‘Bebino!’ a piercing voice shouted almost in his ear. ‘Bebino!’
He turned with a start. Through the narrow, crowded street the cab was making its way at a foot pace, and trotting along beside it, her hand on the frame of the open window, was the inventor (for reasons which she and she alone could understand) of that grotesquely infantile nickname.
‘Mimi!’ he exclaimed, and hoped to God there was nobody of his acquaintance within sight or earshot.
In that extraordinary purple outfit she looked not merely like the pretty little tart she was, but like the caricature of a pretty little tart in a comic paper. Which was what he liked about her, of course. The simple and unaffected vulgarity of her style was absolutely consummate.
Leaning forward, he called to the driver; and when the cab had stopped, opened the door for her. Mimi would look less conspicuous inside than out.
‘Bebino mio!’ She snuggled up against him on the seat, and he found himself enveloped by the reek of cheap perfume. ‘Why haven’t you been to see me, Bebino?’
As the cab drove on, he began to explain that he had been in Paris for a couple of months, and after that in England. But instead of listening, she continued to overwhelm him with reproaches and questions. Such a long, long time! But that was what men were like — forchi, real parchi. Didn’t he love her any more? Was he making her horns with someone else?
‘I tell you, I was in Paris for a couple of months,’ he repeated.
‘Sola, sola,’ she broke in on a note of heart-felt grief.
‘… And then a few weeks in London,’ he went on, raising his voice in an effort to get himself heard.
‘And I who did everything you ever asked!’ There were actually tears in her brown eyes. ‘Everything,’ she insisted plaintively.
‘But I tell you I was away!’ Eustace shouted impatiently.
Abruptly changing her expression, the girl gave him a look and smile of the frankest lasciviousness and, catching up his hand, pressed it against her plump young bosom.
‘Why don’t you come with me now, Bebino? she cajoled. ‘I’ll make you so happy.’ And leaning towards him she whispered in baby language, ‘Hair-brush — naughty little Bebino needs the hair-brush.’
Eustace looked at her for a moment in silence, then consulted his watch. No, there wouldn’t be time, before the train arrived, to fit in both. It would have to be one or the other. The past or the present; commiseration or enjoyment. He made his choice.
‘Gather ye peaches while ye may,’ he said in English, and tapping the glass he told the driver that he had changed his mind: he wanted to be taken somewhere else, and he gave the address of Mimi’s apartment near Santa Croce. The man nodded and gave him an understanding wink.
‘I have to telephone,’ said Eustace when they arrived.
And while Mimi was changing her clothes, he rang up his house and left orders that the car was to be waiting at the main entrance of Santa Croce at a quarter to six. Then it was Laurina’s turn. Could he speak to the Contessa? Waiting for the connection, he elaborated his little fiction.
‘Eustace?’ came the low husky voice that had once had power to command him anything.
‘Chère,’ he began volubly, ‘je suis horriblement ennuyé …’ Polite insincerity seemed to come more easily in French than in English or Italian.
He broke it to her gradually, in a spate of foreign words — the bad, bad news that he had broken the little contraption which had to take the place of his vanished teeth. Not yet a full-scale râtelier, thank goodness — plutôt un de ces bridges — ces petits ponts qui sont les Ponts des Soupirs qu’on traverse pour aller du palais de la jeunesse aux prisons lugubres de la sénilité. He chuckled appreciatively at his own elegant joke. Well, the long and the short of it was that he’d been compelled to go en hâte to the dentist’s, and would have to stay there until his bridge was repaired. And that, hélas, would prevent him from coming to tea.
Laurina took it a great deal better than he had dared to hope. Dr. Rossi, she told him, had imported a new kind of lamp from Vienna, a marvellous new drug from Amsterdam. For days at a time now she was almost free from pain. But that wasn’t the whole story. Passing on from the subject of her health, she remarked with a casualness of tone that was meant to mask, but actually betrayed, her sense of triumph, that D’Annunzio had recently come to see her — several times, and had talked so poetically about the past. And dear old Van Arpels had sent her his new book of poems, and with it the most charming of letters. And, talking of letters, she’d been going through her collection — and he had no idea what a lot there were, and how interesting.
‘They must be,’ said Eustace. And he thought of the almost insane intensities of feeling she had evoked in the days of her fascination, the agonies of craving and jealousy. And in such a variety of men — from pure mathematicians to company promoters, from Hungarian poets to English baronets and Estonian tennis champions. And now … He called up the image of Laurina as she was today, twenty years after: the gaunt cripple in her invalid-chair, and those brassy yellow curls above a face that might have been Dante’s death-mask….
‘I’d got out some of your letters to read to you,’ said the voice in the microphone at his ear.
‘They must sound pretty silly now.’
‘No, no, they’re charming,’ she insisted. ‘So witty; et en même temps si tendres — così vibranti!’
‘Vibranti?’ he repeated. ‘Don’t tell me I was ever vibrant!’
A sound made him turn his head. In the open doorway stood Mimi. She smiled at him and blew him a kiss; her claret-coloured kimono fell open.
