XXV

Cute. They’re cute.
Some of them are even very cute. But then there are ugly ones, too: it’s incredible how people manage to get such a distorted view of themselves. One time, in fact, I heard that a young woman came in who tipped the scales at 200 pounds. I was told about her, because they never let her get all the way to me. They know I wouldn’t have been especially courteous.

Not that I have anything against the ugly, heavens no, and for that matter, if there weren’t any ugly people, how would we ever be able to appreciate beauty? The ugly are a necessary evil. For the most part, they’re well aware of the way they look, and they keep to themselves, lurking in the shadows. When they can, they conceal their appearance with appropriate clothing, or else they devote themselves to intellectual pursuits.

I’m obsessed with beauty. Or actually, I should say, with elegance, which is something quite different from beauty. When it comes to elegance, I’m quite a stickler. First and foremost, let it never be said in my presence that elegance is a way of covering up ugliness. That’s not the way it is. As if elegance were just a matter of dresses and shoes, as if all that were needed was a designer handbag or silk scarf to make up for an asymmetrical face or a wart on the nose.

The distorted use of words is one of the ills of our century. She’s elegant, we say. Or, even worse, we say: at least she’s elegant. As if we were talking about something to make up for a shortcoming, a crutch. Since I have plenty of money, some think, I can use elegance to conceal the sweepings of ugliness under the carpet of beautiful accessories.

Elegance is quite another matter. Elegance is beauty worn proudly, a natural grace in one’s movements, a fierce attitude visible in one’s limbs. Elegance is symmetry. It’s more, it’s harmony. A classical statue is elegant, as is a Mozart sonata and a Matteo Thun sofa. A red rose is elegant, as is an Afghan hound. Elegance is the immediate sensation that you are in the presence of a possible perfection. Elegance is a trace of the presence of God in His creation.

So many women come in here, fully convinced that beauty is all that’s needed. They’re not entirely wrong: come to think of it, people are crude, and they’re glad to settle. I see posters on the walls, magazine covers, advertisements, television commercials: tits and asses, slutty faces. The appeal isn’t to the heart, to the mind, but directly to the genitalia. And so, if you so much as say to them: You know, you really have a nice ass, they immediately get it into their heads that they can become runway models, or have a top photographer take their picture, they think they have the world in their clutches, that they can win over anyone, with the scent of what they have between their thighs, they can hook some rich fat cat and drive him crazy with their allure.

And then they show up, they knock at the door, they sit down and cross their legs and look around: here I am, the queen has arrived, make way. Horrible, ignorant southern bumpkins, these women; half-baked, vulgar fishwives. They don’t know that their smooth, ivory hips, their gravity-defying breasts, will soon be sagging burdens, defeated by ill-advised diets and a natural propensity to become, every last one of them, useless cellulite-ridden creatures that finally just plop down in front of the television set. Like their mothers.

Of course, I accept some of them. I mean, we have to work somehow, don’t we? If I were to indulge my criteria wholly and in every decision, this place would have shut down years and years ago, and I’d be working in finance or selling vacuum cleaners. Instead, we’re actually growing. Even though I can sense the uneasiness of certain customers. They confusedly realize that I’d actually welcome a different sort of request, not just: So listen, Dotto’, find me two girls with big titties, because this ad is for a food shop and pictures of anorexics tend to make you lose your appetite.

There’s no problem, they’re perfect for their purposes. Good-looking girls, young and well nourished, and you throw some clothes on them, get them ready, and have a competent photographer do a shoot. My photographers are the best around, and when you take a look at the final product, you might even be tempted to believe that the model is something other than a small-town girl who can’t open her mouth and produce an articulate sentence.

But true elegance is an absence that hovers in the air. What we do is construct a simulacrum, a pale imitation good enough for a posed picture or a stroll down the catwalk in a pair of heels so high that they determine the gait and the stride, not the girl wearing them.

No one should think for a second that things are any different in Rome or Milan. I go there every season, and what I see is atrocious. They think it’s enough for a girl to weigh ninety pounds, stand six feet tall, and have a demented glint in her eyes to be elegant. There too they’ve forgotten the meaning of the word, and in fact the clothing has become horrible in a desperate attempt to be special. There was a time when it was the models who held up the clothing, and now it’s the other way around. It’s unmistakable.

Another truth that I bitterly and belatedly learned, to my regret: it’s possible to lose that elegance. It’s not like a surname, or the color of your eyes. The passage of time, sheer excess, the cruel blows of fortune can deprive you of proportion and confidence, two necessary components. I’ve seen plenty of women who were once the quintessence of elegance turn into parodies of what they used to be.

