A Life (7 page)

White accompanied Alfonso to the cashier about a draft. It was a little room divided by a light wooden partition behind which, reading a newspaper at his desk, sat Signor Jassy, an old man with a face covered in spots and a few whitish hairs.

Alfonso noted the debits of the draft on a lined sheet of paper proffered by White; then he passed it to Jassy who put it down beside his newspaper without a word.

Just then a youth appeared at the hatch and presented a bill of exchange. Jassy took up a list, looked at him, looked at the bill of exchange, then still motionless called out in a complaining tone: “This is the right one; it’s just listed, but why didn’t you have it countersigned in time by Signor Cellani? Now there’s no one here who can leave the cash desk, and there are people waiting.”

He flung down the piece of paper in front of White. The latter at once replied irritably: “I’ve not listed this draft, it doesn’t concern me; in any case drafts can’t be listed before getting a warning letter. Don’t you agree?”

The old man turned towards Alfonso and said to him more gently: “Please show this draft to Signor Cellani, will you? D’you know where his room is?”

“Come with me,” said White, and moved off.

Alfonso followed him after stopping to look at Jassy. The latter was still talking to the youth who had come to cash the bill of exchange, while moving with a vacillating step towards the counter. His legs were flabby as if they were made of cloth, and he was holding out his hands in front of him as if afraid of falling.

“Is that the cashier?” Alfonso asked White.

“Yes, a poor old man who’d be better adding up sums or retired.”

Signor Cellani was a man who had achieved his position by hard work, step by step; he seemed about fifty, but his thin figure and dry unlined skin made him look no more than thirty.

“My best wishes!” he said very politely to Alfonso, who was coming to him for the first time on a matter of business. “Please be very careful how you lay out your letters. I wasn’t very pleased with Signor Miceni’s. You are intelligent and understand how important the form of a banking letter is.”

He put his initial next to the total sum of the draft.

Meanwhile, others had come to the cash desk and Giuseppe, Signor Cellani’s messenger, was helping Jassy as he moved slowly between cash box and counter, indecisive as ever, incapable even of getting help, perhaps from shyness. Alfonso, in his zeal aroused by Cellani’s kind words, wanted to hand over the chit to Jassy himself. The latter was moving towards the counter with bank notes in both hands; he gave Alfonso a sullen look and without stopping, shouted to Giuseppe: “Here, take that bit of paper out of his hand, will you!”

Later Sanneo gave him another two or three letters to do, and as a last job he had to send off some bills of exchange. White helped him with these too because Alfonso was frightened of handling pieces of paper which were so precious.

When his first zeal had died down, and he was copying big sums in a letter, Alfonso would calculate how the tiniest fraction of each sum would be enough for him to live a serene life in the country.

B
Y NEXT DAY
Alfonso’s work had already increased. Sanneo, who knew nothing of White’s help, found Alfonso’s letters quite satisfactory and felt he could give him more and more
serious
work. But that day from Paris arrived the settlement which White had to check over, and Alfonso was left to his own devices. By midday there was a first outburst from Sanneo, and by evening Sanneo was going around the bank saying that two days’ work had given Alfonso softening of the brain. He called him in and told him to re-do half the letters he had corrected, and Alfonso was forced to confess that he had been helped out by White on the days before. Sanneo calmed down, but grew more brusque from then on.

Then Alfonso’s work became more unpleasant. He had been forbidden to ask help from White, with whom Sanneo was not on good terms; often, instead of giving instructions, Sanneo would point to the date on which an identical letter had been written and tell him to find the right letter-file and copy it out. It was not easy to find a file in the Maller bank. With so many clerks using the files, he had to go to and fro between the accounts department and the cash-desk, more than once too, since no one helped; everyone concentrated on their own business, and he had to search through every drawer to make sure that what he sought was not there. At first Alfonso went round every room shouting: “Gentlemen, please, have you the letter-file for such-and-such a day?” But he soon stopped this because he found it was a waste of breath. No one answered, and one or two just smiled. By running from room to room Alfonso eventually found the file beside a clerk who could easily have told him and saved him the useless rush. Having laid hands on the file, there was still the labour of finding the letter he needed. If Sanneo had even mentioned who the writer was, it would have been a great help, for he would not have had to read it all through. Sanneo’s big handwriting filled a whole sheet of copying paper; Miceni’s was reproduced whole and clear as the original; White’s big wide pen-strokes developed blotches in the file-copy.

