The Woman of Rome (6 page)

“Why?” he asked coolly. “We won’t stay long — don’t worry.

“You don’t see what I mean!” I replied. “I was wrong, because afterward I’ll be ashamed of my own house and neighborhood.”

“You’re right there,” he said with relief, “but what can you do about it? You ought to have been born a millionaire — only millionaires live up here.”

He opened the gate and led the way down a gravel path between two rows of little trees trimmed into a shape of cubes and rounds. We entered the villa by a plate-glass door and found ourselves in a bare, gleaming entrance hall, with a black-and-white-check marble floor, polished like a mirror. From here we went into a larger hall, light and spacious, with the ground-floor rooms leading out of it. At the end of the hall a white staircase led to the upper floor. I was so scared at the sight of this hall that I began walking on tiptoe. Gino noticed me and told me, laughing, that I could make as much noise as I liked, since nobody was at home.

He showed me the drawing room, a huge place with many mirrors and sets of armchairs and sofas; the dining room, which was a little smaller, with an oval table, chairs, and sideboard made of a beautiful dark and polished wood; the linen room full of white varnished wall cupboards. In a smaller sitting room there was even a bar arranged in a niche in the wall, a real bar with shelves for the bottles, a nickel-plated coffee machine and a zinc counter; it was
like a little chapel; there was even a little gilded gateway that shut it off. I asked Gino where they did the cooking, and he told me the kitchen and servants’ rooms were in the basement. It was the first time in my life that I had been in a house of this kind, and I could not help fingering things, as if unable to believe my own eyes. Everything looked new to me and made of precious materials — glass, wood, marble, metals, fabrics. I could not help comparing those walls and that furniture with the dirty floors, blackened walls, and rickety furniture in my own house, and I told myself my mother was right when she said money was the only thing that mattered in the world. I supposed the people living among all those lovely things could not help being lovely and good themselves; they could not possibly drink or swear or shout or hit one another, or do any of the things I had seen done in my own home and others like it.

Meanwhile, for the hundredth time, Gino was explaining with extraordinary pride the way life was lived in a place like that, as if he were bathing in the reflected glory of all that luxury and ease. “They eat off china plates; but they have silver ones for dessert and sweets. The knives and forks are all silver — they have five different courses and drink three kinds of wine. The mistress wears a low-necked dress in the evening and the master a black dinner suit. When dinner’s over the parlormaid hands round seven kinds of cigarettes, foreign brands, of course, on a silver tray. Then they go out of the dining room and have coffee and liqueurs wheeled in on the little table over there. They always have guests, sometimes two, sometimes four. The mistress has got some diamonds as big as this! and a marvelous pearl necklace — she must have several millions’ worth of jewels.”

“You told me that before,” I interrupted him peevishly.

But he was so carried away he did not notice my irritation. “The mistress never goes down into the basement — she gives her orders by phone. Everything in the kitchen is electric — our kitchen’s cleaner than most people’s bedrooms. But not only the kitchen! Even the mistress’s dogs are cleaner and better off than many people.” He spoke with admiration of his employers and with scorn of poor people; and, partly because of the comparison
I kept on making between that house and my own, and partly because of his words, I felt very poor.

We went up the staircase to the next floor. Gino put his arm round my waist and hugged me tight. And then, I don’t know why, I almost felt as if I were the mistress of the house just going upstairs with my husband, after some reception or dinner, on my way to spend the night with him in the same bed, on the next floor. As if he had guessed what I was thinking (Gino was always having these intuitions) he said, “And now let’s go to bed together — tomorrow they’ll bring us our coffee in bed.” I began to laugh, but almost hoped it would come true.

