The Road To The City (9 page)

‘He can never draw the women that really attract him,' said Dr. Gaudenzi.

They gave me a cigarette and laughed to see how it made my eyes water. Alberto took me back to my boarding-house and asked if he could come the next day to bring me a French novel which he had mentioned in the course of the evening.

The next day he came. We went out for a walk and ended up in a café. His eyes were gay and sparkling and I began to think he was in love with me. I was very happy, because no man had ever fallen in love with me before, and I could have sat with him in the café indefinitely. That evening we went to the theatre and I wore my best dress, a crimson velvet given me by my cousin Francesca.

Francesca was at the theatre, too, a few rows behind us, and waved to me. The next day, when I went to lunch at the house of my aunt and uncle, she asked me:

‘Who was that old man?'

‘What old man?'

‘The old man at the theatre.'

I told her he was someone who was interested in me but that I didn't care for him one way or the other. When he came back to the boarding-house to see me I looked him over and he didn't seem so very old to me. Francesca called everyone old. I didn't really like him, and the only reason I was pleased to have him come and call on me was that he looked at me with such gay and sparkling eyes. Every woman is pleased when a man looks at her like that. I thought he must be very much in love. ‘Poor fellow!' I thought to myself, and I imagined his asking me to marry him and the words he would say. I would answer no, and he would ask if we could still be friends. He would keep on taking me to the theatre and one evening he would introduce me to a friend, much younger than himself, who would fall in love with me, and this was the man I should marry. We should have a lot of children and Alberto would come to call. Every Christmas he would bring us a big fruitcake and there would be a touch of melancholy in his enjoyment of our happiness.

Lying dreamily on the bed in my boarding-house room, I imagined how wonderful it would be to be married and have a house of my own. In my imagination I saw exactly how I should arrange my house, with dozens of stylish gadgets and potted plants, and I visualized myself sitting in an armchair over a basket of embroidery. The face of the man I married was constantly changing, but he had always the same voice, which I could hear repeating over and over again the same ironical and tender phrases. The boarding-house was gloomy, with dark hangings and upholstery, and in the room next to mine a colonel's widow knocked on the wall with a hairbrush every time I opened the window or moved a chair. I had to get up early in order to arrive on time at the school where I was a teacher. I dressed in a hurry and ate a roll and an egg which I boiled over a tiny alcohol stove. The colonel's widow knocked furiously on the wall while I moved about the room looking for my clothes, and in the bathroom the landlady's hysterical daughter screeched like a peacock while they gave her a warm shower which was supposed to calm her down. I rushed out on to the street and while I waited in the cold and lonely dawn for the tram, I made up all sorts of stories to keep myself warm, so that sometimes I arrived at school with a wild and absent look on my face that must have been positively funny.

A girl likes to think that a man may be in love with her, and even if she doesn't love him in return it's almost as if she did. She is prettier than usual and her eyes shine; she walks at a faster pace and the tone of her voice is softer and sweeter. Before I knew Alberto I used to feel so dull and unattractive that I was sure I should always be alone, but after I got the impression that he was in love with me I began to think that if I could please him then I might please someone else, too, perhaps the man who spoke to me in ironical and tender phrases in my imagination. This man had a constantly changing face, but he always had broad shoulders and red, slightly awkward hands and an utterly charming way of teasing me every evening when he came home and found me sitting over my embroidery.

When a girl is very much alone and leads a tiresome and monotonous existence, with worn gloves and very little spending money, she may let her imagination run wild and find herself defenceless before all the errors and pitfalls which imagination has devised to deceive her. I was a weak and unarmed victim of imagination as I read Ovid to eighteen girls huddled in a cold classroom or ate my meals in the dingy boarding-house dining-room, peering out through the yellow window-panes as I waited for Alberto to take me out walking or to a concert. Every Saturday afternoon I took the bus to Maona, returning on Sunday evening.

