Zeno's Conscience Part 9

WIFE AND MISTRESS.

In my life I believed at various times that I was on the path to health and happiness. But never was this belief stronger than during the period of my wedding journey, and for a few weeks after our return home. It began with a discovery that stunned me: I loved Augusta and she loved me. At first, still dubious, I would enjoy one day and expect the next to be something quite different. But the next day followed and resembled the previous one, radiant, all filled with Augusta's tenderness and also-this was the surprise-my own. Every morning I rediscovered in her the same touching affection and in myself the same grat.i.tude that, if it was not love, still bore a close resemblance to it. Who could have foreseen this, when I was limping from Ada to Alberta, to arrive at Augusta? I discovered I had not been a blind fool manipulated by others, but a very clever man. And, seeing my amazement, Augusta said to me: "Why are you so surprised? Didn't you know this is how marriage is? Even I knew it, and I'm so much more ignorant than you!"

I'm not sure whether it came before or after my affection, but in my spirit a hope was formed, the great hope finally to come to resemble Augusta, who was the personification of health. During our engagement I hadn't even glimpsed that health, because I was totally absorbed in studying myself first and, after myself, Ada and Guido. The glow of the oil lamp in that drawing room had never reached Augusta's thinnish hair.

Her blush was nothing! When it vanished as simply as the dawn colors vanish in the direct light of the sun, Augusta confidently followed the same path that all her sisters on this earth had followed, those sisters who can find everything in law and in order, or who otherwise renounce everything. Even though I knew her security was precarious, as it was based on me, I loved, I adored that security. Faced with it, I had to act at least with the modesty I a.s.sumed when faced with spiritualism. The latter could exist, and so faith in life could also exist.

Still it amazed me; her every word, her every action made it clear that, deep in her heart, she believed in eternal life. Not that she called it that: indeed, she was surprised when, on one occasion, I, who was repelled by errors until I began to love hers, felt obliged to remind her of life's brevity. What?! She knew everyone had to die, but all the same, now that we were married, we would remain together, together, together. She was thus unaware that when two are joined in this world, the union lasts for a period so very, very short that we cannot comprehend how we arrived at intimacy after an infinite time when we hadn't known each other, and we were now prepared never to see each other again for an equally infinite time. I understood finally what perfect human health was when I realized that for her the present was a tangible truth within which one could curl up and be warm. I sought admission and I tried to remain there, resolved not to make fun of myself and her, because this attack could only be my old sickness and I should at least take care not to infect anyone entrusted to my charge. Also for this reason, in my effort to protect her, for a while I was capable of acting like a healthy man.

She knew all the things that could drive me to despair, but in her hands these things changed their nature. Just because the earth rotates, you don't have to get seasick! Quite the contrary! The earth turned, but all other things stayed in their proper place. And these motionless things had enormous importance: the wedding ring, all the jewels and dresses, the green, the black, the dress for the afternoon stroll, which had to go straight into the closet on her return home, and the evening dress that was never under any circ.u.mstances to be worn during the day, or when I was unwilling to don my tailcoat. And the meal hours were strictly observed, as were the hours intended for sleeping. They existed, those hours, and were always in their place.

On Sunday she went to Ma.s.s, and sometimes I accompanied her to see how she could bear the representation of suffering and death. For her it wasn't there; and that visit filled her with peace for the entire week. She went there also on certain feast days, which she knew by heart. And that was all-whereas I, had I been religious, would have guaranteed my eternal bliss by spending the whole day in church.

There was a world of authorities also here below that rea.s.sured her. To begin with, the Austrian or Italian authority that guaranteed our safety in the streets and in our houses, and I always did my best to share that respect of hers. Then came doctors, those who had pursued their studies in order to save us when-G.o.d forbid-we came down with some illness. I employed that authority every day; she, on the contrary, never. But for this reason I knew what my ghastly fate would be when mortal illness struck me, whereas she believed that even then, firmly sustained up on high and here below, there would be salvation.

I am a.n.a.lyzing her health, but I fail, because I realize that in a.n.a.lyzing it I convert it into sickness. And in writing about that health, I begin to suspect it perhaps needed some treatment or instruction in order to heal. But when I was living at her side for so many years, I never harbored that suspicion for a moment.

