A Private Venus

2

She was indeed tall. She stood waiting for him at the door of the bar and he was impressed by the fact that, as soon as he got out of the Giulietta, she came towards him, with that warmth in her walk and in her eyes, as if she was greeting an old and dear friend. Until ten minutes ago, he hadn’t even known he had a friend like her in the world, let alone so near.

‘We can talk quietly here, it’s the only bar in the area without a TV or a jukebox, so there are almost no customers in the evening.’

Her hair was brown, or rather black, a definite, natural black. It was cut quite short, a bit shorter than the hair of men who wear it long, but a little less short than the men who have it a normal length and go to the barber once every two weeks. A woman with short hair: he liked long hair, but he had to admit it looked good on her.

‘You said things to me that were very, very …’ it would be stupid to say ‘kind,’ but what could he say, so he broke off.

‘I said to you a hundredth of what I should have said to you years ago. But now you want to talk about Alberta, so let’s talk about her.’

She was wearing a dark green dress he liked a lot: smooth, high-necked, sleeveless. She was tanned, but normally, she didn’t look like a Papuan, nor was she pale like girls who never sunbathe. That green, that tan, that black hair, matched the place very well, because it was all in gold, the walls were covered in gold plastic, and so was the counter, and the round tables gleamed dimly like old gold.

‘Two beers.’ They were the only customers, after serving them even the barman disappeared. There was no air conditioning, but a big fan with wide wooden blades gave the place an exotic, colonial tone and probably made it cooler than air conditioning might have.

‘Alberta killed herself a year ago. What do you want to know about a dead woman?’ Like him, she liked getting straight to the point, and when he didn’t reply immediately, she continued, ‘I can imagine how you met her. One evening you were going to the cinema alone, you hadn’t found any other way to spend the evening, you got there in time for the last show, you parked your car and looked around, still undecided whether or not to go in, and that was when you saw her, standing there, looking a bit self-conscious, near the entrance to the cinema. You must have thought she was just a normal girl who’d been stood up by her boyfriend, or else she was waiting for a girlfriend who hadn’t shown up. Before resigning himself to going to the cinema alone, a man has to try everything. So you smiled at her and it came as a pleasant surprise when she smiled back, a bit. Then you approached her, said some kind, considerate, witty words, and the rest is predictable.’

‘I never met Alberta Radelli.’ With this girl, he couldn’t hide.

She seemed to turn colder. ‘On the phone you told me you knew her.’

‘Indirectly. I’ve heard a lot about Alberta.’ Yes, a lot.

‘I don’t like equivocation. I can’t believe you’d indulge in it. Don’t disappoint me. A doctor willing to perform an act of euthanasia can’t be an equivocator. Why are you interested in Alberta? Tell me the truth, or I’ll leave now.’

She was a little too Kantian: behind her words there were categorical imperatives and prolegomena to any future metaphysics that would be able to present itself as a science. But she had beaten him and he had to tell her the truth. Or rather, he did more: he had brought with him the little leather briefcase, and gently-they weren’t images to be shown in public-he showed her Alberta’s photographs.

Livia Ussaro looked at them. ‘I told her not to.’

He thought he was intelligent, but he didn’t understand. He waited.

‘She told me there was someone who was offering her thirty thousand lire for a few photographs like this, and I told her not to. We almost quarrelled, that time. She told me it was less dirty being photographed like that than going with the first man she found. I told her that wasn’t true. She didn’t take any notice, and did this filthy job all the same.’

It was all starting to become clear. ‘What about this other girl, do you know her?’ He took the photograph of the blonde girl from the briefcase.

‘Maurilia, I only know her first name, I think she works at La Rinascente.’

Even clearer. Mascaranti would easily find a Maurilia, either in La Rinascente, or in all of Italy, there couldn’t be many Maurilias. ‘And how did you meet Alberta?’

Livia Ussaro started laughing, without a sound, the silence of the gold-covered bar was not disturbed, but her somewhat masculine face grew softer with the laughter. ‘How I met her doesn’t matter. It’s what led up to it that’s important.’

‘Then tell me what led up to it.’

