My father has been a country doctor at Maona for over twenty years. He is a tall, stout, slightly lame old man who uses a cherrywood cane for walking. In summer he wears a straw hat with a black ribbon around it and in winter a beaver cap and an overcoat with a beaver collar. My mother is a tiny woman with a thick mass of white hair. My father has few calls because he is old and moves about with difficulty. When people are sick they call the doctor from Cavapietra, who has a motorcycle and studied medicine at Naples. My father and mother sit in the kitchen all day long playing chess with the local vet and the tax collector. On Saturdays when I came to Maona I sat down by the kitchen stove and there I sat all day Sunday until it was time to go. I roasted myself there by the stove, stuffed with thick soups and corn meal, and did not so much as open my mouth, while between one game of chess and the next my father told the vet that modern girls have no respect for their parents and do not tell them a word of what they are doing.
I used to tell Alberto about my father and mother and the life I led at Maona before I came to teach in the city. I told him how my father used to rap me over the fingers with his cane and I used to run and cry in the coal cellar. How I used to hide From Slavegirl to Queen under my mattress to read at night and how, when my father and the tax collector and the maidservant and I used to walk down the road between the fields and vineyards to the cemetery, I had a violent longing to run away.
Alberto never told me anything about himself, and I fell into the habit of asking him no questions. It had never happened before that anyone should take such an interest in me and attribute so much importance to what I had felt and said in the coal cellar or on the road to the cemetery. When I went for a walk with Alberto or when we sat in a café together I was happy and no longer felt so alone. Alberto told me that he lived with his mother, who was old and ailing. Dr. Gaudenzi’s wife informed me that she was a very rich but batty old woman who spent her time smoking cigarettes in an ivory holder and studying Sanskrit, and that she never saw anyone except a Dominican friar who came every evening to read her the Epistles of Saint Paul. On the pretext that she could not get her shoes on without hurting her feet she had not left the house for years, but sat all day long in an armchair, in the care of a young servant girl who cheated her on food bills and maltreated her into the bargain. At first I didn’t mind Alberto’s unwillingness to talk about himself, but later I was disappointed and asked him a few questions. His face took on an absent and faraway expression and his eyes were veiled with mist like those of a sick bird whenever I inquired about his mother, or his work, or any other part of his life.
He never said that he was in love with me, but he came regularly to see me, bringing me books and chocolates, and wanting to take me out with him. I thought he might be shy and afraid to speak up, and I waited for him to say that he loved me so that I could tell Francesca. Francesca always had so much to tell and I never had anything. Finally, although he still hadn’t spoken, I told Francesca all the same. That day he had given me some tan kid gloves and I was sure that he must love me after all. I told her that he was too old for me to marry, although I didn’t really know how old he was — forty, perhaps — while I was only twenty-six. Francesca told me to get rid of him, that she didn’t like his looks, and that I should throw the gloves back in his face because the snaps at the wrist were long since out of style and made me look like a country bumpkin. She’d always suspected, she said, that this fellow would bring me trouble. Francesca was only twenty at the time, but I respected her common sense and always listened to what she had to say. But this time I didn’t listen. I liked the gloves in spite of the snaps at the wrist and went on wearing them, and I liked Alberto, too, and continued to see him. After twenty-six years life had seemed empty and sad because no man had ever paid any attention to me, much less given me gifts. It was all very easy for Francesca to talk that way, when she had everything she wanted and was always travelling and amusing herself.
Then summer came and I went to Maona. I expected Alberto to write, but he never sent me anything but his signature on a picture postcard of a village on the lakes. I was bored with Maona and the days seemed never to go by. I sat in the kitchen or stretched out on my bed to read. My mother, with her head wrapped in a napkin, peeled tomatoes on the porch and laid them out to dry on a board, for making preserves, while my father sat on the wall of the square in front of our house with the vet and the tax collector, tracing signs in the dust with his cane. The maidservant washed clothes at the fountain in the courtyard and wrung them out with her heavy red arms; flies buzzed over the tomatoes, and my mother wiped her knife on a newspaper and dried her sticky hands. I looked at Alberto’s postcard until I knew the contents of the picture by heart: a ray of sun striking a sailing boat on the lake. Why had he sent me nothing but this? Francesca wrote me two letters from Rome, where she had gone with a friend to study at a school of dramatics. First she said that she was engaged to be married and then that it was all off.
I often thought that Alberto might come to Maona to see me. My father would be surprised until I explained that he was a friend of Dr. Gaudenzi. I used to go into the kitchen and carry the garbage pail down to the coal cellar because it had such a bad smell, but the maidservant said that it had no smell at all and carried it back to the kitchen. On the one hand I was afraid to see Alberto appear, because I was ashamed of the garbage pail and of the way my mother looked with a napkin wrapped around her head and her hands sticky with tomatoes; on the other, I waited eagerly for his arrival, and every time the bus came I looked out the window to see if he was on it. I breathed hard and shook all over every time I saw a slight figure in a light raincoat get off, but when I realized that it was not Alberto I went back into my room to read and daydream until dinner. Often I tried to dream again of the man with the broad shoulders and ironical manner, but he drifted farther and farther away until his anonymous and changing face lost all significance.
When I came back to the city I expected that Alberto would turn up soon. He must guess that I had to return for the opening of school. Every evening I powdered and primped and sat waiting; then, when he failed to come, I went to bed. The boardinghouse was gloomy and desolate with its dark flowered hangings and upholstery and the screeching of the landlady’s daughter when she refused to get undressed. I had Alberto’s address and telephone number, but I didn’t dare try to get in touch with him because he had always taken the initiative of telephoning me. Perhaps, I thought, he had not yet come back. One day I called his number from a public telephone booth and his voice answered. But I hung up the receiver without saying a word. Every evening I primped and powdered and waited. I was half ashamed of myself and tried to cover up my air of expectancy by reading a book, but the words made no sense. The nights were still warm, and through the open window I could hear the trams on the boulevards. I imagined him riding in one of them with his light raincoat and leather briefcase, going about one of the mysterious activities which he was never willing to talk about.
This, then, is how I fell in love with him, sitting all powdered and primped in my boardinghouse bedroom while the half-hours and hours went by, accompanied by the screeching of the landlady’s daughter, or walking in the city streets, on the alert for his unexpected appearance, and with a quickened pulse every time I saw a slight figure in a light raincoat holding one shoulder a little higher than the other. I began to think constantly of his life, how he managed being in the house with a mother who studied Sanskrit and refused to put on her shoes. I said to myself that if he asked me I would marry him, and then I would know at every hour of the day where he was and what he was doing. Every evening when he came home he would throw his raincoat over a chair in the hall and I would hang it up in the closet. Francesca had not yet come back from Rome, but when she came she would surely ask about Alberto, and when I told her I had not seen him again she would exclaim: “How does that happen, if he was in love with you?” and I would be embarrassed.