On weekday mornings she drove over from Mestre into Venice in the thin, pale hours before dawn, parked in a garage in the Piazzale Roma, then walked a few streets and took the vaporetto n.1 to the San Marco landing. She used the service entrance to the Hotel Giorgione and changed into her uniform in a cramped room among other maids, most of them quite younger than she, who stood around in states of partial undress chattering as they puffed on cigarettes. At the Hotel Giorgione she made as much money as her husband made at his factory work, and much less than her grown up son was making dealing in shady exports. She was not yet worn out by the work.
She changed into her white shoes and straightened the hem of the starched pink uniform, then smoothed her black hair back and clipped it behind her neck. Like this, her face had a more severe expression than usual. She had a few white hairs which flashed in the dark, smoothly rounded shape of her swept-back hair, but these didn’t show when she put on the bonnet. Then all you saw were her searching, sad intelligent eyes and her smile. When she bent her head, you saw that her neck was as smooth as a girl’s.
The Hotel Giorgione rang in the mornings and afternoons with the voices of the tourists who came to stay there having been drawn by descriptions of it they’d read in novels, perhaps, or seen on television. At first, she was cowed by the sheer massiveness and beauty of the place – a 16th-century palazzo with wide, gleaming carpeted halls and vaulted ceilings on which the frescoes of another age had recently been restored to startling life. But she had quickly learned to keep her eyes on the job.
She loaded her cart with fresh towels and linens and with cleaning supplies. She took the freight elevator up to her floor and pushed the cart slowly down the hall to the end, looking for doors which showed the sign asking for the maid to please make up the room. Sometimes the tourists went out early, but sometimes too they stayed, at least the passionate couples on a romantic vacation did, in their rooms making love loudly all morning.
In the rooms that had to be made, she worked with a swift, ruthless efficiency she never showed in her own household. She had learned how to clean a w.c. in ten minutes flat. Most days, as she worked steadily, she was able to detach herself by remembering things that had nothing to do with the cleaning of hotel rooms.
That morning, as she stood in the hall with an armful of dirty sheets, about to stuff them into a laundry bag suspended by a hook to the rear of her cart, a large man stepped out of a room just in front of her. He looked at her and gave her a wide, pleasant smile. She smiled in return.
He said something in English. An American.
She shook her head. He beamed at her and said, Va bene, grazie.
What was this man thanking her for?
She smiled again but, as she did, she raised one hand to her face and touched the side of a cheek with her fingertips.
He looked at her, it seemed, with a sudden sharpness. Then he blinked and smiled again and, turning on his heel, strode off in shoes that squeaked down the corridor to the elevators.
She stood there, holding with one arm the mass of soiled linens, her other arm raised – and she found herself blushing.
At first she thought, It’s easy to know why that happened, this man reminds you of your husband. But it wasn’t that. Then she thought that the feeling that had pierced through her probably had nothing to do with this man for himself but with what she had been thinking, or fantasizing, just as he stepped out into the hallway. She turned her mind back to try to recreate those thoughts, whatever they had been, but she could not. She shrugged theatrically to herself and dropped the sheets in the bag.
From the wide mouth of the laundry bag rose the smell of bodies and of spilled semen.
At noon she took her break. She walked to a small, narrow park nearby the hotel and sat on a bench under the yellowing plane trees. She hugged herself with one arm as she smoked a cigarette and watched the people strolling through the park. At one end was a large statue in sunlight of Garibaldi on a horse, his sword upraised.
There was plenty of cleaning work that day, many of the rooms having cleared out after the long holiday weekend. As she worked, she smelled the scent of her own body rising through the maid’s uniform. She remembered smelling herself like that as a girl – a thought that made her smile
She saw an image of herself swimming with her husband. He was thin then and had the body of a god. After their swim, they’d always go up into the dunes and make love. She remembered once, in a spasm of passion as her husband lunged in and out of her, licking her own shoulder, as if licking her own flesh were somehow no different than licking his.
Recalling that day made her wet between the legs. She shut and locked the door to the room, went into the toilet and, sitting on the curved edge of the bidet with her legs spread and her stockings rolled hastily down and her panties around her knees, masturbated swiftly. She bit the back of her hand as she rose up, up, up into her orgasm.
She was trembling as she hurriedly pulled up the panties and refastened the flesh-coloured stockings. She smelled her fingers – the smell of sex on them was pungent, like the smell of the lagoon around Venice. She patted her dress down front and back.
Who should be walking in the hall but the large man with the clear, pleasant smile? He was dressed in a suit and was holding a large bottle of mineral water. She swept a hand over her forehead to get off it a clinging strand of hair and smiled demurely at him.
Scusi signorina, he said.
She smiled at that. Signorina!
Signora, she said.
Ah, he said, Mi scusi, mi scusi. Signora, io voglio – He suddenly stopped and let his fluttering hand fall.
You can speak English, she told him. I speak some. From my school.
Ah, he said. He shook his head, smiling. Then he looked at her with the sharpness of this morning and said:
Please. I want to know your name.
She stared at him with her mouth open in an O.
My name? she said.
Yes. How do you say that in Italian? I knew but I’ve forgotten. I’m sorry.
Come si chiama?
That means?
It means: What are you called?
Ah.
He looked at her. He had blue eyes.
I am called Gabriella.
He held out a wide hand, which she shook. It was fleshy yet not unpleasant.
Mi chiamo, he said, stumbling a little and pursing his wet lips –
Buono, buono, she said with forced warmth, encouraging him.
Harold.
She beamed. He let go of her hand.
Piacere, she said. It means, With pleasure to meet you.
Ah, he said. Piacere, then.
Are you in Venice on some business? she asked. She was impressed to hear her own speech, realizing that her English was in fact very good, and the fact of her English being good gave her a kind of superiority over him, even though he was in a beautiful suit and she was wearing her slightly wrinkled maid’s uniform.
Yes, yes, he said, pursing his lips as if he were trying to speak his English the way that she spoke it.
Realizing all at once that the hand he had just shaken in his hard, firm grip was the same hand with which she had just finished masturbating herself on the bidet in the locked room, she laughed.
Well, she said to his enquiring look, I hope you have a good stay here.
I will. And thank you. Ciao.
Ciao.
He raised his hand and, waving slightly, passed by her as she stood there in the hall. Watching his back go, Gabriella felt a sadness that thrilled her body like pure elation.