Now I have to tell about one evening when, passing near Largo Cairoli, I was stopped by a flashy hooker, and I went up to her room with her. After the sex act we chatted a little – she was a mature but talkative woman – and so I learned that she had actually moved from Pontremoli, after this war, and had settled with her husband in Milan. Thanks to her work, and saving, she had managed to set up a small apartment in the Porta Ticinese neighbourhood, and now she continued to work, just to finish making the payments on the furniture and the sewing machine. She explained what the bedroom was like, the armoire with three mirrors and the marble-topped night table. She invited me to come and visit her, promising that for the occasion she would organize some ‘numbers’.

That was the word she used, and, curious, I telephoned her one day and made an appointment for seven. It was a nice bourgeois apartment, well kept, clean, with the bathroom tidy and a small poodle and the coffee-pot always ready in the kitchen.

‘Oh, here we drink coffee from morning to night,’ said this woman from Pontremoli, whose name was Signora Anna. The room was as she had described it: she showed me a book of French pornographic photographs, and left me there while she phoned the neighbour upstairs, who was to take part in the famous ‘number’. After that I returned several times to Signora Anna, who arranged the number, always calling on a different friend. Between the two of them they wanted ten thousand lire, and that was fine with me. Usually Anna participated only in the foreplay, then when she saw that we were getting into it she got dressed, leaving to the other the responsibility of finishing the job, and she returned near the end to change the sheets. I was very happy with this arrangement, and I even gave her the phone number of the bookshop, so that she could notify me. One evening around seven she called.

‘Pierclaudio,’ she said (in fact, my name is Pierclaudio), ‘there’s a brand-new model.’

‘What sort of model?’ I said, not having understood right away.

‘A niece of mine. Seventeen years old. A real jewel.’

‘Really?’

‘So we’ll see you?’

And we made an appointment for the next day. The niece, named Rita, was really sweet, slender, blonde, modest in her printed calico house dress. We went to the room together. Anna helped the niece undress, showed her off front and back, praising her features, then left us. Meanwhile I, too, had undressed and was lying on the bed. I nodded to her to join me. When she was at the foot of the bed, and had already put one knee up (because women get in bed knees first – I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed), she stopped and said:

‘Would you like to have some fun or should we move on to the material act right away?’