The Dry Heart

by Natalia Ginzburg

  There was only one thing in life that Alberto didn’t tire of, I reflected, and that was his passion for Giovanna. Because I was sure he had gone with her to the lake and they were sitting on a bench beside the water reading Rilke together. He had long ago given up reading Rilke with me in the evening and taken to reading a book or newspaper to himself, picking his teeth or scratching his head at intervals and never saying a word about what he was thinking. I wondered if this might be my fault, although I had always listened attentively and told him I liked Rilke’s poems, even when they bored me. How had Giovanna managed to hold his interest for all these years? Perhaps she never showed that she loved him, but tormented and deceived him so that he had not a moment of peace and could not possibly forget her. I went over to the cradle and felt sorry for the baby because I was the only one who really loved her. I picked her up and unbuttoned my dress, and while I was nursing her I thought that when a woman has her baby in her arms nothing else should matter.

  I began to wean the baby when she was six months old and tried to feed her a thin porridge to which she did not take at all. Dr. Gaudenzi was very kind about coming to see her, but occasionally he lost his patience and said that I took things too hard and couldn’t seem to relax. There he was quite right. Every time the baby had a touch of fever I went into a panic and didn’t know what I was doing. I took her temperature every five minutes, looked up in a book all the diseases that she could possibly have, stopped eating my meals and combing my hair and couldn’t sleep at night. At times like these my temper was constantly on edge and I would shout at Gemma as if everything were her fault. Then, when the baby’s fever went down, I returned to reason, felt sorry for the way I had treated her, and gave her a handsome present. For a while afterward I didn’t particularly want to see the baby. I almost loathed everything connected with her: the rattle, the talcum powder, the diapers, and all the rest, and only wished I could read a novel or go to the theatre with friends. But I hadn’t any friends, and when I opened a book it bored me and I went back to reading about infants’ diseases and diet.

  One evening while I was cooking the porridge Francesca turned up at the house. She was hatless and had no makeup on her face, while a lock of hair tumbling over her forehead and the raincoat thrown over her black dress gave her a gloomy and defiant air. She told me she had quarrelled with her mother and asked me if I could put her up for the night. I told Gemma to make up the couch in the drawing room. Francesca sat down, puffed at a cigarette, and watched me give the baby her porridge, which the baby spat out as soon as I got it in her mouth.

  “I couldn’t stand a baby,” said Francesca. “If ever I had a baby I’d kill myself, for sure.”

  Alberto was in his study and I went to tell him that it was Francesca and that she had come to stay with us because there was something wrong at home.

  “Good,” he said. He was reading a German book on Charles V and writing notes in the margin.

  I put the baby to bed. Francesca was stretched out on the drawing-room couch, smoking another cigarette and looking as if the place had always been hers. She had taken off her garters and hung them over the back of an armchair, and she flicked the ashes from her cigarette on to the rug.

  “Did you know he was unfaithful to you?” she asked.

  “Yes, I know that.”

  “Don’t you care?”

  “No.”

  “Why don’t you leave him?” she asked. “Let’s go for a trip somewhere. He’s a little rat of a man. What good is he to you?”

  “I love him,” I said, “and then there’s the baby.”

  “But he’s deceiving you. He does it in the most blatant sort of way. I see them together sometimes. She has a behind like a cauliflower. Nothing much to look at.”

  “Her name is Giovanna,” I said.

  “Leave him, I say. What good is he to you?”

  “So you’ve seen her, have you? What’s she like?”

  “Well . . . She doesn’t know how to dress. They walk along very slowly. I see them all the time.”

  “Why did you say she has a behind like a cauliflower?”

  “Because that’s what it’s like, that’s all. It’s round, I mean, and she shakes it when she walks. But what do you care?”

  Francesca took all her clothes off and walked up and down the room. I locked the door.

  “Are you afraid that rat will see me?” she said. “Lend me a nightgown, will you?” I brought her a nightgown and she put it on. “I rattle around in it,” she said. “You’ve got fat.”

  “I’ll lose weight now that the baby’s weaned.”

  “I don’t want any children,” she said. “I don’t want to get married. Do you know why I fell out with my mother? Because there was a man they wanted me to marry. He works for a shipping company. They’ve been trying for ages to marry me off. But I’ve had enough. I’m not going home. I’ll take a room somewhere and look for a job. I’ve had enough of family. I don’t want to be tied to a husband, either. Just to get myself let down the way you are? Not me! I like going to bed with a man. But I’m all for variety. A couple of times with one man is enough for me.”

  I listened to her with astonishment.

  “You’ve had lovers, then?” I asked.

  “Of course I have,” she said, laughing. “Are you shocked?”

  “No,” I said, “but I don’t understand how you can do it.”

  “Do what?”

  “Change all the time.”

  “You don’t understand?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, I’ve had a lot of men,” she said. “First, one in Rome, when I was trying to get on the stage. I broke that off when he asked me to marry him. I was tired of him, anyhow; quite ready to throw him out of the window. But I still took such things seriously. ‘What kind of a girl am I?’ I said to myself. ‘I must be a bitch if I like to change so often.’ Words have a way of scaring us when we’re young. I still thought I ought to marry and be like everyone else. Then little by little I learned to make life less of a tragedy. We have to accept ourselves for what we are.”

