What she called a warning looked to him very much like a plea for help, and it shook him. Of course he could not even think of leaving the country and abandoning his dying mother; so he was saved from all doubt, and however much Francesca warned and called he could not listen to her. But it was very sad that, by an act which had seemed natural and necessary to him but would have seemed unreasonable to any other man, he had set out on the road that Francesca was so energetically pursuing. Instead of finding him an ally in the struggle which she should win in the name of honesty and justice, he had blocked her way. Maller had seduced her, and it was right that he should marry her. This was Alfonso’s only remorse. He regretted betraying not Annetta but Francesca.
For an hour he sat by his mother’s bedside absorbed in his thoughts.
“Does that letter worry you a lot?” asked Signora Carolina, who had been watching him a long time.
She spoke little because it was an effort for her, and the few words which she said sometimes came out a long time after she thought them. Perhaps she had been watching his face from the moment in which he had abandoned himself to reflection.
He started.
“No!” he replied. “It’s a man I know gossiping about things that make me laugh.”
She asked nothing more. It cost her a great deal of effort to turn her attention to outside matters, and deceiving her was easy.
Francesca’s letter did bring some good news though. As she had foreseen, his departure from town was equivalent to renouncing Annetta. Now he was sure that the one jilted would be himself, and this role pleased him much more than that of the betrayer’s. He guessed that Annetta would hate being the jilted party and be far more pleased to leave him first. So he had no regrets in that respect.
Settling down to write the answer he must give to Francesca, although she had not asked for one, he realized that, to make it effective, and also without attracting Frencesca’s hatred, his main difficulty was to convince her that his mother was seriously ill. The two women seemed to have had no news about this from the bank. Eventually he struck the right note. Avoiding all artifice he was brief, like someone giving true facts without bothering to adduce proofs of their truth. He said that his mother was in danger of her life and that for the moment he could think of nothing else. He ended with a phrase which seemed a real inspiration. He pretended not to believe that his presence in town could be as necessary as Francesca asserted.
“Annetta loves me, as you confirm in your letter. Then why should she leave me? Anyway, here I’m only doing my duty.”
After sending the letter he felt relieved, a relief, if less intense, like the one he had felt at his departure from town. After a plunge back into urban intrigues he was out in the country again, and the sight of his mother’s corpse-like face could not quite rob him of the joy of being safe from such intrigues.
That evening, during an instant of peace after a day of terrible suffering, she asked him, “Have you written to your girl? Don’t deny it now, you’d be wrong if you didn’t.”
But a gleam of jealousy flickered in her dull eyes.
He did not deny it. Knowing himself apt to feel bitter regrets, he had been careful during all those days to behave so that he would never have to reprove himself for any brusque word towards the dying woman. He must show confidence, satisfy her curiosity but not tell her lies because he might be sorry for those too. He did not tell her the whole truth, from respect for the secrets of others, or at least that’s how he excused himself. He told her he had loved a girl, but found she was such a flirt that he wanted to cut her out of his heart, which he was managing to do without great difficulty.
“Is it Signorina Lanucci?” asked Signora Carolina with a forced smile.
“No!” he replied, as serious as if he were in the confessional. “It’s a rich girl you don’t know.”
“Very rich?”
“Mm! Richer than me, anyway!”
He did not want to confess that by leaving the girl whom he had declared a flirt he was also rejecting a fortune, for had she known that, his mother would have thought him in the wrong.
That evening she spoke no more of it, but she must have reflected a long time about his words.
“You obviously don’t love her,” she said to him the next day, “or you’d never have been so quick to realize she was a flirt or unable to forgive her when you did.”
After an attack of coughing in which she seemed about to suffocate at any moment, in her gratitude at his help, she said, “Don’t love her, don’t love any of them. Women aren’t worth it.”
Although he had thought himself quite indifferent to the intrigues in town, after receiving Francesca’s letter he found his thoughts dwelling on them for hours longer than on his mother. If, as Francesca told him in a tone which admitted of no doubt, Annetta was leaving him and marrying her cousin, what would her feelings for him be? Hatred, surely. If the memory of Annetta’s fall disgusted even him, what effect could it produce in the mind of an Annetta married to another? Shame and hatred; maybe, for fear of the secret being divulged, active hatred; she would get him thrust out of the Maller bank and try to make life in town impossible for him. How should he react when faced with such hatred? Defend himself? But he had no right to, it seemed to him. He imagined all sorts of persecutions and was shaken by imagined disasters ahead.
His mother saw that he had tears in his eyes. “Why are you crying?”
“My eyes are smarting, I’m not crying!”
She was silent and thought he was crying at seeing her suffer, while his tears were flowing at the thought of being fired from the bank with curses from Maller and Cellani, seeing himself leaving it with head bowed under a weight of guilt, though not that guilt that would be publicly held against him.
Often when his mother needed him, she must have called him a number of times before he heard.
