Her Husband (25 page)

Now he was through. He had seen her and lost all hope. What was left for him to do? Return to his son and his mother, that was it… that was it forever!

He took off for the station to get a tram to Giaveno and arrived just in time for the last one.

After reaching Giaveno around midnight, he started off for Cargiore. All was silent under the moon on the sweet cool May night. More than surprise at the amazing and nearly stunning solitude in the soft moonlight, he felt almost brokenhearted over the mysterious, fascinating beauty of the night, all dappled with shadows from the moon and resonant with silvery trills. At intervals murmurs of unseen water and leafy branches made the heartache more intense. It seemed like that murmuring didn’t want to be heard, nor did it want to hear his footsteps, and so he walked more softly. Suddenly from behind a gate a ferociously barking dog made him jump and tremble and grow cold with fright. Other dogs began to bark from near and far, protesting his passing at that hour. When he stopped trembling, he noticed how extremely tired his legs felt. He thought about how he came to be so tired. He thought about the interminable road he had ahead of him, and suddenly the beauty of the night dimmed for him, its fascination vanished, and he sank into the somber darkness of his pain. He walked on for more than an hour without wanting to stop a moment to catch his breath. Finally, he couldn’t take anymore and sat on the edge of the road: he just collapsed, without the strength to hold up his head. Gradually the deep roar of the Sangone down in the valley became more distinct, then the rustle of the new chestnut leaves and the thick coolness of the wooded valley, and finally the laugh of a little brook down there. And he felt the burning in his mouth again. He moaned
in pity for himself, for his grim and harshly treated soul, and tired and desperate, he felt a scorching need for comfort. He stood up again to go quickly to the only one who could give it to him. But he had to walk another half hour before seeing the octagonal cusp of the church, pointing like a threatening finger toward the sky. When he got there and looked in the direction of his house, he was surprised to see lights in three windows. He had expected one, but why so many?

In the dark, sitting on the steps in front of the door, he found Prever weeping.

“Mamma?” Giustino shouted.

Prever stood up, and with head down he held out his arms:

“Rino . . . Rino . . .” he groaned between sobs in his long beard.

“Rino? But how? What’s wrong?” Shaking himself angrily from the old man’s arms, Giustino ran to his son’s room, still shouting, “What’s wrong? What’s wrong?”

The little boy was being bathed in cold water, and his grandmother held him on her knees, wrapped in a sheet. Dr. Lais was there. Graziella and the nurse were crying. The little boy wasn’t crying; he was shaking all over, with his curly little head soaked with water, his eyes closed, his little face red, almost purple, swollen.

His mother barely looked up, and Giustino felt pierced by her glance.

“What’s wrong? What’s wrong?” he asked the doctor in a trembling voice. “What happened? So . . . suddenly.”

“Well, for two days,” the doctor said.

“Two days?”

His mother turned to stare at him.

“I didn’t know … I didn’t know anything,” Giustino stammered to the doctor, as if to excuse himself. “But how? What’s wrong, Doctor? Tell me! What happened? What happened?”

Doctor Lais took him by an arm and motioned with his head, taking him into the next room.

“You came from Turin, didn’t you? You were at the theater?”

“Yes,” whispered Giustino, looking at him, dazed.

“Well, then,” Dr. Lais continued hesitantly. “If his mother could come . . .”

“What?”

“I think that … it would be a good thing, perhaps, to advise her to . . .”

“Then,” shouted Giustino, “then Rino . . . my little boy . . .”

Three sobs answered him from the next room, and a fourth behind him from Prever, who had come back up. Giustino turned, threw himself into the old man’s arms, and broke into tears himself.

Dr. Lais returned to the room of the boy, who had been put back into bed. Although sunk into lethargy, he jerked convulsively. He was burning again. Breaking free from Prever, Giustino went back into the room.

“I want to know what’s wrong with him! I want to know what’s wrong with him!” he shouted at the doctor, seized by uncontrollable anger.

Dr. Lais was irritated with him and shouted back: “What’s wrong with him? He has tertian fever!”

His tone and scowl said: “You go to the theater and have the gall to ask me in this way what’s wrong with your son!”

“But how? In three days!”

“Certainly in three days! Why the surprise? That’s what tertian fever means! Everything has been done. . . . I’ve tried . . .”

“My Rino . . . My Rino . . . Oh, God, Doctor .. . My little Rirì!”

