The Dry Heart

by Natalia Ginzburg

  “Isn’t she very beautiful?” I asked.

  “How should I know?” he said. “I’m not an expert on beauty. Yes, she’s beautiful, I suppose, when you come down to it. Or at least she was when she was young.”

  “Is she no longer young, then?”

  “Not so very,” he said. “But what’s the point of discussing her?”

  “Please,” I said. “I’d like to be able to talk to you about her once in a while. It gets on my nerves to mope all by myself. I don’t know a thing, you see. I didn’t even know her name. I feel as if I were in the dark, as if I were blind and groping my way around, touching the walls and the objects in the room.” My ball of yarn fell to the floor and Augusto bent over to pick it up.

  “Why the devil did you two marry?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said. “I made a mistake. He wasn’t very keen on it, but he didn’t stop to think. He doesn’t like to think about important things. In fact, he hates people who are always searching inside themselves and trying to find some meaning to life. When he sees me sitting still and thinking he lights a cigarette and goes away. I married him because I wanted to know all the time where he was. But the way it turned out, he knows where I am — I’m just sitting here, waiting for him to come home — and I don’t know where he is any more than I did before. He isn’t really my husband. A husband is a man that — well, that you always know where he is. And if someone asks you: “Where’s your husband?” then you ought to be able to answer without hesitation. Whereas I don’t go out of the house for fear of meeting people I know and hearing them ask: “Where is he?” Because I shouldn’t know what to answer. You may think I’m very silly, but I don’t go out of the house.”

  “Why did you marry?” he repeated. “What got into you?” I began to cry. “It was a hell of an idea,” he said, blowing the smoke out of his mouth and then staring at me in silence. He had a stubborn and gloomy expression on his face, as if he refused to be sorry for me.

  “But where’s Alberto?” I asked him. “Do you know where he is now?”

  “No, I don’t,” Augusto answered. “I’ve got to go. Good night.” He scraped the ashes out of his pipe with a matchstick and took his coat off the chair. Now his tall and solitary figure was standing in the doorway. “There isn’t anything I can do about it,” he said. “Good night.”

  I couldn’t close an eye all night long. I imagined that Augusto had fallen in love with me and I was his mistress. Every day I would go to meet him at a hotel. I would come home very late and Alberto would search my face agonizingly to see where I had been. But when Augusto came to see me again a few evenings later I was ashamed of all the things I had imagined. He picked up my ball of wool when it fell to the floor, filled his pipe, lit it, scraped the ashes out of it with a matchstick, and paced up and down the room, while all the time I imagined how we would make love in a hotel room and blushed with shame at my own imaginings. I didn’t speak again of Alberto and myself and neither did he. We didn’t know what to talk about, and I had an idea he was as bored as I was. Only I was glad we had become friends, and I told Alberto as much when he came back. He didn’t say anything, but he didn’t look very pleased. He shouted and made a great fuss in the bathroom because the water was too hot and he couldn’t find his shaving brush and the other things he was looking for. He came out of the bathroom freshly shaved, with a lighted cigarette in his mouth, and I asked him if this trip had been any more of a success than the one before. He said that it was a trip like any other and not worth talking about, that he had gone on business to Rome. I said I wished he wouldn’t go away again before the baby was born because I was afraid of what might happen if I had pains during the night when I was all alone. He said I wasn’t the first woman in the world to have a baby and if I was so nervous it was just too bad. We didn’t say anything more, but I cried over my knitting, and then he went out, slamming the door behind him.

  Augusto came to the house that evening and I kept him in the drawing room, where Alberto told him that he’d been on a business trip to Rome and thanked him for keeping me company. A little later Gemma called me into the kitchen to look over the household accounts, and when I came back the two men had gone into the study. I wondered whether to join them there or to wait in the drawing room, and after considerable hesitation I decided that there was nothing so strange about my going to join them. I picked up my knitting and started to go into the study, but the door was locked and I could hear Alberto saying: “It’s quite useless.” What did he mean? I sat down in the drawing room and began to count stitches. I felt tired and heavy and the baby stirred inside of me. Then and there I wanted to die with my baby, to escape from this torment and not feel anything more. I went to bed and to sleep but woke up when Alberto came in.

