Zeno's Conscience

  She had called me tu, and this was decisive. I then answered promptly: “I want nothing else!”

  I had forgotten that I would have liked to clarify something first.

  Immediately afterwards I would have liked to begin talking about my relationship with Augusta, having neglected to do so before. But it was difficult just then. Talking with Carla about something else at that moment would have seemed like diminishing the importance of her devotion. Even the most deaf of men knows that such a thing cannot be done, though all men know there is no comparison between the importance of that devotion before it happens and immediately afterwards. It would have been a great insult for a woman, opening her arms to a man for the first time, to hear him say to her: “First of all I must clarify those words I said to you yesterday…” Yesterday?! Anything that happened the day before must seem unworthy of being mentioned, and if a gentleman happens not to sense this, then so much the worse for him, and he must behave in such a way that nobody realizes it.

  Certainly I was the gentleman who didn’t feel that, because in my pretense I erred as sincerity would not have been capable of erring. I asked her: “How did you come to give yourself to me? How did I merit such a thing?”

  Did I want to show my gratitude, or to reproach her? Probably it was only an attempt to embark on the explanations.

  A bit amazed, she looked up, to see my expression: “I had the impression that you took me,” and she smiled affectionately, to prove that she was not reproaching me in any way.

  I remembered how women insist on being told you have taken them. Then, she herself realized she had made a mistake—things are taken, but people come to an agreement—and she murmured: “I was waiting for you! You were the knight who was to come and set me free. Of course it’s a pity you’re married, but since you don’t love your wife, at least I know my happiness isn’t destroying the happiness of anyone else.”

  I was seized by the pain in my side, so intense that I had to stop embracing her. Then I hadn’t exaggerated the importance of my ill-considered words? Was it precisely my falsehood that had led Carla to become mine? So now, if I were to think of describing my love for Augusta, Carla would be entitled to reproach me actually for deceit! Rectifications and explanations were no longer possible. But later on there would be an opportunity for explanation and clarification. Waiting for it established a new bond between me and Carla.

  There, at Carla’s side, my passion for Augusta was reborn completely. Now I would have had only one desire: to rush to my true wife, only to see her intent on her task, like an industrious ant, storing away our things in an atmosphere of camphor and naphthalene.

  But I remained with my duty, which was very grievous because of an episode that disturbed me greatly at first, for it seemed another threat from the sphinx with whom I was dealing. Carla told me that, immediately after I had left the previous day, the singing teacher had come and she had simply shown him the door.

  I couldn’t repress a gesture of vexation. It amounted to informing Copier of our liaison!

  “What will Copier say to that?” I cried.

  She began laughing and took refuge, on her own initiative this time, in my arms. “Didn’t we decide to get rid of him, too?”

  She was pretty, but she could no longer conquer me. I promptly found also a suitable attitude for myself, the pedagogue’s, because it allowed me to release the bitterness I felt deep in my heart against the woman who prevented me from speaking of my wife as I would have liked. “We have to work in this world,” I said to her, because, as she should already know, it is a wicked world, where only the fittest survive. And what if I were to die now? What would become of her? I had suggested the prospect of my abandonment in a way at which she absolutely could not take offense, and in fact she was moved. Then, with the obvious intention of demoralizing her, I told her that, with my wife, I had only to express a wish and I saw it fulfilled.

  “Very well!” she said, resigned. “We’ll send word to the maestro to come back!” Then she tried to communicate to me her dislike of that teacher. Every day she had to tolerate the presence of that disagreeable old man who made her repeat a thousand times the same exercises that were of no use at all, absolutely none. She didn’t recall having had a pleasant day except during the times when the maestro fell ill. She had even hoped he would die, but she had been unlucky.

  She became downright violent in her despair. She repeated, expanding it, her complaint of ill luck: she was a poor helpless creature, past hope. When she recalled that she had loved me immediately because it seemed to her that my actions, my words, my eyes offered the promise of a less harsh life, less rigorous, less boring, she wanted to cry.

