And while days were dull, nights brought more pleasure, for they were reserved for spotting nice looking girls. Unwelcome comments would be made about the length of their mini-skirts and buttocks popping in skinny jeans.
Vulgar as they may have been in their conduct, both young men had strikingly handsome features, enhanced by an exceptionally good taste in clothing.
“You know, my friend? No one needs your good attitude, if there’s no good money equivalent to add up to it.” Having said it, Sandro shivered, whether it was for the amount of coffee he had that morning or for the depth of the words he uttered. “I do not think my mother would be inclined to feel proud of me, if I didn’t supply her with money.”
Gianni proceeded with a silent response to the arguments of his friend. He always failed to keep an important discussion going, especially when he felt he was expected to. His evident lack of eloquence contributed greatly to the natural insecurity of a man whose profession was serving others. Clueless as to what the etiquette required in such cases, Gianni offered his friend to take a turn around the town that night. It would help cheer him up, surely. Sandro nodded with a queer smile and bluntly gazed out of the café’s window.
“Alright”, he said at last, “but I’ll pay for the drinks.”
Venice differs for those who are lucky enough to visit it and the unlucky ones whose destiny is to live it. While the first ones may as well find it charming, alluring and romantic, the second find it exceptionally dull and bleak. Summers are filled with an unpleasant mix of odours of greening water and sour armpits; winters are marked by acqua alta and bitingly cold winds. But what is most annoying about living in Venice is never having it for oneself, at one’s disposal. Like a lover looking for a private date with his beloved, a citizen of Venice always awaits a moment to enjoy her looks in quiet solitude. But her permissive character welcomes everyone and that alone turns the citizen away from his beloved and he curses her for being wanton.
Sandro woke up early that morning. He found his naked self butter-spread along a smelly old sofa, which bore signs of cigarette burns and dark stains from freshly spilled Jack Daniels. The sun beamed into his face and with its heavy summer glow it had his head turning with dizziness. He attempted to lift himself but his limbs would not obey. Exhausted, Sandro fell back into the arms of Morpheus, remembering where he saw that smelly old sofa before. He surely wasn’t back at his place and nothing resembled Gianni’s apartment either.
A high pitched female voice interrupted his thoughts and caught his immediate attention. “Your phone rang,” the voice said. Sandro opened his eyes and cautiously sat himself up, keeping his head below his knees. He stretched out his arm. He felt the phone falling into his palm and forced himself to look up at who the high pitched voice belonged to.
There, before him stood a short and plump girl whose little face was adorned by a thatch of dark curly hair. The girl was fresh in her twenties, standing happily naked in front of him and smiling with her sharp, beaming smile that had him look away from her immediately.
“Did you see who called?” he asked.
“No, but it must be from your office. You must be really late. It’s half past nine already,” followed a bright and shiny response.
Sandro smiled with the left side of his lips and gave the girl a long measured stare. “I am the boss of the office, as you called it. I can never be late. And you? You live here? Maybe you should dress yourself.”
The girl’s smile suddenly disappeared. She hurried into the closet to fetch a bathrobe of some kind.
“So, what’s your name?” Sandro asked as he was putting the shirt on his muscled chest.
“Gabriella,” the girl smiled.
“You’re a hooker?”
Silence followed at Sandro’s turned back as he was zipping his pants up. He turned back to look at her again and apologise. In the end, wasn’t it the most logical thing to ask of a naked girl who greets you with a beaming smile on a shabby sofa? But the sun was too bright that morning, together with the girl’s face who was standing with her back to the window.
“I am a nurse at a rest home for the elderly. Now, if you please, I would like you to leave.” The high pitched voice had changed its colouring but Sandro didn’t notice it.
“Sure. I have to go anyway,” Sandro hurried himself out and gave the last look at the girl in the green bathrobe so unkind to her complexion. “One last thing, though.”
Gabriella raised her eyes at the perfect features of his face to which exhaustion seemed to have only added in charm.
“Where did you get that sofa?”
The girl seemed startled for a moment. “At a flea market,” she said.
“Ah… Okay then. I must leave. Goodbye… and thank you.”
That morning he walked past his favourite café but didn’t go inside. Gianni would be bombarding him with questions about where he ended up last night and what the girl was like in bed, questions quite normal and welcome under different circumstances. So they would be on any other morning but this, when he felt he could barely tolerate the sun, much less talking. So he went to a new place, closer to his house but often overlooked due to his traditionalism. The modern-looking café with white leather walls and dark timber tables was packed with elegantly dressed natives and a couple of sporty looking tourists who could be easily distinguished in the crowd by their absent-minded looks. Sandro sat down at one of the round timber tables and ordered a cappuccino and a glass of water with an aspirin. Something has changed, he felt it quite distinctly. And it urged him to change something else. The least he could do was to betray his usual choice of café and the usual choice of his order.
He left the café feeling tolerably well. His spirits were high. He walked tall and proud in his navy suit and stylish aviator shades along the tiny streets of Venice, collecting desiring looks and enchanted smiles of travelling ladies who among other reasons arrived here to feast their eyes on men. As he caught their eyes on his tall, handsome self, Sandro felt compelled to introduce himself to one of them, preferably a tall German blonde and spend a lovely couple of days pretending he is madly in love with her. But the thought was spoiled with an aftertaste of Jack Daniels reminding him of a plump, short girl and her shabby sofa.
Gianni certainly deserved a wild slap for leaving his friend in the arms of the fat girl. So distasteful it had been for him to wake up next to her this morning. God knows where they met her. And that sofa of hers…
Having left the office early, a luxury that he could easily afford himself as his agency had recently sold an 18th century mansion on the French Riviera, Sandro directed himself towards the well-known café to catch Gianni before he would leave for his daily afternoon nap.
