Interesting Women by Andrea Lee (7 ebook reader txt) 📗

had removed most of the tables inside to discourage the delinquenti from sitting down and doing business there, but they dared not do more. There was some low-level odor of Mafia there that I never felt like investigating. They had reason to feel annoyed, because just a hundred yards away other bars were packed with well-heeled businessmen, fashion models, elegant housewives and their little yapping dogs; while the Bar Opera attracted only this louche company that seemed to be an interior manifestation of the fog in the streets. It was partly the proprietors’ own fault, since they hadn’t bothered to gentrify the place with smoked glass mirrors and little islands of green plants; and because they served horrible stony pastries, too obviously bought day-old on the cheap. Father and son floated wanly behind a dented aluminum counter in a brown cavern of nineteen-fifties paneling lit by a grimy chandelier that seemed to have been looted from a provincial dance hall. Giovanni, who came from a mountain village near Bolzano, still retained a hearty physiognomy that went with his crisp Austrian accent, but Giacomo, who had clearly grown up on an urban caffeine diet, was a forty-year-old with the face of a schoolboy preserved in formaldehyde. And there was an heir, a pale sprout of a ten-year-old who appeared after school and pumped coffee with the deadpan ease of a pro.

The two of them treated me well, probably because they felt I gave a minimal touch of class to the place. Each morning, they paid me respectful compliments on my attire, and adorned my cappuccino with the stylized flower in chocolate powder that is the mark of a skilled barista. With the delinquents themselves I established one of those relationships between cordiality and aloofness that a solitary lady in Italy must set up with the shopkeepers in her area if she is to be considered a lady. I said good morning and nodded with a certain formality, and they did the same. If the truth be told, I was happy to see them, had begun to consider them a sort of family, and would have loved to know more about who they were and what they did. This, however, was impossible, for my own good, and for their clear view of the world. In a certain sense, I measured my dignity by not having recourse to their company and services, but the possibility, I told myself, was not so far removed that I could afford to be casual. Only once did it happen, one morning when I burst into the bar wearing blue jeans and a conversable American grin, that the great stout slick-haired leader stole up to me on light feet like Count Fosco and inquired whether he could buy me a grappa. I declined lightly and civilly, but that day, staring into the dregs of my coffee and milk, I saw an abyss.

Cappuccino is a morning drink, but in those days I drank it all day with my friend Nelda. She’d appear at my door after lunch, when I’d finished writing and she was on a break from her job of showing apartments to rich foreigners. She carried an umbrella against the eternal drizzle and wore a hooded mushroom-colored raincoat that like the rest of her clothes was slightly too large for her, and that made me think of the poem “An Old Woman of the Roads.”

“Oh, to own a little house…”

Nelda was no old woman, but she was Irish, and in spite of being one of the most beautiful girls I have ever known, had about her a faint raggle-taggle air that inspired visions of a weary rainswept vagrant life. The hems of the long peasant skirts she favored were sometimes trampled and wet. She had once been the pampered young wife of a doting Milanese banker and had her nightgowns handmade out of plum-colored silk satin. Now she lived in a studio apartment with a decor that seemed to require underwear dripping in the bathroom. She had some Georgian silver teapots from her mother, and a NordicTrack squeezed alongside the sofa. She was always on the phone to the Philosopher, the man for whom she’d left husband, children, and fortune, a fifty-year-old anarchist from Bologna who spent most of his days getting stoned on a futon, like some wonderful period piece from the seventies. Nelda would call him up and ask what he was doing, and he would reply, shamelessly: “Thinking.” I could imagine him with his neat D. H. Lawrence beard, reclining on a bare futon decorated with graceful brownish blossoms of ancient sperm stains. Nelda worshiped the Philosopher. She told me that, unlike overstressed businessmen his age, who couldn’t get it up, he could make love three times a day.

“Oh,” she would sigh. “If only I didn’t have to be unfaithful to him.” For she saw him only on weekends, and in the splendor of her loneliness was generous with her spare evenings. The only men she disdained were Irishmen, “because I don’t like pink penises.” She liked all other colors. She told me about a young prince from Ghana, a shy polite boy of twenty who had the biggest one she’d ever seen. “It looked like a weapon. I said: ‘That thing is not coming anywhere near me,’ and he said: ‘Look, Nelda. You’ve had babies. If they could get out, this can get in.’ ”

Nelda’s eyes, as she told me these things over cappuccino, had the unnerving clarity of a kitten’s. She seemed born without the capacity to regret anything, and she gave me courage. I felt that if one day I informed her that I’d gone to the zoo, jumped into a cage, and made love to a chimpanzee, she would have found not just an excuse for me but a way of explaining that it had been urgently necessary for my mental health that day to have sex with another species of primate. At the same time, she had a curious loopy