18.
The street was deserted and glistening with rain.
I don’t know how long my spell lasted, but it must have been a pretty long time, because at a certain point, in a worried voice, she asked me if I was all right.
“Fine, yes. Why, don’t I look fine?”
“Fine? Well, it was a like a scene out of The Exorcist. You looked as if you were talking to someone—you were moving your lips, changing your expression—even though you never made a sound.”
She stared at me for a few seconds. Then she asked, “You’re not insane, are you?”
She smiled as she said it, but there was at least the shadow of a doubt in her eyes.
“It really looked like I was talking to someone?”
“Uh-huh,” she said, nodding vigorously.
“When your dog lifted his head to let me stroke his throat, he reminded me of my grandfather’s German shepherd, who used to do the same exact thing—with the same motion—many years ago.”
“You know, even when he lets people pet him, he doesn’t usually expose his throat like that. He likes you. It’s pretty unusual.”
“Well, when he did, it brought back this flood of memories from my childhood. Things I haven’t thought of in thirty years. I’m not surprised to hear that I was talking to myself.”
We started walking again, in the same formation: Nadia in the middle, Pino/Baskerville to her left, and me to her right. The smell of wet asphalt hung in the air.
“I can hardly remember anything from my childhood. I don’t think it was particularly happy or unhappy, but that’s only because I can’t remember any moments of great sadness or great happiness. If I had sad or happy times, I’ve forgotten them. It’s hard to explain. There are things that I know happened, and so I say I remember them, but I really don’t remember anything. It’s as if I know about the things that happened at that time in my life only because someone told me about them. It feels like I have memories of someone else’s childhood,” Nadia said.
“I know what you mean. Sometimes I’m not sure if something really happened or I dreamed it.”
“That’s it exactly. I think my mother threw a couple of birthday parties for me, but I couldn’t tell you what happened at those parties, who came, or even what year it was. Sometimes it makes my head spin. It’s too much.”
“So, is there a part of your life that you remember more clearly?”
“Yes. I don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing, but I remember becoming a working girl perfectly.”
“When was that?” I asked, doing my best to preserve as neutral a tone of voice as possible. She ignored the question.
“You know, there’s nothing tragic about the so-called life choices I made. It’s pretty humdrum. More depressing than anything else.”
I made a gesture with one hand, as if to wave something away. It was a small, involuntary gesture, but she saw it.
“Okay, I won’t try to describe it. What I meant is that there aren’t people or events that I can blame for what I became. My family, for instance.”
“What did your parents do—or should I say, what do they do?”
“My father was an administrator in a middle school, and my mother was a housewife. They’re both dead. I can’t say that I had a great relationship with my parents. But they were probably no worse than the parents of lots of other girls who didn’t grow up to be prostitutes. I have a sister who’s a lot older than I am. She lives in Bologna. I haven’t seen her in ages. Every once in a while we talk on the phone. We’re polite and distant, like a couple of strangers. Which is, after all, exactly what we are.”
I admired Nadia’s straightforward honesty and the economy of words she used.
“Anyway, it all started when I was nineteen. I had graduated from high school with a bookkeeper’s diploma, and I enrolled at the university to study business, but I immediately realized that I had no interest in continuing my studies. Or maybe I just wasn’t interested in studying business, but it adds up to the same thing.”
As she was talking, I sorted through my mental files for her date of birth, which I had read in the documents from the trial for which I had acted as her defense counsel. I don’t know why, but I never forget anyone’s age—even people I barely know or know only on a professional level.
I did some quick math in my head: When she was nineteen, I was twenty-four. What was I doing at age twenty-four? I had just received my college degree. I hadn’t yet met Sara, my ex-wife. My parents were still alive. Practically speaking, when Nadia was embarking on her adventures in the real world, though I was five years older than she, I was just an overgrown boy.
