Читать книгу The Scent Of Rosa's Oil - Lina Simoni - Страница 6

Genoa, 1910

Madam C was combing Rosa’s hair when a stray gust of wind forced its way into the caruggi, the old downtown streets, passageways so narrow sunlight hardly reached below the level of the rooftops. The three panes of the front window of the Luna, the brothel Madam C had owned for nineteen years, shook lightly under the wind’s attack. Set deep in the labyrinth of the caruggi, five blocks from the harbor, halfway down Vico del Pepe, the Luna spread over three floors of an ancient building of slate and stone that had withstood wars, storms, and the furtive erosion of sea salt. Inside, on the first floor, eight feet from the window, Rosa was seated on a stool in the corner of the dimly lit parlor, her thick, curly crimson hair loose down her torso and her neck bent slightly backward. Behind her, a wide-tooth comb in hand, stood Madam C, long-boned and slender, wearing a loose robe of pale yellow silk tied softly around her waist with a sash. Her hair, raven, with only sparse, barely visible threads of gray, was gathered in two braids rolled about her ears and fastened at the top of her head with a pearl clip. Free of makeup, her eyes had no glow. She sank the comb into Rosa’s curls and gently pulled down. “Ouch!” Rosa yelped.

“Be patient, Princess Rosa,” said Margherita, one of the nine Luna girls. She was ensconced in an armchair at the opposite corner of the parlor, near the front door, slowly turning the pages of an oversized, leather-bound book. She lifted her eyes for a moment, sniffed the air, then shook her head and resumed her reading.

“Rosa’s hair is such a jungle,” Madam C said. “And the more I comb it, the more entangled it gets.”

“You say that every time.” Rosa giggled.

“Your curls have a life of their own,” Madam C continued. “We all know what happened on that Sunday I decided to trim them.”

Rosa’s first and only haircut had become a legend at the Luna and one of Madam C’s favorite anecdotes about Rosa’s life. She’d tell that story whenever a new girl arrived, on birthdays and anniversaries, and every time someone stared at Rosa’s curls in awe. Rosa was born bald, the story went, with a smooth, healthy scalp that shone like a rainbow in the sunlight, and stayed bald for two months before her hair started to grow at an amazing speed. By the time she was eight months old, Rosa had a headful of rebellious red curls. By her first birthday the curls reached below her shoulder blades. On a quiet Sunday morning, while all the Luna girls were still asleep on the second floor, Madam C sat a cheerful, smiling Rosa on one of the parlor armchairs and took a pair of large scissors out of a drawer. “Here we go, little Rosa,” she chanted. “We’ll make you so beautiful no one will be able to stop looking at you.” And then, she cut five centimeters off a strand of Rosa’s hair. At once Rosa began to scream. She screamed, and screamed, and screamed, louder than she had ever screamed before. Awakened by the shouts, several girls came running down the stairs to find Madam C standing like a statue, openmouthed, a lock of red hair in one hand, the scissors in the other. Rosa was still screaming. “You poor child,” Esmeralda said, picking up Rosa and patting her on the shoulders.

“She looks awful,” Madam C noted. “We must finish this haircut, one way or another.”

“I’ll hold her in my arms,” Esmeralda said, noticing that Rosa had calmed down. “You go ahead.”

At that, Madam C cut a second strand of hair. Rosa let out a screech so loud the girls cupped their hands over their ears and grimaced at each other.

“It took three girls to hold Rosa down,” Madam C said the first time she told someone the story. “It took the strength of five girls to keep Rosa from bouncing all over,” she said on a following occasion. In the third version, all nine girls were on top of Rosa while Madam C completed the haircut amidst the child’s heart-wrenching screams. “We’ll let this hair grow as long as it wants to,” Madam C told the Luna girls when finally Rosa’s hair was all even. “Obviously Rosa can feel it, like a skin.” The hair stopped growing when it reached Rosa’s waist. With monumental patience, Madam C had been untangling it once a week ever since.

“Almost there,” Madam C said, noticing Rosa’s edgy motions on the stool, then suddenly lowered the comb and scrunched her nose. She said, “What is this odor?”

“I thought I smelled something a moment ago,” Margherita said, without lifting her eyes from the pages, “but I can’t smell it now.”

Madam C said, “Come here.”

Unhurriedly, Margherita closed the book and set it gently on the floor. It was a book of poetry. Its beige parchment pages contained a collection of famous love poems Margherita had copied in her best handwriting over the years. There were twenty of Petrarca’s sonnets from Il Canzoniere, passages of Dante’s Paradiso where Beatrice appeared, the poem Giacomo Leopardi had written for his Silvia, and many more.

