Scent of a Woman

by Giovanni Arpino

  The girl was watching me, a smile quick to appear and reappear on her face, her gleaming gaze intent. The waiter had brought a small plate with four apricot halves in syrup. She lifted one with a spoon and gently, bit by bit, slid her tongue slowly in and out of its depression, her eyes half closed, avoiding mine at first, then suddenly staring at me, at the effort I was making to meet her eyes. The champagne was going to my head; my eyelids felt heavy. By this time the girl had decided to swallow the apricots languidly, pouting.

  After a while she went back to the bar. The show was over. Two or three couples danced, dragging themselves listlessly onto the stage, now transformed into a dance floor. A veiled light revolved, drawing and erasing pink and blue shadows. I saw them bring two coffees to the table. I drank with some effort. The air had become toxic. I thought I spotted the magician’s profile among the disorderly crowd at the bar. Older, his wrinkles powdered, perched on a stool, he was playing dice by himself, a big sandwich in his left hand. Even the black woman from the torch act sprang out of the darkness for a moment to have a drink, looked around, alone, disappeared before my eyes.

  To hold out, I clung to his voice, breathing heavily as he told a story. He seemed to have sagged between the table and the wall, his left arm flung out in abandon, his right hand clutching a cigarette. In the changing flashes of light his face had lost any sense of definition.

  ‘ … in this cave, holy God. Always in a cave. Who knows how they manage. To work. To live. Blind, yet they work, they reproduce. You see? Insects, I’m talking about. I’ve been talking to you for an hour, Ciccio. What’s up? Are you sleeping? Feel nauseous? Insects. How do I know? Once I called information, I swear. How could I make it up? I never learned to read with my fingers, not me. No rehabilitation, I told them right away. There’s nothing left to rehabilitate, nothing to learn, my dear medical professors with all those fucking degrees of yours. So then: the nice, kind voice of that girl on the phone. How she laughed! She always seemed cheerful. The patience she had. Naturally she must have been pretty ugly, to be that patient. Can you believe it? She read half the encyclopedia to me on the phone, explaining about blind insects who work and so on. In the dark. The mole cricket, for example. A carnivorous cricket that eats worms and digs tunnels. It lives at night. He and his missus are causing serious damage to the agricultural crops, you know? And then there are the worker termites. Less appealing though, since they’re asexual. Not only blind but asexual on top of it, thanks to mother nature’s just reward. They work, they build, they sweep, they gather food. They even cultivate edible mushrooms, I swear! Check it out if you don’t believe me. While their good queen oversees them, grows fat, eats mushrooms and produces forty thousand eggs a day. She doesn’t work there any more, that girl. The times I called her, afterwards. Damn her and her shitty kindness. Or maybe she got tired of it. Maybe she asked to be transferred to another office not to have to listen to me any more. I can understand it. What do you think?’

  I don’t know how he managed to drag me over to the telephone. The magician was watching us as he kept moving the dice up and down a green-felt tray. His doves, I thought dully.

  A sulky bartender dialled the number and indifferently handed over the receiver.

  ‘What do you mean, night? What night? It’s morning. Don’t you think it’s time you went to Mass? Confess your sins?’ he shouted raucously, irascibly, happily to his cousin the aunt. He held the receiver away from his ear to allow for the sighs and querulous cries of the frightened voice on the other end. ‘Of course I’m fine. Just dandy. You won’t be coming to my funeral. Nor will my cousin the priest. Saw him today. A tiresome bore, him too. Call the Baron for me. I know he’s sleeping in my bed. I want the Baron. Now. Hey, Baron, is that you? How are you? Speak up. Go on. One little purr. Come on, handsome. There’s my good fatty. Of course you know who I am, it’s me, come on now precious chubby boy. You’ll give me a nice purr now, won’t you? Come on, precious. Or I’ll cut off your whiskers, you know. Are you embarrassed because of my aunt? Tell me. Let me hear you. No? To hell with you too, then.’

  He hung up, his hand trembling. The bartender had poured two small glasses of a dark liquor.

  ‘Courtesy of the management,’ he said grimly.

