The City and the House (21 page)

Alberico talked about another apartment that was perhaps for sale, in Porta Cavalleggeri. It was tiny but it had a beautiful terrace. It was Ippo's apartment. He asked Lucrezia if she knew Ippo. Lucrezia said she didn't. Then she said that perhaps she'd seen her once. Alberico said that Ippo was unbearable. But the apartment was charming. Perhaps she would sell it. She says that she wants to go and live in Fregene. Goodness only knows whether it's true or not. Fregene is a long way from the centre of Rome, where Ippo and Ignazio Fegiz walk about in the evenings as if they were glued together. They are like the Cat and the Fox. I was watching Lucrezia and she seemed pleased and more cheerful, there was a glint in her eyes. She is used to thinking about Ippo and Ignazio Fegiz by herself and to hear them discussed openly, and so frivolously, was a comfort to her.

We were about to leave when Piero phoned. He was in Rome and asked if he could come there to sleep. After a short while he arrived. He had a key. He came in in his big coat and long red woollen scarf. He had come from Perugia and had trouble with his car, he had had to stop in the road and there had been a big downpour of rain. He was freezing cold and asked if he could have a hot shower. He came back after a while wrapped up in Daniele's dressing-gown, which was too tight and too short for him. He said that the water was barely warm, more or less cold. Lucrezia said that she only turned the water-heater on for a few hours a day, to save money. He told her that a water-heater should be kept on all the time because you spend three times as much turning it on and off. He hadn't had any supper and asked if there were any leftovers. He went to look in the kitchen and came back with a cold cutlet. We stayed to keep him company while he ate. He seemed tired. I hadn't seen him for a while and I thought he had aged. He still has his little blond baby curls and that big, full face, but his eyes were sunken and had black circles round them. He said the cutlet was good but not very tender. It must have been an old calf, not proper veal. Lucrezia said it wasn't veal or calf it was beef and that she always bought beef because it was more nutritious and cheaper. He said that beef was marvellous for everything but not for cutlets. She said she didn't want to be criticized about her food, it was something she wouldn't put up with. We left, and in the street I thought that it is very difficult to dissolve a marriage, there are always scattered bits of it lying about and every now and again they give a twitch and draw blood.

Alberico went back to Lucrezia's today to take her some records. I am very pleased that they have become friends. I am very pleased for him and for her.

Yours

Egisto

Princeton, 22nd November

Dear Egisto,

Thank you for writing to me. Thank you for giving me frequent news of Alberico. I get news from Roberta when she phones me, but I get it in a much less summary form from your letters. He and I don't write to each other much.

I am glad you took him to Lucrezia's and that they have become friends. I like the idea of these two people I love being together and chatting. I like to think of them together, and I'm grateful to you for bringing them together.

There's one thing I find strange. You don't say whether you talked about me when you were at Lucrezia's that evening. You list the subjects of conversation, films, apartments, water-heaters and cutlets. But my name seems never to have been mentioned, as if I didn't exist, or were dead.

Though it's true that my flat in via Nazario Sauro was mentioned. I still think of it as mine, even though I've sold it. I don't know why but I don't consider the one I am living in in Princeton at the moment mine at all. It still seems to me to be my brother's and his wife's house. My brother is dead and his wife has married me. But then my first impression was that I was a stranger in the house and first impressions are sometimes ineradicable. And for this reason I continue to move about in this place like a stranger. I feel guilty if I happen to break a cup.

I am pleased you are reading my novel. Though I don't care about the novel at all now, and whenever it comes into my mind I experience a sensation of disgust. I wanted it to be published here and in Italy, but now I don't think I want it to be. Anyway a good three agencies have already turned it down.

I teach. I go cycling. I look after a child, Maggie, my wife's daughter's daughter. I look after her because her mother has gone away and Anne Marie is at her Institute all day, and anyway she doesn't like children. Yours

Giuseppe

Rome, 26th November

A skinny girl, she wears spectacles. That's how you described Chantal in one of your letters years ago. You had just seen her for the first time. A skinny girl, she wears spectacles. A dress with four buttons down one side and four down the other. You mentioned her in passing, in the midst of various other things, and she didn't seem to have made such an impression on you. And then you go and fall in love with her. It happens. Well, yes, certainly I thought you might have when you told me how you went out together, and how you did the housework together. The life you described seemed to me to be extremely boring, but you told me about it in a very warm, excited way. Don't think I don't reread your letters. I often reread them.

