Pleasure (31 page)

And from then on, almost at regular intervals, lifting her blue gaze from her plate, she began languidly to beseech:

—
Love me tonight, Andrew!

—Oh, what a drag, said Maria Fortuna. —But whatever does it mean? Does she feel ill?

Bébé Silva smoked, drank small glasses of
vieux cognac,
and said outrageous things with artificial vivacity. But she had, every now and then, very peculiar moments of tiredness, of prostration, in which it seemed as if something dropped from her face, and that her audacious and obscene form was occupied by some small, sad, miserable, sick, pensive, older figure, the oldness of a consumptive monkey that withdraws to the back of its cage to cough after having made people laugh. They were fleeting moments. She would shake herself out of it to take another sip or to make another outrageous comment.

And Clara Green continued to repeat:

—
Love me tonight, Andrew!

Thus, with a bound, Andrea Sperelli dived back into Pleasure.

For two weeks he was kept occupied by Giulia Arici and Clara Green. Then he left for Paris and London, together with Musèllaro. He returned to Rome toward mid-December; found winter life already very active; and was immediately absorbed back into the great social circle.

But he had never found himself to be in such a restless, uncertain, confused state of mind. He had never experienced a more irritating sense of discontent, a more inconvenient malaise. Neither had he ever felt toward himself crueler impulses of anger and feelings of disgust. Sometimes, in some tired solitary moment, he felt bitterness rise up from his deepest innards, like sudden nausea; and he sat there mulling over it, troubled, without the strength to expel it, with a kind of dull resignation, like a sick person who has lost all faith in being healed and is inclined to live with his illness, to withdraw into his suffering, to sink down into his mortal misery. It seemed to him that once again the old leprosy was spreading through his soul and once again his heart was emptying out, never to fill up again, like a leather water sac that has been irreparably pierced. The sense of this emptiness, the certainty of this irreparability, sometimes moved him to a sort of desperate anger, and then to a crazy scorn of himself, of his willpower, of his last hopes, his last dreams. He had reached a terrible time, pursued by the inexorability of life, by the implacable passion of life; he had reached the supreme moment of salvation or of perdition, the decisive moment in which great hearts reveal all their strength and small hearts all their cowardice. He allowed himself to be overcome; he did not have the courage to save himself with any voluntary act; despite being in the grip of pain, he was afraid of a more virile pain; despite being tormented by disgust, he was afraid of giving up whatever disgusted him; even though he had the intense and ruthless instinct to detach himself from the things that most appeared to attract him, he was afraid to distance himself from such things. He allowed himself to be beaten down; he abdicated his will, his energy, his inner dignity, entirely and forever; he sacrificed forever whatever remained to him of faith and idealism. He threw himself into life, as into a great pointless adventure, seeking out pleasure, the opportunity, the moment of happiness, entrusting himself to destiny, to chance, to the fortuitous confusion of cause. However, while he believed with this kind of cynical fatalism that he was putting a check on suffering and achieving, if not calm, at least dullness, his sensitivity to pain became more acute, his ability to suffer multiplied; his needs and his disgusts increased without end. He was now experiencing the profound truth of the words he had said one day to Maria Ferres, in a moment of sentimental intimacy and melancholy: “Others are unhappier; but I don't know if there has been a man less happy than I, in the world.” He was now experiencing the truth of those words said in a very sweet moment, when the illusion of a second youth and the prescience of a new life were illuminating his soul.

And yet, that day, talking to that person, he had been sincere as never before; he had expressed his thought with naiveté and candor, as never before. Why, in a flash, had everything dispersed, had everything vanished? Why had he not known how to nurture that flame in his heart? Why had he not been able to safeguard that memory and keep that faith? His law was hence mutability; his spirit had the inconsistency of fluid; everything in him was transforming and deforming, without respite; moral strength was completely lacking in him; his moral being was composed of contradictions; unity, simplicity, and spontaneity evaded him; through the tumult, the voice of duty no longer reached him; the voice of will was overpowered by that of the instincts; his conscience, like a star without any light of its own, at every stage was eclipsing itself.

It had always been so; it would always be so. Why, therefore, should he fight against himself?
Cui bono?
¹

But this precise struggle was a necessity of his life; this precise restlessness was an essential condition of his existence; this precise suffering was a punishment from which he would never, ever be able to extract himself.

