The City and the House Read Online Free PDF Page A

morning busying herself with prisoners’ families. She went marching around the city with her military step and flat shoes and a bag over her shoulder. She had a thick, deep, hoarse voice. After I got married she lived alone, with a serving woman called la Lina, and in the evenings she and la Lina knitted things, always for prisoners’ families. With my mother, Piero and la Lina I felt protected, safe, secure; it seemed to me that they would keep every danger, every disaster away from me. Then my mother became neurotically depressed. But you know that, I’ve already told you. She began to complain of headaches and insomnia. The doctor examined her but there was nothing wrong, she was healthy. Bit by bit she stopped going out of the house, washing herself, eating and knitting. She sat in an armchair in her drawing-room, in semi-darkness, with her hands in her lap, and stared at a point on the carpet. When I phoned it was always la Lina who answered, by that time my mother didn’t move, and when I went to see her she gave me a faint smile with half her mouth, then she immediately lowered her eyes and stared at the carpet. In a short time she became very old and thin, a shrunken frame with clothes hanging loosely on it. To me it seemed as if the world had been turned upside down. The doctor came all the time, he would sit down next to her and ask her questions which she hardly answered in her voice that was still hoarse and thick but also now harsh and grating. The doctor was young but not particularly good-looking, he was just very kind and I fell in love with him, because I always fall in love with doctors, but it wasn’t anything important, he didn’t realize and it soon passed. My mother was committed to a hospital for nervous disorders. La Lina went back to her village in Sardinia. Piero got a job in Pisa in a refrigerator factory, a job which seemed to be much better than the one he had had in Florence, and so I had to empty my house and my mother’s too. Piero was busy with his new job, and he also had problems with one of his superiors whom he didn’t like, he was tired and in a bad mood and he told me to get on with it all by myself because he didn’t have time and besides I was twenty-five years old. And so I no longer had any protectors. My mother stayed in that hospital for three months. I went to be with her as much as I could and I waited for her to say a few words to me; but she didn’t say anything to me, she just gave me that faint smile with half her mouth every so often. One night she died, of a heart seizure. Piero had a furious row with his superior and was fired. We had only just settled in the new house in Pisa. Signora Annina, my mother-in-law, came to lend us a hand, but she did nothing except complain about the heat, the mosquitoes and the house. And we had very little money. Piero sat all day in our bedroom, smoking and staring at the window, and I looked at his big head with its blond curls that had become dark with sweat, and I would ask him what we should do now and he would raise his eyebrows and turn the corners of his mouth down. Certainly, I had no protectors any more. Then, that summer, I met Serena. Meeting her cheered me up. She was looking after children as an
au pair
with a Dutch family. When the Dutch family left she came to our house to look after our children. We became friends. She was no protection, on the contrary it was we who had to protect her, and comfort her when she cried. Serena often cries. She was hopeless with the children because she had no patience. In fact I stopped paying her almost at once. Anyway, she didn’t need money because her father was rich and he looked after her. Serena phoned her father and asked him to find a job for Piero. Her father found him one. And that’s how we left for Perugia, at the end ofthat summer. Piero immediately cheered up when he had a job. It has always been his dream to work in a legal office