The Woman of Rome (Italia)

by Alberto Moravia

  I have always slept well and deeply. Sleep for me is like an appetite, easily satisfied without any particular effort or interruption. So when I woke up the next morning, I was almost surprised at first to find myself in Zelinda’s room, stretched out in that bed, in a ray of sunshine that had slipped through the shutters and fallen onto the pillow and the wall. I had hardly realized where I was when I heard the phone ring in the hallway. Zelinda answered, I heard her say my name, and then she knocked at the door. I leaped out of bed and ran to the door as I was, in my nightgown and bare feet.

  The hall was empty, the receiver lay on a ledge, and Zelinda had gone back into the kitchen. I heard Mother’s voice at the other end of the line, asking:

  “Is that you, Adriana?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why did you go away? Things have been happening here.… You might at least have warned me.… Oh, what a scare!”

  “Yes, I know all about it,” I said hurriedly. “It’s no use talking about it.”

  “I was so worried about you,” she went on, “and then there’s Signor Diodati.”

  “Signor Diodati?”

  “Yes, he came over very early this morning. He wants to see you urgently. He says he’ll wait here.”

  “Tell him I’ll be there right away. Tell him I’ll be there in a minute.”

  I hung up the phone, ran into my room, and dressed as quickly as I could. I had not even hoped for Mino to be set free so quickly, and I felt less happy than I would have if I had waited for his liberation for a few days or a week. I mistrusted such a speedy release, and could not help feeling vaguely apprehensive. Every fact has a meaning, and I was unable to grasp the meaning of that premature return to freedom. But I calmed down when I thought that possibly Astarita had managed to have him set free immediately as he had promised. In any case, I was impatient to see him again, and my impatience was a joyful sensation, although it was also painful.

  I finished dressing, put the cigarettes, almond sweets, and candies, which I had not touched the evening before, into my purse so as not to hurt Zelinda’s feelings, and went into the kitchen to say good-bye to her.

  “Feeling more cheerful?” she said. “Got over your bad mood?”

  “I was tired. Good-bye, then.”

  “Now, now! Do you think I didn’t hear you on the telephone? Signor Diodati, eh? Here, wait a minute — have a cup of coffee.” She was still talking when I was already out of the apartment.

  Perched on the edge of the seat in the taxi, with my hands gripping my purse, I was ready to leap out as soon as it stopped; I was afraid I would find a crowd in front of the house on account of Sonzogno’s shoot-out. I even wondered whether it was wise to go home — Sonzogno might turn up to carry out his vendetta. But I realized I did not care. If Sonzogno wanted to take his revenge on me, he could. I longed to see Mino and was determined I would never hide myself again for something I had not done.

  At home I met no one at the street door and no one on the stairs. I rushed into the living room and saw Mother sitting at the sewing machine by the window. The sun poured in through the dirty windowpanes, the cat was sitting on the table licking its paws. Mother stopped sewing immediately. “So here you are, back at last” she said. “You might at least have told me you’d gone out to get the police!”

  “What police? What do you mean?”

  “I’d have gone with you — if you only knew how frightened I was.”

  “But I didn’t go out to get the police,” I said irritably. “I went out, that’s all. The police were looking for someone else. That man must have had something on his conscience.”

  “So you won’t even tell me,” she said, giving me a look of maternal reproach.

  “Tell you what?”

  “It’s not like I’ll go around talking about it — but you’ll never get me to believe you went out like that for nothing … and, in fact, the police came just a few minutes after you’d left.”

  “But it isn’t true, I —”

  “You were right to go, anyway. There are some terrible people around here. Do you know what one of the policemen said? ‘I’ve seen that face before,’ he said.”

  I saw that there was no way of convincing her; she thought I had gone out to denounce Sonzogno and there was nothing I could do about it. “All right, all right,” I interrupted her brusquely. “What about the wounded man? How did they take him away?”

  “What wounded man?”

  “They told me a man was dying.…”

  “No, no, they told you wrong. One of the policemen got his arm grazed by a bullet. I bandaged it up for him myself. But he went away on his own two legs. Still, if you’d heard the shots! They were shooting on the stairs. The whole house was in an uproar. Then they questioned me, but I said I didn’t know anything.”

  “Where is Signor Diodati?”

  “In your room.”

  I had lingered with Mother for a little while because I now felt almost reluctant to go in to Mino, as though I anticipated some bad news. I left the living room and went toward my bedroom. It was plunged in utter darkness, but even before I put my hand out to the switch, I heard Mino’s voice say out of the dark, “I beg you not to turn the light on.”

  The peculiar tone of his voice struck me; it did not sound at all cheerful. I shut the door, groped my way to the bed, sat down on the edge of it. I could feel he was lying on his side close to where I was sitting. “Don’t you feel well?” I asked him.

  “I feel fine.”

  “Aren’t you tired?”

  “No, I’m not tired.”

