Then he added:
—In truth, dear friends, to be hit by a sword today would annoy me.
They were at Villa Sciarra, half of it already blemished by the builders of new houses; and they passed along an avenue of tall slender bay trees, espaliered on each side by roses. Santa Margherita, leaning out of the window, saw another carriage stationary on the square in front of the villa; and said:
—They are waiting for us already.
He looked at his watch. There were still ten minutes to go until the scheduled time. He ordered the carriage to stop; and together with the witness and the surgeon headed toward the adversaries. Andrea remained in the avenue, waiting. Mentally, he began to carry out certain offense and defense actions, which he intended to carry out with probable success; but he was distracted by the vague marvels of light and shadow cast by the intricate web of the bay trees. His eyes roamed behind the appearance of the branches moved by the morning wind, while his mind meditated upon injury; and the trees, as kind as in the loving allegories of Francesco Petrarch, sighed above his head, in which the thought of the good hit reigned.
Barbarisi came up to him to call him, saying:
—We are ready. The custodian has opened the villa. We have the ground floor at our disposal; it’s very convenient. Come and get undressed.
Andrea followed him. While he undressed, the two doctors opened their pouches in which the small steel instruments glinted. One was still young, pale, bald, with feminine hands, his mouth somewhat severe, with a constant visible friction of his bottom jaw, which was extraordinarily developed. The other was already mature, robust, covered with freckles, with a thick ruddy beard and a bull neck. One appeared to be the physical contradiction of the other; and their diversity attracted Sperelli’s inquisitive attention. They were preparing on a table the bandages and the carbolic acid for disinfecting the blades. The odor of the acid spread throughout the room.
When Sperelli was ready, he went out with his witness and the doctors onto the square. Once more, the spectacle of Rome through the palm trees drew his gaze and made his heart pound strongly. Impatience invaded him. He would have liked already to be on guard and to hear the command to attack. It seemed to him that he already had the decisive hit, victory, in his grasp.
—Ready? Santa Margherita asked him, coming to meet him.
—Ready.
The chosen ground was alongside the villa, in the shade, scattered with fine gravel and rollered. Giannetto Rùtolo was already at the other end with Roberto Casteldieri and Carlo de Souza. Each had assumed a grave air, almost solemn. The two adversaries were placed facing each other; and they observed each other. Santa Margherita, who was in charge of the duel, noted Giannetto Rùtolo’s heavily starched shirt, too stiff, with his collar too high; and he pointed this out to Casteldieri, who was his second. The latter spoke to his principal; and Sperelli saw his enemy suddenly become inflamed in the face and with a resolute gesture take off his shirt. With cold tranquillity he followed this example; he rolled up his trousers; took the gauntlet, the cord, and the sword from Santa Margherita’s hands; he armed himself with much care and then shook the sword to ensure that he had it firmly gripped. In that movement, his biceps emerged very visibly, revealing the extensive exercise of his arm and the strength he had acquired.
When the two held out their swords to take measure, Giannetto Rùtolo’s wavered in his convulsed fist. After the warning regarding fair play, the Baron of Santa Margherita commanded in a ringing and virile voice:
—Gentlemen, on guard!
Both assumed the on-guard position at the same time, Rùtolo tapping his foot, Sperelli arching lightly. Rùtolo was of mediocre stature, very slender, full of nervous energy, with an olive-skinned face made haughty by his upturned mustaches and the small pointed beard on his chin, in the style of Charles I in the portraits by Van Dyck. Sperelli was taller, more willowy, more composed, of beautiful posture, steady and calm with a balance of grace and strength, containing in his entire figure the disdain of a great gentleman. Each stared the other in the eye; and each felt inside himself an indefinable shiver at the sight of the other’s naked flesh against which his sharp blade was pointed. In the silence, the cool babbling of the fountain could be heard, mingled with the rustle of the wind through the climbing roses where innumerable white and yellow roses quivered.
—Gentlemen, fence! the baron commanded.
