The Road To The City

by Natalia Ginzburg

  After we had sat for a short time in the café everything was just the way it had been before, and we laughed together at the stories I told him. He seemed very, very happy to be with me and I was happy too. I forgot how long a time I had waited for him in vain and told myself that if he had not been so busy he would surely have come to see me. I talked to him about my mother and father and the tax collector and the new arrivals at the boarding-house. He made a sketch of me in his notebook while I was talking, then tore it up and made another. After that he sketched the lake where he had been staying, with himself rowing a boat and old ladies standing on the shore with little wiry-haired dogs holding their tails straight up in the air while they urinated against a tree.

  We started to see each other once again almost every afternoon or evening. When I went upstairs to my room I asked myself if we were in love, without finding any answer. He never spoke of love and neither did I. I spoke only of my school and the boarding-house and the books I had been reading. I thought of Alberto’s slender hands sketching in his notebook, the curly black hair around his thin face, and his slight body in a light raincoat going about the city. I thought about them all day long, to the exclusion of everything else: first the hands, then the notebook, then the raincoat, and then again the notebook and the curly hair showing below his hat and the thin face and the hands. I read Xenophon to eighteen girls in a classroom newly repainted in green and decorated with a map of Asia and a portrait of the Pope; ate my meals in the boarding-house dining-room while the landlady paced up and down among the tables; took the bus to Maona every Saturday and felt more and more like an idiot because I had no interest in anyone or anything. I was no longer so sure that he loved me, although he went on bringing me books and chocolates and seemed to enjoy my company. But he said nothing about himself, and while I read Xenophon to my class or put the girls’ marks down in my records, I could imagine only his slight figure going about its mysterious activities, wrapped in a flapping raincoat, following impulses and desires of which I was entirely ignorant. Then something like a fever would come over me. Once I had been a fairly good teacher and taken considerable interest in my pupils and their work. But now I felt not the least bit of affection for the eighteen girls in front of me; in fact, they bored me to the point of nausea and I could not even bear to look at them.

  Francesca had come back from Rome in a very bad humour. I went to her house for dinner one night, meaning to leave early because Alberto might come to the boarding-house to see me. It was an endless meal, with my aunt and uncle having a quarrel and Francesca sitting stubbornly silent in a stunning knitted black dress which made her look older than usual and very pale. After dinner my aunt took me up to her room and asked me what was the matter with Francesca. I told her that I didn’t know, and all the time I was impatient to go away, but she clutched my hand and cried. She said that she couldn’t understand Francesca at all, especially since Francesca had begun to wear nothing but black, with black hats that made her look so much older. She couldn’t make out what Francesca had been up to at the school of dramatics or what she intended to do with herself next. Francesca had got herself engaged during the summer to a promising young man of good family, but then she had thrown him over. I felt the minutes passing by and feared that Alberto might be at the boarding-house already, and here my aunt clutched my hand in hers and sniffled into her handkerchief.

  It was late when I finally escaped. When I arrived at the boarding-house they were locking the doors and the maid told me that the usual gentleman had come to see me, waited for a while in the drawing-room, and then gone away. I went up to my room, got into bed, and cried. It was the first time in my life that I had cried over a man, and it seemed to me this must be a sign that I loved him. I thought how, if he asked me to marry him, I would say yes, and then we would always be together and even when he was out I would know where he was. But when I imagined our making love together I felt something like disgust and said to myself that I couldn’t be in love with him after all. It was all very confusing.

  But he never asked me to marry him, and we went on talking together like two good friends. He refused to speak of himself and always wanted me to do the talking. On days when I was in low spirits he seemed to be bored and I was afraid that he would never come to see me again. I forced myself to be gay and told him stories about the people at the boarding-house and the landlady’s screeching daughter, which we laughed at together. But when he went away I felt tired. I stretched out on my bed and thought back to all the things I used to imagine. Now I had become too idiotic to have any imagination. I absorbed his every word and tried to see if there was any love in it. I took his words and turned them over and over again in my mind. They seemed to have first one meaning and then another, until finally I let the whole thing go and dozed off.

