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coat. People live in strange ways. Listening to them talk about their work and the right they had to sell it unfinished, I understood that they were defending not so much the money as their arrogance. I wanted to say to her: My dear girl, you never know where the next meal's coming from, yet you put on these airs. Where do you sleep at night? Does someone keep you? Mariella, who doesn't paint, is well-born and has a fur coat.
    They began to argue again about the play and said that there wasn't time to find another, and all right, they wouldn't do anything this year.
    "That fool," Mariella said. "Let's read a single act, without action or scenery," Nene said, and then Loris jumped up, looked at them disgustedly, as the idiots they were, and said: "All right. Only leave me alone."
    I looked again at a certain unframed picture against the wall under the window. It seemed dirty, unfinished: since I'd come in I'd been asking myself what it was. I didn't want anyone to notice my interest, lest Mariella should say: "Come on, show her your pictures." But that mess of violet and blackish colors fascinated me; I didn't want to look at it and yet I always returned to it; I thought to myself that it was like the whole room and Loris's face.
    I asked when they planned to give the play. "Who knows?" Nene said. "Nobody's coughed up a penny yet."
    "Don't you have an angel?"
    "The angels," Mariella said nastily, "think they can impose their tastes even on us... That's why."
    Loris said: "I'd be happy if anyone tried to impose a taste on me ... But you don't find anyone nowadays who has a taste. They don't know what they want..."
    Mariella gave a self-satisfied laugh, from inside her fur coat. Nene squirmed and said: "There are too many Martellis and too many Mizis mixed up in this. Too many hysterical women... Momina..."
    "She overdoes everything," Mariella said.
    "Momina knows what she wants. Let her do what she likes."
    "So then who will come to hear us?" said Mariella, annoyed. "Who'll do the acting? The hysterical women?"
    "Acting is out. We'll just read."
    "Nonsense," Loris said. "We wanted to paint an atmosphere..."
    They went on awhile. It was clear that the painter only wanted to daub some scenery to earn a little money. And that Mariella wanted to be an actress. Only Nene seemed without pretenses, but there was something at the bottom of her interest, too.
    Then Momina arrived.
     
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    She came in with that discontented, dominating air of hers. Her gloves alone were worth more than the whole studio. Nene, opening the door for her, seemed like a servant. Everyone said a smiling hello.
    "Why, you visit everybody," Momina said on seeing me.
    "That's not difficult in Turin," I replied.
    She moved here and there, going up very close to the pictures, and I saw that she was nearsighted. All the better. I watched Mariella closely.
    "Put on the lights," she told us. "Don't you see it's night?"
    When the lights came on, the window disappeared and the painting became a puddle of flayed faces.
    "Everybody's dropping out," Nene said. "I'm dropping out, too. One loses time over a lot of dumb excuses and we still don't know What we're doing. Clara's right, let's recite in the dark, like a radio broadcast..."
    Momina smiled in her dissatisfied way. She didn't answer Nene but instead told Loris that she had talked with somebody who had told her this and that, and Loris grunted something from the bed, holding his ankle; Mariella jumped in and they laughed and chattered and Nene said: "Crazy nonsense," and they forgot about the theater. Now Momina held forth, telling about a certain Gege di Piové who, meeting a girl he'd known as a child—they hadn't seen each other for years—went up to her in the bar of a big hotel: "Hello."
    "Hello."
    "They tell me you've developed," and slipping his hand down the front of her dress he brought out a breast and they both laughed with Filippo the bartender and the onlookers. Momina and Nene laughed; Mariella