Maria Ferres had always remained faithful to her youthful habit of noting daily in an intimate journal her thoughts, joys, sadness, dreams, troubles, aspirations, regrets, hopes, all the events of her inner life, all the episodes of her outer life, composing almost an Itinerary of the Soul, which from time to time she loved to reread, in order to draw from it a rule for her future journey and to rediscover the trace of things that had long been dead.
Forced by circumstances constantly to withdraw into herself, always locked in her purity as in an incorruptible and inaccessible ivory tower, she felt relief and comfort in that kind of daily confession entrusted to the white page of a secret book. She complained about her troubles, she gave herself up to tears, she sought to penetrate the enigmas of her heart, she interrogated her conscience, she drew courage from prayer, she fortified herself through meditation, she banished all weakness and every vain image from herself, she placed her soul in the hands of the Lord. And every page shone with a common light, that of Truth.
September 15, 1886 (Schifanoja). —How tired I feel! The journey fatigued me somewhat and this new sea and country air has dazed me somewhat. I need rest; and it already seems to me that I can foretaste the goodness of sleep and the sweetness of reawakening tomorrow. I will awaken in a kindly home, to Francesca’s cordial hospitality, in this Schifanoja that has such beautiful roses and tall cypresses; and I will awaken with a few weeks of peace before me, twenty days of spiritual existence, maybe more. I am very grateful to Francesca for the invitation. Seeing her again, I saw a sister once more. How many changes have taken place in me, and what deep ones, since the lovely Florentine years!
Francesca was remembering today, with regard to my hair, all the passions and melancholy of that time, and Carlotta Fiordelise, and Gabriella Vanni, and that whole long-ago story that now doesn’t seem to me to have been lived through, but rather read about in an old forgotten book, or seen in a dream. My hair has not fallen out, but very many other more living things have fallen from me. As many hairs I have on my head, so many wheat spikes of pain do I have in my destiny.
But why is sadness overcoming me once more? And why do the memories cause me pain? And why is my resignation being shaken from time to time? It’s pointless lamenting over a grave; and the past is like a grave that does not give up its dead. My God, let me remember this, once and for all!
Francesca is still young, and still preserves that lovely frank geniality of hers that exerted such a strange charm at boarding school on my somewhat dark spirit. She has a great and rare virtue: she is cheerful, but she can understand the sufferings of others and also knows how to soothe them with her mindful compassion. She is, above all, an intellectual woman, a woman of refined tastes, a perfect woman, a friend who is not a burden. She takes perhaps a little too much pleasure in witticisms and clever phrases, but her arrows always have a golden point and are shot with an inimitable grace. Certainly, among all the worldly ladies I have known, she is the finest; among my friends, she is my favorite.
Her children do not resemble her; they are not beautiful. But the little girl, Muriella, is very kind; she has a clear laugh and her mother’s eyes. She played hostess to Delfina with the courtesy of a little noblewoman. She, certainly, will inherit her mother’s “great style.”
Delfina seems happy. She has already explored most of the garden, she has gone down to the sea, she has descended all the staircases; she has come to tell me about the wonders, panting, gobbling her words, with a kind of dazzle in her eyes. She often repeated the name of her new friend: Muriella. It is a pretty name, and on her mouth it becomes prettier still.
She is sleeping deeply. When her eyes are closed, her lashes cast a long, long shadow over the top of her cheeks. Francesca’s cousin was marveling at their length, this evening, and repeated a verse by William Shakespeare from The Tempest, very beautiful, about Miranda’s eyelashes.
There is too much scent here. Delfina wanted me to leave the bunch of roses next to the bed, before falling asleep. But now that she is sleeping, I will remove it and place it on the veranda, where it is calm.
I am tired, yet I have written three or four pages. I am sleepy, and yet I would like to prolong being awake in order to prolong this undefined languor of my soul, fluttering in some strange tenderness diffused outside of me, around me. It has been so long, so long, since I felt a little benevolence surrounding me!
Francesca is very good, and I am very grateful to her.
*
I carried the vase of roses onto the veranda; and I stayed out there for a few minutes to listen to the night, kept there by the regret of missing, in the blindness of sleep, the hours that pass beneath such a beautiful sky. The harmony between the voice of the fountain and the voice of the sea is strange. The cypresses before me seemed to be the columns of the firmament: the stars shone right above their peaks, lighting them up.
Why, by night, do scents have in their waves something that speaks, has meaning, has a language?
No, flowers do not sleep at night.
*
September 16. —Delightful afternoon, spent almost entirely in conversing with Francesca on the verandas, on the terraces, along the avenues, in all the open spaces of this villa, which appears to have been built by a poet prince in order to forget anguish. The name of the Ferrarese mansion suits it perfectly.
Francesca let me read a sonnet by Count Sperelli, written on parchment: a very fine trifle. This Sperelli is an elect and intense spirit. This morning at table, he said two or three very beautiful things. He is convalescing from a mortal wound received in a duel, in Rome, last May. He has in his gestures, his words, his gaze, that kind of affectionate and delicate abandon which is typical of convalescents, of those who have emerged from the hands of death. He must be very young; but he must have lived a great deal, and a restless life at that. He carries the marks of battle.
*
Delightful evening, of intimate conversation, intimate music, after dinner. I, perhaps, talked too much; or, at least, too fervently. But Francesca listened to me and indulged me; as did Count Sperelli. One of the greatest pleasures, in nonvulgar conversation, is indeed to feel that the same degree of fervor animates all intelligent spirits present. Only then do words take on the sound of sincerity and give those who utter them, and those who hear them, supreme pleasure.
Francesca’s cousin is a refined connoisseur of music. He greatly loves the masters of the eighteenth century, and especially, among the composers for harpsichord, Domenico Scarlatti. But his most ardent love is Sebastian Bach. He likes Chopin little; Beethoven penetrates too deeply inside him and agitates him too much. In sacred music he can find no one to compare with Bach aside from Mozart. “Perhaps,” he said, “in no Mass does the voice of the supernatural reach religiosity and terribleness to the extent that Mozart does in the Tuba mirum of the Requiem. It is not true that he who had so deep a sense of the supernatural as to create musically the Commendatore’s ghost, and who, creating Don Giovanni and Donna Anna, was able to push the analysis of the inner being so far, had to be a Greek, a Platonist, a pure seeker of grace, beauty, serenity . . .”
He said these words and others, with that particular emphasis employed by men who are constantly absorbed in the search for elevated and complex things, when talking of art.
Then, while listening to me, he had a strange expression, as if of astonishment, and at times, of anxiety. I was almost always addressing myself to Francesca, looking at her; and yet, I felt his gaze fixed on me with an insistence that bothered me but did not offend me. He must still be ill, weak, prey to his sensibilities. He asked me, finally: “Do you sing?”—in the same way that he would have asked me: “Do you love me?”
I sang an aria by Paisiello and one by Salieri. I played a little eighteenth-century music. My voice was warm and my hand skillful.
He did not give me any praise. He remained in silence. Why?
Delfina was sleeping already, up here. When I came up to see her, I found her sleeping but with her eyelashes wet as if she had cried. Poor love! Dorothy told me that my voice had reached here clearly and that Delfina had shaken off her drowsiness and had begun to sob and wanted to come downstairs.
When I play, she always cries.
Now she is sleeping; but every now and then her breath quickens; it resembles a muffled sob, and it gives my own breathing a vague anxiety, almost a need to respond to that unconscious sob, to that suffering that has not been appeased in her sleep. Poor love!
