Carl rose.
“Is the price too high?”
“It’s impossible.”
De Vecchis rubbed his brow nervously. “Very well, since not all Americans are rich Americans—you see, I am objective—I will reduce the sum by one half. For less than a month’s rent the key is yours.”
“Thanks. No dice.”
“Please? I don’t understand your expression.”
“I can’t afford it. I’d still have a commission to pay the agent.”
“Oh? Then why don’t you forget him? I will issue orders to the portiere to allow you to move in immediately. This evening, if you prefer. The Contessa’s lawyer will draw up the lease free of charge. And although she is difficult to her lovers, she is an angel to her tenants.”
“I’d like to forget the agent,” Carl said, “but I can’t.”
De Vecchis gnawed his lip. “I will make it twenty-five thousand,” he said, “but this is my last and absolute word.”
“No, thanks. I won’t be a party to a bribe.”
De Vecchis rose, his small face tight, pale. “It is people like you who drive us to the hands of Communists. You try to buy us—our votes, our culture, and then you dare speak of bribes.”
He strode out of the room and through the lobby.
Five minutes later the phone rang. “Fifteen thousand is my final offer.” His voice was thick.
“Not a cent,” said Carl.
Norma stared at him.
De Vecchis slammed the phone.
The portiere telephoned. He had looked everywhere, he said, but had lost the Contessa’s address.
“What about her phone number?” Carl asked.
“It was changed when she moved. The numbers are confused in my mind, the old with the new.”
“Look here,” Carl said, “I’ll tell the Contessa you sent De Vecchis to see me about her apartment.”
“How can you tell her if you don’t know her number?” the portiere asked with curiosity. “It isn’t listed in the book.”
“I’ll ask Mrs. Gaspari for it when she gets home from work, then I’ll call the Contessa and tell her what you did.”
“What did I do? Tell me exactly.”
“You sent her former lover, a man she wants to get rid of, to try to squeeze money out of me for something that is none of his business—namely her apartment.”
“Is there no other way than this?” asked the portiere.
“If you tell me her address I will give you one thousand lire.” Carl felt his tongue thicken.
“How shameful,” Norma said from the sink, where she was washing clothes.
“Not more than one thousand?” asked the portiere.
“Not till I move in.”
The portiere then told him the Contessa’s last name and her new address. “Don’t repeat where you got it.”
Carl swore he wouldn’t.
He left the hotel on the run, got into a cab, and drove across the Tiber to the Via Cassia, in the country.
The Contessa’s maid admitted him into a fabulous place with mosaic floors, gilded furniture, and a marble bust of the Contessa’s greatgrandfather in the foyer where Carl waited. In twenty minutes the Contessa appeared, a plain-looking woman, past fifty, with dyed blond hair, black eyebrows, and a short, tight dress. The skin on her arms was wrinkled, but her bosom was enormous and she smelled like a rose garden.
“Please, you must be quick,” she said impatiently. “There is so much to do. I am preparing for my wedding.”
“Contessa,” said Carl, “excuse me for rushing in like this, but my wife and I have a desperate need for an apartment and we know that yours on the Via Tirreno is vacant. I’m an American student of Italian life and manners. We’ve been in Italy almost a month and are still living in a third-rate hotel. My wife is unhappy. The children have miserable colds. I’ll be glad to pay you fifty thousand lire, instead of the forty-five you ask, if you will kindly let us move in today.”
“Listen,” said the Contessa, “I come from an honorable family. Don’t try to bribe me.”
Carl blushed. “I mean nothing more than to give you proof of my good will.”
“In any case, my lawyer attends to my real estate matters.”
“He hasn’t the key.”
“Why hasn’t he?”
“The former occupant took it with him.”
“The fool,” she said.
“Do you happen to have a duplicate?”
“I never keep duplicate keys. They all get mixed up and I never know which is which.”
“Could we have one made?”
“Ask my lawyer.”
“I called this morning but he’s out of town. May I make a suggestion, Contessa? Could we have a window or a door forced? I will pay the cost of repair.”
