Pleasure Page 23

  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.
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  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 in
curable 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.