I had put on my best dress that day to go out with Gino, and my best shoes, blouse, and silk stockings. I remember the dress was a two-piece, a black jacket and a black-and-white-check skirt. The material wasn’t too bad, but the dressmaker in our neighborhood who had cut it was not much more experienced than Mother. She had made a very short skirt, shorter at the back than in front, so that although my knees were covered, my thighs could be seen from behind. She had made the jacket extremely close-fitting, with wide lapels and such tight sleeves that they hurt my armpits. I felt as if I were bursting out of the jacket; and my breasts stuck out as if a piece of the jacket were missing. My blouse was a very plain one, made of some cheap pink stuff, without any embroidery, and my best white cotton petticoat showed through it. My shoes were black and shiny, the leather was good but the shape old-fashioned. I had not got a hat and my wavy chestnut-brown hair hung loose over my shoulders. It was the first time I had worn the dress and I was very proud of it. I thought myself very smart and could not help imagining everyone turned round in the street to look at me. But as soon as I entered the bedroom of Gino’s mistress and saw the enormous downy bed with its embroidered silk coverlet, embroidered linen sheets and all those gossamer draperies flowing down over the head of the bed, and saw myself reflected three times over in the triple mirror standing on the dressing table at the end of the room, I realized I was dressed like a scarecrow, my pride in my rags was ridiculous and pitiful, and I thought I would never again be able to call
myself happy unless I could dress well and live in a house like this. I almost felt like crying; I sat down on the bed in bewilderment, without saying a word.

“What’s the matter?” asked Gino, sitting down beside me and taking my hand.

“Nothing,” I said. “I was looking at a peasant I happen to know.”

“Who?” he asked in amazement.

“There,” pointing to the mirror in which I could see myself seated on the bed beside Gino; and really, we both looked like a couple of hairy savages who had wandered into a civilized house by mistake, but I looked worse than he did.

This time he understood the feeling of depression, envy, and jealousy that was tormenting me.

“Don’t look at yourself in that mirror,” he said as he put his arms round me. He feared for the outcome of his plans and did not realize that nothing could have been more favorable to them than my present feeling of humiliation. We kissed one another and the kiss revived my courage, because I felt that after all I loved and was loved.

But a little later when he showed me the bathroom, which was as big as an ordinary room, with its white, shining tiles and the built-in bath with nickel-plated faucets; and when he opened one of the closets and showed me his mistress’s dresses, packed tight together, the sensation of envy and of my own poverty returned and made me feel quite desperate. I was suddenly overcome by a desire to think no more about these things; and for the first time I wanted, consciously, to become Gino’s mistress, partly so as to forget my own condition and partly in order to persuade myself that I, too, was free and capable of doing what I liked, despite the sense of slavery that was weighing me down. I could not wear beautiful clothes or have a house like that, but at least I could make love as the rich did, and perhaps better than they.

“Why show me all these clothes?” I asked Gino. “What do they matter to me?”

“I thought you’d be curious to see what they’re like,” he replied, rather disconcerted.

“I’m not at all interested in them,” I said. “They’re lovely, but I didn’t come here to look at clothes.”

I saw his eyes light up as I spoke.

“I’d rather see your room,” I added carelessly.

“It’s in the basement,” he replied eagerly, “Shall we go down?”

I looked at him in silence for a moment and then asked him with a newly found forthright kind of manner I disliked in myself, “Why are you playing the fool with me?”

“But I —” he began uneasily, in surprise.

“You know better than I do that we didn’t come here to look over the house or admire your mistress’s dresses, but to go to your room and make love — well, then, let’s just go do it then, right now, and stop talking about it.”

In this way, all in a moment, through having seen the house, I changed from the shy, ingenuous girl I had been when I entered it. I was amazed at the change and hardly recognized myself. We left the room and began to go downstairs. Gino put his arm around my waist and kissed me on every step — I do not think anyone ever went down a stairway more slowly. When we reached the ground floor Gino opened a doorway concealed in the wall and, still kissing me and holding me by the waist, led me down the back stairs into the basement. It was evening, and the basement was dark. We reached Gino’s room at the end of a long passage, without putting on any lights, our arms still around one another, his mouth on mine. He opened the door, we entered, I heard him close it behind us. We stood there in the dark for some time, kissing one another. It was an endless kiss, every time I wanted to stop he started again; and every time he wanted to stop, it was I who went on. Then Gino pushed me toward the bed and I let myself fall on to it.

