Zeno's Conscience

  My faith in the authenticity of those images persisted in my spirit even when, quite soon, stimulated by that dream, my cold memory discovered further details of that period. The chief one: my brother also envied me because I went to school. I was sure I had noticed it, but that did not immediately suffice to invalidate the truth of the dream. Later it despoiled the evocation of any semblance of truth: the jealousy had in reality existed, but in the dream it had been transferred.

  The second vision also took me back to a recent time, though long before the first: a room in my house, but I don’t know which, because it is vaster than any room actually there. It is strange that I saw myself closed in that room, and that I immediately knew a detail that the mere sight of it could not have provided: the room was far from the place where my mother and Catina then stayed. And another detail: I hadn’t yet started attending school.

  The room was all white and, indeed, I never saw a room so white or so completely illuminated by the sun. Did the sun then pass through the walls? It was certainly already high, but still I was in my bed, holding in my hand a cup from which I had drunk all the milky coffee and in which I continued to scrape the spoon, extracting the sugar. At a certain point the spoon could collect no more, and then I tried to reach the bottom of the cup with my tongue. But I failed. So, finally, I was holding the cup with one hand and the spoon with the other and I was watching my brother, lying in the bed beside mine, as, belatedly, he was still sipping his coffee, with his nose in the cup. When he finally raised his face, I saw it all somehow contracted in the rays of the sun, which struck it fully, whereas mine (God knows why) was in shadow. His face was pale and a bit disfigured by a slight prognathism.

  He said: “Will you lend me your spoon?”

  Only then did I realize that Catina had forgotten to bring him a spoon. Immediately, and without hesitation, I answered him: “Yes! If you’ll give me a bit of your sugar in return.”

  I held up the spoon to underscore its value. But Catina’s voice immediately resounded in the room: “Shame on you! Little shark!”

  Fright and shame plunged me again into the present. I would have liked to argue with Catina, but she, my brother, and I—as I was then, small, innocent, and a usurer—disappeared, sinking into the abyss.

  I regretted having felt that shame so strongly that it destroyed the image which I had achieved with such effort. It would have been so much better if, instead, I had offered the spoon, meekly, and gratis, and had not argued over that bad deed of mine, probably the first I committed. Perhaps Catina would have enlisted my mother’s help to mete out a punishment to me, and finally I would have seen her again.

  I saw her, however, a few days later, or thought I saw her. I might have realized at once it was an illusion, because the image of my mother, as I had evoked it, resembled too closely her portrait, which hangs over my bed. But I must confess that in the apparition my mother moved like a living person.

  Great, immense sunlight, enough to blind you! From what I believed was my youth, there came so much of that sun that it was hard to believe this was not that time. Our dining nook in the afternoon hours. My father has come home and is sitting on a sofa beside Mamma, who is marking with a certain kind of indelible ink some initials on much linen spread over the table at which she sits. I find myself under the table, where I am playing with some marbles. I move closer and closer to Mamma. Probably I want her to join in my game. At a certain point, to stand on my feet between them, I clutch the linen cloth hanging from the table; a disaster occurs. The bottle of ink falls on my head and stains my face, my clothes, Mamma’s skirt, and also produces a little spot on Papa’s trousers. My father raises his leg to give me a kick.

  But I had returned from my longjourney in time, and I was safe here, an adult, an old man. For an instant I suffered at the threatened punishment, and immediately afterwards I was sad that I couldn’t witness the protective gesture that no doubt came from Mamma. But who can arrest those images when they start fleeing through that time, which had never before so resembled space? This was my notion as long as I believed in the authenticity of those images! Now, unfortunately (oh! how it saddens me!), I believe no longer and I know that it wasn’t the images that sped away, but my clear eyes that looked again into real space, where there is no room for ghosts.

  I will say more about the images of another day, to which the doctor attributed such great importance that he pronounced me cured.

  In the doze to which I abandoned myself, I had a dream, immobile as a nightmare. I dreamed of myself, a baby again, but seeing only that baby and how he also dreamed. He lay mute, overcome by a joy that pervaded his tiny organism. He seemed finally to have achieved his old desire. And yet he lay there alone and abandoned! But he could see and hear with the clarity that enables us to see and hear even distant things in dreams. The child, lying in a room of my house, saw (God knows how) that on its roof there was a cage, fixed in very solid foundations, without doors and windows, but illuminated with the most pleasing light and filled with pure and sweet-smelling air. And the child knew that only he could reach that cage, and without even going there, because the cage would come to him. In that cage there was just one piece of furniture, an easy chair, and in it sat a shapely woman, delightfully formed, dressed in black, a blonde with great blue eyes, snow-white hands, and little feet in patent-leather pumps from which, below her skirts, only a faint glow escaped. I must say that the woman seemed to me all one with her black dress and her patent-leather pumps. She was a whole! And the child dreamed of possessing that woman, but in the strangest way. He was sure, that is, that he could eat some little pieces at the top and at the base.

