by Italo Svevo
Then the old man would have liked to put on again at once his air of philanthropist. What was the use now of keeping up the odious appearance of seducer? He had the good taste to talk no more about jobs. Instead, he quickly gave her money. Then, after a slight hesitation, he gave her another separate sum, which he meant for that dear lady, her mother. To appear philanthropical, you must give also to the undeserving. Besides, old men always dole out their money in installments, whereas young men empty their pockets with a single gesture, only to repent later.
Thus the girl had the hard task of having to accept the money twice over and to pretend twice over that she did not want it. The first time is easy and it happens to them all. But the second time? She could not think of a different expression, as the occasion demanded, and repeated mechanically the words and the gestures she had used the first time. The third time too, she would have said: “Money? I don’t want any,” and would have taken it, saying: “I love you.” After the second time she was a little troubled, and the old man attributed her trouble to her disinterestedness. But it may well be that she wondered whether the amount given her had been small and divided into two parts to make it seem larger.
This simple adventure became more complex in the excited brain of the nice old man. It is fate. Somehow or other, even when an old man pays, knowing that favours will no longer be given him, he always ends by falsifying his love adventures and soon earns the laugh of Beaumarchais and the music of Rossini. My nice old man—so intelligent—did not laugh at the words, simple as they were, of the young girl. The adventure must turn out to be “real” and he willingly lent his hand to the deceit. The girl was so charming that no word of hers could ring false. Now such falsifying had some importance, but only in the mind of the old man. Outwardly its only effect was to make the duration of that first interview, and also of those that followed, a little longer. If the old man had been able to do as he liked, he would have sent the girl away soon, because the immorality of old men is of short duration. But with a woman who loves, you cannot adopt such cavalier methods. He was not vain. He thought: “The girl loves the luxury of my office, of my house, of my person. Perhaps also she likes the gentleness of my voice and the refinement of my manners. She loves this room of mine where there is so much good food. She loves so many things of mine that she may love even me a little.” The proffer of love is a very high compliment and pleases even when we don’t know what to do with it. At worst it is at least the equivalent of the knightly titles of persons who deal in oxen, and we know how jealous they are of them. She told him, but without any intention of being tragic, that he was her first lover. And he believed it. In fact the nice old man had to put restraint on himself to prevent himself from offering her money for the third time. So willingly did he yield to the pleasure she gave him that he felt hurt when she told him that she did not like young men, and preferred old ones. This hearing himself called old was a rude awakening and it was painful to have to bow acknowledgments for the flattering declaration. However, the interview, even when least amorous, was anything but a torture to the nice old man. All the energies of the girl were concentrated upon devouring the good supper offered her, so that he could rest at his ease.
But he was glad to see her go and to be left alone. He was used to the talk of serious persons and it was impossible for him to endure long the foolish talk of the pretty girl. I shall be told that there are artists and thinkers, people more serious than my old business man, who, when young, endure with pleasure the chatter of a pretty mouth. But clearly old men are in certain respects more serious than the most serious young men.
The nice old man went to bed still a little troubled. When he was in bed he said: “We must think no more about her. Perhaps I shall never see her again.” So doubtful was he of his own love that he had arranged with her that he would send her a note of invitation for their next meeting.
Before going to sleep he was tortured with thirst. He had drunk too much and eaten things too highly spiced. He called his housekeeper, who brought him a glass of water and a reproachful glance. She was no longer very young, and it had always been her ambition to end up as mistress of the house. Then she had thought that the restraint of the old man arose from class feeling and had accepted the fact because one is born in one class or another without any fault of one’s own. Now she had been able to see the girl for a moment when she left. This taught her that class feeling did not prevent the old man from doing anything. That was as good as a genuine slap in the face for her. Obviously the qualities that make a person more or less desirable do not depend on their merits or demerits. But she held that she possessed those qualities, and therefore it was the old man’s fault if he did not recognise them.
IV
The note with which the old man invited the girl to another meeting was written a few days later, much sooner than he had imagined when he went to bed that night. He wrote to her with a smile on his face, satisfied with himself. He flattered himself that the second meeting would be even more fruitful in pleasure. Instead it was exactly like the first. When he dismissed the girl he was as cautious as before and arranged once more that she should come to him next when he sent for her. He invited her to the third meeting even more quickly, but the parting was the same. He never brought himself to arrange the next meeting at once. For the old man was always happy, both when he sent for the girl and when he dismissed her, that is, when he meant to return to the path of virtue. If, when he dismissed the girl, he had arranged the next meeting at once, this return to virtue would have been less genuine. In this way there was no idea of compromise, and his life remained orderly and virtuous with the exception of a very brief interval.