Who is playing the piano downstairs? Someone is softly playing a few notes of Luigi Rameau’s gavotte,1 a gavotte full of fascinating melancholy, which I was playing earlier. Who can it be? Francesca came upstairs with me; it is late.
I looked out on the veranda. The vestibule hall is dark; only the adjacent room, where the marquis and Manuel are still playing, is lit.
The gavotte is ceasing. Someone is going down the stairs into the garden.
My God, why am I so alert, so vigilant, so curious? Why are noises churning me up so much, inside, tonight?
Delfina has woken up and is calling me.
September 17. —Manuel left this morning. We accompanied him to the station at Rovigliano. Toward October 10 he will return to fetch me; and we will go to Siena, to my mother’s. Delfina and I will remain in Siena probably until the new year: for two or three months. I will once again see the Pope’s Loggia and the Gaia Fountain and my beautiful black-and-white Dome, the beloved house of the Blessed Virgin Assunta, where a part of my soul is still praying, alongside the Chigi chapel, in the place that knows my knees.
In my mind, the image of the place is always clear; and when I return I will kneel down in the exact place where I used to, with precision, better than if I had left two deep hollows there. And there I will once again find that part of my soul that still prays, beneath the spangled blue vault, which is reflected in the marble like a nocturnal sky in calm water.
Nothing, certainly, has changed. In the precious chapel, full of a pulsing shade, of a darkness animated by the jeweled reflections of the stones, the lamps burned; and the light seemed to gather itself entirely within the small circle of oil in which the flame was nourished, as in a clear topaz. Little by little, beneath my intent gaze, the sculpted marble took on a less cold pallor, almost the warmth of ivory; little by little the pale life of the celestial creatures entered the marble, and through the marble forms diffused the vague transparency of angelic flesh.
How ardent and spontaneous my prayer was! If I read Saint Francis’s Philotea, it seemed that the words descended to my heart like tears of honey, like drops of milk. If I began to meditate, it seemed that I was walking along the secret paths of the soul, as in a garden of delight where nightingales sang on flowering trees and doves cooed on the banks of the streams of divine Grace. Devotion infused in me a sense of calm full of freshness and perfumes, opened up the holy springtimes of the Fioretti in my heart, garlanded me with mystical roses and supernatural lilies. And in my old Siena, in the ancient city of the Virgin, I heard above all the voices the calls of the bells.
September 18. —Indefinable hour of torture. I seem to have been condemned to repiece together, to rejoin, to reunite, to recompose the fragments of a dream, of which one part seems to be materializing confusedly outside of me and the other floundering confusedly deep in my heart. And I am toiling, I am toiling, without ever managing to put it back together in its entirety.
September 19. —Another torture. Someone sang to me, a long while ago; and did not finish the song. Someone is singing to me now, taking up the song at the point where it left off; but for a long time now I have forgotten the beginning. And my restless soul, while it tries to remember it in order to connect it to the continuation, loses itself; and neither finds the old tones nor enjoys the new ones.
September 20. —Today, after breakfast, Andrea Sperelli invited me and Francesca to go and see in his rooms the drawings that he received yesterday from Rome.
One can say that an entire art passed today before our eyes, an entire art studied and analyzed by the pencil of a sketcher. I had one of the most intense pleasures of my life.
These drawings are by Sperelli; they are his studies, his sketches, his notes, his memories gathered here and there in all the galleries of Europe; they are, I’ll express it this way, his breviary, a wonderful breviary in which every ancient master has his supreme page, the page in which his style is synthesized, where the noblest and most original beauties of the work are noted, where the punctum saliens2 of the entire production is gathered. Glancing through this wide collection, not only did I manage to gain a precise sense of the different schools, the different movements, the different trends, the different influences through which painting is developed in a given region; but I penetrated into the intimate spirit, into the essential substance of the art of every single painter. How deeply I now understand, for example, the fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries, the Trecentisti and the Quattrocentisti, the simple, noble, great Primitives!
The drawings are stored in lovely cases made of engraved leather with studs and silver clasps imitating those of missals. The variety of the technique is ingenious. Certain drawings, of Rembrandt’s work, are executed on a type of slightly reddish paper, warmed with hematite pencil, watercolor-painted with bistre; and the areas of light are emphasized with white tempera. Certain other drawings, of the Flemish masters’ work, are executed on rough paper very similar to paper prepared for oil painting, where the bistre watercolor takes on the character of sketches done in bitumen. Others are in hematite pencil, in black pencil, in three pencils with a few touches of pastel, in watercolors with bistre over pen strokes, watercolor painted with China ink, on white paper, on yellow paper, on gray paper. Sometimes the hematite pencil seems to contain purple; the black pencil renders a velvety mark; the bistre is warm, tawny, blond, of a fine tortoiseshell color.
All these details I have derived from the sketcher; I feel a strange pleasure in remembering them, in writing them; I seem to be intoxicated by art; my brain is full of a thousand lines, a thousand figures; and in the midst of the jumbled tumult I always see the women of the Primitives, the unforgettable heads of the Saints and the Virgins, the ones that smiled on my religious childhood, in old Siena, from the frescoes of Taddeo and Simone.
No masterpiece of the most advanced and most refined art leaves such a strong, enduring, tenacious impression in the soul. Those long, slim bodies, like lily stalks; those slender reclining necks; those rounded protruding foreheads; those mouths full of suffering and affability; those hands (O Memling!)3 as thin, waxen, diaphanous as a host, more meaningful than any other feature; and that hair red as copper, tawny as gold, blond as honey, one strand made almost distinct from the other by the religious patience of the paintbrush; and all those noble and grave poses, either receiving a flower from an angel or placing their fingers upon an open book or bending over toward the infant or holding on their laps the body of Jesus or in the act of blessing or dying or ascending to Paradise, all those pure, sincere, and profound things make one feel tenderness or pity deep down in one’s intimate soul; and are imprinted forever in memory, like a spectacle of human sadness seen in the reality of life, in the reality of death.
One by one, today, the women of the Primitives passed beneath our eyes. Francesca and I were seated on a low divan, with a large reading desk in front of us, on which was placed the leather holder with the drawings that the sketcher, sitting opposite us, paged through slowly while commenting. With each gesture, I saw his hand take the sheet and place it on the other side of the holder with a singular delicacy. Why, at each gesture, did I feel inside me the beginning of a shiver, as if that hand were about to touch me?
At a certain point, perhaps finding the chair uncomfortable, he knelt on the carpet and continued to turn over the sheets. In talking, he addressed himself almost always to me; and he did not have the air of teaching me but of reasoning with a connoisseur on equal terms; and deep inside me fluttered a slight satisfaction, mingled with gratitude. When I made an exclamation of wonder, he looked at me with a smile that is still with me and that I do not know how to define. Two or three times Francesca leaned her arm on his shoulder, with familiarity, carelessly. Seeing the head of Moses’ firstborn son, taken from Sandro Botticelli’s fresco in the Sistine Chapel, she said: “He looks a bit like you, when you are melancholic.” Seeing the head of the archangel Michael, which is a fragment of the Madonna of Pavia by Perugino, she said: “He looks like Giulia Moceto; doesn’t he?” He did not answer; and he turned the sheet with less slowness. Then she added, laughing: “Far be from us any image of sin!”
Is this Giulia Moceto perhaps a woman whom he once loved? When the page was turned, I felt an incomprehensible desire to see the archangel Michael again, to examine it with greater attention. Was it only curiosity?
I don’t know. I don’t dare to look inside myself, into the secret; I much prefer to delay things, to deceive myself; I don’t think that sooner or later all ambiguous lands fall into the dominion of the Enemy; I don’t have the courage to confront the battle; I am pusillanimous.
