The Woman of Rome (Italia)

by Alberto Moravia

  So I pretended I did not notice his drunkenness and after removing my clothes I sat down on the bed beside him. He was still wearing his overcoat, just as when he had entered the room. I began to help him to get undressed and as I helped him, I kept on talking to distract his attention and prevent its occurring to him to get up and leave me.

  “You haven’t told me how old you are, yet,” I said. Meanwhile I was pulling off his overcoat and he was holding up his arms passively to make it easier for me.

  “I’m nineteen,” he said after a moment.

  “You’re two years younger than I am.”

  “Are you twenty-one?”

  “Yes, nearly twenty-two, in fact.”

  My fingers fumbled clumsily with the knot in his tie. Slowly, with difficulty, he pushed me away and undid the knot. Then he let his arms fall, and I slipped the tie off. “This tie’s all worn,” I said, “I’ll buy you one — what’s your favorite color?”

  He began to laugh and I loved him then because he had such a charming way of laughing. “You really mean to keep me!” he said. “First you want to pay for my meal, and now you want to give me a tie.”

  “Silly!” I said with intense affection. “What does it matter? It would please me to give you a tie, why would you object?” Meanwhile I had taken off his jacket and vest and he was sitting on the edge of the bed in his shirt.

  “Can you tell I’m nineteen?” he asked. He always liked talking about himself. It didn’t take me long to discover this.

  “Yes and no,” I said, hesitating in a way I knew he would find flattering. “Your hair gives you away, mostly,” I added, stroking his head. “A man’s hair isn’t alive. I couldn’t tell from your face.”

  “How old would you say I am?”

  “Twenty-five.”

  He was silent and I saw him shut his eyes as if overcome by his drunkenness. I was seized once more by the fear that he might be sick, so I hurried to take off his shirt. “Tell me more about yourself,” I added. “Are you a student?”

  “Yes.”

  “What are you studying?”

  “Law.”

  “Do you live with your family?”

  “No, they’re in the country at S —”

  “Do you live in a boardinghouse?”

  “No, a furnished room,” he replied mechanically with his eyes shut. “Apartment eight, 20 Via Cola di Rienzo, at Mrs. Amalia Medolaghi’s — she’s a widow.”

  His chest was bare now. I could not help running my hand amorously over his chest and neck. “Why are you just sitting there? Aren’t you cold?” I asked.

  He raised his head and looked at me. “What do you think — that I haven’t noticed?” he laughed, his voice rather sharp.

  “Noticed what?”

  “That without seeming to, you’ve been undressing me — I may be drunk but I’m not as drunk as all that.”

  “Well,” I said, disconcerted, “what if I have — what’s the matter with that? You should have done it yourself — since you didn’t, I’ve been helping you.”

  Apparently he did not hear what I was saying. “I’m drunk,” he said, shaking his head, “but I know perfectly well what I’m doing and why I’m here.… No, I don’t need any help, thank you.”

  He suddenly unfastened his belt violently, with arms whose thinness made them look like a puppet’s, and flung off his trousers and everything else he was wearing. “And I know what you expect from me, too,” he added as he gripped my hips with both hands. His strong, nervous hands squeezed me and the drunken look in his eyes seemed to have been replaced by a kind of malicious energy. I was to encounter this same malice later, even in the moments when he seemed to most abandon himself. It was a clear sign of the lucid consciousness he kept in reserve, whatever he was doing and which, as I was to discover later to my sorrow, prevented him from really loving or communicating with anyone.

  “This is what you want, isn’t it?” he added, as he clutched me and dug his nails into my flesh. “This, and this, and this.” Each time he said “this” he made a gesture of love, kissing me, biting me, pinching me where I least expected it. I was laughing and wriggling and struggling, too happy at his sudden reawakening to notice how forced and lacking in spontaneity his behavior was. He really hurt me, as though my body was an object of hatred for him and not of love. And more rage than desire gleamed in his eyes. Then, his frenzy ceased as suddenly as it had begun. In a curious, inexplicable fashion, as though overcome once more by his feeling of drunkenness, he fell back full-length on the bed and shut his eyes, and I found myself beside him with the strange sensation that he had never moved or spoken, had never touched me or embraced me. As if it all had yet to begin.

  I remained there utterly still for some time, kneeling on the bed in front of him, my hair hanging over my eyes, looking at him and touching his long, thin, beautiful, pure body with timid fingertips. His skin was white and his bones stuck out, his shoulders were broad and thin, his hips narrow, his legs long, and he was hairless except for a few hairs on his chest. His belly was flattened because of the way he was lying, so that his sex appeared raised and offered. I do not like violence in love, and this was why I felt as if nothing had happened between us and everything was still to begin. So I waited for peace and silence to be restored between us after that forced, ironical moment of tumult, and when I felt once more my usual serene and impassioned self, I let myself down beside him, as if I were slowly slipping into the lovely waters of a motionless sea on a blazing day, and I twisted my legs around his and wrapped my arms around his neck and clung to him. This time he neither moved nor spoke to the end. I called him by the sweetest names, panted in his face and wrapped him in the hot, tight mesh of my embraces, while he lay as motionless and supine as if he were dead. I learned afterward that this detached passivity was the highest proof of love he could give.

