‘Yes, this one,’ Livia said. She got out and gave him a five-thousand-lire note, she took the change, leaving him a lot of coins, all the while looking around without turning her head, but the Mercedes had stopped a long way back, almost at the bend. It was a perverse kind of discretion.
The Ulisse Apartments did not have a caretaker. There was a large directory with buttons to press, and behind each transparent square was the name of the occupant. Livia pressed the one that had the words Publicity Photographic on it and almost immediately she heard the Entryphone crackle.
‘Come right up, second floor,’ a colourless voice said, and the crackling stopped. The glass gate opened with a click and at that moment Livia Ussaro felt like a fox putting its paw in a trap.
On the second floor, a young man in a white smock admitted her without saying a word and pointed to an internal door, and she found herself in the usual square room you found in so many apartments. The shutters on the two windows were hermetically sealed, and so were the windows, but there was air conditioning, and it felt all right. You couldn’t say that the room was furnished. In a corner there were three standing lamps, off at the moment, in front of a much enlarged photograph of a high, decorative wave of the sea, presumably used as a background. In the opposite corner there was a big tripod with a kind of cigarette lighter on the top of it: Signor Lamberti had explained to her that this was the Minox. On a chair, the last and final piece of furniture in the room, there were some small-format magazines, and on top of them there was a chessboard, and on the chessboard a box with pieces, a black knight protruded from the box like a horse’s head from a stall in a stable.
The first thing the young man in the white smock said was, ‘You can get undressed in the bathroom, if you want.’
Although Livia was looking at him closely, she realised she wouldn’t be able to describe the man, or his voice: it struck her that it would be like trying to describe the contents of an empty box.
‘Yes, thank you,’ she said, but she didn’t move, she was clutching her handbag and fashion magazine to her dark red cotton dress.
‘What’s the matter?’ he asked.
‘They told me I’d be paid,’ she said, politely but firmly.
‘Yes, of course, but let’s do the photographs first.’
‘I’m sorry, we can do the photographs afterwards.’ This was one of the instructions in Signor Lamberti’s oral manual. The aim of it was to remove any lingering suspicion, if there was any: a girl who wants the money first is someone who cares only about herself and isn’t playing a double game.
The young man in the white smock didn’t smile, didn’t say anything, simply left the room, and came back almost immediately with five ten-thousand-lire notes which he handed over to her in silence.
Livia took them and went into the bathroom. She undressed in a flash, without even closing the door. It was obvious the place had almost never been used, there were no toiletries, not even soap, just two brightly-coloured towels. As she left the bathroom she heard the young man swear, and from the way in which he uttered the swear word, a very vulgar one, she realised immediately, beyond any doubt, what he was: a homosexual, some ghastly new species. She thought that explained the colourlessness of his physical person, she thought it was like the monstrous colourlessness of the mutants described in science-fiction novels, exactly halfway through their mutation, when they still have the outer wrapping of humanity but their minds and nervous systems already belong to some ghastly new species.
‘What happened?’ she asked, conspiratorially, but politely.
‘It keeps flashing,’ the photographer said. In his hands he had one of the black leads from the lamps, it was broken and the plug was on the floor. ‘I have to fix it.’
He hadn’t looked at her even for a moment: she would have liked to know what a homosexual thinks about the female nude. She saw him go out, he was away for a few minutes, then he came back with some Scotch tape and a pair of scissors, and standing there he started adjusting the lead, which had come away from the plug just as he had been inserting it in the socket. Standing by the chair, she watched him in silence, then she remembered that the manual had ordered her to make conversation, a woman who doesn’t talk is a woman who arouses suspicion.
‘Do you play chess?’ she said.
‘By myself,’ he replied. The mere word chess must have opened the secret doors of what, reluctantly, referring to such an individual, had to be called his soul. ‘Almost nobody plays it these days.’
‘I study the championship games, or I play with my father.’ It was true, or almost, not that she spent her days playing chess, but that her father had taught her the game when she was a teenager, and chess was very congenial to her character. She saw the young man raise his head for a moment and look at her, not as a naked woman, but as an entity that understood chess. But he didn’t say anything. So she continued, because it’s useful to show your adversary that you share the same passions, ‘Just a few days ago I saw a beautiful three-knight game in Le Monde.’
‘It wasn’t three days ago, it was more than a month ago, it was the game where Neukirch from Leipzig played white and Zinn from Berlin black.’
‘Yes, that’s the one, my father takes Le Monde because there’s a chess section, and he keeps every issue, it may well have been a month ago, I played it last Monday or Tuesday.’
‘I also take Le Monde for the chess section.’ As he fixed the lead, he seemed to be pondering whether he should suggest to her that they play a game of chess.
‘Do you remember the endgame? Black has had to move his king, then white moves his knight, threatening the bishop, black is forced to protect himself with the rook, but then white pushes the pawn forward and there’s nothing more to be done, the next move is checkmate.’
‘Yes, I remember very well,’ and again he raised his head, a hint of joy in his eyes, almost that of the classical music lover who suddenly hears his favourite piece being played, and at the same time surprise that a woman should know so much about the magical world of chess. ‘But I don’t like knight games, they’re too restricting.’
‘Too cautious,’ she replied, ‘but they say it’s only on the surface, at a certain point there’s always a battle in the middle of the chessboard …’ she said a few more phrases to complete the idea, but she had to control herself because she felt like laughing: here they were, a naked woman in a room with a homosexual fixing a lead, and they were talking about chess.
‘Just a moment, please,’ the photographer said. He had finished fixing the lead, but then something else had happened: they had heard the dull sound of a bell. The man dropped the wire on the floor, left the room, closed the door and in the hall picked up the Entryphone and lifted it to his ear.
‘Open up,’ a voice said.
So he pressed the button that opened the front door downstairs and waited, after a minute the door opened and in the corridor he saw the man get out of the lift, in a very light hazel-coloured suit, a shade of hazel just a little lighter than his hair. He closed the door behind him.
‘How’s it going?’ the man asked. He, too, was young, but there was an air of suppressed violence about him that made him seem less youthful than the photographer.
‘I don’t like her,’ the first man said.
‘Why?’ The man spoke very quietly and very aggressively.
‘I don’t know, I just don’t like her.’
‘I never saw anyone. She came straight here without talking to anyone.’
‘I still don’t like her.’
‘There must be a reason.’
‘I don’t know. She wanted the money first.’ The photographer was whining a little now.
‘Strange, I wouldn’t have thought it. Sol said she was quite refined.’ He was starting to have his suspicions now, too.