A Life

by Italo Svevo

  One evening he found himself hurrying along behind a woman who had glanced at him in passing. Dressed in black, she was holding her skirt very high and showing a delicate foot shod in an elegant gleaming shoe, a black stocking, a trim ankle on a body agile and not too slim. Alfonso caught a glimpse of a very white neck, but not of her face.

  He followed her resolutely, overtook her, then waited for her like a little dog. The lady seemed to laugh and glance at him, and he felt encouraged enough to think of approaching her. It was the first time he found himself in this predicament. He hesitated, and thus was forced to quicken his pace. She crossed the Corso and turned into Via Cavana; she would have to pass by the library. “At worst I can go in there,” thought Alfonso, to give himself an escape route.

  He went ahead and stopped at the door of the library. She passed by; a headlamp lit up the whiteness of her neck and made the polish on her shoes gleam, but she did not look at him, which for some time took away Alfonso’s desire to follow her. She went slowly up the SS Martiri slope and below the Law Courts, while from the pavement Alfonso merely followed her with his eyes. Then when she had almost got to the top of the slope, he moved on up to the Law Courts. He saw her figure outlined against the sky, its curves clear as if seen in close up. Another instant of hesitation and he would lose sight of her; there was no time to reflect; his desire spoke openly and imperiously, urging him to rush so that he came up to her before she had reached level ground. He was flustered but so tired that he very nearly abandoned his resolve from a short time before. He approached her with the same idea in his mind that had made him run up from the Law Courts. “Signora …” he said, and raised his hat; but he was panting so hard as he came to a halt that he could not go on. A blue eye looked at him frostily, and finding himself unprepared for speech, since he had been concentrating only on running after her, he moved aside to let her pass; he caught his breath again, as glad now of being prevented from acting as he had been afraid before. The desires that had seized him so quickly left him as quickly; a stab of fear or tension had been enough to make him forget them.

  For some time he followed some woman every evening, only well-dressed ones, for the object of his dreams was certainly not in rags; and at every pursuit he deluded himself that he had found her. The compulsions always ended in the same way. His firmest resolves were overcome by shyness, and a discouraging gesture on the woman’s part, or even an indiscreet glance from a passer-by, was enough to make him desist.

  But he came to realize from experience that what prevented him from finding love was not only his shyness but also his doubts and hesitations and even that ideal brought in from the country, put away in a corner but never quite abandoned. This ideal would suddenly appear when Alfonso had quite forgotten it and its splendour would make him despise his miserable reality.

  He had an amorous adventure or two, but this was no sooner begun than he abruptly abandoned it due to either an awakening of moral conscience or merely a desire to avoid sacrificing his study-hours.

  For some years he remembered with regret a girl called Maria, with fair hair of purest gold and a slim figure which seemed not to be affected by the shining weight she bore on her head. One evening he had accosted her and, bold like all timid people when forcing themselves to be brave, at once declared his love for her. Maria, who was, so she said, a companion to an old lady, must have been in a state similar to his own, for to his great surprise she listened seriously and with emotion to his wordy though sincere outburst of repressed emotion. She was due to leave a few days later, but as a result of his insistent begging, she granted him an appointment before that. Meanwhile, his evening study-hours had become the most important thing in his day. The appointment was during those hours, and at the last moment he decided not to go. Later he felt bitter regret, but could do nothing about it as he never saw her again.

  Not that he renounced his skirt-chasing. It made him dream better. Then he grew ashamed of the habit and suffered a lot one day on realizing that Gustavo had guessed what he had been up to.

  Till then he had been a kind of master to Gustavo. Wanting to help the Lanuccis, he had tried to lead him back in the right direction. The young man had listened seriously to Alfonso’s teaching but opposed it with his own firm and simple objections: work being usually hard and ill-paid, he preferred to live as a poor man and be free rather than as a slightly richer one and be a slave.

  All of a sudden Alfonso found that he had become the pupil and the other the teacher.

