—Be good, she added, slightly out of breath, tidying herself with a gently vexatious air.
He had remained on the couch and was watching her, mute.
She went toward the wall, near the fireplace, where the small Mona Amorrosisca mirror hung. She put on her hat and veil in front of that clouded glass, which had the appearance of some murky, slightly greenish water.
—How sorry I am to leave you, this evening! . . . This evening more than other times . . . she murmured, oppressed by the melancholy of the hour.
In the room, the violet light of dusk grappled with the candlelight. The cup of tea was on the edge of the table, cold, diminished by two sips. Above the tall crystal vases the lilac flowers appeared whiter. The cushion of the armchair still retained the imprint of the body that had been pressed into it earlier.
The bell of Trinità de’ Monti began to peal.
—My God, how late it is! Help me put on my mantle, said the poor creature, turning toward Andrea.
He grasped her once again in his arms, laid her down and covered her with furious kisses, blindly, lost, with a devouring ardor, without speaking, suffocating her moans on her mouth, suffocating on her mouth an impulse that came to him, almost invincible, to shout out Elena’s name. And on the body of the unknowing woman, he consummated the horrible sacrilege.
They remained for a few minutes entwined together. She said, in an exhausted and elated voice:
—You are taking my very life!
That impassioned vehemence made her happy.
She said: —Soul, my soul, all, all mine!
She said, happy:
—I feel your heart beating . . . so strongly, so strongly!
Then she said, with a sigh:
—Let me get up. I must go.
Andrea was as white and agitated as a murderer.
—What is the matter? she asked him tenderly.
He forced himself to smile at her. He answered:
—I have never felt such a profound emotion. I thought I would die.
He turned to one of the vases, took out the bunch of flowers, and offered it to Maria, accompanying her to the door, almost urging her to leave, because every gesture, every look, every word of hers gave him an unbearable suffering.
—Good-bye, my love. Dream of me! said the poor creature from the doorway, with her supreme tenderness.
CHAPTER II
On the morning of May 20, Andrea Sperelli was walking up the Corso, inundated with sunlight, when he heard himself being called in front of the door of the club.
A cluster of his gentlemen friends stood on the sidewalk, enjoying the sight of ladies passing, and gossiping. Giulio Musèllaro was there, with Ludovico Barbarisi, the Duke of Grimiti, and Galeazzo Secìnaro; Gino Bommìnaco was there, too, with a few others.
—Don’t you know about what happened last night? Barbarisi asked him.
—No. What happened?
—Don Manuel Ferres, the minister of Guatemala . . .
—Well?
—He was caught cheating while playing cards.
Sperelli controlled himself, although some of the gentlemen were watching him with a certain malicious curiosity.
—How?
—Galeazzo was there; in fact, he was playing at the same table.
Prince Secìnaro began to recount the details.
Andrea Sperelli did not affect indifference. He listened, rather, with an attentive and grave manner. Finally he said:
—I am very sorry about this.
He remained for a few more minutes in the group; then he greeted his friends, taking his leave.
—Which way are you walking? Secìnaro asked him.
—I’m going home.
—I’ll walk with you for part of the way.
They walked down toward Via de’ Condotti. The Corso was a happy river of sunlight, from Piazza di Venezia to Piazza del Popolo. Ladies were walking alongside glittering shopwindows, dressed in light-colored spring outfits. The Princess of Ferentino walked past with Barbarella Viti, beneath a lace parasol. Bianca Dolcebuono walked by. Leonetto Lanza’s young bride passed them.
—Did you know him, that Ferres? Galeazzo asked Sperelli, who was silent.
—Yes; I met him last year, in September, at Schifanoja, at my cousin Francesca Ateleta’s. The wife is a great friend of Francesca’s. I’m very sorry about this event, therefore. One should try to publicize this as little as possible. You would do me a service, by helping me . . .
Galeazzo offered to do so with cordial concern.
—I believe—he said—that the scandal could be avoided in part, if the minister presented his resignation to his government, but without delay, as the president of the club has enjoined him to do. The minister, however, is refusing. Last night he had the attitude of a person who has been offended; he was raising his voice. And the proof was there! It would be necessary to persuade him . . .
They continued talking about the fact as they walked along. Sperelli was grateful to Secìnaro for his cordial concern. Secìnaro was favorably inclined toward friendly confidences, by that intimacy.
On the corner of Via de’ Condotti, they glimpsed Mount Edgcumbe’s wife, who was walking along the sidewalk on the left, along the Japanese shopwindows, with that relaxed, rhythmic, fascinating gait of hers.
—Donna Elena, said Galeazzo.
Both looked at her; both felt the allure of that gait. But Andrea’s gaze penetrated her clothing and saw the well-known form, her divine back.
When they caught up to her, they both greeted her; and overtook her. Now they could no longer observe her, and were instead observed. For Andrea it was a new torture, walking alongside a rival, beneath the gaze of the longed-for woman, thinking that the tormenting eyes were delighting in making a comparison. He compared himself mentally with Secìnaro.
