As a Man Grows Older

by Italo Svevo

  Balli appeared at last, coming from the direction of the Aqueduct, arm in arm with a woman as tall as himself. “What a beanstalk!” said Angiolina, at once giving expression to the only judgment it was possible to form of her at that distance.

  When they had come nearer, Balli introduced them: “Margherita! Ange!” He tried to get a view of Angiolina in the dark and brought his face so near to hers that by putting out his lips he could have kissed her. “Are you really Ange?” Nothing would satisfy him but he must strike a match and light up her rosy face, which with the utmost solemnity lent itself to the operation. Lit up thus in the darkness it seemed to shine with an adorable brilliance: the small yellow flame pierced her pale eyes like the clear waters of a pool and they shone back at him with their sweet, wild, bewitching luster. Quite unperturbed, Balli lit up in its turn Margherita’s face, a pale face, pure in outline, with great blue vivacious eyes which at once riveted the attention, an aquiline nose and masses of chestnut hair piled up on her little head. What struck one most in her face was the contradiction between her bold challenging eyes and the suffering, madonna-like air of her finely chiseled features. She took advantage of the tiny flame for studying Emilio rather than for displaying her own charms: then, as the match was still not quite burnt out she blew it out.

  “Now you all know one another; and that fellow there,” said Balli, pointing to Emilio, “you will soon have an opportunity of seeing in the full lamplight.”

  He led the way with Margherita who had already put her arm through his. Margherita was too tall and thin for her figure to be really good; but they had both been struck by the mixture of liveliness and suffering in the expression of her face. She walked insecurely, and took very small steps in proportion to her size. She was wearing a short jacket of a flaming red color, which lost all its dashing character on her modest unassertive-looking back, with its slight stoop; it had rather the air of a military uniform which a boy was dressing-up in, whereas the dullest color which Angiolina wore took on a lively hue. “What a pity!” whispered Angiolina, genuinely distressed. “Such a lovely head stuck up on a maypole like that.”

  Emilio felt a desire to say something. He caught up Balli and said to him: “I think your young lady’s eyes are so lovely that I should like to know what you think of mine.”

  “Her eyes aren’t bad,” declared Balli, “but the modeling of her nose is not perfect; the line of the lower part is very sketchy; it needs a little retouching.”

  “Really?” exclaimed Angiolina, much upset.

  “I may be mistaken, of course,” said Balli, in the most serious voice. “I shall be able to see for certain in a moment, when we get some more light.”

  When Angiolina had got far enough away from her terrible critic, she said spitefully: “As if that great gawk of his was perfect!”

  When they reached the “Mondo Nuovo,” they went into a long room which was timbered at one end and had at the other a glass door opening on to a large open-air café. The waiter, who at once rushed to meet them, was quite young, and very much a peasant, judging by his dress and manners. He climbed on a stool and lit two gas-jets, which were a very insufficient illumination for so big a room; he was in no hurry to come down, but stayed up there rubbing his sleepy eyes till Stefano ran to pull him down, shouting out that he could not allow anyone to fall asleep so high above the ground. The lad leaned on the sculptor’s shoulder and allowed himself to be lifted down, then ran off wide awake and in the best of humors.

  Margherita had a sore foot and she sat down at once. Balli busied himself about her, full of solicitude, and told her not to stand on ceremony, but to take off her boot. But she refused, saying: “It always hurts me more or less, and this evening I hardly feel it at all.”

  How different that woman was from Angiolina! Chaste and affectionate by nature, her declarations of love were made silently and almost imperceptibly, while Angiolina, when she wished to signify that her sensibility was aroused, made a thousand preparatory moves like an engine which needs a long time to get under way.

  But Balli was not satisfied. He had said that she was to take off her boot and he insisted on being obeyed, till at last she declared that she was perfectly ready to take off both her boots if he told her to, but that it would not do the slightest good, for the boots had nothing whatever to do with her pain. All through the evening he made a point of compelling her submission from time to time, because he wanted to illustrate his method of dealing with women. Margherita lent herself admirably to the part; she laughed at him a good deal, but she obeyed. Her manner of talking seemed to show that she was capable of forming her own judgment upon things, and this made her submissive attitude all the more salutary as an example.

  At first she tried to get into conversation with Angiolina, who by standing on tiptoe was trying to get a view of herself in a distant mirror, in order to put her curls in order. She told her about the pains she had in her chest and legs; she couldn’t remember the time when she had not suffered from some pain or other. Still intent on her image in the mirror, Angiolina commented, “Really? Poor thing!” then added with extreme simplicity: “I am always quite well.” Emilio, who knew her so well, could hardly help smiling, for he realized the complete indifference to Margherita’s maladies which was conveyed in her words, and the entire satisfaction she immediately felt in her own well-being. Other people’s misfortunes only made her more delightfully conscious of her own good fortune.

  Margherita placed herself between Stefano and Emilio; Angiolina was the last to take her seat, facing Margherita, and before sitting down she cast one strange look at Balli. Emilio thought it was a look of defiance, but the sculptor knew better how to interpret it: “Dear Angiolina,” he said unceremoniously. “She looks at me like that in the hope that I may admire her nose too; but it is no good. Her nose ought to have this shape,” and he proceeded to dip his finger in the beer and to draw on the table the curve he wanted, a broad line which it would have been difficult to imagine on a human nose.

