The Dry Heart

by Natalia Ginzburg

  She took my hands in hers and squeezed them. She had a sad, hesitant smile on her face; perhaps she was wondering whether or not we should kiss each other good-bye. I put my face close to her cold face and had the scent of it in my nostrils for a second while we kissed.

  “Too bad I didn’t see the baby,” she said as we went down the stairs.

  After she was gone I realized that there were other things I wanted to say to her. But I was relieved to be alone and feel the muscles of my face gradually relaxing. I lay down on the sofa with a cushion under my head. It was dark outside. I always missed the baby when evening came and wondered if my mother was tucking her in tightly so that she wouldn’t toss the blankets off in her sleep. I went into the kitchen and lit the gas under a kettle of soup. Then I called the cat and threw him some scraps of cheese.

  I had thought that after seeing Giovanna I should feel more peaceful, and as a matter of fact I did. An icy calm spread through me. Where before there were fantastic but silent images, now I saw a woman drinking a cup of tea and showing me a picture of her son. I felt neither hate nor pity. I felt nothing at all. Inside there was a great black hole that made me even lonelier than before. Now I realized that those silent images of Giovanna had somehow peopled my solitude and kept me company. I was alone now, and when my hand groped for the picture I had made of her it found only an empty black hole and withdrew with a withering chill upon it. The real Giovanna who had sat in the armchair near the window did not hate me, and I did not hate her; indeed, there was no relationship of any kind between us.

  I wondered when Alberto was going away and wished it would be soon. But he couldn’t seem to make up his mind. I watched the bookshelves gradually empty themselves as every day he packed a few more books away in the zinc case. When they were altogether empty, I thought to myself, he would go away. We hardly talked to each other at all. I made lunch and supper and ironed his shirts because Gemma was away. He polished his own shoes and sometimes he helped me clear the table. Every morning I made his bed while he stood by the window waiting for me to finish.

  I didn’t tell him about Giovanna’s visit, nor did I know whether or not she had told him. A few days later I went to Maona to get the baby. I meant to tell my mother that Alberto and I were separating, but when I saw her I didn’t say anything. She was slicing ham in the kitchen when I arrived, and the baby had a cold. I said she must have tossed off the blankets in her sleep, and at this both my mother and father took offence. I went back in the bus with the baby in my arms and Gemma weeping like a fountain beside me because she was leaving her family. While we were rolling among the hills and fields that bordered the highway I held the baby tight and tried to imagine the time when we would be alone together. My mother had pinned her hair up in two braids around her head, and her thin, bare face had a new alert but melancholy expression. I had a feeling that she knew what had happened. She sat on my knees, crumbling a biscuit in her fingers and putting an occasional piece in her mouth. She didn’t talk yet, but she seemed to understand everything. When we reached home we met Alberto coming out of the gate. He took the baby in his arms and kissed her, but she only started to cry. He set her down on the ground, shrugged his shoulders, and went on his way.

  I telephoned Francesca, and when she came to see me I asked her if she felt like taking that long-delayed trip to San Remo with the baby and me. I told her that probably Alberto would leave in the next few days and I didn’t want to be around and see him go. She was very pleased and said we’d go to the Hotel Bellevue, where they served hot ice cream every Saturday night. I asked her what that was and she said it was vanilla ice cream with a hot chocolate sauce over it. She looked up the trains and made all the arrangements in no time at all.

  When Alberto came home he found me packing my bags. This time it was my turn to be going somewhere without him and he looked on in glum silence. I told him that Gemma would stay to look after him and asked him for some money, which he gave me. We left early the next morning while he was still asleep.

  San Remo was very windy. At first we were all in one room, but Francesca couldn’t stand the baby’s crying and took another room for herself. For some days she hung about us and said that San Remo was a resort for doddering old gentlemen and she was bored to death with it.

  Then she made friends with some people at the hotel and went out boating and dancing with them. She had any number of evening dresses, each one more beautiful than the next. I stayed with the baby until she fell asleep, and then I went downstairs with my knitting, but I was always afraid that the baby might wake up and cry, so I went to bed very early. When Francesca came up she knocked at my door and I went into her room and heard who had danced with her and what they had to say.

  After we had been there a fortnight Augusto came to join us. He was ill-humoured and jealous, and Francesca treated him very shabbily. He sat smoking in the hotel lobby and wrote a chapter of his new book on the origins of Christianity. I asked him if Alberto were at the house and he said that he was still slowly packing his books in the zinc case. I wanted to talk to him about Giovanna, but he cut me short because he was in too gloomy a mood to listen. Sometimes he walked silently up and down the pavement with the baby and me, looking around for Francesca’s plaid coat. Francesca didn’t want him about. She had made friends with a countess, and every night she got drunk with her and they went to the casino. She was bored with all her evening dresses and made herself a new one out of a long black skirt and some silk scarves sewed together. She painted a picture of the countess stretched out on a tiger skin and she was always telling me that the countess’s children weren’t little pests like mine.

  The baby had begun to talk. Every day she said something new and I thought she was very clever. When she had eaten her biscuit she stretched out both hands and said: “More!” with a wily, melancholy smile. Every morning she stood up in her bed and said: “Baby sleep no more!” and I would take her and the camel into my bed and make the camel walk up and down on the bedcover. Then Francesca would come in wearing a wrapper, with cold cream on her face and her hair in curlers, smoke a cigarette, and tell me between yawns about the evening she had spent with the countess.

