Free A Private Venus by Giorgio Scerbanenco Page A

about personal things, then I’ll shut up.’
    ‘I’m not bored at all,’ he said, and it was true.
    ‘Anything can happen in life. Today I met you, you may be the man destiny sent me.’ Her big wide mouth was brushed at the corners by the curtains of her hair, and she wasn’t smiling. ‘If you take me away with you, for at least three months, a long way from here, and spend every minute with me, then tomorrow I won’t have to kill myself anymore. I know it’s absurd, but that’s the way things happen to me. If you like me, it won’t be hell for you. In appearance—only in appearance—I’m serious, sophisticated, elegant, you can take me anywhere and I won’t make you look bad. I know how to eat snails with the correct cutlery, without holdingthem between my fingers and sucking them as a friend of mine does. Even though you said you’re only a clerk, you probably don’t need to save money, but if you want to I can live on toast and Coca-Cola and I can sleep in boarding houses. But take me away from Milan for three months, at least three months, it ought to be much longer, maybe a year or two, but three months will do, and then I’ll see.’
    At that moment, the thought of spending three months with this girl, one girl just for him, something he’d never been able to do because of the network of complexes in which he was imprisoned, opened wide the windows of life for him, and through those windows he saw the three months, verdant, luxuriant, with her naked body gliding softly over those three months, as the car ran on, taking the two of them across an invisible map, Cannes, Paris, Biarritz, Lisbon, Seville.
    She sensed all this. ‘You mustn’t be afraid. I’m not what you might think, you’re not taking a streetwalker with you. I’m crazy, but that’s something else. Every now and again I need money, or else I need to feel like a spendthrift, then I go out and do what I did today with you, next to some bus stop, or a news stand, or there might even be someone following me. But it’s not my profession. It may happen two or three times a month, no more than that, though rather more often lately because I had to leave the job I was doing, and I can’t live only on the arithmetic and geography lessons my sister gets for me, apart from the fact that the mothers of those dunces never pay. I’m a criminal to myself, but I’m the kind of girl you can introduce to anyone, my father is ateacher in Naples, I didn’t want to tell you, but I have to give you my references, you won’t want to take with you someone off the street, and I’m not like that. My sister works for the phone company, she got me a job there, too, but I can’t stand it in those henhouses so I left. Then this thing happened, and I don’t have any choice: either you take me with you, or tomorrow I end it all.’
    ‘What thing happened?’ Her words had rooted him to the spot.
    ‘I’m sorry, darling, I can’t tell you. You’re a gentleman, that’s obvious from the way you’re dressed. I’m asking you what I ask you because I’ve seen that you’re a gentleman, I wouldn’t tell the kind of louts you find around here if I prefer milk or lemon with my tea.’ Then she fell silent, giving him time to think.
    And he thought. Despite all his sensitivity, he was deaf to the appeal of what could be defined as madness. Leaving for three months with a girl he had met only a few hours earlier, even he would call that madness, and in his world madness was in bad taste. But it depressed him, and he said, depressed, ‘I can’t.’
    ‘Why can’t you? Don’t tell me it’s because of the money.’
    No, maybe not because of the money, although he didn’t like spending his allowance and then having to resort to his father. ‘Not only because of the money.’
    Somehow, she could read his thoughts. ‘I understand. You can’t suddenly take off for three months, you have a family, maybe a girlfriend, you ought to tell your father, explain,