‘Of course, that’s all I want to do, we all want to open our hearts completely,’ she continued laughing the same way, but a little less. ‘I don’t know if I’m going to disappoint you, but what led up to it is this.’

She ordered two more beers. In a way, she was happy.

‘Ever since I was sixteen, I’d wanted to experiment with prostitution,’ she said, she had stopped laughing, and that tone had returned, not bureaucratic, but professorial, she was expounding a theory, which was as good as any other, that much was obvious. ‘It wasn’t morbid curiosity. You may be able to tell from my physical type that I’m frigid. Not completely. The gynaecologist and the neurologist have established that when the physical and environmental conditions are right, I can be a perfectly normal woman. Unfortunately these conditions are difficult to produce, and in practice it’s as if I was frigid. Some people who aren’t very perceptive think I’m a lesbian, which I find quite amusing.’

He was finishing his second beer, he was still thirsty, or maybe it wasn’t thirst, and he felt, yes, quite happy, Livia Ussaro existed and was telling him interesting, extraordinary things, even though it wasn’t clear exactly what she was telling him.

‘No, I wanted to make the experiment for purposes of social study. I was born with a weakness for sociology. When the other girls couldn’t wait to put on long sheer stockings, I was reading Pareto and what’s worse, understanding him. Unfortunately, Pareto doesn’t have much to say about women, nor do the other sociologists. As a woman, I’m interested in female sociology, and one of the most important problems in that field is prostitution. The first thing to realise is that you can’t understand prostitution, really understand it, if you haven’t been a prostitute: if you haven’t, at least once, performed an act of prostitution.’

He had the feeling he was at a lecture, at some convention of intellectuals, and he ordered two more beers: he had never got drunk on beer, but he feared that tonight he might have to.

‘It isn’t a logically incontrovertible theory,’ she continued, cool, magisterial, and yet so feminine, ‘in fact, if you analyse it closely it doesn’t hold up at all, but it has its charm. The experiment I wanted to do was to go out on the street, let a man accost me and go with him for money. In that way I would have a typical experience, a sample experience, empirical but significant data that would help me study the question. Except that, whenever I was about to do so, two or three thousand years of taboos stopped me. In addition, I was a virgin and the part of my ego that belonged to the herd balked at the idea of losing my virginity for science. Then, at the age of twenty, despite my frigidity, I fell in love, it was a strange thing that only lasted two days. In those two days the man who had succeeded in breaking down my defences took full advantage of the situation, I lost my virginity, and so there was no longer anything to prevent me performing my experiment. But it took me until I was twenty-three before I managed to overcome all the taboos. And it happened by chance.’

Everything had a slightly hallucinatory air, including all that gold, and that startling silence of an area of Milan a little way out of the centre, towards midnight, when only a few cars pass, the odd tram, and there are long minutes of silence as if you are in the garden of a seventeenth-century villa.

‘I was in the Piazza della Scala, that evening, waiting for a tram,’ she said, informatively, ‘it was about this time of night, I’d been to see a friend who’s a dressmaker, a really stupid girl, but a good worker, even though she only ever talks about pleats, or about her molars, which are always hurting her. I was depressed and all at once I realised that a man about forty was coming towards me, swaying as he walked. I stayed where I was, and he told me in German that I was the most beautiful brunette he’d ever seen anywhere in Europe. I told him, in German, that I didn’t like drunks and asked him to leave me alone. Then he took off his hat, in that heat he was wearing a beautiful black straw hat, and told me he was happy I knew German, and that he was sorry but he wasn’t drunk, maybe I hadn’t seen him properly, he simply had a limp. You can understand the remorse I felt, I’d told him he was drunk, when all he had was a limp. In the meantime he asked if he could buy me something. I said yes, by way of apology. He took me to the Biffi, I had an ice cream, and then he told me that he was feeling lonely and asked if I could keep him company. I said yes. Then he said, “Für Geld oder für Sympathie?” He was a German, after all, and didn’t appreciate equivocation, he wanted to know if I would keep him company for free, as my friend the dressmaker says, out of sympathy, or for money. I was thinking about my prostitution experiment and immediately said, “Für Geld.” He asked me how much, it was my chance to carry out my sociological experiment, but the financial side of it was something I had no idea about. I told him the lowest figure, I was afraid that otherwise he’d say no.’

