The Woman of Rome (Italia) Read online

  I told him the address of the studio. I noticed he had a quiet voice and I thought him rather pleasant, although I could not help feeling there was something false and affected about him.

  “Well, let’s go for a ride — it’s early — then I’ll take you wherever you like,” he answered. The car started up.

  We left my neighborhood by the avenue running along the city walls, went along a wide road with warehouses and little hovels on each side, and at last reached the country. Then he began to drive like a madman down a straight track between two rows of plane trees. Every now and again he said, without turning around, “We’re doing eighty, ninety, a hundred, a hundred and twenty, a hundred and thirty kilometers an hour.” He wanted to impress me with the speed, but I was chiefly anxious because I had to go and pose and was afraid that for some reason or other the car might break down in the open country. Suddenly he put on the brakes, switched off the engine and turned to me.

  “How old are you?”

  “Eighteen.” I answered.

  “Eighteen — I thought you were older.” He really did speak in an affected voice, which occasionally, in order to emphasize some word, dropped as if he were talking to himself or telling a secret.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Adriana. What’s yours?”

  “Gino.”

  “What do you do?” I asked.

  “I’m in business,” he replied quickly.

  “Is this your car?”

  He looked at the car with a kind of disdain.

  “Yes, it’s mine,” he said.

  “I don’t believe you,” I said truthfully.

  “You don’t believe me! Well, great —” he repeated in an astonished, mocking tone, without turning a hair. “Well, wondeful — why not?”

  “You’re a chauffeur.”

  His ironic amazement became even more apparent.

  “Now really, what extraordinary things you say! Just think of that, now! Really — a chauffeur! — what on Earth makes you think that?”

  “Your hands.”

  He looked at his hands without flushing or being embarrassed. “Can’t hide anything from this young lady, can I? How penetrating of you. Very well — I’m a chauffeur. Is that all right?” he said.

  “No, it’s not,” I retorted sharply, “and please take me back to town at once.”

  “Why? Are you cross with me because I told you I was in business?”

  I really was cross with him at that moment. I didn’t know why; it was as though I could not help it.

  “Don’t talk about it anymore — take me back.”

  “It was only a joke. Why not? Can’t we even joke anymore?”

  “I don’t like that kind of joke.”

  “Oh what a nasty character; I was only thinking: this young lady may even be a princess — if she finds out I’m only a poor chauffeur, she won’t even look at me — so I’ll tell her I’m in business.”

  These words were very clever because they flattered me and at the same time showed me what his feelings were toward me. In any case, he said them with a kind of grace that quite won me over.

  “I’m not a princess — I work as a model, like you do as a chauffeur, to earn my living,” I answered.

  “What do you mean, a model?”

  “I go to artists’ studios, take off my clothes, and they paint or draw me.”

  “Haven’t you got a mother?” he asked pointedly.

  “Of course I have! Why?”

  “And your mother lets you pose naked in front of men?”

  It had never crossed my mind that there was anything to be ashamed of in my occupation, and indeed there was not; but I was glad he felt like that about it. It showed he had a serious moral sense. As I have already said, I was thirsting for a normal way of life, and in his astuteness he had guessed (even now I don’t know how) what were the right things to say to me. Any other man, I could not help thinking, would have made fun of me or would have shown an indelicate kind of excitement at the idea of my being naked. So, unconsciously, I modified the first impression his lying had given me and thought that after all he must be a decent, honest young man, just the man I had imagined for a husband in my dreams.

  “Mother found me the work herself,” I answered simply.

  “That means she doesn’t love you.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” I protested. “She loves me — but she was a model herself when she was a girl, and really, there’s nothing wrong in it; lots of girls like me model and are decent girls.”

  He shook his head, unconvinced, and then, placing a hand over mine, said, “Do you know — I’m glad I’ve met you. Really glad.”

  “So am I,” I said ingenuously.

  At that moment I felt a kind of impulse toward him and I almost expected him to kiss me. Certainly if he had kissed me then, I would not have protested. But instead he said in an earnest voice, protectively, “If I had anything to say about it, you wouldn’t be a model.”

  I felt I was a victim, and a feeling of gratitude swept over me. “A girl like you,” he continued, “ought to stay at home and work if she likes, but at some decent job that doesn’t expose her to the risk of losing her honor — a girl like you ought to be married, have a home and children of her own and stay with her husband.”

  That was exactly my way of thinking, and I cannot say how happy I was to find that he thought or appeared to think as I did.

  “You’re right — but all the same you mustn’t think badly of Mother. She wanted to make a model of me because she loves me,” I said.

  “No one would say so,” he answered earnestly, with indignant pity.

  “Yes, she loves me — it’s just that she doesn’t understand certain things.”

