Giorgio Scerbanenco - A Private Venus

‘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.’