There would be little more for us to say about the interviews, if, after a time, the old man had not been seized with an insane jealousy—insane not for its violence, but for its strangeness. This is how it was. It did not appear when he wrote to the girl, because that was the moment when he was taking her away from the others; nor when he said good-bye to her, because that was the moment when he gave her over, willing and whole, to the others. In his case jealousy was inseparable from love, in space and time. Love was revived by it, and the adventure became more “real” than ever. A bliss and a pain indescribable. At a certain moment he became obsessed with the idea that the girl certainly had other lovers, all as young as he was old. He grieved over it for his own sake (oh, so much!), but also for hers, since she could thus throw away all hope of a decent life. It would be disastrous if she trusted others as she had trusted him. His own sin played its part in his jealousy. That is why, in order to make up for his own bad example, the old man habitually preached morality at the very moment when he was making love. He explained to her all the dangers of promiscuous love.
The girl protested that she had but one love, for himself. “Well,” cried the old man, ennobled at one and the same time by love and morality, “if, in your desire to return to virtue, you had to decide not to see me again, I should be delighted.” Here the girl made no answer, and for good reasons. For her the adventure was so clear that it was impossible for her to lie, as he did. She must not break off that relationship for the moment. It was also easy to keep silence when he was covering her with kisses. But when he gave vent to feelings more sincere and talked of other lovers, accusing her of having them, she found words again: How could he believe it? In the first place, she only went through the streets of the town on her tram, and besides, her mother kept an eye on her, and lastly, nobody wanted her, poor thing! And down fell a couple of tears. It was bad reasoning to use so many arguments, but in the meantime love and jealousy disappeared from the old man and she could go back to her supper.
This will show how old men regularly function. With young men each single hour is filled irregularly with the most diverse feelings, whereas with old men every feeling has its hour complete. The young girl fell in with the old man’s ways. When he wanted her, she came; she went off when he had done with her. If they differed, the
y ended by making love and eating afterwards in the best of humours.
Perhaps the old man ate and drank too much. He was anxious to show off his strength.
I do not wish to imply that that is why the old man fell ill. Obviously an excessive number of years is more dangerous than an excess of wine, or of food or even of love. It may be that one of these excesses aggravated another, but it is not for me to assert even as much as that.
V
He had gone quietly to bed, as he did every evening, and especially on those evenings when the girl left him, after eating everything that had been put before her.
He soon fell asleep. He afterwards remembered that he had dreamed, but so confusedly that he did not recollect anything about it. A number of people were round him, shouting, arguing with him and with each other. Then they had all gone away, and, utterly exhausted, he had thrown himself upon a sofa to rest. Then, on a little table exactly on a level with the sofa, he saw a large rat looking at him with its small bright eyes. There was laughter, or rather mockery, in those eyes. Then the rat vanished, but to his horror he realized that it had forced its way into his left arm, and, digging furiously, was making for his chest, causing him excruciating pain.
He woke up gasping, covered with perspiration. It had been a dream, but something real remained behind, the excruciating pain. The image of the object causing the pain changed immediately. It was no longer a rat, but a sword fixed in the upper part of the arm, the point of which reached his chest; curved, not cutting, but jagged and poisonous, because it caused pain wherever it touched. It prevented him from breathing or making any movement. It would have been possible to break the sword by wrenching it, if he had moved. He shouted and he knew it, because the effort of making himself heard hurt his throat, but he was not sure that he heard the sound he uttered. There was a great deal of noise in that empty room. Empty? In that room was death. A profound darkness drew towards him from the ceiling, a cloud which, when it reached him, would crush out of him the little breath that was still left, and would cut him off for ever from all light, driving him among things base and filthy. The darkness drew slowly nearer. When would it reach him? Without a doubt it might expand at any moment, wrap itself round him and strangle him in a second. Was this what death, which had been familiar to him from childhood, was like? So insidious and bringing with it so much pain? He felt the tears flowing from his eyes. He wept from fear and not in the hope of awakening pity, because he knew that there was no pity. And the terror was so great that he seemed to himself to be without fault or sin. He was being strangled like this, he so good and gentle and merciful.
How long did the terror last? He could not have said, and he might have imagined that it lasted a whole night, if the night had not been so long. It seemed to him that first the threatening darkness left him and then the pain. Death had vanished, and the next day he would welcome the sun again. Then the pain shifted, and there was instant relief. It was driven higher up towards the throat, where it disappeared. He covered himself up with the blankets. His teeth chattered with cold, and a convulsive shivering prevented him from resting. But the return to life was complete. He did not call out again, and he was glad that his cry had not been heard. His housekeeper, nasty creature, would have thought that his illness was due to the visit of the girl on the previous evening. This is how he came to remember her, and suddenly he thought: “No more love-making for me!”
VI
The doctor, who was called in in the morning, examined him, and thought the matter over, but did not at first attach much importance to the attack. The old man described the adventure of the previous evening, including the food and the champagne, and the doctor thought that the trouble was due to these excesses. He said he was sure the trouble would not return, provided the old man lived quietly, taking regularly every two hours a certain powder, and refrained from seeing the object of his passion or even from thinking of her.
