A Good Woman

by Lisa Appignanesi

  Sandro’s hands, thick, rough, the nails splayed, so unlike the suit he gracefully wears and his silent movie hero features, alert me before José begins to speak.

  ‘Sandro’s worked in construction since he was fifteen. And last year he graduated from architectural school. He comes from the neighbourhood.’ He says this last as if it is the ultimate testimonial, then adds, ‘You should look at what he did to my apartment.’

  ‘I see.’ I am silent for a moment and in that silence Sandro stares at me, while the others all start again to speak at once.

  ‘She doesn’t believe in us,’ Sandro murmurs in a lull, ‘and if she doesn’t believe in us, amigos, we have one big mother of a battle ahead of us. And one big lot of homework to do.’

  I think it is this last comment which, pictures and plans aside, begins to convince me.

  ‘What is it that you want from us?’ I ask, though I know perfectly well.

  ‘Dollars,’ they shout in unison like an audience at a game-show, and then Sandro goes on, his voice urgent. ‘We’ve gone as far as we can, and now we need help. We know we need publicity to get the money, and we don’t know how to get the publicity to get the money.’

  ‘You need a lot more than publicity,’ I mutter. ‘You need organisation. You need to designate someone, someone with charm and punch to head the group. You need an action plan and financial projections. You need clearly to define stages and attach a target cash figure to each.’ I pull a glossy multi-coloured graph from my desk and wave it in front of them. ‘You need ecstatic letters from your civic and church leaders and local dignitaries. You need a report on conditions in the area and how beneficial what you’re aiming for is going to be. And that’s just the beginning.’

  ‘We’ve got the last,’ José says, offended.

  ‘Good,’ I pause and stare at each of them in turn. ‘And you’re not only going to have to work harder than you’ve ever worked, but you’re going to have to learn to trust the people you team up with.’

  ‘I trust you,’ Sandro says softly. He turns to the others. ‘She’s going to help us.’

  ‘That’s not certain,’ I cut him off brusquely. ‘I have to report back to my partners and before I can do that with any confidence, I need all the background materials you can provide me with.’

  Sandro stays behind when the others trail off. He stares at me from those dark liquid eyes as if he hopes the staring will mesmerize me. It isn’t without effect.

  ‘Look, you have to forgive the others. They didn’t want to come here. I pushed them. They don’t like the idea of hype. I know it’s essential. We have to learn. But they’re a hundred percent. The project means everything to us. To the neighbourhood.’

  I have the sense that he wants to put his hand on my arm as if that will enforce my commitment, but he draws back. ‘When do you want the reports by?’

  ‘Friday.’

  ‘Okay.’ He pauses, clears his throat. ‘I think, if you could make the time, it would be good for you to see the place. To come down there.’ His eyes are so intent on my face that for a moment I can’t focus on what he is saying. ‘And your partners too, if they like.’

  I look down at my appointments book. ‘Difficult, this week. Perhaps Saturday morning. Ring me on Friday.’

  ‘Right.’ His eyes smile. His lips smile. There is an innocent charm about him as he shakes my hand and I reflect, in the way I have with clients, that the cameras will love him.

  Saturday morning, Sandro picks me up in a dilapidated Pontiac which judders over pot-holes as if each one is its last. He takes me to a part of the city I only know from cab windows - cabs wanting to circumvent midtown traffic as they hurtle me to the airport. We pull up in front of a mission which like everything around us has seen better days. To the right of the mission, there is an open lot, dotted with burning trash cans and supermarket trolleys heaped with cardboard and plastic bags. A few men hang about, as inert as the rubble around them. Perhaps he is afraid, I won’t come out, for Sandro rushes to open my door with old-fashioned courtesy. There is a shyness about his speech, his gestures, which makes me feel as if I am some fragile figurine he is bringing home to introduce to family and neighbours. And he is nervous about the introduction. One or other of us may not pass the test.