  Thus I became immediately acquainted with her sobs, and they annoyed me; they were so violent that they shook her weak organism, invading it. I felt I was undergoing at once an abrupt attack on my wallet and on my life. I asked her: “Do you think my wife does nothing in this world? Now, while the two of us are talking, her lungs are being polluted by camphor and naphthalene.”

  Carla sobbed. “Possessions, a household, clothes… lucky woman!”

  Irritated, I thought she wanted me to rush out and buy her all those things, only to provide her with an occupation she preferred. I displayed no anger, thank God, and obeyed the voice of duty, which shouted: Caress the girl who has abandoned herself to you! I caressed her. I ran my hand lightly over her hair. As a result the sobs ceased, and her tears flowed copiously and freely, like rain after a thunderstorm.

  “You are my first lover,” she went on to say, “and I hope you will go on loving me.”

  That information, that I was her first lover, a designation implying a possible second one, did not move me greatly. It was a declaration that came late because for a good half hour that subject had been left behind. Still, it was a new threat. A woman believes herself entitled to everything with her first lover. Softly I murmured in her ear: “You’re my first lover, too … since my marriage.”

  The sweetness in my voice disguised the attempt to make the two of us even.

  A little later I left her, because under no circumstances did I want to arrive late for lunch. Before leaving, I again took out the envelope that I called “of good intentions” because an excellent intention had created it. I felt the need to pay, in order to feel freer. Carla again gently refused that money, and I then became very angry, but I was able to restrain myself from revealing that anger only by shouting very sweet words. I said that I had achieved the summit of my desires in possessing her, and that now I wanted to have the sense of possessing her even further by supporting her completely. Therefore she should take care not to make me angry because I then suffered too much. Wanting to rush off, I summarized in a few words my notion, which became—shouted like this—very curt.

  “Are you my mistress? Then your maintenance is my duty. “

  Frightened, she stopped resisting and accepted the envelope, while she looked at me anxiously reckoning what might be the truth, my outcry of hate or the words of love with which she was granted everything she had desired. She was a bit reassured when, before leaving, I touched her brow with my lips. On the stairs I had the suspicion that now, with the money at her disposal, having heard me assume responsibility for her future, she would show Copier the door as well if he were to come to her that afternoon. I would have liked to climb back up those stars and exhort her not to compromise me by such an action. But there was no time and I had to run off.

  I fear that the doctor, who will read this manuscript of mine, may think that Carla, too, would have been an interesting subject for psychoanalysis. It will seem to him that her submission, preceded by the dismissal of the voice teacher, was perhaps too quick. It seemed to me also that as a reward for her love she had expected too many concessions from me. It required many, many months for me to understand the poor girl better. Probably she had allowed herself to be possessed in order to be free of Copier’s upsetting tutelage, and it must have been a very pain
ful surprise for her to realize that she had given herself in vain because her heaviest burden, namely having to sing, would continue to oppress her. She was still in my arms when she learned that she would have to go on singing. Whence the rage and the grief that couldn’t find the right words. For different reasons each of us thus uttered some very strange words. When she loved me, she regained all the naturalness that calculation had robbed her of. I was never natural with her.

  Running away, I thought still: “If she knew how much I love my wife, she would behave differently.” When she did come to know it, she behaved, in fact, differently.

  In the open air I breathed freedom and didn’t feel the sorrow of having compromised it. I had time until tomorrow, and I would perhaps find some refuge from the difficulties that were threatening me. Hurrying home, I even had the courage to blame it all on the social order, as if it had been responsible for my past behavior. It should have been capable, I felt, of allowing a man to make love now and then (not always), without his having to fear the consequences, even with women he doesn’t love at all. There was no trace of remorse in me. Therefore I believe remorse is generated not by regret for a bad deed already committed, but by the recognition of one’s own guilty propensity. The upper part of the body bends over to study and judge the other part and finds it deformed. The repulsion then felt is called remorse. Even in ancient tragedy the victim wasn’t returned to life, and yet the remorse passed. This meant that the deformity was cured, and that the tears of others had no further importance. Where could there be any room for remorse in me, when, with so much joy and so much affection, I was speeding to my legitimate wife? For a long time I had not felt so pure.

