The Woman of Rome (Italia)

by Alberto Moravia

  But the fault lay not only in myself and my ignorance. In his vanity and lightness, he was at fault, too. If I had sensed anything else but vanity in him, as, in fact, there was, perhaps I would have acted differently and would have forced myself to understand and get to know all the things I was ignorant of: I cannot say with what success. And at this stage I would like to point out something else, which certainly contributed to my nonchalance, this was the fact that he always seemed to be acting a part in a farce rather than behaving seriously. He seemed to have built up an ideal character, piece by piece, but was able to believe in it only up to a certain point, and was striving all the time, almost mechanically, to adapt his actions to this ideal character. This ceaseless comedy created the impression that he was taking part in a game he had, in a certain sense, mastered perfectly; but, as happens in games, it also made what he was doing seem far less serious. At the same time it suggested that for him nothing was irreparable, that at the last moment, even if he were defeated, his opponent would return his losses to him and would shake his hand. Now perhaps he really was playing, like boys whose irrepressible instincts lead them to make a game of everything. But his opponent was in earnest as was evident later. So when the game was up, he found himself unarmed and helpless, outside all games, caught in a mortal strait.

  All these things, and others far sadder and no less reasonable, occurred to me later on when I thought over what had happened. But at the time the idea that his business of the parcels might influence our relationship in any way did not even cross my mind. I was glad he had returned to me, glad I could do him a favor and at the same time have an opportunity of seeing him again. I did not look beyond this double source of happiness. I remember that when I happened to think vaguely and dreamily about the odd favor he had asked me I shook my head as if to say, “Schoolboy tricks!” and turned my mind to other things. In any case, I was so happy that even if I had wanted to, I would not have been capable of directing my thoughts to any troubling topic.

  6

  E VERYTHING SEEMED TO BE improving: Giacomo had come back and at the same time I had found the way to have the maid who had been unjustly accused released from jail, without being obliged to take her place. After Giacomo left that day, I spent at least a couple of hours delighting in my own happiness, as one might delight in a jewel or other precious object newly possessed, that is, in a puzzled, astonished, dazed way that did not, however, exclude profound enjoyment. The bells ringing for vespers roused me from this voluptuous contemplation. I remembered Astarita’s advice, the urgent need to help the wretched woman who was in jail. I dressed hurriedly and went out.

  It is sweet, in winter, when the days are short and the whole morning and the early hours of the afternoon have been passed at home alone in thought, to go out and walk the streets in the heart of the city, where the traffic is thickest, the crowds fullest, the shops most brilliantly lit. In the pure, cool air, amid the noise, movement, and glitter of city life, the brain clears and the heart lightens, fills with a joyous excitement and gay intoxication, as if all our difficulties had suddenly been solved and nothing was left but to wander lightheartedly and thoughtlessly among the crowd, content to follow any fleeting sensation suggested to an idle mind by the pageant of the streets. It really seems at such times as if for a few moments all our trespasses had been forgiven, as the Christian prayer says, without any merit on our part and without retribution, merely by virtue of some mysterious and general benevolence. Naturally, this requires a happy or at least contented frame of mind, since otherwise city life provokes an anguished sense of absurd, aimless motion. But as I said, I was happy that day, and I was most aware of this when I began to walk the sidewalks in the center of town, among the crowds of people.

  I knew I had to go to church to make my confession. But probably just because I knew that this was my purpose and was glad I had resolved to do it, I was in no hurry and did not even think about it. I walked slowly from one street to another, stopping from time to time to look at the goods on display in the shop windows. If anyone who knew me had seen me then, they would certainly have thought I was intent on picking up some man. But, truly, nothing could have been further from my thoughts. I might have let some man I liked the look of stop me, but not for money, only out of an impulse of gaiety, an exuberance for life. But the few men who came up to me with the usual phrases and offers of company, when they saw me standing still and looking in at the shop windows, had nothing that attracted me about them. So I made no reply, did not even look at them, and continued to walk along the pavement with my usual lazy, majestic gait as if they did not even exist.