Born into a middle-class family, Margherita had discovered poetry by accident in her late teens, on a Saturday afternoon, while she was strolling along a tree-lined street with her aunt Genia, the austere older sister of her father. At a certain point, Margherita and Aunt Genia came across a man who stood on a bench, reciting words from a booklet in the direction of a closed window. Margherita stopped and listened, moonstruck by the sounds, entranced by the rhythms of the man’s voice. Shyly, when the man stopped talking, Margherita asked him what those words he had recited were, and the man explained that they were ancient love poems written by Francesco Petrarca out of love for a woman named Laura. “There’s a maiden behind that closed window,” he added, pointing up. “I tried everything to win her heart—presents, flowers, music. Nothing worked. Poetry is my last resort.”

The following day, at the end of Mass, Margherita approached Father Marcello, the sixty-year-old priest who had administered her first Communion and assisted her during her confirmation. “Are there any books of poetry in the church library?” she asked.

Father Marcello couldn’t hide his surprise. “You don’t know how to read,” he said. “What would you do with poetry books?”

“I’d like to be able to read them someday, Father. And write, too. Will you teach me? Please?”

Her reading lessons with Father Marcello began the next day, without her father’s or Aunt Genia’s knowledge, both of them convinced that the purpose of Margherita’s daily church visits was to pray. It wasn’t long before Margherita, a fast and disciplined learner, thirsty for the sounds of the poems, was able to sit in the church library and read. She had Father Marcello point out to her the books of poetry and devoured them with the passion of a scholar. The meaning of the verses she read, however, was obscure. “I’ll be glad to help you with the interpretation,” Father Marcello told her, “as long as you help me play a special game.” To explain the game, Father Marcello grazed her neck and breasts with his fingers several times.

Aunt Genia walked into the library one day while Father Marcello had Margherita on his lap and his hands under her skirt. The poetry books were open on the table in front of them, and Father Marcello was reading verses aloud while Margherita, still as a statue, stared at the written words with empty eyes. Without a word, Aunt Genia grabbed Margherita by the collar and took her home. “Get out of my house!” yelled Margherita’s father once Aunt Genia had explained the situation to him. “Seducing a priest? Our family is disgraced!”

It would take Margherita years to rid herself of the memories of the priest and her unforgiving father. Her love for poetry remained, together with another heritage of her church days: in the peace of the centuries-old library, breathing the pungent perfumes of incense and burning candles, she had learned to associate a man’s touch and display of pleasure with the words of illustrious poets. She could never undo that association. At the Luna, before undressing, she read twelve lines of poetry to her clients. The only place where she could read or write poetry was the brothel. Some of the Luna clients avoided her; others were bewitched. Those who were bewitched loved her routine: she kept incense and candles burning in her room; she had the man lie on the bed fully clothed and with his eyes closed; she sat on the floor, by the bed, her leather-bound book open to a chosen page. Then she read, and as she slowly whispered the twelfth line, she ran a soft hand over the man’s mouth.

That afternoon in the parlor Margherita had been choosing the poetry she would read later on, during that night’s celebration. She stood up and walked toward Madam C, realizing only then that she had smelled an unusual fragrance herself, all day long, in various rooms of the Luna. Meanwhile, a second Luna girl, Stella, appeared at the top of the stairs, her only clothing a shiny blue petticoat. She came down in lazy steps, dragging her feet. “Someone woke up,” Rosa said, glancing at Stella from the stool.

“Barely,” Stella yawned as she reached the parlor and headed for the counter at the north wall. She poured anisette in a stemmed glass, then dipped her lips in the liquor and grazed them with the tip of her tongue.

“Don’t you two smell a strange odor in this room?” Madam C asked.

Margherita shrugged. “Maybe.”

“It must be the wind,” Stella said, setting her elbows on the counter and her chin on her cupped hands. The wind had been blowing since dawn, steadily with sudden gusts, as it often does along the coast of Liguria, enraging the sea and coating the streets with dampness. It was a southwesterly wind, the libeccio.

“The libeccio smells like wet paper,” Madam C said, shaking her head. “This odor reminds me of apples.”

Stella spoke in the grave voice she reserved for her worst omens. “When the libeccio blows, bad things happen.”

Madam C shook her head again. “You and your superstitions.”

“Scoff all you want,” Stella said. “That’s the way it is.”

By the window, Margherita pushed aside the flowered curtain that hid the parlor from the street. “The libeccio blows for three days,” she said, looking outside, “and drives everyone crazy.”

“This hair is driving me crazy,” Madam C said, pulling down the comb stuck in Rosa’s hair.

“Ouch!” Rosa yelped again.

“Don’t complain, Princess Rosa,” Margherita said with a smile. “It’s your big day. I can’t believe you’re sixteen!”

“Does that mean you’re going to treat me like a woman?” Rosa asked, straightening her neck and stretching her legs to touch the floor.

Madam C slapped her softly on the head. “No.”

Smoothly, Rosa stood up and twirled around, making a pinwheel of her topaz-colored pleated skirt of gabardine. “Look at me. Do I look like a child?”

