Zeno's Conscience

  The affair was scrutinized in every respect and, in fact, I remember Guido calculated even the number of months during which, with his profits, he could maintain his wife and the office, his two families, in other words, or his two offices, as he sometimes called them when at home he was particularly vexed. It was overscrutinized, that affair, and this is perhaps why it didn’t work out. From London came a brief dispatch: Bought, then the indication of that day’s price for sulfate, much higher than what our buyer had stipulated. Good-bye, profit. Tacich was informed, and a short time later he left Trieste.

  At that time, for about a month I stopped going to the office, and therefore a certain letter that arrived there didn’t pass through my hands; apparently inoffensive, it was nevertheless to have serious consequences for Guido. In it, that English firm confirmed its dispatch to us and informed us finally that it considered our order valid, unless it was revoked. It didn’t occur to Guido to revoke that order, and when I came back to the office, I had forgotten about the ‘whole transaction. And so several months later, one evening Guido came to see me with a dispatch he couldn’t understand and he thought had been sent to us by mistake, despite the fact that it clearly bore our cable address, which I had naturally made public as soon as we were settled in our office. The dispatch contained only three English words: 60 tons confirmed. I understood it immediately, which was not hard inasmuch as the copper sulfate affair was the only big transaction we had initiated. I said to him: From that dispatch it was clear that the price, which we had stipulated for executing our order, had been reached and therefore we were the proud owners of sixty tons of copper sulfate.

  Guido protested: “How can they think I’d accept such a belated filling of my order?”

  I immediately thought that the letter confirming the first dispatch must be in our office, whereas Guido had no recollection of having received it. Uneasy, he suggested rushing to the office at once to see if it was there, and this suited me very well because I was annoyed at our having this argument in front of Augusta, who didn’t know that for the past month I had never shown up at the office.

  We hurried to the office. Guido was so displeased to see himself forced into that first big deal that, to be rid of it, he would have run all the way to London. We opened the office; then, groping in the darkness, we found our way to our room and reached the gas and lighted it. Then the letter was quickly found and it was as I had supposed, a confirmation that our order, valid until revoked, had been executed.

  Guido looked at the letter, his brow furrowed, either with displeasure or with an effort to make his gaze annihilate what was announced as real, in such verbal simplicity.

  “Just think!” he said. “It would have been enough to write two words, and this damage would have been avoided!”

  It was certainly not a reproach aimed at me because I had been absent from the office and - though I had been able to find the letter immediately, knowing where it should have been—had never seen it before. But to absolve myself more completely of any reproach of his, I addressed him firmly.

  “During my absence you should have read all the letters carefully!”

  Guido’s frown vanished. He shrugged and murmured: “This deal could prove a stroke of luck in the end.”

  A little later he left me, and I returned home.

  But Tacich was right: at certain seasons copper sulfate went down, way down, farther every day, and in the filling of our order and in our immediate impossibility of selling the goods at that price to others, we had occasion to study the phenomenon thoroughly. Our loss increased. The first day Guido asked my advice. He could have sold at a loss small compared to what he had to bear later. I was unwilling to give advice, but I didn’t fail to remind him of Tacich’s conviction that the fall in value would continue for over five months.

  Guido laughed. “Now all I need is that provincial telling me how to run my business!”

  I remembered that I tried also to correct him, saying that this provincial had for many years spent his time in his little Dalmatian city following copper sulfate. I can have no remorse for the loss Guido suffered in that venture. If he had listened to me, it would have been spared him.

  Later we discussed the copper sulfate affair with an agent, a short, tubby little man, brisk and bright, who scolded us for having made that purchase, though he seemed not to share Tacich’s opinion. According to him, copper sulfate, though it was a market unto itself, still was affected by the fluctuation of the general price of metal. From that interview Guido gained a certain confidence. He asked the agent to keep him informed of every shift in price, he would wait, as he wanted to sell not only without loss, but with a small profit. The agent laughed discreetly, then, in the course of the conversation, said something I remarked because it seemed to me very true.

  “Strange, how few people in this world can resign themselves to small losses; it’s the great losses that immediately produce great resignation.”

  Guido paid no attention. But I admired him, too, because he didn’t tell the agent how we had happened to make that purchase. I told Guido this, and he was proud. The agent, he said, would have tried to discredit us and also our goods, spreading the story of that purchase.

  Afterwards, for a long time, we didn’t mention sulfate again - that is, until a letter arrived from London asking us to make payment and wire instructions for the shipment. Sixty tons! To receive and then to store! Guido’s head began to spin. We calculated how much it would cost us to warehouse that merchandise for several months. A huge amount! I didn’t say anything, but the broker, who would have been glad to see the goods arrive in Trieste, because sooner or later he would then have been given the job of selling them, pointed out to Guido that this sum, which seemed huge to him, was not so great if expressed in percentage on the value of the goods.

  Guido started laughing, because the observation seemed strange to him: “I don’t have a mere hundred pounds of sulfate; I have sixty tons, unfortunately!”