Meanwhile, it is a sweet hour. My mind is stimulated with intellectual visual images, as if I had drunk many cups of strong tea. I have no desire to go to bed. The night is warm, as in August; the sky is clear but veiled, like a fabric made of pearls; the sea has a slow and subdued respiration, but the fountains fill in the pauses. The veranda attracts me. Let’s dream a bit! Which dreams?
The eyes of the Virgins and the Saints persecute me. I still see those hollow eyes, low and narrow, with the eyelids lowered, from below which they watch with a fascinating gaze, as mild as that of a dove, slightly oblique like that of a snake. “Be simple as a dove and prudent as a serpent,”4 Jesus Christ said.
Be prudent. Pray, go to bed and sleep.
September 21. —Alas, it is necessary to begin the hard task again, to climb up the steep slope already climbed, reconquer the territory already conquered, once again fight the battle already won!
September 22. —He has given me one of his books of poetry, The Fable of Hermaphrodite, the twenty-first of the twenty-five sole exemplars, printed on parchment, with two frontispiece proof marks.
It is an extraordinary work, in which a mysterious and deep sense is enclosed, although the musical element prevails, drawing one’s spirit into an unprecedented magic of sounds and enveloping one’s thoughts, which shine like a golden and diamond dust in a clear river.
The choruses of the Centaurs, of the Sirens, and of the Sphinxes lend an indefinable uneasiness; awaken an unsatisfied restlessness and curiosity in the ear and the soul, produced by the continuous contrast of a twofold sentiment, a twofold aspiration, of human nature and of the bestial nature. But with what purity, and how visibly, the ideal form of the Androgyne delineates itself amid the troubled choruses of the monsters! No music has intoxicated me as this poem has, and no statue has given me a more harmonious impression of beauty. Certain verses haunt me without respite and will pursue me for a very long time, perhaps; they are so intense.
*
He conquers my intellect and my soul, more and more each day, more and more each hour, without respite, against my will, against my resistance. His words, his glances, his gestures, his slightest movements enter my heart.
September 23. —When we talk together, sometimes I feel that his voice is like the echo of my soul.
It happens at times that I feel myself being pushed by a sudden fascination, by a blind attraction, by an unreasonable violence, toward a phrase, toward a word that could reveal my weakness. I save myself by some miracle; and then an interval of silence falls, in which I am agitated by a terrible internal tremor. If I begin to talk again, I say something frivolous and insignificant, with a light tone; but it seems to me that a flame surges beneath the skin of my face, almost as if I am about to blush. If he chose that moment to look me resolutely in the eyes, I would be lost.
*
I have played much music, by Sebastian Bach and Robert Schumann. He was sitting, like that evening, on my right, slightly behind me, on the leather armchair. Every now and then, at the end of every piece, he stood up and, bending over my shoulder, paged through the book to indicate another fugue, another intermezzo, another improvviso to me. Then he would sit down again; and listen, without moving, deeply absorbed, his eyes fixed above me, letting me feel his presence.
Could he understand how much of myself, of my thoughts, of my sadness, of my intimate being, was passing through the music of others?
*
“Music,—Silver key of the fountain of tears / Where the spirit drinks till the brain is wild, Softest grave of a thousand fears / Where their mother Care, like a drowsy child / Is laid asleep on flowers . . .” SHELLEY.5
The night is menacing. A warm and humid wind blows in the garden; and the dark shudder protracts itself in the darkness, then falls, then begins again more strongly. The peaks of the cypresses oscillate in an almost-black sky, where the stars appear half doused. A strip of clouds stretches across the space, from one horizon to the other, ragged, contorted, blacker than the sky, similar to the tragic head of hair of a Medusa. The sea is invisible in the darkness; but it sobs, as if for an immense and inconsolable pain, alone.
Whatever is this consternation? It seems that the night is warning me of an imminent disaster and that the warning corresponds, deep down inside me, to an undefined remorse. Sebastian Bach’s prelude still pursues me; it mingles in my soul with the shuddering of the wind and the sobbing of the sea.
Wasn’t there some part of me crying, in those notes, earlier?
Someone was crying, moaning, oppressed by anguish; someone was crying, moaning, calling God, asking forgiveness, beseeching help, praying with a prayer that ascended to heaven like a flame. He was calling and being heard; was praying and his prayers were being answered; he was receiving light from above, emitting cries of joy, was finally grasping Truth and Peace, and was resting in the clemency of the Lord.
*
My daughter always comforts me; and she heals me from every fever, like a sublime balm.
She is sleeping in the shadow lit by the lamp, which is as mild as the moon. Her face, of the fresh whiteness of a white rose, is almost buried in the abundance of her dark hair. It seems that the fine texture of her eyelids barely manages to hide her luminous eyes within. I bend over her, I gaze at her again; and all the voices of the night die away, for me; and the silence is measured, for me, by nothing other than the rhythmic breathing of her life.
She feels the closeness of her mother. She lifts an arm and lets it fall again; she smiles with her mouth, which opens like a pearly flower; and for an instant, between her lashes there appears a splendor similar to the damp silvery splendor of the flesh of the asphodel. The longer I contemplate her, she becomes to my eyes an immaterial creature, a being formed from the element such as dreams are made on.6
Why, in giving an idea of her beauty and her spirituality, do images and words of William Shakespeare rise spontaneously to my memory? Of this powerful savage atrocious poet who has such mellifluous lips?
She will grow, nourished and enveloped by the flame of my love, of my great only love . . .
Oh, Desdemona, Ophelia, Cordelia, Juliet! Oh, Titania! Oh, Miranda!
September 24. —I cannot make any resolutions; I cannot define any purpose. I am abandoning myself little by little to this very new sentiment, closing my eyes to the distant danger, closing my ears to the wise warnings of my conscience, with the anxious rashness of one who, wanting to gather violets, ventures onto the edge of an abyss, at the bottom of which roars a voracious river.
He will know nothing from my mouth; I will know nothing from his. The Souls will ascend together, for a brief way, up the hills of the Ideal; they will drink a few sips from the perennial fountains; then each will take his own path, with greater confidence, and less thirst.
*
What tranquillity there is in the air, after midday! The sea has the milky bluish-white color of an opal, of Murano glass; and here and there it is like a crystal glass clouded by a puff of breath.
*
I am reading Percy Shelley, a poet he loves, the divine Ariel who feeds on light and speaks the language of the Spirits. It is nighttime. This allegory lifts itself before me, visibly.
“A door of somber diamond is flung open on the great path of life that we all traverse, an immense and corroded cavern. All around a perpetual war of shadows rages, similar to the restless clouds that crowd around the fissure of some steep mountain, losing themselves up high among the whirlwinds of the highest heavens. And many pass with a careless step before that door, not knowing that a shadow follows in the tracks of every traveler as far as the place where the dead await, in peace, their new companion. Others, however, stimulated by a more curious thought, stop to watch. There are very few of these; and very little do they understand, if not that shadows follow them wherever they go.”7
Behind me, so close that it almost touches me, is the Shadow. I feel it watching me; in the same way that yesterday, while playing, I felt his gaze on me without seeing him.
September 25. —My God, my God!
When he called me, with that voice, with that tremor, I believed that my heart had dissolved in my chest and that I was about to faint. “You will never know,” he said, “you will never know the extent to which my soul is yours.”
We were in the avenue of the fountains. I was listening to the waters. I saw nothing more; I heard nothing more; it seemed that everything was receding from me and that the ground was sinking in and that with it all, my life was dispersing. I made a superhuman effort; and Delfina’s name came to my lips, and I felt a mad impulse to run to her, to escape, to save myself. I shouted that name three times. In the pauses, my heart did not pulsate, my pulse did not beat, from my mouth no breath was exhaled . . .
