The Woman of Rome (Italia) Read online

  Another person who came back into my life at this period was Astarita. It was far simpler in his case than in Gino’s. Gisella used to see him secretly and I suppose he made love to her just to be able to talk about me. Anyway, Gisella was on the lookout for an opportunity to mention him to me, and when she thought enough time had passed and I had recovered my good humor, she took me aside, and very cautiously told me that she had met Astarita and he had asked for news of me. “He didn’t say anything exactly,” she continued, “but I could see he’s still in love with you. As a matter of fact, I felt sorry for him — he looks wretched. Of course, he didn’t say anything to me — but I’m positive he’d like to see you again — and after all —”

  “Listen, it’s useless to go on talking this way!” I interrupted her.

  “What way?”

  “Beating around the bush like this! Why don’t you say straight out that he sent you to me, that he wants to see me again, and you’ve promised to give him my reply?”

  “Suppose I have?” she said, taken aback. “What then?”

  “Then,” I said, “you can tell him I’ve nothing against seeing him again — like I do the others, of course, from time to time, without committing myself.”

  She was completely astonished by my calm; she thought I hated Astarita and would never agree to meet him again. She did not understand that by now love and hatred had ceased to exist for me, and, as usual, thought that I had some hidden motive.

  “You’re right,” she said, after a moment’s reflection and with a certain shyness. “In your place I’d do the same. You have to overlook your dislikes in some cases. Astarita really loves you and might even have his marriage annulled and marry you. Still — you are a clever one! And I thought you were such an innocent!”

  Gisella had never understood the least thing about me, and I knew by experience that I would be wasting my breath if I tried to explain to her. Therefore I agreed. “That’s just how it is,” I said, feigning nonchalance, and left her in a state of mingled admiration and envy.

  She gave Astarita my reply and I met him at the same pastry shop where I had met Giacinti for the first time. As Gisella had said, he still loved me passionately and, in fact, as soon as he saw me he went as white as a sheet, lost his self-possession, and was unable to speak. His emotion must have been stronger than himself, and I believe some of the simple women of the people, like Mother, must be right when they say that some men have been bewitched by their lovers. I had cast a sort of enchantment over him, without any desire or intention on my part; and although he realized it and did all he could to break free he was quite incapable of doing so. Once and for all time I had rendered him inferior, dependent, subject to me; once and for all I had disarmed him, hypnotized him, and placed him at my mercy. He explained later that sometimes he used to rehearse to himself the cold, scornful part he would play, and even learned his phrases by heart; but as soon as he saw me, he grew pale, his breast was filled with anguish, his mind became a blank, and his tongue refused to speak. He even seemed unable to face me, he lost his head and felt driven irresistibly to throw himself on his knees before me and kiss my feet.

  He really was different from all the others; I mean he was quite obsessed. The evening we met he begged me, as soon as we had had a meal at a restaurant in tense and nervous silence and had reached my place, to tell him every single detail of my life from the day we went to Viterbo until the day I broke up with Gino. “Why does it interest you so much?” I asked him in astonishment.

  “There’s no real reason,” he replied, “but what difference does it make to you? Don’t think about me, just talk.”

  “As far as I’m concerned,” I said, shrugging my shoulders, “if it’ll give you any pleasure —” So I told him precisely everything that had happened after the trip; how I had had a talk with Gino, had followed Gisella’s advice, and had met Giacinti. The only thing I did not mention was the matter of the compact, perhaps because I did not want to embarrass him, given his profession as a policeman. He asked me a number of questions, especially about my meeting with Giacinti. He never seemed to tire of the details, it was as if he wanted to see and touch everything, take part in it, not only hear about it. I can’t tell you how often he interrupted me with, “And what did he do?” or, “And what did you do?” When I had finished, he embraced me. “It was all my fault,” he stammered.

  “No, it wasn’t,” I said, rather bored by the discussion. “It wasn’t anyone’s fault.”

  “Yes, it was my fault. It was I who ruined you. If I hadn’t behaved as I did at Viterbo, everything would have been different.”

  “You’re absolutely wrong,” I said quickly. “If it’s anyone’s fault, it’s Gino’s — it has nothing to do with you. You, my dear, wanted to have me by force and things taken by force don’t count. If Gino hadn’t deceived me, I’d have married him, then I’d have told him all about it and it would have been as if I had never met you.”

  “No, it was my fault … maybe it seemed like Gino was to blame … but in reality the fault was mine.”

