The Road To The City Page 9

  Later that night, in my own room, when I was getting undressed and going to bed in the bed I had slept in ever since I was a child, a wave of terror and disgust came over me at the thought that soon Alberto and I would be married and make love together. I reassured myself with the idea that this was only because I had never made love before, but I remembered the slight disgust I felt every time he kissed me and wondered whether or not I really loved him. It’s very difficult, I thought to myself, to know what we’re really like inside. When it had seemed as if he were going out of my life I had felt so sad that I didn’t want to go on living, and yet when he entered my life as he did just now when he talked to my father and mother I was filled with terror and disgust. But I came to the conclusion that I only needed to be a little braver because all girls must feel somewhat the same way. It’s probably a mistake to follow every meandering of our feelings and waste time listening to every echo from within. That, in fact, is no way to live.

  I stayed at Maona all day Sunday while my father went to the city to see Dr. Gaudenzi and find out something more about Alberto. He seemed quite pleased when he came back in the evening and said that he was glad I had found the proper sort of man and one of good social standing. My mother cried and said that marriage was a lottery, but he told her that she was being very silly and that women always have some excuse for shedding a few tears.

  Before we were married, when we went for a walk or sat in a café, Alberto enjoyed my company even if he wasn’t in love with me. He went out of his way to call on me; yes, even if it was raining he never failed to come. He sketched my face in his notebook and listened to what I had to say.

  But after we were married he didn’t sketch my face any more. He drew animals and trains, and when I asked him whether trains meant that he wanted to go away he only laughed and said no. He did go away, though, after we had been married just a month, and didn’t turn up for ten days. One morning I found him packing his bag and he said he was going to the country with Augusto to revisit some of the scenes of their youth. He didn’t ask me if I wanted to go; in fact, such a thought had apparently not even occurred to him. But this didn’t particularly surprise me. Augusto and he had been boys together, and their friendship was so close that they had a way of talking to each other in something like a code which no outsider could decipher. And then he had said once that Augusto didn’t like me. I wasn’t too badly hurt, but I decided it was up to me to make myself agreeable to Augusto so that the next time they went anywhere together they’d ask me to come along. I, too, liked to wander about the countryside, but perhaps he didn’t know it.

  We had a sixteen-year-old girl called Gemma for a maid, the daughter of the shoemaker at Maona. She was very silly and had an unpleasant way of laughing through her nose. She had a notion that there were mice in the house, although I never saw any myself, and she used to sleep with her head under the covers for fear the mice would jump on her bed and eat her up. Finally she came back from Maona one day with a cat and talked to him while she did the cleaning. The cat used to run into the room where the old lady had died, and Gemma was afraid to go after him because she had a peasant belief that the old lady would pop out of a closet and strike her blind. The cat would sit purring on an armchair and Gemma would stand in the doorway trying to lure him out with scraps of cheese. I used to go into this room frequently myself, because I liked to picture the old lady in my imagination and catch the odour of her that lingered in the empty powder box and the tasselled curtains. Her armchair and footstool still stood beside the window, and her black dress and crocheted shawl were hanging in the closet.

  Alberto’s study was locked. Every time he went out of the house he locked the door and put the key in his pocket. When I asked him why, he said because there was a loaded revolver in the drawer of the desk. There was no lock on the drawer, so he locked the door of the room instead. With that he laughed and said he didn’t want to put ideas in my head. For years and years he’d kept that revolver loaded in case he ever wanted to kill somebody, or perhaps commit suicide. Keeping it that way was such a habit that he was almost superstitious about it. He said Augusto kept a loaded revolver in the drawer of his desk too.

