A Life

by Italo Svevo

  Very soon Maller got up and bowed goodbye to everyone. He moved towards Francesca, followed by an attentive look from Alfonso. Francesca did not seem to notice his approach but, when he was near, raised her eyes from her work without pretending to affect surprise, looked at him calmly and held out a little hand which he, as calmly, took in his.

  “Why do you ruin your eyesight by such work?”

  She withdrew her hand, which he still wanted to hold: “It does me no harm.”

  As Maller passed once more before the table on his way out, the men rose to their feet in farewell. The one person who had neither tried to rise nor changed her bearing at his departure was Annetta.

  Only when saying goodbye did Annetta ask Alfonso in a whisper how far he had got with the novel.

  “I’ve not been able to do anything because the trouble is I don’t yet know what to do.”

  After reflecting for an instant, Annetta said in a low voice: “Come tomorrow at seven, will you?”

  “Of course!” and he felt his heart leap.

  In such low voices are lovers’ appointments made.

  XII

  ALFONSO WAS MET by Santo on the stairs. “I was waiting for you,” the man said, smiling at him in a most friendly way.

  He treated Alfonso respectfully, letting him pass through doors first and bowing deeply after opening the library door for him. At the bank also he took every opportunity to show deference.

  In the library were Annetta and Francesca, the latter at her eternal embroidery, the former writing.

  “I was doing the first draft,” Annetta said to him. “Come on, help me because I can’t do it alone.”

  She put some paper in front of him, elegant little pieces of writing-paper, and a pen.

  “The space is a bit awkward for you, but there’s room enough when two people want to work as much as we do.”

  The table was too low and there was no room on it because she had not bothered to clear some newspapers. Francesca remedied Annetta’s forgetfulness.

  “I see that without my help you’ll never get down to work.”

  She took the bundle of newspapers and threw them in a corner.

  The relations between the two women seemed improved. Francesca no longer looked so ill, though she was still pale; but her lips were less white, and Annetta was not avoiding speaking to her.

  “Take care not to try and put your ideas into the novel too, as a novel might conceivably be written by two people, but not by three.”

  Annetta and Francesca had an urge to address each other often, like two people reminding themselves all the time that they were no longer on bad terms.

  “A preliminary word or two,” said Annetta to Alfonso with some gravity. “I’d like to explain the method which I consider should be followed in our work so as to avoid obvious signs of two minds or intentions. Of course we must first see that our two intentions differ as little as possible. That will be the most difficult thing, but with a few concessions on both sides I think we can achieve it. As to our method, we’ll just have to divide the work.”

  With a nervous hand she traced some circles on the paper in front of her to make her idea of this division clear. But she had some hesitation, so she asserted, in explaining how the division should actually work in practice, since she feared he might find her allotting him too inferior a part.

  “Don’t hesitate to tell me,” said Alfonso with a smile and a blush, “I want to do my part, but nothing can make me forget what an honour it is to collaborate with you.”

  The compliment was not badly put. Annetta thanked him.

  “Well, you have good ideas, that we know, so we’ll allot you the part of suggesting and developing them. As I happen to move round town more, I’ll do the dialogue and descriptions. You live among books the whole time.”

  This observation was to console him for having suggested that he never moved around town. Alfonso, much flattered, accepted the suggestion. Every chapter would be drafted by him first and then be re-done by Annetta.

  “I hope I’ll at least be able to recognize your good ideas and leave them intact.” She could not have been more modest. “Well, that’s all settled!” and she gave a sigh of satisfaction as if, with that settled, part of the novel was already finished.

  “Now let’s go on to settle the plot.”

  Here too some principles were needed. They must remember, warned Annetta, that they wanted a success. They would be publishing under a pseudonym, but there would be little pleasure in such a publication unless it was successful. They were not out for future glory or thinking at all of posterity. But they did want an immediate success.