The poor woman had constant need of help because she could no longer turn around in bed by herself. Sores had formed in a number of places from constant lying-down, and the pain of pressure on those parts of her body made her perpetually long to change position. Alfonso found an ingenious way of making the difficult adjustment. He would bend halfway down the bed, and she would then grip his neck with both hands—then he’d move over in the direction where she would lean after turning; and the sick woman rearranged herself thus suspended, then just withdrew one hand from his neck. The only time she felt great relief was when, clinging to Alfonso’s neck, nothing but her feet rested on the bed. While she hung there, he tore himself from his daydreams. But when he was merely sustaining her while she cried and sobbed as she made initial efforts to raise herself, he was again dreaming of Maller, Cellani and Annetta.
Very soon, however, Signora Carolina’s sufferings increased in such a way that they no longer left him time to dream, for she had not a second’s respite and needed him continuously, both for his strength to support her, but also for his mind to find new ways of helping her distress. He could no longer dream, could not even reflect, because the imminence of the event nearing its climax beneath his eyes hampered his every faculty.
Signora Carolina’s most painful disturbances came from dislocations of her nervous system. The mattress seemed to the sick woman to be leaning over to one side and sliding her out of bed, and though level it had to be raised on that side by putting pillows beneath. Of course every effort only proved to the sick woman that her body itself was wrong and not any of the objects that offended her. To the right of her bed was a window which she wanted covered with a sheet because light from that direction hurt her. Then the whiteness of the sheet pained her, and even when Alfonso put a black cloth over the sheet, she had no peace.
“I see, yes, I see!” she groaned and asked for no other changes, but even when she had turned her back, she went on feeling an indefinable malaise on that side.
Only one other time did Alfonso find her calm enough to enable him to go out. He did not want to stay too long away from the sick
woman and longed at least to go as far as the village. So he was annoyed as he left the house to run into young Creglingi, Rosina’s future husband, on his way with two peasants to his fields just beyond Alfonso’s house, spread over half of the most fertile part of the valley.
Alfonso could not quite hide that he had not wanted the meeting, but he noticed that Creglingi did not seem very friendly either; in fact if Alfonso, ashamed of passing by an old friend without even greeting him, had not moved towards him first, Creglingi would have given no sign of noticing him.
“Am I really so put out to find he’s engaged to Rosina?” Alfonso asked himself, surprised at his own hatred and not at the other’s.
“How are you?” asked Creglingi, a sturdy young man with coarse features, sunburnt skin and little sly eyes in a round face. He gave signs of some embarrassment, which Alfonso attributed to jealousy of Rosina.
“Congratulations!” said Alfonso at once, and shook his hand so as to leave no doubts about the sincerity of his good wishes.
But on receiving these congratulations Creglingi seemed no happier with his old friend and moved off saying he had to get home by a certain hour after cutting the hay in a field which was still a long way off.
Their friendship was one of early youth and had lasted till Alfonso’s departure, although as they grew older, the difference between the two young men increased more and more. Creglingi’s brain had developed little, or, rather, had been stifled by manual labour. Alfonso would never have cut off their relationship as he had a nostalgic longing for memories of his early youth. But he felt a stab of bitterness at finding himself the one rejected. Creglingi had no more than two or three ideas in his whole head and they had to serve him all his life; but in spite of that Alfonso had always felt a certain sympathy for his strength and determination.
He had an impression that the three men were having a quiet laugh at him. Blood rushed to his head; he turned and was just about to shout some insult when he found they were walking quietly along beside each other, Creglingi in the middle with head bowed. He doubted whether he had misheard. Then he realized that what had provoked the peasants’ laughter was his doffing his hat to them as people do in towns.
“Idiots,” he thought to calm himself. “When the chance comes, I’ll explain what that gesture means.”
His month’s leave was now up; on the last day he remembered to ask for an extension and wrote a friendly letter direct to Cellani in which he thanked him for the patience shown till then and asked outright for another month. He had an intuition that a fortnight would be enough, but since he could hope for no improvement in Signora Carolina, to put too short a term into writing would have seemed as if he wanted to see her life shortened. Instead he wrote of his hopes for her complete recovery and added that he might need to ask for yet another extension.
In the last week Signora Carolina’s physical suffering had lessened, true sign of the nearing of ‘the great pacifier’. Her body had even become incapable of pain.
One morning, after a sleepless night during which the sick woman was often not only delirious but obviously weakening in her senses, Alfonso found her voice changed, its tone deeper and less sonorous, interrupted by quick irregular breathing, though that did not seem to make the sick woman suffer. In a second of lucidity she said in a voice of anguish that she was dying; that the walls seemed to be folding in and threatening to fall down on her; and a storm raging outside; once, beside herself, she asked him to send someone to the village to see if it was still standing. Then she wanted to describe what she felt and tried in vain for hours to find the right words. It was strange and terrible she said, because she felt herself being martyred but felt no pain.
Towards nightfall she lost consciousness. Alfonso thought her dead and began sobbing unrestrainedly. That long day of new sufferings, the feeling of his own impotence revealed surprising things that he had not known existed. The disease overwhelming his mother’s wretched body seemed now to be taking on an existence of its own. He had seen it strike at intervals, deride all efforts made against it, then struggle with someone whom it knew could not escape, grant illusory truces, and now, finally, kill.
