Pleasure (23 page)

She continued to walk slowly, beneath the brilliant trees that spread their dangling bunches, their delicate white and rose-colored clusters above her head.

—Believe me, Maria, believe me. If they told me now to abandon all vanity and all pride, every desire and every ambition, any dearest memory of the past, the sweetest future enticement, and to live uniquely in you and for you, without any tomorrow, without any yesterday, without any other bond, without any other preference, out of the world, entirely lost in your being, forever, until death, I would not hesitate, I would not hesitate. Believe me. You have looked at me, spoken with me, and smiled and answered; you have sat beside me, and you have been silent and thought; and you have lived, alongside me, your internal existence, that invisible and inaccessible existence that I do not know, that I will never know; and your soul has possessed mine right down to the depths, without changing, without even knowing it, like the sea drinks a river . . . What does my love do for you? What does love do for you? It is a word that has been profaned too many times, a sentiment that has been falsified too many times. I do not offer you love. But will you not accept the humble tribute of religion that the spirit addresses to a nobler and higher being?

She continued to walk slowly, her head bent, extremely pale, bloodless, toward a seat that was placed at the edge of the wood facing the shore. As soon as she reached it, she sat down with a kind of abandon, in silence; and Andrea sat down near her, still talking to her.

The seat was a large semicircle of white marble, edged along its length with a smooth, shining backrest, with no other ornament but for a lion's paw carved at each end serving as an armrest; and it recalled those ancient ones upon which, in the Archipelago islands and in Magna Graecia and in Pompeii, women lazed and listened to poets reading in the shade of oleanders, overlooking the sea. Here the arbutus bushes cast shade more with flowers and fruit than with leaves; and the coral stems, contrasting with the marble, appeared more vivid.

—I love all those things that you love; you possess all those things that I seek. The mercy that came from you would be dearer to me than the passion of any other woman. Your hand on my heart would, I feel, cause a second youth to germinate, much purer than the first, much stronger. That eternal oscillation which is my interior life, would find repose in you; it would find calmness and security in you. My restless and discontented spirit, tormented by attractions and revulsions and by pleasure and disgust in constant conflict, eternally, irremediably alone, would find in yours a refuge from the doubt that contaminates all ideality and defeats all will and diminishes all strength. Others are unhappier; but I don't know if there has been a man less happy than I, in the world.

He was making Obermann's words
⁷
his own. In that kind of sentimental elation, all gloomy thoughts rose to his lips; and the very sound of his voice, humble and slightly trembling, increased his emotion.

—I dare not express my thoughts. Being near you over these few days since I met you, I have had moments of such complete oblivion that it almost seemed to me to have returned to the earliest days of my convalescence, when I was experiencing the deep sentiment of another life. The past, the future, were no more; rather it was as if the one had never been and the other would never be. The world was like a shapeless and obscure illusion. Something like a vague but great dream was rising up in my soul: a fluttering veil, sometimes opaque, sometimes diaphanous, through which now and again the intangible treasure of happiness shone. What did you know about me, in those moments? Perhaps you were far away, in your soul; very, very far! But still, 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.

She was silent, with her head erect, immobile, her torso upright, her hands placed on her knees in the position of one who is keeping herself awake with a fierce effort of courage against a sense of languor that invades her. But her mouth, the expression of her mouth, with lips fruitlessly and fiercely pressed together, betrayed a sort of painful voluptuousness.

—I dare not express my thoughts. Maria, Maria, do you forgive me? Do you forgive me?

Two small hands, from behind the seat, stretched out to blindfold her and a voice palpitating with joy shouted:

—Guess who! Guess who!

She smiled, leaning against the backrest because Delfina was pulling her, holding her fingers on her eyelids, and Andrea saw lucidly, with a strange clarity, that light smile dispersing on that mouth all the obscure contrast of her earlier expression, deleting every trace that could signal to him the indication of consent or confession, routing every dubious shadow that could convert itself into a glimmer of hope in his heart. And he was left like a man who has been deceived by a cup that he thought was almost brimming, which offers nothing but air to his thirst.

—Guess who!

The daughter was covering the mother's head with hard and rapid kisses, in a kind of frenzy, perhaps hurting her slightly.

—I know who you are, I know who you are, the blindfolded woman said. —Let me go!

—What will you give me, if I let you go?

—Whatever you want.

—I want a mule to carry my berries home! Come and see how many I've got!

She went around the seat and took her mother by the hand. She stood up with some difficulty; and once on her feet, she blinked several times as if to clear a dazzle from her vision. Andrea also stood up. They both followed Delfina.

