by Italo Svevo
Angiolina might have appeared to show superior intelligence in her interpretation of Volpini’s letter; the reply flowed entirely from Emilio’s accomplished pen.
She would have liked to write him an insulting letter; she wanted it to give vent to an honest girl’s righteous indignation, when she is falsely accused. “And if Volpini was here,” she observed with lofty anger, “he should just have a good box on the ear, and no reason given. That would soon teach him who is in the wrong.”
Her idea was all right, but Emilio wished to proceed with greater caution. Without it occurring to her to be offended, he made out an ingenious case, saying that in order to study the problem with greater facility he had asked himself the following question: How would an honest girl have acted in Angiolina’s place? He did not add that he had embodied the honest girl in Amalia and asked himself how his sister would have behaved supposing she had had to reply to Volpini’s letter, he only communicated to her the result he had arrived at. The honest woman would first of all have experienced enormous surprise; then doubt as to whether it were not a misunderstanding, and at last, though scarcely even then, the horrible suspicion that the whole letter was to be attributed to the lover’s desire to escape from his responsibilities. Angiolina was charmed by this reconstruction of a whole psychological process, and he at once set to work.
She sat down beside him as quiet as a mouse, and with one hand resting on his knee and her head almost touching his so that she could follow what he was writing, she made her presence felt without in the least getting in his way while he wrote. Her being so near deprived the letter of all air of rigid preparation and, if it had not been destined for a man like Volpini, probably of its efficacy too, for it had quite lost the dignified character which he had meant to give it. Something of Angiolina leaked through into the phrases. Coarse words began to flow from his pen, and he let them flow, rejoicing to see her ecstatic admiration, the same expression she had worn a few days before when watching Balli in his studio.
Then without rereading it she began to copy his prose, enchanted at being able to sign her own name to it. She had seemed much more intelligent when she was reasoning about how one ought to behave than she did now in her uncritical approbation. She could not indeed pay much heed to the contents of the letter, because the actual calligraphy absorbed all her attention.
With her eyes on the outside of the envelope, she suddenly inquired whether Balli had said any more about the masquerade to which he had promised to take her. The slumbering moralist in Emilio did not awake, but he strongly dissuaded her from going to the masquerade for fear Volpini should hear about it. But she had an answer ready for every objection. “Oh yes, now I certainly shall go to the masquerade. Hitherto I haven’t been, because of that wretch, but now! Let him hear of it, I don’t care.”
Emilio pressed to see her that evening. She was to sit for Balli in the afternoon, then she had got to run to the Deluigis for a few moments, so she would not be able to come till quite late. She made an appointment with him for, as she said, she could refuse him nothing at the moment, but not in Paracci’s house because she wanted to be home early. They would go for a walk to Sant’ Andrea as they used to in those happy days when they had first met, and then he would walk home with her. She was still tired—she had drunk so much the day before—and she needed rest. The proposal pleased him too. It was one of his essential characteristics to delight in evoking the sentiment of the past. That evening he would analyze again the color of the sea and sky and Angiolina’s hair.
She said good-bye, and as a last injunction begged him to post the letter to Volpini. So he found himself in the middle of the road with that letter in his hand, a tangible proof of the basest action he had ever committed in his life, but of which he only became conscious now that Angiolina was no longer sitting beside him.
12
HE HAD just shut the door of his flat behind him and was standing hat in hand in the dining-room, uncertain what to do next, and wondering whether he could after all face an hour of boredom in his sister’s mute society. Suddenly there came from Amalia’s room the sound of two or three unintelligible words, and finally a whole phrase: “Get away, you ugly brute!” He shuddered. Her voice was so changed by fatigue or emotion that it resembled his sister’s only as an inarticulate shout proceeding from the throat can resemble the modulated speaking voice. Was she asleep at this hour and dreaming by day?
