The Woman of Rome (52 page)

Apparently he regretted his outburst, for he came up to me and caressed me again. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Don’t take any notice of what I say. Think about your child and don’t worry about me.”

I took his hand and pressed it to my face, bathed it with my tears, and stammered: “Oh, Mino — how can I help worrying about you?”

We remained silent like this for some time. He was standing beside me; I pressed his hand against my face, kissed it, and wept. Then we heard the front doorbell ring.

He broke away from me and became very pale, but at that moment I could not understand why and did not trouble to ask him. I leaped to my feet. “Go on,” I said, “here’s Astarita! Quick! Go away.”

He went out by the kitchen door, leaving it ajar. I dried my eyes quickly, put the chairs back in their places, and went out into the hall. I felt perfectly tranquil and sure of myself once more; and in the darkness of the hall it occurred to me that I might even tell
Astarita I was pregnant; in this way he might leave me alone and if he was disinclined to do me the favor I asked out of love, he might do it out of pity.

I opened the door, and took a step back. Instead of Astarita on the threshold, I saw Sonzogno.

His hands were in his pockets and as I tried, almost mechanically, to shut the door in his face he shoved lightly against it with his shoulders, flung it wide open, and came in. I followed him into the living room. He went and stood by the table near the window. He was hatless as usual and as soon as I entered I felt his insistent unwinking eyes fixed upon me. I closed the door and spoke to him, pretending indifference.

“Why have you come?”

“You informed on me, didn’t you?”

I shrugged my shoulders and sat down at the head of the table. “I didn’t inform on you,” I said.

“You left me, went out, and called the police.”

I felt quite calm. If I felt anything at all at that moment, it was anger rather than fear. He did not frighten me any longer and I felt a great rage rising within me against him and against all those who prevented me from being happy, as he did. “I left you and went away,” I said, “because I love another man and I don’t want to have anything more to do with you. But I didn’t call the police. I’m not an informer. The police came of their own accord. They were looking for someone else.”

He came up to me, took hold of my face with two fingers, and pinched my cheek so cruelly that I had to unclench my teeth as he raised my face to his. “You can thank your God that you’re a woman,”-he said.

He continued to pinch my face, forcing me to make a painful grimace that I knew was both hideous and ridiculous. Rage overcame me and I leaped to my feet. “Get out, you imbecile!” I cried.

He put his hands back into his pockets and came even nearer to me, staring into my eyes as usual. “You’re an imbecile!” I cried once more. “With your muscles, your little blue eyes, your bald head! Get out, go away, you idiot!”

He really was an imbecile, I thought. He said nothing, but, with a slight smile on his thin, crooked lips and his hands in his pockets, approached me, staring at me fixedly. I ran to the other end of the table, gripped an iron, a heavy tailor’s iron, and shouted, “Get out, you cretin! Or I’ll smash your face with this.”

He hesitated a moment and stood still. At the same instant the door of the living room opened behind me and Astarita appeared in the doorway. Obviously he had found the door open and had walked in. I turned toward him. “Tell this man to get out,” I cried. “I don’t know what he wants from me. Tell him to get out.”

I do not know why the elegance of Astarita’s clothes on this occasion gave me such pleasure. He was wearing a double-breasted, gray overcoat that looked new. He had on what looked like a silk shirt, with red stripes on a white background. A silvery gray twill tie was tucked into the folds of his navy-blue suit. He looked at me as I stood there waving the iron, looked at Sonzgono. “The young lady told you to go away,” he said evenly. “What are you waiting for?”

“The young lady and I have several things to talk over. It would be better if you went,” said Sonzogno in a very low, deep voice.

As Astarita came in, he took off his hat, a black felt with edges bordered in silk. He put it down on the table in a leisurely fashion and went toward Sonzogno. His attitude amazed me. His eyes, which were usually so black and melancholy, seemed to gleam belligerently, his large mouth widened and curled upward in a pleased, defiant smile. He showed his teeth. “Oh, so you don’t want to go,”-he said, hammering out each syllable, “but you see, I’m telling you you’re going, right now.”