The latter had the bovine structure of a blond, blue-eyed Lucius Verus;1 and amid the magnificent golden abundance of his beard, there glistened a red mouth that was of no spiritual significance but that was beautiful. He was tall, square-shouldered, and vigorous, with an elegance that was not refined but self-assured.
—And so? Andrea inquired of him, pushed to boldness by an invincible frenzy. —Is the affair going well?
He knew he could speak that way to that man.
Galeazzo turned to him with an air that was half astonished, half questioning, because he did not expect such a question from him, and even less so in such a flippant, perfectly calm tone. Andrea was smiling.
—Ah, my siege has been going on for so long! replied the bearded prince. —Since time immemorial, with various resumptions, and always without any luck. I always got there too late: someone had already beaten me to the conquest. But I have never lost heart. I was convinced that, sooner or later, my turn would come. Attendre pour atteindre.2 In fact . . .
—Well?
—Lady Heathfield is more benign to me than the Duchess of Scerni. I will have, I hope, the sought-after honor of being inscribed, after you, on the list . . .
He broke out in somewhat coarse laughter, showing his white teeth.
—I believe that my Indian feats, divulged by Giulio Musèllaro, have added a few heroic strands to my beard, of an irresistible virtue.
—Oh, but your beard, these days, must be quivering with memories . . .
—Which memories?
—Bacchic memories.
—I don’t understand.
—What! You’ve forgotten the famous May Fair of ’84?
—Oh, fancy! You’ve just reminded me of it. The third anniversary is due in the next few days . . . You weren’t there, though. And who told you about it?
—You want to know too much, my dear fellow!
—Tell me, I beg of you.
—Rather think about making this anniversary worthwhile
; and tell me about it soon.
—When will we see each other again?
—Whenever you like.
—Dine with me this evening, at the club, toward eight. This way we can take care of the other matter together.
—All right. Good-bye, Goldenbeard! Run!
They parted in Piazza di Spagna at the base of the stairs; and as Elena was crossing the square heading toward Via dei Due Macelli, to walk up toward the Four Fountains, Secìnaro caught up and walked together with her.
Andrea, after the effort of dissimulation, felt his heart weigh heavily, horribly, as he walked up the stairs. He felt he could not drag it to the summit. But he was sure, by now, that Secìnaro would confide everything to him, later on; and it almost seemed as if he had obtained some advantage! With a kind of drunkenness, a kind of madness caused him by the excess of suffering, he was going forth blindly toward new and ever crueler torments, ever more senseless, aggravating and complicating the condition of his spirit in a thousand ways, passing from perversion to perversion, from aberration to aberration, from atrocity to atrocity, without being able to stop, without having one moment of respite in the vertiginous fall. He was devoured by an unquenchable fever that with its heat released all the germs of human abjection within the obscure abysses of his being. Every thought, every feeling bore the blemish. He was one great wound.
And yet, deceit itself bound him strongly to the deceived woman. His spirit had adapted itself so strangely to the monstrous comedy that it almost could not conceive of other modes of pleasure, other modes of pain. That incarnation of one woman into another was no longer an act of exasperated passion, but a vice, and hence an urgent need, a necessity. And the unwitting instrument of that vice had therefore become as necessary to him as the vice itself. By some phenomenon of sensual depravity, he had almost gone so far as to believe that the actual possession of Elena would not have afforded him the intense, rare enjoyment afforded him by that imaginary possession. He had almost gone so far as not to be able to separate, in his imagining of pleasure, the two women. And as he thought that pleasure was diminished in the actual possession of one woman, so, too, did he feel all his nerves to be blunted when, through fatigue of the imagination, he found himself before the immediate real form of the other.
Therefore he could not tolerate the thought that Maria could be removed from him by the ruin of Don Manuel Ferres.
When Maria came to him toward evening, he immediately realized that the poor creature was still unaware of her misfortune. But the next day, she arrived panting, distressed, as pale as a corpse; and she sobbed in his arms, hiding her face:
—Do you know?
The news had spread. Scandal was inevitable; ruin was irremediable. Days of desperate torment followed, in which Maria, left alone after the hasty departure of the cheat, abandoned by her few friends, assailed by her husband’s countless creditors, lost amid the legal formalities of the impoundment, amid the summoners and the usurers and other vile people, demonstrated heroic pride, but without managing to save herself from the final collapse that crushed all hope.
And she refused all help from her lover; she never spoke of her martyrdom to her lover, who reproached her for the brevity of her visits of love; she never complained; she could still muster a less sad smile for him; she could still obey his whims, concede her body passionately to the contaminations, and dispense the warmest tenderness of her soul onto the head of her executioner.
Everything was crumbling around her. Punishment had suddenly struck her. The forebodings had been true!
And she did not regret having yielded to her lover; she did not feel remorse for having given herself to him with so much abandon; she did not mourn her lost purity. She had only one sorrow, stronger than any remorse and any fear, stronger than any other pain: and it was the thought of having to go away, to leave, to have to part from the man who was, for her, the life of her life.
—I will die, my friend. I’m going to die far away from you, all alone. You will not close my eyes . . .
She spoke to him of her death with a sorrowful smile, full of resigned certainty. Andrea was still causing her to harbor some flashes of hope; was still sowing in her heart the seeds of a dream, the seed of future suffering!
