“Women of that sort.”
“With that painted face.”
“And those false teeth.”
“And that wig.”
“And her profession.”
“What’s that?”
“She works for men.”
They were near the cemetery. The white chimney of the crematorium came into view.
They went through various gates and made towards it.
Stop.
Out with the coffin. Silence. Speech by a gentleman whom no one had ever seen before.
Did anyone else wish to speak?
No one did.
Two attendants took the coffin into a white room and put it on a trolley, which moved away.
An official of the cremation society announced that the next of kin could watch. Maud stayed in the chapel to pray, and Nocera took up a position behind the big lens, through which he would be able to see his friend’s body devoured by the flames.
“It’ll take an hour,” the official said.
Nocera gave him twenty lire. “See that’s he’s well done.”
“Leave it to me.”
Nocera could see nothing. Suddenly the body came in, naked. No flames surrounded it, but it moved, contracted, writhed.
So it’s true, Nocera said to himself with his face to the lens, so it’s true that it rises, kneels, contracts, curls up, assumes obscene attitudes. Tito was right. A pity he’s not here to see, because he’d be amused. He puts his hand to his brow as in a military salute. He presses his fists to his eyes, like a fetus. Is it a return to the womb?
The body changed color, shriveled, blackened, was consumed, carbonized, turned to ashes.
When it was over, they withdrew the trolley and gathered the ashes with a silver trowel.
Nocera had brought the two shining spherical urns, and he filled both. Some fragments of bone were put in a regulation red clay urn and put in a wall in which there were many small memorial tablets.
He put one urn in one pocket and one in the other and offered his arm to Maud. Everyone else had slipped away.
“And where shall we go now?” Nocera asked her as he helped her into a cab that was waiting outside the cemetery.
“I’ve got to go to the dressmaker’s to order my mourning.”
“Black will suit you very well.”
“I hope so. But not dull black. Shiny black suits me. I’ll order shiny black, so it won’t look so much like mourning.” No one had told the cabman where to go, but he was driving back towards the city.
“I’m not hungry,” Nocera said.
“I couldn’t touch a thing,” said Maud.
Nocera sighed. Maud sighed.
“Oh, well.”
“All the same, we can’t fast for a month. Shall we go to a restaurant?”
“I couldn’t eat a thing.”
“Neither could I.”
“Perhaps a little soup.”
“Or an egg.”
Nocera gave the cabman the name of a restaurant, and Maud thought it right to weep a little.
And she wept a little while the taciturn Nocera recalled the Dantesque spectacle of the body in the furnace.
And so they arrived at the restaurant without noticing it. A whole hierarchy of waiters hurried to offer them seats and take their coats. Maud was not hungry. She couldn’t touch a thing, and nor could Nocera, but they ate all the same.
The bill amounted to 180 lire, which was not expensive considering that it included the liquor necessary to wash down the lobster and the partridges seasoned with truffles.
“How sad going home is.”
“Suppose we go to a show?”
“It would be sacrilege.”
“Not to enjoy ourselves, but to take our minds off our grief.”
“What’s on?”
“The Pills of Hercules.”
“Is it very dirty?”
“Yes.”
When the show was over, Nocera took her home in a cab and let her choose which urn she wanted.
“It’s all the same,” she said, picking one at random. Never was a dead person’s estate shared out so amicably.
Nocera put the other urn in his pocket and got back into the cab.
How shabby the modest flat seemed to the woman who was used to grand hotels and smart villas.
She had been back in Turin for several weeks, after dancing her last dance under the Senegalese sky, and she still had a little African fever in her blood. She had come back to Turin to retire from life, to shut herself up in the humble room in which she had lived as a girl.
She found old picture postcards, empty sweet boxes, disintegrating novels with the first pages missing, yellowed shorthand notebooks, material for blouses, faded ribbons; also she found old memories: the exact spot where Tito had kissed her for the first time, the door against which she had been taken, standing, as one transfixes a butterfly, by a man whose name she didn’t even know, on an August afternoon when passion had flared up inside her.
It would have charm, melancholy charm, she thought, to shut herself up for ever in that room to live and die of memories. She locked herself up in it, full of remorse for not having been faithful to Tito, or at least for not having given him the illusion of being faithful to him. But now she offered him eternal fidelity. He was to be her last lover, as he had wanted.
She laid her chinchilla fur coat on the bed, prepared a soft resting place in the corner of the room for the small live dog that was a perfect imitation of a stuffed one, and was inconsolable at the departure of Pierina, her invaluable lady’s maid, whom she had sent on unlimited leave.
The room was full of trunks, on the lids and sides of which were the names of ships and hotels. The furs and coats exuded the odor of Avatar.
On a table by the window that served as a desk there was a photograph of Tito, and on a piece of old lace there was the urn, spherical and shiny and full of gray powder.
The gray powder was Tito. Was it one of his legs? Or his head and an arm? Two thighs and the neck? Heaven knows what part of him had come to her as her share. And how everything had lost its shape in that yellowy gray powder that might have been a Rachel face powder.
Surrounded by these memories, she said to herself, I shall be able to prepare myself for death.
Nocera paid the doctors, the chemist and the undertaker, and then went to the parish church.
“How much does it come to?” he asked.
The bill was waiting for him, already receipted. He paid up without asking for a reduction, though one of the eight priests (at twenty-five lire each) had been lame.
He also paid other persons involved in the funeral. Who knows why so many people have to be mobilized when someone dies? The day will come when dead bodies are simply thrown into canals like dead cats.
He carried out the deceased’s last wishes, wrote a few letters of thanks, and collected the last things remaining in his room. A pair of shoes were still under the bed.
Oh, the shoes of the dead, what a painful sight they are. Those black objects that preserve the shape of something that no longer exists.
In Paris, Pietro Nocera had never had occasion to see Maud. If he had seen her among all those electrifying Parisian women, he would have noticed nothing but her wretched Italian provincialism.
But as soon as he saw her in Turin he was swept away by the exquisite Parisian fascination of that great female globetrotter. Her devotion to his sick friend moved him; and the distance between sympathy and sensuality is as short as that which separates those two words in the dictionary.
One morning — three days after the funeral — Maddalena was drinking her breakfast coffee on the balcony overlooking the courtyard when they brought her a letter. She read it through once only, then wrote on the first sheet of paper that came to hand:
Dear Nocera, you don’t love me. You think you love me. Don’t write to me like that again. I shall never be yours or anyone else’s. Tito is to be my last lover.