Tancredi had seen it often, and he came quickly down and held the ladder for her.
The steps of the ladder were round and springy. She felt herself to be exceedingly brave, since she climbed up in the full expectation of falling. The higher she went the more the ladder wobbled - she couldn’t imagine how it had stayed so securely in place for Tancredi. She did not go all the way up, but stopped near the top, her face level with the blank countenance of the Virgin. There she stayed for some moments, eye to nonexistent eye, gripping the edges of the ladder. The pallid, erased face, only slightly larger than her own, had less the look of decay than of some utter forgetfulness, some monumental knowledge never imparted and now irretrievably mislaid.
She started to climb down.
‘The stars,’ called Tancredi. ‘Did you see the stars?’
‘Yes,’ she said. And then: ‘I think so.’
They all laughed. ‘Brava!’ they cried out as she put her foot down on the stone floor, and she herself laughed with relief and pleasure. She felt safe to look up at the fresco once more. But, having come so close, it had now receded farther from her than before - seemed hopelessly effaced. Yet her earlier impression stayed, and was the clearer one.
‘Now we should be getting home,’ Tancredi said. They walked out into the sun.
They shook hands, all of them, with great formality as though after the presentation of a medal.
‘Don’t stand here in the heat.’
‘Can you find the way?’
‘Many thanks.’
‘Not at all.’
They didn’t speak to one another walking across the first field, passing the cluster of trees. He saw that she was happy again, so there was no question to ask. When they reached the rise they looked back and waved. Filomena, Nestore, and Nelda stood in the doorway of the house, and now Nelda held the baby in her arms. But when they passed the crest of the hill, they were once more alone in the world. He took her hand as before because the rough grass, folding under their feet, was slippery as they went down. At one point he stopped and turned back to kiss her, and then they went on. As he did this he did not even look about - for this afternoon it was completely deserted, this country. There were just the solitary trees, the lake of grasses and red flowers, and two figures descending the upward path.
Eleven
Tancredi said: ‘My father - whom you knew -’
‘Of course,’ said Luisa, from the bed.
‘- liked to think of himself as detached. As being scarcely influenced by material considerations or by circumstances. The first being largely within his control and the second completely beyond it, he could afford to adopt such an attitude. Actually he was unable to contend with any sort of reality, and this was his means of protecting himself.’
‘Sensible,’ Luisa suggested. She moved her head to a cool place on the pillow but kept her eyes on Tancredi.
He shrugged. ‘He was a man of certain capacities, yet he never put these to any use, not even for his own satisfaction, because he feared the judgement of the world - feared, in fact, the unforeseeable consequences of any kind of action. He philosophized out of his own weakness. Afraid to compete with others, he chose to achieve nothing and to exonerate himself by referring to all men as equals.’
‘He may have believed it,’ she said.
‘He did not. His attitude, rather, was that he had magnanimously spared them his competition. Never having ventured, he implied he would have won.’
‘You’re hard.’
‘He invented his own life and the lives of those who impinged on him. After my mother’s death he created for her a character she had never possessed, and in this way managed to efface her memory for all of us. It was impossible for us, as children, to refer to our mother as having been in any degree fallible, or even human. We wouldn’t have required my father to mention her faults - which were relatively few. Had he merely implied that she occasionally cut her fingernails or brushed her teeth like the rest of us, I believe we would have embraced him. After a while the memory of my mother became boring - it was that boredom that attaches to any matter of which the truth may never be told. The very idea of her, circumscribed as it was at my father’s insistence, was a renunciation of one’s intelligence. He never remarried, and never had another association with a woman, as far as anyone knew. It was surprising he had married in the first place - one could scarcely credit him with so much organization. His life, as I’ve said, was a total unreality. He cut himself off from truth, from all tangible things.’
Luisa said: ‘Sometimes, surely, truth is closer to imagination - or to intelligence, to love - than to fact? To be accurate is not to be right.’
‘Oh - sometimes, sometimes,’ he said impatiently. She would not let him rest with his point of view. This caused him a physical uneasiness, and he shifted about, crossed one knee over the other. If she had not been ill, he would have lit a cigarette. She had been in bed for a week, though he had only heard of her illness that morning. It was odd, he thought, how the idlest gossip went round the district at once, while an important fact was never repeated. ‘But equally, don’t you agree, one can’t live without some facts; without anything - attestable.’
So this is why you make so many commitments, thought Luisa. ‘So this is why,’ she remarked, ‘you became an architect.’
He smiled. He lounged back in the chair. That was more like it, more what he had come for - to be explained and understood and put at his ease. The day was close, and this shuttered room smelling a little of medicines - or so he imagined, perhaps, because he saw the bottles there beside the bed - was a refuge, a hermit’s cave. He always considered her a sage - someone who could give the meanings of the riddles, show him how to make the puzzles come out. But that made her sound more like a conjurer at a fair. He didn’t come to see her perform, it wasn’t that - he came only when he really needed her. (This did not give the right impression either, because his feeling for her was sincere.) She was never disappointing - as others ultimately were, betraying at last by a word or a gesture that they were just as proud, as revengeful, as ambitious as anyone else.
