The Woman of Rome (43 page)

During these readings he really abandoned himself completely, without any fear or irony, like someone in his own element who is no longer afraid of showing his sincerity. This fact struck me, because until then I had always thought that love, not literature, was the most favorable condition in which the human soul could blossom. Apparently in Mino’s case the opposite was true; certainly I never, not even in his rare moments of affection, saw such enthusiasm and candor in his face as there was when, raising his voice in curiously hollow tones or lowering it in a conversational way, he read me passages from his favorite authors. At such times he entirely lost his air of theatrical, burlesque artificiality, which never left him completely even in his most serious moments, and gave the impression that he was always acting a superficial, premeditated part. Quite often I even saw his eyes fill with tears. Then he would shut the book. “Did you like it?” he would ask me abruptly.

I usually answered that I had liked it, without saying why. I could not be more specific because, from the very outset, as I have said, I gave up all effort to grasp the meaning of such obscure stuff. But one day he insisted. “Tell me why you liked it,” he said. “Explain why.”

“To tell you the truth,” I replied after a moment’s hesitation, “I can’t explain anything because I didn’t understand anything.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t understand anything — or only a very little — of what you were reading.”

“And you let me go on reading without warning me!”

“I saw you enjoyed reading and I didn’t want to spoil your pleasure — anyway, I’m never bored — you’re very amusing to watch while you’re reading.”

He leaped to his feet in a rage. “What the devil! You’re a fool, a cretin — and here I am, wasting my breath — you’re an idiot!” He pulled back the book as though he were going to fling it at my head, but controlled himself in time and continued to insult me this way for a while.

I allowed him to let off steam for some time and then spoke. “You say you want to educate me,” I said, “but the first condition for my education would be to do something so I wouldn’t have to earn my living in the way you know I do — I certainly don’t need to read poetry or reflections on morality to pick up men. I could even not know how to read or write and they’d pay me just the same.”

“You’d like to have a beautiful house, a husband, children, clothes, a car, wouldn’t you?” he replied sarcastically. “The trouble is that not even the Lobianco women read — for different reasons from yours, but no less justifiable, from their point of view.”

“I don’t know what I’d like,” I said, a little irritated, “but these books don’t suit my way of life. It’s like giving a beggar a priceless hat and expecting her to wear it with her usual rags.”

“That may be,” he said, “but this is the last time I’ll ever read you a line.”

I have mentioned this slight quarrel because it is so characteristic of his way of thinking and behaving. But I doubt whether he would have continued in his efforts to educate me, even if I had not confessed my inability to understand him. It was not so much his inconsistency that made me think this as his singular inability, which I would call physical, to persist in any effort that demanded sincere, sustained enthusiasm. He never spoke of it in so many words, but I realized that the burlesque quality of his words often corresponded in fact to a spiritual condition. He would get
worked up, as it were, over any purpose and as long as the fire of this enthusiasm lasted he would see that purpose as something concrete and attainable. Then suddenly the fire would die out and he would feel only boredom, disgust, and above all, a sensation of utter absurdity. Then he would either abandon himself to a kind of dull, inert indifference, or act in a conventional and superficial way, as if the fire had never died out — in a word, pretend. I find it difficult to explain what happened to him at such times — it was probably a sharp interruption in his vitality, as if the very warmth of his blood had suddenly withdrawn from his mind, leaving only an arid void. It was an immediate interruption, unforeseeable and total, comparable to the interruption of an electric current, which plunges into sudden darkness a house only a moment before brilliantly illuminated; or to a motor when wheel after wheel, it ceases to move and stands still, when the power is cut off. This constant ebb and flow of his deepest vitality was first revealed to me by the frequent alternation in him of states of ardor and enthusiasm with others of apathy and inertia; but in the end it was shown to me fully by a curious incident to which I attributed little importance at the time, but which later appeared highly significant.

“Would you like to do something for us?” he asked me one day, quite unexpectedly.

“Us who?”

“For our group. Help us distribute our leaflets, for instance?”

