Among Women Only

by Cesare Pavese

  "Put on the lights," she told us. "Don't you see it's night?"

  When the lights came on, the window disappeared and the painting became a puddle of flayed faces.

  "Everybody's dropping out," Nene said. "I'm dropping out, too. One loses time over a lot of dumb excuses and we still don't know What we're doing. Clara's right, let's recite in the dark, like a radio broadcast..."

  Momina smiled in her dissatisfied way. She didn't answer Nene but instead told Loris that she had talked with somebody who had told her this and that, and Loris grunted something from the bed, holding his ankle; Mariella jumped in and they laughed and chattered and Nene said: "Crazy nonsense," and they forgot about the theater. Now Momina held forth, telling about a certain Gege di Piové who, meeting a girl he'd known as a child—they hadn't seen each other for years—went up to her in the bar of a big hotel: "Hello."

  "Hello."

  "They tell me you've developed," and slipping his hand down the front of her dress he brought out a breast and they both laughed with Filippo the bartender and the onlookers. Momina and Nene laughed; Mariella looked disgusted; Loris jumped up from the bed, saying: "It's true. She has magnificent tits."

  "Slander," Mariella said. "Vanna's not like that."

  "They're not magnificent?" Loris said.

  They went on in that vein and Momina skipped from one subject to another, looking at me out of the corners of her eyes in her searching way, asked my opinion, tried to fascinate me. I was glad that the play didn't come up again. Only Mariella was restless, one saw that Momina had taken her place. Momina was younger than I, but not by much: she dressed very well, a gray suit under her beaver coat, her skin was massaged, her face fresh; she took advantage of her nearsightedness by passing it off as detachment. I recalled her violet dress on the first night and looked at her naked ring finger.

  "We're leaving," Mariella said suddenly.

  Momina told us to wait for her, that she had her car below. The three of us got into her green Topolino: I had expected something better. Mariella wanted to sit in the back. Lighting a cigarette, Momina explained: "This is all my husband allows me."

  "Ah," I said.

  "I live alone," Momina observed, putting the car into gear. "It's better for both of us."

  I wanted to stop at the Via Po and take a last look. Momina said: "Stay with me, tonight."

  Mariella, in the back seat, was silent. We dropped her at the gate on her avenue. At the last minute she took up the play again, complained about Momina, about us, accused us of having put a spoke in the wheel. Momina answered coldly; then they flew at each other while I looked at the shrubbery. Now they were quiet. "I'll tell you about it tomorrow," Momina told her. The two of us got back in.

  She took me back to the center, saying nothing about Mariella. Instead she talked about Nene and said that she made such beautiful sculptures. "I can't understand why she wastes her time with that Loris," she smiled. "She's so intelligent. A woman worth more than the man who touches her is damned unlucky."

  I asked her to take me to the Via Po.

  When I emerged from the portico and went back to the car, Momina was smoking a cigarette and looking around in the dark. She opened the door for me.

  We went to the Piazza San Carlo for an aperitif. We took two small armchairs in the back of a new gilded cafe, its entrance still cluttered with trestles and rubbish. An elegant place. Momina turned back her fur coat and looked at me. "Now you know all my friends," she said. "From Rome to Turin is quite a jump. It must be pleasant to work as you do."

  What is she looking for, a job? I thought.

  "Don't be alarmed," she went on. "The circle here in Turin is small... I don't mean to ask your advice. You have taste, but my dressmaker is good enough for me... It's a pleasure to talk to somebody who leads another life."

  We talked a bit about Turin and Rome—she squinting at me through the smoke—about how you can't find apartments, about the new cafe we were in; she had never been to Rome but she had been to Paris and didn't I think I should go to Paris for my work; I absolutely had to go; traveling for the sake of one's work was the only real traveling, and why should I be satisfied with Turin?

  Then I said I had been sent here. "I was born in Turin."

  She was born in Turin too, she said, but grew up in Switzerland and was married in Florence. "They brought me up a lady," she said, "but what's a lady who can't catch a train tomorrow for London or Spain or wherever you like?"

