asked, “have you decided?”
“What?” Clotilde asked in a raspy voice.
“If you want to be in business with me.”
Clotilde bent her neck forward, as if to hide her face. She thought of her brothers. As much as she tried to visualize their faces, all she could come up with was a blur. Then she thought of her mother, and her gentle, loving face came to her in full clarity. She grimaced and let out a long, deep sigh.
“It’s only a job,” Angela said, forcing a white thread through the eye of a needle.
“I could find a different job,” Clotilde argued. “I could be a waitress. Or a maid.”
“And work for someone who will treat you as badly as your brothers did? Making little or no money for the rest of your life? Believe me, being poor is no fun. No fun at all.” She paused. “Wouldn’t you rather work for yourself? Be independent? When you do what I do there’s no one in the whole world who can tell you when to work, or where, or how. It’s you who decide.” She flipped the cloth over. “You’re the boss.”
Clotilde leaned back, raising her head to look at the ceiling. She remained silent a while, eyes fixed on a dormant fly, as Angela rhythmically hemmed the white cloth.
“I never thought of men that way,” Clotilde said after a moment. “Actually, I never thought of men at all. All I ever did was try not to think about the men in my life.”
“You don’t think about these men, either,” Angela clarified. “You use them. That’s all.”
The fly woke up and flew away. “I like being the boss,” Clotilde stated.
Angela’s eyes lit up. “Very well, partner,” she chirped. “You won’t regret it, I promise.”
Over the next week, Clotilde spent time learning the trade. She began by watching, for which Angela charged her clients more. Then she became involved in the foreplay, and Angela’s prices doubled because of that. “I’m ready,” Clotilde told Angela one afternoon, as they were talking about the evening plans. Angela gave her a smile.
That night, Clotilde’s first client, a tall, bearded helmsman with the belly of a whale and a sour odor of cheap alcohol and sweat, laid on her his fantastic weight. As he pounded her into the thin mattress set on the floor of Angela’s sitting room, Clotilde heard her bones squeak and cry out in pain. With her eyes closed, she dreamed of her ride on the hills on the white horse and of the sweet smells of grass and flowers.
From the bedroom, separated by the sitting room by only a curtain, Angela heard every one of Clotilde’s stifled moans, intermixed with the roars of the helmsman’s pleasure. In the morning, she found Clotilde at the open window, elbows on the sill, staring at the sea. “It’s a beautiful day,” Angela said.
Clotilde nodded without turning around.
“When businesses grow,” Angela said softly after a moment, “so do their offices. We need a larger place.”
Clotilde nodded in silence a second time.
Angela joined Clotilde at the window. “The first time is the hardest,” she murmured. “It gets easier as the nights go by.”
“I hope you’re right,” Clotilde sobbed, laying her head on Angela’s shoulder.
“I am, darling,” Angela said. “I am.”
The search for their new apartment began without delay. They looked first at the neighboring buildings, then as far away as the Stazione Principe and the western edge of the harbor—to no avail. Their reputation preceded them, so the owners of respectable buildings turned them down. The other buildings, the shabby ones with dirty lobbies, dark rooms, and shady tenants, which were common in the caruggi that bordered the port area, were something, both girls agreed, they wouldn’t settle for, as such places reminded them of the building they had been born in and vowed to leave behind. It took them two months to find an appropriate accommodation. At the onset of spring, through the intercession of one of their clients to whom they had to promise three months of free service once a week, Angela and Clotilde moved into a four-room apartment on the third floor of an elegant historic building halfway up Via San Lorenzo, out of the caruggi. Their arrival rocked the neighborhood:
“What are those two doing in our building?”
“I thought prostitutes lived only in brothels.”
“The value of our property will go down, I can assure you.”
“Let’s call a lawyer. There must be a way to evict them.”
“Maybe now that they are here, they’ll find an honest way to make a living.”
“Don’t count on that. Once a whore, always a whore.”
“Did you see how they dress? As if it were carnevale.”
“What am I going to tell my children?”
“What a scandal. One block down from the cathedral.”
Heads high, Angela and Clotilde ignored the gossip. They nodded greetings to their new neighbors, who pretended not to see them when they walked by; and they always had a smile for Miss Benassi, the first-floor spinster who led the neighbors’ march against their presence and kept a vigilant eye on the men of Via San Lorenzo to see if any succumbed to temptation. “I’m watching you,” Miss Benassi said one day as Angela and Clotilde walked by her door, “and all the people who go up the stairs. You leave our husbands alone! They deserve better company than yours.”
“Our husbands?” Clotilde said. “I didn’t think you had one, Miss Benassi, but I must be mistaken.”
Despite the hostility, Angela’s and Clotilde’s business blossomed like never before. They became known as “the queens” because of the beautiful dresses they wore, their regal demeanor when they walked in the streets, and the special treatments they gave clients who booked them regularly and for long shifts. By then, Clotilde had become an expert in the art of pleasuring men, surpassing Angela in creativity, audacity, and sense of humor. Her thoughts about hell and her mother looking down at her and dying all over again at the sight of her daughter in the arms of all those strangers had disappeared. She had a life of her own, being paid by men instead of doing things for them for free. “I’m proud of that,” she told Angela one day, “and if I am proud, surely my mother is, too.”
The brothels’ owners didn’t like their success one bit. Neither did the neighbors, who called the police on them at every occasion: a loud noise coming from the apartment, too much garbage left in the street, questionable individuals walking up the stairs. The policeman in charge of that block, however, was one of the queens’ clients, so no one ever managed to catch Angela and Clotilde in the act. One morning, Pietro Valdasco, the owner of the Ancora, one of the largest brothels in town, exasperated by the competition, showed up with two men at the queens’ place and turned it upside down. “It’s only the beginning!” he screamed, as Angela and Clotilde sat terrified on the kitchen floor. “It’d be much safer for you,” he hissed in their ears, “if you left town.”
Given that their business was completely illegal, Angela and Clotilde couldn’t press charges or even report the threat to the police. They mentioned it, though, to their policeman friend, who told his buddies at the bocce run, who told their brothers, cousins, and coworkers. At every telling, the story was inflated. By the time it reached the port and found its way inside the sailors’ bars, it had become a tale of great violence, with blood gushing from wounds and broken bones. Everyone at the Stella Maris was appalled.
“What kind of person would threaten two such beautiful ladies?” the owner cried out.
“I wouldn’t want anything to do with this Pietro Valdasco,” a sailor said, “today or ever.”
A second sailor joined in. “A business that uses such despicable practices should be closed.”
As a result, Pietro Valdasco lost clients and