“Relax,” he said, quickly forcing her knees apart and lifting her skirt up around her waist. She felt like one of the half-clothed dummies she used to see in storefronts on Broadway and she tried to make her features melt into dummy vapidness, to keep her feelings at dummy level.

“Coraggio, signorina,” the doctor was saying, giving her a pat on the leg. “You’re a strong girl—nice legs. I’ll bet you’re a swimmer. Soon,” he continued as he did his examination, “you’ll be at the beach.”

He was not a bad person; and he was quite unaware of the revulsion and anger he stirred in her as he patted and looked. By telling her to have courage he was, in his way, trying to keep her spirits up. Still, she hated him—as much as she hated the pope in his long unsullied skirts, or the fat-bellied old priests who told women they sinned, or the pigs in Parliament who daydreamed of women to fuck as they deliberated on laws that violated their bodies.

No matter how cordial, the doctor was a profiteer and a butcher, and she thought of herself, legs apart, as one of those carcasses hanging in all the meat markets of Rome—revoltingly explicit with their hairy bodies intact but split up the middle. Once, in a festive mood at Christmas, the butcher on Via di Ripetta had put in his front window a pig on skis with a pipe in his mouth and a wool cap on his head. And the poor dumb carcass had actually looked as if it were grinning.

Tina thought of Mussolini hanging like a pig by his feet and his mistress hanging alongside him, her crime having been that of loving him. But even in that bad time, someone had had pity enough to pin Clara’s skirt together as she hung upside-down at that gas station in Milan.

To Tina’s horror, Marco was entering the room.

She half-rose on the table and looked at the doctor wildly. “Tell him to leave,” she said.

“I thought he was your fiancé,” the doctor said.

“No!” Tina said, and turned her head away from both men toward the wall. “Fucking pigs,” she said under her breath. That’s what all men were and these two most of all. She wanted to say aloud what she thought, but was afraid to. The doctor was about to work on her insides, and if she offended him she was afraid of what might happen.

She had always been fearful. Pavida, she thought, feeling the word nail her to the table. From childhood on she had been apprehensive about the world and fearful of being hurt. The grim freakiness of nature and people had always hung over her. She was fearful of bums on Broadway. She would not go to Los Angeles because of the San Andreas fault; nor to Israel because war might break out.