Numero zero by Umberto Eco
7
Wednesday, April 15, Evening
I COULD SEE HOW DISPIRITED Maia was, and I caught up with her as she was leaving. Instinctively I took her by the arm.
“Don’t take it personally, Maia. Let’s go, I’ll walk you home. We could have a drink on the way.”
“I live by the canals, plenty of bars around there. There’s one I know that does an excellent Bellini, my great passion. Thanks.”
We reached Ripa Ticinese, and I saw the canals for the first time. I’d heard about them, of course, but was convinced they were all underground, and yet it felt as if we were in Amsterdam. Maia told me with a certain pride that Milan had once been very much like Amsterdam, crisscrossed by canals right to the center. It must have been beautiful, which was why Stendhal had so liked it. But later they had covered the canals for public health reasons, and only here were they still visible, with their putrid water, though at one time there were washerwomen along the banks. And in some of the side streets you could still see rows of old houses and many case di ringhiera.
Case di ringhiera, large old buildings with an inner courtyard and iron railings circling the upper floors. They were places I’d heard about, images of the 1950s that I’d come across when editing encyclopedias or when referring to the performance of Bertolazzi’s El Nost Milan at the Piccolo Teatro. But I didn’t imagine any still existed.
Maia laughed. “Milan is full of case di ringhiera, except that they’re no longer for poor people. Come, I’ll show you.” She took me into a double courtyard. “Here on the ground floor it’s been completely redeveloped. There are workshops for small antiques dealers—though really just glorified junk shops charging high prices—and the studios of painters in search of fame. Now it’s all stuff for tourists. But up there, those two floors are exactly as they used to be.”
I could see the iron railings around the upper floors, and doors that opened onto each balcony, and I asked whether anyone still hung their wash out to dry.
Maia smiled. “We’re not in Naples. Almost all of it has been renovated. At one time the steps went straight up to the balcony, which led to each front door, and at the far end was a single toilet for several families, with a hole in the floor, and you could forget any idea of a shower or a bath. Now it has all been done up for the rich. Some apartments even have a Jacuzzi and they cost an arm and a leg. Less where I live. I’ve got two rooms with water dripping down the walls, though fortunately they’ve put in a toilet and a shower, but I love the area. Soon, of course, they’ll be fixing that up as well. Then I’ll have to move out, I won’t be able to afford the rent, unless Domani gets going pretty soon and they take me on permanently. That’s why I put up with all this humiliation.”
“Don’t take it personally, Maia. It’s obvious that during a trial period we have to learn what we can write and what we can’t. In any event, Simei has responsibilities, to the paper and to the publisher. Perhaps you could do as you liked when you worked on celebrity romance, but here it’s different, we’re working on a newspaper.”
“And that’s why I was hoping to get away from all that celebrity garbage, I wanted to be a serious journalist. But perhaps I’m a failure. I never graduated, I had to help my parents, then they died, and it was too late to go back. I’m living in a hole. I’ll never be the special correspondent covering the Gulf War . . . What am I doing? Horoscopes, taking advantage of suckers. Isn’t that failure?”
“We’ve only just started. There’ll be opportunities for someone like you as soon as we’ve launched. You’ve come up with some brilliant ideas. I liked them, and I think Simei liked them too.”
I could feel I was lying to her. I should have told her that she was walking into a blind alley, that they’d never send her off to the Gulf, that perhaps it would be better for her to get out before it was too late. But I couldn’t depress her any further. I decided instead to tell her the truth, not about her but about me.
And since I was about to bare my soul, like a poet, I adopted a more intimate tone, almost without realizing it.
“Look at me, Maia, see me as I am. I didn’t get a degree either. All my life I’ve done occasional jobs, and now I’ve ended up past the age of fifty at a newspaper. But you know when I really began to be a loser? When I started thinking of myself as a loser. If I hadn’t spent my time brooding about it, I would have won at least one round.”
“Past fifty? You don’t look it, I mean . . . you don’t.”
“You’d have said I was only fifty?”
“No, I’m sorry, you’re a fine man, and you have a sense of humor. Which is a sign of freshness, youth . . .”
“If anything, it’s a sign of wisdom, and therefore of old age.”
“No, you obviously don’t believe what you’re saying, but it’s clear you’ve decided to go along with this venture and you’re doing it . . . with cheerful cynicism.”
Cheerful? She was a blend of cheer and melancholy and was watching me with the eyes (how would a bad writer have put it?) of a fawn.
Of a fawn? Ah, well . . . it’s just that, as we were walking, she looked up at me because I was taller than she was. And that was it. Any woman who looks at you from below looks like Bambi.
Meanwhile we arrived at her bar. She was sipping her Bellini and I felt relaxed in front of my whiskey. I was gazing once again at a woman who wasn’t a prostitute, and I felt younger.
Perhaps it was the alcohol . . . I was beginning to feel the urge to confide. When did I last confide in anyone? I told her I’d once had a wife who had walked out on me. I told her I had won that woman over because, at the beginning, I’d messed something up and apologized, said that perhaps I was stupid. I love you even if you’re stupid, she’d told me—things like that can drive you mad with love. But then perhaps she realized I was more stupid than she could handle, and it ended.