Rosa had looked nothing like a child for the past eight months. At the onset of fall, as the haze of summer had faded, letting in clearer and crisper air, her breasts had sprouted in a hurry, putting to test her corsets; her torso had taken the shape of an hourglass; her facial features had softened; and her slate-blue eyes had turned aquamarine. Everyone had caught sight of Rosa’s changes: Madam C, the Luna girls, and the men and women in the street, who had begun to take notice of Rosa when she walked by. No one had ever spoken of those changes on any occasion. As for Rosa, it was common belief at the Luna that she had only vague notions of her body. They had explained to her when she was little that what men and women did at the Luna was a game, like the one the Romero kids played with three cards out in the street, except that at the Luna the girls were much smarter than the boys and the boys always lost their bets. No one had ever revised that explanation.

“No,” Margherita said. “You don’t look like a child today.”

“Well, then,” Rosa said, “let me do it.”

Madam C looked at her with hard eyes. “We went over this already, and the answer is no.”

With a pout, Rosa sat back on the stool.

“There goes that smell again,” Madam C said, sniffing around. She placed her nose on Rosa’s hair. “Is that you, Rosa?”

Hands on her hips, Rosa said, “Maybe.”

Stella came over from the counter, and she and Margherita sniffed Rosa’s hair three times. “I think it is Rosa,” Stella said after a moment. “How did you get this smell on you?”

“I’ll tell you if you let me do it,” Rosa said, looking Stella in the eyes.

Margherita rolled her eyes to the ceiling. “How did she get so stubborn?”

Rosa shrugged.

“She didn’t take after her mother,” said Madam C. “Angela was a sweetheart.”

“Then she must have taken after her father,” Stella stated with a half smile.

Pursing her lips, Madam C gave Stella a stare. “Who has the guest list for tonight?” she asked.

“I bet her father was a sailor,” Margherita said with dreamy eyes, “who fought storms and sharks and giant whales, and that’s why she’s so stubborn.”

Stella pushed up Rosa’s chin with her index finger. “No way. With this delicate profile, I bet Rosa’s father was a prince. Well, a marquis at least. British.”

“A British marquis? Don’t get your hopes high, girl,” said a laughing Maddalena, the latest addition to the Luna, walking in from the street with a rectangular cardboard box kept closed by a ribbon of pink organzine. “With that shine on your skin and that crazy hair of yours, you have Gypsy blood, like me.” Turning to Madam C, she added, “And there’s a man outside, who wants to come in.”

“Not today,” Madam C said, reaching for a piece of paper with the words Closed for Private Party written on it. “Hang this on the door, Maddalena, and send him away.” She stood still in the middle of the parlor. “This odor…”

“He was a British marquis,” Stella said. “I know it.”

“Let’s drop the topic, please,” Madam C ordered in a dry voice. “Get the rest of the girls down here.” She clapped her hands. “Let’s go.”

Stella didn’t move. “It’s not a good day for Rosa’s birthday party.”

Everybody said, “Why?”

“It’s Friday,” Stella explained, “and last night I had a bad dream.”

“Enough of this witch talk!” Madam C snapped, raising her voice.

Rosa stood up and bowed. “We’re having the party, and my father was a British marquis who sailed around the world and then joined the Gypsies. Happy?”

She had spoken jokingly, but with a tinge of sadness in her eyes. The discussions about her father were not forbidden in that house, though they were normally carried out upstairs, in the girls’ rooms and the corridor, and never when Madam C was in sight. But on that day of mid-April, between the bewitching howls of the libeccio and the excitement for the upcoming party, the tongues of the Luna girls were restless.

“What you call witch talk,” Stella said, “is mere precaution. Dreams come for a reason. And in my dream there were dead goats and a house on fire.”

“What does that mean?” Rosa asked.

“Goats represent prosperity,” Stella explained. “And a house is a place where people come together. A house on fire is a sign of hatred.”

“I don’t hate anybody,” Rosa said with a smile. She turned to Madam C. “But if you keep hurting me with that comb…”

Madam C dipped her fingers in Rosa’s hair and fluffed it twice. “All done, dear. And don’t you worry about Stella’s goats. You’ll have a prosperous life, and we all love you to pieces.”

“Any last minute birthday wishes?” Margherita asked.

Rosa shook her head, wishing quietly and with all her heart that Angela were there, to help her with the party and be the one to comb and fluff her hair. “How can you love so much someone you’ve never met?” she had asked Maddalena earlier that day.

“Love is strange, dear,” Maddalena had replied. “The elders in my family used to say it’s a Gypsy spirit that wanders endlessly about the earth touching people’s hearts as it passes by. True or not, it’s a fact that love can play major tricks with your head. But you shouldn’t worry about loving Angela, because we all know that she loved you madly before you were born.”

“Sometimes I can feel her next to me,” Rosa had added. “I talk to her as if she were in the room.”

