A Private Venus

by Giorgio Scerbanenco

  ‘You said things to me that were very, very …’ it would be stupid to say ‘kind,’ but what could he say, so he broke off.

  ‘I said to you a hundredth of what I should have said to you years ago. But now you want to talk about Alberta, so let’s talk about her.’

  She was wearing a dark green dress he liked a lot: smooth, high-necked, sleeveless. She was tanned, but normally, she didn’t look like a Papuan, nor was she pale like girls who never sunbathe. That green, that tan, that black hair, matched the place very well, because it was all in gold, the walls were covered in gold plastic, and so was the counter, and the round tables gleamed dimly like old gold.

  ‘Two beers.’ They were the only customers, after serving them even the barman disappeared. There was no air conditioning, but a big fan with wide wooden blades gave the place an exotic, colonial tone and probably made it cooler than air conditioning might have.

  ‘Alberta killed herself a year ago. What do you want to know about a dead woman?’ Like him, she liked getting straight to the point, and when he didn’t reply immediately, she continued, ‘I can imagine how you met her. One evening you were going to the cinema alone, you hadn’t found any other way to spend the evening, you got there in time for the last show, you parked your car and looked around, still undecided whether or not to go in, and that was when you saw her, standing there, looking a bit self-conscious, near the entrance to the cinema. You must have thought she was just a normal girl who’d been stood up by her boyfriend, or else she was waiting for a girlfriend who hadn’t shown up. Before resigning himself to going to the cinema alone, a man has to try everything. So you smiled at her and it came as a pleasant surprise when she smiled back, a bit. Then you approached her, said some kind, considerate, witty words, and the rest is predictable.’

  ‘I never met Alberta Radelli.’ With this girl, he couldn’t hide.

  She seemed to turn colder. ‘On the phone you told me you knew her.’

  ‘Indirectly. I’ve heard a lot about Alberta.’ Yes, a lot.

  ‘I don’t like equivocation. I can’t believe you’d indulge in it. Don’t disappoint me. A doctor willing to perform an act of euthanasia can’t be an equivocator. Why are you interested in Alberta? Tell me the truth, or I’ll leave now.’

  She was a little too Kantian: behind her words there were categorical imperatives and prolegomena to any future metaphysics that would be able to present itself as a science. But she had beaten him and he had to tell her the truth. Or rather, he did more: he had brought with him the little leather briefcase, and gently—they weren’t images to be shown in public—he showed her Alberta’s photographs.

  Livia Ussaro looked at them. ‘I told her not to.’

  He thought he was intelligent, but he didn’t understand. He waited.

  ‘She told me there was someone who was offering her thirty thousand lire for a few photographs like this, and I told her not to. We almost quarrelled, that time. She told me it was less dirty being photographed like that than going with the first man she found. I told her that wasn’t true. She didn’t take any notice, and did this filthy job all the same.’

  It was all starting to become clear. ‘What about this other girl, do you know her?’ He took the photograph of the blonde girl from the briefcase.

  ‘Maurilia, I only know her first name, I think she works at La Rinascente.’

  Even clearer. Mascaranti would easily find a Maurilia, either in La Rinascente, or in all of Italy, there couldn’t be many Maurilias. ‘And how did you meet Alberta?’

  Livia Ussaro started laughing, without a sound, the silence of the gold-covered bar was not disturbed, but her somewhat masculine face grew softer with the laughter. ‘How I met her doesn’t matter. It’s what led up to it that’s important.’

  ‘Then tell me what led up to it.’

  ‘Of course, that’s all I want to do, we all want to open our hearts completely,’ she continued laughing the same way, but a little less. ‘I don’t know if I’m going to disappoint you, but what led up to it is this.’

  She ordered two more beers. In a way, she was happy.