Alfonso would go and greet Miceni in the accounts department and sometimes stop to exchange a few words with him. He forced himself to do this against his will because he felt Miceni resented him. Miceni’s new desk had already taken on the look of his old one; ink-pot, pen, pencil, big ledger set parallel to the edge of the desk. He would do his calculations on tiny bits of paper which he filled with microscopic figures.

Alfonso found he got no enjoyment out of his advancement. It was a real advancement, for even though everyone went out of their way to remind him that he was very far from having Miceni’s position, he had stopped copying letters and offers: servile labour with a pen instead of a broom. But when in the evening Sanneo handed back half his letters with annotations, he felt desperate and longed to take the first train home and leave those letters to be re-done by Signor Maller himself. It was true, though, that if a moment later Sanneo gave a nod of approval when signing a letter, Alfonso, however tired he was, took up his work again with renewed zest.

Tired? Nauseated, more. From day to day his work increased slowly, but changed little or nothing in kind. He only had to think up one or two paragraphs for himself in a day; but he also had to copy out endless figures, repeat the same phrase innumerable times. Towards evening his hand, the only part of his body really tired, would stop, and his attention would stray for lack of
stimulus
; sometimes he was forced to fling down his pen and
abandon
work from nausea, like someone who had eaten too much of one dish. He never quite mastered this work, and worry was now added to his malaise.

White had told him that all contractual letters could be left for a few days or even weeks without a reply, and this had greatly eased his work in the first days; very soon, though, as pending letters increased, his work became more complicated because incoming letters joined others from the same client awaiting replies, and Alfonso, distracted and forgetful of names, did not remember which were which. In the evening the letters were sent back by Sanneo with an annotation. “What about the letter before this one? Signor Nitti
NB
. The poor culprit would go off to Sanneo and listen to a long sermon on disorder, which did nothing to
improve the situation because he lacked not goodwill but
capacity
; his defect was fundamental.

While urged along by zeal for his new job, he felt less bored. He needed to concentrate continuously to get through as many letters as possible in the least amount of time, but the very intensity of the work distracted and tired him more than something less
mechanical
. But this early zeal could only be re-ignited by circumstances independent of his will, and his work proceeded so slowly that a good part of his day was spent either reading letters that had just arrived to find out which he could put aside, and tidying papers left on his desk days before.

Sanneo said he was surprised that a young man who showed such a wish to work could not get more done. He would come into Alfonso’s room unexpectedly, hoping to surprise him reading a newspaper or out chattering with other clerks; but he always found him at his place, pen in hand and eyes fixed on paper. He even lessened his work out of kindness, but the fifteen or twenty short letters which he gave him to do were never all done by evening, and his pending tray always stayed as high.