Sonzogno shook his head in refusal but, to my astonishment, took a step backward. And then I remembered precisely who Sonzogno was. And I was afraid, not for myself but for Astarita who was provoking him so boldly, without knowing who he was dealing with. I had the same feeling of anguish I had experienced as a child at the circus when I saw a little lion-tamer armed with a whip facing a huge, roaring lion, and teasing it. “Look out!” I wanted to shout, “he’s a murderer, a monster!” But I did not have the strength to speak. “Well, are you going — or aren’t you?” said Astarita once more.

Sonzogno shook his head again and took another step backward, Astarita moved one step forward. They were now nose to nose, each the same height. “Who are you, anyway?” asked Astarita with the same twisted grimace. “Your name — right now!”

Sonzogno made no reply. “So you don’t want to tell me, eh?” repeated Astarita almost voluptuously, as if Sonzogno’s silence was a source of pleasure. “You don’t want to tell me and you don’t want to get out, eh? Is that it?”

He waited for a moment, then raised his hand and slapped Sonzogno hard, first on one cheek, then the other. I put my fist to my mouth and buried my teeth in it. Now he’ll kill him, I thought as I shut my eyes. But I heard Astarita’s voice, saying, “And now clear out! Go on, move it!” I reopened my eyes and saw Astarita pushing Sonzogno toward the door, dragging him by his coat collar. Sonzogno’s cheeks were still crimson from the blows he had received, but he seemed docile. He let himself be dragged along as if he were thinking about something else. Astarita pushed him out of the living room and then I heard the front door slam violently, and Astarita reappeared.

“Who was he?” he asked, mechanically removing a piece of fluff from the lapels of his overcoat and looking himself over as if he were afraid he had spoiled his elegance by the violent effort he had made.

“I never knew his last name. I only know him as Carlo,” I lied.

“Carlo,” he replied with a snigger, shaking his head. Then he came up to me. I was standing in the window embrasure and was looking out through the panes of glass. He put his arm around my waist. “How are you?” he asked me, and his voice and expression were already quite different.

“I’m well,” I said, without looking at him. He gazed at me and then pressed me to him, close, without speaking. I pushed him away gently. “You’ve been very kind to me,” I said. “I telephoned to ask you to do me another favor.”

“Let’s hear it,” he said. He was still gazing at me and did not appear to be listening.

“That young man you questioned —” I began.

“Oh, yes,” he interrupted, making a face. “Always him.… He didn’t turn out to be very heroic.”

I was curious to know the truth about Mino’s interview. “Why?” I asked. “Was he afraid?”

Astarita shook his head. “I don’t know if he was afraid or not. I only know that at the first question I put to him he blurted out everything. If he had denied it, I couldn’t have done anything to him. There wasn’t any proof.”

So it really had gone as Mino had said, I thought. It had been a kind of sudden absence, like a collapse, reasonless, unasked for and unprovoked. “Well,” I went on, “I suppose you wrote down what he said. I want you to destroy everything you wrote.”

He smiled contemptuously. “He put you up to this, didn’t he?”

“No, it’s my idea,” I replied. “May I be struck dead this moment if it’s not true,” I swore solemnly.

“They all want the records to disappear,” he said. “The police archives are their uneasy consciences. When the record disappears, the remorse disappears.”

“I wish that were true,” I said, remembering Mino, “but I’m afraid you’re wrong this time.”

He drew me to him again, so that my belly was pressed against his. “What will you give me in exchange?” he stammered, trembling with desire.

“Nothing,” I replied simply. “Nothing at all this time.”

“And if I refuse?”

“You’d make me very unhappy because I love this man, and everything that happens to him is as if it were happening to me.”

“But you told me you’d be nice to me.”

“I did say so. But I’ve changed my mind.”

“Why?”

“Because. There isn’t any reason.”

