A Life

by Italo Svevo

  “Aren’t you well?”

  “No … yes, a slight headache. But what disturbs me is having to stay in the open to be sure of not missing my appointment. Anyway what I’m worried about just doesn’t really deserve it, I can assure you.”

  “It’s unimportant, is it?” asked Alfonso in amazement.

  “No, very important indeed, but …” and he gave a little shrug of the shoulders which Alfonso took to mean utter certainty about his own position.

  “Then why worry?”

  Alfonso went on calming him, but he would have given much to destroy this confidence of Fumigi’s, which stung him.

  For a few moments Fumigi seemed calmer. Then he fell back into his meditations, so little heeding Alfonso that he suddenly bid him goodbye in the middle of another phrase which the other was thinking up to calm him. He needed to be alone, but particularly wanted to make time pass, and he bid farewell while still having to say something—in order to find relief, which was not what he would have said willingly. He took his leave rather wordily, mentioning another appointment he had to go to even before that one.

  Alfonso followed him with an attentive eye and noticed a slight hesitation about his direction on reaching the middle of the square. It was obvious! The poor man was just wandering about with his agonizing doubt and had no other reason for moving.

  That hesitation alone touched Alfonso’s pity and took away the anger aroused in him by Fumigi’s stupid certainty. This pity even went so far that he began dreaming up ways in which he could reconcile his own happiness with Fumigi’s. There were none, but that did not prevent him making a story out of a situation in which he reserved for himself the not unpleasant role of Fumigi’s old friend. What he found unpalatable was the feeling that he had cooperated in Fumigi’s unhappiness and knowingly deserved someone’s hatred for the first time in his life. This was enough to give him a deep disgust at his own happiness.

  Then he settled down to work on the novel in case the nasty labour of it might make him feel he deserved his good fortune more and as if he were placating the envy of the Gods by making himself miserable.

  Remembering a word of Miceni’s was enough to take away part of his security.

  “Probably it’s all settled by this time.”

  If that very second Alfonso had been suddenly told that Fumigi had killed himself after being refused by Annetta, he would not have been at all sorry.

  He happened to remain in that state of mind for a number of days. That evening he did not see Annetta. The maid stopped him on the stairs to say that Signorina Annetta could not receive him.

  “Is there news, then?” asked Alfonso in alarm. Then seeing the woman’s surprise he added, “Is the Signorina unwell?”

  “No!” replied the maid, oldish and rather pretentiously dressed, who had always treated Alfonso with great indifference, maybe partly because he had forgotten to flirt with her. “She’s quite well.” And she hurried off as if she was so busy she could not remain idle for a few minutes.

  That was enough to make Alfonso wonder whether Fumigi had received a different reply than he had supposed. Where had Fumigi derived that security in which he seemed lulled? Though Alfonso knew nothing new, he was beginning now to gather together signs that Fumigi’s question had been greeted favourably, and no longer found indications of its rejection as he had done till then. Even the maid’s state of hurry seemed to show that a serious change had taken place in Annetta’s life.

  Though still convinced that Fumigi must have been refused, now it was only because it seemed incredible that Annetta could ever consent to marry him; not from love of anyone else, not from love of him. He had nothing to do with that decision, he felt now. Threatened with a great disaster, even when the imminent danger had been avoided he would not feel any the safer.

  Next day Miceni told him that he had no news yet but was in no hurry; his card of congratulations would still arrive in time. He hurried off without allowing Alfonso time to make a reply which he must have expected to be sharp. They had never exchanged a single word about Alfonso’s relations with Annetta, but Miceni acted as if he knew of them, and Alfonso realized this.

  That evening he went to Annetta’s. On the way he felt hopeful; he would find her unchanged and awaiting him in that library where he would spend yet another unforgettable evening.

  Just as he was about to put his hat down in the entrance hall, already reassured, Santo called him from the landing.

  “The Signorina can’t see you today; she’s ill.”

