Bella Figura

by Kamin Mohammadi

  “Betsy, no!” I cried. “I am not a model, you mustn’t pay me!”

  But she insisted. “You have given me your day and your body to transform my work. Of course I must pay you. Your time has value, you know.”

  I dozed on the bus, my phone clutched in my hand. It had been a lovely day and Betsy had made posing for her easy, companionable. I had rarely felt so comfortable in my body. It was a golden interlude before the dark days that followed.

  * * *

  —

  Dino never did ring. Not that night, not that weekend, not ever. I never heard from him again. Just like that, Dino went to Spain and disappeared from my life. Had he vanished in a cloud of smoke in front of my eyes it couldn’t have been more mysterious or surprising.

  That first weekend felt like the longest of my life. Back from Betsy’s, I paced about my apartment for the rest of the day, chewing my nails. I didn’t know what to do with myself, so unmoored was I by his silence. So I went to see Luigo on Monday as soon as he arrived for work.

  “Luigo, what if something has happened to him?” I asked feverishly. “I mean, he should have landed a couple of hours ago, he should be back in Florence, but I have tried ringing him and his phone is still off.”

  Luigo regarded me calmly. “Any minute, bella, he will call!” he said with confidence. “You know what a flake he is, he probably left his phone somewhere…”

  “Yes, but once when I rang it rang, and then it was off, so I was thinking perhaps he had left it somewhere and it had run out of charge, but then it rang and rang again and that’s not possible if it has been left in a room in Pisa, say…”

  I heard myself ranting, but I couldn’t stop. I couldn’t imagine any possible reason other than illness or death that would have prevented Dino from being in touch with me for four days. Since meeting three months ago, we had never gone so long without talking or sending a message. It was inexplicable.

  But the week lumbered on with no word from Dino, and I began to realize there would be none. The three-month anniversary of our first kiss, our first date, our first (and only) night together came and went and there was still no word, not a peep, a message, a text. As if to make things worse, with the arrival of July a stultifying humidity descended on Florence. Every time I walked out of my building, a wave of hot air heavy with moisture hit me in the face. People disappeared from the streets during the heat of the day, and I had to stop my walks after I came home one day with sunstroke, vomiting for a whole afternoon, lying on the cool bathroom floor, my phone still gripped in my hand. I had sent a pathetic text to Dino then, saying:

  I’m sick. Help?

  sure that he wouldn’t be able to resist, he had always been so solicitous. I resolved that if he rang then I would say nothing of his disappearance, would forgive him, do all I could to go back to the way things were. But there was no response.

  The apartment was not much better than the streets; the heat sat heavy. I found a small fan in the cupboard off the hall, but it barely alleviated the heat. I didn’t have air-conditioning, and nor did Rifrullo or Luigo’s either. I couldn’t walk across town to the market or Cibreo. I learned to close my shutters as the Florentines did, to shut out the sun, and the dark, muggy air depressed me further.

  The following Friday night I was at Luigo’s. He had opened a terrace outside the bar, put a handful of tables on the street under an awning. We sat there, fanning ourselves, as he dragged on a cigarette and I chewed on the last nail that I had not already bitten to the quick. I had also chewed Luigo’s head off all week and I still had no other topic of conversation. And yet he listened patiently. “Even if he extended his trip for some reason, he should be back from Spain by now, how can he not call me or take my calls? There must be something wrong. His Skype is switched off too.” I still couldn’t quite believe his disappearance had anything to do with not wanting to see me. He had had bursts of unreliability before but never for so long and over all possible modes of communication. “Luigo,” I said seriously. “What if he’s dead?”

  “Bella, he’s not dead, dai,” Luigo reasoned. “You’d know if he was, someone would tell you.”

