Free Among Women Only by Cesare Pavese

that doesn't make sense," Momina added.
    We set off for Turin in a caravan, Rosetta with us; the mother with a maid and chauffeur in the big car sent up from Turin just for the trip. All morning, while waiting for the car, we had strolled around the villa and garden talking and looking at the mountains. Once I was alone with Rosetta,- she took me upstairs to a terrace where as a child, she told me, she would shut herself up for hours at a time to read and look at the tree tops. Down there—she said— was Turin, and on summer evenings she sat in that corner and thought of the seaside towns she had visited, about Turin and winter, the new faces she would some day meet.
    "They often fool you," I said, "don't you think?"
    She said: "You have to look them in the eyes. Everything's in their eyes."
    "There's another way of knowing them," I said. "Working with them. When people work, they give themselves away. It's hard to fake on a job."
    "What job?" she said.
    So we rode to Turin while I thought to myself that neither she nor Momina knew what work was; they had never earned their dinner or their stockings or the trips they had taken and were taking. I thought of how the world is, that everybody works in order to stop working, but if somebody doesn't work, you get mad. I thought of the old Mola woman, the signora, whose work was to agitate herself over her daughter, to run after her, see that she didn't lack anything; and her daughter paid her back with those terrors. I thought of Gisella and her little store—"we're squeezed in upstairs"—and all to keep them from doing anything, to keep them on velvet. I became nasty. I saw Febo's face. I started to think of Via Po.
    I went there before evening, after first taking a bath in the hotel. Nobody had come looking for me, not even Morelli. But on the table was a bunch of lilacs with a telegram from Maurizio. This too, I thought. Doing nothing all day, he had time to think of such things. It was just a month since I had left Rome.
    I found Becuccio supervising the arrival of the crystal chandeliers. He wasn't wearing his gray-green trousers or the heavy sweater any more, but a windbreaker with a yellow scarf. The leather wristband was there, as always. His curly hair and white teeth had a curious effect on me. While I talked I was very nearly on the point of reaching out and touching his ear. It's the mountain air, I thought, scared.
    Instead I became very cold with him over the lateness of the shipments.
    "The architect..." he said.
    "The architect has nothing to do with it," I cut in. "It's your job to keep after the suppliers..."
    Together we checked the crystals and I liked the way his large hands felt about in the straw for the brackets and pendants. In the newly plastered room, under an unshaded bulb, the prisms shone like rain in the beam of headlights. We held them up against the light. He said: "It's like when you're cutting tracks with an acetylene torch." He had been a worker on the night shift for the trolley line—the usual story. Once I felt him taking my hand under the straw. I told him to watch out. "It's expensive stuff."
    He answered: "I know."
    "All right then," I said. We finished the boxes.
     
     
    15
     
    The people in Rome talked as though the shop would be ready by mid-March, but the vaulting on the first floor still had to be done. Working with Febo became difficult; he began saying that they didn't understand anything in Rome and that if I didn't know how to get my way he did. He came back from Ivrea with a foxy look; he never mentioned the bill at the hotel, but he began using the familiar tu. I told him I took orders in Rome but that in Turin I gave them, and how much did he want for his trouble. Keeping my voice down, I let him have it. The next day a bunch of flowers arrived, which I gave to Mariuccia.
    But Rome was a headache. In a long evening phone call they gave me the news: the shop and windows were to stay the same, but the furnishings in the