  Alfonso went pale. Was Miceni right then?

  “Very ill?” he asked Santo. He had to pretend even with him.

  “Oh you know! Women!” explained Santo with the irreverence usual to him when speaking of his employers behind their backs.

  She was not ill! In the drawing-room, all lit up as on evenings when she was receiving, maybe she was sitting next to Fumigi, who was enjoying the full joy of sweet emotion, the calm of uncontested possession, which Alfonso thought must be supreme happiness.

  Santo had already turned his back. Until then and since seeing him at the Mallers, Santo had treated him with almost irritating servility. His contempt now was an evident sign that he considered him a failure. Alfonso followed him for a step or two.

  “Please tell Signorina Annetta that I’ve been here and am very sorry to hear she’s unwell.”

  He went down the stairs looking straight ahead and without deigning to answer the farewell which Santo did actually give. His thoughts were still on the two who were perhaps kissing alone in the sitting-room; but until he was in the next street, he took care to show no sign on his face of the feelings agitating him; someone might be watching him from that house so as to enjoy his sorrow.

  This was a silly idea, he thought then: nobody bothered about him any more, even to hurt him. It was drizzling, and he was holding his umbrella closed in his hand. The thought of how he could tell Miceni had bothered him, as he had imagined the latter’s atrocious and facile irony. But now he need be careful no longer. To hide from Miceni the stupid illusions he had nourished till that day was, he now realized, impossible. Yet, he might try to describe to him how these illusions had started and how they had been encouraged by Annetta.

  If all was over, as he kept repeating to himself it was, then he had lost a very great deal indeed. His life’s aim no less; what else remained to him? For that love he had forgotten his ambition which he did not think could ever revive now that there was no future for him in the Maller household. To be drawn from his squalor by a woman’s kiss had been a dream, a splendid dream. Life for a time had lost its air of severity and injustice, had sent without a struggle fortune and happiness to one who deserved it; it sent forth its dictat from above, and he had got wealth and love.

  Suddenly he realized he was soaked to the skin and far from home. Was it true then? He felt he would have been less agitated had he been in no doubt. He would have made up his mind how to behave, and maybe still get some satisfaction from his misfortune, carried his head high, repaid indifference by indifference, been hurt and hurt in his turn by showing himself unharmed. Annetta was capable of triumphing by the pain she brought him.

  She was just as Macario had described her! Cold and vain, vain before all else. Was he not holding at that moment the proof of her vanity, that novel dictated by vanity in person, from its silly vacuous concepts to each of its emphatic phrases, attempts at flight by someone who did not know how to walk? No mere spirit of vengeance made him think of her like that now. Once fallen from the height in which his love had put her, he thought he saw her as she was.

  On reaching home he found a note from Annetta asking him to call next day.

  “Dear friend!” The opening alone should have been enough to change his mood and give him immense joy. Instead he read and reread it, trying to find what was not there—an assurance that he was wrong in fearing Fumigi and doubting Annetta’s love for himself. That note did not exclude disaster, or if it did momenta
rily, it was no destruction of the threat. He could not regain his calm or even enjoy being much happier than he had been just before. Sorrow, particularly when over, has its attractions, and those with weak ambitions find a satisfaction in dressing up in it. Could he get happiness from this situation when chance had revealed the disaster that this very situation could be to him? He could always be thrown aside like a useless object; as soon as Annetta neglected him, he would again become a poor little clerk without even a right to show his suffering.

  Not that it was suffering which had sent him wandering over the streets of the city shortly before, but the great emotion of self-pity. If Fumigi had been rejected, his relationship with Annetta would continue apparently unchanged; while in reality his jealousy, his fears, the threat of change, made it unendurable. There was only one way to get out of such a situation. He could withdraw first and, however painful such a renunciation, be able at least to think back over the whole adventure without blushing, without a feeling of offence. Even so, it would not be a pleasant memory. He would never be able to forget Annetta’s hardness and vanity, discovered, it seemed, that very moment. The experience he had been through was harsh and would serve him for the whole of his life. Now he wanted to return to his plain habits, to the ideal of work and solitude contested by no one. That was happiness. Habit and regularity would give it.