  Three men of indeterminate age sit on the mission steps, puff on cigarette stubs, pass a bottle to and fro between them. They don’t look up as we approach. Only when Sandro greets them by name does life flicker into glazed eyes and rubbery lips. As we step into the gloom of the mission, the close cloying smell of huddled misery hits me with the force of an uptown express. I have to lean against a wall, but there is no wall to lean on, only Sandro’s arm.

  ‘Okay.’

  I nod, pull my coat more tightly round me, try to breath only in shallow spurts. Sandro guides me along what emerges as a shambling queue of men. Some of them seem to know him, hail him, look at me curiously, call out, ‘Pretty lady,’ or grunt with hostility, ‘Princess cometa visit’. Most have moved beyond curiosity and keep their eyes listlessly on the ground. At the end of the line, there is a man, half hidden by a vast coffee urn.

  ‘Padre, this is the friend I was telling you about.’

  The Padre’s eyes are as blue as a china doll’s amidst the wrinkled crevices of his sallow face. He holds my hand a fraction too long, assessing me, while he utters a welcome. His praises for the Hundreds project are interspersed with words for each of the men who approach him for their paper cup of coffee. Each, it actively occurs to me for the first time, has a name. Each has a story that I am not sure I want to hear.

  Between greetings, questions, comforting phrases, the Padre manages to convey to me how the Hundreds Project could be the beginning of an essential transformation of the area, how it would bring hope, work, sanctuary. He tells me too how he has known Sandro since he was a boy and has complete trust in him and his team. In the midst of all this a leather-jacketed youth who has been overseeing some squabble in a far corner comes up to us. Sandro drapes his arm over his shoulder, introduces him with pride as one of the future works team. The boy gives me a crooked smile, then exchanges some quick-fire Spanish with Sandro, before raised voices from the other side of the room call him away. As I look after him, I find myself having to make a conscious effort to keep the scene before me visible. One flick of the lids and that big city survivor’s tunnel vision I have practised for years would render all the ugliness and misery imperceptible.

  Perhaps Sandro knows this, for a moment later we are in the crisp jarring cold of the open air. We go round to the side of the mission where Sandro unlocks a door bearing the sign ‘Hundreds Project’ to show me a small, cramped office. The walls are covered with check-lists and the group’s plans for the area. This reassures me, as did the materials delivered on Friday which had more professionalism about them than Sandro’s colleagues had led me to expect. We stay for only a moment before setting off on our tour of the area. As we walk, Sandro begins to speak in soft suasive tones. Gradually his voice eradicates burnt out buildings, the squalor of fenced up sites and insidious poverty. Stone by stone, I begin to see the structure of his dreams - simple, functional housing, not displeasing to the eye, the greenery of parks, well-equipped sports and playgrounds. But like some journalist of the more cynical ilk, I won’t succumb to the dream. I tell him that I can imagine buildings, parks. What I can’t imagine is the broken people we’ve met in the mission being set to work, trained. And what guarantee is there that these workers won’t rip off, sabotage to feed habits while good will and funds evaporate?

  By this time we are sitting in a dilapidated little coffee shop where a tattered poster of a distant seascape provides the only colour and Sandro the only spot of beauty. But the look he turns on me is hard. If the neighbourhood doesn’t participate, doesn’t take pride in the project, he tells me, within a year what is reclaimed will look little different from what we just saw. No, it won’t be easy, and no, the recruits, except for a few, aren
’t part of the mission’s floating population. The team has been very careful in its selection so far and the criteria have been well thought through. And there will be skilled men brought in, to teach by example.

  He takes a gulp of the watery coffee and then, as suddenly as if he had lifted a tragic mask to his face, blunt despair distorts his features.

  ‘You’re right. There are no guarantees. And the longer it takes to get going, the more likely it is that all our groundwork in the neighbourhood will have been for nothing. Less than zero. And a lot of guys will have been fed apple pie hopes only to be thrown back to eating out of trash cans one more time. ‘

  He doesn’t say anything else and I don’t know whether it is at that moment or later as he drives me wordlessly back through the disintegrating streets, but all at once it is I who believe in the dream, am convinced of its need, its vitality, its urgency.

  ‘Okay, Sandro. Let’s give it a whirl,’ I say. ‘I’ll sort it with the partners and your team had better prepare itself to scale some awesome heights.’

