The City and the House (4 page)

I haven't told you much new. You know many things about me, I've told you them a thousand times. But it was to tell you how I was and what happened to me when I was twenty-five.

I will say goodbye after this extremely long letter, and go and prepare supper because if I wait for the Sicilian to do it I'll be in a real mess.

Egisto has written to me saying he wants to come here on Saturday with someone he likes, but I don't want to see people at the moment. I feel depressed. Perhaps I'm sorry that you are going. I won't say don't go, or go only for a few days, but when you are there I shall miss you from time to time.

Lucrezia

Monte Fermo, 27th October

Just a couple of lines to tell you not to bring the picture-restorer, or at least not to bring him this Saturday, because I'm worn out and I don't want to see him. I don't want to find myself face to face with someone I don't know. Piero doesn't want anyone to touch the still-life. One of his clients at the office told him it was enough to gently rub an onion over it a few times and the stains would disappear and the colours come up fresh again. He has been doing this for a few days and he is satisfied with the results.

Lucrezia

Rome, 28th October

Yesterday evening I phoned you when I got back from Monte Fermo, but you were out. I wanted you to ask me over for supper because my fridge was empty. So I phoned Egisto, he was in and came over straightaway; he had some more or less stale bread in his house and a tin of Campbell's soup, and we made ourselves a little soup.

I had two letters from Lucrezia, one for you and one for Egisto. I'll put yours in your post box when I pass your house on the way to school, and I'll add this note of mine, just a few words.

Egisto and I, and all of us, think you are making a mistake in moving to America for good. We think you will be very unhappy there. Go there for a holiday and come back. It doesn't matter if you have sold your flat, it doesn't matter if you have sent off your trunks, because there's a solution for everything.

It seems terrible that you're leaving Italy for good. It will be boring at
Le Margherite
without you. I shall certainly go there anyway, because I never have anything to do on Saturday and Sunday; if I go to see my family at Luco dei Marsi I'm ill for the whole week and if I stay in Rome I get depressed. So I shall go there anyway, but it won't be the same without you.

When I met you I fell in love with you, and now I want to tell you so. And I wrote you a lot of letters, but I tore them up. Then it was all over because I'm like Lucrezia in that way, I fall in love easily and then one day I wake up and it's all over.

I've never fallen in love with Egisto perhaps because he seems rather ugly to me - so squat and short and dumpy. Not that you are so good-looking to tell the truth, because you are dry and thin and sallow. Once or twice Egisto has asked me to go to bed with him, I said no, and he was hurt, because he's very touchy; he disappeared for a few days then he came back again and everything was as before. Now we love each other like brother and sister. If I happen to go to bed with someone I tell him about it, but that doesn't happen often, because I fall in love easily but bed is a problem for me.

I don't get on with my real brother. I don't even get on with my mother and when I go home to Luco dei Marsi I have a terrible time. My father is the best, though he is old and deaf. Then there are my sisters Maura and Gina, one nine and the other ten. My brother works in a greengrocer's. He studied to be a teacher but couldn't find a job. It infuriates him that I have a job in Rome. He won't leave it alone. When I go in the shop where he works he gets sulky and goes off in a corner. Then he tells my mother that everyone thinks there is something peculiar about me and that they ask if perhaps I haven't finished up in the Red Brigade.

My mother and brother say I go around dressed like a beggar. I answer that I have to send a good proportion of my salary to them. They answer that I could go to a Standa department store and that I needn't spend much. They really hate my jeans and cheap shoes.

And then at home I have to sleep with Maura and Gina. It's really awful sleeping with Maura and Gina. All of us sleep in a big double bed with a red quilt. I'm too hot, they're too cold, I push the quilt off, they haul it back again. They chatter away in the dark to each other nineteen to the dozen, they giggle and shriek with laughter. When I got the job in Rome and found my bedsit, I was particularly happy in the evenings when I got into my little bed by myself. I've no idea why people say being alone is so unpleasant. Being alone in Rome is lovely. It's not so nice on Sundays if you are waiting for the phone to ring and it doesn't. On the other days it's lovely.

