, supporting or supported by spiral leafwork. The tracks and bubbles on the coarse whiteness were atmospheric pollution, no doubt.

Pinching his cheek, Leonor told him: Stay on your plinth long enough and you'll look just like that. What's the use?

Since he was now broken, she took him home to the atelier where she lived with her cats, her lover-man and her friend-man, explaining: Giovanna's underneath the easel.— But when her mama led him there, down, down, turn again, skulls clenched their fangs at him and goggled their eyesockets up out of the dark ooze, beside a dead butterfly and a dead lizard lying belly up. Far away, a blonde Sphinx was gazing at him. The Sphinx's breasts were so huge and round that they glued her to the mud.

Malvina Fini left him alone there. So did Leonor, because she was in love with her own breasts.

He saw a
woman not unlike Giovanna, but with still longer, richer hair, ornamented with leaves clasped in place by a dog skull, who stood beside a dark-furred cat-man or cat-woman; they were both leaning over a tombstone, admiring a lovely corpse. Closing his eyes in loneliness, he saw parallelograms of red light. And still Giovanna made no appearance, so at length he thought to descend another flight of stairs, which led him down, down, to the mummy realm; down to where two mummies were
playing a game of senet, the gameboard having been pleasingly inscribed in the top of the drawered box where the wooden pieces were kept.

Some people, including Our Lady, who eternally preserved a bright attitude, might have found these caverns almost festive, for their walls were sometimes decorated with red, black, ocher and green scenes of Apis, the sacred bull, who carries the mummies away; but Rossetti could not help but wonder: Why hasn't he carried
these
mummies away? Or is this where he brings them?— He now encountered a male mummy whose shoulders were hunched and whose knees were drawn up; he was grinning at Rossetti as if in agony, and his toes resembled white marbles. Disgusted, the bronze individual turned away, to browse among the nestled half-bodies of anthropoid coffins. Where was Giovanna? Cat mummies bared their teeth at him, lurking among the little faience things found in tombs; and although Rossetti did not know it, his expression, by which I mean the expression of his soul, for his bronze face could scarcely grimace very well, became a younger version of his hosts'. He had seen dead bodies before; sometimes murders were committed in Giardino Pubblico “M. Tommasini,” even right before his plinth; and during the Occupation, the Fascists used to execute people there at night; unable to do anything else, Rossetti, who himself hoped never to be destroyed by the earth, had taken note of the dead faces like cruder mummy-masks of the Old Kingdom; now he remembered them, and the suicided Silvia disturbed him like some tiny vampiretta keening by his ear. Moreover, at first the floor-mosaics had been nearly as ornate as the brilliant red chestnuts upon the green algae and within the yellow light in the bottom of the pond in the Giardino Pubblico “M. Tommasini,” but the designs grew ever more sinister, even to him, and the unpleasant atmosphere was deepened by the unsmiling joy of the goddess Hathor, whose diorite statue he encountered far too often; for even now Rossetti preferred a woman's shape like some drop of bitumen pulled upward until it draws in at the waist. Hunting for Giovanna, ever so lonely even among these lovely slender statuettes of nude wooden women with their arms at their sides, he faced another stiffnecked, grinning mummy, with its bony hands splayed out in the air over its crotch—a wonder they didn't break at the wrists!—and sometimes they approached him in a hostile manner, not that they could exactly trifle with his substance: a single blow from
his bronze hand and they went flying into shards and flakes! But whatever he did, he now found himself surveilled by the rigid brown muscles of a certain mummy's face, whose strained white grin and outthrust jaw felt still more unwelcome than the long white bones breaking through the torn brown fingers, pretending to be fingernails. He uttered Giovanna's name. The mummy pointed deeper into the darkness. When he went that way, Giulia and Lilith, those two dead cats grown gruesomely swollen, launched themselves at him from some high dark niche, clacking their teeth against his face until he brushed them aside, and they flew into the darkness wailing.