My disgust, however, I perhaps feel only now. That morning, I must have felt more than anything else curiosity at being present for the first time at the production of a film. This curiosity, though, was distracted at a certain point in the proceedings by one of the actresses, who, the moment I caught sight of her, aroused in me another curiosity far more keen.
Nestoroff? Was it possible? It seemed to be she and yet it seemed not to be. That hair of a strange tawny colour, almost coppery, that style of dress, sober, almost stiff, were not hers. But the motion of her slender, exquisite body, with a touch of the feline in the sway of her hips; the head raised high, inclined a little to one side, and that sweet smile on a pair of lips as fresh as a pair of rose-leaves, whenever anyone addressed her; those eyes, unnaturally wide, open, greenish, fixed and at the same time vacant, and cold in the shadow of their long lashes were hers, entirely hers, with that certainty all her own that everyone, whatever she might say or ask, would answer yes.
Varia Nestoroff? Was it possible? Acting for a cinematograph company?
There flashed through my mind Capri, the Russian colony, Naples, all those noisy gatherings of young artists, painters, sculptors, in strange eccentric haunts, full of sunshine and colour, and a house, a dear house in the country, near Sorrento, into which this woman had brought confusion and death.
When, after a second rehearsal of the scene for which the company had come to the Shelter, Coc�� Polacco invited me to come and see him at the Kosmograph, I, still in doubt, asked him if this actress was really the Nestoroff.
“Yes, my dear fellow,” he answered with a sigh. “You know her history, perhaps.”
I nodded my head.
“Ah, but you can’t know the rest of it!” Polacco went on. “Come, come and see me at the Kosmograph; I’ll tell you the whole story. Gubbio, I don’t know what I wouldn’t pay to get that woman off my hands. But, I can tell you, it is easier…”
“Polacco! Polacco!” she called to him at that moment.
And from the haste with which Coc�� Polacco obeyed her summons, I fully realised the power that she had with the firm, from which she held a contract as principal with one of the most lavish salaries.
A day or two later I went to the Kosmograph, for no reason except to learn the rest of this woman’s story, of which I knew the beginning all too well.
BOOK II
1
Dear house in the country, the Grandparents’, full of the indescribable fragrance of the oldest family memories, where all the old-fashioned chairs and tables, vitalised by these memories, were no longer inanimate objects but, so to speak, intimate parts of the people who lived in the house, since in them they came in contact with, became aware of the precious, tranquil, safe reality of their existence.
There really did linger in those rooms a peculiar aroma, which I seem to smell now as I write: an aroma of the life of long ago which seemed to have given a fragrance to all the things that were preserved there.
I see again the drawing-room, a trifle gloomy, it must be admitted, with its walls stuccoed in rectangular panels which strove to imitate ancient marbles: red and green alternately; and each panel was set in a handsome border of its own, of stucco likewise, in a pattern of foliage; except that in the course of time these imitation marbles had grown weary of their innocent make-believe, had bulged out a little here and there, and one saw a few tiny cracks on the surface. All of which said to me kindly:
“You are poor; the seams of your jacket are rent; but you see that even in a gentleman’s house…”
Ah, yes! I had only to turn and look at those curious brackets which seemed to shrink from touching the floor with their gilded spidery legs. The marble top of each was a trifle yellow, and in the sloping mirror above were reflected exactly in their immobility the pair of baskets that stood upon the marble: baskets of fruit, also of marble, coloured: figs, peaches, limes, corresponding exactly, on either side, with their reflexions, as though there were four baskets instead of two.
In that motionless, clear reflexion was embodied all the limpid calm which reigned in that house. It seemed as though nothing could ever happen there. This was the message, also, of the little bronze timepiece between the baskets, only the back of which was to be seen in the mirror. It represented a fountain, and had a spiral rod of rock-crystal, which spun round and round with the movement of the clockwork. How much water had that fountain poured forth? And yet the little basin beneath it was never full.
