Free A Private Venus by Giorgio Scerbanenco

cigarette,and watched her as she took off her sky-blue jacket, under it she had a bra and she took that off, too, and then he, too, took off his jacket, which, outside the house, he only ever took off to make love.
    On the way back, she could still see the Kleenex, it had caught in a clump of grass by the water, and she stopped to put on lipstick. ‘You’re nice,’ she said to him as she did so. ‘When I saw you in the Via dei Giardini, I wasn’t sure whether to approach you, you look like the kind of man who’d ruin a woman, but I needed fifty thousand lire.’ She put the lipstick and her mirror back in her handbag and started walking again. ‘We can eat here,’ she said.
    Davide knew he wasn’t any good at bargaining, and, still without the vulgarity of any of those ten-thousand-lire notes coming into sight, he transferred from his wallet into her purse, once again, the rest of the sum required to reach the figure she had requested.
    ‘It’s too much, I know,’ she said. ‘Consider it a charitable donation.’
    He didn’t like talking about money. ‘Where are you from?’ he asked.
    ‘Naples.’
    ‘You don’t sound Neapolitan.’
    ‘I studied elocution for three years, I wanted to work in the theatre, theatre with a capital T. I can recite some Shakespeare, if you like.’
    They ate in the festive little hut on the autostrada. They exchanged a bit of superficial, generalised information about themselves: she said vaguely that she had come to Milanalmost a year earlier to look for work and hadn’t found very much, and he told her he was a clerk in a large office, which was true, after all, he worked for Montecatini, didn’t he?
    ‘A well-paid clerk, if you spend like that.’ He didn’t reply, so she asked him, ‘Do you still want to go to Florence and back?’
    After the meal, the wild beasts that had defeated the censors in him were even freer. ‘I’d prefer to go to the river again,’ he said simply.
    ‘So would I,’ she replied.
    They went to the river again and then came back to have a drink. She was the one who chose whisky: at the time, he preferred beer. After her second whisky he said, ‘Isn’t all that stuff bad for you?’
    ‘In theory, yes. In practice, as I’m going to kill myself tomorrow, I could drink vitriol now and it wouldn’t matter.’
    Davide decided, trivially, that the girl was joking and that she had drunk too much, but at the same time he knew he was lying to himself, because deep down he had the feeling that the girl wasn’t joking and wasn’t drunk, she was a straight person, in her body, her character, and her way of speaking, she never said a superfluous or pointless word: if she wasn’t intending to kill herself, she wouldn’t have wasted time saying it.
    ‘That’s an idea we all get sometimes,’ he said.
    ‘Sometimes it isn’t only an idea,’ she said. ‘A few months ago I saw a book displayed in the window of a bookshop. By chance, I read the band across the cover. I can’t remember the exact words now, but they were something like: “Assoon as I’ve finished writing this book I’ll kill myself.” The author, who was a woman, had said that, and having finished the novel she did in fact kill herself. For her, it wasn’t just an idea.’ They were sitting by the window and every now and again looked through the blinds at the lanes on the autostrada and the cars flashing in the sun like photographers’ flashlights. ‘For me neither.’
    He liked hearing her talk, and he even liked this unexpected topic, Eros and Thanatos are cousins, and he had a few ideas about life and death himself, ideas he’d never been able to talk about due to his lack of social contact, and he told her one now: ‘Of course living is difficult, whereas dying is very simple.’
    ‘Yes,’ she said, although his observation was not about her. ‘But I don’t have any desire to die, and never have had. Listen, if I’m not boring you, I’ll talk for a few more minutes