The Road To The City (17 page)

It was growing light outside. The sun rose out of a greenish haze and shone upon the sea. On the terrace in front of the hotel a waiter in a white jacket was setting wicker chairs and tables in order among the palms, and another man in a striped outfit was dipping a mop into a bucket of water. Now the sun was red and glaring. I hated the sea and the wicker furniture and the palm trees. Why had I come to San Remo anyhow? What was I doing in this room with the woman in a violet kimono? I hated Francesca and thought to myself that she and Augusto must have stopped at the countess's for drinks and have had one too many.

They did come back, though, with the countess's doctor, a tall, bald man with a thin, ivory face and a pendulous lower lip, disclosing teeth that were long and yellow like those of a horse. He said that neither the sedative nor the enema was any use. Everything that had been done so far was wrong. He wrote out another prescription, and while Augusto went back to the pharmacy he questioned me about the baby's health in recent months and how she had been taken ill. While I was telling him he held the camel in his hand and made it walk up and down the rug. Somehow his gesture gave me hope. I asked him if it was something serious and he said he didn't think so but he couldn't yet say for sure. He could advance various hypotheses, but none of them was definitive. He sent away the woman in the kimono because he said there should be as few people as possible in a sickroom in order to conserve the supply of oxygen. Francesca brought me a cup of coffee. It was a bright, sunny day, and the usual old gentlemen were sitting on the terrace, holding their canes between their knees and reading their newspapers.

At nine o'clock, just as the bald doctor was cleaning a syringe in order to make an injection, the freckled-faced doctor of the previous evening came back. He seemed a little offended, but Francesca took him out in the hall and talked to him in private. Then the two doctors held a consultation together. The baby was quiet now and breathing evenly. She seemed very tired, with white lips and dark circles around her eyes. She stood up on the bed and said:

‘Sleep no more!'

These were the first words she had spoken since she had fallen ill, and I was so happy that I burst into tears. Francesca held me in her arms.

‘I thought she was going to die,' I murmured. Francesca patted my shoulders without speaking. ‘I thought she was going to die for certain. I thought so all night long. I was scared to death.' I wanted to make up to Francesca somehow for the hate I had felt for her at three o'clock in the morning. ‘You looked very handsome in your Hindu dress. And the way you had your hair fixed was very becoming.'

‘Don't you think we ought to send a wire to Alberto?' she said. ‘She's the poor devil's daughter, after all.'

‘Yes,' I said. ‘But isn't she better?'

‘Perhaps so,' she said. ‘But I'd send him a wire just the same.'

At eleven o'clock the baby began to scream again, shaking and twitching all over, with a fever of 103. In the afternoon she fell asleep but only for a few minutes. Augusto went to send the wire. I began to wish Alberto would arrive immediately. I paced up and down the room, holding the baby wrapped in a blanket. Francesca stepped out in the hall every now and then for a cigarette. The doctor went out to dinner and came back. I could read no hope in his gloomy, disdainful face with the pendulous lower lip. Everyone looked as if there were no hope, and I wanted to tell them that I knew she was better. She looked better to me, and for a moment, when she was in Francesca's arms, she began to play with her necklace.

Men and women strolled along the pavement or sat comfortably in the wicker chairs among the palm trees. They smoked cigarettes, flicked the ashes away, tucked plaid blankets around their legs, and showed each other cartoons in the papers. A boy came by selling fresh oranges, and they pressed them in their fingers and counted the change in the palms of their hands.

I remembered with horror how I had struck the baby across the hands when she would not eat her supper and how she had thrown down her spoon and started to cry disconsolately. I looked into her big brown eyes and thought that she knew all there was to know about me. Her eyes were weary and dull, and their lack of expression was dreadful on a baby's face. She had a faraway, bitter look, unreproaching but at the same time pitiless, as if she had nothing more to ask. I stopped rocking her in my arms and laid her down on the bed under a shawl. She sobbed convulsively and pushed away my hands.

