The Road To The City by Natalia Ginzburg

only of my school and the boarding-house and the books I had been reading. I thought of Alberto’s slender hands sketching in his notebook, the curly black hair around his thin face, and his slight body in a light raincoat going about the city. I thought about them all day long, to the exclusion of everything else: first the hands, then the notebook, then the raincoat, and then again the notebook and the curly hair showing below his hat and the thin face and the hands. I read Xenophon to eighteen girls in a classroom newly repainted in green and decorated with a map of Asia and a portrait of the Pope; ate my meals in the boarding-house dining-room while the landlady paced up and down among the tables; took the bus to Maona every Saturday and felt more and more like an idiot because I had no interest in anyone or anything. I was no longer so sure that he loved me, although he went on bringing me books and chocolates and seemed to enjoy my company. But he said nothing about himself, and while I read Xenophon to my class or put the girls’ marks down in my records, I could imagine only his slight figure going about its mysterious activities, wrapped in a flapping raincoat, following impulses and desires of which I was entirely ignorant. Then something like a fever would come over me. Once I had been a fairly good teacher and taken considerable interest in my pupils and their work. But now I felt not the least bit of affection for the eighteen girls in front of me; in fact, they bored me to the point of nausea and I could not even bear to look at them.
    Francesca had come back from Rome in a very bad humour. I went to her house for dinner one night, meaning to leave early because Alberto might come to the boarding-house to see me. It was an endless meal, with my aunt and uncle having a quarrel and Francesca sitting stubbornly silent in a stunning knitted black dress which made her look older than usual and very pale. After dinner my aunt took me up to her room and asked me what was the matter with Francesca. I told her that I didn’t know, and all the time I was impatient to go away, but she clutched my hand and cried. She said that she couldn’t understand Francesca at all, especially since Francesca had begun to wear nothing but black, with black hats that made her look so much older. She couldn’t make out what Francesca had been up to at the school of dramatics or what she intended to do with herself next. Francesca had got herself engaged during the summer to a promising young man of good family, but then she had thrown him over. I felt the minutes passing by and feared that Alberto might be at the boarding-house already, and here my aunt clutched my hand in hers and sniffled into her handkerchief.
    It was late when I finally escaped. When I arrived at the boarding-house they were locking the doors and the maid told me that the usual gentleman had come to see me, waited for a while in the drawing-room, and then gone away. I went up to my room, got into bed, and cried. It was the first time in my life that I had cried over a man, and it seemed to me this must be a sign that I loved him. I thought how, if he asked me to marry him, I would say yes, and then we would always be together and even when he was out I would know where he was. But when I imagined our making love together I felt something like disgust and said to myself that I couldn’t be in love with him after all. It was all very confusing.
    But he never asked me to marry him, and we went on talking together like two good friends. He refused to speak of himself and always wanted me to do the talking. On days when I was in low spirits he seemed to be bored and I was afraid that he would never come to see me again. I forced myself to be gay and told him stories about the people at the boarding-house and the landlady’s screeching daughter, which we laughed at together. But when he went away I felt tired. I stretched out on my bed and thought