September 26. —Is it true? Is it not a deception of my misguided spirit? But why does that time yesterday seem so far away, so unreal?
He spoke, again, for a long time, standing close to me while I walked beneath the trees, lost in reverie. Beneath what trees? It was as if I were walking along the secret paths of my soul, among flowers born of my soul, listening to the words of an invisible Spirit that once nourished itself on my soul.
I still hear the sweet and dreadful words.
He said: “I would renounce all the promises of life, just to live in a small part of your heart . . .”
He said: “Out of the world, entirely lost in your being, forever, until death . . .”
He said: “The mercy that came from you would be dearer to me than the passion of any other woman . . .”
“Your visible presence alone was enough to intoxicate me; and I felt it flow in my veins like blood, and invade my spirit, like a superhuman sentiment . . .”
September 27. —When, at the edge of the woods, he picked this flower and offered it to me, did I not call him Life of my life?
When we passed back along the avenue of the fountains, before that fountain where he had first spoken to me, did I not call him Life of my life?
When he took the garland from the herm and gave it back to my daughter, did he not lead me to understand that the Woman exalted in the verses had already fallen, and I alone, I alone was his hope? And did I not call him Life of my life?
September 28. —How long this meditation has been in coming!
So many times, since that hour, I have struggled, I have suffered, to return to my true conscience, to see things in their true light, to judge what has happened with firm and calm judgment, to resolve this, to decide, to recognize my duty. I fled from myself; my mind was bewildered; my will was retreating; every effort was futile. Almost by instinct, I avoided remaining alone with him; I always stayed close to Francesca and my daughter, or remained here in my room, as in a refuge. When my eyes met his, I seemed to read in his a deep and imploring sadness. Doesn’t he know how much, how much, how much I love him?
He doesn’t know; he will never know. This is how I wish it to be. This is how it must be. May I find strength!
My Lord, help me.
September 29. —Why did he speak? Why did he want to break the spell of silence where my soul was being lulled, almost without remorse and almost without fear? Why did he want to tear away the hazy veils of uncertainty and place me in the presence of his unveiled love? By now I can no longer delay, or delude myself, or concede myself any weakness, nor abandon myself to any languor. The danger is there, certain, open, manifest; and it attracts me with its dizzying height, like an abyss. One moment of languor, of weakness, and I am lost.
*
I ask myself: Is this a sincere pain? Is it sincere regret, for that unexpected revelation? Why do I always think about those words? And why, when I repeat them to myself, does an ineffable wave of voluptuousness pervade me? And why does a shiver run through my marrow, if I imagine that I could hear other words, more words still?
*
A verse by William Shakespeare, in As You Like It:
Who ever lov’d, that lov’d not at first sight?8
Nighttime. —The motions of my spirit assume the form of examinations, of enigmas. I question myself constantly and never answer. I have not had the courage to look right into the depths, to understand my state with precision, to make a resolution that is truly strong and loyal. I am pusillanimous; I am cowardly; I am afraid of pain; I want to suffer as little as possible; I still want to waver, to procrastinate, to dissimulate, to save myself with subterfuges, to hide, instead of confronting openly the decisive battle.
The fact is this: that I fear to remain alone with him, to have a serious discussion with him, and that my life here is reduced to a succession of small deceptions, small expedients, small pretexts to avoid his company. This artifice is unworthy of me. Either I want to renounce this love absolutely; and he will hear my sad but firm word. Or I want to accept him, in his purity; and he will have my spiritual consensus.
Now I ask myself: What do I want? Which of the two paths do I choose? Do I renounce? Do I accept?
My God, my God, you answer for me, you illuminate me!
To renounce it, by now, is to tear a living part of my heart out with my nails. The anguish will be supreme; the agony will surpass the limits of all endurance; but heroism, by the grace of God, will be crowned with resignation, will be rewarded by the divine sweetness that follows every strong moral elevation, every triumph of the soul over the fear of suffering.
I will renounce it. My daughter will retain the possession of my entire being, of my entire life. This is my duty.
Plow with sad cries, soul that is suffering,
in order to harvest with songs of gladness.
September 30. —Writing these pages, I feel slightly calmer: I am regaining, at least for now, a little equilibrium and I am considering my disaster with greater lucidity and it seems that my heart is becoming lighter, as after making confession.
Oh, if I could confess! If I could ask for advice and help from my old friend, my old consoler!
In this turbulence, the thought that I will see Don Luigi in a few days’ time sustains me more than any other thing, that I will speak to him and show him all my wounds, and I will reveal to him all my fears and I will ask him for a balm for all my ills, as I once did; as when his mild and deep words drew tears of tenderness from my eyes, which did not yet know the bitter salt of other tears, or the parching thirst, much more terrible, of aridity.
Will he still understand me? Will he understand the obscure anguish of the woman, in the same way that he understood the undefined and fleeting melancholy of the girl? Will I see him bend toward me, in a posture of mercy and sympathy, his lovely forehead crowned with white hair, illuminated with saintliness, pure as the host in the ciborium, blessed by the hand of the Lord?
*
I played music by Sebastian Bach and Cherubini on the chapel organ after Mass. I played the prelude from the other evening.
Someone was crying, moaning, oppressed by anguish; someone was crying, moaning, calling God, asking forgiveness, beseeching help, praying with a prayer that ascended to heaven like a flame. He was calling and being heard; was praying and his prayers were being answered; he was receiving light from above, emitting cries of joy, was finally grasping Truth and Peace, and was resting in the clemency of the Lord.
This organ is not large; the chapel is not large; and yet my soul swelled as if I were in a basilica; it rose up as if in an immense cupola; it touched the summit of the ideal church steeple where the sign of signs glitters, in the heavenly blue, in the sublime ether.
I think about the greatest organs in the greatest cathedrals, those in Hamburg, Strasbourg, Seville, in Weingarten Abbey, Subiaco Abbey, that of the Benedictines in Catania, at Monte Cassino,9 at Saint-Denis. What voice, what choir of voices, what multitude of cries and prayers, what songs, and what weeping of the people are equal to the terribleness and the sweetness of this marvelous Christian instrument that can combine within itself all the intonations perceptible to the human ear, and all those that are imperceptible, too?
I dream:—a solitary Dome, immersed in shadow, mysterious, unadorned, similar to the depth of a dull crater that receives a starry light from above; and a Soul intoxicated with love, as ardent as that of Saint Paul, as sweet as that of Saint John, as multiple as a thousand souls in one, needing to exhale his elation in a superhuman voice; and a vast organ like a forest of wood and metal that, like the one at Saint-Sulpice, has five keyboards, twenty pedals, one hundred and eight organ stops, more than seven thousand pipes, all the sounds.
Nighttime. —Futile! Futile! Nothing calms me; nothing gives me an hour, a minute, a second of oblivion; nothing will ever heal me; no dream of my mind will cancel out the dream of my heart. Futile!
My anguish is mortal. I feel that my ailment is incurable; my heart aches exactly as if someone had squeezed it, had pressed upon it, had damaged it forever; the moral pain is so intense that it changes into a physical pain, into atrocious agony, unbearable. I am infatuated, I know; I am prey to a kind of madness; and I cannot restrain myself, I cannot contain myself, I cannot regain my reason; I cannot, I cannot.
Is this, then, love?
