The Woman of Rome (42 page)

“I don’t understand you.”

“What does it matter if we don’t understand each other, as long as we love each other — which is true?” he concluded, embracing me in his ironical and loveless way. And so the discussion ended. For just as he never gave himself up completely, emotionally speaking, and always seemed to keep something back, perhaps the most important part, so that his rare outbursts of affection were actually worthless, in exactly the same way he never revealed the whole of what he was thinking. Every time I believed I had reached the very core of his intelligence, he repelled me with some joke or burlesque gesture, to distract my attention. He really was elusive, in every sense. And he seemed to me to be like an inferior person, almost like a kind of object of study and experiment. But perhaps
it was for this very reason that I loved him so much, so helplessly and submissively.

Sometimes, too, he seemed to hate not only his own family and his own milieu, but all humankind. One day he remarked — I cannot remember in what connection, “The rich are appalling, but the poor certainly aren’t any better, if for different reasons.”

“It would be easier if you just confessed frankly that you hate all mankind without exception.”

He began to laugh. “In the abstract,” he replied, “when I’m not among them I don’t hate them; on the contrary, I hate them so little that I believe in their progress. If I didn’t believe this, I wouldn’t trouble myself with politics. But when I’m among them they horrify me. Really,” he added sadly, “people are worthless.”

“
We’re
people,” I said, “so we’re worthless, too, and therefore we have no right to judge.”

He laughed again. “I don’t judge them,” he replied. “I smell them — or rather, I sniff them out — like a dog sniffs the scent of a partridge or a hare. But does the dog judge them? I sniff them and I find they’re malicious, stupid, selfish, petty, vulgar, deceitful, shameful, full of filth. I sniff them out. It’s a feeling; can you abolish a feeling?”

I did not know what to reply and limited myself to saying, “I haven’t got that feeling.”

Another time he said, “Men may be good, or bad, I don’t know, but they’re certainly useless, superfluous —”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean it would be wonderful if the whole of humanity were wiped out. It’s only an ugly excrescence on the face of the Earth, a wart. The world would be far more beautiful without people, their cities, their streets, their ports, all their little arrangements. Think how beautiful it would be if there were nothing but sky, sea, trees, earth, animals.”

I could not help laughing. “What strange ideas you have!” I exclaimed.

“Humanity,” he continued, “is a thing without head nor tail-.-.-. decidedly negative, though. The history of humankind is nothing
but one long yawn of sheer boredom. What need is there of it? Speaking for myself — I could have done very well without it.”

“But you’re part of this humanity yourself,” I objected. “Could you have done without yourself, then?”

“Especially without myself.”

Chastity was another of his obsessions, all the more singular in that he did not try to practice it and the idea served only to spoil his pleasure. He sang its praises continually, especially just after we had made love, as if out of pique. He used to say lovemaking was only the silliest and easiest way of freeing oneself from all questions, by forcing them out below, secretly, without anyone noticing, like embarrassing guests shown out by the back door. “Then, when the operation has been performed, you go out for a stroll with your accomplice — wife or mistress — wondrously disposed to accept the world as it is — even the worst of all possible worlds.”

“I don’t understand you,” I said.

“And yet you ought to understand this, at least,” he said. “Isn’t it your speciality?”

I felt offended. “My specialty, as you call it,” I said, “is to love you. But if you like, we won’t make love anymore — I’ll love you all the same.”

He laughed. “Are you quite sure?” he asked; and that day we argued no more. But he came back to the same things repeatedly; so that in the end I took no further notice, but accepted this as I did so many other traits in his paradoxical character.

He never talked to me about politics though, except for an occasional reference. Even today I have no idea what he was aiming at, what his ideas were, what party he belonged to. My ignorance is partly due to his secretiveness over this aspect of his life, and partly to the fact that I myself understood nothing about politics and my shyness and indifference prevented my asking him for all the explanations that might have enlightened me. I was wrong; and God knows I regretted it later on. But at the time I thought it was very convenient not to be involved in things I believed were no concern of mine, and to think only of love. I behaved, in fact, like so many other women, wives and mistressses, who sometimes do
not even know how their men earn the money they bring home. Quite often I met his two companions, whom he used to see almost every day. But they did not mention politics in my presence; they either joked or talked of unimportant matters.

And yet I was unable to shake off a constant feeling of apprehension because I could not forget that plotting against the government was dangerous. What I feared most was that Mino might be drawn into some act of violence; in my ignorance I was unable to separate the idea of a plot from that of weapons and blood. In this connection I remember something that shows to what extent I felt, however obscurely, that it was my duty to intervene in order to ward off the dangers that threatened him. I knew that the carrying of arms was illegal; and that a man might be sentenced to jail merely for carrying a weapon without a permit. Aside from this, it is extremely easy to lose one’s head at certain moments, and the use of arms has so often compromised people who otherwise would have been saved. For all these reasons I thought that the pistol Mino was so proud of was not only unnecessary, but positively dangerous, for he might be obliged to use it or it might simply be discovered on him. But I did not dare to mention it to him, since I realized it would have been useless. In the end I decided to act secretly. On one occasion he had explained to me how the weapon worked. One day while he was asleep, I took the pistol out of his trousers pocket, pulled out the cylinder, and removed the bullets. Then I put the pistol together again and replaced it in his pocket. I hid the bullets in a drawer underneath my lingerie. I did all this in an instant and then went to sleep again beside him. Two days later I put the bullets into my purse and went to throw them into the Tiber.

One day Astarita came to see me. I had almost forgotten him; and as far as the matter of the maid went, I believed I had done my duty and I did not want to think anymore about it. Astarita told me the priest had delivered the compact to the police and that the owner, on the advice of the police themselves, had withdrawn her accusation, and the maid had been declared innocent and set free. I must admit that this news delighted me, especially since it dispelled
the feeling of foreboding I had had ever since my last confession. I thought not of the maid, who was by now free, but of Mino, and told myself that now, since there was no further danger of the denunciation I had been so afraid of, I had nothing more to fear for either of us. In my delight I could not help embracing Astarita.

