The Road To The City (4 page)

'A bit of a chill,' my mother said.

The next morning she came into my room, felt my forehead, and said I didn't have any fever. She told me to get up and help her scrub the stairs.

‘I can't get up,' I said. ‘I don't feel well.'

‘So that's the game, is it?' she said. ‘You're playing sick. I'm the one to be sick with all the back-breaking work I do. When mealtime comes around I'm too tired even to eat. And you enjoy seeing me die by inches.'

‘I can't get up, I told you. I don't feel well.'

‘What's the matter with you?' my mother asked, pulling down the sheet and peering into my eyes. ‘Is anything wrong?'

‘I'm pregnant,' I said. My heart was beating fast, and for the first time I was afraid of what my mother might do. But she showed no surprise. She sat quietly on the edge of the bed and pulled the blanket over my feet.

‘Are you sure?' she asked.

I nodded and began to cry.

‘Don't fret,' said my mother. ‘Everything will come out all right. Does the young man know?' I shook my head.

‘You should have told him, little fool. But now we'll put everything straight. I'll go and talk to those thugs myself. We'll have a thing or two to say to them,' She pulled her shawl up over her head and went out. Pretty soon she came back. Her face was red, but there was a satisfied look on it.

‘The thugs,' she said. ‘But it's done. Only we'll have to wait a while until the young man has taken his degree. They insist on that. Now it's a matter of keeping your father quiet. But I'll see to that. That's your mother's job. You stay in bed and keep warm.' She brought me a cup of coffee and then went to scrub the stairs. I could hear her laughing to herself, but a minute later she was standing in front of me.

‘I like the boy well enough,' she said. 'It's the mother that rubs me the wrong way. The father saw reason from the start. He said he was willing to make good on his son's behalf as long as we didn't cause any scandal. He even asked me if I'd have something to drink. But the mother raised a terrible row. She threw herself on her son as if she were going to kill him and screamed like a slaughtered chicken. But that didn't discourage me. “My daughter's only seventeen,” I said, “and the court will protect her.” She turned white, sat down, and stroked her cuffs in silence. The boy hung his head and didn't look at me. The doctor was the only one to speak. He begged me for the sake of his position not to cause a scandal. He paced up and down the rug the whole time. If you could see the rugs they have! And the house! They've everything.'

I turned my head to one side as if I wanted to sleep, in order to make her go away. After a while I really did fall asleep and didn't wake up until my father came in. I pricked up my ears and heard him talking to my mother in their room. All of a sudden he raised his voice and I thought: 'Now he's coming to kill me!' But he didn't. Giovanni came instead.

‘Nini told me to ask why you didn't come yesterday and tell you he's expecting you to come to-day.'

‘Can't you see I'm in bed?' I answered. ‘I'm not well.'

‘Scarlet fever, that's my guess,' he said. ‘There's an epidemic, and Antonietta's children are both down with it. Soon your face will look like a big strawberry.'

‘I haven't got scarlet fever,' I said. ‘It's something quite different.'

He didn't ask any questions but looked out the window and said:

‘Where's he off to now?'

I looked out the window, too, and saw my father walking toward the village.

‘Where can he be going?' repeated Giovanni. ‘He hasn't even had lunch.'

Toward evening Azalea walked into the room with my mother.

‘We're going to have a beautiful baby here next May,' said my mother.

Azalea didn't answer. She sat down sombrely and unhooked her fox fur.

‘Mother's a great talker,' she said when we were alone, ‘but it's not so certain that he'll marry you. When Father went to see them they raised the roof, and it's a wonder no one got killed. They offered Father money on condition that he would keep his mouth shut and you would go and have the baby somewhere far away. And said they'd see about the wedding later. Father shouted that they'd dishonoured him and that if Giulio didn't promise to marry you he'd take the whole thing to court. When he came to see me he was worn to a frazzle. I told you that's what would happen. Now you'll have to stick close to the house because in the village they're already beginning to talk. They can't possibly know anything, but they can smell it in the air. Well, it's your funeral.'

Later on Giovanni came back. He knew now what it was all about and looked at me with malice in his eyes.

‘Nini doesn't know yet,' he said.

‘I don't want you to tell him,' I said.