Giustino threw himself down on his knees next to the bed to touch the boy’s burning hand with his forehead, and sobbing, he thought he had never given all his heart to that little being who was going away, who had lived for nearly two years away from his love, away from his mother’s, poor boy, and who had found refuge only in his grandmother’s love…. And only that evening he had thought of giving him to his mother! But she didn’t deserve him, either, just as he didn’t! And so the little boy was going away. . . . Neither of them deserved him.

Dr. Lais had him get up and with gentle insistence took him into the next room again.

“I’ll be back as soon as it’s daylight,” he told him. “If you want to send a telegram to his mother … It seems the right thing to do. … I can, if you wish, take care of it before coming back. Here, write on this.”

He took a piece of paper from his notebook, and a pen. He wrote: “Come at once. Your son is dying. Giustino.”

The little room was full of flowers; the bed on which the little corpse lay under a blue veil was full of flowers. Four candles sputtered at each corner, as if the flames were laboring to breathe in that air too heavily laden with sweet perfumes. Even the little dead child seemed oppressed by them: ashen, eyes hardened under livid eyelids.

All those collective flowers no longer gave off a single odor: they polluted the closed air of that little room; they dazed and nauseated. And the child under the blue veil, abandoned to that nauseating smell, sunk into it, prisoner of it, could be looked at only from a distance, in the light of those four candles whose yellow heat made the stagnating stench of all those odors almost visible and impenetrable.

Only Graziella, her eyes red with weeping, was staying by the door to watch the little body when, toward eleven, like a sudden wind on the stairs, among moans, the rustling of clothes, and renewed sobbing down on the ground floor, Silvia, supported by Dr. Lais, started to rush into the little room. Suddenly she stopped just outside the door, lifting her hands as if to protect herself from the sight, and opening her mouth for one cry after another that would not erupt from her throat. Dr. Lais felt her faint in his arms; he shouted: “Get a chair!”

Graziella pulled one over, and they both helped her sit down, and suddenly Dr. Lais ran to the window, exclaiming: “But how can you stand this? You can’t breathe in here! Air! Air!”

And he quickly returned to Silvia, who now sat with her hands over her face, her head bowed as though under a sentence. Besides the weight of sorrow, she carried the weight of remorse and shame, and was weeping, shaken with violent sobs. She wept like this for a while. Then she raised her head, propping it with her fingers splayed over her
eyes, and looked at the little bed. She got up and went to it, saying to the doctor who wanted to stop her: “No … no … let me … let me see him.”

First she looked at him through the veil, then without the veil, stifling her sobs, holding her breath to feel deeply within herself the death of her son, whom she no longer recognized. As though unable to bear the lifelessness she had taken into herself, she bent to kiss the forehead of the poor little body and moaned: “Oh, how cold you are … how cold you are.”

And she wept inwardly: “Because my love couldn’t keep you warm. . . .”

“Cold … cold…” And she lightly caressed his head, his blond curls.

Dr. Lais persuaded her to leave the bedside. She looked at Graziella, who was crying, but she noticed behind her tears for the boy a hostile look for her. She didn’t feel indignant, but instead loved that old woman’s hate, which was an act of love for her child. And she turned to the doctor.

“What happened? What happened?”

Dr. Lais led her to the next room, to the same room where she had slept during the months of her stay there. The tears that had come to her eyes and that had been restrained and nearly dissolved by the emotional tumult of what she saw, now flowed freely and spontaneously. Here she felt her heart lacerated by live memories of that little creature, here she felt herself really a mother, with the heart of that earlier time, when every morning the nurse brought to her bed the little naked pink being fresh from his bath, and she, holding him to her breast, thought that soon she would have to leave him. . . .

In the meantime, Dr. Lais told her about his sudden illness, what he had done to save him, and he told her that even for the father that misfortune had been an unexpected agony, because the evening before he had been at the theater to see her play, without knowing that the boy was so seriously ill.

Silvia looked up with a shudder at this news: “Last night? At the theater? But how could he not know?”

“Signora,” Dr. Lais replied, “when he heard that you would be in Turin …” And he made a gesture with his hand that meant: he seemed to have gone out of his mind.

“His mother didn’t tell him anything, seeing him like that,” he added. “She didn’t think it was really so serious. It’s sad, believe me, sad! As soon as he arrived last night, around two, on foot from Giaveno, he found his boy dying. It was I who suggested notifying you by telegram. In fact, I took it myself, when the boy already, unfortunately … He died around six. . . . Listen! Do you hear him?”

Suddenly on the stairs Giustino’s sobs were heard among the confused shuffling and shouts of the others who perhaps were trying to hold him back.

