Giorgio Scerbanenco - A Private Venus

‘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!’

Her moaning faded abruptly, like a radio when you take the plug out. Because of her large round sunglasses he could not see her eyes, but her half-open mouth told him how scared she was. For a moment she sat there, frozen, her mouth frozen, then she opened the door and got out, clumsy with terror, as if she thought he would hit her if she didn’t get out, and no sooner was she out of the car than Davide closed the door behind her and drove off. He angrily overtook the Mercedes 230, which was now going at forty kilometres an hour: cars are always better than anything, better than any woman, you can drive a car twenty days in a row, but after only twenty minutes a woman becomes impossible.

He felt safe only when he got to the garage near his house, and slowly descended the ramp into the basement, which had become a science-fiction-like grand hotel for cars, with young men in aerodynamic costumes from Cape Kennedy and Marine caps, talking in broad Milanese phrases, all of which immediately re-established a more familiar climate.