Malafrena

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  “I want to try to explain some—a change in my thinking, father.”

  “I’m aware that we disagree on certain matters. Times change. We needn’t think alike on everything. Time spent discussing opinions is time wasted.”

  “Some ideas are more than opinions. To hold them is to serve them.”

  “That may be. But I have no wish to argue, Itale.”

  “Nor have I.” The Social Contract came down on the table with a light thump, raising dust from the old papers and parchments. “None at all. But I wish to act by my principles, as you do by yours.”

  “Your mind is your own. Your time is your own. So long as you do your work here, and you do; you always have done.”

  “My work’s not here.”

  Guide raised his head at that. He said nothing.

  “I have to go to Krasnoy.”

  “You have to do nothing of the sort.”

  “I’m trying to explain—”

  “I don’t want explanations.”

  “If you won’t listen there’s no use my trying to speak.” Itale stood up. So did Guide: “Stay here,” he said. He walked down the room and back, down it and back a second time. He sat down again in the carved chair. Itale remained standing by the table. Behind the house in the valley a sleepy cock crowed; old Eva was singing in the kitchen, rooms away.

  “You want to go to Krasnoy.”

  Itale nodded.

  “Do you expect to take money from the estate to support yourself there?”

  “Not if you are unwilling to let me have it.”

  “I am.”

  Itale tried to repress his resentment and defiance, making so harsh an effort over himself that it weakened him physically. For a moment the reaction was so strong that he wanted to go to his father like a child and ask his pardon: anything to spare this anger. He sat down as before across the table from Guide, picked up the book as before, watched the lamplight flicker on its worn gold edging, and finally said, “I will find work. My friends and I hope to write—perhaps to start some kind of journal.”

  “For what purpose?”

  Itale did not lift his head. “Freedom,” he said.

  “For whom?”

  “All of us.”

  “You think freedom’s yours to hand out?”

  “What I have I can give.”

  “Words, Itale.”

  “These are words, too. This book. It brought the Bastille down. Those are words, those documents about our land. You’ve given your life to what they stand for.”

  “You’re very eloquent.”

  There was a long pause.

  Guide spoke with careful restraint. “Let me tell you how I see this. You want to go down there, mix yourself up with other people’s business; you say you see that as a matter of principle. Of duty. What I see much more clearly is your duty here, to your family and your property and the people on it. Who is to run this estate when I die? A Krasnoy journalist?”

  “That is unjust!”

  “It is not. It is the difference between duty and self-indulgence.”

  “You cannot speak to me as if I were a child. I’m not a child. I am what you made me, and I know what duty is; and I respect your principles; therefore I ask you to respect mine.”

  Guide was speechless a moment before Itale’s self-confidence. “Respect? Respect for what? Your theories, your opinions, your secondhand words that you want to throw away all this for? You are of age, you needn’t obey me, but you can’t touch your inheritance until you’re twenty-five, and thank God for that.”

  “I would never touch it against your will—”

  “But you’re throwing it away, you’re turning your back on it, everything I’ve worked for. It’s not yours to throw away!” That was a cry from the heart. The young man answered desperately, “I’m not—I’ll come back when you need me—”

  “I need you now. If you go, you go.”

  “I’ll go,” Itale answered, on his feet. “You keep all that, but you can’t take my loyalty to it, to this house, to you—A time will come when you’ll see that—”

  “A time will come, will it!” The Social Contract landed on the floor, pages down, a loose endpaper skittering across the room like a scared bird. “Not in my time, or in yours!”

  Both were suffocated with self-righteous anger, both knew there was no more to say, nothing.

  Guide turned away at last. “If you think better of this,” he said in a stifled voice, “no more needs to be said. If not, the sooner you go the better.”

  “I’ll go on the Diligence, Friday.”

  Guide said nothing.

  Itale bowed and left the library.

  His silver watch said eight-twenty. They had gone into the library only a few minutes before. He felt that hours had passed.

  “Itale?”

