by Edoardo Nesi
She hadn’t asked if the aquamarine dress looked good on her, when just a few months ago she would have asked him a thousand times, desperately anxious to please, and the simple rise of Cesare’s right eyebrow was enough to send her back to the wardrobe. It was obvious she already knew she looked great.
Arianna hadn’t moaned even once that they were going to be late, whereas their preparations had always been a litany of pleas and exhortations for Cesare to hurry. She hadn’t looked at him once, not even in the mirror in which she kept admiring herself, and Cesare felt he had become a spectator, an invisible voyeur who had been selected to observe an unknown beauty getting ready for a night out: a secure and liberated woman who depended on no one and belonged to no one, immersed in that soft and irresistible beauty that radiates from many women the moment they reach forty; a superb, distant, almost haughty woman who, if he were to meet her in the street, would have caused him to turn his head and follow her with his gaze. Another woman.
This is what the Beast had thought, and it had turned him on, and he had asked her to give him a blow job. For that matter, as he often told his friends at the top table, a blow job right before going out was one of his classics. She always protested—“No, we can’t, we’re late, I’ve just got dressed and done my hair. Why do you have to do that? Come on, Cesare, I’ll do it when we get back”—but always gave in, warning him to be careful not to come on her hair or her dress.
Arianna looks at him in the mirror.
— No. I’ve just had a coffee.
Cesare starts laughing and repeats his request, adding a playful “please,” but she says no again and turns back toward the mirror. It had never happened before, and he had never begged before, so he asks again, in a low voice, even more turned on by her refusal. She answers no once more, but in a less convinced tone, and Cesare insists, increasingly excited at having to beg, and when he sees her closing her eyes for a few long seconds to allow the insubordination to simmer down, already defeated, he starts to undo his trousers.
Arianna sprays a cloud of Shalimar over her neck, stands up, walks toward the bed, and says they have to be quick as she bends over him and takes off his belt.
Over the years, Cesare had often told his friends at the top table that his wife, unlike theirs, didn’t know how to give a blow job, but he never added that her lack of interest in the matter, and therefore the scant results of her effort, had always been countered by the magnificent scene of her face lowering itself toward his cock, the sublime dance of the lineaments of her face as she sucked it, and, most of all, the candid, disinterested look that often darted from her eyes to his while she held it in her mouth — the precious gem that made Arianna’s blow jobs a remarkable experience, more visual than physical.
Cesare liked it that way. If Arianna had been a carnal woman, he would never have married her. His wife had to be as beautiful as a rose and as faithful as the Virgin Mary. That’s what he wanted, and that’s what he had found. He had always liked watching her while they were screwing, even more than the action itself: the contamination she had to suffer with that sex that she didn’t really like and that, as a result, she wasn’t very good at practicing.
That evening, however, the Beast immediately notices that the very technique used by his wife has changed: she no longer uses her right hand to hold his cock, but the left, while with the right she is delicately stroking his balls — something she had never, never tried before. She doesn’t look him in the eye anymore, but uses her tongue much more and much better, and, at one point, it seems that his wife is trying to become more engaged with the whole procedure, inserting not only the tip of his cock into that fine and graceful mouth, as she had always done, but also much of the shaft.
And then Cesare realizes the most obvious and remarkable difference, which until that moment had eluded him. Just a few seconds after telling him they had to be quick, Arianna had begun a slow, concentrated, passionate, complete, entirely new and different and infinitely better blow job than any she had given him during all the years they’d been together, thus revealing that she had changed, and vastly perfected, her technique. And she had not perfected it with him.
When Arianna gives out a light moan, which is also a novelty, Cesare suddenly comes inside her mouth, in a violent orgasm that he tries to prolong as much as possible by holding his breath. And while his wife lets everything slip out of her mouth and onto his flat stomach, the Beast experiences that painful acuity that sometimes follows orgasm. The moment she lifts her eyes to look at him with a timid, surprised smile, her mouth still wet with his semen, Cesare realizes that Arianna has been cheating on him, and immediately remembers Ivo’s crude sentence when he had gone to tell him about the Historic Baby Doll, and finally sees that his wife has been cheating on him — with Ivo.
But how? With Ivo? His incredulity mixes with surprise, and together they confuse that painful certainty, and his mind runs wild: for a moment he pictures a muscle-bound lifeguard on top of his wife, and they are laughing, and he lowers the top of her bikini to kiss her breasts, but then that scene immediately vanishes. Impossible. No, it’s Ivo, it has to be Ivo. Who else?
He tells himself it is impossible that Arianna had taken a lover on her own initiative: he can’t imagine she has either the strength of mind or the imagination or the necessity. She must have given in to the insistence of someone close to her, someone she admires, someone she can’t say no to.
And then he thinks that it’s not Ivo’s fault at all — it’s his wife who has become a whore, all he did was make the most of the situation just as any man would have done — but then he stops, enraged, and grinds his teeth in silence, and tells himself that he will beat up Ivo that same night, at his own party, in front of everyone, because you don’t do that sort of thing to a friend. You just don’t. Never. He won’t say a word. As soon as he sees Ivo, he’ll walk over to him and beat him until he’s lying on the ground, and then he’ll kick him in the face and leave him passed out in a pool of blood, and before leaving, he’ll spit in his face.