Next I see the room from which one goes down to the garden. (From one room to the other one passes between a pair of low doors, which seem full of their own importance, and perfectly aware of the treasures committed to their charge.) This room, leading down to the garden, is the favourite sitting-room at all times of the year. It has a floor of large, square tiles of terra-cotta, a trifle worn with use. The wallpaper, patterned with damask roses, is a trifle faded, as are the gauze curtains, also patterned with damask roses, screening the windows and the glass door beyond which one sees the landing of the little wooden outside stair, and the green railing and the pergola of the garden bathed in an enchantment of sunshine and stillness.
The light filters green and fervid between the slats of the little sun-blind outside the window, and does not pour into the room, which remains in a cool delicious shadow, embalmed with the scents from the garden.
What bliss, what a bath of purity for the soul, to sit at rest for a little upon that old sofa with its high back, its cylindrical cushions of green rep, likewise a trifle discoloured.
“Giorgio! Giorgio!”
Who is calling from the garden? It is Granny Rosa, who cannot succeed in reaching, even with the end of her cane, the flowers of the jasmine, now that the plant has grown so big and has climbed right up high upon the wall.
Granny Rosa does so love those jasmines! She has upstairs, in the cupboard in the wall of her room, a box full of umbrella-shaped heads of cummin, dried; she takes one out every morning, before she goes down to the garden; and, when she has gathered the blossoms with her cane, she sits down in the shade of the pergola, puts on her spectacles, and slips the jasmines one by one into the spidery stems of that umbrella-shaped head, until she has turned it into a lovely round white rose, with an intense, delicious perfume, which she goes and places religiously in a little vase on the top of the chest of drawers in her room, in front of the portrait of her only son, who died long ago.
It is so intimate and sheltered, this little house, so contented with the life that it encloses within its walls, without any desire for the other life that goes noisily on outside, far away. It remains there, as though perched in a niche behind the green hill, and has not wished for so much as a glimpse of the sea and the marvellous Bay. It has chosen to remain apart, unknown to all the world, almost hidden away in that green, deserted corner, outside and far away from all the vicissitudes of life.
There was at one time on the gatepost a marble tablet, which bore the name of the owner: Carlo Mirelli. Grandfather Carlo decided to remove it, when Death found his way, for the first time, into that modest little house buried in the country, and carried off with him the son of the house, barely thirty years old, already the father himself of two little children.
Did Grandfather Carlo think, perhaps, that when the tablet was removed from the gatepost, Death would not find his way back to the house again?
Grandfather Carlo was one of those old men who wore a velvet cap with a silken tassel, but could read Horace. He knew, therefore, that death, aequo pede, knocks at all doors alike, whether or not they have a name engraved on a tablet.
Were it not that each of us, blinded by what he considers the injustice of his own lot, feels an unreasoning need to vent the fury of his own grief upon somebody or something. Grandfather Carlo’s fury, on that occasion, fell upon the innocent tablet on the gatepost.
If Death allowed us to catch hold of him, I would catch him by the arm and lead him in front of that mirror where with such limpid pr
ecision are reflected in their immobility the two baskets of fruit and the back of the bronze timepiece, and would say to him:
“You see? Now be off with you! Everything here must be allowed to remain as it is!”
But Death does not allow us to catch hold of him.
By taking down that tablet, perhaps Grandfather Carlo meant to imply that—once his son was dead—there was nobody left alive in the house.
A little later, Death came again.
There was one person left alive who called upon him desperately every night: the widowed daughter-in-law who, after her husband’s death, felt as though she were divided from the family, a stranger in the house.
And so, the two little orphans: Lidia, the elder, who was nearly five, and Giorgetto who was three, remained in the sole charge of their grandparents, who were still not so very old.
