where the doors make a heavy prosperous sound when they slam, like a vault closing.
He talks about his estranged wife, whom he has never quite been able to divorce, about the excellence of her family, a pharmaceutical dynasty from Como, about her religion, about her well-bred pipe-stem legs below the Scottish tartan skirts she favored in the nineteen seventies, about how her problem with alcohol began. He talks about how until a certain age a man goes on searching for a woman to heal who-knows-what wound, until some afternoon one looks up from scanning a document and realizes that one has stopped searching and how that realization is the chief disaster one faces. He talks about his son, who is with Salomon Brothers in London, and his daughter, in her last year at Bocconi; he asks Merope how old she is.
“Twenty-eight.” She says it with careless emphasis, knowing that it is too old for his tastes, that probably one of the most intense pleasures he allows himself is the moment he learns definitively how young, how dangerously young, is the girl at his side. It heightens her sense of power, not to be to his taste, and yet there is something companionable in it. Any tiredness she felt has passed: she feels beautiful and in control, sustained by her little black dress with its boned bodice as if by a sheath of magic armor.
On impulse she asks him not to take her immediately home but to drive out of town and follow the canal road toward Pavia first so they can have a look at the rice fields, which are flooded now for the spring planting. To get to the Pavese canal they cut through the neighborhood near Parco Sempione where the transvestite and transsexual whores do business. It’s late for the whores, whose peak hour for exhibiting themselves on the street is midnight, but those who are not already with clients or off the job go into their routine when they see the lights of Nicolò’s car. Variously they shimmy and stick out their tongues, bend over cupping their naked silicone breasts, turn their backs and wag their bare bottoms.
They are said to be the best-dressed streetwalkers in Italy, and certainly in fast glimpses they all look gorgeous, fantastically costumed in string bikinis and garter belts, stockings and high heels, with their original sex revealed only by the width of their jaws and the narrowness of their hips. All together they resemble a marooned group of Fellini extras. One of them is wrapped in a Mephistophelian red cloak that swirls over nipples daubed with phosphorescent makeup; another is wearing a tight silver Lycra jumpsuit with a cutout exposing bare buttocks that remind Merope, inevitably, of the Glutei class.
Nicolò slows down the car to allow the two of them a good look, and makes a weak joke about urban nocturnal transportation services. He tells Merope that the transvestites are nearly all Albanians or Brazilians, something she already knows. With Clay and other friends she has driven around to see them a number of times after dinner; only now, however, does she consider what life must be like for these flamboyant night birds, foreigners to a country, foreigners to a gender, skilled but underappreciated workers in a profession that makes them foreigners to most of the rest of the world.
She can see that Nicolò is eyeing them with the veiled expression that men adopt when with a woman companion they look at whores, and this fills her with friendly amusement. She’s starting to feel slightly fond of him, in fact, old Nicolò. His overlong curls, the superb quality of the fabric of his jacket, his anguish, even his timid taste for adolescents are all, as the Englishman said, parts of a certain type of equation. It has to do not only with vast gloomy apartments with plaster garlands but also with escapes from that world—endless futile escapes with the returns built right in. Nicolò, she knows, would like her to be one of his escapes. He’s not brave enough for the transvestites.
They reach the Naviglio Pavese and drive along the canal toward the periphery of the city, past the darkened restaurant zone and the moored barges full of café tables, the iron footbridges and the few clubs with lights still lit. Nicolò continues to talk: spurred by her silence, he starts improvising, gets a bit declarative. He is confessing to her that he is tired of young models and wild evenings. Even tonight, with that kiss—He has nothing against her friend Clay, who is a fascinating woman, but there is something about her—In any case, at a certain time one wants a woman one can introduce to one’s children, one’s mother. He personally could never involve himself seriously with a woman who—The minute he saw Merope he sensed that, though they were so different, there was a possibility—
They pass through the periphery of Milan: factories, government housing, and hapless remnants of village life swallowed by the city. Then suddenly they are among the rice fields that stretch outside of Pavia. Beside them the sober gleam of the still canal stretches into the distance, and to the right and the left of the empty two-lane road is a magical landscape of water, divided by geometric lines. It could be anywhere: South Carolina, China, Bali. And there is light on the water, because once they are beyond the city limits the moon appears. Not dramatically—as full moons sometimes bound like comic actors onto the scene—but as a woman who has paused unseen at the edge of a group of friends at a party calmly enters the conversation.
The sight of the moon dissolves the flippant self-confidence Merope caught from Clay, which carried her through dinner and the party. She looks down at her bare knees emerging like polished wood from black silk, shifts her body in the enveloping softness of the leather seat, and feels not small, as such encounters with celestial bodies are supposed to make one feel, but simply in error. Out of step.
Once, four or five years ago, on vacation in Senegal, she and her sister sneaked out of Club Med and went to a New Year’s Eve dance in the town gymnasium and a local boy led her onto the floor, where a sweating, ecstatic crowd was surging in an oddly decorous rhythm of small, synchronized stops and starts; and in those beautiful African arms she’d taken one step and realized that it was wrong. And not just that the step was wrong in itself but that it led to a whole chain of wrong steps and that she—who had assumed she was the heiress of the entire continent of Africa—couldn’t for the life of her catch that beat. Sitting now in this car, where she has no real desire or need to be, she experiences a similar dismay. She feels that a far-reaching mistake has been made, not now but long ago, as if she and Nicolò and Clay and the other people she knows are condemned to endless repetitions of a tiresome antique blunder to which the impassive moon continues to bear witness.
“I think it’s time to go back now,” she says, breaking into whatever Nicolò is confessing; then she feels unreasonably annoyed by the polite promptness with which he falls silent, makes a U-turn, and heads toward the city. For a second she wishes intensely that something would happen to surprise her. She sees it in a complete, swift sequence, the way she dreams up those freelance scripts: Nicolò stops the car, turns to her, and bites her bare shoulder to the bone. Or an angel suddenly steps out on the road, wings and arm outstretched, and explains each of them to the other in a kindly, efficient, bilingual manner, rather like a senior UN interpreter. From the radio, which has been on since they reached the canal road, comes a fuzz of static and a few faint phrases of Sam Cooke’s “Cupid.” Merope looks down at her hands in her lap and when she looks up again they are passing an old farmhouse set close to the road: one of the rambling brick peasant cascine, big enough for half a dozen families, that dot the Bassa Padana lowlands like fortresses. Even at night it is clear that this place is half in ruins, but as they pass by she sees a figure standing in front and gives an involuntary cry.
Nicolò has good reflexes and simply slows the car without bringing it to a halt. “What is it?”
“There was someone standing in front of that cascina—it looked like a woman holding a child.”
“That’s not impossible. Some of these big abandoned houses close to the city have been taken over by squatters. Foreigners, again: Albanians, Filipinos, Moroccans, Somalians, Yugoslav gypsies. What I’m afraid we’re facing is a new barbarian invasion.”
She hardly notices what he says, because she is busy trying to understand what she saw back in front of the old farmhouse, whose walls, she realizes with delayed comprehension, seemed to have been festooned
