Steve Katz - The Compleat Memoirrhoids - 137.n

She smiled at me when the music stopped and we separated. Something green was caught between her upper incisors. I thanked her and we turned away from each other. I sank into one of the folding chairs against the wall, and let my hard-on go down. Across the room plaid skirt moved in a dramatic ballet among the other girls. I don’t know why I didn’t get up to ask her to dance again. I was suddenly shy. I was even embarrassed. How could a kid be at fault for an erection? Did I fear this might be a step into a relationship I couldn’t handle? What would I have said to her? “How’d you like my hard-on during the Vic Damone ‘Blue Moon’?”

That encounter imprinted on my erotic memory. Any time I look into the distance and see a tight plaid skirt on a slim woman, I get aroused. Even now I start to squeak and roll when I see the plaid moving gracefully over there.

During the Second World War La Signora Foti fucked many American soldiers. The boys were stationed in or passing through The Salento (the heel of the Italian boot). She restricted her trade, as much as she could, to officers, because they had the money, and the etiquette. At the end of the war she built an apartment complex with her savings, placed a statue of Mary Magdalene in the pebbled yard, and put on many pounds. When I looked to settle my family in an apartment in Lecce, where I was going to teach English, I was steered by my horse-drawn taxi driver to La Putana. She was forever acknowledged for her wartime activity and admired for her enterprise as an investor afterwards. My driver knew she had an apartment empty because her son, who had lived in one of the apartments, had just been thrown into prison for printing and passing phony 20,000 lira notes at the 1960 Olympics in Rome. Jingle was due to arrive in a week, just under the flying deadline for pregnant women, seven months.

Signora Foti lived in the apartment below our rental with her daughter, Felìcitá, son-in-law Aldo, and granddaughter, Fiorella. Aldo was a neurasthenic, spent most of his time in bed, covers up to his chin, driven there perhaps by his wife and mother-in-law, two carabinieras, powerful women who set the rules. When I first arrived masons were laying large blocks of tufa, building another unit onto the Foti complex. The hod carrier couldn’t have been more than eight years old, covered in yellow dust, carrying blocks that looked like they weighed more than the kid. A vague fear came over me as I watched him. What else would I see?

To negotiate for the rental Signora Foti invited me into her “salotto,” a formal room, its french doors rarely open. She moved within a cloud scented of lavender and sweat. The furniture was covered with coarse bed-sheets to protect from dust. “Meestehr Steeb. Venire. Venire. Bene.” People rarely said my last name, because on the street in Italy cazzo means prick. She folded a corner of a sheet and invited me to sit on the ruby-striped silk of a settee as she slid around the room in a chenille bathrobe. My mother would wear something like that. With her fluffy slippers she polished the marble floor. Putana was big, swarthy, and charming, a thick neck set into rolls of fat at her shoulders, like a baby’s fist plunked into the pudding. The way she orchestrated her occasional touches to my shoulder or brushes of my knee with hers, was like the residue from her seductive past. She was a woman confident she could still empty the wallets of American officers.

Aldo had a little English. Before my family showed up I spent time with him, organizing details of the apartment. When you moved into an apartment you had to buy everything. The previous occupants took all the light fixtures, the outlets and bulbs. Figuring out how to get these necessities and hire an electrician to install was daunting. My Italian wasn’t yet good enough. Aldo, wan and gaunt, helped all he could from under his comforter. A major issue was the toilet seat, which had also been taken away by the counterfeiter’s family. Anticipating my pregnant wife having to settle her tender bottom onto the cold ceramic of the toilet rim, imagining Avrum and Nikolai falling in because the hole was too big and the rim too slippery, made me feel I might fail in my oversight as patriarch. It took a few hours for me to get across the concept of toilet seat to Aldo. He kept dozing off. You should go to Upim, he finally told me. I didn’t yet know Upim, a chain department store, where you don’t bargain about prices. In Lecce you bargained even for aspirin (taken in the form of suppositories) at the pharmacy. If they didn’t get to bargain the Leccese got nervous, but it was relaxing for me not to have to dicker the price of a toilet seat.

As a gift for moving in Putana granted us an afternoon of her servant’s time. The tiny woman had a name only in Leccese, a difficult dialect to pronounce. They called her “the ( unpronouncable).” The way they referred to her made her the commodity, the slave they held her to be. I watched her clean the hallway, with La Putana always at her side, steering her towards the dirt as if the woman couldn’t find it by herself. It would have been just as easy for the landlady to do it herself. For the few hours she was granted to us she cleaned the floors, which were already whistle clean, and scrubbed the walls that had no stains whatever of the counterfeiter’s ink. (It was a couple of months before we discovered the trap door in the closet of the kids’ room. This allowed access by ladder to a secret room below the apartment. A small slot of a window almost invisible from outside gave it a bunker feel. Ink stained the walls and floor. The press was gone, but you could almost hear it spinning out 20,000 Lira notes the size of small handkerchiefs.) If this woman had a second smock I never saw it, just one soiled sack, a grimy flowered print that buttoned down the front. She worked at a frenetic pace, the imbecilic grin on her face I interpreted as her pleasure to be working without the grip of Putana. Physically she was the opposite of her mistress, small, and very strong, her body one torqued sinew, that unwound clumsily through the endless work. Her face looked like a twisted glove. Her lightless eyes, her spirit, if there was any left, hunkered down in the thicks of her skull. I wanted to talk to her, but she spoke only Leccese, and looked very confused if I spoke Italian. Except to give her orders, no one ever spoke to her. She bore her position without question, somewhere between human and goat. I had no chance to stop her when she attacked our laundry, scrubbed it on a sawtooth washboard. The cloth of my flimsy American t-shirts, comfortable and airy in the near tropical heat, disintegrated against the board, almost dissolved into the water.

She had a daughter similarly named only in dialect, always called “that one,” who was enslaved by Felicita. This girl still had some teenage glow, a friendly round face unlike her mother’s, a body blossoming through her one tattered smock, slightly chubby, attractive. She hadn’t yet been worked as hard as her mother, could show some spontaneity when something amused her. I brought home once from the market a few tiny ceramic pots, probably used for doll houses. They sold ten for ten Lire. When the girl came up to deliver laundry, I gave her a tiny pitcher. Liz Taylor, receiving the Hope Diamond, couldn’t have looked more thrilled. Her smile threatened to rip into her cheeks. She turned it around in her hands, looked at us, looked back and studied it as if it was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen. She tried to hand it back a couple of times, as if she couldn’t believe it was hers. No one had ever given her a gift before. An immense sorrow swept over me. This was like a foretaste of disaster. The disproportion of gratitude to gift made me want to retreat back to USA. Like a storm from offshore, disaster struck. A few minutes after she got back downstairs we heard her scream. They were beating her. What could I do? My casual gift was a total transgression. After a while her mother came up and without looking us in the face handed me back the tiny pitcher. We could hear the girl sobbing. I felt totally clueless American and helpless.