by André Aciman
He only succeeded after a while. When was it—the last time he’d gone? he wondered. And just as he asked himself this, and recalled the last time had been hardly an hour ago, on the Lungari, when so as not to be seen by Gavino he had chosen to conceal himself behind the opened car door, it wasn’t so much the thin colorless stream of his own urine that he was staring at but rather, with a curiosity, surprise and bitterness he’d never felt before, at the member from which the stream issued. “Huh!” he exclaimed with a grin. Grey, wretched, a mere nothing, with that sign of his circumcision, so familiar and yet so absurd . . . In the end, it was nothing but an object, a pure and simple object like so many others.
3.
“HERE’S THE key,” Bellagamba said. “It’s number 24 on the second floor. I’m sorry you’ll have to climb so many stairs. But up there, you’ll have every comfort, and there’s a bath too.”
They were waiting in the entrance, facing each other as they had been that morning, Bellagamba seated behind the reception desk, the lower part of his face, his square jaw and sagging cheeks in the circle of the lamp’s yellowish light, and he standing with his arms laden with his jacket, pullover, fur cap, gloves. Yet they weren’t alone. He heard people continually passing behind his back, the last customers on their way out. From the corner of his eye he saw them, a few at a time, reach the door that gave onto the street then disappear, hunched and swaddled shadows, into the fog and the darkness.
He rubbed his thumb between the other thumb and forefinger.
Busy replying to the fragmentary good-byes of the customers leaving, Bellagamba suddenly seemed to him distracted, inattentive. Until a moment before he was giving him his full attention, insisting in every way possible that he accept the offer to go to an upstairs room to take a “nap.” Now by contrast . . . But it was clear that he didn’t know how to divide his attention. He would very much have liked to accompany him upstairs personally, as he kept repeating, if only he, “Signor Avvocato” would be a little patient, in five minutes at most he would certainly be able to do so.
“Don’t worry,” he replied at a certain point, wearily shaking himself out of the torpor into which he’d fallen. “Let it be.”
“Are you sure you know where your room is?”
“Of course.”
“Number 24, second floor, the left hand corridor, third door on the right.”
“Good.”
“And what time would you like to be called?”
As usual the other man was observing him with the air of someone with a particular motive who pretends there isn’t one. He was fairly drunk, that’s true, but still alert enough to notice that.
“Now it’s four o’clock,” he continued. “Should we say at six?”
He tried to concentrate. If he were to wake up at six, when would he manage to leave? And then when would he get home by? Wasn’t there the risk of. . . Once again his mind grew muddled. Better give up any attempt to reason. Better just move and flake out on a bed straightaway. Try to get some sleep.
Without replying he passed the side of the desk and moved toward the stairs.
“Have a good sleep!” Bellagamba shouted after him, adding in dialect “and be careful not to take a header down the stairs, for God’s sake!”
He started to climb the stairs, his right hand gripping the rail. His jacket, pullover and so on bundled up beneath his left arm and heavy as lead, his stomach crammed with food and wine—so full and swollen that he ought to have let out his trousers by two or three notches—every step cost him an immense effort. As he went up, he stared at the feeble dusty lamp that hung high up on the ceiling of the first landing and told himself that no, he’d never be able to drag himself all the way up to the second floor. It seemed impossible, an exertion way beyond any strength he had.The porthole window a little below the light source of the lamp was completely blind. A black disc, extinguished and opaque.
He reached the landing, turned to the right, broached the second staircase, set foot on the mezzanine landing and began climbing again. At last, completely out of breath, with his heart beating madly within his ribcage and his head more giddy than ever, he found himself before the second-floor bathroom door. So he was there, motionless, still gasping, his gaze once more drawn to the small dark vertical letters of the enamelled sign on which was written bathroom, but he was numb, empty of all thought. Around him there was absolute silence. Even Bellagamba’s voice, that loud baying that every now and then rose upstairs from the depths to vex his ears, had now gone silent. All he could hear was his own panting, the beating of his heart and the throbbing at his temples.
