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Text originally published in 1932 under the same title.
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Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.
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AS A MAN GROWS OLDER
BY
ITALO SVEVO
TRANSLATED FROM THE ITALIAN BY BERYL DE ZOETE
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Contents
TABLE OF CONTENTS 3
1 4
2 11
3 18
4 27
5 40
6 51
7 59
8 70
9 77
10 88
11 104
12 116
13 136
14 143
REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 148
1
AT ONCE, with his very first words, he wanted to make it perfectly clear that he had no intention of beginning anything in the nature of a serious flirtation. For this reason he addressed her more or less as follows: “I love you very much and it is for your sake that I feel we ought to agree to behave with great prudence.” His words sounded, indeed, so very cautious that it was hard to believe the sentiment which inspired them was altogether disinterested; had he been able to speak a little more frankly he would probably have said something of this sort: “I am very much in love with you, but it is impossible that I should ever consider you as more than a plaything. I have other duties in life, my career and my family.”
And his family? An only sister who made no claim at all on him, either physically or morally. She was small and pale, several years younger than himself, but older in character, unless it were perhaps that the conditions under which she had lived so long made her appear so.
Of the two it was really he who was the egoist. She was like a mother to him in her unselfish devotion, but this did not prevent him from speaking as if his shoulders were weighed down by the burden of another precious life bound to his own, and of acting as if this weight of responsibility obliged him to go cautiously through life, avoiding all its perils, but also renouncing all its pleasures and all hope of earthly felicity. At the age of thirty-five, the desire for pleasures he had never tasted, for love he had never known surged up in his heart, but with a sense of bitterness and frustration at the thought of all he might have enjoyed; and he was conscious at the same time of a great mistrust of himself, and of the weakness of his own character which hitherto he had had occasion rather to suspect than to prove by actual experience.
Emilio Brentani’s career was a more complicated matter, because at that time it consisted of two distinct occupations, with completely diverse aims. His official career was a quite subordinate post in an Insurance Society, which was just sufficient to provide for the needs of his small family. His other career was literary, and apart from a mild degree of fame, which flattered his vanity rather than satisfied his ambition, it brought him in nothing, but also took nothing out of him. For many years now, in fact since the publication of a novel on which praise had been showered by the local Press, he had written nothing at all, not from any mistrust of his own powers, but from sheer inertia. His novel, printed on bad paper, had turned yellow on the shelves of the bookshops, but Emilio, who at the time of its publication had been spoken of only as a literary star of the future, had by degrees come to be looked upon as a solid literary asset who had some weight in the petty artistic scales of the city. The original estimate had never been revised, it had merely developed with time into something else.
He had too clear a perception of the insignificance of his own work ever to boast about the past; but in art as in life he regarded himself as being still in a preparatory stage, secretly considering his genius to be a powerful machine in process of construction but not yet functioning. He lived in a perpetual state of impatient expectation of something which was to be evolved for him by his brain, namely art, and of something which was to come to him from outside—good fortune, success—as if he had not already passed the age when his vitality was at the full.
Angiolina walked beside him. She was a tall, healthy blonde, with big blue eyes and a supple, graceful body, an expressive face and transparent skin glowing with health. As she walked, she held her head slightly on one side, as if it were weighed down by the mass of golden hair which was braided round it, and she kept looking down at the ground which she tapped at each step with her elegant parasol, as if she hoped there might issue from it some comment on the words that had just been spoken. When at last she was sure she had heard aright, she murmured: “How strange!” and looked at him from under her eyelids. “No one ever said such a thing to me before.” She could not understand him, but somehow felt flattered at seeing him assume a responsibility that was not really his, that of warding off a danger from her. It made the affection he offered her seem of a tender, brotherly nature.
Having stated his conditions, Emilio felt that he had set his mind at rest, and could allow himself to resume a tone more in keeping with the occasion. He rained down on her fair head the lyrical effusions which the desire of all these long years had ripened and refined, and as he uttered them, they seemed to him to have been born afresh at that moment, under the inspiration of Angiolina’s blue eyes. It seemed to him that it was years since he had really tried to compose, since he had drawn ideas and words from his inner consciousness; and this discovery endowed the humdrum tenor of his life with a rare and unforgettable quality of peace and suspended movement. A woman had come into his life! The glamour of her youth and of her beauty was over it all, banishing from his mind the memory of his sad and lonely past, full of unsatisfied desires, and holding out to him the promise of a joyful future which could not, he felt sure, be compromised by her.
He had approached her with the idea of a brief and easy intrigue, such as he had so often heard described, but had never yet experienced, at least hardly in such a form as to be worthy of the name. She had dropped her sunshade just in time to provide him with an excuse for accosting her, and now that he was thus cunningly entangled in the pretty web of the young girl’s life he felt no desire to free himself from it until he should have advanced much farther into her intimacy.