My father has been a country doctor at Maona for over twenty years. He is a tall, stout, slightly lame old man who uses a cherry-wood cane for walking. In summer he wears a straw hat with a black ribbon around it and in winter a beaver cap and an overcoat with a beaver collar. My mother is a tiny woman with a thick mass of white hair. My father has few calls because he is old and moves about with difficulty. When people are sick they call the doctor from Cavapietra, who has a motor-cycle and studied medicine at Naples. My father and mother sit in the kitchen all day long playing chess with the local vet and the tax collector. On Saturdays when I came to Maona I sat down by the kitchen stove and there I sat all day Sunday until it was time to go. I roasted myself there by the stove, stuffed with thick soups and corn meal, and did not so much as open my mouth, while between one game of chess and the next my father told the vet that modern girls have no respect for their parents and do not tell them a word of what they are doing.

I used to tell Alberto about my father and mother and the life I led at Maona before I came to teach in the city. I told him how my father used to rap me over the fingers with his cane and I used to run and cry in the coal cellar. How I used to hide
From Slavegirl to Queen
under my mattress to read at night and how, when my father and the tax collector and the maidservant and I used to walk down the road between the fields and vineyards to the cemetery, I had a violent longing to run away.

Alberto never told me anything about himself, and I fell into the habit of asking him no questions. It had never happened before that anyone should take such an interest in me and attribute so much importance to what I had felt and said in the coal cellar or on the road to the cemetery. When I went for a walk with Alberto or when we sat in a café together I was happy and no longer felt so alone. Alberto told me that he lived with his mother, who was old and ailing. Dr. Gaudenzi's wife informed me that she was a very rich but batty old woman who spent her time smoking cigarettes in an ivory holder and studying Sanskrit, and that she never saw anyone except a Dominican friar who came every evening to read her the Epistles of Saint Paul. On the pretext that she could not get her shoes on without hurting her feet she had not left the house for years, but sat all day long in an armchair, in the care of a young servant girl who cheated her on food bills and maltreated her into the bargain. At first I didn't mind Alberto's unwillingness to talk about himself, but later I was disappointed and asked him a few questions. His face took on an absent and faraway expression and his eyes were veiled with mist like those of a sick bird whenever I inquired about his mother, or his work, or any other part of his life.

He never said that he was in love with me, but he came regularly to see me, bringing me books and chocolates, and wanting to take me out with him. I thought he might be shy and afraid to speak up, and I waited for him to say that he loved me so that I could tell Francesca. Francesca always had so much to tell and I never had anything. Finally, although he still hadn't spoken, I told Francesca all the same. That day he had given me some tan kid gloves and I was sure that he must love me after all. I told her that he was too old for me to marry, although I didn't really know how old he was—forty, perhaps—while I was only twenty-six. Francesca told me to get rid of him, that she didn't like his looks, and that I should throw the gloves back in his face because the snaps at the wrist were long since out of style and made me look like a country bumpkin. She'd always suspected, she said, that this fellow would bring me trouble. Francesca was only twenty at the time, but I respected her common sense and always listened to what she had to say. But this time I didn't listen. I liked the gloves in spite of the snaps at the wrist and went on wearing them, and I liked Alberto, too, and continued to see him. After twenty-six years life had seemed empty and sad because no man had ever paid any attention to me, much less given me gifts. It was all very easy for Francesca to talk that way, when she had everything she wanted and was always travelling and amusing herself.

Then summer came and I went to Maona. I expected Alberto to write, but he never sent me anything but his signature on a picture postcard of a village on the lakes. I was bored with Maona and the days seemed never to go by. I sat in the kitchen or stretched out on my bed to read. My mother, with her head wrapped in a napkin, peeled tomatoes on the porch and laid them out to dry on a board, for making preserves, while my father sat on the wall of the square in front of our house with the vet and the tax collector, tracing signs in the dust with his cane. The maidservant washed clothes at the fountain in the courtyard and wrung them out with her heavy red arms; flies buzzed over the tomatoes, and my mother wiped her knife on a newspaper and dried her sticky hands. I looked at Alberto's postcard until I knew the contents of the picture by heart: a ray of sun striking a sailing boat on the lake. Why had he sent me nothing but this? Francesca wrote me two letters from Rome, where she had gone with a friend to study at a school of dramatics. First she said that she was engaged to be married and then that it was all off.

