been crazy that day. Why don’t you work for me? I’ll treat you like the queens you are.”
“Thank you,” Angela said, not taking the flowers, “but we don’t work for criminals.”
“And so you know,” Clotilde added, “there’s no criminal or threat on earth that could convince us to leave this town.”
Two weeks later, in a café, the queens ran into Ildebrando Balbi—Signor Balbi, for short—the five-foot-tall, bald owner of the Carena, a newer brothel located on Piazza delle Oche. “I’d be honored to have you two join the Carena,” he told them as he gallantly bowed, then made them an offer that sounded good to Angela and Clotilde for more than one reason: it included a guaranteed salary, something neither of them had ever seen; Signor Balbi was a polite, straightforward man who had never in his life threatened anybody; they were sick of the looks of contempt the neighbors gave them at every occasion; despite the apology and the flowers, they were scared of Pietro Valdasco and his men; they had been scammed by dishonest clients more than once, so by this time they clearly understood that it was easier and safer to work in a brothel than out in the bars at the mercy of adventurers and sailors. “I’m so glad you decided to work here,” Signor Balbi said the first time the queens set foot in the Carena. “With you two on board, we’ll make mincemeat of the other brothels.”
They worked at the Carena for eight years, without incident, and, as Signor Balbi had predicted, they boosted his business by bringing in a steady stream of new clients. Then, with the help of a close friend, Clotilde took over the Luna, a rundown, unsuccessful brothel, managed at the time by a drunkard and owned by a merchant up to his ears in gambling debts. Immediately, the Luna underwent a facelift. After a thorough scrub, the graniglia floors were polished, the musty chandeliers replaced, and the walls freshened with a new coat of whitewash. The front of the building also came to life when the marble door frame was restored and the entrance kept beautiful with a wreath of fresh flowers. On the day of the Luna’s grand reopening, Clotilde spoke to Angela and the eight girls she had hired. “From now on,” she said, “everyone will call me Madam C.”
The transition from protected paid employee to business owner didn’t come easily in an area of town that boasted more brothels than churches and at a time when the bustling activity of the port and the large number of transients and foreigners that populated it brought along thefts, riots, and a variety of serious criminal endeavors. During the first week of business alone two Abyssinian men shattered one of the Luna’s first-floor windows and broke in at four in the morning; there was a fistfight in the parlor; and one of the girls came down the stairs one night screaming bloody murder and showing everyone the knife cut she had on her belly. Madam C and Angela dealt with the situation with their grits. They threw the Abyssinians out of the Luna with kitchen knives pointed at the men’s throats; they settled the fistfight with a few blows of their own; and they delivered the man who had scratched the girl’s belly to the police. “You come back,” Madam C growled at him with an icy glare, “and your balls will hang in my parlor as a trophy.” Soon the message spread that no one, local or foreigner, should mess with Madam C. Thereafter the incidents became rare, then only memories, and within a short eight months from its grand opening the Luna was a profitable enterprise. Angela helped all along. Three years later, one week after her thirty-third birthday, she took Madam C aside. “I will no longer be with the Luna clients,” she said with a serene smile.
Madam C frowned. “Why?”
Angela circled her hand over her belly. “Someone more important.”
Madam C dropped her jaw. “Who’s the father?”
Angela shrugged. “It’s my baby,” she whispered. “There’s nothing else to say.”
CHAPTER 2
“Get ready, Rosa,” Madam C said. She paused. “The smell of apples is still here.”
“For you,” Maddalena said, handing to Rosa the cardboard box she had brought in earlier from the street.
“Tonight you’ll truly look like a princess,” Margherita echoed, pulling the pink ribbon on the box loose.
Stella lifted the box lid and two sheets of tissue paper. “What do you think?”
In slow motion, Rosa took out of the box a long white dress of silk and Brussels lace.
“It’s from all the girls,” Maddalena said, “although I did all the legwork, as usual.”
“I love you all,” Rosa mumbled.
“Try it on,” said Madam C. “It may need adjustments, and we don’t have a lot of time before the guests arrive. And you,” she told the three girls, “help me with the wine. Santo Cielo, we’ll never be ready for this party.”
The preparations for Rosa’s sixteenth-birthday party had been underway at the Luna for one week. Margherita, Maddalena, Stella, and the other Luna girls had been on long outings in the morning looking for the perfect dress for Rosa. Antonia, the cook, an old woman with a big mole on her cheek, had worked overtime in the kitchen for days preparing vegetable tortes, pollo alla cacciatora, and stoccafisso in umido for the thirty guests Madam C expected that night. Santina, the maid, who normally came to the Luna every other morning, had come every day that week to spruce up the first floor. In the parlor, she had scrubbed the walls to make sure the whitewash was clean, waxed the graniglia floor to make it shine, and washed the flowered curtains to remove the smell of smoke. Then she had cleaned every inch of Rosa’s bedroom twice. “This room has still a baby smell,” she told Rosa, mop in hand. “We need to scrub it off. When a girl turns sixteen, it’s a new life. No more baby smell for you.”
“Thank you,” Rosa said, grateful for the recognition of this important milestone, “but you seem to be the only one to notice. Could you explain that to Madam C?”
“Don’t worry,” Santina replied. “She knows.”
There was a baby smell in Rosa’s room because Rosa had slept there since her very first day of life, in the same double bed of wrought iron with a thick wool mattress, batiste sheets, and a soft white bedspread filled with goose feathers. Madam C didn’t believe in cribs. “Cribs are a wicked invention,” she had told Angela toward the end of her pregnancy. “Their only function is to keep mothers away from their babies. A man must have invented them, so he wouldn’t be bothered. Your baby will sleep in a bed with tall pillows on each side to prevent falls.” The double bed had been ready for Rosa for days in the room behind the kitchen—bedspread, pillows, and all. When the midwife had handed Madam C the newborn, Madam C had rocked her in her arms for a while. Then she had placed her gently on the bedspread, between the two lines of pillows, and sat on the bed next to her, caressing her tiny, soft, bald head and her forehead marked by three wrinkles. Rosa had fallen fast asleep.
Overall, Rosa was a quiet baby, at times absorbed in her own thoughts, at times staring at the people around her with large, startled eyes, as if she wondered where she was and why. She gave everyone big smiles. The Luna inhabitants were spellbound. Madam C, who had cried over Angela’s death for seven nights, held Rosa’s hands for hours and talked to her about anything just to see her smile. All the Luna girls took turns to bathe Rosa, sing her songs, and take her down the block to Mafalda, the wet nurse, four times a day. Puzzled by the number of different women who showed up at her house with Rosa, Mafalda, a housewife with huge breasts and two loud kids of her own, asked Madam C one day, “Who’s the mother?”
“I am,” Madam C said with pride. “Is Rosa eating enough?”
“She is. And she’s growing fast.”
“Your milk must be good.”
“It’s not my milk,” Mafalda said. “In all my life, I’ve never seen a baby surrounded by so much love.”
“We’re love experts at the Luna.” Madam C giggled. “You know that.”
Soon after Rosa’s birth, the schedule of the Luna underwent changes. Madam C moved the brothel’s opening hour from three to four in the