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crossing the hall, went towards the drawing-room, or rather towards the four or five sitting-rooms, anterooms and drawing-rooms that occupied the ground floor of the villa.
    These rooms, used by my mother both for living in and for entertainment, communicated with each other by means of arches or doorways with no doors in them, so that they formed, almost, a single large room; and they were furnished in an entirely impersonal manner, with the opulent, tedious impersonality of furniture that has been chosen solely on account of its commercial value. You could, in fact, be sure that in those rooms there was not a single object that was not the most expensive, or anyhow among the most expensive, in the category to which it belonged. My mother had neither taste, nor culture, nor curiosity, nor love of beauty; her one criterion in any sort of acquisition she made was, always, its price, and the higher the price the more completely was she persuaded that the object to be sold possessed the qualities of beauty and refinement and originality which otherwise she would have been incapable of recognizing. My mother, of course, did not throw money down the drain; on the contrary, she was always extremely careful, and more than once I had heard her exclaim, in a shop: 'No, it's too dear, it's not even to be thought of.' But I knew that this exclamation on her part referred to her own financial possibilities and not to the real value of the object in question, about which she understood nothing and which, though out of reach of her purse, nevertheless remained desirable precisely because it was expensive.
    The result of this criterion of choice was, as I have already said, a collection of furniture without character and without intimacy, but robust and imposing, for my mother laid great importance, not merely on money value, but also on solidity and size, these being two other qualities that she was capable of judging and appreciating. And so everything in these rooms—deep sofas, enormous armchairs, gigantic lampshades, massive tables, heavy curtains, monumental fittings—conveyed the idea of a luxury that was substantial and of good quality. And in every darker corner of the rooms light was reflected from wax-polished floors, from surfaces of well-kept wood, from gleaming brass and silver: extreme cleanliness was another characteristic of the house. And finally I noticed that, as usual, there were a number of large vases here and there, filled with slightly funereal bunches of flowers which my mother, as I knew, went to pick early every morning in the greenhouses. I realized that I was looking at all these things with an eye that was different from usual, less absent-minded, less detached, as though I were trying to discover the effect they made upon me, now that I had decided to come back and live with my mother. And I found that I had a feeling of mean and disgusted complacency, as if faced by an old temptation, now victorious but still as repugnant as ever. I went over to the antique, heavily-framed mirror that hung above a console-table at the far end of the drawing-room, looked at myself and suddenly felt a need to shout an insult at myself, whether from hatred or joy, I did not know. 'Idiot!' I cried. Almost at the same moment I heard a rustling sound behind me.
    I turned and saw the maid Rita standing a few paces from me beside a drinks-trolley and looking at me with a questioning air through her thick black-rimmed glasses. I wondered whether she had seen me while I was hurling insults at myself; I looked at her pale, sly face and could tell nothing from it. After a moment's silence she said: 'The Signora will be down in a moment. She told me to offer you a drink in the meantime. What would you like?'
    Again I wondered whether her voice contained the irony that was not shown in her face. But no, it was a serious, or at the least a hypocritically serious, voice. I said I would like some whisky and she, with very precise movements,