But the amazing purity of her profile and her incomparable health—are not good health and corruption always assumed by the rhetorician to be incompatible?—had subdued the ardor of his first onset and, overcome with a sudden reluctance to go farther, he now found all his delight in marveling at the mystery of her face, with its clear and delicate chiseling and infinite sweetness of expression. His happiness was complete, he was at rest.
She had told him very little about herself, and he was so much preoccupied with his own feelings that at the time he did not even listen to the little she told him. She was obviously poor, very poor even, but for the moment, as she related to him with a certain amount of pride, she had no need to earn her living. This added a certain charm to the adventure, for
to carry on a flirtation with someone who is on the brink of starvation has a disturbing influence on one’s enjoyment. Emilio had therefore not much information to go on, but it seemed to him on the whole that such conclusions as he was able to draw were sufficiently reassuring. If the girl were honest, as her limpid gaze seemed to suggest, he should certainly not be the one to deprave her. If, however, her profile and that clear eye of hers belied her real character, so much the better for him. In either case he had a fair prospect of enjoying himself, and in neither did there seem to be any danger.
Angiolina had not understood a great deal of what he was saying, but there were plenty of small indications to enable her to interpret the rest. Even the words she found most difficult to comprehend were spoken in a tone of voice which left no doubt as to how they should be interpreted. Her color rose, and she did not withdraw her shapely hand when Emilio impressed a chaste kiss upon it.
They remained standing a long time on the terrace of S. Andrea, looking out over the calm sea with the glow of sunset still upon it under a clear, starry sky. Though there was no moon the night was not dark. A cart drove by on the road below, and in the great silence which surrounded them the distant sound of wheels over the uneven ground reached them long after it had passed. They amused themselves by trying to catch the sound as it became more and more distant, till it melted at last into the universal silence, and it pleased them that they both lost the sound at the same moment. “Our ears agree well together,” said Emilio with a smile.
He had said all he had to say and did not feel inclined to talk any more just then. It was only after a long interval that he broke silence by saying: “I wonder whether this meeting will bring us good luck.” He was quite sincere. He felt the need to express aloud the doubt he entertained as to his own future happiness.
“I wonder,” she replied, trying to convey in her own voice the emotion she had felt in his. Emilio smiled again, but thought it more becoming to hide his smile. Given the premises from which he had started, what sort of good luck could come to Angiolina from knowing him?
At last it was time for them to part. She did not want him to be seen with her in the town, so he followed slowly at a distance, unable wholly to tear himself away from her. How charming she looked, as she walked along in all the assurance of her splendid youth, never faltering, though the pavement was covered with a slippery mud! There was something of a wild beast’s beauty in her strong and graceful carriage.
As luck would have it, the very next day he learned a good deal more about Angiolina than she had told him herself.
He met her by chance in the Corso, at midday, and greeted her with all the enthusiasm of delighted surprise, almost sweeping the ground with his hat in a magnificent gesture of salutation: she replied with a slight inclination of the head, enhanced however by a brilliant glance of her flashing eyes.
Someone named Sorniani, a thin, shriveled little creature, reputed to be a great ladies’ man and also a malicious gossip, touched Emilio on the arm and asked him where on earth he had got to know that girl. They had been friends since childhood, but it was several years since they had spoken to each other and it was only the sight of a pretty woman that had made Sorniani feel the need for renewing their former acquaintance. “I met her at some friends of mine,” replied Emilio.
“And what is she doing now?” asked Sorniani, in a tone which implied that he knew all about Angiolina’s past, and was quite injured at knowing nothing about her life at the moment.
“I have no idea,” answered Emilio, adding, with well-feigned indifference: “She strikes me as being a very nice sort of girl.”
“Don’t be too sure,” exclaimed Sorniani emphatically, as if he would have liked to assert the contrary; it was only after a short pause that he corrected himself. “I know nothing at all about her now, and at the time I knew her everyone seemed to think her quite respectable, though once she had been in a rather equivocal situation.”
It needed no encouragement on Emilio’s part for him to relate that the poor girl had been within an ace of a great stroke of good fortune which, perhaps by no fault of her own, had turned out very badly for her. When she was scarcely more than a child, a certain Merighi had fallen madly in love with her. He was an extremely handsome fellow, that Sorniani was obliged to admit, though he had never liked him personally, and he was a very prosperous man of business. His intentions towards her were perfectly honest. He had removed her from her family, of whom he did not think very highly, and had insisted on his own mother adopting the girl. “His own mother!” cried Sorniani. “As if the idiot could not have enjoyed the girl outside his own house, but must needs do it under his mother’s very nose.” He was bent on proving the man to be a fool and the woman dishonest. In a few months time Angiolina returned to her own home, which she ought never to have come out of, and Merighi and his mother left the town, giving out that they had lost a good deal of money over an unlucky speculation. But some people gave a rather different account of what had happened. Merighi’s mother was said to have discovered that Angiolina was carrying on a disgraceful intrigue with someone else and to have turned her out of the house. Sorniani volunteered, unasked, other variations on the same theme.