“Maybe she is in the room with you,” Maddalena had whispered. “We don’t really know what happens to people after they die.”

Rosa had nodded. She never told Maddalena or anyone else inside or outside the Luna that at night she often dreamed of being in a warm darkness inside Angela’s womb, feeling her movements and hearing the sound of her voice. And then she started kicking and elbowing her way out of the darkness, until she felt heat on her face and saw a ray of sunshine. To Rosa, the story of Angela’s life and of how she had given birth to her child was like a fairy tale. She was certain she didn’t have all the details. Madam C had told her portions of the story, and in the rooms of the Luna, over the years, Rosa had overheard other bits and pieces. In any case, for whatever reason, Rosa had grown up feeling that her mother was always by her side.

There had been no heat or sunshine on the day Rosa was born. It was 1894, a gray and cold spring day, rare in that region of Italy known for its temperate climate and clear, sunny skies. Madam C and her girls had waited on the second floor of the Luna, in the hallway outside the corner bedroom, for Angela to give birth with the help of a midwife. They heard the moans and the screams, the midwife’s orders to push and not to push, and then the loudest scream of all followed by the squeaks of the newborn. A moment later, the midwife came out of the bedroom, holding the little bundle that would be Rosa. It wasn’t a happy event, by any means. Angela died three days later because of an infection that spread fast and uncontrolled through her abused body. Like Madam C, she had been a prostitute most of her adult life and had no family or friends other than Madam C and the girls who worked at the Luna. So was it that Madam C, who was not fond of children and had sworn many times she wouldn’t raise one, nevertheless found herself a mother. She did the best she could under the circumstances: she named the child after Angela’s favorite color; for Rosa, she set aside a room at the Luna on the first floor, in the back, behind the kitchen, as far away as possible from the parlor and the rooms where the girls worked with the clients; she devoted a significant portion of her free time to play with Rosa; and every evening she sat by Rosa’s bed and sang her to sleep. She owed it to Angela, and, to paraphrase her, there was nothing else to say.

Angela and Madam C went back a long time. They had been born one year apart in the same shabby building on Vico Caprettari, Angela the only child of a single mother, Madam C, Clotilde in those days, the only daughter in a family of seven: her mother, her father, Clotilde, and four loud boys. She was the youngest child. Vico Caprettari was a caruggio few people knew beyond those who had family there and those who called it home. It was dark, narrow, and impregnated with the smells of seaweed, garbage, and minestrone. It was a world apart, with tall buildings stuck to each other to mark its boundaries, ensuring that the world of the neighboring streets would not seep over.

Clotilde’s family lived in three rooms on the seventh floor, with stairs so steep and narrow Clotilde’s father, a tall, strong man with shoulders much wider than his waist, had to climb sideways, and the younger children had to climb on all fours or they wouldn’t reach the steps. Angela and her mother had one room on the first floor, darker than a manhole. As a child, Angela used to hang out with Clotilde and her siblings in the dirty street, chasing pigeons. None of them went to school. One after the other, as soon as they were strong enough to lift, the boys went to work with their father in one of the warehouses by the docks; the girls were not educated, period. Angela’s mother was a seamstress, and she had done that for so long in that dark room on the first floor that her eyes were failing. When Angela was old enough to find her way around the maze of the caruggi, about seven, she made pickups and deliveries of clothes, sheets, and bedspreads for her mother. The rest of the time, she sat quietly next to her and watched those swift hands push the needle in and out of hems and buttonholes. At eight, Angela did her first repair all by herself: a white linen sheet, thin and torn in the middle, where someone’s body had been lying at night for years. As she mended, she thought she would meet this person someday, certainly a fat woman, and she would tell her to her face, “I know what you did to that sheet with your big behind.”

Meanwhile, on the seventh floor, Clotilde and her mother worked around the clock to keep their men fed and clean. They scrubbed, cooked, washed, ironed, and made beds. With all their chores, Angela and Clotilde had little time to spend together, but when they managed to do so, it was the best part of their day. Sometimes Clotilde helped Angela deliver the mended pieces; sometimes Angela accompanied Clotilde to the fountain to wash clothes. They always talked about their dreams: Angela, of the store she’d open in Via Luccoli some day, where beautiful rich ladies would have their Sunday dresses made to measure; Clotilde, of the trip she’d take on the back of a white horse on her eighteenth birthday, up and down the hills, to see the world.