  I told her she ought to be a little nicer to Augusto. She was heartless, I told her, to lead him a life like this. Every now and then they went for a walk together, and perhaps they found a place to make love somewhere because he always seemed slightly more cheerful when they returned. But then the countess and her friends whistled under Francesca’s window and she powdered her face in a hurry, threw on her plaid coat, and ran to join them. I never knew whether she had taken a liking to one of the men in the party or not. She said no. She said that they were amusing, while Augusto was solemn and jealous and his origins of Christianity bored her to death.

  The baby was taken ill on November seventeenth. She was upset all day long and would not eat. It was Saturday and they served the famous hot ice cream, but she cried and spat it all over the place, until I lost patience and struck her across the hands. She cried and cried, and I didn’t know what to do. She didn’t want to hear about Le bon roi Dagobert or have her camel beside her or anything. She cried steadily until ten o’clock in the evening, and then she fell asleep. I lowered her gently into the bed and sat down beside her. She slept for half an hour or so, but very lightly, shifting about and twitching at intervals. Francesca dropped in to see me on her way to a dance at the casino. She had combed her hair back from her forehead in a strange new way and painted her lips a colour that was almost yellow. She had on what she called her Hindu dress, the one made of silk scarves sewed together, and a wide silver lamé sash around her waist. The effect was really stunning. She looked down at the baby and said she must have worms to twitch that way in her sleep. She walked around the room, and I hated her for making so much noise. Then the countess whistled under the window and off she went.

  While she was running down the hall the baby woke up scre
aming and I picked her up in my arms. She seemed burning hot, and so I took her temperature. The thermometer read 102. I paced up and down the room with her, wondering what could be the matter. She was breathing hard and twisting her lips. It couldn’t be just an ordinary fever. She had been feverish a number of times, but never before had she cried so desperately. I tried asking her what hurt, but she only cried louder and pushed away my hands. I was terrified. Finally I laid her down on the bed and went to call Augusto. He was lying fully dressed on his bed with the light on, and there was a distressed look in his half-closed eyes because Francesca had gone to the dance without him. I told him that the baby was very sick and asked him to go and get a doctor. He sat up and smoothed his hair without really understanding what I had said. Then he pulled himself together and put on his overcoat. I went back to my room, picked up the baby, and paced up and down, holding her wrapped in a blanket. She had a red face and excessively bright eyes. Every now and then she fell asleep, only to wake up again with a start. I thought of how men and women spend their time tormenting one another and how stupid it all seems when you are face to face with something like a baby’s fever. I remembered how once upon a time I had tormented myself waiting tremblingly for Alberto and wondered how I could have attached importance to anything so idiotic. I was badly frightened, but beneath my fright there was a feeling that the baby was going to get well and Francesca would tease me for being such an alarmist. So many times before I had been scared to death over nothing at all.

  Then Augusto came back with the doctor, a red-haired young man with a freckled face. I hurriedly and nervously undressed the baby on the bed. She was crying more feebly now as the doctor held her thin little body in his hands and Augusto looked on in silence. The doctor said that he couldn’t diagnose her trouble, but he saw no reason for concern. He prescribed a mild sedative and Augusto went to have it made up at a pharmacy. Then the doctor went away, saying he would come back in the morning. Augusto stayed with me and I felt much calmer. The baby went to sleep and I looked at her thin, red face and perspiration-drenched hair. I asked Augusto not to go away because I was still frightened to be alone.

  At three o’clock in the morning the baby screamed. She grew purple in the face and threw up the small portion of ice cream I had forced down her the evening before. She waved her arms and legs and pushed me away. The chambermaid and a woman who had the room next to mine came in and suggested I give her an enema prepared with camomile. While I was preparing it Francesca appeared at the door, looking very drunk. Hating her with all my might, I shouted:

  “Go away!”

  She went into her room and came back a few minutes later, after she had apparently bathed her face in cold water. She asked the maid to get her a cup of strong coffee. I hated her so much that I couldn’t look her in the face. My throat was dry and constricted with terror. The baby was not crying any more; she lay there under the blanket with all the colour gone out of her cheeks, breathing jerkily.

  “You nincompoops!” said Francesca. “Can’t you see she’s in a very bad way? You’ve got to get a doctor.”

  The maid told her that one had already come, but Francesca said none of the San Remo doctors was any good except the countess’s doctor. She spoke in a loud voice and a decisive manner, as if to show that she was no longer drunk. She went out to look for the countess’s doctor, and Augusto went with her, leaving me alone with the woman who had suggested the enema. Her face was heavy and wrinkled, with powder caked in the furrows; she wore a violet kimono and spoke with a strong German accent. For some reason her presence was very reassuring; I had complete confidence in her heavy, wrinkled face. She told me that the baby must have an upset stomach and such a disturbance often takes on terrifying forms. Her son had had an attack of the same kind when he was a baby. And now he was a grown man — she raised her hand to show me how tall he was — who had taken a degree in engineering and got himself engaged to be married.

  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 freckle-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.

  Le bon roi Dagobert

  Chassait dans la plaine de l’Enfer!

  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.

  Le bon roi Dagobert

  A mis sa c
ulotte à l’envers!

  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 freckle-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.