Zeno's Conscience
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 Masses 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 canals 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 passing 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 canal, 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 analyze 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 passing 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 bébés. But at present there were no bébés 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 café, 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 trem
bling.
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 ownership 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 impassioned 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 Papà?”
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 quantity, 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 quantity.
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 Mass 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 assumed 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 assign me some task. While I waited, I frequently went out and I spent many hours at the Tergesteo or in some café.
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 h
ad 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 fashion, 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.”