The Woman of Rome (Italia)

by Alberto Moravia

  “But just act like nothing happened,” I insisted again. “Go back and see them, without saying anything. What does it matter to you? Anyone can have a moment’s weakness.”

  “Yes,” he replied, “but not everyone can die and still go on living. Do you know what happened to me in that instant when I spoke? I died — just died. Died forever.”

  I could no longer bear the anguish that wrung my heart and I burst into tears. “Why are you crying?” he asked.

  “Because of what you’re saying,” I answered, sobbing harder than ever. “That you’re dead. I’m so frightened.”

  “Don’t you like being with a dead man?” he asked jokingly. “It’s not as dreadful as it seems. In fact, it isn’t dreadful at all. I died in a very special way. My body’s still very much alive. Feel if I’m not alive,” and he took my hand and made me touch his body. “You can feel I’m alive.” He pulled on my hand, forcing me to press it against him, and finally pulled it down to his groin and crushed it against his penis. “I’m alive all over … as far as you’re concerned as you can see for yourself, I’m more alive than ever-.-.-. don’t worry, if we didn’t make love much while I was still alive, we’ll make up for it thoroughly now that I’m dead.”

  He flung my limp hand away from him with a kind of angry disdain. I put both hands to my face and gave way noisily to my misery and pain. I wanted to cry forever, to go on crying endlessly, because I was afraid of the moment when I would stop weeping and would be left empty, dazed, and still confronted by the unchanged situation that had provoked my outburst. The moment came, however, and I dried my wet face with the sheet and stared into the darkness with wide-open eyes. Then I heard him ask me in a gentle, affectionate voice. “Let’s see what you think I ought to do,” he asked.

  I turned around violently, clung to him as hard as I could, and spoke with my mouth on his. “Don’t think about it anymore. Don’t worry about it anymore. What’s done is done. That’s what you ought to do.”

  “And then?”

  “And then begin studying again. Get your degree. And after that go back to your own hometown. I don’t mind if I don’t see you again, as long as I know you’re happy. Get a job, and when the time comes, marry a girl from that part of the world, a girl who loves you, a girl of your own class. What have you got to do with politics? You weren’t made for politics, you were wrong ever to take it up. It was a mistake, but everyone makes mistakes. One day you’ll think it strange that you ever thought about it at all. I really do love you, Mino. Another woman in my place wouldn’t want you to leave, but if it’s necessary, go away tomorrow. If you think it’s best, we’ll never see each other again. As long as you’re happy —”

  “But I’ll never be happy again,” he said in a clear, very deep voice. “I’m an informer.”

  “It’s not true!” I answered in exasperation. “You’re not an informer at all. And even if you were, you could be happy all the same! There are people who have committed actual crimes and are still perfectly happy. Take me, for example. When people say ‘whore,’ who knows what they imagine. But I’m a woman like any other, and I’m often even happy. I was so happy these past few days,” I added bitterly.

  “You were happy?”

  “Yes, very. But I knew it couldn’t last. And, in fact —” at these words I felt like crying again, but I controlled myself — “you imagined yourself to be someone completely different from who you really are. And then we know what happened. Now you must accept yourself as you really are, and everything will fall into place. What’s making you so unhappy over what happened is the fact that you feel ashamed, and are afraid of what other people, your friends, will think. Give up seeing them then, see other people; the world’s a big place! If they aren’t fond enough of you to understand it was only a moment’s weakness, stay with me. I love you and understand you and I don’t judge you — really,” I exclaimed forcefully at this stage, “even if you had done something a thousand time worse, you’d still be my Mino.”

  He kept silent. “I’m only a poor, ignorant girl, I know,” I went on, “but I understand some things better than your friends and better even than you. I’ve had just the same feeling as you have now. The first time we met and you didn’t touch me, I got it into my head that it was because you despised me, and I felt so unhappy, I suddenly lost all desire to go on living. I wanted to be someone else and at the same time I realized that was impossible and that I’d have to go on being what I was. I felt a sticky, burning kind of shame, a despair, a heartsickness. I felt shriveled, frozen, bound hand and foot. I even thought I wanted to die.… Then one day I went out with Mother and we happened to go into a church and there, as I prayed, I felt I understood that I had nothing to be ashamed of after all. That if I was made as I was, it meant it was the will of God; that I ought not to rebel against my fate but accept it submissively and trustfully, and that if you despised me it was your fault and not mine. In fact, I thought a great many things and at last my humiliation passed and I felt gay and lighthearted again.”

  He began to laugh with that laugh of his that froze me. “So you’re saying,” he answered, “that I ought to accept what I’ve done and not struggle against it. I ought to accept what I’ve become and not judge myself. Well, maybe such things can happen in church, but out of church —”

  “Go to church, then,” I suggested, clinging to this new hope.

  “No, I won’t. I don’t believe in it and I’m just bored in church. Besides — what crazy talk!” He began to laugh again but suddenly stopped short and, seizing me by the shoulders, started to shake me violently. “Don’t you understand what I’ve done?” he shouted. “Don’t you understand? Don’t you understand?” He shook me so hard that he made me lose my breath before hurling me backward with one final outburst, and then I heard him leap out of bed and begin to dress in the dark. “Don’t turn the light on,” he said in a menacing tone. “I’ve got to get used to being looked at in the face. But it’s too soon yet. It’ll go hard with you if you switch the light on.”

