The Woman of Rome (Italia)

by Alberto Moravia

  “And then,” he said, as if speaking to himself, “I’m so tired of living alone. When you live alone, you end up doing something crazy.”

  After a moment’s silence I spoke again. “I can’t say yes or no point-blank like this,”-I said. “Give me time to think it over.”

  “Think it over, think it over,”-he said to my astonishment, clenching his teeth. “There’s no hurry.” Then he left my side and continued undressing.

  I had been struck chiefly by the phrase, “We’re made for each other,” and I asked myself now whether he was not right, after all. What could I hope for now but a man like him? And was it not true that a hidden bond, which I recognized and feared, existed between us? I found I was repeating submissively to myself the words, “Run away, run away —” and shaking my head despondently.

  “Milan?” I said in a clear voice that filled my mouth with saliva. “Aren’t you afraid they’ll be looking for you?”

  “I just said that … Actually they don’t even know I exist.”

  The weakness that had weighed down my limbs suddenly vanished and I felt strong and very determined. I stood up, took off my coat, and went to hang it on the coatrack. As usual, I turned the key in the lock and then walked slowly over to the window to close the shutters. Then standing straight in front of the mirror, I began to unbutton my bodice from the bottom up. But I stopped almost immediately and turned toward Sonzogno. He was sitting on the edge of the bed and was bending over to untie his shoelaces. “Just a minute,” I said with assumed casualness, “someone was supposed to be coming this evening; I must go and warn Mother to send him away.” He made no reply, had not even time to do so. I left the room, closing the door behind me, and went into the living room.

  Mother was at the sewing machine near the window. She had taken up her work again a while ago to relieve the monotony of her existence. “Call me at Gisella’s or at Zelinda’s,” I said hurriedly, under my breath, “tomorrow morning.” Zelinda rented out rooms in the center of town; I used to go there sometimes with my lovers, and Mother knew her.

  “Why?”

  “I’m going out,” I said. “When that man in there asks about me, tell him you don’t know anything.”

  Mother sat there gaping at me while I pulled down her worn old fur jacket, which had been mine years before, from its hook.

  “Above all, don’t tell him where I’ve gone,” I added. “He’d murder me.”

  “But —”

  “The money’s in the usual place.… Take care, then — don’t tell him anything and phone me tomorrow.” I went out hurriedly, crossed the hall on tiptoe, and began to go downstairs.

  When I was in the street I began to run. I knew that Mino was at home at that time, and I wanted to reach him before he went out with his friends after supper. I ran as far as the square, took a taxi, gave Mino’s address. While the taxi sped along, I suddenly realized that I was fleeing not so much from Sonzogno as from myself, because I felt myself, in some obscure way, to be attracted by that violence and furor. I remembered the piercing cry of mingled horror and delight he had wrung from me the first and only time he had possessed me, and I told myself that on that day he had conquered me once and for all, as no other man had since known how, not even Mino. Yes, I could not help concluding, we really were made for each other, but as the body is made for the precipice that causes its head to spin and its eyes to mist, until it is finally dragged toward the giddy depths.

  I climbed up the stairs two at a time, arriving out of breath, and gave Mino’s name to the elderly maid who came to the door.

  She looked at me with a frightened air; then, without a single word, she hurried away, leaving me on the threshold.

  I thought she had gone to tell Mino, so I went into the hall and closed the door.

  Then I heard a kind of whispering behind the curtain that separated the hall from the passage. The curtain was raised and the widow Medolaghi appeared. I had forgotten her entirely since the first and only time I had ever seen her. As she rose up suddenly before me, her heavy black figure, her deathly white face with the black mask of her eyes filled me with a sense of terror, as if I were in the presence of some frightening apparition. She halted at some distance from me and addressed me.

  “Did you want Signor Diodati?”

  “Yes.”

  “He’s been arrested.”

