Zeno's Conscience

  In that little room, my heart was again beating. Not, this time, out of fear of finding myself loved by one I didn’t love. Only a few moments before, and only through Signora Malfenti’s words, had I recognized that I had committed a grave breach of respect to poor Guido’s memory. Ada herself, now aware that pardoning this error would bring her a fortune, still couldn’t forgive me immediately. I sat down and looked at the portraits of Guido’s parents. Old Cada Vez had a pleased expression that seemed to me due to my endeavor, whereas Guido’s mother, a thin woman wearing a full-sleeved dress and a little hat perched on a mountain of hair, looked very severe. Of course! In front of the camera, everyone assumes another appearance, and I looked away, outraged with myself for studying those faces. The mother surely couldn’t have foreseen that I wouldn’t attend her son’s burial!

  But the way Ada spoke to me was a painful surprise. She must have rehearsed at length what she wanted to say to me, and she actually took no notice of my explanations, my protests, and my rectifications, which she couldn’t have foreseen and for which therefore she was not prepared. She raced along her track, like a frightened horse, to the very end.

  She entered, dressed simply in a black house robe, her hair in great disorder, disheveled, and perhaps torn by hands, which insist on doing something when they cannot otherwise soothe. She reached the little table at which I was seated, and leaned forward, pressing both hands on the surface, to get a better look at me. Her little face was thin again, and freed from that strange health that swelled there discordantly. She was not beautiful, as when Guido had won her, but no one looking at her would have remembered the sickness. It was gone! In its place there was a sorrow so great that it completely mastered her. I understood it so well, that enormous sorrow, that I was unable to speak. As I looked at her, I thought: “What words could I say to her that would be the equivalent of taking her fraternally into my arms to comfort her and induce her to cry and unburden herself?” Then, when I heard myself being assailed, I tried to react, but too weakly, and she didn’t hear me.

  She spoke and spoke and spoke, and I can’t repeat all her words. If I’m not mistaken, she began by thanking me soberly, but without warmth, for having done so much for her and for her children. Then immediately she reproached me: “Thanks to what you’ve done, he actually died for something that wasn’t worth it!”

  Then she lowered her voice as if she wanted to keep secret what she was saying to me, and in that voice there was greater warmth, a warmth caused by her affection for Guido and (or was this only an appearance?) also for me: “And I pardon you for not coming to the funeral. You couldn’t, and I pardon you. He, too, would pardon you if he were still alive. What would you have done at his funeral, anyway! You, who didn’t love him! Good as you are, you could have wept for me, but not for him, whom you … hated! Poor Zeno! My brother!”

  It was outrageous that such things could be said to me, altering the truth so. I protested, but she didn’t hear me. I believe I shouted, or at least I felt that urge in my gullet: “But this is wrong, a lie, a slander. How can you believe such a thing?”

  She continued, still in a low voice: “But neither was I able to love him. I never betrayed him, not even in my thoughts, but my feelings didn’t allow me to protect him. I looked at your relationship with your wife and I envied it. It seemed better than what he offered me. I’m grateful to you for not having come to the funeral, because if you had, even now, I would have understood nothing. As it is, on the contrary, I see and understand everything. Also that I didn’t love him: otherwise how could I have hated even his violin, the most complete expression of his great spirit?”

  It was then that I lay my head on her arm and hid my face. The accusations she was making were so unjust that they couldn’t even be debated, and their irrationality was so tempered by her affectionate tone that my reaction couldn’t be as harsh as it should have been, in order to be victorious. Moreover, Augusta had already given me an example of considerate silence, not to offend and exacerbate such sorrow. When my eyes closed, however, in the darkness I saw that her words had created a new world, like all words that are not true. I seemed to realize, myself, that I had always hated Guido and had constantly been at his side, waiting for the opportunity to strike him. Like me, she, too, had coupled Guido with his violin. If I hadn’t known that she was groping blindly in her sorrow and in her remorse, I could have believed that the violin had been brought in as part of Guido to convince my spirit of the accusation of hatred.

  Then in the darkness I saw again Guido’s corpse and, still imprinted on his face, the stupor of being there, robbed of life. Frightened, I raised my head. It was preferable to confront Ada’s accusation, which I knew was unjust, than to stare into the darkness.

