The City and the House

by Natalia Ginzburg

  Don’t think fm not astonished to have married her. I feel astonished about it every day. I don’t know if she wonders why she has married me. I still don’t know.

  She smiles all the time. She’s one of those people who smiles all the time. At first I used to smile too, in answer to her. But I thought that at a certain point we would both stop smiling. I’ve stopped. But she hasn’t, she smiles from when she gets up in the morning to when we go to bed in the evening.

  I’m very pleased about what you told me concerning the film.

  With love from

  your father

  SERENA TO EGÎSTO

  Pianura, 28th November

  Dear Egisto,

  Perhaps you will have heard that Albina’s mother has died. Perhaps she has phoned you or written to you. She is in a right mess now. Her father can’t live alone. He’s old, he’s ill and he’s deaf. Her sisters are very young. Her brother can only be bothered with his own affairs. An aunt was helping them but she has left. Albina will have to stay in Luco dei Marsi now. She has had to give up that job she had in Rome at the convent school. I shall have her bedsit.

  I’m leaving Pianura. I’m sorry because I’ve become fond of the area. I’ve been there a few years now. But there isn’t anyone at Monte Fermo now. Le Margherite is up for sale, and it doesn’t make sense for me to stay here any more. For me, living in Pianura meant being near Piero and Lucrezia, seeing them every day. But what will I do in Pianura by myself? I shall go to Rome, that way I’ll be company for Lucrezia. Lucrezia, if you ask me, has got herself into real trouble. She’s done everything too quickly. She’s sick of Piero, she can’t stand him any longer. But then they had an open relationship, or so they said. People with an open relationship don’t separate, each one comes and goes as he pleases.

  Lucrezia is deceiving herself about Ignazio Fegiz. She imagines that this is her great love and that he is the one man in her life. Like hell he is. He hasn’t gone to live with her and I don’t believe he ever will. He wouldn’t dream of it. And so she’s alone and pregnant with five children and a dog in a dark, noisy apartment in the old part of Rome - without a blade of grass in sight or even a balcony, with a cleaning woman who’s paid hourly, with hardly any money and hardly any freeedom to go out. It’s a disaster.

  Piero has moved to Perugia with Signora Annina. Just imagine the joy of having his mother under his feet all day. She even follows him to the office, because she doesn’t know what to do with herself.

  But it was good being with Piero and Lucrezia. Remember? It was good being with them both whether or not they had an open relationship. I mustn’t think about it, because before I know where I am I’ll start crying.

  I’ll tell you about my Russian trip. It was wonderful.,We haven’t seen each other since then. We haven’t seen each other for ages.

  I’m coming to Rome and I hope I’ll see you a few times.

  I’ve closed the Women’s Centre, even so I have to pay the rent for a year, until the contract runs out.

  Yours,

  Serena

  LUCREZIA TO GIUSEPPE

  Rome, 12th December

  Dear Giuseppe,

  So, you’re married. I’m not surprised because it was very clear from your recent letters that you were considering the idea.

  I ought to congratulate you. I can’t because this marriage of yours doesn’t make me feel in a congratulatory mood at all. I keep all your letters. I keep them in my wardrobe in a cardboard box. Every now and then I get them out and look at them. How you hated Anne Marie when you arrived in America, and then later too, all the time your brother was alive. ‘We haven’t anything to say to each other in any language’, ‘I can’t stand either her long neck, or her clear squinting eyes, or her smile, or her plait, or her bun.’ I’m picking out phrases from your letters at random.

  Roberta says that when you and your brother were children, you always wanted to do what he did. And so now you’ve married his wife. But I think you’ve finished up in a real stinking mess. I’ve seen a photograph of you and Anne Marie. Roberta showed it to me. Anne Marie is ugly. Those eyes, that raincoat, that smile. She’s cross-eyed. Her smile is false. You have your usual look of a bird that’s just fallen off a roof.

  I’m fine. I’m in Rome, in an apartment someone’s lent me, in Piazza del Paradiso. I see Roberta a lot. She is a great help to me. I see Serena who has come to live in Rome, in Albina’s bedsit. Albina is at Luco dei Marsi. Her mother’s died.

