The Road To The City

by Natalia Ginzburg

  When Alberto came home he found me packing my bags. This time it was my turn to be going somewhere without him and he looked on in glum silence. I told him that Gemma would stay to look after him and asked him for some money, which he gave me. We left early the next morning while he was still asleep.

  San Remo was very windy. At first we were all in one room, but Francesca couldn’t stand the baby’s crying and took another room for herself. For some days she hung about us and said that San Remo was a resort for doddering old gentlemen and she was bored to death with it.

  Then she made friends with some people at the hotel and went out boating and dancing with them. She had any number of evening dresses, each one more beautiful than the next. I stayed with the baby until she fell asleep, and then I went downstairs with my knitting, but I was always afraid that the baby might wake up and cry, so I went to bed very early. When Francesca came up she knocked at my door and I went into her room and heard who had danced with her and what they had to say.

  After we had been there a fortnight Augusto came to join us. He was ill-humoured and jealous, and Francesca treated him very shabbily. He sat smoking in the hotel lobby and wrote a chapter of his new book on the origins of Christianity. I asked him if Alberto were at the house and he said that he was still slowly packing his books in the zinc case. I wanted to talk to him about Giovanna, but he cut me short because he was in too gloomy a mood to listen. Sometimes he walked silently up and down the pavement with the baby and me, looking around for Francesca’s plaid coat. Francesca didn’t want him about. She had made friends with a countess, and every night she got drunk with her and they went to the casino. She was bored with all her evening dresses and made herself a new one out of a long black skirt and some silk scarves sewed together. She painted a picture of the countess stretched out on a tiger skin and she was always telling me that the countess’s children weren’t little pests like mine.

  The baby had begun to talk. Every day she said something new and I thought she was very clever. When she had eaten her biscuit she stretched out both hands and said: ‘More!’ with a wily, melancholy smile. Every morning she stood up in her bed and said: ‘Baby sleep no more!’ and I would take her and the camel into my bed and make the camel walk up and down on the bedcover. Then Francesca would come in wearing a wrapper, with cold cream on her face and her hair in curlers, smoke a cigarette, and tell me between yawns about the evening she had spent with the countess.

  I told her she ought to be a little nicer to Augusto. She was heartless, I told her, to lead him a life like this. Every now and then they went for a walk together, and perhaps they found a place to make love somewhere because he always seemed slightly more cheerful when they returned. But then the countess and her friends whistled under Francesca’s window and she powdered her face in a hurry, threw on her plaid coat, and ran to join them. I never knew whether she had taken a liking to one of the men in the party or not. She said no. She said that they were amusing, while Augusto was solemn and jealous and his origins of Christianity bored her to death.

  The baby was taken ill on November seventeenth. She was upset all day long and would not eat. It was Saturday and they served the famous hot ice-cream, but she cried and spat it all over the place, until I lost patience and struck her across the hands. She cried and cried, and I didn’t know what to do. She didn’t want to hear about Le bon roi Dagobert or have her camel beside her or anything. She cried steadily until ten o’clock in the evening, and then she fell asleep. I lowered her gently into the bed and sat down beside her. She slept for half an hour or so, but very lightly, shifting about and twitching at intervals. Francesca dropped in to see me on her way to a dance at the casino. She had combed her hair back from her forehead in a strange new way and painted her lips a colour that was almost yellow. She had on what she called her Hindu dress, the one made of silk scarves sewed together, and a wide silver lamé sash around her waist. The effect was really stunning. She looked down at the baby and said she must have worms to twitch that way in her sleep. She walked around the room, and I hated her for making so much noise. Then the countess whistled under the window and off she went.