As soon as he was in his room, stretched out on the bed—recovered now from his breathlessness—he immediately tried to fall asleep. He ought to have undressed, or at least to have taken off his shoes and turned off the light. But no matter. If he had the patience to stay there with his eyes closed for a few minutes, forcing himself not to move and above all not to think about anything, there was not the least doubt that with all he’d drunk he would most certainly have fallen asleep.
And yet there was no way—he couldn’t keep still. He had turned onto his right side, then onto his left, then again he had turned to lie on his back, and soon after he knew he’d start all over again. How odd: before he’d been stumbling every which way and now, instead, lying down, he felt as though threaded with faint, repeated electric shocks. Shifting, restless, alert, even his eyeballs seemed to be hurting. In the cavity of their orbs it seemed as though two small beasts had made their dens, so swollen with blood as to be on the verge of bursting and yet still avid to swallow more, two greedy little monsters as ready to tense and pounce as the fleeting swarms of those sparks, the glinting commas of light, that were closing in on them from all sides.
Not thinking was likewise impossible. It was like a ribbon that was unspooling of its own accord, an unstoppable, monotonous, sequential reel of images. There was Bellagamba for example. Against the dark screen of his quivering eyelids, or against the no less dark screen of thick shadows in which, if he opened his eyes, his gaze became submerged, there he was with his leathery face always thrust forward, continually twisted up into unpredictable grimaces, winks, wrinklings of the forehead, odd twitches of his eyebrows, his nose, his lips, his tongue. Then immediately afterward, other faces—the face of Nives, framed by her pillow; that of his mother with the eternal black velvet ribbon hanging loosely round her neck; then Gavino’s face out of the Aprilia’s side window; and even those of the hunters from Milan, one after another, Commendatore Ceresa and his companions about whom Bellagamba had been so loquacious: industrialists, the big shots, the sharks of the luxury chalet not far from Romea. It was obviously money—he told himself with bitterness, feeling once again offended by certain very costly articles of hunting equipment that group would be supplied with (which as it happened were not actually in sight): buckskin jackets, pigskin or chamois gloves, multicolored sweaters of Norwegian wool or cashmere, strange, distinctive footwear. Even more than that, the way they’d heaped their stuff on an extra five or six chairs, the way they spoke to each other or turned to Bellagamba (he standing respectfully, their host and servant) and yet kept him at a distance—it was money, cash, that conferred such assurance, such good health and made the one provided with more than a certain quantity appear as if of a different race, stronger, more full of life, more attractive, more likeable! Money, cash, dough: in the vicinity of those who had it, everything but everything—Fascism, Nazism, Communism, religion, family quarrels or affections, agricultural disputes, bank loans and so on and so forth—everything else suddenly became of no concern or importance.
Suddenly he saw before him the face of the woman in the dark trouser suit whom he’d noticed down in the dining room—her big pallid face, that of an ex-farmworker probably from the neighborhood, her large lustreless eyes which seemed focused on nothing, her fat fleshy lips, caked with lipstick. Before they’d parted Bellagamba had yelled merrily “Sleep well!”
But on reflection what did Bellagamba have to be so merry about? He was joshing him of course, the way someone does who has too much need of you and of your protection, especially in the case of someone drunk. Yet mightn’t it be that Bellagamba was trying in his own way, as a proficient pimp, to indicate that he should relax and not concern himself because the whore, who’d cost no more than a thousand lire, with whom he’d seen his guest exchanging glances throughout lunch, was a thing that he, Gino Bellagamba, could easily procure for him and could send upstairs to his room without delay? That was it for sure. That was what Bellagamba had been promising, now he understood, with all his winking, with all his continuous, perpetual half-saying and not saying!
