The Scent Of Rosa's Oil (3 page)

That night they went to a bar by the port, the Stella Maris, a pickup place for prostitutes who worked illegally out of the brothels. Angela was one of them. By then, she had already experienced most of the dangers of that life: adventurers without scruples, drunks, perverts prone to violence and rough games, and, last but not least, the hostility of the brothels’ owners, who hated the “strays,” as they called them, for taking away their business by charging less than the brothels did. Still, Angela entered the crowded bar with her head high, proud of her shiny pink dress and the fresh rose she wore on her heart, below the neckline. Clotilde walked behind her in a daze, staring at the men drinking and smoking cigars, intoxicated by sounds and odors she had never heard or smelled before. They sat at a table, and three sailors who were standing by the counter joined them at once. One of them bought a round of drinks. A second sailor ran a hand across Angela’s breasts, and Angela chuckled, then told the sailor that would cost him and did he have any money or was he a bum. Then the third sailor grazed Clotilde’s neck with his fingers, and Clotilde felt a long wave of heat filling her cheeks and going to the tip of her nose. Angela noticed at once her friend’s big, fearful eyes and told the sailor not to touch her, as she was not what he thought she was. The sailor laughed and asked, “What is she doing here if she’s not a whore?”

“They are not all like him,” Angela said after the sailors had left the table. “I meet gentlemen sometimes, who know how to treat a lady.” Clotilde stared at Angela a while, wondering where those gentlemen were, as she would have liked to be treated like a lady right there and then. Two of the three sailors came back shortly with a roll of banknotes. Angela counted the money carefully before nodding a yes and standing up. “Come along,” she told Clotilde. She paused, then spoke softly in Clotilde’s ear. “Unless you want to stay here by yourself.”

At that, Clotilde stood up fast, and they all went back to Angela’s place, which was only two blocks away. Clotilde sat outside the apartment, on the stairs, while inside Angela took care of the sailors, and that was the part of the evening Clotilde liked the least, sitting all by herself on the musty floor, and thank God she was still wearing the yellow dress, so she could look at it and feel less alone.

The sailors left in a hurry a half hour later. From the open doorway, Angela waved for Clotilde to come in. She showed her the money, stacked in a pile on the small table next to the wood stove. “One of these is for you,” she said, taking a banknote and handing it over.

Clotilde shook her head.

“You helped me,” Angela insisted.

So Clotilde took the banknote, hoping her mother would be busy that night up in heaven and wouldn’t have time to look down and notice.

They went back to the bar ten minutes later and returned home shortly with more sailors. Again, Angela handed Clotilde a banknote after the sailors left. “I’m tired,” Angela said, yawning. “Let’s go to sleep.”

It was then that Clotilde realized that she had left home many hours earlier to go to the market and had not returned. She hadn’t made dinner for her brothers, or washed the floors, or ironed clothes. For sure her brothers would beat her if she showed up. Her stomach shrank for a moment. She looked out the window at the dark shadows of the sea, then gazed about the room and saw Angela snuggling under the covers and falling asleep. “Good night,” she whispered, then understood with clarity that she would never go back to Vico Caprettari, because home for her was where she was now, in Angela’s apartment, with the yellow dress, the banknotes, and the musky smell of the sailors.

The following morning, Clotilde awoke in a thick daze. From across the room, Angela lifted her eyes from her needlework. “Good morning, my friend,” she blurted out in a joyful voice. Clotilde yawned and stretched before coming to a seated position. “So,” Angela asked, “have you decided?”

“What?” Clotilde asked in a raspy voice.

“If you want to be in business with me.”

Clotilde bent her neck forward, as if to hide her face. She thought of her brothers. As much as she tried to visualize their faces, all she could come up with was a blur. Then she thought of her mother, and her gentle, loving face came to her in full clarity. She grimaced and let out a long, deep sigh.

“It’s only a job,” Angela said, forcing a white thread through the eye of a needle.

“I could find a different job,” Clotilde argued. “I could be a waitress. Or a maid.”

“And work for someone who will treat you as badly as your brothers did? Making little or no money for the rest of your life? Believe me, being poor is no fun. No fun at all.” She paused. “Wouldn’t you rather work for yourself? Be independent? When you do what I do there’s no one in the whole world who can tell you when to work, or where, or how. It’s you who decide.” She flipped the cloth over. “You’re the boss.”

Clotilde leaned back, raising her head to look at the ceiling. She remained silent a while, eyes fixed on a dormant fly, as Angela rhythmically hemmed the white cloth.

