On Sunday afternoons Frau Schoen organized teas for her friends who were reputed to be an arty set — they were lively occasions. Sr Boca was always insisting we should go. As he never shut up, and it would have been rude not to gratify him, off we went.
It was a fine house. The apartment was rather high up but had marvelous rooms that overlooked a large, open piece of land where masses of youngsters practiced sport during the holidays. When it rained and the curtain of water and low sky blurred the view from that apartment you felt you were outside Berlin, in the middle of the countryside. The interior, however, was very German and was furnished according to that lady’s taste. One room luxuriated in purple wallpaper with complex Cubist lighting painted in every color imaginable. The walls of another were a dazzling canary yellow, with black, spiraling furniture. A big goldfish bowl, home to two fish, stood in the centre, and the window ledges were filled with a large number of tiny pots of those soft hideous plants that are now so fashionable — cacti. It all made your hair stand on end. You’d often seen the clean, shiny shell of a tortoise emerge from under a sofa or the lady would walk in half naked, displaying her goatish teats, red hair, ravaged face, in purple shoes and stockings, and holding a stuffed bird or cheeky monkey on one hand. Some people reckoned Frau Schoen had a room devoted to snakes. I never saw a snake in her house, but it wouldn’t have surprised me if one had slithered out from under the furniture.
Our friendship with the correspondents of Italian daily newspapers in Berlin meant that two in particular often visited our apartment on Kantstrasse.
Ragutini was from Naples, and one of the saddest men I have ever met. In his mid-thirties, he was short, with a toupee, a nose like a billiard ball, round, with shifty eyes, broad, red cardboard cheeks, and a tiny, trimmed mustache. He acted like a dejected clown and seemed eternally sorrowful. He usually wore light-colored clothes and Xammar argued that the sadness emanating from him came precisely from his light-colored attire.
Sabatini worked for an important Turin daily, was from the Mantuan nobility. His freedom of movement in high society was astounding. He was a thin, dark, curly-haired person whose svelte body shimmied sinuously. He had a penchant for rather effeminate black and white check three-piece suits. He wore a monocle he constantly fiddled with, because he was always fidgety. Sometimes, for no apparent reason, he’d get up from his chair, leave his interlocutor in mid-sentence and stand in front of the first mirror he could find.
Then he tightened the knot of his tie and started singing a fragment from an opera or a ballad.
He had a soft spot for the immortaclass="underline"
Si piange
Ma le lacrime
Si asciugan
doppo un di.
La vita va costi …
that he rendered with arms outstretched, elongating his words as if they were made of rubber, with a half cynical, half sentimental glint in his hypnotic eyes. He could also deliver a patriotic song and many others in the genre, whether rousing or lyrical, mournful or amorous, accompanied or solo.
When his colleague was singing, Ragutini blushed, smoked compulsively, opened his eyes and mouth as if he’d realized he’d just blundered badly, and then, when the song was sung, he would snigger on the sly. Sabatini took note.
“Sei un infarinato, tu, Ragutini …! Non ti piace l’Italia …!” he’d say, giving the final touch to the knot of his tie.
One immediately noticed how Sabatini stirred up the ladies. His eyes devoured them and he lapped up their patter like manna from heaven. He treated them with Olympian contempt and told them of his affairs, never sparing a detail. He did it so calmly that he often seemed to be speaking quite spontaneously.
When one heard them for the first time, Sabatini’s amorous feats were amusing enough. He was so fluent and voluble you’d have thought a brightly colored streamer was ticker-taping from his mouth. Subsequently, one tended to glaze over and drowse off.
While he was speaking, Ragutini tried to position himself conspicuously. He’d follow his spiel and back it up with incredulous little chuckles. The two men were complete opposites. Ragutini was the intelligent fellow out on a limb, shunting his melancholy rancor about the world like a suitcase. Sabatini, on the other hand, was the born idiot for whom life was an open-doored Paradise, ever new and ever renewable. So discreet and always striving to understand things, Ragutini never made any headway. Sabatini would make a stupid remark, fall head over heels and doors opened wide for him.
A young Polish woman sailed with the Italians. She had some post or other in her country’s telegram agency. She was Gerdy, or at least that was the rather un-Polish name she went by, was petite, lively, and cheerfuclass="underline" a glittering jewel. Gerdy must have been in her early twenties. Her fine brown hair gleamed voluptuously and she wore it cut very short; she had a vivacious expression and her skin was firm and pale. She was the kind of person who brings movement and freshness to everything she touches, and she made a big impact in that world of decomposing marooned monsters. She was always smoking Russian cigarettes in a white holder. She dressed in a wonderful, unfussy style and, in the leather raincoat she wore, was quite delightful.
Ragutini was in love with her. Sabatini treated her any old how. Ragutini tracked her with his sad clownish eyes, his mouth dried up when he spoke to her, leaving him tongue-tied. His attitude showed he was prepared to make whatever sacrifice that woman demanded of him. Sabatini often shrugged his shoulders most rudely when Gerdy asked him a question. Moments later, nevertheless, he’d give her an ever-so-knowing wink on the sly, in a well-rehearsed gesture that had the Polish lady hooting like a lunatic for five minutes.
One day I quizzed her about the Italians.
“Sabatini is a perfect fool, but I find him hugely entertaining,” said Gerdy pensively, exhaling a wisp of smoke through a crack in her lips. “Ragutini is more intelligent and safer, but I find him a boor and wearingly sentimental. You feel as if you are wasting your time when you speak to him.”
“Would you marry Sabatini?”
“Why not?”
“Even though he’s so stupid?”
“So what? You need so little to get married … Perhaps you need just a little wit and nous not to marry.”
“Come, come! If you don’t want to marry, you simply need to be a touch more naïve.”
“I don’t agree. You could never see things through my eyes and I could never share your ideas, however hard we tried. Everyone see things from their point of view, especially women. In any case, we do almost see eye to eye on this.”
I looked at her quizzically.
“Don’t you like women who are ever so slightly foolish, rather than complete fools? If you don’t,” rasped Gerdy, lifting her hand to head off my reply, “you don’t have much in the way of taste.”