They went down to lunch at the table d’hôte and Anna realized that Signora Maria was happy at this Pensione Corona, perhaps it reminded her of the hotels in which she had stayed once upon a time with the old lady, but it was just a dreary boarding-house and the table d’hôte was a table in the form of a horseshoe at which a large number of little old ladies like Signora Maria had their meals, each one had her little bottle of oil and they ate bowls of hot water with herbs in it and a couple of anchovies and eight cherries each. Signora Maria was very friendly with these other old ladies, and she introduced Anna as her niece, she explained to her in a low voice in French that it was no use going into a great many details. In the afternoon Anna went out for a walk by herself because Signora Maria was very much taken up with the other old ladies, they invited one another to their rooms and drank substitute coffee. Anna would have liked to go and see Concettina at their own town, but Signora Maria told her that Concettina had gone off to the mountains with the baby and her mother-in-law, Concettina belonged entirely to her mother-in-law nowadays and had no more sisters and brothers, she might as well have a cross put up over her.
Anna went for many walks by herself during those days that she stayed at Turin, because Signora Maria always had engagements with the little old women in the boarding-house and with other acquaintances whom she said she had in Turin, Anna used to see her going out with big parcels under her arm and suspected that she was going off to sell clothes or towels, things that the old lady had left her. But as for clothes and towels and shoes, there was always a heap of them in her room, there were even some on the desk, between a picture of Ippolito and the plate of tomatoes.
It was the month of July and the streets of Turin were hot and deserted, the asphalt was melting and stuck to your shoes, Anna walked along very slowly on this burning asphalt with big bags of cherries and ate them as she looked into the shop windows, there were not many things in the windows but she enjoyed looking into them all the same because at San Costanzo there were only two shop windows, the draper’s and the food-shop with the famous almond paste that sent Cenzo Rena into a rage. The public gardens were now to be seen without any railings because the iron had been requisitioned, and inside the public gardens were to be seen stone kiosks and arrows pointing to the underground air raid shelters, the air raid warning would sound and people would go without haste and without any confidence down those short stairs, they were not much frightened because there had not been any big raids and very often the siren would sound and then nothing would happen, in any case people said that the underground shelters were not dug deep enough below the ground to be really safe. These underground shelters were usually occupied by couples for the purpose of making love, people who went down into them when the air raid alarm sounded used to find quantities of couples kissing and whispering.
One afternoon when Anna was walking along the Corso all of a sudden she saw Giuma coming towards her. He had not recognized her and was walking quietly towards her, his jacket thrown over his shoulders and the usual lock of hair over his eyes. Suddenly they found themselves face to face and he gave a start, but he recovered himself and made her a sort of little bow.
They walked along together and exchanged a few first hesitating words. He was there studying, he had told Mammina that he refused to have anything more to do with their own little town. He was studying commercial sciences but he still thought of taking a degree in philosophy some time or other. He was attending lectures in philosophy all the time as well. He was living in a furnished room and taking his meals at a students’ canteen, very often in the evenings he cooked something for himself in his room so as to save money. It was vacation-time now but all the same he was not going home, at home there was Mammina whom he could no longer manage to put up with. He had made a mess of so many of the things in his life, he said, now he wanted to live in quite a different way. Anna saw that his shoes were dusty and worn and that his white trousers were rather dirty, they were his old tennis trousers but dirty and worn, and he no longer had the watch in the black shell, he had no watch and he asked a passer-by what time it was. He invited her to have some substitute coffee with him. They went into a café and sat down inside in the half-darkness, all of a sudden the expression on his face relaxed and he smiled, he seemed very pleased to be there with her in the café. He asked her if she still remembered the Paris café. Its owner had never had the money to finish doing it up and had sold it, the Paris café had now become a tobacconist’s shop.