Silvia jumped to her feet in distress and drew back in a corner as if trying to hide.

Assisted by Don Buti, Prever, and his mother, Giustino appeared in the doorway as though on the verge of collapse, his clothes and hair in disarray, his face bathed in tears. He looked fiercely at Dr. Lais and said: “Where is she?”

As soon as he saw her, his body gave a start, his legs and chin began to tremble, until tears, gradually distorting his features, gurgled in his convulsed throat, but as Prever and Don Buti tried to drag him out, he broke away furiously:

“No, here!” he shouted.

He stood there like that for an instant, unrestrained, perplexed. Then, gasping, he threw himself on Silvia and embraced her wildly.

Silvia didn’t move, but stiffened to withstand that desperate impulse. She closed her eyes in pity, then opened them again to reassure his mother she need have no fear. She let herself be embraced out of pity and she knew how to control that pity.

“Did you see? Did you see?” Giustino sobbed on her breast, grasping her harder. “He’s gone…. Rirì’s gone because we weren’t here…. You weren’t here . . . and I wasn’t even here anymore . . . and so the little one said: ‘What am I doing here?’ and he went away. If he could see you here now . . . Come! Come! If he could see you here . . .”

He pulled her by the hand to the boy’s room, as if the joy of her coming could perform the miracle of bringing the boy back to life.

“Rirì!.. . Oh, Rirì… oh, my Rirì. ..” He fell on his knees again at the bedside, burying his face in the flowers.

Silvia felt faint. Dr. Lais ran to support her, taking her to the next room. Giustino was also pulled away from the bedside by Don Buti and Prever and led downstairs.

“Silvia! Silvia!” he kept calling, overpowered by those two, and without the strength to rebel now that he had seen his dead son again.

At the sound of her name fading in the distance, Silvia felt as though called from the depths of the life spent there a year ago: an obscure premonition of this tragedy had existed in the happiness of that time, and that premonition now called to her in the distant cry:
Silvia! . . . Silvia!
. . . Oh, if she had been able to hear her name called out like that, she would have found the strength to resist every temptation. She would have stayed here with her little one, in this peaceful nest in the mountains, and her little one wouldn’t be dead, and none of the horrible things that happened would have happened. The most horrible thing of all… Oh, that! Among the flashes of smothering images, she still felt her flesh burn with shame for the single embrace, attempted almost coldly, out of a terrible, inevitable necessity there in Ostia, and left desperately incomplete. She would feel sullied by it forever, more than if she had sinned thousands of times with all those young men rumored to have been her lovers. The cloying memory of that single inconclusive embrace had aroused an invincible nausea, a loathing, in which every desire for love would be forever drowned. She was sure that Giustino, if that were her wish, could be torn from his mother’s arms and from every shred of self-respect to return to her. But no, she didn’t want that, and she shouldn’t for both their sakes! Now the last bond between them had been broken by the death. And he was struggling down there in vain against the arms trying to hold him. Dr. Lais had been called to help. In there her dead son lay among the flowers. People were coming up to see him: women from the town, old people, children, and they all brought more flowers, more flowers. .. .

A short time later Dr. Lais, hot and panting, came back to her with a sheet of paper in his hand, the draft of a telegram that her husband down below, shouting and struggling, had thought necessary to write. He wanted Dr. Lais to send it as soon as he showed it to her.

“A telegram?” Silvia asked, surprised.

“Yes. Here it is.” Dr. Lais handed it to her.

It was a telegram to the Fresi Company. Several words were made almost illegible by the tears that had fallen on it. It announced the death of the boy, asking that the play performances be suspended, after announcing to the public the author’s grave loss. It was signed
Boggiolo
.

Silvia read it and remained, under the eyes of the waiting doctor, absorbed, confused, and bewildered. “Does it have to be sent?”

She knew it! After the embrace, he felt he had already become her husband again.

“No, not like that,” she said to the doctor. “Remove the announcement to the public, and if you don’t mind the bother, go ahead and send it, but under my name, please.”

Dr. Lais bowed. “I understand perfectly,” he said. “Don’t worry, it will be done.” And he went out.

But after about half an hour, Giustino came up again with a foolish expression on his face, along with a journalist, the same young journalist who came from Turin a year ago looking for the writer of
The New Colony
.

“Here she is! Her she is!” he said, bringing him in the room, and turning to Silvia: “You know him, don’t you?”

Embarrassed by Boggiolo’s unseemly, almost jocular anxiety intruding on that tragic moment (although the poor man’s face was burned by tears), the young man bowed and shook Silvia’s hand, saying: “I am sorry, Signora, to find you here in such different circumstances from our first meeting. I learned at the theater that you had rushed here. I didn’t think that already . ..”