  His mother came into the hall, looking puzzled. “Is your father in the library, dear?”

  “Yes.” He went quickly upstairs, to his room, and shut the door. The room was full of the blue of late evening reflected upward from the lake beneath the windows, a warm unreal atmosphere in which objects seemed to hang suspended like the dim plants seen underwater just off shore. The serenity of light, vague, weightless, picked up and opened out the anguish that bore him down; he felt he could draw breath again. But never in his life had he felt so lonely and so deathly tired.

  V

  It was the fifth of August, a day hot with the dull intensity that ends in storm. Since dawn the fields had baked in sunlight; the lake lay glassy; the sun was warped and reddish in the sky pale with heat. Crickets sang in the mown and the yellow fields, in the orchards, under the oaks. Shadows now touched the lake from the western peaks and there was a softer color low in the sky, a vague blue-violet, but still no wind rose, and Malafrena lay like a bowl of heat and light. Piera Valtorskar was coming downstairs, an action that to her, in this huge timeless afternoon of August, seemed to last a long while, an interval full of intangible thoughts and manifold sensations. The house, built of limestone and marble, was cool; one knew it was a hot day only by the dryness of the air, the cricket-chant, the molten glare of a sun-streak finding its way through a shuttered window. Piera was wearing the women’s dress of her province, a full dark-red skirt, black vest, linen blouse embroidered at the neck. The sleeves of the blouse were stitched at the shoulder into twelve pleats: it had been made in Val Malafrena. A blouse made in Val Altesma would have gathered sleeves, and certain motifs and stitches of the embroidery would be different, a flower design instead of a pattern of birds and branches. All these things were as they should be, as they had always been; so Piera preferred this dress to any other. As she descended the stairs she was smoothing out the skirt, aware of the garnet color feeling the cool grainy texture of the homespun cloth. Her right hand was on the marble stair-railing, soap-slick and cold. Step by step she descended, feeling herself descend, feeling the heavy skirt sway, feeling the railing under her hand, thinking of a great deal though she could not have said what. On the fourth step from the bottom she began to hum the song, “Red are the berries on the autumn bough”; on the last step she stopped humming and ran her finger down the backbone of the Cupid on the newel post. He was a crude, squat, provincial Cupid carved of grey Montayna marble. He looked anxious and dyspeptic. Piera poked his belly to see if he would belch; then all at once she wheeled round and darted up the stairs in a fifth the time it had taken her to come down them.

  The upstairs hall was dark and smelled of dusty velvet. She listened at her father’s door. Silence. Count Orlant was still asleep. On hot days he generally slept away the afternoon on his old leather couch, though he never meant to. Piera went back down the stairs smartly, trip-trip-trip, swung round the newel post using Cupid as a fulcrum, and went off to her great-aunt’s room.

  Auntie—so she was always called, and the servants called her Countess Aunt—was very old. She had been very old during all Piera’s life. She had birthdays, like other people; but she could no
t possibly remember them, as Piera remembered all her birthdays since the eleventh one; and what difference could a ninety-fifth birthday make? Whether she was ninety-three or ninety-four or ninety-five, Auntie sat in her straight-backed chair, wearing a black dress and grey shawl, and sometimes dozed and sometimes did not. Her face was netted with countless dry lines radiating from her mouth and the corners of her eyes. Her features, nose, cheekbones, cheek-hollows, were as if obliterated by that network of tiny lines. Most of her teeth were gone, her lips sunken. Her eyes were like her grandniece’s eyes, grey, translucent. Auntie was not dozing this afternoon. She looked at Piera with clear grey eyes across the gulf of eighty years.

  “Auntie, did you ever dream you could fly?”

  “No, my dear.”

  Auntie usually answered No.

  “This afternoon when I was lying down, I dreamed I could float. All it takes is knowing you can. You just push off from the wall, so, with one finger, holding your breath, and then take long steps, you see? and to change direction you just push off the wall again. I’m sure I was doing it. I came clear downstairs without touching Shall I hold wool for you?”

