The Woman of Rome Read Free

confusion and promiscuity of the street. In the building where I lived, on the contrary, the street penetrated everywhere: into the huge hall that was like a warehouse, into the wide, bare, dirty staircase, even into the rooms, where the rickety, casual furniture was reminiscent of junkshops where the same sort of pieces are exhibited for sale on the pavements.
    One summer evening, when I was out walking with Mother, I saw a family scene through a window in one of those villas; it impressedme deeply and seemed to conform in every respect with the idea I had of a normal, decent life. It was a clean little room, with flowered wallpaper, a sideboard, and a central lamp hanging over a table laid ready for a meal. Around the table sat five or six people, among them three children between the ages of eight and ten. A soup tureen stood in the middle of the table, and the mother was standing up to serve the soup. It may seem strange, but what struck me most of all was the central lamp, or rather the extraordinarily peaceful and usual look everything had in that light. As I turned the scene over in my mind later on, I told myself positively that I ought to make it my aim in life to live one day in a house like that, to have a family like that and to live in that same light which seemed to reveal the presence of innumerable firm, constant affections. Perhaps many people will think my ambitions very modest. But my situation at that time must be taken into account. That little house had the same effect on me, born in the railwaymen’s houses, as the grander, wealthier dwellings in the luxury districts of the city had on the inhabitants of the little villas themselves. One man’s paradise is another’s hell.
    But Mother had made elaborate plans for my future; I soon realized they were plans that put entirely out of the question any such arrangements as the one I desired most. Mother firmly believed that with my beauty I might aim at any kind of success, but not at becoming a married woman with a family like everyone else. We were extremely poor and she looked on my beauty as our only available capital and, as such, as belonging to her as well as to me; if for no other reason than that it was she who had given me birth. I was to draw on this capital as she decreed, without any consideration for appearances, in order to improve our situation. Probably the whole scheme was due chiefly to a lack of imagination. In a situation like ours, the idea of capitalizing on my beauty was the first to occur to her. Mother stopped short at this idea and did not delve any deeper.
    At that time I had a very imperfect understanding of what Mother’s plans were. But even later, when they were quite clear to me, I never dared to ask her why, with these ideas, she had been reduced to such poverty — she, the wife of a railwayman.I understood from various hints that I was the cause of Mother’s failure, since she had had me both unwillingly and unexpectedly. In other words, I was conceived by accident and Mother, who did not dare to prevent my birth (as she ought to have done, she said), had been obliged to marry my father and accept all the consequences of such a marriage. When she referred to my birth, she often used to say, “You were the ruin of me,” a phrase that at one time hurt me and was obscure, but whose meaning I understood fully later on. The phrase meant, “If it had not been for you, I would not have married that man, and by now I’d have had my own car.” Obviously, as she pondered over her own life in this way, she did not want her daughter, who was so much more handsome, to make the same mistakes and incur the same fate. Today, seeing things from a certain distance, I really cannot bring myself to say she was wrong. A family for Mother had meant poverty, slavery, and a few infrequent pleasures that came to an abrupt end with the death of her husband. Naturally, she considered a decent family life as a great misfortune, and was ever