  In the end he would have allowed the agent’s calculation, obviously correct, to convince him that with a slight upward shift in the price, the expenses would have been more than covered; but at that moment he was struck by one of what he called his inspirations. When he happened to conceive a commercial idea all on his own, it became an absolute obsession, and there was no room in his mind for other considerations. This was his idea: The merchandise would be sent him FOB Trieste, so the English shippers would pay for transport. If he were now to sell the goods back to his English purchasers, they would thus save the expenses of the shipment, and he would benefit by setting a more advantageous price than the one being offered him in Trieste. This was not entirely true, but, to please him, nobody debated it. Once the affair was concluded, he had a slightly bitter smile on his face, like that of a pessimist philosopher, and he said: “We’ll say no more about it. It was a pretty costly lesson; now we have to learn how to profit by it.”

  But we did say more about it. He never recovered his fine confidence in rejecting offers, and at the end of the year, when I showed him how much we had lost, he murmured: “That damned copper sulfate was my downfall! I kept feeling I had to make up for that loss!”

  My absence from the office had been provoked by Carla’s leaving me. I could no longer witness the dalliance of Carmen and Guido. They looked at each other, smiled at each other, in my presence. I went off indignantly with a resolution I formed that evening at the moment of closing the office, and I said nothing about it to anyone. I would wait until Guido asked me the reason for this desertion, and then I would let him have it. I could be very severe with him, since he knew absolutely nothing of my excursions to the Public Garden.

  It was a form of jealousy on my part, because Carmen appeared to me as Guido’s Carla, but a milder, more submissive Carla. With his second woman, as with his first, he had been luckier than I. But perhaps—and this motivated another of my reproaches to him—he owed his luck also to those qualities of his that I envied, yet
continued to consider inferior: parallel to his ease with the violin there ran also his nonchalance toward life. I now knew for certain that I had given up Carla for Augusta. When my thoughts returned to those two years of happiness Carla had granted me, it was hard for me to understand how she—being the sort of person I now knew she was—could have tolerated me so long. Hadn’t I offended her daily, out of love for Augusta? Guido, I knew for a fact, would on the contrary enjoy Carmen without giving Ada a thought. In his carefree spirit, two women were no more than enough. Comparing myself to him., I seemed downright innocent. I had married Augusta without love, and yet I had been unable to betray her without suffering. Perhaps he had also married Ada without loving her, but—though by now Ada meant nothing to me—I remembered the love she had inspired in me, and it seemed to me that since I had loved her so much, in his situation I would have been even more delicate than I was now in my own.

  It wasn’t Guido who came looking for me. It was I who, on my own, returned to that office, to seek relief from a great boredom. He behaved according to the terms of our contract, whereby I had no obligation to take any part regularly in his affairs, and when he ran into me at home or elsewhere, he acted toward me with the usual great friendship and didn’t seem to recall that I had left vacant my place at that desk he had bought for me. Between the two of us there was only one embarrassment: mine. When I returned to my desk, he received me as if I had been absent just a single day, warmly expressed his pleasure at having regained my company and, hearing my intention to resume my work, he cried: “Then I was right not to allow anyone to touch your books!”

  In fact, I found the ledger and the daybook exactly where I had left them.

  Luciano said to me: “Let’s hope that now that you’re here, we’ll start moving again. I believe Signor Guido is discouraged because of a couple of deals he tackled, which then went sour. Don’t say anything to him about me talking to you like this, but see if you can give him some encouragement.”

  I realized, in fact, that little work was being done in that office, and until the loss on the copper sulfate agitated us, we led a truly idyllic life there. I immediately concluded that Guido no longer felt such an urgent need to make Carmen work under his direction, and that the period of courtship between them was over and she had by now become his mistress.

  Carmen’s welcome brought me a surprise because she promptly felt the need to remind me of something I had completely forgotten. Apparently, before leaving that office, in those days when I had run after so many women because it was no longer possible for me to go and see my own, I had also pestered Carmen. She spoke to me with great seriousness and some embarrassment: She was glad to see me back because she believed I was fond of Guido and my advice could be useful to him, and she wanted to maintain with me—if I would permit it—a warm, fraternal friendship. She said something to this effect, extending her hand in a broad gesture. On her face, beautiful as it was, a very grave expression underlined the fraternal purity of the relationship now being offered me.

  I remembered then, and I blushed. Perhaps if I had remembered earlier, I would never have gone back to that office again. It had been such a brief thing, crammed in among so many other actions of the same import, that if I had not now been reminded of it, I could have believed it had never happened. A few days after Carla’s abandonment, I had set myself to examine the books, enlisting Carmen’s help and, little by little, the better to see the same page, I had put my arm around her waist, which I then continued to squeeze harder and harder. With a leap, Carmen had escaped me and I had then left the office.