  “I’m not afraid any more; I only want to die,” I said.

  “Go to sleep and don’t be silly,” he answered. “I don’t want you to die.”

  “What difference would it make to you?” I asked him. “You have Augusto and Giovanna. You don’t need me. You don’t need the baby either. What will you do with a baby anyhow? You’ve grown old without ever having a baby and you got along perfectly well without it.”

  “I’m not so old,” he said with a laugh. “I’m only forty-four.”

  “You are old, though,” I said. “You have a lot of grey hair. You got along without a baby for forty-four years. What will you do with one now? It’s too late for you to get used to having a baby crying about the house.”

  “Please don’t say such silly things,” he said. “You know perfectly well I’m anxious to have this baby.”

  “Why didn’t you ever have one with Giovanna?”

  Out of the darkness he gave a deep sigh.

  “I’ve asked you not to talk about that person.”

  I sat bolt upright in the bed.

  “Don’t say ‘that person.’ Say ‘Giovanna.’ ”

  “As you like.”

  “Say ‘Giovanna.’ ”

  “Giovanna, then.”

  “Why didn’t you ever have a baby together?”

  “I don’t think she ever wanted to have a baby by me.”

  “No? Then she can’t love you very much.”

  “I don’t think she does love me very much.”

  “I don’t love you either. No one can love you. Do you know why? Because you have no courage. You’re a little man who hasn’t enough courage to get to the bottom of anything. You’re a cork bobbing on the surface, that’s what you are. You don’t love anybody and nobody loves you.”

  “You don’t love me, then?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “When did you stop loving me?”

  “I don’t know. Some time ago.”

  Once more he sighed.

  “It’s all too bad,” he said.

  “Alberto,” I said, “tell me where you were these last few days.”

  “In Rome, on business.”

  “Alone or with Giovanna?”

  “Alone.”

  “Do you swear it?”

  “I don’t want to swear,” he said.

  “Because it isn’t true. That’s why. You were with Giovanna. Where did you go? To the lakes? Did you go to the lakes?”

  He put on the light, got up, and took a blanket out of the cupboard.

  “I’m going to sleep in my study. Both of us will get more rest that way.”

  He stood there in the middle of the room with the blanket over his arm, a slight figure in rumpled blue pyjamas, with his hair in disorder and a look of weariness and distress in his eyes.

  “No, Alberto, don’t go away; I don’t want you to go away.” I was weeping and trembling and he came over and stroked my hair. I took his hand and kissed it. “It’s not true that I don’t love you,” I said. “I love you more than you can possibly know. I couldn’t live with any other man. I
couldn’t make love with Augusto or with anybody else. I like making love with you. I’m your wife. I’m always thinking of you when you’re away. I can’t think of anything else, no matter how hard I try. It’s idiotic of me, I know, but I can’t help it. I think of every single thing that’s happened to us since the day we first met. I’m glad I’m your wife.”

  “Then everything’s all right,” he said, picking up the blanket. He went to sleep in the study, and it was a long time before we slept together again.

  It was dark when I left the café. The rain had stopped, but the pavement was still glistening. I realized that I was very tired and I had a burning feeling in my knees. I walked about the city for a while longer, then I took a tram and got off in front of Francesca’s house. There were bright lights in the drawing room, and I could see a maid passing a tray. Then I remembered that it was Wednesday, and Wednesday was Francesca’s day for receiving her friends at home, so I didn’t go in. I went on walking. My feet were heavy and tired, and there was a hole in the heel of my left stocking, where my shoe rubbed against the bare skin and gave me pain. Sooner or later, I thought, I’d have to go home. I shivered and a wave of nausea came over me, so I went back to the park. I sat down on a bench and slipped off my shoe to look at the sore spot on the back of my heel. The heel was swollen and red; a blister had formed and broken and now it was bleeding. Couples were embracing each other on the park benches, and in the shadow of the trees an old man lay asleep under a dark green coat.

