Pleasure (35 page)

Andrea did not distinctly recall that memory, but he nodded.

The calm and solemn andante, dominated by a distinct melody of pathos, was composed of extensive developments followed by a burst of sorrow. The finale was characterized by an insistent rhythmic monotony, full of tiredness.

She said:

—Now it's the turn of your Bach.

And both, when the music began, felt an instinctive need to draw closer to each other. Their elbows touched. At the end of every movement, Andrea leaned toward her to read the program that she held unfolded in her hands; and in the act, he pressed against her arm, smelling the scent of the violets, and transmitted a shiver of delight to her. The adagio had such a compelling elevation of melody, and rose with such soaring flight to the summits of ecstasy, and expanded into Infinity with such complete assurance, that it seemed to be the voice of a superhuman creature, pouring its rejoicing at an immortal conquest into the rhythm. All spirits present were swept along by the irresistible wave. When the music ended, the quivering of the instruments lasted for a few minutes in the auditorium. A whisper circulated from one end of the hall to the other. Applause broke out, after the delay, more intensely.

The two looked at each other with transfigured eyes, as if they were drawing apart after an unbearably pleasurable sexual embrace. The music was continuing; the light in the hall was becoming more unobtrusive; a pleasant warmth softened the air; in this warmth, Donna Maria's violets emanated a stronger scent. Andrea almost had the illusion of being
alone
with her, because he could not see anyone he knew in front of him.

But he was wrong. During an interval, turning around, he saw Elena Muti standing at the back of the hall, together with the Princess of Ferentino. His eyes immediately met hers. He greeted her, from afar. It seemed to him that he could discern a peculiar smile on Elena's lips.

—Who are you greeting? asked Donna Maria, also turning around. —Who are those ladies?

—Lady Heathfield and the Princess of Ferentino.

She thought she could hear a troubled note in his voice.

—Which is the Princess of Ferentino?

—The blonde.

—The other one is very beautiful.

Andrea remained silent.

—But is she English? she added.

—No, she is from Rome; she is the widow of the Duke of Scerni, and Lord Heathfield is her second husband.

—She is very beautiful.

Andrea asked, with concern:

—What are they going to play now?

—Brahms's Quartet in C minor.

—Do you know it?

—No.

—The second movement is wonderful.

He spoke in order to hide his uneasiness.

—When will I see you again?

—I don't know.

—Tomorrow?

She hesitated. A light shadow appeared to fall over her face. She replied:

—Tomorrow, if it is sunny, I will go with Delfina to Piazza di Spagna, toward noon.

—And if it isn't sunny?

—On Saturday evening I'm going to Countess Starnina's . . .

The music was starting up again. The first movement expressed a deep and virile struggle, full of vigor. The romanza expressed a yearning but very sad nostalgia, and hence a slow, uncertain, weak uplifting toward a very distant dawn. A clear melodic phrase was developing with deep modulations. It was a very different sentiment from the one that animated Bach's adagio; it was more human, more earthly, more elegiac. A breath of Ludwig van Beethoven ran through that music.

Andrea was possessed by such terrible anxiety that he feared he would betray himself. All the sweetness he had felt earlier was now converted to bitterness. He was not precisely conscious of this new suffering; he could neither pull himself together nor control himself; he wavered, disoriented, between the dual feminine attraction and the charm of the music, but was penetrated by none of the three forces; inside him he felt an indefinable impression, like a vacuum in which great blows constantly resounded with a painful echo; and his thoughts fragmented into a thousand pieces, became disconnected and undone; and the two feminine images superimposed themselves on each other, mingled together, and destroyed each other, so that he could not manage to separate them, and he could not manage to define his feelings for the one or his feelings for the other. And right on the surface of this troubled inner suffering there moved a restlessness generated by his immediate reality, by his practical worries. He did not miss even a slight change in Donna Maria's attitude toward him; and he believed he could feel Elena's assiduous and fixed gaze; and he could not manage to find a way to contain himself: he did not know whether he should accompany Donna Maria when leaving the hall, or whether he should approach Elena; nor did he know which instance would benefit or harm his prospects with the one and the other.

—I'm going, said Donna Maria, standing up, at the end of the romanza.