  I did not understand. I don’t know why, but I imagined his arrest was connected in some way with Sonzogno’s crime. “Arrested!” I stammered. “But he’s got nothing to do with it.”

  “I know nothing about it,” she said. “I only know they came here, searched the house, and arrested him.” I understood from her expression of disgust that she would not tell me anything.

  “But why?” I could not help asking her.

  “Young lady, I’ve already told you I don’t know anything.”

  “Where did they take him?”

  “I don’t know anything.”

  “But tell me at least whether he left any message.”

  This time she did not even reply, but turning away in stiff and offended majesty called out, “Diomira!”

  The old maid with the scared look reappeared. Her mistress pointed to the door, and said, as she raised the curtain and turned to go, “Show the young lady out.” The curtain fell back into its place.

  Only after I had gone downstairs and was out in the street, did I realize that Mino’s arrest and Sonzogno’s crime were two separate facts, independent of one another. The only real link between them was my own fear. This unexpected convergence of misfortunes was proof to me of the lavishness of a destiny that poured out all its tragic gifts for me at once; just as a good season makes all kinds of different fruits ripen together. It is a fact that troubles never come singly, as the proverb says. I felt this, rather than thought it, as I walked from one street to the next, with my head and shoulders bowed under a shower of imaginary hailstones.

  Naturally, the first person I thought of turning to was Astarita. I knew the phone number to his office by heart, so I went into the first café I came across and called him. His number was not busy but no one replied. I dialed several times and at last grew convinced that Astarita was not there. He must have gone out to supper and would be back later. I knew all this, but I had hoped that this time I would find him in his office, as an exception to the rule.

  I looked at my watch. It was eight o’clock in the evening and Astarita would not be back in his office before ten. I stood rigid on a street corner; the curved surface of a bridge lay before me, with its unending flow of pedestrians, alone or in groups, and they rushed toward me, dark and hurrying, like dead leaves driven by a ceaseless wind. But the rows of houses beyond the bridge created an impression of peace, with all their windows lit up and people moving back and forth among the tables and other furniture. It occurred to me that I was not far away from the central police station, where I imagined Mino must have been taken, and although I knew it was a desperate undertaking, I decided to go straight there to ask for news of him. I knew in advance that they would not give me any, but that did not matter; I wanted more than anything to feel that I was doing something for him.

  I followed the side streets, keeping close to the walls, reached the police station, mounted the few steps, and entered. A guard who was leaning back on a chair in the booth by the door, reading a newspaper with his feet on another chair and his cap on the table, asked me where I was going. “Alien’s Office,” I replied. This was one of the many departments at the police station and I had heard Astarita refer to it one time, I do not remember why.

  I did not know where I was going, but I began to climb at random up the dirty, badly lit staircase. I kept on running into clerks or uniformed policemen, who were going upstairs or coming down, their hands full of papers, and I kept close to the wall on the darkest side with my face lowered. On every landing I had a glimpse of low, dark, dirty corridors with people moving to and fro, scanty lighting, open doors, rooms and
rooms. The police station seemed to be like some kind of an extremely busy beehive, but the bees who inhabited it certainly did not alight on flowers, and their honey, of which I was tasting the flavor for the first time in my life, was rank, black, and very bitter.

  When I reached the third floor, I felt so desperate that I chose one of the halls haphazardly. No one looked at me, no one troubled about me. Door after door, mostly open, stood on each side of the corridor and uniformed policemen were sitting in the doorways on straw-bottomed chairs, smoking and chatting. The view inside each room was always the same — shelf upon shelf of files, a table, and a policeman seated behind the table with a pen in his hand. The hall was not straight but curved slightly, so that after a short time I had lost my way. Every now and again it led down into a lower hallway and I had to descend three or four steps — or it crossed over other corridors that were identical in every particular, with their lights, their rows of open doors and policemen seated in the doorways. I felt bewildered. At one point, I had the impression that I was retracing my own steps and was following a corridor I had already gone down once before. A messenger passed by, so I asked him, at random, for the “deputy superintendent” and without speaking he pointed to a dark passage nearby, between two doors. I went toward it, descended four steps and entered a low and extremely narrow little corridor. At the same moment a door opened at the end, where this kind of entrail of a corridor formed a right angle, and two men appeared; they were walking away from from me toward the corner. One of them was holding the other by the wrist and for a moment I thought it was Mino. “Mino!” I cried, and hurled myself forward.

