NOTE:
‘The Purple Ceiling’ is set on the Lido di Venezia, the long thin island that stretches across the southern lagoon. The year is 1965. The entire southern coast of the Lido is lined with beaches and, while it does have a permanent population, it also shares some of the seasonal characteristics of other seaside places. Which is what leads Rosella to install a television in the bar. The song that is at the center of the story, ‘Un cielo in una stanza,’ is one of the most iconic Italian songs of the 20th century. It was composed by Gino Paoli in 1959, became a huge hit for Mina (Anna Maria Mazzini) the following year and then for Paoli himself in 1965. The story of the sex-worker who was the inspiration for the song was related by Paoli in an interview. This story is partly based on that incident and on an appearance by Paoli on Studio RAI in 1965.
***
Lido di Venezia, 1965
Rosella had never wanted a television, but the café barely managed to survive its first winter. Come October, people vanished and takings plummeted. And then the mists came down, spoiling the mood and stealing the sea. It was Marco, one of the locals, who raised the subject.
‘That new place up the road has one,’ he said. ‘Plenty of people will go there if there’s football on.’
‘Let them,’ she said, screwing a cloth inside a glass. ‘I’m not made of money.’
The fellow who was drinking with Marco that night, a skin-and-bones electrician from up the road, said he could give her a good price when it came to the installation. He was back the following day with a quote.
‘It’s just not that kind of place,’ Rosella said.
‘More’s the pity. If you don’t give people what they want, they’ll vote with their feet.’
The television was built into the wood paneling at great expense. It jutted out awkwardly up there, so Rosella placed a vase of plastic roses on the top. She draped a nice bit of lace over the dead screen, hung ‘Monica Vitti’ on one side, ‘Richard Harris’ on the other.
Since the television arrived, the regulars have begun congregating at the bar for the Friday night music on Studio RAI. Everyone enjoys making fun of the compere, a fawning slug of a man, while the women ooh and aah at the dresses, the hairstyles, the ice-rink of a floor that stretches right back to the glittery two-tier orchestra. Sometimes the customers even sing along, though Rosella discourages that kind of thing, having aimed from the start to be a high-end sort of place. In Venice, after all, she could start afresh.
Studio RAI seemed able to attract the biggest names, despite the irritating host. Even Mina appeared one Friday evening. Everyone knew what Mina sounded like. But nobody had ever seen her on a screen. With her mad eyes and careless mouth, her long witchy arms, Mina was dramatic. Perhaps over-dramatic. But it was impossible to take your eyes off her. It was that walls-and-trees, sky-in-a-room song, the purple ceiling one.
For Rosella, that song was a German town with a canning factory. It was ten years of keeping her head down. It was an infusion of beauty in a place where there was none. Watching Mina perform, on her very own television in her very own bar bought with her very own money, Rosella understood for the first time what the song was about.
There is only one thing that makes the walls dissolve.
Back in Genoa, Rosella had heard about the job in Germany from her friend Maria, who worked the same rooms down at the port. One day, Maria announced that she was sick of all this shit, sick of men, that she was off. In Germany, she said, people were building things up again, which was more than could be said for home.
‘Come if you like,’ she said. ‘I’ll only ask the once.’
They shared a bunk-bedded cubicle in the same factory-owned apartment, though Maria had moved in with a Turk by the end of the first month. Rosella hated that flat. She hated the dual carriageway outside her bedroom window, the lorry park outside the back door. Beyond the scaffolded Altstadt, ugliness ran rampant. People at the factory assured her that the traffic was like a sea. Soon, she would barely notice it. But she never stopped noticing it.
If Genoa had taught her nothing else, it had schooled her in endurance. She might have cogs running constantly inside her head, but she would endure. What she did come to relish was the bird song. There was a point in every night at which the birds seemed just about to win the day. It happened around the time that Rosella left for the early shift. By the time she’d reached the factory, though, the cars had taken over again, and the birds were gone.
Rosella worked the conveyor belts, picking off the bad cherries, plucking dead mice from among the peas. She sang to herself to stay sane though, really, she didn’t have a note. When it came to the top bunk, the factory said there would be a new girl along shortly. Maria and the Turk had long since left for Essen, and the women in the other cubicles were stone-faced Greeks who had no time for anyone else. Rosella was lonely; her heart was like a hard little pea. But the money was good, and she was determined to tough it out. Avoid the bars and clubs. Avoid the men.
The town had little to offer when it came to friendship. There were churches, of course, but she was not that desperate. On Saturday mornings, a group of stolid-looking walkers skirted the bomb craters on their way to the scarred woods. She was not that desperate either. The new girl never did arrive and, when Rosella’s roster at the factory changed, she took on a weekend cleaning job.
