Under the Rose (5 page)

There was a dog in the house, Michèle’s silver poodle – perhaps you know it? – Rinaldino, a rather highly-strung creature which Marie and Mercedes had been told was mine. Michèle had asked Diego to keep it for her because she was going on a cruise and it pines if left in a kennel. Diego can never say ‘no’ to Michèle, and so a story was concocted about my flat being painted and how I had had to move to a hotel where I couldn’t take my new dog. All this because of Diego’s not wanting his wife to know that she was being asked to house his mistress’s dog. Surprisingly, the plan had worked up to now and Rinaldino had been three weeks at Diego’s. Mercedes was mad about him and everyone had been pleased about that. This evening, however, she suddenly announced that from now on the dog was hers. She wasn’t giving him back. She just wasn’t. So there. The dog loved her, she claimed and, besides, she had told her friends it was hers and didn’t want to be made to look a liar. She said all this in her grown-up way: half playful, half testing and I couldn’t help having the old-fashioned notion that what she really wanted, deep down, was to be told ‘no’. That used to be said, remember, when
we
were children. It was thought that children needed to know the limits of their possibilities.

Anyway, she kept on and Diego wouldn’t contradict her and neither did Marie. I kept my mouth shut. It’s not my business if Diego spoils his daughter as he spoils his mistress so, even though the dog was supposed to be mine, I didn’t react
when Mercedes started clamouring for a promise that Dino, as she had rechristened Rinaldino, should never leave. She would not go to bed till she got it, she said. It was obvious that she was trying to provoke me, but I pretended not to notice. Poor child, it’s not her fault if she is the way she is.

‘Dino likes me better than he likes you,’ she told me.

‘Why wouldn’t he like you?’ I asked. ‘You’re a good girl, aren’t you?’

‘He likes me whether I’m good or not. He likes me even when I hurt him.’

I can’t remember what I said to that and doubt if it mattered. She had taken against me and the next thing she did was to start twisting the dog’s ears.

‘See,’ she said. ‘Even when I do this, he likes me. He likes me because he’s mine. I’m his Mummy.’

Then she began to cuddle the animal in that way that children do if they’re not stopped. She tied a napkin under its chin, half choking it, and held it as if it were a baby, bending its spine and pretending to rock it to sleep.

‘Mine, mine, mine,’ she crooned.

I had an odd sensation as I watched. What struck me was that in a way the dog was
Michèle’s
baby, her substitute for the family she might have had if Mercedes had not been born. And now, here was Mercedes trying to steal even that from her. I found myself wondering whether some instinct was making her do it. An intuition? The thought was absurd but I let myself play with it to keep my mind off what the brat was doing to little Rinaldino. The French
are
insensitive about animals and Marie seemed indifferent. She often goes into a sort of passive trance when Diego is around and he, of course, has no feeling for creatures at all. Maybe I was showing my discomfort in spite of myself? I can’t be sure. Anyway, the little beast – I’m talking about Mercedes – began to pull Rinaldino’s whiskers and it was all I could do to keep myself from slapping her. I was on the point of warning her that she
might get bitten when she gave a shriek and threw the dog violently across the room. For a moment I thought she might have broken its back, but no, it got up and scuttled under the sofa. That, it turned out, was good canine thinking.

It had bitten her cheek. Not deeply, but it had drawn blood.

Well, the scene after that was beyond description, unbelievable. It literally took my breath away: hysteria, screams, foot-stamping, hand-wringing – all the things you think real people never do, they did. And no initiative at all.
I
had to take charge and clean the child’s cheek and put disinfectant on it. You’d think I’d cut off her head from the way she carried on. Diego was crying. Marie was tight-lipped and kept clenching her fists as though she was about to explode.

‘Look,’ I told them, ‘it’s a scratch. It’s nothing. She’d have got worse from a bramble bush. Just
look
,’ I kept insisting.

But they wouldn’t. Not really. They kept exclaiming and averting their faces and clapping their hands over their eyes. They wanted their drama and were working each other up, so that when Mercedes shouted, ‘I want the dog killed. Right now. It doesn’t like me. It doesn’t love me. It must be killed!’ I realized that the adults were half ready to go along with the idea. Diego was completely out of his mind.