Andrea Sperelli expected an impetuous attack by Rùtolo; but the latter did not move. For a minute both continued to study each other, without having any contact of the blades, almost immobile. Sperelli, crouching even farther down on his ankles in low guard, was exposing himself completely, by bringing his sword very much into third position; and he provoked his adversary with insolence in his eyes and by tapping his foot. Rùtolo advanced, feinting a direct thrust, accompanying it with a yell in the manner of certain Sicilian swordsmen; and the fencing began.
Sperelli was not building up any decisive action, limiting himself almost always to parries, forcing his adversary to disclose all his intentions, to exhaust all his means, to carry out all the varieties of his game. He was parrying cleanly and fast, without ceding ground, with an admirable precision, as if he were on the piste in a fencing academy facing an innocuous foil; while Rùtolo was attacking with ardor, accompanying every thrust with a dull cry, similar to that of tree fellers wielding their axe.
—Halt! commanded Santa Margherita, whose vigilant eyes did not miss any movement of the two blades.
And he approached Rùtolo, saying:
—You have been touched, if I am not mistaken.
In fact, he had a scratch on his forearm, but so light that there was no need even for taffeta.19 He was panting, however; and his extreme pallor, as somber as a bruise, was a sign of his contained ire. Sperelli, smiling, said in a low voice to Barbarisi:
—I know my man now. I’ll give him a carnation below the left breast. Watch out in the second assault.
Since without thinking he had rested the tip of his sword on the ground, the bald doctor, the one with the great jaw, came to him with the sponge soaked in carbolic acid and once again disinfected the sword.
—By God! murmured Andrea to Barbarisi. —He looks like a jinx to me. This blade is going to break.
A blackbird began to whistle in the trees. Among the rosebushes, a few roses were shedding petals and dispersing in the wind. Some clouds in midair were rising up to meet the sun, sparse, similar to the fleece of sheep; and broke up into tufts; and gradually vanished.
—On guard!
Giannetto Rùtolo, conscious of his inferiority vis-à-vis his enemy, resolved to work in close measure, recklessly, and thus to block every action taken by the other. He had for this purpose the short stature and the agile, slender, flexible body that offered very little target for hits.
—Fence!
Andrea Sperelli already knew that Rùtolo would advance in that way, with the usual feints. He stood on guard arched like a crossbow ready to let fly, intent on choosing his time.
—Halt, shouted Santa Margherita.
Rùtolo’s chest was bleeding slightly. His adversary’s sword had hit him below the right breast, injuring the tissues almost to the rib. The doctors ran to him. But the wounded man said immediately to Casteldieri, with a harsh voice in which a tremor of rage could be heard:
—It’s nothing. I want to continue.
He refused to go back into the villa to be medicated. The bald doctor, after having squeezed the small hole, which was bleeding slightly, and after having cleansed it with antiseptic, applied a simple piece of plaster; and said:
—He can continue.
The baron, by invitation of Casteldieri, commanded the third assault without hesitating.
—On guard!
Andrea Sperelli perceived the danger. Before him his enemy, all hunched on his ankles, almost hidden behind t
he point of his sword, seemed determined to make a supreme effort. His eyes were glinting strangely and his left thigh, under the excessive tension of the muscles, was trembling badly. Andrea, this time, against this attack, was preparing to throw himself across in order to replicate Cassìbile’s decisive hit, and the white disc of the plaster on the hostile chest served him as a target. He aimed to place the thrust there once again but to find the intercostal space, not the rib. All around, the silence appeared deeper; all the onlookers were conscious of the murderous will that drove those two men; and anxiety gripped them, and the thought that they would perhaps be taking home a dead or dying man bound them together. The sun, veiled by the little sheep, cast an almost milky light; the trees rustled now and again; the blackbird still whistled, invisible.
—Fence!
Rùtolo launched himself at close measure, with two circles of the sword and a thrust in second. Sperelli parried and riposted, taking a step backward. Rùtolo pursued him, furious, with rapid thrusts, almost all of them low, no longer accompanying them with yells. Sperelli, without becoming disconcerted at that fury, wishing to avoid contact, parried hard and riposted with such fierceness that each of his thrusts could have passed right through his enemy. Rùtolo’s thigh, near the groin, was bleeding.