I would be very happy to make a little trip to America too, but I don't even have enough money to buy myself a new pair of shoes.

You must have heard about the Women's Centre. Yesterday we spent hours cleaning the floor. We were ready to drop afterwards. We went back to
Le Margherite
and Lucrezia shut herself in her room to write to you and told me to give Vito his supper. This was quite a job because Vito runs from one room to another and you have to follow him with the plate. Yesterday that Swiss girl they were expecting arrived. But she had taken the dogs for a walk. She says she adores dogs. Perhaps she prefers the. dogs to the children, and she's quite right to because though Lucrezia's children are very beautiful they're quite impossible to put up with.

Afterwards Piero took me into Pianura by car, just in time for me to catch the last train.

I wanted to write you just a couple of words, and instead I have written you a proper, long letter.

Ask me over to supper tonight. Ask Egisto over too. You have to spend a little money on these suppers you keep giving us, but these are the last days you will be with us.

Albina

Rome, 30th October

Disagreeable. You really are disagreeable. You don't want me to bring Ignazio Fegiz to see you, and I won't bring him. So much the worse for you. You will miss the opportunity of meeting a really agreeable person.

I'm sending you this letter by post. I'm not coming either. I'm going to Tarquinia with Ignazio Fegiz, to stay with some of his friends who have a beautiful house there.

Look after your still-lives and your onions.

Egisto

Rome, 4th November

I apologise. My letter was a bit curt. Piero phoned me and apologised. He said that these days you are depressed and irritable. Perhaps Giuseppe's leaving has made you depressed. It's made all of us depressed. I apologised too. Piero said I was to bring whoever I liked.

I will come with Ignazio Fegiz next Saturday. We didn't go to Tarquinia because his friends asked us to postpone the trip, their water system had broken down.

Egisto

Rome, 5th November

The Lanzaras came today. I told you, they are the people who are buying my house. They came to look at the house and furniture properly and to decide on how the rooms should be arranged. I called Roberta and she came up immediately. I wanted her to meet them, seeing that she says they have led me up the garden path. Also Roberta has a way of making me more at ease with people. She had some caviar and brought it along. I made tea and toasted some bread. I like the Lanzaras. He is a psychoanalyst. He is little and has a long pear-shaped head which is completely bald. She is a plump Spaniard with black hair. They don't look like a couple of crooks. I would be very sorry if my home were to be lived in by a couple of crooks.

Whilst we were having tea Egisto arrived with a friend of his whom he has talked about a lot to me. He is called Ignazio Fegiz. When he came in, in a raincoat covered in epaulettes and buttons and with a peaked cap on his head, it seemed as if a great gust of wind came in with him. He is a man of about forty, but his hair is completely grey as was apparent when he took off his cap. A thick grey crew-cut. He is tall, good-looking, florid, with strong white teeth. He always keeps one hand clenched behind his back, and he makes great gestures in the air with the other. He sat down and had tea and ate a considerable amount of toast and caviar. He was meeting the Lanzaras for the first time but he immediately started to question them about the flat and the arrangement of the rooms, disapproving of everything they had already decided. He began to wander about the flat, flinging all the doors open. He discovered that they had to get rid of a wall between the kitchen and the bathroom, and make a new bathroom where the little cards-room is. They ought to have what is now the sitting-room as the bedroom and the room at the end of the passage should be the consulting-room. Roberta didn't agree. He got hold of a piece of paper and drew a plan of the flat as he saw it. Roberta drew a plan too. The Lanzaras stayed silent and seemed a little mystified. Egisto was curled up in a corner reading a book.

Then the Lanzaras left and I suggested that we make a little supper. Roberta started to make a sauce for the spaghetti. But Ignazio Fegiz also had his own ideas about spaghetti sauce. It didn't need butter and tomatoes, it needed oil, garlic and chillies. Egisto sided with him. I was neutral. Ignazio Fegiz won. I think he is one of those people who always wins.

While we were eating Ignazio Fegiz talked about himself. He lives alone. He has a flat in via della Scrofa. He restores pictures and sometimes he sells pictures too. When he was young he would have liked to paint, but he soon realized that he did not have a vocation for it.

