As well as I could I told him the story of the film and he began without hesitation to suggest things. The girl, instead of being a model, which was rather a commonplace, might work at Vogue, where his wife’s former secretary, a very clever girl who spoke four or five languages … but Vogue was already a little too fancy, perhaps, he decided. A salesgirl in a boutique, he thought, or perhaps, yes, even better, a mannequin in one of the couture houses — Fourquet on Via Condotti, for example. “She may earn only eighty thousand lire a month but it’s interesting work, she meets people, a certain kind of person with money, taste. If she has something to attend, Fourquet will probably lend her one of his expensive dresses.”
With heroic charm he began to describe the man in the film, the young, proper lawyer. Politics slightly to the left—“In Italy, everybody is, everybody except me,” he explained. The lawyer has a good car, he goes dancing, to the beach. He loves sport, like all Italians, though not as a participant, of course, and there is also something traditional — he still goes home every day to eat with his mother at noon.
Crespi’s enthusiasm and willingness to provide details increased my confidence. There might be a tone, a manner in which it could be presented, which would redeem it. As we talked on, in response to certain things I said, Crespi began to shift his view, to see the lawyer as less sophisticated, not part of the new Italy where people in Rome, as Fellini had shown, had seen everything. Perhaps it might take place in a more provincial town, Piacenza or Verona. Yes, he said, he saw it as a really romantic story. The women would all be crying, he predicted.
“But could all this happen in a town like Verona?” I said. “Are there call girls there?”
“Of course. Everywhere,” he said. “It’s in all the papers. It’s the scandal of Italy. They advertise as manicure, with a chic address, senza portiere. Columns of them. Look in Il Messaggero.”
It was true. In Il Tempo as well. I sat reading the papers in a noisy hotel on the Piazza della Rotonda, the recommendation of which had also come from Glenville. The furniture seemed to be from an old orphanage. The floors were bare wood. Giovanissima—very young — the ads all said. Via Flaminia, Via del Babuino, senza portiere.
As it happened, I didn’t go to Verona or Piacenza. I met other people and then others. I took the apartment of an Englishwoman — her pretty, botanical name, Lyndall Birch, was on a small white card beneath the doorbell — on Via dei Coronari, a narrow, homely street in the old part of the city. The apartment was an attico, three rooms and a terrace, reached by climbing six flights of worn marble stairs. Across the rooftops, hot and becalmed, the Crespis’ terrace could be seen, bounded by furled blue, palatial drapes. It was late June; the city was a furnace, the sun beating down on the ceiling. In the months that were to come I wrote lying prone on the apartment’s cool stone floor, the burning air above my head too thick to breathe.
At dinner one night in a country restaurant I tried to follow the conversation and bursts of laughter. It was all wicked and in Italian. I could make out occasional coarse words. We were in the the garden, grouped around an animated woman named Laura Betti. She was a singer and actress. Pasolini and Moravia had written lyrics for her songs and she performed all the Kurt Weill — Bertolt Brecht repertory in Italian. She talked constantly that night, a cigarette between her fingers. Her laugh was irresistible. Smoke poured from her mouth. She was blonde, a bit heavy, perhaps thirty years old, the sort of woman who proudly wore a latent sadness.
We were in the ancient world, it seemed, in the cool air, the darkness beneath the vines. The empty carafes of wine were replaced by others, the green bottles of minerale. There were six or seven of us. They were talking about everyone and eating from one another’s plates: about the famous actress who liked to make love in two ways at the same time, you could always recognize such women, Laura Betti said, by the way they looked over their shoulder with a knowing smile; about the madwoman who walked the streets singing in a ruined voice, a confused song about her great love who had taken her in his arms, the beauty of Jesus, and the little boy’s dove she touched with her tongue. It was all about love, or, more properly, desire. Rome to them was a village that had no secrets. They knew everything, the names of the four countesses who had picked up an eleven-year-old gypsy girl one night and brought her to the house of a noted journalist to see him have his pleasure with her.
The script I was writing, they asked, what was its nature? Though feeling it sounded naïve, I described it. Perhaps it should not take place in Rome, I suggested — someone had mentioned Piacenza.
“Bologna,” Laura Betti said. “That’s where it could take place.”
“Bologna?”
“It’s marvelous,” her husky voice declared. It was the city she was from.
“Bologna is famous for three things,” she said. “It’s famous for its learning — it has the oldest university in Italy, founded in the twelfth century. It’s famous for its food. The cuisine is the finest in the country. You can eat in Bologna as nowhere else, that’s well known. And lastly, it’s famous for fellatio.” She used another word.
“It’s a specialty,” she said. “All the various forms are called by the names of pasta. Rigate, for instance,” she explained, “which is a pasta with thin, fluted marks. For that the girls gently use their teeth. When there used to be brothels there was always a Signorina Bolognese—that was her specialty.”
The girl who worked in a publishing house and the one from Milan gave no sign of having heard. At nearby tables couples were talking in the darkness. I was impressed by Laura Betti’s cool frankness, her poise — it was my novitiate.
I went to Bologna. Beside the wooden doors of the main station as the train pulled in, a woman was waiting. She nodded and smiled. I knew her name, Camilla Cagli. She was Bolognese; her husband was a lawyer. Laura Betti had called her and asked if she would be able to show me the city, and of that long day it is her smile I remember, the ease of her company, the natural grace. We walked beneath the arcades, talked of life in Bologna, and visited the huge house, the palazzo now become apartments, in which she had been born. For a few hours one is wrapped, even enraptured, in intimacy.
She had been married before, to a man of good family, but it was an empty marriage of bridge games and idleness before the war. She had been lucky and gotten a divorce — almost unheard of in Italy — during a brief period when the Communists were in power.
In the end, however, it was not in Bologna but in Rome itself that it all unfolded.
—
In Rome, the heat bore down. Dark Sicilians rose at two in the afternoon. The Tiber was green and stagnant. On Sunday mornings the highway to the sea was jammed with cars, the music from hundreds of radios beating the blue, exhausted air.
Three or four times a week I traveled up via Flaminia and across the bridge to the apartment of an American woman who was giving me Italian lessons. Her children closed the door to the living room and left us alone. Dorothy Brown was my tutor’s name. We sat on the couch and studied. The vocabulary was not that of school. “The Italians are more interested in the culo than the fica,” she told me, writing down the words. “There is even a verb for it, inculare. The girls all prefer it to preserve their virginity.” Her boyfriend, she said, had done it this way with his cousin since they were both fourteen. Molten images: the dark, shadowed room, the youthful limbs, the faint smooth rustle of sheets.