Alfonso came to the conclusion that he felt generally out of sorts because his body needed something to tire itself out on, with which to exhaust itself. This body of his now became a plastic
concept
which he reshaped to every new sensation. In the evening, after a day spent on sums or rushing about the bank or sitting with pen and paper and thoughts elsewhere, he would imagine matter flowing fast through his body in pliable tubes, impossible to regulate or resist. Whenever he could, he took long walks, and his malaise vanished; his lungs expanded, he could feel his joints becoming more flexible, his body obeying more promptly; and he would imagine that flow of material as having been absorbed or regulated, and helping him now instead of impeding him. If he settled down to study, he would drop his book and feel that his chin was tired, and a strange sensation would come over his forehead as if the volume inside was trying to expand, to enlarge its content. He felt the same sort of calm as if he had tired himself out
running
; his brain was lucid and his daydreams either conscious or absent. Very soon even the time he had given to walking became taken up by study: it took less time to find calm in study than it did
in walking. A single hour spent on some difficult work of criticism would soothe him for an entire day. He was growing ambitious, and study became a means to satisfy this. That blind obedience to Sanneo, the scenes he had to endure daily, disgusted him; study was his recreation. A well-written book gave him megalomaniac dreams, not due to the quality of his brain but to circumstances; finding himself at one extreme, he dreamt of another.

Every second of his time outside the office—or even in the office where he kept a few books in a cupboard—he spent
reading
. Generally he read serious works of criticism and
philosophy
, which he found less tiring than poetry or art. He also wrote, but very little; his style was not formed, and he felt thwarted by inappropriate words which never quite hit the target. He thought study would improve this. He was in no hurry, and the little he did was in accordance with a timetable which he had laid down for his own work. After being tired out by work at the bank and library, he would jot down a few concepts or a romantic dialogue with
himself
which no one else would ever hear. The odd thing about these was that in them he seemed to be suffering from some universal disease: never a hint of his real sufferings, of the nostalgia still torturing him. These writings were in the nature of rudimentary jottings which he hoped to use in some distant future for major works; plays, novels, verse.

He had never yet read an Italian classic all through, and had only a haphazard knowledge of literary history and criticism. Later he plunged into reading German works of philosophy translated into French.

Then he discovered the city library, and all those centuries of culture at his free disposal saved him a great deal from his meagre budget. He tied himself down to the library at fixed hours, which gave his studies the regularity he needed. Another reason for going there often was that his room at the Lanuccis’ was not good for study. It was small, half of it occupied by the bed, very dark, it was rarely touched by sun, and he found thinking neither pleasant nor easy at a small round table whose four legs never touched the floor at the same time.

When he had managed to get through a day of this routine, he would go to the bank the next day, still tired, and work worse than
usual. Pending letters increased, and by evening he found himself facing a huge pile of correspondence from every town in Italy; the whole world seemed to be conspiring to impose this labour upon him.

He made very few acquaintances in the library. He would enter the long reading-room filled with tables in parallel lines, take any seat and sit there for some time with his head in his hands, so absorbed in reading that he did not even see the people sitting beside him. After an hour at most this concentrated
reading
began to repel him, but he still forced himself to go on for a time and stopped only when his mind could no longer grasp the words seen by his eyes; then he handed in his book at once and left. After an hour spent with the German idealists everything in the street seemed to be calling out to him.

A
LFONSO HAD COME
to the city with a great contempt for its inhabitants; townspeople he considered bound to be physically weak and morally lax, and he despised what he
considered
to be their sexual habits, general womanizing and facile affairs. He could never be like them, he thought, and felt and, actually was, very different. Sensuality he had known only as an exalted emotion. To him a woman was man’s gentle companion born to be adored rather than embraced, and in the solitude of the country village where his body had grown to maturity he had vowed to keep himself pure until he could lay all of himself at the feet of some goddess. In the city this ideal had very soon lost any influence on his life, though it still remained a vague objective for which he felt no need to struggle.

He held to it as a theory even after realizing that it seemed ridiculous to those to whom he explained it. He had no idea what to replace it with; its abandonment would have created a void in his life. But he no longer spoke of it, and Miceni was quite wrong in boasting of having converted him.

At twenty-two his senses had the delicacy and weakness of an adolescent’s. He had desires which it was torture for him to repress. The sight or even the thought of a skirt, harsh mockery of his dream, was enough to provoke these desires; and they were strong enough to drag him suddenly from the reading he had settled into, and make him rush through the streets, prey to an
agitation
which would have seemed mysterious had he not known its origin. There was only one occupation that soothed this state—
following
some attractive girl for long stretches of the street, admiring her, timid and ashamed. The thought of going any further only came later. Till then he had waited for his ideal to come to him.