He couldn’t understand why he had suddenly felt impelled to say these things about his father. It was all true enough, but it was something he seldom thought of now. He had had, like everyone else, an exceptionally unhappy childhood, but his later memories, of adolescence, were predominantly pleasant ones. These memories were frequently represented in single scenes, like paintings - paintings in clear colours, well preserved, perhaps a little over-cleaned. Sometimes he would see himself, a tall young man, walking on the unpaved country roads in the morning. (In these memories he was always taller, it was always morning, and the roads were still unspoiled by asphalt.) At other times he was on the beach at Pesaro, at his family’s summer house - studying while the others bathed, because he was usually sitting examinations in those days. Or with his sister - he in a white suit, she in a straight yellow dress that reached to her calf. This memory was particularly piercing, for Gabriella had been a tall, pliant beauty, a tulip of a girl, romantically sheltered, with no presentiment of the nervous spinsterhood in store for her. Looking at Luisa, Tancredi wondered: How can you bear it, this memory, this recollecting of things utterly and unthinkably past? He himself was already finding it intolerable to remember - not merely the people he would never speak with again, or the houses in which he could never hope to see them, but fragments of mood, light, sensation, which he couldn’t recapture and which, revealing themselves to him only in the subsequent act of remembering, then seemed to remain permanently and to accumulate significance in direct proportion to their increasing remoteness in his experience. The very word experience, at that moment, was more poignant to him than grief or love.
Then how shall I bear this later on, he wondered - for all the while he had in some way been thinking of Sophie and marvelling at the sadness he was storing up for himself. How shall I stand it?
‘Your memory is a little harsh,
’ Luisa said.
He stared at her.
‘We were talking of your father.’
‘Ah yes.’
‘He was a scholar. He had taken the trouble to know many things - to know them thoroughly, that is.’
Tancredi nodded. ‘He seldom erred, and never on the side of generosity.’
Luisa gave him up, her hand briefly lifted from the sheet to brush away his last remark. They were silent.
‘I’m afraid you’re tired,’ Tancredi said at last. He stood up, a darker, heavier, shorter man than the figure of his reminiscences. And older. He said: ‘She will be waiting for me.’
‘I’ve been thinking that.’
‘I came straight from town. She doesn’t know yet that you’re ill.’ Tancredi found the greatest difficulty in speaking of Sophie to Luisa. He could not bring himself to utter her name. He said, speaking as though he were dictating a formal letter of sympathy: ‘I hope you’re going to be well soon. I was so sorry to learn you were ill.’
‘Nothing serious,’ she said, taking his hand and smiling. ‘It gives me a chance to be alone with my thoughts.’
It’s all very well for you, he thought peevishly, with your thoughts.
‘Give her my love.’
‘Of course she’ll come to see you.’
‘I would like that.’
He kissed her hand and laid it back on the sheet, but he went on standing there looking at her. She was so composed, so prepared for anything, that he suddenly thought: Are you going to be really ill? Are you going to die? ‘Are you going to be all right,’ he asked, ‘if I leave you now?’
‘They’ll come as soon as you’ve gone. And there’s the bell - I only have to ring.’
He went to the door. ‘And forgive me,’ he said, ‘for taking up so much time with talk about my father - whom in any case, you knew as well as I.’
‘Whom I knew,’ she said.
Twelve
‘It’s nothing serious.’ He put down his glass and went on with his meal. ‘Or so she says.’
‘I must go to see her,’ Sophie said.
‘I spoke with the family before I left. Her son is there - the banker, what’s his name, Giorgio. They didn’t seem alarmed.’
‘I’ll go on Friday,’ she said.
‘Or tomorrow,’ he suggested.
‘But tomorrow - we were going to drive to the mountains.’
He thought: She has a streak of ruthlessness. He looked at her to chart this new discovery, but found after all only the desire to be with him. When people say ‘a streak’ like that, he reflected - ‘So-and-So has a streak of something’ - it is always in a pejorative sense: a streak of cruelty, of cowardice, of dishonesty. Kindness, sympathy, affection were considered more pervasive, apparently did not come in streaks.
‘Otherwise,’ he went on, ‘she was as always. Very calm, imposing.’
‘She has a noble streak.’
After a moment Tancredi said: ‘She said something strange - something that never occurred to me.’
‘What?’
‘A remark she made about my father. Not even a remark - merely a tone of voice, as I was leaving.’ He hesitated again. ‘No, nothing.’
For another idea had come to him now, and he stopped eating and looked again at Sophie. Everything he had said to Luisa that morning about his father had been directed at Sophie; it was only a step from his father’s unrealities to hers. The total lack of reference, in her behaviour with him, to her present position caused him, he realized, precisely the claustrophobic sensations he had been describing an hour earlier. It was as if she had taken leave of her senses - or come into their full possession at the expense of her reason; as if she had no capacity to consider her actions in the light of their consequences, as if she thought it could go on for ever, this disregard for the eventual course of her life, and his. She surely could not imagine that he had always lived this way, in such seclusion, with no expression of his personality other than as a lover. If only she had once asked him: ‘What are we to do?’ or ‘What is to become of us?’ - that, he felt distractedly, was all he asked. It seemed little enough - the least indication that she made in her mind some connexion with external things. What of the continuity of her own existence? She lived within society, a society that required one to give an account of oneself - not even a good account, but an account. He felt quite indignant on behalf of her relatives and friends, who must expect her home or look for news of her. The earth might be uninhabited, from the way she behaved.
