by André Aciman
“Bartleby. And who might that gentleman be?”
“It just goes to show you’ve never read Melville’s short stories.”
Of Melville—I said—I only knew Moby-Dick, in Cesare Pavese’s translation. Then she wanted me to get up, to go and fetch from the bookcase there in front of me, between the two windows, the volume of Piazza Tales and bring it to her. While I was searching among the books, she told me the plot of the story. Bartleby was a clerk—she said—a scrivener employed by a New York lawyer (a real professional, busy, capable, “liberal,” “one of those nineteenth-century Americans that Spencer Tracy plays to perfection”) employed to copy out office work, legal documents and so on. Well, this Bartleby, so long as they got him to copy, would keep scribbling away conscientiously, bent over his desk. But if it crossed Spencer Tracy’s mind to entrust him with some other small supplementary task, such as to collate a copy of the original text, or to nip down to the tobacco shop on the corner to buy a stamp, nothing doing—he would confine himself to an evasive smile and reply with stubborn politeness: “I prefer not to.”
“And why should he do that?” I asked, returning with the book in my hand.
“Because he wasn’t prepared to be anything but a scrivener. A scrivener and nothing else.”
“I’m sorry, but,” I objected, “surely Spencer Tracy paid him a regular wage.”
“Of course,” Micòl relied. “But why should that matter? The wage is paid for the work, not for the person who performs it.”
“I don’t understand,” I insisted. “Bartleby had been taken on in the office as a copyist by Spencer Tracy, but also, I suppose, so as to help things along in general. In the end what was he asking of him? A little more that may well have been less. For someone obliged to remain forever seated, nipping out to the tobacconist on the street corner might be seen as a pleasant change, a necessary break in the routine—whichever way you consider it, a perfect chance to stretch his legs a bit. No, I’m sorry. In my view, Spencer Tracy was quite right to protest that your Bartleby shouldn’t hang about there playing the victim, and should immediately perform what had been asked of him.”
We went on for a long time arguing about poor Bartleby and Spencer Tracy. She reproached me for not understanding the whole point, for being unimaginative, the usual inveterate conformist. Conformist? She must be joking. The fact is that just before, with an air of commiserating, she’d compared me to Bartleby. And now, on the contrary, seeing I was on the side of the “abject bosses” she had begun to laud in Bartleby “the inalienable right of every human being not to collaborate,” that is, to liberty. She just kept on criticizing me, but for contradictory reasons.
At a certain point the telephone rang. They were calling from the kitchen to ask if and when they should bring up the supper tray. Micòl declared that for now she wasn’t hungry, and that she would ring them back later. Would some minestrone soup be all right?—she replied with a grimace to a detailed question that came to her through the ear-piece. Of course. But, please, they shouldn’t start preparing it yet—she never liked food that “had hung around.”
Having put down the receiver, she turned to me. She stared at me with eyes that were at once kind and serious, and for some moments said nothing.
“How are you?” she asked at last, in a low voice.
I swallowed.
“Just so-so.”
I smiled and looked around the room.
“It’s strange,” I went on. “Every detail of this room exactly matches how I’d imagined it. For instance, over there’s the chaise longue. It’s as though I’d already seen it. Well, actually I have seen it.”
I told her the dream I’d had six months ago, the night before she left for Venice. I pointed to the row of làttimi, glowing in the half-dark of their shelves: the only things here, I told her, which in my dream had seemed other than they really were. I explained how they’d appeared to me and she kept listening, serious, attentive, without once interrupting.
When I’d finished, she stroked the sleeve of my jacket with a light caress. I knelt by the side of the bed, embraced her, kissed her neck, her eyes, her lips. She let me do it, but always watching me and, with little maneuvers of her head, always trying to stop me kissing her mouth.
“No . . . no . . . ” she kept saying. “Stop it now . . . please . . . Be good . . . No, no . . . someone might come in . . . No.”