  I did not manage to reach them because someone seized me by the arm. It was a very young policeman with a thin, dark face, his cap perched sideways on a mass of curly, black hair. “Who do you want? Who are you looking for?” he asked me.

  The two men had turned at my cry and I could see I was mistaken. “They’ve arrested my friend —” I panted. “I wanted to know whether he’s been brought here.”

  “What’s his name?” asked the policeman, with an air of peremptory authority and without letting me go.

  “Giacomo Diodati.”

  “What does he do?”

  “He’s a student.”

  “When was he arrested?”

  I suddenly realized he was questioning me in this way to give himself an air of importance and that he knew nothing. “Instead of asking me so many questions,” I replied angrily, “tell me where he is.”

  We were alone in the corridor. He looked around and then pressing close to me whispered in a fatuous tone of understanding, “We’ll go see the student — but give me a kiss in the meantime.”

  “Let me go! Don’t waste my time!” I shouted furiously. I pushed him away, ran off, entered another hallway, and saw an open door and beyond the door a room larger than the others, with a desk at the end where a middle-aged man was seated. I went in. “I want to know where Diodati the student has been taken — he was arrested this afternoon,” I said without pausing to get my breath.

  The man raised his eyes from his desk where a newspaper lay open before him and looked at me in astonishment. “You want to know —”

  “Yes, where Diodati the student, who was arrested this afternoon, has been taken.”

  “But who are you? How dare you come in here?

  “That’s none of your business — just tell me where he is.”

  “Who are you?” he shouted, and hammered with his fist on the table. “How dare you? Do you know where you are?”

  I suddenly realized that I would learn nothing and that I was in danger of being arrested myself, and then I would be unable to talk to Astarita, and Mino would not be set free. “It doesn’t matter,” I said withdrawing. “I made a mistake — I’m sorry.”

  My apologies made him even more furious than the questions that had preceded them. But by now I was near the door. “You make the Fascist salute on entering and leaving this room,” he shouted, as he pointed to a notice that hung above his head. I nodded as if in agreement that it was quite true, one ought to enter and leave the room with the Fascist salute; and I left the room, walking backward. I went back the whole length of the corridor, wandered about for a while, and at last, having found the staircase, I hurried down it. I passed the porter’s booth and came out into the open once more.

  The only result of my visit to the police station was that it had helped some time to pass. I reckoned that if I were to walk very slowly toward Astarita’s Ministry it would take me about three-quarters of an hour, or even an hour. When I got there I could sit in a café near the Ministry and phone Astarita after about twenty minutes, in the hope of finding him in.

  While I was walking along, it occurred to me that Mino’s arrest might be a kind of revenge on Astarita’s part. He held an important position in the branch of the political police force that had arrested Mino; obviously they must have been keeping an eye on Mino for some time and knew of my relations with him. It was not at all unlikely that the papers had passed through Astarita’s hands and that he had given orders for Mino’s arrest out of jealousy. At this thought, a kind of rage against Astarita overwhelmed me. I knew he was still in love with me and I felt quite capable of making him pay bitterly for his cruel deed if my suspicions turned out to be well-founded. But at the same time I realized, with a sense of misgiving, that perhaps this was not the case and that I was preparing, with my feeble weapons, to fight a hidden foe who had no features and whose properties were rather those of an ingenious mechanism than of a sensitive man swayed by his emotions.