  Angiolina looked at the line as if she would have liked to commit it to memory; then she touched her own nose: “It is better like this!” she said almost to herself, as if she were no longer interested in trying to persuade anyone else.

  “What bad taste!” cried Balli, unable any longer to keep himself from laughing. It was evident that from that moment he found Angiolina most entertaining. He went on saying uncomplimentary things to her, but he seemed to be doing it only in order to rouse her to defend herself. She obviously took a certain pleasure in it herself. When she looked at Balli her eye shone with the same affectionate interest as Margherita’s. She seemed to be copying her, and Emilio, having in vain tried several times to attract a little attention in the general conversation, was beginning to ask himself what had induced him to get up such a party.

  But Balli had not forgotten him. He was merely following out his system, which was apparently one of brutality even towards the waiter. First he shouted at him because all the dishes he proposed serving seemed to have veal in them. Then he resigned himself to ordering one, but almost before the waiter had left the room he would shout after him in a comic fit of unprovoked anger: “You dog! you villain!” The waiter seemed thoroughly to enjoy being shouted at, and obeyed all his orders with extraordinary promptitude. When he had thus reduced everyone to subjection, Balli felt he had given Emilio exactly the lesson he intended.

  But Emilio was incapable of applying such a system even in regard to the most insignificant matters. Margherita did not want anything to eat: “Beware!” Balli said to her, “or it is the last time I ever take you out to dine. I can’t endure people giving themselves airs!” She at once let him order a portion for her too; her appetite returned so quickly that Emilio immediately reflected he had never received a similar sign of affection from Angiolina. Meanwhile she, too, after hesitating for a long time, finally declared that she could not eat any veal.

  “Didn’t you hear?” Emilio said, “Stefano can’t
endure people giving themselves airs.” She shrugged her shoulders; she didn’t care, she said, whom she pleased and whom she didn’t, and to Emilio it seemed that her contempt was directed against him rather than Balli.

  Balli, with his mouth full, then addressed himself to the other three: “This veal repast,” he said, “is not a very harmonious function. You two clash terribly together: you as black as coal, and she as fair as an ear of corn at the end of June—you seem to have been arranged by an Academy painter. As for us they might have given us the title: ‘Grenadier with wounded wife.’”

  To this Margherita replied with true feeling: “We don’t go out together in order to be looked at by other people.” Balli rewarded her by a kiss on the forehead, but even this token of affection was given with his habitual brusquerie and mock severity.

  Angiolina, with sudden bashfulness, began looking at the ceiling. “Don’t pretend to be so virtuous,” said Balli fiercely to her. “As if you two don’t do much worse things than that.”

  “Who told you so?” asked Angiolina, looking threateningly towards Emilio.

  “I didn’t,” Emilio rather feebly protested.

  “And what do you do together every evening, I should like to know? I never see him now, so it must be with you that he spends all his evenings. Why did he need to fall in love at his age? Farewell billiards, farewell our walks together. I stay there waiting for him, or am obliged to put up with the first fool who comes along, to keep me company. We used to get on so well together. I, the most intelligent person in the town and he the fifth, for there are four places vacant immediately below me, and he comes directly after that.”

  Margherita, to whom the kiss had restored all her serenity, cast an affectionate glance at Emilio. “It is quite true. He is always talking about you. He is very fond of you.”

  Angiolina, however, was thinking that the fifth intelligent person in the town was not worth very much, and reserved all her admiration for the first. “Emilio told me you sing so well. Do sing a little. I should so much like to hear you.”

  “I should be delighted. But I always rest after eating. I take as long to digest as a snake.”

  Margherita alone guessed Emilio’s state of mind. She looked severely at Angiolina, then turning to Emilio, she devoted all her attention to him, and went on talking to him about Stefano. “Sometimes he is rude, of course, but not always, and even when he is there is really nothing to be afraid of.” Then in a low, sweetly modulated voice, she added: “A man who thinks for himself is so different from all the rest who don’t think at all.” It was clear that by “all the rest” she meant the people she generally had to consort with, and for the moment he was able to detach himself from his own melancholy situation, and looked at her pityingly. She was right to love in others the qualities she lacked; such a sweet, gentle creature was incapable of standing alone.

  But Balli called attention to him once more. “How silent you have become!” Turning to Angiolina he asked: “Is that what he is like all the time during those long evenings you spend together?”

  She had apparently forgotten the hymns of love he had sung to her, and said rather crossly: “He is a serious man.”

  Balli good-humoredly tried to enhance Emilio’s prestige; he began by drawing a mock picture of him. “As regards goodness he comes first and I only fifth. He is the only man I have ever been able to agree with. He is my alter ego, my other self, he thinks as I do, and always accepts my opinion if I don’t at once accept his.” By the time he reached the last sentence he had entirely forgotten the good intention with which he set out, and good-humoredly buried Emilio beneath the weight of his own superiority. Emilio was obliged to compose his features in a forced smile.