‘How much?’ The most fascinating form of madness was the lucid, rational kind.

‘Five thousand.’ She paused.

‘And then?’

‘Nothing. He gave it to me immediately. His car was parked in the Piazza della Scala, he asked me to tell him where to go: it was a bit awkward, because I didn’t know anything about the sexual geography of Milan at the time. By chance, we ended up in the Parco Lambro.’ She fell silent again.

‘And then?’

‘What struck me was how quick it was.’ She was very serious now. ‘And later, every time I repeated these experiments, it was the one thing I could never understand, the brevity. I think it takes longer to weigh yourself properly on a pharmacist’s weighing machine. And to think that four-fifths of human experience is based on something so quick, something that flashes by in an instant. I wrote lots of notes about that first experiment, but you wouldn’t want to read them.’

No, he didn’t want to, but he didn’t tell her that. ‘Is that what led up to your meeting Alberta?’

‘Yes, it is. In fact, I met her the very next day. A friend from university had invited me to a cocktail party. His father is the director of a large company making corsets and swimming costumes, and they were presenting their latest creations to the press and public in a reception room in the Hotel Principe. I’d never been to anything like that before, so I went. There were a whole lot of women, and many must have been lesbians, real lesbians, because they kept coming up to me and buzzing around me like flies until they realised I wasn’t the rose they’d imagined and left me alone. Then, in the middle of that world that was so strange to me, I saw someone else looking as lost as I was. That was her, Alberta. I don’t have friends, I’ve never been good at making them, but after an hour Alberta and I were like sisters and we’d told each other everything. It was the first time since high school that I’d found someone I could talk to about general topics, I don’t mean the future of mankind, but at least the influence in politics of the female vote. These days, the only general topics people talk about are leisure time and the influence of machines, which apart from anything else aren’t even really what you could call topics, in the strict sense of the term. Don’t you agree?’

He did, warmly, maybe because he was still warm with beer: leisure time and the influence of machines, pah!

‘We left the cocktail party and she took me to her place, at eleven we were still talking, about midnight we realised we hadn’t eaten and she prepared some bread and cheese, and at half past one we were still there, talking.’

‘And what did you talk about?’ Four or five hours of conversation: it might well be that they’d done nothing but talk, Livia Ussaro said so, and Livia Ussaro didn’t tell lies, but a lesbian may use the word for something more intimate. The suspicion, though, faded immediately, because of the fervour with which she answered his question.

‘I think that in the last three hours all we talked about was prostitution. I told her about my experiment the previous night-that’s why I had to tell you what led up to our meeting-and Alberta told me that over the past few months she’d been doing the same kind of experiment. Not for the purposes of study, obviously, but out of necessity. Not long after she had arrived in Milan from Naples, she had realised it wouldn’t be easy to live here. She’d wanted to work in the theatre, but she’d given up the idea after talking to the porters of the theatres where the various companies worked. Instead, she easily found work as a shop assistant, because of her elegant figure and the way she treated the customers, but the customers, or the boss, sooner or later put her in a position where she had to be fired. So, when she was really broke, she’d go out and come back home a little later feeling a little easier financially. I made her tell me all the experiences she’d had, half my notes are based on what Alberta told me. If people here in Italy didn’t laugh about certain subjects, especially if dealt with by a woman, I could write a report on private prostitution. There was one question that fascinated us above all: From a social point of view, does a woman have the right to prostitute herself, but, I emphasise, privately? And only when she wants to, without anything else driving her?’

He must be drunk and he was still thirsty. He wanted to see if she would get angry. ‘A woman also has the right to get married, at least so I’ve heard.’

She didn’t get angry, but she seemed disappointed. ‘Don’t turn nasty on me, I’m serious. For an intelligent woman, like Alberta, like many others …’

‘Like you.’

‘Yes, like me, too. It’s difficult to get married when you’re intelligent. Of course, in the end we all get married, but an intelligent woman wants to marry well, and it’s difficult to find the right man.’

He really wanted to make her angry. ‘That’s not a good reason to go out on the streets and let yourself be picked up by the first man who comes along.’

