Pleasure (30 page)

He thought once again about the resolution he had made that morning. One evening in solitude, in the house where she would perhaps come one day; a melancholic but pleasant evening, in the company of his memories and dreams, in the company of her spirit; an evening of meditation and concentration! In truth, his resolution could hardly have been better kept. He was about to go to a dinner with friends and women; and, without a doubt, he would spend the night with Clara Green.

His repentance was so unbearable, and gave him such torment, that he dressed with unusual speed, jumped into the
coupé,
and was driven to the hotel, arriving early. He found Clara ready. He suggested to her that they go for a ride in the
coupé
along the streets of Rome, to fill the time that remained till eight o'clock.

They passed along Via del Babuino, around the obelisk in Piazza del Popolo, and from there up the Corso and then right, along Via della Fontanella di Borghese; they returned via Montecitorio on the Corso to Piazza di Venezia, and then up to the Teatro Nazionale. Clara prattled constantly, and now and then leaned toward the young man to place a half kiss on the corner of his mouth, hiding the furtive act with a fan made of white feathers, from which drifted a very subtle scent of white rose.
²³
But Andrea appeared not to be listening and at her gesture barely smiled.

—What are you thinking about? she asked, pronouncing the Italian words with a slight graceful uncertainty.

—Nothing, Andrea answered, taking one of her hands, which was not yet gloved, and looking at her rings.

—Who knows! she sighed, giving singular expression to those two monosyllables that foreign women learn immediately; in which they believe all the melancholy of Italian love to be enclosed. —Who knows!

Then she added, with an almost pleading tone:

—
Love me this evening, Andrew!
²⁴

Andrea kissed her ear, passed an arm around her waist, told her a quantity of silly trifles, and changed his mood. The Corso was full of people, shopwindows gleamed, newspaper vendors shouted, public and elegant carriages intersected with the
coupé,
and from Piazza Colonna to Piazza di Venezia extended all the evening bustle of Roman life.

When they entered the Doney, it was ten past eight. The other six dining companions were already present. Andrea Sperelli greeted the company and, holding Clara Green by the hand, said:

—
Ecce
²⁵
Miss Clara Green,
ancilla Domini, Sibylla palmifera, candida puella
.
²⁶

—
Ora pro nobis,
²⁷
Musèllaro, Barbarisi, and Grimiti answered in chorus. The women laughed, but without understanding. Clara smiled; and having slipped off her cloak, appeared in a white, simple, short dress, with a décolletage coming down to a point on her chest and on her back, with a sea-green ribbon on her left shoulder, two emeralds at her ears, self-assured under the triple scrutiny of Giulia Arici, Bébé Silva, and Maria Fortuna.

Musèllaro and Grimiti knew her. Barbarisi was introduced to her. Andrea was saying:

—Mercedes Silva, known as Bébé,
chica pero guapa.
²⁸

—Maria Fortuna, the lovely Talisman, who is a real public Fortune . . . for this Rome of ours, which has the fortune of possessing her.

Then, turning to Barbarisi:

—Do us the honor of introducing us to that lady who, if I am not mistaken, is the divine Giulia Farnese.

—No: Arici, interrupted Giulia.

—I beg your pardon, but to believe it I need to gather all my good faith and consult the Pinturicchio
²⁹
in the Sala Quinta.
³⁰

He uttered these nonsensical things without laughing, taking pleasure in astonishing or irritating the sweet ignorance of these lovely foolish women. When he happened to be in the
demimonde,
he had his own particular manner and style. In order not to be bored, he started to compose grotesque phrases, to spout huge paradoxes, atrocious impertinences that he dissimulated with the ambiguity of his words, incomprehensible subtleties, enigmatic madrigals, in an unorthodox language, mingled like slang, with a thousand flavors as in a Rabelaisian
olla podrida,
³¹
laden with strong spices and succulent flesh. No one knew better than he how to recount a coarse tale, a scandalous anecdote, a Casanovian deed. No one, in the description of something pertaining to sensual pleasure, knew better than he how to choose a lewd word, but one that was precise and powerful, a real word made of flesh and bones, a sentence full of substantial marrow, a phrase that lives and breathes and palpitates like the object of which it depicts the form, communicating to the worthy listener a double pleasure, an enjoyment not only of the intellect but of the senses, a joy partly similar to that produced by certain paintings of the great master colorists, blended with purple and milk, bathed as if in the transparency of liquid amber, impregnated with a warm and unquenchably luminous gold like immortal blood.

