A Life

by Italo Svevo

  In the living-room they were talking, and he listened mechanically. It was Signora Lanucci and her husband; he could distinguish nothing but the sound of their voices, and only when they passed by his door on their way to their room did he clearly hear Lanucci exclaim with a good-humoured little laugh, probably to end their discussion: “Real lovers’ quarrels, these are!”

  He already had suspicions about Signora Lanucci’s aims for him but had considered them till then not so much real aims as hopes which could flatter but not alarm. Those few words overheard by chance, the end of a longer conversation, seemed to prove that not only had they hopes of him but were plotting against him, against his liberty. Both mother’s and daughter’s behaviour fitted in with this. The mother had handed over to him, who in his simplicity had wanted to teach her daughter, not a pupil but a bride.

  He remembered some words of advice from her which could have had a double meaning. The daughter had put up with everything rather than see the lessons interrupted as he had threatened. Now making up the quarrel must have revived their hopes.

  Should he get indignant? Their attempt deserved it because, had it succeeded, his situation would have become much worse.

  The Lanuccis were in a nasty situation themselves though, with the two men in the family unable to better their state. So safe did he feel from the nets spread by Signora Lanucci that he could look at the situation quite objectively and realize that never again would he ever have a chance of doing such a good deed as marrying Lucia. What would her future be? Probably she would remain an old maid, uselessly hanging on to all those ‘society manners’, as her mother called them, till the end of her life. In his dreams he was capable of heroic action; but next day his bearing towards her was less affectionate. When alone he saw the situation quite differently from when he was with Lucia; he found excuses, forgave her, even felt remorse at being incapable of acting nobly enough, recalled the love which Lucia had shown for him by her patience in putting up with his brutality and by the violence of her misery on realizing she could not reach her goal. But face to face with Lucia he noticed her prominent cheek-bones. No, he did not desire her! He was free and wanted to remain so.

  “I’m ill!”

  This conclusion was reached after making a series of observations about himself. The deep gloom which turned everything grey and dull for him had seemed till then a natural result of his discontent; his insomnia he thought must be due to brain agitation brought on by night study; and an abnormal restlessness he sometimes noticed in himself must be because his muscles and lungs were insisting on exercise and pure air. At other times a few hours’ freedom was enough to restore his vivacity and calm. But now he was constantly, monotonously, obsessed by one vision which made him incapable of taking part in the present, hearing and examining anything said by others. Sanneo, after giving very lengthy instructions, asked him in a changed tone: “Do you understand?” That change of tone tore Alfonso away from his fantasies. He said, “yes,” just in order to be left in peace and fall back into his dreams as soon as possible. But he had understood nothing, heard nothing and was even incapable of worrying. He went slowly off to his place, taking short steps so as to gain time and to interrupt his beloved visions as little as possible.

  He still went on spending every evening in the library, though he came out as he had entered, with no new ideas because his mind was shut to them. He could only re-evoke the past, complete some megalomaniac dream in which he saw himself showing off his knowledge before others. A vague sensation of madness weakened his nerves. He feared and avoided people whom he did not know, and a passer-by at night made him start with fright. He felt awful in the dark and quivered at the faintest sound. Crouching in bed, his head under the covers, he would lie for hours unable to conquer sleep. What a difficult conquest it was! How could he think of nothing? Sometimes he went to bed really tired and felt he would only have to close his eyes to fall asleep. But on flinging himself on the bed, sleep deserted him, and when hours later he managed to lie quiet on some part of the bed, he had to be content with a sleep lacking depth in which his brain went on working dumbly and instinctively, and none the less tiringly for that.

  “You’re unwell, it seems to me,” said Cellani, seeing him pale, with eyes staring. “Take a couple of weeks off if you need ’em.”

  Alfonso did not accept at once and had to go and ask Cellani that evening for what he had refused that morning.

  Sanneo, rather brusquely, also granted him the required permission. For some time now he had put an assistant with Alfonso, one Carlo Alchieri, an artillery lieutenant on half-pay because of a weak chest. As the small pension granted him was not enough, he had joined Maller’s. He was young with an old man’s face and a full drab beard: outwardly he looked strong enough. He was the only one to curse on hearing of Alfonso’s holiday, because he knew he would have to bear all that burden of work alone. Sanneo was not one to take other clerks away from their usual jobs to help out someone temporarily overwhelmed by work. Sanneo would say a clerk who found himself in that position was officially a substitute for the one away.

  All Alfonso needed to combat his inertia was to be out in the open air, knowing he could stay there some time for the sake of his health. He longed to feel well again. Till then he had not felt any regret for his weakness, thinking of it as do holy men in India who find an increase of intelligence by annihilating the material. But his state of boredom, of greyness and monotony, was not that of an intelligent person.

  The sun was just up when Alfonso jumped out of bed with a violent effort of will. He did not know where to go or where chance would take him; there were plenty of hills around the town.

