Voices In The Evening

by Natalia Ginzburg

  You, Tommasino, have had the sad experience of an unfortunate marriage in your family. Poor Vincenzino.

  ‘And perhaps it is for that reason,’ she said, ‘that you don’t get married. You will think long about it and you are right. For that matter, as a man, you are still very young.’

  ‘I,’ said Aunt Ottavia, ‘have not married and I am quite happy so.’

  ‘You were not cut out for marriage,’ said my mother; 'you are too fond of your own convenience.’

  ‘My convenience? And when do I ever look after my own convenience?’ said Aunt Ottavia.

  ‘Well, she has not got engaged, Giuliana Bottiglia,’ said my mother; ‘one has seen them about together for years, she and Gigi Sartorio. If they were engaged, I should be the first to know of it. Her mother, Netta Bottiglia, and I are together from morning till evening.’

  ‘How is your work getting on, my dear Tommasino?’ asked my father.

  Twisting his hair round his fingers, Tommasino began to talk about linear programmation.

  We went into the sitting-room for coffee.

  ‘Your views are socialistic, aren’t they, Tommasino?’ said my mother. Is this linear programmation, if I have understood it rightly, something socialistic?’

  I could not allow my mother to appropriate linear programmation.

  ‘Socialism does not come into it at all,’ I said. ‘It is useless to wish to talk about what one doesn’t understand.’

  ‘I have understood it perfectly well,’ said my mother. ‘My poor brother—I don’t know if you have heard him mentioned, Tommasino—was also taken up with these matters. He died some years ago; his name was Cesare Maderna.’

  ‘Your brother,’ said my father, ‘was employed on the railways. How could he have had anything to do with what Tommasino was talking about?’

  ‘But he was a politician,’ said my mother. ‘He was a candidate for Parliament. He was a Socialist. A great Socialist like your father, Tommasino.’

  ‘Except, however, that he joined the Fascist Party,’ said my father.

  ‘What does that matter? He had to do it or he lost his place. From every point of view he was first a politician and was interested in social problems exactly as Tommasino is now. Isn’t that true, Ottavia?

  ‘Our poor brother,’ said Aunt Ottavia, ‘was only a humble railway employee. As a young man he took some part in politics, without much success, however. He was never a candidate for Parliament. You, Matilda, confuse him with Cousin Ernesto. Cousin Ernesto, yes, was a candidate for Parliament. But our poor brother, never. He was just an honourable man. He did join the Fascists, yes, but as for the black shirt he never put it on. He had one, but he never put it on.’

  ‘And what did it matter to him even if he did lose his place?’ said my father. ‘His wife was rich; he would go on just the same. ‘His wife,’ said he turning to Tommasino, was a Terenzi of Cignano. Vineyards, woods, pastures, a fine inheritance. They had no children and left everything on their death to the priests.’

  ‘That was she, his wife,’ said my mother. ‘He could not bear to look at the priests. But he was already dead when she died.’

  ‘A Terenzi of Cignano,’ said Tommasino. ‘Relations of the Terenzis of this place?’

  ‘Distant relations.’

  ‘And on the other hand, as regards Cousin Ernesto,’ said Aunt Ottavia, the Fascists beat him up, and he was in prison, too. He died poor.’

  ‘And our cousin’s daughter,’ said my mother, ‘had a very beautiful voice. She went to America and sang in the biggest theatres. Then, suddenly, she lost her voice. Now she cannot sing any more, not even Garibaldi’s Hymn.’

  ‘That is because she was in a fire over there, in America,’ said Aunt Ottavia. ‘The hotel caught fire one night and she had to jump from the window, and everyone called out to her to jump, and she stuck there astride of the window-sill and would not jump. At last she jumped, because they had spread the safety net, you know, underneath. She jumped, but she lost her voice.’

  ‘Partly fear, partly the smoke,’ said my mother.

  ‘Now, however,’ said Aunt Ottavia, ‘she has consoled herself and married a dentist.’