  At lunch, making no effort at all, I was happy and affectionate with Augusta. That day there was not a false note between us. Nothing excessive: I was as I should be with the woman honestly and surely mine. At other times there were excessive shows of affection on my part, but only when there was a struggle going on in my spirit between the two women. Then, through excessive displays of affection, it was easier for me to keep Augusta from seeing that between the two of us there lay the shadow, momentarily fairly powerful, of another woman. I can also say that for this reason Augusta preferred me when I was not entirely and most sincerely hers.

  I myself was somewhat amazed by my calm, and I attributed it to the fact that I had succeeded in making Carla accept that envelope of good intentions. Of course, I didn’t believe that, with it, I had paid her off. But it seemed to me that I had begun to buy an indulgence. Unfortunately, for the entire duration of my affair with Carla, money remained my principal concern. At every opportunity I laid some aside in a well-hidden place in my library, to be ready to deal with any demands from the mistress of whom I was so afraid. Thus, when Carla abandoned me and left me holding that money, it served to pay for something quite different.

  We were to spend the evening at my father-in-law’s house, at a dinner to which only family members had been invited and which was meant to replace the traditional banquet, prelude to the wedding being celebrated two days later. Guido wanted to take advantage of Giovanni’s improvement in order to be married, for he was afraid the condition wouldn’t last.

  I went with Augusta to my father-in-law’s early in the afternoon. Along the way I reminded her that, the day before, she had suspected I was unhappy because of that wedding. She was ashamed of her suspicion and I went on at length about that innocence of mine. Hadn’t I come home, without even remembering that the same evening there was the celebration preparatory to the wedding?

  Although there were no other guests except us family members, the older Malfentis wanted the banquet to unfold in all solemnity. Augusta had been asked to come and supervise the dining room and the table. Alberta would have nothing to do with such matters. A short time before, she had been awarded a prize for a one-act play, and now she was eagerly girding herself to reform the nation’s theater. So we bustled around that table, I and Augusta, assisted by a maid and by Luciano, a boy from Giovanni’s office, who showed as much feeling for order in the household as he did for order in the office.

  I helped carry some flowers to the table and arranged them neatly.

  “You see?” I said, joking, to Augusta, “I even contribute to their happiness. If they asked me also to make up the nuptial bed, I would do it with the same untroubled brow!”

  Later we went to see the bridal pair, who had just returned from a formal visit. They had occupied the most secluded corner of the living room, and I suppose that until we arrived they had been cuddling. The bride hadn’t even changed her afternoon dress and was very pretty, flushed as she was by the heat.

  I believe that the couple, to hide any sign of the kisses they had exchanged, wanted to persuade us that they had been discussing science. It was nonsense, perhaps even improper! Did they want to exclude us from their intimacy, or did they believe their kisses could cause someone pain? In any case, this didn’t spoil my good humor. Guido told me Ada wouldn’t believe him when he said that certain wasps could, with their sting, paralyze other insects even stronger than they, then preserve them, paralyzed, alive and fresh, as nourishment for their offspring. I thought I recalled that something so monstrous did exist in nature, but at this point I was unwilling to give Guido any satisfaction.

  “You think I’m a wasp, so you’re aiming at me?” I said to him, laughing.

  We left the couple so they could devote themselves to happier things. I, however, was beginning to find the afternoon quite long, and I wanted to go home and await the dinner hour in my study.