‘Don't worry about that. Do you think I want to brag about your accomplishments? You've got yourself into a pretty mess! Who knows if he'll really marry you? Just now he's gone away, no one knows where. They say he was engaged, you know. Not that I care. You can go to the devil, you and your baby.'

I sat up and threw a glass that was on the night table at him. He screamed and started to hit me, but then my mother came in, took him by the collar of his jacket, and hauled him away. My mother didn't want me to go near the kitchen or any of the downstairs rooms, for fear I'd run into my father. Giovanni told me that my father had sworn he wouldn't come home if he had to see me. Anyhow, I didn't want to leave my bed. I put my dress on in the morning in order to keep warm, but then I lay on the bed with a blanket over me. I felt worse every day. Mother brought me my meals on a tray, but I hardly touched them. One evening Giovanni threw a book on my bed.

‘That's from Nini,' he said.' He waited three hours for you at the factory. He's been waiting there for days, so he told me. So I said you weren't well.'

I tried to read the book but never got more than halfway through it. There were two men in it who killed a girl and trussed her up in a suitcase. The story frightened me and I wasn't used to reading. I'd no sooner read a few pages than I forgot what had gone just before. I wasn't like Nini that way. But all the same, time went by. I had them bring the gramophone up to my room and listened to the hoarse voice singing:

Was the singer a man or a woman? It was hard to tell. But I was used to the voice and enjoyed hearing it. No other song could have pleased me half as well. I no longer wanted anything new. Every morning I put on the same old worn dress with patches all over it. Dresses now meant nothing to me at all.

When Nini turned up quite unexpectedly, while my mother was at church on Sunday, I was almost sorry to see him. I stared at the flowers, dripping with rain, that he had brought with him and his dripping hair and smiling face as if they were unfamiliar and extraneous.

‘Shut the door,' I said angrily.

‘Did I startle you? Were you sleeping? I've brought you some flowers,' he said, sitting down near me. ‘How do you feel? Better? What was it, anyhow? You have such a funny look on your face.'

‘I'm not well,' I answered, realizing that he still didn't know.

‘Your face is thin and you've lost all your colour,' he said. ‘It's a very poor idea to stay shut up in your room. You ought to get some exercise. I've been waiting for you at the factory gate. Every day I think: “Perhaps she's better now and will come.” Will you come to meet me there again when you get well?'

‘I don't know.'

‘What do you mean, you don't know? Why that high-and-mighty tone of voice? You've lost your good disposition too. Will you come or won't you?'

‘They won't let me go out,' I answered.

‘What's that? Why not?'

‘They don't want me to go around with Giulio. Or with you either. Or with any boy.'

‘All right,' he said, ‘have it your own way.' And he began to pace up and down the floor. ‘That's all lies,' he said suddenly. ‘It must be a tricky way you've thought up of sending me to the devil. How you like to see me suffer, don't you? I'm no good for working or for anything else. I think of you all day long. That's what you wanted, isn't it? To break up my life completely.' He looked at me with hard, wet eyes. ‘Well, you've got what you want, then.'

‘I don't particularly want to see you suffer,' I said, sitting up in bed. ‘Perhaps I did once upon a time. But not now. I've other things on my mind. I'm going to have a baby.'

‘Oh, is that it?' he said, without showing very much surprise. But his voice went flat and dull. ‘Poor little girl!' he said, laying a hand on my shoulder. ‘What will you do?'

‘I don't know,' I said.

‘Is he going to marry you?'. 

‘I don't know. I haven't the slightest idea. They've gone to talk to him about it, and it seems he may marry me after he gets his degree.'

‘I love you. Do you know that?' he said.

‘Yes,' I said.

‘You might have come to love me too, after a while,' he said. 'But there's no point in talking about that now. It would just make it hurt all the more. That's all over. Here I am beside you and I don't know what to say. I'd like to do something to help you, and at the same time I wish I could go away and never hear your name again.'

‘Go along, then,' I said, starting to cry.

‘I was terribly happy,' he said. ‘I thought that little by little you'd fall in love with me too. At least, sometimes I thought so. At other times I was afraid I loved you too much. “She'll never love me,” I said to myself; “she only likes to see people suffer….” How silly we were, both of us.'