“There he is, ladies and gentlemen! Signor Alessandro!”
“I wish you were less excited when you see me coming in, Gianni.”
“Why not, my friend? The world is your oyster! Can you not feel it?”
“I guess…”
“By the way, I used your secret trick with ladies and it’s working.”
“What exactly are you talking about?”
“You know, showing the money off, getting them drunk, talking all kinds of shit of how beautiful they are and how you really like them. It works and very well! Last night I slept with this gorgeous blonde and tonight I feel like I can fuck any girl I want.”
“Yeah, right. As long as I pay for it.”
“You didn’t have a problem with it last night, Sandro. By the way, of all the pretty girls you went away with that fat short one,” Gianni whispered and then burst into laughter so loud that clients at the café jumped off their seats.
“About that…” Sandro whispered softly, making sure no one but Gianni could witness his humiliation, “Who is she? And why the hell did you let me leave together with her?”
“No idea, friend. Just a fat girl we met in a bar. She came with her pretty blonde friend, the one that I slept with,” he said proudly. “Honestly I thought you’d fancy her but then you stuck your tongue deep into that fat girl’s mouth and you left twenty minutes later with a bottle of Jack Daniels. Her blonde friend has really big soft tits and while I fucked her I felt really sorry for you and your fat girl,” Gianni went on laughing again, louder, in fits that were scaring his clients away.
“Stop calling her a fat girl,” Sandro hissed at his friend, took his change and left.
“I’ll see you at ten,” Gianni said in the pauses between his laughing fits and went back to bartending and entertaining the remaining clients.
Sandro left not feeling particularly diverted. Something about last night disturbed him profoundly. And that shabby couch and the way it felt, so familiar, yet so disgusting…
That night was spent with Gianni and a group of young American tourists who among other souvenirs wanted a memory of a well spent holiday. Sandro woke up in his own apartment, which didn’t feel like his own anymore, for it smelled of strangers, who were piled up one atop of the other. Three unknown girls who spoke no word of Italian and his best friend lay across Sandro’s bed. A thought splashed across his mind in a split of a second. This must be hell, he thought. It was the kind of hell his grandmother told him about once when he was still a child. “I shall burn and these bodies shall burn together with me,” he thought and shivered. He wasn’t a simpleton to believe in such nonsense as God, heaven and hell, but the mere thought that there could be something bigger in life than a God of Money he prayed to, that thought didn’t let him go back to sleep that night.
Cold morning dressed his skin in a chill.
“I don’t want them here,” he thought. “I don’t want myself here either.”
He hurried to dress himself and leave the house before anyone noticed his absence. The city smelled of a rosy summer dawn. In a couple of minutes the whole lagoon would sparkle and shine in the first rays of sun and the new day would begin. So he walked and let his feet take him to the unknown. With his head pleasantly empty, Sandro felt his lungs fill up with long awaited silence of the deserted city. "There, she is all mine, at last. Only at my disposal and now I can caress the most secret, intimate parts on her body with my eyes,” he thought. His heart gaily pumped blood into his vessels and rushed endorphins into his empty head. There he was on Piazza San Marco, in the centre of the most beautiful and romantic city enjoying the sunrise alone.
And while no one was watching, Sandro sat on the cold stones of the embankment, letting his expensive suit get dirty while his feet were enjoying the pleasurable freshness of green water.
“Money…,” he thought, “Money turns loyalty into cheating, love into hate, hate into love, goodness into sin, a slave into a master and a master into a slave, stupidity into reason and reason into stupidity. While bearing no meaning, money has an immense power. Not just the economic power, but a deep moral aspect of it, a somewhat magically mythological power – the act of possession and the measure of possession alters the man.”
Sandro raised his eyes. The sun was wilfully taking the sky into its possession, spreading all over it like melted butter in a cup of hot milk. Sandro felt a sudden fit in his chest. Noises of the awakening city were reaching him from all ends of Piazza San Marco. He hurried to pull his feet out of the water, put them into his patent leather shoes and covered his eyes with stylish eyewear. Now no one would recognise him.
His first instinct was to return home, but as he remembered the sparse naked bodies adorning his bed, he made his way in a previously unknown direction. Like any other Venetian, Sandro always knew that the city’s charm could not be unveiled to the one who hasn’t had the guts to get himself lost in its intricate streets. And so he let himself get lost for the very first time.
Before him little shops were opened. Sellers greeted him with their sun beamed smiles, which didn’t seem to bother him so much this morning. He wondered how he hadn’t noticed them before. He asked himself of their lives and what they did to remain so bright.
“They have no money, I bet. How much can they earn with selling fish?
Something next to nothing, unless of course they cheat. But still…,” he tried to reason and make his mind up about what these seemingly poor people could have to smile about in their miserable lives.
“Are you lost?” the high pitched female voice enquired of him. “Did you forget something yesterday?” Sandro couldn’t help but smile. But the girl’s face wasn’t smiling. It was Gabriella. She frowned at the sight of him.
“I don’t know how I got here,” was the only thing he could say.
“In that case, I hope you’ll find your way back. Just like you did yesterday,” Gabriella said while closing the front door behind herself, ready to leave. “Wait,” Sandro stopped her. “That sofa of yours… I remember it now. It used to be my mother’s before I made enough money and bought her a new house and then she got rid of it,” he took his shades off and felt how her beaming smile didn’t hurt his eyes anymore. “Please let me come inside and sit on that sofa with you”.
Copyright © 2017 by Anna Novikova
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