  Much later in the night I raised up on my elbow and gazed at him intensely, in a way which is still, after so long, a precise and painful memory. He was sleeping with his head buried sideways in the pillow; his usual air of wavering dignity, which he tried to maintain at all times and at all costs, had abandoned him; and nothing remained in his features, which sleep revealed in all their sincerity, except his youthfulness, more like an indefinable freshness and innocence than an expression mirroring some special quality or tendency in his soul. But I remembered that I had seen him alternately spiteful, hostile, indifferent, cruel, and full of desire, and I felt a melancholy and anxious discontent, for I knew that his spite, his hostility, his indifference, his desire, all these things that differentiated him from me and everyone else, had their origin in some deep center that was still secret and unknown to me. I did not want him to explain his attitudes by taking them down and examining them in words, as the parts of a machine can be taken down and examined; I wanted instead to have known them, down to their most delicate roots, through the act of love alone, and unfortunately I had failed in this. The little of him that escaped me was all himself, and the greater part that did not escape me was unimportant and useless to me. Gino, Astarita, and even Sonzogno, had been nearer to me and better known. I looked at him and felt anguished because the most profound parts of our beings had not been able to meet and join, as our bodies had done only a little while before. My deepest part was widowed and was weeping bitterly, mourning the chance that had been lost. Perhaps there had been a moment while we were loving one another when he had let down his defenses, and by a gesture or a word I might have entered him and he would have been mine forever. But I had not recognized the right moment and now it was too late; he was sleeping, and had gone away from me once more.

  While I continued gazing at him, he opened his eyes, but kept quite still, with his head still buried sideways in the pillow. “Have you been asleep, too?” he asked.

  There was a different note in his voice, I thought. It was more intimate and trusting. I was filled with a sudden hope that during his sleep our intimacy had grown in some mysterious wa
y. “No, I’ve been watching you,” I said.

  He was silent a moment. “I want to ask you a favor —” he continued “— but can I rely on you?”

  “What a question.”

  “Will you do me the favor of keeping a parcel I’ll give you for a few days? Then I’ll come and collect it and perhaps bring you another.”

  At any other time I would have shown some curiosity over this matter of the parcels. But just then the only thing that mattered to me was Giacomo and our relationship. I thought it would give me another opportunity for seeing him; that I ought to do all I could to please him; and that if I were to question him, he might regret his suggestion and withdraw it. “If that’s all,” I said lightly.

  He was silent again for a long time, as if he were meditating. “So you agree?” he said then.

  “I’ve already told you so!”

  “And don’t you want to know what’s inside the parcels?”

  “If you don’t want to tell me,” I answered, doing my utmost to appear detached, “it means you have your reasons: I don’t ask you what they are.”

  “But it might be something dangerous.… What do you know?”

  “I’ll have to risk it.”

  “It might,” he continued, lying flat on his back while his eyes gleamed with an ingenuous amusement, “it might be stolen goods — I might be a thief.”

  I remembered Sonzogno, who was not only a thief but a murderer, and my own thefts of the compact and the scarf; and I thought what a curious coincidence it was for him to pass himself off as a thief to me, when I really was a thief, living among thieves. “No, you’re not a thief, I’m sure!” I said gently as I caressed him.

  His face clouded over; his pride was always alert and the strangest and most unexpected things offended him. “Why not? I might be.”

  “You don’t have the face for it — of course, anything’s possible — but really, you don’t look like one.”

  “Why? What do I look like?”

  “What you are. A young man of good family, a student —”

  “I told you I was a student. But I might be something else, too, as in fact, I am.”

  I was no longer listening to him. I was thinking that I did not have a thief’s face either; and yet I was one; and I longed to tell him so. This temptation was partly due to his own curious attitude. I had always thought stealing was something blameworthy; yet here was a someone who not only did not disapprove of such an act, but seemed to find in it some positive aspect totally mysterious to me.

  “You’re right,”-I said, after a moment’s hesitation. “I don’t think you’re a thief, because I’m convinced you aren’t one; but as to what you look like — you might even be one — people don’t always look like what they are. Do I look like a thief, for instance?”

  “No,” he replied without looking at me.

  “And yet I am one,” I said composedly.

  “You are?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you steal?”

  I had put my purse down on the night table. I picked it up, took out the compact, and showed it to him. “This, in a house where I happened to be a while ago, and a silk scarf in a shop the other day, which I gave to my mother.”

  It would be wrong to think I told him all this out of vanity. Actually I was led to do it by a desire for intimacy and emotional complicity. For lack of anything better, even the confession of a crime can draw people together and arouse love. I saw him become serious and look at me pensively. I was suddenly afraid he might think badly of me and might decide not to see me again. “But don’t think I’m glad I stole them,” I said hastily. “I’ve decided to give the compact back; today, in fact. I can’t give the scarf back, but I’m sorry and I’ve made up my mind not to ever do it again.”