The terrible creature had stripped almost half the thicket of its fruit. The lower plants no longer displayed even one berry on their branches. She had used a cane found heaven knows where, and had collected a prodigious quantity, lastly gathering all the berries into a single heap that resembled a pile of burning coals for the intensity of their hue on the brown earth. But the bunches of flowers had not attracted her: they hung, white, pink, faintly yellow, almost diaphanous, more delicate than the clusters of an acacia, gentler than lily of the valley, immersed in the indistinct light as in the transparence of an amber milk.

—Oh, Delfina, Delfina, exclaimed Donna Maria, looking at that devastation. —What have you done?

The little girl was laughing, happy, in front of her vermilion pyramid.

—You are really going to have to leave everything here.

—No, no . . .

She did not want to, at first. Then she changed her mind; and said almost to herself, with shining eyes:

—The deer will come and eat it.

She had perhaps seen the lovely animal roaming free in the park, in that vicinity; and the thought of having gathered the food for it gratified her and fired her imagination, already nourished with fairy tales in which deer are kind and powerful fairies that recline on satin cushions and drink from sapphire goblets. She fell silent, immersed in thought, perhaps already seeing the lovely blond animal gorge on berries beneath the flowering trees.

—Let's go, said Donna Maria. —It's late.

She held Delfina by the hand and walked beneath the flowering plants. At the edge of the woods she stopped and looked at the sea.

The waters, receiving the reflections of the clouds, gave the appearance of an immense silken fabric, soft, fluid, changing, undulating in broad folds; and the clouds, white and golden, one detached from the other but emerging from a common strip, resembled chryselephantine
⁸
statues wrapped in thin veils, lifted atop a bridge without arches.

In silence, Andrea plucked from an arbutus a bunch so dense that its branch was bending under its weight; and he offered it to Donna Maria. Taking it, she looked at it, but she did not open her mouth.

They set off down the paths once more. Delfina was now talking and talking, copiously, repeating the same things endlessly, infatuated with the deer, mingling the strangest fantasies, inventing long, monotonous stories, confusing one fairy tale with another, composing tangled stories in which she herself became lost. She talked and talked, with a kind of unconsciousness, almost as if the morning air had inebriated her; and around that deer of hers she invoked sons and daughters of kings, Cinderellas, little queens, wizards, monsters, all the characters of imaginary kingdoms, in crowds, in tumults, as in the continuous metamorphosis of a dream. She spoke in the same way that a bird warbles, with melodious modulations, sometimes with successions of sounds that were not words, from which the already-begun musical wave was emitted, like the quivering of a string during a pause, when in that infantile spirit the link between the verbal sign and the idea was interrupted.

The other two were not speaking or listening. But it seemed to them that that singsong refrain covered their thoughts, the murmur of their thoughts, because in thinking they had the impression that something sonorous was escaping from their innermost minds, something that in silence one would have been able to perceive physically; and if Delfina was quiet for a short time, they felt a strange sense of disquiet and suspension, as if silence would reveal and almost strip bare their souls.

The avenue of the One Hundred Fountains appeared in a vanishing perspective, in which the needles and mirrors of water gave off a fine vitreous sparkle, a mobile translucent transparency. A peacock that was perched on one of the escutcheons took flight, causing some disintegrating roses to tumble into the basin below. Andrea recognized, a few steps farther on, the basin in front of which Donna Maria had said to him, “Can you hear that?”

Within the herm's dominion the odor of musk could no longer be perceived. The herm, musing beneath its garland, was entirely spangled by the rays that penetrated between the gaps in the foliage. The blackbirds sang, replying to one another.

Delfina, seized by a new whim, said:

—Mommy, give me back the garland.

—No, let's leave it there. Why do you want it back?

—Give it back to me; I want to take it to Muriella.

—Muriella will spoil it.

—Give it back to me, please!

The mother looked at Andrea. He approached the stone, took the garland off it, and gave it to Delfina. In their exalted spirits, superstition, which is one of the obscure perturbations brought by love even to intellectual creatures, gave the insignificant episode the mysteriousness of an allegory. It seemed to them that in that simple deed a symbol was concealed. They did not know precisely what; but they thought about it. A verse tormented Andrea:

Will I thus not see the sign that consents?

An enormous sense of anxiety compressed his heart, the closer they came to the end of the path; and he would have given half his blood for a word from the woman. But she was on the point of speaking one hundred times, and she did not speak.

—Look, Mommy, down there, there's Ferdinando, Muriella, Riccardo . . . said Delfina, catching sight of Donna Francesca's children at the bottom of the path; and she flew off, shaking the crown. —Muriella! Muriella! Muriella!

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 saliens
²
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.