He opened the door noiselessly, and a sight presented itself to his eyes which till his dying day he could never forget. For ever afterwards one or other of the details of that scene had only to strike his senses for him to recall the whole of it immediately and to feel again the appalling horror of it. Some peasants were passing in a road nearby, and forever afterwards the monotonous air they were singing at that moment brought tears to Emilio’s eyes. All the sounds which reached him were monotonous, without warmth or sense. In a neighboring flat someone who could not play at all was strumming a vulgar waltz. Played like that the waltz sounded to him like a funeral march—how often it recurred to him afterwards! Even the cheerful day outside became sad for him. It was not long after mid-day and a dazzling sunlight was reflected from the windows of the opposite house into the lonely room. Yet his memory of that moment was always associated with a sensation of darkness and of frightful cold.
Amalia’s clothes lay scattered all over the floor and a skirt prevented him from opening the door completely; there were a few garments under the bed, her bodice was shut between the window-panes, and her boots had been arranged with evident care in the middle of the table.
Amalia was sitting on the edge of the bed, clothed only in a short chemise. She had not noticed her brother’s entry, and continued gently to pass her hands up and down her legs, which were as thin as spindles. Emilio was surprised and shocked to see that her naked body resembled that of an ill-nourished child.
He did not realize at first that she was delirious. He did not see that she was physically worn out; he attributed her noisy breathing and the difficulty she had in drawing each breath to the tiring position she was sitting in. His first feeling was of anger; he had hardly escaped from Angiolina before he found this other woman ready to annoy him and cause him fresh anxiety. “Amalia! What are you doing?” he said reprovingly.
She did not hear him, though she seemed to be conscious of the sounds of the waltz, for she marked its rhythm with her hands as she continued to pass them up and down her legs.
“Amalia!” he repeated in a faint voice, overwhelmed by this obvious proof that she was delirious. He put his hand on her shoulder. Then she turned. She looked first at the hand whose touch she had felt, then she looked him in the face; but there was no recognition in her eyes, only a feverish glitter and the effort to see. Her cheeks were flaming, and her lips purple and dry and shapeless like an old wound which refuses to heal. Her eye passed to the window flooded in sunlight but, hurt perhaps by the glare, returned at once to her naked legs which she continued to gaze at with curious intentness.
“Oh Amalia!” he cried, letting all his horror find vent in that one cry which he hoped might recall her to herself. A weak man dreads delirium and insanity as if they were contagious diseases; Emilio’s loathing was such that he had to put great restraint upon himself in order not to fly from the room. Overcoming with an effort his violent repulsion, he again touched his sister’s shoulder and cried: “Amalia! Amalia!” It was a call for help.
It was a slight relief to him to notice that she had heard him. She looked at him again, thoughtfully, as if she were trying to understand the meaning of those cries and of the repeated pressure on her shoulder. She touched her chest as if she had suddenly become conscious of the weight upon it which tormented her. Then, forgetting Emilio and her own exhaustion, she shouted again: “Oh, still those horrible creatures!” and there was a break in her voice as if she were going to burst out crying. She rubbed her legs vigorously with both her hands; then bent down with a swift movement as if
she were about to surprise an animal in the act of escaping. She seized one of her toes in her right hand and covered it over with her left, then carefully raised both her closed hands as if she were holding something in them. When she saw they were empty she examined them several times, then returned to her foot, ready to stoop down again and renew her strange chase.
A shivering attack reminded Emilio that he ought to induce her to get into bed. He approached her, horrified at the thought of having perhaps to resort to force. His task was however quite easy, for she obeyed the first firm pressure of his hand; she lifted one leg after the other on to the bed, without any shame, and allowed him to pull the bedclothes over her. But she showed an inexplicable reluctance to lie down altogether, and remained leaning on one elbow. Very soon, however, she could no longer hold out in that position, and abandoned herself on the pillow, uttering for the first time an intelligible sound of grief. “Oh, my God! my God!”