Frau Rittmann wore a helmet of steel-grey hair and elasticated stockings. She lived in an old, gabled house at the edge of town, a captured-princess kind of place that gave Rosella the creeps. She addressed Rosella formally, corrected her grammar in a manner that was surprisingly firm. Rosella didn’t much like that. She wondered if Frau Rittmann might be some sort of do-gooder.
One afternoon, as Rosella was stowing the cleaning materials, Frau Rittmann asked if she liked music. ‘At the Ladies’ Club, Thursday is music night. We are particularly fond of the Italian music.’
Rosella produced a careful smile.
‘You must miss home, Fraulein. And it would be wonderful to have the benefit of your linguistic expertise. Shall we say this Thursday?’
A Ladies’ Club sounded awful. And, sure as anything, the music would be opera. But somehow Rosella found herself saying yes.
Most of the Ladies were decades younger than Frau Rittmann, who introduced Rosella without once mentioning the word cleaner. The Ladies accepted Rosella as if she was one of them. Did she seem like one of them? It wasn’t likely, with her scrappy German and her rough hands. Rosella did tell them that she worked in the factory, but they chose to assume that she was a secretary. She has wondered since how on earth they dreamed that one up. And how they would have reacted had they known that, her last summer in Genoa, she had slept with men for money.
She needn’t have worried about the opera; there was none of that. It was wall-to-wall Italian pop, the lusher the better. Italians were in vogue, it seemed. And so, apparently, was she. Mina’s song — the walls-and-trees, sky-in-a-room one — was a particular favorite. The women played it constantly, and the song took hold of Rosella though she didn’t know why. It was as if she understood it in her veins and in her bones. It made her think of poor dead Paolo. It made her cry. But then, they all cried when they listened to that song, even Frau Rittmann.
Another Friday night, another music show. Caterina, whose mother supplies the lunchtime tramezzini, is managing the queue while Rosella mixes lemon-drop martinis for two Americans who must have strayed across from the hotel. They stand there with stars in their eyes. She hears the word authentic.
The compère is surpassing himself in awfulness tonight. Everything is oily, exaggerated, over-the-top. And then he introduces a man he calls the greatest songwriter of all time.
‘Puccini might have something to say about that,’ mutters the old professor from his perch under ‘Gina Lollobrigida’.
Back inside the television, the compère simpers at the audience. ‘Ladies and Gentlemen. Please welcome. The one, the only, the unmatchable…. Gino Paoli.’
And with a shimmering of violins there it is —the walls-and-trees, sky-in-a-room song, Mina’s song. The hotel hairdressers are still gossiping about what goes on in the beach huts after dark. But even they shut up when the songwriter appears.
It had never occurred to Rosella that an actual person might have written that song, and that he was probably a man. Who knew that men had the capacity to dream? Marco is cozying up to the television set, tweaking the dial.
‘Hey, Marco,’ she calls out. ‘Turn that thing up.’
The greatest songwriter of all time is slight, perhaps a little shifty. He seems uncomfortable with the attention, his shirt buttoned to the neck, his tense mouth topped by a pair of enormous dark glasses. The contrast between the fanfare he has received and his own uncertainty is striking.
‘Is he a bit strange, do you think?’ asks the woman from the fruit shop.
‘Might be the light,’ says Marco. ‘You know. Light sensitivity.’
‘Bright in there, all right, under all them bulbs,’ says one of the hairdressers.
‘Strange, sensitive, one or the other,’ says her friend.
‘Same difference,’ says the fruit-shop woman.
But he does look odd, or maybe just out-of-place. While the compère offers twiddly bits of melody on a piano he insists on playing standing up, his guest stands with his arms folded tight against his chest.
‘Welcome to the show, dear Gino,’ the compère says. ‘But first, my friend. You are a man with the world at your feet. So why the dark glasses, the furrowed brow?’
The reception is bad tonight — perhaps there is change in the air — and the screen starts to jump. Marco gives the box a bang, and the picture rights itself.
The famous songwriter hugs himself and says it’s how his face was made. He drops his arms. Then, seeming not to know what to do with them, he rests his thumbs on his hips, his fingers splayed across his thighs. Casual but not. The stance is distinctive. Rosella lays down her knife, wipes her hands. It cannot be. But she raises the hatch and pulls up a stool next to Marco.
‘Even Gino Paoli was born without dark glasses….’ The compère goofs at the camera and the audience laughs. ‘Gino, dear Gino, show us your mournful eyes.’