Ah! the importance attributed to me in her little world! On every question I had to express my wishes, in the choice of food or dress, company or reading matter. I was forced into great activity, which didn't annoy me. I was collaborating in the construction of a patriarchal family, and I myself was becoming the patriarch I had once hated, but who now appeared to me as the emblem of health. It's one thing to be a patriarch and another to have to revere someone who claims that distinction. I wanted health for myself even at the price of sloughing off sickness onto the non-patriarchs, and especially during our journey, sometimes I gladly struck the pose of an equestrian statue.

But already during that journey it was not always easy for me to carry off the imitation I had prescribed for myself. Augusta wanted to see everything, as if this were an educational expedition. It was by no means enough just to go to the Pitti Palace: it was necessary to pa.s.s through all those numberless galleries, stopping at least for a moment or two at each work of art. I refused to leave the first room and I saw nothing further, a.s.suming only the burden of finding excuses for my laziness. I spent half a day before the portraits of the founders of the house of Medici, and I discovered that they resembled Carnegie and Vanderbilt. Wonderful! So we belonged to the same race! Augusta didn't share my amazement. She knew that those two were Yankees, but she didn't yet know clearly who I was.

Here her health failed to triumph, and she had to renounce museums. I told her that once, at the Louvre, I became so confused in the midst of all those works of art that I was about to smash the Venus to bits.

With resignation, Augusta said: "Thank goodness museums are something you do on your honeymoon, then never again! "

In fact, in real life we lack the monotony of museums. Days go by, suitable for framing; they are rich in sounds that daze you, and besides their lines and colors, they are also filled with real light, the kind that burns and therefore isn't boring.

Health impels us to activity, to take on a world of nuisances. When the museums were closed, shopping began. She, who had never lived there, knew our villa better than I did, and she remembered that one room needed a mirror, another a rug, and in a third there was a place for a little statue. She bought furniture for a whole drawing room, and from every city we visited, at least one s.h.i.+pment was arranged. It seemed to me that it would have been more convenient and less annoying to make all those purchases in Trieste. Now we had to think of transport, insurance, customs clearance.

"But don't you know that all goods have to travel? Aren't you a merchant?" She laughed.

She was almost right, but I reb.u.t.ted: "Goods are s.h.i.+pped in order to be sold, to make a profit. Otherwise they're left undisturbed, and they disturb n.o.body."

But her enterprise was one of the things I loved most about her. It was delightful, that enterprise, so naive! Naive because she had to be ignorant of the history of the world to be able to believe that she had made a clever transaction simply by buying an object: it's when you sell the object that you judge the wisdom of the purchase.

I thought I was well into my convalescence. My wounds had become less infected. Starting at that time, my unvaried att.i.tude was one of happiness. It was as if, in those unforgettable days, I had made a vow to Augusta, and it was the only promise I never broke except for brief moments, times when life laughed louder than I. Our relations.h.i.+p was and remains a smiling one because I smiled always at her, believing her ignorant, and she at me, to whom she attributed much learning and many errors that she-so she flattered herself-would correct. I remained apparently happy even when my sickness overwhelmed me again. Happy as if my pain were no more than a kind of tickling.

In our long progress through Italy, despite my new-found health, I was not immune to many sufferings. We had set out with no letters of introduction, and very often it seemed to me that many of the strangers among whom we moved were my enemies. It was a ridiculous fear, but I was unable to master it. I could have been attacked, insulted, and, especially, slandered; and who would have protected me?

This fear reached a real crisis, which fortunately no one, not even Augusta, noticed. I was accustomed to buying almost all the newspapers that were offered to me along the street. One day, having stopped at a news vendor's kiosk, I felt the suspicion that he hated me and might easily have me arrested as a thief, for I had acquired only one paper from him, while under my arm I was holding many others, bought elsewhere and as yet unfolded. I fled, followed by Augusta, to whom I gave no reason for my running off.

I made friends with a coachman and with a guide; in their company at least I was a.s.sured of not being accused of absurd thefts.

Between me and the cabbie there were some obvious points of contact. He was very fond of the Roman Castelli wines, and he told me that from time to time his feet swelled up. He would go to the hospital, and then, cured, he would be discharged with many admonitions to give up wine. He would make an oath that he called ironclad because, along with it, he made a knot, which he tied to his metal watch chain. But when I knew him, the chain was hanging, without any knots, over his vest. I invited him to come and stay with me in Trieste. I described the taste of our wine, so different from his, to guarantee the success of this drastic cure. He wouldn't hear of it, and refused with an expression already filled with homesickness.

