“I like it here,” I say. “The other place I like is Café Einstein.”
“Ah yes. The Einstein is very well known. An institution, really. I haven’t been there for years.”
“Perhaps if you live here …”
“Yes, perhaps.”
The waitress brings his coffee. He glances up and thanks her. She’s dressed more discreetly today, in a black ribbed sweater with a high neck.
He turns back to me. “Where you’re staying, it’s not a good area.”
“I know. You told me that yesterday.”
He sighs.
“There’s a nightclub,” I say.
“And prostitutes. There are also prostitutes.”
I remember the idling car and the woman in her shiny boots. I remember the laughter in the middle of the night. The creaking. The hot-pink blinds.
“It’s not safe,” Klaus says. “For a woman.”
As I watch him over the rim of my coffee cup, both my elbows propped on the table, something lifts inside me. I think I know where this is going.
“The thing is, I have a big apartment —” He pauses, then plunges on. “You would have privacy.”
“I think you might have missed a sentence out.”
“I’m sorry?”
“Are you offering me a place to stay?”
“Oh, I see. Yes. That’s what I wanted to say.”
“Do you live alone?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have a girlfriend?”
He hesitates.
A voluptuous woman in a dark-green dress stands smoldering beside him, one hand on his shoulder. Valentina. The expression on her face is privileged, dismissive. In her eyes I’m just another girl who is on the make. I may have high cheekbones and good legs but my breasts are small. I’m not a threat to her. I’m too skinny.
“No,” Klaus says at last. “No girlfriend.”
I signal to the waitress that I want to pay. When I face Klaus again he looks fearful, almost panic-stricken. Perhaps he thinks he has failed to convince me, and that he has blown his chance. The woman in the dark-green dress is gone.
“You can have your own room,” he says quickly. “For as long as you like.”
“I can’t afford to pay much money.”
“I didn’t ask for money.”
“You don’t know me. I could be anyone.”
“So could I.” He leans back in his chair. For the first time I feel a certain authority or confidence come off him. Once again I wonder what he does.
I finish my coffee. The bill arrives.
“I have an idea,” Klaus says. “Come and have a drink this evening. Then you can see the apartment for yourself.” He wants to text me his address and phone number, but I tell him I haven’t got a phone. “No phone?” Like Oswald, he doesn’t know what to make of this. In the end he jots his details down on the back of my bill. “The old-fashioned way,” he says, and smiles.
I study the address I have already memorized. “What time should I come?”
“Seven.”
As I tuck the piece of paper into my bag I think of the dozens of messages I have received in the past few months, only to ignore them. Though this one is obviously for me — I’ve provoked it, engineered it — things haven’t got much clearer. I’m reminded of Magritte’s famous painting of a man in a bowler hat positioned in front of a mirror. Since the man is painted from behind, all anyone can see is his back. And in the mirror too that’s all anyone can see.
Something jerks at the edge of my field of vision. It’s the minute hand of the clock above the bar. I look at Klaus again. His eyes, small and steady, are fastened on my face.
“Won’t you be late for work?” I say.
/
When I was twelve and a half my mother took me to a nightclub on the coast road not far from Gaèta. We parked with two wheels in a ditch, then walked down a steep path between spiky clumps of aloe vera. The lanterns that hung on thin poles, guiding people to the entrance, swayed and flickered in the warm breeze that blew in off the sea.
“We’ll have to pretend you’re sixteen.” My mother gave me a sidelong glance. “Can you manage that?”
I wasn’t sure.
“Leave it to me,” she said.
Somehow we slipped past the buttafuori, with their muscular necks, their headsets, and their immaculate tuxedoes, and once we were beyond them my mother hugged me and then stood back.
“We did it,” she said. “You did it.”
I wish I had a photo of that moment — her face lit up and full of glee, and only the glittery Neapolitan darkness behind her.
I drank my first ever glass of prosecco that night. My mother drank two. Later, we danced. I let the music take me over. My hair grew heavy, spiny with sweat. You could go inside if you wanted, but there were outdoor dance floors too, some cut into the hillside, others down by the water. Steps that were tiled or inlaid with mosaic led from one level to the next. Intense green spotlights made the plants look hyper-real. Far below, white lines expanded sideways in the dark where the waves broke against the rocks.
A man with a shaved head asked my mother if she would dance with him.
“No,” she said. “I can’t.”
He looked puzzled. “Why not?”
“I’m dying.”
“All the more reason.”
They stood still, staring at each other. Then my mother shook her head and took my hand and led me to the low wall where we had left our drinks.
I liked the man for his directness and his restraint. Round his left bicep was a circular tattoo, an armband made of ink. His shaved head shone. When my mother turned him down he shrugged and moved away, and though he continued to watch her from a distance he didn’t approach her again. I don’t think she wanted anyone to enter the world she had conjured for us. It wouldn’t sustain another presence. It was too fragile and too rare, like bone china or gold leaf.
“I’m sorry,” she said later, when we were sitting on a bench next to the sea. “I don’t know why I said that.”
“To frighten him away,” I said.
She looked at me, her face as still and deep as water at the bottom of a well, and I thought I could see myself in it, far away and small and slightly blurred. She drew me close and kissed my hair. She told me she was proud of me and would always be proud of me. She said I should never forget that.
At two in the morning we drove north, back to Rome. A dense fog swirled around the car. We were passing through the Pontine Marshes, my mother said. Before Mussolini drained the area, it was a breeding ground for malaria. If the pumps were switched off, she told me, the water level would rise in less than a week. The fog thickened. She had to slow right down. It was as if we were motionless and big pale rags were being thrown at us. The temperature dropped and she turned the heater on. The heater — in July! Once, I peered upwards and saw a patch of dark clear sky loaded with stars, then the fog closed round the car again.
“We’re very late,” my mother said. “Your father’s going to be worried.” She sighed. “It wears me out.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“He hates me for being ill,” she said. “He thinks I’ve let him down.”
“He loves you too,” I said.
She reached across and squeezed my hand. “I know, angel. I’m sorry. You probably think I’m talking nonsense.”
“I think you’re beautiful.”
She began to cry and the trunk of a tree leapt towards us. She swerved just in time. “Oh God.” The car bumped up onto the verge. She put the handbrake on and wiped her eyes. “Fuck.” Now we were still, bits of fog drifted through the headlights like a flock of ghostly sheep.