Pleasure (25 page)

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.

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 ostensorium
¹⁰
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.

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.