He asked her for news of Giustino at the war. He said that he himself would never go to the war, if the war went on for a long time and they called up his class he would do anything in the world not to go, perhaps he would manage to develop some serious illness. Or perhaps he would do as Ippolito did, on a seat in the public gardens. He thought a great deal about Ippolito, very often he had a great desire to do as he did. He was sorry he had not been a friend of Ippolito’s, he understood now what a lot of things they might have said to each other, very often nowadays he was alone in his room and he talked to Ippolito just as though he had him there in front of him. It had been a beautiful death. It had been a beautiful death and it had left a full and serene memory to anyone who could understand it, of course there were vulgar people who did not understand it, who thought it was cowardly to choose a seat in the public gardens to die on. But he himself, Giuma, lived by the thought that he could always choose himself a seat in the public gardens some time or other. He had had difficult moments, he said, and he lowered his eyes, clasping and unclasping his hands. Very difficult moments, and he had thought much of seats in public gardens. Anna asked him if it had been because the girl Fiammetta had been unwilling to marry him. That too, he said, that too, and his voice went small and fragile, but in truth that girl had been just a small detail in the whole mass of things. His chief trouble was that he had no one to talk to, and so he took to talking to Ippolito, who was dead. It was not cheerful, talking to the dead. Also he found it very difficult to remember Ippolito’s face, he had seen him only a few times and as it were hastily, he used to go into Emanuele’s room to look at his portrait. What a beautiful face Ippolito had had, nobody among the people you met had such a beautiful face. But Emanuele had at once been frightened at seeing him looking at the portrait of Ippolito, he had asked him what there was for him to look at, and when he went out he had followed him with a very suspicious air. He had followed him but then they had not known what to say to each other, Giuma when he was with Emanuele felt a tightness in his throat and not a single word would come out. It had been Emanuele who had insisted upon Mammina allowing him to study at Turin. Every now and then he came to see him in Turin and asked him clumsy questions, he wanted to know whether he had any girl friends. No, he had no girl friends now. He had no friends of any kind, he stayed shut up in his room reading the philosophers, he never even went to the cinema and he was careful not to spend money because he had come to hate money, it made him think of the people who were dying of hunger. He asked Anna whether she still remembered their conversations about justice, now all of a sudden he had seen that she had been right about justice, he remembered that he had laughed when they had talked about the revolution. Now all of a sudden he had started to believe in the revolution. He ordered some grey-looking cakes and ate three or four of them hurriedly, he said that was the only dinner he had, he did not have anything else. Anna asked him all at once whether he knew she had had a baby girl. Yes, he said, he had heard about it, and immediately he went red and looked away from her. He started violently stirring his sham coffee. And how was San Costanzo, he asked her, Emanuele had spoken to him about it but in his usual superficial, fatuous way, Emanuele was a good chap but so very superficial. He could not endure Emanuele and Mammina any longer, if he ever went home he felt that he would explode, Mammina still had her provisions, her lady friends and her bridge. He could not understand now how he could have lived so long in that house, dragging round the drawing-rooms with Mammina, expecti
ng to have a job in the soap factory some day. He was studying commercial sciences to please Mammina but he had no intention of ever setting foot in a factory. It was getting late, Anna said she must go, she had to pack her bag because she was leaving next day. He begged her to stay a moment longer, he still wanted to say something to her, Anna waited with her heart beating fast. He pushed back the lock of hair from his forehead and asked her if he had made her suffer a great deal, he himself had suffered too now and he knew what it was, he knew he had been very cruel to her. No, Anna said, no. Then he heaved a long sigh and slipped on his jacket and they went out of the café. And afterwards they could hardly find anything to say to one another, he merely went on and on repeating that he was now going to his room to read and that he had already had his dinner, his whole dinner had consisted of those grey cakes and that sham coffee. He said good-bye to her at the door of the Pensione Corona, he looked for a little at the front of the Pensione Corona and said it was like Paris, poor Paris, he said, poor France, now there was General Pétain. He walked off with a step which had grown very slow and listless,’ she stood looking at him from the door, he turned round towards her again for a second and waved his hand, he smiled with his wolf-like teeth. She started going up the stairs of the boarding-house and wondered if it had really been true, if she had really spent that afternoon with Giuma in a café. She left Turin again next morning, on the platform at the station stood Signora Maria waving her handkerchief exactly as she had once been used to shake the dust out of her duster at the window. At the last moment Signora Maria had wanted to make her a present of a cape, she said these were much worn. As soon as the train moved Anna took off the cape, which was a mantle of pale lilac silk.