Clotilde’s father had his own ideas about Angela and her mother and voiced them often and openly in front of his family at dinnertime. Who was that Angela, anyway, he’d mumble, dipping his bread in pasta sauce, who lived in that hole down below, and what kind of family was that without a man to give it respectability? And who knows who Angela’s father was to begin with, possibly a drunken sailor, but there was no point asking that question, was there, because no one knew the answer, not even Angela’s mother, who these days, with those tiny crossed eyes, looked more and more like a mole. Plus, who knew what was going on in that dark room when Angela was out, he’d continue, and in any case, even if nothing happened any more, surely those two females were no good for Clotilde, the daughter of a warehouse shift leader, respected by all and strong like a mountain. Clotilde’s heart sank when her father spoke of Angela that way, but she was careful not to show her tears, which she pushed hard down her throat, as she knew better than to contradict her father, especially after he had stopped at Lorenzo’s, the neighborhood bar, on the way home. Her mother had talked back to him one evening, over a bowl of soup that wasn’t warm enough, and the little blue scar across her lip was there to remind everyone who was in charge.

A father’s words, no matter how silly or mean, do make an impression on a daughter, so eventually the talk about Angela and her mother convinced Clotilde that she deserved better friends than the daughter of an unknown drunken sailor. Unconsciously, she began to avoid Angela in her outings, until the girls became estranged. So estranged, in fact, that years went by without Angela and Clotilde exchanging words. It took Clotilde a long time to realize that Angela no longer lived downstairs.

Clotilde’s family fell apart suddenly when Clotilde was sixteen. Her mother died of consumption, and her father began spending more time at Lorenzo’s than at the warehouse, until he could hardly stand up and finally got himself fired. He walked out of Vico Caprettari one morning, cursing his fate, and never came back. Clotilde was left alone with her brothers, who hardly talked to her at all. When they did, it was only to give her orders for a meal or ask for clean clothes. Her routine became more strenuous, as there was now one woman to take care of four men instead of two women to take care of five; her mother’s absence made the routine unbearable. The two of them had talked, laughed, joked. The days went by before Clotilde knew it. Now her days felt longer than seasons. When finally night fell, Clotilde prayed to God to take her so she could be with her mother again and have a laugh once in a while. There was never a reason to laugh now that she was all alone. And she wished that Angela were still living on the first floor, so she’d have someone to talk to, not just her four brothers who ordered her around like a mule.

On a sunny spring day that made even the darkest of the caruggi come alive, Clotilde went to the Sottoripa market to buy fruit. On the way back, she crossed paths with a beautiful, elegant, tall woman with long wavy cinnamon hair falling on her shoulders beneath a beige satin-brimmed hat. Her dress, a perfect match to the hat in color and material, glimmered under the sunlight and fit her body like a glove. Clotilde stopped walking and stared at the woman as she passed by. In front of Clotilde, the woman stopped and smiled. “You don’t recognize me, do you? I can’t blame you. I’ve changed.” It was then that Clotilde realized that the elegant woman was Angela. “You haven’t changed,” Angela continued. “I’ve thought of you many times.”

Clotilde spoke with a thread of voice. “I’ve thought of you, too. What happened?”

“Come along,” Angela said, taking Clotilde’s hand. “I’ll tell you everything.”

They went to Angela’s home, a spacious two-room apartment on the top floor of a white and gray building, with high vaulted ceilings and a tall window off the sitting room overlooking the port. The contrast to the dark room on Vico Caprettari couldn’t have been starker. “This is it,” Angela said. “My private palace. Bright and airy, for a change.” She opened the window, and Clotilde stood by it a few moments, blinded by the brilliance of the sea, inhaling the sharp, familiar odors of salt and weeds, lost in the multitude of sounds that rose in waves from the docks. “It’s beautiful here,” she said, taking a seat next to Angela on a worn-out couch. Angela nodded, then explained that the reason she could afford the place was that she had found a way to make good money with little effort, and she had done that for a couple of years now, since her mother had gone blind and moved in with her sister in the Lerici countryside. “And what about you?” she asked.

Clotilde summarized her life in two sentences, then inquired about the way to make good money with little effort, asking if there was a chance that she could do that, too. As Angela went on explaining, Clotilde understood what the way was and told Angela she was happy to have met her that day but now she had to go, and, no, she wasn’t interested in that way at all. True, she added, it was a bad life to be serving her brothers day and night, but at least she wouldn’t be going to hell after her death, which would be coming soon, as she couldn’t keep living like this much longer.

“It’s not as bad as you think,” Angela replied. “And you don’t go to hell for this. You go to hell if you do things that hurt other people. I make men happy.” She paused and cocked her head. “For a fee.” She stared at Clotilde. “What’s wrong with that?”

Clotilde was out of arguments against the way.

“Come with me tonight,” Angela said. “You don’t have to do anything. Just watch me. Then decide. Can’t make a decision without knowing, can you?”

Clotilde couldn’t find an argument against that, either.

“Look at my clothes,” Angela said, showing Clotilde to her closet. “I buy the cloth at the market and then I cut and sew. For myself. Which is so much better than that silly idea I had of opening a store and making dresses for other people. I’ll make you a dress—what am I saying—three dresses of your favorite colors. For tonight,” she said, rummaging in the closet, “you can borrow this.” It was a dress of pale yellow muslin, with little glass beads along the hem and the neckline.