Any attempt at analyzing himself resulted in greater uncertainty, in greater obscurity. As he was completely unequipped with the ability to synthesize, his analysis became a cruel destructive game. And after an hour of reflection upon himself, he emerged confused, undone, desperate, lost.

When, on the morning of December 30, in Via de' Condotti, he unexpectedly encountered Elena Muti, he was filled with an inexpressible emotion, as if he were seeing some wondrous destiny come to pass, as if the reappearance of that woman in that exceedingly sad moment of his life occurred by virtue of predestination and she had been sent to him as a last aid, or to cause the final damage in his mysterious shipwreck. The first impulse of his soul was to join himself to her, to retake her, reconquer her, to repossess her entirely, as he had once done; to revive the old passion with all its elations and all its splendors. His first impulse was one of jubilation and hope. Then, without hesitation, diffidence, doubt, and jealousy arose; without hesitation, he was invaded by the certainty that no miracle would ever be able to resuscitate even a minimum part of the happiness that had died, or reproduce even one spark of the joy that had been extinguished, or even one shadow of the illusion that had vanished.

She had come! She had come! She had returned to the place where everything conserved a memory for her, and had said: “I am no longer yours; I can never be yours again.” She had cried out at him: “Would you tolerate sharing my body with others?” She had really dared to shout those words at him, in that place, in front of all those things!

An atrocious, enormous pain, consisting of a thousand stings, each distinct from the other, and each more acute than the other, possessed him for some time and exasperated him. Passion enveloped him with a thousand fires, provoking an inextinguishable carnal ardor in him for that woman who was no longer his, reawakening in his memory all the tiniest details of those remote pleasures, the images of all the caresses and all her postures during pleasure, all the mad couplings that never sated or slaked their craving, which was constantly being reborn. And yet always, in all his imaginings, that strange difficulty persisted in matching up the Elena from then with the Elena of now. While the memories of possession inflamed and tortured him, the certainty of possession eluded him: the Elena of now seemed to him to be a new woman, never enjoyed, never held. His desire gave him such spasms of pain that he thought he would die of them. Impurity infected him like a toxin.

Impurity, which
then
the winged flame of the soul had veiled with a sacred veil, and surrounded with an almost divine mystery, now appeared without the veil, without the mystery of the flame, like an entirely carnal lust, like a base libido. And he felt that that ardor of his was not Love, and that it no longer had anything in common with Love. It was not Love. She had shouted at him: “Would you tolerate sharing my body with others?” Well, yes, he would have tolerated it!

He would have taken her, without repugnance, just as she came to him, contaminated by the embrace of another; he would have placed his caress on top of another man's caress; he would have pressed his kiss over another man's kiss.

Nothing more, nothing, therefore, remained intact in him. Even the memory of that great passion was becoming miserably corrupted, soiled, degraded, within him. The last flicker of hope had been dampened. Finally, he was touching the bottom, never to raise himself up again.

But now a terrible frenzy invaded him, to cast down the idol that yet remained before him, lofty and enigmatic. With a cynical cruelty he began to undermine it, to obscure it, to corrode it. This destructive analysis, which he had already experimented on himself, he now used on Elena. To all the doubting questions he had once wished to evade, he now sought an answer; of all the suspicions that had once appeared and dissipated without leaving a trace, he now studied the source, found justifications, and obtained confirmation. He believed he found relief in this wretched exercise of demolition; and increased his suffering, irritated his malaise, enlarged his blemishes.

What had been the real reason for Elena's departure, in March 1885? There had been many rumors in that period and at the time of her marriage to Humphrey Heathfield. There was only one truth. He had heard it from Giulio Musèllaro one evening, by chance, amid irrelevant chitchat, while coming out of the theater; and he did not doubt it. Donna Elena Muti had left for financial reasons, in order to conclude a “transaction” that would extract her from very serious pecuniary difficulties caused by her excessive extravagance. Marriage with Lord Heathfield had saved her from ruin. This Heathfield, Marquis of Mount Edgcumbe and Count of Bradford, possessed considerable wealth and was allied with the highest British nobility. Donna Elena had managed to settle her affairs with great acumen; she had been able to remove herself from peril with extraordinary skill. Certainly, her three years of widowhood did not appear to have been a chaste interval preparatory to her second marriage. Neither chaste nor cautious. But, without doubt, Donna Elena was a great woman . . .