  But she was still speaking of me and of Guido. “And you, poor Zeno, without knowing it, went on living at his side, hating him. You did good things for him out of love for me. It was impossible! It had to end like this! I also thought once of being able to take advantage of the love I knew you still bore me, to increase the protection around him that could serve him. He could only be protected by someone who loved him, and among us, nobody loved him.”

  “What more could I have done for him?” I asked, weeping hot tears to make her—and myself— feel my innocence. Tears sometimes can substitute for a scream. I didn’t want to scream, and I was even in doubt about whether I should speak. But I had to drown out her assertions and I wept.

  “Save him, dear brother! I, or you—we should have saved him. Instead, I stayed with him and couldn’t save him, because I lacked true affection, and you remained distant, absent, always absent, until he was buried. Then you appeared sure of yourself, armed with all your affection. But before, you cared nothing for him. And yet he was with you until evening. And you could have imagined, if you had been concerned for him, that something serious was about to happen.”

  My tears prevented me from speaking, but I blurted something intended to establish the fact that the previous night he had spent enjoying himself in the marsh, hunting, so no one in this world could have predicted the use to which he would put the night that followed.

  “He needed his hunting! He needed it!” she cried, in loud reproach. And then, as if the effort of that cry had been excessive, all of a sudden she collapsed and fell senseless to the floor.

  I remember that I hesitated for a moment before calling Signora Malfenti. It seemed to me that this swoon revealed something about what she had said.

  Signora Malfenti and Alberta rushed in. Signora Malfenti, supporting Ada, asked me: “Did she talk with you about that wretched trading on the market?” Then: “This is her second fainting fit today!”

  She begged me to step out for a moment, and I went into the passage, where I waited to be told if I should go back into the room or leave the house. I was preparing myself for further explanations with Ada. She was forgetting that if things had been carried forward as I had suggested, the tragedy would surely have been averted. It would suffice to tell her this, and she would be convinced of her injustice toward me.

  A little later, Signora Malfenti joined me and said Ada had come round and wanted to bid me good-bye. She was resting on the sofa where, until a short time before, I had been seated.

  Seeing me, she started crying, and these were the first tears I saw her shed. She extended her little hand, moist with sweat: “Good-bye, dear Zeno! I beg you: remember! Remember always! Don’t forget him!”

  Signora Malfenti spoke up, asking what it was I should remember, and I told her Ada wanted Guido’s position on the Bourse to be settled at once. I blushed at my lie and I also feared a denial on Ada’s part. Instead of contradicting me, she started screaming: “Yes, yes! Everything must be cleared up! That horrible Bourse! I never want to hear it mentioned again!”

  She grew pale once more, and Signora Malfenti, to calm her, assured her that what she desired would be done immediately.

  Then Signora Malfenti accompanied me to the door
and begged me not to rush things: I was to do whatever I thought was in Guido’s best interests. But I replied that I had lost confidence. The risk was enormous and I no longer dared deal with another’s interests in that way. I no longer believed in the Bourse and in playing it, or at least I had lost faith that my mental energies could control the market’s movement. I therefore had to liquidate at once, quite happy that things had gone as they had.

  I didn’t repeat to Augusta what Ada had said. Why should I distress her? But those words, also because I repeated them to no one, continued to pound in my ear, and remained with me for long years. They still reecho in my soul. Again and again, even today, I analyze them. I can’t say I loved Guido, but this is only because he was a strange man. But I stood by him like a brother and helped him as best I could. I don’t deserve Ada’s reproach.

  I never again found myself alone with her. She didn’t feel the need to say anything else to me, nor did I dare demand an explanation, perhaps to avoid renewing her sorrow.

  At the Bourse the matter ended as I had foreseen, and Guido’s father, after having been informed by the first dispatch that he had lost his entire fortune, was surely pleased to find half of it intact. All my doing, but I wasn’t able to enjoy it as I had anticipated.