—Halt! thundered Santa Margherita when he noticed it. But at that exact moment Sperelli, executing a parry in low fourth and not meeting the adversary’s blade, received a hit full in the chest; and fell in a faint into Barbarisi’s arms.
—Thoracic wound, at the fourth right intercostal space, penetrating into the cavity, with superficial lesion of the lung, the bull-necked surgeon announced in the room, once he had completed his examination.
SECOND BOOK
CHAPTER I
Convalescence is a purification and a rebirth. Never is the sense of life as sweet as it is after the anguish of pain; and never is the human soul more inclined to goodness and faith than after having gazed into the abyss of death. Man understands, when healing, that thought, desire, will, consciousness of life, are not life. Something in him is more vigilant than thought, more constant than desire, more potent than will, more profound even than consciousness; and it is the substance, the nature of his being. He understands that his real life is, as it were, the one not lived by him; it is the combination of involuntary, spontaneous, unconscious, instinctive sensations; it is the harmonious and mysterious activity of living vegetation; it is the imperceptible development of all metamorphoses and all renewals. It is precisely that life within him that carries out the miracles of convalescence: it closes wounds, remedies losses, reconnects broken tissues, mends lacerated flesh, restores the mechanism of organs, reinfuses the veins with the richness of blood, ties once more around the eyes the blindfold of love, weaves once more the crown of dreams around the head, rekindles the flame of hope in the heart, opens once more the wings of the chimeras of fantasy.
After the mortal wound, after a kind of long and slow hovering at the point of death, Andrea Sperelli little by little was now being reborn, almost with another body and another spirit, like a new man, like a creature emerged from a cool Lethean bath,1 forgetful and vacuous. It seemed to him that he had taken on a more elementary form. The past, in his memory, was all equally distant, just as the starred sky is, to the eye, an equal and diffuse field, even though the stars are at different distances. Turmoil was pacified, mud receded to the lowest level, the soul cleansed itself; and he returned to the womb of Mother Nature, feeling goodness and strength infuse maternally into him.
Hosted by his cousin at the villa of Schifanoja, Andrea Sperelli was once again facing existence in the presence of the sea. Since the sympathetic nature still persists within us, and since our old soul, embraced by the great natural soul still palpitates at this contact, the convalescent measured his breathing against the wide and tranquil respiration of the sea, stretched out his body the way powerful trees do, calmed his thoughts with the calmness of the horizon. Little by little, in that attentive and absorbed leisure, his spirit relaxed, unfolded, unfurled, lifted itself gently like grass crushed on a path; finally it became real, ingenuous, original, free, open to pure knowledge, ready for pure contemplation; he attracted things to himself, conceived of them as forms of his own being, as forms of his own existence; he felt himself finally being penetrated by the truth proclaimed by the Upanishad2 of the Vedas:3 “Hae omnes creaturae in totum ego sum, et praeter me aliud ens non est.”4 The great gust of ideality exhaled by the sacred Indian books, once studied and loved, appeared to uplift him. And repeatedly, the Sanskrit formula glowed for him in a remarkable way: “TAT TWAM ASI”; which means: “This living thing, that you are.”
It was the last days of August. An ecstatic quietness held the sea; the waters were of such transparency that they reflected any image with perfect exactness; the farthest line of the waters mingled with the sky in such a way that the two elements appeared to be one single, impalpable, unnatural element. The vast amphitheater of the hills, studded with olive trees, orange trees, pines, all the noblest forms of Italic vegetation, embracing that silence, was no longer a multitude of things but one single thing, under the common sun.
The young man, stretched out in the shade or leaning against a tree trunk or seated on a rock, believed he could feel the river of time flowing within him; with a kind of catalectic tranquillity, he believed he could feel the entire world living in his heart; with a kind of religious exaltation, he believed he possessed the infinite. What he felt was ineffable, not expressible even in the words of the mystic: “I am admitted by nature into the most secret of her divine seats, to the source of all life. Here I discover the cause of movement and hear the first song of living beings, in all its freshness.”5 His sight slowly mutated into a profound and continuous vision; the branches of the trees above his head seemed to him to hold up the sky, to amplify the blueness, to shine like the crowns of immortal poets; and he contemplated and listened, breathing with the sea and the earth, placid as a god.
