The Road To The City (7 page)

At the bus stop he was angry because I couldn't find my ticket, and when my handbag slipped down on the ground in the confusion my old pair of stockings fell out of it.

‘You're just the same as you always were,' he said. ‘You'll never know what it's all about.'

The night before the wedding I did nothing but cry, and my aunt insisted that I put cold compresses on my face so that no one would see the traces of my tears. She washed my hair with an egg and spread a cold cream that had once been a favourite with the countess over my chapped red hands. But I wept every time anyone opened their mouth and was a pitiful sight indeed, with my swollen eyes, trembling lips, and freshly washed and unruly hair.

My mother and father came early in the morning in a wagon, and my little brothers followed later, hopeful of getting something to eat. But they were so dirty that my aunt wouldn't let them go into the church. They didn't bring Giovanni with them because he had wisely run off to the city before it was time to go. Azalea was at the seashore, supposedly for the health of her children, but I gathered from a letter she wrote me that her lover was there and she couldn't be bothered to come. Last of all arrived Giulio and his father. Giulio wore a long overcoat, gloves, and highly polished shoes, which made him almost unrecognizable. My aunt had to borrow some chairs because her own were coming apart.

I didn't understand a word of what the priest was saying, and I was in mortal terror lest the smell of incense make me feel sick and faint. The church had just been whitewashed inside, and it was so bare and empty that it didn't seem like a church at all. My mother had brought a brazier to keep her feet warm, and my aunt had one eye on the door the whole time because she was worried about the dinner she had left in the oven. Santa wept because she was not the bride, and needless to say I wept without ceasing both at church and at dinner. The others pretended not to notice and talked among themselves about things that were of no concern to me.

When my father got up to go my aunt pushed me in front of him and told me to say I was sorry for all the trouble I had caused. He kissed me in an embarrassed fashion and turned his head away. He had changed a great deal in the last months and looked permanently hurt and sad. He was wearing glasses, and it was hard to believe that he had ever beaten me up on account of Giulio now that all the strength required for getting angry or shouting or beating anyone up seemed to have gone out of him. All through the festivities he had only shot me oblique glances, without ever saying a word, as if he were ashamed.

After dinner they all went away, leaving Giulio and me alone. We went upstairs together, and he told me that I was to stay at my aunt's until the baby was born. He would come to see me, he said, but not very often. Studying made him tired and I, too, should take it easy because having a baby was no joke. He told me to lie flat on the bed and rest after all the excitement of the wedding, while he went down to the kitchen where Santa was drying the dishes.

Giulio came again one Sunday to see me. He was dressed in his hunting clothes with the black boots and open jacket which I had seen him wear in the village. I asked him if he had found an apartment for us to live in.

‘What do you mean, an apartment?' he said. ‘I haven't even looked for one because my mother has already fixed up a room for us at home.'

‘Oh, she has, has she?' I said in a voice trembling with rage. ‘But I don't want to live with your mother. I'd rather die than be in the same house with her.'

‘I won't allow you to talk that way,' he answered. And he said that he was going to rent an office in the city but that we would have to live with his parents because we hadn't enough money to take a place of our own.

‘It would have been better not to get married in that case,' I said.

‘It
would
have been better, there I agree,' he said. ‘But I was sorry for you. Have you forgotten that you wanted to throw yourself in the river?'

I glared at him and went out through the garden without speaking to my aunt, who asked me where I was going. I walked for a long time, with my hands in my pockets and the wind in my face, among the grapevines where I had walked with Nini. When I came back Giulio had gone.

‘You little wretch,' said my aunt, ‘is that the way you behave with your husband? I heard you two quarrelling. It's too early for fights. A fine song and dance you'll lead him if you go on like that.'

A few days later Giulio came back with some yard goods for me to make myself some new clothes and said he would reconsider the idea of our living in the city.

'I'll stand up against my own family if it will make you happy,' he said. ‘And you really don't deserve it because you're a bad girl.'

My aunt came to look at the materials, pulled out a fashion journal, and said that as soon as the baby was born she would make me something to wear. Giulio told her that he wanted me to go to a dressmaker in the city, and at that she grew red in the face and took offence. Finally she ordered us into the kitchen on the pretext of putting a closet in order.

‘After all, this is my house,' she said.

Giulio said that if we were to live in the city I must dress in the proper style. And that didn't mean dressing like Azalea, who wore such extravagant things that everyone turned around to stare at her on the street. He didn't want me to be stared at, but it was important for me to be stylish if I wanted him to take me around. Santa teased him by saying that he had made a poor choice of materials because the colours were not in fashion.

‘I expect I know what's in fashion better than you people here in the sticks,' Giulio retorted.

‘Then why don't you dress like everybody else instead of wearing those ridiculous boots?' Santa asked him.

Both of them were put out, and Giulio began to talk to me as if we were alone. He said that if we lived in the city we'd have to entertain people every now and then, and this was one of the many things I'd have to learn how to do. Sometimes, he said, I seemed to him to have fallen from the moon. I looked at him to see if he was thinking of the Moon Hotel, that prostitutes' hangout, where he used to take me in the old days, but apparently he wasn't. He seemed to have forgotten all about the days before we were married and his reluctance to marry me and the fact that his father had offered me money if I would disappear along with our unborn child. Now he spoke often of the baby and how he imagined it would look and of a new kind of collapsible baby carriage that he had in mind to buy.

My labour pains came on at night. My aunt got up to call the midwife and sent Santa to her godmother's because she said it wasn't proper for a young girl to see how a baby is born. Santa was impatient to kiss the baby and give him a cap with pale blue ribbons that she had embroidered for him. Toward morning my mother arrived, bringing more caps and ribbons. By this time I was wild with pain and fear. I had two fainting spells and the midwife said they must take me to the hospital in the city. My mother wept all the way to the hospital, and looking into her face, I was sure I was going to die. I scratched my mother's hand and screamed at the top of my lungs.