Giustino interrupted him, taking him by the arm: “While the play was being performed last night in Turin,” he began telling him, with a great tremor in his voice and hands, yet with his eyes fixed on his, as if
he were lecturing him, “the boy was dying here, and we didn’t know it, neither she nor I, you see? And she,” he continued, pointing to Silvia, “do you know why she came here the first time? Because our baby was born! And do you know when our baby was born? The same evening as
The New Colony’s
success the very same evening, which is why we named him Vittorio, Vittorino…. Now she has returned for his death! And when did this death happen? Just while her new play was being performed in Turin! Just think about it! What destiny … He is born and dies like that. … Come here, come here, I’ll show him to you….”

So taken up was he by the excitement of his endeavors, it was almost frightening. The young man looked at him, appalled.

“Here he is! Here he is! Our little angel! See how beautiful he is among all those flowers? These are the tragedies of life, my dear sir, the tragedies that grip us. . . . There’s no need to go looking for tragedies on faraway islands, among savage people! I am telling you this for your readers, you know? The public doesn’t want to know some things. . . . You journalists must explain to them that if today a writer can get a tragedy out of… of her head, a savage tragedy, that everyone likes immediately for its novelty, tomorrow she herself, the writer, can be seized by one of these tragedies of life, that crushes a poor little boy and the hearts of a father and mother, understand? This, this is what you should explain to the public, those people who feel nothing when faced with the tragedy of a father who has a daughter living apart from him, of a wife who knows she cannot have her husband back except by taking in his child, and she goes there, she goes to her husband’s lover to get the child! These are tragedies … the tragedies … the tragedies of life, my dear sir. This poor woman here, believe me, can do nothing … she doesn’t… she doesn’t know how to get the most out of her work. … I, I want, I who know these things so well. . . but right now my head hurts … it hurts so much. Too much emotion . . . too much, too much . . . and I need to sleep. It’s the weariness, you know? that makes me talk like this. I need to sleep. … I can’t take any more. . . . I can’t take any more.”

He went out, his head in his hands, repeating: “I can’t take any more . . . can’t take any more. . . .”

“The poor man!” sighed the journalist, going into the other room with Silvia. “What a state he’s in!”

“For heaven’s sake,” Silvia quickly begged, “don’t say anything, don’t refer to any of this in the paper. .. .”

“My dear signora! What are you thinking?” he interrupted, fending off the idea with his hands.

“It’s a double torment for me!” Silvia continued, almost suffocated. “It’s like being struck by lightning! And now . . . this other torment.”

“It really makes you pity him!”

“Yes, and just because of the pity I feel, I want to go away, I want to leave.”

“If you want, Signora, I have here with me . . .”

“No, no: tomorrow, tomorrow. As long my little boy is here, I’ll stay here. My uncle is buried here also. And the thought of my dear old uncle being in a stranger’s tomb makes me feel so sad. The dead, I understand, are neither friends nor enemies to each other. But I think of him among the dead who aren’t friends. Now he’ll have his little nephew with him and won’t be alone anymore. I’ll give him my little one tomorrow, and when everything is done I’ll leave.”

“Do you want me to come tomorrow to take you back? I would be very happy to do it.”

“Thank you,” Silvia replied, “but I still don’t know when.”

“I’ll find out, don’t worry. Until tomorrow!”

The young journalist left, very pleased. Silvia closed her eyes, with her lips in an expression more of bitterness than disdain, and shook her head. A little later, without looking at her, Graziella brought her something to drink. But she didn’t want to put it to her lips. Later she had the torment of a visitor: the doctor’s wife, more than ever overflowing with affectations. But fortunately, in her weariness and dazed condition, while the woman foolishly tried to comfort her, she found a new well of tears and turned her eyes to a corner of the room.

On the dresser, as if conversing with one another, were Rirì’s toys: a papier-mâché horse attached to a four-wheeled cart, a tin horn, a boat, a little clown with a tambourine. The little horse, with a threadbare tail, a crushed ear, and a missing wheel on the cart was the saddest of all.
The little sailboat with its prow turned toward the horse seemed far, far away, a large boat in a dream sea far, far away, and it was sailing along in that dream sea with Rirì’s little soul amazed and lost… . But of course not! The little clown, smiling, told her it wasn’ true, that the top of the dresser wasn’t the sea at all, and that Rirì’s little soul could sail no more on it.