  While Alberto was away I often stopped in front of that door. It wasn’t on account of the revolver, I told myself, that he kept it locked. Perhaps there were letters and pictures in his desk. I was sorry that I hadn’t anything to hide from him, that he knew everything there was to know about me. Before I met him my life had been colourless and dull. And after our marriage I had let everything go. I had stopped teaching and saw Francesca very infrequently. Ever since she had offered to take me to San Remo and I had let her down she had shown little desire to see me. I felt that she was making an effort not to say anything disagreeable and looked back sentimentally to the time when she used to bully and scold me instead of being distant and polite. The Gaudenzis used to ask Alberto and me to their house in the evening. They were always very nice and said they felt they had a share in our happiness because it was through them that we had met. But Alberto said they were stupid and uninteresting and he was always finding excuses to stay away. What he did like, however, was to have Augusto drop in. They would sit and talk in the study and I went to bed, because Alberto said that it embarrassed Augusto to see me.

  A few days after Alberto had gone I met Augusto in the street. He was walking along with his overcoat collar turned up and his hands in his pockets, and he looked at me hard out of his strong stony face. I began to shake so that I couldn’t say a word, and he nodded to me and walked hurriedly on. So now I knew that Alberto had lied when he told me he was going away with Augusto. I went back to the house and sat down by the stove and the cat crept up into my lap. Then it was that I thought for the first time that our marriage was a big mistake. I sat there stroking the cat and staring through the window at the leaves on the trees, which had turned pink in the glow of the sunset. All of a sudden I realized that I felt like a guest in this house. I never thought of it as mine, or the garden either, and I felt guilty whenever Gemma broke a plate, even if Alberto didn’t say anything. Sometimes I half imagined that the old lady actually would pop out of a closet and chase Gemma and the cat and myself away. But where, then, could I feel at home? In my room at Maona my mother had begun to store potatoes and jars of tomato preserve. For a moment I wished I were back in the boarding-house, with the landlady’s hysterical daughter and the flowered hangings, boiling an egg over an alcohol flame.

  Finally I had supper and went to bed. But it was cold and I lay there with my teeth chattering instead of going to sleep. Here in this bed we had made love for the first time when we came back from our fortnight’s honeymoon on the lakes. I was disgusted and ashamed every time Alberto made love to me, but I imagined that all women must feel the same way at the start. I liked best to lie quietly and feel him sleeping beside me. I told him the way I felt about making love and asked him if other women felt the same way. He answered that he didn’t know how the devil it was with women. The main thing for a woman was to have a baby, and for a man too. And I ought to cure myself of the habit of thinking about things so hard.

  It had never occurred to me that he could lie. I had helped him pack his bag and made him take a blanket with him because I thought he might be cold in the inns and farmhouses where he said he would stay. He didn’t want to take it, but I insisted. Then he left the house in a great hurry, saying that Augusto was waiting for him at the station.

  I thought of our love-making and the tender, feverish words he whispered in my ear. Then he would fall asleep and I could hear his steady breathing beside me. I would lie awake in the darkness and try to remember every word he had said. I didn’t care much for the love-making, but I enjoyed lying awake in the darkness and saying his words over and over to myself.

  He hadn’t gone away with Augusto, then. He had gone with that woman. Doubtless this wasn’t the first time he had lied to me; doubtless they had gone on meeting even after he had decided to
marry. When he said he was going to the office, perhaps he was going to see her instead. They were making love together and he said the same feverish words to her as he said to me. Then he probably lay quietly at her side and they sighed over the fact that they must live apart. I could see the woman standing motionless in the darkness before me, wearing a shiny silk dress and quantities of jewels. She yawned and pulled down her stockings with an indolent gesture. Then she disappeared, only to turn up again in a tall and masculine guise, striding along with a Pekinese dog in her arms.

  Alberto stayed away ten days. The evening he came back he seemed tired and in a bad humour and he asked for a cup of very hot coffee. Gemma had already gone to bed, so I made the coffee and took it to him in our room. He drank it very slowly, staring at me all the while but making no motion to kiss me.

  ‘You weren’t with Augusto,’ I said. ‘Who were you with?'

  He put the cup on the table, got up, and scratched his head. Then he took off his jacket and tie and threw them on the chair.