For the whole of the journey she did nothing but talk to Giuma, telling him all the things she had not been capable of telling him when she had had him in front of her. For the whole of the journey she told him all about the baby that had been born from the two of them. But she remembered how he had looked away when she had started to talk to him about the baby, she saw again his bewildered eyes avoiding hers. She tried to wipe out the memory of those bewildered eyes, perhaps they had not really been avoiding hers, perhaps he was expecting her to talk for some time about the baby and had been surprised at her stopping all of a sudden. She was sorry that he had seen her wearing the ugly dress made by the San Costanzo dressmaker, he had become contemptuous of fine clothes and yet she was sorry that he had seen her like that. She had bought herself rather a fine dress at Turin with Signora Maria’s clothing coupons, a dress she had found ready made in one of the big shops. But the day she met Giuma she was not wearing it because Signora Maria had already put it into her suitcase. What a mania Signora Maria had for always packing bags before it was necessary, Anna felt a great rage against Signora Maria, what a pity Giuma had not seen her wearing that dress, it was beautiful and did not look like a curtain. She was seized with rage against the cape, too, and wanted to fling it out of the train, but she thought she might give it to La Maschiona for when she went to Mass on Sundays.
La Maschiona was immensely pleased with the cape, but she shut it up in her cupboard together with her coat and could never make up her mind to wear it. The baby clung to La Maschiona’s skirts and had become surly and savage, Cenzo Rena said that La Maschiona made everyone surly and savage that remained in her company. Anna looked out of the window at the village and realized how she had forgotten it during those few days ; at Turin, when she had tried to remember it, all she could see was the man with the corkscrew leg and the pieces of mules’ hair lying outside the farrier’s door. Now, little by little, she found everything again as it was. Then she started unpacking her suitcase and showed Cenzo Rena the dress she had bought in Turin. Cenzo Rena looked at it absent-mindedly and said it was not too bad. But when he heard how much it had cost he became gloomy and said it was too much, he hadn’t very much money now, they must be economical and limit themselves to what was absolutely necessary. He had had to make another loan to the police-sergeant because his wife had to have an operation for a tumour of the breast, they had taken her off to the town in a motor ambulance. The San Costanzo doctor had not realized it was a tumour, he had kept saying it was nothing at all, doctors from the town had had to be called in for a consultation. Cenzo Rena said this was altogether too much, they must get rid of this doctor as quickly as possible. The police-sergeant and Cenzo Rena had made peace again, the sergeant had confessed with a blush that he had been forced to have his little boy’s curls cut, because the mother was in hospital and no one in the house knew how to put in those curling-pins in the evening. Now, without its curls, the face of the police-sergeant’s son looked bare and flat like that of the sergeant himself, you could see his big, squashed-looking nose and Cenzo Rena thought that the boy now looked like a little police-sergeant, and he thought that after all they had not been altogether wrong to leave him with curls all that time. The police-sergeant was still suffering at the thought of those shorn curls, he did not know how to tell his wife about it. The sergeant also had a pair of twins of a few months old and as yet they had no curls, in the twins’ curls now lay the only hope.
Cenzo Rena was in a very bad humour and he was annoyed also at having made peace with the police-sergeant, because the sergeant now came often to see him, and he had to be comforted and told that his wife would get better. Very often he came in the evenings, too, and found the contadino Giuseppe there, and it was no longer possible to listen to the forbidden radio with the police-sergeant sitting there, he sat there in his cloak and on his chest he had a decoration on which was inscribed : “God curse England.”
