Voices In The Evening by Natalia Ginzburg Read Free Book Online

Xenia’s first baby was due to arrive, Mario sent for a gynaecologist from Switzerland. The following year they had a baby again. They had a Swiss
nurse
with a blue veil. They had a Venetian nursemaid as well. Xenia fell ill after this and they removed her womb. She recovered and took up once more her sculpture, painting and walks with the pet dogs.
    All her hair turned grey very early, and she never dyed it; one cannot say why.
    Old Balotta, on the rare occasions on which he saw her, such as the children’s birthdays, would say later to his wife,
    â€˜Did you see how old Xenia has become? Did you see how ugly she is? How can Mario bear to go to bed with her?’
    Vincenzino explained everything by psychoanalysis. He said that Mario had a mother-complex and felt protected by Xenia, who had an authoritarian temperament and ruled him and ordered him about.
    Now and then old Balotta and Vincenzino revived their suspicions that she was a spy. Nothing was known about her, nothing of what she had done before she arrived in the neighbourhood. On the rare occasions when they met her, she spoke very little, and always in French since she had never taken the trouble to leam Italian.
    But Nebbia said,
    â€˜No, she is not a spy. She is merely a stupid woman, and so as not to let it be seen how stupid she is, she weaves all those mysteries about her. Like certain grubs which wrap themselves up in saliva so that no one gets at them.’
    Mario meanwhile had become rather stout, went to bed early, and had had no more trouble with insomnia or fits of loquaciousness.

    Vincenzino and his wife went to live at Casa Mercanti It was a small house, immediately at the end of the village, and had a broad meadow in front of it in which were a few pear trees. Behind, it had a walled kitchen-garden full of cabbages.
    Vincenzino’s wife was called Catè. She was tall and sturdy. She had a wealth of blonde hair which she did sometimes in two tresses tightly pressed over the ears, and sometimes in a soft heavy mass, twisted and pinned on the crown of her head.
    Her round face was bronzed with the sun and slightly freckled. She had high prominent cheekbones and green eyes somewhat slanting upwards to her temples.
    She was long remembered in the village returning from the stream where she went to bathe, with the wind catching up her short skirt over her shapely legs. Her hair would be damp and hang untidily over her forehead. Over her shoulder would be a wet towel soiled with sand.
    People remembered her, too, coming down the hill, her mouth stained with mulberry juice, a tall handsome blonde with her blonde children.
    When she went to the stream in summer she wore a blue dress with a white strip on the bottom of the skirt, and she tied up her hair in a handkerchief with blue and white spots. When she went ski-ing in winter she wore a white pull-over with the collar rolled back. On cool autumn evenings when she sat in the garden she had a black shawl over her shoulders, such as the poorer women wear.
    She had married Vincenzino without love. But she had thought that he was so good, if a bit melancholy, and that he must therefore be intelligent.
    She had also remembered that he had plenty of money and she had none.
    Yet in those early days when she was at Casa Mercanti an infinite sadness came over her. She was there in the long afternoons looking at the cabbages in the garden behind the house. It seemed to her that the whole world was full of cabbages and she used to cry because she longed so much to return to her mother.
    Borgo Martino was not so far away, but she did not venture to go there because her husband was against it.
    At home in Borgo Martino was her mother a widow, who owned a small stationery shop, and three small sisters who were at school. There was always a great deal of cheerfulness and noise in the house.
    By contrast in Casa Mercanti silence always reigned. She went sometimes to the kitchen to pass the time discussing