He gives the impression of being an extrovert, expansive person who is generous with himself. But in fact I think he is a complicated, tormented person and that he has a whole lot of things inside himself that he never mentions. In that hand which he always keeps behind his back he has a bundle of things that he never shows to anyone. I said as much to him. I said that I would like to see what he had in that bundle. He burst out laughing and spread his hands out on the table. He laughed, but perhaps he wasn't too pleased all the same.

I feel I would like to stay here a little longer. But it is better that I leave thinking that my life here in Italy was a good one. In fact it seems good to me because I am leaving. Before I decided to leave I found it intolerable.

I would like to come to Monte Fermo once more. To go walking with you, to follow you through the streets in Pianura while you bought ham and wool. But I won't do it. I won't come. It's strange how sometimes a man forbids himself to do things he really wants to do, things that are completely harmless and simple and natural. But I shan't come. My separation from you has already happened. I'm already a long way off, already in America. I prefer sheets of paper.

I wander around Rome a great deal. Yesterday I took the bus to Piazza San Silvestro. Piazza San Silvestro isn't so very special, with its half-open bags of rubbish in the corner, its Japanese tourists, its beggars stretched out on newspapers, its post office vans and Red-Cross sirens and police motor-cycles. It isn't very special. But I said goodbye to it lovingly and for a long time. In America there will be other squares with tourists, beggars and sirens. But they will mean nothing to me because a man can only make so many things his own during his life. At a certain point in our lives everything we see for the first time is external to us. We look at it like tourists, with interest but coldly. It belongs to other people.

You say a lot about your mother in your letter. You have often talked about her to me. You never talk about your father because you can't remember him, he died when you were little. But I think that all your life you have been searching for a father, in your mother, in your husband, and in me. Perhaps you were even looking for a father in Dr Civetta.

I always say very little about my parents. I soon stopped thinking of them as any protection. I found them irritating and boring. I too drank in boredom as a child, it's true not as much as my own son, but I drank in my share. It was my brother who was a protection for me. Even now I feel the need for his authoritative, slightly contemptuous and high-handed protection. You often reproached me for not protecting you. But how could I have protected you when I myself have such a need to be protected? And you reproached Piero too for not protecting you. You often talk about your wish to feel protected. You often talk about protectors. It is one of your obsessions. ‘Prostitutes have protectors,' Piero said to you once. You were very hurt. In truth, adults should not need to be protected. But perhaps neither you nor I have ever become adults, nor Piero either. We are a brood of children.

Giuseppe

Rome, 10th November

Yesterday I went to see Ignazio Fegiz, he phoned me and suggested I go to his house to see some paintings by a friend of his. They are pictures of woodland scenes. His flat is small, on a split-level plan with a sitting-room and a room above. I can't bear split-level rooms. I like proper houses with a corridor in them. He has a lot of paintings in- the house. I'm not very interested in paintings. I told him so. I also said that he and I perhaps didn't have much to talk about to each other. He said that didn't matter. Two people can get along very well without having anything to talk about. It's true.

In the sitting-room there's a picture of a woman with a great mass of blond hair sitting in an arm-chair. I looked at it and he told me it was a self-portrait by one of his friends. He thought it very beautiful. I'm not so sure. He showed me other pictures by this friend of his. They are mostly landscapes, mainly red and a golden-blond. He looked at the time and said he had to see someone. He couldn't take me home because he was going a different way. We went down together. His house has no lift, there's a rather dirty little flight of stairs. He got into his car, an olive-green Renault. Later Egisto told me that this friend of his, the one with the red and golden-blond paintings, lives in Porta Cavalleggeri and that he eats at her flat almost every evening. Her name is Ippolita, people call her Ippo. She isn't beautiful but she has marvellous thick, curly blond hair. She is very thin. But even though she's so thin she lives in terror of getting fat and eats nothing at all. A bread-stick, a carrot, a lemon. Even so she's a very good cook and invents dishes that she doesn't taste herself. Egisto always knows everyone's business.