Giovanni Arpino - Scent of a Woman

‘Nice compliment. A fine wish.’ He laughed, disconcerted. ‘You’re not jinxing me, are you, Ciccio?’

‘I saw the revolver,’ I said softly.

He started.

‘Yes, sir. Last night. You were sleeping. I looked in your suitcase and I saw the revolver.’

He nodded, his face tightening. ‘Dirty bastard,’ he murmured.

‘I’m sorry I stuck my nose in where it didn’t belong, but I was right to,’ I said defiantly.

‘Filthy traitor. Rotten swine,’ he went on, controlling his harsh breathing. His right hand grabbed the edge of the tablecloth and twisted it into thick folds.

‘Call me whatever you want,’ I defended myself, trying to overcome the tremor in my voice, ‘but I’m not sorry I did it. I could even be held responsible if something happened.’

‘You have no responsibility. No right. No nothing,’ he shouted coldly. ‘I’ll beat the living daylights out of you. I’ll kick the shit out of you.’

‘You do whatever you think is best,’ I tried again. ‘But I’m not your orderly. Or your lightning rod. I can’t put up with everything.’

He allowed himself a faint smile.

‘You’ll put up with it,’ he said, pronouncing each syllable, ‘you bet you’ll put up with it. I’ll make sure you’re raked over the coals. You have only one way out. Know what it is? Run off. Scram.’

‘I’m not the type.’

‘You are. Idiot. Go ahead, get up. Get out of here. Beat it. Let’s see that courage of yours. I swear I won’t start shouting. I won’t run after you. Girlie.’

He waved his cane. The two guys were now staring intently at us, unsure whether to give us an amused smile or a look of pity. The cane dropped back on the table.

‘Go on. What are you waiting for? Move. You think you’re needed? You’re more useless than a dead weight. Get lost.’

‘I wouldn’t do such a despicable thing.’

‘It’s not despicable. It would be courageous. A word you’ve never heard of. What you like is saying “yessir”. And snooping around on the sly like a thieving servant. Well? are you going or not?’

‘No.’

‘I know what you’re thinking: you’ll go when it’s convenient for you. That’s what you’re thinking.’

‘Whatever you say, sir.’

He laughed in short, harsh bursts.

‘Poor fool. I’m a thousand steps ahead of you, I am. So watch out. I might be the first to scram. And force you to trot behind me with your tongue hanging out.’

I didn’t say another word, torn between the nagging thought that I had gone too far and the bitter satisfaction of having finally managed to speak out. He went on waving his cane, his breath laboured.

The two guys stood up. Before leaving, they gave us a long lingering look. I gave them a rude gesture, which persuaded them to move off into the park. I heard them laughing in the distance.

‘We should go back to the hotel. For the suitcases,’ I decided after a while.

He stood up. We started walking along the street at a rapid pace again, unable to find a single word to say.

I was very tired. My head felt flushed and heavy, but I got by without slowing down. His arm under mine now sought to lure me back into the usual hopeless pity, but I managed to remain detached, to resist, even though I was ashamed of the confused reasons for such absurd resistance.

At a very crowded crosswalk we bumped into one another, but no profanities or rebukes were thrown at me. I was in no mood to apologize.

The city’s noises had grown, rising into a long, protracted rumble. The late afternoon air grew even denser, scorching hot, despite the impending evening, its electricity quickening everyone’s steps and gestures. Along a stretch of arcades I realized I was staring hungrily at several large, colourful film posters: a grainy, hazy shape of a woman with a machine gun against the swaying yellow light of a rich pagoda.

He was whistling, lips tight, chin thrust out. Then he stopped, shaken by silent laughter, which he stifled in his chest.

The sound of a siren at the port made its way through the walls and the muffled depths of the city.

In the bar back at the hotel he perched on a stool and began drumming on the counter with his left hand, silently outraged at the lack of service. The last of the sun poured through a window, glinting off his dark glasses and lighting up his forehead, his hair.

‘Beat it,’ he told me as soon as he was able to bend over a glass of whisky. ‘I’m staying here. Until it’s time for the train. You: fuck around wherever you want.’

His hand was trembling. He drank the first sip with barely controlled craving. The wrinkles in his linen suit scrunched along his back.

I sank into a chair in the next room, by this time indifferent to any poster images.

…Maybe it’s all because of my low self-esteem. Idiotic and pointless to try to fool oneself: therefore I must predictably blame my modesty, that is, my mediocrity… Otherwise I would have known: even his most absurd words, vicious, hostile, would have managed to stir something in me, real intelligence or real rebellion. Not pity, because pity alone comes and goes and is of no use, but a different way of looking at the world, at life: seeing it and seizing that life in its most enigmatic senses, and laughing at it, laughing at the good and bad in it, with it, as he can, albeit atrociously… Maybe I’m just a poor, miserable individual who scrapes by on the piddling, presumptuous stash of his reasoning and doesn’t even enjoy the impulses, good or bad, of youth…

That’s what I was thinking, as the train plunged along in the night, he asleep in his corner, his head bowed, wobbling as the seat shook, his right hand in his lap. He had drunk too much, up until our departure time, and took some pills as soon as we boarded the train.

Violent whistles from the front of the train broke the dark silence of the night.

I watched him with the utmost care, marvelling up and down at the scars and pockmarks on his face, the impeccable knot of his tie, the slim wrist of his right hand, the lithe firmness of his crossed knees. Even the motion of the train added to his degree of gracefulness, rocking him with subdued languor, and I realized how that gracefulness constituted a perfect shell for the desperate fury that lay within it.

I envied him, in some obscure way, for the effect he had managed to create of himself.

His merciless words, that attitude of contempt, were then abruptly overturned in my mind and I finally saw how funny they were, so slyly charged with diverse tones, really laughable. I clamped my mouth shut to contain the burst of laughter that surged in my chest.

Who knows what his everyday life is like? I thought, in that house, with his cousin, the cat, the corridor, the whisky in the cabinet. But it seemed impossible even to guess. I couldn’t imagine him, picture him, on some street or piazza or the Lungo po, Turin’s river walk. Maybe for him too this trip meant a temporary escape from a limbo of routines, trapped one inside the other.

It seemed miraculously blessed not to know.

I went out into the corridor; the dark glass reflected me as a vague silhouette of uncertain contour. Leaning at the window I tried to peer into the night, a black void that for a split second suddenly fractured into shadowy walls, poles, signs, deserted gates slashed by vivid lights, and was then quickly restored.

In the reflection of the glass, my forehead pressed against the pane, I saw my eyelid, shiny and dark, the grain of the skin enlarged, the eye’s moisture quick to reappear after each blink.

And I remembered him in bed at the hotel, without his dark glasses, the gaunt, livid, turbulent splotch of his face against the pillow.