“I wanted to be independent. I wanted to get away from home. I hated my boring, ordinary family life. I couldn’t stand that modest apartment, three bedrooms, a kitchen, and a bathroom, filled with objects in miserable taste and the smell of mothballs that wafted out of their bedroom. I couldn’t stand their meaningless conversations and their pathetic prospects: pay the monthly installments on the car, find a little two-star pensione for our summer vacations, count the years until Dad can retire. I couldn’t stand the calculations they performed to balance the family budget, warmed-over pasta for dinner, my big sister’s hand-me-down clothes, the shiny oilskin tablecloth. But there was one thing I hated more than anything else.”
“What was that?”
“My father drank a little wine, at lunch and at dinner. Just a little, but every day, twice a day. Of course, we couldn’t afford expensive wine, so when we went to the grocery store, we always bought wine in cartons. There was always a carton of wine on the table, and I remember exactly how it went: My mother snipped the carton open with a pair of scissors; my father filled his glass halfway and then diluted the wine with water; at the end of the meal my mother pinched the mouth of the carton closed with a clothespin and put it away; then she put it back on the table for dinner. My God, I hated it. There are times when I relive it, and I can hardly breathe, just the way I could barely breathe then. Other times, I’m just overwhelmed by a suffocating sense of guilt.”
“Sure, I think so. Anyway, I was a good-looking girl, so I got a job with an agency that provided staff and services for conferences, political rallies, and other events. One day, one of the men organizing a convention for drug company representatives asked me out to dinner, after work. He was a gentleman of about fifty, very distinguished, very well-mannered. I accepted the invitation and arranged to meet him far from my house, because I was ashamed to have him see where we lived.”
“Where did you live?”
“It was public housing, over near the church of the Redentore—you know, the Salesian church.”
“Sure, I box right near there.”
“You box? You mean you fight, in a ring?”
“Yes.”
“You know you’re not normal, right?”
“Come on, tell the story.”
“He came to pick me up in a Ferrari Thema and took me to dinner at a well-known restaurant, one of the restaurants I used to dream about eating in. I remember it as if it were yesterday. I remember everything: the tablecloth, the silverware—real silver—the crystal glasses, the waiters treating me like a lady, even though I was just a kid. And I can still remember everything we ate and the wine we drank. It was a Brunello. It must have cost a fortune, and I can still taste and smell the flavor and aroma of that wine right here, right now, while I’m talking.”
“Which restaurant was it?”
She told me the name, and I remembered it well. Twenty years earlier it had been one of the area’s fanciest restaurants. It was just outside of Bari. I’d never gone there. I didn’t go when I was a young man because I couldn’t afford it, and I didn’t go when I was an adult, because it had gone out of business, vanished into the void, like so many other things from that period.
“After dinner, he invited me to his place for a drink.”
Her tone of voice was neutral. Still, you could sense tension and a climax arriving in the narrative. One of those stories with an ending you already know. An ending you don’t particularly like, but there’s nothing you can do to ward it off or change it.
“I thought he lived alone, and that he was taking me to his home. But in fact he was married, and he had a son about my age. He took me to a little apartment, a sort of pied-à-terre, and it all happened very naturally. When it was time to go, he gave me three hundred thousand lire.”
She paused and looked at me for a few seconds before continuing in a tone of voice with an almost imperceptible note of challenge to it.
“And you know what? I really liked taking that money. I felt as if I was taking control of my life.”
“It didn’t make you uncomfortable?”
“Incredible as it might sound, no. I’d been with boys, I even had a boyfriend then. But this was different, and it all felt very natural. We hadn’t talked about money beforehand, but, I can’t say why, I just knew right away that he was hiring me, giving me a kind of assignment. It wasn’t fun, but it wasn’t repulsive either.”
She paused again. I sat there, uncertain what to say, or for that matter what to think.
“After that night, I saw the gentleman in question a number of times. His name was Vito. I was sorry to hear that he died a few years ago. Going out with him wasn’t exactly like being a whore. I mean, we’d get together and go out for dinner, and then we’d have sex, and then he’d give me a gift. I haven’t been married myself, but I think that in many cases it works in the exact same way.”
