Peeling. Gymnastics. Stretching and weights.
She had returned with her head full of grand ideas which she immediately put into effect. She had sold off the three hairdressing salons and bought a warehouse on the Aurelia that sold agricultural machinery and turned it into a multi-specialised centre for the care and health of the body. Now she had a staff of ten, including instructors, aestheticians and paramedics. She had become immensely rich and much sought after by local bachelors. But she said she was faithful to the memory of the old barber.
8
When Graziano entered, Ivana welcomed him joyfully, hugged him to her large perfumed bosom and told him he looked like a corpse. She would put him to rights. She drew up a programme for him. First a course of massage, bath in toning seaweed, total sunbed, hair-dying, manicure and pedicure, and, to round it all off, what she called her recreative-revitalising therapy.
Whenever Graziano returned to Ischiano, he always liked to undergo Ivana’s therapy.
A series of massages of her own devising, which she performed only after hours and on people she deemed worthy of the privilege. Massages which tended to revitalise and reawaken very specific organs of the body and which left you feeling, for a couple of days afterwards, like Lazarus when he rose from the grave.
On this occasion, however, Graziano declined the offer. ‘I’m sorry, Ivana, but I’m about to get married. You know how it is.’
Ivana gave him a hug and wished him a happy life and lots of children.
Three hours later, he emerged from the centre and drove to the Scottish House in Orbano to buy a few items of clothing that would make him feel more in harmony with the country life on which he was preparing to embark.
He spent nine hundred and thirty thousand lire.
And here he was at last, our hero, outside the doors of the Station Bar.
He was ready.
His hair, glossy, frizzy and savannah-coloured, smelled of conditioner. His shaven jaw smelled of Egoiste. His eyes were dark and bright. His skin had regained its melanine and at last had that colour, halfway between hazel and bronze, which drove the Scandinavian girls wild.
He looked like a Devonshire gentleman fresh from a holiday in the Maldives. Green flannel shirt. Brown wide-cord trousers. Scottish short-sleeved pullover with the tartan of the Dundee clan(the shop assistant had told him that). A tweed jacket with elbow-patches. And chunky Timberland shoes.
Graziano pushed the door open and took two slow, measured, John Wayne-type steps towards the bar.
Barbara, the twenty-year-old bartender, nearly fainted when she saw him appear. Just like that, on an ordinary day. With no trumpets or fanfares to announce him. No heralds to warn of his impending arrival.
Biglia!
He was back.
The ladykiller was back.
The sex symbol of Ischiano was here. Here to rekindle never-extinguished erotic obsessions, to reignite jealousies, to set tongues wagging.
After his performances in Riccione, Goa, Port France, Battipaglia and Ibiza, he was here again.
The man who had been invited on to the Maurizio Costanzo Show to talk about his experiences as a Latin lover. The man who had won the Casanova Cup. The man who had played on Planet Bar with the Rodriguez brothers. The man who had bedded the actress Marina Delia (the page torn out of Novella 2000 with photographs of Graziano on Riccione beach massaging Marina Delia’s back and kissing her neck had hung beside the pinball machine for six months, and still reigned supreme in Roscio’s workshop among the nude-model calendars). The man who had beaten the great Peppone pulling record (three hundred scores in one summer, the papers said). He was here again.
More flourishing and in better shape than ever.
His contemporaries, who had become husbands and fathers, worn out by a dreary, humdrum life, resembled mangy, greying bulldogs, whereas Graziano …
( What on earth can his secret be? )
… grew more handsome and
She had returned with her head full of grand ideas which she immediately put into effect. She had sold off the three hairdressing salons and bought a warehouse on the Aurelia that sold agricultural machinery and turned it into a multi-specialised centre for the care and health of the body. Now she had a staff of ten, including instructors, aestheticians and paramedics. She had become immensely rich and much sought after by local bachelors. But she said she was faithful to the memory of the old barber.
8
When Graziano entered, Ivana welcomed him joyfully, hugged him to her large perfumed bosom and told him he looked like a corpse. She would put him to rights. She drew up a programme for him. First a course of massage, bath in toning seaweed, total sunbed, hair-dying, manicure and pedicure, and, to round it all off, what she called her recreative-revitalising therapy.
Whenever Graziano returned to Ischiano, he always liked to undergo Ivana’s therapy.
A series of massages of her own devising, which she performed only after hours and on people she deemed worthy of the privilege. Massages which tended to revitalise and reawaken very specific organs of the body and which left you feeling, for a couple of days afterwards, like Lazarus when he rose from the grave.
On this occasion, however, Graziano declined the offer. ‘I’m sorry, Ivana, but I’m about to get married. You know how it is.’
Ivana gave him a hug and wished him a happy life and lots of children.
Three hours later, he emerged from the centre and drove to the Scottish House in Orbano to buy a few items of clothing that would make him feel more in harmony with the country life on which he was preparing to embark.
He spent nine hundred and thirty thousand lire.
And here he was at last, our hero, outside the doors of the Station Bar.
He was ready.
His hair, glossy, frizzy and savannah-coloured, smelled of conditioner. His shaven jaw smelled of Egoiste. His eyes were dark and bright. His skin had regained its melanine and at last had that colour, halfway between hazel and bronze, which drove the Scandinavian girls wild.
He looked like a Devonshire gentleman fresh from a holiday in the Maldives. Green flannel shirt. Brown wide-cord trousers. Scottish short-sleeved pullover with the tartan of the Dundee clan(the shop assistant had told him that). A tweed jacket with elbow-patches. And chunky Timberland shoes.
Graziano pushed the door open and took two slow, measured, John Wayne-type steps towards the bar.
Barbara, the twenty-year-old bartender, nearly fainted when she saw him appear. Just like that, on an ordinary day. With no trumpets or fanfares to announce him. No heralds to warn of his impending arrival.
Biglia!
He was back.
The ladykiller was back.
The sex symbol of Ischiano was here. Here to rekindle never-extinguished erotic obsessions, to reignite jealousies, to set tongues wagging.
After his performances in Riccione, Goa, Port France, Battipaglia and Ibiza, he was here again.
The man who had been invited on to the Maurizio Costanzo Show to talk about his experiences as a Latin lover. The man who had won the Casanova Cup. The man who had played on Planet Bar with the Rodriguez brothers. The man who had bedded the actress Marina Delia (the page torn out of Novella 2000 with photographs of Graziano on Riccione beach massaging Marina Delia’s back and kissing her neck had hung beside the pinball machine for six months, and still reigned supreme in Roscio’s workshop among the nude-model calendars). The man who had beaten the great Peppone pulling record (three hundred scores in one summer, the papers said). He was here again.
More flourishing and in better shape than ever.
His contemporaries, who had become husbands and fathers, worn out by a dreary, humdrum life, resembled mangy, greying bulldogs, whereas Graziano …
( What on earth can his secret be? )
… grew more handsome and
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