One evening he found himself hurrying along behind a woman who had glanced at him in passing. Dressed in black, she was holding her skirt very high and showing a delicate foot shod in an elegant gleaming shoe, a black stocking, a trim ankle on a body agile and not too slim. Alfonso caught a glimpse of a very white neck, but not of her face.

He followed her resolutely, overtook her, then waited for her like a little dog. The lady seemed to laugh and glance at him, and he felt encouraged enough to think of approaching her. It was the first time he found himself in this predicament. He hesitated, and thus was forced to quicken his pace. She crossed the Corso and turned into Via Cavana; she would have to pass by the library. “At worst I can go in there,” thought Alfonso, to give himself an escape route.

He went ahead and stopped at the door of the library. She passed by; a headlamp lit up the whiteness of her neck and made the polish on her shoes gleam, but she did not look at him, which for some time took away Alfonso’s desire to follow her. She went slowly up the
SS Martiri
slope and below the Law Courts, while from the pavement Alfonso merely followed her with his eyes. Then when she had almost got to the top of the slope, he moved on up to the Law Courts. He saw her figure outlined against the sky, its curves clear as if seen in close up. Another instant of
hesitation
and he would lose sight of her; there was no time to reflect; his desire spoke openly and imperiously, urging him to rush so that he came up to her before she had reached level ground. He was flustered but so tired that he very nearly abandoned his resolve from a short time before. He approached her with the same idea in his mind that had made him run up from the Law Courts. “Signora …” he said, and raised his hat; but he was
panting
so hard as he came to a halt that he could not go on. A blue eye looked at him frostily, and finding himself unprepared for speech, since he had been concentrating only on running after her, he moved aside to let her pass; he caught his breath again, as glad now of being prevented from acting as he had been afraid before. The desires that had seized him so quickly left him as quickly; a stab of fear or tension had been enough to make him forget them.

For some time he followed some woman every evening, only well-dressed ones, for the object of his dreams was certainly not in rags; and at every pursuit he deluded himself that he had found her. The compulsions always ended in the same way. His firmest resolves were overcome by shyness, and a discouraging gesture on the woman’s part, or even an indiscreet glance from a passer-by, was enough to make him desist.

But he came to realize from experience that what prevented him from finding love was not only his shyness but also his doubts and hesitations and even that ideal brought in from the country, put away in a corner but never quite abandoned. This ideal would suddenly appear when Alfonso had quite forgotten it and its
splendour
would make him despise his miserable reality.

He had an amorous adventure or two, but this was no sooner begun than he abruptly abandoned it due to either an awakening of moral conscience or merely a desire to avoid sacrificing his study-hours.

For some years he remembered with regret a girl called Maria, with fair hair of purest gold and a slim figure which seemed not to be affected by the shining weight she bore on her head. One evening he had accosted her and, bold like all timid people when forcing themselves to be brave, at once declared his love for her. Maria, who was, so she said, a companion to an old lady, must have been in a state similar to his own, for to his great surprise she listened seriously and with emotion to his wordy though sincere outburst of repressed emotion. She was due to leave a few days later, but as a result of his insistent begging, she granted him an appointment before that. Meanwhile, his evening study-hours had become the most important thing in his day. The
appointment
was during those hours, and at the last moment he decided not to go. Later he felt bitter regret, but could do nothing about it as he never saw her again.

Not that he renounced his skirt-chasing. It made him dream
better
. Then he grew ashamed of the habit and suffered a lot one day on realizing that Gustavo had guessed what he had been up to.

Till then he had been a kind of master to Gustavo. Wanting to help the Lanuccis, he had tried to lead him back in the right
direction
. The young man had listened seriously to Alfonso’s teaching but opposed it with his own firm and simple objections: work being usually hard and ill-paid, he preferred to live as a poor man and be free rather than as a slightly richer one and be a slave.