  Auntie’s hands had got too stiff years ago for knitting or embroidery, but she liked to hold needles and wool, or a panel and silk, and doze with them; and she particularly liked to wind the hanks of wool and silk into balls. Piera also enjoyed this. She could bold hanks for Auntie for an hour, watching the red or blue or green yarn slip off her parallel hands and gleam in Auntie’s stiff, deliberate fingers winding it round and round and round.

  “Not now, my dear.”

  “Is it time for your tea?”

  Auntie said nothing; it was not time for her tea. She dozed, and her grandniece slipped away. She looked into the kitchen, an enormous low room darkened by the oaks outside. The house of Valtorsa, built in 1710, was screened from the lake by trees and faced the valley and the foothills: old Itale Sorde’s notion of building his house right on the water had been one of his foreign fancies. No one was in the kitchen now but Mariya the cook, gutting a hen. Piera came and looked.

  “What’s that, Mariya?”

  “The crop, contesina.”

  “All full of seeds, yes…What’s that?”

  “An egg, contesina, didn’t you ever see an egg?”

  “Not inside a hen. Look, there’s more of them!”

  “It’s that old fool Maati, I told him the brown hen with white specks and he brought the Kiassafonte hen instead, and her head off already, the old fool. She’s old but she was a fine layer. Look there, the bitty eggs, like beads on a necklace…” The stout woman and the girl peered into the blood-scented innards, Mariya roused to momentary interest by Piera’s interest.

  “But how do they get there?”

  “Why, the he-bird…” Mariya shrugged.

  “Yes, I know, the he-bird,” Piera murmured. She sighed, wrinkling her nose at that dry smell of blood. “Are you going to bake this afternoon, Mariya?”

  “Thursday afternoon?”

  “Oh, I knew you weren’t, I just asked…Where’s Stasio?”

  “In the fields.”

  “Everybody’s in the fields all day, they might as well have died and gone to heaven. I wish winter would come!” Piera spun round to make her skirt balloon out, investigated a huge iron soup-kettle hanging in a corner of the hearth, then wandered out. Her domain was desolate. All the farm people were getting the late hay in, Mariya had nothing to say, Auntie was asleep, the count was asleep, the governess was off on her holiday, it was too dull to stay indoors and too hot to go outdoors, and she could not go to see Laura because Itale was leaving tomorrow, leaving all at once for the city, forever. She wandered to the front room with its drawn blinds, marble fireplace with more marble Cupids, its long, shiny, empty floor and sparse, stiff furniture. The floor looked cool; she knew it was cool, and was tempted to lie down on it flat on her stomach as she had used to do on hot afternoons. But she was too old, in her garnet skirt and linen blouse, to go crawling on the floor. She curled up on the windowseat and peered out between the shutter and the frame at the empty, shady side yard. The whole trouble was that there was nobody to talk to, nobody to understand what she did not understand, nothing to do with the life that filled her, nothing to do…Piera sat still, her feet tucked under her, her hand holding aside the corner of the linen blind so that she could see the same dull bit of the yard and the foothills building up towards Sinviya Mountain, and she was sad, sad, sad, with the dull, deep, immense sadness of August, of a hot eternal afternoon of August.

  The Sorde house was also silent, but under the summer trance there was some coming and going, now and then the sound of voices. Itale’s bedroom was hot; he had opened the window to get air, indifferent to the bar of fiery sunshine that lay across the floor. He was in shirtsleeves and his hair, wet with sweat, stuck up in tangles above his forehead. He was sorting through papers, putting most of them back in a tin box, leaving out a few to take with him. Soon done with the task, he shoved the box back under the table and stood up. The first breath of wind broke the day’s great stillness: a catspaw streaked the lake near shore, taking long to disappear, and the topmost paper of the little pile on the desk stirred. He put his hand on it mechanically, then looked down. Not this time a dream, O Liberty.…It was a poem on the revolution of Naples he had written last winter; his friends in Amiktiya had thought it very fine. He began to stuff the papers into the valise open on the bed. Metastasio’s words to his mistress, sung in the streets of Naples by a people briefly free, went on in his head, I am not dreaming this time…Non sogno questa volta, non sogno libertà!—over and over, like the cricket-chant, till he stopped listening. The breath of wind had passed. The bar of sunlight lay across the bare floor, intolerably bright.