The baby was a boy and they baptized him immediately for fear he wouldn't live. The next morning he was flourishing, while I felt very weak and had a fever, and they told me I couldn't nurse him. I stayed at the hospital a whole month, and the Sisters fed the baby with a bottle. Every now and then they brought him in for me to see, wearing Santa's cap on his head. He was ugly as sin, with long fingers, which he wriggled very slowly, and a secretive staring expression, as if he were about to discover something of importance.

The day after the baby was born my mother-in-law came to see me and scolded one of the Sisters for not binding him up the way she should. Then she sat stiffly on the edge of a chair with her pocketbook on her lap and a melancholy look on her long face and told me that in her time she had suffered a great deal more than me and the doctors had praised her for her courage. Against their advice she had nursed her baby and she had cried all day when she heard I wasn't going to nurse mine. At this point she pulled out a handkerchief and dried away her tears.

‘It's sad for a baby to be denied his mother's breast,' she said. Then she pulled down my nightgown and said that I wasn't well enough developed to have milk, anyhow. I was angry and told her that my head ached and I wanted to sleep. She asked me if she had hurt my feelings, ran her fingers caressingly under my chin, and said that perhaps she had spoken too frankly. Then she pulled out a box of dates and put them under my pillow.

‘Call me Mother,' she said as she went away.

When she had gone I ate all the dates, one by one, and put the box away, thinking it might be good to keep gloves in. I began to think of the white gloves with black stitching like Azalea's that I would buy as soon as I got out of the hospital, and all the dresses and hats I had set my heart on, partly just to annoy my mother-in-law and make her say that I was wasting money. I was depressed by my mother-in-law's visit and the prospect of having her hang around me.

When they brought in the baby and laid him beside me in the bed I almost hated him because he seemed to look so much like her. I was sorry to have a baby with my mother-in-law's long chin and something of Giulio about him but not a trace of myself ‘If I loved Giulio, I'd love the baby too,' I said to myself, ‘but this way it's out of the question.' Still there was something about his soft damp hair and the way the breath came and went in his little body that attracted me and lingered in my thoughts after they had taken him away. He didn't care in the least about what I thought of him or whether I was happy or sad. He knew nothing of what was in my mind or of the things I wanted to buy, and I was sorry that he was still so small that I couldn't talk to him and tell him what I was thinking. Then he sneezed and I pulled the shawl up over him. Strange, I thought, how long he had lived inside me, all the time I had sat in my aunt's kitchen and when I had gone out walking with Nini. What had happened to Nini, anyway? Why didn't he come to see me? But perhaps it was just as well he didn't come because I was weak and tired and talking made my head ache. Besides, Nini would surely have said something nasty about the baby.

Giulio came to see me every evening, when the Sisters were saying their prayers in the hall and a tiny lamp with a silk shade was lit beside my bed. As soon as he arrived I began to complain that I didn't feel well and that my whole body ached as if it had been pounded into jelly. This was partly true, but I said so mostly because I enjoyed giving him a scare. I told him that I was sick and tired of the hospital and the time never went by and some fine day I was going to run away to the films. Then he would beg me to be patient and make a great fuss and promise to bring me a surprise if I stopped giving him so much worry. He was very tender and affectionate and said he'd do anything in the world to make me happy. In fact, he'd already rented an apartment in a building that had an elevator and every other possible convenience.

It wasn't true that I was unhappy at the hospital. I enjoyed myself there very much because I didn't have to lift a finger. Whereas after I left I would have to rock the baby to sleep and boil his milk and change his nappies all day long. As long as I was in the hospital I didn't know how to handle him at all and I was desperate every time he cried because he would get all red in the face and I thought he was going to burst. Occasionally, now that I had the money, I was impatient to get up, put on my clothes, look at myself in the mirror, and go out on the street. At times when I was bored like this there was nothing to do except to wait for someone to come and see me. My mother no longer came very often because she was busy at home and didn't want to come to the city in her shabby clothes. She didn't seem to be as satisfied with my marriage as she once was, and she had quarrelled with Giulio already over his refusal to lend her some money. My mother wouldn't forgive him and extended her grudge to me as well.

Azalea came to see me as soon as she returned from the shore. Her nose was peeling and she wore beach sandals. She wasn't getting on very well with her lover. He was jealous and wouldn't let her go to any dances, she said, and they fought tooth and nail most of the time.

‘How's your son?' she inquired. I asked her if she wanted to see him, but she said she was fed up with children and tiny babies made her flesh creep.

‘How are you making out with your husband?' she said. ‘You were very wise to hold out for an apartment of your own. If you'd gone to live with his mother you'd never have a penny to call your own. You have to take a strong hand with the men because if you show any signs of weakness they'll strip the shirt off your back.'

The next day she brought her dressmaker to see me. I told her that I couldn't get out of my bed to have my measurements taken, but she said that the dressmaker was just coming to make my acquaintance and tell me about the latest styles. Then Azalea began to say that it was high time for me to get up. There wasn't a thing in the world the matter with me, she said; in fact, I was much stronger than she was.

It was a great occasion when I got up for the first time and slipped on a feathery pink wrapper that Azalea had brought me. I walked slowly down the hall on Giulio's arm, looking out the high windows at the street below. Who knows if Nini mightn't be passing by? I watched out for him every day. If I'd seen him on the street I'd have called down to him to come and see me and we should have talked and quarrelled as we did before. After all this time he couldn't possibly love me. But even if he did that was no reason for not coming to see me. Still my watch was all in vain and I grew ill-humoured and fought with the Sisters when they told me to go back to bed.