  The car lurches as he lets out a whoop of jubilation. He grips my wrist so hard that I have no doubts left of his experience on construction sites. ‘I knew I could count on you as soon as I laid eyes on you.’

  ‘Lucky it wasn’t hands,’ I mutter and rub my wrist, but we are both smiling.

  At my place, which is now a top floor SoHo loft vacated by a painter Rome-wards bound, Sandro and I begin to detail an action plan. Four pages of it in his small meticulous hand result by the time darkness takes over the afternoon.

  It is only when I switch on lamps and lights that Sandro looks around him. He whistles beneath his breath. ‘This is some nice place you’ve got here. Design it yourself?’

  I shake my head. ‘It was more or less like this when I took it over, all except the movables.’ I follow his gaze and imagine how the place must look to him. Against prevailing fashion, this is my colour phase. When I first moved in, the sheer size and whiteness of the space terrified me and I filled it with as much colour as a Fauve canvas. Two overstuffed sofas, one coral, the other clear iridescent blue, face each other in the space where we now sit. In the far corner of the room, my office bathes in deep provençal yellow. Creamy stone columns of irregular size form an entrance into the dining area dominated by a long oak table and again snatches of yellow, coral, blue. After the gloom of the mission, it must seem as if we have flown into the vividness of the Mediterranean. The climate suits Sandro. His face glows as he fingers a tapestry, smooths a sculpting.

  ‘I do a little sculpture, when there’s time,’ he announces. ‘Maybe you can come and see it sometime.’

  ‘I’d like that.’

  He flashes me a look of gratitude, wanders around some more, eyeing the place with what it occurs to me is professional interest as I fetch drinks.

  ‘Maybe I’ll give you a piece. There’s one that would look good, just here.’

  ‘You shouldn’t give. You should sell.’

  ‘Why? I do it for pleasure. I’d like to share the pleasure. With you.’

  I don’t respond and after a moment he asks me, ‘Do you live here alone?’

  ‘I’m afraid so. Does it seem wasteful?’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking of that.’

  The look he gives me reminds me that Tom Abrams, my current beau, must be due any minute. I say beau, advisedly, since Tom and I aren’t lovers. Tom is a family man whose family has abandoned him and he’s still feeling raw about it. I suspect he’d like to start a new family with me, but he’s cautious, since I give few signs of being the family type and he’s only recently convinced himself that he’s in love with me. The added caution is to do with Aids: Tom is infected with the new purity. Despite what the media tell us, this secondary infection hasn’t been in my experience quite as contagious as the first, but Tom has it. Not that he’s the proverbial money and jogging man. He’s just careful and his dreams are about hearthside chats over brandy with the children snuggly tucked in upstairs. He’s older, too, and I like him, like the chats which are mostly about where he’s got to in life and where he’s gone wrong, with all the emotions close to the surface. He suits me at the moment, a rest after the last affair which ran precariously close to my being cited in the divorce courts. Then, too, Grant Rutherford, who has never stopped following my doings, both professional and personal, from a middle distance, has cropped up in my life again for what he likes to call another instalment in his undying French Affair. Between the two of them and mounds of work, I have ended up again with too few of those precious evenings on my own.

  ‘I’m afraid a friend is due in just a bit,’ I say to Sandro. ‘And I should go and change.’

  ‘Of course, no problem, thank you.’ Sandro drains his glass hastily.

  ‘Wait a minute. It’s just occurred to me. Tom is an architect. Cartenuto, Reynolds, Abrams, Steele. You should talk to him. We’ll need a known firm to vet the project. Perhaps act as an umbrella. Tom may have some ideas.’

  Sandro blanches, stiffens abruptly. ‘We don’t need any vetters. Any umbrellas. My roofs won’t leak.’

  I am hardly blind to male pride but Sandro is behaving as if he were Placido Domingo and I had recommended he take on some smalltown Kansas tenor as a coach. His chin juts forward as I stare at him, his shoulders are tensed.