  A knock; Laura came in at his word. “Here’s the linens. Mother’s finishing a shirt for you to wear tomorrow.”

  “All right. Thanks.”

  “Can I help?”

  “All done except for these.” He began stuffing the clean shirts into the valise, needing something to occupy him in Laura’s presence; each felt oppressed, unnatural, and aware of the other’s feeling so.

  “Let me. You’re folding them all wrong.”

  “Oh, well.” He let Laura pack the shirts.

  “Piera said she had a book of yours.”

  “The Estenskar—get it from her when she’s done with it. You ought to read it. Don’t post it to me, it’s a contraband edition.” He stood looking out the window again. “It’s going to be a real storm tonight.”

  “I hope so.” Laura straightened up and watched with him the slow faint massing of clouds in the southwest, behind the Hunter.

  “Ten to one Count Orlant hasn’t got his hay in from Arly’s Field. Every year I can remember he’s racing a storm for that hay.”

  “I hope it’s a huge storm…”

  “Why?”

  There was no one but Itale who could ask her “Why?” and smile because he knew the answer. There was no other man to whom she could talk as an equal, whom she could trust absolutely. There were beloved parents, relatives, friends, but one brother only.

  “I wish I could go too.”

  He went on looking at her and finally asked, “Why?” in a different tone, a voice full not of unconscious but conscious, regretful love.

  “Why are you going?”

  “I’m obliged to, Laura.”

  “I’m obliged not to.”

  Neither was able to put that fact in question.

  Among women, all of whom he desired, all of whom baffled and frightened him, among them all there was one sister only.

  “Will you go to Evalde, Laura?”

  Until he went to college he and she had gone every year at dawn of the spring equinox across the lake to the gulf of Evalde, where a river broke from caverns in a high cascade to the lake. On the shore there was a high rock curiously marked, called the Hermit’s Rock; Count Orlant ascribed the markings to druids, others, dub
ious of druids, said it marked the place where St Italus the Missionary had preached to the heathen tribes of Val Malafrena. The spirit it roused in the brother and sister was heathen enough; to them in adolescence the true year began with that silent course before dawn across the lake and arrival on that shore, a solitary celebration of rock and mist and light above the waters.

  “Yes, I will.”

  “In Falkone.”

  She nodded.

  “And you’ll write.”

  “Of course. But will you? Real letters? You wrote such stupid letters before you came home!”

  “I couldn’t explain about being under house arrest. Everything got so complicated…” Laura was at last getting the whole story of Müller, Von Haller, and Gentz, when her mother came in; she and Itale had been laughing, they felt ashamed of laughing on the day before Itale left, knowing that their mother had wept for his going. Laura escaped, and Eleonora showed him the shirt she had ironed herself. “To wear tomorrow,” she said. She was used to the inadequacies of life, to the shirt ironed because the words cannot be said, or will do no good. He was not.

  “Mother, you do understand—” He stopped.

  “I think so, dear. I only wish you were happier about it yourself.” She looked into his valise. “Will you wear your blue coat?”

  “How can I be happy if father—”

  “You mustn’t hold anger against him, dear.”

  “I don’t. Only if he—” Itale stammered slightly when he was keyed up. “If he’d try to understand that I’m trying to do right!”

  Eleonora was silent; then she said, mild and tenacious, “You mustn’t hold anger against him, Itale.”

  “Believe me, I try not to!” he said with his passionate candor and seriousness, so that she turned to him smiling. “But if we could only talk to each other, if I could explain to him—”