In the room with the bear-cubs. Anne Marie with red blotches on her neck. The hamburger forgotten on your plate. Little Maggie. They made you sleep in the lumber-room. They've left you holding the baby. They use you as a baby-sitter. This is your life in America. My poor Giuseppe. You're in a really bad way.

Come back here. Pack your bags and come back here. Walk out on Anne Marie, Maggie, Danny and Mrs Mortimer. Come back here, where I am, your old faithful friend. I don't know what else to say.

Piero has a girl. He told me yesterday. She is called Diana and she is twenty-two. She is very beautiful, she has black hair and big eyes. I've seen a photograph of her. She is from Todi. She is a social worker. She's from a humble family, her father's a post-office employee. He met her last winter in Todi, during a concert. They were playing Ravel's
Bolero
when he and she exchanged a couple of words and a smile for the first time. She says she loves him, but she has a relationship with a student. This torments Piero. On Saturdays she sees the student and because of this he almost always comes to Rome on Saturdays. He's not up to staying alone in Perugia, his mother Annina is there and at the moment he can't bear his mother's company. Also he thinks he ought to be with the children a bit. He goes for walks with the children and Joli. They go up to the Villa Borghese. The children are not really children any more, apart from little Vito, and they quickly get bored at the Villa Borghese and apart from Vito they go off and amuse themselves. They tell me they find Piero strange. They ask me what has happened to him. Sometimes he talks and talks and sometimes he smokes and smokes and doesn't say a syllable.

I didn't suspect anything. To tell you the truth I thought that over the past few months he wanted to suggest I go back to living with him again. He seemed to me to be acting like someone who wants to put back together again a marriage that has come apart. I had even prepared inside myself how I was going to refuse resolutely I was going to say to him that he must not on any account ever think of it again. Idiot, idiot. I didn't realise. Yesterday he told me everything. He has a girl. It is a serious matter, a serious commitment. He wants to marry her. He asked if I'd agree to divorce, but even so they'd have to wait five years and there was the risk she might go off with the other one in the meantime. She is a young, confused girl and she's not always sincere. I was dumbfounded. I had always believed myself to be the centre of his life, the centre of his thoughts. When I realized I wasn't, it was as if I had fallen from the top of a mountain. I was dumbfounded, and I was also, goodness knows why, suddenly very sad. I suddenly remembered all the saddest things in my life, my mother's illness, T leaving me, the dead baby. I almost wept. Piero didn't notice. He doesn't see other people any more, he only sees that girl and himself. He went on talking, he kept me up till two in the morning.

This morning Zezé told me I looked ill. She asked if I was worried about money. She went to Piero who was in the kitchen making himself coffee. She told him I looked sick and was worried about money. Piero came and asked me if I was worried about money. I told him I have to buy a house and that houses cost money. I went out. I walked, despising myself, hating myself. I thought that I didn't have the right to shed a single tear about Piero's girl. What had happened to me wasn't unusual.

Piero went off again today. Alberico came to see me and stayed to supper. This will seem strange to you but Alberico often comes to my flat now. He is the one person in the world I feel good with.

I told him about Piero. I cried too. He didn't try to comfort me because there was nothing anyone could say.

Lucrezia

Luco dei Marsi, 3rd December

Dear Giuseppe,

You wrote to me when I got married and I never answered you. To tell the truth I haven't even written to you once since you've been in America.

Egisto came to see me here in Luco and we talked about you. I think your ears must have been burning. We talked about those lovely far-off times when we were all younger and we saw each other all the time. In fact those times are not so distant, but they seem very distant indeed, goodness knows why. And in fact we were not so young then, and we are not so old now.

I want to ask a favour of you. Perhaps you know that my husband and I have a little furniture factory here in Luco. We make reproduction antique furniture. Now we want to try our hand at making modern furniture too. I would be grateful if you could send me some American Interior Decorating Magazines. I can get ideas from them.

