She does not have a Venus of the Ports face but she has big shoes with a heel and a buckle as was fashionable in those years. She looks like a mannequin with a long white skirt that accompanies her curves. She works at the docks, waiting for the sailors when they disembark, tired and eager to hold a female body. She has no face, but it matters little, she fulfils a precise social function.
The nocturnal atmosphere captivates the viewer, it looks like a Fassbinder scene: the Venus is leaning against a gutter on the quay of the harbour, in the distance a ship is manoeuvring to leave the dock and gain the open sea.
She is there, waiting for the next load of goods and tired, eager men. Later, shrouded in darkness, her ankles swollen, she will return to what she calls home: a kitchen with a bed and a table, the loo in the yard. When she gets up, around noon, and crosses the threshold of her dwelling, she will meet the stares of honest people, people who live off little like her but do not sell their bodies, and she will have to endure that contempt as well. We cannot judge the Venus of the ports, for some she represents, even if only for a few minutes, a promise of paradise.
The Venus of the Port has no face, on the contrary, her face is a helmet, it is part of the job, no one can kiss her on the mouth, no one can break her solitude. Under that concealment hides a woman who perhaps still has the strength to fall in love, it could be the face of Simone Signoret, muse of a certain black and white French cinema, a hard but beautiful face.
- The work: Mario Sironi, The Venus of the Ports (1919), Boschi House Museum | Milan
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