But all in vain. Gradually, first with one leg and then with the other, I got myself onto the bed. Then I was pressing down on her with my whole weight. I continued blindly kissing her face, but only rarely managing to meet her lips, and never succeeding in getting her to lower her eyelids. At last I buried my head in her neck. And while my body, as though almost independent of me, made convulsive movements over hers, immobile under the covers as a statue, suddenly, in a terrible pang deep within me, I had the precise impression that I was losing her, that I’d already lost her.
She was the first to speak.
“Please get up,” I heard her saying, very close to my ear. “I can’t breathe like this.”
I was literally annihilated. To get off that bed seemed to me an undertaking beyond my powers. Yet there was no other choice.
I dragged myself up. I took some steps around the room, hesitating. At length, I let myself fall once again on the little armchair beside the bed, and hid my face in my hands. My cheeks were burning.
“Why are you doing this?” Micòl said. “Can’t you see it’s useless?”
“Why is it useless?” I asked, quickly raising my eyes. “May I ask why?”
She looked at me, the shadow of an impish smile playing round her lips.
“Won’t you go in there for a moment?” she said, nodding toward the bathroom door. “You’re all red, impizà† red. Go and wash your face.”
“Thanks, I will. Perhaps it’s a good idea.”
I got up in a hurry and made toward the bathroom. Then, just at that moment, the door that gave onto the staircase was shaken by a vigorous blow. It seemed as though someone was trying to shoulder their way in.
“What is it?” I whispered.
“It’s Jor,” Micòl replied calmly. “Go and let him in.”
• 3 •
IN THE oval mirror above the sink I saw my face reflected.
I examined it carefully as though it wasn’t mine, as though it belonged to someone else. Although I’d plunged it several times in cold water, it still looked completely red, impizàda red—as Micòl had said—with darker blotches between my nose and upper lip, above and around my cheekbones. I scrutinized with minute attention that large face lit up there in front of me, drawn first by the throbbing of the arteries under the skin of my forehead and temples, then by the dense mesh of tiny scarlet veins which, as I widened my eyes, seemed to lock the irises’ blue discs down in a kind of siege, then by the hairs of my beard thickly bristling on my chin and along my jaw, then by a small spot that was barely visible . . . I was thinking of nothing. Through the thin dividing wall I could hear Micòl speaking on the phone. To whom? To the kitchen staff, probably, to stop them bringing up the supper. Good. The impending goodbye would then be less embarrassing. For both of us.
I came in as she was putting down the receiver, and once again, not without surprise, I realized she had nothing against me.
She leaned from the bed to pour herself a cup of tea.
“Now please sit down,” she said “and have something to drink.”
I obeyed in silence. I drank with slow deliberate sips, without raising my eyes. Sprawled out on the parquet behind me, Jor was asleep. His thick snoring, like a drunken tramp’s, filled the room.
I put down the cup.
It was once again Micòl who started speaking. Without any reference to what had just happened, she began by saying how for a long time, for much longer than I might think, she’d meant to speak frankly about the situation which bit by bit had developed between us. Did I perhaps remember that time—she went on—last
October when, so as not to get soaked, we’d ended up in the coach-house, and had gone to sit in the carriage? Well, it was exactly from that time on that she’d become aware of the way our relationship had taken a wrong turn. She’d understood immediately that something wrong, something false and dangerous had started up between us. And it was mainly her fault, she was only too ready to admit, if, since then, the landslide had gathered momentum and kept on rolling downhill. But what could she have done? The simple thing would have been to take me aside and be honest with me, at that point, without delay. But rather than that, like a real coward, she’d chosen the worst course—to escape. Oh yes. It’s easy enough to cut the cord. But what comes of it? Especially where it’s all become “morbid.” Ninety-nine percent of the time, the fire’s still glowing under the cinders, with the wonderful result that later, when the two see each other again, for them to speak calmly, like good friends, has become hard as can be, almost impossible.
