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 ice cream 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.