  I didn’t even try to refuse. He drank, and immediately afterwards found my glass too by feeling around.

  ‘Herbal,’ he decreed coughing.

  ‘An extract. Very digestive and stimulating, sir.’ The bartender wasn’t surprised.

  The magician had turned away, I saw his curved back, the faded pattern on his jacket.

  ‘How about we wake up my cousin the priest? Just a thought. Maybe he needs us. We might manage to get him to come to Naples with us. Having a priest along could be useful.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, sir,’ I replied, though I realized that I could not offer any opposing arguments.

  ‘He’s a good man, the little priest. He’s amusing.’ He began complaining in a fake voice. ‘You, Ciccio, on the other hand, are a nobody. A cipher. Why can’t you manage to keep me company?’

  The bartender’s putty rubber face lost its frown in a faint smile of complicity.

  ‘You’re not a friend,’ he went on. ‘You don’t speak, you don’t sing, you don’t wag your tail. Where the hell are you from, madamina? Because you’re a little bit of a coquette, like a madamina. Or does that offend you?’

  ‘No, sir,’ I said patiently.

  I kept my hands on the bar to steady myself; I felt the wood grow damp under my palms. The bartender poured a third glass of liquor. I ordered myself to say no with my head to display a modicum of authority on my part. The man nodded, took back the glass.

  An insolent, early light hung over the houses when we went out. In three taxis two men slept sprawled out between the seat and the steering wheel; a third was reading the newspaper.

  ‘Rotten bitch. It wouldn’t have cost her anything to come with us,’ I heard him rattling on. ‘But she’s no admiral’s daughter. These goddamned whores always say they’re admirals’ daughters. Never understood why. You didn’t say a word to stop her, Ciccio. You’re too befuddled. Did you see her again afterwards?’

  ‘No.’

  She was right there, walking along, not twenty yards from us, her tender bare flesh unharmed by the light of day. She climbed into a car, went past us, elbow raised to shade her eyes and forehead.

  ‘Incurable provincial captive that I am.’ He coughed. ‘If things go on this way I’ll be talking to myself any minute. The nut house. Trips, not on your life. I should have myself taken to the blessing of the animals. Ciccio, why don’t you shove me under a tram?’

  He could hardly stand up, his shoulder leaning on mine, his knees caving in. Every now and then he tensed up to repress a shudder.

  ‘Naples and death,’ he began repeating, continuing on in the taxi, saying it over and over again non-stop and coughing as we hurtled through the deserted streets and piazzas to the station.

  I fell into a kind of absurd calculation of the days already spent and those yet to come. The fizz from the champagne was bubbling in my stomach in troublesome eruptions. I gave up on the intricate cabbala concerning time and held my breath, suppressing hiccups.

  A large fountain circled around us, its water steely-grey; he stuck his head out the window to drown in that air, that cool sound.

  Then: ‘The Baron, too. Even him now. What would it have cost him to say something? He always talks to me on the phone. He gets angry, he gets offended, but then he always mutters something. This time, nothing. More spiteful than usual. You think it’s my fault, Ciccio? Am I really such a bitter pill? And to think I see myself, I consider myself a poor canary blinded so he can sing better.’

  He laughed shrilly, only to have it turn into laboured gurgling. He bent over, pressing his stomach.

  ‘What was that last drink? Manure? Do your guts feel rotten too?’

  Darkness obscured my eyes, ripped into my throat. I struggled not
to come apart. I kept my eyes fixed on the door handle trying not to look elsewhere, not to close my eyes again.

  The taxi driver braked rudely, dumping us off in front of the station without a word.

  ‘A shame to leave here. Too bad we can’t stay. But on to Nero’s!’ he cried, swaying along, his cane raised.

  Only the patience of a porter extricated our bags from the luggage room. Overturned cups and saucers in the sink at the bar, the raucous thumps of voices from the loudspeakers drilled into my skull.

  ‘Istanbul. Calcutta is where we should go. Forget Naples. Only three hours’ sleep. What an eternal idiot I’m turning into. May God strike me dead.’ He went on protesting in the train, his lips livid. He had already swallowed the sleeping pill.

