A Traditional Marriage

Natalia Ginzburg, The Dry Heart

Cover image for the New Directions edition of The Dry Heart.

Natalia Ginzburg’s 1947 novella The Dry Heart (which I read in an English translation by Frances Frenaye) begins in a noirish way: with a murder, followed by a recounting of the events, stretching back over many years, that led to the violence.

“Tell me the truth,” I said.

“What truth?” he echoed. He was making a rapid sketch in his notebook and now he showed me what it was: a long, long train with a big cloud of black smoke swirling over it and himself leaning out of a window to wave a handkerchief.

I shot him between the eyes.

The murderer and narrator, a “simple country girl,” spends the remaining pages explaining why she shot her husband, Alberto. Although she acted in the impulse of the moment, her intention was far from impulsive: “For a long time already I had known that sooner or later I should do something of the sort,” she says.

I mentioned in my year-end book roundup that I read a Clarice Lispector book nearly every year. The same is true of books by Natalia Ginzburg, although the truth is that they don’t always quite land with me. Her semi-autobiographical Family Lexicon is one of her best-known and most-praised novels, but its appeal wasn’t quite legible to me — something about the dry homogeneity of its tone, the scattered quality of the narrative, left me feeling like I didn’t know what Ginzburg wanted me to know or feel or understand. Happiness, As Such made the same impression. But her shorter works, the novellas and essays, have always stunned me: focused, funny, sometimes grotesque, and always searching. At 88 pages, The Dry Heart falls into this latter category.

From the murder that opens the novel, we can surmise that the narrator’s marriage to her husband is unhappy. A few pages later, she recounts the murder again, this time with some extra details:

“Tell me the truth, Alberto,” I said.

“What truth?” he echoed.

“You are going away together.”

“Who are going away together? You let your imagination run riot. You eat your heart out thinking up terrible things. That way you’ve no peace of mind and neither has anyone else… Take the bus that goes to Maona at two o’clock,” he said.

“Yes,” I answered.

He looked at the sky and remarked: “Better wear your raincoat and galoshes.”

“I’d rather know the truth, whatever it may be,” I said, and he laughed and misquoted:

She seeketh Truth, which is so dear / As knowleth he who life for her refuses.

Now we understand that the husband is having an affair, and assume that the narrator has perhaps just discovered it — but as we read her confession we learn, again, that this was not a crime of passion but of resignation.

These days, both fiction writers and tech people love to talk about “agency:” the capacity of individuals to take specific action to change their circumstances.¹ Writers are advised to give their protagonists agency, since passive characters are likely to bore or annoy the reader. But some of the stories that fascinate me the most involve characters who are either excessively passive, or whose acts of agency seal their doom, as in the great tragedies and their glamorously seedy descendants, film noir stories.

The narrator of The Dry Heart is meek and reserved, a young schoolteacher from a poor family who lives in a women’s boarding house. Her desires for her life are modest and vague: she wants to be married and have a house of her own. “The face of the man I married was constantly changing,” she writes about her fantasy of wedded life, “but he had always the same voice, which I could hear repeating over and over again the same ironical and tender phrases.” When Alberto, a man she meets at a friend’s house, starts paying her visits, she thinks at first that he is too old for her. But he is the first man who has ever shown her any attention, and when he suddenly withdraws that attention without explanation, she is profoundly disappointed.

When a girl is very much alone and leads a tiresome and monotonous existence, with worn gloves and very little spending money, she may let her imagination run wild and find herself defenceless before all the errors and pitfalls which imagination has devised to deceive her. I was a weak and unarmed victim of imagination as I read Ovid to eighteen girls huddled in a cold classroom or ate my meals in the dingy boardinghouse dining room, peering out through the yellow windowpanes as I waited for Alberto to take me out walking or to a concert.

Alberto, we learn quickly, isn’t much of a prize. When they meet again after his absence, she’s confused by her reaction: “I looked at him and tried to recognize in this little man with the curly black hair the cause of all my anguish and torment. I felt cold and humiliated and as if something inside me were broken.” But it’s because of this anguish and torment that she assumes she must be in love.

When she finally confesses her feelings to Alberto, he rejects her, telling her that he’s already in love with someone else, a married woman (who we later learn is named Giovanna). But after Alberto’s mother dies and he’s left alone in the house he shared with her, he proposes marriage. The thought of sex with the older Alberto disgusts her, but she talks herself out of her worries, reasoning that most women must feel something similar.

