The Road To The City Page 4

  My aunt’s house was a large one, with cold, empty, high-ceilinged rooms. There were sacks of corn and chestnuts all over the place, and strings of onions hung from the ceilings. She had had nine children, but gradually they had died or moved away, all except Santa, the youngest, who was now twenty-four. My aunt couldn’t bear her and bawled her out all day long. Santa’s marriage had been so long delayed chiefly because my aunt, with one excuse and another, wouldn’t let her put a trousseau together but preferred to keep her at home and torment her. Santa was thoroughly scared of her mother, but whenever she spoke of leaving her in order to get married she burst into tears. She was surprised that I didn’t cry when my mother went away, because she worked herself up into a state of despair every time her mother went to the city for only a day. Santa herself had been to the city only two or three times in her whole life and said she liked it better at home. And yet their village was worse than ours. It was pervaded by the smell of manure and unwashed babies squatting on the stairs. There was no electric light in the houses, and all the water came from a public fountain. I wrote to my mother to come and take me away because I didn’t like it. She wasn’t much good at writing letters, and so instead of answering she sent word through a coal dealer that I should stay put and make the best of it because there was nothing else to do.

  And so I stayed on. I was not to be married until February and now it was only November. Ever since I had told my mother about the baby my life had taken a strange turn and I had to hide myself as if there were something shameful about me that no one should see, I thought back to the life I had led before, to the city where I had gone almost every day and the road I had travelled for so many years in every kind of weather. I remembered every inch of it, the heaps of stones, the hedges, the sharp turn revealing the river, and the crowded bridge that led directly to the central square. There in the city I had eaten salted almonds and plates of ice-cream and looked at the shop-windows. There was Nini coming out of the factory, Antonietta scolding the clerk who helped her in the shop, and Azalea waiting to go to the Moon with her lover. Now I was far away from all these things and recalled them with astonishment. Meanwhile Giulio was down there studying medicine, without coming to see me or even writing me a letter, just as if he had forgotten my existence and the fact that we were soon to be married. I hadn’t laid eyes on him since he had found out that I was having a baby, and I wondered what he was thinking. Was he happy or unhappy over the prospect of marrying me?

  I spent my days sitting in my aunt’s kitchen, holding the fire tongs in my hands and thinking the same things over and over again. I wore a wool shawl over my shoulders and held the cat on my knees to keep warm. Every now and then women of the village came for a fitting, and my aunt, with her mouth full of pins, argued with them over the shape of a neck or a sleeve. When the countess was still alive, she said, she had gone every day to her house. The countess had been dead for some time now and her house had long since been sold, but my aunt still wept when she spoke of her.

  ‘It was a pleasure to run those silks and laces through one’s hands,’ she said. ‘The countess was very fond of me indeed. “My dear Elide,” she used to say, “you’ll never want for anything as long as I’m alive.”‘

  But it seemed that the countess died poor because her husband and children had wasted her fortune.

  The women who came to my aunt’s stared at me with ill-concealed curiosity, and my aunt told them that she had taken me in out of sheer pity when my own family had thrown me out of the house on account of my misfortune. Every now and then one of them would start to moralize, but my aunt would cut her short, saying:

  ‘What’s done is done. And one can never tell. Sometimes when it looks most as if one had made a mistake everything turns out for the best. The girl may not look like much, but she picked on a fellow with money and education and he’ll have to marry her. My daughter is the stupid one. She’s been at it for eight years without getting herself married. She says it’s all my fault because I won’t give her a trousseau, but I say that his family’s better off than I am and they can do something about it.’

  ‘One fine day I’ll come home pregnant, too, and then you’ll be happy!’ my cousin retorted.

  ‘Just try it and you’ll see!’ my aunt said. ‘I’ll pull every one of your teeth out of your mouth if I hear you say that again. In my house such things don’t happen. Five of my nine children are girls, but I’ve brought them up so well that no one’s ever been able to say a word against them. Say again what you just said, you little devil!’ she concluded, turning to Santa. Santa burst out laughing, and all the women joined her. Finally my aunt laughed, too, and they went on that way for some time.