  But when he was with Annetta, when she shook his hand with the same sweet smile with which she had bade him farewell a few days ago as if there were nothing in the meantime to disturb their good relations, he forgot his intentions. There was another way of dealing with that situation, he now understood, apart from giving up the whole thing. His only regret was that he could not blurt out all that he had suspected in the last few days so as to provoke an explanation which might lose him Annetta’s friendship, but could also reaffirm, re-awaken it as love. Meanwhile shyness allowed him only to express calm and cordiality.

  They were in the living-room and alone because Francesca was unwell. Annetta talked about a chapter of the novel, made some suggestions; Alfonso approved these and without any effort was able to make a show of admiration. It was not a moment for agitated criticism. Annetta needed advice because she was finding difficulty in making headway with a plot that was now tending to the absurd. Her hero and heroine were still passionately in love with each other and not saying so out of pride. This confession would end the novel, and Annetta’s little head was beginning to fail in ideas of what to do next.

  Suddenly Alfonso became talkative. He needed to talk, and began holding forth about the novel and his admiration for Annetta’s ideas. When people shout, it does not matter what they say; the voice provides the outlet. Alfonso was soothed by the flow of his own words, and such pauses as he made were from calculation and from an idea that if he did not let Annetta talk, he would learn nothing about her. Eventually, and with a cold calculation which at once took him to his goal, Alfonso began animatedly describing his life every day, coming to the conclusion that his happy hours had added up to no more than a few days in one whole year, counting among these all the hours he had spent at the Mallers.

  At his request Annetta described how she had spent the last week. When she began, Alfonso flushed and stared, as mere listening did not seem enough. He wanted to guess at what point in her account she would think of Fumigi, and to see her expression when she did.

  That week she had been to the theatre twice. But she had also a number of dull evenings, on one of which she had been on the point of sending for him to raise her from her boredom with philosophical talk and work together on the novel.

  “I’d have loved to come!” murmured Alfonso in a voice suffocated with emotion.

  “Yes?” asked Annetta, also blushing. “Another time then, we’re agreed?”

  This gave Alfonso a lion’s courage.

  “Nothing else?” he murmured when she had finished describing her week.

  “Nothing else!” replied Annetta in surprise, suddenly going pale.

  “I’ve spent a horrid week,” said Alfonso in a deep voice.

  He told her he had heard a disaster was hanging over him and had at first not believed this; then he kept on coming up against indications confirming the threat, so that when he heard this had been avoided, he refused to believe it because he had so long considered it inevitable. Indeed he still doubted it. He described this succession of events so faithfully that, on remembering his pain, tears came to his eyes, and he had to stop talking.

  It was his declaration; and when Alfonso thought it over later, he had to smile because it was certainly not love which had brought tears to his eyes, but, as always with him, self-pity. Although no longer speaking, tears were pouring down his cheeks, and he did not dry them because the gesture would show them to Annetta, who might not have noticed. This was the second time that he wept in front of her; the first time the results had not been very flattering.

  “Tears!” exclaimed Annetta moved. “Am I the cause?”

  Wanting to soothe him, she took him affectionately by the hand. The gesture, not the contact, not the pleasure of desire, made Alfonso happy. It destroyed his misery about the coldness of his relations with Annetta, and the change from his own idea of those relations to these real ones in which Annetta now acted as consoler was so sharp that he had to close his eyes. He kissed Annetta’s hand without moving it, bending his head until his lips reached it, careful this time to make the bold gesture respectful. He just grazed the hand with his lips; it was a sketch of a kiss, and he did not want to go any further. Till then they had advanced very little, and if they went no further than that kiss, they would be able to return to the almost ingenuous sweetness of their relationship.

