Among Women Only

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Book: Read Among Women Only for Free Online
Authors: Cesare Pavese
looked disgusted; Loris jumped up from the bed, saying: "It's true. She has magnificent tits."
    "Slander," Mariella said. "Vanna's not like that."
    "They're not magnificent?" Loris said.
    They went on in that vein and Momina skipped from one subject to another, looking at me out of the corners of her eyes in her searching way, asked my opinion, tried to fascinate me. I was glad that the play didn't come up again. Only Mariella was restless, one saw that Momina had taken her place. Momina was younger than I, but not by much: she dressed very well, a gray suit under her beaver coat, her skin was massaged, her face fresh; she took advantage of her nearsightedness by passing it off as detachment. I recalled her violet dress on the first night and looked at her naked ring finger.
    "We're leaving," Mariella said suddenly.
    Momina told us to wait for her, that she had her car below. The three of us got into her green Topolino: I had expected something better. Mariella wanted to sit in the back. Lighting a cigarette, Momina explained: "This is all my husband allows me."
    "Ah," I said.
    "I live alone," Momina observed, putting the car into gear. "It's better for both of us."
    I wanted to stop at the Via Po and take a last look. Momina said: "Stay with me, tonight."
    Mariella, in the back seat, was silent. We dropped her at the gate on her avenue. At the last minute she took up the play again, complained about Momina, about us, accused us of having put a spoke in the wheel. Momina answered coldly; then they flew at each other while I looked at the shrubbery. Now they were quiet. "I'll tell you about it tomorrow," Momina told her. The two of us got back in.
    She took me back to the center, saying nothing about Mariella. Instead she talked about Nene and said that she made such beautiful sculptures. "I can't understand why she wastes her time with that Loris," she smiled. "She's so intelligent. A woman worth more than the man who touches her is damned unlucky."
    I asked her to take me to the Via Po.
    When I emerged from the portico and went back to the car, Momina was smoking a cigarette and looking around in the dark. She opened the door for me.
    We went to the Piazza San Carlo for an aperitif. We took two small armchairs in the back of a new gilded cafe, its entrance still cluttered with trestles and rubbish. An elegant place. Momina turned back her fur coat and looked at me. "Now you know all my friends," she said. "From Rome to Turin is quite a jump. It must be pleasant to work as you do."
    What is she looking for, a job? I thought.
    "Don't be alarmed," she went on. "The circle here in Turin is small... I don't mean to ask your advice. You have taste, but my dressmaker is good enough for me... It's a pleasure to talk to somebody who leads another life."
    We talked a bit about Turin and Rome—she squinting at me through the smoke—about how you can't find apartments, about the new cafe we were in; she had never been to Rome but she had been to Paris and didn't I think I should go to Paris for my work; I absolutely had to go; traveling for the sake of one's work was the only real traveling, and why should I be satisfied with Turin?
    Then I said I had been sent here. "I was born in Turin."
    She was born in Turin too, she said, but grew up in Switzerland and was married in Florence. "They brought me up a lady," she said, "but what's a lady who can't catch a train tomorrow for London or Spain or wherever you like?"
    I opened my mouth, but she said that after the war only workers like myself could afford the luxury.
    "When you work, you don't have time," I said.
    She observed calmly: "It's hardly worth working just to come to Turin."
    I believed I understood her and told her I hadn't been in Turin for nearly twenty years and had also come back to see my old home.
    "You are alone, it seems."
    "The house I lived in, the quarter..."
    She looked at me with that discontented smile. "I don't understand these things," she said. "You probably

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