I told him about my insomnia, my chronic bronchitis, a rash on my cheeks that was tormenting me, about certain shooting pains in my legs, and finally about my strange memory gaps.
Paoli analyzed my urine in my presence. The mixture turned black, and Paoli became thoughtful. Here, finally, was a real analysis and not a psychoanalysis. I remembered with affection and emotion my remote past as a chemist and some real analyses: me, a test tube, and a reagent! The other, the analyzed, sleeps until the reagent imperiously wakens him. Resistance in the test tube doesn’t exist or else it succumbs to the slightest increase of temperature, and simulation is also completely absent. In that test tube, nothing happens that could recall my behavior when, to please Dr. S., I invented new details of my childhood, which then confirmed the diagnosis of Sophocles. Here, on the contrary, all was truth. The thing to be analyzed was imprisoned in the tube and, remaining always itself, it awaited the reagent. When it arrived, the thing always said the same word. In psychoanalysis there is never repetition, neither of the same images nor of the same words.
It should be called something else. Let’s call it psychic adventure. That’s right: when you begin such an analysis, it’s as if you were going into a wood, not knowing whether you will encounter an outlaw or a friend. And even when the adventure is over, you still don’t know. In this, psychoanalysis recalls spiritualism.
But Paoli didn’t believe it was a question of sugar. He wanted to see me again the next day, after he had analyzed that liquid by polarization.
Meanwhile, I went off, basking in the glory of diabetes. I was about to go to Dr. S. to ask him how he would now analyze, in my bosom, the causes of such a disease in order to nullify them. But I had had enough of that individual, and I wouldn’t see him again, not even to make fun of him.
I must confess that diabetes for me was infinitely sweet. I talked of it with Augusta, who immediately had tears in her eyes. “You’ve talkedso much about diseases allyour life, that you had to end up having one!” she said, then tried to console me.
I loved my illness. I fondly remembered poor Copler, who preferred real sickness to the imaginary. Now I agreed with him. Real sickness was so simple: you just let it have its way. In fact, when I read in a medical volume the description of my sweet sickness, I discovered a kind of program of life (not death!) in its various stages. Farewell, resolutions: at last I was free. Everything would take its course without any intervention on my part.
I also discovered that my sickness was always, or almost always, very sweet. The sick person eats and drinks a great deal, and there are no great sufferings if you are careful to avoid ulcers. Then you die in a very sweet coma.
A little later, Paoli called me on the telephone. He informed me that there was no trace of sugar. I went to him the next day and he prescribed a diet, which I followed only a few days, and a potion that he described in an illegible prescription, which did me good for a whole month.
“Did diabetes give you a great fright?” he asked me, smiling.
I protested, but I didn’t tell him that since diabetes had abandoned me, I felt very much alone. He wouldn’t have believed me.
In that period I happened upon Dr. Beard’s famous work on neurasthenia. I followed his advice and changed medicines every week according to his prescriptions, which I copied out in a clear hand. For some months the treatment seemed to do me good. Not even Copier had had such an abundant consolation of medicines in his life as I did at that time. Then that faith also faded, but meanwhile I had postponed from day to day my return to psychoanalysis.
I then ran into Dr. S. He asked me if I had decided to give up therapy. He was, however, very polite, far more so than when he had had me in his hands. Obviously he wanted to get me back. I told him I had some urgent business, family matters that occupied and preoccupied me, and that once I found peace again, I would return to him. I would have liked to ask him to give me back my manuscript, but I didn’t dare; it would have been tantamount to confessing that I wanted nothing more to do with the treatment. I postponed such an attempt to another time, when he would have realized that I no longer gave therapy any thought, and he would have to resign himself.
Before leaving me, he said a few words, meant to win me back: “If you examine your consciousness, you will find it changed. As you will see, you will return to me only if you realize that I was able, in a relatively short time, to bring you close to health.”
But, to tell the truth, I believe that, with his help, in studying my consciousness, I have introduced some new sicknesses into it.
I am bent on recovering from his therapy. I avoid dreams and memories. Thanks to them, my poor head has been so transformed that it doesn’t feel secure on my neck. I have frightful distractions. I speak with people, and while I am saying one thing, I try involuntarily to recall something else that, just a moment before, I said or did and now no longer remember, or I even pursue a thought of mine that seems to me enormously important, with the importance my father attributed to those thoughts he had just before dying, which he, too, was unable to recall.
If I don’t want to end up in the lunatic asylum, I must throw away these playthings.
15 May, I915
We have spent a two-day holiday at Lucinico, in our villa there. My son, Alfio, has to recuperate from influenza and will remain in the villa with his sister for a few weeks. We’ll come back here for Pentecost.
I have finally succeeded in returning to my sweet habits, and stopped smoking. I am already much better since I have been able to abolish the freedom that foolish doctor chose to grant me. Today, as we are in midmonth, I have been struck by the difficulty our calendar creates for regular and orderly resolutions. No one month is the same as another. To underline better one’s inner resolve, one likes to end smoking together with the end of something else: for example, the month. But except for July and August, and then December and January, there are no two successive months that form a pair thanks to their equal number of days. Time involves true disorder!