The Contessa’s eyes glinted. “Of course not,” she said huffily. “I will have no destruction of my property. We’ve had enough of that sort of thing here. You Americans have no idea what we’ve lived through.”
“But doesn’t it mean something to you to have a reliable tenant in your apartment? What good is it standing empty? Say the word and I’ll bring you the rent in an hour.”
“Come back in two weeks, young man, after I finish my honeymoon.”
“In two weeks I may be dead,” Carl said.
The Contessa laughed.
Outside, he met Bevilacqua. He had a black eye and a stricken expression.
“So you’ve betrayed me?” the Italian said hoarsely.
“What do you mean ‘betrayed’? Who are you, Jesus Christ?”
“I hear you went to De Vecchis and begged for the key, with plans to move in without telling me.”
“How could I keep that a secret with your pal Mrs. Gaspari living right over my head? The minute I moved in she’d tell you, then you’d be over on horseback to collect.”
“That’s right,” said Bevilacqua. “I didn’t think of it.”
“Who gave you the black eye?” Carl asked.
“De Vecchis. He’s as strong as a wild pig. I met him at the apartment and asked for the key. He called me dirty names. We had a fight and he hit me in the eye with his elbow. How did you make out with the Contessa?”
“Not well. Did you come to see her?”
“Vaguely.”
“Go in and beg her to let me move in, for God’s sake. Maybe she’ll listen to a countryman.”
“Don’t ask me to eat a horse,” said Bevilacqua.
That night Carl dreamed they had moved out of the hotel into the Contessa’s apartment. The children were in the garden, playing among the roses. In the morning he decided to go to the portiere and offer him ten thousand lire if he would have a new key made, however they did it—door up or door down.
When he arrived at the apartment house the portiere and Bevilacqua were there with a toothless man, on his knees, poking a hooked wire into the door lock. In two minutes it clicked open.
With a gasp they all entered. From room to room they wandered like dead men. The place was a ruin. The furniture had been smashed with a dull axe. The slashed sofa revealed its inner springs. Rugs were cut up, crockery broken, books wildly torn and scattered. The white walls had been splashed with red wine, except one in the living room which was decorated with dirty words in six languages, printed in orange lipstick.
“Mamma mia,” muttered the toothless locksmith, crossing himself. The portiere slowly turned yellow. Bevilacqua wept.
De Vecchis, in his pea-green suit, appeared in the doorway. “Ecco la chiave!” He held it triumphantly aloft.
“Assassin!” shouted Bevilacqua. “Turd! May your bones grow hair and rot.”
“He lives for my death,” he cried to Carl, “I for his. This is our condition.”
“You lie,” said Carl. “I love this country.”
De Vecchis flung the key at them and ran. Bevilacqua, the light of hatred in his eyes, ducked, and the key hit Carl on the forehead, leaving a mark he could not rub out.
; 1958
The Maid’s Shoes
The maid had left her name with the porter’s wife. She said she was looking for steady work and would take anything but preferred not to work for an old woman. Still, if she had to she would. She was forty-five and looked older. Her face was worn but her hair was black, and her eyes and lips were pretty. She had few good teeth. When she laughed she was embarrassed around the mouth. Although it was cold in early October, that year in Rome, and the chestnut vendors were already bent over their pans of glowing charcoals, the maid wore only a threadbare black cotton dress which had a split down the left side, where about two inches of seam had opened on the hip, exposing her underwear. She had sewn the seam several times but this was one of the times it was open again. Her heavy but well-formed legs were bare and she wore house slippers as she talked to the portinaia; she had done a single day’s washing for a signora down the street and carried her shoes in a paper bag. There were three comparatively new apartment houses on the hilly street and she left her name in each.
