One might come away from an evening out with friends, especially if they are pleasant, with an entire book in one’s head. However, more often than not, one comes away escorting a woman, and while you can do whatever you want with a book, with a woman, a person distinct from yourself, after a while you might not know what to do. She attaches herself to you and becomes an imposing plane tree that cools you with its foliage and sheds its leaves poetically in the fall, but never budges.
That isn’t exactly what happened with Ursula.
That evening, Ursula, fed up with the stories of our little group (which, I should point out, did not pay her the slightest attention, although she was young and beautiful and not the much older, much less attractive type of woman toward whom gay men tend to
gravitate), asked me if she could share a cab with me.
She said she lived near my hotel; a lie, as I was to discover later, but far from an unpleasant one for me.
Federico laughed as he saw us leaving together. His matchmaking had been a success.
In the taxi, I took her hand tenderly in mine.
“So you’re not one of them?” she remarked slyly.
“Do I look like I am?” I asked.
“Nowadays, you never can tell….”
It was clearly an invitation to find out more.
But when we arrived at the hotel, the night watchman, not the regular one, who was my friend, but his replacement, made me furious. He asked Ursula for identification papers. She had no papers on her. He insisted that he couldn’t let her spend the night in my room. Not to mention that the rate of the room would have to go up.
“All right,” I said. “We’ll pay. What business is it of yours?” I suppose he was jealous, that dirty old Italian, because I’d landed myself with such an attractive woman, and so he was giving me a hard time.
“The police, you see… they don’t allow us… the Red Brigades….”
Ursula told me later that she had felt more and more like a prostitute under the watchman’s gaze. For my part, I kept explaining that I lived there on a regular basis, but that he didn’t happen to know me because he wasn’t the regular watchman. Finally, it was all settled with a Visa credit card that Ursula fortunately had in her bag and with which she paid for the room, thereby entering her name in the hotel register.
As soon as we got to my room (I had kept Rosa’s three, by-then-dried-up roses as a souvenir), Ursula went into the bathroom, from where she emerged holding a pair of dirty socks.
“One can tell you’re a bachelor,” she said, inspecting the room. “I understand you’re a writer.”
“I try to be,” I sighed.
“What kind of things do you write?” she asked, turning on the radio to a music program.
“Romance novels.”
She leaned over the papers on my desk. She picked one up, looked at it, and let it fall like a leaf from a plane tree.
“What a shame that it’s in Greek,” she said. “I used to do ancient Greek in high school, but I’ve forgotten it all.”
Then she came and sat next to me.
“Well then, let me tell you my life story.”
It was daybreak when Ursula finished her story. I could hear the toilets being flushed in adjoining rooms.
The first breakfast trays were coming up to my floor.
People were starting to wake up. Generally speaking, tourists wake up early so they can grab the day by the scruff of the neck and see as many of the sights as they can. For the tourist, time is money. He has to take advantage of his time because he’s paying for it. And most of the guests at this hotel were either groups of elderly people, miners from northern Europe, or American college brats. Every evening, next to the front desk, posters were put up announcing organized tours for the following day. Rush hour at the hotel lasted from seven to nine each morning. Then, the tree quieted down. The birds would be back again between seven and nine in the evening. That’s why I never got up before nine o’clock. It was around half past seven when Ursula, exhausted, tried to lie down next to me on the single bed that was too narrow for us both.
“What do you say?” I suggested. “Shall we go out for a coffee?”
I threw some water on my face, she tidied herself up in the mirror, and we went downstairs.
My neighborhood was beautiful early in the morning. The colors of the buildings, still untouched by the harsh sunlight, were muted; the light had not yet come over the church domes to strip them. I was fine.
We were fine. The old flower lady was sitting outdoors at a cafe table like a fairy tale witch, surrounded by the bags in which she arranged her possessions. She was a tall, aristocratic-looking woman who looked a bit like my grandmother from Thásos. She always sold flowers at the city’s squares. I knew her from long ago. Almost twenty years. I returned to this city every so often, and the old lady was always there, in the streets and squares around the Pantheon, every evening arranging her bags, every morning arranging her flowers, and every time I would greet her and every time she would not recognize me. Twenty years. Some died, others left, dictatorships were established, earthquakes, kidnappings, murders took place; the old lady was always here. She lived in the recesses offered to her by the churches and palazzi of the city, a little more hunched over each time I returned, a little more bent down, her body a little closer to closing in a circle, but always alert and energetic, always with her flowers supplied to her by the cemeteries. She seemed to me like a ghost that never dies, because it is not alive. It only exists like a sprite, a wispy spirit that does not come under the jurisdiction of time because it is beyond it; a Shakespearean creature, an old woman Fate, the kismet of my life.
We were the first customers at this cafe where the old flower lady sat, which for me was a home away from home, next door to my hotel. Whenever I wanted to take a break, I always came down here for a cafe mácchiato a coffee “dirtied” by a dash of milk. The waiters no longer asked me what I wanted. They knew me. Many times I would take it in a plastic cup up to my room, where I would sip at it slowly as I wrote.
That morning, they were surprised to see I was their first customer of the day. But when they saw my companion they understood why I hadn’t kept my regular schedule. How were they to know, I said to myself, that a writer’s life does not take place in his bed but at his writing table? His confessional. The night watchmen were coming to drink their first coffee, and also the ladies of the night, whom I never saw during my usual hours. As the morning drew on, a whole world of clerks who worked in the neighboring office buildings began to arrive. I didn’t know them either, because after nine o’clock when I would come down, all these people were already tucked away in some damp, sunless office, little cogs of a big machine, of the state, the banks, the companies, the slow-moving Italian bureaucracy, antiquated, unchanged since the time the small republics and kingdoms had joined and had chosen Papal Rome as their capital.
These people, who carried under their arms their bags or their car radios to avoid having them stolen, constituted a different kind of army for me than the armies of tourists I was used to, with their city maps like prayer books, or umbrellas to lead the flock.
Ursula and I parted company. She went to her house, where she had invited me to come that evening, and I went back to my room, where remnants of her perfume hung in the air like threads.
I found the fat cleaning lady tidying my room, puzzled that my bed was not unmade, even though I had had “company.” Every morning, the fat cleaning lady, who never failed to ask me for a cigarette, would study my sheets as if they were the entrails of birds, trying to divine what kind of night I had had. She took a singular pleasure in doing my room. From the dampness of the sheets, from the little hairs like snails, from a barrette, from an earring she had once found fallen behind the bed, she would deduce my night. She would talk to me for hours. She seemed to be especially fond of me. So much so, in fact, that I was a little suspicious.