I became friends with the guide because he seemed superior to his fellows. It's easy enough to know more history than I do, but Augusta also, with her precision and her Baedeker, verified the accuracy of many of his observations. Besides, he was young and strode confidently along the allees sown with statues.

When I lost those two friends, I left Rome. The cabbie, having received a great deal of money from me, proved how wine sometimes also affected his brain, and he caused us to crash against a very solid ancient Roman construction. Later, the guide took it into his head one day to declare that the ancient Romans knew all about electricity and employed it extensively. He even recited some Latin verses to bear out what he said.

But then I was stricken by a minor ailment from which I was never to recover. A trifle, really: the fear of aging and, above all, the fear of dying. I believe it was generated by a special form of jealousy. Aging frightened me only because it brought me closer to death. As long as I was alive, Augusta would surely not be unfaithful to me; but I imagined that as soon as I was dead and buried, after making sure my grave would be properly tended and the necessary Ma.s.ses said, she would promptly start looking for my successor, whom she would then surround with the same healthy and regulated world that now made me blissful. Her lovely health couldn't die just because I had died. My faith in that health was so great that I felt it could never perish, unless it was crushed beneath an entire speeding train.

I remember one evening in Venice as we were in a gondola moving along one of those ca.n.a.ls whose profound silence is occasionally interrupted by the light and the noise of a street suddenly opening onto them. As always, Augusta was looking at things and objectively recording them: a cool, green garden rising from a filthy foundation revealed by the retreating water; the murky reflection of a spire; a long, dark alley ending at a stream of light and people. I, on the contrary, in the darkness, totally disheartened, was feeling an awareness of myself. I spoke to her of how time was pa.s.sing and soon she would repeat that wedding journey with another man. I was so convinced of this that I seemed to be telling her a story that had already happened. And I felt it was unwarranted for her to start crying, to deny the truth of that story. Perhaps she had misunderstood me, and thought I "was charging her with the intention of killing me. Quite the contrary! To make myself clearer, I described to her a possible manner of my dying: my legs, in which the circulation was surely already defective, would become gangrenous, and the gangrene, spreading rapidly, would arrive at some organ indispensable to my keeping my eyes open. Then I would close them, and it would be good-bye, Patriarch! A new one would have to be produced.

She went on sobbing, and to me those tears of hers, in the enormous sadness of that ca.n.a.l, seemed very important. Were they perhaps provoked by her despair at my precise view of that ghastly health of hers? Later I learned that, on the contrary, she hadn't the slightest idea of what health was. Health doesn't a.n.a.lyze itself, nor does it look at itself in the mirror. Only we sick people know something about ourselves.

It was then that she told me how she had loved me before she ever met me. She had loved me from the moment she heard my name, uttered by her father in this form: Zeno Cosini, an ingenuous fellow who widened his eyes when he heard any kind of commercial stratagem mentioned, and hastened to make a note of it in an order book, which he would then misplace. And if I hadn't noticed her confusion at our first meeting, then I must have been confused myself.

I remembered that on first seeing Augusta, I was distracted by her ugliness, since in that house with the four girls sharing the initial A, I had expected to find four great beauties. Now I learned she had loved me for a long time, but what did that prove? I didn't give her the satisfaction of changing my mind. When I was dead, she would find another.

When her tears abated, she leaned closer to me and, suddenly laughing, asked: "Where would I find your successor? Can't you see how ugly I am?"

In fact, in all likelihood I would be allowed some time to rot in peace.

But fear of aging never abandoned me thereafter, I lived always with the fear of pa.s.sing my wife on to another man. The fear was not mitigated when I was unfaithful to her, nor was it increased by the thought of losing my mistress in the same way. That was an entirely different thing, and one had nothing to do with the other. When the fear of dying seized me, I would turn to Augusta for comfort, like children who hold out their little scratched hand for their mother to kiss. She found always new words to comfort me. On our honeymoon she gave me another thirty years of youth, and today she does the same. I, on the contrary, knew that the joyful weeks of our wedding trip had already brought me substantially closer to the horrible grimaces of the deathbed. Augusta could say whatever she liked, the calculation was still simple: every week I was one week nearer.