  This aunt was my father’s sister. Although she hadn’t set foot in our village for years she spoke about my family and their affairs as if she had an intimate acquaintance with them. She had it in for Azalea because she was stuck-up.

  ‘Just because she wears furs in the winter she thinks she’s somebody,’ she said. ‘The countess had three fur coats, you know, and she tossed them into the butler’s arms when she came into the house as if they were so many rags. But I know furs and I can tell you how much they cost.

  'Azalea’s is rabbit; anyone can smell the rabbit in it a yard away.’

  ‘Nini’s a queer one,’ she said once. ‘He’s related to me almost as closely as you are, but I’ve never had a chance to know him. I met him in the city one day, and he bowed very politely and went his way. And yet I used to carry him in my arms when he was a baby and later on I patched his trousers. I hear that he’s living with some woman or other.’

  ‘He’s working in a factory,’ I said.

  ‘Well, it’s a good thing that one of you is working. My boys have always earned their living, but in your family no one does a thing. It’s pathetic the way you’ve all grown up like weeds. You haven’t made your bed once since you’ve been here. You sit in the kitchen all day with your feet on a stool.’

  ‘I don’t feel well,’ I said. ‘I’m not up to doing anything.’

  ‘You have only to look at her to see that,’ Santa interposed. ‘Her face is as yellow as a lemon, and she’s always twisting her lips with pain. Not everyone’s as strong as we are. We’re country people, and she comes from near the city.’

  ‘From the city, you might as well say,’ observed my aunt. ‘She’s run away to the city ever since she was a little girl, and that’s how she lost all shame. No girl should go to the city unless her mother goes with her. But her mother’s got more than one screw loose too. She was a shameless creature as a girl herself.’

  ‘If Delia gets married she’ll be better off than any of us,’ said Santa, ‘and then she’ll be stuck-up too, just like Azalea.’

  ‘That’s true. The day she marries, her troubles are over. Let’s just wait and see. Everything may turn out all right. Who knows? Let’s hope so.’

  ‘When you’re married I’ll come and be your personal maid,’ said Santa after my aunt had gone away. ‘That is, if I don’t get married myself. But when I marry I’ll have to tie a handkerchief around my head and go out and sweat in the fields all day on a donkey. My fiance is a peasant and his family own land all around the village, and vineyards too. Not to mention their pigs and cows. I’ll be well off myself, as far as that goes.’

  ‘I wish you joy of it. Just to think of a life like that gives me a pain,’ I said.

  ‘Everything gives you a pain,’ said Santa, cutting up a cabbage to put in the soup. ‘I love Vincenzo and I’d love him just the same way if he were a beggar and I had to share his poverty. You can’t even decide whether you love one man or another, because in your condition you’ve got to get married fast. And say thank you to the man that marries you. I don’t mind hard work, if I can be near someone who loves me.’

  We ate supper holding our bowls in our laps, without moving away from the fire. I could never manage to finish my soup, and my aunt would drink up what I left of it.

&nb
sp; ‘If you go on eating so little you’ll bring forth a mouse,’ she said.

  ‘It’s sitting in the dark that frightens me and takes away my appetite. I feel as if I were in a tomb.’

  Oh, you need an electric light to eat by, do you? That’s something new to me. Electricity makes for appetite, does it?’

  After supper Santa and her mother stayed up for a while knitting woollen underwear. I was sleepy, but I stayed with them because I was afraid to go upstairs alone. We all slept in one big room under the attic. In the morning I was the last to get up. My aunt went down to feed the chickens, and Santa combed her hair and talked to me about her fiance. I lay there listening with one ear and asked her to shine my shoes for me. She had to be careful that my aunt didn’t catch her at it, because she was not supposed to wait on me. Meanwhile she went on talking.

  ‘I’m no saint even if my name is Santa,’ she said. And she explained that she went walking with her fiance when he came home on furlough and even let him kiss her.