  “Would they?” I demanded. “Who would tell me? I don’t know his friends and his family…”

  “You met lots of his friends, didn’t you?” Luigo was right, we had been joined at Nello by plenty of people, but I didn’t know them beyond their first names. I didn’t have anyone’s phone number. I had never been to his home, met his family; in fact, I didn’t even know where he lived. How had I never noticed any of this before?

  Nothing else occupied my overheated brain all week, in spite of the promise I had made to myself at Betsy’s to return to my writing routine. It dawned on me that Dino had treated me like an affair. Always coming to my apartment or taking me out of town in the evenings. He had revealed nothing about himself. The reality now hit me like a train. Our relationship, no matter how romantic and close it had felt to me, added up to very little of substance. All I had imagined between us melted away, the future I had written for us deleted to nothing. I was in shock.

  But he had behaved as if he had nothing to hide. When he checked his email from my computer, he saved his password and never logged out. And so it was that one night, desperate for some contact, feeling half crazy in the heat, I decided to check his email. That way, I could at least see if he was picking up mail—proof that he was alive. I opened his Web browser and clicked into his inbox, pushing aside my misgivings at this invasion of his privacy, finally feeling calmer to be taking some action.

  The email I had sent him had been opened. He had been online. Instant relief. A quick look at his sent box revealed that he had been writing emails the day before. They were short, hurried—he’d probably been online for only ten minutes—but nonetheless, there were no emails to me.

  The relief that he was okay was quickly followed by outrage—how could he be alive and not call me? A few days ago we had been together, close, in love, I was his amore. And now he was avoiding my calls, hiding on Skype, ignoring me. Just like that, from one day to the next, he had erased me from his life. Only now did I realize that although I had made him the center of mine, I had actually not been part of his life at all.

  * * *

  —

  I was sprawled like a starfish across the double bed, naked. The window was open and the fan sat on the rickety table in front of me. A salty film of sweat covered my body, my iPod was playing “Estate” on a loop. I knew the words by heart by now and I sang along, silent tears running down my face. Every word could have been written for me: “summer, which gave its perfume to each flower, the summer which created our love, only then to make me die of pain…”

  The summer was, indeed, killing me. The season that had promised so much had me prone, useless, unable to do anything but lie around and cry. I never knew I could sweat so much.

  When I was not crying, I was furious. In the days since breaking into his email for the first time, my anger had burned hotter than the scorching midday sun. Hacking into his email had become an obsession. I had recruited Kicca to translate his emails, but trawl as we might through mails and pictures that friends had sent of the wedding in Spain (Dino looking handsome in a morning suit, Dino playing the fool in a bullring, Dino in a line of tall, besuited men), rake as my eyes did his face for any clue to his state of mind, we had found no smoking gun.

  The heat rose up all day, reaching me at the top of the building with such ferocity that in the middle of the afternoon I had to switch off my computer to stop it from overheating and lie in a cold bath. I now understood why people escaped the city on the weekends for the fresh breezes of the coast, but I had no choice. Weekends of messing about on boats with Dino remained a distant dream, although his emails and their attached pictures showed me that he was busy with jaunts: a weekend in Sicily (in linen, dancing on a beach at twilight), a fishing trip to Sardinia (action shots grappling with fish), a chic party in St. Tropez (going up the steps of
a private plane), and a walk in the sea with a prominent female politician at an upscale beach resort: he had been photographed by paparazzi walking thigh-high in the surf with her, his sunglasses on, a new mustache decorating his top lip, almost unrecognizable.

  My weekends were empty. I was lost; he had rung five times a day, his habit of seeming always on his way had filled my days. Now that I had been dumped out into the dull reality of normal life, I had no routine to ground me, nothing to save me from thinking. Motivating myself to sit in front of my computer and push on with the book was impossible. I dreaded going out into my street. We had been such a public couple and now I couldn’t face everyone, their curiosity, their kindness. I slunk out in the early evenings, up to the hills, where I watched well-dressed couples coming home, stepping elegantly into their villas, and felt locked out of this chic domesticity. The city that had opened its arms to me now felt alien and impenetrable, governed by rules I didn’t understand.