  I had expected quite a different kind of meeting. But it is a fact that joy and light are inseparable. In the dark like that my eyes seemed unable to sparkle, my voice was incapable of breaking into exclamations of joy, my hands could not reach out to recognize his beloved features. I waited for some time. “What do you want to do?” I asked him then as I bent toward him. “Do you want to go to sleep?”

  “No.”

  “Do you want me to go away?”

  “No.”

  “Do you want me to stay here beside you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you want me to lie on the bed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you want to make love?” I asked randomly.

  “Yes.”

  This reply was a surprise to me, because, as I have already said, he never really felt inclined to make love to me. I suddenly felt myself growing excited. “Do you like to make love with me?” I asked him in a soft, inviting tone.

  “Yes.”

  “Will you always like it from now on?”

  “Yes.”

  “And will we always be together?”

  “Yes.”

  “Don’t you want me to turn the light on?”

  “No.”

  “I doesn’t matter; I’ll get undressed in the dark.”

  I began to undress with the intoxicating sensation of having won a complete victory. I imagined that the night he had spent in prison had unexpectedly shown him that he loved me and needed me. I was wrong, as I shall relate; and although I was right in thinking that there was a connection between his arrest and his sudden surrender, I did not understand that this change in his attitude held nothing complimentary or even encouraging in it for me. On the other hand, it would have been difficult to be so clear-sighted at that moment. My body urged me impetuously toward him, like a horse that has been curbed too long, and I was impatient to give him the ardent, joyous welcome his attitude and the darkness had prevented me giving him earlier.

  But when I drew close to him and bent over the bed to stretch myself beside him, I suddenly felt him grip my knees with his arms and then bite me so savagely on the left hip that it bled. I felt an acute spasm of pain and at the same time the precise sensation that the bite expressed some indefinable despair he was experiencing. It was as though, rather than being two lovers about to make love, we were two of the damned driven by hatred, rage, and sorrow to bury our teeth
in one another’s flesh in the depths of some new kind of hell. The bite seemed endless — it was really as though he wanted to tear out a piece of my flesh with his teeth. At last, although I half wanted him to bite me, liked him biting me, even sensing that there was little love in it, I could not stand the pain any longer and I pushed him away. “No, no,”-I said in a humble, broken voice, “what are you doing? You’re hurting me —”

  And so, almost immediately, my illusion of victory came to an end. After this, we said not one word more all the time we were making love; nevertheless from his actions I was able to guess dimly the true significance of his abandonment, which he later explained to me in detail. I understood that until that moment he had wanted not so much to ignore me as to ignore that part of himself that desired me; now, instead, he was giving this part of himself free rein, whereas before he had fought against it — that was all. I had nothing to do with it, and he loved me no more now than he had done before. It was all the same to him whether he had me or someone else, and, as before, I was nothing more than a means he adopted to punish or reward himself. I was not so much conscious of thinking these things while we lay in the dark together, as of feeling them in my flesh and my blood, just as some time before I had sensed the fact that Sonzogno was a monster although I had known nothing of his crime. But I loved him; and my love was stronger than my knowledge.

  Still, I was amazed at the violence and insatiability of his desire, which had once been so grudging. I had always thought that he restrained himself for reasons of health, since he was delicate. So, when he began all over again for the third time when he had just that moment taken his pleasure of me, I could not help whispering to him, “For me, go ahead … but watch out you don’t hurt yourself.”

  I thought I heard him laugh and I heard his voice murmuring in my ear, “Nothing can ever hurt me now.”

  That “ever” gave me a tragic feeling and so that the pleasure I felt in his embraces was almost destroyed, and I waited impatiently for the moment when I could talk to him and finally find out what had actually happened. After we had finished making love, he seemed to drop off but perhaps he did not really sleep. I waited for a reasonable length of time before speaking to him. “And now tell me what happened,” I said in a low voice, with an effort that made my heart miss a beat.

  “Nothing happened.”

  “But something must have happened.”

  He was silent for a moment and then spoke as if to himself. “After all, I suppose you’ll have to know, too. Well, this is what happened. At eleven o’clock last night I became a traitor.”

  An icy chill gripped me at these words, not so much on account of the words themselves as for the tone in which he uttered them. “A traitor?” I stammered. “Why?”

  He replied in his cold and grimly humorous tone, “Signor Mino, among the comrades of his political faith, was known for the intransigence of his opinions and the violence of his resentments — Signor Mino was actually considered by them as their future leader — Signor Mino was so sure that he would do himself credit in any circumstances that he almost hoped he would be arrested and put to the test — because, you see, Signor Mino thought that arrest, imprisonment, and other sufferings are essential to the life of a political man, just as long cruises, hurricanes, and shipwrecks form part of the life of a sailor. But instead, at the first heavy seas the sailor felt as sick as the basest, most stupid woman … Signor Mino no sooner found himself in the presence of an ordinary little policeman than he blurted everything out without even waiting to be threatened or tortured — in other words, he’s a traitor. So since yesterday Signor Mino said good-bye to his political career and entered upon that of — shall we say informer?”

  “You were afraid!” I exclaimed.