‘Supposing it has rabies?’ he whispered to me.

‘It’s been inoculated,’ I told him.

‘Are you sure?’

‘Of course I am. It’s on its name tag. Look. With the date.’

‘I want it killed now! Here. Now. It doesn’t love me. It’s a bad dog,’ screamed Mercedes.

‘It’s my dog,’ I told her. ‘You can’t kill my dog.’

She began to kick me then. Hard. I still have bruised shins. She carried on as if she had rabies herself and her mother had to pull her off me and take her to bed.

‘I want it killed!’ She was screaming and scratching and biting as they went through the door. Later, I heard her still at it in her bedroom.

Diego looked distraught. He said he had heard of dogs which were rabid in spite of having been inoculated. Was I
sure
it had been inoculated? What did a name tag prove after all? It struck me then that he had either forgotten that the dog was not mine or was trying to persuade himself that it was. We were alone together now but he avoided mentioning Michèle’s name. Maybe he felt that some sin of his was coming to the fore and demanding a blood sacrifice? He kept pouring whiskey and drinking it down fast. At one point he went into the kitchen and looked at the rack of knives.

Well, you can never tell how much that sort of thing is theatre, can you? I mean that theatre can spill into life if people work themselves up enough. Maybe he was seeing himself as an Amerindian priest? I don’t mind telling you that I began to get scared. The thing was taking on odd dimensions as he got drunker and guiltier and the screams ebbed and started up again in the bedroom. Rinaldino, very sensibly, stayed right where he was under the sofa and that affected me more than anything. After all, dogs do pick up bad vibrations, don’t they? Anyway, the outcome was that when Diego went into the lavatory I phoned a taxi, took the dog and left. I was convinced that by now he wasn’t seeing the dog as a dog at all and that if I hadn’t got it out of the house he would have ended up killing it – or worse.

Marie wouldn’t have interfered. Even if she’d been standing beside him she wouldn’t. I’m sure of that. They’re extraordinary that way. I keep thinking of them now. Each is so intelligent and kind and – I want to say ‘ordinary’, when they’re on their own. Normal? But let a scene start and you’d think you were dealing with members of the House of Atreus. Marie’s passivity has started to seem sinister to me. I’ve started dreaming of that evening and it’s become deformed in my memory. Sometimes it seems to me that she was the silent puppet-mistress pulling the strings and that even I was one of the puppets. Even the dog. Well, certainly the dog.
Maybe it’s self-referential to bring myself in? But I’ve started worrying whether Marie as well as Mercedes see me as an intrusive female. ‘She’s jealous,’ Diego told me that evening and laughed. He could have meant his wife. Could he? I’m only his confidante but Marie might dislike that, mightn’t she? It’s very unhealthy on my part to dwell on the thing and it would be absurd for me to have a crush on a man like Diego and I hope nobody thinks this is the case. In my more sober moments I know that any bad feeling that came my way that evening was really directed through me at Michèle. I was her stand-in. After all, I’d pretended to own her dog. But somehow, emotion sticks. I feel a little as though mud had been thrown at me and that I can’t quite clean it off.

‘… your hair?’

‘By myself.’ A fib. But to say ‘at Fulvio’s’ would draw sneers from Leftish friends (‘Ha! Consorting with Black Florence, is that it?’) and a governessy nosiness from Black Florentines themselves: ‘So you’ve found your way there? Isn’t Fulvio a pet? And … have you discovered yet where to buy the best chocolate in all Florence? My dear,
let
me…. My grandaunt’s cook whom she brought from Vienna when….’ And off one would be in danger of being led to some den where there would be time, while each sweet was hand-wrapped, to ruminate on how these were probably going to be less good than the obvious commercial brand. ‘The best chocolate in all Florence …!’ Another myth. Black Florentines live by myth. It gives matter to their conversation and a breathless impulse. ‘What!’ the next B(lack) F(lorentine) would cry, ‘you
didn’t
let Bibi take you to that dreadful little confectioner where the cat sleeps on the chocolates! The poor thing is quite doddery! Bibi feels obliged to help her out with a small income, so any sale he can promote is to
his
good.
D’ailleurs c’est un mythomane! Surtout,
never buy any of Bibi’s wine.
Not classico!
Can’t blame him, poor chap. He’s a dear really. Just crackers!’ B–F–s speak as little Italian as possible. They were occupied for long periods by an army of English nannies.