Her words hung in the damp air for a few seconds. The clouds began to thin, and you could see patches of night sky here and there. I would have liked to have sat on a bench and continued talking, but everything was wet from the rain. So we just kept walking, with Pino beside us, though he didn’t have much to add to the conversation.
“Then things changed.”
“What happened?”
“One night, as we were leaving his pied-à-terre, Vito asked me if I’d do him a favor.”
“What favor?”
“He asked me if I’d go out with a man he knew. He was a businessman, and Vito was discussing a number of important deals with him. He was scheduled to come to town the following day. Vito told me he was a very distinguished, impeccable gentleman, and handsome, too. Vito wanted him to be in a good mood so he’d sign a big contract. I can’t remember if I said anything or not. In the next image in my mind, he’s smiling, pulling out his wallet, and counting out ten hundred-thousand-lire bills. He handed them to me, and then he pinched my cheek affectionately, like I’d been a good girl and behaved nicely.”
I was about to tell her I didn’t want to hear the rest. Then I realized that I didn’t want to hear it, and yet, at the same time, I did. I get that feeling sometimes with books or movies when they’re about subjects I find disturbing, things I’d prefer to ignore.
“After that, from time to time Vito would ask me if I felt like going out with some friend of his, but he wouldn’t pay. From there I started building a client list of my own. Word of mouth. There were a couple of judges on that list. One of them is dead now; the other is very prominent. Sometimes I see his picture in the newspaper. He always has a very serious expression on his face.”
She let that hang in the air for a moment, clearly implying that the judge in question wasn’t always as serious as he appeared to be in those photographs. She didn’t say his name, and I appreciated that, though it took a certain amount of self-control to keep myself from asking who it was.
“I know this all sounds depressing, and it probably is. But—how can I put this—it was hard to see that at the time. It was hard to tell the difference between my dates and real dates. Lots of my clients took me out to dinner, to the movies, to see shows, and lots of them wanted someone to talk to. As time went by, I realized that for some of them those other things were at least as important as the sex.
“One thing that you often hear prostitutes say is that many men want a woman they can fuck in peace and talk to in peace. Without being judged for one thing or the other. And from my own experience, I can say that’s true. But that’s always where the problems lie.”
“What problems?”
“Sometimes, a client got confused and mistook fiction for reality. In other words, he’d fall in love. When that happened, I cut them off immediately. It seemed like the fair thing to do, the ethical thing. Okay, I know it might seem odd to hear a whore talking about professional ethics, but I think everyone clings to a system of rules to keep things clear, no matter what profession they practice. Ethics aside, it was just smart to put a quick end to those relationships. You never know what goes on in people’s heads. A girlfriend of mine was stalked and practically beaten to death after she rejected a client who’d fallen in love with her.”
“Of course, you moved out of your parents’ apartment?”
“Of course. I told my parents the money came from a job I’d found selling clothing wholesale. I have no idea whether they actually believed me. In fact, I don’t know if my mother and father ever figured out what I really did. By the time I was arrested and the whole thing became a matter of public record, they’d both been dead for years.”
“So, how did it end?”
“The rest isn’t all that interesting, that is, if what I’ve told you so far was interesting at all. Anyway, what happened later is pretty unclear in my memory. For a while I made movies, but not for long. The pay was much better for prostitution. Then I started having other girls work for me, and that paid even better. I hadn’t worked as a prostitute in quite a while by the time they arrested me. Anyway, you know that part of the story, since you were my lawyer.”
She seemed to have finished, and I was about to say something, when she started talking again—as if she’d remembered an important detail.
“But there was something I never told you when you were my lawyer.”
“What’s that?”
“When they arrested me, I was almost relieved. I couldn’t take that life anymore, and things got a lot worse once I started running a prostitution ring. It was much easier for me to maintain my equilibrium when I was just a whore. Once I started to manage other girls, I had a better picture of how depressing it all was. I probably didn’t realize it—and in any case I can’t remember it clearly—but I think I wanted to find a way out. That wasn’t easy, though. The work paid so well, and I had no other skills.”