  “What fun d’you get out of it?” asked Gustavo in surprise, interrupting one of his pursuits of a woman.

  Boorish though Gustavo was, he spoke serenely of subjects that were deeply moving and disturbing to Alfonso, who envied him. Though more adult and more intelligent, in this important aspect he was inferior. There was weakness in his disordered strength, while Gustavo’s thin, anaemic face shone with health and serenity.

  Alfonso did not feel unhappy. He found happiness partly in study itself, partly in ambition, a hunger for glory. He felt himself superior to others, and though he did not yet know how he would gain this glory, fortified his hopes by a love of study which had become a passion. To his hours in the library were added as many more at home, and they were still not enough. Study invaded his office, lunch and supper hours, and was robbing him of many hours’ sleep every day.

  During a particularly active phase he suggested giving Lucia lessons in Italian syntax. It would be pleasant to learn while teaching.

  The suggestion sent the old Lanuccis into a flutter, and the father told Gustavo to join in these lessons too. He even became enthusiastic. He tried to show great diligence and made Alfonso dictate definitions of parts of speech which he intended learning by heart, sure that it was mere lack of preparation and not of intelligence that prevented him from understanding. Then he never appeared again and only remembered to excuse himself the first two times, though with good grace and repeating how much he had enjoyed that first lesson.

  Signora Lanucci formally handed over Lucia to Alfonso. The first lessons were given in the living-room, the others in Alfonso’s room, as the living-room at some hours was not quiet enough. Alfonso took his duties seriously, and Signora Lanucci’s enthusiasm eventually persuaded him that he was also doing Lucia a real kindness by these lessons.

  They had started with Puoti but soon changed the programme, both bored to death. Lucia had not understood a thing, and Alfonso knew it all.

  For some time Alfonso had been reading Tommaseo’s synonyms. He decided to make Lucia study those instead of grammar.

  “At least one doesn’t have any system to cope with,” he told her “though in fact there is one. One would never realize one had not grasped it because it’s disconnected, every page and article standing on their own. Study these and one fine day you’ll find to your surprise that you’ve built up a whole building and conquered the Italian language …”

  What he most loved in these lessons was giving introductory talks. After that both Lucia’s ignorance and the details of teaching bored and wearied him. Lucia managed to seem capable and clever for the first two lessons because she understood the many subtle differences between the words ‘abandon’ and ‘leave’. She took the huge volume with her and learnt that paragraph by heart. In the third lesson, seeing that the girl had followed him so easily till then, Alfonso declared that they could proceed more rapidly; about a quarter of the work was already known to him, and he was in a hurry to get to where he could begin learning himself. She wanted nothing better than to go a long way quickly. She loved him, or at least thought he loved her, which stirred her deeply. On his side Alfonso was quite fond of Lucia at that time; he had found no one to take Maria’s place, and Lucia acted as a substitute. He did not describe his longings but just taught her, and the dogmas and theories which he produced between synonyms were enough to relieve his bitterness. Lucia’s little face, not intelligent but attentive in a way that seemed to come more from homage than self-in
terest, made him forget Sanneo’s restless eyes and rough words.

  Sometimes he was put out by Lucia’s ignorance and would become violent when he realized that his explanations were not understood or his former ones forgotten. Subtle distinctions did penetrate now and again into that brain of hers, but it was no home for them, and they left it again after a very short stay. If the same idea came up a second time, he had to introduce it formally all over again, and then the anger oozing from the teacher’s every pore destroyed the calm needed by the pupil for thought. When he asked her to repeat his explanations, she would raise her little nose, then, smiling but pale, say the opposite of what Alfonso had said, or hastily produce some phrases that had stuck in her mind without worrying much about their meaning. Alfonso, so as not to lose patience, would silently repeat maxims of goodness and tell himself that he must not offend someone of lesser intelligence.

  “Lesser intelligence is something to be pitied,” he was shouting a week later. “But not lesser application!”

