by Italo Svevo
She was a little flustered, and stammered out that if he had not spoken to her she had meant to write to him the very next day. “After all, what have I done?” she asked, forgetting that she had asked his pardon just before.
Emilio thought it politic to express some doubt. “How can I believe you?” And then he said reproachfully: “With an umbrella-maker!”
This made them both burst out laughing. “You jealous thing,” she cried, squeezing the hand which she still held in hers, “fancy being jealous of that wild man of the woods!” And it was true that however right he perhaps was in breaking off his relation with Angiolina he had certainly been wrong in making use of that stupid story as an excuse. The umbrella-maker was not the most formidable of his rivals. And this reflection gave him the strange feeling that he ought to lay at his own door all the evils which had befallen him since he had abandoned Angiolina.
She was silent for a long time. It could not have been on purpose, for this would have been too subtle for Angiolina. She was probably silent because she could think of nothing else to say to excuse herself, so they walked on in silence side by side through the dark, mysterious night; the sky was covered all over with clouds lit up only at one point by the light of the moon.
They reached Angiolina’s house and she stopped, perhaps to take leave of him. But he made her walk on. “Let us go on walking, on and on without speaking!” To please him she naturally continued to walk beside him in silence. And he loved her again from that moment, or at least he was conscious of it from that moment. He had walking beside him again the woman who was ennobled by his uninterrupted dream of her, and by that last cry of anguish which broke from her when he left her, and which for long had personified her wholly for him; ennobled too by art, for now his desire for her made Emilio feel that he had beside him a goddess capable of every lofty dream and sentiment.
Beyond Angiolina’s house they came to a dark and lonely road shut in on one side by a hill, on the other by a low wall bounding the fields. She sat down on it and he leaned against her, trying to recover the position he had liked best in the past, during the first days of their love. He missed the sea. The one shining thing in this damp, gray landscape was Angiolina’s fairness; she was the one warm, luminous note.
It was so long since he had felt her lips on his own that he was violently excited by it. “Oh, my sweet! my dear one!” he murmured, kissing her eyes, her throat, her hands, her dress. She let him do just what he wanted, and he was so deeply moved by such unexpected docility and tenderness that he wept, at first silently, and then breaking out in sobs. He felt as if it was in his power to make that blissful moment last forever. Everything was explained now, all doubts were solved. His life would consist henceforward of his love alone.
“Do you really love me so much?” she murmured, touched and wondering. There were tears in her eyes too. She told him how she had seen him in the street, looking pale and worn, and with evident signs of suffering on his face, and that her heart ached with pity for him. “Why didn’t you come before?” she asked him reproachfully.
She supported herself against him in getting down from the wall. He could not understand why she wanted to cut short that delicious explanation, which he would have liked to continue forever. “Come home with me,” she said firmly.
He felt dizzy with delight and took her in his arms and kissed her again and again, not knowing how to show his gratitude. But Angiolina’s house was some way off and Emilio had time, while walking along, to fall a prey to all his old doubts and misgivings. How if he were to bind himself to her for life, then and there? He began to mount the stairs slowly, and turned on her suddenly with the question: “How about Volpini?”
She hesitated, and stood still. “Volpini?” Then she came firmly up the few stairs which divided her from Emilio. She leaned against him and hid her face on his shoulder with an affectation of modesty which reminded him of the old Angiolina and her melodramatic seriousness, and said:
“No one knows, not even my mother.” One by one all the old properties were coming back, and now it was her dear mother. She had given herself to Volpini; he had insisted on it, he had even made it a condition of continuing their relationship. “He felt I did not love him,” whispered Angiolina, “and wanted a proof of my love.” The only guarantee she had received in reward was a promise of marriage. With her usual lack of consideration for Emilio’s feelings she named a young solicitor who had advised her to satisfy herself with that, since the law punished seduction under those conditions.
With their arms round each other they mounted the stairs which seemed as if they would never end. Every fresh step made Angiolina more like the woman he had fled from. For now she had begun chattering again, as a first step towards giving herself to him. Now she could at last be his because—she kept on repeating this—it was for his sake that she had given herself to the tailor. He could not escape that responsibility even if he gave her up altogether.
She opened the door and went along the dark passage towards her room. From another room the nasal voice of her mother was heard to call: “Is that you, Angiolina?”
“Yes,” replied Angiolina, smothering a laugh. “I am going straight to bed. Good night, Mother.”
She lit a candle and took off her coat and hat. Then she threw herself into his arms, or rather, clasped him in hers.
Emilio was able to test that evening the importance of possessing a woman whom one has long desired. On that memorable evening it seemed to him as if he had been twice transformed in his most secret soul. The deplorable inertia which had driven him again to seek out Angiolina had disappeared, but so had also the enthusiasm which had made him sob from mingled joy and sadness. The male was satisfied, but beyond that satisfaction he had really felt nothing at all. He had possessed the woman he hated, not the woman he loved. Oh, deceiver! It was not the first nor, as she would have him believe, the second time that she had slept with a man. It was not worth while being angry about it, because he had known it for a long time. But possession of her had set him free to judge the woman who had given herself to him. “I shall dream no more,” he thought as he left the house. And then, as he looked at her, lit up by the pale moon-rays, he thought: “Perhaps I shall never come here again.” He had taken no decision. Why should he? The whole thing was entirely without importance.