When I realized that I was afflicted too often by the same pain, I avoided tiring her by saying the same things over and over, and to inform her of my need for comfort, I had only to murmur: "Poor Cosini!" She knew then exactly what was upsetting me, and she hastened to envelop me in her great fondness. In this way I was able to receive her comfort also when I suffered quite different pain. One day, sick with the pain of having betrayed her, I murmured inadvertently: "Poor Cosini!" I derived great benefit from it because even then her comfort was precious to me.

On returning from the honeymoon, I was surprised because I had never lived in such a warm and comfortable home. Augusta brought into it all the conveniences she had had in her own home, but also many others she invented herself. The bathroom, which since time immemorial had always been at the end of a long corridor, half a kilometer from my bedroom, was now next to our room, and it was supplied with a greater number of faucets. Then a little area near the pantry was converted into a coffee room, furnished with padded carpets and great leather armchairs. We spent an hour or so there every day after lunch. Against my wish, it contained everything necessary for smoking. My little study, too, though I did everything to defend it, underwent alterations. I was afraid the changes would make it hateful to me, but, on the contrary, I quickly realized that only now had it become possible to live in. She arranged its lighting so that I could read while seated at my desk or sprawled in a chair or stretched out on the sofa. She even provided a music stand for the violin, with its own little light that illuminated the music without hurting my eyes. There too, and also against my wishes, I was accompanied by all the equipment required for a peaceful smoke.

So there was much construction at home, and there was a certain amount of disorder that affected our tranquillity. To her, working toward eternity, this brief inconvenience couldn't matter, but for me it was quite different. I put up stiff opposition when she conceived the desire to create a little laundry in our garden, which would involve the actual building of a shed. Augusta insisted that having a laundry at home guaranteed the health of the bebes. But at present there were no bebes and I saw no need to be disturbed by them before their arrival. But she brought to my old house an instinct that came from the open air, and, in love, she resembled the swallow, who immediately thinks of the nest.

But I also made love, and brought flowers and jewels to the house. My life was entirely changed by my marriage. After a weak attempt at resistance, I gave up the idea of arranging my time as I pleased, and I adhered to the strictest schedule. In this respect my education brought excellent results. One day, shortly after our honeymoon, I innocently allowed myself to be detained from going home to lunch, and after eating something in a cafe, I remained out until evening. Coming home well after dark, I found that Augusta had had no lunch and was destroyed by hunger. She uttered no reproach, but she could not be convinced that she had done the wrong thing. Sweetly but firmly, she declared that unless she had advance notice, she would await me for lunch, even until dinnertime. This was no joking matter! On another occasion I let a friend persuade me to stay out until two in the morning. I found Augusta up, waiting for me, her teeth chattering from the cold, as she had neglected to tend the stove. She was slightly indisposed, afterwards making the lesson imparted to me unforgettable.

One day I decided to give her another great present: I would work! It was something she desired, and I myself thought that work would be beneficial to my health. Obviously those who have less time for sickness are less sick. I went to work, and if I didn't persist at it, that wasn't my fault. I went with the best intentions and with true humility. I didn't insist on sharing in the management of the business, asking instead just to keep the ledger. Facing the thick volume in which all the clerical work was laid out with the regularity of streets and houses, I was filled with respect, and I began to write, my hand trembling.

Olivi's son, an elegant, bespectacled young man, erudite in all the commercial sciences, took over my instruction, and I honestly can't complain about him. He annoyed me a little with his economic science and his law of supply and demand, which seemed to me more self-evident than he would admit. But he showed a certain respect for me as the owner, and I was all the more grateful because he couldn't possibly have learned that from his father. Respect for owners.h.i.+p must have been part of his economic science. He never scolded me for the mistakes I often made in posting entries; he simply ascribed them to ignorance and then gave me explanations that were really superfluous.

The trouble came when, what with looking at all those transactions, I began to feel like making some of my own. In the ledger, very clearly, I came to visualize my own pocket, and when I posted a sum under "debit" for our clients, instead of a pen, I seemed to hold in my hand a croupier's rake, ready to collect the money scattered over the gaming table.

