The Pieces from Berlin Read Online Free PDF Page A

thing to be a banker; banks did not yet have the kind of power that interested people, not like the makers of cloth or cars or steel. She was too grand for some parties, not quite grand enough for the best parties. She saw the girls linger at the shop windows, chatting. She saw the police smile under their black helmets. She wanted to flirt, but correctly.
    At least in the Galleria she felt a little insulated: no weather, no stench from the engines in the street, no beggars, no truly poor people. She could find, in the echo and bustle, all those men who’d be happy to talk, but she had no excuse to talk to any one of them in particular.
    She thought how much easier it would have been if she had brothers, who could lend her their friends.
    A young man stopped in front of her. She failed to dodge him. He said: “Signorina, I am a singer.” She said nothing. “I am a singer,” he said, “who has heard the applause of the French.” Since he blocked her, she looked him over: tall, narrow shoulders, too much chest, pipe legs, and all wrapped in a cloak that could have warmed half a chorus. “Unfortunately,” he said, “at this particular season, the impresarios have chosen not to favor talent. Not at all.” She thought of kicking him. “I was wondering,” he said, “if I could buy you a coffee.”
    She stared at him. She had already, in her mind, counted the change in her purse.
    They sat in the way of the crowds, a table by potted plants. Lucia told the man nothing, which did not seem to matter since he told her everything about a brilliant career now briefly and only temporarily spoiled by unemployment. His name was Giorgio. He was, of course, a tenor.
    She bought him pasta in the end. She thought of him as a clue: how to find a different city, how to get out and not just to wait for her life to begin. And for a little while, quite chastely, she did move out into a city she had only glimpsed as she walked past the cafés: a minor Bohemia of resting musicians, all waiting for the next season’s contracts, all hungry to go sing in some tiny box of a theater in far Piedmont rather than live without an audience at all.
    She went to his house one afternoon when her parents assumed she was with friends at the cinema. Giorgio lived off the main avenues, down cobbled streets with no sidewalk, on the wrong side of an unused church.
    She sat on the edge of a chair and drank coffee he made with a metal espresso pot on a gas ring. She could smell stale water somewhere.
    She learned that the stars her parents followed at La Scala were all fakes and frauds and failing, that only the conspiracy of managers stopped a whole new generation showing them up. She learned a little, too, about singing Pagliacci, but she got the impression Giorgio had never actually done that in public.
    She heard voices, one after another, through the whole afternoon: uncertain sopranos, rustbucket basses, a mezzo whose breath swelled and failed like a graph. There was a double bass being bowed, a sound just under her conscious hearing. There was a harpist, not good.
    One of the two shutters on Giorgio’s window slammed into place.
    “Don’t worry,” Giorgio said.
    Lucia wondered why the half shade was supposed to make her anxious.
    “There’s still light enough,” Giorgio said.
    She used to think she learned everything that mattered in that moment: that Giorgio couldn’t go on, could hardly think until she gave him an excuse. He wanted her, but he couldn’t place her: not a working girl, clearly of good family, and so dangerous. She couldn’t possibly want what he wanted. But then, why was she there?
    Lucia didn’t move.
    “Unless,” Giorgio said, “you’d like me to close the other shutter.”
    But she had learned her lesson already. She remembered that she had to meet someone, so she said, and she left, and after that Giorgio hailed her in the Galleria any time she wanted, presented her to his friends, sometimes took her to a party, once