Pleasure (17 page)

Convalescence is a purification and a rebirth. Never is the sense of life as sweet as it is after the anguish of pain; and never is the human soul more inclined to goodness and faith than after having gazed into the abyss of death. Man understands, when healing, that thought, desire, will, consciousness of life, are not life. Something in him is more vigilant than thought, more constant than desire, more potent than will, more profound even than consciousness; and it is the substance, the nature of his being. He understands that his real life is, as it were, the one not lived by him; it is the combination of involuntary, spontaneous, unconscious, instinctive sensations; it is the harmonious and mysterious activity of living vegetation; it is the imperceptible development of all metamorphoses and all renewals. It is precisely that life within him that carries out the miracles of convalescence: it closes wounds, remedies losses, reconnects broken tissues, mends lacerated flesh, restores the mechanism of organs, reinfuses the veins with the richness of blood, ties once more around the eyes the blindfold of love, weaves once more the crown of dreams around the head, rekindles the flame of hope in the heart, opens once more the wings of the chimeras of fantasy.

After the mortal wound, after a kind of long and slow hovering at the point of death, Andrea Sperelli little by little was now being reborn, almost with another body and another spirit, like a new man, like a creature emerged from a cool Lethean bath,
¹
forgetful and vacuous. It seemed to him that he had taken on a more elementary form. The past, in his memory, was all equally distant, just as the starred sky is, to the eye, an equal and diffuse field, even though the stars are at different distances. Turmoil was pacified, mud receded to the lowest level, the soul cleansed itself; and he returned to the womb of Mother Nature, feeling goodness and strength infuse maternally into him.

Hosted by his cousin at the villa of Schifanoja, Andrea Sperelli was once again facing existence in the presence of the sea. Since the
sympathetic
nature still persists within us, and since our old soul, embraced by the great natural soul still palpitates at this contact, the convalescent measured his breathing against the wide and tranquil respiration of the sea, stretched out his body the way powerful trees do, calmed his thoughts with the calmness of the horizon. Little by little, in that attentive and absorbed leisure, his spirit relaxed, unfolded, unfurled, lifted itself gently like grass crushed on a path; finally it became real, ingenuous, original, free, open to pure knowledge, ready for pure contemplation; he attracted things to himself, conceived of them as forms of his own being, as forms of his own existence; he felt himself finally being penetrated by the truth proclaimed by the Upanishad
²
of the Vedas:
³
“
Hae omnes creaturae in totum ego sum, et praeter me aliud ens non est.”
⁴
The great gust of ideality exhaled by the sacred Indian books, once studied and loved, appeared to uplift him. And repeatedly, the Sanskrit formula glowed for him in a remarkable way: “
TAT TWAM ASI
”; which means: “This living thing, that you are.”

It was the last days of August. An ecstatic quietness held the sea; the waters were of such transparency that they reflected any image with perfect exactness; the farthest line of the waters mingled with the sky in such a way that the two elements appeared to be one single, impalpable, unnatural element. The vast amphitheater of the hills, studded with olive trees, orange trees, pines, all the noblest forms of Italic vegetation, embracing that silence, was no longer a multitude of things but one single thing, under the common sun.

The young man, stretched out in the shade or leaning against a tree trunk or seated on a rock, believed he could feel the river of time flowing within him; with a kind of catalectic tranquillity, he believed he could feel the entire world living in his heart; with a kind of religious exaltation, he believed he possessed the infinite. What he felt was ineffable, not expressible even in the words of the mystic: “I am admitted by nature into the most secret of her divine seats, to the source of all life. Here I discover the cause of movement and hear the first song of living beings, in all its freshness.”
⁵
His sight slowly mutated into a profound and continuous vision; the branches of the trees above his head seemed to him to hold up the sky, to amplify the blueness, to shine like the crowns of immortal poets; and he contemplated and listened, breathing with the sea and the earth, placid as a god.