‘You’re doing this deliberately. I’m not saying she has to do that, I’m just asking, theoretically, whether or not she has the right.’

He had let her talk for a long time and had learned something useful: Alberta Radelli had indulged in private prostitution, a form of prostitution that seemed to be on the increase. But he needed to know more. ‘Listen, I like general topics very much, but for the job I’m doing I need details. Do you have any idea where Alberta went to pose for these photographs, and why?’

When she thought, her face took on an almost childish expression. ‘I don’t have a very good memory, but I do remember something about it because it was the reason I became disappointed in Alberta.’

‘What is it you remember?’ If he could find out who had taken those photographs, there was no stopping him.

‘I remember a number. Numbers are easier to remember, you know. For example, I remember they were giving her thirty thousand lire to pose for those photographs. I spent a whole afternoon arguing with her, she really disappointed me, although she realised those photographs were something different …’

Oh, no, enough philosophy for the moment. He interrupted her. ‘What’s the number you remember?’

‘The number is 78, it was a house number, but I don’t remember the name of the street. I asked her for the details, because I realised there was something that wasn’t right, that she was moving from private prostitution into something organised …’

No, no, he interrupted her again, he would take her to the Torre Branca one of these days, on a rainy weekday, and there he would let her talk about general topics, there in the deserted round bar a hundred metres above the Milanese plain, until the place closed, but now he needed to know about Alberta, and quickly.

‘Now please listen, this is very important. Can you remember anything more about these photographs? The number 78 isn’t enough, and we have to find the photographer, soon.’ Why soon? A year had passed since Alberta’s death, what was the hurry? Maybe he was telepathic or something, but he felt a sense of urgency.

‘I don’t remember anything else, she just told me she was going to see a photographer.’

‘Obviously.’

‘Oh, wait, she said something strange, now I remember, she said it was like industrial photography. What has industrial photography got to do with nude photographs?’

It did have something to do with it, but he didn’t tell her: it was a cover. So, at number 78 of one of the three thousand or six thousand streets in Milan there existed, or at least there had existed a year before, a studio for industrial photography, at which, discreetly, artistic photographs were also taken. It might take Mascaranti only half a day to find this studio, if it still existed, or even if it didn’t.

‘And did she tell you who had suggested she pose for these photographs?’

‘Yes, she did. It was a filthy business, I don’t like perversions.’ She looked at the barman, who was standing restlessly in the doorway of the bar, waiting to close: it was almost midnight. ‘There was a man who’d approached her, they’d gone in his car some distance from Milan, he was a middle-aged man, I think, he was very generous and very kind, but he’d hardly touched her. Then he’d confessed to her that at his age people had weaknesses, he was able to respond to female charms more in a beautiful photograph, if she wanted to pose for some photographs that would be sufficient for him, just photographs. She said yes, and he gave her the address of the photographer. Then he asked her if she had a friend who might also like to pose for photographs, each of them would be given thirty thousand lire.’

It was a lot of money just so that this voyeur could look at some photographs. ‘Let’s see if I’ve got this right. Alberta told you that a man she’d been with suggested she pose for some photographs and gave her the address of a photographer. In other words, Alberta had to go alone to this photographer, who already knew the work he had to do?’

‘Yes, that’s exactly it.’

‘But, in order to let the photographer know that she had come for that special kind of photograph, didn’t she have to tell him anything, give him some kind of password? She couldn’t just tell him, out of the blue, that she wanted to be photographed nude.’

‘No, she didn’t need to say anything, that was why I quarrelled with Alberta. I made her give me all the details because I wanted to understand what it was all about. All Alberta had to do was go to the studio and when she got there she didn’t have to tell him anything, the photographer already knew. She would pose for some photographs, the photographer would pay her, and that was it.’

For a moment he could hear sirens sounding the alarm, just like when he was a little boy during the war. ‘Try to remember: was the photographer supposed to hand over the exposed film to Alberta, or was he supposed to keep it for himself and send Alberta away? And are you sure, or do you have any doubts?’

