The Woman of Rome (Italia) Read online

  What made me decide that this time I would accept Astarita’s invitation, after so many refusals, I do not know myself. “Very well, I’ll go,” I said, feeling more dead than alive.

  Gisella was rather disconcerted by my passivity. For the first time she noticed how pale and frightened I was.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked. “Is it because he’s in the police? He’s not after you! What are you scared of? He doesn’t want to arrest you!”

  I got up, although I felt dizzy. “All right,” I said, “I’ll go. Which Ministry is it?”

  “Home Office. Just in front of the Supercinema. But listen —”

  “At what time?”

  “Any time in the morning. But listen —”

  “Good-bye.”

  I slept very little that night. I could not understand what Astarita wanted of me, outside his own passion, but an intuition that seemed infallible to me told me it could not be anything good. The place he summoned me to led me to think it must be something to do with the police. I knew, on the other hand, as all poor people do, that when the police get going, it is never for your good, and after I had examined my own behavior in every detail, I came to the conclusion that Astarita wanted to blackmail me again by using some information he had obtained concerning Gino. I did not know anything about Gino’s life, and it might be that he was politically compromised. I had never troubled myself with politics, but I was not so ignorant as not to know that there were a number of people who had no liking for the Fascist government, and that men like Astarita had the task of hunting out such enemies of the regime. My imagination depicted for me in vivid colors the dilemma Astarita would place me in: I would either have to give in to him again or let Gino go to prison. My anguish was caused by the fact that, while I did not at all want to satisfy Astarita, I did not want Gino to go to jail either. I felt no further pity for Astarita as I pondered over these matters, but only hatred. He seemed a low and vile creature to me, unfit to live, who deserved only merciless punishment. And it is true that among other projected solutions to my problem that night, I even contemplated murdering Astarita. But this was a morbid, half-waking fantasy rather than a solution; and, in fact, it kept me company until morning, like any fantasy that never properly develops into an objective and firm determination. I saw myself putting a sharp, pointed clasp knife with a sheath, which Mother used for peeling potatoes, into my purse, going to Astarita, hearing the invitation I feared, and then plunging the knife into his neck with all the strength of my muscular arm, just between his ear and white starched collar. I saw myself leaving the room, pretending to be absolutely calm and then running to hide at Gisella’s or at some other friend’s place. But although I went over these bloodthirsty scenes in my imagination, I knew all the time that I would never be capable of putting any one of them into action.

  I dozed off toward dawn and slept a little, then day broke, I got up and went to my usual appointment with Gino.

  “Tell me,” I said as soon as we met in the suburban avenue after the usual greetings, trying to make my voice sound as casual as possible, “have you ever had anything to do with politics?”

  “Politics? How do you mean?”

  “I mean doing anything against the government.”

  He looked at me knowingly. “Tell me something,” he said, “do I look like a fool to you?”

  “No, but —”

  “No, no — let’s get this clear! Do I look like a fool?”

  “No,” I said, “you don’t look like one, but —”

  “All right, then,” he said, “why the devil do you think I’d have anything to do with politics?”

  “I don’t know, but sometimes —”

  “Forget it! You can tell whoever threw out any hints that Gino Molinari’s not a damn fool.”

  At about eleven o’clock, after having wandered around the Ministry for more than an hour, unable to make up my mind to enter, I approached the porter and asked for Astarita. First I had to go up a wide marble staircase, then a smaller but still extremely wide one, then I was accompanied along a number of corridors into an anteroom with three doors leading into it. I had always associated the word “police” with the mean, filthy offices of the local branches, and was therefore astonished by the magnificence of the place where Astarita worked. The anteroom was vast, with a mosaic floor and old pictures such as you see in churches; leather chairs stood about against the walls and a huge table filled the center of the room.