Giuseppina touched her mistress’s body, found it cold, and had the ingenious idea of reanimating it by warming the bed artificially. Once more Signora Carolina opened her eyes and looked supplicatingly around. She was imploring grace from someone.
Giuseppina began vaunting her own miracle, but it did not last long. Perhaps the sick woman felt the nearness of death because, raising her head as if wanting to greet it courteously, she murmured, “This I’ve never felt.”
They were her last words. The panting changed to a rattle. Alfonso thought that she had been granted some peace at last and that the lungs were returning to their regular work; he tried to hold one of her hands to support her and found it stiff.
That very moment Doctor Frontini happened to arrive. He confirmed death after a careful examination, as if it were still a question of remedies.
“It’s all over,” Alfonso said to spare him the trouble.
He had to say the same to Mascotti, who had hurried up, called by Giuseppina; he first refused to believe in the death, and then tried to comfort him by a speech to show that Signora Carolina was better dead. But Alfonso needed no comfort. He felt no emotion, did not shout, his voice was firm and calm. He was surprised by the speed with which that pain, that horrible panting, had ceased. The dead woman was laid out on the bed which would no longer make her suffer, from which she would never slip again. Her mouth was agape, but not to shout. It seemed open for a long yawn.
On seeing Alfonso so calm Mascotti was soon at ease; for he had entered this house in fear of having to watch scenes. He now wanted to stay and even asked Frontini to keep Alfonso company. Giuseppina, without being told, brought a table from the dead woman’s room into her own, set chairs around and put out some wine.
As soon as they had sat down, Mascotti suggested that Alfonso should come and stay at his home.
Alfonso refused, saying that he would remain in this house until he left the village. He said it calmly but firmly, and Mascotti did not insist.
Both Mascotti and Frontini tried to change the subject; they spoke of the wine they were drinking, the situation of the house, the heavy fall of snow the day before and the harsh temperature that day, and then they fell to talking again about the event which had reunited them in that room.
Giuseppina described how helpful her nursing had been to Signora Carolina. If she had not been there the poor woman would have died half-an-hour before.
Mascotti sat listening with curiosity.
“Strange! So life was nothing but some warmth!”
He spoke like a peasant, while Frontini asserted that if the patient had come round, it could not have been due only to the little warmth supplied her by Giuseppina.
The doctor then assured them that all the resources of science had been lavished on the sick woman, but that from the very start of her illness he had realized that there was no remedy, and said so to Mascotti.
“Wasn’t that true?”
Mascotti confirmed it.
Alfonso sat listening, only half understanding. He did not drink at all and spoke little, only when forced to answer a direct question. He felt no emotion but seemed deep in thought; actually he was prostrated by exhaustion in his limbs and head. Mascotti must be thinking him a heartless son.
There were no beds in the house apart from his father’s, and that would have to be dismantled in order to get it out of the dead woman’s room. Mascotti renewed his suggestion that Alfonso should go and sleep at his house for a couple of nights, and Frontini, with slightly more energy because it cost him nothing, encouraged this. Alfonso, tired, agreed with whatever cost less words and accepted. Giuseppina promised to watch over the body. Never had she been so ready and active. She had informed the priest and busied herself around the dead woman, in whose hands she had put a crucifix, and had set two candles on eit
her side.
Before leaving the house Alfonso wanted to kiss his mother, and seeing Mascotti and Frontini were taking no notice of him he tried to enter the next-door room unseen. Mascotti prevented him, saying that he could give his last farewell to the dead woman next day. The poor man was still afraid of scenes. Frontini agreed with Mascotti, and Giuseppina in her new zeal grabbed Alfonso by the jacket and pulled him back. But Alfonso insisted and eventually forced his way in. Tears came to his eyes as he struggled. Was he to leave his mother as if escaping from her?
The features were no longer those he had loved, and he turned pale at kissing a forehead that was already ice-cold. He had kissed a thing and not a person.
Then he was docile and did what Mascotti wanted. He left the house without giving Giuseppina any instructions; he was leaving so little in her custody. He walked along between the two men with bowed head. They too were silent because, after seeing those few tears torn from him by the violence of their condolences, his wordless sorrow touched them.
The ice-covered snow crackled beneath their feet and the full moon in a clear sky was bathing the white valley with its rays, dazzling in that cold light. The tip of the stone hillock beyond the village seemed afire, surrounded by pale motionless flames. In the village petty attempts had been made to sweep away the snow, and the terrible white uniformity was at last broken by some darker patches of bare earth.
The houses were silent and dark; only from two windows of a ground-floor room in Faldelli’s tavern came strips of bright light and the sound of loud voices.
They stopped in front of Mascotti’s house, next to the tavern. Frontini bid Alfonso farewell with some words which he did not hear; more sympathy, it must have been.
The notary’s daughter, an ugly little old spinster, opened the door, and although she already knew of Alfonso’s tragedy, as soon as she had shaken his hand as a sign of condolence, she produced a phrase prepared long before and which she was unable to renounce though it was now quite out of place.