We’d walked a long way, from the waterfront to the neighborhood around the Teatro Petruzzelli. I couldn’t quite decipher Nadia’s story. I wasn’t sure of the emotions behind it. She’d described everything that happened to her in a neutral tone of voice, but it was obvious that there was something boiling just beneath the surface. I couldn’t figure out what it was. Pino continued walking close to his mistress’s left leg, and it occurred to me how nice it would be to have a silent, discreet companion on my nightly walks. I’d never thought of getting a dog before, but just then I decided I liked the idea.
Nadia’s voice broke into my thoughts. There was a slightly different tone in her voice than when she was relating her story.
“Can I tell you something silly?”
“I like silly things.”
“After my arrest, I asked a friend—not a customer—for a referral to a lawyer. He gave me your name. He said that you were a very good lawyer and a very respectable person, and from the way he said it, I pictured you as some old, chubby bald guy. Somebody’s uncle. But then you showed up in the prison visiting room.”
“I showed up, and then what?” Sometimes I can be really good at missing the point.
“Well, you’re not that old, and you’re not chubby or bald. Though you certainly were very serious and very professional.”
“You were very serious, too. An ideal client, actually—no pointless chitchat, no ridiculous demands.”
“I had to be serious. I didn’t want to seem like what I was, which was a whore, even if I was a high-end whore. I figured that any manifestation of femininity would be taken the wrong way.”
She stopped for a moment, as if thinking about what she’d just said.
“Or maybe the right way. Anyway, the only thing that I could figure out to do was to give you a book, after the trial. Do you remember?”
“How could I forget? The Revolution of Hope by Erich Fromm.”
“I suspected you already had a copy, even though you said you didn’t. You thanked me and said how happy you were to have it. You said you’d been thinking about buying it for some time now, and you were going to read it right away.”
I smiled. I didn’t remember saying any of those things, but it was typical of me, the sort of things I always said in that situation. When someone gives me a book that I’ve already read, I hate to disappoint the gift giver, so I lie.
“Well, in fact, I had already read it.”
She smiled, but there was something in her eyes that caused a pang in my heart, completely out of proportion and unconnected to the episode of the book. As if a door had swung open, for a few moments, and I had glimpsed a terrible pool of sorrow.
“What about afterward?”
“What do you mean, afterward?”
“After the trial.”
“Oh, right. I’ve been smart enough to stay clean since then. I had plenty of savings, and I’d invested them wisely. Low-risk mutual funds with moderate but reliable yields. I own three apartments in good neighborhoods, with good tenants paying reasonably high rents. A fourth apartment that I live in. In other words, I could afford to retire, while I tried to figure out what to do with the second half of my life. I traveled a little. Then I got the bad news I told you about, but I had good doctors, and I think they caught it early enough. I think that’s over. So when I got back—from my trips and from my time in the hospital—I decided to enroll in college.”
“Studying what?”
“Contemporary literature. I’m taking my exams. Can you believe that? Just another couple of years and I’ll have my degree.”
“Have you decided on a thesis?”
She smiled again, but this time there were no shadows behind her eyes. If anything, a gleam of gratitude that I had taken her seriously.
“No, not yet. But I’d like to do something related to film history. I love movies.”
I said nothing. As we walked, I cast her a sidelong glance. But she was looking straight ahead. That is, she wasn’t looking at anything. A few minutes went by.
“Anyway, I had a boyfriend, too. The first, and the last, for now, in my second life. For the first time I didn’t have to worry about concealing how I made a living.”
“How did it go with him?”
“He was—is—a shithead. So it went the way it always goes with a shithead. After less than a year, it was over.”
“And since then?”
“Since then, nothing.”
I tried to calculate mentally how long it had been. She understood and spared me the effort.
“I haven’t been with a man for close to a year.”
It seemed like a good time not to say anything.
“I feel as if I’m living my life backwards, if you know what I mean.”
I nodded my head. I don’t know if she saw me, because she kept looking straight ahead.
“What about the Chelsea Hotel?”
“That’s the last part of the story. I really like going to college, but it’s not enough for me. I needed something more. I had too much time to think, which isn’t always a good thing.”
