Spadafora’s recommendation turned out to be highly beneficial. The management treated me very kindly and the manager sometimes came into my bedroom to pass the time of day. This gentleman — a German from the south — was in his forties, on the thin side, fair, blue-eyed and sallow-skinned with big, transparent ears that stuck out; his head had been shaved all over, except for over his forehead which was furnished with rather a rakish commercial toupé. He wore the black morning coat and striped trousers managers of such places tend to wear. He spoke very precisely, in a staccato syncopated style to avoid confusion and define the limits of the stream of topics rehearsed. His favorite gesture was to enumerate his statements and arguments by counting them on his fingers and then conclude a subject by moving his hands as if an invisible plumb-line was dangling in front of him. He always held his thumb next to his little finger ready to count and sometimes described a circle in the air, dividing it into angles and sections as if he was slicing a watermelon. Each slice was a topic … His passion for precision succeeded in giving his trivial conversation a grandiose ring, and among his acquaintances — not to mention his clientele — he was thought to be a man of the golden mean with original opinions. One couldn’t deny that he was strong on method.
As I said, the boarding house was international, though the clientele was essentially German. In my time, however, there were lots of Russian émigrés and the language they spoke — as wistful and sugary as jam — was often to be heard in the small sitting room and dismally dark passageways.
Mommsen the historian figured as the most distinguished occasional lodger in the annals of that boarding house. This fact was the Pensione Fiorentina’s crowning glory. The manager boasted how he tied the great man’s shoelaces one day when the sirocco had brought on an attack of rheumatism. After he’d said that, I took the opportunity to put a question to him.
“If you tied his shoelaces,” I said, “you probably noticed his feet. I’ve heard that Mommsen’s feet were huge, very fat and quite extraordinary, the most impressive feet a historian may ever have had. Could you confirm this was in fact true?”
The manager looked at me sternly and refused to answer. I realized that Mommsen was untouchable in that household, that he was a holy of holies, and memories of him were idealized and embellished and simply floated on air.
One day the manager told me an anecdote that highlighted the historian’s character.
When Mommsen was in Rome, he worked in the Vatican Library. One afternoon he was in his usual place in the library when the Pope walked in on the spur of the moment, with none of the rituals of protocol. When his presence was noted, everyone stood up. Only Mommsen remained seated at his table as if nothing had changed. The Pope crossed the vast reading room and entered the Prefect’s office, keen above all to pass unperceived. Within two hours the whole of Rome was talking about what had happened. The manager’s features glowed with the most ardent admiration, as he asked me: “What do you think? Could one have shown finer mettle, been firmer and more single-minded? Oh, what a man that Mommsen was! A proper German of the old school! Don’t you agree?”
“No, I don’t. I think what he did was quite deplorable, an act of complete discourtesy. One can be as anti-Papist as you like but Mommsen, in the Vatican Library, wasn’t in his own home, and when you are in someone else’s and the master enters, good manners require that you stand up …”
The manager stiffened, glared at me, muttered a few unintelligible words and changed the subject.
A few days later, it became evident that the manager championed imperialist ideas, he spoke admiringly to me about the war.
“I never studied military matters,” he said, “and I really regret that, believe me. There’s nothing like war, it is life at its fullest, most instinctive and cheerful. One lives by the day and past and future don’t exist. Now that those effeminate hairdressers in Paris are in charge, how can one expect the world to be right? You know: one … two … three … etc.”
Initially, I found the manager amusing; when he became bellicose, he was a pain. His precise, numbered conversation, his gestures, plumb-lines and rules began to pall. I tried to contradict him — relatively persistently — and not just let him spout on. It was like lighting tinder. He became furious when I raised my first objections and then wilted completely. His method quivered on his lips. Finally he gave me a fierce, pitying look and left my bedroom, slamming the door behind him. From then on I only saw him behind his desk, when I went in or out of the front door. We nodded blankly at each other by way of a greeting.
The boarding house had two very pleasant chambermaids: Ida and Rosetta. Ida was tall and thin and from the Piedmont; she was rather undernourished, with long, slender legs, luscious brown tresses, dry lips and the most beautiful dark, impish eyes that brimmed with life. She lived in a constant state of nervous tension, was astonishingly lithe, and desperate to smoke Macedonia cigarettes.
“A cigarette, a cigarette … Ida would say every two or three minutes peering round my door, a pitiful expression in her bright, mischievous eyes.
I gave her one and she lit up. She smoked like a child, staring hard at the flame. Two dimples came to her cheeks. Then, surprising herself, she exhaled the smoke through her nose, with an expression of ineffable delight, gripping the cigarette in one hand and supporting the back of her neck with the other, elbow in air, like a picture postcard odalisque. Ida felt passionate about her smokes and liked to live inside a fleeting pinky blue cloud.
“Well then, Ida,” I’d ask, “are you deeply in love?”
“Oh, l’amore!” she’d go, grinning suddenly, her arms aloft, turning round, swinging her head back, her hair in a tangle, showing off her white, warm bosom. Then she’d come over and whisper softly: “What do you think? I think love is irresistible …”
“The wife of a friend of mine is of a similar mind …”
I said that frivolously in keeping with the situation, but she seemed to think I was being spiteful.
Ida and Rosetta weren’t what you could call friends. Perhaps at root they couldn’t see eye to eye. They spied on each other and the manager had achieved a fine equilibrium in the service on the first floor via their bickering.
Rosetta came from Venice. She was thirty-five, tall, well-built, wore dark clothes and had gray eyes, a small nose, and red hair. Ida was like quicksilver. Rosetta was the quiet, placid sort. Ida was noisy and nervy. Rosetta walked down the passageways without making a sound.
“Just imagine!” said Ida talking about her. “She’s separated from her husband …”
“Can’t you understand that?”
“I can understand everything except a woman who leaves her husband. What does Rosetta have that other women don’t?”
“I know, I know … but life holds so many mysteries …”
“I think she’s an evil woman and that her husband is right. She is hypocritical and selfish, cattiva.”
“How can you possibly know? Has she ever hurt you?”
“No, but that red hair of hers can only mean trouble. Besides, she’s tedesca …”
Rosetta said her companion was apensierata and perfidious, though she said that so calmly, so imperturbably she might have been talking about the weather.
Ida tried to treat me with a degree of complicity. She’d come into my bedroom, ask for a cigarette, light it and sit on a chair. If I didn’t feel like talking or was working, she smoked in silence and gave me the occasional quizzical look, as if she was in the presence of a rare, harmless but sizable animal. The sight of my table strewn with books and papers was probably what most inspired respect in her.