The Scent Of Rosa's Oil (13 page)

“Cows come from the earth too,” Rosa rebutted, skeptical of the ability of soups to fill anyone’s stomach.

Isabel shook her head. “There’s nothing in cows that you can’t find in this soup as well. Give it a try.” With a ladle, she poured the soup of that evening—lentils, celery, onions, bay leaves, and other herbs Rosa didn’t recognize—into a bowl for Rosa. Then she took a small glass shaker from a drawer beside the stove and sprinkled a tiny amount of a white powder in the bowl. “Go ahead.”

“What did you just put in my soup?” Rosa asked with some mistrust.

Isabel repeated, “Go ahead.”

Rosa stuck her nose inside the bowl and smelled a few times the brown, steaming liquid before taking the first spoonful.
Bye-bye, Antonia’s food
, she said to herself as she swallowed. She was surprised by the soup’s pleasant taste and aroma, and even more surprised, at the end of the meal, by the satiety of her stomach and the calmness she felt throughout her body for the first time that day.

Her thoughts later on, in the flower room, as she drifted into sleep, went back to the morning she had spent with Madam C on the hills picking flowers and to the breathtaking view of Genoa from the belvedere. That was the way she wanted to remember Madam C and what she considered in her head the end of her life at the Luna. Everything that had happened afterward—the party, the white dress, the cake, the mayor, the game, and the big fight—was a blur Rosa didn’t even attempt to sort out.

She woke up much later than she would have at the Luna, and found Isabel at work steaming a batch of eucalyptus leaves. “Good morning, Tramonto,” Isabel said without turning around.

“Do you ever sleep?” Rosa asked.

“No longer than three hours per night,” Isabel replied. “When you are this old,” she explained, “you don’t want to close your eyes for too long.”

“I feel like sleeping all the time,” Rosa replied, “so I don’t have to think about what happened.”

“Whatever happened between you and Madam C,” Isabel said, “is something you’ll have to deal with sooner or later.”

“Maybe,” Rosa conceded. “Right now all I want to do is steam flowers.”

Isabel hadn’t asked Rosa a single question about her departure from the Luna. For that and for the warm hospitality Rosa was grateful. She decided to help Isabel with her oil business by going often to the hills to pick leaves and fresh flowers and by selling the oils and their by-products at the market. “I don’t have dark skin,” she told Isabel one day, “or a strange accent. And some of the shopkeepers have known me since I was a child. No one will send me away.”

With discarded bricks and wood planks she found in the garbage on Piazza della Pece Greca, Rosa built a U-shaped stall in Piazza Banchi, a location she had chosen for its strategic position: it was close to the market, the port, and the stores of Via Luccoli, where the wealthy ladies shopped in the afternoon. There was a good crowd in that piazza from dawn till dinnertime. Rosa didn’t have a proper license to sell goods or even to have a stall in a public piazza, but no one, shopkeepers or police, seemed to mind. Every morning, except Sundays when she went looking for flowers, Rosa set out bottles and candles on the planks and charmed the passersby in any way she could. She demonstrated for them the oils’ powers by rubbing samples on their skins and encouraging everyone to smell the candles. “I bet you never smelled this before,” she’d say, opening a flask of what she called Miracle Oil. It was a mix of eucalyptus, lemongrass, and pine, which she sold as a remedy for arthritis, bruises, and back pains. “Pamper yourself with a rub of Paradise Oil,” she’d shout, rubbing on her own skin a concoction of lavender and geranium, “and you’ll feel rejuvenated.” In a corner of the stall, she always had a vaporizer going, with ten parts of water and one part of some oil a candle kept boiling hour after hour. Both men and women found the smells hard to resist even as they rushed by. The only mix Rosa wouldn’t sell was her perfect oil. She had saved it from destruction when Madam C had picked up her things in her room and thrown them outside. Now she kept a flask of it next to her bed in the flower room, and every night, before falling asleep, she opened the flask and inhaled, so she could see Isabel’s hill when she closed her eyes.

Soon, Rosa’s business on Piazza Banchi produced an income Isabel had never dreamed of before. “What are we going to do with all this money?” she asked Rosa one day.

“Make our dreams come true,” Rosa replied.

“What’s your dream?” asked Isabel.

“To cross the ocean. What’s yours?”

“To be buried on the hill behind my town, next to Azul and the orchids and the wildflowers.”