To start life afresh when one is already beginning to grow feeble, and to rediscover in oneself all the first amazements of childhood; to create once again round a pair of rosy children the most innocent affection, the most pleasant dreams, and to drive away, as being importunate and tiresome, Experience, who from time to time thrusts in her head, the face of a withered old woman, to say, blinking behind her spectacles: “This will happen, that will happen,” when as yet nothing has ever happened, and it is so delightful that nothing should have happened; and to act and think and speak as though really one knew nothing more than is already known to two little children who know nothing at all: to act as though things were seen not in retrospect but through the eyes of a person going forwards for the first time, and for the first time seeing and hearing: this miracle was performed by Grandfather Carlo and Granny Rosa; they did, that is to say, for the two little ones, far more than would have been done by the father and mother, who, if they had lived, young as they both were, might have wished to enjoy life a little longer themselves. Nor did their not having anything left to enjoy render the task more easy for the two old people, for we know that to the old everything is a heavy burden, when it no longer has any meaning or value for them.
The two grandparents accepted the meaning and value which their two grandchildren gradually, as they grew older, began to give to things, and all the world took on the bright colours of youth for them, and life recaptured the candour and freshness of innocence. But what could they know of a world so wide, of a life so different from their own, which was going on outside, far away, those two young creatures born and brought up in the house in the country? The old people had forgotten that life and that world, everything had become new again for them, the sky, the scenery, the song of the birds, the taste of food. Outside the gate, life existed no longer. Life began there, at the gate, and gilded afresh everything round about; nor did the old people imagine that anything could come to them from outside; and even Death, even Death they had almost forgotten, albeit he had already come there twice.
Have patience a little while, Death, to whom no house, however remote and hidden, can remain unknown! But how in the world, starting from thousands and thousands of miles away, thrust aside, or dragged, tossed hither and thither by the turmoil of ever so many mysterious changes of fortune, could there have found her way to that modest little house, perched in its niche there behind the green hill, a woman, to whom the peace and the affection that reigned there not only must have been incomprehensible, must have been not even conceivable?
I have no record, nor perhaps has anyone, of the path followed by this woman to bring her to the dear house in the country, near Sorrento.
There, at that very spot, before the gatepost, from which Grandfather Carlo, long ago, had had the tablet removed, she did not arrive of her own accord; that is certain; she did not raise her hand, uninvited, to ring the bell, to make them open the gate to her. But not far from there she stopped to wait for a young man, guarded until then with the life and soul of two old grandparents, handsome, innocent, ardent, his soul borne on the wings of dreams, to come out of that gate and advance confidently towards life.
Oh, Granny Rosa, do you still call to him from the garden, for him to pull down with your cane your jasmine blossoms?
“Giorgio! Giorgio!”
There still rings in my ears, Granny Rosa, the sound of your voice. And I feel a bitter delight, which I cannot express in words, in imagining you as still there, in your little house, which I see again as though I were there at this moment, and were at this moment breathing the atmosphere that lingers there of an old-fashioned existence; in imagining you as knowing nothing of all that has happened, as you were at first, when I, in the summer holidays, came out from Sorrento every morning to prepare for the October examinations your grandson Giorgio, who refused to learn a word of Latin or Greek, and instead covered every scrap of paper that came into his hands, the margins of his books, the top of the schoolroom table, with sketches in pen and pencil, with caricatures. There must even be one of me, still, on the top of that table, covered all over with scribblings.
“Ah, Signor Serafino,” you sigh, Granny Rosa, as you hand me in an old cup the familiar coffee with essence of cinnamon, like the coffee that our aunts in religion offer us in their convents, “ah, Signor Serafino, Giorgio has bought a box of paints; he wants to leave us; he wants to become a painter…”
And over your shoulder opens her sweet, clear, sky-blue eyes and blushes a deep red Lidiuccia, your granddaughter; Duccella, as you call her. Why?