At the other end of the wire paper sharply rustled.
‘Listen to this,’ said Laurina’s husky voice. ‘“You have the power of arousing desires that are infinite and, being infinite, can never be assuaged by the possession of a merely finite body and personal mind.”’
‘Golly!’ said Eustace. ‘Did I write that? It sounds like Alfred de Musset.’
Mimi was standing beside him now. With his free hand he gave her a couple of friendly pats on the buttocks. Gather ye peaches …
The husky voice went on reading. ‘“So it looks, Laurina, as though the only cure for being in love with you were to become a Sufi or a John of the Cross. God alone is commensurate with the cravings you inspire …”’
‘Il faudrait d’abord l’inventer’ Eustace interjected with a little chuckle. But at the time, he remembered, it had seemed quite sensible to say that sort of thing. Which just showed to what a condition this damned love could reduce a reasonable being! Well, thank goodness, now he was finished with that sort of thing! He administered another gentle smack and looked up at Mimi with a smile.
‘Spicciati, Bebino,’ she whispered.
‘And here’s another adorable thing you wrote,’ said Laurina’s voice in the same instant: ‘“Loving you as I do …”’
Mimi tweaked his ear impatiently —
‘“… As though one had been born again into another and intenser kind of life,”’ the voice at the telephone read on.
‘Sorry to have to interrupt my own raptures,’ said Eustace, speaking into the receiver. ‘But I’ve got to ring off…. No, no, not a moment more, my dear. Here’s the dentist. Ecco il dentista,’ he repeated for Mimi’s benefit, accompanying the words with a playful little pinch. ‘Adesso commincia la tortura.’
He hung up, turned and, pulling the girl down on to his knee, began with thick stubby fingers to tickle her well-covered ribs.
‘No, no, Bebino … no!’
‘Adesso commincia la tortura,’ he said again through the peals of her hysterical laughter.
CHAPTER TEN
SEATED AT THE counter of his cavernous little shop, Bruno Rontini was engaged in pricing a newly purchased batch of books. Fifteen lire, twelve, twenty-five, forty … His pencil moved from fly-leaf to fly-leaf. The light that fell almost vertically downwards from the hanging lamp above his head brought out black shadows w
ithin the deeply sunken sockets of the eyes and under the cheek-bones and the prominent nose. It was a beaked skull that bent over the books; but when he looked up, the eyes were blue and bright, the whole face wore an expression almost of gaiety.
Carlo had gone home, and he was alone — all alone with that which made his solitudes so pregnant with an inexpressible happiness. The noises of the street were loud beyond the window; but inside the little shop there was a core, as it were, of quintessential silence, to which every noise was an irrelevance, and which persisted through any interruption. Seated at the heart of that silence, Bruno was thinking that the crossed L which he was tracing out before the numerals on every fly-leaf stood not only for Lire, but also for Love, also for Liberation.
The door-bell rang, and a customer entered the shop. Bruno raised his head and saw a young, almost childish face. But how oddly skimped! As though Nature, suddenly parsimonious, had refused to provide a sufficiency of material for full-sized and significant features. Only the uneven and projecting teeth were large — those and the concave spectacles, through which, with a shy, sharp furtiveness, there beamed an intelligence that was obviously being used as an instrument, not for the discovery of truth, but for self-defence and, above all, for self-reassurance in humiliation.
The stranger coughed nervously and said that he wanted a good book on comparative religion. Bruno produced what he had in stock — a standard Italian text-book, a popular work in French, a translation, in two volumes, from the German.
‘I recommend the Frenchman,’ he said in his soft voice. ‘Only two hundred and seventy pages. You’ll hardly waste more than a couple of hours on him.’
He received a contemptuous smile.
‘I’m looking for something a little more solid.’
There was a little silence while the stranger turned over the pages of the other two books.
‘You’re going into teaching, I take it?’ said Bruno.
The other glanced at him suspiciously; then, finding no trace of irony or impertinence in the bookseller’s expression, he nodded.
Yes, he was going into teaching. And meanwhile he’d take the translation from the German.
‘Peccato,’ said Bruno, as he picked up the two thick volumes. ‘And when you finally get to be a university professor,’ he added, ‘what then?’
The young man held up the Italian text-book.
‘I shall write,’ he answered.
Yes, he’d write, Bruno said to himself, rather sadly. And either in despair, or out of an ingenuous respect for professors as such, some woman would have married him. And, of course, it is better to marry than to burn; but this one, it was all too obvious, would go on burning even after he was married — furtively, but with the inextinguishable violence characteristic of such frail and nervous temperaments. And under the crust of respectability and even eminence, the life of God-eclipsing phantasy, the secret addiction to self-inflicted pleasure, would persist almost into old age. But of course, he quickly reminded himself, nothing could ever be certainly prognosticated of any human being. There was always free will, there was always a sufficiency of grace if one wished to co-operate with it.
‘I shall write with authority,’ the young man went on almost aggressively.