  We went on talking like this, seated behind the windshield in the closed car. It was May, I remember, the air was soft, the shadows of the plane trees were playing on the surface of the road as far as the eye could see. No one passed us except an occasional car at high speed, and the green, sunny countryside all around us was deserted, too. At last he looked at his watch and said he would take me back to town. In all that time he had not done anything but touch my hand once. I had expected him to try to kiss me at least, and was both disappointed and pleased by his discretion. Disappointed because I liked him, and, in fact, could not resist gazing at his thin red lips; glad because it strengthened my opinion that he was a serious-minded young man, just as I hoped he was.

  He took me as far as the studio and told me that from that day on, if I would be at the streetcar stop at a certain time, he would always take me along since he had nothing to do at that hour. I was delighted to accept, and all that day my long hours of posing passed on wings. I seemed to have found a purpose in my life, and I was glad I could think about him, without any resentment or regret, as a person who not only attracted me physically but had the moral qualities I considered essential.

  I did not mention him to Mother; I was afraid she would not have allowed me to become involved with a poor man who had only a modest future. Next morning he came to pick me up as he had promised, and this time took me straight to the studio. The following days, when the weather was good, he took me out, sometimes along the avenues or thinly populated streets on the outskirts of the city, so that he could talk to me at his ease; but he was always earnest and serious in his speech and had a most respectful manner calculated to charm me. My sentimentality at that time made anything connected with goodness, virtue, morality, family affection, stir me strangely, even to the point of tears, which welled up in my eyes on the slightest pretext and gave me an overwhelming and intoxicating feeling of consolation, trust, and sympathy. So, little by little, I came to believe him absolutely perfect. Really, I asked myself sometimes, what faults had he? He was handsome, young, intelligent, honest, serious minded — he could not be said to have any real flaw. I was astonished at this conclusion, because we do not encounter perfection every day of our lives, and I was almost frightened. What sort of man i
s this, I asked myself, who has no fault, no shortcoming, however much I examine him? In fact, without knowing it, I had fallen in love with him. And we all know love is a deceptive glass that can make even a monster appear fascinating.

  I was so deeply in love that the first time he kissed me, in the avenue where we had had our first talk together, I felt a sense of relief, as if I had progressed in the most natural way possible from the stage of an already ripe desire to that of its first satisfaction. Nevertheless, the irresistible impulse that joined our lips in this kiss frightened me a little, because I realized that my actions no longer depended on myself but on the exquisitely powerful force that drove me so urgently toward him. But I was completely reassured when he told me, as soon as we separated, that from now on we were to consider ourselves engaged. I could not help thinking that this time, too, he had read my innermost thoughts and had said the very words I wanted to hear. The uneasiness my first kiss had caused me therefore faded at once; and for the rest of the time we stayed there on the roadside, I kissed him without any reserve, with a feeling of utter, violent, and legitimate abandon.

  Since then I have given and received many kisses, and God knows I have given and received them without participating in them, either emotionally or physically, as you give and receive an old coin that has been handled by many people; but I shall always remember that first kiss because of its almost painful intensity, in which I seemed to be expressing not only my love for Gino but a lifelong state of expectancy. I remember that I felt as if the whole world were revolving around me and the sky lay beneath me, the Earth above. In fact, I was leaning back slightly, his mouth on mine, so that the embrace would last longer. Something cool and living pressed against my teeth and when I unclenched them I felt his tongue, that had caressed my ears so long with the sweetness of his words, now penetrating wordlessly into my mouth to reveal to me another sweetness I had never suspected. I did not know people could kiss in that way for so long, and I was soon breathless and half intoxicated. In the end, when we broke away from one another I was obliged to lean back against the seat with my eyes closed and my mind hazy, as if I were going to faint. And so I discovered there were other joys in the world than merely living peacefully in the bosom of one’s family. I did not dream that in my case, these joys were to exclude the more homely ones I had aspired to until then; and after Gino’s promise of an engagement, I felt sure that in the future I would be able to taste the delights of both, without sinning and without remorse.

  I was so convinced of the rightness and the lawfulness of my behavior that that very evening I told Mother everything, perhaps with too much trepidation and delight. I found her at her sewing machine by the window, sitting in the blinding light from an unshaded bulb.

  “Mother, I’m engaged,” I said, my cheeks burning as I did so.

  I saw her whole face screw up in an expression of annoyance as if a trickle of icy cold water were running down her back.

  “Who to?”

  “A young man I met recently.”

  “What is he?”

  “A chauffeur.”

