Inevitable Read Free Page A

forgot much about herself, she still felt lonely. She had spent two weeks in Siena, but had found it oppressive with its gloomy streets and funereal palaces, and had longed for Rome. But that afternoon she had not yet found Rome. And though she felt tired, most of all she felt lonely, totally alone and futile in the great wide world, in a great city, a city where one perhaps feels greatness and futility more intensely than anywhere else. She felt like a tiny atom of suffering, like an ant, an insect, battered and half-crushed among the vast cupolas of Rome that she sensed were outside.
    Her hand wandered idly over her reading-matter, which in her conscientious way she had piled up on a side table near her, a few translated classics: Ovid, Tacitus, then Dante, Petrarch and Tasso. Dusk was falling in her room, not a light to read by, and she was too unsure of herself to ring for a lamp; a chill drifted through her room, now that the sun had completely set, and she had forgotten to have them light a stove that first day. Wide acres of loneliness surrounded her, her suffering pained her, her soul longed for another soul, her lips for a kiss, her arms for the man who had once been her husband, and as she tossed about on her cushions, wringing her hands, indecision rose from deep within her:
    “Oh God, tell me what I’m to do!”

III
    T HERE WAS A BUZZ of voices at dinner; the three or four long tables were full; the
marchesa
sat at the head of the centre table. Now and then she beckoned impatiently to Giuseppe, the old head waiter, who had dropped a spoon at an archducal court, and youthful waiters trotted about breathlessly. Sitting opposite her Cornélie found the benevolent fat gentleman whom the German ladies had called Mr Rudyard, and by her place setting her flask of Genzano. She thanked him with a smile, and talked to Mr Rudyard—the usual chit-chat: how she had been for a tour that afternoon, her first taste of Rome, the Forum, the Pincio. She talked to the German ladies and with the Englishwoman, who was always so tired from ‘sightseeing’, and the German ladies, an old baroness and her daughter, a young baroness, laughed with her at the two aesthetes whom Cornélie had encountered in the drawing-room that first morning. They were sitting some distance away; tall and angular, with unwashed hair, in strangely cut evening dresses that revealed bosoms and arms, comfortably covered by grey woollen vests, over which they had calmly draped strings of large blue beads. Both of them surveyed the long table, as if pitying anyone who had travelled to Rome to become acquainted with art, since they alone knew what art in Rome was. While eating, which they did unappetisingly, almost with their fingers, they read aesthetic works, frowningand occasionally looking up crossly because people were talking at table. With their pedantry, their impossible manners, their appalling taste in clothes, together with their great pretentiousness, they were typical English ladies on their travels, of the kind one finds nowhere but in Italy. The criticism of them at table was unanimous. They came to Pensione Belloni every winter, and painted watercolours in the Forum or on the Via Appia. And they were so extraordinary in their unprecedented originality, in their angular scruffiness, with their evening dresses, the woollens, the blue necklaces, the aesthetic books and their fingers busily picking meat apart, that all eyes were drawn to them by a Medusa-like attraction. The young baroness, a type from a fashionable magazine, incisive, quick-witted, with her round little German face and high sharply drawn eyebrows, laughed with Cornélie, and was showing her a sketchbook containing a drawing she had dashed off of the two aesthetic ladies, when Giuseppe led a young lady to the end of the table where Cornélie and Rudyard were sitting opposite each other. She had obviously just arrived, wished the assembled gathering a good evening, and sat down with