  Now, thinking back, I am amazed that the doctor, who, according to what he says, has read my manuscript so carefully, didn’t recall the dream I had before going to see Carla. To me, some time afterwards, as I thought it over, it seemed that this dream was simply the other one, slightly altered, made more childish.

  But the doctor recorded everything carefully, then asked me with a somewhat syrupy attitude: “Was your mother blond and shapely?”

  I was amazed by the question, and answered that my grandmother also had been the same. But for him I was cured, quite cured. I opened my mouth to rejoice with him and I adjusted myself to what was to come next: namely, no more investigations, no research or meditations, but rather a genuine and diligent reeducation.

  From then on, those sessions were downright torture, and I continued them only because it has always been so difficult for me to stop when I am moving or to move when I am still. On occasion, when he exaggerated, I would venture some objection. It wasn’t really true—as he believed—that my every word, my every thought was criminal. He would then widen his eyes. I was cured, and I refused to realize it! This was true blindness: I learned that I had desired to steal my father’s wife—my mother!—and yet I didn’t feel cured? My stubbornness was unheard of. However, the doctor admitted that I would be even more cured when my reeducation was finished, after which I would be accustomed to considering those things (desire to kill father and to kiss mother) quite innocent matters for which there was no need to suffer remorse, because they occurred often in the best families. Basically, what did I have to lose? One day he told me that now I was like a convalescent who still wasn’t accustomed to living without a fever. Well, I would wait until I was accustomed.

  He felt that I was not yet entirely his, and, besides the reeducation, from time to time he returned also to the therapy. He tried dreams again, but we didn’t have a single one that was authentic. Annoyed with all this waiting, in the end I made up one. I wouldn’t have done so if I could have foreseen the difficulty of such simulation. It isn’t all that easy to stammer as if we were immersed in a half-dream, or to cover ourselves with sweat or turn pale, not giving the game away, or perhaps turning scarlet from strain, and yet not blushing. I spoke as if I had gone back to the woman in the cage and had persuaded her to extend, through a hole suddenly produced in the wall
of the little room, her foot for me to suck and eat. “The left one! The left one!” I murmured, putting into the vision a curious detail that might make it resemble the previous dreams more closely. Thus I demonstrated that I had understood perfectly the sickness that the doctor demanded of me. The child Oedipus had in fact done just this: he had sucked his mother’s left foot, leaving the right one for his father. In my effort to concoct a reality (far from a contradiction, this), I deceived also myself and could taste the flavor of that foot. I wanted to vomit.

  Not only the doctor but I, too, would have liked to be revisited by those dear images of my youth, authentic or not, which I hadn’t had to invent. Since, in the doctor’s presence, they no longer came, I tried to summon them when I was away from him. By myself, I ran the risk of forgetting them, but I wasn’t looking for therapy, after all! I wanted again May roses in December. I had had them once, why couldn’t I have them again?

  In solitude, too, I was fairly bored, but then, instead of the images, something else came and for a while replaced them. Simply, I believed I had made an important scientific discovery. I thought I had been called upon to complete the whole theory of physiological colors. My predecessors, Goethe and Schopenhauer, had never imagined what could be achieved by deftly handling complementary colors.

  I should say that I spent my time sprawled on the sofa opposite my study window, from which I had a view of a stretch of sea and horizon. Now, one evening, as the sunset colored a sky jagged with clouds, I lingered at length to admire, along a limpid edge, a magnificent color, a pure and soft green. In the sky there was also a good deal of red, along the outlines of the clouds to the west, but it was a still-pale red, diluted by the white rays of the direct sun. Dazzled, after a certain time, I shut my eyes and it was obviously the green to which my attention had been directed, along with my affection, because on my retina now its complementary color was produced, a brilliant red that had nothing to do with the luminous but pale red of the sky. I looked, I caressed that color I had created. My great surprise came when, after I opened my eyes, I saw that dazzling red invade the whole sky and cover also the emerald green that for a long time I couldn’t then find again. So I had discovered the way to color nature! Naturally, I repeated the experiment several times. The wonderful thing was that there was also movement within that coloration. When I reopened my eyes, the sky would not accept immediately the color of my retina. There was an instant of hesitation, during which I was still able to see the emerald green that had generated that red by which it would be destroyed. The latter rose from the background, unexpected, and spread like a frightful fire.

  When I was convinced of the exactness of my observation, I took it to the doctor in the hope of enlivening our boring sessions. The doctor settled the question for me, saying that my retina was more sensitive because of nicotine. I was almost ready to say that, if so, then the images we had considered reproductions of events of my childhood could also have been generated through the effect of the same poison. But then I would have revealed to him that I wasn’t cured, and he would have tried to persuade me to start the therapy all over again.