  In fact the girl was no longer studying. With an immense effort her brain reached a certain point, then stopped because it was tired, almost saturated. When the lessons began, her mother, being used to school systems—in order to find her daughter enough time for this new occupation—had arranged a timetable by which an hour of the day was set aside for preparation. This hour the girl had regularly spent, not studying in her room, but with the rest of the family at table listening to her father’s stories. Then she would sit restlessly, nagged by her mother’s calls for more zeal, and by her own wish to make a good impression on Alfonso, and positively tortured by the fear he might shout at her if she stayed there! She did stay, from inertia, resigned to enduring Alfonso’s cutting observations and far preferring his blows, rather than trying to struggle by herself with concepts which he had explained only briefly. She could have learnt them by heart, but that was not enough; if she forgot one word, that was bound to be the essential one, according to Alfonso.

  Alfonso was not a good teacher because he failed to appreciate any efforts by his pupil. He very rarely praised her and then only when sorry for some harsh word and hoping to avoid her tears, but never because of some answer that was nearly correct. He had deluded himself about a vocation for teaching, which he enjoyed not from any fondness for his pupil. Lucia’s progress was of little or no account to him. He was offended she did not learn more, and on irksome days, after having had to put up with others’ anger himself, he would have an outburst.

  It was surprising Lucia did not lose patience and suspend those lessons, which caused her so much agony and were of such little use. She did not want to. In fact at the end of every lesson, when Alfonso, saying goodbye, became milder and treated her with his usual respect, she promised herself to study really hard so as to deserve such treatment during the lesson too. How lovely it would have been to spend that hour too as friends, admiring each other, which she could so easily do on her side. After that hour of forced effort, study seemed easier and more pleasant to her than it had before the lesson, which had helped to rub off the rust on her brain formed during a day spent working at her sewing. She promised herself to get up earlier next morning to begin studying again; but night plunged her back into her usual lethargy.

  No, she did not want the lessons suspended, but her dislike of them showed by the fact that she would snatch at any excuse to avoid one. On some evenings she had to visit a friend, and on many others, for lack of a better excuse, she felt unwell. One evening, Gustavo, seeing her pretending to be gloomy and listless since Alfonso’s entry, and not realizing the purpose of her indisposition, asked: “Been taken ill very sudden, haven’t you?”

  There was no need of this warning to show Alfonso the sort of love for study which he had managed to inculcate in his pupil, but he found it not unpleasant to be feared.

  Once Lucia plucked up the courage to refuse a lesson without making any excuse. She went to open the door for Alfonso and just announced, with a loud laugh copied from a friend, that she would not be having her lesson that evening.

  “Why not?” asked Alfonso with a frown. He was not laughing but unpleasantly surprised.

  “Let’s spend the time having a laugh, not studying,” replied Lucia bravely.

  “Hadn’t we better stop these lessons altogether, as you don’t seem to like them much?”

  Lucia blanched, terrified at once. Her mother came to her rescue and explained to Alfonso that Lucia had not found time to do her homework and so was having no lesson that evening lest they got too far ahead before she mastered what they had gone over together. Then he too spent a much more pleasant evening than if he had studied with Lucia. He chattered away and was listened to devoutly.

  At their next lesson he was more brutal than usual and even called her an ignoramus. He had given her half-an-hour to find an answer which she could not give at once, and behaved as if she had committed a crime by being unable to think of it in that interval; he forgot that where there is no blood it cannot be made to flow. He declared, for lack of other cutting phrases, that it was time to suspend lessons that were producing no results, and got to his feet to suspend this one at once. The girl had not dared declare frankly till then that she could not say what she did not know. She looked up at the ceiling for a reply, made sounds of impatience to diminish Alfonso’s own impatience, and gave a smile so forced that it was pitiable.

  At Alfonso’s crude announcement she burst into tears, got up, left, banged the door violently and flung herself into the arms of her mother, who was alone in the living-room. Alfonso, alarmed by the effect he had produced, would willingly have stopped her to apologize.