  “No,” he answered immediately. “Perhaps I wasn’t even afraid. Only the same thing happened to me as happened that evening I was with you — when you wanted me to explain my ideas to you. Suddenly nothing seemed to matter at all. I almost took a liking to the man who was questioning me. He wanted to know certain things; at the moment, I didn’t care about concealing them from him and I told him what he wanted to know. Quite simply, like I’m talking to you now, or,” he added after a moment of reflection, “not so simply … with solicitude, eagerness, with zeal, you might say. A little more, and he would have had to moderate my enthusiasm.”

  I thought of Astarita and I found it strange that Mino should have taken a liking to him. “Who questioned you?” I asked.

  “I don’t know him. A young man with a sallow face, bald head, black eyes, very well dressed. He must have been one of the high-ups.”

  “And you liked him!” I could not help exclaiming, since I recognized Astarita from the description.

  Mino began to laugh in the dark with his mouth on my ear. “Slow down … not him personally, but his position. You know — when you give up being what you know you ought to be, or don’t even know what you ought to be, what you really are comes to the surface. And am I the son of a rich landowner or not? And wasn’t that man actually protecting my interests, by doing his job? We recognized that we belonged to the same race, that we were united in the same cause. What did you think? That I liked him for himself? No, no. I liked his function — I realized that it was I who was paying him; that it was he who defended me; I who stood behind him as a master, even as I stood facing him as the accused.”

  He laughed, or rather, gave a coughing sort of laugh that grated horribly on my ears. I understood nothing except that something very tragic had happened and that my whole life was once more in question. “But perhaps I’m doing myself an injustice,” he added after a moment, “and I only talked because it didn’t matter to me not to talk — because everything suddenly seemed absurd and unimportant and I didn’t understand any of the things I ought to have believed in anymore.”

  “You didn’t understand anything anymore?” I repeated mechanically.

  “No, or rather, I only understood the words themselves, as I would understand them now, but not the facts underlying them. Now how can you suffer for words? Words are sounds; it would have been like going to prison for the braying of an ass or the creaking of a wheel. Words no longer had any value for me, they seemed all alike and all absurd. He wanted words and I gave them to him, as many as he wanted.”

  “Well, then,” I could not help objecting, “since they were only words, what does it matter?”

  “Yes, but unfortunately, as soon as I’d pronounced them, they ceased to be mere words and became facts.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I began to suffer. Because I was sorry I had said them. Because I realized, I felt, that in saying those words I had become myself that fact which is known by the word traitor.”

  “But why did you say them, then?”

  “Why do people talk in their sleep?” he said slowly. “Perhaps I was asleep. But now I’ve woken up.”

  And so he went around and around but always returned to the same point. I felt cruelly pierced to the heart. “But maybe you’re mistaken,” I said with an effort. “Maybe you think you said all sorts of things, when actually you didn’t say a thing.”

  “No, I’m not mistaken,” he said briefly.

  I was silent for a moment. “What about your friends?” I asked him.

  “What friends?”

  “Tullio and Tommaso.”

  “I don’t know anything about them,” he said, with a kind of ostentatious indifference. “They’ll be arrested.”

  “No, they won’t be arrested!” I exclaimed. I thought Astarita certainly would not have taken advantage of Mino’s momentary weakness. But at the idea of his two friends being arrested, the gravity of the whole matter began to dawn on me.

  “Why not?” he said. “I gave their names. There’s no reason why they shouldn’t be arrested.”

  “Oh, Mino,” I could not help exclaiming painfully. “Why did you do this?”

  “That’s what I keep on asking myself.”

/>   “But if they aren’t arrested,” I went on after a moment, clinging to the only hope I had left, “nothing is irreparable. They’ll never know that you —”

  “Yes, but I know it!” he interrupted me. “I’ll always know it. I’ll always know that I’m not the same person as I was but someone else, someone I gave birth to the moment I talked as surely as a mother gives birth to her child. But unfortunately, it’s not a person I like, that’s the trouble. Some men kill their wives because they can’t bear to live with them. Now think what it’s like to be two people in one body, when one of them hates the other to death. Anyway, about my friends … they’ll arrest them for sure.”

  I could not restrain myself any longer. “Even if you’d never spoken,” I said, “you’d have been released all the same. And your friends aren’t in any danger.” Then I hurriedly told him the story of my relationship with Astarita, my intervention on his behalf, and Astarita’s promise. He listened to me in silence. “Better and better!” he said at last. “So I don’t owe my release only to my zeal as an informer, but also to your love affair with a policeman.”

  “Don’t talk like that, Mino!”

  “But anyway,” he added after a moment, “I’m glad my friends will make out — at least I won’t have this other remorse on my conscience, too.”

  “Look,” I said eagerly, “what’s the difference now between you and your friends? They owe their freedom to me, too, and to the fact that Astarita’s in love with me.”

  “Pardon. There is a difference. They haven’t talked.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I hope not, for their sakes. But anyway in this case, sharing the burden doesn’t lighten the load.”