  I opened my mouth, but she said that after the war only workers like myself could afford the luxury.

  "When you work, you don't have time," I said.

  She observed calmly: "It's hardly worth working just to come to Turin."

  I believed I understood her and told her I hadn't been in Turin for nearly twenty years and had also come back to see my old home.

  "You are alone, it seems."

  "The house I lived in, the quarter..."

  She looked at me with that discontented smile. "I don't understand these things," she said. "You probably have nothing in common with the girl who was born in Turin. Your family..."

  "Dead."

  "... If they weren't, they'd make you laugh. What would you have in common with them now?"

  She was so cold and distant that I flushed and didn't know what to say. I felt a fool. After all, I thought, she's trying to pay you a compliment. She looked at me quizzically as if she had understood.

  "Now don't tell me, like some people I know, that it's fine being born in a courtyard..."

  I said that it was fine to think about the courtyard, comparing it with now.

  "I knew it," she said, laughing. "Living is so foolish that one gets attached even to the foolishness of having been born..."

  She knew how to talk, no question of that. I looked around at the gilding, the mirrors, the prints on the walls. "This cafe," Momina said, "was put up by a man like you, pigheaded..."

  She made me smile. Are you on the ball because you've lived in Paris, I thought, or were you in Paris because you're on the ball?

  But she said abruptly: "Did you enjoy the party the other evening?"

  "Was that a party?" I murmured, disillusioned. "I wasn't aware."

  "They say it's carnival time," she remarked ironically in a low voice, laughing. "These things happen."

  "And pretty Mariella," I said, "why doesn't she go to these parties?"

  "She's already told you that?" Momina smiled. "Why, you're real friends already."

  "She hasn't asked me yet to run up a dress for her."

  "She will, she will. We're all like that in Turin..."

  9

  I am a fool. In the evening I was sorry to have spoken badly of Mariella after she had defended that girl Vanna in Loris's studio. The bitterness stayed in my mouth. Of course I knew they were only words, that these people—all of them, including Morelli— lived like cats, always ready to scratch and snatch, but anyhow I was sorry and said to myself: "Here I am just like them." The mood didn't last, however, and when Momina asked what I was doing that evening I agreed to keep her company. We went to the hotel for dinner and naturally Morelli showed up and came over to our table to talk, showing no surprise at seeing us together. Halfway through the meal my telephone call from Rome came through. For a couple of minutes in the booth I discussed the Via Po, made projects, and breathed the old air. When I got back, Morelli and Momina told me to forget all that, we were going to enjoy ourselves, we would go out together and end up in Morelli's apartment.

  That evening Morelli wanted to drive. He took us to the wine market, where he tried to get us drunk, as men do with inexperienced girls, but eventually he drank more than we did. And then, as a kind of game, we made the rounds of numberless places, getting in and out of the car; I kept taking off and putting on my fur, one dance and away—I seemed to recognize dozens of faces. Once we lost Momina and found her at the door of the next room, laughing and talking with the doorman. I had no idea there was so much going on in
Turin. Momina stopped treating me absently, she laughed in Morelli's face and suggested we make the rounds of the dives along Porta Palazzo where you drink red wine and the whores hang out. "This isn't Paris, you know," Morelli said. "Content yourself with those four fairies over there." In a bar in Via Roma, near the little square with the churches, Morelli pretended to be bargaining for cocaine with the barkeep, they were great friends. He stood us drinks and then the drummer began telling us about the time he played in the Royal Palace. "His Highness ... because for me he is still His Highness ..." To get away, I danced with Momina. I don't like dancing with women, but I wanted to test a suspicion and this is still the quickest way. Nobody paid us any attention; Momina danced, talking into my ear, held me so tight it burned, rubbed against me, laughed and breathed in my hair, but it didn't seem to me she wanted anything else; she made no advances, was just a little crazy and drunk. Well and good; it would have been a very unpleasant mess.