  I did not even dare to breathe. “Are you going?” I asked him at last.

  “Yes, but I’ll come back,” he said, and I thought he laughed again. “Don’t be afraid. I’ll come back. What’s more, here’s a piece of good news for you — I’ll come and live here with you.”

  “Here with me?”

  “Yes, but I won’t bother you. You’ll be able to carry on with your usual life. Actually, though,” he went on, “we could both live on what my family sends me. I was paying full board, but it would be enough for the two of us, living at home.”

  I found the idea that he might come and live with me more strange than pleasurable. But I did not dare say anything. He finished dressing in silence in the pitch dark. “I’ll be back tonight,” he then said. I heard him open the door, go out, and shut the door. I lay there in the dark, my eyes wide open.

  10

  T HAT VERY AFTERNOON I followed Astarita’s advice and went to the local police station to make a statement about Sonzogno’s case. I hated to go, because after what had happened to Mino anything that was remotely connected with the police inspired me with mortal dread. But by now I was almost resigned: I realized that life had lost almost all its savor for me for some time to come.

  “We expected you this morning,” said the commissioner of police as soon as I had told him the reason for my visit. He was a good man — I had known him for some time — and although he was the father of a family and over fifty years old, I had sensed much earlier that his feelings for me were more than friendly. What stands out in my memory of him is his nose, large and spongy, melancholy of expression. His hair was always disheveled and his eyes always half shut, as if he had only just got out of bed. These eyes, of a vivid blue, seemed to be peeping out from behind a mask; his thick, pink, wrinkled face was like the skin of those huge oranges, the last of the season, which contain nothing but a shriveled core.

  I said I had been unable to come sooner. The blue e
yes behind the orange-peel skin of his face looked at me for a moment and then he addressed me confidentially. “Well, what’s his name?”

  “How should I know?”

  “Come on, of course you know.”

  “Word of honor,” I said with my hand on my heart. “He stopped me in the Corso — I remember thinking there was something strange about him, but I didn’t take any notice.”

  “But how was it you left him alone in your room?”

  “I had an urgent appointment, so I left him.”

  “But he thought you’d gone out to call the police. Did you know that? And he shouted out that you’d turned him in.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “And that he’d pay you back.”

  “So what?”

  “But don’t you realize he’s a dangerous man,” he added, looking at me intently, “and might even shoot you tomorrow, since he thinks you turned him in, just as he shot at the police?”

  “Of course, I realize it.”

  “Then why won’t you tell us who he is? We’ll have him arrested and you won’t have to worry anymore.”

  “But I’ve told you I don’t know his name … Really … Am I supposed to know the names of all the men I take home?”

  “But we do know his name,” he suddenly declared, in a higher, more theatrical tone of voice as he leaned forward.

  I knew he was only pretending. “If you know,” I answered coolly, “why are you tormenting me about it? Arrest him and make an end of it.”

  He looked at me in silence for a moment. I noticed that his restless, troubled eyes were examining my figure rather than my face, and I understood that, suddenly and despite himself, his professional sense of duty had been overcome by his longstanding desire for me. “We also know that if he fired and then ran off, he must have had good reason for doing it,” he went on.

  “Oh, I’m sure of that, too.”

  “But you know what his reasons are.”

  “I don’t know anything. If I don’t know his name, how could I know the rest?”

  “We know all about the rest,” he said. By now he was speaking mechanically, as if he were thinking about something else, and I felt sure that in another moment he would get up and come over to me. “We know all about it and we’ll get him. It’s just a question of days — perhaps hours.”

  “Good for you.”

  He stood up as I had foreseen he would, walked around the table, came up to me, and, cupping my chin in his hand, spoke to me. “Come on, you know all about it and won’t tell us. What are you afraid of?”

  “I’m not afraid of anything,” I answered, “and I don’t know anything. And now keep your hands to yourself.”

  “Come on,” he repeated. But he sat down again behind the table before continuing. “You’re lucky because I like you and I know you’re a good girl. Do you know what another man would have done in my place, to make you talk? He’d have had you kept in custody for a long time. Or sent you to San Gallicano.”

  I got up. “Well, I’m busy,” I said. “If you don’t have anything else to say to me —”

  “Go ahead. But be careful what company you keep — political and otherwise.”

  I pretended I had not heard these last words, which he pronounced meaningfully, and I escaped as hurriedly as I could from those sordid little rooms.

