Zeno's Conscience

  At that hour I should have gone to my office, or rather to Guido’s. But it was impossible for me to leave this place in my present state. What would I do now? This was very different from the day before! If I had only known the address of that wretched maestro who, while singing at my expense, had taken my mistress from me!

  In the end I went back to the old woman. I would find a word to send to Carla, to persuade her to see me again. Now the main endeavor was to bring her within reach as quickly as possible. The rest wouldn’t involve great difficulties.

  I found the old woman seated at a window in the kitchen, intent on darning a stocking. She took off her eyeglasses and, almost timorously, cast an interrogative glance at me. I hesitated. Then I asked her: “Do you know if Carla has decided to marry that Lali?”

  To me, it seemed I was breaking this news to myself. Carla had already told it to me twice, but the day before I had paid little attention. Those words of Carla’s had struck my ear, and distinctly, because I had recalled them, but they had slipped away without penetrating more deeply. Now they barely reached my viscera, which were twisting in pain.

  The old woman looked at me, also hesitant. Surely she was afraid of committing any indiscretions for which she could then be reproached. Finally she burst out, obviously and completely joyful: “Carla told you? Then it must be so! I believe she would be doing the right thing! What do you think?”

  Now she was laughing happily, the cursed hag, who, I had always believed, was informed about my relations with Carla. I would gladly have struck her, but I confined myself to saying that first I would have waited until the maestro had made a position for himself. To me, in other words, it seemed they had rushed matters.

  In her joy the Signora became talkative with me for the first time. She didn’t share my opinion. When a couple marries young, the career has to be made afterwards. Why did it have to be made first? Carla had so few needs. Her voice, now, would cost less, since her husband would also be her teacher.

  These words, which could have seemed a reproach to my niggardliness, gave me an idea that appeared magnificent and that for the moment raised my spirits. In the envelope I always carried in my breast pocket there should by now be a tidy sum. I took it from my pocket, sealed it, and handed it to the old woman to give to Carla. Perhaps I also had the desire to pay off my mistress finally in a seemly fashion, but the stronger desire was to see her again and possess her again. Carla would see me again whether she wanted to return the money to me or whether it suited her to keep it, because then she would feel the need to thank me. I could breathe: all was not over forever!

  I told the old woman that the envelope contained a little money, what was left of the sum given to me for them by poor Copier’s friends. Then, greatly reassured, I said to tell Carla that I would remain her good friend for the rest of my life, and that if she ever needed help, she could call on me freely. In this way I could send her my address, which was that of Guido’s office.

  I left with a far more buoyant step than the one that had brought me there.

  But that day I had a violent quarrel with Augusta. It was over a trifle. I said the soup was too salty and she claimed it wasn’t. I had a mad fit of rage because I had the impression she was making fun of me. I violently pulled the cloth toward me, making the dishes fly from the table to the floor. The baby, in her nurse’s arms, began screaming, which mortified me greatly because the little mouth seemed to be reproaching me. Augusta blanched as only she could blanch, took the child in her arms, and went out. It seemed to me her reaction was also excessive: Would she now leave me to eat alone like a dog? But immediately, without the child, she came back, laid the table again, sat opposite me in her usual place, where she moved her spoon as if she wanted to resume eating.

  Under my breath, I was cursing, but I already knew I was a plaything in the hands of the intemperate forces of nature. Nature, who found little difficulty in accumulating those forces, found even less in unleashing them. My curses now were directed against Carla, who pretended to act only in the interest of my wife. And this was what the girl had done to her!

  Augusta, true to a system she has continued to follow, when she sees me in that state, didn’t protest, didn’t cry, didn’t argue. When I meekly began to beg her pardon, she wanted to explain one thing: she hadn’t laughed, she had only smiled in the very way that had so often pleased me and that I had so often praised.

  I was profoundly ashamed. I begged for the child to be brought to us at once, and holding her in my arms, I played with her for a long time. Then I made her sit on my head, and under her little dress, which covered my face, I dried my eyes, wet with the tears that Augusta hadn’t shed. I played with the baby, knowing that in this way, without humbling myself to apologize, I was drawing closer to Augusta, and in fact her cheeks had already regained their usual color.

  So that day also ended very well, and the afternoon resembled the previous one. It was exactly the same as if that morning I had found Carla in the usual place. I hadn’t lacked my relief. I had repeatedly begged forgiveness because I had to coax Augusta to resume her motherly smile when I said or did anything eccentric. It would have been dreadful if, in my presence, she had been forced to assume a fixed attitude or repress even one of those familiar, affectionate smiles that seemed to me the fullest and most benevolent judgment of me that could be expressed.

  In the evening we talked again about Guido. Apparently his peace with Ada was complete. Augusta was amazed at her sister’s goodness. This time, however, it was I who had to smile, because obviously she didn’t realize her own goodness, which was immense.

  I asked her: “And if I were to besmirch our home, wouldn’t you forgive me?”

  She hesitated. “We have our child,” she cried, “whereas Ada has no children that bind her to that man. “

  She didn’t love Guido; at times I think she bore him a grudge for having made me suffer.