I was always on the alert for anything that might bring me nearer to him and strengthen our connection.

“Of course,” I replied eagerly, “tell me what I have to do and I’ll do it.”

“Aren’t you afraid?”

“Why should I be? If you do it —”

“Yes, but first I have to explain what it’s about,” he said. “First you have to understand the ideas for which you run such risks.”

“Explain them, then.”

“But you won’t be interested.”

“Why? First of all, they’ll surely interest me, besides, everything you do interests me, if only because you do it.”

He looked at me and suddenly his eyes sparkled and his cheeks grew unexpectedly flushed. “All right,” he said hurriedly, “it’s too late today — but I’ll explain everything tomorrow — myself, since books bore you. But remember, it’ll take a long time, and you’ll have to listen and follow me — even if you think you don’t understand sometimes.”

“I’ll try to understand,” I said.

“You ought to,” he replied, as if speaking to himself. And he left me.

Next day I waited for him but he did not come. Two days later he arrived and as soon as he was in my room he sat down on the armchair at the foot of the bed without saying a word.

“Well,” I said gaily, “I’m ready — I’m listening.”

I had noticed his downcast expression, his opaque eyes, and his wilted, exhausted manner, but I did not want to remark on it.

“It’s no good listening,” he said at last, “because you won’t hear anything.”

“Why?”

“Because.”

“Tell me the truth,” I protested. “You think I’m too stupid or too ignorant to understand certain things, don’t you? Thanks.”

“No, you’re wrong,” he said seriously.

“Why, then?”

We continued like this for some time, with me insisting on knowing why and him refusing to explain. “Do you want to know why?” he said at last. “Because I wouldn’t know how to express those ideas to you myself today.”

“Why not? — since you think about them all the time.”

“I do think about them the whole time, I know. But since yesterday, and for who knows how much longer, those ideas aren’t clear to me anymore, in fact I don’t understand a thing.”

“You can’t mean it.”

“Try to understand me,” he said. “Two days ago, when I suggested that you should work for us, I’m sure that if I had explained our ideas to you, I’d not only have done it vigorously, clearly, and persuasively, but you’d have understood them perfectly. Today
I might move my tongue and lips to utter certain words, but it would be something mechanical, in which I participated not at all. Today,” he repeated, emphasizing each syllable as he spoke, “I don’t understand a thing.”

“You don’t understand a thing?”

“No, I don’t understand a thing. Ideas, concepts, facts, memories, convictions, everything has been transformed into a kind of mush, a mush that fills my head —” he tapped his forehead with his finger “— my whole head — and disgusts me as if it were excrement.”

I looked at him in puzzled suspense. A quiver of exasperation seemed to run through him at this.

“Try to understand me,” he cried, “today everything seems incomprehensible. Not only ideas, but everything ever written or said or thought — it all seems absurd. For instance, do you know the Lord’s Prayer?”

“Yes.”

“Say it, then.”

“Our Father, which art in Heaven,” I began.

“That’s enough,” he interrupted. “Now just think for a moment how many ways this prayer has been said over the centuries, with how many different emotions! Well, I don’t understand it at all, not at all. You might as well say it backward, it’d be all the same to me.”

He was silent for a moment. “It isn’t only words that have this effect on me,” he continued, “but things, too — people. There are you sitting on the arm of this chair beside me, and maybe you think I see you. But I don’t see you because I can’t understand you — I can even touch you and still not understand you. I will touch you, in fact —” as he spoke he jerked aside my dressing gown and uncovered my breast, as if seized by a sudden frenzy. “I’m touching your breast — I can feel its shape, warmth, form, I see its color, its outline … but I don’t understand what it is. I say to myself: here’s a round, warm, soft, white, swelling object, with a little round, dark knob in the middle, which gives milk and gives pleasure if it is caressed. But I don’t understand a thing. I tell myself it’s beautiful, that it ought to fill me with desire, but I still don’t
understand a thing. Do you see what I mean, now?” he repeated furiously, grabbing my breast so hard that I could not repress a cry of pain. He let go of me at once. “Probably,” he observed reflectively after a moment, “it’s just this kind of incomprehension that makes so many people cruel. They are trying to rediscover contact with reality through other people’s pain.”