  ‘Because after she had lost her voice,’ said my mother, ‘she went practically mad through grief and was treated in a clinic. Once a week a dentist visited the place to see the patients’ teeth, and thus he fell in love with her. She had a very beautiful mouth.’

  ‘So, we have heard the whole story of Cousin Ernesto’s daughter,’ said my father.

  ‘Ada, don’t you remember Ada?’ said my mother. ‘We have not seen her again for years and years. But she was a tall, beautiful woman.’

  ‘You have told this story to me millions of times,’ said my father. ‘Why do you want to bother Tommasino with it, with persons he has never seen and never will see?’

  ‘It serves to make a bit of conversation,’ said my mother. ‘Do you want us to sit here all evening gazing into each other’s eyes? One tells stories and talks, someone says one thing, and someone else another.’

  She said, ‘Tommasino, do you want me to sew that button on your sleeve? You will lose it otherwise.’

  She said, ‘This overcoat is almost done for. Why don’t you tell Gigi Sartorio to bring you a mont-gomery from London the next time he goes there? They are very practical.’

  She said, ‘You are not offended with me for saying this? I am a regular mother, am I not?’

  ‘He has been very well brought up,’ said my mother to my father when they were alone in their room. I heard them through the wall

  ‘You see,’ said my mother, ‘that Salice school is a good school.

  ‘Perhaps he is not as odd as all that,’ she said. ‘Perhaps the little oddities he has are faults of youth.’

  ‘He is very likeable,’ she said. ‘He has Signora Cecilia’s nose. His mouth is that of Magna Maria.’

  ‘I don’t see any trace of Magna Maria in Tom-masino,’ said my father.

  ‘Because you don’t understand resemblances,’ said my mother.

  ‘Well, then, what impression did I make on you in my own picture frame?’ I said.

  We were in the room in the Via Gorizia, and I was lying on the bed. Tommasino was sitting up to the table with his elbows on it, and smoking.

  ‘An unfavourable impression, yes?’ I said.

  ‘And I,’ he said, ‘what impression did I make in your picture frame?’ he said.

  ‘You are always in my frame,’ I said. ‘You never leave it

  ‘I keep you there always,’ I said, ‘among my things, and I talk to you and everything goes on just as when we are together here. But you, you put me away from yourself. You go back to your Casa Tonda, and I am not there. Occasionally, but only occasionally, you look down towards my house. But only occasionally and, as it were, by mistake.

  ‘I do not,’ I said, ‘put you away from me. I keep you there among my things. If I did not, there are times when I could not put up with my picture frame.’

  ‘You put up with it,’ he said, ‘before l existed for you.’

  ‘Yes, I did,’ said. ‘It irked me, but I put up with it. But I did not know then that life could have another pace. I imagined one vaguely, but I did not know.

  ‘I did not know,’ said, ‘that life could go at a run, with drums beating.

  ‘For you, it is different,’ I said. ‘Your life, after I came into it, went on at its usual pace, without any sound.’

  ‘There is a little sound,’ he said, ‘a little, yes, for me. Not really loud, but it is there.’

  He said, ‘But I should have liked to have gone far away, somewhere abroad, and to have got to know you by chance, in some street or other, a girl one had never seen before. I should like to know nothing about you, nothing of your relations and not to meet them ever.’

  ‘Instead,’ I said, ‘we have grown up in the same village, and played together as children, at Le Piètre. But that does not worry me at all. To me it is of no signific
ance.’

  I said, ‘It is of no significance to me. And since you have come to exist for me, our village there has become an unknown land, very big and all full of unforeseeable dramatic things that stir the emotions and can happen at any moment. It can happen to me, for example, to cross the piazza to the post and to see your car standing outside the Concordia, or to see your sisters or to see Magna Maria.’

  ‘I don’t understand,’ he said ‘Do you find your emotions stirred at seeing Magna Maria?’

  ‘Seeing Magna Maria,’ I said, ‘makes my heart beat quickly.’

  ‘I don’t understand. When I meet your father in the corridor at the works I don’t feel my heart beating.