  He seemed to cling to the idea that he was to blame, not because he was sorry, but because, on the contrary, it pleased him to think he had corrupted me and led me astray. But to say that it pleased him is too feeble an expression: I should say the idea excited him, and perhaps this was the chief cause of his passion for me. I understood this later on when I noticed that he often insisted on my telling him, when we met, all that had happened, in full detail, between me and my paying lovers. During these accounts, he had a troubled, tense, and attentive expression on his face that embarrassed me and filled me with shame. And immediately afterward he would throw himself onto me and while he was taking me, he would passionately repeat obscene, brutal, offensive words I won’t mention, but which would be insulting to even the most depraved women. How he could reconcile this extraordinary attitude with his adoration of me I never could fathom; in my opinion it is impossible to love a woman and at the same time fail to respect her, but in Astarita love and cruelty were mixed, the one lent the other its own color and strength. I have sometimes thought that his strange excitement at imagining me degraded by his own fault had been suggested to him by his profession as a member of the political police; his function, as far as I could understand, was to find the weak point in the accused, and corrupt and humiliate them in such a way that they would be harmless ever afterward. He told me himself, I cannot remember in what connection, that every time he succeeded in persuading an accused man to confess or break down, he felt a peculiar kind of satisfaction, like the satisfaction of possession in love. “An accused man’s like a woman,” he used to say, “as long as she resists she can hold her head up.… But as soon as she’s surrendered she’s a rag and you can have her again how and when you like.” But more probably his cruel, complacent character was natural to him and he had chosen his profession simply because that was his character, and not the other way around.

  Astarita was not happy; in fact, his unhappiness seemed the most utter and incurable I had ever known, because it was not due to any external cause, but originated in some weakness or twist I never succeeded in fathoming. When he was not obliging me to tell him my professional adventures he usually knelt in front of me, put his head in my lap, and stayed like that, motionless, sometimes for an entire hour. I had only to stroke his head lightly every now and again, like mothers stroke their children. From time to time he uttered a moan, perhaps he was even crying. I never loved Astarita but at such moments he roused a feeling of immense pity in me, because I could see he was suffering and there was no way of alleviating his pain.

  He used to talk very bitterly about his family: his wife, whom he hated; his little girls, whom he did not love; his parents, who had given him a difficult childhood and had forced him to make a disastrous marriage while he was still an inexperienced youth. He hardly ever referred to his profession. Only once he told me, with an expression of peculiar distaste, “there are lots of useful thin
gs in a house, even if they aren’t all clean — I’m one of them — a garbage can for rubbish.” But I formed the impression that on the whole he considered his profession an honorable one. He had a high sense of duty and was a model official — as far as I could judge from my visit to him at the Ministry and his way of talking — being zealous, secretive, sharpsighted, incorruptible, and inflexible. Although he formed part of the political police force, he declared he knew nothing about politics. “I’m a cog in a wheel,” he said to me another time. “What they say, I do.”

  Astarita would have liked to meet me every evening, but in addition to the fact that I did not wish to be tied up to any one man, he bored me and his convulsive seriousness and strange ways made me feel uneasy, so that every time I left him I heaved a sigh of relief, although I pitied him. For this reason, I tried to avoid seeing him more than once a week. The rareness of our meetings certainly helped to keep his passion for me ever wakeful and burning. If I had agreed to live with him, on the other hand, as he continually suggested, he would gradually have become accustomed to my presence and in the end would have seen me for what I really am — a poor girl like dozens of others. He gave me the number of the phone on his desk at the Ministry. It was a secret number, known only to the chief of police, the head of the government, the minister, and a few other important people. When I phoned he used to reply at once, but as soon as he found it was me his voice, which had been clear and calm a moment before, became troubled, and he began to stutter. He really was completely submissive and under my thumb, like a slave. I remember that once I absentmindedly stroked his cheek, without having been asked. He immediately seized my hand and kissed it passionately. On other occasions he asked me to repeat my impulsive gesture; but caresses cannot be given to order.

  Quite often I had no desire to go down into the streets to pick up men, so I stayed at home. I did not want to stay with Mother, because although we had a tacit agreement not to mention my profession, our conversation always came around to it, in awkward allusions, and I would almost have preferred to talk of it openly without concealment. Instead, I used to shut myself up in my room, warning Mother not to disturb me, and stretched myself out on the bed. My room looked onto the courtyard, through the closed window no noise reached me from outside. I used to doze for a while, then got up and wandered around the room, busy with some little task, tidying my things or dusting the furniture. These jobs were nothing more than a stimulus to set my mind working, an attempt to create an atmosphere of intense and secluded intimacy. I used to become more and more deeply immersed in my reflections, until in the end I hardly thought at all, and was content with feeling alive after so much wasted time and exhausting ways.

  At a certain moment during the hours I spent in such seclusion a profound feeling of bewilderment always overcame me; I suddenly seemed to see the whole of my life and all of myself from all sides, with icy clearsightedness. The things I was doing split apart, lost the substance of their meaning, were reduced to mere incomprehensible, absurd externals. I used to say to myself, “I often bring home a man who has been waiting for me in the night, without knowing me. We struggle with one another on this bed, clutching each other like two sworn enemies. Then he gives me a piece of printed, colored paper. Next day I exchange this paper for food, clothes, and other articles.” But these words were only the first step in a process of deeper bewilderment. They served to clear my mind of the censure, always lying in wait there, of my profession, and they showed me my work as a series of meaningless gestures, similar in every way to the routine motions of other professions. Immediately afterward a distant sound in the city or the creaking of some piece of furniture in the room gave me a ludicrous and almost delirious awareness of my existence. I said to myself, “Here I am and I might be elsewhere. I might exist a thousand years ago or in a thousand years’ time. I might be black or old, blonde or short.” I thought how I had come out of endless night and would soon go on into another endless darkness, and that my brief passing was marked only by absurd and trivial actions. I then understood that my anguish was caused, not by what I was doing, but more profoundly by the bare fact of being alive, which was neither good nor evil but only painful and without meaning.