She had gone down with him to the street door. She had not been conscious of any coldness on his part, for he would have been ashamed to show any. On the contrary he had made haste to ask her for an appointment for the following evening, which she had been obliged to refuse, as she was busy all day and till late in the evening with Signora Deluigi. They agreed to meet the next day but one. “But not in our house,” said Angiolina, suddenly growing crimson with indignation. “How can you imagine such a thing? I don’t want to run the risk of being killed on the spot by my father.” Emilio promised to provide a room for their next rendezvous. He would send a note tomorrow letting her know the address.
Was possession the truth after all? Her lying continued as shamelessly as before, and he saw no means of freeing himself from it. With her last kiss she begged him to be discreet, especially with Balli. She set store by her reputation.
Emilio was immediately indiscreet with Balli, that very evening. He did it on purpose, as the best way he could devise of reacting to Angiolina’s lies, and without any regard to her recommendations to secrecy, which he was sure were intended only to deceive himself and not to keep others in the dark. But it gave him great satisfaction that every cloud was lifted from his brow.
Balli sat listening to him with the air of a doctor about to make a diagnosis. “I think I really can take it upon myself to say that you are cured.”
Then Emilio felt a desire to confide in him still further and said how indignant Angiolina’s behavior made him, for she still wanted him to believe that she had given herself to Volpini in order to be able to belong to him. But he allowed himself almost at once to speak too warmly. “S
he is trying to cheat me even now. It is so painful to me to see that she is just the same as ever that I almost feel I don’t care whether I see her again or not.”
Balli at once saw through him and said: “You are just the same as ever too. Not a single word you have said suggests indifference.” Emilio hotly protested, but Balli was not to be convinced. “You have made a great mistake, a very great mistake, in getting to know her again.”
Emilio had plenty of opportunity that night for proving to himself that Balli was right. Indignation, and an angry unrest which demanded instant action, kept him awake. He could no longer deceive himself into believing that it was the indignation of a pure man shocked by an obscenity. He knew that state of mind too well. It was exactly like what he had experienced before the incident of the umbrella-maker and before he had possessed Angiolina, and now he had fallen into it again. His youth was returning to him! He no longer wanted to commit murder, but he would gladly have destroyed himself in his shame and anguish.
His suffering was increased now by the burden on his conscience, the remorse he felt at having tied himself again to that woman, and his fear of finding his own life still more compromised by her. Indeed, how was it possible to explain the fellness with which she laid on him all the blame of her connection with Volpini, if it were not that she intended to attach herself to him, to compromise him and to suck dry the little blood he had left in his veins? He was forever bound to Angiolina by a strange contradiction of his own heart: by his senses (for alone in bed his desire for her had awakened again) and by the very indignation which he attributed to hatred.
That indignation procured him the most delightful dreams. Towards morning the tumult of his senses subsided, leaving only an emotional anxiety about his own fate. He did not fall asleep, but lay in a curious state of physical weakness which deprived him of the sense of time or place. He thought he was ill, seriously, hopelessly ill, and that Angiolina had come to look after him. He read in her face the gravity and sweet self-devotion of the good hospital nurse. He was conscious of her moving about the room, and whenever she came near him she brought him refreshment, touching his burning brow with her cool hand or kissing him on the eyes and forehead with a touch so light as to be scarcely perceptible. Could Angiolina kiss like that? He turned heavily in his bed and returned to consciousness. If that dream should come true then he could feel he had really possessed her. And to think that a few hours before he believed himself to have lost all capacity for dreaming. Oh, surely his youth had returned! It coursed powerful as ever through his veins and annulled whatever resolution his senile mind had made.
He rose early and went out. He could not wait; he must see Angiolina immediately. He sped along, all impatience to embrace her, but resolved not to chatter too much. He would not lower himself by declarations which would have put their relationship on a wrong footing. The truth could not come to one by possession, but possession itself, neither embellished by dreams nor words, was actually the pure and bestial truth.
But this was just what Angiolina with admirable obstinacy refused to hear of. She was already dressed to go out and she again gave him clearly to understand that she did not intend to dishonor her own house.
He had meanwhile made an observation which led him to feel that perhaps he ought to change his plan. He noticed that she was examining him curiously in order to see whether his love had diminished or increased in consequence of his having possessed her. She was betraying herself with touching ingenuousness; she had no doubt known some men who felt a repugnance for the woman they had slept with. It was easy for him to prove to her that he was not one of them. Resigning himself to the abstinence she imposed upon him, he contented himself with the kisses he had lived on for so long. But soon kisses were not enough for him and he again began murmuring in her ear all the tender words he had learned during the long period of his love for her. Ange! Ange!
