The Woman of Rome (38 page)

A long time had passed since my first and only confession in that church. And in the pleasant turmoil of my self-complacent goodness I had almost forgotten Father Elia’s most pleasing characteristic — his French pronunciation. The priest who was addressing me had no special accent, but he was undoubtedly Italian and had the peculiarly oily voice you hear in the mouths of so many priests. I suddenly realized the mistake I had made and an icy shudder ran through me — as if my fingertips had encountered the cold, quivering scales of a serpent when I had confidently stretched out my hand to pluck a lovely flower. The unpleasant surprise of being faced with a confessor I had not expected was enhanced by the sense of horror his dark, insinuating voice aroused in me.

“Are you really Father Elia?” I stammered with an effort.

“Himself in person,” replied the unknown priest. “Why? Have you been here before?”

“Once before.”

The priest was silent for a moment. “Everything you have told me should really be reconsidered point by point. You have told me not one, but many things, some of which concern yourself, and some other people. As far as you are concerned — do you understand that you have sinned grievously?”

“Yes, I know,” I murmured.

“And do you repent?”

“I believe I do.”

“If you are sincere in your repentance,” he began, speaking in a confiding, paternal undertone, “you may certainly hope for absolution. Unfortunately you are not the only one.… There are
the others, the crimes and faults of the others. You have come to know a terrible criminal: a man has been murdered in the most hideous way! Do you feel no impulse in your conscience to reveal the criminal’s name and bring him to justice?”

In this way he suggested that I should denounce Sonzogno. I do not say he was wrong, as a priest. But the proposal, made in that insinuating voice and at just that time, only increased my doubts and fears. “If I say who did it,” I stammered, “I’ll be put in jail myself.”

His reply was immediate. “Men, like God himself, will be capable of appreciating your sacrifice and repentance. The law both punishes and forgives. But in exchange for a little suffering, so slight when compared to the agonies of the victim, you would have helped to reestablish justice, which has been so foully offended. Oh, do you not hear the voice of the victim vainly beseeching his murderer for mercy?”

He continued to exhort me, choosing his words carefully and complacently from the conventional phrases proper to his office. But my only desire now was to get away, I felt almost hysterical.

“I need to think about denouncing him,” I said hurriedly. “I’ll come back tomorrow and tell you what I’ve decided. Will I find you here tomorrow?”

“Certainly, at any time.”

“All right,” I said dazedly. “All I ask of you for the time being is to hand over this object.” I stopped speaking, and after a short prayer he asked me once more if I had really repented and determined to change my way of life, then he gave me absolution. I crossed myself and left the confessional. At the same time he opened his door and stood before me. All the fears his voice had inspired in me were confirmed immediately at the sight of him. He was short, with a huge head that hung sideways as if he had a perpetual stiff neck. I did not have time to examine him thoroughly, I was in such a hurry to escape and he filled me with such horror. I glimpsed a brownish yellow face, a pale, high forehead, eyes sunk deep in their orbits, a flattened nose with wide nostrils, and a large shapeless mouth with purplish, sinuous lips. He was probably not old, he was simply ageless. Clasping his hands on his
breast and shaking his head he addressed me in heartfelt tones. “But why, my dear child, did you not come to me sooner? Why? How many terrible things you would have been spared.”

I wanted to tell him what I was thinking: that God would never have wanted me to come like this, but I restrained myself, and taking the compact from my purse I gave it to him. “Please be as quick as you can,” I said earnestly. “I can’t tell you how the thought of that poor woman in jail on my account torments me.”

“I’ll go this very day,” he replied, as he clasped the compact to his breast and shook his head with a deprecatory and aggrieved air.

I thanked him in a low voice, and having nodded to him I left the church as quickly as I could. He remained standing where he was beside the confessional, clasping his hands to his breast and shaking his head.

