The Girl on the Via Flaminia (5 page)

She was somewhere there, in the darkness.

“It's been a long time,” he said. “A long time since I've been with a girl. And I'm not your enemy.”

Through the crack in the door a light flickered. He turned and opened the door. She could escape now if she wanted to. In the hallway, Ugo's thin face and almost bald head appeared lit by two wax candles. “Eh,” the old man said, “the war, the war. Every day something else happens.”

“That's all right,” Robert said. “I like candles.”

He took one of the wax tapers from the old man.

“It's usually only for a short time,” Ugo said. “Then they repair it.”

“We'll be all right,” Robert said.

The old man made a gesture with his hands.

“Scusi,” he said, apologizing again for the condition of his city, and then he went down the hall carrying his own candle, throwing a large and unhappy shadow.

Robert carried the candle into the room and put it on the table beside the musette bag and the small green can of milk and the chocolate bars. He was now a little ashamed of the bars of chocolate and the milk and the musette bag. When he had the candle adjusted, he turned to look at her. She was standing beside the bed that had that too obvious color. “Why don't you sit down?” he said. She stood there, in her raincoat, her chin down. The bedroom door was open. He picked out a package from the depths of the musette bag. “Oh,” he said, “do you know what this is?” He showed her the package. “Soup,” he said. “You wouldn't think they could put soup into a little package like this and send it all the way across the ocean and it would still be soup. But it is. All you have to do with it is put it into a pot of water and boil it five minutes and there it is—soup. My mother sent it.”

The tinfoil sealed package was in his hand.

He watched her head lift slowly. Her hair was that very soft-looking blonde again in the light of the candle, and her shadow lay across the bed and on the wall.

“In such a small package?” she said.

“Sure.”

His hands were cold and he had forgotten how cold he was and now he blew again on his hands. He took out his knife. It was a decorated knife he had bought from a wireman coming over on the boat. “Wouldn't you like me to cut you a piece of the fruit cake?” he said. She did not answer and he took the knife and cut through the cellophane and the cake. “Please,” he said, holding the cake out.

“Grazie,” she said.

She took the cake.

“Taste it,” he said. “It's real good. I don't like cake but when my mother sends something it's pretty good.”

He watched her taste the cake.

“Isn't it good?” he said, eagerly.

“Yes,” she said. “Buonissimo.”

“It came all the way from America,” Robert said, watching her eat the cake.

 

 

 

 

B
ut it was no good. In the days that followed he was soon aware that the thing between them was no good. The weather stayed cold, and the governmental crisis continued, and the people burned charcoal, and the soldiers continued to come into the city on leave. The soldiers got drunk and the people hungrier, and that was about the only feature of life which had a certain constancy in those days. He tried not to think about or to accept the fact that it was no good between them. The night he had gone to bed with her, the first night, when she had at last accepted the fruit cake almost like a flag of truce, he had thought it might actually work out. He had sat finally on the edge of the bed. He said to her, “I have to be in camp at seven-thirty in the morning. Will you tell the signora to knock at the door in the morning?”

“Yes,” she said.

And that was almost matrimonial, too, her saying the yes. She had gone out of the room then. He sat there, on the bed, unbuckling his boots, thinking how heavy and awkward they were, putting them carefully and noiselessly beside the bed. It was a very married gesture. The bed was frozen but the sheets were clean and he lay on the icy pillow, waiting for his own warmth to warm the bed, and for her return.

It was a real pillow. That was what impressed him most that first night. In Piombino, a town north of the city, he had been in a house. It was a ruined house and there had been an orchard outside. An orchard of fig trees and peach trees and there had been some grapes growing in an arbor and there had been a vegetable patch with tomato vines. It was a week he had eaten more tomatoes than he ever had in his life. He put the tomatoes in the sun and let them ripen and they were wonderful. The sea had been visible, too, from the top of the main street of the town and there was a little island that turned out to be Elba in the bay, blue, misty and unapproachable. The pillow in that house had been his raincoat under the blanket. But this was a real pillow, and clean.

He would have liked to have been casual and funny and to have said perhaps, “Come on, warm the bed up,” but he did not say it. It was because he was hoping that nothing would damage the very temporary truce between them.

He lay there in the cold clean darkness.

He could hear her undressing in that darkness. She was standing on the small rug next to the bed, undressing, and as he lay there he listened to and followed the sounds of her clothes.

She must be shivering, he thought.

Once on a road in the south when he was marching, there had been an oxcart. Oxen, slow, white, sacrificial. And the wooden cart, driven by an old man in a black hat. The heat, the green fields of early summer. It was near a village where the Madonna in a roadside shrine had been broken by a shell. And on the back of the creaking and slow-moving cart, on the hay in the cart, there had been a woman. Young. And the strong brown naked legs and the naked shoeless feet under the black full-aproned skirt. That, and her smile. In that brown strong beautiful face, that smile. In the heat, during the marching. Coming back into the area, after the twenty miles they had marched, and after passing the light British tanks with their regimental pennants and their drivers, goggled, dusty, and in crash helmets, leaning out from the turrets between their machine guns, he remembered that smile. Its whiteness.