  A few months later, Ada presented Guido with twins, and Guido never understood why I congratulated him so warmly. Now that he had children, even in Augusta’s opinion, the housemaids could be his without his risking any danger.

  The following morning, however, at the office, when I found on my desk an envelope addressed to me in Carla’s hand, I breathed again. Now nothing was finished and I could go on living supplied with all the necessary elements. In a few words Carla agreed to meet me at eleven that morning at the Public Garden, by the entrance just opposite her house. We would not be in her room, but still in a place very close to it.

  I couldn’t wait, and I arrived at the meeting place a quarter-hour early. If Carla was not there, I would go straight to her house, which would be far more comfortable.

  This day, too, was steeped in the new spring, tender and radiant. When I turned off the noisy Corsia Stadion and entered the garden, I found myself in the silence of the countryside, which was not really broken by the light, constant rustle of the boughs stirred by the breeze.

  With rapid steps I was nearing the gate of the garden when Carla came walking toward me. She had my envelope in her hand and she approached me without a smile of greeting, but rather with a stern determination on her pale face. She was wearing a simple cotton dress, coarsely woven, with pale blue stripes, which was very becoming. She, too, seemed a part of the garden. Later, in the moments when I hated her, I accused her of having dressed like that deliberately to make herself more desirable at the very moment when she was denying herself to me. It was, instead, the first day of spring that clothed her. It must also be remembered that in my long but brusque love, my woman’s adornment played a very small part. I had always gone directly to that studio room of hers, and modest women are always very simple when they are staying home.

  She held out her hand, which I pressed, saying to her: “I thank you for coming!”

  How much more decorous it would have been for me if, during that conversation, I had remained so meek!

  Carla seemed moved, and when she spoke, a kind of
tremor affected her lips. At times, also when she sang, that movement of the lips impeded the note. She said to me: “I would like to oblige you and accept this money from you, but I can’t, I absolutely can’t. Please, take it back.”

  Seeing her close to tears, I immediately obeyed, accepting the envelope, which later I found still in my hand long after I had abandoned that place.

  “You really want nothing more to do with me?”

  I asked this question, not thinking that she had answered it the day before. But was it possible that, desirable as she appeared to me, she could refuse herself?

  “Zeno!” the girl answered, with some sweetness. “Didn’t we promise ourselves we would never see each other again? After that promise, I have made a commitment similar to the one you had before knowing me. It is as sacred as yours. I hope that by now your wife has realized you are entirely hers.”

  So in her thoughts Ada’s beauty continued to be important. If I had been sure this abandonment was Ada’s fault, I would have had a way of taking reparatory measures. I would have told Carla that Ada wasn’t my wife and I would have let her see Augusta, with her asymmetrical eye and her healthy wet-nurse figure. But wasn’t the commitment she had made now more important? That had to be discussed.

  I tried to speak calmly while my lips were also trembling, though with desire. I told her she didn’t yet realize how much she was mine and how she no longer had the right to dispose of herself. In my head was stirring the scientific proof of what I wanted to say, namely that famous experiment of Darwin’s on an Arab mare, but, thank heaven, I am almost certain I didn’t say anything about it. I must have talked about animals, however, and their physical fidelity, in a meaningless stammer. Then I gave up the more difficult arguments, inaccessible to her and also to me at that moment.

  And I said: “What commitment can you have made? What importance can it have compared with an affection like the one that has united us for over a year?”

  I grabbed her roughly by the hand, feeling the need of some energetic action, but finding no words to complement it.

  She freed herself as vigorously from my grasp as if it were the first time I had taken such a liberty.

  “Never!” she said, in the attitude of someone taking an oath. “I have made a holier pledge! With a man who also has made the same pledge to me.”

  There was no doubt! The blood that suddenly colored her cheeks had been driven there by rancor toward the man who had not made any commitment to her.

  She made herself even clearer: “Yesterday we walked along the streets, arm in arm, in the company of his mother.”

  It was obvious that my woman was running away, farther and farther from me. I ran after her madly, leaping like a dog when he is denied a tasty morsel of meat. Again I seized her hand violently.

  “Well,” I suggested, “let’s walk like this, hand in hand, through the whole city. In this unusual fashion, to make ourselves even more visible, we’ll go along Corsia Stadion, then past the Chiozza arcades, and across the Corso as far as Sant’Andrea, then return to our room by another route, so the whole city can see us.”

  There, for the first time, I was renouncing Augusta! And it seemed a liberation to me because she was the one who wanted to take Carla from me.

  Again she removed her hand from my grasp and said sharply: “That would more or less be the same walk he and I took yesterday!”

  I started again: “And does he know? Everything? Does he know that you were mine yesterday, too?”

  “Yes,” she said proudly. “He knows everything, everything.”

  I felt lost, and in my anger, like the dog who, when he can’t reach the desired morsel, bites the clothes of the one withholding it, I said: “This husband of yours has an excellent stomach. Today he digests me. Tomorrow he will be able to digest everything you like.”

  I didn’t hear the exact sound of my words. I knew I was shouting in pain. She, on the contrary, had an expression of indignation of which I wouldn’t have believed her dark, mild gazelle eyes capable.