“I never thought of men that way,” Clotilde said after a moment. “Actually, I never thought of men at all. All I ever did was try not to think about the men in my life.”

“You don’t think about these men, either,” Angela clarified. “You use them. That’s all.”

The fly woke up and flew away. “I like being the boss,” Clotilde stated.

Angela’s eyes lit up. “Very well, partner,” she chirped. “You won’t regret it, I promise.”

Over the next week, Clotilde spent time learning the trade. She began by watching, for which Angela charged her clients more. Then she became involved in the foreplay, and Angela’s prices doubled because of that. “I’m ready,” Clotilde told Angela one afternoon, as they were talking about the evening plans. Angela gave her a smile.

That night, Clotilde’s first client, a tall, bearded helmsman with the belly of a whale and a sour odor of cheap alcohol and sweat, laid on her his fantastic weight. As he pounded her into the thin mattress set on the floor of Angela’s sitting room, Clotilde heard her bones squeak and cry out in pain. With her eyes closed, she dreamed of her ride on the hills on the white horse and of the sweet smells of grass and flowers.

From the bedroom, separated by the sitting room by only a curtain, Angela heard every one of Clotilde’s stifled moans, intermixed with the roars of the helmsman’s pleasure. In the morning, she found Clotilde at the open window, elbows on the sill, staring at the sea. “It’s a beautiful day,” Angela said.

Clotilde nodded without turning around.

“When businesses grow,” Angela said softly after a moment, “so do their offices. We need a larger place.”

Clotilde nodded in silence a second time.

Angela joined Clotilde at the window. “The first time is the hardest,” she murmured. “It gets easier as the nights go by.”

“I hope you’re right,” Clotilde sobbed, laying her head on Angela’s shoulder.

“I am, darling,” Angela said. “I am.”

The search for their new apartment began without delay. They looked first at the neighboring buildings, then as far away as the Stazione Principe and the western edge of the harbor—to no avail. Their reputation preceded them, so the owners of respectable buildings turned them down. The other buildings, the shabby ones with dirty lobbies, dark rooms, and shady tenants, which were common in the
caruggi
that bordered the port area, were something, both girls agreed, they wouldn’t settle for, as such places reminded them of the building they had been born in and vowed to leave behind. It took them two months to find an appropriate accommodation. At the onset of spring, through the intercession of one of their clients to whom they had to promise three months of free service once a week, Angela and Clotilde moved into a four-room apartment on the third floor of an elegant historic building halfway up Via San Lorenzo, out of the
caruggi
. Their arrival rocked the neighborhood:

“What are those two doing in our building?”

“I thought prostitutes lived only in brothels.”

“The value of our property will go down, I can assure you.”

“Let’s call a lawyer. There must be a way to evict them.”

“Maybe now that they are here, they’ll find an honest way to make a living.”

“Don’t count on that. Once a whore, always a whore.”

“Did you see how they dress? As if it were
carnevale
.”

“What am I going to tell my children?”

“What a scandal. One block down from the cathedral.”

Heads high, Angela and Clotilde ignored the gossip. They nodded greetings to their new neighbors, who pretended not to see them when they walked by; and they always had a smile for Miss Benassi, the first-floor spinster who led the neighbors’ march against their presence and kept a vigilant eye on the men of Via San Lorenzo to see if any succumbed to temptation. “I’m watching you,” Miss Benassi said one day as Angela and Clotilde walked by her door, “and all the people who go up the stairs. You leave our husbands alone! They deserve better company than yours.”

“Our husbands?” Clotilde said. “I didn’t think you had one, Miss Benassi, but I must be mistaken.”

Despite the hostility, Angela’s and Clotilde’s business blossomed like never before. They became known as “the queens” because of the beautiful dresses they wore, their regal demeanor when they walked in the streets, and the special treatments they gave clients who booked them regularly and for long shifts. By then, Clotilde had become an expert in the art of pleasuring men, surpassing Angela in creativity, audacity, and sense of humor. Her thoughts about hell and her mother looking down at her and dying all over again at the sight of her daughter in the arms of all those strangers had disappeared. She had a life of her own, being paid by men instead of doing things for them for free. “I’m proud of that,” she told Angela one day, “and if I am proud, surely my mother is, too.”

