Pleasure Page 22

  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 mo
re 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.