—Aren't you waiting for the end?

—No; I have to be home by five.

—Remember, tomorrow . . .

She held out her hand to him. Perhaps due to the heat in the stuffy room, a slight flame enlivened her paleness. Her whole body was covered by a velvet mantle in a dark leaden color, edged with a wide band of chinchilla; and amid the ashen fur the violets were dying gracefully. Walking out, she moved with sovereign elegance, and some of the ladies sitting there turned to watch her. And for the first time Andrea saw in her, in the spiritual woman, in the pure Sienese Madonna, the woman of the world.

The quartet was entering the third movement. As daylight was fading, the yellow curtains were raised, as in a church. Other ladies left the hall. Whispers could be heard here and there. In the auditorium, tiredness and inattention were setting in, which occurs at the end of every concert. With one of those peculiar phenomena of sudden elasticity and volubility, Andrea felt a sense of relief, almost cheerful. He suddenly lost every sentimental and passionate worry; and only the pleasurable adventure appeared, lucidly, to his vanity and his depravity. He thought that Donna Maria, in conceding to him those harmless meetings, had already placed her foot on the gentle slope at the bottom of which is sin, inevitable even for the most vigilant of souls; he thought that maybe a bit of jealousy could push Elena back into his arms, and hence, that perhaps one love affair would help the other along; he thought that perhaps a vague fear or a jealous foreboding had hastened Donna Maria's assent to their next meeting. He was therefore on his way toward a double conquest; and he smiled, noting that in both endeavors, difficulty presented itself in the same form. He had to convert two sisters—or rather, two women who wanted to play the role of sisters with him—into lovers. He noted other similarities between the two instances, smiling. That voice! How strange, Elena's tones in Donna Maria's voice! A crazy thought flashed into his head. That voice could be, for him, the element of an imaginative work: by virtue of such an affinity, he could fuse the two beauties in order to possess a third, imaginary one, more complex, more perfect, more
real
because she was ideal . . .

The third movement, executed with impeccable style, ended amid applause. Andrea stood up and approached Elena.

—Oh, Ugenta, where have you been until now? the Princess of Ferentino asked him. —
Au pays du Tendre?
⁵

—And that unknown woman, who's she? Elena said to him, lightly, smelling a bunch of violets she had pulled out of her marten-fur muff.

—She's a great friend of my cousin's: Donna Maria Ferres y Capdevila, wife of the new minister of Guatemala, Andrea answered, smoothly. —A lovely creature, very refined. She was at Francesca's, at Schifanoja, in September.

—And Francesca? Elena interrupted. —Don't you know when she'll be back?

—I've heard from her recently, from San Remo. Ferdinando is getting better. But I'm afraid she'll have to stay there for another month, maybe longer.

—What a pity!

The quartet was entering its last movement, which was very brief. Elena and the Princess of Ferentino had occupied two chairs at the back, along the wall, beneath the dim mirror that reflected the gloomy hall. Elena listened, her head bowed, running the ends of a shining marten-fur boa through her hands.

—Come with us, she said to Sperelli, when the concert had ended.

Climbing into the carriage after the Princess of Ferentino, she said:

—Come, get in. We'll drop Eva off at Palazzo Fiano. I'll let you off wherever you like.

—Thanks.

Sperelli accepted. Driving out onto the Corso, the carriage was forced to proceed very slowly because the entire road was cluttered with rioting people. Much noise came from Piazza di Montecitorio and from Piazza Colonna, and it spread like a din made by waves, growing, receding, rising again, mingled with the blaring of military trumpets. The sedition was growing, in the ashen, cold evening; the horror of the distant massacre was making the masses yell; men were running, waving great bundles of paper, cutting through the crowd; above the racket, the name “Africa” could distinctly be heard.

—All for four hundred brutes, who died brutally! Andrea murmured, drawing back after having looked out of the window.

—But what are you saying? exclaimed the Princess of Ferentino.

On the corner of Palazzo Chigi, the mayhem resembled a scuffle. The carriage was forced to come to a halt. Elena leaned to look out; her face, out of the shadow, was lit up in the reflection of the headlamp and in the twilight, she appeared to have an almost funereal pallor, a pallor that was frozen and slightly blue, which awoke in Andrea the vague memory of a head he had once seen—he could not say when or where—in a gallery, in a chapel.