There had been, of course, the whores. And he had tried. He drove up, in the carriage they had hired, to the end of town, and outside the white stone peasant house there was a line of soldiers. They were very patient. The sun was hot, and the heat came up from the dust, and they squatted down on their heels in that line, waiting. There were two women in the white stone peasant house. The line moved about every ten minutes closer to the house and everybody was very patient, waiting in the dust and the sun, for the line to move up, like a chow line, and while they waited they squatted down on their heels and they smoked and then after about ten minutes the line moved up one man and they moved up with it and then they squatted down again, smoking and waiting. Even all the cognac he had in him at that time, and all the loneliness, had not been enough to get him to wait out that kind of line for what must have been at the end of it, and he walked back to town, and back to the bar near the Air Force club, and finished up the afternoon with cognac.

Now he could not stand the waiting.

He turned in the cold bed and found his matches on the small table and struck a match, the match flaring, cupping the light, and she stood there in the light of the held match for just a moment, her back toward him, looking at him over her shoulder, startled, for only a moment, then he blew the match out.

In the darkness he said, “Christ, you are beautiful,” and that image held for him, the image of her turning to look at him over her naked shoulder in the light of the held match, and what Nina had said was perfectly true, she did have wonderful shoulders, and in that very short flickering moment in which he had held the match to see her she had been more beautiful than any girl he could remember.

Touching her, then, that first time, there had been no words at all to express the overwhelming sense of a woman being with him, in a clean place, in a clean bed, just being there, in a room, alone feeling the warmth even though it was not a given and voluntary and loving warmth, only the inevitable warmth of somebody's body. There were no words at all for the enormous charity that having a woman, in a room with a closed door, in a bed that was one's own, meant. He touched her with a quality of wonder and thankfulness. She said nothing. She did not move. But it was not necessary for her to say anything or even to give him anything. It was just the tremendousness of her being there. And he could not tell her that.

He fell asleep.

When she awoke in the morning he was gone. The moment of awakening was not at first one of panic. She was warm, and she did not remember immediately where she was, or what this room was, and then, when she did remember, and the panic began, there was the bad moment when, shivering and in haste, rising from the bed, she confronted her own accidental image in the long narrow mirror that was fixed to the door of the wardrobe closet. It seemed to her then that the thing she had done was incredible, that it had not been done by her at all, but by some unhappy and debased stranger, and then, on the table, she found the food he had so solicitously left behind for her, the milk, the chocolate, the soup package, coffee, even cigarettes, and she looked at the nakedness of the gifts as though they contained some terrible confirmation of the fact that the woman who had inhabited this room through the night had, after all, not been a stranger. She dressed quickly. She thought now that if she escaped quickly enough, if she went out quickly enough from this room, she would be able to leave behind that image the mirror had seen of the woman rising from the bed, and which only the mirror contained. She thought that once she had done this she would be able to escape quickly and forever because now she was being forced to escape, and she thought that when she had dressed she would go quickly somewhere, she did not know quite where, into the city she thought, and then somehow she would find something, work or something, somewhere, because she had to, now she had to more than ever, and then this room and the mirror and the food and the night would stop existing.

And she must, she thought, in the cold of the morning, get out of the room immediately the things he had left behind on the table so nakedly. She dressed herself in what she had worn the night before: the thick ski stockings, the heavy tasseled shoes, the woolen skirt, the woolen sweater. She put on her raincoat, not thinking that seeing her like this whoever was awake in the house would look perhaps strangely at her, and then going to the table she gathered up the gifts and went out of the room, carrying them down the hallway to the kitchen where she could hear sound and movement. Adele was standing at the stove, frying something in oil, the inevitabile cigarette in her mouth, and Antonio was sitting at the kitchen table. She heard Adele's “Good morning,” and she went into the kitchen, and put the things he had left her, the mementoes, his part of the arrangement, on the kitchen table, and she said, “Will you take this, signora? There is too much—” and Adele was pleased. “Milk,” she said, “and coffee. Guarda; chocolate, too. What is this?” She held up the sealed tinfoil package.

“Soup,” Lisa said.

“Soup?” The astonishment was, perhaps, similar to her own. “But how? In a package?”

“It is dried soup.”

“Un altro miracolo,” Adele said. “They put everything in packages.” She shook the tinfoil. “Well, one can't die from it.” She looked at the girl. “Sit down, signora. Have some coffee.”

“No, grazie.”

“The coffee's ready.” Reluctantly, Lisa sat down.

“Did you sleep well? Did the room please your husband?”