The doctor, who was a contemporary and an old friend, treated him without any ceremony: “My dear fellow, you must not go to your lover until I allow you.”
The old man, however, who attached more importance to his health than the doctor, thought: “Even if you gave me permission, I would not go to her. I was so much better before I knew her.”
As soon as he was alone, he began to think of the girl, with the idea of freeing himself from her altogether. But he remembered that the girl loved him, and he therefore thought her capable of coming to see him after a time, even without being invited. The strength of love is well known. Then what sort of a figure would he cut, he who had determined not to see her even with the doctor’s permission? He wrote to her that he should have to leave town unexpectedly for a long time. He would let her know when he returned. He enclosed a sum of money which was meant to settle accounts with his own conscience. The letter also ended with a kiss, written after a moment’s hesitation. No. The kiss had not set his pulse beating.
The next day he felt reassured by a quiet, though almost sleepless night. The terrible pain had not returned, whereas, in spite of the doctor’s assurances, he had dreaded being attacked by it every night in the dark. Next time he went to bed more calmly and recovered confidence, but not sleep. The rumbling of the guns reached him and the nice old man asked: “Why have they not managed to discover a way of killing each other without making so much noise about it?” It was not very long since the day when the sound of the fighting had awakened generous impulses in him. But illness had taken from him the remnants of a feeling for his fellows which old age had failed to destroy in him.
During the next few days the doctor added some drops in the intervals between the powders. Then, to insure his sleeping at night, he came in the evening to give him injections. There was also special medicine for the appetite which he had to take at stated hours. There was plenty to do in the old man’s day. And the housekeeper, unnoticed in happier days, became very important. The old man, who could be grateful, might perhaps have grown fond of her, for sometimes she had even to get up in the night to give him his medicines. But she had a bad fault. She did not forgive him his transgressions and made frequent references to them. The first time she had to give him a small dose of champagne by way of medicine, she accompanied it with the remark: “It is some of that which was bought for a very different purpose.”
For a time the old man protested, trying to make her think that between him and the girl there had been nothing more than an affection of the utmost purity. Then, seeing that nothing could shake her conviction, he began to believe that she had long known it and had spied upon him. How could he tell when? He puzzled his brains for a long while to find out. He blushed especially for what the woman knew, because the rest did not exist, but with that damned woman everything ended by existing, given those very vague allusions of hers, with the help of which it was possible to remember the whole adventure. The result was that he could no longer endure the woman and allowed her near him only when he needed her. It is true that he needed her also to gossip with, so that even this hatred, which might have been really vital, was ineffectual. It confined itself to his whispering to the doctor: “She is as ugly as sin.”
In the course of his struggle with this woman he remembered the girl, but without regretting her. All he regretted was his health, or rather what he regarded as his own youth. Youth had fled with the girl’s last visit, and regret for this persisted in his regret for her. Now, in all seriousness, he would find a job for the girl … if he recovered his health. Then he would return to his important and profitable work and not to sin. It was sin that injured health.
Summer passed. He was allowed to go for a drive on one of the last calm days. The doctor went with him. The result was far from unfavourable, for he enjoyed the change and his condition was no worse, but it was impossible to repeat the experiment in the bad weather that followed.
Thus his empty life went on. There was no change, except in the medicines. Each medicine was good for a time. Then the doses had to b
e increased to produce the same effect till it had to be replaced by another drug. After a month or two, it is true, they began all over again.
However, a certain equilibrium was established in his system. If he was going to his death, the progress was imperceptible. It was no longer a question of the pain, heroic in its violence, on the night when death had uplifted its arm to give him the decisive blow. Far from it. Perhaps, as he was then, he was no longer worth striking. He thought he was getting better every day. He even believed that his appetite had returned. He took time to swallow his tasteless broths and really thought he was eating. There were still some tins of stimulating food in the house. The old man took one in his trembling hands: he read the name of the famous maker and put it down again. He meant to keep it for the day when he should be even better. For that day were also kept some bottles of champagne. It had been found that the wine was useless for his malady.
The most important part of the day was that which he spent by a window during the warmest hours. That window was a chink through which he looked out on life as it went on its way in the streets, even now that he had been exiled from it. If the woman of sin, as he called her, was at hand, he criticized to her the luxury that still appeared in the poor streets of Trieste or pitied in rather emphatic tones the poverty that went by in a stream. Opposite his house was a baker’s and there was often a queue of people drawn up at his door, waiting for their crust of bread. The old man expressed pity for these people waiting so anxiously for a badly cooked loaf that filled him with disgust, but here his pity was pure hypocrisy. He envied those who moved freely about the streets. It was childish of him. On the whole he was comfortable in the shelter of his well-warmed room, but he would have liked to look even beyond that road. The passers-by who awakened his curiosity, because they were dressed either too well or too badly, turned round the corner and were lost to him.
