“I’m not afraid any more; I only want to die,” I said.
“Go to sleep and don’t be silly,” he answered. “I don’t want you to die.”
“What difference would it make to you?” I asked him. “You have Augusto and Giovanna. You don’t need me. You don’t need the baby either. What will you do with a baby anyhow? You’ve grown old without ever having a baby and you got along perfectly well without it.”
“I’m not so old,” he said with a laugh. “I’m only forty-four.”
“You are old, though,” I said. “You have a lot of grey hair. You got along without a baby for forty-four years. What will you do with one now? It’s too late for you to get used to having a baby crying about the house.”
“Please don’t say such silly things,” he said. “You know perfectly well I’m anxious to have this baby.”
“Why didn’t you ever have one with Giovanna?”
Out of the darkness he gave a deep sigh.
“I’ve asked you not to talk about that person.”
I sat bolt upright in the bed.
“Don’t say ‘that person.’ Say ‘Giovanna.’ ”
“As you like.”
“Say ‘Giovanna.’ ”
“Giovanna, then.”
“Why didn’t you ever have a baby together?”
“I don’t think she ever wanted to have a baby by me.”
“No? Then she can’t love you very much.”
“I don’t think she does love me very much.”
“I don’t love you either. No one can love you. Do you know why? Because you have no courage. You’re a little man who hasn’t enough courage to get to the bottom of anything. You’re a cork bobbing on the surface, that’s what you are. You don’t love anybody and nobody loves you.”
“You don’t love me, then?” he asked.
“No.”
“When did you stop loving me?”
“I don’t know. Some time ago.”
Once more he sighed.
“It’s all too bad,” he said.
“Alberto,” I said, “tell me where you were these last few days.”
“In Rome, on business.”
“Alone or with Giovanna?”
“Alone.”
“Do you swear it?”
“I don’t want to swear,” he said.
“Because it isn’t true. That’s why. You were with Giovanna. Where did you go? To the lakes? Did you go to the lakes?”
He put on the light, got up, and took a blanket out of the cupboard.
“I’m going to sleep in my study. Both of us will get more rest that way.”
He stood there in the middle of the room with the blanket over his arm, a slight figure in rumpled blue pyjamas, with his hair in disorder and a look of weariness and distress in his eyes.
“No, Alberto, don’t go away; I don’t want you to go away.” I was weeping and trembling and he came over and stroked my hair. I took his hand and kissed it. “It’s not true that I don’t love you,” I said. “I love you more than you can possibly know. I couldn’t live with any other man. I couldn’t make love with Augusto or with anybody else. I like making love with you. I’m your wife. I’m always thinking of you when you’re away. I can’t think of anything else, no matter how hard I try. It’s idiotic of me, I know, but I can’t help it. I think of every single thing that’s happened to us since the day we first met. I’m glad I’m your wife.”
“Then everything’s all right,” he said, picking up the blanket. He went to sleep in the study, and it was a long time before we slept together again.
It was dark when I left the café. The rain had stopped, but the pavement was still glistening. I realized that I was very tired and I had a burning feeling in my knees. I walked about the city for a while longer, then I took a tram and got off in front of Francesca’s house. There were bright lights in the drawing room, and I could see a maid passing a tray. Then I remembered that it was Wednesday, and Wednesday was Francesca’s day for receiving her friends at home, so I didn’t go in. I went on walking. My feet were heavy and tired, and there was a hole in the heel of my left stocking, where my shoe rubbed against the bare skin and gave me pain. Sooner or later, I thought, I’d have to go home. I shivered and a wave of nausea came over me, so I went back to the park. I sat down on a bench and slipped off my shoe to look at the sore spot on the back of my heel. The heel was swollen and red; a blister had formed and broken and now it was bleeding. Couples were embracing each other on the park benches, and in the shadow of the trees an old man lay asleep under a dark green coat.
I shut my eyes and remembered certain afternoons when I used to take the baby out in the park. We used to walk very, very slowly and I would give her warm milk out of a thermos bottle I carried in my bag. I had an enormous bag where I used to put all the baby’s things: a rubber bib and one of towelling and some little raisin biscuits that she especially liked, sent by my mother from Maona. Those were long afternoons I used to spend in the park, turning around to watch the baby follow me in her velvet-edged hood, her little coat with the velvet buttons, and her white leggings. Francesca had given her a camel that swayed its head as it walked. It was a lovely camel with a gold-embroidered red cloth saddle, and it swayed its head in a very wise and appealing way. Every other minute the camel would get tangled up in its string and fall and we had to set it on its feet again. Then we walked slowly on among the trees in the warm, humid sunshine. The baby’s mittens would come off and I would lean over to pull them on and blow her nose and then carry her when she was tired.
I would go home for the night, I thought, and to the police station in the morning. I didn’t know where the police station was, so I’d have to look it up in the telephone book. I’d ask them to let me tell the whole story, from the very first day, including certain details which might seem trivial enough but had considerable importance. It was a long story, but they’d have to let me talk. I tried to imagine the face of the man who would listen to me, and I saw him, with a moustache and an olive complexion, sitting behind a desk. I shivered again and suddenly I wanted to phone Augusto and Francesca and ask them to go to the police station for me. Or else I might write a letter to the police and wait for them to come and pick me up at home. Of course they’d put me in jail, but I couldn’t exactly imagine how that would be. All I could see was the police station and a man with a long, shiny, olive-skinned face behind a desk. When he laughed it made me shiver, and then everything was a blank, days and years tumbling out of my life that had no connection with the days and years that had been filled with the baby and Alberto and Augusto and Francesca and Gemma and the cat and my father and mother at Maona. It didn’t matter at this point whether or not I went to jail. Everything that mattered had happened already, for everything that mattered was Alberto at the moment when I shot him and he fell heavily across the table and I closed my eyes and ran out of the room.
Our little girl was born three years ago on January eleventh at three o’clock in the afternoon. I trailed around the house in a wrapper, moaning with pain, for two whole days while Alberto followed me with a frightened look on his face. Dr. Gaudenzi came to take care of me, bringing a young and obnoxious nurse who called Alberto “Daddy.” The nurse had a fight with Gemma in the kitchen because she said the kettles were dirty. They needed lots of hot water, and Gemma was terrified by my moans and groans, besides having a stye in her eye that made her particularly unintelligent. My father and mother came too. I wandered about the house making senseless remarks to the effect that they must hurry up and help me to get rid of that infernal baby. Then I was so dead tired I went to bed and fell asleep for a minute, only to wake up shrieking with pain until the nurse told me I’d get a goitre from straining my throat that way. I had forgotten the baby and Alberto, and all I wanted was to go to sleep and stop suffering. I no longer wanted to die; in fact, I was scared to pieces of dying and asked nothing more than to live. I begged everyone to tell me when the pain would be over, but it lasted a very long time, while the nurse went to and fro with kettles of water, my mother huddled in her black dress in a corner, and Alberto held my hand. But I didn’t want his hand; I only bit the sheet and tried, regardless of the baby, to get rid of that terrible pain in my middle.