He left this morning, on horseback, with a servant, without my seeing him. My morning was spent almost entirely in the chapel. He did not return for breakfast. His absence made me suffer so much that I was stunned by the acuteness of that suffering. I came here to my room; in order to lessen my pain, I wrote a page of my journal, a religious page, becoming excited at the memory of my morning faith; then I read a few passages of Percy Shelley’s Epipsychidion; then I went down to the park to look for my daughter. In all these actions, the intense thought of him gripped me, occupied me, tormented me without respite.
When I heard his voice again, I was on the first terrace. He was talking to Francesca in the vestibule. Francesca had leaned out, calling me from above: “Come up!”
Climbing the stairs again, I felt my knees give way. In greeting me, he held out his hand; and he must have noticed the tremor in mine, because I saw something pass across his expression, rapidly. We sat down on the long wicker chairs in the vestibule, facing the sea. He said he was very tired; and he began to smoke, talking about his horse ride. He had reached Vicomìle, where he had stopped for a rest.
“Vicomìle,” he said, “possesses three wonders: a pine forest, a tower, and an ostensorium10 dating back to the fifteenth century. Imagine a pine forest between the sea and the hill, full of ponds that multiply the woods to infinity; a bell tower in the pagan Lombard style, which certainly dates back to the eleventh century, a stone stalk laden with sirens, peacocks, serpents, Chimeras, hippogriffs, with a thousand monsters and a thousand flowers; and an ostensorium of gilded silver, enameled, engraved, and carved, in a Gothic-Byzantine style with a foretaste of the Renaissance, made by Gallucci, an almost-unknown craftsman, who is a great precursor of Benvenuto . . .”
He was addressing himself to me, while talking. It is strange how I remember all his words so exactly. I could write down his conversation in full, with the most insignificant and minute details; if there were the means, I could reproduce every modulation of his voice.
He showed us two or three small pencil drawings in his notebook. Then he continued to talk about the wonders of Vicomìle, with that ardor he has when talking about beautiful things, with that enthusiasm for art which is one of his greatest seductions.
“I promised the Canon that I would return on Sunday. We’ll go, won’t we, Francesca? Donna Maria simply must see Vicomìle.”
Oh, my name on his mouth! If there were a way, I could reproduce exactly the position, the opening of his lips in pronouncing each syllable of the two words: Donna Maria. But I could never express my sensation; I could never recount all the unknown, unexpected, unsuspected feelings that awaken in my being in the presence of that man.
We remained seated there until lunchtime. Francesca seemed slightly melancholic, unusually for her. At a certain point, a grave silence descended upon us. But between him and me one of those discussions of silence began, where the soul exhales the Unutterable and comprehends the murmur of thoughts. He said things to me that made me faint with sweetness upon my cushion: things that his mouth could never repeat to me and my ear could never hear.
In front of us the unmoving cypresses, as insubstantial to the eye as if they were immersed in a sublimating ether, lit by the sun, appeared to bear a flame at their tips, like twisted votive candles. The sea had the green shade of an aloe leaf, and here and there the palest blue of a liquefied turquoise: an indescribable delicacy of paleness, a diffusion of angel-like light, where every sail gave the impression of an angel swimming. And the harmony of scents rendered weaker by autumn was like the spirit and the sentiment of that afternoon spectacle.
O serene September death!
This month, too, is finished, lost, fallen into the abyss. Adieu.
An immense sadness oppresses me. How much of me this period of time is taking away with it! I have lived more in fifteen days than in fifteen years; and it seems that none of my long weeks of suffering equals in acuteness of agony this brief week of passion. My heart hurts; my mind has gone astray; a dark and burning thing is deep inside me, something that suddenly appeared like an infection and that is beginning to contaminate my blood and my soul, against my will, against every remedy: Desire.
I am ashamed and horrified by it, as by something dishonorable, a sacrilege, a violation; I am desperately and madly afraid of it, as of a deceitful enemy who knows ways to penetrate into the city that are unknown even to me.
And now and then I stay awake at night; and writing this page with the agitation with which lovers write their love letters, I do not hear the breath of my daughter who is sleeping. She sleeps in peace; she does not know how far away her mother’s soul is . . .
October 1. —My eyes see something in him that they did not see before. When he talks, I watch his mouth; and the position and color of his lips engage me more than the sound and meaning of his words.
October 2. —Today is Saturday; today is the eighth day since the unforgettable day—SEPTEMBER 25, 1886.
*
By some remarkable fate, although I now no longer avoid being alone with him, although on the contrary I want that terrible and heroic moment to come; by some remarkable fate, the moment has not come.
Francesca has always been with me today. This morning we went for a ride along the Rovigliano road. And we spent the afternoon almost entirely at the piano. She wanted me to play her some dance music of the sixteenth century, then the Sonata in F sharp minor and the famous toccata by Muzio Clementi, then two or three caprices by Domenico Scarlatti; and she wanted me to sing her some parts of Robert Schumann’s Frauenliebe. What contrasts!
Francesca is no longer cheerful, like she was once, like she was also in the first days of my stay here. She is often pensive; when she laughs, when she jokes, her gaiety seems artificial to me. I asked her: “Is there some thought that is bothering you?” She answered, appearing astonished: “Why?” I added: “You seem a bit sad.” And she: “Sad? Oh no; you’re mistaken.” And she laughed, but a laugh that was involuntarily bitter.
This thing afflicts me and gives me a vague sense of disquiet.
*
Tomorrow, then, we are going to Vicomìle, after midday. He asked me:—“Do you have the strength to go on horseback? If we are on horses we can cross the entire pine forest . . .”
Then he also said to me: “Reread, among Shelley’s lyrics to Jane, the Recollection.”
Therefore we will be going on horseback; Francesca will also ride with us. The others, including Delfina, will go by mail coach.
What a strange frame of mind I find myself in this evening! I have a kind of dull and acrid wrath at the base of my heart, and I don’t know why; I have a kind of intolerance of myself and of my life and of everything. The nervous agitation is so strong that now and then I am gripped by a mad impulse to shout, to sink my nails into my flesh, to break my fingers against the wall, to provoke whatever sort of material agony in order to extract myself from this unbearable internal malaise, this unbearable torment. I seem to have a knot of fire at the top of my chest, my throat blocked by a sob that does not want to come out, my head empty, now cold, now burning; and from time to time I feel myself invaded by a kind of sudden anxiety, by an absurd dismay that I can never repel nor repress. And at times, involuntary images and thoughts flicker through my mind, arising from heaven knows what depths of my being: base images and thoughts. And I feel languid and faint, like one who is immersed in a binding love; and yet it is not a pleasure, it is not a pleasure!
October 3. —How weak and wretched our soul is, without defense against the reawakening and the assaults of everything that is least noble and pure, dormant in our unconscious life, in the unexplored abyss where blind dreams are born of blind sensations!
A dream can poison a soul; one sole involuntary thought can corrupt the will.
*
We are going to Vicomìle. Delfina is in a state of joy. It is a religious day. Today is the name day of Mary, Virgin of the Rosary. Have courage, my soul!
October 4. —No courage.
The day yesterday was, for me, so full of little episodes and great emotions, so happy and so sad, so strangely troubled that I become bewildered remembering it. And already all the other memories fade away and vanish in the face of one single one.
After visiting the tower and admiring the ostensorium, we prepared to leave Vicomìle toward five thirty. Francesca was tired; and she preferred to return with the mail coach rather than remount the horse. We followed for a while, trotting at times behind, at times alongside it. From the coach, Delfina and Muriella shook long flowered canes toward us, and laughed, threatening us with the lovely violet plumes.