  “The explanation is sufficient,” said Annetta with a smile, but in a voice broken with emotion, which surprised Alfonso. She withdrew her hand.

  “Poor Fumigi!” exclaimed Alfonso, who could not manage to infuse his own voice with the emotion heard in Annetta’s.

  “Not so poor!”

  She said that he was a strong and energetic man who would soon recover from this little blow. She had felt honoured by his request and had not accepted because she did not wish to marry.

  “It’s partly our artistic ideal that makes me prefer my liberty.” This phrase, with the first person plural, cancelled in Alfonso the impression of coldness given by the preceding one.

  “Anyway, Fumigi remains a good friend of mine, he’s promised! And now let’s go back to our novel.”

  But they did not go back to it. There was too big a break between that cold, forced thing and the passion which they were talking to hide. Alfonso saw that Annetta was now calm again, her voice steady and sure, her hand firm as it held the pen.

  “Now what on earth does this fool of ours want?” asked Alfonso, alluding to their hero, who had been made to pass, in a dark corridor, his wife who loved him and from dignity was pretending not to see him. “Does such dignity exist?”

  Speaking and acting with an air of spontaneity, which was really calculated audacity, he knelt down before Annetta and tried to take her hand again. She began to laugh but put her own head close to Alfonso’s dark one; neither could have said how they came to kiss each other on the lips for the first time. So little had he foreseen it that after the contact ceased, he thought he had not felt all the happiness he should and tried to make up for this by a second kiss. But she had drawn back her head and risen to her feet in alarm, apparently not feeling quite safe when sitting. But her cheeks were brightly flushed, her eyes glistening and splendid, and she gave him a glance which did not seem angry though it must have been intended to intimidate him. Like that she was really lovely.

  “Enough, Signor Nitti!”

  He got to his feet and, standing still, in a voice thick with emotion said, to calm her, that it was indeed enough, and he could live near her all his life and never ask for more.

  Annetta smiled in thanks; she felt safe with this boy; it had been really this boyish quali
ty which had taken him so far. What had she to fear from this personified shyness? She had been touched by the sweetness of his wordless love, by his shy silence even after his first daring had been unpunished. He had never hinted in any way at that stolen kiss on her hand, never betrayed impatience, and she had ingenuously believed that he would ask for nothing more, considering that because the little favour came from her, it would be enough.

  They had now taken a huge step forward, and there was no way back. They had spoken, and what was more Alfonso had seen Annetta’s weakness, had suddenly discovered he was the stronger.

  Annetta did not realize this and, with a smile intended to attenuate the despotism of her order, told him never to talk of love again. She was disobeyed at once. He asked if he could please talk about it just once more and then made a regular love declaration, mingling memories of novels he had read with phrases that had long been going round in his brain and which were only awaiting a chance to be addressed to Annetta. He had been longing to talk about his love to her and had thought of this as his first poem; love could be ennobled, elevated, by intelligent wording, he had thought, and this could help to make their difference in status forgotten. Now, though, he realized that desire is wordless. As he mouthed contrived sentimentalities as seemed his duty, he felt their bloodless and lifeless conventionality; this surprised him, as he did not know to what to attribute such coldness. Only when he spoke of his friendship with her did his voice fuse and tremble in an emotion which took his breath away. He had thought of this sweet intimacy ever since first being near Annetta, but now, speaking of it, a quite different desire was dressed out in the same words and made his head swim as it passed before him.

  “I knew it,” said Annetta with sincerity, “but it would have been better not to tell me.”

  She threatened him with a jesting finger, while a shadow of seriousness passed over her face. Anyway, his words of love seemed colder to her, just as they did to Alfonso himself, because of what had preceded and provoked them. She did not fear them; they were a mere satisfaction to her vanity. She interrupted him, saying with great sweetness, “Enough, enough!” so that, had he not been bored, Alfonso would have gone on.