  He followed her and was struck by a look of intense fury flung across the room at him by Signora Lanucci, who was holding the girl tight to her breast. Lucia was sobbing so hard that she had been unable to explain anything so far. On seeing him, the Signora said grimly: “What have you done to the poor girl?”

  Very embarrassed, Alfonso replied: “I shouted at her because she’d done no studying!”

  “Of course she’s studied! I saw her myself!”

  Lucia’s anger, like all weak people’s, burst out violently because long repressed. Between sobs she now yelled at Alfonso three clearly distinguishable insults: “Fool, idiot, ass!”

  In her emotion the fine manners learnt with difficulty during recent years left her, and she was reduced to the words, tone and gestures of Gustavo. Alfonso was offended but speechless and uncertain whether to defend or to save himself from her anger by taking refuge in his room.

  Signora Lanucci, pained at this break in the harmony she hoped to see between the two young people, turned on Lucia: “It’s you who’re the idiot and fool! Will you be silent?” and she pushed her away.

  Lucia went and flopped into a chair but did not seem to have had her say yet: “He thinks he’s clever.”

  “Will you be quiet?” interrupted Signora Lanucci threateningly.

  Lucia went on sobbing for another half-hour.

  Signora Lanucci wanted to minimize the incident and laughed about it to Alfonso, who felt in no state to imitate her.

  “But I do want peace in my home, and I realize that the only way to have it is to stop these lessons. Such a pity!”

  She could share her regret without fear of arousing Alfonso’s suspicions, because at the start of the lessons she had explained how she hoped Lucia would gain from his instruction. “Men, particularly those with a real enthusiasm for study,” Signora Lanucci had said with a flattering bow towards Alfonso, “are better teachers than women, who love petty things and get lost in useless detail, so harmful to an understanding of the whole.” But men, she was just realizing, had other defects that were just as damaging. In spite of these defects she went on being surprisingly kind to Alfonso.

  Lucia less so. For a week she did not address a word to him. She served him at table as her mother ordered, but without uttering a word. Signora Lanucci, in consolation, would wink at him, laugh
and turning to Lucia say ironically:

  “Just hand that dish to Signor Alfonso, will you? D’you hate him so much you’ll let him die of hunger?”

  Lucia obeyed, looking very glum; Alfonso, just as glum, let himself be served with a cold word of thanks.

  One evening, on suddenly entering the living-room with Gustavo, who had the keys of the house, he found old Lanucci and his wife looking angry and Lucia with eyes red from weeping. Evidently the two old people had been preaching at her. He sat down at table, pretending that he had noticed nothing.

  He regretted his behaviour but did not know how to ask for pardon. The poor girl’s mute attempts at excusing herself came back to him as he thought it over in the evening or in the office, and he had to confess that his rage had been both stupid and brutal. He concluded that it was his duty to meet Lucia halfway, beg her pardon, and stop obviously making her wretched. But when he saw that stupid, expressionless face again, with its projecting cheek-bones and set sulk, the kind words he had ready stuck in his throat.

  Lucia, without looking him in the face, after some hesitation went up to him, held out her hand and said:

  “Excuse me, Signor Alfonso, I was wrong; let’s make it up!”

  Alfonso, touched, shook her hand warmly.

  “The fault was mostly mine; it’s you who must excuse me!”

  Lucia gave him a grateful glance which made her less ugly, and soon had the calm relaxed air of one who has forgotten any misunderstandings. She often laughed and quickly went back to her affected ways.

  He was sorry to have been outdone in generosity and was less at ease. He, the person of culture, the teacher, should have been the first to give way. This regret, slight as it was, continued to worry him even when lying in bed. There were always insignificant facts such as these disturbing his life, in which nothing important ever happened, and every night he would brood over some ill-considered remark uttered by himself, or by someone else, whose real meaning he had only just realized, and he would either regret not having revenged himself with a sharp answer or blame himself for having produced an answer that was unjustifiably brusque.