Free Among Women Only by Cesare Pavese Page B

wanted, he asked if I were setting up house in Turin.
    Then I took him to the Via Po and showed him the rooms.
    "Your painter friends, what do they say?" he asked.
    "If they only understood paintings ..."
    "Here the pictures will be the mirrors," he said seriously. "No need to let your customers disappear. There's no painting that's worth a beautiful woman undressing."
    He accompanied me to the antique stores on the Via Mazzini and meanwhile we talked of Rome. "It would be easier in Rome," I said. "Rome is full of old houses being broken up ..."
    They weren't fooling in Turin either. Those shops were the honey and we the flies. You could hardly move among the mountains of stuff—ivory pieces, peeling canvases, grandfather clocks, figurines, artificial flowers, necklaces, fans. At first glance everything seemed old and decrepit, but after a while you could see there wasn't a piece—not a miniature, not an umbrella handle— that didn't make your mouth water. Morelli said: "They aren't showing us the best. They don't know who we are." He looked me over and said: "My wife should be here."
    Crossing the street, he asked: "What do you think of all this stuff?"
    "It hurts to think that when you die everything you own ends up like this in other people's hands."
    "It's worse when it ends up like that before you're dead," Morelli said. "If our beautiful friend were here, she would say that we also pass from hand to hand, the hands of those who want us. The only thing that saves people is money, which passes through everybody's hands."
    Then the talk shifted to women and houses and to Donna Clementina, who was a girl when some of those parasols and guitars and mottled mirrors were new. "She knew how to set herself up. No man could have claimed to have her in hand. These boys make me laugh, these girl friends of Mariella who have the vices but not the experience... They think it's enough to talk. I'd like to see them in twenty years ... The old lady got where she wanted to go ..."
    We went into another shop. We didn't talk baroque. I told Morelli that it was better to see a palace, a house, and find how things should look in their natural setting. "Let's go to Donna Clementina's," he said. "That evening there were too many people, but the porcelains alone are worth ..."
     
     
     
    16
     
    We arrived just as some women were leaving; they stared at me. Twenty years ago my route never went through that quarter of Turin. We found Mariella and her mother, who had just had tea; the grandmother—unfortunately—was napping, she was preparing for the evening, when a certain Rumanian violinist was coming to play and she wanted to be present. A few friends were expected, would we care to join them?
    Mariella looked at me reproachfully and while we were going into the room with the porcelains she scolded me for not having told her in time about the trip to Saint Vincent. "Come this evening," she said. "Rosetta and the whole crowd will be here."
    "I haven't been seeing anybody. What are you all doing?"
    "I can't tell," she said mysteriously. "You'll have to see to find out."
    I pulled Morelli's coattail just in time to keep him from telling those gossips the story of my fitting rooms. Mariella's mother lit the showcase lights and told us something about each piece. She spoke of her great grandfather, of weddings, of aunts, of the French Revolution. Morelli told us the names of some of the pink, bewigged women in the miniatures hanging on the walls. There was a certain Giudetta—also in the family—who had lain under a tree in the royal gardens and the king of that epoch let cherries fall through the branches into her mouth. I looked closely and tried to understand these things, what they were made of and the artist's secret—the way you do with a dress—but I didn't get very far. The elegance of the figurines and the little painted portraits was made out of air, and without the names, conversation, and family stories that went with them,