Having come to Rome to work as an electrician, Ines reported, he had found work in a shop at sixty lire per week:
"but then they fired him." Whereupon, afterwards, he worked here and there: on his own: "he went to people's houses to fix wires when they were worn out, or to wire a room, in a new apartment: or maybe some old bag's place," she insinuated, and became annoyed. "Or to change the fuses or make the bells work, when they broke down and wouldn't ring anymore, because some ladies, and their husbands, too, are afraid to touch electric fuses. Mamma mia! Afraid of getting a shock. And then, if you stop and think about it, who would ever have the nerve to climb up to the top of a ladder, till you touch the ceiling with your head? Except some poor kid who does it to earn his living? standing on that ladder for hours and hours too? Putting all those wires together, that's what I say. . well, if we women do it, you can see everything… I mean, garters and all the rest": she turned two magnificent eyes, two gems. "No, nobody wants to do that kind of job." She seemed to hesitate for a moment. "Well, maybe the Milanese, everybody knows what they're like: they get a kick out of that stuff: they're all engineers." She was repeating, or so it seemed, in these words, an affirmation of the young man.
Ingravallo scratched himself lightly, tick, tick, with the back of his thumb, on the black Angus mop. "So he worked at odd jobs then. Can you tell us where?"
"I don't know where; he never told me. He went to work for people, in their houses. Sometimes he went to work even for a countess, he said: she spoke Venetian"; she assumed her spiteful little mask, adorable. "And I have a feeling that with her, he… or maybe I'm wrong": and she broke off.
"What's this feeling of yours? Out with it," Pompeo said, in a kindly tone.
"I have a feeling that. . that he made a thorough job of it. He's a wide-awake kind of boy. When something's broken, he finds the trouble right away. And then, in Rome, with his living expenses. It couldn't be any other way."
Fumi turned his eyes on Ingravallo; at the very moment that Ingravallo had raised his own, more clouded, to look at him. Then, to the girclass="underline"
"This countess then? Where is she? I mean," he clenched his lips, "where does she live?"
"Somewhere near the station, I think: past Piazza Vit-torio though. But I… I don't know that part of town very well." She blushed faintly: her voice seemed to dissolve, to vacillate: to tremble towards weeping. "I. . What is this? Now you want to make a spy out of me? I. ."
"Talk, talk, talk, eh girlie? Make up your mind. In or out. You take your pick. ." menaced Ingravallo, anything but amiable: and he stood up, black.
"It's a long wide street," she said, hesitating between shame and remorse, "a straight one. . that goes all the way to San Giovanni."
"I get it," Doctor Fumi said, "I get the whole thing." He glanced again at his colleague, who looked back at him.
Diomede was in need of money: when he had it, he spent it: and he procured more: he spent that, too: coffee, cigarettes, neckties, ball games, movies, trams: he even played the lottery.
"He even wanted to drink an aperitiff: Carpano, it's called" (she explained, mistaking the accent). "At Pic-carozzi, in the Gallery. Before he went to eat." But she said this with pride, as she might have said: "and a shirt of real silk, yes, sir!"
"And where does he go to eat?" asked Fumi.
"It depends. If he's by himself, he makes do with a sandwich maybe. He might even drink straight from the fountain: a gulp of Aqua Marcia in Via della Scrofa or at the little fountain in Piazza Borghese. But if he's with some of those young ladies, with fancy customers.."
"So he wasn't all yours, then," Pompeo pricked her, with a grin. And touching her shoulder: "Come on, baby, you got to get it off your chest, console yourself!" she moved away, spitefully, as if disgusted by that contact. "Yes, yes," she wept, "I do want to console myself."
She dried herself with her hand, sobbed, changed her mind: "Well, what do you think? He's not the only fish in the sea." And she started, at a new sob, to look for a handkerchief: to dry her face, her nose: until, as usual, she rubbed it on her sleeve. Poor creature! The elbow revealed the hole, and the sleeve the darns and the tatters. The poor wrist, the arm, the shoulders jerked in desperate sobs. But she raised her head: and with her wet face she looked at them again. "When he finds a woman that'll come across, I mean one of those women. . who don't make any fuss about it, because that's what they're out looking for, then he makes her go to a fancy place: to Bottaro in Passeggiata di Ripetta: or to the Quattro Cantoni to L'Aliciaro, behind San Carlo: or maybe in Via della Vite, if he catches on. . that she's from out of town, that she's maybe a foreigner, something speciaclass="underline" and he has a sharp eye for them. Even to the Buco in Sant' Ignazio, sometimes, where they're Tuscans, he told me: from Tuscany. And there, you have to drink their wine, and it costs more because it's famous and fancy and all."
"I understand," murmured Fumi, his great head on the desk.
"Tuscans!" she resumed: and throwing her head back, with one hand she thrust back her hair, those blond locks on which drops of glue had rained: then she whispered, bored: "they're a bunch of stinkers, too, goddamn 'em." The imprecation was lost in a murmur, in the apocope of the pronoun, in an ever less benevolent stammering of the tongue, of the lips.
"Stinkers? What have they ever done to you?" Grabber pricked her again, with a tinkling laugh, as a novelist would say; but which, given his gullet, was instead the thunder of a trombone.
"Nothing. They didn't do nothing to me. I just happen to know they're stinkers, that's all."
"Take it easy, Pompeo, and don't bother her," Doctor Fumi said, contracting his nose: and to the girclass="underline" "You were saying i
"I was saying that, with women like that, he picks them up right off, without having to work too hard to make them catch on. T beg your pardong, could you direck me to Villa Porghesay?' When they're on Via Veneto, a foot away. Or even at the arches of Porta Pinciana! the pigs. 'It's not far away from here.' I'll say it isn't. All you have to do is cross the street. He lights her cigarette maybe. T can show you the way, if you want!' And they want, all right. With me, it's different, with these rags I have on. . dying of the cold. With me, now, he doesn't even want to come: he says I'm stupid, that I look like a beggar. But with them! From Porta Pinciana, to the lake, to the Belvedere — it isn't a walk that makes your feet hurt, either. A little chat, as they go, turning to look at each other every now and then, looking her straight in the eye. Oh I know, I know how he does." "And what about you?"
"Me? They've screwed me, that's what they've done, so's I don't know which way to turn for a crust of bread: I'm just about ready to jump in the river. With them, they have a nice hot meal, a dinner — or supper, anyway."
"And the ready?"
"The ready?"
"The money, I mean: who puts out?" Pompeo interrupted again, rubbing his thumb against his index finger in the classic gesture.
"Shut up, Pompeo, you're getting on my nerves," Fumi admonished him. Then, to her: "These dinners, or let's say these suppers: who pays for them?"
"He pays, of course," the girl replied with hauteur and envy: "but she passes him the cash under the napkin: or when they go into Bottaro's" (envy of the disbursing rival) "while they're looking in the window… at the list of the day's dishes. To see if there's chicken, or lamb. They've worked it all out along the way: and he's got a driver's license and everything, he took the exam, and all he has to do is collect the license in Via Panisperna, but he needs certain papers still, certain official stamps: and he knows all the restaurants in Rome by heart, but it wouldn't look good for him or for her either, to let them see that she's the one who's putting out the money. Rome isn't like Paris, he says. Because we've got the Pope here." They laughed. In her weariness, in her tears, erect, at the end, in the mucid light of the room, she had spoken, resplendent: her lashes, blond, turned aloft, radiated above the luminous gravity of her gaze: her tears had cleansed the irises, a dark brown, the two turquoise jewels they enclosed. Her face appeared stained and tired.