Gino kept on whispering in my ear, most provocatively, words of endearment and persuasion, with the obvious purpose of bewildering me and preventing me from noticing that, meanwhile, he was trying to undress me. But this was quite unnecessary, first of all because I had made up my mind to give myself to him, and then because I hated all those clothes I had liked so much before,
and I was dying to be rid of them. Naked, I thought, I would be as beautiful, if not more beautiful, than Gino’s mistress and all the other rich women in the world. In any case, my body had been waiting for this moment for months now, and I felt that despite myself, it was quivering with impatience and repressed desire like a chained and starving animal, which finally, after a long fast, is set free and given food.

For this reason, the act of love seemed entirely natural to me, and my physical pleasure was not accompanied by any feeling that I was doing something unusual. On the contrary, I seemed to be doing things I had already done, I did not know where or when, maybe in another life, just as sometimes certain landscapes seem familiar whereas you are really seeing them for the first time in your life. This did not prevent me from loving Gino passionately, fiercely, kissing him, biting him, crushing him in my arms almost to the point of suffocation. He, too, seemed to be swept away by the same rage of possession. And so we embraced one another violently in that dark little room, buried beneath two floors of the empty, silent house, goading our bodies in innumerable ways like two enemies struggling for life and trying to hurt each other as much as possible.

But as soon as our desire was satisfied and we lay beside one another, drowsy and exhausted, I became terribly afraid that now Gino had had me, he would no longer want to marry me. So I began to talk about the house we would live in after the wedding.

The villa belonging to Gino’s mistress had made a deep impression upon me, and I was quite convinced now that there could be no happiness except among beautiful, clean things. I realized we would never be able to own a house or even a single room like that house, but the brightness of the villa even more than its luxury had given me a welter of ideas. I tried to convince Gino that cleanliness could make even ugly objects look beautiful; but what I really wanted was to convince myself, since I was in despair at the idea of my own poverty and I knew that marrying Gino would be the only way out of it. “Even two rooms can be beautiful,” I said, “if they’re properly kept, with the floors washed down every day, all the furniture dusted
and the brass polished and everything kept tidy, the plates in their proper places, the dusters in their proper places, clothes and shoes all in their proper places — the main thing is to sweep thoroughly and wash the floors and dust everything every day. You don’t have to judge by the house where Mother and I live — Mother’s untidy and anyway, she never has the time, poor thing. But our house’ll shine like a mirror, I can promise you that much.”

“Yes, yes,” said Gino, “cleanliness comes first. Do you know what the mistress does if she finds a speck of dust in some corner? She calls the chambermaid, makes her go down on her knees and pick it up with her hands — as if she were a dog who’d gone to the bathroom in the house. And she’s quite right.”

“I’m sure my house’ll be even cleaner and tidier than that,” I said. “You’ll see.”

“But you’re going to be an artists’ model,” he said to tease me. “And you won’t bother with the house at all.”

“A model!” I replied sharply. “I’m not going to be a model any more. I’ll stay at home all day and keep it clean and tidy for you and cook for you — Mother says that means I’ll be your servant — but if you love someone, even being a servant can be a pleasure.”

So we stayed chatting for a long time; and little by little my fear dwindled, giving way to my usual charmed and innocent trustfulness. How could I doubt him? Gino not only agreed to all my plans, but discussed the details, improved on them, added others of his own.

After we had rambled on for a couple of hours, or thereabouts, I dropped off to sleep and I think Gino also slept. We were wakened by a ray of moonlight that came in through the basement window and lit up the bed and our bodies lying there. Gino said it must be very late; and in fact the alarm clock on the night table showed that it was a few minutes past midnight. “What on Earth will Mother do to me!” I exclaimed, jumping out of bed and beginning to dress in the moonlight.

“Why?”

“I’ve never stayed out so late in all my life. I never go out in the evening.”

“You can tell her we went out for a ride in the car,” said Gino as he got up, “and it broke down right out in the country.”