Наталия Гинзбург - The Dry Heart

When Alberto’s mother died he was a wreck. He found her one morning dead in her bed. That afternoon he was to take me to an art exhibition. Finally, when he didn’t turn up, I phoned him and he told me that his mother was dead. I couldn’t find much to say over the telephone, so I sat down and wrote him a letter. Sometimes I can manage such things fairly well, and this one came to me easily. I didn’t go to the funeral because the old lady had left the express wish that no one should be invited, at least so Dr. Gaudenzi told me when I phoned him up to inquire.

A few days later I got a note from Alberto saying that he didn’t feel like going out and would I come to his house to see him. My heart beat fast at the prospect. I found Alberto unshaven and with rumpled hair, wearing a pyjama jacket over his trousers. He tried to light the stove but only managed to stuff it with newspapers without getting it to burn. I succeeded in lighting it, and we sat down close by. He showed me a picture of his mother when she was young, a large, haughty woman with a big Spanish comb stuck in her hair. He spoke of her at great length, and I could not reconcile his description of her as a kindly and sensitive soul with either the young woman in the picture or the cantankerous old lady in bedroom slippers whom I had always imagined. I looked at the stove and the room and the garden outside with its high trees and the grapevine growing on the wall. Sitting with him there in his house, I felt quieter and more peaceful than I had felt for a long time, as if the feverishness and tension of the past few months had subsided.

I was so happy when I went away that I couldn’t bear to stay alone in the boardinghouse and I went to see Francesca. But Francesca was in an abominable humour. She no sooner saw me than she complained of a headache and said she had no desire to listen to anyone’s confidences. She lay there on her bed with a hot-water bottle and asked me to mend the lining of her coat because she had to go out. I mended it and went away.

Alberto didn’t ask me to come to his house again. We went back to walking along the river and sitting for hours in cafés. Of his mother he spoke no more. He wore a black band on his coat sleeve, but he was making sketches in his notebook, including one of the two of us lighting the stove. When he went away I was left with a feeling of emptiness and stupor. For the life of me I couldn’t make him out. I couldn’t understand why he chose to spend so many hours with me, asking questions about the people in the boardinghouse and making sketches. Not a single word of love had ever passed between us. We went for long walks along the river or in the outskirts of the city, where lovers go, and yet we exchanged none of the words or gestures of love.

So it was that I finally spoke up and said that I loved him. I was weary of the burden of my secret; often in my boardinghouse room I could feel it growing within me until I thought I should burst, and all the time I was becoming more and more of an idiot, unable to take an interest in anyone or anything else. I had to find out whether he loved me, too, and whether one day we should be married. Knowing this was a necessity like eating and drinking, and all of a sudden it came to me that telling the truth was a necessity, too, no matter how difficult it seemed. And so I said that I loved him.

We were leaning up against the wall of a bridge. It was dark and wagons were passing slowly along the street with paper lanterns swinging under the horses’ bellies, while birds whirred out of the tall rough grass beside the river. We had stood there silently for some minutes, watching darkness fall and the lights come on in the last scattered houses of the city. Alberto was telling me how as a little boy he had loved those paper lanterns and waited every year for the holiday when they were strung up on every balcony, only to be torn down, in melancholy fashion, the morning after. Then it was that I came out with the whole thing. I told him how I tormented myself waiting for him at the boardinghouse, how I couldn’t concentrate on correcting my school papers, how I was gradually turning into a complete idiot, all because I loved him. I turned to look at him after I had spoken, and on his face there was a sad and frightened expression, which I knew meant he didn’t love me at all. I began to cry and he pulled out a handkerchief to dry my tears. He was pale and frightened and said that he had never dreamed such a thing could happen. He enjoyed my company and considered me a good friend, but he simply didn’t care for me that way. He said there was a woman he had been in love with for years. He couldn’t marry her because she was already married, but he didn’t think he could ever live with anyone else. He had made a great mistake to hurt me, but quite unintentionally, without ever dreaming that it could be so serious.

We went back to the city without speaking. When we said good night at the boardinghouse door he asked if he could come back the next day and I said I preferred never to see him again. “All right,” he said as he started to go. I watched him walk away looking somehow humiliated, with the bent shoulders and slow, tired steps of a boy who has taken a beating.

I went up to bed without any dinner, leaving word with the maid to call Francesca and ask her if she could come over. Francesca had freshly plucked eyebrows and looked very handsome in her black knitted dress and a turban with a silk pendant. She sat on the edge of my bed, lit a cigarette, and said:

“Out with it!” But I could not speak through my tears, so she smoked and waited for me to pull myself together. “Still the same old guy?” she asked.

“Yes,” I answered. She grimaced and blew out a mouthful of smoke.

“I simply can’t see him,” she said.

Little by little I told her the whole story. She stayed until midnight and we had to call the maid to open the front door and let her out. Francesca left me some sleeping pills, but I couldn’t close my eyes all night long. Every now and then, as I began to doze off, Alberto’s sad and frightened face surged up before me. I asked myself what I was going to do with my life and felt ashamed of the way I had spoken. Every word either one of us had said there on the bridge came back to haunt me.

Francesca returned the next morning and brought me some oranges. She sent the maid to the school to say that I had bronchitis and wrote a letter to my mother telling her that I wouldn’t be home for the weekend because I was under the weather. She peeled an orange for me, but I couldn’t eat it, so she ate it herself and told me to spend the day in bed. The only thing to do, she said, was to go and stay for two months with her at San Remo. I said I couldn’t move on account of the school, and besides I hadn’t the money. “Who gives a rap for that filthy school?” she said, and added that she had plenty of money for both of us and that we were leaving the very next day. When we got to San Remo she would lend me her low-necked pink tulle dress with the two blue roses on one shoulder. She pulled my suitcase out of the cupboard, wiped it off with a newspaper, and began to pack my clothes, then she went home to have lunch and do her own packing.

I stayed in bed for a while, thinking about the woman Alberto loved. I could see her standing motionless in front of me, staring at me out of cruel, stupid eyes that were set in a wide, heavily powdered face. She had a soft and abundantly curving figure and slender hands loaded with rings. Then this image faded away and I saw her as a weary hag with an outmoded wide-brimmed hat and a lean and hungry look about her. The weary hag was sorry for me, but I couldn’t bear her presence in the room, and her compassionate expression froze me with horror. I asked myself what I was going to do with my life, and all the words exchanged between Alberto and myself flowed to and fro somewhere inside of me. My mouth was bitter and dry and my head throbbed.