  And finally we arrived at the entrance to Morelli's place. He saw us a bit unsteadily into the elevator, talking a blue streak to both of us. As we went into his apartment, he said: "All this gabble lengthens your life. I'm glad I'm not old yet because if I were I'd be running after dolls... You're not dolls, you're real women... Vicious, bad-tempered: but women... You know how to talk... No, no, I'm not old yet..."

  We entered laughing and I liked the apartment immediately. It was obviously empty and very large. We went to the living room, which had big armchairs and was full of rugs and azaleas. The large window opening on the boulevard must have been pleasant in summer.

  Brandy glasses in hand, we made plans. Momina asked if I were going to the mountains. There was still snow. Morelli talked stubbornly about Capri and the pine woods of Fregene; he tried to recall whether he had business in Rome that would justify a vacation or any kind of trip. I said it was odd that men should make such a fuss about appearances. "If it weren't for the men," I said, "we'd have had divorce in Italy long ago."

  "No need of it, really," Momina observed tranquilly. "You can always come to an understanding with your husband."

  "I admire Clelia," he said, "who hasn't even wanted..."

  "It's not that I want to pry," Momina said, looking at me, "but, if you married, would you want to have children?"

  "Have you had them?" I laughed. "That's what people get married for."

  But she didn't laugh. "When you have children," she said, staring at her glass, "you accept life. Do you accept life?"

  "If you live, you accept it, don't you?" I said. "Children don't affect the question."

  "Yes, but you haven't had any..." she said, raising her eyes and looking at me.

  "Children are a great nuisance," Morelli said, "but women are all for them."

  "Not us," Momina shot out.

  "I've always noticed that someone who hasn't wanted children usually ends by taking care of someone else's."

  "That's not it," Momina interrupted. "The point is that a woman with a child is no longer herself. She has to accept so many things, she has to say yes. And is it worth the trouble to say yes?"

  "Clelia doesn't want to say yes," Morelli said.

  Then I said that arguing such matters made no sense because everybody likes a child but you can't always do what you want. If you want to have a child you have one, but you should be careful first to provide him with a home and money so that later he won't curse his mother.

  Momina, lighting a cigarette, looked at me searchingly with her eyes half closed against the smoke. She went back to asking me if I accepted life. She said that to have a child you had to carry it inside, to become a sow, bleed and die—you had to say yes to so many things. That was what she wanted to know, whether I accepted life.

  "Oh drop it now," Morelli said. "Neither of you is pregnant."

  We drank some more cognac. Morelli wanted us to listen to some records; he said his maid slept like the dead. From the floor above came a reverberation of feet and a great uproar. "They're celebrating the carnival too," he said so solemnly that I broke out laughing. But I had been struck by this business of saying yes; Momina had taken off her shoes and had curled up in the armchair, smoking. We talked trivialities, she studying me with her discontented air, like a cat, listening; I talked but felt rotten inside. I had never thought about things in the light that Momina put on them, - I knew it was all words—"we're here to have a good time"—but meanwhile it was true that not to have children meant you were afraid of life. I thought of the girl in the hotel and told myself: it will turn out that she was pregnant. I was a bit drunk and sleepy too, but Morelli, on the other hand, the later it got the more boyish he became; he walked around the room, amused us, talked of getting breakfast. When we went out—he had to come at any cost—they took me to the hotel in the car,- and so we said no more that time about those things.

  10

  One of those days—it was drizzling—I had to return before evening from the neighborhood of the Consolata. I was looking for an electrician and it excited me a little to see the old stores again, the big outer doors in the alleys, and to read the names— delle Orfane, di Corte d'Appello, Tre galline—and recognize the signs. Not even the cobblestones had changed. I didn't have an umbrella and under the narrow slits of sky above the roofs I rediscovered the old odor of the walls. No one knows, I said to myself, that you're that Clelia. I hadn't dared stop to examine the old windows closely.

  But when I was ready to go back I let myself go. I was in Via Santa Chiara and remembered the corner, the grated windows, the smeared, steamed glass of the shop front. I stepped firmly across the threshold to the sound of the old bell, as I used to, and passing my hand over my fur felt its wetness. The little shelves and their display of buttons, the little counter, the smell of cloth, were still the same in that close air.