We fell silent, and tears streamed down my face.

‘Perhaps he'll marry me when he gets his degree,' I said.

‘Yes, perhaps he will. Besides, I'm not your type. You'd take it out of me. We're too different.'

And Nini went away. I heard him go down the stairs and stop in the garden to speak to my mother. Then my mother came up to see me and said that she'd seen the doctor's family at church, but Giulio wasn't there. The doctor had told her that he'd sent Giulio to the city and asked her if he could come to see her at the house.

‘That means it's in the bag,' my mother said.

The doctor came that very day, and he and my mother shut themselves up in the dining-room and talked for nearly two hours. Then my mother came upstairs and told me to be glad, because it was settled that we were to get married in February. Until then Giulio had to have peace and quiet and concentrate on his studies and we weren't to see one another. In fact, the doctor wanted me to leave the village at once in order to avoid the possibility of gossip. My mother had decided to send me to my aunt, who lived in a village higher up in the mountains, but not very far away. She was afraid that I might refuse to go, so she spoke in the highest terms of her sister-in-law, glossing over the fact that they had hardly spoken for years on account of a dispute over some furniture. She told me about the garden in front of my aunt's house, where I could walk to my heart's content.

‘I hate to see you shut up in your room,' she said. ‘But people have evil tongues.'

Later Azalea came, and she and my mother decided on the day when I was to leave. My mother wanted her to persuade her husband to lend us a car from the company he worked for, but Azalea wouldn't do it.

When I finally did go to my aunt's it was in a wagon. My mother went with me, and we drove through the fields so that no one should see us. I had on one of Azalea's coats because none of my own clothes fitted me any more. It was evening when we got there. My aunt was a stout woman with bulging black eyes and wore a pair of scissors around her neck because she was a dressmaker. The first thing she did was to quarrel with my mother over the amount of board I was to pay. Santa, her daughter, brought me something to eat and lit the fire. She sat down beside me and told me that she, too, hoped to get married some day, but ‘there wasn't any hurry.' She laughed as she spoke, because she had been engaged for eight years to the mayor's son, who sent her postcards from the camp where he was doing his military service.

My aunt's house was a large one, with cold, empty, high-ceilinged rooms. There were sacks of corn and chestnuts all over the place, and strings of onions hung from the ceilings. She had had nine children, but gradually they had died or moved away, all except Santa, the youngest, who was now twenty-four. My aunt couldn't bear her and bawled her out all day long. Santa's marriage had been so long delayed chiefly because my aunt, with one excuse and another, wouldn't let her put a trousseau together but preferred to keep her at home and torment her. Santa was thoroughly scared of her mother, but whenever she spoke of leaving her in order to get married she burst into tears. She was surprised that I didn't cry when my mother went away, because she worked herself up into a state of despair every time her mother went to the city for only a day. Santa herself had been to the city only two or three times in her whole life and said she liked it better at home. And yet their village was worse than ours. It was pervaded by the smell of manure and unwashed babies squatting on the stairs. There was no electric light in the houses, and all the water came from a public fountain. I wrote to my mother to come and take me away because I didn't like it. She wasn't much good at writing letters, and so instead of answering she sent word through a coal dealer that I should stay put and make the best of it because there was nothing else to do.

And so I stayed on. I was not to be married until February and now it was only November. Ever since I had told my mother about the baby my life had taken a strange turn and I had to hide myself as if there were something shameful about me that no one should see, I thought back to the life I had led before, to the city where I had gone almost every day and the road I had travelled for so many years in every kind of weather. I remembered every inch of it, the heaps of stones, the hedges, the sharp turn revealing the river, and the crowded bridge that led directly to the central square. There in the city I had eaten salted almonds and plates of ice-cream and looked at the shop-windows. There was Nini coming out of the factory, Antonietta scolding the clerk who helped her in the shop, and Azalea waiting to go to the Moon with her lover. Now I was far away from all these things and recalled them with astonishment. Meanwhile Giulio was down there studying medicine, without coming to see me or even writing me a letter, just as if he had forgotten my existence and the fact that we were soon to be married. I hadn't laid eyes on him since he had found out that I was having a baby, and I wondered what he was thinking. Was he happy or unhappy over the prospect of marrying me?