The City and the House by Natalia Ginzburg

Author:Natalia Ginzburg [Ginzburg, Natalia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-61145-624-0
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.
Published: 2011-11-18T16:00:00+00:00

ROBERTA TO GIUSEPPE

Rome, 22nd September

Dear Giuseppe,

We haven’t written to each other for a while now. For months we’ve just talked over the phone and that’s been it. But when you’re making international telephone calls you think about the money you’re spending and so you finish up not saying anything.

So many more things can be said in a letter.

As I told you on the phone, Alberico has agreed to undergo psychoanalysis, after I had strenuously insisted that he should. He comes and sees Doctor Lanzara four times a week, at two in the afternoon. He started on the 10th September. He’s been punctual so far. I asked Lanzara if the fact that his consulting room is in what was once your flat might disturb Alberico and remind him too much of you. Lanzara thought about it for a while but then he said it wasn’t important. Besides the flat is completely different now, it seems virtually unrecognizable.

After each session Alberico comes down to my flat and has a coffee. In this way I see him often, which pleases me. He seems fairly well to me. As ever he’s very thin and pale, and has that shuffling way of walking; he wears sandals and his feet are always filthy. He always seems like somebody who has just walked for miles and miles. Though in reality he’s just caught the bus in Piazza Sonnino and got out a few yards away from here.

He’s working, he says. He’s writing the screen-play for a film. He told me the story. I didn’t understand any of it.

The film’s title is Deviance.

I always ask him what he’s eaten, because he looks undernourished. However it seems that they eat an incredible amount at his house. They do nothing but cook. Fish, peppers.

The baby has been weaned and is growing well. That’s what he told me. I haven’t been to their place for a while. I don’t want to bother them. I belong to a different generation.

You will have heard that Piero and Lucrezia are separating. What a pity. I’m very sorry; I remember them together and I can’t imagine them apart. She is trying to find a flat in Rome, with the money she inherited from her mother. She has seen a great many but she doesn’t like any of them. She has asked me to help her. You know I have a friend who runs an estate agency. Lucrezia wants to have a house in old Rome. But she has very little money. It’s not an easy matter by any means.

They are going to sell Le Margherite. What a pity. With the money they get from the sale he will buy an apartment in Perugia and the rest will go to her.

How quickly everything is happening. It seems only yesterday that you and I went to Le Margherite, that I saw Le Margherite in front of me - the porch, the swing, all those children and all those dogs, and that entrance hall where there was a coat-stand that was always overloaded.

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