  A lamp with a green reflector still lighted the cash register. At the last minute I hoped the business had changed hands, but the bony, resentful face of the thin woman who got up from behind the counter was really Gisella's. I think I blushed and hoped that I, too, had aged like that. Gisella inspected me suspiciously, with a half smile of invitation on her thin mouth. She was gray, but neat.

  Then she asked, in a tone that once would have made us both laugh, if I wanted to buy anything. I answered by winking. She didn't comprehend and began the phrase again. I interrupted her with my hand. "Is it possible?" I said.

  After the first pleasure and surprise, which wasn't enough to give her color (she left the counter and we both went to the doorway to see each other better), we chatted and laughed and she looked at my fur and stockings with an appraising eye as if I were her daughter. I didn't tell her everything about myself or why I was in Turin. I let her think what she liked, mentioning Rome vaguely, that I had a job. When we were both girls, Gisella was raised so very strictly that she wasn't even allowed in the movies, but I used to tell her to come anyway.

  She had already asked if I were married, and my impatient shrug had made her sigh, whether for me or for herself I don't know. "I'm a widow," she said. "Giulio is dead." Giulio was the son of the owner of the store, who had adopted the orphaned Gisella, and even in my time you could tell that she wanted Gisella to be her daughter-in-law. Giulio was a very tall, consumptive boy who wore a cape instead of an overcoat or sweater and always sunned himself in the winter on the steps of the cathedral. Gisella never talked about Giulio then; she was the only one who refused to believe that the old lady kept her in the house to marry the sick boy; she always used to say that he wasn't sick. Gisella was shrewd and lively in those days. In the house she was often held up to us as an example.

  "And Carlotta?" I asked. "What is she doing? Still dancing?"

  But Gisella had gone on talking about the shop and told me the usual story—she was glad to see me and relieve her feelings. I was struck by the rancorous tone she used in telling me that Carlotta had made her own way—she had been a ballerina in Germany during the war, then nobody had seen her. Gisella went back to th
e store, said that she had been bled white by Giulio's death, had been paying his sanatorium bills until three years ago. She told me about the old lady's death and of bad times even before the war. Her daughters—she had two, Rosa and Lina: one coughed, was anemic; the other one, fifteen years old; both were studying—they were a great trouble, life was expensive and the shop didn't bring what it used to bring in the old days.

  "But you're well off. You still have that apartment."

  Just trouble, she told me, nobody paid their rent; she had to throw out the previous tenants and now was renting to a group of girls. "It pays better. We're squeezed in upstairs." I recalled those two upper rooms, the stairway, the tiny kitchen. In the old lady's time, to climb those stairs was a risk, she was always in the middle of things, yelling at Gisella, telling her not to go out on the street. I was struck by the way Gisella now resembled the old lady, sighed, half shut her eyes; even the resentful smile she threw at my fur and stockings had a tinge of the rancor with which the old lady used to judge the rest of us.

  She called her daughters. I would rather have left. This was my whole past, insupportable yet so different now, so dead. I had told myself so many times in those years—and later too, as a matter of fact—that my purpose in life was to make good, to become somebody, in order to come back some day to those alleys where I had been a girl and enjoy the warmth, the amazement, the admiration of those familiar faces, of those little people. And I had done it, I came back; and the faces, the little people had all gone. Carlotta had gone, and Slim, Giulio, Pia, the old women. Guido, too, had gone. Neither we nor those times mattered any more to the people left, like Gisella. Maurizio always says that you get the things you want, but when they are no more use.

  Rosa wasn't there, she had gone to the neighbors'. But Lina, the healthy one, ran down the stairs, sprinted into the shop; she stopped, cautious and reserved, outside the cone of light. She was dressed in flannel, not badly, and was well developed. Gisella talked about making coffee and taking me upstairs; I said it would be better if we didn't leave the shop. In fact, just then the bell rang and a customer came in.