Troubling Love

11

With the bus unmoving in the chaos of Via Salvator Rosa, I discovered that I no longer felt any sympathy for the city of Amalia, for the language in which she spoke to me, for the streets that I had walked as a girl, for the people. When at a certain point there appeared a glimpse of the sea (the same that had excited me as a child), it seemed to me purple parchment pasted over a crack in a wall. I knew that I was losing my mother definitively and that it was exactly what I wanted.

The Vossi sisters’ shop was in Piazza Vanvitelli. As a girl I had often stopped in front of the sober windows, their thick panes of glass enclosed in mahogany frames. The entrance had an old door whose upper part was glass, and at the top were incised the three “V”s and the date of the shop’s founding, 1948. I didn’t know what was beyond the glass, which was opaque: I had never had either the need to go and see or the money to do so. I had often stopped outside because I especially liked the corner window, where women’s garments were carelessly placed beneath a painting that I wasn’t able to date, but that was certainly by a skilled artist. Two women, so close and so identical in movement that their profiles were almost superimposed, were running openmouthed, from the right side of the canvas to the left. You couldn’t tell if they were following or being followed. The image seemed to have been cut away from a much larger scene, and so only the left legs of the women were visible and their extended arms were severed at the wrists. Even my father, who had some objection or other to every painting that had been made in the course of the centuries, liked it. He invented stupid attributions, pretending to be an expert, as if we all didn’t know that he hadn’t been to any kind of school, that of art he knew little or nothing, that all he could paint, night and day, was his Gypsies. When he was in the mood and disposed to boast more than usual with us, his daughters, he even attributed it to himself.

It was at least twenty years since I had had occasion to go up the hill, to this place near the castle of San Martino that I recalled as cool and clean, different from the rest of the city. I was immediately vexed. The piazza seemed to me changed, with its few spindly plane trees, encroached on by the steel bodies of cars, and overhung by a scaffolding of yellow-painted iron beams. I recalled that at the center of the piazza of long ago were palm trees that had seemed to me very tall. There was one, a sickly dwarf, besieged by the gray barriers of the construction. Furthermore, I couldn’t at first glance find the shop. Tailed by my uncle, who was continuing with himself the argument he had been having with the people on the bus, even though it had occurred an hour earlier, I circled the space: dust-filled, noisy, bombarded by horns and pneumatic drills, beneath a cloudy sky that seemed to want to rain and couldn’t. Finally I stopped in front of some wigless female mannequins in underpants and bras, carefully positioned in bold, even vulgar, attitudes. Among mirrors, gilded bits of metal, and fabrics in electric colors, I had difficulty recognizing the three “V”s in the arch of the door, the only thing that remained the same. Even the painting I liked was no longer there.

I looked at my watch: it was ten-fifteen. The activity was such that the whole piazza — buildings, gray-violet colonnades, clouds of sounds and dust — seemed a merry-go-round. Uncle Filippo glanced at the display windows and immediately turned away in embarrassment: too many spread legs, too many provocative breasts, he’d have ugly thoughts. He said that he would wait for me on the corner: that I should be quick. I said to myself that I hadn’t asked him to come with me, and I went in.

I had always imagined that, inside, the Vossi sisters’ shop was dim, and inhabited by three genteel old ladies, wearing long dresses and thick strands of pearls, their hair gathered in chignons held by old-fashioned hairpins. Instead I found bright lights, loud customers, mannequins in satin nightgowns, camisoles in many colors, silk underpants, counters and tables that overloaded the place with merchandise, heavily made-up young salesgirls, all wearing tight pistachio-colored uniforms with the three “V”s embroidered on the chest.

“Is this the Vossi sisters’ shop?” I asked one of them, the one who looked the nicest, perhaps uneasy in her uniform.

“Yes. May I help you?”

“Could I speak with one of the Miss Vossis?”

The girl looked at me, bewildered.

“They’re not here anymore,” she said.

“Are they dead?”

“No, I don’t think so. They’ve retired.”

“Did they give up the shop?”

“They were getting on, they sold everything. There’s new management now, but the label is the same. Are you an old customer?”

“My mother was,” I said. And I slowly began to take from the plastic bag that I had brought with me the nightgown, the two dresses, the five pairs of underpants found in Amalia’s suitcase, spreading out everything on the counter. “I think she bought them all here.”

The girl looked with expert eyes.

“The things, yes, they’re ours,” she said with a questioning air. I saw that she was trying to guess my mother’s age based on how old I seemed to be.

“She’ll be sixty-three in July,” I said. Then it occurred to me to lie: “They weren’t for her. They were gifts for me, for my birthday. I was forty-five on May 23rd.”

“You look at least fifteen years younger,” the girl said, trying to do her job.

In an engaging tone, I explained:

“The things are beautiful, and I like them. Only, this dress binds a little and the panties are tight.”

“Do you want to exchange them? I’d need the receipt.”

“I don’t have the receipt. But they were bought here. Don’t you remember my mother?”

“I don’t know. So many people come here.”