  “I know the way to get it. It’s not so difficult, you know! For some years I’ve been noticing what succeeds best with theatre-goers or readers, and I always find the same recipe of taming a shrew. It doesn’t matter much if the shrew is male or female, but he or she must be tamed by the force of love.”

  Alfonso too admitted that he had sometimes found his interest aroused by such productions, though never enough to lessen his contempt for book and author. But this was not the moment to emphasize this contempt. Annetta had never attracted him so much. Bent over her writing, her smooth brown hair simply dressed, pen in delicate hand, he saw her for the first time wholly oblivious to her beauty, not bothering whether she was pleased or not, with pursed lips and frowning brow, her noble head nobly poised. Alfonso agreed to everything. At top speed she jotted down the contents of the first ten chapters, then in a few words a general idea of the rest. He had not noticed one original attitude or concept, but the slightest doubt would have seemed an offence to Annetta’s first flight of enthusiasm. Anyway, it seemed premature to give opinions; the plot could improve in execution.

  When alone with the work he had taken on, he had a stronger sense than ever of its vulgarity. The shrew this time was feminine. Annetta had sketched out a plot about a young lady of rank who was jilted by a duke and, on the rebound, agreed to marry a rich industrialist. She did not love him and treated him with contempt. The industrialist, who was an excellent man, with muscles as strong as his character was gentle, eventually triumphed over his wife’s aversion and the two of them lived happily together for many a long year. Annetta’s skeleton plot was marked with ‘scenes’ at what she thought effective points, which made it all the more like the plot for a comedy, a very everyday comedy.

  But the first chapter, though it plunged right into the subject, because Annetta said that long openings bored the public, was so vaguely sketched that from it Alfonso could make up a chapter to his own taste.

  ‘Clara, a young countess, learns that the duke is marrying a shopkeeper’s daughter; her despair.’ The precedents of this situation needed describing, and this became something in which Alfonso could have a free hand. In a few words he described the state of mind of the girl’s mother on receiving the announcement of the duke’s marriage; she tells her daughter, not knowing the storm this news would arouse in the heart of the poor girl, who takes the blow with dignity and only gives vent to her feelings when alone again in her room. There she not only gives vent to them but muses sorrowfully over the past, her early childhood with the duke, who was a cousin, a wild lad who had often hit her yet was very lovable. Down went what Alfonso thought a successful description, sweet as an idyll. Various touches showed that the author was someone with grave worries who had been unable to give all his attention to the account and so let his pen run on, putting it back on its path every now and again and not bothering much if it soon wandered again. He knew that the whole novel could not go like that, but anyway the chapter was done.

  He handed it over to Annetta on the next Wednesday, when Annetta told the whole company about the work she and Alfonso had embarked upon. She then explained to Spalati and Prarchi why she had not chosen them instead of Alfonso. She said that she had not chosen the first because people are shy of working with their own teachers; Prarchi on the other hand she had excluded because he was too dete
rminedly ‘realist’. Prarchi asserted that he was less of a ‘realist’ than he had said himself, and would sacrifice any exaggerated opinions for this chance. He spoke seriously, as if still in time to persuade Annetta to go back on her resolution. Then he began to laugh.

  “For this chance I’d have collaborated on a really romantic romance.”

  Alfonso took this quip as a warning to himself.

  Fumigi walked with Alfonso for part of the way home, asked shyly about their method of work and seemed very interested in the novel’s plot, but when, with an affectation of indifference and looking elsewhere, he asked how many times they met a week, Alfonso felt the same surprise as he had at Macario’s yawn.

  “Are they all in love with Annetta, then?”

  He went to visit Annetta next evening as they had agreed. He found her writing in the library. On seeing him she gave a movement of pleased impatience, then pushed aside the manuscript and started to talk of other things, of the wonderfully mild weather for that time of year. Alfonso, who knew no motive for hesitation, asked her how she had liked his chapter, with a smile asking for clemency. It was rather unpromising that she had not mentioned the subject first.