The brothels’ owners didn’t like their success one bit. Neither did the neighbors, who called the police on them at every occasion: a loud noise coming from the apartment, too much garbage left in the street, questionable individuals walking up the stairs. The policeman in charge of that block, however, was one of the queens’ clients, so no one ever managed to catch Angela and Clotilde in the act. One morning, Pietro Valdasco, the owner of the Ancora, one of the largest brothels in town, exasperated by the competition, showed up with two men at the queens’ place and turned it upside down. “It’s only the beginning!” he screamed, as Angela and Clotilde sat terrified on the kitchen floor. “It’d be much safer for you,” he hissed in their ears, “if you left town.”

Given that their business was completely illegal, Angela and Clotilde couldn’t press charges or even report the threat to the police. They mentioned it, though, to their policeman friend, who told his buddies at the bocce run, who told their brothers, cousins, and coworkers. At every telling, the story was inflated. By the time it reached the port and found its way inside the sailors’ bars, it had become a tale of great violence, with blood gushing from wounds and broken bones. Everyone at the Stella Maris was appalled.

“What kind of person would threaten two such beautiful ladies?” the owner cried out.

“I wouldn’t want anything to do with this Pietro Valdasco,” a sailor said, “today or ever.”

A second sailor joined in. “A business that uses such despicable practices should be closed.”

As a result, Pietro Valdasco lost clients and spent many hours cursing himself for what he had done. Later that month, he waited for Angela and Clotilde in the street, holding a bouquet of spring flowers. “I apologize,” he told them when they came out of the building, “for what I did to you. I must have been crazy that day. Why don’t you work for me? I’ll treat you like the queens you are.”

“Thank you,” Angela said, not taking the flowers, “but we don’t work for criminals.”

“And so you know,” Clotilde added, “there’s no criminal or threat on earth that could convince us to leave this town.”

Two weeks later, in a café, the queens ran into Ildebrando Balbi—Signor Balbi, for short—the five-foot-tall, bald owner of the Carena, a newer brothel located on Piazza delle Oche. “I’d be honored to have you two join the Carena,” he told them as he gallantly bowed, then made them an offer that sounded good to Angela and Clotilde for more than one reason: it included a guaranteed salary, something neither of them had ever seen; Signor Balbi was a polite, straightforward man who had never in his life threatened anybody; they were sick of the looks of contempt the neighbors gave them at every occasion; despite the apology and the flowers, they were scared of Pietro Valdasco and his men; they had been scammed by dishonest clients more than once, so by this time they clearly understood that it was easier and safer to work in a brothel than out in the bars at the mercy of adventurers and sailors. “I’m so glad you decided to work here,” Signor Balbi said the first time the queens set foot in the Carena. “With you two on board, we’ll make mincemeat of the other brothels.”

They worked at the Carena for eight years, without incident, and, as Signor Balbi had predicted, they boosted his business by bringing in a steady stream of new clients. Then, with the help of a close friend, Clotilde took over the Luna, a rundown, unsuccessful brothel, managed at the time by a drunkard and owned by a merchant up to his ears in gambling debts. Immediately, the Luna underwent a facelift. After a thorough scrub, the
graniglia
floors were polished, the musty chandeliers replaced, and the walls freshened with a new coat of whitewash. The front of the building also came to life when the marble door frame was restored and the entrance kept beautiful with a wreath of fresh flowers. On the day of the Luna’s grand reopening, Clotilde spoke to Angela and the eight girls she had hired. “From now on,” she said, “everyone will call me Madam C.”

The transition from protected paid employee to business owner didn’t come easily in an area of town that boasted more brothels than churches and at a time when the bustling activity of the port and the large number of transients and foreigners that populated it brought along thefts, riots, and a variety of serious criminal endeavors. During the first week of business alone two Abyssinian men shattered one of the Luna’s first-floor windows and broke in at four in the morning; there was a fistfight in the parlor; and one of the girls came down the stairs one night screaming bloody murder and showing everyone the knife cut she had on her belly. Madam C and Angela dealt with the situation with their grits. They threw the Abyssinians out of the Luna with kitchen knives pointed at the men’s throats; they settled the fistfight with a few blows of their own; and they delivered the man who had scratched the girl’s belly to the police. “You come back,” Madam C growled at him with an icy glare, “and your balls will hang in my parlor as a trophy.” Soon the message spread that no one, local or foreigner, should mess with Madam C. Thereafter the incidents became rare, then only memories, and within a short eight months from its grand opening the Luna was a profitable enterprise. Angela helped all along. Three years later, one week after her thirty-third birthday, she took Madam C aside. “I will no longer be with the Luna clients,” she said with a serene smile.