‘And not as the scribes and Pharisees,’ Bruno murmured with a little smile. ‘But what then?’
‘“What then?”’ the other repeated. ‘What do you mean by “what then?” I shall go on writing.’
No, there was no chink yet in that protective carapace. Bruno turned away and began to tie up the books in brown paper. Shrinking from the vulgar transference of coin from hand to hand, the young man laid out the money along the edge of the counter. For him, no physical contacts with other human beings except the sexual. And even those, thought Bruno, even those would always prove disappointing, even a bit repulsive. He tied the final knot and handed over the parcel.
‘Many thanks,’ he said. ‘And if ever you should get tired of this kind of …’ He hesitated; in their deep sockets the blue eyes twinkled with an almost mischievous light. ‘… This kind of learned frivolity,’ he went on, laying his finger on the parcel, ‘remember, I’ve got quite a considerable stock of really serious books on the subject.’ He pointed to a section of the shelves on the opposite wall. ‘Scupoli, the Bhagavata, the Tao Teh King, the Theologia Germanica, the Graces of Interior Prayer …’
For a few seconds the young man listened — listened with the uneasy expression of one who finds himself closeted with a potentially dangerous lunatic; then, looking at his wrist-watch, he muttered something about its being very late, and hurried out of the shop.
Bruno Rontini sighed, and went back to the pricing of his books. L for Lire, L for Liberation. Out of ten thousand only one would ever break out of his carapace completely. Not a high proportion. But out of all those galaxies of eggs, how many herrings ever came to be full-sized fish? And herrings, it was to be remembered, suffered only from external interruptions to their hatching and growth. Whereas, in this process of spiritual maturation, every human being was always his own worst enemy. The attacks came from both sides, and from within even more violently and persistently and purposefully than from without. So that, after all, the record of one growing-up in ten thousand trials was really pretty creditable. Something to be admired rather than deplored. Something in regard to which one should not, as one was so often tempted, rail against God for his injustice, but rather give thanks for that divine generosity which granted to so many a reward so incommensurably vast.
L for Liberation, L for Love…. In spite of the impatient hooting, in spite of the clang and rumble of the traffic, the silence, for Bruno Rontini, was like a living crystal. Then the door-bell rang again, and looking up, he saw, under its tilted Homburg, the broad sagging face, with its pouchy eyes and its loosely smiling, unweaned lips, of Eustace Barnack. And through the medium of that living crystal he perceived the man as entombed, as coffined away from the light, as immured in an impenetrable privation of beatitude. And the walls of that sepulchre were built of the same sloths and sensualities as he had known within himself, and still knew, still had to beg God to forgive him. Filled with an enormous compassion, Bruno rose and went to greet him.
‘Found at last!’ Eustace cried. He spoke in Italian, because it was easier, when one was thus consummately acting the part of a jovial Florentine bourgeois, to preserve oneself from the danger of having to talk too seriously — and with Bruno it was particularly important that one should never be serious. ‘I’ve been looking for you all day.’
‘Yes, I heard you’d been in this morning,’ Bruno answered in English.
‘And was received,’ said Eustace, still playing his Tuscan comedy, ‘by the most ardent young disciple of yours! He even managed to sell me some edifying literature — qualche trattatine sull’ amor del Gaseous Vertebrate,’ he concluded airily.
And now the volume had taken its place between one of Pittigrilli’s novels and a dog-eared Dream Book on Mimi’s bed-table.
‘Eustace, are you well?’ Bruno asked with an earnestness that was entirely out of key with the other’s jocularity.
Eustace was startled into his native language.
‘Never felt better,’ he answered. And then, as Bruno continued to look at him with the same intent, distressed expression, a note of irritation and suspicion came into his voice. ‘What is it?’ he questioned sharply.
Could the fellow see something that permitted him to guess about Mimi? Not that Mimi was anything one had to be ashamed of. No, the intolerable thing was the intrusion on one’s privacy. And Bruno, he remembered, had always had this odd, exasperating gift of knowing things without being told about them. And of course, if it wasn’t clairvoyance, it might easily be smears of lipstick.
‘Why do you stare at me?’
Bruno smiled apologetically.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I just thought you looked … well, I don’t know. Like people look when they’re going to h
ave a touch of flu.’
It was the face of a man entombed, and now all of a sudden menaced in his tomb. Menaced by what?
Relieved that it wasn’t Mimi who had been detected, Eustace relaxed into a smile.
‘Well, if I get the flu,’ he said, ‘I shall know who wished it on me. And now don’t imagine,’ he went on genially, ‘that I’ve come here just to feast my eyes on that seraphic mug of yours. I want you to get permission for me to take my young nephew to see the maze in the Galigai gardens. He’s arriving this evening.’
‘Which nephew?’ Bruno asked. ‘One of Alice’s sons?’
‘Those louts?’ said Eustace. ‘God forbid! No, no; this is John’s boy. Quite a remarkable little creature. Seventeen, and childish at that; but writes the most surprising verses — full of talent.’
Complete Works of Aldous Huxley Page 243