  Then, feeling that it would not be difficult to divine the effort behind the smile, he determined to say something so as to appear more at his ease. There had been some talk, he could not remember exactly how it had arisen, of Angiolina’s posing for a figure which Balli had in his head. He had no objection; it was only a matter of copying her head, he told Angiolina, as if he did not know quite well that she would willingly have offered far more. But without asking his opinion she had already accepted while he was engaged in conversation with Margherita, and she now burst in on his unnecessarily long and stilted speech with the exclamation: “But I have already accepted.”

  Balli thanked her and said that he should certainly call on her, but not for a few months, as he was at the moment too much occupied with other works. He looked at her for a long time, imagining the pose he would place her in for her portrait, and Angiolina grew quite pink with pleasure. One would have thought that Emilio would at least have had a companion in his suffering. But no! Margherita was not at all jealous, and she, too, looked at Angiolina with the eye of an artist. Stefano would certainly do something beautiful of her, she said, and she spoke with enthusiasm of the surprises art had given her, when she saw emerging from the docile clay a face, an expression, life itself.

  Balli at once resumed his brusque manner. “Are you really called Angiolina? A diminutive for a great, strapping girl like you. I shall call you Angiolona, perhaps only Giolona.” And henceforward he always called her that, emphasizing the broad vowels to the utmost, so that the sounds conveyed the maximum of contempt. Emilio was surprised that Angiolina showed no dislike for the name; she never got angry at it, and when Balli bellowed it in her ear she only laughed as if he had been tickling her.

  On their way back together Balli sang. He had a voice of considerable volume and even tone, which he modulated with much taste and subtlety, though the popular songs he sang by preference hardly deserved such delicate treatment. He sang one that evening of which he was obliged, by the presence of the two young women, to leave out some of the words, but he supplied their lack by suggestive glances and a certain sensuality in his voice. Angiolina was enchanted by them.

  When they parted, Emilio and Angiolina stood still a moment and watched the others walking away. “He must be blind!” she said. “How can he love a smoke-dried stick which can scarcely hold itself upright?”

  Next evening she did not allow Emilio time to utter the reproaches which he had been turning over in his mind all day long. She had some surprising news for him. The tailor had written to her—she had forgotten to bring his letter along—to say that he would not be able to marry her for a whole year. A partner of his was preventing him by threatening to break up the partnership and withdraw his capital. “It seems that the partner wants him to marry his own daughter, a hunchback, who would certainly match my fiancé very well. But Volpini swears that he will be able to do without the partner and his money in a year’s time, and that then he will marry me. Do you understand?” He showed that he did not. “There is something else,” she said softly and rather timidly. “Volpini says he can’t live a whole year with his desire unsatisfied.”

  He understood at last. He protested that she could not expect him to consent to such a thing. But what objection could he raise? “Shall you have any guarantee of his good faith?”

  “Whatever I choose. He is ready to make a contract with a notary.”

  After a short pause he asked: “When?”

  She laughed. “He can’t come next Sunday. He wants to get everything ready for the contract which he will make in a fortnight’s time, and then...” She broke off laughing and kissed him.

  She would be his at last! It was not thus that he had dreamed of possessing her, but he, too, embraced her effusively and tried to persuade himself that he was perfectly happy. He ought to be grateful to her, no doubt. She loved him, or rather she loved him as well. What had he got to complain of?

  Besides, this was perhaps the cure he had been hoping for. Polluted by the tailor, possessed by him, Ange would soon die, and he would continue to amuse himself with Giolona; he would be gay, as she wanted all men to be, indifferent and cynical like Balli.

  5

  IT WAS TRUE what Balli had said. It was because of Angiolina that the relati
ons of the two friends had become so cold. Up to the evening of their dinner together Emilio had hardly ever been to see his friend, but was not conscious that he had neglected him till Balli had ended by taking offense and had stopped running after him, though he still cherished their friendship, like all his other habits. The dinner broke down Stefano’s obstinacy and also made him fear that he might have offended his friend. Emilio’s unhappy state of mind had not escaped him and so soon as the intense pleasure he took in knowing himself to be loved by both the women at once had died down—and it lasted only a fraction of an hour—his conscience smote him. In order to silence it he hastened to Emilio’s house at noon the following day, under the pretense of giving him some good advice. A little sound argument would probably be more efficacious than example in curing Emilio, and even if it did not altogether work, it would at least enable him to appear again in the guise of a friend and to give up the role of rival which he had only assumed from weakness and for the sake of a moment’s distraction.

  Amalia came to open the door. The poor girl inspired in Balli a rather uncomfortable feeling of pity. He held that it was permissible to live in order to enjoy fame or beauty or physical strength, but that otherwise there was no justification for one’s being alive; one simply became an odious encumbrance to other people. Why then was this poor creature alive? It was evidently a mistake on the part of Nature. Sometimes, if he did not find his friend at home when he came to the house, he would make an excuse for going away on the spot, for her pale face and hoarse voice produced in him a feeling of profound depression. She, on the other hand, who liked to feel she was sharing Emilio’s life, had looked upon herself as a friend of Balli.