  My apartment is a bit dark. I’m cold. I’ve bought some more electric heaters. There were already three of them, but I feel the cold a great deal.

  However, the children are happy, and they like Rome. Vito goes to a kindergarten run by nuns. Cecilia takes him and picks him up. I feel sick all the time. My new baby will be born in April.

  I brought one of the dogs, Joli, with me because the children liked him a lot, I gave the other dogs to the help at Le Margherite.

  Piero comes to see us quite often. Relations between us are calm now. He phones before he comes because he doesn’t want to bump into T. I call him T now. Even the children call him T. Once however, T and Piero did bump into each other. It didn’t go too badly. First they talked about the price of houses, then about the price of pictures.

  T hasn’t come to live here yet. He’s coming but not at the moment. He has to think things over for a while.

  He usually eats lunch with us. At supper time he has to go to her place, to Ippo’s. It’s a relationship that’s gone on for twenty years and he can’t just break it off in one fell swoop. And she, Ippo, has a bad heart. My God, what a bloody nuisance she is. She has a bad stomach and she has a bad heart. I, on the other hand, am as strong as a horse. She has such a bad stomach and she can’t eat. She has a horror of getting fat, and because of this she stopped eating years ago and this has made her stomach shrink. A carrot, a glass of hot water with a slice of lemon in it - that’s what her meals are. T has to go to her house every evening to see that she at least eats her carrot. Ippo. All day her name goes round and round inside my head. What with T and Ippo I feel that / is the only letter in the alphabet.

  I asked T if Ippo knows that I am pregnant. He said yes, she knows. But he says very little about her to me. Before, I used to ask lots of questions about her, and he answered me to some extent. Now he doesn’t answer, so I’ve stopped. I keep all these questions inside me now. They swell my belly up,, like the baby.

  I don’t sleep well at night. I’m always waiting for T to phone me, or I’m waiting for the noise of the lift and his key. He doesn’t always come. Sometimes he phones me at one in the morning, worn out, really worn out, from via della Scrofa. It’s difficult to get back to sleep, to find reassuring thoughts that will make me sleep.

  Yours

  Lucrezia

  LUCREZIA TO GIUSEPPE

  Rome, 15th December

  I’ll tell you about my new home.

  It is L-shaped. There’s a coat-stand in the entrance hall, not one that’s fixed on the wall, but one of those you can move about, with lots of arms; it was black but I’ve painted it red. The living-room is long and narrow. I’ve put the Persian carpet in there, and the picture with the two coaches, and a sofa that I’ve had recovered. Piero kept the picture of King Lear. I’ve put the chest of drawers with the tortoises and the green wardrobe in my room. Daniele, Augusto and Graziano have a room with bunk-beds in it. There’s another room with two beds where Cecilia and Vito sleep. I have put the quilts with dragons on these two beds. There’s another little room next to my room and that will be for the new baby. Cecilia is fed up with sleeping with Vito and wants to sleep alone. She says I ought to give her the little room and have the new baby sleep in with me. But I don’t want babies in my room. Cecilia and I argue about this all day long. She comes and sits herself down in front of me and tells me all the mistakes I made during the move. According to her, I have arranged the furniture and the rooms wrongly. She looks at me severely and I look at he
r in the same way. I think she’s grown ugly. Her eyebrows have become bushy and her nose is swollen. She still has her lovely chestnut curls. But she’s got fat and she always wears the same tight-fitting tartan dress. At the moment my relations with Cecilia are very bad. Cecilia doesn’t love T and misses her father. She doesn’t say so, but when she sits in front of me and reproaches me for the chaos here, and for the furniture which according to her I’ve scattered all over the place, I know only too well what her real reproaches - which she hides and doesn’t mention - are. I tell her she’ll have a room of her own in our real new house, the one I’m buying. She answers that I’m not buying any real house. It’s true. Sometimes I read the advertisements in II Messaggero, but I imagine the houses in those advertisements to be extremely ugly, and then I feel unhappy, as if I were already living in one of them. And I’m very tired too. I’ll go house-hunting after the baby is born.