  While she was running down the hall the baby woke up screaming and I picked her up in my arms. She seemed burning hot, and so I took her temperature. The thermometer read 102. I paced up and down the room with her, wondering what could be the matter. She was breathing hard and twisting her lips. It couldn’t be just an ordinary fever. She had been feverish a number of times, but never before had she cried so desperately. I tried asking her what hurt, but she only cried louder and pushed away my hands. I was terrified. Finally I laid her down on the bed and went to call Augusto. He was lying fully dressed on his bed with the light on, and there was a distressed look in his half-closed eyes because Francesca had gone to the dance without him. I told him that the baby was very sick and asked him to go and get a doctor. He sat up and smoothed his hair without really understanding what I had said. Then he pulled himself together and put on his overcoat. I went back to my room, picked up the baby, and paced up and down, holding her wrapped in a blanket. She had a red face and excessively bright eyes. Every now and then she fell asleep, only to wake up again with a start. I thought of how men and women spend their time tormenting one another and how stupid it all seems when you are face to face with something like a baby’s fever. I remembered how once upon a time I had tormented myself waiting tremblingly for Alberto and wondered how I could have attached importance to anything so idiotic. I was badly frightened, but beneath my fright there was a feeling that the baby was going to get well and Francesca would tease me for being such an alarmist. So many times before I had been scared to death over nothing at all.

  Then Augusto came back with the doctor, a red-haired young man with a freckled face. I hurriedly and nervously undressed the baby on the bed. She was crying more feebly now as the doctor held her thin little body in his hands and Augusto looked on in silence. The doctor said that he couldn’t diagnose her trouble, but he saw no reason for concern. He prescribed a mild sedative and Augusto went to have it made up at a pharmacy. Then the doctor went away, saying he would come back in the morning. Augusto stayed with me and I felt much calmer. The baby went to sleep and I looked at her thin, red face and perspiration-drenched hair. I asked Augusto not to go away because I was still frightened to be alone.

  At three o’clock in the morning the baby screamed. She grew purple in the face and threw up the small portion of icecream I had forced down her the evening before. She waved her arms and legs and pushed me away. The chambermaid and a woman who had the room next to mine came in and suggested I give her an enema prepared with camomile. While I was preparing it Francesca appeared at the door, looking very drunk. Hating her with all my might, I shouted:

  ‘Go away!’

  She went into her room and came back a few minutes later, after she had apparently bathed her face in cold water. She asked the maid to get her a cup of strong coffee. I hated her so much that I couldn’t look her in the face. My throat was dry and constricted with terror. The baby was not crying any more; she lay there under the blanket with all the colour gone out of her cheeks, breathing jerkily.

  ‘You nincompoops!’ said Francesca. ‘Can’t you see she’s in a very bad way? You’ve got to get a doctor.’

  The maid told her that one had already come, but Francesca said none of the San Remo doctors was any good except the countess’s doctor. She spoke in a loud voice and a decisive manner, as if to show that she was no longer drunk. She went out to look for the countess’s doctor, and Augusto went with her, leaving me alone with the woman who had suggested the enema. Her face was heavy and wrinkled, with powder caked in the furrows; she wore a violet kimono and spoke with a strong German accent. For some reason her presence was very reassuring; I had complete confidence in her heavy, wrinkled face. She told me that the baby must have an upset stomach and such a disturbance often takes on terrifying forms. Her son had had an attack of the
same kind when he was a baby. And now he was a grown man—she raised her hand to show me how tall he was—who had taken a degree in engineering and got himself engaged to be married.

  It was growing light outside. The sun rose out of a greenish haze and shone upon the sea. On the terrace in front of the hotel a waiter in a white jacket was setting wicker chairs and tables in order among the palms, and another man in a striped outfit was dipping a mop into a bucket of water. Now the sun was red and glaring. I hated the sea and the wicker furniture and the palm trees. Why had I come to San Remo anyhow? What was I doing in this room with the woman in a violet kimono? I hated Francesca and thought to myself that she and Augusto must have stopped at the countess’s for drinks and have had one too many.

  They did come back, though, with the countess’s doctor, a tall, bald man with a thin, ivory face and a pendulous lower lip, disclosing teeth that were long and yellow like those of a horse. He said that neither the sedative nor the enema was any use. Everything that had been done so far was wrong. He wrote out another prescription, and while Augusto went back to the pharmacy he questioned me about the baby’s health in recent months and how she had been taken ill. While I was telling him he held the camel in his hand and made it walk up and down the rug. Somehow his gesture gave me hope. I asked him if it was something serious and he said he didn’t think so but he couldn’t yet say for sure. He could advance various hypotheses, but none of them was definitive. He sent away the woman in the kimono because he said there should be as few people as possible in a sickroom in order to conserve the supply of oxygen. Francesca brought me a cup of coffee. It was a bright, sunny day, and the usual old gentlemen were sitting on the terrace, holding their canes between their knees and reading their newspapers.