  Sometimes I walked in the garden, because my aunt said that a pregnant woman shouldn’t stay seated too long and practically pushed me outside. The garden had a wall around it and a wooden gate leading on to the road, which I never bothered to open. I could see the village from our bedroom, and there was nothing inviting about it. I walked from the house to the gate and back to the house again, between a row of stakes for tomato vines and a row of cabbages. I was told to take care that I didn’t step on anything.

  ‘Watch out for the cabbages!’ my aunt would call from the window.

  The garden was full of snow and my feet were half frozen. What month was it and what day of the month? What were they doing at home, and was Giulio still in the city? I was quite in the dark. All I knew was that I was growing bigger and bigger, and twice my aunt had let out my dress. As my body grew bigger, my face became drawn and small. I looked constantly in the mirror and marvelled at how strange it had become. ‘It’s a good thing nobody can see me,’ I thought to myself. I was humiliated by the fact that Giulio had not come to see me or written me a letter.

  9

  One afternoon Azalea did come, though. She was wearing her famous fur piece and an extravagant hat with three feathers on it. Santa was in the kitchen teaching some children to crochet, but Azalea went upstairs without a word of greeting and said she wanted to speak to me alone. She opened the first door she came to and walked in on my aunt, who had lain down to rest in a black petticoat, with her grey hair falling over her shoulders. When my aunt saw who it was she became nervous and excited and began to say all sorts of flattering things, as if she had forgotten the very uncomplimentary ones she had said in her absence. She wanted to go down and make some coffee, but Azalea said shortly that she hadn’t time to drink it and preferred to spend the few minutes she could stay talking to me. After my aunt had gone away Azalea asked me how I was feeling.

  ‘You’re terribly large,’ she remarked. ‘It looks to me as if you’ll be big as a house by your wedding day.’

  She told me that Giulio’s father had come to the house again and offered my mother money if she would let him out of the marriage. My mother had made a terrible racket, and he had gone away protesting that they had misunderstood him and that he was very happy about the whole thing. Then she said that I was to stay at my aunt’s after the wedding, until the baby was born, so that there wouldn’t be gossip in the village. Giulio’s mother was a terrible miser, she said. She didn’t give her servant enough to eat and she counted her sheets every day for fear they might be stolen. If I had to live with her it would be no joke.

  ‘But Giulio says we’ll have a place of our own in the city.’

  ‘Here’s hoping you do. Otherwise God help you.’

  ‘Tell Giovanni to come and see me,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll tell him, but I don’t know whether he’ll do it. He’s tied up with a woman most of the time.’

  ‘Antonietta?’

  ‘No. I don’t know who she is. A blonde that used to go around with Nini. They walk around the city arm in arm. But she’s not so young, and I don’t think much of her.’

  ‘Ask Nini to come too. I’m bored here alone.’

  ‘I haven’t seen Nini for quite a while, but if I have a chance I’ll tell him. And I’ll try to come again myself, but I haven’t much time. That fellow of mine is always after me. He whistles below my window in a way that’s positively shameless.’

  ‘Is it still the student?’

  ‘Of course. You don’t think I have a new one every month, do you?’ she said sharply, pulling on her gloves. ‘Good-bye, I have to go.’ She put her arms around me and, somewhat in a daze, I kissed her cold, powdered face. ‘Good-bye!’ she called again from the stairs. And I saw her walk stiffly away through the garden, with my aunt at her heels.

  My aunt called me to come and taste some tarts she had j

  ust finished baking. She was still upset by Azalea’s visit and told me that she had asked her for some old shoes for Santa and herself, which Azalea had promised to bring next time she came. The tarts were heavy and made me sick at my stomach. Somehow Azalea had depressed me. I was sorry that I had sent any message to Nini. What would he think of me if he were to come? I no longer recognized myself in the mirror. How quickly I had used to run up and down the stairs! Now I could hear my clumsy footsteps echo through the whole house.