Leter that night, in my own room, when I was getting undressed and going to bed in the bed I had slept in ever since I was a child, a wave of terror and disgust came over me at the thought that soon Alberto and I would be married and make love together. I reassured myself with the idea that this was only because I had never made love before, but I remembered the slight disgust I felt every time he kissed me and wondered whether or not I really loved him. It’s very difficult, I thought, to know what we’re really like inside. When it had seemed as if he were going out of my life I had felt so sad that I didn’t want to go on living, and yet when he entered my life as he did just now when he talked to my father and mother I was filled with terror and disgust. But I came to the conclusion that I only needed to be a little braver because all girls must feel somewhat the same way. It’s probably a mistake to follow every meandering of our feelings and waste time listening to every echo from within. That, in fact, is no way to live.

The unnamed narrator isn’t the only passive character in the novel: almost everyone in her social circle is stuck in a repeating loop, dissatisfied with their lives but unable or unwilling to do anything differently. Alberto admits that his love affair with Giovanna is unhappy, that she is often cruel to him, and that he’s not sure if he even likes her, but he continues to see her anyway. He describes himself as a cork bobbing in the sea, unable to shape his life or experience it in any depth. His friend Augusto appears to have no interests except working on a book about the origins of Christianity and looking at himself in the mirror. The narrator’s friend Francesca, a party girl, has a somewhat more exciting life, full of travel and boyfriends, but never forms any lasting connections. Sometimes, events in the novel seem like they might jolt the characters into some new relationship with the world, but once the shock subsides, they fall right back into their old patterns.

Ginzburg’s characters are sparsely described, but she repeats certain details to make them memorable: Alberto’s mistress Giovanna has “a behind like a cauliflower,” the narrator’s baby loves a song called Le Bon Roi Dagobert. At moments of great feeling or tragedy, she leans on the absurd or grotesque, like this description at the moment of a child’s death:

I was left alone with the bald doctor, and all of a sudden his pendulous lower lip reminded me of something indecent, like the sexual parts of a dog. Then he told me it might be meningitis. At ten o’clock in the evening the baby died.

For a brief moment, when she thinks her husband might leave her, the narrator considers the prospect of freedom and finds it exciting, given that she has “made a mess of her life.” She thinks of emulating her friend Francesca: “How easy life is, I thought, for women who are not afraid of a man.” But Alberto doesn’t leave, despite his threats: the closest he gets is packing his books into a suitcase, at a rate of one or two per day, before taking them out again.

Literature is full of characters who get married to people they don’t like, simply because those people withdrew their attentions at a crucial moment, or who exploited a period of vulnerability. One of my favorite lines from Proust comes at the end of Swann in Love, the middle section of Swann’s Way. Charles Swann, who has ruined his social position by marrying the object of his earlier obsession, the courtesan Odette, later laments: “To think that I wasted years of my life, that I wanted to die, that I felt my deepest love, for a woman who did not even appeal to me, who was not my type!”

It’s common to encounter, on conservative social media, a yearning for traditional courtship and marriage. Some of these fantasies involve a surrender of agency. For women, this looks like imagining a life of ease and comfort under the protection of a man, not having to make any decisions more consequential than what to cook for dinner. For men, it’s also a fantasy of ease and fewer decisions: a girl-next-door ready to marry, a ready-made career path to follow, with minimal competition for both. But the past was full of desperately unhappy people too, suffering from the repression and stasis resulting from a life spent following the path of least resistance. Plenty of marriages were like the one in The Dry Heart: two unhappy people who, nevertheless, don’t leave each other.

A final thought: I’ve often reflected that the appeal of romantic stories is only superficially about the attractive, obsessive men and women who populate them. Romances are about the transformation of the self, about being lifted by the force of someone’s desire, someone else’s agency, into a different kind of life — more glamorous, more exciting, more meaningful. When people fall for lovers who ultimately hurt them, it’s often because those lovers initially appear to offer this possibility of transformation that a healthy relationship, with someone who appreciates them as they are, can’t offer, almost by definition. The Dry Heart’s narrator mentions her girlhood, reading books with titles like From Slavegirl To Queen. She understands too late that her marriage, far from changing her life, can only keep her rooted to the spot. As I wrote a few years ago about the characters in the French novel Adolphe: “There is something much more damaging to one’s dignity than a man who leaves you, and that’s a man who doesn’t.”

1. Among tech people, the word agentic (adjective describing one who, or that which, exercises agency) is a particular plague. Google Trends tells me that people didn’t really start throwing around this word until around this time last year, probably amid fantasies of “agentic” AI systems.