When I Was Mortal Read Free Page A

company while you wait or would you rather be alone if you’re in pain?” I asked rhetorically since, having found her still up, I wasn’t prepared to go off to bed without satisfying my desire to have a chat and a rest from those other abominable languages and from the wine drunk during the evening. Before she had a chance to reply, I added: “Your friend’s very nice. She said her husband was ill; the local doctors are in for a busy night.”
    Claudia hesitated for a few seconds and it seemed to me thatshe again looked at me warily, but said nothing. Then she said, this time without looking at me:
    “Yes, she’s got a husband too; he’s even more unbearable than mine. Hers is young, though, just a bit older than her, but she’s had him for ten years now and he’s just as mean. Like me, she doesn’t earn very much with her job, and he even rations out the hot water. Once he used his old bath water to water the plants, which died soon after. When they go out together, he won’t even buy her a coffee, they each pay for themselves, so that sometimes she goes without and he has a full afternoon tea. She doesn’t earn that much, and he’s one of those men who thinks that the person who earns less in a marriage is inevitably taking advantage of the other. He’s obsessed with it. He monitors all her phone calls, he’s fitted the phone with a device that stops her calling anywhere outside of the city, so that if she wants to speak to her family in Italy she has to go to a public phone box and use coins or a card.”
    “Why doesn’t she leave him?”
    Claudia didn’t reply at once:
    “I don’t know; for the same reason I don’t, although my situation isn’t as bad as hers. I suppose it’s true that she does earn less, I suppose she does take advantage of him; I suppose they’re right, these men who are obsessed with the money they spend or manage to save with their low-earning wives; but that’s what marriage is about, everything has its compensations and it all evens out in the end.” Claudia dimmed the light still further, so that we were sitting in almost complete darkness. Her nightdress and dressing gown seemed to glow red, an effect of the growing dark. She lowered her voice still further, to the point where it became a furious whisper. “Why do you think I get these pains, why do you think I have to call a doctor out to give me a sedative? It’s just as well it only happens on nights when we give suppers or parties, when he’s eaten and drunk and enjoyed himself. Whenhe’s seen that others have seen me. He thinks about other men and about their eyes, about what others don’t know about, but take for granted or assume, and then he wants to make it reality, not just taken for granted or assumed or unknown. Not imaginary. Then it isn’t enough for him just to imagine it.” She fell silent for a moment and added: “That great lump of a man is sheer torment.”
    Although our friendship went back a long way, we had never exchanged this kind of confidence. Not that it bothered me, on the contrary, there’s nothing I like more than being privy to such revelations. But I wasn’t used to it with her, and I may have blushed a little (not that she would have seen me) and I answered awkwardly, perhaps dissuading her from continuing, the exact opposite of what I wanted:
    “I see.”
    The doorbell went, a feeble ring, just loud enough to be heard, the way you ring at the door of a house where people are already alerted or expecting you to call.
    “It’s the night doctor,” said Claudia.
    “I’ll leave you then. Goodnight, and I hope you feel better soon.”
    We left the studio together, she went into the hall and I in the opposite direction, towards the kitchen, where I thought I might read the newspaper for a while before going to bed, for at night the kitchen was the warmest room in the house. Before turning the corner of the corridor that would take me there, though, I paused and looked back