  Huddled miserably in a corner, I tried to shield myself as much as possible with the edge of a curtain. I felt the light, now too strong, pressing and prying between my eyelids like an incandescent blade. Cries, shouts, noises tore brutally around us.

  ‘Relics of ourselves. That’s what we are, Naples and death,’ he continued muttering, a dark, swollen vein in the middle of his forehead. ‘Is anybody in here?’

  ‘No one, sir,’ I said.

  The train began to move.

  8

  I saw them at the back of the terrace in the marble-veined evening sky. They were speaking almost listlessly, with long intervals of silence and not a shadow of a smile, he, upright as a post as usual, the other, his back already curved, though he was tall and stocky, straining to hold himself erect. They seemed out of place against the vibrant stripes of a large umbrella.

  ‘I’ll say goodnight. It’s late for me. Do you need anything? By now you know where everything is, you’ve seen everything. Make yourself at home. See you tomorrow,’ the soldier said from the door. He had the narrow face of a weasel, with unexpected flickers of cunning, and smooth hands. He had first said he was a student, then a records clerk, but his tone was that of someone afraid of saying the wrong thing.

  I remained alone in that enormous room crammed with portraits. A last glimmer of light shone on the face of a woman surrounded by an oval antique frame; the pale flower pinned between her throat and shoulder stood out starkly. Groupings of photographs edged with silver lay on a desk, small tables, mantelpieces, a piano.

  In the afternoon the soldier had shown me around the house, a maze of hallways, cubbyholes, rooms one inside the other. From almost every window you could see views of the city plunging down to the sea, precipitous and unruly, like a chaotic crèche.

  I would be sleeping in the room of a maid who had left on vacation just that morning. The drawers and closet in the room had been emptied or locked, the walls were bare with damp, branched shadows. There were no sheets under the bed cover.

  ‘Good thinking, that too. Four men in the house, or at least you three if I really don’t matter and no one counts me, and what does he come up with? He sends the only useful person, the only woman, on a trip. Who hadn’t even asked to go. The proverb is right: the brains of those whom God hath marked work differently. See what you can do. Mind you, I’ve already decided: I’m eating at the barracks. Beds, brooms, dustmops – as far as I’m concerned, they can wait until Christmas. I’m not an orderly. You neither. If they have an itch, let them scratch it,’ the soldier had promptly told me.

  ‘What’s the name of your guy?’

  ‘Vincenzo V. But just call him Lieutenant. That’s enough for him. He retired as a captain, but he insists on still being called Lieutenant. Naturally: those brains I just mentioned. Still, a person with heart, a whining bore but good-hearted. Believe me: I’ve been here six months now. And thank the Almighty God, at least he has both his hands. How does your guy manage to shave? Do you see to it?’

  I saw them on the terrace, still standing side by side, their cigarettes lit. They had ironically felt each other’s stomach and abdomen but with quick, almost disgusted touches, neither one laughing. They weren’t talking any more.

  I had managed to rest a few hours. My exhaustion and all its various toxins had vanished, but I still felt gripped by a strange, indecipherably hostile force, like a cobweb, or better yet perhaps, a soap bubble that had enclosed me: rising higher and higher, uncontrollable, swaying, it was carrying me away, every aspect of the world increasingly diminished, cold and distant.

  I too went out on the terrace, taking care to retreat to the corner farthest away from those two.

  The city was already all lit up, a dense undulating jungle of lights and lamps, multicoloured patches that ran up and down the gulf’s coastline in a blur of loops and scallops, swirls and eddies, beneath a sky streaked with purple. At the point where the purple darkened, a cloud was slowly forming the head, then the shoulder, and finally the prodigious hand of a giant. The last curls of his hair still caught the sun from below the horizon. Rising towards him from that jungle was the thick growl of an immeasurable beast, stretched out, sleepless, humming from millions of pores, orifices, scales, wrinkles, recesses of its skin exposed to summer’s inert vapours.

  My prison felt tighter and more oppressive, and I immediately felt an urge to dive in – not walk, but actually plunge in among those lights, that breath, and disappear there.