  ‘I’m sleepy and tired,’ he said. ‘I don’t feel like talking.’

  ‘Augusto was here all the time,’ I said. ‘I saw him on the street. Who were you with?’

  ‘Alone,’ he answered. ‘I was alone.’ We got into bed and I put out the light. Suddenly Alberto’s voice rose up out of the darkness.

  ‘It was anything but a pleasant trip,’ he said. ‘I’d have done better to stay at home.’ He edged up to me and held me tight. ‘Don’t ask any questions,’ he added. ‘I feel worn out and terribly sad. Just be silent and very, very still.’

  ‘Is she as bad as all that?’ I asked.

  ‘She’s unfortunate,’ he said, running his hands over my body. ‘She can’t help being unkind.’

  Hot, silent tears streamed down my cheeks. He touched my face with his hands and held me tighter.

  ‘A perfectly hellish trip,’ he said, and I heard him laughing under his breath. ‘Don’t ask any questions. Don’t ever ask any questions. You’re all I’ve got. Just remember that.’

  His hand lay on my shoulder, and I put out my hand to touch his thin, hot face. For the first time I wasn’t disgusted when we made love.

  A few months later Alberto went away again. I didn’t ask him any questions. He was packing his bag in the study and I saw him put in a volume of Rilke. He used to read Rilke’s poems out loud to me, too, in the evening. When he went out the door he said:

  'I'll be back in a fortnight’

  Then he turned the key in the lock, something he never forgot to do. I smiled at him as he left. The smile was still on my lips when I went back up the stairs and into my room, and I tried to keep it there as long as I could. I sat down in front of the mirror and brushed my hair, still with that silly smile on my face. I was pregnant and my face was pale and heavy. The letters I wrote to my mother had in them the same cowardly and idiotic smile. I hadn’t gone to Maona for some time because I was afraid of the questions my mother might ask me.

  ‘You’re all I’ve got. Just remember that.’ Yes, I had remembered; indeed these words had helped me to go on living from day to day. But little by little they had lost their sweetness, like a prune stone that has been sucked too long. I didn’t ask Alberto anything. When he came back to the house late at night I never asked him what he had been doing. But I had waited for him so long that a burden of silence had accumulated inside me. I looked in vain for something amusing to say to him so that he wouldn’t be too bored with me. I sat knitting under the lamp while he read the paper, cleaning his teeth with a toothpick and scratching his head. Sometimes he sketched in his notebook, but he no longer drew my face. He drew trains and little horses galloping away with their tails streaming in the wind. And now that we had a cat he did cats and mice too. Once I told him that he should put my face on a mouse and his on a cat. He laughed and asked me why. So I asked him if he didn’t think we two fitted into these roles. He laughed again and said there was nothing mouselike about me. Still he did draw a mouse with my face and a cat with his. The mouse was knitting, with a frightened and ashamed expression on its face, and the cat was angrily making a sketch in a notebook.

  The evening after he had gone away for the second time Augusto came to see me and stayed quite late. He said that Alberto had asked him to keep me company sometimes in the evening while he was gone. I was taken aback and couldn’t find anything to say. He sat there with his pipe between his teeth and an ugly grey wool scarf thrown around his neck, staring at me silently out of his square stony face with the black moustache. Finally I asked him if it was true that he didn’t like me. He turned brick-red up to the eyebrows and then we had a good laugh together. That’s how we started being friends. Sometimes when two people don’t know what to say to each other some such trivial remark will turn the trick. Augusto told me that on general principles he didn’t like anybody, that the only person he’d ever really liked was himself. Whenever he was in a bad humour, he said, he looked at himself in the mirror and began to smile and then he felt positively cheerful. I told him that I had tried smiling at myself in the mirror, too, but it didn’t do any good. He asked me if I was in a bad humour very often and I said yes, I was. He stood in front of me with his pipe in his hand, blowing smoke out between his closed lips.