Wherever were all his vanities and his cruelties and his expedients and his lies? Where were the loves and the betrayals and the disillusionments and the disgust and the incurable repugnance after pleasure? Where were those impure and rapid love affairs that left in his mouth the strange sourness of fruit cut with a steel knife? He could no longer remember anything. His spirit had made a great renunciation. Another beginning of life was entering into him;
someone
was entering into him, secretly, who profoundly felt the peace. He rested, because he did not desire anymore.

Desire had abandoned its realm; during activity, intellect freely followed its own laws and reflected the objective world like a pure subject of knowledge; things appeared in their true form, in their true color, in their true and full meaning and beauty, precise and very clear; every sentiment of the person disappeared. In this temporary death of desire, in this temporary absence of memory, in this perfect objectivity of contemplation, was to be found the cause of never-experienced pleasure.

Die Sterne, die begehrt man nicht,

Man freut sich ihrer Pracht.

“The stars, man does not desire them—but takes pleasure in their splendor.”
⁶
For the first time, in fact, the young man discovered all the harmonious nocturnal poetry of the summer skies.

They were the last moonless nights of August. The ardent life of innumerable constellations pulsated in the deep basin. The Ursus constellations, the Swan, Hercules, Boötes, Cassiopeia, scintillated with such a rapid and strong throb that they almost seemed to draw closer to the earth, to have entered the earth's atmosphere. The Milky Way unfolded like a regal aerial river, like an assembly of heavenly coasts, like an immense silent stream that drew into its
“miro gurge”
⁷
a dust of starry minerals, passing above a crystal hive, between phalanxes of flowers. At intervals, shining meteors streaked the immobile air, with the infinitely soft and silent slide of a drop of water on a sheet of diamond. The breathing of the sea, slow and solemn, was enough to measure the tranquillity of the night without disturbing it; and the pauses were sweeter than the sound.

But this period of visions, of abstractions, of intuitions, of pure contemplations, this sort of Buddhistic and almost, one could say, cosmogonic mysticism, was extremely brief. The causes of the rare phenomenon, over and above the plastic nature of the young man and his aptitude toward objectivity, were perhaps to be sought in the singular tension and extreme impressionability of his cerebral nervous system. Little by little, he began to recover consciousness of himself, to regain the sentiment of himself, and to return to his original corporeity. One day at the noon hour, while the life of things appeared to be suspended, the great and terrible silence suddenly allowed him to perceive within himself vertiginous abysses, inextinguishable needs, indestructible memories, accumulations of suffering and regret, all the misery he had once felt, all the vestiges of his vice, all the residues of his passions.

From that day on, a subdued and constant melancholy occupied his soul; and he saw in every aspect of things a state of his spirit. Instead of transmuting into other forms of existence, or placing himself in different states of consciousness or losing his particular being in general life, he now presented contrary phenomena, wrapping himself up in a nature that was a completely subjective conception of his intellect. The countryside became for him a symbol, an emblem, a sign, an escort that guided him through his internal labyrinth. He discovered secret affinities between the apparent life of things and the intimate life of his desires and his memories.
“To me—high mountains are a feeling.
”
Just like mountains in George Byron's verse, so, too, was the seashore, for him,
a
feeling.

Clear September seashores! The sea, calm and innocent like a sleeping boy, spread out under angelic pearly heavens. Sometimes it appeared to be completely green, the fine and precious green of malachite; and on it, the small red sails resembled errant flamelets. Sometimes it appeared to be completely blue, of an intense azure, almost, one could say, heraldic, shot through with veins of gold like a lapis lazuli; and on it, the decorated sails resembled a procession of ensigns and banners and Catholic shields. Also, sometimes it took on a diffused metallic gleam, a pale silvery color, mingled with the greenish hue of a ripe lemon, something indefinably strange and delicate; and on it, the sails were pious and as innumerable as the wings of cherubs in the background of Giotto's panels.

The convalescent discovered forgotten childhood sensations, that impression of coolness lent to childish blood by the gusts of salty wind, those inexpressible effects lent by the lights, shadows, colors, smells of water on the virgin soul. The sea was not only a delight for his eyes but also a perennial wave of peace at which his thoughts drank, a magical fountain of youth in which his body regained its health and his spirit its nobility. The sea held for him the mysterious attraction of a fatherland; and he surrendered himself to it with filial familiarity, like a weak son in the arms of an omnipotent father. And he took comfort from it; because no one has ever confided his pain, his desire, his dream to the sea in vain.