The portinaia, a dumpy woman wearing a brown tweed skirt she had got from an English family that had once lived in the building, said she would remember the maid but then she forgot; she forgot until an American professor moved into a furnished apartment on the fifth floor and asked her to help him find a maid. The portinaia brought him a girl from the neighborhood, a girl of sixteen, recently from Umbria, who came with her aunt. But the professor, Orlando Krantz, did not like the way the aunt played up certain qualities of the girl, so he sent her away. He told the portinaia he was looking for an older woman, someone he wouldn’t have to worry about. Then the portinaia thought of the maid who had left her name and address, and she went to her house on the Via Appia Antica near the catacombs and told her an American was looking for a maid, mezzo servizio; she would give him her name if the maid agreed to make it worth her while. The maid, whose name was Rosa, shrugged her shoulders and looked stiffly down the street. She said she had nothing to offer the portinaia.
“Look at what I’m wearing,” she said. “Look at this junk pile, can you call it a house? I live here with my son and his bitch of a wife who counts every spoonful of soup in my mouth. They treat me like dirt and dirt is all I have to my name.”
“In that case I can do nothing for you,” the portinaia said. “I have myself and my husband to think of.” But she returned from the bus stop and said she would recommend the maid to the American professor if she gave her five thousand lire the first time she was paid.
“How much will he pay?” the maid asked the portinaia.
“I would ask for eighteen thousand a month. Tell him you have to spend two hundred lire a day for carfare.”
“That’s almost right,” Rosa said. “It will cost me forty one way and forty back. But if he pays me eighteen thousand I’ll give you five if you sign that’s all I owe you.”
“I will sign,” said the portinaia, and she recommended the maid to the American professor.
Orlando Krantz was a nervous man of sixty. He had mild gray eyes, a broad mouth, and a pointed clefted chin. His round head was bald and he had a bit of a belly, although the rest of him was quite thin. He was a somewhat odd-looking man but an authority in law, the portinaia told Rosa. The professor sat at a table in his study, writing all day, yet was up every half hour on some pretext or other to look nervously around. He worried how things were going and often came out of his study to see. He would watch Rosa working, then went in and wrote. In a half hour he would come out, ostensibly to wash his hands in the bathroom or drink a glass of cold water, but he was really passing by to see what she was doing. She was doing what she had to. Rosa worked quickly, especially when he was watching. She seemed, he thought, to be unhappy, but that was none of his business. Their lives, he knew, were full of troubles, often sordid; it was best to be detached.
This was the professor’s second year in Italy; he had spent the first in Milan, and the second was in Rome. He had rented a large three-bedroom apartment, one of which he used as a study. His wife and daughter, who had returned for a visit to the States in August, would have the other bedrooms; they were due back before not too long. When the ladies returned, he had told Rosa, he would put her on full-time. There was a maid’s room where she could sleep; indeed, which she already used as her own though she was in the apartment only from nine till four. Rosa agreed to a full-time arrangement because it would mean all her meals in and no rent to pay her son and his dog-faced wife.
While they were waiting for Mrs. Krantz and the daughter to arrive, Rosa did the marketing and cooking. She made the professor’s breakfast when she came in, and his lunch at one. She offered to stay later than four, to prepare his supper, which he ate at six, but he preferred to take that meal out. After shopping she cleaned the house, thoroughly mopping the marble floors with a wet rag she pushed around with a stick, though the floors did not look particularly dusty to him. She also washed and ironed his laundry. She was a good worker, her slippers clip-clopping as she hurried from one room to the next, and she frequently finished up about an hour or so before she was due to go home; so she retired to the maid’s room and there read Tempo or Epoca, or sometimes a love story in photographs, with the words printed in italics under each picture. Often she pulled her bed down and lay in it under blankets, to keep warm. The weather had turned rainy, and now the apartment was uncomfortably cold. The custom of the condominium in this apartment house was not to heat until the fifteenth of November, and if it was cold before then, as it was now, the people of the house had to do the best they could. The cold disturbed the professor, who wrote with his gloves and hat on, and increased his nervousness so that he was out to look at her more often. He wore a heavy blue bathrobe over his clothes; sometimes the bathrobe belt was wrapped around a hot-water bottle he had placed against the lower part of his back, under the suit coat. Sometimes he sat on the hot-water bag as he wrote, a sight that caused Rosa, when she once saw this, to smile behind her hand. If he left the hot-water bag in the dining room after lunch, Rosa asked if she might use it. As a rule he allowed her to, and then she did her work with the rubber bag pressed against her stomach with her elbow. She said she had trouble with her liver. That was why the professor did not mind her going to the maid’s room to lie down before leaving, after she had finished her work.