Out on the street, I tried to think more coolly about what had happened. Now that I had shaken off my first confused terrors, I realized that what I was most afraid of was that the priest would not respect the seal of the confessional, and I tried to clarify to myself what grounds I might have for my fears. I knew, like everybody else, that confession is a sacrament and is therefore inviolable. I also knew it was impossible for any priest, no matter how corrupt he might be, to violate it. But his advice to me to denounce Sonzogno to the police made me fear he might take it upon himself, since I had not done so, to reveal the name of the perpetrator of the crime in Via Palestro. His voice and appearance, however, caused me the gravest fears. I am emotional rather than reflective and I have an instinct for danger, like some animals. All the reasons my mind marshaled to reassure me were nothing in comparison with my unreasoned presentiment. It’s true that the seal of the confessional is inviolable, I thought, but only a miracle can prevent that priest from denouncing Sonzogno, me, and all the others.

Something else helped to give me the sensation of some mysterious and impending disaster: the substitution of the second confessor for the first. Obviously the French monk was not Father Elia, although he had listened to me in the confessional that bore that name. Who was he then? I was sorry I had not asked the real
Father Elia for news of him. But I was half afraid the ugly priest would tell me he knew nothing of him, confirming the apparitional aspect the figure of the young monk was assuming in my mind. There really was something of the phantom about him, both because he was so utterly different from other priests and because of the way he had appeared in my life and had then vanished. I actually began to doubt whether I had ever seen him, or, rather, whether I had ever seen him in the flesh, and I imagined for a moment that I might have had an hallucination. Because I now discovered in him an undeniable resemblance to Christ himself, as he is usually portrayed in sacred paintings. But if this were true, if Christ himself had appeared to me in my hour of sorrow and had heard my confession, his substitution by the sordid, repellent priest I had just seen clearly boded ill. It meant, if nothing else, that religion had abandoned me at the moment of my greatest spiritual anguish. It was like opening a safe containing a treasure of gold coins, in order to meet the most urgent need, and finding instead only dust, cobwebs, and the excrement of mice.

I returned home with this presentiment that some misfortune would surely result from my confession and went straight to bed, without supper, convinced that this would be my last night at home before being arrested. But I must say that I was not at all afraid now and had no desire to avoid my fate. My initial terror, born of a nervous weakness common to nearly all women, had yielded to something more than mere resignation, a determined desire to accept the destiny that threatened me. I felt a kind of voluptuous delight, in fact, in letting myself sink to the depths of what I imagined must be the last stage of despair. I felt protected, in a sense, by the excess of my misfortune; and I found a certain pleasure in the thought that nothing worse could happen to me except death, which I no longer feared.

But next day I waited in vain for the expected visit from the police. That whole day and the next passed without anything occurring to justify my apprehension. During this whole time I never left the house, or even my room, and I soon tired of thinking over the consequences of my rashness. I began to think about Giacomo
again and realized I was longing to see him at least once more, before the priest’s denunciation, which I now considered inevitable, took effect. Toward evening on the third day I got up, dressed carefully, and left the house.

I knew Giacomo’s address and it took me twenty minutes to reach his house. But just as I was about to enter the main door I remembered I had not warned him I was coming, and I suddenly felt shy. I was afraid he might be annoyed at seeing me or even send me away. My impatient step slowed down, and I stopped outside a shop, with my heart full of sadness, wondering whether it would not be better to turn back and wait for him to make up his mind to call on me. I realized that at the beginning of our relationship, in particular, I ought to be very wary and subtle and never let him know that I was in love with him and could not live without him. On the other hand, turning back seemed very bitter to me, since I was uneasy on account of the confession and I needed to see him, if only to take my mind off my worries. My eye fell on the window of the shop in front of me. It was full of shirts and ties and I suddenly remembered I had promised to buy him a new tie to replace his threadbare one. When people are in love, their minds never work properly; I told myself I could make the gift of a tie an excuse for my visit, without realizing that the gift itself would emphasize the submissive, anxious nature of my feeling toward him. I went into the shop and after spending a long time over my choice I bought a gray tie with red stripes, the handsomest and most expensive of them all. The man behind the counter asked me, with the somewhat indiscreet courtesy of salesmen who think they can influence their customers in their choice, whether the tie was for a fair or a dark man. “He’s dark,” I replied slowly and, realizing I had pronounced the word “dark” in a caressing tone, I blushed at the thought that the salesman might have noticed it.