There was a moment of silence. Then I spoke. “If this is true, how do you manage when you have to do certain things?”

“What, for instance?”

“I don’t know — you tell me that you distribute leaflets, and that you write them yourself. But if you don’t believe in them, how can you write them and distribute them?”

He burst into a fit of sarcastic laughter. “I behave as if I believed in them.”

“But that’s impossible.”

“Why impossible? Almost everyone does it, except in the case of eating, drinking, sleeping, and making love. Almost everyone does things as if they believed in them. Hadn’t you noticed that?” He laughed nervously.

“I don’t,” I replied.

“You don’t,” he replied, almost insultingly, “exactly because you limit yourself to eating, drinking, sleeping, and making love whenever you feel like it. It isn’t necessary to pretend in these things, it seems — which is a lot. But at the same time, it’s not much.” He laughed, suddenly slapped me hard on the thigh, and then took me into his arms, squeezing me and shaking me as he usually did. “Don’t you know this is the world of ‘as if’?” He began to repeat, “don’t you know that everyone, from the king to the beggar, behaves ‘as if’ — it’s the world of ‘as if, as if, as if’ …”

I let him have his way because I knew that at such moments it was better not to be offended or to protest, but to wait for him to get it all out. But at last I said firmly, “I love you — that’s the only thing I know and it’s enough for me.”

“You’re right,” he said simply, suddenly growing calm again. The evening finished in the usual way, without our speaking any further about politics or his incapacity to discuss them.

When I was alone again, I concluded after much reflection that perhaps things were as he said; but that it was far more likely that he was unwilling to talk to me about politics because he thought I would not understand and also, perhaps, because he was afraid I might compromise him through some indiscretion. Not that I thought he was lying, but I knew from experience that everyone can have a day when the world seems to fall to pieces, or, as he said, when you do not understand a thing, not even the Lord’s Prayer. I, too, when I was ill, or in a bad mood for some reason, had experienced more or less the same sensations of boredom, disgust, and dullness. Evidently there was some other motive behind his refusal to let me share his most secret life; mistrust, as I have said, either of my intelligence or of my discretion. I realized afterward, when it was too late, that I had been mistaken, and that in his case, either through his youthful inexperience or weakness of character, those morbid states of mind assumed a special gravity.

But at the time I thought it would be wiser to retreat and not disturb him with my curiosity; and I did so.

8

I
DON’T KNOW WHY, BUT I
remember perfectly even the weather we were having at that time. February had come and gone, cold and rainy, and with March began the first milder days. A close network of white gossamer clouds veiled the whole sky and dazzled the eyes as soon as one stepped from the darkness of the house into the street. The air was sweet but still numb from the rigors of winter. I walked along in that thin, anaesthetized, and somnolent light with stupefied pleasure, and every now and again slackened my pace and closed my eyes; or stood still in amazement to gaze at the most insignificant things: a black-and-white cat licking itself on a doorstep, a hanging branch of oleander snapped off by the wind but which perhaps would flower all the same, a tuft of green grass springing up between the slabs of a sidewalk. The moss that the rain of the past months had sprinkled along the base of the houses filled me with a deep sense of peace and trust: I thought that if such lovely emerald velvet could flourish in the sparse soil between the jagged edges of bricks and
cobblestones, then my life, whose roots were no deeper than those of moss and which also throve on the most meager nourishment and was really nothing more than a kind of mold growing at the foot of a building, had perhaps some likelihood of continuing and flourishing. I was convinced that all the unpleasant matters of the immediate past were now settled once and for all; that I would never see Sonzogno again or hear his crime mentioned; and that from now on I could peacefully enjoy my relationship with Mino. And with these thoughts, I seemed to taste to the full the real savor of life for the first time, composed as it was of mild boredom, opportunity, and hope.