Numero Zero

7 Wednesday, April 15, Evening

I could see how dispirited Maia was, and I caught up with her as she was leaving. Instinctively I took her by the arm.

“Don’t take it personally, Maia. Let’s go, I’ll walk you home. We could have a drink on the way.”

“I live by the canals, plenty of bars around there. There’s one I know that does an excellent Bellini, my great passion. Thanks.”

We reached Ripa Ticinese, and I saw the canals for the first time. I’d heard about them, of course, but was convinced they were all underground, and yet it felt as if we were in Amsterdam. Maia told me with a certain pride that Milan had once been very much like Amsterdam, crisscrossed by canals right to the center. It must have been beautiful, which was why Stendhal had so liked it. But later they had covered the canals for public health reasons, and only here were they still visible, with their putrid water, though at one time there were washerwomen along the banks. And in some of the side streets you could still see rows of old houses and many case di ringhiera.

Case di ringhiera, large old buildings with an inner courtyard and iron railings circling the upper floors. They were places I’d heard about, images of the 1950s that I’d come across when editing encyclopedias or when referring to the performance of Bertolazzi’s El Nost Milan at the Piccolo Teatro. But I didn’t imagine any still existed.

Maia laughed. “Milan is full of case di ringhiera, except that they’re no longer for poor people. Come, I’ll show you.” She took me into a double courtyard. “Here on the ground floor it’s been completely redeveloped. There are workshops for small antiques dealers — though really just glorified junk shops charging high prices — and the studios of painters in search of fame. Now it’s all stuff for tourists. But up there, those two floors are exactly as they used to be.”

I could see the iron railings around the upper floors, and doors that opened onto each balcony, and I asked whether anyone still hung their wash out to dry.

Maia smiled. “We’re not in Naples. Almost all of it has been renovated. At one time the steps went straight up to the balcony, which led to each front door, and at the far end was a single toilet for several families, with a hole in the floor, and you could forget any idea of a shower or a bath. Now it has all been done up for the rich. Some apartments even have a Jacuzzi and they cost an arm and a leg. Less where I live. I’ve got two rooms with water dripping down the walls, though fortunately they’ve put in a toilet and a shower, but I love the area. Soon, of course, they’ll be fixing that up as well. Then I’ll have to move out, I won’t be able to afford the rent, unless Domani gets going pretty soon and they take me on permanently. That’s why I put up with all this humiliation.”

“Don’t take it personally, Maia. It’s obvious that during a trial period we have to learn what we can write and what we can’t. In any event, Simei has responsibilities, to the paper and to the publisher. Perhaps you could do as you liked when you worked on celebrity romance, but here it’s different, we’re working on a newspaper.”

“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.