Zeno's Conscience

  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 sex 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 sexual 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 analyzing 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 associated 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 passed 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 viaticum 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 gratitude of the two women I had benefited. At first I tried to escape this nuisance, assuring 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 gratitude 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 space 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.

  We knocked on the door at the left, the study, where mother and daughter, advised of our visit, were waiting for us. Copier made the introductions. The mother, a very shy person in a poor black dress, her head distinguished by her snowy white hair, made me a little speech that she must have prepared in advance: they were honored by my visit, and they thanked me for the considerable present I had given them. After that she didn’t open her mouth again.

  Copier observed everything like a professor at a state examination, hearing the repeated lesson that he had taught with great effort. He corrected the speaker, telling her that I had not only provided the money for the piano, but had also contributed to the assistance he had collected for them. Devoted to precision, Copier was.

  Signorina Carla rose from the chair by the piano where she had been sitting, extended her hand to me, and said simply: “Thank you.”

  This, at least, was sufficiently brief. My philanthropic burden was beginning to weigh on me. I, too, concerned myself with other people’s business, like any truly sick man! What would that pretty young woman see in me? A person eminently respectable, but not a man! And she was really pretty! I believe she wanted to seem younger than she was, wearing a skirt too short for the current fashion, unless around the house she wore a skirt dating from the time when she hadn’t attained her full growth. But her head was a woman’s, and displayed the somewhat elaborate coiffure of a woman who wishes to please. The rich brown braids were arranged to cover her ears and also, in part, her neck. I was so concerned with my dignity, and so afraid of Copier’s inquisitorial eye, that at first I didn’t even take a good look at the girl; but now I know her completely. There was a musical quality in her voice when she spoke, and with an affectation by now a part of her nature, she deliberately elongated her syllables as if she wanted to caress the sound she put into them. For this reason, and also because of certain vowels, excessively broad even for Trieste, her speech had something foreign about it. I learned later that certain coaches, to teach voice production, alter the value of vowels. Her pronunciation was something quite different from Ada’s. Her every sound seemed to be one of love.

  During that visit, Signorina Carla smiled all the time, perhaps imagining that she had the expression of gratitude imprinted on her face. It was a slightly forced smile: the true look of gratitude. Then, a few hours later, when I began to dream of Carla, I imagined that in her face there had been a struggle between happiness and sorrow. Subsequently I found none of this in her, and once again I learned that female beauty simulates feelings that are totally unrelated to it, just as the canvas on which a battle is portrayed has no heroic feeling.

  Copier seemed pleased by the introduction, as if the two women had been his creation. He described them to me: they remained happy with their lot and they were working. He spoke some words that seemed quoted from a scholastic text and, nodding mechanically, I seemed bent on confirming that I had done my homework and therefore knew how poor, virtuous women without money ought to be.

  Then he asked Carla to sing something for us. She was reluctant, insisting she had a cold. She suggested postponing it to another day. I felt, sympathetically, that she feared our judgment, but I wished to prolong the meeting, so I joined my pleas to Copier’s. I added that I didn’t know if she would ever see me again, as I was very busy. Copier, though he knew I had absolutely no obligations in the world, confirmed with great seriousness everything I said. It was then easy for me to deduce that he didn’t want me to see Carla again.

  Again she tried to beg off, but Copier insisted, with a word that sounded like a command, and she obeyed. How easy it was to force her!

  She sang ha mia bandiera. From my soft sofa I followed her singing. I desired ardently to be able to admire it. How beautiful it would have been to behold her clad in genius! But on the contrary I was surprised to hear that her voice, when she sang, lost all musicality. Effort distorted it. Nor was Carla able to play, and her inept accompaniment made that poor music even poorer. I reminded myself that I was hearing a student, and I analyzed the volume of the voice to see if it sufficed. I decided, in order to be able to continue encouraging her, that only her training had been bad.

  When she stopped, I seconded Copier’s abundant and talkative applause. He said, “Imagine the effect of this voice if it were accompanied by a good orchestra.”

  This was certainly true. An entire, powerful orchestra was needed over that voice. I said with great sincerity that I would wait to hear the young lady in a few months’ time, when I could give my opinion about the value of her training. Less sincerely, I added that the voice surely deserved schooling of the first rank. Then, to attenuate anything disagreeable that there may have been in my first words, I philosophized about how it was necessary for a superb voice to find a superb school. This superlative covered everything. But later, when I rema
ined alone, I was amazed at having felt the necessity to be sincere with Carla. Did I love her already? Why, I hadn’t even taken a good look at her!

  On the stairs, with their dubious odor, Copier spoke again: “Her voice is too strong. It’s a voice for the theater.”

  He didn’t know that by now I had learned something different: that voice belonged in a very small space, where the listener could enjoy the impression of naïveté in that singing and could dream of adding art to it, through life and suffering.

  Leaving me, Copier said he would let me know when Carla’s teacher organized a public concert. This maestro was not yet much known in the city, but he would surely become a great celebrity in the future. Copier was sure of it, even though the maestro was fairly old. It seemed that celebrity would be awarded him now after Copier had come to know him. Two illusions characteristic of the moribund, the maestro’s and Copier’s.

  The curious thing is that I felt it necessary to tell Augusta about this visit. One could think I did so out of prudence, since Copier knew about it and I didn’t feel like asking him to keep it quiet. But actually I was only too eager to talk about it. It was a great relief. So far I had had nothing to reproach myself with except my having remained silent with Augusta. Now I was completely innocent.

  She asked me a few questions about the girl, and whether she was beautiful. It was hard for me to answer: I said that the poor girl had seemed very anemic to me. Then I had a good idea: “What if you took her in hand a bit?”

  Augusta had so much to do in her new house and in her old family, where they called on her to help out in the care of her sick father, that she thought no more about it. My idea had therefore been truly good.

  Copier, however, learned from Augusta that I had told her about our visit, and he also therefore forgot the qualities he had attributed to the imaginary sick man. He said to me, in Augusta’s presence, that in a short time we would pay another visit to Carla. He trusted me completely.