  * * *

  —

  I want my mom, I thought feverishly one day as I lay curled up on the corner sofa. I rang her, crying, and in a move so unexpected that it roused me off the sofa to start cleaning again, my mother announced she was coming to see me. Coming to get me was what she implied. I snapped into action.

  My parents, while always supportive, had never really recovered from my refusal to continue living with them—like a good Iranian girl—until I was married. Straight after university I had moved in with friends, and while they accepted my British insistence on independence, they rarely came to visit me in my own apartments; I always went home to them.

  Now my mother was coming to take care of me, and I was so surprised that I battled the heat to visit the market, filling my fridge with the plenty of summer—deep red San Marzano plum tomatoes, small zucchini with their trumpetlike flowers, sweet plums, and burgundy mulberries that stained my fingers.

  A few days later she was in my apartment, pulling from her suitcase packets of basmati rice, dried barberries, jars of Iranian pickles carefully swaddled in bubble wrap, pots of Persian saffron and turmeric. Despite my protestations that there was food in Italy, she had come to my rescue with the tools for the type of healing she excelled at—her cooking.

  My mother’s kitchen has always been my haven, an Iranian oasis in the desert of dull English food. Smelling of herbs and spices, it was a place of permanent culinary activity: chopping parsley, cleaning coriander, grinding the dark orange threads of saffron into a vivid powder, rice bubbling in water on the cooker. Yet, despite her passion for cooking and the refinement of her presentation—rice sprinkled with shards of cut pistachios and orange peel, pink dried rose petals scattered over homemade yogurt—she could not pass her skills on. A perfectionist by nature, and a society hostess by training, my mother could not countenance a tomato cut badly, a lettuce shredded the wrong way, and my clumsiness and impatience brought us to loggerheads. I had retired from any attempt at cooking a long time ago but had never lost the taste for my mother’s food, its bountiful flavors carrying the memories of Iran and my childhood.

  Our first stop was the market. By now I had found a way to get across the city in the heat. I skirted the palazzos on the sides of the streets, pausing by their basement windows—which opened to the street at pavement level—to cool my ankles in the fresh air that came blowing out. Now I led my mother to the market, teaching her how to stick close to the buildings, walking in the shade of their wide roofs, and we scuttled across the city like a couple of shy mice.

  My mother loved the market and worked her way through the stalls like the old hand that she was. When we had first arrived in London, at the tail end of the drab 1970s, the supermarkets had been a sad affair and the paucity of English fruit distressed her. At first she had taken refuge in Harrods’s food hall, the Iranian diaspora’s default setting in those days—when in doubt, head to Harrods—but she had eventually found her way to both Portobello and Church Street markets, filling up there on the large bunches of herbs and piles of fruit and vegetables we had been used to in Iran. Now I led her to Antonio’s stall, where he took her hand and bent so low over it in greeting that I worried he would fall. Like two old friends, they busied themselves, my mother pointing to the produce she wanted, rejecting anything Antonio picked up that she didn’t like the look of. Unlike his bossy way with me, with my mother Antonio was acquiescent and respectful, keeping his place in the face of a superior authority. They got on famously despite having no common language, and I was sure that somehow, in the middle of their inexplicable communication, they even laughed at me and my shopping habits.

  Back home she got to work straightaway, and before long pots were bubbling on the stove, tomatoes being turned into paste, the smell of saffron rising from the rice as she stained it expertly. It wasn’t until we sat down to eat a delicious and comforting Persian meal that I finally confided in her, told her about Dino and his disappearance.

