The Woman of Rome (Italia)

by Alberto Moravia

  He looked around him at last and made a grimace I did not understand. I took his hand and made him sit on the bed. “Now leave it all to me,” I said. He looked at me as he sat there with his coat collar still turned up, his hands in his pockets. I removed his coat, slipping it off carefully, then his jacket, and hung it with the coat on a hanger. In no hurry, I undid his tie and then took off tie and shirt together and hung them over a chair. Then I knelt down and taking his foot onto my lap, like a shoemaker, I pulled off his shoes and socks and kissed his feet. I had begun slowly and methodically, but, little by little, as I removed his clothes, a kind of frenzy of humility and adoration grew upon me. Perhaps it was the same feeling I had when I knelt down in church, but this was the first time I had ever felt it for a man and I was happy, because I was sure that this was pure love, far removed from all sensuality and vice.

  When he was naked, I knelt down between his thighs and took his sex, like a dark flower, between the palms of my hands, and for a moment pressed it hard against my cheek and hair, with my eyes shut. He let me do whatever I wanted, and I enjoyed the bewildered expression on his face. Then I got up, went behind the bed, and quickly undressed, letting all my clothes fall on the floor and trampled them. He was still seated on the edge of the bed, shivering, with downcast eyes. I came up behind him and, possessed by some gay fit of violence, I seized him and pushed him over, his head on the pillows. He had a long, slim, white body; bodies, like faces, have their own expressions, and his was chaste and young. I stretched myself beside him, my own body running the length of his, and felt how ardent and strong and dark and fleshy my body was in comparison with his thinness, slightness, coldness, and whiteness. I clung to him violently and pressed my body against his hips and threw my arms across his chest, my face on his with my lips to his ear. I felt as though I wanted, not so much to make love to him, as to wrap myself around him like a warm blanket and infuse him with my own ardor. He lay on his back with his head slightly raised, his eyes open, as if he wanted to watch everything I was doing. His keen glance swept down my spine and gave me a strange feeling of uneasy discomfort; however, for a while I paid no heed to it, being led on by my first impulse.

  “Don’t you feel better now?” I murmured suddenly.

  “Yes,” he replied in a distant, neutral tone.

  “Wait,” I said.

  But at the very instant when I was about to embrace him with renewed passion. I felt his cold, steady gaze once more taut upon my back, like a piece of wet wire, and I suddenly felt ashamed and bewildered. My ecstasy died down; slowly I slipped from him and let myself fall on my back, separate from him. I had made a great effort of love. I had put into it the whole impulse of an innocent and primitive despair. The sudden realization that my effort was useless filled my eyes with tears, and I put my arm across my face to hide from him the fact that I was crying. Apparently I had been mistaken; I could not love him or be loved by him, and I also thought that he must be judging me, without any illusions, for what I really was. Now, I knew I was living in a kind of fog I had created in order to avoid mirroring myself in my own conscience. But he, on the contrary, had dispersed the fog with his glances and had placed the mirror once more before my eyes. And I saw myself as I really was, or rather, as I must have been for him.

  “Go away,” I said at last.

  “Why?” He raised himself on one elbow and looked at me in embarrassment. “What’s the matter?”

  “You’d better go,” I said, keeping my arm over my face. “Don’t think I’m angry with you, but I can see that you don’t feel anything for me so —” I did not finish but shook my head.

  He did not answer, but I felt him move and leave my side; he was dressing. I then felt a stabbing pain, as though someone had wounded me deeply and was now twisting a thin, sharp knife into the heart of the wound. I was in pain as I listened to him dressing, in pain at the thought that in a few moments he would be gone forever and I would never see him again, in pain at my suffering.

  He dressed slowly; perhaps he expected me to call him back. I remember hoping at one moment to hold him there by exciting his desire for me. I had lain down beside him with the coverlet drawn over me. Now, with a coquettishness I knew to be desolate and despairing, I moved my leg so as to make the cover slip off my body. I had never offered myself in this way and for a while, as I lay there naked, with my legs apart and my arm over my eyes, I had the almost physical illusion that his hands were on my shoulders and his mouth on mine. But then, almost immediately, I heard the door close.