  Once Alberto told me that he had never done anything in earnest. He knew how to draw, but he was not a painter; he played the piano without playing it well; he was a lawyer but he did not have to work for a living and it didn’t make much difference whether he turned up at his office or not. For this reason he stayed in bed all morning, reading. But often he had a feeling half of shame and half of satiety and thought he was going to stifle in his soft warm bed, with its yellow silk comforter. He said that he was like a cork bobbing on the surface of the sea, pleasantly cradled by the waves but unable to know what there was at the bottom. This was all he ever said about himself, except for the fact that he liked the country around the lakes. I absorbed these words and turned them over and over in my mind, but they amounted to very little beside the great stretches of mystery in his life, where only an old lady intent on her Sanskrit and a yellow silk comforter bobbed vaguely on the waves of my imagination.

  While I was sitting there in the park it began to rain. I got up, went back to the café, and sat down at a small table near a window. Peering through the glass, I suddenly began to wonder whether anyone had heard my revolver shot. Our house is at the end of a quiet street, surrounded by a garden with trees. Quite possibly no one had heard it at all. This is the house of the old lady who studied Sanskrit; the bookcases are still full of Sanskrit tomes and the old lady’s odour lingers on. I never saw the old lady for myself because she died before we were married, but I saw her ivory cigarette holder lying in a box, her bedroom slippers, her crocheted wool shawl, and her powder box, empty except for a wad of cotton. And everywhere there was her odour.

  When Alberto’s mother died he was a wreck. He found her one morning dead in her bed. That afternoon he was to take me to an art exhibition. Finally, when he didn’t turn up, I phoned him and he told me that his mother was dead. I couldn’t find much to say over the telephone, so I sat down and wrote him a letter. Sometimes I can manage such things fairly well, and this one came to me easily. I didn’t go to the funeral because the old lady had left the express wish that no one should be invited, at least so Dr. Gaudenzi told me when I phoned him up to inquire.

  A few days later I got a note from Alberto saying that he didn’t feel like going out and would I come to his house to see him. My heart beat fast at the prospect. I found Alberto unshaven and with rumpled hair, wearing a pyjama jacket over his trousers. He tried to light the stove but only managed to stuff it with newspapers without getting it to burn. I succeeded in lighting it, and we sat down close by. He showed me a picture of his mother when she was young, a large, haughty woman with a big Spanish comb stuck in her hair. He spoke of her at great length, and I could not reconcile his description of her as a kindly and sensitive soul with either the young woman in the picture or the cantankerous old lady in bedroom slippers whom I had always imagined. I looked at the stove and the room and the garden outside with its high trees and the grapevine growing on the wall. Sitting with him there in his house, I felt quieter and more peaceful than I had felt for a long time, as if the feverishness and tension of the past few months had subsided.

  I was so happy when I went away that I couldn’t bear to stay alone in t
he boarding-house and I went to see Francesca. But Francesca was in an abominable humour. She no sooner saw me than she complained of a headache and said she had no desire to listen to anyone’s confidences. She lay there on her bed with a hot-water bottle and asked me to mend the lining of her coat because she had to go out. I mended it and went away.

  Alberto didn’t ask me to come to his house again. We went back to walking along the river and sitting for hours in cafés. Of his mother he spoke no more. He wore a black band on his coat sleeve, but he was making sketches in his notebook, including one of the two of us lighting the stove. When he went away I was left with a feeling of emptiness and stupor. For the life of me I couldn’t make him out. I couldn’t understand why he chose to spend so many hours with me, asking questions about the people in the boarding-house and making sketches. Not a single word of love had ever passed between us. We went for long walks along the river or in the outskirts of the city, where lovers go, and yet we exchanged none of the words or gestures of love.