Young Olivi also showed me the incoming mail; I read it with attention and-I must say-at first, in the hope of understanding it better than others. A perfectly commonplace offer one day commanded my impa.s.sioned attention. Even before reading it I felt something stir in my bosom, which I recognized immediately as that obscure presentiment that sometimes came to me at the gaming table. It is hard to describe this precognition. It consists of a certain expansion of the lungs whereby you breathe the air voluptuously, no matter how smoke-filled it may be. But there is more: You know at once that when you have doubled your stake you will feel even better. However, it takes some experience to grasp all this. You have to have abandoned the table with empty pockets and with regret at not having heeded it; then the table can no longer elude you. And if you have neglected it, that day is beyond salvation, because the cards take their revenge. However, it is much more pardonable not to heed the green table than to disregard the ledger before your eyes; and in fact I heard the call clearly, inside me, crying: "Buy that dried fruit at once!"

In all humility I spoke of it to Olivi, naturally without mentioning my inspiration. Olivi replied that he handled such transactions only for third parties, when he might make a small percentage. Thus he denied my dealings any possibility of inspiration, which was to be saved for third parties.

Night strengthened my conviction; the presentiment was then inside me. I breathed so well that I couldn't sleep. Augusta sensed my restlessness, and I had to tell her the reason. She immediately felt my inspiration, and in her sleep she even murmured, "Aren't you the master?"

True, in the morning, before I left, she said to me, concerned: "It wouldn't do for you to vex Olivi. Shall I speak with Papa?"

I wouldn't permit that, because I knew that Giovanni also attached very little significance to inspirations.

I reached the office fully determined to fight for my idea, not least to avenge the insomnia I had suffered. The battle raged until noon, when the deadline for accepting the offer expired. Olivi remained irremovable and dismissed me with the usual remark.

"Would you perhaps like to reduce the authority vested in me by your late father?"

Offended, I went back to my ledger for the moment, quite determined not to meddle in business anymore. But the taste of sultana raisins lingered on my palate, and every day at the Tergesteo I inquired about the price. Nothing else mattered to me. It rose slowly, very slowly, as if it needed to gather strength before breaking into a dash. Then in a single day it made a spectacular leap. The grape harvest had been wretched, and that fact became known only now. Funny thing, inspiration! It hadn't foreseen the poor harvest, but only the increase in price.

The cards took their revenge. In any event I couldn't stay put at my ledger, and I lost all respect for my instructors, especially now that Olivi no longer seemed so sure he had done the right thing. I laughed and jeered; it was my chief occupation.

A second offer came in, the price almost doubled. Olivi, to appease me, asked my opinion, and I said, triumphant, that I wouldn't eat raisins at that price.

Offended, Olivi murmured: "I stick to the system I've followed all my life."

And he went off to look for a buyer. He found one for a very small quant.i.ty, and again with the best of intentions, he came back to me and asked hesitantly: "Shall I cover this little purchase?"

Nasty as before, I answered: "I'd have covered it before making it."

In the end Olivi lost the strength of his own conviction and left the sale uncovered. The raisins continued to rise, and we lost everything we could lose on that small quant.i.ty.

But Olivi became angry with me and declared that he had gambled only to please me. The sly fox was forgetting that I had advised betting on the red and he, to outsmart me, had bet on the black. Our quarrel was beyond mending. Olivi appealed to my father-in-law, saying that between me and himself the firm would be harmed, and if my family so wished, he and his son would step down and leave me a free hand. My father-in-law immediately decided in Olivi's favor.

He said to me: "This dried-fruit deal is all too instructive. You two men will never be able to get along. Now who has to step down? The man who, without the other, would have concluded only one good transaction? Or the man who has been running the firm by himself for half a century?"

Augusta, too, was led by her father to persuade me not to meddle again in my own affairs. "Your goodness and your innocence," she said, "seem to make you unsuited to business. Stay home with me."

Enraged, I sulked in my tent-or, rather, my study. For a while I did some reading, I played music, then I felt a desire for more serious activity, and I nearly returned to chemistry, then to jurisprudence. Finally, and I don't know why, I devoted myself to the study of religion. I seemed to be resuming the studies I had already begun at the death of my father. Perhaps this time they were undertaken as a vigorous attempt to draw closer to Augusta and her health. Going to Ma.s.s with her was not enough; I had to proceed in a different way, namely by reading Renan and D. F. Strauss, the former with pleasure, the latter as punishment. I say this here to underline the immense desire that bound me to Augusta. And she never guessed this desire when she saw me with the critical edition of the Gospels in my hands. She preferred indifference to knowledge, and so she was unable to appreciate the greatest sign of affection I had given her. When she interrupted her toilette or her household occupations, as she regularly did, to peep in at the door of my room with a word of greeting, seeing me bent over those texts, she would make a grimace.