  ‘Ever since I was sixteen, I’d wanted to experiment with prostitution,’ she said, she had stopped laughing, and that tone had returned, not bureaucratic, but professorial, she was expounding a theory, which was as good as any other, that much was obvious. ‘It wasn’t morbid curiosity. You may be able to tell from my physical type that I’m frigid. Not completely. The gynaecologist and the neurologist have established that when the physical and environmental conditions are right, I can be a perfectly normal woman. Unfortunately these conditions are difficult to produce, and in practice it’s as if I was frigid. Some people who aren’t very perceptive think I’m a lesbian, which I find quite amusing.’

  He was finishing his second beer, he was still thirsty, or maybe it wasn’t thirst, and he felt, yes, quite happy, Livia Ussaro existed and was telling him interesting, extraordinary things, even though it wasn’t clear exactly what she was telling him.

  ‘No, I wanted to make the experiment for purposes of social study. I was born with a weakness for sociology. When the other girls couldn’t wait to put on long sheer stockings, I was reading Pareto and what’s worse, understanding him. Unfortunately, Pareto doesn’t have much to say about women, nor do the other sociologists. As a woman, I’m interested in female sociology, and one of the most important problems in that field is prostitution. The first thing to realise is that you can’t understand prostitution, really understand it, if you haven’t been a prostitute: if you haven’t, at least once, performed an act of prostitution.’

  He had the feeling he was at a lecture, at some convention of intellectuals, and he ordered two more beers: he had never got drunk on beer, but he feared that tonight he might have to.

  ‘It isn’t a logically incontrovertible theory,’ she continued, cool, magisterial, and yet so feminine, ‘in fact, if you analyse it closely it doesn’t hold up at all, but it has its charm. The experiment I wanted to do was to go out on the street, let a man accost me and go with him for money. In that way I would have a typical experience, a sample experience, empirical but significant data that would help me study the question. Except that, whenever I was about to do so, two or three thousand years of taboos stopped me. In addition, I was a virgin and the part of my ego that belonged to the herd balked at the idea of losing my virginity for science. Then, at the age of twenty, despite my frigidity, I fell in love, it was a strange thing that only lasted two days. In those two days the man who had succeeded in breaking down my defences took full advantage of the situation, I lost my virginity, and so there was no longer anything to prevent me performing my experiment. But it took me until I was twenty-three before I managed to overcome all the taboos. And it happened by chance.’

  Everything had a slightly hallucinatory air, including all that gold, and that startling silence of an area of Milan a little way out of the centre, towards midnight, when only a few cars pass, the odd tram, and there are long minutes of silence as if you are in the garden of a seventeenth-century villa.

  ‘I was in the Piazza della Scala, that evening, waiting for a tram,’ she said, informatively, ‘it was about this time of night, I’d been to see a friend who’s a dressmaker, a really stupid girl, but a good worker, even though she only ever talks about pleats, or about her molars, which are always hurting her. I was depressed and all at once I realised that a man about forty was coming towards me, swaying as he walked. I stayed where I was, and he told me in German that I was the most beautiful brunette he’d ever seen anywhere in Europe. I told him, in German, that I didn’t like drunks and asked him to leave me alone. Then he took off his hat, in that heat he was wearing a beautiful black straw hat, and told me he was happy I knew German, and that he was sorry but he wasn’t drunk, maybe I hadn’t seen him properly, he simply had a limp. You can understand the remorse I felt, I’d told him he was drunk, when all he had was a limp. In the meantime he asked if he could buy
me something. I said yes, by way of apology. He took me to the Biffi, I had an ice cream, and then he told me that he was feeling lonely and asked if I could keep him company. I said yes. Then he said, “Für Geld oder für Sympathie?” He was a German, after all, and didn’t appreciate equivocation, he wanted to know if I would keep him company for free, as my friend the dressmaker says, out of sympathy, or for money. I was thinking about my prostitution experiment and immediately said, “Für Geld.” He asked me how much, it was my chance to carry out my sociological experiment, but the financial side of it was something I had no idea about. I told him the lowest figure, I was afraid that otherwise he’d say no.’

  ‘How much?’ The most fascinating form of madness was the lucid, rational kind.

