As a Man Grows Older

by Italo Svevo

  It was a most painful surprise to him. He said: “My life has fled.” But on the contrary, Angiolina’s flight restored him for a while to full vitality, plunged him again into the midst of his sufferings and resentments. He dreamed of vengeance and love, as on the first occasion when he had abandoned her.

  When his resentment had died down he went to see Angiolina’s mother, just as he had gone to see Elena when the memory of Amalia had threatened to become faint. This visit also was imposed on him by a definite state of mind which demanded that a fresh impulse be given it at that very moment, so much so that he paid his visit during office hours, unable to put it off even for a moment.

  The old woman received him as kindly as usual. Angiolina’s room had changed its appearance a little, for all the knick-knacks had been removed which she had collected during her long career. The photographs had disappeared too, and were now no doubt adorning the walls of a room in some other town.

  “So she has run away?” said Emilio, in a tone of bitter irony. He savored that moment as if he had been talking to Angiolina herself.

  Old mother Zarri denied that Angiolina had run away. She had gone to stay with some relations of theirs who lived in Vienna. Emilio made no comment, but soon afterwards, yielding to an imperious desire, he assumed again the accusing tone which he had made an effort to lay aside. He said that he had foreseen everything. He had tried to correct Angiolina and to point out the straight road to her. He had not succeeded and he was deeply distressed about it; but it was far worse for Angiolina, whom he would never have deserted if she had treated him differently.

  He would not have been able to repeat afterwards the words he said at that all-important moment, but they were evidently very efficacious, for the poor old mother burst out into a strange dry sobbing; she turned her back on him and went away. He followed her with his eye, rather surprised at the effect he had produced. The sobs were obviously sincere; they shook her whole body so much that she could scarcely walk.

  “Good day, Signor Brentani,” said Angiolina’s little sister, coming in at that moment with a pretty curtsey and holding out her hand. “Mamma has gone in there because she doesn’t feel well. But we hope you will come back another day.”

  “No!” said Emilio solemnly, as if he were only now in the act of abandoning Angiolina. “I shall never come back again.” He stroked her hair, which was less thick but the same color as Angiolina’s. “Never again!” he repeated and kissed her on the forehead with profound pity.

  “Why not?” she asked, flinging her arms round his neck. He was so taken aback that he allowed her to cover his face with kisses that were by no means childish.

  By the time he succeeded in breaking away from that embrace, disgust had destroyed any kind of emotion he had felt before. He saw that it was unnecessary to go on with his sermon and went out, after having given the child an indulgent, fatherly caress, so as not to go away leaving her unhappy.

  When he was alone again in the road a great heaviness took possession of him. He felt that the caress he had given out of pity to that child really marked the end of his adventure; but he himself could not have said exactly what important period of his life had ended with that caress.

  For a long time his adventure left him unbalanced and discontented. Love and sorrow had passed through his life and, deprived of these elements, he had rather the feeling of someone who has had an important part of his body amputated. But the gap was finally filled. A love of quiet and of security sprang up again in him, and the necessity of looking after himself robbed him of every other desire.

  Years afterwards he looked back with a kind of enchanted wonder on that period which had been the most important and the most luminous in his life. He lived on it like an old man on the memories of his youth. Angiolina underwent a strange metamorphosis in the writer’s idle imagination. She preserved all her own beauty, but acquired as well all the qualities of Amalia, who died a second time in her. She grew sad and dispirited, her eye acquired an intellectual clarity. He saw her before him as on an altar, the personification of thought and suffering, and he never ceased loving her, if admiration and desire are love. She stood for all that was noble in his thought and vision during that period of his life.

  Her figure even became a symbol. It was always looking in the same direction, towards the horizon, the future from which came those glowing rays, reflected in rose and amber and white upon her face. She was waiting! The image embodied the dream he had once dreamed at Angiolina’s side, which that child of the people could not understand.

  That lofty, splendid symbol sometimes seemed on the point of coming to life again as a warm-blooded woman, but always a sad and thoughtful one.

  Yes, Angiolina thinks and sometimes cries, thinks as though the secret of the universe had been explained to her or the secret of her own existence, and is sad as though in all the whole wide world she could not find one single solitary deo gratias.

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  {1} She used the familiar tu.