To collect my thoughts more readily, I spent the afternoon of my second solitary day on the shores of the Isonzo. Nothing is more conducive to meditation than watching the flow of water. You stand motionless, and the running water supplies the distraction needed, because it is never identical to itself, in its color and its pattern, not even for a moment.
It was a strange day. Certainly up above, a strong wind was blowing, because the clouds constantly changed shape; but below, the atmosphere was unmoving. It happened that from time to time, among the shifting clouds, the already-hot sun found an aperture through which to lavish its rays on this or that patch of hill or mountaintop, emphasizing the sweet green of May amid the shadow covering the landscape. The temperature was mild and there was also something springlike in that flight of clouds in the sky. There could be no doubt: our weather was regaining health!
Mine was genuine meditation, one of those rare instants that our miserly life bestows of true, great objectivity, when you finally stop believing and feeling yourself a victim. In the midst of all that green, emphasized so delightfully by those patches of sun, I could smile at my life and also at my sickness. Woman had an enormous importance in it. Perhaps in fragments: her little feet, her waist, or her mouth filled my days. And seeing my life again and also my sickness, I loved them, I understood them! How much more beautiful my life had been than that of the so-called healthy, those who beat or would have liked to beat their women every day, except at certain moments. I, on the contrary, had been accompanied always by love. When I hadn’t thought of my woman for a while, I then called her to mind again, to win forgiveness for thinking of other women. Other men abandoned their women, disappointed and despairing of life. I had never stripped life of desire, and illusion was immediately, totally reborn after every shipwreck, in the dream of limbs, of voices, of more-perfect attitudes.
At that moment I remembered that among the many lies I had dished out to that profound observer Dr. S., there was also the s
tory that I had never again betrayed my wife after the departure of Ada. This lie, too, had helped him construct his theories. But there, on the bank of that river, suddenly and with fear, I remembered that it was true that, for a few days now, perhaps since I had given up the therapy, I hadn’t sought the company of other women. Am I perhaps cured, as Dr. S. claims? Old as I am, for some time women have no longer looked at me. If I stop looking at them, then all ties between us are severed.
If a suspicion like this had come to me in Trieste, I could have resolved it at once. Out here, that is much more difficult.
A few days before, I had picked up the memoirs of Da Ponte, the adventurer, contemporary of Casanova. He, too, had surely passed through Lucinico, and I dreamed of encountering those ladies of his, faces powdered, limbs concealed by crinolines. My God! How did those women manage to surrender so quickly and so frequently, defended as they were by all those rags?
It seemed to me that the thought of the crinoline, despite my therapy, was rather arousing. But my desire was fairly artificial, and it wasn’t enough to reassure me.
The experience I sought came to me a little later, and it sufficed to reassure me, but only at great cost. To have that experience, I altered and spoiled the purest relationship I had had in my life.
I ran into Teresina, the older daughter of the tenant of a farm situated next to my villa. Her father had been left a widower two years ago, and his numerous brood had found a new mother in Teresina, a sturdy girl who got up every morning to work, and stopped only to go to bed and rest in order to be able to resume her work. That day she was leading the donkey habitually entrusted to the care of her little brother, and she was walking beside the cart loaded with fresh grass, because the far-from-large animal would have been unable to carry up the slight slope the added weight of the girl.
A year ago, Teresina had seemed to me still a child, and I had felt for her nothing but a smiling, paternal fondness. But even the day before, when I saw her again for the first time, despite the fact that I found her grown, her dark little face more serious, her slight shoulders broadened and the bosom rounder in the scant ripening of the overworked little body, I continued to regard her as an immature child in whom only her extraordinary activity could be loved, and the maternal instinct from which her little charges benefited. If it hadn’t been for that accursed therapy and the necessity to verify immediately the state of my sickness, I could have left Lucinico once again without have disturbed such innocence.
She had no crinoline. And the round, smiling little face was ignorant of powder. Her feet were bare, and half of her legs were also visibly naked. The little face and the feet and the legs were unable to excite me. The face and the limbs that Teresina allowed to be seen were of the same color; they all belonged to the air, and there was nothing wrong in their being exposed to the air. Perhaps for this reason they were unable to stir me. But on feeling myself so cold, I was frightened. After the treatment, did I now require crinolines?
I began by stroking the donkey, for whom I had won a bit of respite. Then I tried to return to Teresina, and I put into her hand a ten-crown note. It was a first assault! The year before, with her and the other children, to express my paternal affection, I had pressed only a few pennies into their hands. But paternal affection, of course, is a different thing. Teresina was dumbfounded by the rich gift. Carefully she raised her little skirt to put the precious piece of paper into some concealed pocket or other. Thus I saw a further bit of leg, but it, too, was still tanned and chaste.
I returned to the donkey and gave him a kiss on the head. My affection provoked his. He stretched his muzzle and emitted his great cry of love, which I heard always with respect. How it crosses distances, and how significant it is, that initial cry that invokes and then is repeated, diminished, ending in a desperate lament. But, heard at such close range, it hurt my eardrum.