Even I could understand what she was saying—I put in at this point—and in the end I was very grateful to her for speaking so honestly.
But there was something I wanted her to explain. She’d suddenly rushed off without even saying goodbye to me, and after that, as soon as she’d arrived in Venice, she seemed concerned only with one thing: to be sure that I didn’t stop seeing her brother Alberto.
“Why was that?” I asked. “If, as you say, you really wanted me to forget you (forgive the cliché and don’t start laughing in my face!), couldn’t you have dropped me completely? I know it would have been hard on me. But not impossible that, for lack of fuel, to put it that way, all the cinders might go out, on their own.”
She looked at me without hiding a start of surprise, perhaps astonished that I could find in me the strength to move into a counter-attack, even if, all considered, with such small conviction behind it.
I wasn’t wrong—she then agreed, with a troubled look, shaking her head—I wasn’t wrong at all. But she begged me to believe that, acting as she had, there hadn’t been the least intention on her part to stir things up. She valued our friendship, that was all, valued it even in a slightly too possessive way. And then, seriously, she’d been thinking more about Alberto than about me—Alberto who’d been left here with no one, apart from Giampiero Malnate, he could have a chat with. Poor Alberto—she sighed. Hadn’t I noticed, spending time with him these last few months, how much he needed company? For someone like him, used to spending the winter in Milan, with theaters, cinemas and everything else on tap, the prospect of being stuck here at Ferrara, shut up at home for months on end, and on top of that having nothing to do, was hardly a happy one, I had to agree. Poor Alberto!—she repeated. Compared to him, she was much stronger, much more independent—able to put up with, if need be, the most awful loneliness. And besides, it seemed to her she’d already told me, Venice was perhaps, as far as squalor goes, even worse in the winter than Ferrara, and her uncles’ house no less sad and secluded than this one was.
“But this house isn’t in the least bit sad,” I said, suddenly moved.
“D’you like it here?” she asked, brightening up. “Then I have to confess something to you (but you mustn’t get annoyed with me and accuse me of hypocrisy, or even of being two-faced!)—I very much wanted you to see it.”
“And why’s that?”
“I don’t know why. I can’t explain to you why. I suppose it’s for the same reason that, even as a child, at the Temple, I would happily have pulled you too under Papa’s tallit . . . ah! If only I could have done! I can still see you there, under your father’s tallit, on the bench in front of ours. What a pang I felt seeing you. It’s stupid, I know, but I felt the same kind of sorrow as though you’d been an orphan, without a father and mother.”
She fell silent for some moments, her eyes fixed on the ceiling. Then, leaning her elbow on the bolster, she began to speak to me again—but this time seriously, almost solemnly.
She said she hated causing me pain, she really hated it. On the other hand she needed me to understand—it was absolutely unnecessary that we spoil, as we were risking doing, the lovely memories of a shared childhood. For us two to make love? Did it really seem feasible to me?
I asked her why she thought that so impossible.
For countless reasons—she replied—but mainly because the thought of making love to me disconcerted, embarrassed her: in the same way as if she were to imagine making love with a brother, with, say, Alberto. It was true that, as a child, she’d had “a crush” on me, and, who knows, it was perhaps precisely this that was now blocking her so utterly with regard to me. I . . . I stood “alongside” of her, didn’t I see? rather than “in front” of her, while being in love (at least this was how she imagined it) was something for people who were determined to get the better of each other, a cruel, hard sport—far crueller and harder than tennis!—with no holds barred, with all kinds of low blows, and without any concern, just to palliate things, for the good of the soul or for notions of fairness.
Maudit soit à jamais le rêveur inutile
qui voulut le premier, dans sa stupidité,
s’éprenant d’un problème insoluble et stérile,
aux choses de l’amour mêler l’honnêteté!
—Baudelaire, who well understood, had warned. As for us? We were both stupidly honest, as alike as two drops of water (“and, you ought to believe me, people so alike should never fight each other”), so we’d never be able to try to get the better of each other, us two. Could I really see us wanting to “wound” each other? No way! As the good Lord had made us like this, it meant the whole thing had neither prospects nor possibilities.