"Still bothering with that stuff?"

The religion that Augusta needed did not require any time to be learned or practiced. A quick bow of the head, then back to life at once! No more than that. For me, religion a.s.sumed quite a different aspect. If I had possessed true faith, I would have had only that and nothing else in this world.

Still, into my magnificently organized little room boredom sometimes entered. It was more like anxiety, because that was precisely when I seemed to feel the strength to work; but I was waiting for life to a.s.sign me some task. While I waited, I frequently went out and I spent many hours at the Tergesteo or in some cafe.

I was living in a simulation of activity. Very boring activity.

A university friend, who had been forced to come home in haste from a little town in Styria to be treated for a serious illness, became my nemesis, although he hardly looked the part. He came to see me after having spent a month in Trieste, in bed, which had sufficed to transform his disease from acute nephritis to chronic and probably incurable nephritis. But he believed he was better and was gaily preparing to move immediately, during that spring, to some place with a climate milder than ours, where he expected to be restored to complete health. It had probably been fatal for him to linger so long in our bleak native town.

The visit of that man, sick but happy and smiling, I consider a dire event for me; but perhaps I am wrong. It only marks a time in my life that I would have had to live through in any case.

My friend, Enrico Copier, was amazed that I had heard nothing about him or about his illness, of which Giovanni must have been informed. But Giovanni, since he was also sick, had no time for anyone and had said nothing to me, even though he came to my house every sunny day to nap for a few hours in the open air.

With the two sick men there, we all spent a very merry afternoon. They talked about their sicknesses, which provide the greatest diversion for the sick, while the subject is not too sad also for the healthy who are listening. There was only one disagreement, because Giovanni required fresh air, which was forbidden the other guest. The disagreement vanished when a slight wind rose, persuading Giovanni also to stay with us, in the warm little room.

Copier told us about his sickness, which caused no pain but sapped his strength. Only now that he was better did he realize how sick he had been. He talked about the medicines that had been administered to him, and then my interest grew keener. Among other things, his doctor had recommended an effective method to allow him long sleep, without having to poison himself with actual sleeping potions. But they were the very thing I needed most!

My poor friend, hearing that I needed medicines, flattered himself for a moment, thinking I might be suffering from his own disease, and he advised me to have myself looked at, listened to, and treated.

Augusta burst into hearty laughter and declared that I was nothing but an imaginary sick man. Then Copier's emaciated face betrayed something similar to resentment. Immediately, in a virile fas.h.i.+on, he freed himself from the condition of inferiority to which he was apparently condemned, attacking me with great energy.

"Imaginary sick man? Well, I prefer to be genuinely sick. In the first place, an imaginary sick man is a ridiculous monstrosity, and furthermore there are no medicines for him, whereas the pharmacy, as you can see in my case, always has something efficacious for those of us who are really ill."

His speech seemed that of a well man, and-here I must be honest-it made me suffer.

My father-in-law energetically agreed with Copier, but his words stopped short of heaping contempt on the imaginary sick man, because they betrayed all too clearly Giovanni's envy of the healthy man. He said that if he were healthy, as I was, instead of boring his fellow man with complaints, he would have rushed to his beloved, beneficent transactions, especially now that he had managed to reduce his girth. He was unaware that his loss of weight was not considered a favorable symptom.

Thanks to Copler's attack, I really did look like a sick man, and an ill-treated sick man at that. Augusta felt called upon to intervene on my behalf. Stroking my hand as it lay limp on the desk, she said my sickness didn't trouble anybody and she wasn't even convinced I did believe I was sick, because in that case I wouldn't be so filled with the joy of living. Thus Copier returned to the condition of inferiority to which he was doomed. He was quite alone in this world, and while he might be my rival in the matter of health, he possessed nothing similar to the devotion Augusta offered me. Feeling deeply the need for a nurse, he resigned himself to confessing to me later how much he had envied me for this reason.