Some time ago I was in Rome to see Serena act in
Mirra
. We were all there, me, Egisto, Lucrezia, your cousin Roberta. Piero wasn't there.

I enjoyed myself. It was good.

I spent an afternoon with Lucrezia. I don't know what was wrong but it didn't go well, we both felt uncomfortable. Afterwards she told Egisto that I had become hard inside. Egisto passed this on to me. He was wrong to do this because there's never any need to tell someone the horrid things people say behind her back.

I haven't become hard. I talk about furniture a lot, and timber, and interior decorating. I talk about debts. My husband and I wake up at night to talk about debts, VAT, and all the other dreadful things. He gets up and makes himself hot, milky coffee.

Our business isn't going well. If things don't get better we shall be forced to close. Please send me the magazines.

How Lucrezia's children have changed. Cecilia wears stiletto heels. Vito has a key to the house and goes out to buy milk. And I found Graziano reading
Death in Venice
. Daniele and Augusto wouldn't even look me in the face. And we played so many games of football together on the lawn at
Le Margherite
. But they're not interested in me now because they're at an ungrateful age.

I often miss my bedsit, and my chats with Egisto, and our suppers at the Mariuccia Restaurant, which doesn't exist any more.

Albina

Princeton, 12th December

Dear Lucrezia,

Chantal came three days ago with a friend of hers and took the child. It was four in the afternoon. It was snowing. I hadn't taken the child to the nursery because she had a slight cold. She and I were in the sitting-room. She was sitting on the carpet playing with her dolls - she has lots of them. I was reading
Orlando Furioso
. I have to read it with my students and I have to be able to explain it.

Chantal arrived in a red Opel. I was standing at the window for a moment, watching the snow. She and her friend, a tall, thin girl with a long chin, got out of the car. I went out to them. Chantal had a red windcheater on, with a hood. She didn't even push her hood back. She told me she had come to collect the child and that she intended to leave at once. The Opel belonged to her friend. They had decided everything in a hurry and she hadn't had time to phone. In any case we knew that she would come sooner or later. She had left the commune and lived with her friend in a two-room apartment. She talked hurriedly and kept laughing in the shrill, dry, nervous way she has. The child was very happy to see her and wanted her to pick her up. I told her that the child had a cold but she said that didn't matter, they would wrap her up well, they had blankets in the car. I told her we ought to phone Anne Marie at the Institute, because she would come straight away. She said there wasn't time and in any case she didn't want to see her mother. She had a suitcase with her. She went into the room with the bear-cubs, took the child's clothes out of the drawers and stuffed them into the suitcase. There were still the toys, of which the child has an enormous number. Chantal told her friend to collect them together and to put them in the boot in a blanket. The friend went and fetched a blanket and made a bundle of the toys with it. Whilst they were getting in the car Mrs Mortimer appeared at the window of her house. She came out but Chantal had already got into the car with the child and just waved to her. The friend sat in the driver's seat. The Opel drove off and Mrs Mortimer and I were left standing in the road with the snow swirling around us.

Mrs Mortimer suggested I come into her house and have a cup of tea. I didn't want to at all but it seemed rude to refuse. Mrs Mortimer didn't make any comment about Chantal. She just said that it was a pity she had chosen such a cold day to travel on. Perhaps she saw me looking pale because she wanted to give me whisky instead of tea. Then she wanted to show me a cake she had made. It was in the oven and it wasn't ready yet, otherwise I could have tried it. She said that I would certainly miss the child because she was always with me. Sometimes she had heard me telling her little stories. They were really lovely and perhaps I could write them down and make them into a book. It might have better luck than my other book, which Anne Marie said had been turned down by no less than four agencies. I told her that it wasn't four but three. Anyway, she said, it had had bad luck. I finally managed to get back home. There were wardrobes standing open and empty in the room with the bear-cubs. However, I saw that Chantal had forgotten to take the child's vitamins, they were still on the chest of drawers. She had also forgotten them when she walked out of the house in Philadelphia.