  Ada treated me affectionately always, until her departure for Buenos Aires, where she and the children went to live with her husband’s family. She enjoyed seeing me and Augusta. I sometimes chose to imagine that her whole speech had been due to a genuinely mad outburst of pain, and that not even she remembered it. But then once when Guido was mentioned again in our presence, she repeated and confirmed in a few words everything she had said to me that day: “He wasn’t loved by anybody, poor thing!”

  At the moment of boarding ship, carrying one of her babies, slightly indisposed, in her arms, she kissed me. Then, in a moment when there was nobody near, she said to me: “Goodbye, Zeno, dear brother. I will always remember that I wasn’t able to love him enough. You must know that! I am glad to be leaving my country. I feel as if I’m leaving my remorse behind! “

  I scolded her for tormenting herself like that. Ï avowed she had been a good wife and I knew it and could bear witness to it. I don’t know if I succeeded in convincing her. She no longer spoke, overcome with sobs. Then, a long time afterwards, I sensed that, in bidding me farewell, she had meant those words also to renew her reproaches of me. But I know she misjudged me. Surely, I don’t have to reproach myself with not having loved Guido.

  It was a dark, murky day. It was as if a sole cloud, outspread but not at all threatening, darkened the sky. From the port, a great fishing vessel, its sails hanging limp from the masts, was trying to move out, rowed by the sailors. Only two men were at the oars, and despite repeated efforts, they managed barely to shift the heavy vessel. Out at sea they would find a favoring breeze, perhaps.

  Ada, from the deck of the liner, waved her handkerchief. Then she turned her back. Of course, she was looking toward Sant’Anna, where Guido lay at rest. Her trim little form became more perfect, the farther it moved off. My eyes were blurred with tears. Now she was abandoning us, and never more would I be able to prove my innocence to her.

  PSYCHOANALYSIS

  3 May, 1915

  I‘m through with psychoanalysis. After having practiced it faithfully for six whole months, I’m worse off than before. I still haven’t discharged the doctor, but my decision is irrevocable. Yesterday, in any case, I sent him word that I was tied up, and for a few days I’ll keep him waiting. If I were quite sure of being able to laugh at him and not lose my temper, I might even see him again. But I’m afraid I’d end up coming to blows.

  In this city, after the outbreak of the war, we are more bored than ever, and, as a substitute for psychoanalysis, I have returned to my beloved papers. For a year I hadn’t written a word; in this, as in everything else, obeying the doctor, who commanded that during my therapy I was to reflect only when I was with him, because unsupervised reflection would reinforce the brakes that inhibited my sincerity, my relaxation. But now I find myself unbalanced and sicker than ever, and, through writing, I believe I will purge myself of the sickness more easily than through my therapy. At least I am sure that this is the true system for restoring importance to a past no longer painful, and the dispelling the dreary present more quickly.

  I had put myself in the doctor’s hands with such trust that when he told me I was cured, I believed him completely and, on the contrary, I didn’t believe in my pains, which still afflicted me. I said to them: “You’re not real, after all!” But now there can be no doubt! It’s them, all right! The bones in my legs have been converted into vibrant scales that hurt the flesh and the muscles.

  But this wouldn’t matter all that much to me, and it isn’t for this reason that I am giving up my therapy. If those hours of reflection at the doctor’s had continued to be interesting bearers of surprises and emotions, I wouldn’t have abandoned them, or before abandoning them, I would have waited until the end of the war, which makes all other activity impossible for me. But now that I know everything, namely that it was nothing but a foolish illusion, a trick designed to affect some hysterical old woman, how could I bear the company of that ridiculous man, with that eye of his, meant to be penetrating, and that presumption that allows him to collect all the phenomena of this world within his great new theory? I will spend my remaining free time writing. To begin with, I will write sincerely the story of my therapy. All sincerity between me and the doctor has vanished; now I can breathe. No stress is imposed on me any longer. I don’t have to force myself to have faith, or to pretend I have it. The better to conceal my true thoughts, I believed I had to show him a supine obsequiousness, and he exploited that to invent something new every day. My therapy was supposedly finished because my sickness had been discovered. It was nothing but the one diagnosed, in his day, by the late Sophocles for poor Oedipus: I had loved my mother and I would have liked to kill my father.