  ‘Look Sandro, we’re not talking leaky roofs here,’ I say at last. ‘We’re talking big money from a lot of people. Which means making a lot of friends. Inducing confidence. You could be Mies van der Rohe himself, and at this stage of the game, I’d suggest the same thing. Okay?’

  For a moment he doesn’t budge, then inch by inch fluidity returns to his body.

  ‘Okay. But not today.’

  ‘Up to you,’ I shrug. But it is already too late. The doorbell has rung and Tom is at the door. He gives Sandro a surprised look. I introduce them, throw Sandro in at the deep end, and leave the two of them together while I go off and change. When I come back, they are deep in conversation, Tom firing questions, Sandro answering. They are so intent that they don’t even notice me. I am pleased. I perch quietly at the far end of the sofa and watch. Sandro’s zeal is evident in every gesture - I find myself making mental notes - but he will have to temper his over-sensitivity, a slight tendency to react to questions as intrusion or insult. It is only a modulation. The fire is good. The pride is good.

  ‘I must go,’ he suddenly stands up, turns to me. ‘I’m imposing on your evening.’

  ‘Perhaps Maria can arrange for me to look at the plans.’

  ‘Of course. Next week sometime.’

  After Sandro has left, Tom says, ‘Interesting young man. Where’d you find him?’

  ‘I’m afraid he found me,’ I laugh. ‘Or rather the Agency.’

  Over the next months I work harder than I would have thought possible with the Hundreds group. With Tom’s help we find a better placed architectural firm who will check figures, vouch for the project and allow their name to appear as consultants. Leading architects write one line testimonials. We whittle down the aims of the project into one terse page of prose which Steve, with his inimitable flair, translates and spices for different markets - journalistic, philanthropic, civic, trade. We devise a fund raising campaign, complete with visuals, which concentrates on the number 100 and follows the number into tens and hundreds of hundreds of dollars. Another complementary board shows building targets achieved in hundreds of days, together with the cash figure needed for each stage of construction. We find companies who will initially donate materials in exchange for appearing as patrons and in the hope that eventually donations will turn into cash orders. An up-and-coming fashion designer agrees to create work clothes for the trainees, bright green overalls with the number 100 on the back. We take rolls of human interest pictures and cull the best for a publicity package which goes out to all and sundry.

  With Sandro, I select five of the most photogenic future trainees and coach them in interview techniques. I do the s
ame with the core group and particularly with Sandro and Carmen: I show them how to get aims across clearly, passionately and succinctly, since media time is short; teach them how not to be waylaid or stumped by interviewers’ tangents or hostility; how to use statistics effectively; how to smile and charm, hide nerves and sit quietly. I call in favours: get celebrities to give their names in support of the project; talk to journalists and feature writers, begin the process of creating a buzz - a feature here about the area and its ills and possible solutions; a profile there of Sandro, his neighbourhood and dreams; a few radio interviews; a local TV slot, a piece in the architectural press. Sandro doesn’t need much coaching. He’s a natural. The women interviewers, particularly, love him.

  I start to take Sandro round with me to the places and parties where he will meet the people he needs to know, the great, the good and the rich. One night he doesn’t turn up at the appointed time. Nor is there any word of explanation. I am angry - all the more so because it was a sit down affair and I had managed to get him placed next to the wife of a corporate head with a good record in city charities. The next day I leave an irate message on the Project’s answering machine.

  When I come home from the office, Sandro is waiting by my door. In the lamplight, his face looks ashen beneath the dark curling hair.

  ‘Sorry,’ he mumbles. ‘Couldn’t get there last night. Had an accident. At work.’

  ‘What happened? Come on up.’

  As the creaking elevator takes us up to my apartment, I examine his face for cuts and bruises. I have visions of him beaten up, left for dead on one of those derelict sites. My knees feel weak.

  ‘What happened? I ask again when we are through the door.

  ‘Nothing serious. But I had to go to the hospital and that took forever.’ He seems ashamed.

  It is only when he takes his coat off that I notice that his hand is bandaged, that he is moving his shoulder oddly. He holds out the bandaged hand. ‘Fractured my thumb,’ he grins.