Francesca sent me to her house for some clothes. My aunt was there and burst into tears as soon as she saw me. She asked me any number of questions, which I didn’t know how to answer. She couldn’t understand why Francesca wouldn’t consider the man from the shipping company, who was handsome and very much of a gentleman as well. She had never understood what Francesca wanted to do with her life, or anything else about her.
“It’s this younger generation,” she said, weeping and rubbing her face with her wet handkerchief. I tried to tell her that Francesca was still young and had plenty of time ahead of her in which to find a man more to her liking. Then she told me that she didn’t care for the way Francesca behaved with men, flirting with them and keeping three or four on her string at a time. I don’t think for a moment that it ever remotely occurred to her that Francesca had any lovers. She did her best to understand, but the task was quite beyond her. I thought how all of us are always trying to imagine what someone else is doing, eating our hearts out trying to find the truth and moving about in our own private worlds like a blind man who gropes for the walls and the various objects in a room. Then I wrapped up Francesca’s clothes and went away.
Francesca was plucking her eyebrows in the kitchen, looking into a mirror which she held in one hand. Gemma stood there gaping at her until Francesca grimaced and said:
“Run me a bath, will you, my girl?”
Gemma hurried away, laughing, and Francesca pulled her clothes out of the bundle and scrutinized them carefully, turning them over and over in her hands. I asked her whether she was ever going home.
“No,” she said dryly. “Don’t ask me again.”
I was preparing to give the baby her first orange juice and feeling a little sentimental about it. I was glad that she was turning into a big girl and starting to eat grown-up food.
“What a lot of fuss,” said Francesca as she saw me boiling a spoon. “And when she’s older she’ll just be a pain in the neck the way I am to my mother. Families are a stupid invention. No marriage for me, thank you!”
I was almost jealous of Francesca. Alberto was always making up to her and sketching her face. She treated him with scorn, but when he began to make sketches of her in his notebook she came down from her high horse. In the evening Alberto would call us into his study to hear Rilke’s poems and Augusto would come to join us. I decided that they might make a good match, but when I said as much to Francesca she replied that Augusto looked like a justice of the peace with his heavy moustache and scarf and the shirt sleeves that stuck out below those of his jacket. Even the man from the shipping company was a cut above him. But every time Augusto came she powdered her nose and debated in front of the mirror as to whether she should wear her best necklace.
Finally Francesca sold some of her jewels and rented a one-room apartment. She said she was going to look for a job, but meanwhile she did nothing in particular except try her hand at painting, because she claimed to have lost interest in the stage. She painted strange pictures with great splotches of colour and everything in them but the kitchen stove: houses, skulls, knights in armour, and invariably the moon. She wore a long grey linen smock and painted all day long and said that she didn’t have a lover.
I was still very busy with the baby. She was just starting to walk and I had to trail her all over the house to make sure she didn’t fall. She cried every time I left her alone, and I had to take her with me, even into the bathroom. She was given to tantrums and never wanted to eat her meals. I had to play with her at mealtime and get the food down without her knowing it. She staggered around the room, from chair to chair, playing with the cat and my sewing basket, and I followed her with a bowl in my hand, waiting for the right moment to slip a spoon into her mouth.
Until she was a year old the baby had lead-grey eyes, but then I noticed flecks of brown coming into them. She had very fine blonde hair which I combed back and tied with a ribbon. She was still thin and pale and not what you could call beautiful; her eyes were dull and often had dark circles around them. Eating and sleeping simply did not interest her. She cried every evening before going to sleep, and I had to walk up and down the room singing lullabies. She always wanted to hear the same thing, a French song I had learned from my mother:
I used to tie a red cloth around the lamp and sing as I paced up and down with the baby in my arms. When I left the room I felt exhausted, as if from a battle. Very often I had no sooner gone out than her feeble and plaintive cry followed me and I had to go back and start all over again. She couldn’t stand Alberto and cried whenever he picked her up, and he in his turn said that I had spoiled her and made her into a perfect little pest. Alberto was seldom at home and went on a number of his usual trips. When he was at home he shut himself up in the study with Augusto. But at this point I didn’t particularly care what they were talking about, whether it was Giovanna or something quite different. All that mattered to me was to see the baby eat her supper until the picture of a chick emerging from the egg at the bottom of her bowl was uncovered and the bowl was empty. I remembered Alberto’s telling me that a baby was the main thing in a woman’s life and in a man’s too. This was all very true for a woman, I reflected, but not for a man. Alberto’s habits had not changed an iota since our baby was born. He took the same trips, made the same sketches in his notebook, went on jotting down phrases on the margins of his books, and continued to walk down the street at the same brisk pace as before, with a cigarette stuck between his lips. He was never upset if the baby was pale or hadn’t eaten her supper. He didn’t really know what she was supposed to eat, and perhaps he had not even noticed that her eyes were changing colour.
I thought I was cured of my jealousy and that I didn’t care to know whether he was seeing Giovanna or not. I had borne his child and that was enough. The days when I had waited for him in the boardinghouse and trembled at the mere thought of his coming now seemed so remote that I could hardly believe they belonged to the same existence. Occasionally he called me into the study to make love, but I was always on the alert for the baby’s cry and didn’t stop to wonder how much I enjoyed it. He didn’t ask me, either, and I came to the conclusion that our marriage was no better and no worse than the run-of-the-mill variety.
One day I went for a walk with the baby. Francesca had given her the camel, and this was the first time we were taking it out. The camel was handsome and swayed its head in such a way that people stopped to look at it. We went slowly in the warm sunshine, and I was very cheerful because the baby had drunk her milk and eaten two ladyfingers. The camel kept falling down and I would stoop to pick it up and dust its red cloth saddle.
Then I saw Alberto crossing the street with a woman. All that I could see of her was that she was tall and wore a mouton fur piece. I picked the baby and the camel up in my arms and hurried back home. The baby struggled and cried because she wanted to walk, but I held her tight until I came to the door. Then I told Gemma to take off her coat and keep her in the kitchen while I wrote a letter. I shut the drawing-room door and sat down on the sofa. I had thought of Giovanna so often and pictured her as having a wide, immobile face that this image had lost all power to hurt me. Now I had to adjust myself to the sight of her as a tall woman with a mouton fur piece, and I clenched my teeth to put down the pain I felt inside. They had been walking very slowly, just as Francesca said. He had left the house at three o’clock that afternoon, saying that he had some long-neglected law cases to attend to at the office. And when I saw them it was half past four. Obviously he lied to me all the time without a qualm, without a single muscle of his face betraying him. He had taken his hat off the rack, slipped on his raincoat, and gone out at his usual brisk pace.