Suddenly Francesca began to cry and went out of the room. I looked at the doctor and he looked at me. His damp, red, pendulous lower lip gave him the appearance of an animal drinking. The freckled doctor came back with another, smaller doctor who seemed to be someone very important. I asked them if I should undress the baby and they said no. The little doctor felt her neck and forehead and tapped her knees with an ivory stick. Then they went away. I was left alone with the bald doctor, and all of a sudden his pendulous lower lip reminded me of something indecent, like the sexual parts of a dog. Then he told me it might be meningitis. At ten o'clock in the evening the baby died.

Francesca took me into her room and I lay down on her bed and drank a cup of coffee. The woman in the violet kimono and the manager of the hotel and the freckled-faced doctor all came to see me. The woman told me I'd have other children. She said that when children die young it isn't so bad. It's worse when they're older. She had lost a son who was a lieutenant in the Navy, and she raised her hand to show me how tall he was. But the hotel manager said it was harder to lose children when they were small. Finally Francesca sent them all away and told me to go to sleep.

I shut my eyes, but there was one sight I couldn't get away from. It was the expression in the baby's face when I was rocking her in my arms. Her eyes were bitter and indifferent, indifferent even to
Le bon roi Dagobert
. I could see all her clothes and toys: the camel, the ball, the squeaking rubber cat, the leggings, the galoshes, and the apron with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs on it. I remembered the things she ate and the words she knew how to say. Then I fell asleep and dreamed I was walking along a road and bumped up against a stone wall, which made me wake up screaming.

I called Francesca, but she wasn't in the room. There was only Augusto, standing by the window with his head against the glass. He said Francesca had gone in to the baby and asked me if there was anything I wanted. I asked him to sit down beside me, and he sat there, holding my hand and stroking my hair. Then I began to cry. I cried all night long, with my face buried in the pillow. I hung on to his hand and said things that made no sense. As long as I cried or talked I could forget about the camel and the ball. Alberto arrived at five o'clock in the morning. He dropped his bag and ran sobbing to kneel down beside me, and his head of curly grey hair on my shoulder seemed to be the only thing in the world I needed.

I told Alberto that I never wanted to see the camel or the ball again, and Francesca and he made a bundle of all the baby's things and gave them away. Francesca left San Remo several days before us and removed from the house the baby's carriage, crib, and all the rest of her belongings. At the same time she told Gemma to go and pay a visit to her family at Maona. Gemma left in tears, taking the cat with her. I couldn't bear to see her because I should have been reminded of the stye in her eye when she bent over me the day the baby was born. Alberto wrote to my mother and father that I didn't want to see them but preferred to be alone with him for a while. I didn't want anyone else, and they must be patient and let me fill my own needs as I thought best. Everyone reacts to sorrow in his own particular way, he told them, and throws up the best defences he can. And in such cases the family and friends must hold their peace and stand by quietly until it is over.

We went back to the city, and for a while I didn't leave the house because I didn't want to see any children. At first a woman came to do the cleaning, but it was so hard for me to talk to her that finally I told her not to come and did the work myself. Still I didn't have very much to do. I stayed in bed late in the morning, watching my arms lie empty and free on the bedcover. Then I slowly got dressed and let the empty hours of the day drag by. I tried not to think of the song about
Le bon roi Dagobert
, but it rang continually in my ears. And I still saw in front of me the doctor's mouth, like that of an animal drinking, the long halls and red-carpeted stairways of the Hotel Bellevue and the wicker chairs and palm trees on the terrace below.

Alberto stayed at home a great deal. He was extremely kind, and I was amazed by his efforts to help me. We never mentioned the baby, and I noticed that he had taken away the oatmeal and the rest of her food that Francesca had forgotten. He read Rilke's poems out loud and also some of the notes he had written on the margins of various books. He said that some day or other he wanted to put all these notes together in a volume which he would call
Variations on a Minor Scale
. I think he was slightly envious of Augusto for the books he had published. Anyhow, he said I was to help put the notes in order, and sometimes he had me work over them on the typewriter until late at night. I didn't type fast enough to keep up with his dictation, but he never lost his temper. He even told me that I should make comments on anything that didn't seem clear to me.