  “I don’t like it!” Annetta said to him, giving him a friendly look to attenuate the crude phrase: “It’s very fine, of course, I recognize its merits, but it’s dull.”

  She told him that she had begun correcting it but had not succeeded, and that he would definitely have to re-write it, because she had to confess that even now she did not know just what was lacking in that chapter.

  “It’s all of a piece!”

  At this critic’s expression she became enthusiastic because she knew that things ‘all of a piece’ are praiseworthy; and Alfonso’s heart beat lighter.

  “But it’s dull, very dull. Who d’you expect to read with any pleasure such a string of thoughts with no interruption or ornamentation? And then you do too little narrating; you’re always describing, even when you think you’re narrating. After an opening like that, how are we to go on? There are a thousand words of description to one of narrative. The other way round would have been better. It’s more important to lay down the main theme, Clara’s first reactions on her marriage to that industrialist and his longstanding love for her, rather than describe some drawing-room which the reader is never going to see again, and give all those details about Clara’s childhood.”

  She read her own version aloud to him. A few of Alfonso’s words and phrases were kept, obviously from kindness, but they were so unimportant that he could not feel grateful; the very parts that meant most to him had been treated most summarily.

  On finishing her reading Annetta looked at him expecting enthusiastic approval; but Alfonso with a great effort just managed to mutter some words of praise which were still too cold. He made things worse because he was unable to hide his disappointment at having worked so hard and uselessly—finding no immediate way of expressing disappointment without offending Annetta, when he thought he had found such a way, he used it without stopping to consider its outcome. Without speaking of his own work he said that Annetta’s would be more popular, but went on to criticize her theories. It was quite true, he said, that they would have a success by using those theories but denied that it was worthwhile sacrificing every higher artistic aim for a hunger for ephemeral success.

  “Excuse me!” interrupted Francesca, who had been silent till then and had not seemed to follow the conversation, “By the look on your face I’d have said you enjoyed Annetta’s work. So it cannot be as unartistic as you say.”

  Alfonso thought that Francesca accompanied her phrase with a glance which might have been an invitation for him to agree, and this was such a surprise that for a time he could not take his eyes off her. Had Francesca also collaborated on that chapter she was defending? Now it was obvious that he had to admire it, and he adapted himself with the best grace he could. He said that he had liked the chapter but was only against the theory.

  Actually the chapter had seemed to him ugly, bare and declamatory, and he was humiliated to have to make that explicit declaration by which he abdicated the right of giving his own opinion. He was amazed to see that Annetta had no doubts about the sincerity of his declaration. Then it was settled, she said, that this chapter was to stay just as she had rewritten it, and they would agree about the other chapters in the same way.

  In fact about the second and third chapters they did agree in the same way but more easily. Alfonso wrote them out trying to imitate Annetta, and Annetta rewrote them without bothering much about the first version.

  This situation had an agreeable side for Alfonso. Having won her superiority and made it manifest, having probably noticed how much it cost Alfonso to submit, Annetta tried to make up for this by showing him more friendship, at times even a protectiveness, a kind of maternal affection. She derided him for his weakness, described him as a little bear who lacked tact and who did not know how to pay a compliment; one evening she said to the Wednesday group in his presence that there may be greater philosophers than Alfonso, but none who had taken philosophy so seriously or lived in such conformity with its dictates. She gave him, but only when they were alone together, the nickname of ‘frog’. A ‘frog’ when he stuttered out half a phrase and did not know how to complete it, a ‘frog’ when he said that literary success was worth little because it was made by the ignorant; she even called him a ‘frog’ when he brought her his drafts all ready to be thrown aside.

  She would say the word to him with a sweet smile, looking at him with admiration as if he were some eccentric creature to be studied but not read, while he stood rigid, talking little and clipping his words to deserve her nickname the more. She always stuck firmly to her first opinion that although Alfonso had many more superior ideas at his disposal, he did not know how to connect them and form a good novel. He was too heavy, too dull. Sooner or later he would make a fine name for himself by some excellent work of philosophy, but not by novels, which were too light for him.