  Giovanni turned up a few days later, riding a motor-cycle which had been lent to him by a friend. As soon as he got off he showed me a new watch and told me he had bought it with his commissions.

  ‘What are commissions?’ I asked.

  Then he explained how he had been instrumental in the sale of a delivery van and found himself with a neat sum of money in his pocket.

  ‘It’s idiotic to break your back working eight hours a day in a factory like Nini. If you just have the gift of gab money will come easy. Nini gets so dog-tired that all day Sunday he shuts himself up in his room and sleeps. Besides, he’s taken up drinking again, worse than before.’

  ‘Do you see him often?’ I asked.

  ‘Not very. He’s moved, you know.’

  ‘Isn’t he living with Antonietta?’

  ‘No.’

  I wanted to ask more about Nini, but he started in talking again about the commission he had earned on the delivery van and another that he expected to cash in on very soon. He sat in the kitchen with Santa and helped her shell chestnuts, while he went on bragging about his commissions and the idea he had of buying a motor-cycle of his own as soon as he had the money. Santa went out to church and we were left alone by the fire.

  ‘Are you fairly happy up here?’ he asked.

  ‘I’m bored,’ I said.

  ‘Giulio’s living in town. Antonietta and I ran into him in a café and he bought us a drink. He said that he was studying day and night and didn’t have time to write to you.’

  ‘Was Nini along?’

  ‘No, Antonietta and he aren’t speaking to one another. Antonietta says that Nini behaved very badly, that he pulled out of the house one fine morning shouting as if he were possessed by the devil. Now he has a furnished room piled high with all his books, and when he leaves work he shuts himself up in there to read and drink. When I go to see him he hides the bottle. He doesn’t bother to buy food and he’s unbelievably dirty. I took some books to him that he had left behind at Antonietta’s. “You can have Antonietta,” he said to me. “Go and take my place with her and you’ll be better off than you are at home. Antonietta’s a really good cook and her roasts are simply delicious.”‘

  ‘And are you going to take him up on it?’

  ‘I’m not a fool,’ said Giovanni. ‘If I did I’d end up having to marry her. I’ll go with her as long as it suits me and then I’ll leave her cold the way he did. When she hasn’t any makeup on she shows her years. And she’s always complaining about something.’

  Giovanni stayed to supper and scared Santa with a ghost story. Then she went out with him in the gar
den.

  ‘So long,’ he said as he got on the motor-cycle. ‘Keep smiling. When you get rid of that coconut of yours I’ll take you and Antonietta to the films. There’s nothing they don’t show. Antonietta and I go all the time because she knows a man who owns a theatre and he gives us cut-rate tickets.’ And off he went, with a loud noise, and a cloud of smoke.

  Santa and her mother talked all evening long about Giovanni’s ghost and one of their own, the figure of a nun which Santa herself had seen at the fountain. They got me so scared that I couldn’t sleep. I tugged at Santa’s arm, but she only muttered and turned over. I got up and walked with bare feet over to the window, thinking of Nini drinking alone in his room with his hair all rumpled and hiding the bottle when Giovanni came in. I wished I could talk to him and tell him I was afraid of ghosts and hear him tease me the way he used to do. But was he still such a joker? Perhaps he was slightly crazed with drink and didn’t laugh as he did before. I began to cry uncontrollably, standing in my nightgown in the middle of the room. My aunt woke up, jumped out of bed, lit a candle, and asked what was the matter. I told her I was afraid, and she said to stop being silly and go back to sleep.

  One day Santa’s fiance came for a furlough. He was tall and red-faced and too shy to talk. Santa asked me how I liked him.

  ‘Not much,’ I said.

  ‘Perhaps a man has to have a moustache for you to like him.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I like men without moustaches too,’ I thought of Nini and wished again that I could be far away from where I was now, lying with him beside the river in my light blue summer dress. I should have liked to know whether he still loved me. But I was so strange and ugly-looking at this point that I should have been ashamed to have him see me. I was embarrassed enough by the presence of Santa’s fiance.