My wife, for instance, was elegant. I could sit there for hours on end, admiring the position of her hands, the way she sat on the sofa with her legs tucked up under her: a feline creature, ready to pounce. She was the epitome of elegance. Then she started drinking. Now no one could detect or even guess at the echo of a stride and a gait that once caught me and refused to let me go, not under those varicose veins and that hint of a bulging tummy.

You can miss elegance, the way you might miss a beloved person who is no longer with us, the way you can miss your own youth. I’ve stopped chasing after it, I’ve resigned myself to remembering it.

Then I saw her.

I saw her far from here, not among the lines of young women eager to do a test shot or add to their book; or even among the would-be prostitutes who are convinced that the agency is just a cover for an escort business, girls who would rather be an escort than get a university degree. I saw her on the street, no different than a thousand others: discount jeans, canvas shoes, a shapeless bag with who knows what inside it, and a pair of earbuds in her ears.

She was walking.

I came dangerously close to running into the car ahead of me, so hard was I staring at her. I slammed on the brakes, people turned to stare when they heard the screeching rubber, but she didn’t, because she was listening to her music. I double-parked my SUV and hopped out; everyone behind me was leaning on their horn, freaking out, but I would have done the same thing if I’d been on the highway, if I had had to.

She was walking.

No, it’s not quite right to say that she was walking: she was dancing. I know the score of the way she was walking the way a choreographer knows the score of Swan Lake: muscles pulling taut beneath her skin, as she sailed through life with the certainty of someone who has charted her course.

What’s more, she was beautiful. That wouldn’t have been necessary, the way she walked was more than enough, but she was also beautiful.

I stopped her without any real idea of what I was going to say to her. And she, with surpassing grace, took the earbuds out of her ears and stared at me with those immense eyes. She emanated a curiosity devoid of any mistrust.

I was completely intimidated, I felt unworthy to speak with that goddess.

All around me, the symphony of car horns went on, I wouldn’t be able to stay there much longer. I asked her—or really perhaps I should say that I begged her—to take a moment to talk to me, just a brief instant. I felt like Doctor Zhivago as he watches Lara go by and fears that he might be about to lose her again.

Once again, I was in the presence of true elegance. I had it before me again, just when I was starting to think that I’d lost it once and for all. I could sweep away the fear that I’d only ever imagined it after all, the fear that it had never existed.

Even the sound of her voice was no disappointment, even though I’d feared it would be. The Calabrian accent, those broad flat vowels, bowed down upon her lips and played their part in the intriguing overall picture. She was beautiful. Ravishingly beautiful.

I managed to talk her into getting in the car. I drove a few blocks at walking speed, then I parked and we stepped into a café. I spoke to her, I told her about myself and the work I did. In my voice, I realized, was the tone of someone begging. I, who listened from morning to night to the pleas of women of all kinds, and then decreed their fate, I was begging her. I couldn’t let go of that panther gait, that long graceful neck, that slender, lithe body. I couldn’t let go of her.

I tried to figure out whether she needed work. I saw the thoughts pass over those dark eyes of hers like clouds above the sea.

In the end, she told me that maybe, one day, she’d drop by the agency and try out. Maybe.

She came in, and it went very well.

And so I talked to her about lighting, dresses, and shoes, handbags and jewelry, probing her yearning for luxury, but I glimpsed not a trace of that desire. I was afraid she was going to pull out.

Then, she asked me what she asked. I was on the verge of bursting into laughter at the puny nature, the petty insignificance of her demand.

Instead I kept a straight face and said: Yes, that won’t be a problem. And we came to an agreement. I was happier than I ever remember being in my life.

I needed to find out everything about her. Everything. The years that she had spent out of my sight could not be allowed to remain a mystery. I asked, and she answered. She told me about her brother, her father, the man she was close to.

I immediately realized that the last two were going to be an obstacle in terms of what I had in mind for her. I talked to her at considerable length, eloquently arguing in favor of the values of freedom, of self-determination. And I told her that, sometimes, in order to do someone good, you need to conceal from them the manner, however legitimate, however fine, however gratifying and amusing it might be, in which this good is achieved.

I couldn’t allow reluctance and scruples to steer her to live so far from her real self.

When she stood up and went away, her image remained in my eyes. I couldn’t even begin to imagine how that moment would mark the beginning of my damnation. Because now I don’t know if I’ll be able to go on living without seeing her walk and laugh, dance and eat.

Now that she’s dead.