Live and let live.

"Would you like to go out this evening?" he asked. "Turin by night?"

"First I've got to have a look at Turin by day. Let me get myself settled. Are you staying in this hotel?"

"Why not come to my place?"

He had to say that. I let the suggestion pass. I asked him to call for me at nine.

He repeated: "I can put you up at my place."

"Don't be foolish," I said. "We're not children. I'll come and pay you a visit one day."

That afternoon I went out on my own, and in the evening he took me out to a party.

 

 

3

 

When I returned in the evening, Morelli, who had been waiting for me, noticed that I had gone out in my cloth coat and left the fur behind. I had him come up and while I was getting ready I asked him if he spent his days in the hotel.

"I spend my nights at home," he said.

"Really?" I was talking into the mirror, my back turned to him. "Don't you ever visit your estate?"

"I pass over it in the train on my way to Genoa. My wife lives there. Nobody like women for certain sacrifices."

"Married ones, too?" I murmured.

I could tell he was laughing.

"Not only them," he sighed. "It hurts me, Clelia, that you should go around in overalls bossing whitewashers ... However, I don't like that place in the Via Po. What do you expect to sell there?"

"Turin is really an old woman, a concierge."

"Cities grow old like women."

"For me it's only thirty. Oh, well, thirty-four... But I didn't pick the Via Po. They decided in Rome."

"Obviously."

We left. I was glad that Morelli, who understood everything, hadn't understood why I went out that day in a cloth coat. I was thinking about it when we got into the taxi, and I thought about it later. I believe that in the hubbub of the party, when cherry brandy, kummel, and meeting new people had made me restless and unhappy, I told him. Instead of going to the Via Po, I had gone to the hairdresser—a little hairdresser two steps from the hotel— and while she was drying my hair I heard the sharp voice of the manicurist behind the glass partition telling how she was awakened that morning by the smell of milk spilled on the gas stove. "What a mess. Even the cat couldn't take it. Tonight I'll have to clean the burner." That was enough for me to see a kitchen, an unmade bed, dirty panes on the balcony door, a dark staircase seemingly carved out of the wall. Leaving the hairdresser, I thought only of the old courtyard, and I went back to the hotel and left my fur. I had to return to that Via della Basilica and perhaps someone might recognize me; I didn't want to seem so proud.

I had gone there, after exploring the district first. I knew the houses, I knew the stores. I pretended to stop and examine the shop windows, but really I was hesitating: it seemed impossible that I had been a child in those crannies, and at the same time, with something like fear, I felt no longer myself. The quarter was much dirtier than I remembered it.