  First he thought of following a company of soldiers going out on manoeuvres. But the sound of their heavy measured tread on the cobble-stones irritated him. He went up Via Stadion almost at a run to get away from them, as they were taking the same road. He wanted to reach the cliff-side. The effort would have been enough for that first day. But before he was past the last houses of the city, low and rustic, some thatched and painted in bright earthy colours, he had already changed his mind. Now he wanted a green hillside lying on his right, not a grim cliff. He crossed a wooden bridge over the wide but nearly dry bed of a stream; a thread of water ran amid white stones. He crossed a wide avenue on the other side and at last felt bare earth beneath his feet, living grass soft beneath his weight. Already tired and panting, he flung himself on the ground. He was in a copse of young trees with slim trunks, with tufty tops wavering in the morning breeze. This sound joined with the murmer of water trickling into a pool near a low white house only a few steps away.

  Again he was seized with a desire to run, a yearning to get far away. As he climbed, the trees became thicker and stronger. Here and there bushes held him up, and he forced himself ahead with febrile impatience, without the strong man’s calm step. He crossed another road and strode through another copse, still climbing aimlessly. The blood was churning in his head and his breath failing, but this only stopped him for very short stops. Exhaustion only overwhelmed him when he came up against a high wall blocking his way. He had climbed for less than an hour before flinging himself on the ground completely exhausted; it seemed to him a well-deserved rest.

  For a minute or two he was terrified by a violent beating in his heart and temples. He took off his jacket, put it under his head and lay down on dry ground by an oak. Shortly after, though his blood was still agitated, his lungs opened, and he took a deep breath, deeper than he had taken for a long time. He looked at the little field around and enjoyed seeing it clear and green and smiling, as if it were his own and would one day be his home. A corner of the city was visible: some twenty close-packed houses, then others scattered one by one on the opposite hillside. Beyond was a patch of blue sea with motionless boats. The clear sky, cloudless to the horizon, the green of the country, those houses flung down haphazardly, reminded him of an oleograph in which colours had been levelled out by the machine, th
e painter’s idea muted by reproduction, its light and movement gone.

  Like a child, smiling, with closed fists, he fell asleep.

  He had an absurd dream about Maria, whom he recognized by her bright coloured dress. She told him that she knew that circumstances had prevented him from coming to that appointment. She forgave and loved him.

  VIII

  ALCHIERI, RUSHED AND FLUSTERED, holding a bundle of papers, was hurrying towards the cash-desk when he saw Alfonso, hat in hand, about to enter Sanneo’s room to announce his return to the office. He gave a cry of delight, tried to stop Alfonso, who passed by without noticing him, then grew calmer and sat down next to Giacomo, on duty in the passage and intent on deciphering a newspaper half aloud. Finding no one else to tell, Alchieri confided to Giacomo that this was the first time for a fortnight he had sat down to rest and not to write.

  Sanneo greeted Alfonso cordially, then, turning back to a huge register on which he was writing in his big script, asked if he was well. Without waiting for a reply, in phrases interrupted by work which at intervals called for all his attention, he spoke of some letters left pending which needed answering as soon as possible. Then he handed him a few, to the accompaniment of explanations, which Alfonso only half understood, referring to things that had happened during his absence, a period which seemed to Alfonso much more than a fortnight away. Sanneo dismissed him with a piece of good news.

  “Signor Alchieri will continue to help you—he works quite well … it seems.”

  Alchieri stopped him in the passage and tried to hug him in thanks for returning at the exact date promised.

  “I couldn’t take much more!”

  Then he too began to explain various business matters and, there and then in the passage, handed over all the letters he had in his hand, statements of account or advice of drafts. He could not wait to be rid of them.

  With those letters in one hand and his hat in the other, Alfonso went to pay his respects to Cellani.

  He found him opening the post. With one snip of his scissors he opened an envelope, took out the contents which he threw on one side, and before putting down the envelope gave it a careful glance against the light. He too went on working while talking to Alfonso; but when the latter, with his usual shyness, murmured his thanks, reminding him that he owed his holiday to him, Cellani got up and went to shake Alfonso’s hand with a friendly smile on his pale face. His long sportsman’s body, elegant but weak, seemed borne along rather than self-propelled, so little energy was there in his movements and so exactly and unhesitatingly did he pass through the narrow space between desk and chair.

  “You’re looking fine,” he said to Alfonso, glancing almost enviously at the latter’s sun-tanned face. He was in a hurry to return to his own place. Shaking Alfonso’s hand again he said laughing: “Now …” and made a show of writing very fast with the pen in his left hand.

  Alfonso found that Alchieri had diminished his pending tray, and, sitting in his place, he decided under the encouragement of Cellani’s welcome to get it all done and allow no more to accumulate. Alchieri, coming from a barracks, had introduced in only a fortnight a system of work far preferable to Alfonso’s, who found it easy, at least at first, to keep to this. His improved serenity, reinforced by the open air, made him capable of greater concentration, effort though it always was.

  Even when back at work he continued his open-air cure, as he called it. Every morning he walked for an hour or two, usually towards the plateau because he needed the climb. Up he went with his measured pace and tramped along the whole of the wide Opicina road, whose enormous length took him up to the plateau in a single, wide, gently sloping semi-circle around the town. Alfonso would rest on this road where a lane branched off towards Longera.