It was a very peaceful evening, windless. The sun was about to set behind the Rovigliano hill, in a sky all rosy like one in the Far East. Everywhere, roses roses roses drifted down, slowly, densely, delicately, like snowfall at dawn. When the sun disappeared, the roses multiplied, spreading out almost as far as the opposite horizon, vanishing, dissolving in an infinitely pale azure, in a silvery azure, indefinable, similar to the hue that curves over the peaks of ice-covered mountains.
It was he who said to me from time to time: “Look at the tower of Vicomìle. Look at the cupola of San Consalvo . . .”
When the pine forest was in view, he asked me: “Shall we cross it?”
The main road skirted the woods, describing a wide curve and approaching the sea, almost right on the shore, at the summit of the arch. The woods appeared to be already dark, a somber green, as if the shadows had gathered on the tops of the trees, leaving the air above it still clear; but within them, the ponds shone with an intense deep light, like fragments of a sky much purer than the one that stretched above our heads.
Without waiting for my answer, he said to Francesca:
“We’re going to ride through the pine forest. We’ll meet you on the road, at the Convito bridge, on the other side.”
And he held back his horse.
Why did I consent? Why did I enter the woods with him? In my eyes, I had a kind of dazzle; it seemed to me that I was under the influence of a confused fascination; it seemed that that countryside, that light, that event, all that combination of circumstance was not new to me, but had already existed once, almost, I could say, in a previous existence, which was now existing again . . . The impression is inexpressible. It seemed to me then that that hour, those moments, had already been lived through by me, were not happening outside of me, independently of me, but rather belonged to me, had a natural and indissoluble bond with my person, so that I could not withdraw myself to relive them in that given way, but that I necessarily had to relive them, rather. I had a very clear feeling of this necessity. The inertia of my will was absolute. It was like when an episode of life returns in a dream with something more than truth, and different from truth. I can’t even describe a minimum part of that extraordinary phenomenon.
And there was a secret correspondence, a mysterious affinity between my soul and the countryside. The image of the woods in the water of the ponds appeared in fact, to be the dreamed image of the real scene. As in Percy Shelley’s poem, each pond seemed to be a brief sky engulfed in a subterranean world; a firmament of rose-colored light, spread out above the dark earth, more infinite than the infinite night and purer than day; where the trees developed in the same way as in the air above but more perfect in form and shade than any of the others undulating there.11 And delicate views, such as have never been seen in our world above, were painted there by the love of the waters for the beautiful forest; and all their depth was penetrated by a faint heavenly light, by an unchanging atmosphere, by an evening that was gentler than the one above.12
From what remote time did that hour come to us? We rode along at walking pace, in silence. The occasional cries of magpies, the gait and the breathing of the horses did not disturb the tranquillity, which seemed to become greater and more magical as each minute passed.
Why did he have to shatter the magic we ourselves had created?
He spoke; he poured into my heart a wave of ardent, crazy, almost senseless words, which in that silence of the trees alarmed me, because there was something not human about them, something indefinably strange and fascinating. He was not humble and meek as in the park; he did not tell me about his timid and discouraged hopes, his almost mystical aspirations, his incurable sadness; he did not beseech; he did not implore. He had the voice of passion, audacious and strong; a voice that I did not recognize in him.
“You love me, you love me, you cannot not love me! Tell me that you love me!”
His horse was walking alongside mine, very close by. And I felt him brush against me; and I also thought I could feel his breath on my cheek, the ardor of his words; and I thought I would faint from the great agitation I felt, and that I would fall into his arms.
“Tell me that you love me!” he repeated, obstinately, without pity. “Tell me that you love me!”
Out of my mind, in the terrible exasperation his demanding voice caused me, I believe that I said, I don’t know whether with a cry or with a sob:
“I love you, I love you, I love you!”
And I urged my horse into a gallop along the road that was barely visible in the density of the tree trunks, not knowing what I was doing.
He followed me shouting:
“Maria, Maria, stop! You’re going to get hurt . . .”
I did not stop; I don’t know how my horse avoided the trees; I don’t know how I did not fall. I cannot describe the impression given to me during this ride by the dark forest interrupted here and there by the wide shining patches of the ponds. When finally I emerged from it onto the road, at the opposite side near the Convito bridge, it seemed that I was emerging from a hallucination.
He said to me with some severity:
“Did you want to kill yourself?”
We heard the sound of the coach approaching; and we moved toward it. He still wanted to talk to me.
“Be quiet, I pray you; please!” I implored, because I felt that I could take no more.
He fell silent. Then, with a confidence that amazed me, he said to Francesca:
“What a pity that you did not come! It was enchanting . . .”
And he continued to talk, frankly, simply, as if nothing had occurred; rather, with a certain gaiety. And I was grateful to him for his dissimulation, which seemed to save me, because certainly, if I had had to talk, I would have betrayed myself; and if we had both been silent it would have perhaps seemed suspicious to Francesca.
After a while, the ascent toward Schifanoja began. What immense melancholy in the evening! The first quarter of the moon shone in a delicate sky, slightly green, in which my eyes, or maybe my eyes only, still saw a faint appearance of rose, of the rosy hue that illuminated the ponds, down there in the forest.
October 5. —He now knows that I love him; he knows it from my own mouth. I have no escape other than flight. This is the point I have reached.
When he looks at me, there is deep in his eyes a singular glitter that was not there before. Today, in a moment when Francesca was not present, he took my hand and made as if to kiss it. I managed to withdraw it; and I saw his lips disturbed by a small tremor; I caught on his lips, for a second, almost the shape of a kiss not planted, an expression that has remained in my memory and that does not leave me, does not leave me!
October 6. —On September 25, on the marble seat, in the arbutus woods, he said to me: “I know that you do not love me and that you cannot love me.” And on October 3: “You love me, you love me, you cannot not love me.”
*
In Francesca’s presence, he asked me if I would permit him to do a study of my hands. I consented. He will begin today.
And I am apprehensive and anxious, as if I had to offer up my hands to an unknown torture.
Nighttime. —The slow, sweet, indefinable torture has begun.
He was drawing with black pencil and hematite pencil. My right hand was resting on a piece of velvet. On the table there was a Korean vase, yellowish and spotted like the skin of a python; and in the vase was a bunch of orchids, those grotesque multiform flowers that are Francesca’s sophisticated idiosyncrasy. Some green ones, of the almost animal green of certain locusts, hung down in the form of small Etruscan urns, with the lid slightly lifted. Others bore at the top of a silver stem a five-petaled flower with a small calyx at the center, yellow on the inside and white on the outside. Others bore a small purplish ampulla and, on the sides of the ampulla, two long filaments; and they brought to mind some minuscule king in fairy tales, greatly affected with goiter, and with a beard divided into two braids in the Oriental style. Still others bore a quantity of yellow flowers, similar to little angels in a long dress, hovering in flight with their arms raised high and their halo behind their head.
I looked at them, when it seemed I could no longer bear the torment; and their unusual shapes engaged me for an instant, evoked a fleeting memory of their countries of origin, induced in my spirit some momentary sense of bewilderment. He drew without talking; his eyes went constantly from the paper to my hands; then, two or three times, they turned toward the vase. At a certain point, standing up, he said:
“Forgive me.”
And he took up the vase and took it farther away, to another table; I don’t know why.
Then he began to draw with greater openness, as if liberated from an irritation.
I cannot say what his eyes made me feel. It seemed to me that I was not offering to his scrutiny my naked hand, but rather a naked part of my soul; and that he had penetrated it with his gaze right down to the very base of it, uncovering all its innermost secrets. I had never felt such a sentiment from my hand; it had never appeared to me so alive, so expressive, so intimately tied to my heart, so dependent on my internal existence, so revealing. An imperceptible but constant vibration caused it to quiver under the influence of his gaze; and the vibration spread right to the depths of my being. At times the tremor became stronger and more visible; and if he was looking at me with too much intensity, I was gripped by an instinctive impulse to withdraw it; and sometimes this impulse was one of modesty.