Balli had given him the address of a house where they let out rooms for a certain purpose. He told her how to find it. She made him describe the house to her at great length, so that she should make no mistake, and also the exact position of the room, which was rather embarrassing to Emilio, who had never seen it himself. He had been too busy kissing her to notice at the time, but when he was alone in the street he perceived, to his great surprise, that it was only now he would really have been capable of finding his way to that room for himself. There could be no doubt about it! He had been directed by Angiolina.
He went there immediately. The woman who let out the room was called Paracci, and was a disgusting old creature dressed in a dirty garment beneath which one could divine the contours of a swelling bosom, the one vestige of youth left in her flabby old age; a few scanty curls covered her head and between them one could see her red, greasy skin. She received him very politely and at once agreed to let him a room, saying at the same time that she only let to people she knew very well—therefore of course to him.
He wanted to look at the room and went in, followed by the old woman, through a door leading off from the stairs. Another door, which was always kept shut (Paracci said the words as if she were taking an oath), communicated directly with the street. It was furnished, or it would be more true to say it was encumbered, by an enormous bed, which looked clean, and two big cupboards; in the middle was a table, a sofa and four chairs. There would not have been room for a single other piece of furniture.
The widow Paracci stood watching him, her arms resting on her great swelling hips, and the smile on her face—an ugly grimace, displaying her toothless mouth—of someone who awaits a word of applause. She had in fact made certain attempts at decoration in the room. A Chinese umbrella was open above the top of the bed and some photographs were hanging on the wall, as in Angiolina’s room.
A cry of astonishment escaped him when he saw, hanging beside the photo of a half-naked woman, the photo of a girl he used to know, a friend of Amalia’s, who had died a few years ago. He asked the old woman where she had got those photographs and she replied that she had bought them to decorate the walls. He gazed for some time at the sweet face of the poor girl, who had posed before the camera all dressed up in her best—perhaps just that once in her whole life—only to serve as an adornment for that sordid little room. And yet he dreamed of love as he stood there in that sordid little room, while the disgusting old woman eyed him with satisfaction, delighted to have secured a fresh client. It was precisely under those conditions that he found it most exciting to picture Angiolina coming to bring him the love he longed for. He thought to himself with a thrill of delight: Tomorrow I shall have my love!
But when she came he felt he had never loved her less than he did that day. He had been rendered unhappy by long separation; he felt as if it had robbed him of all powers of enjoyment. An hour before going to the appointment he decided that if he did not experience the joy he expected he would tell Angiolina that he never intended to see her again, and he would tell her in the following words: “You are such a loose woman that I am disgusted by you.” He had thought these words out while sitting with Amalia, whom he envied for her tranquillity although she looked so sad. And he had thought that for her love still remained a pure and spiritual desire; it was its realization which sullied and debased our poor human nature.
But that night he was happy. Angiolina made him wait more than half an hour, a century to him. He thought that anger was the only emotion he felt, an impotent rage which increased the hatred he had persuaded himself he felt for her. He thought he should strike her when she did come. There was no possible excuse, for she herself had said she was not going to work that day, and that therefore she would be able to be punctual. Wasn’t it just because she had not wanted to keep him waiting that she had refused to make an appointment for the evening before? And now she had made him wait a whole day as well as an endless age besides.
But when she came he, who had already despaired of seeing her, was astonished at his own good fortune. He whispered reproaches on her lips,
in her neck, but she did not attempt to answer them, they had so much the sound of an entreaty, a murmur of adoration. In the dim light widow Paracci’s room became a temple. For a long time no words broke his dream. Angiolina was far better than her word. She had undone her wealth of hair and his head lay on a pillow of gold. He pressed his face into it like a child, to drink in the perfume of its gold. She was a complacent mistress and divined all his desires with exquisite intelligence; in that bed at least he need not complain of the quickness of her intuitions. There all was pure pleasure and delight.
It was only later that the memory of that scene made him grind his teeth with rage. Passion had for a moment freed him from his painful habit of observation, but had not prevented every detail of the scene from being impressed on his memory. Now for the first time he felt that he could say he knew Angiolina. Passion had left him indelible memories and from these he was able to reconstruct the feelings which Angiolina had left unexpressed, which she had even carefully concealed. In cold blood he could not have succeeded in doing so. But now he knew, knew with the most absolute certainty, that Angiolina had known men who had given her more pleasure. Several times she had said: “Now that is enough. I can’t bear any more.” She had tried to say it in a tone of admiration which she had not succeeded in finding. He felt the evening could be divided into two halves: during the first half she had loved him, during the second she had been obliged to make an effort not to repulse him. When they got up she betrayed that she was tired of being there. It naturally did not require then great powers of observation to read her real feelings—for seeing that he still hesitated she pushed him out of bed with the joking remark: “Now come along, my beauty.” My beauty! She must have thought out that ironic word quite half an hour before. He had read it in her face.