  Had I not been so desperate, I would have said nothing. Although we were close in our way, I was still the typical immigrant child, keeping the English part of my life—with its sex and myriad modern problems—to myself, presenting my parents instead with an idealized version of myself. Through the painful years of the Big Job, I had hidden the extent of my distress from them, even while its physical manifestations were plain for all to see. But now, Dino’s desertion had me floored and I could not—did not want to—hide it from my mother. My tears dripped into the steam rising from my rice and eggplant stew. When I finished telling her everything, my mother reached out and took my hand. “You know why you are crying, azizam?” she asked softly. “It’s not so much for that man, really. It’s because of the death of the fantasy. That’s much harder to let go of, you know. Reality”—she sighed—“well, real love is messy and uncomfortable and challenging. But it’s so much better, you’ll see.”

  * * *

  —

  I was trailing Antonella through town after putting my mother on the train to the airport. I had cried saying goodbye to her, and we had hugged tight. It had been a short trip but rich with comfort and closeness. We had gone to the market every day, had been delighted to discover it full of sour cherries and had taken a whole box home in a taxi, where, after an hour of washing, then patiently pitting each cherry, my mother showed me her method for making my childhood favorite, sour cherry jam. From a little of its dark, thick syrup she had made me a sharbat, the traditional Iranian fruit syrup mixed with a little water and lots of ice to beat the heat, and put the rest in my fridge for the following days. She had taught me how to make my own yogurt, inspired by the creamy milk from the Maremma, showing me how to use muslin to make it thick and tangy. She had packed my freezer with her rich tomato-based Persian stews, had tucked the packets of basmati rice into my cupboards, and with that, she had departed, leaving me with the tastes of my homeland as solace.

  Antonella was on her way to the hairdresser and I followed her into the salon, entering a world of noisy, female banter. She introduced me to Maria, the salon owner, a wild-haired older woman who settled in with us after bringing us coffee, and as another woman attended to coloring Antonella’s locks, talk turned—as it does in such settings the world over—to men and our love lives. I explained, through Antonella, what had just happened with Dino. To my surprise, instead of being shocked, Maria and the attendant women all nodded sagely.

  “Eh,” said a stately woman from under a hood hairdryer. “It’s happened also to me…”

  “Me too,” piped up a young woman from the other chair, her hair wrapped in foil. “Sono stronzi!”

  Antonella turned to me: “You see, bella, you’re not alone.”

  Maria cupped one of my cheeks in her hand. “These stronzi happen to us all,” she said kindly. “You mustn’t take it personally, a beautiful girl like you.”

  I did take it personally. I found it impossible to separate Dino’s behavior from myself, my looks. “I feel so ugly,” I wailed, and Maria exchanged a glance with A
ntonella.

  “Guarda, bella,” said Maria. “I have an idea. You have beautiful hair.” She stroked my head tenderly. “Have you ever thought about wearing it shorter?”

  “Cut that man right out of your hair, tesoro,” Antonella urged.

  I hesitated. My hair had been this length for as long as I could remember. But in this heat, I felt nothing but the dead weight of all those curls, crowding around me as I lay unsleeping in bed at night. Now, as I looked at Maria, I nodded my assent. Why not, I thought, cut that bastard out of my hair?

  Maria prepared her scissors as I had my hair washed, the whole salon joining in with ideas. But Maria had her own plan. And as I sat down next to Antonella, Maria’s scissors flew around my head, snipping and cutting, a mass of black curls tumbling to the floor.

  “It’s like a black sheep is being shorn, cara,” laughed Antonella. I looked at Maria anxiously and she gave me a reassuring pat on the shoulder. “Don’t worry,” she said, “is going to be perfect. I was thinking—do you know Gina Lollobrigida…?”

  I smiled, and even more broadly when Maria had finished, putting down her hairdryer and turning my chair to face the whole salon. A cheer went up from the women, choruses of “Ma dai, che bella!” When Maria turned my chair to face the mirror, I was dumbstruck. She had transformed me into a 1950s starlet, given me a head of curls that sat as glamorously as if on Ava Gardner.

  “Guarda,” said Antonella proudly. “You are the Iranian Sophia Loren. Bellissima!”