“I’ll take you there,” Rosa said, “as soon as we have enough money to buy two tickets to Central America. I promise.”

When the Luna girls found out that Rosa had set up a business on Piazza Banchi, they became at once her best customers and promoters. They all loved the oils and candles, for themselves and as tools to enhance their sexual practices and the mood of some of their most demanding clients. On her end, Madam C was aware that Rosa lived with Isabel and sold oils on Piazza Banchi, but she never approached Isabel’s booth or Rosa’s stall in any of her outings. For the first time since owning the Luna, she changed drastically her shopping itineraries so she wouldn’t have to be within a hundred meters of either of those places.

If she had passed by Rosa’s stall at any time of the day, she would have noticed a man with an unshaven beard and raggedy clothes seated on the ground on the opposite side of the piazza, staring at Rosa. He was Cesare Cortimiglia. Margherita caught sight of him one day. “Is he who I think he is?” she said, tugging at Maddalena’s arm.

“He looks like a ghost,” Maddalena exclaimed.

They approached him, and Cesare wept openly at the sight of them.

“What’s the matter?” Maddalena asked.

“I love Rosa,” he said, “and she doesn’t even know that I exist.”

Maddalena and Margherita looked at each other in disbelief. “We thought you had just taken advantage of her. We never suspected—”

“Help me,” Cesare begged. “Please.”

“Does she know that you are in love with her?” Maddalena asked.

“I told her,” he said.

“Let me talk to her,” Margherita said. “Wait here.”

Rosa told Margherita exactly what she thought: “I have been trying to forget that night ever since it happened. I don’t want to see him or talk to him for any reason. All I care about are these oils and making enough money to take Isabel with me across the ocean.”

“Bad news,” Margherita said when she returned to Cesare’s observation point. “I think you really need to forget about her. Go home and wash. You stink of dead trout.”

“I can’t,” the former mayor wept. “In all my life, I never felt this way about a woman.”

Maddalena made her point clear. “She’s not a woman. She’s a child. She’s sixteen, and you are forty-four. Don’t you have anything better to do? Go see Madam C. She could use your company, believe me. She has been impossible since that night. We’re all thinking of quitting, she’s so mean.”

Cesare shook his head. “All I want is Rosa.”

Things continued unchanged for some time. Isabel worked in the distillery, Rosa sold oils and picked flowers. Cesare spent his days weeping in the piazza, the girls visited Rosa almost every morning, and at the Luna Madam C drove everyone crazy with her tantrums. Rosa was amazed at the perseverance with which Cesare stared at her from across the street. Enough weeks had passed from the night of her sixteenth birthday that she could think back on those events and wonder about them. “What’s love?” she asked Isabel one night.

“I’m not sure, Tramonto,” Isabel replied after a moment. “I thought I found it when I met Francesco. When I was still in Manzanillo with my family and he was courting me, I felt like melting every time he came by. My mouth and throat would dry up, and I felt butterflies in my stomach. I wanted to run up to him and I could hardly move. Obviously, he never felt the same way.”

“I felt butterflies in my stomach when the mayor came into my room,” Rosa said. “But when he took off his clothes I became scared. And the butterflies were no longer there.”

“Love has nothing to do with taking off one’s clothes,” Isabel said.

“No?” Rosa asked, surprised.

“No, Tramonto. It has to do with what you feel inside. When you love someone, you can think of nothing but him, and it doesn’t matter whether he’s with you or far away.”

“I’ve been wondering about what my friends do at the Luna,” Rosa said. “Is that love?”

“It’s a special kind of love,” Isabel explained, “the kind men pay for. It has its reason to exist, and we shouldn’t judge it. But it’s not the love you and I are talking about.”

“So the butterflies I felt in my stomach when the mayor came to my room were not love?”

“I don’t think so, Tramonto. Or you would be with him by now.”

“I see him every day on Piazza Banchi,” Rosa said. “He stares at me, and he cries.”

“What do you feel when you look at him?” Isabel asked.

Rosa thought a moment. “Pity, I guess. And sympathy at times.”

Isabel smiled. “I can guarantee you, Tramonto, that it’s not love you’re feeling.”

“Maddalena read me the cards when she arrived at the Luna,” Rosa said, “and told me I would fall in love.”

“Then you will. But the mayor is not the one.”

“How do I know who is the one?” Rosa asked.

“When you find him, Tramonto,” Isabel replied, “you’ll have no doubt.”