  And I didn’t become angry! Spellbound, I lay there and listened. It was a sickness that elevated me to the highest noble company. An illustrious sickness, whose ancestors dated back to the mythological era! And I’m not angry now, either, alone here with my pen in hand. I laugh at it wholeheartedly. The best proof that I never had that sickness is supplied by the fact that I am not cured of it. This proof would convince even the doctor. He should set his mind at rest: his words couldn’t spoil the memory of my youth. I close my eyes and I see immediately, pure and childish and ingenuous, my love for my mother, my respect and my great fondness for my father.

  The doctor puts too much faith also in those damned-confessions of mine, which he won’t return to me so I can revise them. Good heavens! He studied only medicine and therefore doesn’t know what it means to write in Italian for those of us who speak the dialect and can’t write it. A confession in writing is always a lie. With our every Tuscan word, we lie! If he knew how, by predilection, we recount all the things for which we have the words at hand, and how we avoid those things that would oblige us to turn to the dictionary! This is exactly how we choose, from our life, the episodes to underline. Obviously our life would have an entirely different aspect if it were told in our dialect.

  The doctor confessed to me that in all his long practice, he had never witnessed emotion as strong as mine on discovering myself in the images that he thought he had been able to evoke from me. For this reason, too, he was so prompt to declare me cured.

  And I didn’t simulate that emotion. It was, indeed, one of the most profound I have felt in my whole life. Bathed in sweat when I created the image, in tears when I held it. I had already cherished the hope of being able to relive one day of innocence and naïveté. For months and months that hope supported me and animated me. Didn’t it mean producing, through vital memory, in full winter the roses of May? The doctor himself guaranteed that the memory would be vivid and complete, such that it would amount to an extra day in my life. The roses would have all their scent and p
erhaps also their thorns.

  Thus, after pursuing those images, I overtook them. Now I know that I invented them. But inventing is a creation, not a lie. Mine were inventions like those of a fever, which walk around the room so that you can see them from every side, and then they touch you. They had the solidity, the color, the insolence of living things. Thanks to my desire, I projected the images, which were only in my brain, into the space where I was looking, a space whose air I could sense, and its light, and even the blunt corners that were never lacking in any space through which I passed.

  When I achieved the drowsiness that should have facilitated illusion, though it seemed to me nothing but the association of a great effort with a great inertia, I believed those images were real reproductions of distant days. I might have suspected at once that they were not, because the moment they vanished, I remembered them again, but without any excitement or emotion. I remembered them the way you remember an event narrated by someone who was not present. If they had been true reproductions, I would have continued laughing and crying over them as when I had experienced them. And the doctor made notes. He said: “We have had this, we have had that.” To tell the truth, we had had nothing more than graphic marks, skeletons of images.

  I was led to believe this was an evocation of my childhood because the first of the images placed me in a relatively recent period of which I had retained, even previously, a pale memory that this image seemed to confirm. There was a year in my life when I went to school before my brother had begun there. I saw myself leave my house one sunny morning in spring, and cross our garden to descend into the city, down, down, with an old maidservant of ours, Catina, holding me by the hand. My brother, in this dream scene, didn’t appear, but he was its hero. I sensed him in the house, free and happy, while I was going to school. I went off, choked with sobs, dragging my feet, an intense bitterness in my spirit. I visualized only one of those walks to school, but my rancor told me that I went to school every day, and every day my brother stayed home. To infinity, though in reality I believe that, after a fairly short time, my brother, only a year younger than I, also went to school. But then the dream’s truth seemed to me beyond debate. I was condemned to go always to school while my brother was permitted to stay home. Walking at Catina’s side, I calculated the duration of the torture. Until noon! While he’s at home! Further, I recalled that, during the preceding days, I must have been upset at school by threats and scolding, and then, too, I had thought: They can’t touch him. It had been a vision of enormous immediacy. Catina, whom I had known as a small woman, seemed to me huge, surely because I was so little. Even then she had seemed very old, but, as is well known, the very young always see older people as ancient. And along the streets I had to follow to reach school, I glimpsed also the strange little columns that in those days bordered the sidewalks of our city. True, I was born long enough ago to see still, as an adult, those little columns in our downtown streets. But the ones along the street I took that day with Catina were gone by the time I emerged from childhood.