The discussion continued over the next few days in a calmer key, while Giovanni slept in the garden. And Copier, having given the question some thought, now declared that an imaginary sick man was genuinely sick, but more intimately and even more radically than the genuinely sick. In fact, the former's nerves were reduced to such a state that he felt sickness when it wasn't there, while the normal function of the nerves would consist of giving the alarm through pain and leading the sufferer to seek aid.

"Yes," I said. "Like the teeth, where the pain is felt only when the nerve is exposed, and then it has to be destroyed to effect the cure."

In the end we agreed that a truly sick man and an imaginary sick man were equal. In his nephritis, in fact, a warning sign from the nerves had been absent, and still was; whereas my nerves, on the contrary, were perhaps so sensitive that they were alerting me to the sickness I would die of some decades later. So they were perfect nerves and had the sole disadvantage of not allowing me many happy days in this world. Now that he had managed to catalog me among the sick, Copier was quite content.

I don't know why the poor man had a mania for talking about women, but when my wife was not present, he talked of nothing else. He claimed that in the truly sick man, at least with the diseases we know of, there was a weakening of the s.e.x drive, which was a good defense of the organism, whereas in the imaginary sick man, who suffered only a disorder of the overexerted nerves (this was our diagnosis), that same drive was pathologically strong. I corroborated his theory with my experience, and we commiserated with each other reciprocally. I don't know why I didn't feel like telling him I was far removed from any excess and had been for a long time. I could have at least confessed that I considered myself, if not healthy, then convalescent, without offending him too much, for to proclaim oneself healthy while one knows all the complications of our organism is a difficult thing to do.

"You desire all the beautiful women you see?" Copier questioned me further.

"Not all!" I murmured, to tell him I was not that sick. For a start I didn't desire Ada, whom I saw every evening. For me she was truly the forbidden woman. The rustle of her skirts said nothing to me, and if I had been allowed to move them with my own hands, it would have been the same. Luckily I hadn't married her. This indifference was, or so it seemed to me, a manifestation of genuine health. Perhaps my desire for her at one time had been so violent that it had burned itself out. However, my indifference extended also to Alberta, though she was very pretty in her tidy, sober little school-dress. Could the possession of Augusta have sufficed to still my desire for the entire Malfenti family? That would really have been very moral!

Perhaps I didn't mention my virtue because I was constantly being unfaithful to Augusta in my thoughts, and even now, speaking to Copier, with a shudder of desire I thought of all the women that I was neglecting on her account. I thought of the women hurrying along the streets, all bundled up, and whose secondary s.e.xual organs for that reason became too important, whereas those of woman possessed then vanished as if possession had atrophied them. I still felt keenly the desire for adventure: that adventure that began with the admiration of a boot, a glove, a skirt, of all that covers and alters shape. But this desire was not in itself guilty. Copier, however, was wrong in a.n.a.lyzing me. To explain to someone the sort of man he is somehow authorizes that man to act as he pleases. Copier did even worse, but still, when he spoke or when he acted, he couldn't foresee where he would be leading me.

Copier's words remain so important in my memory that when I recall them, they summon up all the sensations a.s.sociated with them, and all the things and the people. I stepped into the garden with my friend, who had to go home before sunset. From my villa, which stands on a hill, there was a view of the port and the sea, a view now blocked by recent construction. We paused to take a long look at the sea, ruffled by a slight breeze, reflecting in myriads of red light the calm glow of the sky. The Istrian peninsula afforded the eye repose, with its green tenderness that extended in an enormous arc on the sea like a solid penumbra. The docks and the breakwaters were small and insignificant in their strictly linear forms, and the water in the basins dark in its immobility, or was it perhaps murky? In the vast panorama, peace was small, compared to all that animated red on the water; and after a little while, dazzled, we turned our backs to the sea. On the little lawn before the house, in contrast, night was already descending.

In front of the porch, on a big chair, his head covered by a cap and protected also by the raised lapel of his fur coat, his legs wrapped in a blanket, my father-in-law was asleep. We stopped to look at him. His mouth was agape, the lower jaw slack like that of something dead, his respiration noisy and too rapid. Every so often his head fell on his chest, and without waking, he would raise it again. There was then a movement of his eyelids, as if he wanted to open his eyes, to find his balance more easily, and his breathing would change rhythm. A genuine interruption of his sleep.

