The Beautiful Summer by Cesare Pavese

Author:Cesare Pavese
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241983409
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2018-03-28T16:00:00+00:00

NINE

Next day, at noon, Amelia called on her, but as Severino was having a meal with her, they only chatted generalities. When they were out in the street, Amelia told her that she had been to a woman-painter that morning who had given her some work. Why didn’t she come too. This fool of an artist wanted to do a painting of two women embracing, so they could pose together. ‘Why couldn’t she copy herself in the mirror?’ replied Ginia. ‘Do you expect her to take her clothes off to paint?’ retorted Amelia, laughing.

Ginia said she could not leave the shop any time she chose. ‘But this woman will pay us, you realize that?’ said Amelia. ‘It’s a picture that will take some time to do. If you don’t come, she won’t take me either’.

‘Won’t you do alone?’

‘There have got to be two women having a scrap, get it? There must be two. It is a large picture. We should only have to pose as if we were dancing together’.

‘But I don’t want to pose’, said Ginia.

‘What are you frightened of? She is a woman too, you know’.

‘I don’t want to’.

They argued as far as the tram and Amelia asked her what she thought she had under her clothes to preserve like a holy of holies. She was in a temper and did not look at her. Ginia did not reply, but when Amelia told her that she would have agreed to take off her clothes for Barbetta, she laughed in her face. They parted on such bad terms that she was doubtful whether Amelia would ever forgive her. But Ginia who at first dismissed the matter with a shrug of her shoulders, suddenly panicked at the thought that Amelia might make her look a fool in front of Guido and Rodrigues, and she was not too confident that Guido would be ingenuous enough not to laugh at her as well. ‘I would not mind posing for him’, she thought. But she knew very well that Amelia was a better figure than she was and that a painter would prefer her. Amelia was a fully developed woman.

At a late hour she called at the studio for a moment to forestall Amelia. It was the time when Guido said he always went along. She found the door locked. It occurred to her that Guido would be at the café with the other two. She passed by the café and looked in the window for a moment but she could only see Amelia sitting there, smoking, with her chin resting on her fist. ‘Poor blighter’, she thought as she went back home.

After supper she saw from the street that there was a light in the studio and ran upstairs, overjoyed. But Guido was not in. Rodrigues opened the door and let her in and asked her to excuse him because he was terribly hungry and in the middle of a meal. He was standing up by the table, eating salami out of the wrapping; the light was as dim as on the previous occasion.

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