  The sight of the church where I had been to confession before, after the trip to Viterbo, caught me unaware, in this gay and absent mood. The baroque facade of the church, standing there as it did between the movie posters and the hosier’s window, which were both brilliantly lit, sunk in darkness and set like a folding screen in an indentation of the street, its high pediment topped by two trumpeting angels and streaked with violet reflections from the luminous sign on a neighboring house, seemed to me like the dark, wrinkled face of an old woman beckoning to me confidentially from the shadow of an old shawl, among the other, lighted faces of the other passersby. I remembered the handsome French confessor, Father Elia, and how I had been attracted by him, and I thought no one could perform the task of returning the compact better than he, for he was young, intelligent, and a man of the world, different in every way from other priests. Besides, Father Elia already knew me, in a way, and so I would find it easier to confess to him the many terrible, shameful things that weighed so heavily upon my soul.

  I climbed the steps, pushed aside the heavy covering over the door, and entered, putting a handkerchief on my head. While I dipped my fingers in the holy water stoup, I was struck by a scene carved around the edge of the stoup — it showed a naked woman, her hair streaming in the wind, her arms raised as she fled, pursued by a foul dragon, with a parrot’s beak, that was standing upright on its hind legs like a man. I seemed to recognize myself in that woman and thought how I, too, was fleeing just such a dragon, that the course of my flight was circular, like hers, but that as I ran around in circles, I sometimes found I was not fleeing but was following a desire and gaily pursuing the ugly beast. I turned from the holy water stoup to the church as I crossed myself, and it seemed to me to have remained in the same darkness, squalor, and disorder I had noticed the last time I had seen it. Everything lay in darkness, as then, except the high altar with all its candles burning closely around the crucifix in a confused glitter of brass candlesticks and silver vases. The chapel dedicated to the Madonna, where I had prayed so fervently and uselessly, was also illuminated. Two vergers were standing on ladders fixing gold-fringed red hangings to the architrave. I found that Father Elia’s confessional was engaged, so I went and knelt down in front of the high altar on one of the displaced straw-bottomed chairs. I was not at all moved, but merely impatient to settle the matter of the compact. My impatience had something peculiar about it, it was gay, impetuous, self-congratulatory and rather vain, the kind you feel when you are on the point of doing some good deed you have been contemplating for a long time. I have often noticed that this kind of impatience, which springs from the heart and is deaf to the counsel of intelligence, usually ends by compromising the good deed and often doing greater harm than would more calculated behavior.

  As soon as I saw the person who was confessing get up and go away, I went straight to the confessional, knelt down, and began to speak quickly, without waiting for the confessor to address me. “Father Elia,” I said, “I have not come to make my confession in the usual sense. I have come to speak to you of a very serious matter and to ask you a favor I am sure you will not refuse.”

  The confessor’s low voice on the other side of the grill invited me to proceed. I was so sure Father Elia was on the other side that I almost imagined I could see his calm, handsome face outlined against the dark grill pierced with littl
e holes. Then, for the first time since I had entered the church, an impulse of devout and trusting emotion swept over me. It was as though my soul felt impelled to free itself from my body and kneel down naked on the steps before the grill, with all its stains exposed. I felt for a moment as if I were a disembodied spirit, free, formed of light and air, as they say we are after death. And I imagined, too, that Father Elia, whose spirit was so much more luminous than mine, had broken free of the prison of the flesh and had caused the grill, the walls, and the darkness of the confessional to vanish and stood there in person before me, dazzling and comforting. Perhaps this is the emotion we ought to feel every time we kneel down to confess. But I had never felt it so intensely before.

