The Beautiful Summer

by Cesare Pavese

  ‘There don’t seem to be many about, do there?’ she said to Ginia. ‘The ones who work seriously haven’t time to come’. So Amelia had more acquaintances among waiters than among the customers but Ginia, who was fond of hearing the latter joking together, was careful not to trust any of them too far. One who often sat with Amelia and had moved to Ginia on the first occasion without so much as a glance in her direction, was a hairy youth with a white tie and very black eyes, called Rodrigues. In fact he did not look like an Italian at all and he had a peculiar, rasping voice. Amelia talked to him as if he was a naughty boy, telling him that, if instead of squandering that lira at the café, he had kept it, he could – in ten days – have paid for a model. Ginia listened, amused, but Rodrigues now began in his hesitant voice to treat Amelia alternately as a fine lady and a spoilt child. She smiled, but sometimes she was annoyed and told him to go away. Rodrigues then moved to another table, pulled out his pencil and began to write, watching them out of the corner of his eye. ‘Don’t pay any attention to him’, said Amelia, ‘it’s just what he’d like’. So gradually Ginia got accustomed to ignoring him.

  One evening they went out together with no particular aim in view. They had been for a walk; it had begun to rain and they took shelter under a doorway. They found it chilly standing still in their wet stockings. Amelia had said, ‘If Guido is at home, what about going along to his place?’ ‘Who is Guido?’ Amelia had then put her nose outside and craned her neck to look at the windows of the house opposite. ‘There’s a light; let’s go up, we shall be under cover’. They had mounted at least to the sixth floor and had reached the attics when Amelia paused, breathless, and said, ‘Are you afraid?’ ‘Why should I be?’ said Ginia, ‘You know him, don’t you?’

  While they were knocking at the door, they could hear the sound of laughter inside; it was a subdued and unpleasant laugh that reminded Ginia of Rodrigues. They heard footsteps, the door opened, but they could not see anyone. ‘May we come in?’ said Amelia.

  It was Rodrigues. He was lying on a sofa against the wall under a harsh light. But there was someone else there, standing up; it was a soldier in his shirt sleeves, blond, mud-stained, who looked at them and smiled. Ginia had to lower her eyes against the glare of the lamp, which appeared to be acetylene. Three of the walls were covered with pictures and curtains but the fourth consisted entirely of windows.

  Amelia said to Rodrigues in a tone that was half serious, half amused, ‘So it is you, after all!’ He waved his hand by way of greeting and shouted: ‘The other girl is called Ginia, Guido’. The soldier then shook hands with her, looking her over with an impudent smile on his face.

  Ginia realized that the situation required self-possession on her part, and allowed her eyes to wander above Amelia’s and Guido’s heads to the pictures on the wall; they seemed to be mostly landscapes with plains and mountains but she also caught a glimpse of some portraits. The lamp that hung without a shade, such as one sees in incompleted houses, dazzled her without providing an adequate light. By looking hard, she could see that there were fewer curtains than at Barbetta’s, though there was a red one which shut off the room at the back and Ginia concluded there must be another room beyond it.

  Guido asked if they would care for a drink. A bottle and some glasses stood on the large table in the middle of the room. ‘We’ve come up to get warm’, said Amelia. ‘We’re drenched up to our knees’. Guido poured out drinks – it was red wine – and Amelia took a glass over to Rodrigues, who left his recumbent position to sit up. While they were drinking, Amelia said to him, ‘If Guido doesn’t object, I would be glad if, now that you’re up, you would let me have the bed to warm up my legs in. Beds are for women. You come too, Ginia!’ But Ginia did not wish to and said that the wine had warmed her up and sat down on a chair. Then Amelia removed her shoes and her jacket and threw herself under the bed-cover. Rodrigues remained sitting on the edge of the sofa as before.

  ‘Go on with the conversation’, said Amelia. ‘But this light’s worrying me’. She stretched out her arm up the wall and turned it out. ‘That’s that. Give me a cigarette’.

  Ginia sat in the dark, terrified. But she realized that Guido had gone over to the sofa, heard him striking a match and saw the two faces in the flame and the darting shadow. Then darkness again, and for a few seconds no sound of breathing. You could just hear the rain dripping under the windows.