It was the first time the gravity of my father-in-law's illness was revealed to me so clearly, and I was deeply distressed.

In a low voice Copier said to me: "He should be under treatment. Probably he also suffers from nephritis. He isn't actually sleeping: I know that condition. Poor devil!"

Concluding, he advised me to send for his doctor.

Giovanni heard us and opened his eyes. He immediately seemed less ill, and joked with Copier: "You're staying out here, defying the open air? Won't it be bad for you?"

He thought he had slept soundly, and he had no idea that he could lack for air here, facing the vast sea from which so much air was wafted to him! But his voice was faint and his words interrupted by gasps; his face was ashen and, rising from his chair, he felt frozen. He had to take refuge in the house. I can still see him, the blanket under his arm, as he crossed the lawn, short of breath but laughing, as he waved to us.

"You see what a genuinely sick man is like?" Copier said, unable to dispel his dominating thought. "He's dying, and he doesn't know he's sick."

It seemed to me, too, that the genuinely sick man was not suffering much. My father-in-law and also Copier have been at rest for many years in the Sant'Anna cemetery, but there was a day when I pa.s.sed their graves and the fact of their having lain beneath their tombstones for so many years did not vitiate the thesis of one of them.

Before leaving his old house, Copier had liquidated his affairs, and so, like me, he had no business concerns. However, once out of bed, he was unable to remain still and, not having any business of his own, he began to busy himself with that of others, which seemed far more interesting to him. He devoted himself to charity, but because he had decided to live entirely off the interest of his capital, he couldn't permit himself the luxury of doing everything at his own expense.

So he organized collections and taxed his friends and acquaintances. He recorded everything, like the good businessman he was, and I thought that book was his viatic.u.m and that, had I been in his situation, sentenced to a brief life and without family as he was, I would have enriched that life by delving into capital. But he was the imaginary healthy man and he touched only the interest due him, unable to concede that the future was brief.

One day he came at me with a request for a few hundred crowns, to purchase a little piano for a poor girl who had already been often subsidized by me and by others through him, providing her a small monthly allowance. We now had to act quickly, to take advantage of a bargain. I couldn't exempt myself but a bit sullenly I remarked that I would have made a profit if I had stayed home that day. From time to time I am subject to fits of stinginess.

Copler took the money and went off with a word of thanks, but the effect of my remark became evident a few days later and it was, unfortunately, significant. He came to tell me that the piano had been installed and that Signorina Carla Cerco and her mother begged me to call on them so they could thank me. Copler was afraid of losing his client and wanted to obligate me, allowing me to savor the grat.i.tude of the two women I had benefited. At first I tried to escape this nuisance, a.s.suring him that I was convinced he distributed his benefaction wisely; but he was so insistent that I finally had to agree.

"Is she beautiful?" I asked, laughing.

"Very beautiful," he replied, "but she's not your cup of tea.

Curious, his mentioning cups, as if we could have drunk from the same one and he might communicate his pyorrhea to me. He told me how honest this family was, and how unfortunate, having lost its mainstay a few years ago, and how they continued to live in the direst poverty, though always with the strictest propriety.

It was an unpleasant day. A damp wind was blowing, and I envied Copier, who was wearing his fur coat. I had to hold my hat on with my hand; otherwise it would have flown off. But I was in a good humor because I was going to collect the grat.i.tude owed to my philanthropy. We went on foot along Corsia Stadion, we crossed the Public Garden. It was a part of the city I never saw. We entered one of those so-called developer's houses, which our forefathers had set about building some forty years ago, in places remote from the city, which promptly invaded them; its appearance was modest, but still more impressive than the houses built today with the same intentions. The stairs occupied a cramped s.p.a.ce and were therefore very steep.

We stopped at the second floor, which I reached well before my companion. I was surprised that of the three doors that gave on that landing, two, one on either side, were marked by the visiting card of Carla Gerco, pinned there with tacks, while the third also had a card, but with another name. Copier explained to me that the Gerco ladies had their kitchen and bedroom to the right, while, to the left, there was only one room, Signorina Carla's studio. They had been able to rent out the central rooms of the apartment, and so their own rent was very low, but they suffered the inconvenience of having to cross the landing to go from one room to the other.