  I shut my eyes and remembered certain afternoons when I used to take the baby out in the park. We used to walk very, very slowly and I would give her warm milk out of a thermos bottle I carried in my bag. I had an enormous bag where I used to put all the baby’s things: a rubber bib and one of towelling and some little raisin biscuits that she especially liked, sent by my mother from Maona. Those were long afternoons I used to spend in the park, turning around to watch the baby follow me in her velvet-edged hood, her little coat with the velvet buttons, and her white leggings. Francesca had given her a camel that swayed its head as it walked. It was a lovely camel with a gold-embroidered red cloth saddle, and it swayed its head in a very wise and appealing way. Every other minute the camel would get tangled up in its string and fall and we had to set it on its feet again. Then we walked slowly on among the trees in the warm, humid sunshine. The baby’s mittens would come off and I would lean over to pull them on and blow her nose and then carry her when she was tired.

  I would go home for the night, I thought, and to the police station in the morning. I didn’t know where the police station was, so I’d have to look it up in the telephone book. I’d ask them to let me tell the whole story, from the very first day, including certain details which might seem trivial enough but had considerable importance. It was a long story, but they’d have to let me talk. I tried to imagine the face of the man who would listen to me, and I saw him, with a moustache and an olive complexion, sitting behind a desk. I shivered again and suddenly I wanted to phone Augusto and Francesca and ask them to go to the police station for me. Or else I might write a letter to the police and wait for them to come and pick me up at home. Of course they’d put me in jail, but I couldn’t exactly imagine how that would be. All I could see was the police station and a man with a long, shiny, olive-skinned face behind a desk. When he laughed it made me shiver, and then everything was a blank, days and years tumbling out of my life that had no connection with the days and years that had been filled with the baby and Alberto and Augusto and Francesca and Gemma and the cat and my father and mother at Maona. It didn’t matter at this point whether or not I went to jail. Everything that mattered had happened already, for everything that mattered was Alberto at the moment when I shot him and he fell heavily across the table and I closed my eyes and ran out of the room.

  Our little girl was born three years ago on January eleventh at three o’clock in the afternoon. I trailed around the house in a wrapper, moaning with pain, for two whole days while Alberto followed me with a frightened look on his face. Dr. Gaudenzi came to take care of me, bringing a young and obnoxious nurse who called Alberto “Daddy.” The nurse had a fight with Gemma in the kitchen because she said the kettles were dirty. They needed lots of hot water, and Gemma was terrified by my moans and groans, besides having a stye in her eye that made her particularly unintelligent. My father and mother came too. I wandered about the house making senseless remarks to the effect that they must hurry up and help me to get rid of that infernal baby. Then I was so dead tired I went to bed and fell asleep for a minute, only to wake up shrieking with pain until the nurse told me I’d get a goitre from straining my throat that way. I had forgotten the baby and Alberto, and all I wanted was to go to sleep and stop suffering. I no longer wanted to die; in fact, I was scared to pieces of dying and asked nothing more than to live. I begged everyone to tell me when the pain would be over, but it lasted a very long time, while the nurse went to and fro with kettles of water, my mother huddled in her black dress in a corner, and Alberto held my hand. But I didn’t want his hand; I only bit the sheet and tried, regardless of the baby, to get rid of that terrible pain in my middle.

  Then the baby was born and suddenly all my pain was gone. I raised my head to look at her as she lay there naked and red between my legs, and Alberto leaned over me with relief and joy on his face while I felt happier than I had ever felt in my life, with the pain gone from my body, leaving me with a sense of glory and peace.

  My mother put the baby in bed beside me, wrapped in a white shawl with her two cold, red fists and her damp, bald little head sticking out. I saw Gemma’s face leaning over with a glorious smile, and my mother’s face had a glorious smile on it, too, while the baby’s feeble whimpering in the shawl filled me with joy.