But even allowing for the unlikely hypothesis that we were made differently from the way we were, that between us there was in fact even the least possibility of a relationship of the kind that “offered no hostages,” how were we then supposed to behave? “To get engaged,” for instance, accompanied by an exchange of rings, parental visits, etc.? What an edifying image! If he were still alive, and got to hear of it, Israel Zangwill himself might have had a juicy coda to add to his Dreamers of the Ghetto.‡ And what a delight, what a “pious” delight everyone would feel when we appeared together in the Italian synagogue for the next Yom Kippur: a bit wan in the face from fasting, but apart from that so good looking, such a perfect couple! And seeing us, there’d certainly be someone there who’d give thanks to the Racial Laws, proclaiming that, faced with such a lovely union, the only thing to be said was: every cloud has a silver lining. Who knows if even the Secretary of the Fascist Party in Via Cavour might go a bit soft at the prospect! Even if in secret, wasn’t that good fellow Consul Bolognesi really a lover of Jews? Pah!
Defeated, I kept silent.
She profited from this pause to lift the receiver and tell them in the kitchen to bring up the supper, but in a half-hour or so, not before, as—she repeated—that evening she wasn’t “in the least bit hungry.” Only the day after, going over it all, would I remember when, closed in the bathroom, I’d heard her talking on the telephone. So I was wrong—I told myself the next day. She might have been talking with anyone in the house (or even outside) but not with the kitchen.
But then I was immersed in a completely different train of thought. When Micòl put the receiver down I lifted my head.
“You said we were exactly alike,” I spoke again. “In what way?”
“But yes, yes we are”—she exclaimed—“in the way, like you, I’ve no access to that instinctive enjoyment of things that’s typical of normal people.” She could sense it very clearly: for me, no less than for her, the past counted far more than the present, remembering something far more than possessing it. Compared to memory, every possession can only ever seem disappointing, banal, inadequate . . . She understood me so well! My anxiety that the present “immediately” turned into the past so that I could love it and dream about it at leisure was just like hers, was identical. It was “our” vice, this: to go forward with our heads forever
turned back. Wasn’t it true?
It was—I had to admit within myself—it was exactly so. When was it that I’d embraced her? At the most an hour before. And already everything had again become as unreal and mythical as ever: an event that was unbelievable, or a source of fear.
“Who knows,” I replied. “Perhaps it’s all much simpler. Perhaps you don’t find me attractive. And that’s all it is.”
“Don’t talk nonsense,” she said in protest. “What’s that got to do with it?”
“It’s got everything to do with it!”
“You are fishing for compliments.§ And you know it. But I’m not going to give you the satisfaction, you don’t deserve it. And anyway, even if I was now to try telling you once more all the praise I’ve lavished on your famous blue-green eyes (and not only on your eyes) what would I get from that? You’d be the first to judge me ill, as an utter hypocrite. You’d think, here we go, after the stick comes the carrot, the sweetener . . . ”
“Unless . . . ”
“Unless what?
I hesitated, and then finally decided.
“Unless,” I went on, “there’s someone else involved.”
She shook her head to say no, looking me in the eyes.
“There’s no one else in the least bit involved,” she replied. “And who could there be?”
I believed her. But I was desperate and wanted to hurt her.
“You’re asking me?” I said, pouting. “It could be anyone. Who can assure me that this winter, in Venice, you haven’t met someone else?”
She burst out laughing. Fresh, happy, crystalline laughter.
“What an idea!” she exclaimed. “Given I’ve done nothing else but huddle over my thesis the whole time!”
“You don’t mean to say that in these five years of university you’ve not been out with anyone. Please! There must have been someone there who was following you around!”
I was convinced she’d deny it. But I was wrong.
“Sure, I’ve had some admirers,” she admitted.