“Yes.”

“In the old days, I wouldn't have thought of renting a room. But now . . .” She poured the coffee. “This is the last of Nina's captain.”

“Good,” Antonio said.

“Why? Good we had the coffee. You drink it.”

“Reluctantly,” Antonio said.

“Nevertheless, you drink it,” Adele said.

Antonio smiled across the table at her. “Do you know Leopardi, signora?”

“Leopardi?” Lisa said. “The poems?”

“Yes.”

“No. I know very little poetry.”

“‘O patria mia,'” Antonio quoted, “‘I see the walls and the arches and the columns and the images and the heraldic shields of our ancestors, but the glory I do not see.'”

His smile made her uncomfortable. “‘But the glory I don't see,'” Antonio said, repeating his Leopardi. “Their coffee I see.” He stirred his cup. “Signor Roberto is a private, isn't he?”

“Yes,” the girl said.

“Antonio means,” Adele said, “that in our army he was an officer. That is something to boast about.”

“I am not boasting,” Antonio said. “It doesn't matter what I was. What I was exists only in the Libyan desert. I only meant a girl like you, signora, might have married one of their officers.”

She flushed.

“Was I unfortunate?”

“No,” Antonio said. “I suppose their privates are richer than our colonels. What does your husband do, signora—in America?”

“In America?” she said.

“Yes. When he is a civilian. Where the war is over.”

“He is studying to be a lawyer,” Lisa said.

“An avvocato? Very good,” Adele said.

I am lying, Lisa thought; why should I be? Why do I try to make him somebody or something important? Perhaps he works in a garage. Perhaps he is nothing.

“A lawyer?” Antonio said, politely. “He does not look like a lawyer. But then, even their priests—have you seen their priests?—they don't look like priests either. Their priests look like soccer players.”

“The military ones,” Adele said.

“Do we ever see anything but their military ones?” Antonio said. He stood up. “‘Ma la gloria non vedo,'” he said, again quoting Leopardi. “Do you know, signora, when I left in my transport from Augusta to sail for Africa there was a time when I thought I would enjoy the war? I thought it would force me into a heroism, and to be a hero, even a reluctant one, is an attractive idea. I thought war was something like firefighting: a great blaze, and then men, all together, working to put it out.” He grinned, savagely, and she realized that the mockery was not directed at her, but at himself, at that poor illusioned Antonio who had gone into the transport at Augusta. “But how wrong I was; war is the opposite of men working together. It is more than ever only men trying to save themselves separately. At Bardia I was cured of being a fool about war forever.”

“And now?” Lisa said.

“Now?” He looked intently at her. He hesitated. “Excuse me, signora—but your husband, have you found it possible to be happy with a,” and there was again that slight pause as he chose the word, “stranger?”

“A stranger?” Lisa said. “But all men are strangers.”

“I meant a foreigner, an American.”

“They are generous,” she said, “and not all of them are alike.”

“Have you been happy?”

She did not answer.

“Excuse me,” Antonio said. “Perhaps I should not ask. But it is difficult for me to accept certain things.”

“That our women marry foreigners?”

“No,” Antonio said. “That they don't marry them. That they sell themselves to them.”

She stood up, abruptly. It was absolutely necessary to escape, and to escape now, this moment, while she could. “Excuse me,” she said. She went out of the kitchen and then out of the house. The grayness of winter inhabited everything: sky, building, street. And it seemed to her, walking rapidly, with the cold coming through the inadequate raincoat she wore, that almost all of the faces of the young men she passed were like Antonio's, and she thought how similar their memories (of transports, defeat, the desert) must be. Her own urgency had increased now; she had already lied, saying he was a lawyer, defending him, involving herself deeper, when what she wished above all was to end it, to close off forever the house, the room, and the night. She walked quickly down the Via Flaminia toward the city. A truck, one of her countrymen's, going down the wide boulevard exploded from a protruding exhaust pipe a dense black cloud of something that was hardly gasoline. Near the old enormous stone gate, whose archways led into the Piazza del Popolo, a starved cabman's horse stamped, his ribs covered with a soldier's blanket. At the trolley terminal, a clump of people waited with that incredible patience born out of the war and disaster for the infrequent circolare.

She crossed the dung-spotted cobbles, under the archways, avoiding the horn blasts of the vehicles, passing on her left the old church Nero's ghost was supposed to haunt, the city's birds roosting on its stone, and then the piazza itself, wide, with the fountain and obelisk in its geometrical center, and the park above it, and the statuary at each side. Three avenues fanned out from the piazza, and she walked toward the central one, the Corso. He sat on the edge of the bed, she remembered, unbuckling his boots, and in the darkness there had been that intensified and unrelaxed waiting, that expectation of his hands, and she remembered too, shrinkingly, that when he had touched her, later, something in her had not been entirely unwilling.