  I stayed as I was, motionless on my back. I believe I passed from sorrow to a kind of drowsiness and then fell asleep without being aware of having done so. But when the night was well advanced, I awoke and realized for the first time that I was alone. During my first sleep the sense of his presence had remained with me despite the bitterness of his departure. Somehow, I fell asleep again.

  2

  T HE FOLLOWING DAY I WAS surprised to find myself feeling as languid, melancholy, and indifferent as if I were just recovering from a month’s illness. I have a cheerful nature and my cheerfulness, which is due to my physical health and vigor, has always been stronger than any misfortune that has befallen me, so much so that on occasion I have been irritated at feeling cheerful despite myself, even when circumstances did not really warrant it. On most days, for instance, as soon as I got up I felt an impulse to sing or say something amusing to Mother. But that morning my involuntary lightheartedness was entirely lacking; I felt aching, dull, quite without the usual impetuous appetite for the coming twelve hours of life the day had to offer. I told Mother, who noticed my unusual mood at once, that I had had a bad night.

  This was true; except that I gave as a cause only one of the many effects of profound humiliation inflicted on my spirit by Giacomo’s rejection. As I said before, I no longer minded being what I was; I could see no reason, in my own eyes, why I should not be that. But I had hoped to love and be loved; and Giacomo’s refusal, despite the complicated reasons he had given me for it, were, I thought, all due to my profession, which suddenly became hateful and intolerable to me on this account.

  Self-love is a strange beast that may lie dormant under the cruelest blows and then awaken and be mortally wounded at the slightest scratch. One memory above all others stung me and filled me with bitterness and shame, the memory of a phrase I had uttered the evening before while I was hanging up my coat, “How do you like this room?” I had said. “Don’t you think it’s cozy?”

  I remembered he had not answered, but had looked around him, making a grimace I had not understood at the time. Now I realized it was an expression of disgust. Certainly he had been thinking to himself: a streetwalker’s room. As I thought it over, I writhed at having said it with such ingenuous pride. I ought to have realized that to anyone like him, so civilized and sensitive, my room must have seemed a sordid hovel, made even uglier by the extremely modern furniture and the use to which I put it.

  I wished I had never uttered that miserable phrase! But now it was out and there was no more to be done about it. This phrase seemed like a prison from which I could never escape on any terms. To forget it or pretend to myself that I had never said it would be like forgetting myself or pretending to myself that I did not exist.

  These reflections had the effect on me of a slow poison making its harmful way through the most precious blood in my veins. Although in the morning I usually tried to prolong my state of idleness, the moment always came when the sheets revolted me, and my body, as if moved by a will of its own, threw them off and leaped out of bed. But the opposite happened on that day; the whole morning passed, it was lunchtime, and although I tried to urge myself to get up, I could not stir. I felt tied down, inert, powerless, torpid, and at the same time I was aching all over as if my immobility had been won at the expense of some enormous, desperate effort. I felt as though I was one of those rotten old boats sometimes seen anchored in a marshy inlet, their holds full of black, stinking water.
If anyone boards one of them, the decaying planks give way instantly and the boat, which has been there perhaps for years, sinks in a flash. I do not know how long I stayed there that way, uncomfortably wrapped up in the blankets, staring into the void, the sheets drawn up to my nose. I heard the bells chime midday, then strike one, two, three, four o’clock. I had locked the door and every now and again Mother came and knocked anxiously. I told her I would get up soon and that she was not to disturb me.

  When the light began to fade, I summoned up my courage and, with what seemed to be a superhuman effort, I threw off the blankets and got out of bed.

  My limbs were heavy with inertia and disgust; and I dragged myself about the room rather than walked as I washed and dressed. My mind was a blank; I only knew, with the whole of my body rather than my mind, that for that day at least I had not the slightest desire to go out and pick up a lover. As soon as I was dressed, I went and told Mother we were going to spend the evening together. We would go out for a stroll in the town and later we would have a vermouth in a café.