  Uneasy at such splendor, I could not help thinking that Gisella might be right — Astarita really must be someone important. His importance was impressed upon me by an unexpected occurrence. I had only just sat down, when one of the doors opened and a tall and beautiful, if no longer young, lady came out, dressed all in black, very smart, with a little veil over her face; she was followed by Astarita. I got up, thinking it was my turn. But after Astarita had made me a sign with his hand, as if to let me know that he had seen me, but that it was not quite my turn yet, he continued speaking to the lady in the doorway. Then, having accompanied her to the middle of the room, he bowed to her, kissed her hand, then left her, after making a sign to another person who was in the anteroom with me, an old man dressed in black with a little white beard and spectacles who looked like a professor. When Astarita beckoned, he rose immediately and hastened after him, humbly and eagerly. The two of them disappeared into the room, and I was left alone.

  What had struck me most during Astarita’s brief appearance had been the difference in his manner from what it had been on the Viterbo trip. Then I had see him looking awkward, convulsed, dumb, and half-crazed; now he seemed entirely master of himself, easy-mannered but precise, exuding an indefinable sense of discreet though authoritative superiority. Even his voice had changed. During the trip he had spoken in low, warm, strangled tones, but while he was speaking to the lady with the veil, his voice had sounded clear, cold, measured, calm. He was dressed as usual in dark gray, with a high white collar that gave his head a rigid look, but on this occasion his suit and collar, which I had noticed during the trip without giving them any special significance, seemed as perfectly matched as a uniform to the huge room with its severe, heavy furniture, and the silence and order that reigned there. Gisella was right, I thought, he really must be someone who counted for a great deal, and only love could explain his awkward manner and sense of inferiority with regard to me.

  These reflections took my mind off my earlier feelings of agitation, so that when the door opened after a few minutes and the old man came out, I felt sufficiently in control of myself. But this time Astarita did not come to beckon me from the doorway. A bell rang, a servant went in to see what Astarita wanted and shut the door behind him, then returned, and, after having asked my name in a low voice, he said I could go in. I got up and went casually toward the room.

  Astarita’s office was a room not much smaller than the anteroom. It was empty except for a sofa and two leather armchairs in one corner, and in another a large table, at which Astarita was seated. Two white-curtained windows let in a cold, sunless light, so still and sad that it reminded me of Astarita’s voice when he was talking to the lady with the veil. There was a huge soft carpet on the floor and two or three pictures hung on the walls. I can remember one of them: it was of an expanse of green fields bounded on the horizon by a chain of rocky mountains.

  As I have said, Astarita was sitting behind a large table, and when I entered, he did not even look up from the papers he was reading or pretending to read. I say “pretending” because I felt sure that this was all a show intended to intimidate me and fill me with a sense of his authority and importance. In fact, when I drew near to the table, I saw that the paper he was studying so attentively contained only three or four lines with a scribbled signature below them. Besides, his agitation was revealed by the way the hand on which he was leaning his forehead, between two fingers of which he held a lighted cigarette, was visibly trembling. This trembling caused some of the ash to fall
on the sheet of paper he was examining so closely and with such artificial attention.

  I placed my hand on the edge of the table and said, “Here I am.”

  At these words, as if at a signal, he stopped reading, jumped to his feet and came around to greet me, taking my two hands in his. And all this, done in perfect silence, contrasted strangely with the authoritative and unconcerned attitude he was trying to maintain. As a matter of fact, as I soon learned, my voice alone had been enough to make him forget the part he had prepared himself to play; and his usual state of agitation had then irresistibly overwhelmed him. He kissed my hands, first one then the other, gazed at me while rolling his melancholy and lovelorn eyes, and made as if to speak, but his lips trembled and he was forced to remain silent.

  “You’ve come,” he said at last in the low, strangled voice I recognized as his.

  Now I, perhaps by contrast with Astarita’s attitude, felt full of self-assurance. “Yes, I’ve come,” I said. “Actually, I shouldn’t have — what have you got to tell me?”