And then his fury deflates and Cesare feels emptier than he has ever felt in his entire life, and as he looks at Arianna’s serene face beside his now flaccid cock, he softens and remembers her as a bride, with the white dress and the veil, joyously happy and full of trust and happiness and hope, twenty-two years old, and he wonders how it all could end up so miserably.
Then she gets up from the bed, runs a hand through her hair and tells him, Come on, get ready, we’re late.
E LA CHIAMANO ESTATE
AS A WARM NIGHT SLOWLY FALLS on the Tyrrhenian Sea, the soft coastline outlined by the smallest mountain chain in the world is dotted with a long line of headlights. The traffic runs slowly in front of the nightclub which looks like a house and reigns over the waterfront. Each incoming automobile is immediately surrounded by a handful of polite boys in white shirts and blue Bermuda shorts who will assume the task of parking it very, very carefully.
The ladies have the door opened for them while the gentlemen are greeted with deference, and many if not all of the couples who find themselves welcomed so regally get embarrassed and immediately start smartening themselves up: the ladies feel the sudden need to stroke their dresses to smooth out invisible creases and use their reflections in the clean glass of the car windows to check upon hairstyles, while the men make sure that their collars are straight and their shirtsleeves protrude not more than one or two centimeters from their jackets, as they had been taught.
Reassured, they move arm in arm toward the entrance, smiling, their eyes shining with anticipation at the sight of the large illuminated sign that announces to the world that Gloria Gaynor will give a concert here tonight, and that it’s sold out.
Tanned faces peer out from the windows of the cars lining up along the waterfront, their curiosity piqued by all that bustle. They all seem to be smiling while sitting in that traffic jam: it feels a bit like being in a movie theater to watch an American comedy, and no one would
dream of protesting in any way or, even less, honking, when traffic is completely blocked by the simultaneous parking of three Porsche Carreras and a majestic red Ferrari BB 512, all brand-new with Milan license plates, all arriving at the same time, which end up side by side in full view outside the club after a thousand terrified maneuvers by the boys in Bermuda shorts.
The looks, the comments, even the thoughts of those watching the show from the open car windows are immeasurably different from the looks and the comments and the thoughts that the tattered, desperate characters of Charles Dickens were aiming at the ostentation of the parties of the rich in nineteenth-century London.
Whatever shines in the eyes of those who are staring at the happy few entering the nightclub that seems like a house to attend the concert of Gloria Gaynor is not hate or rage, but merely the light, transparent, sacrosanct, clean, innocent, respectful, creative envy that is the real driving force of the twentieth century and pushes everybody on toward emulation rather than in the direction of the resentful, incessant gnawing that consumes and destroys the soul of those who have not and hold no hope they will ever have.
How can you hate such a young wealth, almost comical for the clumsy and careless way in which it is displayed, when you know it comes from the free and possible exploitation of the ocean of opportunity that reveals itself every day to the eyes of those who wish to see it?
And then, they know each other, almost all of them. Many of those who are about to enter the nightclub go over to the car windows and try to persuade those sitting in traffic to park and come and see Gloria with them, and those sitting in traffic take great pleasure in these invitations, and say they can’t because they aren’t dressed appropriately, but they will certainly come next time, and if there will be no Gloria Gaynor, it will be Donna Summer, or Barry White with his Love Unlimited Orchestra…
They are all the same kind of people. They come from the people, and from work, and all they have ever done is live by their wits and their work. They are not in competition with one another: their battle is against fate and fortune and destiny. And they are winning.
Not one of them comes from a rich family, they all started as ordinary workers, right after the war, and the money they have in their pockets comes from manufacturing — the transformation of raw materials into consumer objects, as the dictionaries coldly hold forth, unable to explain how it can actually be a special ability of the heart: a bright, almost magical, entirely Italian comprehension of the way of the world.
They aren’t sly, because slyness doesn’t get you very far in a world without shortcuts, ruled by simple and tough rules: if they want to earn more all they have to do is invest in their small business in order to make it grow, so they buy or rent larger sheds where they will install new and more efficient machines and hire more people to produce more and more goods, which they will then rush to sell throughout the world, in a glorious and benign and daring cycle that leaves very few resources to pay taxes to a corrupt and distant state, because if they paid taxes — so they say — they could never buy all the machines they have bought or employ all the people they have employed or grow as much they have grown.
And they are not the best; not the fabled victors of an ideal selection process that has finally declared them the most suited to being successful out of millions and millions of people: in the only country in the world in which entrepreneurship is a mass phenomenon, they are, to put it simply, the ones who tried and succeeded in a free and open market. Darwin, as far as these people are concerned, can go jump off a bridge.
Ignored or derided by those who would study them, they are individualists to the point of paranoia, and mistrust everything that is public. They see themselves as a plurality of proudly free individuals, and even though they are conformists in their private lives, their real aspiration is to stand out from the masses and be defined, one day, as unique and inimitable.