  At nine o’clock, just as the bald doctor was cleaning a syringe in order to make an injection, the freckled-faced doctor of the previous evening came back. He seemed a little offended, but Francesca took him out in the hall and talked to him in private. Then the two doctors held a consultation together. The baby was quiet now and breathing evenly. She seemed very tired, with white lips and dark circles around her eyes. She stood up on the bed and said:

  ‘Sleep no more!’

  These were the first words she had spoken since she had fallen ill, and I was so happy that I burst into tears. Francesca held me in her arms.

  ‘I thought she was going to die,’ I murmured. Francesca patted my shoulders without speaking. ‘I thought she was going to die for certain. I thought so all night long. I was scared to death.’ I wanted to make up to Francesca somehow for the hate I had felt for her at three o’clock in the morning. ‘You looked very handsome in your Hindu dress. And the way you had your hair fixed was very becoming.’

  ‘Don’t you think we ought to send a wire to Alberto?’ she said. ‘She’s the poor devil’s daughter, after all.'

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But isn’t she better?’

  ‘Perhaps so,’ she said. ‘But I’d send him a wire just the same.’

  At eleven o’clock the baby began to scream again, shaking and twitching all over, with a fever of 103. In the afternoon she fell asleep but only for a few minutes. Augusto went to send the wire. I began to wish Alberto would arrive immediately. I paced up and down the room, holding the baby wrapped in a blanket. Francesca stepped out in the hall every now and then for a cigarette. The doctor went out to dinner and came back. I could read no hope in his gloomy, disdainful face with the pendulous lower lip. Everyone looked as if there were no hope, and I wanted to tell them that I knew she was better. She looked better to me, and for a moment, when she was in Francesca’s arms, she began to play with her necklace.

  ‘Le bon roi Dagobert

  Chassait dans la plaine de l’Enfer!’

  Men and women strolled along the pavement or sat comfortably in the wicker chairs among the palm trees. They smoked cigarettes, flicked the ashes away, tucked plaid blankets around their legs, and showed each other cartoons in the papers. A boy came by selling fresh oranges, and they pressed them in their fingers and counted the change in the palms of their hands.

  ‘Le bon roi Dagobert

  A mis sa culotte a l’envers!’

  I remembered with horror how I had struck the baby across the hands when she would not eat her supper and how she had thrown down her spoon and started to cry disconsolately. I looked into her big brown eyes and thought that she knew all there was to know about me. Her eyes were weary and dull, and their lack of expression was dreadful on a baby’s face. She had a faraway, bitter look, unreproaching but at the same time pitiless, as if she had nothing more to ask. I stopped rocking her in my arms and laid her down on the bed under a shawl. She sobbed convulsively and pushed away my hands.

  Suddenly Francesca began to cry and went out of the room. I looked at the doctor and he looked at me. His damp, red, pendulous lower lip gave him the appearance of an animal drinking. The freckled doctor came back with another, smaller doctor who seemed to be someone very important. I asked them if I should undress the baby and they said no. The little doctor felt her neck and forehead and tapped her knees with an ivory stick. Then they went away. I was left alone with the bald doctor, and all of a sudden his pendulous lower lip reminded me of something indecent, like the sexual parts of a dog. Then he told me it might be meningitis. At ten o’clock in the evening the baby died.

  Francesca took me into her room and I lay down on her bed and drank a cup of coffee. The woman in the violet kimono and the manager of the hotel and the freckled-faced doctor all came to see me. The woman told me I’d have other children. She said that when children die young it isn’t so bad. It’s worse when they’re older. She had lost a son who was a lieutenant in the Navy, and she raised her hand to show me how tall he was. But the hotel manager said it was harder to lose children when they were small. Finally Francesca sent them all away and told me to go to sleep.