  Someone broke the silence for a moment but Ginia who still felt ill at ease, did not catch the words. She noticed that Guido was smoking too and quietly pacing up and down in the dark. She could see the glow of his cigarette and hear his footsteps. She next became aware that Amelia and Rodrigues were having a tiff. It was only when she had gradually got used to the darkness and was beginning to distinguish the table, the shadow of the other people and even a few of the pictures on the wall that she felt less worried. Amelia was talking to Guido about an occasion when she had been ill and had slept on the sofa. ‘But you hadn’t this friend in those days’, she said, ‘eh, what are you doing, stripping?’

  It was all so strange to Ginia that she said, ‘It’s like being at the pictures’.

  ‘Except you don’t have to pay for a ticket’, remarked Rodrigues from his corner.

  Guido was still walking up and down and seemed to be everywhere at once; the thin floor vibrated under his boots. They were all talking at once but Ginia suddenly noticed that Amelia was silent, though she saw the cigarette, and that Rodrigues was silent as well. There was only Guido’s voice filling the room, explaining something, she could not make out what, because her ear was against the sofa. A light from the lamps outside came through the windows like a reflection from the rain and she could hear the rain splashing and pouring on to the roofs and guttering. Every time both the rain and the voices ceased, it somehow seemed colder. Then Ginia strained her eyes into the darkness trying to see Amelia’s cigarette.

  SIX

  Now that it had stopped raining, they said goodbye at the door down in the street. Ginia was still seeing the studio, untidy, dripping with water, in the light of the lamp. Guido had relit it several times, to pour out drinks or to hunt for something and Amelia had shaded her eyes, shouting to him from the sofa to turn it off, and she had noticed too, Rodrigues curled up against the wall at Amelia’s feet, motionless.

  ‘Haven’t those two got anyone to do the room for them?’ Ginia had enquired on their way back home. Amelia had replied that Guido was too independent to leave the studio key with Rodrigues.

  ‘Did Guido paint those pictures?’

  ‘If I was in his shoes, I would be afraid that dago would sell them and sublet the room into the bargain!’

  ‘Have you ever posed for Guido?’

  As they walked along, Amelia told her how she had got to know Rodrigues in earlier days when she was sitting for some artist or other, and Rodrigues had turned up, as he had now, and sat down in the studio as if it were a café. He had squatted in a corner of the room and had looked from her to the picture without saying a word. Even in those days he had affected a white tie. He had behaved in a like manner with another model she knew.

  ‘But doesn’t he himself ever paint?’

  ‘Who do you think would be rash enough to stand in front of him in the nude?’

  Ginia would have liked to have another look at Guido’s pictures because she knew that the colours would only be seen properly by daylight. If she could have been sure that Rodrigues was out, she would have taken her courage in both hands and gone there alone. She pictured herself going upstairs, knocking at the door and finding Guido in his soldier’s trousers and laughing at him, to break the ice. The attractive thing about him as a painter was that he did not seem like a painter at all. Ginia remembered how he had held out his hand with an encouraging smile, and then his voice in the dark room and his face when the light was turned up and he had looked at her as if they were a couple on their own, nothing to do with the others. But Guido would not be there now and she would
have to cope with the other man.

  Next day at the café she asked Amelia whether Guido would at any rate be off duty on Sunday. ‘A while back you could have asked me’, said Amelia, ‘but I’ve not seen him for some time now’. ‘Rodrigues has invited me to his studio whenever I care to go’. ‘You want to look out!’ said Amelia.

  But for several days they did not see him at the café. ‘What do you bet he’s expecting us to go and look him out, now that he has a bed available, just to create and to see us again? It would be just like him’, said Amelia.

  ‘It’s a mess’, said Ginia.

  Thinking it over in her mind, she was convinced that Amelia’s action of getting into bed and turning out the light in front of the others was not after all such a shame-faced business; Guido and Rodrigues had scarcely taken any notice of it. What worried her was the thought of what Amelia might have done on that bed in the old days when Guido had been the sole tenant.