  “And other people for what they are, too,” I said. “That’s why I have to put up with Alberto. And then I shouldn’t like to change.”

  She burst out laughing and kissed me.

  “Am I a bitch?” she asked.

  “No, you’re not a bitch,” I said. “But you’ll be alone in your old age.”

  “What the devil do I care about that? I’ll kill myself when I’m forty. Or else you’ll walk out on this little rat and we’ll live together.”

  I kissed her and went into my room. My head was whirling with a medley of words: rat, cauliflower, bitch, accepting people for what they are, and killing oneself. I could see Alberto walking slowly along with Giovanna the way he used to walk with me before we were married. Now we never went for a walk together at all. Finally I went to bed. I had a strong urge to go into the study and stretch out beside him in his bed. I wanted to put my head on his shoulder and ask him why we never went for any more walks. I wanted to tell him that I could never change to another man. But I was afraid he might think I was there just in order to make love with him, so I stayed in my own bed, waiting for sleep to come.

  Francesca stayed with us three weeks. I was very happy all this time, and it did me good to talk to her. I was no longer so nervous over the baby’s diarrhoea, and when I did show some nervousness she teased me out of it. Sometimes she persuaded me to leave the baby with Gemma while we went to a moving picture together. It was fun to get up in the morning, find Francesca wandering about the house in a long white satin wrapper and cold cream on her face, and pass the time of day with her until it was time for lunch. It was, in fact, a relief to have her to talk to. I realized then how little Alberto and I had to say to each other any more and how I practically never felt that I could tell him what I was thinking. When he was at h
ome he spent most of his time in the study, which was in a state of complete disorder because he wouldn’t let anyone tidy it up. Gemma made his bed and swept, under his strict supervision, but that was all she was allowed to do. He forbade her to touch either his desk or books, with the result that everything was covered with dust and the place gave out a bad smell.

  On his desk Alberto kept a picture of his mother and a plaster bust of Napoleon that he had modelled himself when he was sixteen years old. It looked very little like Napoleon, but it was a good technical job. Then he had a fleet of miniature ships which he had built as a little boy, copies exact down to every last detail. Of these he was very proud, particularly of a tiny sailing boat with a pennant flying from the mast. He asked Francesca into his study to admire them and insisted that she examine the sailing boat carefully. Then he showed her his library and read some of Rilke’s poems out loud. With Francesca he was very agreeable and in fact put himself out to please her as he always did when he came up against somebody new. And then I fancied that Francesca somewhat frightened him. It even occurred to me that Giovanna tyrannized him by fright too. I was the only person he wasn’t afraid of, and perhaps that was the root of the whole trouble. No, he certainly wasn’t afraid of me.

  Francesca sent me to her house for some clothes. My aunt was there and burst into tears as soon as she saw me. She asked me any number of questions, which I didn’t know how to answer. She couldn’t understand why Francesca wouldn’t consider the man from the shipping company, who was handsome and very much of a gentleman as well. She had never understood what Francesca wanted to do with her life, or anything else about her.

  “It’s this younger generation,” she said, weeping and rubbing her face with her wet handkerchief. I tried to tell her that Francesca was still young and had plenty of time ahead of her in which to find a man more to her liking. Then she told me that she didn’t care for the way Francesca behaved with men, flirting with them and keeping three or four on her string at a time. I don’t think for a moment that it ever remotely occurred to her that Francesca had any lovers. She did her best to understand, but the task was quite beyond her. I thought how all of us are always trying to imagine what someone else is doing, eating our hearts out trying to find the truth and moving about in our own private worlds like a blind man who gropes for the walls and the various objects in a room. Then I wrapped up Francesca’s clothes and went away.

  Francesca was plucking her eyebrows in the kitchen, looking into a mirror which she held in one hand. Gemma stood there gaping at her until Francesca grimaced and said:

  “Run me a bath, will you, my girl?”

  Gemma hurried away, laughing, and Francesca pulled her clothes out of the bundle and scrutinized them carefully, turning them over and over in her hands. I asked her whether she was ever going home.

  “No,” she said dryly. “Don’t ask me again.”

  I was preparing to give the baby her first orange juice and feeling a little sentimental about it. I was glad that she was turning into a big girl and starting to eat grown-up food.

  “What a lot of fuss,” said Francesca as she saw me boiling a spoon. “And when she’s older she’ll just be a pain in the neck the way I am to my mother. Families are a stupid invention. No marriage for me, thank you!”

  I was almost jealous of Francesca. Alberto was always making up to her and sketching her face. She treated him with scorn, but when he began to make sketches of her in his notebook she came down from her high horse. In the evening Alberto would call us into his study to hear Rilke’s poems and Augusto would come to join us. I decided that they might make a good match, but when I said as much to Francesca she replied that Augusto looked like a justice of the peace with his heavy moustache and scarf and the shirt sleeves that stuck out below those of his jacket. Even the man from the shipping company was a cut above him. But every time Augusto came she powdered her nose and debated in front of the mirror as to whether she should wear her best necklace.