Maia laughed. (“What a nice thing to say, I love you even if you’re stupid!”) And then she told me that even though she was younger and had never thought of herself as stupid, she too had had some unhappy affairs, perhaps because she couldn’t bear the stupidity of the other person, or perhaps because most of those roughly her own age seemed so immature. “As if I were the mature one. And so, you see, I’m almost thirty and still on the shelf. It’s just that we’re never satisfied with what we have.”
Thirty? In Balzac’s time a woman of thirty was old and wrinkled, and Maia seemed like twenty, apart from a few fine lines around the eyes, as if she had done a lot of crying, or was sensitive to the light and always squinted on sunny days.
“There’s nothing better,” I said, “than an amiable encounter between two losers,” and as soon as I said it, I felt afraid.
“Fool,” she said lightly, then she apologized, fearing she had been overly familiar.
“No, on the contrary, thank you,” I said. “No one has ever called me fool in such a seductive way.”
I had gone too far. Fortunately, she was quick to change the subject. “They’re trying to make it look like Harry’s Bar,” she said, “and they can’t even get the spirits in the right place. You see, among the various whiskeys there’s a Gordon’s gin, and the Sapphire and the Tanqueray are on the other side.”
“What, where?” I asked, looking straight ahead, and all I could see was tables. “No,” she said, “at the bar, look.” I turned, and she was right, but how could she have imagined I’d seen what she was looking at? At the time I didn’t take much notice, and took the opportunity to call for the check. I gave her a few more words of reassurance as I walked her to a door, from which you could see a courtyard and the workshop of a mattress maker. There were still a few mattress makers left, it seemed, despite the television ads for spring mattresses. She thanked me, she smiled, she offered me her hand. It was warm and appreciative.
I returned home along the canals of a benign old Milan. I ought to have been more familiar with the city that held so many surprises.
8
Friday, April 17
OVER THE NEXT FEW DAYS, as we were doing our homework (as we now called it), Simei entertained us with projects that were perhaps not pressing, but still demanded our attention.
“I’m not yet sure whether it will be for issue 0/1 or 0/2, though we still have many blank pages for 0/1, and I’m not saying we have to start off with sixty pages like the Corriere, but we need at least twenty-four. For some pages, we can get by with advertising. That no one has yet taken any is neither here nor there: we’ll lift it from other newspapers and run it as if—and in the meantime it’ll inspire confidence in our proprietor, give him a sense of a decent future income.”
“And a column with death notices,” suggested Maia. “They also bring in cash. Let me make up a few. I love killing off characters with strange names and bereft families, especially the important ones. I like the ones who grieve on the sidelines, those who don’t care much about the deceased or the family but use the announcement to name-drop, just so they can say they knew him too.”
Sharp as ever. But after our walk of a few evenings ago, I was keeping some distance from her, and she likewise, both of us feeling vulnerable.
“Death notices are fine,” said Simei, “but first the horoscopes. I was thinking of something else, though. I mean brothels, or rather, the old-fashioned ‘houses of tolerance.’ People talk of bordellos even if they have no idea what they are, but I can remember them. I was already an adult in 1958 when they were closed down.”
“I too had come of age by then,” said Braggadocio. “I explored a few myself.”
“I’m not talking about the one in Via Chiaravalle—that was a real bordello, with urinals at the entrance so that troops could relieve themselves before going in—”
“—and shapeless swaggering whores sticking their tongues out at the soldiers and timid provincial lads, and the maîtresse shouting, ‘Come on, boys, what are we waiting for?’”
“Please, Braggadocio, there’s a young lady here.”
“Perhaps, if you have to write about it,” said Maia, unabashed, “you should say, ‘Ripe in years, they strolled indolently, gestured lasciviously, before clients hot with desire.’”
“Well done, Fresia, not exactly like that, but a more delicate language needs to be found. Not least because I was particularly interested in the more respectable houses, such as the one in San Giovanni sul Muro, all Art Nouveau style, full of intellectuals who went there (so they said) in search not of sex but of art history.”
“Or the one in Via Fiori Chiari, Art Deco with multicolored tiles,” said Braggadocio, his voice full of nostalgia. “Who knows whether our readers recall them.”
“And those not yet old enough would have seen them in Fellini films,” I added, because when you have no recollections of events, you take them from art.
“I leave that to you, Braggadocio,” concluded Simei. “Do me a nice colorful piece saying something along the lines that the good old days weren’t so bad after all.”
“But why this renewed interest in brothels?” I asked. “It might excite older men, but it would scandalize older women.”