“But what has happened to you?” asked Emilio who, at the sound of that one sensible cry, thought that he could talk to her like a reasonable person. She made no reply, for she was intent on discovering what it was that still went on tormenting her, even under the bedclothes. She hunched herself all up together, sought out her legs with her hands, and in the deep plot she was evidently meditating against the things or creatures which tormented her, she even contrived to make her breathing less noisy. Then she drew up her hands again and gazed at them in incredulous surprise when she found them empty. She lay for a while beneath the sheets in a state of such distress that she seemed even to forget her terrible bodily fatigue.
“Are you better?” Emilio asked, in a tone of entreaty. He wanted to console himself by the sound of his own voice, which he modulated softly in an effort to forget his recent dread that he might have to restrain her by violence. He bent over her, so that she might hear him better.
She lay looking at him for a long time, while her quick, feeble breath rose towards him. She recognized him; the warmth of the bed seemed to have revived her senses. However far she wandered afterwards in her delirium, he never forgot that she had recognized him. She was evidently getting better. “Now let us leave this house,” she said, pronouncing each syllable with care. She stretched out a leg as if she were meditating getting out of bed, but when he restrained her, with perhaps unnecessary force, she at once resigned herself and forgot what it was which had prompted her to the act.
She repeated it again soon afterwards, but without the same energy; she seemed to remember that she had been ordered to lie down, and not to get out of bed. Now she was speaking again. She thought they had changed house and that there was a great deal to do, that she would have to work desperately to put it all in order. “My God! how dirty it all is here. I knew it was, but you would come to it. And now? Aren’t we going away?”
He tried to calm her by playing up to her fancy. He caressed her gently, saying that it didn’t look to him so dirty, and that now they were in the house they would do better to stay there.
Amalia listened to all he had to say, but she seemed also to be listening inwardly to other words beside his; then she said: “If you want it I must do it. We will stay here then, but...so much dirt...” Two tears flowed down her cheeks which had been dry till that moment; they rolled like two pearls down her flaming cheeks.
Soon after she forgot that grievance, but her delirium soon produced another source of distress. She had been out fishing, and could not catch any fish: “I can’t understand! What is the good of going out fishing if there are not any fish? One has to go such a long, long way, and it is so cold.” The others had taken all the fish and there were none left for them. All her grief and fatigue now seemed to be due to that fact. Her fevered words, to which her exhaustion gave a kind of tired rhythm, were continually interrupted by some sound of distress.
He had ceased to pay any attention to her; he must find some way out of the situation, he must devise some means of fetching a doctor. Every idea which his despair suggested to him was examined in turn, as if it would have been possible to act on them. He looked round to see if he could find a cord to bind the sick woman to the bed and leave her alone; he took a step towards the window, to call for help from there, and at last, forgetting that it was impossible to make himself intelligible to Amalia, he began talking to her, trying to get her to promise to stay quiet during his absence. Patting the bedclothes gently down on her shoulders to show her that she was to stay in bed, he said: “Will you stay like that, Amalia? Promise me you will!”
But now she was talking about clothes. They had enough to last a year, so they would not have to spend anything on them for a whole year. “We are not rich, but we have everything we need—everything.” Signora Birlini might look down on them, because she was better off than they were. But Amalia was glad she was better off, for she was fond of her. She went on babbling in this childish, contented way, and it wrung his heart to hear her say how happy she was amid so much suffering.
He must decide something, and at once. Amalia had shown no sign of violence in her delirium, either in speech or gesture, and when Emilio had recovered from the bewilderment into which he had fallen from the moment he had come in and found her in that state, he left the room and rushed to the front door. He thought of calling the porter, or that he would run and fetch the doctor himself, or that he would go and ask Balli’s advice. He had not made up his mind yet what he should do, but he must make haste and get some help for his unfortunate sister. He could not bear to remember her pitiful state of nakedness.
He stood hesitating on the landing. He felt a strong impulse to return to Amalia to see if she had taken advantage of his absence to commit some act of madness. He leaned against the banister to see if anyone was coming up. He bent right over, so as to see further, and for a single instant, only for a second, his thoughts wandered; he forgot his sister and remembered that this was just the position in which he used to wait for Angiolina. Even in that brief flash the image was so clear that, as he strained to see further, he was conscious of seeking not only the help he needed, but also the living form of his mistress. He straightened himself again, sick at the thought.
