One evening while I was cooking the porridge Francesca turned up at the house. She was hatless and had no makeup on her face, while a lock of hair tumbling over her forehead and the raincoat thrown over her black dress gave her a gloomy and defiant air. She told me she had quarrelled with her mother and asked me if I could put her up for the night. I told Gemma to make up the couch in the drawing room. Francesca sat down, puffed at a cigarette, and watched me give the baby her porridge, which the baby spat out as soon as I got it in her mouth.
“I couldn’t stand a baby,” said Francesca. “If ever I had a baby I’d kill myself, for sure.”
Alberto was in his study and I went to tell him that it was Francesca and that she had come to stay with us because there was something wrong at home.
“Good,” he said. He was reading a German book on Charles V and writing notes in the margin.
I put the baby to bed. Francesca was stretched out on the drawing-room couch, smoking another cigarette and looking as if the place had always been hers. She had taken off her garters and hung them over the back of an armchair, and she flicked the ashes from her cigarette on to the rug.
“Did you know he was unfaithful to you?” she asked.
“Yes, I know that.”
“Don’t you care?”
“No.”
“Why don’t you leave him?” she asked. “Let’s go for a trip somewhere. He’s a little rat of a man. What good is he to you?”
“I love him,” I said, “and then there’s the baby.”
“But he’s deceiving you. He does it in the most blatant sort of way. I see them together sometimes. She has a behind like a cauliflower. Nothing much to look at.”
“Her name is Giovanna,” I said.
“Leave him, I say. What good is he to you?”
“So you’ve seen her, have you? What’s she like?”
“Well… She doesn’t know how to dress. They walk along very slowly. I see them all the time.”
“Why did you say she has a behind like a cauliflower?”
“Because that’s what it’s like, that’s all. It’s round, I mean, and she shakes it when she walks. But what do you care?”
Francesca took all her clothes off and walked up and down the room. I locked the door.
“Are you afraid that rat will see me?” she said. “Lend me a nightgown, will you?” I brought her a nightgown and she put it on. “I rattle around in it,” she said. “You’ve got fat.”
“I’ll lose weight now that the baby’s weaned.”
“I don’t want any children,” she said. “I don’t want to get married. Do you know why I fell out with my mother? Because there was a man they wanted me to marry. He works for a shipping company. They’ve been trying for ages to marry me off. But I’ve had enough. I’m not going home. I’ll take a room somewhere and look for a job. I’ve had enough of family. I don’t want to be tied to a husband, either. Just to get myself let down the way you are? Not me! I like going to bed with a man. But I’m all for variety. A couple of times with one man is enough for me.”
I listened to her with astonishment.
“You’ve had lovers, then?” I asked.
“Of course I have,” she said, laughing. “Are you shocked?”
“No,” I said, “but I don’t understand how you can do it.”
“Do what?”
“Change all the time.”
“You don’t understand?”
“No.”
“Oh, I’ve had a lot of men,” she said. “First, one in Rome, when I was trying to get on the stage. I broke that off when he asked me to marry him. I was tired of him, anyhow; quite ready to throw him out of the window. But I still took such things seriously. ‘What kind of a girl am I?’ I said to myself. ‘I must be a bitch if I like to change so often.’ Words have a way of scaring us when we’re young. I still thought I ought to marry and be like everyone else. Then little by little I learned to make life less of a tragedy. We have to accept ourselves for what we are.”
“And other people for what they are, too,” I said. “That’s why I have to put up with Alberto. And then I shouldn’t like to change.”
She burst out laughing and kissed me.
“Am I a bitch?” she asked.
“No, you’re not a bitch,” I said. “But you’ll be alone in your old age.”
“What the devil do I care about that? I’ll kill myself when I’m forty. Or else you’ll walk out on this little rat and we’ll live together.”
I kissed her and went into my room. My head was whirling with a medley of words: rat, cauliflower, bitch, accepting people for what they are, and killing oneself. I could see Alberto walking slowly along with Giovanna the way he used to walk with me before we were married. Now we never went for a walk together at all. Finally I went to bed. I had a strong urge to go into the study and stretch out beside him in his bed. I wanted to put my head on his shoulder and ask him why we never went for any more walks. I wanted to tell him that I could never change to another man. But I was afraid he might think I was there just in order to make love with him, so I stayed in my own bed, waiting for sleep to come.
Francesca stayed with us three weeks. I was very happy all this time, and it did me good to talk to her. I was no longer so nervous over the baby’s diarrhoea, and when I did show some nervousness she teased me out of it. Sometimes she persuaded me to leave the baby with Gemma while we went to a moving picture together. It was fun to get up in the morning, find Francesca wandering about the house in a long white satin wrapper and cold cream on her face, and pass the time of day with her until it was time for lunch. It was, in fact, a relief to have her to talk to. I realized then how little Alberto and I had to say to each other any more and how I practically never felt that I could tell him what I was thinking. When he was at home he spent most of his time in the study, which was in a state of complete disorder because he wouldn’t let anyone tidy it up. Gemma made his bed and swept, under his strict supervision, but that was all she was allowed to do. He forbade her to touch either his desk or books, with the result that everything was covered with dust and the place gave out a bad smell.
On his desk Alberto kept a picture of his mother and a plaster bust of Napoleon that he had modelled himself when he was sixteen years old. It looked very little like Napoleon, but it was a good technical job. Then he had a fleet of miniature ships which he had built as a little boy, copies exact down to every last detail. Of these he was very proud, particularly of a tiny sailing boat with a pennant flying from the mast. He asked Francesca into his study to admire them and insisted that she examine the sailing boat carefully. Then he showed her his library and read some of Rilke’s poems out loud. With Francesca he was very agreeable and in fact put himself out to please her as he always did when he came up against somebody new. And then I fancied that Francesca somewhat frightened him. It even occurred to me that Giovanna tyrannized him by fright too. I was the only person he wasn’t afraid of, and perhaps that was the root of the whole trouble. No, he certainly wasn’t afraid of me.