He took an evident pleasure in enlarging on so spicy a subject, and Brentani only paid attention to such of his words as seemed to be worthy of credence, facts which must be notorious to everyone. He had known Merighi by sight and remembered very well his tall, athletic figure, obviously the perfect mate for Angiolina. He remembered having heard him favorably spoken of as an idealistic businessman, rather too daring in his conceptions; a man who was convinced that he could conquer the world by his energy alone. He had also heard from people connected with him in business that Merighi’s lofty ideals had cost him dear, and that he had in the end been obliged to liquidate his knowledge under the most unfavorable conditions. But Sorniani might as well have talked to the winds, for Emilio was now sure that he knew exactly what had happened. Merighi, impoverished and discredited, had lacked the courage to embark on matrimony, and Angiolina, who was to have been made into the respectable wife of a rich bourgeois, had ended by becoming a plaything in his own hands. He felt a profound pity for her.
Sorniani had himself witnessed various incidents in Merighi’s love-making. He had often seen him on Sunday at the door of Sant’ Antonio Vecchio, waiting patiently while she knelt before the altar, saying her prayers; he had watched him gazing with all his soul at that fair head shining in the twilight of the church.
“Two adorations,” thought Brentani, deeply moved. He found it easy to understand the tenderness which held Merighi spellbound on the threshold of the church.
“What a fool!” wound up Sorniani.
The result of Sorniani’s communication was to make his own adventure seem more important in Brentani’s eyes. He awaited Thursday, when he was to see her again, in a state of feverish impatience, and his impatience made him communicative.
His most intimate friend, a sculptor named Balli, was told about his meeting with Angiolina the very next day. “Why shouldn’t I amuse myself as well as everyone else, when it costs me so little?” Emilio inquired of him.
Balli listened to his story with an expression of utter amazement. He had been a friend of Brentani for more than ten years, and this was the first time he had ever seen him excited about a woman. He at once saw the danger which threatened his friend, and took a grave view of this adventure.
Emilio protested. “What danger can I possibly run, at my age and with my experience?” He was fond of talking about his experience. What he was pleased to call so was something he had absorbed from books: a considerable mistrust of his fellow-men and a great contempt for them.
Balli had turned forty-odd years to better account, and his experience enabled him to judge that of his friend. He was less cultivated, but he had always exercised a sort of paternal authority over him, which Emilio accepted only too gladly; for although his lot was rather drab and
perfectly ordinary, and though his life was entirely devoid of unforeseen happenings, he did not feel safe without a few hints as to its conduct.
Stefano Balli was a tall, powerfully built man, with one of those smooth, bronzed faces which never seem to grow old, and youthful blue eyes. His beard was neatly trimmed, his appearance correct and his expression somewhat unbending. The only sign of age about him was that his chestnut hair was turning slightly gray.
When animated by curiosity or pity his piercing look became almost tender; but if his antagonism was aroused, even during the most trivial discussion, he could assume an expression of great severity.
Fortune had not favored him either. Various juries, when rejecting his designs, had praised certain details, but no work of his had found a place on any of the numerous piazzas in Italy. Yet he had never allowed himself to be depressed by his want of success. He was satisfied with the praise of a few individual artists, convinced that his very originality must prevent him from having a wider and more popular appeal, and he had continued to pursue an ideal of spontaneity, a certain willful ruggedness, a simplicity, or, as he preferred to say, perspicacity of idea from which he thought his artistic “ego” must emerge purified of all that was not original either in form or idea. He would not admit that one could be discouraged by the success or failure of one’s work, but it is doubtful whether he would really have escaped discouragement if his enormous personal success had not brought him a certain solace which he was at pains to hide, and always denied, but which certainly went a considerable way towards keeping his handsome figure erect and confident. The attraction which all women felt for him did more than satisfy his vanity, although ambition being the prime instinct of his being, he was not capable of falling in love. He tasted success, or something very like it, in the love of women; loving the artist, they loved also his art, though it would have seemed to have in it so little that could appeal to them. So that his conviction of his own genius, added to the love and admiration which others felt for him, made it possible for him to continue to play the part of a superior being. In matters of art his judgment was severe and uncompromising; in society he made no effort to create a favorable impression. He was, on the whole, not at all popular with men and never sought their company unless he knew that they already had a certain admiration for him.