  I began to speak with my eyes closed, leaning my head against the grill. And I told him everything. I told him of my profession, of Gino, Astarita, Sonzogno, of the theft and the murder. I told him my name, Gino’s, Astarita’s, and Sonzogno’s. I told him where the theft and the murder had taken place, told him where I lived. I even described what the different people looked like. I do not know what impulse swept me along. Perhaps it was the same impulse that a housewife feels when she finally decides to clean up her house after a long period of neglect and is unable to rest until she has swept away the last speck of dust, the last bit of fluff under the furniture or in the corners. And, in fact, as I went on telling my tale in all its particulars, I felt as if I were unburdening my heart and soul and felt lighter and cleaner.

  I spoke in the same quiet, reasonable voice the whole time. The confessor listened to me without interruption to the very end. When I stopped a moment’s silence ensued. Then I heard a dreadful, slow, unctuous, dragging voice address me. “You have told me of terrible, fearful things, my child, the mind finds them hardly credible. But you did well to come to confession — I will do everything that lies in my power for you.”

  A long time had passed since my first and only confession in that church. And in the pleasant turmoil of my self-complacent goodness I had almost forgotten Father Elia’s most pleasing characteristic — his French pronunciation. The priest who was addressing me had no special accent, but he was undoubtedly Italian and had the peculiarly oily voice you hear in the mouths of so many priests. I suddenly realized the mistake I had made and an icy shudder ran through me — as if my fingertips had encountered the cold, quivering scales of a serpent when I had confidently stretched out my hand to pluck a lovely flower. The unpleasant surprise of being faced with a confessor I had not expected was enhanced by the sense of horror his dark, insinuating voice aroused in me.

  “Are you really Father Elia?” I stammered with an effort.

  “Himself in person,” replied the unknown priest. “Why? Have you been here before?”

  “Once before.”

  The priest was silent for a moment. “Everything you have told me should really be reconsidered point by point. You have told me not one, but many things, some of which concern yourself, and some other people. As far as you are concerned — do you understand that you have sinned grievously?”

  “Yes, I know,” I murmured.

  “And do you repent?”

  “I believe I do.”

  “If you are sincere in your repentance,” he began, speaking in a confiding, paternal undertone, “you may certainly hope for absolution. Unfortunately you are not the only one.… There are the others, the crimes and faults of the others. You have come to know a terrible criminal: a man has been murdered in the most hideous way! Do you feel no impulse in your conscience to reveal the criminal’s name and bring him to justice?”

  In this way he suggested that I should denounce Sonzogno. I do not say he was wrong, as a priest. But the proposal, made in that insinuating voice and at just that time, only increased my doubts and fears. “If I say who did it,” I stammered, “I’ll be put in jail myself.”

  His reply was immediate. “Men, like God himself, will be capable of appreciating your sacrifice and repentance. The law both punishes and forgives. But in exchange for a little suffering, so slight when compared to the agonies of the victim, you would have helped to reestablish justice, which has been so foully offended. Oh, do you not hear the voice of the victim vainly beseeching his murderer for mercy?”

  He continued to exhort me, choosing his words carefully and complacently from the conventional phrases proper to his office. But my only desire now was to get away, I felt almost hysterical.

  “I need to think about denouncing him,” I said hurriedly. “I’ll come back tomorrow and tell you what I’ve decided. Will I find you here tomorrow?”

  “Certainly, at any time.”

  “All right,” I said dazedly. “All I ask of you for the time being is to hand over this object.” I stopped speaking, and after a short prayer he asked me once more if I had really repented and determined to change my way of life, then he gave me absolution. I crossed myself and left the confessional. At the same time he opened his door and stood before me. All the fears his voice had inspired in me were confirmed immediately at the sight of him. He was short, with a huge head that hung sideways as if he had a perpetual stiff neck. I did not have time to examine him thoroughly, I was in such a hurry to escape and he filled me with such horror. I glimpsed a brownish yellow face, a pale, high forehead, eyes sunk deep in their orbits, a flattened nose with wide nostrils, and a large shapeless mouth with purplish, sinuous lips. He was probably not old, he was simply ageless. Clasping his hands on his breast and shaking his head he addressed me in heartfelt tones. “But why, my dear child, did you not come to me sooner? Why? How many terrible things you would have been spared.”