  This bewilderment used to make my flesh crawl with fear; I would shudder uncontrollably, feeling my hair stand on end, and suddenly the walls of my apartment, the city, and even the world seemed to vanish, leaving me suspended in dark, empty, endless space — suspended, what’s more, in the same clothes, with the same memories, name, and profession. A girl called Adriana suspended in nothingness. This nothingness seemed to me something terrible, solemn, and incomprehensible, and the saddest aspect of the whole matter was my meeting this nothingness with the manners and outward appearance with which I met Gisella in the evening in the pastry shop where she waited for me. I found no consolation in the thought that other people also acted and moved in just as futile and inadequate a way under that nothingness, within that nothingness, surrounded by that nothingness. I was only amazed at their not noticing it, or not making their observations known, not referring more often to it, as usually happens when many people discover the same fact at once.

  At these times I used to throw myself onto my knees and pray, perhaps more through a habit formed in childhood than from conscious will. But I did not use the words of the usual prayers, which seemed too long to my sudden mood. I used to throw myself onto my knees so violently that my legs hurt for some days afterward and pray aloud, “Christ have mercy on me,” in a shrill and desperate voice. It was not really a prayer but a magic formula that I thought might dispel my anguish and bring me back to reality. After having cried out impulsively in this way, with all my strength, I remained for some time with my face in my hands, utterly absorbed. At last I would become aware that my mind was a blank, that I was bored, that I was the same Adriana as ever, that I was in my own room. I touched my body half astonished at finding it whole, and getting up from my knees I slipped into bed. I felt very tired and ached all over, as if I had fallen down a rocky slope, and I went to sleep immediately.

  These states of mind, however, had no influence at all on my daily life. I went on being the same Adriana, with the same character, who took men home for money, went about with Gisella, and talked of unimportant things with my own mother and with everyone else. And I thought it was strange that I was so different alone, in my relationship with myself, from what I was in company and with other people. But I did not flatter myself that I was the only one to have such violent and desperate feelings. I imagined everyone, at least once a day, must feel his own life reduced to a single point of absurd, ineffable anguish — only their knowledge apparently produced no visible effect upon them either. They left their homes, as I did, and went around sincerely playing their insincere parts. This thought strengthened me in my belief that all men, without exception, deserve to be pitied, if only because they are alive.

  PART II

  1

  B Y NOW GISELLA AND I were partners more than friends. We did not agree about the places to frequent, it is true, for Gisella preferred restaurants and fashionable haunts, while I preferred simple cafés and even the street; but we managed to come to an agreement even over this difference in taste: we used to go to the different places in turn. One evening, after we had dined in vain at a restaurant, we were on our way home when I became aware that a car was following us. I warned Gisella that we might have customers if we let them approach us. She was in an angry mood that evening, because she had had to pay for her supper without getting anything out of it and she had been extremely hard-up for some time. “You go,” she replied rudely. “I’m going home to bed.” Meanwhile the car had come up close to the curb and was keeping level with us at reduced speed. Gisella was near the wall and I was on the outside. I looked out of the corner of my eye and saw there were two men in the car.

  “What shall we do?” I asked Gisella in a whisper. “If you don’t come, I won’t go either.”

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p; She in her turn cast a surreptitious glance at the car and, for a moment, she seemed to hesitate, still in a foul temper. “I’m not coming,” she said finally. “You go. Are you scared?”

  “No, but I’m not going unless you come, too.”

  She shook her head, glanced once more at the car, which was still keeping pace with us, and then, as if suddenly making up her mind, said, “All right.… But pretend nothing’s up and we’ll lead them on for a while.… I don’t like picking them up here in the Corso.”

  We walked along for fifty yards or so, the car keeping alongside us the whole time. Then Gisella, reaching a corner, turned up into a dark and narrow side street with a narrow pavement running beside an old wall covered with posters. We heard the car turn on to the side street, too, and then the blinding white rays from the headlights fell on us. We felt as though the light stripped us naked and nailed us both against the damp wall, with its torn, faded advertisements; and we stood still. Gisella said to me in an irritable whisper, “What’s this all about? Didn’t they get a good enough look at us in the Corso? I’ve half a mind to go home —”

  “No, no, don’t!” I pleaded hastily. I did not know why myself, but I was extremely anxious to meet the two men in the car. “What does it matter? They all act this way.”

  She shrugged her shoulders and at the same time the headlights wavered and went out, and the car stopped by the pavement in front of us. The driver thrust a blond head and rosy face out the window.

  “Good evening!” he said in a ringing voice.

  “Good evening,” replied Gisella, with great dignity.

  “Where are you going to all on your lonesome?” he continued. “Can’t we keep you company?”

  He spoke in the ironical tones of a person who thinks he is being witty, but these were hackneyed phrases I had already heard hundreds of times before.