One day I asked him if he was going away and he said no. Sooner or later, he said, he'd empty the zinc case where he'd begun to pack his books. Meanwhile it sat there in his study, half filled with his things. When he wanted one particular book he had quite a time digging it out, but still he didn't get around to putting everything back on the shelves. We spent most of the time in the study, and he never said a word about wanting to go out. At first we didn't talk about the baby, but later we did, and he said perhaps it was good for me to unburden myself to him. He said that we'd have another child and that even if now this prospect gave me no pleasure, I would love the new one just as well, and all my peace of mind would come back to me when I saw it lying at my side. We made love together and gradually I began to imagine the time when I would have another baby. I thought of how I would nurse it and rock it, and of all my thoughts this was the only one from which I got any satisfaction.

Then I began to fall in love again with Alberto, and the realization of it frightened me. I trembled now at the idea of his going away, and the sight of the zinc case became painful. When I typed to his dictation I was afraid of going too slowly, and when he looked at me I imagined that he didn't like my face. I reflected how easy everything was for other women—Francesca and Giovanna, for instance, who never seemed to have known even the shadow of my great fear. How easy life is, I thought, for women who are not afraid of a man. I stared for a long time at my face in the mirror. It had never been very pretty, and now it seemed to me that every trace of youth and freshness was gone.

Alberto and I were always at home, and I understood now how a man and woman live together. He never went out, and I saw him from one end of the day to the other. I saw him get up in the morning and drink the cup of coffee I had made for him; I saw him bend over and dig into the zinc case and make notes on the margins of his books. We made love on his couch in the study and lay awake in the darkness while I felt him breathing calmly beside me. Before going to sleep he always told me to wake him up if I felt sad. I didn't dare actually wake him, but the thought that I could if I wanted to was a great consolation. He was so very kind that now I knew what a man's tenderness could be. It was my own fault, I realized, if even now I wasn't altogether happy with him. I was always worried about my face and body, and when we made love I was afraid he might be bored. Every time I had something to say to him I thought it over to make sure it wasn't boring. When he read me the notes he wanted to make into a book occasional comments came into my mind. But when one day I finally said something he seemed displeased and explained to me at length why I was wrong. I could have bitten off my tongue for having spoken. I remembered the time before we were married when we sat endlessly in cafés and I babbled on without stopping. Then it was easy enough for me to talk. I said whatever came into my head and moved before him with all the confidence of youth. Now that I had had the baby and the baby was dead I couldn't bear the idea of his leaving me.

‘Why
don't
 you go away?' I said. ‘I know it's just that you're sorry for me. Why don't you go?'

‘I don't like the idea of your being here alone,' he replied.

‘I never expected you to be so kind,' I went on. ‘I didn't dream you'd try to help me as much as you've done. I didn't think you cared much for the baby or for me either. I thought you cared only for Giovanna.'

He chuckled quietly, as if to himself. ‘Sometimes I think I don't care for anyone,' he said.

‘Not even for Giovanna?'

‘No, not even for Giovanna,' he said. ‘She and her husband have gone to their country house near the lakes, and I don't know when she'll be back. When I don't see her I hardly ever think of her at all. Queer, isn't it?'

We were silent for a few minutes. He lay at my side breathing quietly, toying with my hand on the bedcover. He opened my fingers and closed them suddenly; he tickled my palm, then put my hand down and drew away.

‘It's difficult to know what we have inside of us. We're here to-day and gone to-morrow. I've never understood myself properly. I was very fond of my mother, for instance, and terribly sad to see her go. Then one morning I walked out of the house with a cigarette in my mouth, and just as I was striking a match to light it I had a sudden feeling of relief. I was almost glad that she was dead, that I would never have to play draughts with her again or hear her irritated tone of voice when I put too much sugar in her coffee. That's how it is that I don't really know how much I care for Giovanna. I haven't seen her for several months now, and I can't say I've thought very much about her. I'm lazy, when you come down to it, and I don't want to suffer.'