  Mother’s delight at an invitation of this kind, which she was not accustomed to, irritated me, I did not know why myself; and once again I noticed without any tenderness what flabby, swollen cheeks she had and what tiny eyes, filled with a wavering and uncertain light. But I restrained the impulse to make some sharp remark to her that might have destroyed her happiness, and sat down at the table in the dimly lit room, waiting for her to dress. The white light shed through the curtainless windows by the streetlamp shone on the sewing machine, lit up one of the walls. I lowered my eyes to the table and in the half-light I glimpsed the rows of gaily figured patience cards with which Mother used to relieve the boredom of her long evenings alone. At this I suddenly felt a strange sensation: I felt as if I were Mother, Mother herself in flesh and blood, waiting for her daughter Adriana in the next room to have done with one of her johns. This sensation can probably be attributed to the fact that I was seated in her chair, at her table, in front of her cards. Places do occasionally conjure up feelings in this way; and many people when they visit a prison, for example, imagine they feel the same chill, despair, and sense of isolation experienced by the prisoner who once languished there. But the living room was not a prison and Mother’s sufferings were neither so weighty nor so easily imaginable. She was only living as, I suppose, she had always lived. Nevertheless, perhaps because a moment earlier I had felt a hostile impulse toward her, the intuitive sense of the life she lived was enough to produce in me a kind of reincarnation. When good people want to excuse a blameworthy deed they sometimes say, “Put yourself in her place.” Well, at that moment I put myself in Mother’s place to such an extent that I persuaded myself I was Mother.

  I was Mother, but with a consciousness of being her, which she certainly did not have; otherwise she would have rebelled in some way. I suddenly felt shriveled, wrinkled, crippled, and realized what old age was, in that it not only changes the body but makes it weak and powerless. What was Mother like? I had seen her sometimes when she was undressing and, without reflecting, I had noticed her shrunken, flabby, grayish breasts, her yellow, relaxed belly. I now felt in my own person those breasts that had given me milk, that belly that had given me birth. I could touch them, and I seemed to experience the same regret and helpless anguish that the sight of her changed body must have caused in her. Youth and beauty make life beautiful and even gay. But when they are gone? I shuddered with terror and shaking off the nightmare for a moment, congratulated myself on being, in reality, Adriana, who was both young and beautiful and had nothing in common with Mother, who was neither young nor beautiful nor ever would be again.

  At the same time, slowly, like some mechanism that has run down and gradually begins to pick up speed again, my mind began to formulate thoughts that must have come to her while, alone in the room, she waited for my return. It is not at all difficult to imagine what a person like Mother must have thought in similar circumstances; only in most people such thoughts are necessarily the product of reproach and scorn; and actually they do not so much imagine, as fashion for themselves a kind of dummy on which to vent all their hostility. But since I loved Mother and was putting myself in her place through affection, I knew that her thoughts at such moments were not selfish, fearful, or shameful, but were, in fact, unrelated in any way to what I did and was. I knew, rather, that her thoughts were incidental and insignificant — the kind a poor, ignorant old woman would have — since she had never been able to believe or think the same thing for two days running, without being sharply contradicted by necessity. Great thoughts and emotions, even when they are sad and negative, need shelter and a period of growth; they are delicate plants that require time to give them strength and firm rooting. But Mother had never been able to cultivate anything in her mind and heart other than the short-lived weeds of day-to-day reflections, resentments, and worries. And so I was able, as in fact I did, to sell myself for money in my own room; but Mother, as she sat in the living room before her patience cards, went on revolving in her mind the usual nonsense, if the things she had lived for throughout her life may justly so be called — the price of food, the gossip of the neighborhood, the household chores, the fear of accidents, the work she had to sew, and other such trivialities. At most, perhaps, day in day out, she listened for the clock to strike in the neighboring belfry and, without attaching much importance to them, had such vague thoughts as: Adriana’s being longer than usual this time! Or, on hearing me open the door and saying a word or two in the hall: Adriana’s finished. What else? Now, through this power of imagination, I was wholly my mother, body and soul; and, because I was able to put myself so truly and nakedly in Mother’s place, I felt I loved her again even more than before.