  His usual malice sparkled in his eyes as I was speaking. He looked at me and suddenly burst into laughter. Then he gripped me by the shoulders, threw me onto the bed, and began to squeeze and pinch slyly, as he had before, repeating, “Thief! You’re a thief, you’re a thief, a great big thief, a sweet little thief, an adorable thief,” with a kind of sarcastic affection that left me in doubt as to whether I ought to be offended or flattered. But his impetuousness excited and pleased me in a way. It was better than his former deathly passivity, in any case. So I laughed and wriggled all over because I am very ticklish and he, perversely, was tickling me under the arms. But all the time I was twisting and laughing to the point of tears, I could see that his face, bending over me so pitilessly, remained closed and withdrawn. Then he stopped, as suddenly as he had begun, and threw himself back upon the bed. “I’m not a thief, though — I’m really not — and there aren’t any stolen goods in those parcels.”

  I could see that he was bursting to tell me what the parcels contained and that the whole thing was a matter of vanity for him more than anything else — a vanity not vastly different from Sonzogno’s, when he told me of his crime. Men have many things in common, despite all their differences; and when they are with a woman they love, or with whom they have at least made love, they always tend to show off their virility by boasting of the dangerous, energetic things they have done or are going to do.

  “You’re dying to tell me what’s in the parcels,” I said gently.

  He was offended. “You’re a fool. I don’t care at all. But I ought to tell you what’s in them so that you can decide whether you’re going to do me the favor or not. So — they contain propaganda.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I belong to a group of people,” he said slowly, “who don’t love, let us say, the present government: they hate it in fact, and want to get rid of it as soon as possible. The parcels contain a lot of pamphlets printed secretly, in which we explain to people why it isn’t a good government and how it can be gotten rid of.”

  I had never had anything to do with politics. Matters of government did not touch me, or many other people, I believe. But I remembered Astarita and his occasional references to politics.

  “But it’s forbidden! It’s dangerous!” I exclaimed in alarm.

  He looked at me with evident satisfaction. At last I had said something he liked and that flattered his ego. “Yes,” he agreed with extreme and slightly emphatic gravity, “in fact it is dangerous. Now it’s up to you to decide whether you’ll do me the favor or not.”

  “I wasn’t speaking for myself,” I retorted hotly. “I was thinking of you. As far as I’m concerned, I’ll do it.”

  “I warn you,” he said again, “it’s really dangerous. If they find them, you’ll end up in jail.”

  I looked at him and a flood of uncontrollable emotion swept over me. I do not know whether it was for him or for something else I could not define. My eyes filled with tears. “Don’t you understand it doesn’t matter to me at all?” I stammered. “I’d go to prison — so what?” I shook my head and the tears ran down my cheeks.

  “And now what are you crying for?” he asked in astonishment.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m being stupid — I don’t know why myself, maybe because I wish you’d realize how much I love you and how ready I am to do anything for you.”

  I had not yet learned that I must not mention my love to him. At my words, he did what I was to see so often in the future, his face filled with an expression of vague, distant embarrassment and he averted his eyes. “All right,” he said hurriedly, “I’ll bring you the parcel in a couple of days. We’re agreed, then. And now I’ve got to go, it’s getting late.” As he spoke, he leaped from the bed and began to dress quickly. I stayed where I was, on the bed, with my emotion and tears, naked and a little ashamed, either because I was naked or because I had been crying.

  He picked his clothes up off the floor where they had fallen and put them on. He went over to the coatrack, got his overcoat, slipped into it and came over to me. “Feel here,” he said, with that charming, ingenuous smile I found so attractive.

  I looked and saw he was pointing to one of the po
ckets of his overcoat. He had come near to the bed so that I could stretch out my hand without any effort. I felt something hard through the material of the pocket. “What is it?” I asked, without understanding.

  He smiled in satisfaction, put his hand into his pocket and slowly drew a large, black pistol half out of it, staring at me fixedly all the while. “A pistol!” I exclaimed. “What are you going to do with it?”

  “You never know,” he said. “It may come in useful one day.”

  I did not know what to think, but he did not even give me time. He replaced the weapon in his pocket, bent down, brushed my lips with his as he said, “All right, then — I’ll be back in two days.” Before I could recover from my surprise, he was gone.

  Since then I have often thought over our first assignation and have reproached myself bitterly for not having foreseen the danger his passion for politics exposed him to. I know I never had any influence over him; but at least, if I had known many of the things I have learned since, I would have been able to advise him and when advice was useless, I would have been at his side, fully conscious and decisive. The fault was certainly mine, or rather, was the fault of my ignorance, which, however, I could not help, as it was due to my condition. As I have already said, I had never given any thought to political things, of which I understood nothing and which I felt to be extraneous to my destiny, as if they were not unfolding around me but on another planet altogether. When I read a newspaper I always skipped the first page with its political news, which didn’t interest me, and went on to glance through the reports of criminal cases, where certain incidents and crimes gave my mind something to feed on, at least. My condition was actually very like that of those transparent little creatures that live, they say, in the depths of the sea, in the dark almost, knowing nothing of what is happening on the surface in the sunlight. Politics, like many other things that men seem to think so important, reached me from a higher and unknown world, they were even weaker and more incomprehensible to me than the light of day to those simple creatures in the depths of the sea.