“I’ll tell you something, Colonna,” said Simei. “The old brothel in Via Fiori Chiari closed down in 1958, then someone bought it in the early 1960s and turned it into a restaurant that was very chic with all those multicolored tiles. But they kept one or two cubicles and gilded the bidets. And you’ve no idea how many women asked their husbands to take them into those cubbyholes to find out what happened in the old days . . . That, of course, only went on until the wives lost interest, or else the food wasn’t up to snuff. The restaurant closed, end of story. But listen, I’m thinking of a page with Braggadocio’s piece on the left and, on the right, a report on decay in the city’s suburbs, with the indecent traffic of young women walking the streets so children can’t go out at night. No comment to link the two phenomena, we’ll let readers draw their own conclusions. After all, everyone agrees deep down that the houses of tolerance should be brought back—the wives so that husbands will not go around the streets picking up hookers who stink up the car with cheap perfume, the men so they can sneak off into one of those courtyards and, if spotted, they can say they’re there to admire the local color. Who will do me the report on hookers?”
Costanza said he would like to do it, and everyone agreed. To spend a few nights driving around the streets was too heavy on gas, and then there was always the risk of bumping into a police patrol.
That evening I was struck by Maia’s expression. As if she’d realized she had fallen into a snake pit. And so I waited for her to leave, hung around for a few minutes on the pavement, and then—knowing which route she took—caught up with her halfway home. “I’m leaving, I’m leaving,” she said, almost in tears, trembling. “What kind of newspaper have I ended up in? At least my celebrity romances did no harm to anyone—they even brought some business to ladies’ hairdressers.”
“Maia, don’t decide anything yet, Simei is still working things out, we can’t be sure he really wants to publish all that stuff. We’re still at the drawing board, inventing ideas, possible scenarios, that’s a good thing, and nobody has asked you to go around the streets dressed as a hooker to interview anyone. This evening you’re looking at it all the wrong way, you’ve got to stop imagining things. How about going to a movie?”
“Over there is a film I’ve already seen.”
“Over where?”
“Where we just passed on the other side of the street.”
“But I was holding your arm and looking at you, I wasn’t looking at the other side of the street. You’re a strange one.”
“You never see the things I see,” she said. “Anyway, let’s buy a newspaper and see what’s playing in the area.”
We saw a film of which I remember nothing. Feeling her still trembling, I eventually took her hand, warm and appreciative once more, and we remained there like two young lovers, except that we were like the lovers from the Round Table who slept with a sword between them.
Taking her home—she now seemed a little more cheerful—I kissed her on the forehead, patting her on the cheek as an elderly friend might do. After all, I thought, I could be her father.
Or almost.
9
Friday, April 24
WORK WENT SLOWLY THAT WEEK. No one seemed eager to do very much, including Simei. On the other hand, twelve issues in a year isn’t the same as one a day. I read the first drafts of the articles, tried to give them a uniformity of style and to discourage overly elaborate expressions. Simei approved: “We’re doing journalism here, not literature.”
“By the way,” chipped in Costanza, “this fashion for cell phones is on the increase. Yesterday someone next to me on the train was rambling on about his bank transactions, I learned all about him. People are going crazy. We ought to do a lifestyle piece about it.”
“The whole business of cell phones can’t last,” declared Simei. “First, they cost a fortune and only a few can afford them. Second, people will soon discover it isn’t so essential to telephone everyone at all times. They’ll lose the enjoyment of private, face-to-face conversation, and at the end of the month they’ll discover their phone bill is running out of control. It’s a fashion that’s going to fizzle out in a year, two at most. Cell phones, for now, are useful only to adulterous husbands, and perhaps plumbers. But no one else. So for our readers, most of whom don’t have cell phones, a lifestyle piece is of no interest. And those who have them couldn’t care less, or rather, they’d just regard us as snobs, as radical chic.”
“Not only that,” I said. “Remember that Rockefeller, Agnelli, and the president of the United States don’t need cell phones, they have teams of secretaries to look after them. So people will soon realize that only second-raters use them—those poor folk who have to keep in touch with the bank to make sure they’re not overdrawn, or with the boss who’s checking up on them. And so cell phones will become a symbol of social inferiority, and no one will want them.”
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“And as she’ll be reading Domani—we hope—we can tell her she’s not a lady. And she has a husband who’s second-rate or an adulterer. And there again, perhaps Commendator Vimercate is thinking of checking out cell phone companies, and we’ll be doing him a fine service. In short, the question is either irrelevant or too hot to handle. Let’s leave it. It’s like the business of the computer. Here the Commendatore has given us one each, and they’re useful for writing or storing information, though I’m old school and never know what to do with them. Most of our readers are like me and have no use for them because they have no information to store. We’ll end up giving our readers inferiority complexes.”
Having abandoned the subject of electronics, we set about rereading an article that had been duly corrected, and Braggadocio said, “‘Moscow’s anger’? Isn’t it banal to always use such emphatic expressions—the president’s anger, pensioners’ rage, and so on and on?”
“No,” I said, “these are precisely the expressions readers expect, that’s what newspapers have accustomed them to. Readers understand what’s going on only if you tell them we’re in a no-go situation, the government is forecasting blood and tears, the road is all uphill, the Quirinal Palace is ready for war, Craxi is shooting point-blank, time is pressing, should not be taken for granted, no room for bellyaching, we’re in deep water, or better still, we’re in the eye of the storm. Politicians don’t just say or state emphatically—they roar. And the police act with professionalism.”