  So it was that I finally spoke up and said that I loved him. I was weary of the burden of my secret; often in my boarding-house room I could feel it growing within me until I thought I should burst, and all the time I was becoming more and more of an idiot, unable to take an interest in anyone or anything else. I had to find out whether he loved me, too, and whether one day we should be married. Knowing this was a necessity like eating and drinking, and all of a sudden it came to me that telling the truth was a necessity, too, no matter how difficult it seemed. And so I said that I loved him.

  We were leaning up against the wall of a bridge. It was dark and wagons were passing slowly along the street with paper lanterns swinging under the horses’ bellies, while birds whirred out of the tall rough grass beside the river. We had stood there silently for some minutes, watching darkness fall and the lights come on in the last scattered houses of the city. Alberto was telling me how as a little boy he had loved those paper lanterns and waited every year for the holiday when they were strung up on every balcony, only to be torn down, in melancholy fashion, the morning after. Then it was that I came out with the whole thing. I told him how I tormented myself waiting for him at the boarding-house, how I couldn’t concentrate on correcting my school papers, how I was gradually turning into a complete idiot, all because I loved him. I turned to look at him after I had spoken, and on his face there was a sad and frightened expression, which I knew meant he didn’t love me at all. I began to cry and he pulled out a handkerchief to dry my tears. He was pale and frightened and said that he had never dreamed such a thing could happen. He enjoyed my company and considered me a good friend, but he simply didn’t care for me that way. He said there was a woman he had been in love with for years. He couldn’t marry her because she was already married, but he didn’t think he could ever live with anyone else. He had made a great mistake to hurt me, but quite unintentionally, without ever dreaming that it could be so serious.

  We went back to the city without speaking. When we said good-night at the boarding-house door he asked if he could come back the next day and I said I preferred never to see him again. ‘All right,’ he said as he started to go. I watched him walk away looking somehow humiliated, with the bent shoulders and slow, tired steps of a boy who has taken a beating.

  I went up to bed without any dinner, leaving word with the maid to call Francesca and ask her if she could come over. Francesca had freshly plucked eyebrows and looked very handsome in her black knitted dress and a turban with a silk pendant. She sat on the edge of my bed, lit a cigarette, and said:

  'Out with it!' But I could not speak through my tears, so she smoked and waited for me to pull myself together. ‘Still the same old guy?’ she asked.

  ‘ Yes,’ I answered. She grimaced and blew out a mouthful of smoke.

  ‘I simply can’t see him,’ she said.

  Little by little I told her the whole story. She stayed until midnight and we had to call the maid to open the front door and let her out. Francesca left me some sleeping pills, but I couldn’t close my eyes all night long. Every now and then, as I began to doze off, Alberto’s sad and frightened face surged up before me. I asked myself what I was going to do with my life and felt ashamed of the way I had spoken. Every word either one of us had said there on the bridge came back to haunt me.

  Francesca returned the next morning and brought me some oranges. She sent the maid to the school to say that I had bronchitis and wrote a letter to my mother telling her that I wouldn’t be home for the week-end because I was under the weather. She peeled an orange for me, but I couldn’t eat it, so she ate it herself and told me to spend the day in bed. The only thing to do, she said, was to go and stay for two months with herat San Remo. I said I couldn’t move on account of the school, and besides I hadn’t the money.‘Who gives a rap for that filthy school?’ she said, and added that she had plenty of money for both of us and that we were leaving the very next day. When we got to San Remo she would lend me her low-necked pink tulle dress with the two blue roses on one shoulder. She pulled my suitcase out of the cupboard, wiped it off with a newspaper, and began to pack my clothes, then she went home to have lunch and do her own packing.

