3
The taxi stopped at 78 Via Farini and Alberta and Maurilia got out. The front door of number 78 was large and a lorry was coming out, behind the taxi, then there was a tram ringing its bell, and only after an exchange of imprecations between the lorry driver, the tram driver and the taxi driver, did they reach the caretaker’s wife, who told them that Industry Photographic was on the second floor, the staircase beyond the courtyard, and they crossed that courtyard, watched hungrily by a number of men in overalls who were loading a lorry with metal disks and pursued by sibilant phrases from these men, indicating what they would like to do with the two girls if they could, propositions which in themselves weren’t unnatural or wicked, just ill-timed.
On the second floor, the young man who opened the door was simply a young man in a white dressing gown, in other words, he had a face without any distinguishing characteristics, almost like one of those faces drawn by someone who doesn’t know how to draw at all, and the only things you could say about him were that he wasn’t old and that he wasn’t wearing a black dressing gown.
He looked at them and didn’t say anything, they didn’t say anything, and he let them in. There were no windows in the first room, and the light was on.
‘This way,’ he said.
The second room was a long, large room, there were two windows, but the blinds were closed, you could see strips of sunlight through the dusty panes, which were also closed, and the light was on in here, too.
‘You can undress over there,’ he said, indicating a corner with a table and chairs. ‘Don’t knock the chess pieces over.’ On the table there was a chessboard, with a dozen pieces, the others were in a wooden box.
‘Isn’t there a screen?’ Alberta asked, and immediately realised she was an idiot, of course there wasn’t. There was nothing that looked anything like a screen in that long gallery that was supposed to be a photographic studio, or any furniture for that matter, apart from that table and chairs which were infinitely, obviously temporary. It was all quite frightening: those closed windows, the lights on at eleven in the morning, that heat as dead as a tomb in the sun.
‘I’m sorry,’ the young man said, referring, apparently, to the fact that he didn’t have a screen. ‘But don’t worry, the doors are locked.’ He had reached the far end of the gallery, and his voice, a voice as nondescript as his face, echoed a little.
‘Can’t we open the windows?’ Alberta yelled towards the dark end of the room. Within a minute, both the girls were soaked in sweat, their clothes clinging to them.
‘Then more heat will come in, along with the stench of acetylene,’ the man with the nondescript face said, and all at once the end of the gallery burst into flame: he had lit the three standing lamps and the six lights on the ceiling. ‘I don’t know what they make down there, but they use acetylene, and the smell is ghastly.’
‘Who wants to pose first?’ he asked. ‘It’s all the same to me.’
Maurilia was a blonde who laughed easily, got scared easily, was easy with everything. Now she was scared. ‘You start,’ she said to Alberta.
Alberta undressed quickly, her dress, bra, and knickers ending up on a chair, she kept on her high-heeled shoes, not to make the photographs sexier, but in order not to have to walk barefoot on that floor.
‘Over here,’ the man said. In front of the floodlights was a background of clouds, an enlarged photograph mounted on a sliding door. ‘We’ll be quick, with this little camera, you’ll see.’
Only then did Alberta see the heavy tripod, and on the tripod something resembling a cigarette lighter, which must be the camera.
‘Stand over there, on that rug.’ He stooped behind the cigarette lighter and started looking. ‘You choose the poses, it doesn’t matter very much, hide your face if you want, but you have to show it in at least five or six of the shots. Move about as you want, it’s like being in a film, come on.’ In his left hand he held the shaft of the tripod, making the Minox move imperceptibly in every direction he wanted, and in his right hand he held a wire with a button that worked the shutter. ‘Move, one,’ click, ‘there, stop, two,’ click, with each photograph that cigarette lighter closed and reopened, just as if lighting a cigarette, ‘move, stop, three,’ click, and so it went on, four, five, ten, twelve photographs, every now and again he suggested a more aggressive pose, but always in words that were restrained, clean, without vulgarity, ‘move, stop, twenty-six, that’s enough, now it’s your friend’s turn.’
At the other end of the gallery, in the nauseating heat, Maurilia was afraid. Not of undressing. She wasn’t even sure what she was afraid of. Alberta knew her: on the surface she was a carefree blonde, she had immediately agreed to pose in the nude, but now she was looking at Alberta imploringly.
‘If you don’t want to do it, then don’t,’ she said irritably, she couldn’t stand stupidity and Maurilia was a champion of stupidity: flabby, morally shifty, sure to end up badly, although she, Alberta, tried to keep her from the slippery slope that led to walking the avenues every night, with a parasite a few metres away keeping watch over you only to take the money you just earned. But for now she was bound to her, as if they were married.
‘Look, you’re here now, just pose,’ said the young man in the dressing gown, who had heard these last words.
His tone wasn’t threatening, at least on the surface, only sad, as if he was saying, ‘What a pity, she came here to pose for photographs, and now she doesn’t want to,’ yet Alberta heard something else in it. What the man who wasn’t old and wasn’t wearing a black dressing gown was actually saying, Alberta was sure, was, ‘Now that you’re here you’re going to pose, even if you don’t want to, because I want you to.’
With a forlorn smile, Maurilia said, ‘No, no, no,’ she undressed and Alberta walked with her to the end of the room, where the man was waiting, in the shadow, against the flaming background of the floodlights.
‘On the rug, there, like that,’ he said, becoming quite pleasant again, ‘do whatever you like, just don’t come off the rug, but on it you can move, like that, stop, one,’ and the clicks started again, ‘move, there, stop, two, move, not the same pose, something different, there, stop, three.’
Alberta started to smell the hot, metallic smell of the floodlights, Maurilia’s nudity was irritating, at least for a woman: aesthetically, her body was overblown, poorly arranged, it seemed to have been constructed for one purpose only, a sexual one, her arms and legs and head and shoulders and hair seemed as much like sexual organs as the actual sexual organs. She stopped looking and thinking that she, too, had posed like that: seeing it from the outside, it was more indecent than she had thought. She turned back towards the other end of the room, partly so as not to be blinded by the floodlights, and only then did she notice that along one of the two longer walls there ran a narrow shelf on which stood, in a row, objects she couldn’t make out immediately, and when she did make them out her first thought was that they were toys: lorries, tipper trucks, tractors, other vehicles, maybe agricultural ones, each one about ten centimetres long at most. She picked up a silver tanker lorry, she was puzzled at first, but then it struck her that the imitation was perfect, these weren’t toys, they were industrial models.
‘They’re nice, aren’t they, but don’t touch,’ the young man said, he obviously had eyes in the back of his head, all the while continuing to take photographs, ‘yes, yes, move, there, good, stop, twelve.’
Go on, she thought, what did she care about the models, she was drowning in the heat and the bad smell, and in her anger towards herself, but it was much more than anger, much more than contempt, much more than disgust, almost hate, and perhaps more.
Finally the photographer said, ‘Move, stop, twenty-five,’ and for the last time there was a click, and Maurilia came and got dressed again next to Alberta, who was looking at the chessboard: it was an endgame study, white to move and win. Next to the chessboard there was a little English chess magazine: the young man was clearly a fan of the great game.