‘I think I’m sure.’ Oh, that thoughtful little girl’s face of hers. ‘Alberta told me all she had to do was go to the studio, pose for the photographs, and that was it, she thought it was stupid to pass up all that money for a matter of principle and she was even going to take a friend of hers, Maurilia, and I told her that if she went and posed for those photographs I never wanted to see her again.’

It was time to go, the barman and a large man who had suddenly appeared told them they were going to close. So he took his Livia Ussaro outside, pushed her into the Giulietta, but didn’t switch the engine on. Once the shutters of the bar had been pulled down, that stretch of the Via Plinio was quite shadowy and discreet.

‘I’m not going to let you go home to sleep if you don’t explain one point,’ he said, perhaps a little too seriously. ‘In Alberta’s handbag on the evening before the day she was found dead in Metanopoli, there was a Minox cartridge that hadn’t yet been developed. Do you know what that means?’

‘I’m thinking about it.’

‘Let me do the thinking. It means the photographer gave the cartridge to Alberta.’

‘Obviously.’

‘Right. But what was Alberta supposed to do with it? Did she have to take it to that photosensitive middle-aged man?’ How witty he was!

Livia smiled, it was nice, talking like this in the semi-darkness of the car, the Via Plinio was more deserted than ever. ‘No, that’s not possible, I’m sure of it. Apart from anything else she couldn’t have known where the man who’d spoken to her about the photos lived; when a woman goes with a man like that he doesn’t normally give her his address. This one certainly didn’t.’

‘They may have fixed a place to meet so that she could hand the cartridge over to him to be developed.’ The hypothesis was almost ridiculous: when a photographer takes photographs, it’s normal for him to develop, enlarge and print them himself, without the person who wanted those photographs having to look for another photographer or make the enlargements himself, which would have been quite difficult for an amateur, given that the photographs had been taken on Minox film.

‘No, Alberta would have told me if she’d had to hand over the roll of film to that man. I questioned her for two hours, I was very afraid, I realised it was no longer private prostitution, that she was going downhill, that she was getting mixed up in …’

He wasn’t listening to her, even though he would have liked to, because he would have liked to talk to her for weeks, about all her beloved ‘general topics,’ but he was imagining Alberta and her blonde friend going to the photographer, getting undressed, posing for the photographs, then taking the money and leaving. That was the logical sequence. Instead of which, Alberta had the cartridge in her handbag. What was she supposed to do with it? And why had the photographer given it to her?

‘You’re not listening to me, are you?’

‘No.’

Humbly, generously, she said, ‘Ask me more about Alberta.’

Yes, he did have other questions to ask. ‘After that time when she told you she was going to pose for photographs, what did Alberta say to you when you saw her again?’

‘I never saw her again. Nearly a week later, I read in the newspaper that she’d killed herself.’

The path ended here. ‘We need to meet again, do you mind that?’

‘No, even if it’s only about Alberta.’ Then she betrayed her feminine weakness. ‘Why are you so interested in her? You never met her, you’re not even a policeman, in fact, you told me you’re taking a big risk, getting involved in these things.’

At last he looked at her without thinking about Alberta. ‘I can tell you, Little Miss General Topics, it’s because of a general topic.’

‘And what would that be?’

He could tell her, in fact she was the one person in the world he could tell something like that without making her smile. ‘I don’t like swindlers.’ He then explained what he meant, he even had to generalise a bit to thank her for all the useful information she had given him. ‘Society is a game, right? The rules of the game are written in the penal code, in the civil code, and in another rather imprecise, unwritten code called the moral code. They may be debatable codes, and have to be constantly updated, but either you keep to the rules, or you don’t. The only person breaking the rules of the game that I can respect is the bandit with his rifle hiding in the mountains: he doesn’t keep to the rules of the game, but then he makes it quite clear he doesn’t want to play in good society anyway and that he’ll make his own rules as he wants, with his rifle. But not swindlers, no, I hate and despise them. These days, there are bandits with lawyers in attendance, they cheat, they rob, they kill, but they’ve already worked out a line of defence with their lawyer in case they’re found out and put on trial, and they never get the punishment they deserve. They want others to keep to the game, to the rules, but not themselves. I don’t like that, I can’t stand these people, just knowing they’re near, just smelling them, sets my nerves on edge.’