  I stayed in bed for a while, thinking about the woman Alberto loved. I could see her standing motionless in front of me, staring at me out of cruel, stupid eyes that were set in a wide, heavily powdered face. She had a soft and abundantly curving figure and slender hands loaded with rings. Then this image faded away and I saw her as a weary hag with an outmoded wide-brimmed hat and a lean and hungry look about her. The weary hag was sorry for me, but I couldn’t bear her presence in the room, and her compassionate expression froze me with horror. I asked, myself what I was going to do with my life, and all the words exchanged between Alberto and myself flowed to and fro somewhere inside of me. My mouth was bitter and dry and my head throbbed.

  The maid came up to tell me that the usual gentleman was downstairs in the drawing-room. I got up, dressed, and went down. Alberto was sitting there with his brief-case on his knees and the shivery, cowed appearance of a little boy who had just had a caning. He said he hadn’t been able to sleep, and I said I hadn’t either. We went out to a café together and sat at the far end of a dark, deserted room decorated with mirrors that had Cinzano Vermouth painted in red letters across them. They were playing billiards next door, and we could hear the knocking of balls and the hum of voices. Alberto said he couldn’t get along without seeing me and that he had spent a very bad night thinking about how much he had hurt me. Since his mother had died the house was very lonely and the days when he didn’t see me were empty and cold. I reminded him of the other woman. But he said she was often unkind to him and his life was entirely without joy. He felt stupid and useless, like a cork bobbing on the water.

  I didn’t go to San Remo. When Francesca came back I told her I didn’t want to go. She lost her temper, threw the oranges on the floor, and kicked my suitcase over. The colonel’s widow began to knock on the wall with her hairbrush. I told Francesca that San Remo was the last place in the world I wanted to go to, that I hated the violent colours and glaring light of the sea. I said I’d rather give up the ghost in my own room in the boarding-house than board a train and go away. If you’re in trouble, I told her, it’s better to stew in your own juice in familiar surroundings. A change of air is positively fatal.

  ‘Look out for yourself, then,’ she said. ‘And next time you’re on your deathbed don’t call me. I’ve better things to do.’ She jammed her turban on her head and looked at herself in the mirror while she buttoned up her coat and smoothed it over her hips.

  When Alberto asked me to marry him I said yes. I asked him how he expected to live with me if he was in love with somebody else, and he said that if I loved him very much and was very brave we might make out very well together. Plenty of marriages are like that, he said, because it’s very unusual for both partners to love each other the same way. I wanted to know a lot more about his feelings
for me, but I couldn’t talk to him for long about anything important because it bored him to try to get to the bottom of things and turn them over and over the way I did. When I began to speak of the woman he loved and to ask if he still went to see her, his eyes dimmed and his voice became tired and faraway and he said that she was a bad woman, that she had caused him a great deal of pain and he didn’t want to be reminded of her.

  So he said that we’d get married and we went on seeing each other. Now he held my hands and kissed me when we were alone in a café or beside the river, but he never set any definite month or day for our wedding. Finally I told him that we must go together to Maona and he must speak to my father about it. He didn’t seem very enthusiastic, but he came. I wrote to my mother to take the garbage pail out of the kitchen and cook a good dinner for Saturday night because I was bringing someone with me.

  We took the usual bus and Alberto made sketches of all the people on it. When we got to Maona my mother and father were somewhat taken aback, but Alberto reassured them by asking to speak to my father alone. They went into the smaller parlour together and my mother took in a brazier of coals to warm it up. Afterward my father came out looking very happy and we all drank marsala together. But my mother took me aside and half cried. Alberto seemed so old, she said, and then he only came up to my shoulder, whereas in her opinion a man ought to be taller than his wife. She asked me if I was sure I loved him, and when I said yes she took me up to her room to show me the bed and table linen she had set aside for the day of my marriage. Alberto spent the whole day chatting in the kitchen. My mother had taken the garbage pail away and bought two salt cellars so that the salt should not come to the table in a saucer. The vet and the tax collector dropped in after supper, and Father introduced Alberto as my fiance. Alberto played a game of chess with the tax collector and then we drank some more marsala. Alberto became great friends with the tax collector, and before going back to the city that evening he promised to send him some Danish stamps for his collection.