  They moved and crossed the terrace in silence, shoulder to shoulder, the white cane and the bamboo staff swaying in sync.

  The lieutenant had a deep thick voice given to sudden dubious languor; his guest’s words abruptly interrupted what he was saying. Three, four times they retraced those few feet in a straight line, the host’s bald head gleaming like an eggshell. They didn’t appear to be friends; they never displayed a sincere gesture of affection, of understanding.

  The lieutenant said softly: ‘I have the courage. But I’m so afraid.’

  His response was laughter that stung like a whip.

  Prudently I returned to the living room, preferring not to listen to their talk.

  Through the windows, in the room’s darkness, I could still see the sea, black and obscure, surrounding two large vessels whose masts were illuminated like perfect triangles.

  Finally I decided to move, to at least try to find the light switches.

  After supper the girls arrived. Two were daughters of the owner of the nearby restaurant where we had eaten, and two were their friends. They were very young. The one with glasses laughed and was more active than the others. They immediately moved about the house as if they knew it by heart, finding glasses, bottles, ice, some feather pillows in a closet.

  They followed one another back and forth between the kitchen and the living room with loud cries.

  ‘Ines Candida Michelina Sara. You’re driving me crazy,’ the lieutenant complained from the depths of his armchair. ‘Where are you running to? Why are you fussing around? Here, all of you come here right now. Sit down.’

  He, already shielded behind his whisky, was silent, as if oblivious to it all.

  ‘You too. Say something. They waited so long for you, poor girls,’ the lieutenant prodded.

  ‘Women. By now they’re grown women. A far cry from the little girls of four years ago. I can barely stand them,’ he grumbled.

  ‘Fausto,’ the other gave a long sigh, ‘we might come to an end, but not the world.’

  The bespectacled Ines appeared, manoeuvring a fan with its long electrical cord.

  ‘How about a little air? It’s stifling in here. Come on, don’t start drinking like sponges right away, otherwise we’ll leave. Would you like another cup of coffee? Is the breeze too strong?’

  She lowered her voice then and moved to the two armchairs, where she said quickly, giggling, ‘Did you notice, Fausto? Sara is still in love with you. Really head over heels, poor girl. Like when she had braids, remember? She even bought a new perfume today. French. Say something to her, Fausto, make us laugh.’

  ‘Ines, you gossipy mischief-maker, you. A fine friend you are. Be quiet for once. And call the others. What are they doing over there?’ the lieutenant objec
ted listlessly.

  ‘They’re embarrassed!’ Ines laughed again before running off, leaving the fan on the floor.

  ‘Well. They must still be virgins?’ he said lazily.

  ‘Captain, have you lost your mind?’ the lieutenant said in alarm, shocked. ‘How can you talk that way. Four fine young women worthy of respect. I’m even Candida’s godfather …’

  He gave up with a hopeless wave of his hand.

  ‘Curiosity. Just talk.’ He yawned. ‘What do you expect me to think? They’re women, so talking is useless. You have to touch them.’

  ‘Fausto,’ his friend scolded him again, ‘don’t you remember four years ago? When they accompanied us to cafés, to the park, and we bought them ice-cream cones?’

  ‘Baloney.’ He was quickly silenced.

  They came back in together, their eyes focused on me, as if weighing my possible though not yet established complicity. They sat in a row on the sofa in front of the two men, nudging each other, making faces and smiling, their giggles quickly muffled by their hands across their mouths.

  ‘Be good now,’ the lieutenant warned.

  He didn’t have many scars on his face, just a reddened zigzagging slash behind his right ear. His dark glasses made his large head, that fleshy nose, seem even heavier. His chin wobbled at the slightest word or collapsed in a trace of a double chin.

  ‘Any ideas, girls? Let’s not stay up too late though,’ he asked around mildly.

  ‘A game. Yes, a game!’ Ines cried immediately.

  She had taken off her glasses. They all seemed indifferent to the soft, warm cushions, to the dozens of eyes looking down on them from the whiskered men along the walls, from those garlanded matrons and dames in their frames, with their prodigious chests, painted mouths, tight curls at their temples.