—Who is Pinturicchio? asked Giulia Arici of Barbarisi.

—Pinturicchio? exclaimed Andrea. —A superficial interior decorator, who some time ago had the whim to paint a portrait of you above a door in the apartment of the Pope. Don't worry about it. He's dead.

—But how? . . .

—Oh, in a frightful manner! His wife was the lover of a soldier from Perugia, who was garrisoned at Siena. Ask Ludovico about it. He knows everything; but he has never spoken to you about it, for fear of troubling you. Bébé, I would like to caution you that the Prince of Wales, at table, begins to smoke between the second and the third course; not before. You are somewhat premature.

The Silva woman had lit a cigarette; and was swallowing oysters while smoke issued from her nostrils. She resembled a sexless schoolboy, a small, depraved hermaphrodite: pale, thin, with eyes made bright by fever and charcoal, an excessively red mouth, and short, woolly, slightly curly hair, which covered her head like an astrakhan pageboy. In her left eye socket was wedged a round lens; she wore a high starched collar, a white cravat, an open waistcoat, a black jacket with a masculine cut, a gardenia in her buttonhole, affecting the manners of a dandy, talking in a hoarse voice. She was attractive, tempting, because of that stamp of vice, of depravity, of monstrosity that was in her appearance, in her poses, in her words.
Sal y pimiento.
³²

Maria Fortuna, instead, was of a more bovine type, a Madame de Parabère,
³³
tending toward corpulence. Like the lovely mistress of the Regent, she possessed a white skin, of an opaque and profound whiteness, one of those untiring and insatiable bodies on which Hercules could have carried out his labor of love, his thirteenth task, without being asked for a respite. And her eyes swam, soft violets, in a shadow such as Tranquillo Cremona would have painted, and her mouth, always half open, displayed an indistinct mother-of-pearl gleam in a rosy shadow, like a half-opened seashell.

Sperelli found Giulia Arici very pleasing, with her golden coloring, from which gazed elongated velvet eyes, of a soft chestnut velvet that at times took on almost tawny glints. Her slightly fleshy nose and her swollen, fresh, bloodred, firm lips lent the lower part of her face an expression of overt wantonness, rendered even racier by the restlessness of her tongue. Her canine teeth, being too prominent, lifted the corners of her mouth; and as the corners lifted in this way became dry or perhaps caused her some slight irritation, every now and then she moistened them with the tip of her tongue. And each time one saw that tip run along the enclosure formed by her teeth, like the moistened petal of a plump rose along a row of small bare almonds.

—Julia
³⁴
—said Andrea Sperelli, watching her mouth—San Bernardino
³⁵
has a wonderful epithet for you in one of his sermons. And you don't know this, either!

The Arici woman began to laugh, a stupid but beautiful laugh, which revealed her gums slightly; and with the commotion of her hilarity, a stronger scent emanated from her, as when a bush is shaken.

—What would you give me—added Andrea—what would you give me as a reward if, extracting that sensual word from the saint's sermon, like an aphrodisiac stone from a theological treasury, I offered it to you?

—I don't know, answered the Arici woman, still laughing, holding between her rather long, fine fingers a glass of Chablis wine. —Whatever you want.

—The noun of the adjective.

—What are you saying?

—We'll talk about it. The word is:
linguatica
.
³⁶
Mister Ludovico, add this epithet to your litany:
“Rosa linguatica, glube nos.”
³⁷

—Pity—said Musèllaro—that you aren't at the dining table of a sixteenth-century duke, between a Violante and an Imperia,
³⁸
with Giulio Romano, Pietro Aretino, and Marc Antony!

The conversation grew more and more inflamed with the wine, the aged French wines, fluid and ardent, which lend wings and flames to words. The majolica tableware was not made by Durantino, nor decorated by the cavalier Cipriano dei Piccolpasso; nor was the silverware from Milan, of Ludovico the Moor; but neither were they too common. In the center of the table a vase of pale blue crystal stood, containing a great bouquet of chrysanthemums—yellow, white, violet—gazed at by the melancholic eyes of Clara Green.