She would have liked to continue this conversation, she loved hearing that kind of speech, but tenderly he asked her where he could take her and she replied, just to her front door, over there opposite the bar, and then told him that he could phone her whenever he wanted, she’d be very pleased to hear from him, and her voice was definitely not the voice of a frigid woman, but he had to go, he had left Davide alone too long.

Davide was lying on the bed, fully dressed apart from his shoes, the light was on and he was awake. On the table were the bottle of Frascati, which looked empty, and the bottle of whisky, which was open but from which only a couple of spoonfuls at most seemed to be missing, in what must have been an extreme effort of will Davide had drunk less than a spoonful of whisky an hour, even though he’d had the bottle there at his disposal, as well as his doctor’s permission.

He took the chair and moved it close to the bed. Davide made as if to sit up, it wasn’t right to lie down when his doctor was here, but Duca put a hand on his shoulder and made him lie down again. ‘Davide,’ he said, ‘we need to sleep.’ He had been happy with Livia Ussaro, and he was happy now with Davide Auseri, the psychotic only-begotten son of a leading engineer. It had been a happy evening. ‘We can’t spend our days and nights thinking about a woman, especially if she’s dead. You’re still thinking about Alberta, aren’t you?’

Davide turned his face to the pillow: in his language, that meant yes.

‘It isn’t right, Davide.’ He was doing his job as a doctor, with passion, with happiness. ‘It isn’t right for someone of your age to be in love with a dead woman. I’m going to talk to you a little about her, because these past few days I’ve understood a lot of things. When you threw Alberta out of your car, you weren’t in love with her. When you read in the newspapers that she’d killed herself, you still weren’t in love with her, but you felt remorse. Later, the remorse grew in you, more every day, every time you got drunk, but it didn’t stay as just remorse. Over time, alongside the remorse another feeling was born. Let’s call it love. You kept thinking, “If I’d taken her with me that day, I’d have saved her life.” Then you went further, you started to think that if you’d taken her with you, not only would you have saved her life, but it would have been beautiful for both of you, really beautiful, not just making love so much, but something more. You’ve never had a girlfriend, you’ve never really been in love, the upbringing your father gave you, your father’s personality, have always crushed you. Alberta was the first woman who gave you this feeling of love, this need for love-after she was dead, unfortunately. I know this is all rather like street-corner psychoanalysis, but that’s the way it is: you keep thinking about Alberta because you’re in love with her, and being in love with her what you can’t stand is the thought that she’s dead and you were partly responsible, am I right or not?’

He had hoped it would happen, without really expecting it: but now he was pleased to see that Davide was beginning to cry. Even though he covered his eyes and no sound came from him, he couldn’t conceal the fact, because his large chest was heaving. Calmly, Duca went on, ‘Since the dead never come back, and neither I nor anyone else can bring Alberta here to you, alive, and have her cure you, as only she could do, then we have to do something else. The most important thing is to find the person who forced her to kill herself, or who killed her, and when we find him we strangle him. Just tell yourself that: we’ll find him and strangle him. I might leave the job to you.’ He had to appeal to his baser instincts, in order to save him. ‘It isn’t hard, you’ll see, and you won’t spend even one day in prison. We’ll find this person and you’ll strangle him, just like that, with your bare hands, you won’t even have to squeeze hard, I’ll explain to you some other time, as a doctor, when you can be sure you’ve strangled him, the kind of cracking you have to feel between your fingers as you squeeze, and after that cracking you can even relax your grip because there’s nothing more to be done. Of course you’ll say you were attacked, the person jumped you, he had a knife, a revolver, you were forced to defend yourself, you were about to be killed and you had to react. There’ll be irrefutable witnesses, Mascaranti for example, I assure you that you’ll be able to strangle that man without any problem. And I assure you it’ll happen soon, because we’ll find him soon, but now you have to sleep, you have to relax, to be ready for that moment.’ It wasn’t a nice little bedtime story, but the child he had to put to sleep was rather big and needed stronger stories. He, Duca, also needed a bedtime story, one about finding a photographer in the woods. He just had to find out who had taken those photographs, only that, nothing but that.