A door on an upper floor opened and shut again. Someone—salvation—was coming down the stairs. He sprang up a flight at one bound and found himself face to face with the tall, strong figure of a woman. Tall and strong and dark; that was all he saw, but he at once found the words he needed: “Oh, Signora,” he entreated. “Help me! I would do for any human being what I am asking you to do for me.”
“Is it Signor Brentani?” inquired a sweet voice; and the dark lady, who had already made a backward movement as if to retreat, stood still.
He told her that he had come home a short while ago and found his sister in such a state of delirium that he did not dare to leave her alone while he went to fetch a doctor.
The lady came down the stairs. “Signorina Amalia? Poor dear! I will come with you at once, gladly.” She was dressed in mourning. Emilio thought she was probably religious and after a moment’s hesitation said: “May God bless you for it.”
The lady followed him into Amalia’s room. Emilio took those few steps in a state of indescribable anguish. Who could tell what fresh sight might await him! In the next room there was no sound to be heard, though it had seemed to him as if Amalia’s breathing must be heard all over the house.
He found her with her face turned to the wall. She was talking about a fire now; she saw the flames; they could not touch her, they could only make her terribly hot. He bent over her, and kissed her flaming cheek, in order to draw her attention to himself. When she turned to him he was anxious, before going away, to see what impression the companion he was leaving with her made on her. Amalia looked at the newcomer for a moment, with complete indifference.
“I entrust her to you,” said Emilio to the lady. He felt he could safely do so. She had a sweet, motherly face; her little eyes rested on Amalia with great tenderness. “The Signorina knows me,�
� she said, sitting down at the bedside. “I am Elena Chierici and I live on the third floor. Do you remember the day you lent me your thermometer to take my son’s temperature?”
Amalia looked at her, and said: “Yes, but it burns, and it will always go on burning.”
“Not always,” said Signora Elena, bending over her with a kind, encouraging smile, her own eyes moist with compassion. She asked Emilio to give her, before he went out, a jug of water and a glass. It was a serious business for him to find these things in a house where he had lived with as little regard for domestic details as if he had been in an hotel.
Amalia did not at once understand that refreshment was being offered her in that glass; then she drank eagerly in little sips. When she let herself fall back on the pillow she found a fresh support; Elena’s soft arm was lying there, and her little head rested upon it with delightful ease. A wave of gratitude surged up in Emilio’s breast, and he pressed Elena’s hand warmly before leaving the room.
He rushed to Balli’s studio, and ran into his friend who was just coming out. He thought he might have found Angiolina there, and breathed freely when he found Balli alone. He had never any need to feel remorse for his own conduct during the few hours of that day in which he still imagined it possible to do something to save Amalia. During those hours his sole thought was of his sister, and if he had met Angiolina he should have trembled with pain solely because the sight of her would have reminded him of his own sin.
“Oh, Stefano! Such a terrible thing has happened to me.” He entered the studio and sat down on the chair nearest the door, and hiding his face in his hands burst out into despairing sobs. He would have found it hard to explain why he had burst into tears at that moment. He was just beginning to recover from the severe shock he had received and his grief pressed to find an outlet; or perhaps it was the neighborhood of Balli, who must have had some part in Amalia’s illness, which caused his sudden outburst of emotion. It is certain that he soon experienced satisfaction at having indulged in this violent expression of grief—for himself and for Balli too. His fit of weeping had soothed and calmed him; he felt a sense of moral restoration. He would devote the rest of his life to Amalia, and even if, as he feared, she were to become mad he would keep her with him, not as his sister but as his own child. And he found such solace in weeping that he forgot how urgent it was to send for a doctor. This, he felt, was his proper place, it was here that he could really work for Amalia’s good. In his present state of excitement every exploit seemed easy to him, and he felt as if it were possible for him to wipe out the past and all its memories both for him and for Balli simply by that outburst of grief. He would teach him to know Amalia as she really was, so tender and good and unfortunate.