Sneers at their taste are well grounded. Though not about Fulvio. I’ve forgotten who recommended him to me. I must have been a student at the time for I remember my terror lest I be unable to pay his bill. Yet I never went to another hairdresser in Florence afterwards and, as the
carovita
sends
prices spiralling, his have remained steady. (At least for me. Cocking an ear to those he charges tourists, I suspect him of making new customers pay for the old.) He is a good hairdresser, though it is less this that draws me back to him than the pleasurable femininity one puts on with his lavender pinafores. Anonymous in one of these, I agree to be an odalisque. His voice, mirrors and tuberoses are peremptory and, while hands and feet lie at anchor in the grip of his manicurists, I find my will receding; my mind drowses; Fulvio has taken over. Above our heads, heavy vaulting weaves vaguely – the stone roots of his old palazzo – burying us in a reckless vacancy. Delicate-featured apprentices hover and my blood, slowing to the indolent pace of the cosseted old Florentines around me, purrs and contentedly restores itself. All my defences are down. Which is why this morning’s incident was so upsetting.

Maria was brushing my hair. She is the prettiest and palest of the apprentices, weak-chinned, long-nosed, sweet and brittle-looking with a heron’s legs. Today she brushed longer than necessary. Fulvio came up. ‘Is Maria busy?’ he asked. ‘Yes,’ said one of the master hairdressers, ‘yes, I have a job for her.’ ‘Because’, Fulvio said, ‘the
principessa
is coming.’ Maria tore at my hair. ‘The
principessa
makes Maria vomit,’ said a manicurist. ‘She makes her sick for the rest of the day.’ Maria tore on and Fulvio said nothing to this. Instead, he fingered the gold chain which descends from his left lapel to the right back trouser pocket, where he keeps a pair of gold scissors inscribed with his name and the date of some aestheticians’ banquet held in the ’30s. He smiled at me. ‘It is more pleasant to work on the signora,’ he said. ‘The signora is beautiful no matter what one does to her. She doesn’t really need us at all. But I don’t’, he turned his smile on Maria, ‘pay you to do only what you like.’ ‘Do you pay her for getting sick?’ the manicurist asked. Fulvio moved off to work on a customer in the jabbing manner which suggests he is building up a picture lock by lock. ‘I can hardly turn the
principessa
away,’ he called,
still smiling. ‘Can I now? I run a shop, not a club.’ ‘You
could
,’ threw back one of the cherubic male hairdressers. ‘What’s so unfair’, said an apprentice, ‘is that she always wants Maria. Every time….’

Maria had begun giving me a friction and I could hear no more. I could see, however, that she was not taking part in this discussion at all. Her face in the mirror floated calmly above my own, and she might have seemed impassive but for the harsh knuckles she was grinding into my skull. When Beppe came to set my hair he kept Maria on to pass him the rollers. She was still with us when an odd pantomime figure strode into the looking glass and began to twirl within its fanciful stucco frame. ‘Good morning,
principessa
. Make yourself comfortable,’ invited Fulvio. ‘Maria will be with you presently.’ But the figure continued to plunge about in its tall felt boots, over-long greatcoat and soiled pink turban. ‘
Io sono puntua-a-ale!
’ piped the
principessa
since this was she. ‘I am on ti-i-ime!’ She intoned the words to a nursery-rhyme rhythm, half mocking, half whining. Maria kept her face resolutely focused on the basket of coloured rollers. ‘Two red,’ demanded Beppe, ‘one green. Old witch,’ he whispered to Maria. ‘I’d refuse if I were you. The sight of her is enough. A maid servant wouldn’t do it, why should you?’ He jerked his head towards Fulvio. ‘Snobby old sod,’ he whispered out of the corner of his mouth, ‘let him look after her himself if it means that much to him to have her here. A blue one for the bottom please.’