They have read just a few books in their lives, and have never listened to Beethoven or Mozart, and all they know about Lucio Fontana is that he was a lunatic who cut canvas and said it was art. They do not go to the theater and consider movies the perfect instrument to switch off and have fun. They love it when John Wayne shoots Indians, and don’t realize they are continually humiliated and insulted by the authors and directors who represent Italy to the world: they barely know their books or films, and have no interest whatsoever in reading or watching them because they have no time for things not immediately useful to them or to their families, and are only marginally aware of having built the foundations of a unique industrial system made of small and very small businesses that was able to create a well-being that, in certain parts of Italy, was so capillary and diffuse that it could be defined as democratic.
For many of them this is the first evening out in years, and they are dressing at their best. The men’s shirts are white cotton, so duly ironed and starched as to seem brand-new, and there are only a few jackets around, almost all of cool wool: few have dared choosing cotton ones out of fear of seeming crumpled, and only Barrocciai and a lawyer from Florence with a blue Jaguar dared to wear linen. Many trousers have a central crease fixed so hard it looks like a cutting blade, and the fabrics still have that sheen that will be worn away by the nervous pastime of rubbing them with the palm of the hand. The shoes are all very shiny indeed.
Even those who understand nothing about fashion, or the fool who spurns it as useless and vain, cannot help but notice how the fresh, fragrant ladies’ dresses rustle and sparkle and shine. They are made of silk, cotton, viscose, linen, or some mix of these fibers, and dyed every possible color and printed with every possible pattern, even laminated, decorated with shoulder pads and designs and even some incongruous slogan, always in English.
Then a beautiful woman dressed in an ethereal periwinkle-colored palazzo pantsuit, with insolent curls bleached by the sun and the sea, undoubtedly Milanese, incredibly alone, quickly advances and haughtily enters the nightclub that looks like a house leaving behind her a sweet trail of Giorgio Beverly Hills perfume, bewitching the souls of the men paralyzed in admiration and thus decreeing the beginning of that sparkling and fiery evening.
Killer looks dart around, while jealousy, ambition, passion, hate, joy, and surprise seize the night. Introductions flourish between those who never had the occasion or the courage to get to know each other, and every shyness vanishes as the air fills and swells with the smell of pine resin, hair spray, and after-sun, and the intoxicating mix of all the parfums blends with the scent of baby squids already frying in the kitchens to welcome guests together with a glass of cold Vernaccia, reminding everyone that it is about dinnertime.
Ivo had insisted that his guests shouldn’t trickle in one by one, so a small assembly had formed around him, the prime mover, dressed in linen and redolent of Eau Sauvage.
The navy blue suit of Irish linen was an easy choice, but he hesitated long over a shirt. He went through them all, unsure, caressing them on the hangers, before finally choosing the simplest and his favorite, a shirt of natural ecru linen, soft and draping and full of humble knots, dotted by slubs as long as a newborn’s finger.
He had bought it ten years before, at a discount, from the stall of a traveling salesman who was desperate to sell it because, in textiles as in life, the fine is often the worst enemy of the refined, and given its magnificent coarseness, no one else wanted that shirt. To Ivo, instead, the ancient intersection of warp and weft in the plain weave highlighted the defective and untamable beauty of linen, which is poor and rich at the same time, light-years away from the shoddy industrial perfection of every other fiber.
How Barrocciai loved linen! Its cool embrace reminded him of that of a woman in love upon whom a minor offense had been inflicted, and he enjoyed so much its ever so brief resistance to contact with the skin, as if the fiber had its own free will and was trying to maintain a minimum of rigidity at least for a moment, refusing to fold instantly around the body and limbs like servile cotton, because
cotton dents while linen bows, and creates folds as deep as wounds, splendid and elegant.
Ivo turns to look at his guests: none of them have ever been to the famous nightclub on the waterfront before. Cesare with Arianna; Andrea Vecchio, Citarella, Carmine, and Barbugli with their wives; Sergio Vari, who looks around with wolfish eyes; a growling Brunero, who keeps Rosa under his arm as if terrified someone might grab her and take her away from him; Vittorio, who stares into the void and gives monosyllabic answers to every question shot at him at machine-gun speed by Dino and Tonino, who are immensely excited to be there.
It is time to go in, and Ivo and his guests enter triumphantly, welcomed with deferent greetings from the bouncers and the manager who immediately escorts them to their table, which is positioned regally in the middle of the American bar.
— I’d like Gavi di Gavi for dinner at my table, Ivo tells Cipollini, waiter extraordinaire. There are twenty of us so we’ll need twenty bottles in twenty ice buckets, so everyone has his own and there won’t be any problems. Let’s bring them right away.
—Very well, Barrocciai, Cipollini answered. As always, the most beautiful women are at your table.
Ivo turns to look at Arianna and Rosa, school friends finally reunited, who are sitting next to each other and are attracting the attention of the entire club, radiant and tanned, one blond and one with black hair.
As they both shoot the same smile toward him, Bruno Martino sits at the piano, wishes the audience a good evening, and begins to sing “E la chiamano estate.”