“Me?” Clotilde said, pointing a finger at herself. “Wearing that dress? I couldn’t. Look at me. My hair is wild, my hands are rough.”

“We have time,” Angela insisted, hanging the dress back in the closet. “Come with me.” It took them a few hours of scrubbing, drying, and styling. Then Clotilde wore the yellow dress and a pair of shoes with heels and a golden buckle she had seen before only in her dreams. Angela pinned a yellow cloth flower to her hair, dabbed some powder on her cheekbones, and took her downstairs, so she could see herself in the windows of the furniture store across the street. “I guess you won’t be going horseback riding on the hills any time soon,” Angela said with a naughty smile as Clotilde stared at the image of a woman she didn’t know. She stood still a moment, then turned around and shook her head to make her black hair bounce. Hands on her waist, she took two steps back, then two steps forward, and bowed at her reflection in the dusty glass. Angela laughed. “You’re on your way to heaven, darling. Forget hell.”

That night they went to a bar by the port, the Stella Maris, a pickup place for prostitutes who worked illegally out of the brothels. Angela was one of them. By then, she had already experienced most of the dangers of that life: adventurers without scruples, drunks, perverts prone to violence and rough games, and, last but not least, the hostility of the brothels’ owners, who hated the “strays,” as they called them, for taking away their business by charging less than the brothels did. Still, Angela entered the crowded bar with her head high, proud of her shiny pink dress and the fresh rose she wore on her heart, below the neckline. Clotilde walked behind her in a daze, staring at the men drinking and smoking cigars, intoxicated by sounds and odors she had never heard or smelled before. They sat at a table, and three sailors who were standing by the counter joined them at once. One of them bought a round of drinks. A second sailor ran a hand across Angela’s breasts, and Angela chuckled, then told the sailor that would cost him and did he have any money or was he a bum. Then the third sailor grazed Clotilde’s neck with his fingers, and Clotilde felt a long wave of heat filling her cheeks and going to the tip of her nose. Angela noticed at once her friend’s big, fearful eyes and told the sailor not to touch her, as she was not what he thought she was. The sailor laughed and asked, “What is she doing here if she’s not a whore?”

“They are not all like him,” Angela said after the sailors had left the table. “I meet gentlemen sometimes, who know how to treat a lady.” Clotilde stared at Angela a while, wondering where those gentlemen were, as she would have liked to be treated like a lady right there and then. Two of the three sailors came back shortly with a roll of banknotes. Angela counted the money carefully before nodding a yes and standing up. “Come along,” she told Clotilde. She paused, then spoke softly in Clotilde’s ear. “Unless you want to stay here by yourself.”

At that, Clotilde stood up fast, and they all went back to Angela’s place, which was only two blocks away. Clotilde sat outside the apartment, on the stairs, while inside Angela took care of the sailors, and that was the part of the evening Clotilde liked the least, sitting all by herself on the musty floor, and thank God she was still wearing the yellow dress, so she could look at it and feel less alone.

The sailors left in a hurry a half hour later. From the open doorway, Angela waved for Clotilde to come in. She showed her the money, stacked in a pile on the small table next to the wood stove. “One of these is for you,” she said, taking a banknote and handing it over.

Clotilde shook her head.

“You helped me,” Angela insisted.

So Clotilde took the banknote, hoping her mother would be busy that night up in heaven and wouldn’t have time to look down and notice.

They went back to the bar ten minutes later and returned home shortly with more sailors. Again, Angela handed Clotilde a banknote after the sailors left. “I’m tired,” Angela said, yawning. “Let’s go to sleep.”

It was then that Clotilde realized that she had left home many hours earlier to go to the market and had not returned. She hadn’t made dinner for her brothers, or washed the floors, or ironed clothes. For sure her brothers would beat her if she showed up. Her stomach shrank for a moment. She looked out the window at the dark shadows of the sea, then gazed about the room and saw Angela snuggling under the covers and falling asleep. “Good night,” she whispered, then understood with clarity that she would never go back to Vico Caprettari, because home for her was where she was now, in Angela’s apartment, with the yellow dress, the banknotes, and the musky smell of the sailors.

The following morning, Clotilde awoke in a thick daze. From across the room, Angela lifted her eyes from her needlework. “Good morning, my friend,” she blurted out in a joyful voice. Clotilde yawned and stretched before coming to a seated position. “So,” Angela asked, “have you decided?”

“What?” Clotilde asked in a raspy voice.

“If you want to be in business with me.”

Clotilde bent her neck forward, as if to hide her face. She thought of her brothers. As much as she tried to visualize their faces, all she could come up with was a blur. Then she thought of her mother, and her gentle, loving face came to her in full clarity. She grimaced and let out a long, deep sigh.

“It’s only a job,” Angela said, forcing a white thread through the eye of a needle.