  ‘Five thousand.’ She paused.

  ‘And then?’

  ‘Nothing. He gave it to me immediately. His car was parked in the Piazza della Scala, he asked me to tell him where to go: it was a bit awkward, because I didn’t know anything about the sexual geography of Milan at the time. By chance, we ended up in the Parco Lambro.’ She fell silent again.

  ‘And then?’

  ‘What struck me was how quick it was.’ She was very serious now. ‘And later, every time I repeated these experiments, it was the one thing I could never understand, the brevity. I think it takes longer to weigh yourself properly on a pharmacist’s weighing machine. And to think that four-fifths of human experience is based on something so quick, something that flashes by in an instant. I wrote lots of notes about that first experiment, but you wouldn’t want to read them.’

  No, he didn’t want to, but he didn’t tell her that. ‘Is that what led up to your meeting Alberta?’

  ‘Yes, it is. In fact, I met her the very next day. A friend from university had invited me to a cocktail party. His father is the director of a large company making corsets and swimming costumes, and they were presenting their latest creations to the press and public in a reception room in the Hotel Principe. I’d never been to anything like that before, so I went. There were a whole lot of women, and many must have been lesbians, real lesbians, because they kept coming up to me and buzzing around me like flies until they realised I wasn’t the rose they’d imagined and left me alone. Then, in the middle of that world that was so strange to me, I saw someone else looking as lost as I was. That was her, Alberta. I don’t have friends, I’ve never been good at making them, but after an hour Alberta and I were like sisters and we’d told each other everything. It was the first time since high school that I’d found someone I could talk to about general topics, I don’t mean the future of mankind, but at least the influence in politics of the female vote. These days, the only general topics people talk about are leisure time and the influence of machines, which apart from anything else aren’t even really what you could call topics, in the strict sense of the term. Don’t you agree?’

  He did, warmly, maybe because he was still warm with beer: leisure time and the influence of machines, pah!

  ‘We left the cocktail party and she took me to her place, at eleven we were still talking, about midnight we realised we hadn’t eaten and she prepared some bread and cheese, and at half past one we were still there, talking.’

  ‘And what did you talk about?’ Four or five hours of conversation: it might well be that they’d done nothing but talk, Livia Ussaro said so, and Livia Ussaro didn’t tell lies, but a lesbian may use the word for something more intimate. The suspicion, though, faded immediately, because of the fervour with which she answered his question.

  ‘I think that in the last three hours all we talked about was prostitution. I told her about my experiment the previous night—that’s why I had to tell you what led up to our meeting—and Alberta told me that over the past few months she’d been doing the same kind of experiment. Not for the purposes of study, obviously, but out of necessity. Not long after she had arrived in Milan from Naples, she had realised it wouldn’t be easy to live here. She’d wanted to work in the theatre, but she’d given up the idea after talking to the porters of the theatres where the various companies worked. Instead, she easily found work as a shop assistant, because of her elegant figure and the way she treated the customers, but the customers, or the boss, sooner or later put her in a position where she had to be fired. So, when she was really broke, she’d go out and come back home a little later feeling a little easier financially. I made her tell me all the experiences she’d had, half my notes are based on what Alberta told me. If people here in Italy didn’t laugh about certain subjects, especially if dealt with by a woman, I could write a report on private prostitution. There was one question that fascinated us above all: From a social point of view, does a woman have the right to prostitute herself, but, I emphasise, privately? And only when she wants to, without anything else driving her?’

  He must be drunk and he was still thirsty. He wanted to see if she would get angry. ‘A woman also has the right to get married, at least so I’ve heard.’

  She didn’t get angry, but she seemed disappointed. ‘Don’t turn nasty on me, I’m serious. For an intelligent woman, like Alberta, like many others …’

  ‘Like you.’

  ‘Yes, like me, too. It’s difficult to get married when you’re intelligent. Of course, in the end we all get married, but an intelligent woman wants to marry well, and it’s difficult to find the right man.’