  And yet that brute didn’t always believe I was poisoned like that. This was clear also in the reeducation he undertook, to heal me of what he called my smoking sickness. These are his words: smoking wasn’t bad for me, and if I were convinced it was harmless, it would really be so. And he went further: now that the relationship with my father had been revealed and subjected to my adult judgment, I could realize I had contracted that vice to compete with my father, and had attributed a poisonous effect to tobacco thanks to my unconscious moral feeling that wanted to punish me for my rivalry with him.

  That day I left the doctor’s house smoking like a chimney. A test was necessary, and I gladly subjected myself to it. That whole day I smoked uninterruptedly. Then a totally sleepless night followed. My chronic bronchitis returned, and there could be no doubt about that, because it was easy to discover the consequences in the spittoon.

  The next day I told the doctor I had smoked a great deal and now it no longer mattered to me. The doctor looked at me, smiling, and I could sense his bosom swelling with pride. Calmly he resumed my reeducation! He proceeded with the confidence of one who sees flowers blossom from every clod on which he sets his foot.

  I remember very little of that reeducation. I submitted to it, and when I emerged from that room I shook myself like a dog coming out of the water, and also like the dog remained damp but not soaked.

  I remember, however, with indignation that my educator asserted that Dr. Coprosich had rightly addressed to me the words that had so provoked my ill-feeling. But would I then have deserved as well the slap my father tried to give me, as he was dying? I don’t know if the doctor also said this. But I do know for certain that he declared I had hated also old Malfenti, whom I had installed in my father’s place. Many in this world believe they cannot live without a given affection; I, on the contrary, according to him, became unbalanced if I lacked a given hatred. I married one or another of the daughters, and it didn’t matter which, because it was a question of putting their father in a place where my hatred could reach him. Then I defaced, as best I could, the house I had made mine. I betrayed my wife and, obviously, if I could have succeeded, I would have seduced Ada and also Alberta. Naturally I have no thought of denying this, and indeed the doctor made me laugh when, in telling it to me, he assumed the attitude of Christopher Columbus arriving in America. I believe, however, that he is the only one in this world who, hearing I wanted to go to bed with two beautiful women, would ask himself: Now let’s see why this man wants to go to bed with them.

  It was even more difficult for me to tolerate what he thought himself entitled to say about my relations with Guido. From my own account he had learned of the dislike that had marked the beginning of my acquaintance with Guido. This dislike never ceased, according to the doctor, and Ada was right to see my absence from the funeral as its final manifestation. The doctor forgot how, at that moment, I was intent on my labor of love, saving Ada’s fortune, nor did I deign to remind him.

  It seems that, on the subject of Guido, the doctor had even made some inquiries. He asserts that, having been chosen by Ada, Guido couldn’t be the way I’ve described him. He has discovered that an important lumberyard, very close to the house where he practices psychoanalysis, belonged to the finn of Guido Speier & Co. Why hadn’t I mentioned it?

  If I had mentioned it, it would have been an added difficulty in my already quite difficult exposition. This omission is simply the proof that a confession made by me in Italian could be neither complete nor sincere. In a lumberyard there are enormous varieties of lumber, which we in Trieste call by barbarous names derived from the dialect, from Croat, from German, and sometimes even from French(zapin, for example, which is by no means the equivalent of sapin). Who could have given me the appropriate vocabulary? Old as I am, should I have found myself a job with a lumber dealer from Tuscany? For that matter, the lumberyard belonging to the firm of Guido Speier & Co. produced only losses. So I had no call to mention it, as it remained always inactive, except when thieves broke in and made that barbarously named wood move, as if it were destined to make little tables for spiritualist séances.

  I suggested to the doctor that he seek information on Guido from my wife, from Carmen, or from Luciano, who is now a well-known, successful merchant. To my knowledge, the doctor consulted none of them, and I must believe he refrained for fear of seeing, thanks to their information, the collapse of all his construction of accusations and suspicions. Who knows why he has been overcome by such hatred of me? He must be another hysteric who, having desired his mother in vain, takes it out on someone totally extraneous.

  In the end I grew very tired of the struggle I had to sustain with the doctor, whom I was paying. I believe also that those dreams didn’t do me any good, and then the freedom to smoke whenever I liked finally depressed me totally. I had a good idea: I went to Dr. Paoli.
br />   I hadn’t seen him for many years. He had gone rather white, but his grenadier figure had not yet been fattened by age, or bent. He still looked at things with a gaze that seemed a caress. This time I discovered why he seemed like that to me. Obviously he enjoys looking, and he looks at the beautiful and the ugly with the satisfaction that others derive from a caress.

  I had gone up to see him with the intention of asking him if he believed I should continue my psychoanalysis. But when I found myself facing that coldly investigative eye, my courage failed me. Perhaps I would make myself ridiculous, telling him that at my age I had let myself be taken in by such charlatanism. I was sorry to have to remain silent, because if Paoli had forbidden me psychoanalysis, my position would have been greatly simplified, but I definitely would not have liked to see myself caressed at length by that great eye of his.