The sea always had a profound word for him, full of sudden revelations, unexpected illuminations, unforeseen meanings. It uncovered in his secret soul a still-living, though hidden, ulcer and made it bleed; but the balm thereafter was sweeter. It shook awake in his heart a sleeping chimera and incited it so that he could once again feel its nails and its beak; but then it killed it and buried it in his heart forever. It awoke in his memory a recollection and it revived it such that he suffered all the bitterness of regret for things that were irremediably lost; but then it lavished upon him the sweetness of an endless oblivion. Nothing remained hidden in that soul, in the presence of the great consoler. In the same way that a strong electrical current makes metals luminous and reveals their essence by the color of their flame, the virtue of the sea illuminated and revealed all the powers and the potentialities of that human soul.

At certain times the convalescent, under the assiduous dominion of such a virtue, under the assiduous yoke of such fascination, felt a sort of bewilderment and almost of dismay, as if that dominion and that yoke were unbearable, due to his weakness. At certain times he derived from the incessant exchange between his soul and the sea a vague sense of prostration, as if that great discourse caused too much violence to his distressed intellect, eager to comprehend the incomprehensible. Any sadness of the waters upset him like a misfortune.

One day, he saw himself lost. Bloody and evil vapors burned on the horizon, casting splashes of blood and gold onto the dark waters; a tangle of purple clouds arose from the vapors, resembling a skirmish of enormous centaurs above a flaming volcano; and in that tragic light a funeral procession of triangular sails was etched in black on the farthest rim. They were sails of an indescribable hue, as sinister as the insignia of death; marked with crosses and shadowy figures; they resembled the sails of fleets carrying plague-infested cadavers to some cursed island populated by ravenous vultures. A human sense of terror and pain loomed over that sea; an agonizing dejection burdened that air. The gush spurting from the wounds of the brawling monsters did not ever abate; rather it grew into rivers that reddened the waters throughout the entire area, right up to the shore, becoming tinted here and there with violet and greenish shades as if it were decaying. Every now and then the knot collapsed, the bodies became deformed or tore apart, bleeding strips dangled down from the crater or disappeared, swallowed by the abyss. Then, after the great collapse, the giants, regenerated, once again sprang into battle, more atrocious than before; the mound recomposed itself, more enormous than before; and the massacre began again, redder than before, until the combatants were left drained of blood amid the ashes of dusk, lifeless, defeated, on the semi-extinct volcano.

It seemed like an episode from some primitive Titanomachia,
⁸
a heroic spectacle, seen over a long succession of epochs in the fabled sky. Andrea, his heart suspended, followed the entire succession of events. Accustomed to the tranquil descent of shadow in that serene decline of summer, he now felt himself shaken, uplifted, and confused by the unusual contrast, with a strange violence. At first, it was like a confused anguish, tumultuous, full of unwitting tremors. Fascinated by the bellicose sunset, he was not yet able to see clearly inside himself. But when the ash of dusk rained down extinguishing every war, and the sea resembled an immense leaden swamp, he believed he could hear in the shadow the shout of his soul, the shout of other souls.

It was inside him, like a gloomy shipwreck in the shadow. Many, many voices called for help, imploring for help, cursing death; familiar voices, voices to which he had once listened (voices of human beings or of phantoms?); and now he could not distinguish the one from the other! They called, they implored, they cursed uselessly, feeling themselves perish; they grew feebler, suffocated by the voracious wave; they became weaker, distant, interrupted, unrecognizable; they became a moan; they died away; they rose up no more.

He was left alone. Of his entire youth, of his entire interior life, of all his ideals, nothing remained. Inside him there was nothing but a cold empty abyss; around him was impassive nature, the perennial source of pain for the solitary soul. Every hope was dimmed; every voice was mute; every anchor was broken. What was there to live for?