10
ALIIERTO MORAVIA
increase, and with them
his
ill-humor. It was raining, into the
bargain-a fine rain, not enough to justify the use of an um–
brella but enough to cover the pavements with a dewlike mois–
ture slippery to the feet.
This
rain seemed to make the air even
more stifling; when he reached the top of the street he became
conscious that he was dripping with sweat.
He had come out in order to go for a walk, but he saw
that, with all this mass of clothes on him, his walk was not pro–
ducing its usual diverting, restful effect; on the contrary, with
the unhealthy heat in which he was imprisoned from head to
foot,
his
eye concentrated angrily upon all the meanest and
ugliest aspects of the city.
As
though seeing them for the first
time, he became alive to the vulgarity of the shop windows
filled with objectS which all seemed to him quite useless; to the
damp, murky wretchedness of narrow lanes strewn with rubbish
and frequented by shadowy, prowling cats; to the awkwardness
of the women's clothes; to the poorneSs of the men's clothes;
and to the sweaty, greasy, worn-out look of the faces that came
ceaselessly towards
him
out of the dimness of the street, rushed
forward to meet him and then disappeared. The whole city,
which usually he loved
so
much, now appeared to him like an
enormous heap of
dirt
in which, thrown confusedly together,
men and things that in another place and in different condi–
tions would have kept their freshness and integrity became cor–
rupted and rotten.
Meanwhile, darkness was rapidly falling. Not knowing
what to do, he stopped in front of the window of a
tobacco~t's
shop, observing, almost without seeing them, the pipes and
the
packs
of cards displayed there. The thing that troubled
him
most, at that moment, was
his
woolen socks: he tried to move
his
toes inside
his
shoe and felt them all stuck together,
as
though they were on the point of melting, like candles. Then
someone coming out of the shop knocked against
him;
he looked
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