Once after Rosa had gone home, smelling tobacco smoke in the corridor near her room, the professor entered it to investigate. The room was not more than an elongated cubicle with a narrow bed that lifted sideways against the wall; there was also a small green cabinet, and an adjoining tiny bathroom containing a toilet and a sitz bath fed by a cold-water tap. She often did the laundry on a washboard in the sitz bath, but never, so far as he knew, had bathed in it. The day before her daughter-in-law’s name day she had asked permission to take a hot bath in his tub in the big bathroom, and though he had hesitated a moment, the professor finally said yes. In her room, he opened a drawer at the bottom of the cabinet and found a hoard of cigarette butts in it, the butts he had left in ashtrays. He noticed, too, that she had collected his old newspapers and magazines from the wastebaskets. She also saved cord, paper bags, and rubber bands; also pencil stubs he had thrown away. After he found that out, he occasionally gave her some meat left over from lunch, and cheese that had gone dry, to take with her. For this she brought him flowers. She also brought a dirty egg or two her daughter-in-law’s hen had laid, but he thanked her and said the yolks were too strong for his taste. He noticed that she needed a pair of shoes, for those she put on to go home in were split in two places, and she wore the same black dress with the tear in it every day, which embarrassed him when he had to speak to her; however, he thought he would refer these matters to his wife when she arrived.
As jobs went, Rosa knew she had a good one. The professor paid well and promptly, and he never ordered her around in the haughty manner of some of her Italian employers. This one was nervous and fussy but not a bad sort. His main fault was his silenc
e. Though he could speak a better than passable Italian, he preferred, when not at work, to sit in an armchair in the living room, reading. Only two souls in the whole apartment, you would think they would want to say something to each other once in a while. Sometimes when she served him a cup of coffee as he read, she tried to get in a word about her troubles. She wanted to tell him about her long, impoverished widowhood, how badly her son had turned out, and what her miserable daughter-in-law was like to live with. But though he listened courteously, although they shared the same roof, and even the same hot-water bottle and bathtub, they almost never shared speech. He said no more to her than a crow would, and clearly showed he preferred to be left alone. So she left him alone and was lonely in the apartment. Working for foreigners had its advantages, she thought, but it also had disadvantages.
After a while the professor noticed that the telephone was ringing regularly for Rosa each afternoon during the time she usually was resting in her room. In the following week, instead of staying in the house until four, after her telephone call she asked permission to leave. At first she said her liver was bothering her, but later she stopped giving excuses. Although he did not much approve of this sort of thing, suspecting she would take advantage of him if he was too liberal in granting favors, he informed her that, until his wife arrived, she might leave at three on two afternoons of the week, provided that all her duties were fully discharged. He knew that everything was done before she left but thought he ought to say it. She listened meekly—her eyes aglow, lips twitching—and meekly agreed. He presumed, when he happened to think about it afterwards, that Rosa had a good spot here, by any standard, and she ought soon to show it in her face, change her unhappy expression for one less so. However, this did not happen, for when he chanced to observe her, even on days when she was leaving early, she seemed sadly preoccupied, sighed much, as if something on her heart was weighing her down.
He never asked what, preferring not to become involved in whatever it was. These people had endless troubles, and if you let yourself get involved in them you got endlessly involved. He knew of one woman, the wife of a colleague, who had said to her maid: “Lucrezia, I am sympathetic to your condition but I don’t want to hear about it.” This, the professor reflected, was basically good policy. It kept employer-employee relationships where they belonged—on an objective level. He was, after all, leaving Italy in April and would never in his life see Rosa again. It would do her a lot more good if, say, he sent her a small check at Christmas, than if he needlessly immersed himself in her miseries now. The professor knew he was nervous and often impatient, and he was sometimes sorry for his nature; but he was what he was and preferred to stay aloof from what did not closely and personally concern him.
The Complete Stories Page 32