At times he gazed at me intently for a long time, without drawing; and I had the impression that he was drinking in some part of me with his pupils, or that he was caressing me with a caress softer than the velvet on which my hand was resting. Every now and then, while he was bent over the paper, perhaps instilling into the line whatever he had drunk from me, a faint smile drifted over his lips, but so light that I could barely glimpse it. And that smile, I don’t know why, gave me a tremor of pleasure in the upper part of my chest. Again, two or three times, I saw the shape of the kiss reappear on his mouth.
Now and then, curiosity overcame me; and I asked: “Well?”
Francesca was sitting at the piano, her back toward us; and was touching the keys, trying to remember Luigi Rameau’s gavotte, the Gavotte of the Yellow Ladies, which I played so often and which will remain the musical memory of my holiday at Schifanoja. She was muffling the notes with the pedal, and interrupting herself often. And those interruptions in the aria and in the cadences that were so familiar to me, which the ear would complete in advance, were another source of disquiet for me. Suddenly, she struck a key hard, repeatedly, as if incited by cranky impatience; and she got up and went to bend over the drawing.
I looked at her. And I understood.
This bitterness was the last thing I needed. God held aside this cruelest test for last. May His will be done.
October 7. —I have but one single thought, one single desire, one single purpose: to leave, to leave, to leave.
I am at the limit of my strength. I am swooning, I am dying from my love; and the unexpected revelation multiplies my mortal sadness. What does she think of me? What does she believe? Does she love him, then? And since when? And does he know? Or does he not even have the slightest suspicion? . . .
My God, my God! I am losing my reason, my strength is abandoning me; my sense of reality is slipping away from me. At times my suffering pauses, similar to the lull that occurs during hurricanes when the furies of the elements are balanced in a terrible immobility, just to break out again with even greater violence. I find myself in a kind of stupefaction, my head heavy, my limbs tired and worn out as if someone had been beating me; and while the pain gathers itself to launch a new assault on me, I cannot manage to gather my will.
What does she think of me? What does she think? What does she believe?
To be snubbed by her, my best friend, the one who is dearest to me, the one to whom my heart was always open! It is the greatest bitterness; it is the cruelest test reserved by God for one who has made sacrifice the law of her life.
I must talk to her before I leave. She must know everything from me, and I must know everything from her. This is my duty.
Nighttime. —Toward five o’clock she proposed that we go for a ride in the carriage along the Rovigliano road. We went alone, in an open carriage. I thought, trembling: I will talk to her now. But the internal tremor deprived me of all courage. Was she waiting for me to speak? I don’t know.
We remained silent for a long time, listening to the regular trot of the two horses, observing the trees and the hedges alongside the road. Now and then, with a brief phrase or a nod, she brought to my attention some detail of the autumnal countryside.
All of autumn’s human enchantment was being disseminated at that hour. The oblique rays of evening lit up against the hill the diffuse, harmonious richness of dying foliage. Due to the constant blowing of the northeast wind with the new moon, premature death throes grip the trees of the coastal lands. Gold, amber, crocus, sulfur yellow, ocher, orange, bistre, copper, sea green, maroon, purple, crimson, the dullest hues, the most violent and most delicate shades mingled in a profound harmony that will never be surpassed in sweetness by any spring melody.
Pointing out a cluster of black locust trees, she said: “Don’t they look as if they are full of flowers!”
Already withered, they appeared to be of a slightly rose-colored white, like great almond trees in March, against the turquoise sky, which was already inclining toward ash-gray.
After an interval of silence, I said, to begin with: “Manuel will come on Saturday, most likely. I’m awaiting his telegram, tomorrow. And we will depart on Sunday, with the morning train. You have been so good to me, these last days; I am so grateful to you . . .”
My voice was trembling slightly; an immense tenderness swelled my heart. She took my hand and kept it in hers, without speaking, without looking at me. And we remained for a long time in silence, holding hands.
She asked me: “How long will you stay at your mother’s?”
I answered: “Until the end of the year, I hope; and maybe longer.”
“So long?”
Again, we fell silent. I already felt that I would not have the courage to confront the explanation; and I also felt that it was less necessary now. It seemed that she was drawing closer to me now, that she understood me, acknowledged me, was becoming my good sister. My sadness attracted her sadness, the way the moon attracts the waters of the sea.
“Listen,” she said; because the sound of a chant, sung at the top of their voices by women of the village, was reaching us, a slow, extensive, religious song like a Gregorian chant.
Farther on we saw the singers. They were emerging from a field of desiccated sunflowers, walking in line, like a sacred procession. And the sunflowers at the top of the long, leafless sulfur-yellow stalks bore their wide disks neither crowned with petals nor laden with seeds, but resembling in their bareness liturgical emblems, pale golden ostensories.
My emotion grew. The chant behind us dispersed in the evening. We crossed Rovigliano, where the lights were already being lit; then we emerged again onto the main road. Behind us, the sound of the bells faded. A damp wind blew across the tops of the trees, which cast a bluish shadow on the white street, and an almost liquid shadow, as in water, in the air.
“Aren’t you cold?” she asked me; and ordered the lackey to unfold a plaid blanket and the coachman to turn the horses around for the return journey.
In the Rovigliano bell tower a bell still tolled, with slow tolls, as if for a religious rite; and it seemed to propagate, in the wind, a wave of frost along with the wave of sound. Of common accord we drew close to each other, pulling the blanket over our knees, infecting each other with the shiver of cold. And the carriage entered the village at a walking pace.
“Whatever is that bell tolling for?” she murmured, in a voice that no longer seemed hers.
I replied: “Unless I’m mistaken, the viaticum is coming out.”
Farther on, in fact, we saw the priest enter a doorway while a cleric held a raised umbrella and two others held lit lanterns aimed directly on the doorposts, on the threshold. In that house one single window was illuminated, the window of the Christian on his deathbed awaiting the holy oil. Slight shadows appeared in the glow; on that rectangle of yellow light, there could be seen, faintly traced, the entire silent drama enacted around whoever is about to enter into death.
One of the two servants asked in a low voice, bending down slightly from above: “Who is dying?” The person questioned gave the name of a woman, in his dialect.
And I would have liked to attenuate the noise of the wheels on the cobblestones, I would have liked to silence our passage through that place where the breath of a spirit was about to depart. Certainly, Francesca had the same sentiment.
The carriage reached the Schifanoja road, speeding up to a trot. The moon, encircled by auras, shone like an opal in diaphanous milk. A bank of clouds arose from the sea and slowly transformed into globe shapes, like fickle smoke. The choppy sea drowned all other sounds with its din. Never, I think, has a heavier sadness bound two souls.
I felt a sense of warmth on my cold cheeks, and I turned to Francesca to see whether she had realized that I was crying. I met her eyes full of tears. And we remained mute, alongside each other, our mouths pressed shut, squeezing our hands together, knowing that we were crying for him; and the tears descended drop by drop, silently.
Near Schifanoja I dried mine and she hers. Each of us hid our own weakness.
He was waiting for us with Delfina, Muriella, and Ferdinando in the atrium. Why did I feel toward him, deep in my heart, an indistinct sense of diffidence, as if instinct were warning me of an obscure damage? What suffering did the future hold for me? Will I be able to escape the passion that attracts me, blinding me?