  “You say this to me? And why don’t you have the courage to say it to him?”

  She turned her back on me and rapidly walked toward the gate. I was already feeling remorse for the words I had said, bewildered, however, by my great surprise that I was forbidden to treat Carla less gently now. It kept me nailed to the spot. The little figure, blue and white, with quick, short steps, was already reaching the exit, when I made up my mind to run after her. I didn’t know what I would say to her, but it was impossible for us to part like this.

  I stopped her at the door of her building and spoke, sincerely, only of the great sorrow of that moment. “Are we going to part like this, after so much love?”

  She went on without answering me, and I followed her up the steps. Then she looked at me with hostile eyes: “If you want to see my husband, come with me. Can’t you hear? He’s the one playing the piano.”

  I heard just then the syncopated notes of Schubert’s Abschied in the Liszt transcription.

  Though since my childhood I have never handled a sabre or a club, I am not a fearful man. The great desire that had impelled me thus far had suddenly vanished. Of the male character, all that remained in me was the combativeness. I had asked imperiously for something not rightfully mine. To lessen my error now I had to fight, because otherwise the memory of that woman threatening to have me punished by her husband would have been unbearable.

  “Very well!” I said to her. “If you will allow me, I’ll come with you.”

  My heart was pounding, with no fear—except the fear of not behaving properly.

  I continued climbing the stairs with her. But suddenly she stopped, leaned against the wall, and started crying, wordlessly. Up above, the notes of the Abschied continued to resound on that piano which I had paid for. Carla’s tears made that sound very moving.

  “I’ll do whatever you want. Do you want me to go?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said, barely able to utter that brief word.

  I slowly went down the stairs, also whistling Schubert’s Abschied. I don’t know if it was an illusion, but I seemed to hear her call me: “Zeno!”

  At that moment she could even have called me by that strange name of Dario that she sometimes considered a pet name, and I wouldn’t have stopped. I had a great desire to go away, and I was returning once again, pure, to Augusta—as the dog, when his approach to the female is fended off with kicks, runs away, totally pure for the moment.

  When, the next day, I was again reduced to the state in which I had found myself at the moment I headed for the Public Garden, it seemed to me simply that I had been a coward: she had called me, though not by our pet name, and I hadn’t answered! It was the first day of suffering, which was followed by many others of bitter desolation. No longer understanding why I had gone off like that, I blamed myself for having been afraid of that man or afraid of scandal. Now I was ready to accept any compromise, as I had been when I suggested to Carla that long walk through the city. I had lost an opportune moment, and I knew very well that, with certain women, such a moment occurs only once. For me that one time would have sufficed.

  I decided promptly to write to Carla. It wasn’t possible for me to allow even one more day to go by without making an attempt to return to her. I wrote and rewrote that letter, to condense into a few words all the intelligence of which I was capable. I rewrote it so many times also because writing it was a great comfort to me; it was the release I needed. I begged her forgiveness for my display of wrath, declaring that my great love needed some time to calm down. I added: “Every day that passes brings me another crumb of tranquillity,” and I wrote this sentence many times, always clenching my teeth. Then I told her that I couldn’t forgive myself for the words I had addressed to her and I felt the need to ask her pardon. I couldn’t, unfortunately, offer her what Lali was offering her and of which she was so worthy.

  I imagined that the letter would have a great effect. Since Lali knew everything, Ca
rla would show it to him, and for Lali it could be advantageous to have a friend of my worth. I even dreamed we might begin a sweet three-sided life, because my love was such that for the moment I would have regarded my fate as mitigated if I were allowed simply to pay court to Carla.

  The third day I received a brief note from her. It was not addressed at all, neither to Zeno nor to Dario. She said only: “Thank you! May you also be happy with your spouse, so worthy of all good things!” Naturally, she was speaking of Ada.

  The opportune moment had not lasted, and with women it never lasts unless you grab it by the braids and hold it tight. My desire was distilled into a furious bitterness. Not toward Augusta! My spirit was so full of Carla that I felt remorse, and with Augusta I forced myself to maintain a foolish, stereotyped smile, which to her seemed genuine.

  But I had to do something. I surely couldn’t wait and suffer like this every day! I didn’t want to write her again. For women, written words have too little importance. I had to find something better.

  With no specific intention, I hurried to the Public Garden. Then, much more slowly, to Carla’s house and, arriving on that landing, I knocked at the kitchen door. If it were possible, I would have avoided seeing Lali, but I wouldn’t have minded running into him. That would be the crisis I felt I needed.

  The old woman, as usual, was at the stove, on which two great fires were burning. She was surprised to see me, but then she laughed like the good, innocent creature she was.

  She said, “I’m glad to see you! You were so accustomed to see us every day, that obviously you can’t bring yourself to give us up entirely.”

  It was easy for me to make her chatter on. She told me that Carla’s love for Vittorio was immense. That day he and his mother were coming to have dinner with them. She added, laughing: “Soon he’ll end by persuading her to come with him even to the many voice lessons he has to give every day. They can’t bear to be apart, not even for a few moments.”