Anna asked Cenzo Rena why he too did not go away on a journey, why he did not go for example to Turin. Why to Turin, asked Cenzo Rena, why should everybody now have to go to Turin, the most boring city in Italy ? No, he did not want to go anywhere, he wanted to stay at San Costanzo and see if he could manage to get another doctor to come to the village. Meanwhile the doctor had come to know that he was not wanted any more, and every day he became more melancholy. He tried to occupy himself to some extent with the dysentery. When he met Cenzo Rena he told him he had not really understood what was wrong with the police-sergeant’s wife, it had seemed such a small thing, just a nodule, he had prescribed Unseed poultices for her. A nodule, said Cenzo Rena, a nodule. And he started to explain to him that it was useless for him to persist in being a doctor. The doctor asked what else he could do, he had spent his whole life in being a doctor, winter and summer he had been trudging round those roads. Now he was nearly seventy. As a young man he had thought it a fine thing to cure people, but then gradually he had started asking himself what he was trying to cure them for, they were contadini and they were all the same, they called in the doctor but then took no notice of what he said, in reality they only believed in their own pieces of witchcraft. When a child had a convulsive cough they gave it urine to drink, yes, that was what they did, in any case Cenzo Rena must know that. He himself had gradually become very melancholy, the only thing he liked now was good food, lunch-time was the best moment of his day. Yes, he was sorry about the police-sergeant’s wife, but in truth there was nothing to be done for a cancer of the breast, she would have died just the same even if he had diagnosed it before. And besides, what sort of a life did the police-sergeant’s wife have, very little better than the lives of the contadini, between the washing and the children she wore herself out and they said that the police-sergeant beat her. And then, those breasts of hers were nothing but a wreck and a ruin, a couple of limp bags that it was painful to see, and he himself tried to look at them as little as possible when he was called in to visit her.
Cenzo Rena told Anna that he would be sorry for that melancholy doctor, if it really happened that they found another one to take his place. But he said that all men made you sorry for them if you looked at them closely, and that in fact one ought to guard against that excess of compassion which arose suddenly, from looking closely at people.
He was sitting on the bed in their room, he had taken off his shirt and there he was bare to the waist with his plump chest all covered with grey hairs, he scratched his back and he scratched in front among the hairs and uttered great yawns, Anna told him she had once seen a lion at the zoo and it was yawning just like him. When had she been to the zoo, he asked, she had never told him about that. Anna said that she had been there once in Rome as a little girl, with Giustino and Signora Maria. In any case there were lots of things she had never had time to tell him, for instance she had not told him all about Turin, because he himself did nothing but talk about the doctor and the police-sergeant’s wife. In Turin, she said, she had met Giuma and they had gone together to a café. Cenzo Rena slipped on his pyjamas and lay down on the bed, and suddenly stopped yawning and scratching. He said nothing and looked at the ceiling, he had taken off his glasses and his face always looked very strange without glasses, all goggle-eyed, as it were, and naked. He said nothing and blinked his eyelids and swallowed, and a profound silence fell between them ; Anna was standing near the window, still fully dressed, she was wearing the dress she had bought in Turin. Outside it was night, an August night, you could see the hills in the moonlight, and a strong smell of dust and withered grass came in through the windows. And what was he like now, this Giuma, asked Cenzo Rena at last, what had he turned into now ? But Anna no longer wanted to talk about Giuma, she stood there in the corner of the window and thought how strange the name of Giuma sounded in that room, how strange was Cenzo Rena’s voice as he uttered it, Cenzo Rena and Giuma were two things that could not be thought of together. Cenzo Rena told her to take off that ugly dress that she had bought at Turin. What a stupid journey it had been, he said, she had bought that ugly dress and had not succeeded in carrying off Signora Maria from the Pensione Corona, he himself was very glad not to be falling over Signora Maria there in his own house but she couldn’t possibly stay for ever at the Pensione Corona, however little you spent in a boarding-house you were still spending something and he could not go on sending her money for ever. Everybody wanted money from him and in a short time he would not have any left. Anna undressed hastily and put out the light, and then suddenly she asked him whether she had done wrong in going to sit in that café with Giuma. No, he said, no. And he turned to her and the whole bed bounced up and down and he said to her, didn’t she know he was very, very fond of her and was always a little afraid she might go off with Giuma or someone else and leave him alone ?
All Our Yesterdays Page 22
