The Woman of Rome Read Free Page B

legs, I had no gift for dancing. I had already had some dancing lessons with two girlfriends at a dancing academy in our district. They knew how to keep time and kick their legs and swing their hips like two experienced dancers after the first few lessons, but I could only drag myself about, as if I were made of lead from the waist down. I didn’t seem to be built like other girls; there was something massive and heavy about me that even music was unable to dispel. Besides, feeling an arm round my waist had filled me with a kind of languorous abandon the few times I had danced, so that I dragged my legs rather than moved them. The artist, too, had said to me, “Adriana, you ought to have been born four centuries ago! They had women like you then. It’s fashionable nowadays to be thin, you’re a fish out of water. In four or five years’ time you’ll be a Juno.” He was mistaken there, though, because today, five years later, I am no stouter or more Junoesque than before. But he was right in saying that I was not made for these days of slim women. My clumsiness made me wretched and I would have given anything to be slim and able to dance like other girls. But although I ate little, I was always as solidly built as a statue, and when I danced I was quite incapable of grasping the rapid, jerky rhythms of modern music.
    I told Mother all this because I knew the interview with the producer of the variety show would only be a fiasco, and I was humiliated at the idea of being turned down. But Mother began shouting at once that I was far more beautiful than all the wretched girls who showed themselves off on the stage and the producer ought to thank Heaven if he could get me for his company, and so on. Mother knew nothing about modern beauty, and honestly believed that the more fully developed her breasts, and the rounder her hips, the more beautiful a woman must be.
    The producer was waiting in a room that led out of the antechamber; I suppose he watched his dancers’ rehearsals from that room through the open door. He was sitting in an armchair at the foot of the unmade bed. There was a tray on the bed and he was just finishing his breakfast. He was a stout old man, but the excessive elegance of his clothes, his brilliantine, his impeccable tidiness, made a strange effect against those tumbled sheets, in the low light of that stuffy room. His florid complexion looked painted to me, because unhealthy, dark, uneven patches showed beneath the rose flush on his cheeks. He was wearing a monocle and puffed and panted all the time, showing such extremely white teeth that they were probably false. He was dressed very smartly, as I said. I still remember his bow tie of the same pattern and color as the handkerchief tucked into his breast pocket. He was sitting with his belly sprawling forward and, as soon as he had finished eating, he wiped his mouth and said in a bored, complaining voice, “Come on, show me your legs.”
    “Show the gentleman your legs,” repeated Mother anxiously.
    I was no longer shy after the studios, so I pulled up my dress and showed him my legs, then stood still, holding my dress up and leaving my legs exposed. My legs are magnificent, long and straight, but just above the knees my thighs began to swell out round and solid, broadening gradually to my hips. The producer shook his head as he looked at me. “How old are you?” he asked,
    “She was eighteen in August,” replied Mother readily.
    He got up in silence, panting a little, and walked over to a phonograph standing on a table among a heap of papers and clothes. He wound it up, carefully chose a record, and put it on the phonograph.
    “Now try to dance to this music — but keep your dress up,” he said.
    “She’s only had a few dancing lessons,” said Mother. She realized that this would be the decisive moment and, knowing how clumsy I was, she feared the result.
    But the producer motioned to her to be silent, set the record going, then with