—Here we are, said the princess, since the carriage had finally reached Palazzo Fiano. —Good-bye, then. See you tonight at the Angelieris'. Good-bye, Ugenta. Will you come and have lunch at my place tomorrow? Elena and the Viti woman and my cousin will be there, too.

—At what time?

—Half past twelve.

—All right. Thank you.

The princess dismounted from the carriage. The servant awaited an order.

—Where do you want me to take you? Elena asked Sperelli, who had already sat down next to her, in the place her friend had vacated.

—
Far, far away . . .
⁶

—Come on, tell me: to your house?

And without waiting for an answer, she ordered:

—Trinità de' Monti, Palazzo Zuccari.

The servant closed the door. The carriage moved forward at a trot and turned into Via Frattina, leaving behind it the crowd, the shouts, the noise.

—Oh, Elena, after so long . . . Andrea burst out, leaning down to look at the desired woman, who had withdrawn into the shadows at the far end, as if avoiding any contact.

The brightness of a shopwindow crossed the shadow, in passing; and he saw that Elena was smiling, very pale, an alluring smile.

Still smiling in this way, she took the long marten-fur boa from her neck with an agile gesture and threw it around his neck like a lasso. It seemed that she was doing it as a game. But with that soft noose, scented with the same perfume that Andrea had smelled in the blue fox fur, she drew Andrea toward her; and offered him her lips, without speaking.

Both their mouths remembered the old mingling, those terrible and sweet conjunctions that lasted until they were short of breath and that gave their hearts an illusory sensation, as of a soft, dewy fruit dissolving. To make it last longer, they held their breaths. From Via dei Due Macelli,
⁷
the carriage rode up Via del Tritone,
⁸
turned into Via Sistina, and stopped in front of Palazzo Zuccari.

Rapidly, Elena pushed the young man away. She said to him, her voice a little husky:

—Go, Andrea.

—When will you come?

—Who knows!

The servant opened the door. Andrea descended. The carriage turned again, to drive back along Via Sistina. Andrea, still all aquiver, with his eyes still floating in a cloudy vapor, watched to see if Elena's face appeared from behind the glass; but he saw nothing. The carriage drove away.

Climbing the stairs again, he thought:
At last, she is coming around!
In his head, there was still something like a fog of euphoria; in his mouth, there was still the taste of the kiss; in his eyes, there was still the flash of the smile with which Elena had thrown that sort of shining, sweet-smelling snake around his neck. And Donna Maria? Most certainly, he owed this unexpected lust to the Sienese woman. Without any doubt, at the base of Elena's strange and fantastic act, there was the stirring of jealousy. Fearing, perhaps, that he would escape her, she had wanted to bind him, to entice him, to once again ignite the thirst in him.
Does she love me? Love me not?
And what did it matter to him, to know it? What good did it do him? By now the enchantment was broken. No miracle could ever resuscitate even a small part of the extinct happiness. It was better that he occupy himself with flesh that was still divine.

He considered the affair for a long time, with a sense of smugness. He was particularly satisfied with the elegant and unusual manner with which Elena had added spice to her whim. And the image of the boa aroused the image of Donna Maria's braid, and aroused a flurry of all the amorous dreams that he had dreamed about that vast virgin mass of hair, which once had made schoolgirls at the Florentine convent swoon with love. Again, he mingled the two desires; he cherished the duplicity of pleasure; he could faintly perceive the third ideal Lover.

He was entering into a reflective frame of mind. While dressing for dinner, he thought:—
Yesterday, there was a great scene of passion, almost with tears; today a small mute scene of sensuality. And yesterday it seemed to me that my feeling was sincere, just as my sensation before that was sincere. Moreover, on this very day, an hour before Elena's kiss, I had had another lyrical moment at the side of Donna Maria. Of all this, no trace remains. Tomorrow, certainly, I will begin again. I am chameleonic, chimeric, incoherent, inconsistent. Any effort I make to achieve unity will always be in vain. I must resign myself, by now. My law may be found in one word:
NUNC
.
⁹
May the will of the law be done.