—Ah, my dear chap, a great woman! repeated Giulio Musèllaro. —And you know it well.

Andrea remained silent.

—But I don't advise you to approach her again, added his friend, throwing away his cigarette, which had gone out between one piece of gossip and another. —Relighting a love affair is like relighting a cigarette. The tobacco becomes bitter; love, too. Shall we go and have a cup of tea with the Moceto woman? She told me that one can drop by after the theater: it is never too late.

They were outside Palazzetto Borghese.

—You go, said Andrea. —I'm going home, to sleep. Today's hunt tired me out somewhat. Say hello to Donna Giulia for me.
Comprends et prends.
²

Musèllaro went upstairs. Andrea continued down along the Fontanella de Borghese and Via Condotti, toward the Trinità. It was a cold and tranquil January night, one of those prodigious wintry nights that transform Rome into a silver city enclosed within a diamond sphere. The full moon, in mid-sky, poured out its triple purity of light, frost, and silence.

He walked under the moon like a somnambulist, conscious of nothing but his pain. The last blow had been struck; the idol was crumbling; nothing else remained on the great ruins; everything thus was ending, forever. She had never loved him, therefore. Without hesitating, she had ended their love in order to rectify a financial problem. Without hesitating, she had contracted a marriage of convenience. Now, before him, she was putting on the air of a martyr, was wrapping herself in the veil of an inviolable bride! A bitter laugh rose up from deep down inside him; and then a dull rage stirred in him against the woman and blinded him. The memories of passion counted for nothing. Everything from that period seemed to him to be one great deceit, enormous and cruel, like one great lie; and this man who had made deceit and lies a habit in his life, this man who had deceived and lied so many times, felt, at the thought of other people's fraud, offended, scornful, disgusted, as by an unforgivable sin, as by an inexcusable, and also inexplicable, monstrosity. He could not manage to understand how Elena could have committed such an offense; and despite not understanding, could not concede her any justification, could not entertain the doubt that some other secret cause had pushed her to the sudden flight. He could see nothing but the brutal act, the baseness, the vulgarity: the vulgarity, above all—crude, overt, odious, not extenuated by any emergency. All in all, it amounted to this: a passion, which had seemed sincere and was sworn to be great and inextinguishable, had been interrupted by a commercial affair, a material benefit, a deal.

“Ingrate! Ingrate! What do you know about what happened, about what I suffered? What do you know?” Elena's words returned to his memory with precision; all her words, from the beginning to the end of the conversation held in front of the fireplace, returned to his memory: the words of tenderness, the offers of sisterhood, all those sentimental phrases. And he thought again of the tears that had veiled her eyes, the changing expression of her face, her trembling, her voice choked by her words of farewell when he had placed the bunch of roses on her lap. Why ever had she agreed to come to his house? Why had she decided to play that role, to provoke that scene, to plot that new drama or comedy? Why?

He had reached the top of the stairs in the deserted square. The beauty of the night gave him, suddenly, a vague but anxious aspiration toward some unknown Good; the image of Donna Maria passed through his mind; his heart pounded strongly, as under the impetus of desire; he had the sudden thought of holding Donna Maria's hands in his, to rest his forehead against her heart and feel her console him wordlessly, mercifully. That need for pity, refuge, sympathy, was like the last piece of the soul that did not resign itself to perishing. He bowed his head and reentered the house, without turning to regard the night any longer.

Terenzio was waiting for him in the entrance, and followed him right into his bedroom, where the fire was lit. He asked:

—Will the Lord Count go to bed immediately?

—No, Terenzio. Bring me some tea, his master answered, sitting down in front of the fireplace and holding his hands out toward the flames.

He was trembling, a slight nervous tremor. He had uttered those words with a strange sweetness; he had called his servant by name; he had been familiar with him.
³

—Is the Lord Count cold? asked Terenzio, with affectionate concern, encouraged by the benevolence of the master.

And he bent down over the andiron to stoke the fire, adding other pieces of wood. He was an old servant of the Sperelli household; he had served Andrea's father for many years; and his devotion toward the young man reached idolatry. No human being seemed more handsome, nobler, more sacred to him. He belonged, in truth, to that ideal race that provides faithful servants for adventure or sentimental novels. But unlike fictional servants, he spoke rarely, gave no advice, and devoted himself only to obeying.