  Finally Francesca sold some of her jewels and rented a one-room apartment. She said she was going to look for a job, but meanwhile she did nothing in particular except try her hand at painting, because she claimed to have lost interest in the stage. She painted strange pictures with great splotches of colour and everything in them but the kitchen stove: houses, skulls, knights in armour, and invariably the moon. She wore a long grey linen smock and painted all day long and said that she didn’t have a lover.

  I was still very busy with the baby. She was just starting to walk and I had to trail her all over the house to make sure she didn’t fall. She cried every time I left her alone, and I had to take her with me, even into the bathroom. She was given to tantrums and never wanted to eat her meals. I had to play with her at mealtime and get the food down without her knowing it. She staggered around the room, from chair to chair, playing with the cat and my sewing basket, and I followed her with a bowl in my hand, waiting for the right moment to slip a spoon into her mouth.

  Until she was a year old the baby had lead-grey eyes, but then I noticed flecks of brown coming into them. She had very fine blonde hair which I combed back and tied with a ribbon. She was still thin and pale and not what you could call beautiful; her eyes were dull and often had dark circles around them. Eating and sleeping simply did not interest her. She cried every evening before going to sleep, and I had to walk up and down the room singing lullabies. She always wanted to hear the same thing, a French song I had learned from my mother:

  Le bonx roi Dagobert

  A mis sa culotte à l’envers!

  Le bon Saint Éloi

  Lui dit: O mon roi,

  Votre Majesté

  Est mal culotté.

  I used to tie a red cloth around the lamp and sing as I paced up and down with the baby in my arms. When I left the room I felt exhausted, as if from a battle. Very often I had no sooner gone out than her feeble and plaintive cry followed me and I had to go back and start all over again. She couldn’t stand Alberto and cried whenever he picked her up, and he in his turn said that I had spoiled her and made her into a perfect little pest. Alberto was seldom at home and went on a number of his usual trips. When he was at home he shut himself up in the study with Augusto. But at this point I didn’t particularly care what they were talking about, whether it was Giovanna or something quite different. All that mattered to me was to see the baby eat her supper until the picture of a chick emerging from the egg at the bottom of her bowl was uncovered and the bowl was empty. I remembered Alberto’s telling me that a baby was the main thing in a woman’s life and in a man’s too. This was all very true for a woman, I reflected, but not for a man. Alberto’s habits had not changed an iota since our baby was born. He took the same trips, made the same sketches in his notebook, went on jotting down phrases on the margins of his books, and continued to walk down the street at the same brisk pace as before, with a cigarette stuck between his lips. He was never upset if the baby was pale or hadn’t eaten her supper. He didn’t really know what she was supposed to eat, and perhaps he had not even noticed that her eyes were changing colour.

  I thought I was cured of my jealousy and that I didn’t care to know whether he was seeing Giovanna or not. I had borne his child and that was enough. The days when I had waited for him in the boardinghouse and trembled at the mere thought of his coming now seemed so remote that I could hardly believe they belonged to the same existence. Occasionally he called me into the study to make love, but I was always on the alert for the baby’s cry and didn’t stop to wonder how much I enjoyed it. He didn’t ask me, either, and I came to the conclusion that our marriage was no better and no worse than the run-of-the-mill variety.

  One day I went for a walk with the baby. Francesca had given her the camel, and this was the first time we were taking it out. The camel was handsome and swayed its head in such a way that people stopped to look at it. We went slowly in the warm sunshine, and I was ve
ry cheerful because the baby had drunk her milk and eaten two ladyfingers. The camel kept falling down and I would stoop to pick it up and dust its red cloth saddle.

  Then I saw Alberto crossing the street with a woman. All that I could see of her was that she was tall and wore a mouton fur piece. I picked the baby and the camel up in my arms and hurried back home. The baby struggled and cried because she wanted to walk, but I held her tight until I came to the door. Then I told Gemma to take off her coat and keep her in the kitchen while I wrote a letter. I shut the drawing-room door and sat down on the sofa. I had thought of Giovanna so often and pictured her as having a wide, immobile face that this image had lost all power to hurt me. Now I had to adjust myself to the sight of her as a tall woman with a mouton fur piece, and I clenched my teeth to put down the pain I felt inside. They had been walking very slowly, just as Francesca said. He had left the house at three o’clock that afternoon, saying that he had some long-neglected law cases to attend to at the office. And when I saw them it was half past four. Obviously he lied to me all the time without a qualm, without a single muscle of his face betraying him. He had taken his hat off the rack, slipped on his raincoat, and gone out at his usual brisk pace.

  Darkness was coming on when he returned to the house. I was still lying on the sofa while the baby played with the cat and Gemma set the dining-room table. Alberto went into his study and called out to me to follow. When I looked at his face I knew that he had seen me too. He looked as if he had been through a wringer, and he had hardly any voice at all.