I went back to my typing, but I couldn’t keep my mind on it and made any number of mistakes. I went over to the mirror to see if I really looked like a simple country girl. By the time lunch was ready Alberto had come home. I asked him if I looked like a simple country girl, and he looked at me hard for a minute before he said no. Then he added that he didn’t know what a simple country girl would look like anyhow. He was nervous and distracted and immediately after lunch he went out again.
I wanted to phone Francesca or go and see her, but I remembered that she was probably with her new lover. Alberto went back to going out every day and sometimes in the evening as well. Now that I was sleeping in the study he no longer locked the door, so very often when I was alone in the evening I opened the desk drawer and looked at the revolver. To look at it like that calmed me down, and afterwards I shut the drawer very slowly and went to bed. I lay awake in the darkness, trying not to remember the time when the baby’s feeble and plaintive cry used to break the silence of the night. My thoughts carried me far away to the time when I was a child in Maona. I remembered a certain black cream that my mother used to put on my hands to cure me of chilblains, and I could see the face of an old school teacher with glasses who used to take us on picnics, and that of a monk who came every Sunday to ask charity of my mother and carried with him a grey sack full of dry crusts of bread. I thought of how I used to read From Slavegirl to Queen and how I had hidden in the coal cellar and wept one day when my mother had made me a pale blue dress to wear to a school party and I had thought it was very pretty and then discovered it wasn’t pretty at all. I realized that I was saying good-bye to all these things, as if I were about to take leave of them forever, and, closing my eyes, I could smell the black cream on my hands and the odour of the baked pears that my mother used to feed us in cold weather.
When Alberto came home on nights like these we would make love together. But he no longer spoke of our having any more children. He was bored with dictating notes for his book and he glanced constantly at his watch all the time that he was in the house. Sometimes it occurred to me that soon he would be too old and tired to go out and then he would sit in an armchair and dictate to me and ask me to take his things out of the zinc case, to put the books back on the shelves and the miniature ships in their accustomed place. But Alberto was just the same as ever, older and yet incorrigibly young. He walked at a brisk pace and stuck his thin head forward as if to drink in the air of the street, with his open raincoat flapping across his slight body and a lighted cigarette between his lips. Between the eyes I shot him.
He had asked me to put some tea in a thermos bottle to take with him on his trip. He had always said that I was good at making tea. I wasn’t especially good at ironing or cooking, but my tea was the best he had ever tasted. He was slightly annoyed when it came to packing his bag because his shirts weren’t very well ironed, particularly between the sleeves and the collar. He packed his bag alone, saying he didn’t want me to help him. He put in on top several books from the zinc case. I suggested the poems of Rilke, but he turned them down.
“I know them by heart,” he said.
I put some books in my bag too. When he saw me packing he was glad and said it would do me good to go to Maona and have my mother bring me my coffee in bed in the morning. I asked him what he was going to do about the zinc case.
“The zinc case?” he said, and started to laugh. “I’m not going away for good, you know. Did you think I was? Is that why you have such a solemn face?”
I went to look in the mirror and said:
“A very ordinary sort of face. The face of a simple country girl.”
“Yes, a simple country girl,” he said, and stroked my hair. Then he asked me to make him the tea, which he liked strong and very sweet.
“Tell me the truth, Alberto,” I said.
“What truth?” he echoed.
“You’re going away together.”
“Who are going away together?” And then he added jokingly:
She seeketh Truth, which is so dear
As knoweth he who life for her refuses.
When I came back to the study he had completed the sketch. He showed it to me and laughed. It was a long, long train with a big cloud of black smoke swirling over it. He wet the tip of the pencil with his tongue in order to make the smoke thicker. I put the thermos bottle down on the desk. He was laughing and turned around to see if I was laughing too.
I shot him between the eyes.
My feet were wet and cold and my blistered heel hurt me at every step. The streets were quite empty and they glistened in the gentle rain. I wanted to go to Francesca’s, but I thought probably she was with her lover. And so I went home. There was a dead silence, which I tried my very best not to hear. When I reached the kitchen I knew what I was going to do. It was very easy and I was not afraid. I knew now that I would never have to talk to the man with the olive complexion sitting behind the desk in the police station, and this genuinely relieved me. I would never talk to anyone again. Not to Francesca or Giovanna or Augusto or my mother. To no one. I sat down at the marble-top table, where I could not escape listening to the silence. A cold, rank smell came up out of the sink, and the alarm clock ticked on the shelf. I took pen and ink and began to write in the notebook where I kept an account of household expenses. All of a sudden I asked myself for whose benefit I was writing. Not for Giovanna or Francesca, not even for my mother. For whom, then? It was too difficult to decide, and I felt that the time of conventional and clear-cut answers had come forever to a stop within me.
* * *
* “He seeketh Liberty . . .” (Dante, Purgatory, I, 71).
The Dry Heart Page 9