“It almost never is.”
“Exactly. So I figured it was time to find a job, and the idea of opening the Chelsea Hotel came to me while I was talking to a gay friend of mine. I like the hours: We get started around eight in the evening, and we go home around four in the morning, and then I sleep until lunch-time. Plus, having a place to go every night, lots of people to see, makes me feel a little less lonely.”
There was a boy walking a dog of indeterminate breed on the sidewalk across the street. The dog started barking ferociously, doing his best to yank his leash from the boy’s hand. Pino/Baskerville calmly turned his head in the barking dog’s direction, stopped, and gazed across the street at him. He neither barked, nor growled, nor showed any intention of lunging at the dog—though he certainly could have, because he wasn’t on a leash. He looked over and did nothing, but I imagined that in those seconds terrible images ran through his head—the sounds of violence, the metallic taste of blood, the pain when his ear was ripped off his head, fangs, claws, life and death. Nadia whispered a command and the huge beast methodically arranged himself horizontally, assuming a sphinx-like position. He didn’t even look in the other dog’s direction.
At last the boy managed to drag the barking dog—by now in the throes of hysteria—down the street. The nocturnal silence was restored, and we resumed our stroll and our conversation. The gaps between the clouds were bigger now, and the sight of the night sky made me happy.
“Do you think I told you the whole truth? Or do you think I changed things to make it less depressing?”
“No one ever tells the whole truth, especially when they’re talking about themselves. But if you ask a question like that, it means that in one way or another, you know that and you’ve done your best. So, if I had to guess, I’d say you probably told me something pretty close to the so-called truth.”
She looked at me with an expression that mixed curiosity and concern, as if she’d just heard something with unexpected consequences.
“Really? No one ever tells the truth?”
“The whole truth, no, no one ever does. The ones who tell you that they’re being completely honest—and they may even believe it—are the most dangerous. They don’t know that lying is inevitable. They have no self-awareness, and they’re prisoners of themselves.”
“Prisoners of themselves. I like the sound of that.”
“That’s right, prisoners of themselves, and incapable of figuring out who they really are. You just go ahead and ask one of those people who claim always to tell the truth how he does his work, what his personal strengths and weaknesses are, how he interacts with other people, or anything else that has to do with his, or her, self-image. You’ll discover something interesting.”
“They don’t know how to answer. They give rote answers and rely on stereotypes, or they describe the qualities they wish they possessed but don’t. Qualities that correspond to the false image that they have of themselves. Have you ever heard of Alan Watts?”
“No.”
“He was an English philosopher. He studied eastern cultures, and he wrote a beautiful book about Zen. Watts wrote that an honest person is someone who knows that he is a complete impostor and is nonchalant about it. According to that definition, I’m halfway there. I know that I’m an impostor, but I still can’t quite pull off the nonchalant part.”
“You are completely crazy.”
“I hope I can take that as a compliment.”
“You can.”
“I think it’s time to go to sleep,” I said, glancing at my watch.
“That’s right, you have a serious person’s job. You can’t stay in bed until noon like I do.”
“I’ll walk you back to your car.”
“There’s no need. That is, unless you need a ride home. I don’t know where you live, but if it’s far away, let’s go back to the car and I’ll take you home.”
“I live just a short walk from here.”
“Then there’s no need for you to come all the way back to the car.”
“Well, thanks for the talk, and for everything.”
“Thank you.”
“Baskerville is a good sort of demon after all.”
“Right.”
After a moment’s hesitation she leaned toward me and gave me a kiss on the cheek. Luckily, Pino chose not to view this as an act of hostility, so he didn’t rip me limb from limb.
“See you.
“Bye.”
“Well, that’s ridiculous.”
“What?”
“I’m blushing.”
“I hadn’t noticed.” When I really make an effort, I manage to say some truly idiotic things.
“Well, now I really should go.”
“Are you sure you’ll be all right walking back by yourself?”
I said the words, and then my eyes met Pino’s.
He had the kind of patient expression reserved for those who aren’t necessarily bad, but clearly are not very bright.