Cesare Cortimiglia, meanwhile, lived crippled by Rosa’s indifference and by his own inexperience with emotional love. Accustomed to stop thinking about his lovers once his physical pleasure had been achieved, he was at a loss as to why the memories of that night with Rosa would not fade: the shiny red hair; the white dress; the liquid, aquamarine eyes; the soft texture of Rosa’s skin; her nipples and belly; and that smell he could still feel in his nostrils if he closed his eyes. He had gone looking for her at the Luna the day after the incident at City Hall. Madam C, who had opened the front door, had stared at him with eyes of fire. “You son of a bitch. How dare you come here?”

In his confusion, all he could say was, “I came to see Rosa.”

Madam C grew even more infuriated. “Your little slut no longer lives here,” she said, slamming the door in his face.

He returned home limping like a wounded man. Alone in the apartment on Via Assarotti following the departure of his wife and his resignation as mayor, he spent the first few days crying and the nights haunted by nightmares. In one of them, Rosa drowned in a black lake under his eyes. He wanted to save her, but as soon as he took a step toward the lake, cuffs appeared around his wrists and ankles, attached to strong chains that prevented him from moving. In another dream, he and Rosa were on a transatlantic ship on the way to America. It was night, and they were strolling on the deck, admiring the beauty of the stars. Suddenly, he took her in his arms, lifted her, and dropped her overboard. He watched her fall into the dark waters, her white dress waving in the wind, and at the moment she hit the surface of the sea, he resumed his stroll on the deck in the direction of his cabin. During the nightmares he screamed and cried, waking up after every one of them drenched in cold sweat.

Roberto Passalacqua, who still called him mayor, was as faithful to him as when he had held power, visited him daily and brought him food and water. It was he who told Cesare one day that Rosa worked at the corner of Piazza Banchi and took him there the following morning, hoping that the sight of her would comfort him and soothe his pain. Too late did he realize how poor a decision he had made. When Cesare walked up to Rosa’s stall and told her how much he loved her, she said, “Leave me alone,” then turned away from him and went back to mixing and selling her oils.

He felt worse than when Madam C had slammed the door on him earlier that week. In his delirium, he told himself that if he spent enough time near Rosa, there would be a chance that she would accept his love and change her mind. That was when he decided he would spend his days on the piazza, staring at Rosa. He smiled most of the time, often sniffing the air, trying to take in the perfumes that came from the stall, searching for the scent he had smelled in the parlor on Rosa’s hand and later in her bedroom and on her sheets. Rosa peeked at him occasionally, but overall her disinterest was clear. His desire was stronger than her indifference. When at seven in the evening Rosa closed down her stall and went home, Cesare Cortimiglia kept staring in the stall’s direction as if she were still there. By then, he was hallucinating.

As is often the case in Mediterranean towns, before two weeks went by, an oddity had become a fixture of the neighborhood. Shopkeepers and passersby quit wondering and gossiping about the bearded man seated on the ground and even occasionally stopped by him with a cup of espresso or a shot of white wine. Next to the corner of the piazza where Cesare sat day after day was a bar called Grifone, which used to be the Stella Maris, the bar where Angela and Clotilde had long ago picked up sailors. The owners had changed since that time, as had the bar’s name and the crowd that frequented it every day. The Grifone always closed before midnight, and the customers were mostly from the port crowd, longshoremen and coal-heavers who stopped there at the end of their shifts for a drink and to wind down. They became accustomed to the presence of the man outside and occasionally said “Hi” to him even though he never replied. He looked so bad by then, with his long beard and dirty clothes, that no one, other than the Luna girls and Rosa, ever realized that he was the former mayor. Roberto Passalacqua came by every evening to take him home. “You’re not coming back here tomorrow,” he’d say, pulling him up from the ground. “She doesn’t care about you, isn’t it obvious?” All Cesare would do was shake his head and cry. Not even Maddalena’s frank suggestion that he go home and wash had been able to convince him to stop staring at Rosa.

Two months later, worried about Cesare’s health and the stability of his mind, Roberto walked up to Rosa’s stall. “I need your help, Miss Rosa. The mayor keeps babbling about a scent he smelled in your room at the Luna and won’t quit coming here unless he smells it again. I understand that you don’t wish to talk to him, and I have no idea what scent he’s talking about, but if you do know what he wants, please do something. He’s getting sicker every day.”