  ‘I have a great regard for your father,’ he said, ‘but I swear to you that he does not make my heart beat fast!’

  ‘Because you are not in love with me,’ I said. ‘That is the sole explanation.

  ‘There is no change in your life,’ I said, ‘since the day when I came to exist for you.

  ‘It is for this reason,’ I said, ‘that you go on daydreaming about supposing you had met me in a foreign country, supposing everything had happened differently. For me, on the other hand, it is all right just as it happened. We played together as children with those ugly pinafores.’

  ‘It was you that had ugly pinafores,’ he said. ‘I have never worn pinafores in my life.’

  ‘I said you were not romantic,’ I said, ‘and it is not true—you are romantic. You want veiled ladies and unknown cities, not families or parents. This means being a romantic.’

  ‘I have got so many, so many relations,’ he said, ‘a long trail of them.

  ‘I have a trail of relations like a long snake,’ he said. ‘l should not want any more, no. My own are enough.’

  ‘When you came to my home, the other evening, with the yeast, you said you wanted to try it out. What did you want to try out?

  ‘You wanted to try out,’ I said ‘being my fiancé and you saw that it did not suit you? You don’t like it?’

  ‘I saw,’ he said, ‘that it was a bit difficult for me.’

  ‘And so now it will no longer be nice to come here either, ’I said, ‘now that we have been together there in my home, with my parents, first in the sitting-room, then in the dining-room, then in the sitting-room again. Now that you have had coffee in our pretty flowered cups, now that you have heard the stories about Cousin Ernesto, it seems to me that I shall no longer enjoy being with you here, in this room, or changing the books at the "Selecta” or going for walks with you in the park, because I shall always be thinking of how you wanted to try out being my fiancé, and it didn’t suit you and you didn’t like it. I shall always think that I am all right for you here as a girl friend, but I am not all right for you as a wife.’

  ‘I have always told you,’ he said, ‘that I did not wish to marry you.’

  ‘True,’ I said. ‘You have always said that. And I said, "Patience." I suffered for it, but I said, "Patience. It’s better than nothing,’’’ I said. ‘But now you have tried it out; you wanted to see if by chance you were not making a mistake. And you saw that you were making a mistake, and that you could not go on. And now in the face of that I can no longer say, "Patience.” It hurts me in a way which I do not know how to bear.’

  I said, ‘I felt so happy that you had come to my home, that evening, with the yeast, and I was so glad to see you there large as life in our little sitting-room where I was always thinking of you. But instead everything now is ruined. Now we cannot be here either. I have come to hate this Via Gorizia, this room.’

  And I began to cry. I said.

  ‘Why have we ruined everything?’

  ‘Ah, no,’ he said, ‘don’t cry, I hate to see women cry.’

  But I cried and said just like Catè,

  ‘Why has everything been ruined?’

  The next day in the evening Tommasino came to speak to my father. He had put on dark clothes. He had consulted Betta and Betta had told him that dark clothes were indispensable.

  My father opened a bottle of moscado for the occasion, from our own vineyard, nine years old.

  My mother was so moved that she remained awake all night. She woke my father and said to him,

  ‘Had you thought of him?’

  And she said,

  ‘When he appeared before me the other evening with that packet in his hand, I thought of it.’

  Then she said,

  ‘But the property, what will that amount to? It must be a fine figure, eh?’

  My father, half asleep, said,

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You don’t know? You, the accountant, don’t know? A fine accountant! Well, then, who is there who does know?’

  First thing in the morning she ran to tell the whole story to Signora Bottiglia. But Signora Bottiglia knew all about it, because Betta had told her when she came in the early morning with the vegetables.

  Indeed, she knew even earlier than that that there was something. She had known of it for some time.

  Her daughter Mariolina had told her that she had seen me and Tommasino one day in the city, sitting in a café, holding hands.

  ‘Impossible,’ said my mother, just imagine to yourself whether Elsa would let her hands be held by a man in public I wonder what your Maria can have seen.’