I glanced at the people the salesgirl had alluded to: women who talked loudly in a dialect marked by a forced cheer, who laughed noisily, flaunted expensive jewelry, came out of the fitting rooms in bra and underpants or in tiny gold, silver, or leopard-print bathing suits, displayed abundant flesh striped by stretch marks and dented by cellulite, gazed at pubis and buttocks, pushed their breasts up with cupped hands, ignored the saleswomen, and, in those poses, turned to a man who was a kind of floorwalker, well dressed and already tanned, installed there purposely to channel the flow of money and cast threatening glances at the ineffectual salesgirls.

It wasn’t the clientele I had imagined. They seemed women whose men had got rich suddenly and easily, hurling them into a provisional luxury that they were compelled to enjoy, and whose subculture was like a damp crowded basement, with semi-porn comic strips, with obscenities used as refrains. They were women forced into a city-prison, corrupted first by poverty and now by money, with no interruption. Seeing them and hearing them, I realized that I was getting nervous. They behaved with that man the way my father imagined women behaved, the way he imagined his wife behaved as soon as he turned his back, the way Amalia, too, perhaps, had for her whole life dreamed of behaving: a woman of the world who bends over without having to place two fingers at the center of her neckline, crosses her legs without worrying about her skirt, laughs coarsely, covers herself with costly objects, her whole body brimming with indiscriminate sexual offerings, ready to joust face to face with men in the arena of the obscene.

I made an uncontrollable grimace of annoyance. I said:

“She’s the same height as I am, with only a little white in her hair. But she wears it in an old-fashioned style, no one does it like that anymore. She came with a man of about seventy, but pleasant, slender, with thick white hair. A handsome couple, to look at. You ought to remember them, they bought all these things.”

The salesgirl shook her head, she didn’t remember.

“So many people come here,” she said. Then she glanced at the floorwalker, worried about the time she was wasting, and suggested to me: “Try them on. They look just your size. If the dress is tight. . ”

“I’d like to speak to that man. . ” I ventured.

The salesgirl pushed me toward a fitting room, anxious about that barely articulated request.

“If the underpants don’t fit, take another pair. . we’ll give you a discount,” she offered. And I found myself in a tiny room that was all rectangular mirrors.

I sighed, and wearily took off the funeral dress. I had less and less tolerance for the frenetic chatter of the customers, which in there seemed not muffled but, rather, amplified. After a moment of hesitation I also took off the underpants of my mother’s that I had put on the night before and changed into the lace ones that I had found in her bag. They were exactly my size. Puzzled, I ran a finger along the rip in the side that Amalia had probably made putting them on and then pulled over my head the rust-colored dress. It came to about two inches above my knees and the neckline was too low. But it wasn’t at all too tight; rather, it slid over my tense and muscular thinness and softened it. I came out of the fitting room tugging the dress on one side, staring at one calf and saying aloud:

“Look, you can see, the dress is tight here on the side. . and anyway it’s too short.”

But beside the young salesgirl now was the man, who appeared to be in his forties, with a black mustache, at least eight inches taller than me, broad in the shoulders and chest. Both his features and his body were inflated, threatening; only his gaze was not unpleasant but lively, familiar. He said, in a TV Italian, but without kindness, without even a hint of the willing compliance that he showed with the other customers, in fact visibly striving to be formal with me:

“It looks very good on you, it’s not at all too tight. That’s the style.”

“It’s precisely the style that I’m not sure about. My mother chose it without me. . ”

“She made a good choice. Keep your dress and enjoy it.”

I stared at him for a second, in silence. I felt that I wanted to do something either to him or to myself. I glanced at the other customers. I pulled the dress up over my hips and turned toward one of the mirrors.

“Look at the panties,” I pointed to the mirror, “they’re tight on me.”

The man changed neither his expression nor his tone.

“Madam, I don’t know what to tell you, you don’t even have the receipt,” he said.

I saw myself in the mirror, my legs thin and bare: I pulled down the dress, uneasy. I picked up the old dress and the underpants, put everything in the bag and searched at the bottom for the plastic case with Amalia’s identification card.

“You ought to remember my mother,” I tried again, pulling out the document and opening it right in front of him.

The man gave a quick look and seemed to lose patience. He switched to dialect.

“My dear lady, we can’t waste time here,” he said, and gave back the document.

“I’m only asking you. . ”

“Merchandise that’s been sold can’t be exchanged.”

“I’m only asking you. . ”

He advanced to a light touch on the shoulder.

“Are you playing games? Did you come to play games?”

“Don’t you dare touch me. . ”

“No, you really are joking. . go on, take your things and your document. Who sent you? What do you want? Tell whoever sent you to come and get the cash personally. Then we’ll see! In fact, here’s my card: Antonio Polledro, name, address, and telephone number. You’ll find me here or at home. All right?”

It was a tone that I knew very well. Immediately afterward he would begin to push me harder and then to strike me, without regard to whether I was a man or a woman. I tore the document from his hand with calculated disdain, and to discover what had so unnerved him I looked at the photograph of my mother. The long, baroquely sculpted hair on her forehead and around her face had been carefully scraped away. The white that emerged around her head had been changed with a pencil to a nebulous gray. With the same pencil someone had slightly hardened the features of her face. The woman in the photograph wasn’t Amalia: it was me.