The Woman of Rome by Alberto Moravia Read Free Book Online Page B

sense of novelty and discovery, as if I were entering a freer and more beautiful world, where it would have been pleasant to live. I could not help remembering my own district, the road running along the city walls, the railwaymen’s houses, and I said to Gino, “I was wrong to come here.”
    “Why?” he asked coolly. “We won’t stay long — don’t worry.
    “You don’t see what I mean!” I replied. “I was wrong, because afterward I’ll be ashamed of my own house and neighborhood.”
    “You’re right there,” he said with relief, “but what can you do about it? You ought to have been born a millionaire — only millionaires live up here.”
    He opened the gate and led the way down a gravel path between two rows of little trees trimmed into a shape of cubes and rounds. We entered the villa by a plate-glass door and found ourselves in a bare, gleaming entrance hall, with a black-and-white-check marble floor, polished like a mirror. From here we went into a larger hall, light and spacious, with the ground-floor rooms leading out of it. At the end of the hall a white staircase led to the upper floor. I was so scared at the sight of this hall that I began walking on tiptoe. Gino noticed me and told me, laughing, that I could make as much noise as I liked, since nobody was at home.
    He showed me the drawing room, a huge place with many mirrors and sets of armchairs and sofas; the dining room, which was a little smaller, with an oval table, chairs, and sideboard made of a beautiful dark and polished wood; the linen room full of white varnished wall cupboards. In a smaller sitting room there was even a bar arranged in a niche in the wall, a real bar with shelves for the bottles, a nickel-plated coffee machine and a zinc counter; it waslike a little chapel; there was even a little gilded gateway that shut it off. I asked Gino where they did the cooking, and he told me the kitchen and servants’ rooms were in the basement. It was the first time in my life that I had been in a house of this kind, and I could not help fingering things, as if unable to believe my own eyes. Everything looked new to me and made of precious materials — glass, wood, marble, metals, fabrics. I could not help comparing those walls and that furniture with the dirty floors, blackened walls, and rickety furniture in my own house, and I told myself my mother was right when she said money was the only thing that mattered in the world. I supposed the people living among all those lovely things could not help being lovely and good themselves; they could not possibly drink or swear or shout or hit one another, or do any of the things I had seen done in my own home and others like it.
    Meanwhile, for the hundredth time, Gino was explaining with extraordinary pride the way life was lived in a place like that, as if he were bathing in the reflected glory of all that luxury and ease. “They eat off china plates; but they have silver ones for dessert and sweets. The knives and forks are all silver — they have five different courses and drink three kinds of wine. The mistress wears a low-necked dress in the evening and the master a black dinner suit. When dinner’s over the parlormaid hands round seven kinds of cigarettes, foreign brands, of course, on a silver tray. Then they go out of the dining room and have coffee and liqueurs wheeled in on the little table over there. They always have guests, sometimes two, sometimes four. The mistress has got some diamonds as big as this! and a marvelous pearl necklace — she must have several millions’ worth of jewels.”
    “You told me that before,” I interrupted him peevishly.
    But he was so carried away he did not notice my irritation. “The mistress never goes down into the basement — she gives her orders by phone. Everything in the kitchen is electric — our kitchen’s cleaner than most people’s bedrooms. But not only the kitchen! Even the mistress’s dogs are cleaner and better off than many