  As soon as I get up in the morning I put my fur coat on and go down to shop at the market in Campo dei Fiori, with Joli. This is quite a happy moment. I bought the fur coat second-hand in a shop near here. It’s a long, yellow and black coat, made of German wolf fur, I’m not tired in the morning and I feel strong. I usually meet Selena because her bedsit, or rather Albina’s bedsit, is near here, in via dei Sediari. Serena says to me, ‘You’re so big you look like a tower coming towards me.’ ‘And in fact I’d much rather be a little woman,’ I answer. Tittle and very thin, around seven stone,’ she says. I turn my face away because there are some things I don’t like talking about. I don’t like talking about Ippo. She takes my arm and we go between the stalls, I in my fur coat and she in her jacket made from African ram’s wool. Then we have a cappuccino in a bar. I get on with Serena when she doesn’t tell me about the mistakes I’ve made. At the moment everyone tells me about the mistakes I’ve made: Serena, Cecilia, Egisto (who came to see me one evening). After the market Serena helps me to carry the bags up. I don’t ask her to stay for lunch because T comes for lunch and relations between T and Serena are very bad. I don’t even ask her to come to supper because though T isn’t usually there, it could turn out that he is. So when Serena takes herself off she’s always slightly offended. She eats alone in a pizzeria. She doesn’t see many people. Egisto is having an affair with an American girl who is living with your son Alberico. She was supposed to be leaving, but she hasn’t left yet. She is called Anais. I start cooking. I’ve a woman I pay by the hour who comes in to help. She’s pretty unpleasant and I want to change her. She’s called Enzina. She says she doesn’t know how to cook but she hangs about while I am cooking and tells me all the mistakes I’m making. Then T arrives. This is a very beautifulmoment, perhaps the most beautiful of all. It doesn’t last long, because almost immediately I’m afraid that something in the house is going to upset him -Enzina’s face, or the smell of cauliflower, or the record-player which doesn’t work properly. I was never afraid with Piero. Fear is a new thing for me. Usually T sits in the living-room and puts records on while I finish preparing the lunch. I don’t know, he seemed to love cooking when I first met him, but he never comes in the kitchen now. I don’t understand why. I sit in the living-room with him and wait for the children. I’m on tenterhooks because he keeps looking at the time and the children are always late. He was so friendly to the children before, but now he and the children hardly speak. This upsets me a lot. We - T and I - spend a few hours together in the afternoon. Sometimes we go to via della Scrofa and there we can be undisturbed. But Ippo’s paintings are there. There are lots of pictures but I only see Ippo’s, and I find them incredibly ugly, they are all a carroty red. I’m not always able to go to via della Scrofa with him because sometimes I have to go and pick up Vito from the kindergarten and take him for a walk when Cecilia says she has too much homework and can’t go. She often says this, perhaps to stop me from going to via della Scrofa.

  I think I’ll get rid of Enzina and take on a woman from Capo Verde. I’ve met her and talked to her, but she isn’t free yet, I have to wait. I’m always having to wait for something.

  When I imagined my life in Rome, I imagined it so differently. I believed that T would be living with me. Then suddenly he can’t, I’m always asking him about it and he gets angry, he says I don’t understand because I don’t want to understand, it’s suddenly completely impossible. Later. Later but when? He doesn’t know.

  I wish Ippo would die. It would be enough if he would leave her but he says he can’t and then I wish she would die. He says I shouldn’t say such terrible things and I shouldn’t even think them. Perhaps I could manage not to say them but how can I not think them? What can anyone do against their thoughts? They crawl about your body, backwards and forwards, like worms or like diseases.

  Lucrezia

  GIUSEPPE TO LUCREZIA

  Princeton, 28th December

  Dear Lucrezia,

  I wish you a happy Christmas, even though Christmas is over.

  I received your letter. It depressed me. To tell you the truth I don’t think 'I' is ever going to live with you. It’s not so simple to live with five children, and soon there’ll be six, when you are not used to it. 'I' has acted badly because he didn’t tell you at once that this would be difficult for him and perhaps impossible. I was more honest with you.

  The really bad thing is that he hasn’t left that woman he’s with. I’ve never seen this woman. I’ve seen her pictures in 'I's house in via della Scrofa. Her pictures seemed fairly ugly to me too, if that makes you feel any better.