  She was a bit puzzled, because Signora Bottiglia had not shown surprise, and she had a zest for creating surprises and the whole night she had been anticipating the pleasure of seeing surprise in her old friend’s eyes, behind their big lenses, always lit up with a little green sparkle either of incredulity or malice.

  Signora Bottiglia said,

  ‘We mothers are always the last to know these things.’

  And she told as a secret to my mother that her daughter Giuliana was about to get engaged to Gigi Sartorio. But they were waiting because they must first take off the plaster of Paris.

  ‘How does the plaster come into it?’ asked my mother. ‘There is not the slightest need of his arm to get engaged with.’

  ‘But the doctor,’ said Signora Bottiglia, ‘has advised that he should not get excited, or perspire, or jerk himself.’

  ‘There are no jerks in getting engaged,’ said my mother. ‘There is no need at all to perspire.’

  On getting home she hastened to tell Aunt Ottavia about Giuliana and Gigi.

  ‘It will rather be that he has to wait to be quite cured of his morphine before he marries, that’s what it will be.’

  7

  The End of the Affair

  TOMMASINO took to coming to us every evening. In the winter there were heavy falls of snow, and he would arrive with his hair full of snow and my mother would say,

  ‘Why do you go about without a hat?’

  Sometimes he played a card game with my father. Sometimes we sat in the sitting-room, he and I and Aunt Ottavia, who read her novels.

  My mother would say,

  ‘I am leaving your aunt here; it is usual for someone to be with an engaged couple.’

  She referred to my aunt as though she was a chair. And as a matter of fact Aunt Ottavia behaved like a chair, silent, motionless. She did not raise her eyes from her book.

  Still, she was there, and we could find nothing to say to each other because of the presence of that head and its woolly tresses there under the lamp.

  He twisted his hair round his fingers. I knitted.

  It just seemed to me impossible that a Via Gorizia could have ever existed, and a room with a little stove behind a curtain where we sometimes made coffee.

  We still went often to the town. But we did not go any more to the Via Gorizia. On the contrary we avoided going down that street.

  I did not know either if he still kept that room on or continued to pay the rent.

  We avoided certain topics We rarely spoke of the old times when we met there in the Via Gorizia. Both of us pretended that those times had never existed.

  We used to go to the furniture and u
pholstery shops to satisfy my mother.

  And my mother would ask,

  ‘Have you ordered the sideboard and shelves? Have you been to see that divan?’

  Then my mother took it into her head to come with us every time that we went down into the town. She walked about very slowly, stopping at every shop window, and the hours became interminable.

  My mother wanted pictures and carpets for the Casa Tonda. She wanted to pack it from top to bottom so that there should not be a square inch left uncovered.

  At night when she could not get to sleep she let her imagination run ahead. She played the devil with the Casa Tonda, broke down walls, had floors up, erected colonnades and arcades, converted loggias into baths and baths into loggias. Also, between sleeping and waking, she dismissed Betta, Betta had told Signora Bottiglia that Tommasino deserved a prettier and richer wife than myself, and Signora Bottiglia had immediately reported this to my mother. So my mother dismissed Betta, imagining to herself a scene in which she caught her stealing. She spoke a few sharp contemptuous words to Betta, and appointed in her place the old nurse, Gemmina’s old nurse, promising her a big increase of wages. She did this to spite Gemmina as well, since she did not like her.

  Gemmina had asked us to dinner, me and Tommasino, and had given us rabbit. My mother considered that a great lack of respect. Rabbit seemed to her by no means a choice dish, not by any means intended to celebrate an engagement.

  And on one occasion when my mother had been to call on her at the Casetta, tiring her legs out on the way up, Gemmina had unloaded on her four tickets for the arts and crafts exhibition and a very ugly little tablecloth with tassels which cost eight hundred lire.

  Next, my mother, between sleeping and waking, dismissed Purillo from the works, I don’t know how, and put Tommasino in his place. She changed the whole organization of the works and increased the workers’ pay. On the other hand, she reduced Borzaghi's salary, because she did not like Borzaghi, having quarrelled with his wife on some occasion in a shop when Signora Borzaghi had wished to be served first.