To Rosella’s surprise, the fellow does take his glasses off, though just as quickly he puts them back on again. But even in those few seconds, she can detect his inner landscape, a kind of melancholy that marks him out as different. The memory starts to swell inside her chest. And even though this cannot be, she somehow knows it is.
‘He’s a bully, that presenter fellow,’ Marco is saying. ’No crime to be shy.’
Rosella doesn’t speak.
One of the hairdressers blows a raspberry at the compère, who is affecting a sad clown-face now, his fingers running mock tears down his cheeks. ‘Gino. So talented, and yet so….’
‘Gloomy?’ says the famous songwriter. ‘Not at all. I am a foolish optimist when it comes to love.’
Rosella’s heart is hammering. It is not emotion, or not exactly. It is the force of the past, the punch of it. It is the slight smile on the man’s face, his quiet dignity. It is the slope of his shoulders, that distinctive stance of his. If she squints, she can almost see the boy.
The compère looks down at his keyboard and plays another run of notes from Mina’s song.
‘There you are,’ the songwriter says, gesturing at the little piano. ‘A case in point.’
‘And your ideas, dear Gino. How do you come by your ideas?’
‘Idiot man,’ Rosella says. Though her heart is in her fist.
‘My ideas come from life,’ says the songwriter. ‘I never make things up.’
‘A purple ceiling?’ The compère offers the camera a pantomime grimace.
‘Oh, it existed. Probably still does.’ The songwriter smiles as if sorry for the host, for his incomprehension. And it is the exact same smile he gave her all those years ago. When neither of them had a name, beneath a purple ceiling.
He was just a kid. Scrawny, pale. He smelt faintly of antiseptic, perhaps for the spots, and the flush on his neck was like a wound. Sometimes she did feel like inflicting pain on the worst of them. But looking at this scalded boy she felt nothing but sadness that he was even there. When it was over, he’d tried to interlace his fingers with hers. That was a gesture from the other world, the one he hadn’t paid to enter, and she pulled away.
When he spoke again, he sounded bruised. Don’t make me feel sorry for you, she thought. Six months on, you won’t even remember me.
‘Let me care for you,’ he said, this strange boy. What was he, seventeen?
She might have laughed in his face, but he was just so solemn. And care is such a lovely word. There are so many dreams in it. He was young, that’s all.
Turning the taps on at the wash basin, she could hear him dressing, the clink of his belt, the slide of his shirt against his ruined skin. She stared into the retreating water as it circled the plughole. When she turned back again, he would be whoever he was in real life. That was what happened. They regathered their street selves. She wondered who this one was. A choirboy?
When she turned, the boy was dressed but his face hadn’t changed. His eyes steady, he smiled at her. And she returned the smile, because why withhold a smile?
‘What?’ she said as he walked towards her.
He gazed up at the ceiling, or beyond it maybe.
‘Oh that?’ she said. ‘God, yes, what a color.’
The boy just shook his head. ‘All I can see is sky.’
He looked at her a little sadly then, and she remembers how the light was fading, and how she wished that he would go. She found his tenderness disconcerting. It was the wrong place for that.
‘What now?’ she said, sending him on his way.
‘I’m going home,’ he said. ‘And then I’m going to write a song.’
She thinks she might have laughed at that.
‘Takes my mind off things.’
She knew better than to probe. Because they’re a mess, every single one of them. ‘You should get yourself a girl,’ she said, breaking her own rule.
‘Can I see you again?’
She was tired and turned her back on him. ‘Talk to Lucio.’
‘That wasn’t what I meant.’
‘I know.’ She hated to ruin whatever fantasy was brewing, but that was how it was.
He was quiet for a moment. ‘How do you do this job?’
She bristled at the hint of condescension. ‘I don’t take drugs,’ she said. ‘If that’s what you’re suggesting.’
‘I know you don’t,’ he said, as if acquainted with her blood, her brain.
‘I wouldn’t do it if it didn’t sometimes give me pleasure.’ That’s what she said, but control would have been a better word. The helplessness of men’s desire, the momentary shift of power, the surge of elation she experienced when she’d weakened them. That was its own drug. It liberated her from what had gone before. It lit the way ahead. If she could do this, then she could do anything.
‘I think you are a heroine,’ he said, as if he’d read her mind. ‘I wish I had a laurel wreath for you.’
He said nothing more. Just stood there, learning everything by heart. And when he did turn to go, she somehow knew he’d never visit her again.
The screen has gone jazzy, and Rosella is dimly aware of Marco standing up to thump the box. But is she really here? She isn’t sure.
‘There was love beneath that purple ceiling,’ Gino Paoli says, looking straight at her through the television set. ‘And I do mean love.’