Teresina laughed, and her laughter encouraged me. I returned to her and promptly grasped her by the forearm, where my hand moved up, slowly, toward the shoulder, as I studied my sensations. Thank heaven I was not yet cured! I had given up the therapy in time.
But Teresina, hitting the donkey with a stick, made the animal move on, following him and leaving me behind.
Laughing heartily, because I remained happy even if the little peasant girl would have none of me, I said to her: “Do you have a boyfriend? You should. Too bad you don’t have one already!”
Still moving away from me, she said: “If I do take one, he’ll surely be younger than you!”
My happiness was not marred by this. I would have liked to give Teresina a little lesson, and I tried to remember from Boccaccio how “Maestro Alberto of Bologna virtuously shamed a woman who wanted to shame him, as he was in love with her.” But Maestro Alberto’s reasoning didn’t have the desired effect, because Madonna Malgherida de’ Ghisolieri said to him: “Your love is dear to me as that of a wise and worthy man should be; and therefore, save for my virtue, ask surely of me any pleasure, as if it were yours to demand.”
I tried to do better: “When will you give old men some time, Teresina?” I shouted, to be heard by her who was already far away from me.
“When I’m old myself!” she cried, laughing wholeheartedly and without pausing.
“But then the old men will want nothing to do with you. Mind what I say! I know them!”
I was shouting, pleased with my wit, which came directly from my sex.
At that moment, in some part of the sky, the clouds opened to release the sun’s rays; they struck Teresina, who now was at least forty meters from me, and about ten or more higher than I. She was tanned, small, but luminous!
The sun didn’t illuminate me! When you are old, you remain in shadow, even when you have wit.
26 June, 1915
The war has overtaken me! I, who was listening to the stories of war as if it were a war of olden days, amusing to narrate, but foolish to worry about! I stumbled into its midst, bewildered and at the same time amazed at not having already realized that sooner or later I would have to be involved. I had lived, completely calm, in a building whose ground floor was on fire, and I hadn’t foreseen that sooner or later the whole building, with me in it, would collapse in flames.
The war grabbed me, shook me like a rag, deprived me at one stroke of my whole family and also of my business manager. Overnight I was an entirely new man, or rather, to be more precise, all twenty-four of my hours were entirely new. Since yesterday I have been a bit calmer because finally, after waiting a month, I received the first news of my family. They are safe and sound in Turin, whereas I had given up all hope of ever seeing them again.
I have to spend the whole day in my office. I have nothing to do there, but the Olivis, as Italian citizens, have had to leave, and my few able employees have all gone off to fight on this side or that, and so I have to remain on guard at my post. In the evening I go home, burdened with the heavy keys of the warehouse. Today, feeling so much calmer, I brought with me to the office this manuscript, which might help me endure the long hours better. In fact, it has provided me with a wonderful quarter-hour in which I learned that there was in this world a period of peace and silence that allowed one to concern himself with such trivial matters.
It would also be beautiful if someone now seriously invited me to sink into a state of semiconsciousness so as to be able to relive even one hour of my previous life. I would laugh in his face. How can anyone abandon a present like this, to go hunting for things of no importance? It seems to me that I have only now definitively separated myself from my health and from my sickness. I walk through the streets of our wretched city, feeling privileged, not going to the war, finding each day what food I require. Compared with everyone else, I feel so happy—especially since I’ve had news of my family—that I would feel I was provoking the wrath of the gods themselves if I were also perfectly well.
The war and I met in a violent fashion, though now it seems a bit comical to me.
Augusta an
d I had gone back to Lucinico to spend Pentecost with the children. On 23 May, I got up early. I had to take my Karlsbad salts and also go for a walk before my coffee. It was during this cure at Lucinico that I became aware that the heart, when you are fasting, attends more actively to other repairs, spreading a great well-being through the whole organism. My theory was then to be perfected that very day, when it forced me to suffer the hunger that did me so much good.
Bidding me good morning, Augusta raised her head, now totally white, from her pillow and reminded me that I had promised my daughter to find her some roses. Our only rosebush had withered, and something therefore had to be done. My daughter has become a beautiful girl and resembles Ada. From one moment to the next, I had forgotten to play the gruff educator with her, and I had turned into the cavalier who respects womanhood even in his own daughter. She immediately became aware of her power, and to my great amusement and Augusta’s, she abused it. She wanted roses, and roses had to be found.
I planned to walk for a couple of hours. There was a bright sun, and since my intention was to keep walking and not to stop until I had returned home, I didn’t take even a jacket and hat. Luckily, I recalled that I would have to pay for the roses, and therefore I didn’t leave my wallet behind with the jacket.
First of all I went to the nearby farm, to Teresina’s father, to ask him to cut the roses, which I would collect on my way home. I entered the great yard girded by a dilapidated wall, and I found no one. I shouted the name of Teresina. From the house carne the smallest of the children; he must then have been about six. I put a few coins in his hand and he told me that the whole family had crossed the Isonzo early that morning for a day’s work in a potato field, where the clods had to be broken up.