  “Come and sit down over here,” he murmured. He had never let go of my hand and, still pressing it tightly, he led me to the sofa. I sat down, and all at once he knelt in front of me, put his two arms around my legs and pressed his forehead so hard against me that he hurt me, and after remaining for a long time like this, he lifted his bald head upward as though he wanted to lay it on my lap. I made a move as if to get up. “You had something important to tell me — say it, or I’ll go away,” I declared.

  With an effort he got to his feet, sat beside me and took my hand.

  “It’s nothing,” he murmured. “I wanted to see you again.” I moved to get up once more, but he caught hold of me. “Yes,” he added, “but I also wanted to tell you that you and I need to come to an understanding.”

  “In what way?”

  “I love you,” he said hurriedly. “I love you so much.… Come and live with me in my house, you can be mistress there … just as if you were my wife.… I’ll buy clothes, jewels, anything you like, for you —”

  He seemed crazed, the words poured confusedly out of his mouth while his lips remained almost motionless and twisted. “So that’s why you made me come up here?” I asked coldly.

  “Don’t you want to?”

  “I won’t even discuss it.”

  Oddly enough, he said not a word to my reply. But he raised his hand and, almost hypnotizing me with his crazy, fixed stare, he stroked my face as if he wanted to memorize its shape. His fingers were light, and I could feel them trembling while the tips traced my face from the forehead to the cheek and back again. For a moment I was almost moved by compassion to say something less final and chilling to him, but he gave me no time. As soon as he had finished caressing me, he got up and spoke in halting and precise tones, a curious mixture of suppressed desire and some new and unknown sense of duty.

  “Just a minute, though,” he said. “I really have got something important to tell you.” Meanwhile, he went back to the table and picked up a red folder.

  It was my turn to become agitated when I saw him coming toward me with this red folder. “What is it?” I asked him faintly.

  “It’s — it’s —” It was strange how the authoritative and official note in his voice became all mixed with his excitement “— it’s some information about your fiancé.”

  “Oh!” I said, and for a moment, frightened to death, I shut my eyes. Astarita did not notice; he was turning over the pages and in his agitation was crumpling them.

  “Gino Molinari, isn’t he?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re getting married in October, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “But Gino Molinari appears to be married already,” he continued, “and, to be precise, to Antonietta Partini, the daughter of the late Emilio and Diomira Lavagna — for four years already.… They’ve got a child called Maria.… At the present time his wife is living in Orvieto with her mother.”

  I said nothing, but got up from the sofa and walked to the door. Astarita remained standing in the middle of the room, with the papers in his hand. I opened the door and went out.

  I can remember that when I found myself in the street, among the crowds, on a fine and cloudy day of that mild winter, I felt with bitter certainty that my life, like a river that has been artificially turned from its course for a brief period, had begun once more to flow in its usual direction, without change or novelty, after an interruption caused by my hopes and the preparations for my marriage. Perhaps this sensation was due in part to the fact that in my bewilderment I was looking around me with a gaze shorn of its original bright hopefulness. The crowd, the shops, the streets, appeared to me, for the first time in many months, in a pitilessly objective light, neither beautiful nor ugly, neither interesting nor dull, but just as they were — as they must appear to a drunkard when his state of intoxication is past. But more probably it derived from my realization that the normal things of life were not, as I had supposed, my plans for happiness, but the exact opposite — I mean, all those things that are inimical to planning and programs are casual, faulty, and unforeseen agents of disillusionment and sorrow. If this were true, as I thought it must be, I had undoubtedly begun that morning to live again, after a state of intoxication lasting several months.