  ‘How old is Guido?’ she asked.

  ‘He used to be the same age as me’.

  But Rodrigues was not to be seen, and one morning while she was out shopping, Ginia passed down the street of that night. Looking up, she recognized the triangular façade of the studio. Without giving it much thought, she ran up the staircase – which seemed endless – but when she had got into the last corridor, she saw various doors and was unable to decide which was his. She realized that Guido couldn’t be very important – there wasn’t even a visiting card pinned on his door, and as she went down again, she thought sympathetically of him having to have the glaring lamp of that evening which must be a handicap as far as a painter was concerned. She made no reference to her visit next time she saw Amelia.

  One day when they were chatting, she asked her why men became artists. ‘Because some people buy pictures’, retorted Amelia. ‘Not all’, said Ginia, ‘what about the pictures that nobody buys?’

  ‘It’s a matter of taste like any other job’, said Amelia. ‘But they don’t get much to eat’.

  ‘They paint because they get satisfaction out of it’, said Ginia.

  ‘Listen here, would you make yourself a dress if you weren’t going to wear it? Rodrigues is the sly one: he gives himself out as a painter but nobody’s ever seen a paint-brush in his hand!’

  That day in point of fact he was at the café, drawing in a sketch-book with great concentration. ‘What are you drawing?’ asked Amelia and took the book from him. Ginia had a glance, too, full of curiosity, but all she could see was an intricate network of lines which might have been a man’s bronchial tubes. ‘What is it? A lettuce?’ asked Amelia. Rodrigues said neither yes nor no, and then they turned over the pages of the sketch-book, which was filled with drawings; some looked like skeletons of plants, some like faces without any eyes, only areas of black hatching, and others, you could not tell whether they were faces or landscapes.

  ‘They are subjects seen at night by gaslight’, said Amelia. Rodrigues laughed and Ginia felt embarrassed rather than irritated.

  ‘Nothing worth looking at here’, said Amelia, ‘if you made me look like that in a portrait, I’d cut you dead’.

  Rodrigues looked at her but said nothing.

  ‘A good model is wasted on you’, said Amelia. ‘Where the dickens do you find models?’

  ‘I don’t use models’, said Rodrigues, ‘I’ve too great a respect for my materials’.

  At this point Ginia told him she would like to see Guido’s pictures again. Rodrigues replaced his sketch-book in his pocket and replied, ‘At your service’. The result was that they went along the first available Sunday and Ginia missed a part of mass to be in time. They had agreed to meet in the porch but Ginia found no one there and so she went upstairs alone. Once again she hesitated among the four doors of the corridor, could not decide which one it was, and descended half the staircase, then decided she was being stupid and went up again and stood listening in front of the last door. Meanwhile a woman emerged from another; she was unkempt and wearing a dressing-gown, she had a bucket in her hand. Ginia only just managed to get up to her in time to ask her where the painter lived. But the woman did not deign either to glance at her or reply and hurried off down the corridor. Ginia, flushed and trembling, held her breath until everything was quiet again and then hurried downstairs.

  Every so often someone would enter or leave by the front door and look at her in passing. Ginia began to walk up and down, feeling desperate, especially as a butcher-boy was leaning against a doorpost at the other side of the street, leering at her most unpleasantly. She thought of enquiring where the studio was of the female concierge but now she might as well wait for Amelia. It was almost midday.

  To make matters worse, she had not fixed any rendezvous with Amelia and so she would have to stay on her own that afternoon. ‘Nothing seems to go right for me’, she thought. Just then Rodrigues appeared in the doorway and beckoned to her. ‘Amelia is up there’, he said casually, ‘and wants you to come up’.

  Ginia accompanied him upstairs in silence. It turned out to be the last door; it had been silent within. Amelia was sitting on the sofa, smoking as if she were at the café. ‘Why didn’t you come up?’ she asked suddenly in a quiet voice. Ginia told her not to be silly, but she and Rodrigues seemed so categorical that they expected her to find her way up that she found it impossible to argue and she could not even say that she had listened at the door – that would have made matters worse. But she had only to recall how quiet the two of them had been to realize that the sofa could tell a tale. ‘They take me for an idiot’, she reflected, and tried to decide whether Amelia’s hair was ruffled and read the expression in Rodrigues’ eyes.