  Everyone said I ought to sleep, but now I didn’t want to. I talked incessantly and asked how the baby looked and what kind of a nose and mouth and forehead she had. They closed the shutters and took the baby away, leaving Alberto alone with me, and we laughed together over the stye in Gemma’s eye and the nurse’s way of calling him “Daddy.” Alberto asked me if I still wanted to die, and I told him that was the last thing I wanted to do, but I did want a glass of orange juice because I was thirsty. He went to get the juice and brought it to me on a tray, holding up my head while I drank it and planting a gentle kiss on my hair.

  The baby was very ugly at first, and Alberto called her the “little toad.” Every time he came back from outside the first thing he asked was: “What’s the little toad up to?” Then he stood with his hands in his pockets, looking down into her cradle. He even bought a camera to take pictures of her as soon as she was slightly better to look at.

  My father and mother went away after a few days, and when my mother asked me at the last minute whether I was happy I told her I most certainly was. She sent me a big box of woollens for the baby and a pair of socks she had knitted for Alberto, while my father sent a case of wine. It made them happy to think that all was going well with me, and my mother wrote to me that because Alberto was thin and had no appetite I should see to it that he didn’t overwork and that the baby didn’t disturb his sleep.

  Probably my mother thought that we would sleep together again now that the baby was born, but he went right on sleeping in the study, as he had ever since coming back from his last trip, and I kept the baby’s crib near my bed. But I couldn’t sleep very well because I got up frequently to see how the baby was sleeping and whether she was hot or cold and to listen to her regular breathing. After the first few months she became very bad and woke up crying all the time, until I picked her up and rocked her in my arms. I was afraid that Alberto would hear her, so I picked her up in a hurry and walked up and down the room, singing to her in a low voice. That way she got worse and worse. She liked to have me rock her and would apparently fall asleep in my arms with her eyes shut and her breathing even, but just as soon as I put her down in the crib she started crying again. As a res
ult I was sleepy all day long.

  I didn’t have much milk to give her, so I stuffed myself with food until I was quite fat. But the baby stayed thin, and when I took her out in her carriage I used to look at the other babies and ask how old they were and how much they weighed and feel ashamed because mine wasn’t as fat and strong as the rest. I hastened to weigh her immediately after every time I gave her the breast and every Saturday, without her clothes on, just before her bath. I kept a notebook, where I wrote down in red ink her weekly weight and in green her increase of weight after every feeding. Saturdays I got up with a pounding heart, hoping that she would be a little heavier than the week before, but often she wasn’t and I was plunged into despair. Alberto got angry with me about this and said that he had been a thin baby himself. He teased me about the notebook and about the way my hands trembled when I was dressing or undressing the baby, the way I upset the talcum powder and rushed breathlessly around the howling baby. He made a sketch of me with my mouth full of safety pins and a breathless, frightened air about me, letting the belt of my open wrapper drag on the floor, and wearing my hair in a net because I didn’t feel like combing it.

  I didn’t let Gemma touch the baby; in fact, I was distressed whenever she went over to whisper sweet nothings in her ear and to shake her rattle with damp, red hands. I didn’t even like to see Augusto come into the room because I was afraid he might bring in some germs from outside. Augusto lived with a sister who had a small child, and I feared he might be the carrier of whooping cough or measles. Moreover, I was ashamed to have Augusto tell me that his sister’s child was fat and strong.

  When the baby was two or three months old Alberto began to take pictures of her: in her bath, on the table, bareheaded, and with her cap on. For a while this gave him great amusement and he bought a better camera and an album with a flowered cover where he pasted in the pictures with the dates when they were taken and a phrase of comment in red ink below. But this amusement soon palled, because he was a man who tired quickly of everything. One day he said he was going to visit some friends who had a villa on one of the lakes, and I saw him pack the volume of Rilke in his bag. He locked the study door, as he never forgot to do, and after he had gone I looked at the photograph album on the drawing-room table, which had remained only half filled after he lost his interest in photography. It depressed me to see the empty black pages, with the last picture of the baby holding her rattle, and written in red ink underneath it: “We begin to play.”