  ‘That woman, Augusto…’ I said. ‘What’s she like?’

  ‘What woman?’ he asked.

  ‘The woman who goes on trips with Alberto.’

  ‘Look here,’ he said. ‘It’s no use talking about her. Besides, it doesn’t seem right.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about her,’ I said, ‘not even her name. And I torment myself trying to imagine her face.’

  ‘Her name is Giovanna,’ he said. ‘And her face—well, her face isn’t anything special.’

  ‘Isn’t she very beautiful?’ I asked.

  ‘How should I know?’ he said. ‘I’m not an expert on beauty. Yes, she’s beautiful, I suppose, when you come down to it. Or at least she was when she was young.’

  ‘Is she no longer young, then?’

  ‘Not so very,’ he said. ‘But what’s the point of discussing her?

  ‘Please,’ I said. ‘I’d like to be able to talk to you about her once in a while. It gets on my nerves to mope all by myself. I don’t know a thing, you see. I didn’t even know her name. I feel as if I were in the dark, as if I were blind and groping my way around, touching the walls and the objects in the room.’ My ball of yarn fell to the floor and Augusto bent over to pick it up.

  ‘Why the devil did you two marry?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I made a mistake. He wasn’t very keen on it, but he didn’t stop to think. He doesn’t like to think about important things. In fact, he hates people who are always searching inside themselves and trying to find some meaning to life. When he sees me sitting still and thinking he lights a cigarette and goes away. I married him because I wanted to know all the time where he was. But the way it turned out, he knows where I am—I’m just sitting here, waiting for him to come home—and I don’t know where he is any more than I did before. He isn’t really my husband. A husband is a man that—well, that you always know where he is. And if someone asks you: “Where’s your husband?” then you ought to be able to answer without hesitation. Whereas I don’t go out of the house for fear of meeting people I know and hearing them ask: “Where is he?” Because I shouldn’t know what to answer. You may think I’m very silly, but I don’t go out of the house.’

  ‘Why did you marry?’ he repeated. ‘What got into you?’ I began to cry. ‘It was a hell of an idea,’ he said, blowing the smoke out of his mouth and then staring at me in silence. He had a stubborn and gloomy expression on his face, as if he refused to be sorry for me.

  ‘But where’s Alberto?’ I asked him. 'Do you know where he is now?'

  ‘No, I don’t,’ Augusto answered. ‘I’ve got to go. Good night.’ He scraped the ashes out of his pipe with a matchstick and took his coat off the chair. Now his tall and
solitary figure was standing in the doorway. ‘There isn’t anything I can do about it,’ he said. ‘Good night.’

  I couldn’t close an eye all night long. I imagined that Augusto had fallen in love with me and I was his mistress. Every day I would go to meet him at a hotel. I would come home very late and Alberto would search my face agonizingly to see where I had been. But when Augusto came to see me again a few evenings later I was ashamed of all the things I had imagined. He picked up my ball of wool when it fell to the floor, filled his pipe, lit it, scraped the ashes out of it with a matchstick, and paced up and down the room, while all the time I imagined how we would make love in a hotel room and blushed with shame at my own imaginings. I didn’t speak again of Alberto and myself and neither did he. We didn’t know what to talk about, and I had an idea he was as bored as I was. Only I was glad we had become friends, and I told Alberto as much when he came back. He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t look very pleased. He shouted and made a great fuss in the bathroom because the water was too hot and he couldn’t find his shaving brush and the other things he was looking for. He came out of the bathroom freshly shaved, with a lighted cigarette in his mouth, and I asked him if this trip had been any more of a success than the one before. He said that it was a trip like any other and not worth talking about, that he had gone on business to Rome. I said I wished he wouldn’t go away again before the baby was born because I was afraid of what might happen if I had pains during the night when I was all alone. He said I wasn’t the first woman in the world to have a baby and if I was so nervous it was just too bad. We didn’t say anything more, but I cried over my knitting, and then he went out, slamming the door behind him.