Wherever were all his vanities and his cruelties and his expedients and his lies? Where were the loves and the betrayals and the disillusionments and the disgust and the incurable repugnance after pleasure? Where were those impure and rapid love affairs that left in his mouth the strange sourness of fruit cut with a steel knife? He could no longer remember anything. His spirit had made a great renunciation. Another beginning of life was entering into him; someone was entering into him, secretly, who profoundly felt the peace. He rested, because he did not desire anymore.
Desire had abandoned its realm; during activity, intellect freely followed its own laws and reflected the objective world like a pure subject of knowledge; things appeared in their true form, in their true color, in their true and full meaning and beauty, precise and very clear; every sentiment of the person disappeared. In this temporary death of desire, in this temporary absence of memory, in this perfect objectivity of contemplation, was to be found the cause of never-experienced pleasure.
Die Sterne, die begehrt man nicht,
Man freut sich ihrer Pracht.
“The stars, man does not desire them—but takes pleasure in their splendor.”6 For the first time, in fact, the young man discovered all the harmonious nocturnal poetry of the summer skies.
They were the last moonless nights of August. The ardent life of innumerable constellations pulsated in the deep basin. The Ursus constellations, the Swan, Hercules, Boötes, Cassiopeia, scintillated with such a rapid and strong throb that they almost seemed to draw closer to the earth, to have entered the earth’s atmosphere. The Milky Way unfolded like a regal aerial river, like an assembly of heavenly coasts, like an immense silent stream that drew into its “miro gurge”7 a dust of starry minerals, passing above a crystal hive, between phalanxes of flowers. At intervals, shining meteors streaked the immobile air, with the infinitely soft and silent slide of a drop of water on a sheet of diamond. The breathing of the sea, slow and solemn,
was enough to measure the tranquillity of the night without disturbing it; and the pauses were sweeter than the sound.
But this period of visions, of abstractions, of intuitions, of pure contemplations, this sort of Buddhistic and almost, one could say, cosmogonic mysticism, was extremely brief. The causes of the rare phenomenon, over and above the plastic nature of the young man and his aptitude toward objectivity, were perhaps to be sought in the singular tension and extreme impressionability of his cerebral nervous system. Little by little, he began to recover consciousness of himself, to regain the sentiment of himself, and to return to his original corporeity. One day at the noon hour, while the life of things appeared to be suspended, the great and terrible silence suddenly allowed him to perceive within himself vertiginous abysses, inextinguishable needs, indestructible memories, accumulations of suffering and regret, all the misery he had once felt, all the vestiges of his vice, all the residues of his passions.
From that day on, a subdued and constant melancholy occupied his soul; and he saw in every aspect of things a state of his spirit. Instead of transmuting into other forms of existence, or placing himself in different states of consciousness or losing his particular being in general life, he now presented contrary phenomena, wrapping himself up in a nature that was a completely subjective conception of his intellect. The countryside became for him a symbol, an emblem, a sign, an escort that guided him through his internal labyrinth. He discovered secret affinities between the apparent life of things and the intimate life of his desires and his memories. “To me—high mountains are a feeling.” Just like mountains in George Byron’s verse, so, too, was the seashore, for him, a feeling.
Clear September seashores! The sea, calm and innocent like a sleeping boy, spread out under angelic pearly heavens. Sometimes it appeared to be completely green, the fine and precious green of malachite; and on it, the small red sails resembled errant flamelets. Sometimes it appeared to be completely blue, of an intense azure, almost, one could say, heraldic, shot through with veins of gold like a lapis lazuli; and on it, the decorated sails resembled a procession of ensigns and banners and Catholic shields. Also, sometimes it took on a diffused metallic gleam, a pale silvery color, mingled with the greenish hue of a ripe lemon, something indefinably strange and delicate; and on it, the sails were pious and as innumerable as the wings of cherubs in the background of Giotto’s panels.
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