Ah, because…. There has come now three times from Naples a young gentleman, a fine young gentleman all covered with scent, in a velvet coat, with yellow chamois-leather gloves, an eyeglass in his right eye and a baron’s coronet on his handkerchief and portfolio. He was sent by his grandfather, Barone Nuti, a friend of Grandfather Carlo, who was like a brother to him before Grandfather Carlo, growing weary of the world, retired from Naples, here, to the Sorrentine villa. You know this, Granny Rosa. But you do not know that the young gentleman from Naples is fervently encouraging Giorgio to devote himself to art and to go off to Naples with him. Duccella knows, because young Aldo Nuti (how very strange!), when speaking with such fervour of art, never looks at Giorgio, but looks at her, into her eyes, as though it were her that he had to encourage, and not Giorgio; yes, yes, her, to come to Naples to stay there for ever with himself.
So that is why Duccella blushes a deep red, over your shoulder, Granny Rosa, whenever she hears you say that Giorgio wishes to become a painter.
He too, the young gentleman from Naples, if his grandfather would allow him… Not a painter, no… He would like to go upon the stage, to become an actor. How he would love that! But his grandfather does not wish it…. Dare we wager, Granny Rosa, that Duccella does not wish it either?
2
Of the sequel to this simple, innocent, idyllic life, about four years later, I have a cursory knowledge.
I acted as tutor to Giorgio Mirelli, but I was myself a student also, a penniless student who had grown old while waiting to complete his studies, and whom the sacrifices borne by his parents to keep him at school had automatically inspired with the utmost zeal, the utmost diligence, a shy, painful humility, a constraint which never diminished, albeit this period of waiting had now extended over many, many years.
Yet my time had perhaps not been wasted. I studied by myself and meditated, in those years of waiting, far more and with infinitely greater profit than I had done in my years at school; and I taught myself Latin and Greek, in an attempt to pass from the technical side, in which I had started, to the classical, in the hope that it might be easier for me to enter the University by that road.
Certainly this kind of study was far better suited to my intelligence. I buried myself in it with a passion so intense and vital that when, at six-and-twenty, through an unexpected, tiny legacy from an uncle in holy orders (who had died in Apulia, and whose existence had long been almost forgotten by my family), I was finally able to enter the University, I remained for long in doubt whether it would not be better for me to leave behind in the drawer,
where it had slumbered undisturbed for all those years, my qualifying diploma from the technical institute, and to procure another from the liceo, so as to matriculate in the faculty of philosophy and literature.
Family counsels prevailed, and I set off for Liege, where, with this worm of philosophy gnawing my brain, I acquired an intimate and painful knowledge of all the machines invented by man for his own happiness.
I have derived one great benefit from it, as you can see. I have learned to draw back with an instinctive shudder from reality, as others see and handle it, without however managing to arrest a reality of my own, since my distracted, wandering sentiments never succeed in giving any value or meaning to this uncertain, loveless life of mine. I look now at everything, myself included, as from a distance; and from nothing does there ever come to me a loving signal, beckoning me to approach it with confidence or with the hope of deriving some comfort from it. Pitying signals, yes, I seem to catch in the eyes of many people, in the aspect of many places which impel me not to receive comfort nor to give it, since he that cannot receive it cannot give it; but pity. Pity, ah yes… But I know that pity is such a difficult thing either to give or to receive.
For some years after my return to Naples I found nothing to do; I led a dissolute life with a group of young artists, until the last remains of that modest legacy had gone. I owe to chance, as I have said, and to the friendship of one of my old school friends the post that I now occupy. I fill it-yes, we may say so-honourably, and I am well rewarded for my labour. Oh, they all respect me, here, as a first rate operator: alert, accurate, and perfectly impassive. If I ought to be grateful to Polacco, Polacco ought in turn to be grateful to me for the credit that he has acquired with Commendator Borgalli, the Chairman and General Manager of the Kosmograph, for the acquisition that the firm has made of an operator like myself. Signor Gubbio is not, properly speaking, attached to any of the four companies among which the production is distributed, but is summoned here and there, from one to another, to take the longest and most difficult films. Signor Gubbio does far more work than the firm’s other five operators; but for every film that proves a success he receives a handsome commission and frequent bonuses. I ought to be happy and contented. Instead of which I think with longing of my lean years of youthful folly at Naples among the young artists.
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