—Clara—inquired Ruggero Grimiti—are you sad? What are you thinking about?

—
À ma chimère!
³⁹
answered the ex-lover of Adolphus Jeckyll, smiling; and she hid her sigh within a brimming glass of champagne.

That clear and sparkling wine, which has such an immediate and strange effect on women, was already beginning to excite the minds and wombs of those four dissimilar
hetaerae
⁴⁰
in different ways, to reawaken and stimulate in them the small hysterical demon, and to cause it to run amok through their veins, spreading madness as it went. Bébé Silva was uttering horrendous witticisms, laughing a choked, convulsive, almost sobbing laugh, like a woman who is being tickled to death. Maria Fortuna was crushing
fondants
with her naked elbow and offering them for free, pressing her sweetened elbow onto Ruggero's mouth. Giulia Arici, tyrannized by Sperelli's madrigals, was blocking her ears with her lovely hands, leaning back against the chair; and her mouth, in that act, attracted bites like a juicy fruit.

—Have you ever eaten—Barbarisi was saying to Sperelli—certain sweetmeats from Constantinople, as soft as dough, made from bergamot, orange blossom, and roses, which perfume your breath for the rest of your life? Giulia's mouth is an Oriental sweetmeat.

—Please, Ludovico—said Sperelli—let me try her. Seduce Clara Green for me and give me Giulia for a week. Clara also has a novel flavor: a julep of Parma violets between two Peek Frean
⁴¹
vanilla biscuits . . .

—Watch, gentlemen! shouted Bébé Silva, taking a
fondant
.

She had seen the attention Maria Fortuna was attracting, and had made a gymnastic bet that she could eat a
fondant
from her own elbow by pulling it toward her lips. To accomplish the feat, she uncovered her arm: a thin and pale arm, covered with a dark down; she stuck the
fondant
on her sharp bone; and taking her right forearm with her left hand and pressing on it hard, managed to win the bet, with the ability of a clown, amid applause.

—And that's nothing, she said, covering her spectral nudity. —
Chica pero guapa;
not so, Musèllaro?

And she lit her tenth cigarette.

The odor of the tobacco was so delicious that everyone wanted to smoke some. The Silva woman's cigarette case was passed from hand to hand. Maria Fortuna read aloud from the engraved enameled silver of the case:

—
“Quia nominor Bébé.”
⁴²

Then everyone wanted a saying, a motto to place on their handkerchiefs, their notepaper, their shirts. It seemed to them to be a very aristocratic, supremely elegant thing.

—Who will find me a motto? exclaimed Carlo de Souza's ex-lover. —I want it in Latin.

—I will, said Andrea Sperelli. —Here it is:
“Semper parata.”
⁴³

—No.

—
“Diu saepe fortiter.”
⁴⁴

—What does it mean?

—What do you care what it means? It just has to be Latin. Here's another one, a magnificent one:
“Non timeo dona ferentes.”
⁴⁵

—I don't like it much. It's not new to me . . .

—All right then, this one:
“Rarae nates cum gurgite vasto.”
⁴⁶

—It's too common. I read it so often in the newspaper columns.

Ludovico, Giulio, Ruggero laughed in chorus, loudly. The smoke of their cigarettes wafted over their heads forming light pale-bluish clouds. Every now and then, a wave of sound drifted over in the hot air from the theater orchestra; and it made Bébé hum. Clara Green was shredding petals from chrysanthemums into her plate, in silence, because the light white wine had been converted in her veins to a dismal listlessness. For those who already knew her, such Bacchic sentimentalism was not new; and the Duke of Grimiti was amusing himself by provoking it even more. She did not reply, continuing to tear off chrysanthemum petals and pressing her lips together, almost to stop herself from crying. Since Andrea Sperelli was paying little attention to her and had thrown himself into a crazy jollity of actions and words, amazing even his own companions in pleasure, she said with a pleading voice, amid the chorus of the other voices:

—
Love me tonight, Andrew!
⁴⁷