He heard footsteps in the corridor. He searched gropingly behind his head for the light switch, and finding it pressed the button. It was bound to be her—he said to himself, sitting up on the bed—it could only be her. After having announced herself with all that slapping of slipper soles, in a moment she’d be knocking on the door. Or else, opening the door no further than was needed, she’d slip straight inside.
He put his feet on the floor and slowly, doing up his trousers, he walked toward the door. His heart had begun to beat madly again. He was sure he was right. A question of seconds, and then . . . the latch would be lowered, the door would begin to edge open, slowly, cautiously, inexorably, and then suddenly he would find that strange creature before him, face to face. And so? How would he react at that point? From the time when, as boys, they’d frequented brothels together, Ulderico had always been very curt and brisk with prostitutes. Not vulgar or brutal of course. Minimum chat and down to the act. While he, on the contrary—apart from the fact that for something like eight years after getting married, the idea of going with a prostitute hadn’t even entered his mind—had always been shy, insecure, solicitous and on every occasion needing an interminable preamble before he got round to the infamous act . . .
From the depths of the room the tall mirror of the straw-colored wardrobe reflected an image of himself standing beside the door: a remote and sketchy image, as though about to dissolve. So how should he behave?—he asked himself in confusion. Give her something and send her away? Why not. Later, it was true, he would have to see her with Bellagamba, put up with a new series of more or less sly hints of one type or another. Important, though, not to hesitate. Let her come in, keep her there talking for a short while, and finally be rid of her, pressing two or three hundred lire into her hand. He saw no other way out of a situation like this one.
4.
AS THE latch was not lowered, at a certain point he wondered whether it wouldn’t be better to open the door himself. Unfortunately he hadn’t left the key in the lock. If he had he could have locked himself in, without standing there getting into such a state.
He opened the door and, seeing no one there, stepped out into the half-darkness of the corridor. He looked right toward the landing, then left toward the end of the corridor. No one, not a soul. How was that possible? There was no doubt, he had heard the sound of footsteps. He was quite sure he hadn’t imagined it. Perhaps it had been an employee, perhaps the cleaning woman? On a Sunday afternoon? Why not? It wasn’t that strange once he thought about it.
In the meantime, he left the door half-closed and made his way along the corridor as far as the landing. He leaned on the banister, and looked down into the dark abyss of the stairwell. From the ground floor, along with a faint gleam of light, came a vague hum of stoves, of tables being shifted, of footsteps, of far away voices. It was evident—he told himself, yawning—that they were clearing the dining room and getting it ready for the evening.
He went back into his room and locked the door. After which, hurriedly undressing, he slipped back into bed. He had kept on his woolen underclothes. But no sooner had he drawn the covers up to his nose than he was shaken with an extended shivering. The sheets were cold and damp, especially at the bottom of the bed around his feet. Still nothing like as bad as before. Without anything clinging tight about his waist he felt infinitely better. Even his stomach seemed far less heavy.
He stretched out an arm to switch off the light, turned on his right side and yawned till tears came to his eyes. And almost immediately, with the sudden permission of his whole being, he was aware that his mind had misted over, that he was falling asleep and dreaming.
He dreamed he was once again on the stairs of the Bosco Elòceo, once again climbing up them step by step, intending to reach the second floor. What he was going to do up there was not clear. He was simply ascending, effortlessly, with a mysterious lightness, even. He shook his head. A moment before, down below, Bellagamba, winking, had offered to have him carried up on a stretcher by a pair of sturdy youths he’d recruited as waiters from the neighboring countryside—he happened to have a stretcher in the entrance made of rough hemp exactly like those used in Ferrara’s Sant’Anna Hospital to bear the very ill from one ward to another—as though he were weak in the legs or had a heart ailment or something worse. But the opposite was the case. Agile, calm, he went up the stairs as though borne along by a favorable wind, as though he had wings. It was neither night time nor was it early morning. Through the porthole fitted above the first set of stairs, the sky appeared a deep, sunlit blue. It was two or three o’clock on a lovely late Spring afternoon in May or June. The time just after lunch.