“I could find a different job,” Clotilde argued. “I could be a waitress. Or a maid.”

“And work for someone who will treat you as badly as your brothers did? Making little or no money for the rest of your life? Believe me, being poor is no fun. No fun at all.” She paused. “Wouldn’t you rather work for yourself? Be independent? When you do what I do there’s no one in the whole world who can tell you when to work, or where, or how. It’s you who decide.” She flipped the cloth over. “You’re the boss.”

Clotilde leaned back, raising her head to look at the ceiling. She remained silent a while, eyes fixed on a dormant fly, as Angela rhythmically hemmed the white cloth.

“I never thought of men that way,” Clotilde said after a moment. “Actually, I never thought of men at all. All I ever did was try not to think about the men in my life.”

“You don’t think about these men, either,” Angela clarified. “You use them. That’s all.”

The fly woke up and flew away. “I like being the boss,” Clotilde stated.

Angela’s eyes lit up. “Very well, partner,” she chirped. “You won’t regret it, I promise.”

Over the next week, Clotilde spent time learning the trade. She began by watching, for which Angela charged her clients more. Then she became involved in the foreplay, and Angela’s prices doubled because of that. “I’m ready,” Clotilde told Angela one afternoon, as they were talking about the evening plans. Angela gave her a smile.

That night, Clotilde’s first client, a tall, bearded helmsman with the belly of a whale and a sour odor of cheap alcohol and sweat, laid on her his fantastic weight. As he pounded her into the thin mattress set on the floor of Angela’s sitting room, Clotilde heard her bones squeak and cry out in pain. With her eyes closed, she dreamed of her ride on the hills on the white horse and of the sweet smells of grass and flowers.

From the bedroom, separated by the sitting room by only a curtain, Angela heard every one of Clotilde’s stifled moans, intermixed with the roars of the helmsman’s pleasure. In the morning, she found Clotilde at the open window, elbows on the sill, staring at the sea. “It’s a beautiful day,” Angela said.

Clotilde nodded without turning around.

“When businesses grow,” Angela said softly after a moment, “so do their offices. We need a larger place.”

Clotilde nodded in silence a second time.

Angela joined Clotilde at the window. “The first time is the hardest,” she murmured. “It gets easier as the nights go by.”

“I hope you’re right,” Clotilde sobbed, laying her head on Angela’s shoulder.

“I am, darling,” Angela said. “I am.”

The search for their new apartment began without delay. They looked first at the neighboring buildings, then as far away as the Stazione Principe and the western edge of the harbor—to no avail. Their reputation preceded them, so the owners of respectable buildings turned them down. The other buildings, the shabby ones with dirty lobbies, dark rooms, and shady tenants, which were common in the caruggi that bordered the port area, were something, both girls agreed, they wouldn’t settle for, as such places reminded them of the building they had been born in and vowed to leave behind. It took them two months to find an appropriate accommodation. At the onset of spring, through the intercession of one of their clients to whom they had to promise three months of free service once a week, Angela and Clotilde moved into a four-room apartment on the third floor of an elegant historic building halfway up Via San Lorenzo, out of the caruggi. Their arrival rocked the neighborhood:

“What are those two doing in our building?”

“I thought prostitutes lived only in brothels.”

“The value of our property will go down, I can assure you.”

“Let’s call a lawyer. There must be a way to evict them.”

“Maybe now that they are here, they’ll find an honest way to make a living.”

“Don’t count on that. Once a whore, always a whore.”

“Did you see how they dress? As if it were carnevale.”

“What am I going to tell my children?”

“What a scandal. One block down from the cathedral.”

Heads high, Angela and Clotilde ignored the gossip. They nodded greetings to their new neighbors, who pretended not to see them when they walked by; and they always had a smile for Miss Benassi, the first-floor spinster who led the neighbors’ march against their presence and kept a vigilant eye on the men of Via San Lorenzo to see if any succumbed to temptation. “I’m watching you,” Miss Benassi said one day as Angela and Clotilde walked by her door, “and all the people who go up the stairs. You leave our husbands alone! They deserve better company than yours.”

“Our husbands?” Clotilde said. “I didn’t think you had one, Miss Benassi, but I must be mistaken.”

Despite the hostility, Angela’s and Clotilde’s business blossomed like never before. They became known as “the queens” because of the beautiful dresses they wore, their regal demeanor when they walked in the streets, and the special treatments they gave clients who booked them regularly and for long shifts. By then, Clotilde had become an expert in the art of pleasuring men, surpassing Angela in creativity, audacity, and sense of humor. Her thoughts about hell and her mother looking down at her and dying all over again at the sight of her daughter in the arms of all those strangers had disappeared. She had a life of her own, being paid by men instead of doing things for them for free. “I’m proud of that,” she told Angela one day, “and if I am proud, surely my mother is, too.”