  I could have defended myself with a smile, inducing her to smile with me, because women are so inclined to smile at such crimes! I could have said to her: “I attempted something that didn’t succeed, and I’m sorry for it, but I bear you no grudge and I want to be your friend until you prefer it to be otherwise.”

  Or I could have replied as a serious person, apologizing to her and also to Guido: “Forgive me and don’t judge me until you know the condition in which I found myself at that time.”

  Instead, words failed me. My throat—I believe—was blocked by a lump of bitterness and I was unable to speak. All these women who firmly rejected me gave my life a downright tragic cast. I had never endured such a miserable period. Instead of uttering a reply, I would have been prepared only to grind my teeth, hardly comfortable, as I had to maintain silence. Perhaps speech failed me also because of the pain at seeing firmly denied a hope I still cherished. I can’t help confessing it: for me, no one better than Carmen could have replaced the mistress I had lost, that girl who, so far from being compromising, had asked for nothing save the permission to live at my side until she asked never to see me again. A mistress shared is the least compromising mistress. To be sure, I hadn’t yet entirely clarified my ideas, but I sensed them, and now I know them. Becoming Carmen’s lover, I would have contributed to Ada’s well-being and I wouldn’t have harmed Augusta too much. Both would have been betrayed far less than if Guido and I had had a whole woman each.

  I gave Carmen my reply several days later, but even now it embarrasses me. The turmoil into which Carla’s abandonment had thrown me must have still survived, impelling me to such a juncture. I feel a remorse for it worse than for any other action in my whole life. The bestial words we allow to escape us prick the conscience more than the most unspeakable actions our passion inspires. Naturally, by words I mean only those that are not actions, because I know very well that the words of Iago, for example, are out-and-out actions. But actions, including Iago’s words, are performed to produce some pleasure or some benefit and then the whole organism, including that part which should set itself up as judge, participates and becomes consequently a very benevolent judge. But the stupid tongue acts on its own and for the satisfaction of some little part of the organism that, without words, feels defeated and proceeds to simulate a struggle after the struggle is over and lost. The tongue wants to wound or it wants to caress. It moves always amid mastodonic metaphors. And when words are red-hot, they scorch their speaker.

  I had observed that she no longer had the coloring that had won her such prompt admittance to our office. I imagined she had lost it through some suffering that I refused to admit might have been physical, and I attributed it, instead, to her love for Guido. For that matter, we men are quite inclined to commiserate with those women who surrender to others. We never see what advantage they can expect. We may perhaps love the man in question—as was my case—but even then we can’t forget how the vicissitudes of love on this earth usually end up. I felt a sincere compassion for Carmen, as I had never felt for Augusta or for Carla. I said to her: “And as you have been so kind as to invite me to be your friend, will you allow me to give you some advice?”

  She wouldn’t allow it, because, like all women in such situations, she also believed that advice is always an aggression. She blushed and stammered: “I don’t understand. Why are you saying that?” And, immediately afterwards, to silence me: “If I really needed advice, I would certainly turn to you, Signor Cosini.”

  Therefore I was not allowed to preach morality to her, and it was too bad for me. In preaching morality to her I would surely have arrived at a higher level of sincerity, perhaps attempting again to take her into my arms. I would not torment myself any more for having wanted to play that false role of Mentor.

  Several days each week, Guido never even put in an appearance at the office, for he was an impassioned hunter and fisherman. I, on the contrary, after my return, was assidus for a while, occupied with bringing the books up to date. I was often with Carmen and Luciano, who considered me their manager. It didn’t seem to me that Carmen suffered at Guido’s absence, and I imagined she loved him so much that she was overjoyed to know that he was having a good time. She must also have been advised which days he would be absent, because she showed no sign of anxious expectation. I knew from Augusta that with Ada, on the contrary, it was a different story, for she complained b
itterly of her husband’s frequent absences. In any case, that wasn’t her only complaint. Like all unloved women, she complained of great wrongs and small ones with the same fervor. Not only was Guido unfaithful to her, but when he was at home he constantly played the violin. That violin, which had caused me such suffering, was a kind of Achilles’ spear in the variety of its functions. I learned that it had also passed through our office, where it had enriched the wooing of Carmen with some beautiful variations on the Barber. Then it had moved on, as in the office it was no longer needed, and had returned home, where it spared Guido the boredom of having to converse with his wife.

  There was never anything between me and Carmen. Quite soon I felt an absolute indifference toward her, as if she had changed sex, something similar to what I felt for Ada. A keen sympathy for both, and nothing more. That was it!

  Guido showered me with kindnesses. I believe that in that month when I had left him alone, he had learned to value my company. A girl like Carmen can be pleasant from time to time, but you can’t really bear her for whole days. He invited me hunting and fishing. I detest hunting, and firmly refused to accompany him. But one evening, driven by boredom, I did end up going fishing with him. A fish lacks any means of communicating with us, and cannot arouse our compassion. He gasps even when he’s safe and sound in the water! Death itself doesn’t alter his appearance. His suffering, if it exists, is perfectly concealed beneath his scales.