Read Online The Girl on the Via Flaminia by Hayes Alfred - Free Book Online

said, “Christ, you are beautiful,” and that image held for him, the image of her turning to look at him over her naked shoulder in the light of the held match, and what Nina had said was perfectly true, she did have wonderful shoulders, and in that very short flickering moment in which he had held the match to see her she had been more beautiful than any girl he could remember.
    Touching her, then, that first time, there had been no words at all to express the overwhelming sense of a woman being with him, in a clean place, in a clean bed, just being there, in a room, alone feeling the warmth even though it was not a given and voluntary and loving warmth, only the inevitable warmth of somebody’s body. There were no words at all for the enormous charity that having a woman, in a room with a closed door, in a bed that was one’s own, meant. He touched her with a quality of wonder and thankfulness. She said nothing. She did not move. But it was not necessary for her to say anything or even to give him anything. It was just the tremendousness of her being there. And he could not tell her that.
    He fell asleep.
    When she awoke in the morning he was gone. The moment of awakening was not at first one of panic. She was warm, and she did not remember immediately where she was, or what this room was, and then, when she did remember, and the panic began, there was the bad moment when, shivering and in haste, rising from the bed, she confronted her own accidental image in the long narrow mirror that was fixed to the door of the wardrobe closet. It seemed to her then that the thing she had done was incredible, that it had not been done by her at all, but by some unhappy and debased stranger, and then, on the table, she found the food he had so solicitously left behind for her, the milk, the chocolate, the soup package, coffee, even cigarettes, and she looked at the nakedness of the gifts as though they contained some terrible confirmation of the fact that the woman who had inhabited this room through the night had, after all, not been a stranger. She dressed quickly. She thought now that if she escaped quickly enough, if she went out quickly enough from this room, she would be able to leave behind that image the mirror had seen of the woman rising from the bed, and which only the mirror contained. She thought that once she had done this she would be able to escape quickly and forever because now she was being forced to escape, and she thought that when she had dressed she would go quickly somewhere, she did not know quite where, into the city she thought, and then somehow she would find something, work or something, somewhere, because she had to, now she had to more than ever, and then this room and the mirror and the food and the night would stop existing.
    And she must, she thought, in the cold of the morning, get out of the room immediately the things he had left behind on the table so nakedly. She dressed herself in what she had worn the night before: the thick ski stockings, the heavy tasseled shoes, the woolen skirt, the woolen sweater. She put on her raincoat, not thinking that seeing her like this whoever was awake in the house would look perhaps strangely at her, and then going to the table she gathered up the gifts and went out of the room, carrying them down the hallway to the kitchen where she could hear sound and movement. Adele was standing at the stove, frying something in oil, the inevitabile cigarette in her mouth, and Antonio was sitting at the kitchen table. She heard Adele’s “Good morning,” and she went into the kitchen, and put the things he had left her, the mementoes, his part of the arrangement, on the kitchen table, and she said, “Will you take this, signora? There is too much—” and Adele was pleased. “Milk,” she said, “and coffee. Guarda; chocolate, too. What is this?” She held up the sealed tinfoil package.
    â€œSoup,” Lisa