“But I—” Agostino insisted, exasperated by Tortima’s treachery.
“Get out of here, little boy. Go home,” said the woman. She went to the door, opened it, and found herself face-to-face with two men on their way in. “Good evening, good evening,” said the first, a man with a ruddy, jovial face. “We have an agreement, right?” he added, turning to his companion, a pale thin blond. “If Pina is free, she’s mine. I mean it.”
“Agreed.”
“What does this kid want?” asked the jovial man, pointing at Agostino.
“He wanted to get in,” said the woman. A fawning smile was outlined on her lips.
“You wanted to get in?” the man shouted at Agostino. “You wanted to get in? At your age you should be home this hour of the night. Go home, go home,” he shouted, waving his arms.
“That’s what I told him,” the woman replied.
“And if we let him in?” remarked the blond man. “At his age I was already making love to the maid.”
“Who do you think you’re fooling? Go home, go home!” shouted the man, infuriated. “Go home!” With the blond man right behind him, he burst through the door, slamming it behind him. Before he knew what had happened, Agostino found himself outside in the yard.
Everything had ended badly, he thought. Tortima had cheated him, taking the money, and he himself had been kicked out. Not knowing what to do, he walked backwards down the driveway, gazing at the half-open door, the awning, the front of the house rising before him with its white shutters closed tight. He felt a searing sense of disappointment, especially because of the way the two men had treated him, like a child. He found the jovial man’s shouting and the blond’s cold tentative kindness no less humiliating than the matron’s blunt, expressionless hostility. Still walking backward, looking around and peering at the trees and bushes in the dark yard, he headed toward the gate. But he suddenly noticed that one whole part of the garden, on the left side of the house, appeared to be illuminated by a bright light that seemed to emanate from an open window on the ground floor. It occurred to him that through the window he would at least be able to get a glimpse of the house. Trying to make as little noise as possible, he worked his way toward the light.
As he imagined, it was a ground-floor window, wide open. The windowsill wasn’t very high. Slowly but surely, hewing close to the corner where it was less likely he would be seen, he approached the window and peered inside.
The room was small and brightly lit. The walls were papered with a gaudy floral pattern in green and black. Opposite the window, a red curtain, hanging by wooden rings from a brass rod, seemed to conceal a door. There was no furniture. Someone was sitting in a corner, on the window side. All you could see were his crossed feet in yellow shoes extended almost to the middle of the room: the feet, Agostino thought, of a man comfortably settled in an armchair. Disappointed, he was about to withdraw when the curtain was lifted and a woman appeared.
She was wearing a loose sheer sky-blue gown that reminded Agostino of his mother’s negligees. The gown, transparent, reached all the way down to her feet. Beneath the sheer material, the woman’s limbs, which took on the aquamarine tint of the fabric, appeared pale and long, almost swaying in lazy curves around the dark stain of her pelvis. Her gown, in a bizarre detail that impressed Agostino, parted over her chest in an oval neckline that dipped all the way down to her waist. Her breasts, which were round and heavy, protruded almost painfully, naked and tightly squeezed against each other. Her gown, which surrounded her breasts with a tightly pleated frame, then reconnected at the neck. Her wavy brown hair was loose and tumbled to her shoulders. She had a wide face, flat and pale, like a spoiled child, and a whimsical expression in her weary eyes and on the pursed lips of her painted mouth. With her hands behind her back and her breasts out, she emerged through the curtain and for a long moment, in an expectant pose, she stood straight and still, without saying a word. She seemed to be looking toward the corner at the man whose crossed feet could be seen in the middle of the room. Then, in the same silence with which she had come, she turned around, lifted the curtain, and disappeared. Almost immediately the man’s feet retreated from Agostino’s view. There was the sound of someone standing up. Frightened, Agostino drew away from the window.
He returned to the driveway, gave a shove to the gate, and went out into the piazza. He was feeling a strong sense of disappointment over his failed venture. At the same time he was gripped almost by terror at what awaited him in the days to come. Nothing had happened, he thought. He hadn’t been able to possess a single woman. Tortima had taken his money, and the next day the teasing of the boys and the impure torment of his relations with his mother would resume. It’s true that for a moment he had seen the woman he desired, standing in her sheer gown, her breasts naked. But he had a dark sense that this inadequate and ambiguous image would be the only picture of womanhood to accompany his memories for long years to come. In fact, years and years would go by, empty and unhappy, between him and the liberating experience. Not until he was as old as Tortima, he thought, would he be released once and for all from this awkward age of transition. But in the meantime he had to continue living in the same way. He felt his whole spirit rebel against the thought, like the bitter sense of a final impossibility.
Once he reached home, he entered without making a sound. In the doorway he saw the guest’s suitcases and heard voices in the living room. Then he climbed the stairs and went to throw himself on the cot in his mother’s bedroom. There, in the dark, angrily tearing off his clothes and tossing them on the ground, he got undressed and slipped under the sheets. Then he waited, his eyes wide open in the blackness.
He waited a long while. At a certain point he started to feel drowsy and he really did nod off. All at once he woke with a start. The lamp was on, illuminating the mother’s back. She was wearing a negligee and had one knee on the bed, getting ready to turn in for the night. “Mamma,” he said immediately in a loud and almost violent voice.
The mother turned around and came near him. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “Is something the matter, dear?” Her negligee was transparent, like the gown of the woman at the house. Her body was also shaped like the other body, in vague lines and shadows. “I want to leave tomorrow,” said Agostino, in the same loud and exasperated voice, trying not to look at the mother’s body but at her face.
The mother, startled, sat down on the bed and stared at him. “Why? What’s the matter? Aren’t you having a good time here?”
“I want to leave tomorrow,” he repeated.
“We’ll see,” said the mother, discreetly passing a hand over his forehead, as if she was afraid he had a fever. “What’s the matter? Don’t you feel well? Why do you want to leave?”
Agostino said nothing. The mother’s negligee reminded him of the gown worn by the woman at the house, the same transparency, the same pale flesh, listless and within reach. Except the negligee was wrinkled, making it even more intimate and his glimpse of her even more furtive. So, Agostino thought, not only did the image of the woman at the house not act as a screen between himself and the mother, as he had hoped, but it had somehow confirmed the mother’s womanhood. “Why do you want to leave?” she asked again. “Don’t you enjoy spending time with me?”
“You always treat me like a baby,” Agostino said all at once, not even he knew why.
The mother laughed and patted him on the cheek. “All right, then, from now on I’ll treat you like a man. Will that make you happy? Now go to sleep… it’s late.” She bent down and kissed him. With the light out, Agostino could hear her getting into bed.