  As I walked along, I began to think about Sonzogno again. The commissioner of police had confirmed for me what I had already suspected: Sonzogno wanted to revenge himself upon me because he was sure I had denounced him. I was terrified; not for myself but for Mino. Sonzogno was a raving madman; if he found Mino with me, he would not hesitate to kill him, too. I must confess that the idea of dying with Mino was curiously attractive. I seemed to see the whole scene: Sonzogno would shoot and I would throw myself between him and Mino in order to shield Mino and be wounded in his place. But I did not mind the idea that Mino, too, should be wounded and that we would die together, mingling our blood. But I thought that being killed by the same murderer at the same moment would not be as wonderful as committing suicide together. A suicide pact seemed to me a worthy conclusion to a passionate love affair. It was like cutting a flower before it has withered; like shutting oneself up in silence after having heard celestial music. I had often pondered over this kind of suicide, which arrests time before it can corrupt and spoil love, and is willed and carried out through an excess of joy, rather than an inability to bear suffering. At those moments when I felt I loved Mino so intensely that I feared I might never be able to love him so much in the future, the idea of a suicide pact occurred to me quite naturally, with the same easy spontaneity with which I kissed and caressed him. But I had never spoken of it to him, because I knew that if two people commit suicide together they have to be in love to the same degree. And Mino did not love me; or if he loved me, he did not love me so much to want to cease living.

  I was reflecting intensely on all these things as I walked home. But all of a sudden an attack of dizziness accompanied by a wave of nausea and a ghastly feeling of weakness throughout my body overcame me, and I just had time to go into a café nearby. I was not far from home, but I knew I did not have the strength to cover that short distance without falling down.

  I sat down at one of the little tables behind the glass-fronted door and shut my eyes, overwhelmed by illness. I still felt sick to my stomach and giddy and this sensation was increased by the puffs of steam from the coffee machine, which were extremely upsetting although strangely remote. I could feel the warmth of the closed, heated room on my hands and face, but despite this I felt very cold. “A cup of coffee, Signorina Adriana?” called the man behind the counter, who knew me well, and without opening my eyes I nodded assent.

  At last I recovered and sipped the coffee that the man had placed on the table in front of me. As a matter of fact, it was not the first time lately I had felt this kind of sickness but it had always been very slight, scarcely noticeable. I had not paid any attention to it, because the extraordinary and painful events in which I had been involved had prevented me from thinking about it. But now, reflecting on it and correlating the sickness with a significant interruption in my physical life, which had occurred just this same month, I became convinced that certain vague suspicions I had harbored recently, but had always pushed into the darkest background of my consciousness, must be founded on fact. There can be no doubt about it, I suddenly thought, I must be expecting a child.

  I paid for the coffee and left the place. What I felt was extremely complicated and even now, after such a lapse of time, I do not find it at all easy to express it. I have already remarked that misfortunes never come singly; and this new fact, which I would have greeted joyously at any other time and in any other conditions, seemed to me to be a real piece of bad luck in the present circumstances. On the other hand, my temperament is such that an inexplicable and irresistible instinct always leads me to discover a pleasing aspect to even the most unpleasant circumstances. This time such an aspect was not at all difficult to find; it was the same feeling that fills the hearts of all women with hope and satisfaction when they learn that they are pregnant. It was true that my child would be born in the least favorable conditions imaginable; but he would still be my child; I would be the one who had given him birth and raised him and delighted in him. A child is a child, I thought, and no woman, however poor she is, however desperate her circumstances and uncertain her future, however abandoned and unprovided for, can help being happy at the idea of bringing one into the world.

  These thoughts restored my calm, so that, after a moment’s fear and despair, I once more felt as placid and trustful as ever. The young doctor, who had examined me some time before when Mother had dragged me to the pharmacy to find out whether Gino and I had been making love, had his consulting room not far from the café. I made up my mind to go and be examined by him. It was early and there was no one in the waiting room. The doctor, who knew me very well, greeted me cordially.

  “D
octor, I’m almost sure I’m pregnant,” I announced quietly as soon as he had closed the door.

  He began to laugh because he knew what my profession was. “Are you sorry?” he asked me.

  “Not at all. I’m glad in fact.”

  “Let’s see.”

  After he had asked me several questions about my sickness, he made me lie down on the oilcloth sheet spread on the cot, and examined me. “You’ve hit the nail right on the head this time,” he said cheerfully.

  I was glad to have my suspicions confirmed without feeling any shadow of disappointment. I was perfectly calm. “I knew I was,” I said. “I only came to make sure.”

  “You can be absolutely sure.”

  He rubbed his hands together as joyfully as if he were the father himself and swayed from one foot to the other, all cheerful and full of pleasure for me. Only one thing troubled me and I wanted to make certain. “How far gone am I?” I asked.

  “About two months, I should say — more or less. Why? Do you want to know who it was?”

  “I know already.”

  I went to the door. “If you need anything, come and see me,” he said as he opened the door for me. “And when the time comes, we’ll see that the baby is born under the best conditions possible.” He, like the commissioner of police, was very fond of me. But I liked him, too, whereas I did not like the commissioner at all. I have already described the doctor once. He was a handsome young man, very dark, healthy and vigorous, with a black mustache, bright eyes and white teeth, as cheerful and lively as a gun-dog. I often went to him to have myself examined, at least once a fortnight, and two or three times I had let him make love to me, out of gratitude because he never made me pay him, on the same cot where he had examined me. But he was discreet and, except for an occasional playful gesture, he never tried to force his desire on me. He gave me advice, and I think he was a little bit in love with me in his own way.