“And that’s why I was hoping to get away from all that celebrity garbage, I wanted to be a serious journalist. But perhaps I’m a failure. I never graduated, I had to help my parents, then they died, and it was too late to go back. I’m living in a hole. I’ll never be the special correspondent covering the Gulf War... What am I doing? Horoscopes, taking advantage of suckers. Isn’t that failure?”
“We’ve only just started. There’ll be opportunities for someone like you as soon as we’ve launched. You’ve come up with some brilliant ideas. I liked them, and I think Simei liked them too.”
I could feel I was lying to her. I should have told her that she was walking into a blind alley, that they’d never send her off to the Gulf, that perhaps it would be better for her to get out before it was too late. But I couldn’t depress her any further. I decided instead to tell her the truth, not about her but about me.
And since I was about to bare my soul, like a poet, I adopted a more intimate tone, almost without realizing it.
“Look at me, Maia, see me as I am. I didn’t get a degree either. All my life I’ve done occasional jobs, and now I’ve ended up past the age of fifty at a newspaper. But you know when I really began to be a loser? When I started thinking of myself as a loser. If I hadn’t spent my time brooding about it, I would have won at least one round.”
“Past fifty? You don’t look it, I mean... you don’t.”
“You’d have said I was only fifty?”
“No, I’m sorry, you’re a fine man, and you have a sense of humor. Which is a sign of freshness, youth...”
“If anything, it’s a sign of wisdom, and therefore of old age.”
“No, you obviously don’t believe what you’re saying, but it’s clear you’ve decided to go along with this venture and you’re doing it... with cheerful cynicism.”
Cheerful? She was a blend of cheer and melancholy and was watching me with the eyes (how would a bad writer have put it?) of a fawn.
Of a fawn? Ah, well... it’s just that, as we were walking, she looked up at me because I was taller than she was. And that was it. Any woman who looks at you from below looks like Bambi.
Meanwhile we arrived at her bar. She was sipping her Bellini and I felt relaxed in front of my whiskey. I was gazing once again at a woman who wasn’t a prostitute, and I felt younger.
Perhaps it was the alcohol... I was beginning to feel the urge to confide. When did I last confide in anyone? I told her I’d once had a wife who had walked out on me. I told her I had won that woman over because, at the beginning, I’d messed something up and apologized, said that perhaps I was stupid. I love you even if you’re stupid, she’d told me — things like that can drive you mad with love. But then perhaps she realized I was more stupid than she could handle, and it ended.
Maia laughed. (“What a nice thing to say, I love you even if you’re stupid!”) And then she told me that even though she was younger and had never thought of herself as stupid, she too had had some unhappy affairs, perhaps because she couldn’t bear the stupidity of the other person, or perhaps because most of those roughly her own age seemed so immature. “As if I were the mature one. And so, you see, I’m almost thirty and still on the shelf. It’s just that we’re never satisfied with what we have.”
Thirty? In Balzac’s time a woman of thirty was old and wrinkled, and Maia seemed like twenty, apart from a few fine lines around the eyes, as if she had done a lot of crying, or was sensitive to the light and always squinted on sunny days.
“There’s nothing better,” I said, “than an amiable encounter between two losers,” and as soon as I said it, I felt afraid.
“Fool,” she said lightly, then she apologized, fearing she had been overly familiar.
“No, on the contrary, thank you,” I said. “No one has ever called me fool in such a seductive way.”
I had gone too far. Fortunately, she was quick to change the subject. “They’re trying to make it look like Harry’s Bar,” she said, “and they can’t even get the spirits in the right place. You see, among the various whiskeys there’s a Gordon’s gin, and the Sapphire and the Tanqueray are on the other side.”
“What, where?” I asked, looking straight ahead, and all I could see was tables. “No,” she said, “at the bar, look.” I turned, and she was right, but how could she have imagined I’d seen what she was looking at? At the time I didn’t take much notice, and took the opportunity to call for the check. I gave her a few more words of reassurance as I walked her to a door, from which you could see a courtyard and the workshop of a mattress maker. There were still a few mattress makers left, it seemed, despite the television ads for spring mattresses. She thanked me, she smiled, she offered me her hand. It was warm and appreciative.
I returned home along the canals of a benign old Milan. I ought to have been more familiar with the city that held so many surprises.
8
Friday, April 17
Over the next few days, as we were doing our homework (as we now called it), Simei entertained us with projects that were perhaps not pressing, but still demanded our attention.
“I’m not yet sure whether it will be for issue 0/1 or 0/2, though we still have many blank pages for 0/1, and I’m not saying we have to start off with sixty pages like the Corriere, but we need at least twenty-four. For some pages, we can get by with advertising. That no one has yet taken any is neither here nor there: we’ll lift it from other newspapers and run it as if — and in the meantime it’ll inspire confidence in our proprietor, give him a sense of a decent future income.”
“And a column with death notices,” suggested Maia. “They also bring in cash. Let me make up a few. I love killing off characters with strange names and bereft families, especially the important ones. I like the ones who grieve on the sidelines, those who don’t care much about the deceased or the family but use the announcement to name-drop, just so they can say they knew him too.”
Sharp as ever. But after our walk of a few evenings ago, I was keeping some distance from her, and she likewise, both of us feeling vulnerable.
“Death notices are fine,” said Simei, “but first the horoscopes. I was thinking of something else, though. I mean brothels, or rather, the old-fashioned ‘houses of tolerance.’ People talk of bordellos even if they have no idea what they are, but I can remember them. I was already an adult in 1958 when they were closed down.”
“I too had come of age by then,” said Braggadocio. “I explored a few myself.”
“I’m not talking about the one in Via Chiaravalle — that was a real bordello, with urinals at the entrance so that troops could relieve themselves before going in—”
“—and shapeless swaggering whores sticking their tongues out at the soldiers and timid provincial lads, and the maîtresse shouting, ‘Come on, boys, what are we waiting for?’”
“Please, Braggadocio, there’s a young lady here.”
“Perhaps, if you have to write about it,” said Maia, unabashed, “you should say, ‘Ripe in years, they strolled indolently, gestured lasciviously, before clients hot with desire.’”
“Well done, Fresia, not exactly like that, but a more delicate language needs to be found. Not least because I was particularly interested in the more respectable houses, such as the one in San Giovanni sul Muro, all Art Nouveau style, full of intellectuals who went there (so they said) in search not of sex but of art history.”