I strained to catch a glimpse of the
principessa
’s face, astonished at the licence her presence unleashed in this formal establishment. But she had twirled off again. She had, I had noticed, a foreign accent. Could that be the matter? Could she have lice perhaps? Surely not! I found myself shuddering, caught in the general excited distaste. Her costume was like something out of Delacroix – an Eastern merchant’s redolent of unwholesome travels. ‘I am being kept wai-i-iting!’ carolled the
principessa
coyly, ‘although I telephoned!’ Beppe
put me under the dryer and I heard no more.

Minutes later, I felt curious enough to squirm out again on the pretext that I had to make a phone call. The
principessa
had taken off the turban. She was near bald. Wisps of cobweb hair clung like spiders to her pink scalp. Her face was ancient and livid. A manicurist held one outstretched foot: a yellowish grey appendage, like those of dead saints miraculously preserved and exposed in crypts. Maria was sulkily stirring something which she showed to the old woman as I passed. It must have been unsatisfactory for she was still tinkering with it when I returned, and it was another ten minutes before I saw her start to massage her customer’s pate. The old woman’s mouth kept going all the time but of course I could hear nothing. The staff were by now in stitches of laughter which they concealed by turning their heads or grinning on one side of their faces like glove puppets. By the time I came out from under my dryer their mood had changed. The princess was under the steamer, and now they talked with open anger, insisting that Maria had done enough for one day and that someone else should finish the old woman off. ‘But she always asks for Maria,’ objected the manicurist. ‘Maria,’ called the
principessa
at that moment from under her steamer, ‘Maria!’ ‘What do you want?’ asked an apprentice irritably. ‘I want Maria.’ ‘Maria is busy.’ ‘Which Maria do you want?’ another girl asked cunningly, ‘we have three Marias you know!’ The old woman subsided.

Beppe came to comb me out. ‘Who is she?’ I asked. ‘A White Russian,’ he said, ‘filthy rich and mean as an ant. She never pays.’ ‘You mean she never tips?’ He laughed, ‘
Macchè!
She never pays! Not a lira. It’s not just for Maria’s sake that we’re angry, though that’s unfair enough. Why should we have her here? Is she pretty? Does she pay? Is she poor? There’s no reason,’ he concluded harshly. ‘Signor Fulvio
è grullo!
He’s a fool! Your hair came out well,’ he ended professionally, ‘those uncombed styles suit you.’

‘Everything suits the signora,’ smiled Fulvio coming up. ‘She has good bones,’ he flattered, ‘fine skin. That’s beauty. You have to admit it when you see beauty! When we see a painting,’ he went on in a louder voice, haranguing the
salon
, ‘we admire it, so why not a beautiful woman who is a gift of nature and’, he bowed at Beppe, ‘of art?’ Beneath him, as he bowed, the gold scissors chain bellied with the pendulous delicacy of an udder. When he straightened, it subsided. He was a trim little man.

‘Beauty!’ I recognized the old woman’s accent although what she had released was less a word than a sob. ‘Beauty!’ she repeated. She had come out from the steamer and was standing behind us. On her scalp, the sparse few hairs, now dampened, stood out like feelers on some pale primitive fish. ‘I was never beautiful,’ she said in a haggard voice, ‘but now I sometimes stare in the mirror’ – she moved over beside me to the glass – ‘like this!’ Her eyes fixed their image and she went on in a voice which the departure of its earlier querulous and mocking note had left disturbingly intimate, ‘And I say: can
this
, this be Nadia?’ She stared at us, then back at her own image. ‘It’s horrible,’ she muttered, ‘appalling!’ She paused for a moment, her widening orbs fastened to their own reflection. The girls held their breath.

Fulvio tried a little laugh. ‘
Principessa!
It comes to us all!’

‘Yes,’ she said eagerly. ‘I wasn’t beautiful, but I was not like
this
! I wish I had a photograph, Fulvio, to show you. Just to….’ She trailed off.