  I wanted to tell him what I was thinking: that God would never have wanted me to come like this, but I restrained myself, and taking the compact from my purse I gave it to him. “Please be as quick as you can,” I said earnestly. “I can’t tell you how the thought of that poor woman in jail on my account torments me.”

  “I’ll go this very day,” he replied, as he clasped the compact to his breast and shook his head with a deprecatory and aggrieved air.

  I thanked him in a low voice, and having nodded to him I left the church as quickly as I could. He remained standing where he was beside the confessional, clasping his hands to his breast and shaking his head.

  Out on the street, I tried to think more coolly about what had happened. Now that I had shaken off my first confused terrors, I realized that what I was most afraid of was that the priest would not respect the seal of the confessional, and I tried to clarify to myself what grounds I might have for my fears. I knew, like everybody else, that confession is a sacrament and is therefore inviolable. I also knew it was impossible for any priest, no matter how corrupt he might be, to violate it. But his advice to me to denounce Sonzogno to the police made me fear he might take it upon himself, since I had not done so, to reveal the name of the perpetrator of the crime in Via Palestro. His voice and appearance, however, caused me the gravest fears. I am emotional rather than reflective and I have an instinct for danger, like some animals. All the reasons my mind marshaled to reassure me were nothing in comparison with my unreasoned presentiment. It’s true that the seal of the confessional is inviolable, I thought, but only a miracle can prevent that priest from denouncing Sonzogno, me, and all the others.

  Something else helped to give me the sensation of some mysterious and impending disaster: the substitution of the second confessor for the first. Obviously the French monk was not Father Elia, although he had listened to me in the confessional that bore that name. Who was he then? I was sorry I had not asked the real Father Elia for news of him. But I was half afraid the ugly priest would tell me he knew nothing of him, confirming the apparitional aspect the figure of the young monk was assuming in my mind. There really was something of the phantom about him, both because he was so utterly different from other priests and because of the way he had appeared in my life and had then vanished. I actually began to doubt whether I had ever seen him, or, rather, whether I had
ever seen him in the flesh, and I imagined for a moment that I might have had an hallucination. Because I now discovered in him an undeniable resemblance to Christ himself, as he is usually portrayed in sacred paintings. But if this were true, if Christ himself had appeared to me in my hour of sorrow and had heard my confession, his substitution by the sordid, repellent priest I had just seen clearly boded ill. It meant, if nothing else, that religion had abandoned me at the moment of my greatest spiritual anguish. It was like opening a safe containing a treasure of gold coins, in order to meet the most urgent need, and finding instead only dust, cobwebs, and the excrement of mice.

  I returned home with this presentiment that some misfortune would surely result from my confession and went straight to bed, without supper, convinced that this would be my last night at home before being arrested. But I must say that I was not at all afraid now and had no desire to avoid my fate. My initial terror, born of a nervous weakness common to nearly all women, had yielded to something more than mere resignation, a determined desire to accept the destiny that threatened me. I felt a kind of voluptuous delight, in fact, in letting myself sink to the depths of what I imagined must be the last stage of despair. I felt protected, in a sense, by the excess of my misfortune; and I found a certain pleasure in the thought that nothing worse could happen to me except death, which I no longer feared.

  But next day I waited in vain for the expected visit from the police. That whole day and the next passed without anything occurring to justify my apprehension. During this whole time I never left the house, or even my room, and I soon tired of thinking over the consequences of my rashness. I began to think about Giacomo again and realized I was longing to see him at least once more, before the priest’s denunciation, which I now considered inevitable, took effect. Toward evening on the third day I got up, dressed carefully, and left the house.