  Anne Marie and I spent Christmas alone, but yesterday Anne Marie’s daughter, Chantal, arrived with her baby in her arms, She has left her husband. We knew there were difficulties between them. She arrived from Philadelphia at nine in the evening without having let us know she was coming. There had been a violent row. Chantal says that he hit her. She pulled up the sleeve of her dress and showed us a bruise on her arm. She’s going to ask for a divorce. Something similar to what happened to her mother has happened to her. Anne Marie’s first marriage also broke down suddenly. Anne Marie also left her husband with her baby in her arms.

  Anne Marie wants me to go to Philadelphia to talk to Danny. I don’t want to do this at all because I shall have to interrupt work on my novel and because I don’t like being away from the house. But I shall have to do it.

  Anne Marie smiles all the time. Chantal almost never smiles. Things are difficult between mother and daughter, as they are between you and Cecilia. They also argue all day. They argue savagely but very quietly. They never raise their voices, neither of them.

  The baby is very pretty. Her name is Margaret, but she gets called Maggie. The baby and Chantal sleep in the room with the bear-cubs.

  Write to me soon. Tell me how things are with you.

  Giuseppe

  LUCREZIA TO GIUSEPPE

  Rome, 6th January

  Dear Giuseppe,

  I spent Christmas and the New Year at Terminillo, in a hotel, with Serena and the children. Piero was to have come but he caught influenza and stayed in Perugia.

  'I' left for Paris before the holidays began and he hasn’t come back yet.

  Serena and the children went skiing at Terminillo. I went for little walks with Joli. We had taken Joli along. Which was a bad idea because they couldn’t stand dogs in the hotel.

  I went for little walks, very short, never going very far from the hotel. I was afraid that 'I' would phone me and they wouldn’t be able to find me. Also I have a big belly now and I was afraid of slipping in the snow.

  I spent hours stretched out on a deck chair on the terrace in front of the hotel. I did some knitting. Knitting is good for the nerves - I think your Mrs Mortimer said as much.

  For a while now I’ve done nothing but wait. I wait for 'I' to phone me. I wait for my child to be born. I wait for my life to become less confused. Waiting gets on one’s nerves. If you’re waiting for a child to be born you shouldn’t be waiting for anything else.

  What an awful place Terminil
lo is. Windy, and full of stupid people. Serena chose it. She likes it. She enjoyed herself and so did the children. They ate like wolves, and so did I come to that. In the evenings we played duhito. It’s a card game that children like. But then when we were alone in our room Serena started to say unpleasant things to me. She said I was wrong about everything. The separation, the house in Rome, everything. According to Serena 'I' doesn’t care about me very much. This child I’m going to have won’t have a father. He will have Piero’s surname, certainly Piero won’t deny paternity. But after that he’ll be a child without a father. 'I' won’t even look at him. He will say he isn’t his. According to Serena he will do what you did over Graziano, just the same. Except that Piero accepted Graziano as his, but I hadn’t broken the marriage up then and now on the other hand I have broken it up, and I’ve got myself in a real fucking mess. According to Serena men are bastards, all except for Piero who is an angel and I have been a complete idiot to leave him. I left him to be with 'I' who is the worst bastard of the lot. I got undressed and got under the blankets and turned my face to the wall and she walked up and down the room and then I saw her face hanging over me all smothered in cream, and we both started to cry.

  Now we are back in Rome. Piero came to see us for a day; he brought lots of presents for the children, and a shawl for me.

  Yours

  Lucrezia

  ROBERTA TO GIUSEPPE

  Rome, 9th January

  Dear Giuseppe,

  I went and talked to Ignazio Fegiz, or to 'I' as Lucrezia calls him. I didn’t say anything to Lucrezia, I just went. I thought that as I don’t like him and he probably doesn’t like me, we wouldn’t run any risk of spoiling our relationship, seeing that it was so bad to begin with. I phoned him, put my fur coat on and got into my little Fiat 500. It was snowing. Unfortunately the Fiat stopped at Largo Argentina. I had to go quite a way on foot, walking through the snow and mud.