He pressed me to him again and, stammering rapidly with his mouth to my ear, he began to beg me to yield, at least for one last time, to his desperate desire. I cannot repeat the things he said, because he mingled his supplications with atrocious things I could not write down, things men say to women like me, things women
like me say to their lovers. He enumerated them in meticulous, abundant, and precise detail; not with the shameless gaiety that usually accompanies such outbursts, but with grim pleasure, as if he were obsessed. I once saw a homicidal maniac in the insane asylum describe to his nurse the tortures he would inflict upon him if he chanced to have him in his power, and he spoke with the same scrupulous, serious, balanced tone of voice with which Astarita whispered his obscenities to me. What he was really describing in this way was his love, both tragic and lustful, which to others might have seemed mere lechery, but which I, on the contrary, knew to be as deep, absolute, and, in its way, as pure as any love could be. I felt stirred to pity for him, as I always did, since underneath all those obscenities I could sense only his loneliness and his absolute incapacity to escape from it. I let him pour it all out, then said to him. “I didn’t want to tell you, but you force me to. Do what you like, but I can never again be what I was. I’m pregnant.”

He was not astonished; he never deviated for one single moment from his fixed purpose. “Well — so what?”

“So now I’m going to change my way of life. I’m getting married.”

My main reason for telling him of my condition had been to console him for my refusal. But I realized as I spoke that I was saying what I really thought and that those words came from my heart. “When you first knew me I wanted to get married,” I added with a sigh. “And it wasn’t my fault that I didn’t.”

His arm was still around my waist but he had loosened his hold. Now he drew away from me completely. “I curse the day I met you!” he said.

“Why?”

He spat, turning his head to one side, then continued. “I curse the day I met you and I curse the day I was born.” He spoke quietly and did not seem to be giving vent to any violent emotion. He spoke calmly and surely. “Your friend has nothing to fear,” he added. “The interview wasn’t written down, and the information he gave wasn’t acted upon. He’s only noted in our archives as still being dangerous from the political standpoint. Good-bye, Adriana.”

I remained by the window and returned his farewell, watching him from a distance as he went off. He picked up his hat from the table and left without turning around.

The door leading into the kitchen opened immediately and Mino came in with his pistol in his hand. I gazed at him in astonishment, feeling empty and speechless.

“I had made up my mind to kill Astarita,” he said with a smile. “Did you really think I cared whether the papers dealing with my case disappeared or not?”

“Then why didn’t you do it?” I asked in a dazed voice.

“He cursed the day he was born so deeply; let him go on cursing it for a year or two yet,” he said shaking his head.

I felt that something was hurting me but however hard I tried I was unable to discover what it was. “In any case,” I said, “I got what I wanted. There’s nothing written down.”

“I heard him, I heard him,” he interrupted me. “I heard everything. I was standing behind the door, and the door was ajar. I saw what he did, too. He’s brave,” he added carelessly, “your Astarita’s brave … pam pam! The way he slapped Sonzogno was really masterful! There are ways of doing these things, even slapping someone. He hit him like a superior hits an inferior, like a master hits a servant. And the way Sonzogno swallowed it! He didn’t say a word.” He laughed and put his pistol back into his pocket.

I was rather disconcerted by this singular eulogy of Astarita. “What do you think Sonzogno will do?” I asked uncertainly.

“Oh, who knows?”

It was nearly night by now and the living room was immersed in deep shadow. He leaned over the table and switched on the central light, which was surrounded by darkness. Mother’s glasses and her patience cards lay on the table. Mino sat down, picked up the cards, and shuffled them. “Want to play a game of cards while we wait for supper?” he then said.

“What an idea!” I exclaimed. “A game of cards?”

“Yes,
briscola
. Come on.”

I obeyed him, sat down, and mechanically took up the cards he dealt me. I was confused in my mind and my hands, I was not
sure why, were trembling. I began to play. The figures on the cards seemed to me to possess a malicious, disturbing character of their own: the jack of clubs, black and sinister with his black eye and a black flower in his fist; the queen of hearts, lustful, excited, shapeless; the king of diamonds, paunchy, cold, impassive, inhuman. I felt we were playing for some immensely important stakes, but I did not know what. I was deathly sad and every now and then, even as I was playing, I sighed lightly to ascertain whether the weight that was oppressing me was still there. And I could feel that not only was it still there, but was becoming heavier.

He won the first game and then the second. “What’s the matter?” he asked, shuffling the cards. “You’re playing so badly.”

I threw the cards down. “Don’t torture me like this, Mino! I really don’t feel like playing at all.”

“Why not?”