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.
The maid came up to tell me that the usual gentleman was downstairs in the drawing room. I got up, dressed, and went down. Alberto was sitting there with his briefcase on his knees and the shivery, cowed appearance of a little boy who had just had a caning. He said he hadn’t been able to sleep, and I said I hadn’t either. We went out to a café together and sat at the far end of a dark, deserted room decorated with mirrors that had Cinzano Vermouth painted in red letters across them. They were playing billiards next door, and we could hear the knocking of balls and the hum of voices. Alberto said he couldn’t get along without seeing me and that he had spent a very bad night thinking about how much he had hurt me. Since his mother had died the house was very lonely and the days when he didn’t see me were empty and cold. I reminded him of the other woman. But he said she was often unkind to him and his life was entirely without joy. He felt stupid and useless, like a cork bobbing on the water.
I didn’t go to San Remo. When Francesca came back I told her I didn’t want to go. She lost her temper, threw the oranges on the floor, and kicked my suitcase over. The colonel’s widow began to knock on the wall with her hairbrush. I told Francesca that San Remo was the last place in the world I wanted to go to, that I hated the violent colours and glaring light of the sea. I said I’d rather give up the ghost in my own room in the boardinghouse than board a train and go away. If you’re in trouble, I told her, it’s better to stew in your own juice in familiar surroundings. A change of air is positively fatal.
“Look out for yourself, then,” she said. “And next time you’re on your deathbed don’t call me. I’ve better things to do.” She jammed her turban on her head and looked at herself in the mirror while she buttoned up her coat and smoothed it over her hips.
When Alberto asked me to marry him I said yes. I asked him how he expected to live with me if he was in love with somebody else, and he said that if I loved him very much and was very brave we might make out very well together. Plenty of marriages are like that, he said, because it’s very unusual for both partners to love each other the same way. I wanted to know a lot more about his feelings for me, but I couldn’t talk to him for long about anything important because it bored him to try to get to the bottom of things and turn them over and over the way I did. When I began to speak of the woman he loved and to ask if he still went to see her, his eyes dimmed and his voice became tired and faraway and he said that she was a bad woman, that she had caused him a great deal of pain and he didn’t want to be reminded of her.
So he said that we’d get married and we went on seeing each other. Now he held my hands and kissed me when we were alone in a café or beside the river, but he never set any definite month or day for our wedding. Finally I told him that we must go together to Maona and he must speak to my father about it. He didn’t seem very enthusiastic, but he came. I wrote to my mother to take the garbage pail out of the kitchen and cook a good dinner for Saturday night because I was bringing someone with me.
We took the usual bus and Alberto made sketches of all the people on it. When we got to Maona my mother and father were somewhat taken aback, but Alberto reassured them by asking to speak to my father alone. They went into the smaller parlour together and my mother took in a brazier of coals to warm it up. Afterward my father came out looking very happy and we all drank marsala together. But my mother took me aside and half cried. Alberto seemed so old, she said, and then he only came up to my shoulder, whereas in her opinion a man ought to be taller than his wife. She asked me if I was sure I loved him, and when I said yes she took me up to her room to show me the bed and table linen she had set aside for the day of my marriage. Alberto spent the whole day chatting in the kitchen. My mother had taken the garbage pail away and bought two salt cellars so that the salt should not come to the table in a saucer. The vet and the tax collector dropped in after supper, and Father introduced Alberto as my fiancé. Alberto played a game of chess with the tax collector and then we drank some more marsala. Alberto became great friends with the tax collector, and before going back to the city that evening he promised to send him some Danish stamps for his collection.
Later that night, in my own room, when I was getting undressed and going to bed in the bed I had slept in ever since I was a child, a wave of terror and disgust came over me at the thought that soon Alberto and I would be married and make love together. I reassured myself with the idea that this was only because I had never made love before, but I remembered the slight disgust I felt every time he kissed me and wondered whether or not I really loved him. It’s very difficult, I thought to myself, to know what we’re really like inside. When it had seemed as if he were going out of my life I had felt so sad that I didn’t want to go on living, and yet when he entered my life as he did just now when he talked to my father and mother I was filled with terror and disgust. But I came to the conclusion that I only needed to be a little braver because all girls must feel somewhat the same way. It’s probably a mistake to follow every meandering of our feelings and waste time listening to every echo from within. That, in fact, is no way to live.
I stayed at Maona all day Sunday while my father went to the city to see Dr. Gaudenzi and find out something more about Alberto. He seemed quite pleased when he came back in the evening and said that he was glad I had found the proper sort of man and one of good social standing. My mother cried and said that marriage was a lottery, but he told her that she was being very silly and that women always have some excuse for shedding a few tears.
Before we were married, when we went for a walk or sat in a café, Alberto enjoyed my company even if he wasn’t in love with me. He went out of his way to call on me; yes, even if it was raining he never failed to come. He sketched my face in his notebook and listened to what I had to say.
But after we were married he didn’t sketch my face any more. He drew animals and trains, and when I asked him whether trains meant that he wanted to go away he only laughed and said no. He did go away, though, after we had been married just a month, and didn’t turn up for ten days. One morning I found him packing his bag and he said he was going to the country with Augusto to revisit some of the scenes of their youth. He didn’t ask me if I wanted to go; in fact, such a thought had apparently not even occurred to him. But this didn’t particularly surprise me. Augusto and he had been boys together, and their friendship was so close that they had a way of talking to each other in something like a code which no outsider could decipher. And then he had said once that Augusto didn’t like me. I wasn’t too badly hurt, but I decided it was up to me to make myself agreeable to Augusto so that the next time they went anywhere together they’d ask me to come along. I, too, liked to wander about the countryside, but perhaps he didn’t know it.