The brothels’ owners didn’t like their success one bit. Neither did the neighbors, who called the police on them at every occasion: a loud noise coming from the apartment, too much garbage left in the street, questionable individuals walking up the stairs. The policeman in charge of that block, however, was one of the queens’ clients, so no one ever managed to catch Angela and Clotilde in the act. One morning, Pietro Valdasco, the owner of the Ancora, one of the largest brothels in town, exasperated by the competition, showed up with two men at the queens’ place and turned it upside down. “It’s only the beginning!” he screamed, as Angela and Clotilde sat terrified on the kitchen floor. “It’d be much safer for you,” he hissed in their ears, “if you left town.”

Given that their business was completely illegal, Angela and Clotilde couldn’t press charges or even report the threat to the police. They mentioned it, though, to their policeman friend, who told his buddies at the bocce run, who told their brothers, cousins, and coworkers. At every telling, the story was inflated. By the time it reached the port and found its way inside the sailors’ bars, it had become a tale of great violence, with blood gushing from wounds and broken bones. Everyone at the Stella Maris was appalled.

“What kind of person would threaten two such beautiful ladies?” the owner cried out.

“I wouldn’t want anything to do with this Pietro Valdasco,” a sailor said, “today or ever.”

A second sailor joined in. “A business that uses such despicable practices should be closed.”

As a result, Pietro Valdasco lost clients and spent many hours cursing himself for what he had done. Later that month, he waited for Angela and Clotilde in the street, holding a bouquet of spring flowers. “I apologize,” he told them when they came out of the building, “for what I did to you. I must have been crazy that day. Why don’t you work for me? I’ll treat you like the queens you are.”

“Thank you,” Angela said, not taking the flowers, “but we don’t work for criminals.”

“And so you know,” Clotilde added, “there’s no criminal or threat on earth that could convince us to leave this town.”

Two weeks later, in a café, the queens ran into Ildebrando Balbi—Signor Balbi, for short—the five-foot-tall, bald owner of the Carena, a newer brothel located on Piazza delle Oche. “I’d be honored to have you two join the Carena,” he told them as he gallantly bowed, then made them an offer that sounded good to Angela and Clotilde for more than one reason: it included a guaranteed salary, something neither of them had ever seen; Signor Balbi was a polite, straightforward man who had never in his life threatened anybody; they were sick of the looks of contempt the neighbors gave them at every occasion; despite the apology and the flowers, they were scared of Pietro Valdasco and his men; they had been scammed by dishonest clients more than once, so by this time they clearly understood that it was easier and safer to work in a brothel than out in the bars at the mercy of adventurers and sailors. “I’m so glad you decided to work here,” Signor Balbi said the first time the queens set foot in the Carena. “With you two on board, we’ll make mincemeat of the other brothels.”

They worked at the Carena for eight years, without incident, and, as Signor Balbi had predicted, they boosted his business by bringing in a steady stream of new clients. Then, with the help of a close friend, Clotilde took over the Luna, a rundown, unsuccessful brothel, managed at the time by a drunkard and owned by a merchant up to his ears in gambling debts. Immediately, the Luna underwent a facelift. After a thorough scrub, the graniglia floors were polished, the musty chandeliers replaced, and the walls freshened with a new coat of whitewash. The front of the building also came to life when the marble door frame was restored and the entrance kept beautiful with a wreath of fresh flowers. On the day of the Luna’s grand reopening, Clotilde spoke to Angela and the eight girls she had hired. “From now on,” she said, “everyone will call me Madam C.”

The transition from protected paid employee to business owner didn’t come easily in an area of town that boasted more brothels than churches and at a time when the bustling activity of the port and the large number of transients and foreigners that populated it brought along thefts, riots, and a variety of serious criminal endeavors. During the first week of business alone two Abyssinian men shattered one of the Luna’s first-floor windows and broke in at four in the morning; there was a fistfight in the parlor; and one of the girls came down the stairs one night screaming bloody murder and showing everyone the knife cut she had on her belly. Madam C and Angela dealt with the situation with their grits. They threw the Abyssinians out of the Luna with kitchen knives pointed at the men’s throats; they settled the fistfight with a few blows of their own; and they delivered the man who had scratched the girl’s belly to the police. “You come back,” Madam C growled at him with an icy glare, “and your balls will hang in my parlor as a trophy.” Soon the message spread that no one, local or foreigner, should mess with Madam C. Thereafter the incidents became rare, then only memories, and within a short eight months from its grand opening the Luna was a profitable enterprise. Angela helped all along. Three years later, one week after her thirty-third birthday, she took Madam C aside. “I will no longer be with the Luna clients,” she said with a serene smile.

Madam C frowned. “Why?”

Angela circled her hand over her belly. “Someone more important.”

Madam C dropped her jaw. “Who’s the father?”

Angela shrugged. “It’s my baby,” she whispered. “There’s nothing else to say.”