I often thought that Alberto might come to Maona to see me. My father would be surprised until I explained that he was a friend of Dr. Gaudenzi. I used to go into the kitchen and carry the garbage pail down to the coal cellar because it had such a bad smell, but the maidservant said that it had no smell at all and carried it back to the kitchen. On the one hand I was afraid to see Alberto appear, because I was ashamed of the garbage pail and of the way my mother looked with a napkin wrapped around her head and her hands sticky with tomatoes; on the other, I waited eagerly for his arrival, and every time the bus came I looked out the window to see if he was on it. I breathed hard and shook all over every time I saw a slight figure in a light raincoat get off, but when I realized that it was not Alberto I went back into my room to read and daydream until dinner. Often I tried to dream again of the man with the broad shoulders and ironical manner, but he drifted farther and farther away until his anonymous and changing face lost all significance.

When I came back to the city I expected that Alberto would turn up soon. He must guess that I had to return for the opening of school. Every evening I powdered and primped and sat waiting; then, when he failed to come, I went to bed. The boarding-house was gloomy and desolate with its dark flowered hangings and upholstery and the screeching of the landlady's daughter when she refused to get undressed. I had Alberto's address and telephone number, but I didn't dare try to get in touch with him because he had always taken the initiative of telephoning me. Perhaps, I thought, he had not yet come back. One day I called his number from a public telephone booth and his voice answered. But I hung up the receiver without saying a word. Every evening I primped and powdered and waited. I was half ashamed of myself and tried to cover up my air of expectancy by reading a book, but the words made no sense. The nights were still warm, and through the open window I could hear the trams on the boulevards. I imagined him riding in one of them with his light raincoat and leather brief-case, going about one of the mysterious activities which he was never willing to talk about.

This, then, is how I fell in love with him, sitting all powdered and primped in my boarding-house bedroom while the half-hours and hours went by, accompanied by the screeching of the landlady's daughter, or walking in the city streets, on the alert for his unexpected appearance, and with a quickened pulse every time I saw a slight figure in a light raincoat holding one shoulder a little higher than the other. I began to think constantly of his life, how he managed being in the house with a mother who studied Sanskrit and refused to put on her shoes. I said to myself that if he asked me I would marry him, and then I would know at every hour of the day where he was and what he was doing. Every evening when he came home he would throw his raincoat over a chair in the hall and I would hang it up in the closet. Francesca had not yet come back from Rome, but when she came she would surely ask about Alberto, and when I told her I had not seen him again she would exclaim: ‘How does that happen, if he was in love with you?' and I would be embarrassed.

I went to the Gaudenzi house one day to see if he was there or if they had news of him. The doctor wasn't at home and his wife was washing the windows. While I watched her polish them she told me that the system was to clean them with a solution of ashes and then to rub them slowly with a wool cloth. Then she came down from the ladder and made me a cup of hot chocolate. But she said not a word about Alberto, so I went away.

Finally one day I met him on the street. I saw him from a distance with his brief-case under his arm and his raincoat open and flapping. I walked behind him for a while as he smoked a cigarette and flicked the ashes away. Then he stopped and turned around in order to stamp out the butt and saw me. He was very pleased and took me to a café. He told me that it was only because he was very busy that he had not come to call, but that he had thought of me often. I looked at him and tried to recognize in this little man with the curly black hair the cause of all my anguish and torment. I felt cold and humiliated and as if something inside me were broken. Alberto asked me how I had spent the summer and whether I had hidden in the coal cellar, and with that we both laughed. He remembered everything, without exception, that I had ever told him about myself. Then I asked him about his holiday. He immediately put on a weary and faraway expression and said that he had done nothing but look at the lake. He liked lakes, he said, because their water does not have the same violent colours and glaring light as that of the sea.