  In the vestibule we found Dr. Paoli, coming out of my father-in-law’s bedroom. He was a young doctor who, nevertheless, had already been able to acquire a good clientele. He was very blond and ruddy and white, like an overgrown boy. His powerful physique, however, was so dominated by his eyes that his whole person seemed serious and imposing. His eyeglasses made him appear bigger, and his gaze clung to things like a caress. Now that I know very well both him and Dr. S.—the psychoanalysis man—it seems to me that the latter’s eyes are more deliberately inquiring, whereas in Dr. Paoli they indicate his tireless curiosity. Paoli sees his patient precisely, but also the patient’s wife and the chair on which he is sitting. God only knows which of the two men treats his patients better! During my father-in-law’s sickness, I often went to Paoli to persuade him not to tell the family that the threatened catastrophe was imminent, and I remember one day, looking at me longer than I liked, he said to me, smiling: “Why, you udore your wife!”

  He was a good observer, because I did indeed at that moment adore my wife, who was suffering so much because of her father’s illness and whom I was betraying daily.

  He told us Giovanni was even better than the day before. Now he had no other reservations because the season was very favorable, and he believed the bridal couple could set off on their journey without concern. “Naturally,” he added cautiously, “there could be unpredictable complications.” His prognosis came true, because unpredictable complications followed.

  As he was taking his leave, he remembered that we knew a man named Copier, to whose bedside he had been called that very day for a consultation. He found that the man had been seized with a kidney paralysis. He told us the paralysis had been heralded by a horrible toothache. Here his prognosis was grave but, as usual, attenuated by a doubt.

  “His life could even be prolonged, if he survives to see the sun tomorrow morning.”

  Augusta, in her compassion, had tears in her eyes and begged me to hurry at once to our poor friend. After some hesitation, I obeyed her wish, and gladly, because my spirit was suddenly filled with Carla. How hard he had been on our poor girl! And now, with Copier gone, she was left there, alone, on that landing, not compromising in the least, because cut off now from any communication with my world. I had to hasten to her and erase the impression my harsh attitude must have made that morning.

  But, prudently, I went first to Copler. I had, after all, to be
able to tell Augusta I had seen him.

  I already knew the modest but comfortable and decent little apartment where Copier lived in Corsia Stadion. An old pensioner let him have three of the five rooms. I was received by this landlord, a heavy man, short of breath, with red eyes, who paced restlessly up and down a short, dark corridor. He told me the regular doctor had only just left, after having verified that Copier was in the throes of death. The old man spoke in a low voice, always gasping, as if he were afraid to disturb the peace of the dying man. I lowered my voice as well. It is a form of respect, this way we men feel, though it is not exactly certain whether the dying would not prefer to be accompanied along the last stretch of their path by bright, strong voices that would remind them of life.

  The old man told me the patient was being tended by a nun. Filled with awe, I stopped for some while at the door of that room where poor Copier, with his death-rattle, its rhythm so precise, was measuring out his final hours. His noisy respiration was composed of two sounds: the one produced by the air he inhaled seemed hesitant; the other, born from the exhaled air, seemed precipitous. A haste to die? A pause followed the two sounds, and I thought that when the pause was lengthened, then the new life would begin.

  The old man wanted me to go into the room, but I wouldn’t. I had had my fill of dying men who glared at me with an expression of reproach.

  I didn’t wait for that pause to lengthen, and I hurried to Carla. I knocked at the door of her study, which was locked, but nobody answered. Losing patience, I started kicking the door, and then, behind me, the door of the living room opened. The voice of Carla’s mother asked: “Who is it?”

  Then the timorous old woman looked out, and when, in the yellow light that came from her kitchen, she recognized me, I realized that her face was covered by an intense flush heightened by the transparent whiteness of her hair. Carla wasn’t in, and she offered to go fetch the key to the study to admit me to that room, which she considered the only one worthy of receiving me. But I told her not to take the trouble, I entered the kitchen and sat down unceremoniously on a wooden chair. Under a pot on the stove, a modest little mound of charcoal was glowing. I told her not to neglect supper on my account. She reassured me. She was preparing some beans, which can never be overdone. The humble food being cooked in the house, whose cost I would now have to sustain by myself, moved me and allayed the irritation I felt at not having found my mistress ready.