Today, arriving at the house, Tancredi had found the certainty of her presence almost frightening. On weekdays, before lunch, Sophie went to sit at the end of the garden in the shade of the trees, and she waited there for him to come home. She could not hear the car, which arrived on the other side of the house, but she felt his presence before she heard his step and, not looking up from her book or letter, would smile with pleasure. He was sometimes late, but she stayed on in the garden until he came, although the sun began to burn through the trees and the cook’s son, who waited at table, looked out of the house repeatedly in despair.
Today, for the first time, he had almost expected, almost wished for, some disappointment - to find her, perhaps, more meagre, more pallid, diminished in his eyes like a cherished place revisited after an absence. Instead, of course, she had been disturbingly beautiful, dishearteningly pleased to see him. Glancing into her smiling, upturned face as he leaned down to kiss her, he had found it incredible that this woman had ever looked at him in any other way. She had once told him - and he longed to remind her of it - that their association was a threat to her; at one time, he knew, she had considered him unreliable and vain. He could scarcely believe that she had ever said such a thing, ever had a critical opinion of him. That time when she had coolly judged him now presented itself to him as a time of happiness.
Her love is perfect, he thought. What one always hears about - perfect love. Then he told himself, with relief and a certain satisfaction: I am not worthy of that. Not up to it at all. I am an ordinary person - a fallible, inconsistent, mortal man. Each adjective was successively pleasant to him, and he said them over in his head.
‘Shall we walk a little?’ he asked her, putting his napkin by his plate and pushing away the unfinished meal. ‘Is it too warm for you?’
She got up and walked to the edge of the covered terrace where they had been sitting. He came and took her arm, and they went down the double step and into the garden.
‘What a lovely dress,’ he suddenly said to her. Her beauty had seemed to him so remarkable as they sat at table that he could not keep from making at least this indirect reference to it. She was wearing a simple dress of a splendid colour, the sort of dress that might turn up in one of his memories.
She did not reply, and when they had reached the end of the path he said to her, knowing that he was actually speaking of his own preoccupation: ‘What’s the matter?’
She sat on the low stone wall that ran along the end of the garden. ‘You’re strange today.’
‘Am I?’ he said in corroboration.
She was running her hand slowly over the stone, stirring dust and bringing alarmed ants out of crevices. She was not looking at him, nor yet away. ‘Why is that?’
‘Why do you think it is?’ he asked idly, trying to collect himself because he knew that he must speak to her and that the matter was very serious.
‘Oh - you might be tired. You might be angry. It might be anything.’ She brushed her palms together, dusting them off, and went on in the same way: ‘You might have stopped loving me.’
‘Why would I do that?’ he asked with an inflection of real interest, as if he would be genuinely grateful to know.
‘Oh,’ she said again, ‘I don’t know. There wouldn’t need to be an explanation - not a plausible one, that is.’ Having cleaned her hand, she put it back on the dusty wall. ‘Anything might happen. You might find that you didn’t like the colour of my eyes.’
He
said gravely: ‘I don’t think that could ever be the reason.’ He put out his hand and turned her face up to his. He said again: ‘No. It could never be that.’ And again he spoke with a note of literal meaning, as though he were turning over the suggestion in his mind.
He dropped his hand, and she lowered her eyes. It seemed to him that he was more engaged than ever in this newly discovered dream world of hers; in the same way it had become more necessary for him to speak. He felt like a man obliged to commit some demeaning act, some sickening petty theft that, while leaving its victim destitute, will not bring any material benefit to himself. He must break into this state of hers not in order to make himself happy but only so that his existence might be comprehensible to him. He had not faced the possibility of losing her. He loved her still. It was the unreality of her attitude that was intolerable to him.
He thought, with an almost comic sense of his own situation: How absurd it is to propose to us that our actions are altogether composed of influences and the effects of our circumstances; that we are irrevocably cut off from our own will. There comes a moment when one must utter a single sentence, and the immense effort involved in that utterance is unmistakably the expenditure of will. He looked at her closely, still hoping to detect some justifying fault. But as before, when he had examined her face for a trace of callousness, she defeated him, and he could only see her as she was to appear in his memory. It was, so to speak, the reverse of saying to oneself: ‘I shall remember this’; he felt rather that here was a recollection, which must first be lived through. Since his nostalgia for her was inevitable, he preferred to embark on it as soon as possible - even in her presence.
He was about to speak; or so he told himself, as he sat there silent. Exchanging in his mind one pretext for delay after the other, he was like someone who, at the close of a beautiful day, constantly shifts his chair to enjoy the last of the light.
The Evening of the Holiday Page 8