  But the tedium of the work was considerable. In the second chapter there was a terrible scene between Clara and her husband in their bedroom, but in the third, and by Annetta’s express wish, husband and wife both realized they loved each other, although divided by immense pride. The whole of the rest of the novel was to be about these two prides which had to be tamed, because such was the plot. But it did not even continue about these two prides, for Annetta wanted to graft into the novel a thousand other little tales which had nothing to do with the main one. A former fiancé, a shopkeeper, Clara’s rival the nobleman’s wife, and also a brother of Clara’s and a sister of the industrialist whom she eventually married, were all brought in; so were various other characters who took part in some political comedy, an election put in to swell the novella up to a full-scale novel. Alfonso proposed omitting all this useless matter and leaving the two prides as Annetta wanted them, facing each other to fight it out between them; a good analysis of pride could still be made of that. Annetta found this suggestion positively comical. There was to be chapter after chapter of long talks and struggles between the two women, Clara and the noble’s wife; every chapter was to be adorned by one or more glances of love between husband and wife. They got no further.

  For Alfonso this work began to take on an odd resemblance to his work in the bank. In the evening he would sit down to it with a yawn, struggling against sleep, intent only on keeping closely to what Annetta had told him to do, glad when he had finished. Sometimes the boredom of the work was such that he ended by going to Annetta’s without having done anything. At the last moment when he had not worked, resolving to send her his excuses next day and renounce seeing her that time rather than have to write such stuff. But he could not renounce seeing her, found some other excuse and went.

  Annetta always greeted him kindly and never reproved him. She made him read what she had done and then let him change the subject. She rather enjoyed hearing him talk. He was now only shy on purpose, bec
ause he had realized that it was wise to preserve a certain shyness with Annetta. When about to leave he would remember Macario’s warnings and Francesca’s little sign and even the bearing of Spalati, Annetta’s oldest friend, who, when he took liberties, did so always with an air as respectful as his words were free. Spalati was clever enough only to lack respect for her when he flattered her. In this way his flattery took on an aspect of frankness that made it seem sincere. He was quite capable of telling her that she used too many adjectives, like Victor Hugo. Alfonso understood his method and his bearing, made easier by his capacity to simulate the character attributed to him. By showing contempt for exterior forms he was allowed to transgress some of them, but it was not such forms that Annetta demanded. The important thing for her was to show admiration or enthusiasm at the proper time.

  Their pleasantest evenings were when the novel was not mentioned at all, but Alfonso realized that in the long run Annetta might be displeased by the slow progress of the work. He was also warned of this by Francesca, who for a second time showed a wish to direct him in his relations with Annetta. One evening she received him when Annetta was still in her room.

  “Have you not done anything today, either?” she asked him with a note of reproof. “Take care, as Annetta easily gets impatient.”

  That evening he did happen to have something done. He understood the importance of the warning and accepted it; from then on, and for some time, every evening he brought some proof of having worked on or thought about the novel.

  He was finding this more and more difficult. There was a lot to do at the bank. Now he had nearly all Miceni’s work on his shoulders, so that there were daily bouts of hard work with which he and Alchieri could scarcely cope. He felt the need for long walks and for rest more strongly than ever.

  The first time since Francesca’s warning that he happened to visit Annetta without bringing a single page of writing Annetta greeted him with her usual sweet smile; but he, afraid she was hiding the anger mentioned by Francesca and in no way reassured, expected to be dismissed suddenly and for ever. In his fear he did not think one excuse enough but mentioned how busy he was, then said he’d had a headache and even some worrying news from home about his mother’s health which had spoilt the calm he needed for work. Annetta listened to him with a deeply sympathetic air, very moving to Alfonso. He hated having to excuse himself like a little schoolboy when he longed to say something quite different, and this brought tears to his eyes, which Annetta attributed to worry about his mother’s health.