  When I reached the Ministry, I gave up the idea of going to sit in a café and went straight to the telephone. This time someone lifted the receiver at the first ring and it was Astarita’s voice that answered me.

  “It’s Adriana,” I said impetuously, “and I want to see you.”

  “At once?”

  “Yes, immediately, it’s urgent. I’m down here outside the Ministry.”

  He paused to think for a moment, then said I could come. This was the second time I had climbed the stairs in Astarita’s Ministry, but I now did so in a very different state of mind from the first time. Then I had been afraid Astarita might blackmail me, afraid that he might upset my marriage with Gino, afraid of the vague threat all poor people feel hanging over them where the police are concerned. I had gone there with a tremulous heart, a quivering spirit. Now, on the contrary, I was going there in an aggressive mood, with the idea of blackmailing Astarita in my turn, determined to use every means in my power to get Mino back. But my aggressiveness could not be explained solely by my love for Mino. My scorn for Astarita formed part of it, too — and my scorn for his Ministry, for politics, and for Mino himself, inasmuch as he troubled himself with politics. I understood nothing at all about politics, but perhaps it was this very ignorance of mine that made politics seem a ridiculous, unimportant thing compared with my love for Mino. I remembered the way Astarita’s speech was impeded by his stammer every time he saw me, or even when he only heard my voice, and I thought complacently that he certainly did not stammer when he faced one of his chiefs, even if it was Mussolini himself. With these thoughts in my mind, I hurried along the huge corridors of the Ministry and noticed I was looking scornfully at all the clerks I happened to meet. I longed to snatch the red and green folders they were squeezing under their arms and throw them away, to scatter to the winds all their papers full of prohibitions and iniquity.

  “I have to speak to Dr. Astarita at once — I have an appointment and can’t wait,” I said imperiously to the receptionist who came toward me in the anteroom. He looked at me in amazement but did not dare to protest and went to announce me.

  As soon as Astarita saw me, he hurried forward, kissed my hand, and led me toward a divan at the end of the room. This was the way he had greeted me the first time, too, and I suppose it was the way he behaved to all the women who came to his office. I restrained the surge of anger that I felt swelling within
me as well as I could. “Look,” I said, “if you’ve had Mino arrested — have him set free at once. Otherwise you can count on never seeing me again.”

  An expression of profound astonishment mixed with unpleasant reflection colored his face, and I realized he knew nothing. “Just a moment — what the … What Mino?” he stuttered.

  “I thought you knew about it,” I said. And then I told him, as briefly as possible, the whole story of my love for Mino and how he had been arrested at his house that afternoon. I saw him change color when I said I loved Mino, but I preferred to tell him the truth, not only because I was afraid of harming Mino if I lied, but also because I longed to proclaim my love to the whole world. Now, after discovering that Astarita had had nothing to do with Mino’s arrest, the rage that had sustained me collapsed, and I felt utterly weak and disarmed once again. So although I began my tale in a firm, excited voice, I ended it in tears. In fact, my eyes were overflowing. “I don’t know what they’ll do to him,” I said in anguish. “He says they beat them —”

  Astarita interrupted me immediately. “Don’t worry. If he were a workingman … but since he’s a student —”

  “But I don’t want … I don’t want him to be locked up!” I cried tearfully.

  Then we were both silent. I tried to master my emotion and Astarita looked at me. For the first time he seemed reluctant to do me the favor I was asking him. But his unwillingness to satisfy me must have been due in part to his disappointment at finding that I was in love with another man. “If you get him out,” I said, as I placed my hand over his, “I promise I’ll do anything you want.”

  He looked at me irresolutely, and although my heart was not in it I bent forward and offered him my lips. “Well — will you do me this favor?” I asked.

  He gazed at me, torn between the temptation to kiss me and his consciousness of the humiliating significance of that kiss, offered by my tear-stained face as a bribe. Then he pushed me away, leaped to his feet, told me to wait, and disappeared.