‘And are we talking about first love, dear Gino?’ says the compère.
‘No,’ he says. ‘We are talking about a prostitute.’
‘Whaaaaaat?’ squeal the hairdressers.
Marco whistles to himself. ‘Didn’t see that one coming.’
The compère looks alarmed. He glances towards the wings as if expecting trouble.
Idiot man, Rosella thinks. Don’t pretend you’ve never heard the word.
‘What did I tell you?’ says the fruit-shop woman. ‘It’s always the quiet ones.’
Rosella is nervous now. Her breath hurts. She doesn’t want to be disparaged. She doesn’t know how that would feel in this bright new hard-won world.
‘The room was squalid. But the woman made it disappear.’
‘Really?’ The compère pulls a stupid face. ‘And that is love?’
‘Of course. Love for a moment. But love all the same. Perhaps that is nothing, like the room was nothing. But perhaps it is everything. Perhaps it is all we need.’
The studio is silent and so is the bar. The only sound is the clink of the glasses that Caterina is collecting.
‘Love can happen anywhere,’ he continues. ‘That is all you need to know about this song.’
The compère rubs his hands, anxious to hurry things along. ‘And now he’s going to sing it for us …’ he gestures towards the orchestra, ‘Un cielo in una stanza by the Great… Gino… Paoli.’
While the orchestra plays the honey-and-velvet intro, Gino walks to the microphone stand. With his sloping shoulders, his concave chest, he looks inconsequential. You would pass him by on the street and never guess what was in his heart. Hands on hips, dark glasses on, he starts to sing the song she’d always thought was Mina’s. The pace is slower, the voice smoky. It is real and sad. And, just for an instant, she can smell that room, the insect repellent and the unclean bed.
When he has finished, the studio audience applaud, and so does the bar. Rosella doesn’t move. She isn’t able. Her head is full of noise.
‘Did you know he has a bullet in his chest?’ Marco is saying.
‘No way,’ says the fruit-shop woman.
‘Oh yes. Shot himself for love.’
Rosella feels emptied out. She pulls a cigarette from the pack she keeps on the bar. Sucks in the smoke. Then goes to tell Caterina she’s taking a breather.
Outside, beyond the fierce cicadas, there is the faint sound of music from the hotel ballroom. Her feet take her across the road and into the foyer that is crammed tonight with girls in high boots, young men in polo-necks. Everything is rectangles, circles. Everything is black and white. She pushes her way through to the terrace, to what she came here for, the sea.
When she first arrived on the Lido, she was surprised how few boats there were on the Adriatic side. There were container ships on the horizon, oil tankers queuing up for the industrial port. Closer into shore, though, the sea was empty. Growing up in Genoa, she had never known an empty sea.
She descends the staircase to the beach that has been raked to perfection. She walks west past the accommodation reserved for the hotel workers, past the newly built apartment blocks where her regulars live, buildings entirely lacking in either charm or vice.
The sea speaks to her in images she finds it difficult to visit. Paolo’s absented face, the white sheet a blade against his chin. And then another face, ruddy with intent outside her bedroom door — the brother-in-law who’d lent her money, come to claim his price. After the faces come the feelings: the ice in her lungs, the drab-grey encirclement of shame, the impossibility of meeting her sister’s eye.
To offer herself willingly to as many men as possible seemed preferable to what was happening every week against her will. The decision set her free, but there’s no point pretending it was pretty. All summer long she tilted her face towards a purple ceiling. She endured men’s egos, and their demanding pricks. Sometimes she was fearful. Sometimes she was the boss. Sometimes she thought she would throw up. And yet, one boy made a song of it. She looks back at the hotel, etched on the navy sky like a Moorish palace. Whoever conceived of such a place had fairytales at the back of his eyes. But we see none of that. All we see now is a hotel.
The air is sharpening. She needs to be back for last orders or Caterina will get into arguments, become clumsy and break things. Turning back, Rosella can make out the café lights, the jumble of people at the window. The life she has earned. Nothing has changed because of tonight. Nothing at all. And yet, she sees clearly now the distance she has travelled, the perfection that can hide inside a moment.
She must speak to the fruit-shop woman about the quality of her lemons. And then there is the broken shutter. Perhaps Marco knows a decent carpenter. Closer now, the sweeping script of the neon sign is blinking. She wonders if anyone has seen that skin-and-bones electrician, or if he patronizes the new place now.
Moving across the sand towards through the ranks of folded beach umbrellas, she meets her own footprints coming towards her. It strikes her then how seldom you see the imprint that you made. It’s not the kind of thing that people tell you, by and large.