  The noise of the door being opened awoke me from my kind of daydream. Mother was lighting the lamp. “What are you doing in the dark?” she asked me, and I leaped to my feet, dazzled, and looked at her. She had put on brand-new clothes: I took that in at first glance. She had not put on a hat, because she never wore one, but was wearing an elaborately cut black dress. On her arm she was carrying a large, black leather bag with a yellow metal clasp, and had a short cat fur around her neck. She had damped her gray hair and combed it carefully, pulling it tightly piled on top of her head into a little knot stuck through with hairpins. She had even dabbed some pink powder on her once dry and withered but now too florid cheeks. I could hardly help smiling when I saw her so dressed up and serious; and, in my usual affectionate way, I said, “We’d better be going.”

  I knew Mother enjoyed ambling slowly along, when the traffic was at its height, through the main streets where the best shops in town are to be found. So we took a streetcar and got off at the top of Via Nazionale. When I was a little girl, Mother used to take me for walks along this street. She used to begin from Piazza dell’Esedra, on the right-hand sidewalk, and proceed slowly, looking attentively into every shop window until we reached Piazza Venezia. Then she would cross over and return to Piazza dell’Esedra, still looking at every single thing in the windows and dragging me along by the hand. Then, without having bought even a pin or having dared to enter one of the numerous cafés, she used to take me home, tired and sleepy. I remember I did not enjoy these walks myself because, unlike Mother, who seemed content to feed her appetite on detailed and delighted window shopping, I had wanted to enter the shops, to buy and take home some of the many lovely new things offered for sale in so much light behind the gleaming windows. But I realized very young that we were poor and I never expressed my feelings in any way. Only once I made a scene, I cannot remember why. We rushed along the crowded street, Mother dragging me by one arm while I tugged against her with all my might, shouting and crying. Until at last Mother lost her patience and boxed my ears instead of giving me the object I craved; and, at each successive blow, I forgot the pain of not being allowed to have what I wanted.

  Here I was, then, once more at the far end of the sidewalk opposite the Piazza dell’Esed
ra, on Mother’s arm, as if all the years had made no difference. Here the pavements were swarming with feet wearing shoes, boots, high boots, shoes with heels and shoes without, and some in sandals, which, to look at them, made one’s head go round; here the people were strolling up and down in couples, or in groups of men, women and children, or alone: some slow, some in a hurry, all alike, perhaps just because they all wanted to be different, with the same clothes, the same hair, the same faces, eyes, and mouths. Here were the furriers, bootmakers, stationers, jewelers, watchmakers, booksellers, florists, drapers, toyshops, hardware stores, milliners, hosiers, glove shops, cafés, theaters, banks; here were the lighted windows of the buildings with people walking up and down or working at desks; the electric signs, always the same; on the street corners stood the newspaper kiosks, the chestnut sellers, the unemployed selling ruban de Bruges and rubber rings for umbrellas. Here were the beggars, a blind man with black spectacles, cap in hand at the top of the street, his head thrown back against the wall, lower down an elderly woman suckling a child at her shrunken breast, and lower still an idiot with a shiny yellow stump like a knee-joint where his hand should have been. As I found myself once more in that street, among such familiar things, I had a funereal impression of immobility, which made me shudder profoundly and feel momentarily naked, as if the icy breath of fear had passed between my body and my clothes. The clamorous, impassioned voice of a woman singing came from the radio of a nearby café. She was singing Faccetta nera — it was the year of the Abyssinian war.

  Mother naturally had no inkling of what I was feeling; and, of course, I did not show it. As I have already said, I look good-natured, docile, even-tempered, and other people cannot easily guess what is going on inside my head. But at one moment I felt moved despite myself — the woman’s voice had now started on a sentimental song — my lips trembled and I spoke to Mother. “Do you remember when you used to take me up and down this street to look in the shop windows?”