The widow Medolaghi lived on the fourth floor of a gloomy old palace whose windows looked out onto the Tiber embankment. I walked up eight flights of stairs and rang the bell of a door hidden in the shadows, without even waiting to recover my breath. The
door opened almost immediately and Giacomo appeared on the threshold. “Oh, it’s you!” he exclaimed in surprise. He was obviously expecting someone.

“May I come in?”

“Yes … yes.… Come this way.”

He led me from the dim hall into the sitting room. It was dark here, too, because the windows had little, round, red, leaded panes, like ones in a church. I glimpsed a quantity of black furniture inlaid with mother-of-pearl. A round table with a blue crystal decanter of an old-fashioned shape stood in the middle. There were many carpets and a very worn white bearskin. Everything was old, but clean and neat and as if preserved within the deep silence that had apparently reigned in the house since time immemorial. I went and sat down on a sofa at the other end of the room.

“Were you expecting anybody?” I asked.

“No. But why have you come?” The words were not actually very welcoming. But he did not seem angry, only surprised.

“I’ve just come to say hello,” I smiled. “Because I think this will be the last time we’ll see one another.”

“Why?”

“I’m positive that tomorrow at the latest they’ll come for me and take me to jail.”

“To jail? What the devil do you mean?”

His voice and expression changed and I realized that he was afraid on his own account; perhaps he thought I had denounced him or compromised him in some way by talking to someone about his political activities. “Don’t worry,” I smiled again. “It’s nothing to do with you, not even remotely.”

“No, no,” he replied hurriedly, “but I can’t understand, that’s all. Why should you go to jail?”

“Shut the door and sit down here,” I said, pointing to the sofa beside me.

He shut the door and then sat down beside me. Then I told him the whole story of the compact, very calmly, including my confession. He listened with his head bowed, without looking at me, biting his nails, which was always a sign that he was interested.
“So I’m sure that that priest will play a dirty trick on me. What do you think?” I concluded.

He shook his head and spoke, not looking at me but at the leaded panes in the windows. “He shouldn’t, in fact, I don’t think he will. It’s not enough for a priest to be ugly.…”

“But you should have seen him!” I interrupted eagerly.

“He’d have to be monstrous to do such a thing! But, of course, anything can happen,” he added hurriedly, with a laugh.

“So you think I shouldn’t be afraid.”

“Yes. All the more so, since you can’t do anything — it doesn’t depend on you.”

“That’s a nice way to talk! People feel afraid because they’re afraid! It’s stronger than us.”

He suddenly made a fond gesture typical of him. He put one hand on my neck and laughed as he gave it a little shake. “You aren’t afraid, though, are you?” he said.

“But I tell you I am!”

“You aren’t afraid, you’re a brave woman!”

“I tell you I was terrified! I even went to bed and didn’t get up for two days.”

“Yes, but then you came to see me and tell me everything with the utmost composure. You don’t know what it is to be afraid.”

“What should I have done?” I asked, smiling despite myself. “I can’t exactly scream for fear!”

“You aren’t afraid.”

A moment’s silence followed. Then he asked me in an odd tone of voice that surprised me, “What about this friend of yours — let’s call him your friend — Sonzogno? What sort of a man is he?”

“Like a lot of others,” I answered vaguely. I could not think of anything in particular to say about Sonzogno at that moment.

“But what’s he like? Describe him.”

“Why? Do you want to have him arrested?” I asked, laughing. “If you do, I’ll be put into jail, too, remember! He’s a little blond.” I added, “short, broad-shouldered, with a pale face, blue eyes, nothing special, in fact. The only outstanding thing about him is that he’s terrifically strong.”

“Strong?”

“You wouldn’t think it to look at him. But if you touch his arm, it’s like iron.” Seeing that he was interested, I told him the story of the incident between Sonzogno and Gino. He made no comment, but asked when I had finished, “So you think Sonzogno’s crime was premeditated? I mean — that he thought it all out and then did it in cold blood?”