  Amelia’s hat – the one with the veil – had been flung down on the table. Rodrigues, standing with his back to the window, was staring at her ironically. ‘Perhaps a veil would suit Ginia’, remarked Amelia point-blank.

  Ginia frowned and, from where she stood, began to survey the pictures above Amelia’s head. But all those little paintings had lost interest for her. Lifting her nose, she could detect Amelia’s perfume in the cold mustiness. She could not recollect the smell of the room from the last occasion.

  Then she walked through the room, looking at the pictures on the walls. She inspected a landscape, then a plate of fruit; she stopped; she could not bring herself to look away; nobody spoke. There were some female portraits; she did not recognize the faces. She came to the back of the room and found herself before the high curtain made of some heavy material such as draped the walls. It occurred to her that Guido had collected the glasses from behind there and she said, ‘May I?’ in an undertone, but neither of them heard because Rodrigues was saying something. Then Ginia parted the curtain to look, but all that met her eyes was an unmade bed and the sink-recess. Behind there too she could smell Amelia’s perfume and she thought it must be pleasant to sleep alone tucked away in that corner.

  SEVEN

  ‘Rodrigues is dying for you to sit for him’, remarked Ginia, on their way home.

  ‘So what?’

  ‘Didn’t you notice how he was hopping round you, looking at your legs?’

  ‘Let him!’ said Amelia.

  ‘Have you ever posed for Guido?’

  ‘Never’, said Amelia.

  On their way across the piazza, they saw Rosa go by, arm in arm with someone who was not Pino. She was clinging to him as if she were lame, and Ginia said, ‘Look, they’re afraid of losing each other!’ ‘You can do anything on Sundays’, said Amelia. ‘But surely not in the piazza. It makes you a laughing-stock’. ‘All depends what you want’, Amelia replied, ‘if you’re silly enough and want to, you can do what you like’.

  Ginia had learnt from Rodrigues that Guido came and spent lots of his off-duty afternoons in the studio, painting. ‘He would paint in the night, if he could’, Rodrigues had remarked. ‘A canvas in front of him is like a red rag to a bull. He has to go for it – and cover it!’ And he had begun to laugh in his throaty voice.

&nb
sp; Without saying a word to anyone, Ginia chose an afternoon when Rodrigues was at the café and went to the studio alone. This time again, her heart beat wildly as she went up – but for a different reason. She did not pause to reflect in front of the door which she found open. ‘Come in!’ shouted Guido.

  Ginia banged the door behind her in her embarrassment. She stopped breathless before Guido’s gaze. Perhaps it was just an evening-effect, but the velvet curtain, catching a ray of sunlight, suffused the whole room with pink. Guido moved towards her, his head down, and said, ‘What do you want?’

  ‘Don’t you know me any longer?’

  Guido was in his shirt sleeves as usual and in his grey-green trousers.

  ‘What about your friend?’ he said.

  Then Ginia explained that she was on her own and Amelia was staying behind at the café. ‘Rodrigues told me I could come and see the pictures. We came one morning before but you weren’t in’.

  ‘Sit down, then’, said Guido, ‘I’m finishing something’.

  He went to a place near the window and began scraping a wooden board with a palette-knife. Ginia sat down on the sofa; it was so low, she felt she was falling off. His free-and-easy manner embarrassed her and a smile escaped her at the thought that all of them, painters and mechanics, were familiar like this from the start. But how pleasant it was, half-closing one’s eyes in that soft light.

  Guido made some remark about Amelia. ‘We are friends’, replied Ginia, ‘but I work in a dressmaker’s shop’.

  The light was beginning to fade in the room, and Ginia stood up and turned to look at a picture. It was the one depicting slices of melon which looked transparent and juicy. Ginia realized that the pink light in the picture was not just the reflection of the sunlight; it echoed the red of the velvet when she had first come in. She then understood that painters had to know about such things, but she did not dare mention it to Guido. He stole up behind her and looked at the pictures with her.