  He really wanted to make her angry. ‘That’s not a good reason to go out on the streets and let yourself be picked up by the first man who comes along.’

  ‘You’re doing this deliberately. I’m not saying she has to do that, I’m just asking, theoretically, whether or not she has the right.’

  He had let her talk for a long time and had learned something useful: Alberta Radelli had indulged in private prostitution, a form of prostitution that seemed to be on the increase. But he needed to know more. ‘Listen, I like general topics very much, but for the job I’m doing I need details. Do you have any idea where Alberta went to pose for these photographs, and why?’

  When she thought, her face took on an almost childish expression. ‘I don’t have a very good memory, but I do remember something about it because it was the reason I became disappointed in Alberta.’

  ‘What is it you remember?’ If he could find out who had taken those photographs, there was no stopping him.

  ‘I remember a number. Numbers are easier to remember, you know. For example, I remember they were giving her thirty thousand lire to pose for those photographs. I spent a whole afternoon arguing with her, she really disappointed me, although she realised those photographs were something different …’

  Oh, no, enough philosophy for the moment. He interrupted her. ‘What’s the number you remember?’

  ‘The number is 78, it was a house number, but I don’t remember the name of the street. I asked her for the details, because I realised there was something that wasn’t right, that she was moving from private prostitution into something organised …’

  No, no, he interrupted her again, he would take her to the Torre Branca one of these days, on a rainy weekday, and there he would let her talk about general topics, there in the deserted round bar a hundred metres above the Milanese plain, until the place closed, but now he needed to know about Alberta, and quickly.

  ‘Now please listen, this is very important. Can you remember anything more about these photographs? The number 78 isn’t enough, and we have to find the photographer, soon.’ Why soon? A year had passed since Alberta’s death, what was the hurry? Maybe he was telepathic or something, but he felt a sense of urgency.

  ‘I don’t remember anything else, she just told me she was going to see a photographer.’

  ‘Obviously.’

  ‘Oh, wait, she said something strange, now I remember, she said it was like industrial photography. What has industrial photography got to do with nude photographs?’

  It did have something to do with it, but he didn’t tell her: it was a cover. So, at number
78 of one of the three thousand or six thousand streets in Milan there existed, or at least there had existed a year before, a studio for industrial photography, at which, discreetly, artistic photographs were also taken. It might take Mascaranti only half a day to find this studio, if it still existed, or even if it didn’t.

  ‘And did she tell you who had suggested she pose for these photographs?’

  ‘Yes, she did. It was a filthy business, I don’t like perversions.’ She looked at the barman, who was standing restlessly in the doorway of the bar, waiting to close: it was almost midnight. ‘There was a man who’d approached her, they’d gone in his car some distance from Milan, he was a middle-aged man, I think, he was very generous and very kind, but he’d hardly touched her. Then he’d confessed to her that at his age people had weaknesses, he was able to respond to female charms more in a beautiful photograph, if she wanted to pose for some photographs that would be sufficient for him, just photographs. She said yes, and he gave her the address of the photographer. Then he asked her if she had a friend who might also like to pose for photographs, each of them would be given thirty thousand lire.’

  It was a lot of money just so that this voyeur could look at some photographs. ‘Let’s see if I’ve got this right. Alberta told you that a man she’d been with suggested she pose for some photographs and gave her the address of a photographer. In other words, Alberta had to go alone to this photographer, who already knew the work he had to do?’

  ‘Yes, that’s exactly it.’

  ‘But, in order to let the photographer know that she had come for that special kind of photograph, didn’t she have to tell him anything, give him some kind of password? She couldn’t just tell him, out of the blue, that she wanted to be photographed nude.’

  ‘No, she didn’t need to say anything, that was why I quarrelled with Alberta. I made her give me all the details because I wanted to understand what it was all about. All Alberta had to do was go to the studio and when she got there she didn’t have to tell him anything, the photographer already knew. She would pose for some photographs, the photographer would pay her, and that was it.’