  I wanted to continue, but had not the time. My mother stopped her machine, jumped off her chair, and seized me by the hair. “Engaged, did you say? — without telling me anything — and to a chauffeur! God help me — you’ll be the death of me!” She was trying to hit me as she said this. I protected myself as best I could with my hands and at last broke away from her, but she followed me. I rushed round the table in the middle of the room, but she was after me, shouting desperately. I was utterly terrified by her thin face thrust out toward me with an expression of agonized rage. “I’ll kill you!” she shouted. “I’ll kill you this time.” Every time she said “I’ll kill you,” her fury seemed to increase and the threat appeared more actual. I stayed at the end of the table and watched every movement she made, because I knew that just then she was out of control, and was really capable of hurting me with the first thing that she happened to pick up, even if she did not murder me. And, in fact, she suddenly began waving her dressmaking scissors, the large ones, and I was only just in time to dart aside as the scissors passed me and hit the wall. She was frightened herself at this and suddenly sat down at the table, her face buried in her hands, and burst into a nervous choking fit of crying, in which there seemed more anger than sorrow.

  “I had made so many plans for you,” she said between her sobs. “I wanted you to be rich, with all your good looks — and now your engaged to a beggar.”

  “He’s not a beggar!” I interrupted timidly.

  “A chauffeur!” she exclaimed, shrugging her shoulders. “A chauffeur.… You’re unlucky, and you’ll end up like me.” She said these words slowly as if to savor all their bitterness. Then she added after a moment, “He’ll marry you and you’ll become his servant, and then the servant of your children — that’ll be the end of it.”

  “We’ll get married when he has enough money to buy his own car,” I said, telling her one of Gino’s plans.

  “Don’t hold your breath! But don’t bring him here,” she suddenly shouted, raising her tear-stained face. “Don’t bring him here — I don’t want to see him. Do what you like, see him wherever you like — but don’t bring him here.”

  That evening I went to bed supperless, feeling very unhappy and depressed. But I told myself that Mother was carrying on in this way because she loved me and had made all sorts of plans for my future that were being upset by my engagement to Gino. Later on, even when I knew what these plans were, I could not really blame her. She had received in exchange for her honest, hardworking life nothing but bitterness, travail, and poverty. How could anyone wonder at her hoping for an entirely different life for her daughter? I ought to say, perhaps, that they were not so much cut-and-dried plans as vague, scintillating dreams, which could be cherished without much remorse because of their very brilliance and vagueness. But that is only my own idea; and perhaps, instead, Mother really had reached the decision, through the lifelong dulling of her conscience, of setting me one day on the path that later I was in any case destined to follow on my own account. I do not say this out of spite toward my mother, but because I still do not quite understand what was in her mind at that moment, and experience has taught me that the most contradictory things may be thought and felt at one and the same moment, without one noticing the contradiction or choosing one in preference to another.

  She had vowed that she did not want to meet him and for some time I respected her wish. But after Gino had kissed me the first few times, he seemed anxious to have everything open and aboveboard, as he put it; and every day he insisted that I ought to introduce him to my mother. I did not dare tell him Mother did not want to know him because she thought his employment too humble, so I tried to postpone the meeting with various excuses. At last Gino realized I was concealing something from him, and he pressed me so much that I was obliged to tell him the truth.

  “Mother doesn’t want to meet you because she says I ought to marry a gentleman and not a chauffeur.”

  We were in the car in the usual suburban avenue. He looked at me sadly and heaved a sigh. I was so infatuated with him that I did not notice how contrived his sorrow really was.

  “That’s what comes of being poor,” he exclaimed pointedly, and was silent for some time.

  “Do you mind?” I asked him at last.

  “I’m humiliated,” he replied, shaking his head. “Any other man in my place would never have asked to meet her, would never have mentioned an engagement — that’s what you get for trying to do the right thing.”

  “Why worry?” I said. “I love you — that’s all that matters.”

  “I ought to have come with my pockets full of money but no talk of engagement, of course! And then your mother would have been delighted to welcome me.”

  I did not dare to contradict him, because I knew that what he was saying was absolutely true.

  “Do you know what we’ll do?” I said after a while. “One day I’l
l take you along and we’ll surprise her. She’ll have to meet you, then. She can’t shut her eyes.”

  We arranged a day and, in the evening as we had agreed, I took Gino into the living room. Mother had just finished her work and was clearing the end of the table in order to lay the cloth.

  “This is Gino, Mother,” I said as I led him in.

  I had expected a scene and had put Gino on his guard. But to my surprise Mother said shortly, “Glad to meet you,” glancing at him sideways. Then she left the room.

  “You’ll see, it’ll be all right,” I said to Gino. I went close to him and putting my face up said, “Give me a kiss.”

  “No, no,” he replied in a low voice as he pushed me off, “Your mother would be right in thinking badly of me.”

  He always knew how to say the appropriate words in any situation, and always said them at the right moment. I could not help admitting to myself that he was right. Mother returned and spoke without looking at Gino.

  “There’s only enough food for the two of us, really — you didn’t tell me. I’ll go out and —”

  She did not finish what she was saying. Gino stepped forward and interrupted her.

  “For heaven’s sake! I didn’t come here to invite myself to supper. Let me invite the two of you, you and Adriana.”