“Was it so important to you to get that woman out of jail, then?” he asked me with a doubtful expression.

“It may seem strange to you,” I lied, “who lightheartedly send who knows how many innocent people to jail every day, but it was real agony to me.”

“I don’t send anyone to jail,” he stammered. “I only do my duty.”

“Did you see the priest yourself?” I asked him.

“No, I didn’t see him, I phoned. They told me the compact had, in fact, been given up by a priest, who had received it under the seal of the confessional. So then I recommended her release.”

I remained pensive, I did not know why myself.

“Do you really love me?” I asked him then.

This question put him into turmoil immediately and he embraced me tightly. “Why do you ask me that?” he stammered. “You ought to know by now.”

He wanted to kiss me but I avoided him. “I asked you,” I said, “because I want to know if you’ll always help me — every time I ask you — like you helped me this time.”

“Always,” he replied, trembling all over. “But you’ll be kind to me?” he asked, putting his face up to mine.

Now I had firmly decided, after Mino had returned to me, that I would not have anything more to do with Astarita. He was different from my usual paying lovers; and although I did not love him and indeed felt a positive aversion for him at times, perhaps for this very reason I felt that giving myself to him would be like betraying Mino. I was tempted to tell him the truth, “No, I shall never be kind to you again,” but then I suddenly changed my mind and controlled myself. I remembered what power he had, how Giacomo might be arrested at any time, and that if I wanted Astarita to intervene to free him it was unwise to offend him. I resigned myself and said quickly. “Yes, I’ll be kind to you.”

“Tell me,”-he insisted, feeling emboldened, “tell me — do you love me a little?”

“No, I don’t love you,” I said firmly, “and you know it — I’ve already told you that so many times.”

“Won’t you ever love me?”

“I don’t think so.”

“But why?”

“There isn’t any reason.”

“You love someone else.”

“That’s no business of yours.”

“But I need your love,” he said in despair, looking at me with his bilious eyes. “Why, why won’t you love me a little?”

That day I allowed him to remain with me until late into the night. He was inconsolable because of my inability to love him and seemed unconvinced of the truth of what I said. “But I’m no worse than other men,” he protested. “Why couldn’t you love me instead of someone else?” Really, I felt sorry for him; and since he insisted on questioning me about my feelings for him and on trying to find some fuel for his hopes in my replies, I felt almost tempted to lie to him, if only to give him the illusion he so longed for. I noticed that he was more mournful and sickened that night than he usually was. It was as though he wanted his gestures and attitudes to awaken in me, from without, the love my heart denied him.

I remember that at a certain moment he asked me to sit naked in an armchair. He knelt down in front of me and put his head in my lap, crushing his face against my belly and remaining motionless like this for a long time. Meanwhile I had to stroke his head again and again with a light, incessant caress. This was not the first time he had obliged me to perform a kind of mimicry of love; but he seemed more desperate that day than usual. He pressed his head violently into my lap as if he wanted to enter into me and be swallowed up, and he groaned occasionally. In those moments he no longer seemed like a lover, but a child seeking the warmth and darkness of his mother’s womb. And I thought that many men would like never to have been born; and that this gesture of his, perhaps unconsciously, expressed that dim longing to be engulfed
once more in the shadowy womb from which he had been painfully expelled into the light.

That night he remained kneeling so long that I became drowsy and fell asleep, with my head flung back against the chair, my hand resting on his head. I do not know how long I slept. At a certain moment I seemed to wake up and glimpse Astarita, no longer kneeling at my feet but seated in front of me, already dressed, gazing at me with his mournful, bilious eyes. But perhaps it was only a dream, or a hallucination. The fact is that I suddenly really woke up and found that Astarita had gone, leaving the usual sum of money in my lap where he had lain his face.

About a fortnight passed, and these were among the happiest days in my life. I saw Mino almost every day and although there was no change in our relationship I contented myself with the kind of habit we had established, in which we seemed to have found by now some common ground. It was silently taken for granted between us that he did not love me, that he would never love me, and that in any case he preferred chastity to love. It was equally taken for granted that I loved him, that I always would love him despite his indifference to me, and that in any case I preferred a love like that, incomplete and wavering though it might be, to no love at all. I am not made like Astarita; and having once resigned myself to the fact that I was not loved, I found much pleasure all the same in loving. I cannot swear that at the bottom of my heart I did not nurse a hope that my submissiveness, patience, and affection might one day make him love me. But I did nothing to encourage this hope; and it was, more than anything else, the slightly bitter spice to his uncertain, grudging caresses.

But I certainly did all I could to enter unobtrusively into his life, and since I could not do so by the main door, I exercised my ingenuity in trying to enter by the back door. Despite his explicit and I believe genuine hatred of people, some curious contradiction gave him an irresistible impulse to preach and act in support of what he thought was for the good of humankind. And although this impulse was almost always checked by sudden regrets and sarcastic disgust, it was sincere.

At that time he appeared to become passionately interested in what he ironically referred to as my education. As I have said, I tried to bind him to me and so I favored this inclination of his. This experiment ended almost immediately, however, in a way worth mentioning. He came to see me for several evenings running and brought some books of his with him. After he had explained briefly what the subject was, he began to read a passage here and there. He read well, with a great variety of expression in his voice according to the subject matter, and with a passion that made him flush and gave his features an unusual animation. But I was usually unable to understand what he read however hard I tried; and I soon gave up listening to him and contented myself with watching the different expressions that flitted across his face while he was reading, a pleasure I never tired of.