Yet those few tears have done me so much good! I feel less oppressed, less parched, more trustful. And I feel an inexpressible tenderness repeating the last excursion to myself, while Delfina sleeps, content with all the crazy kisses I placed on her face, and while the melancholy of the moon, which earlier saw me cry, smiles on the windowpanes.
October 8. —Did I sleep last night? Did I remain awake? I cannot say.
Obscurely, terrible thoughts and images of unbearable suffering flashed through my brain like thick shadows; and my heart was subject to sudden jolts and palpitations, and I would find myself with my eyes open in the darkness, not knowing whether I had come out of a dream, or whether until then I had been awake, thinking and imagining. And this sort of ambiguous drowsiness, much more tormenting than insomnia, continued, continued, continued.
Nonetheless, when I heard the voice of my daughter calling me in the morning, I did not answer; I pretended to be sleeping deeply, to avoid getting up, to remain there still, to procrastinate, to postpone for a while the inexorable certainty of necessary realities. The tortures of my thoughts and my imagination seemed less cruel than the unforeseen tortures my life is preparing for me in these last two days.
After a short while, Delfina came in on tiptoe, holding her breath, to look at me; and she said to Dorothy, her voice agitated by a slight tremor: “She’s sleeping so deeply! Let’s not wake her.”
Nighttime. —I seem not to have a drop of blood left in my veins. While ascending the stairs it felt that with every effort I made to climb one step, my blood and my life escaped through all my open-ended veins. I am weak like a dying woman . . .
Courage, courage! There are still a few hours left; Manuel will arrive tomorrow; we will leave on Sunday; by Monday we will be at my mother’s.
Earlier, I gave him back two or three books that he had lent me. In the book by Percy Shelley, at the end of a stanza, I underlined two lines with my nail and made a visible sign on the page. The lines said:
And forget me, for I can never
Be thine!13
October 9, nighttime. —The entire day, the entire day he sought a moment to talk to me. His suffering was manifest. And the entire day I tried to escape from him, so that he could not cast into my soul other seeds of suffering, of desire, of regret, of remorse. I won; I was strong and heroic. I thank you, my Lord.
This is the last night. We are leaving tomorrow morning. Everything will be over.
Will everything be over? Deep down, a voice speaks to me; and I don’t understand it, but I know that it speaks to me of distant disasters, unknown yet inevitable, mysterious yet detestable as death. The future is dismal, like a field full of graves already dug and ready to receive cadavers; and on the field, here and there, pale lamps glow, which I can barely distinguish; and I don’t know whether they are burning to attract me toward danger or to signal a path of salvation for me.
I read my journal again, attentively, slowly, from September 15, the day I arrived. What a difference between that first night and this last one!
I wrote: “I will awaken in a kindly home, to Francesca’s cordial hospitality, in this Schifanoja, which has such beautiful roses and tall cypresses; and I will wake up with a few weeks of peace before me, twenty days of spiritual existence, maybe more.” Alas, where has the peace gone? And the roses, so beautiful, why were they also so treacherous? Perhaps I have opened my heart too much to fragrances, starting with that night, on the veranda, while Delfina was sleeping. Now the October moon is flooding the sky; and I see the tips of the cypresses through the windowpanes, black and unchanging, which were touching the stars that night.
I can repeat one single phrase from that prelude in this wretched ending. “So much hair on my head, so many wheat spikes of pain in my destiny.” The spikes multiply, rise up, undulate like a sea; and the iron to form the scythe has not yet been extracted from the mines.
I am leaving. What will become of him, when I am far away? What will become of Francesca?
Francesca’s change is still incomprehensible, inexplicable; it is an enigma that tortures and confuses me. She loves him! And since when? And does he know?
My soul, confess the new misery. A new infection is poisoning you. You are jealous.
But I am ready for ever more atrocious suffering; I know the agony that awaits me; I know that the torments of these days are nothing compared to the torments to come, to the terrible cross to which my thoughts will bind my soul in order to devour it. I am ready. I ask only for a respite, O Lord, a brief respite for the remaining hours. I will need all my strength tomorrow.
How strangely, sometimes, in the different events of life, external circumstances resemble each other, correspond to each other! This evening, in the vestibule hall, it seemed as if I had returned to the evening of September 16, when I sang and played; when he began to invade me. Tonight, too, I was sitting at the piano, and the same dim light illuminated the hall and in the adjacent room Manuel and the marquis were playing cards; and I played the Gavotte of the Yellow Ladies, the one that Francesca likes so much, the one that on September 16 I heard being repeated while I was awake during the first indeterminate nocturnal restlessness.
Certain fair-haired ladies, no longer young but just out of their youth, dressed in a dull silk the color of a yellow chrysanthemum, dance it with adolescent dancing partners, dressed in rose, somewhat listless; they carry in their hearts the image of other, more beautiful women, the flame of a new desire. And they dance it in a hall that is too large, which has all the walls covered in mirrors; they dance it upon a floor inlaid with amaranthus and cedar, beneath a great crystal chandelier in which the candles are about to burn out, but never do. And on their slightly faded mouths the women have a faint but never-dimming smile; and the gentlemen have an infinite boredom in their eyes. And a pendulum clock is always sounding the same hour; and the mirrors always repeat repeat repeat the same poses; and the gavotte continues continues continues, always sweet, always slow, always the same, eternally, like a prison sentence.
That sadness entices me.
I don’t know why, but my soul inclines toward that form of torment; it is seduced by the perpetuity of a single suffering, by uniformity, by monotony. It would willingly accept for its entire life a tremendous weight, but a defined and unchanging one, rather than changeability, than unforeseeable events, than unforeseeable alternatives. Even though it is accustomed to suffering, it is afraid of the uncertain, it fears surprises; it fears sudden jolts. Without hesitating for an instant, tonight it would accept any heavier sentence of suffering, as long as it were protected against unknown ambushes in the future.
My God, my God, where does such a blind fear come from? Please will You protect me! I am placing my soul in Your hands!
And now, enough of this wretched raving, which unfortunately increases the anguish rather than relieving it. But I already know that I will not be able to close my eyes, even though they hurt.
He, surely, is not sleeping. When I came upstairs, he, having been invited to do so, was about to take the marquis’s place at the card table, opposite my husband. Are they still playing? Perhaps he is thinking and suffering, while playing. What might his thoughts be? What might be his suffering?
I am not sleepy, I am not sleepy. I am going onto the veranda. I want to know if they are playing still; or whether he has returned to his rooms. His windows are at the corner, on the second floor.
*
The night is bright and damp. The gaming hall is illuminated; and I remained there on the veranda for a long time, looking down toward the light, which was reflected against a cypress, mingling with the light of the moon. I am trembling all over. I cannot describe the almost tragic impression exerted on me by those illuminated windows, behind which the two men are playing, one opposite the other, in the great silence of the night barely interrupted by the muffled sobs of the sea. And they will, perhaps, play until dawn, if he wishes to gratify my husband’s terrible passion. Three of us will remain awake until dawn, without rest, out of passion.
But what does he think? What is his torment? I don’t know what I would give, at this moment, to be able to see him, to be able to remain gazing at him until dawn, even through the window, in the dampness of the night, trembling as I now tremble.
The craziest thoughts flash inside me and dazzle me, rapid, confused; I feel something akin to the beginning of an unpleasant drunkenness; I feel something akin to a dull incitement to do something audacious and irreparable; I feel something like the fascination of perdition.
I would remove, I feel, this enormous weight from my heart, I would remove this suffocating knot from my throat, if now, in the night, in the silence, with all the strength of my spirit I began to shout that I love him, I love him, I love him.