  From there he saw the vast, silent deserted plateau with its innumerable stone hillocks of all shapes; pointed, round, squat heaps of stones fallen from above and arranged as haphazardly as was Monte Re on the horizon, with its wide back, gentle slope at one side and almost perpendicular drop on the other.

  Alfonso never passed that point, partly because he had no time. From there he could see the city with its white houses, and the sea, usually in morning calm as if the few hours of light had not yet been enough to rouse it. The green of the promontories on the left of the city and the colours of the sea contrasted strangely with the grey stones of the plateau.

  He descended into a city quieter than he ever knew it except when leaving the library. Near Longera he passed without entering an oblong village halfway down the valley, hugging the mountain as if for refuge, its houses all clustered together, though it could easily have found air and space by encroaching on surrounding fields. People were already beginning to swarm on to the village streets at that hour, and from a distance all the outer forms of human activities and destinies seemed suggested by those few figures moving about the narrow alleys of the little place. A boy’s quick run, which Alfonso could follow from one side of the village to the other; a peasant leaving home with his hat on and then, before moving on, calmly examining the sky, maybe to see whether to take an umbrella; in a more remote lane a man and woman were chattering away, maybe of love already at that hour; in a courtyard grain was being beaten amid so much movement that from a distance it could be mistaken for gaiety. Then Alfonso passed prosperous San Giovanni with its scattered houses, its little white church, empty during the week but so full on Sundays that not all the faithful could enter, and peasant-women, dressed in black wool edged with wide strips of blue or red silk, crowded the little square and made their devotions out in the open.

  Alfonso’s new way of life was damaging to his studies, because the first result of his frequent outings was a need for yet more air and an inability to stay shut up for long. Sometimes he would move towards the library on coming out of the office but could seldom stay there more than a half-hour; he would be seized by an invincible restlessness which took him out into the open to stand riveted to some quay, with no ideas or dreams in his head, his only preoccupation being to absorb that sea-breeze, whose beneficial effects he thought he could feel at once.

  Then he would go home and at supper still intend to spend the rest of the evening with a book, but weariness would overcome him, and he would go off into ten hours of calm and restful sleep.

  Yet it was precisely then that his ambition took definite form. He had found his path! He would lay the foundations of modern Italian philosophy by translating a good German work and at the same time writing an original work of his own. The translation remained purely an intention, but he did start on the original work: a title The Moral Idea in the Modern World and a preface in which he declared the aim of his work. This aim was theoretical and without any practical intention, which seemed to him quite new for Italian philosophy. The idea briefly laid out in the table of contents, beyond which Alfonso himself knew no more, was to show that the only basis for a moral idea in the world was the community’s advantage. The idea was not particularly original, but his development of it could become so if treated exclusively as a search for truth with no preoccupation about possible practical consequences. For this he lacked neither the courage nor the sincerity; when writing he had all the courage that he lacked in life, and studies undertaken purely for the sake of learning would have no effect on his sincerity. He did not know and cared less what elements were needed for literary success. He wanted to work, to work well, and success would come by itself.

  He did work well, but very little. Too often his thoughts were on the completed work, while phrases actually written could be counted on his fingers. Thus he imagined more and more qualities in a book which, because so far more or less non-existent, could not be damaged by his pen’s resistance. After some months, seeing that the result of his efforts was three or four short pages of preface, which promised to do and to attempt much while nothing was actually done or attempted at all, he felt very discouraged. Those pages represented the work of months, for no other had been done in th
e meantime. He had not been studying much, and those pages were the only progress he had made towards his goal; so small that it was equivalent to a tacit renunciation of all ambition.

  With more reason he could persuade himself that this lack of progress was due to renunciation, for he really did find himself happier at the bank and hating less the work that was in fundamental antagonism, so he thought, with the intellectual labours to which he wanted to dedicate himself. Alchieri had helped to make the bank less odious, but so, he considered, had the almost complete abandonment of his other more intelligent activities.

  For some time he tried to get back to reading at the civic library, even at the cost of leaving his philosophical writing aside for the moment. One evening Sanneo scolded him for a mistake. Although realizing that he deserved such rebukes, he was put out by the manner of their delivery, by an over-brusque word. At other times, he remembered, he had rid himself of the bitter mood aroused by these incidents in a clerk’s life by applying himself more fervently to the studies which would eventually pull him out of his position of inferiority. That was what took him back to the library after a long absence.

  He plunged into reading an Italian bibliographical journal. He felt that language was not obeying him and that he must go in for reading more Italian. For about an hour he read spontaneously and attentively—due to Sanneo’s brutality— a discussion about the authenticity of some of Petrarch’s letters. When he paused he felt satisfied; but the tiring of his brain reminded him of past readings; he felt an overwhelming sense of regret and of how much his life had changed.

  On raising his head he noticed that opposite him was sitting Macario, who was gazing at him indecisively.