  I shut my eyes, but there was one sight I couldn’t get away from. It was the expression in the baby’s face when I was rocking her in my arms. Her eyes were bitter and indifferent, indifferent even to Le bon roi Dagobert. I could see all her clothes and toys: the camel, the ball, the squeaking rubber cat, the leggings, the galoshes, and the apron with Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs on it. I remembered the things she ate and the words she knew how to say. Then I fell asleep and dreamed I was walking along a road and bumped up against a stone wall, which made me wake up screaming.

  I called Francesca, but she wasn’t in the room. There was only Augusto, standing by the window with his head against the glass. He said Francesca had gone in to the baby and asked me if there was anything I wanted. I asked him to sit down beside me, and he sat there, holding my hand and stroking my hair. Then I began to cry. I cried all night long, with my face buried in the pillow. I hung on to his hand and said things that made no sense. As long as I cried or talked I could forget about the camel and the ball. Alberto arrived at five o’clock in the morning. He dropped his bag and ran sobbing to kneel down beside me, and his head of curly grey hair on my shoulder seemed to be the only thing in the world I needed.

  I told Alberto that I never wanted to see the camel or the ball again, and Francesca and he made a bundle of all the baby’s things and gave them away. Francesca left San Remo several days before us and removed from the house the baby’s carriage, crib, and all the rest of her belongings. At the same time she told Gemma to go and pay a visit to her family at Maona. Gemma left in tears, taking the cat with her. I couldn’t bear to see her because I should have been reminded of the stye in her eye when she bent over me the day the baby was born. Alberto wrote to my mother and father that I didn’t want to see them but preferred to be alone with him for a while. I didn’t want anyone else, and they must be patient and let me fill my own needs as I thought best. Everyone reacts to sorrow in his own particular way, he told them, and throws up the best defences he can. And in such cases the family and friends must hold their peace and stand by quietly until it is over. />
  We went back to the city, and for a while I didn’t leave the house because I didn’t want to see any children. At first a woman came to do the cleaning, but it was so hard for me to talk to her that finally I told her not to come and did the work myself. Still I didn’t have very much to do. I stayed in bed late in the morning, watching my arms lie empty and free on the bedcover. Then I slowly got dressed and let the empty hours of the day drag by. I tried not to think of the song about Le bon roi Dagobert, but it rang continually in my ears. And I still saw in front of me the doctor’s mouth, like that of an animal drinking, the long halls and red-carpeted stairways of the Hotel Bellevue and the wicker chairs and palm trees on the terrace below.

  Alberto stayed at home a great deal. He was extremely kind, and I was amazed by his efforts to help me. We never mentioned the baby, and I noticed that he had taken away the oatmeal and the rest of her food that Francesca had forgotten. He read Rilke’s poems out loud and also some of the notes he had written on the margins of various books. He said that some day or other he wanted to put all these notes together in a volume which he would call Variations on a Minor Scale. I think he was slightly envious of Augusto for the books he had published. Anyhow, he said I was to help put the notes in order, and sometimes he had me work over them on the typewriter until late at night. I didn’t type fast enough to keep up with his dictation, but he never lost his temper. He even told me that I should make comments on anything that didn’t seem clear to me.

  One day I asked him if he was going away and he said no. Sooner or later, he said, he’d empty the zinc case where he’d begun to pack his books. Meanwhile it sat there in his study, half filled with his things. When he wanted one particular book he had quite a time digging it out, but still he didn’t get around to putting everything back on the shelves. We spent most of the time in the study, and he never said a word about wanting to go out. At first we didn’t talk about the baby, but later we did, and he said perhaps it was good for me to unburden myself to him. He said that we’d have another child and that even if now this prospect gave me no pleasure, I would love the new one just as well, and all my peace of mind would come back to me when I saw it lying at my side. We made love together and gradually I began to imagine the time when I would have another baby. I thought of how I would nurse it and rock it, and of all my thoughts this was the only one from which I got any satisfaction.