The hotel was full of people. Although there wasn’t a living soul on the stairs, outside every facing pair of rooms along the two first floor corridors, in perfect order, some lit by the oblique rays of the sun, one could see two pairs of shoes, one male, the other female. Heavens, how many shoes! But it wasn’t surprising. Even without having spotted all those shoes, it was clear that the ground floor restaurant was a cover for what was happening up here on the first as well as the second floor. Each room of the hotel, rented out by the hour, hid a couple. They came by car from everywhere, even from as far away as Milan. They talked, they chatted, they whispered, shut two by two into their cramped rooms, each with its wretched porcelain basin, brand-new but already chipped, with its metal bidet, with its wobbly, straw-colored plywood furniture, with its miserable, askew bedside rugs and its wan central light. Enough just to lend an ear to perceive the buzz, the hum, part beehive part industrial plant, that secretly ran through the entire establishment from wall to wall and floor to floor.
But at his back, the sound of a dropped, metallic object ringing out on a stair startled him and made him turn abruptly. On the landing below, that of the first floor, was the same dark-suited woman who from the moment he’d entered the dining room till a couple of minutes ago when he’d left it, had never stopped looking at him. In slippers and a dressing gown that tightened round her thighs as she crouched to pick up the key that had slipped from her hand, she was staring at him with the same insistence, turning her face three-quarters of the way toward him. She was no longer as made-up as before, in fact she was without make-up. She was smiling and staring at him, now far younger looking, much more like a girl. At last she stood up, the key in her hand. And without detaching her eyes from his, she stuck her tongue out and began to lick her upper lip.
He could only see the tip. But from the little of it that was visible he could guess that it was thick and short, bestial in its shape as much as in its color which was a wine-dark mauve. She was obviously local, perhaps a peasant—black and shining, even her eyes seemed like those of certain animals you find in the country, cows, for example, or horses—one of the many employed by Bellagamba as scullery maids, but really their main job was to entertain solitary and needy customers wanting company in the rooms upstairs. But what did she think she was doing showing him her tongue like that?—he wondered as he went on up the stairs, still observing her. Did she think it would impress him? If so, she was mistaken. Seeing her make a show of her tongue like that did nothing but disgust him.
Now, without knowing how or why, he was leaving a bathroom on the second floor and once again she was standing there, wait
ing for him outside the door, this time adopting a pose, leaning with her back against the landing’s handrail with the dressing gown gathered around her legs to show the thickness of her thighs.
She came toward him and silently staring up at him began to touch him. He, while letting her do so and taking in the smell of roast eel that wafted from her hair, told himself that she must work here, in the Bosco Elòceo, and not even as a waitress but as a scullery maid. In a few moments, the bellowing voice of Bellagamba would sound from the depths of the staircase and order her back down to tend to the stoves or the dishes.
“Give it a rest, will you?” he tried to grumble at a certain point. “What d’you want from me?”
She continued touching him and smiled to disclose her big teeth with gaps between them.
“Me? Nothing.”
“Can’t you see I haven’t time? Let me get on—I’m already late.”
“If you’d like,” she insisted, her voice no more than a whisper, “if you’d like I’ll come to your room. What number is it?”
It was hard to tell from her accent where she was from. She hadn’t said vengo for “I’ll come” but venghe. If not from Ferrara perhaps from Emilia. But venghe? Perhaps she was a Southern Italian? Perhaps she’d been evacuated from Naples with her working class family after the bombardment of 1942 and ended up working as a whore in a Codigoro hotel.
“I don’t have a room. I’m just passing through.”
“Well then, you can come to my room. It’s just upstairs, number 24. I’m good at it, you know,” and again she displayed her tongue. “You’ll see what a good time I’ll give you.”
Having said this she took his hand and hurriedly, making her slippers slap against her naked calloused heels, began to pull him behind her toward the corridor on the right.