  This was the only thought the discovery of Gino Molinari’s deceit aroused in me. I did not dream of blaming him and did not really feel any deep sense of injury toward him. I had not been led astray without my own complicity. And the memory of the pleasure I had enjoyed in his arms was too recent for me not to try to find excuses, if not justification, for his lying. I supposed he had been weak rather than wicked, carried away as he was by desire, and that the fault, if fault there was, lay with my beauty, which made men lose their heads and forget all their scruples and obligations. In the long run Gino was no more to blame than Astarita, only he had used fraud whereas Astarita had used blackmail. Both of them loved me very much, and certainly would have preferred to possess me by legal means if they could, and would have secured for me that modest form of happiness that I had set my heart on. Fate, on the contrary, had led me, in my beauty, to meet the very men who could not obtain that kind of happiness for me. Unfortunately, even if there was no one to blame, there was most decidedly a victim, and that was myself.

  This way of reasoning and arguing may seem feeble to some, after such a betrayal as Gino’s. But every time I have been hurt, and I often have been, because of my poverty, innocence, and loneliness, I have always tried to find excuses for the wrongdoer and to forget the harm done me as quickly as possible. If the hurt changes me at all, I do not show it in my conduct and outward appearance, but far more deeply in my soul, which closes in upon itself like healthy flesh attempting as soon as possible to heal a wound. But scars remain and these almost unconscious wounds in the soul are always permanent.

  With Gino the same thing happened. I bore him no grudge, not even for a moment, but within me I felt many things were shattered forever — my respect for him, my hopes of establishing a family, my desire not to admit that Gisella and Mother were right, my religious faith or at least the kind of belief I had held until then. I compared myself with a doll I had had when I was little — after I had beaten her and dragged her about all day long, I felt a kind of lump inside her, a sinister creaking, although her face was still as rosy and smiling as ever. I unscrewed her head, and little scraps of china, string, screws, and the works that made her talk and move her eyes about all tumbled out of her neck, together with odd pieces of wood and shreds of stuff whose function remained a mystery to me.

  Stunned but calm, I returned home, and that afternoon went about my usual business, without telling Mother what had happened or the conclusions I had reached as a result. But I realized that I could not pretend to the extent of sewing my trousseau as I had done on other days. I picked up the things I had already made and those I still had to do and locked them away in the closet in my room. Mother c
ould not help noticing I was unhappy, which was unusual, because I am nearly always gay and thoughtless. But I told her I was tired, as indeed I was. Toward evening, while Mother was sewing on her machine, I left my work, went into my room and stretched myself on the bed. I realized I was looking at the furniture, which I had finished paying for and was really mine now, thanks to Astarita’s money, with very different feelings than before, without pleasure or hope. I did not feel unhappy but only tired and indifferent, as you do after some enormous but entirely useless effort you have made. I was physically tired, anyway, aching in all my limbs, with a deep longing for rest. Thinking in a confused way about my furniture and how impossible it would be to use it now as I had hoped, I fell asleep fully dressed on the bed. I slept soundly for about four hours, a deep, sorrowful sleep, woke up very late and called Mother out of the darkness that surrounded me. She ran in to me at once and told me she had been unwilling to wake me because she had seen me sleeping so peacefully and contentedly. “Supper’s been ready for an hour,” she added, standing there and looking at me. “What are you doing? Won’t you come and have something to eat?”

  “I don’t want to get up,” I answered, covering my dazzled eyes with one arm. “Why don’t you bring it in to me?”

  She went out and returned shortly after with a tray bearing my usual supper. She put the tray on the edge of the bed, and I pulled myself up and, leaning on one elbow, began to eat, without any appetite. But after the first few mouthfuls, I stopped eating and flung myself back on the pillows again. “What’s the matter? Why aren’t you eating anything?” Mother asked.

  “I’m not hungry.”

  “Aren’t you well?”

  “I’m perfectly well.”

  “I’ll take it away then,” she grumbled. She lifted the tray off the bed and went to put it on the table near the window.

  “Don’t wake me tomorrow morning.” I continued after a moment.

  “Why?”

  “Because I’ve made up my mind I’m not going to be a model anymore — you work too hard and earn too little.”