—I will not allow you to die. You will still be mine, for a long time. Our love will still have happy days . . .
He spoke to her about an imminent future. He would move to Florence; from there he would travel often to Siena under the pretext of his studies; he would stay in Siena for months on end, copying ancient paintings, researching ancient chronicles. Their mysterious love affair would have its own hidden nest, in a deserted road, or outside the city walls, in the countryside, in a villa decorated with majolica made by the Della Robbias, surrounded by a kitchen garden. She would be able to find an hour here and there for him. Sometimes, she would also come to Florence for a week of happiness. She would transfer their idyll to the Fiesole hills, in a September that was as mild as April; and the cypresses of Montughi would be as clement as those of Schifanoja.
—If only it were true! If only it were true! sighed Maria.
—Don’t you believe me?
—Yes, I believe you; but my heart tells me that all these things, these too-sweet things, will not be anything more than a dream.
She wanted Andrea to hold her for a long time in his arms; and she stayed there, leaning against his chest, without talking, huddling there as if to hide away, with the movement and the shivering of a sick person or one who has been threatened and needs protection. She asked Andrea for spiritual caresses, those that in her language of intimacy she called “good caresses,” the ones that touched her and moved her to tears of yearning that were sweeter than any pleasure. She could not comprehend why, in those moments of supreme spirituality, in those last sorrowful hours of passion, in those hours of parting, her lover was not satisfied with kissing her hands.
She beseeched him, almost hurt by Andrea’s crude desire:
—No, love! It seems that you are closer to me, more bound to me, more mingled with my being, when you sit next to me, when you take my hands, when you gaze deep into my eyes, when you tell me the things that only you know how to say. It seems that the other caresses distance us, that they place some kind of shadow between us . . . I can’t explain my thoughts properly . . . The other caresses leave me so sad, so so sad . . . I don’t know . . . and tired, with such a dreadful tiredness!
She beseeched him, humble, submissive, fearing that she would displease him. She did not cease to evoke memories, memories, memories, past ones, recent ones, in the minutest detail, remembering the slightest gestures, the most fleeting words, all the smallest, most insignificant facts that had had significance for her. Her heart returned with greatest frequency to the very first days at Schifanoja.
—Do you remember? Do you remember?
And suddenly tears would fill her despondent eyes.
One evening Andrea asked her, thinking of her husband:
—Since I met you, have you been all mine?
—Always.
—I’m not asking about your soul . . .
—Hush! Always all yours.
And he, who had never believed this of any of his adulterous lovers, believed her; he did not have even the shadow of a doubt regarding the truth of what she was stating.
He believed her; because, despite contaminating her and deceiving her without restraint, he knew that he was loved by an elevated and noble spirit; he knew by now that he was in the presence of a great and terrible passion; by now, he was as conscious of that greatness as he was of his own depravity. He knew, he knew he was immensely loved; and sometimes, in the frenzy of his imaginings, he went so far as to bite the mouth of the sweet creature to stop himself from shouting out a name that rose up in him with invincible force to his throat; and the good and sorrowful mouth bled in an unconscious smile, saying:
—Even like this, you don’t hurt me.
Very few days were left until her departure. Miss Dorothy had taken Delfina to Siena and had returned to help the lady with the last, most onerous vexations and to accompany her on the journey. In Siena, in her mother’s house, the truth was not known. Even Delfina knew nothing. Maria had restricted herself to sending the news that Manuel had suddenly been recalled by his government. She was preparing herself for the departure; she was preparing herself to leave the rooms, full of beloved things, passing through the hands of public evaluators who had already written up the inventory and had established the day of the auction:— June 20, Monday, at ten in the morning.
On the evening of June 9, just about to leave Andrea, she was searching for a lost glove. While looking for it, she saw on a table the book by Percy Bysshe Shelley, the same volume that Andrea had lent her during the time at Schifanoja, the volume in which she had read the Recollection before the outing to Vicomìle, the dear, sad volume in which she had underlined two verses with her nail:
And forget me, for I can never
Be thine!
She picked it up with visible emotion; she leafed through it and found the page, the imprint of her nail, the two verses.
—Never! she murmured, shaking her head. —Do you remember? And barely eight months have passed!
She remained slightly pensive; she leafed through the book again; and read a few other verses.
—He is our poet, she added. —How many times you have promised to take me to the English cemetery! Do you remember? We were going to take flowers to the grave . . . Do you want to go? Take me before I leave. It will be our last outing.
He said:
—We’ll go tomorrow.
They left when the sun was already sinking. In the open carriage, she held a bunch of roses on her lap. They passed below the tree-lined Aventino. In the port of Ripa Grande, they glimpsed ships at anchor, laden with Sicilian wine.
In the vicinity of the cemetery they alighted; they walked for a stretch, as far as the gate, in silence. Maria felt deep in her heart that she was not going only to take flowers to the grave of a poet, but that she was going to grieve, in that place of death, for something of herself that was irreparably lost. Percy’s fragment, read in the night in her insomnia, resounded at the base of her soul, while she observed the cypresses reaching high into the sky, on the other side of the whitewashed wall.
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