‘All of us,’ said Fulvio consolingly.

‘
No!
’ She wouldn’t have such. ‘You, Fulvio, may be in your sixties.’ (
Could
he? Perhaps.) ‘
I
am eighty-six,
eighty
-six…. These young things come to you, Fulvio, and you work on them but I …’ She seemed to try to collect herself, giving him the fossil of a worldly smile from teeth whose newness was bleak among the marshes of her flesh. ‘I….’ Again she foundered. Closed, her receding mouth was gentle, blindly
soft as perhaps a fish muzzle. ‘I can’t bear a wig now. The itch…. Fulvio…. Oh, what an old wreck!’ She was crying. The deepened wrinkles drew stars and goose’s footprints across the lost face.

‘We’ll try something else.’

She was not listening. ‘Older,’ she murmured, ‘every day! Fulvio! And when you know what it means….’

‘It doesn’t matter….’

‘OOhh!’

‘But
principessa
,’ Fulvio spoke with ardour. ‘It comes to us
all!
Truly,’ he pleaded, ‘princess!’ The word was magic to him. He would have performed feats to restore the poor hag to the image that went with it, to energize her blue and sluggish blood.

‘Ahh!’ She was unconsoled.

‘Every mother’s son of us,’ he assured her. ‘Earlier than we think! We’re in the same boat. From the beginning. From adolescence. Cells in our brains – I was reading only the other day – begin to decay, to die. You envy the signora!’ (He was preparing to sacrifice me. Let him. Poor woman, I thought, poor wretch, do what you can for her, say what you like. I tried to signal my complaisance but Fulvio was staring at me as though at some creature in a pet shop which he had decided not to buy.) ‘Her beauty’, he said, ‘is fading already. Not obviously perhaps but I can see. The expert detects what will be plain to all in a year or so. Look at the dry parts of her face.’ He bent towards my reflection in the mirror. ‘See,’ he invited. He pointed to the corners of my eyes and I could feel them cringe, crinkling into the folds he wished to find. ‘Crows’ feet,’ he cried. I tried to smile through this but what appeared was not unlike the old woman’s nervous simper of some minutes before. Old hag, I thought suddenly, just because she’s some sort of a princess! ‘There’s a pout line,’ shouted Fulvio, ‘by her mouth. Laughter, pleasure – it takes its toll!’

‘Signor Fulvio!’ Beppe giggled in embarrassment.

‘Oh,’ the
principessa’s
groan was gentler now. ‘The signora has time before her.’

‘Phuitt!’ Fulvio dismissed it. (I’ll get up, I thought. I’ll leave now. But they were standing around me. It would look like pique.) ‘Her bones’, he reneged on his earlier compliment, ‘won’t save her. Do we admire skeletons? Thin women wear worse. All this talk of carbohydrates now. It used to be calories. Pupupuh! I say to them. Our generation, princess’ – gallantly – ‘had more sense!’

I stood up. ‘I’m going, Fulvio.’

He stepped aside. ‘Eh? Ah, you’re finished? Well, your hair looks very nice, signora. An excellent job, successful! You’re not … no hard feelings, eh?’

I walked out to the hall. Blushing and shrugging, Beppe followed me. He helped me off with the lavender pinafore and accepted his tip. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘Signor Fulvio is a bit, well … he has Russian blood himself, like the
principessa
. It…. Oh, one must make allowances and … he’s getting old….’ Realizing that this was the wrong tack, Beppe rushed me to the outer door where he sprayed my hair with a lacquer smelling faintly of incense. Visible even here in the mirrors, Fulvio’s image seemed to be still castigating his own pomps and artifices. The mournful gorgon beside him did not appear consoled. There was a retch from the cloakroom. Maria? From the street I saw them again through the plate-glass window. Fulvio’s hands were upturned, his mouth agape in the traditional gestures of impotence. In the polished marble slab on which gold lettering spelled F
ULVIO
,
coiffeur, friseur, parrucchière,
I could see the fashionable outline of my lacquered hair.