All of a sudden Alfonso found that he had become the pupil and the other the teacher.

“What fun d’you get out of it?” asked Gustavo in surprise,
interrupting
one of his pursuits of a woman.

Boorish though Gustavo was, he spoke serenely of subjects that were deeply moving and disturbing to Alfonso, who envied him. Though more adult and more intelligent, in this important aspect he was inferior. There was weakness in his disordered strength, while Gustavo’s thin, anaemic face shone with health and serenity.

Alfonso did not feel unhappy. He found happiness partly in study itself, partly in ambition, a hunger for glory. He felt himself superior to others, and though he did not yet know how he would gain this glory, fortified his hopes by a love of study which had become a passion. To his hours in the library were added as many more at home, and they were still not enough. Study invaded his office, lunch and supper hours, and was robbing him of many hours’ sleep every day.

During a particularly active phase he suggested giving Lucia lessons in Italian syntax. It would be pleasant to learn while
teaching
.

The suggestion sent the old Lanuccis into a flutter, and the father told Gustavo to join in these lessons too. He even became enthusiastic. He tried to show great diligence and made Alfonso dictate definitions of parts of speech which he intended
learning
by heart, sure that it was mere lack of preparation and not of intelligence that prevented him from understanding. Then he never appeared again and only remembered to excuse himself the first two times, though with good grace and repeating how much he had enjoyed that first lesson.

Signora Lanucci formally handed over Lucia to Alfonso. The first lessons were given in the living-room, the others in Alfonso’s room, as the living-room at some hours was not quiet enough. Alfonso took his duties seriously, and Signora Lanucci’s
enthusiasm
eventually persuaded him that he was also doing Lucia a real kindness by these lessons.

They had started with Puoti but soon changed the programme, both bored to death. Lucia had not understood a thing, and Alfonso knew it all.

For some time Alfonso had been reading Tommaseo’s synonyms. He decided to make Lucia study those instead of grammar.

“At least one doesn’t have any system to cope with,” he told her “though in fact there is one. One would never realize one had not
grasped it because it’s disconnected, every page and article
standing
on their own. Study these and one fine day you’ll find to your surprise that you’ve built up a whole building and conquered the Italian language …”

What he most loved in these lessons was giving introductory talks. After that both Lucia’s ignorance and the details of teaching bored and wearied him. Lucia managed to seem capable and clever for the first two lessons because she understood the many subtle differences between the words ‘abandon’ and ‘leave’. She took the huge volume with her and learnt that paragraph by heart. In the third lesson, seeing that the girl had followed him so easily till then, Alfonso declared that they could proceed more rapidly; about a quarter of the work was already known to him, and he was in a hurry to get to where he could begin learning himself. She wanted nothing better than to go a long way quickly. She loved him, or at least thought he loved her, which stirred her deeply. On his side Alfonso was quite fond of Lucia at that time; he had found no one to take Maria’s place, and Lucia acted as a substitute. He did not describe his longings but just taught her, and the dogmas and theories which he produced between
synonyms
were enough to relieve his bitterness. Lucia’s little face, not intelligent but attentive in a way that seemed to come more from homage than self-interest, made him forget Sanneo’s restless eyes and rough words.

Sometimes he was put out by Lucia’s ignorance and would become violent when he realized that his explanations were not understood or his former ones forgotten. Subtle distinctions did penetrate now and again into that brain of hers, but it was no home for them, and they left it again after a very short stay. If the same idea came up a second time, he had to introduce it formally all over again, and then the anger oozing from the teacher’s every pore destroyed the calm needed by the pupil for thought. When he asked her to repeat his explanations, she would raise her little nose, then, smiling but pale, say the opposite of what Alfonso had said, or hastily produce some phrases that had stuck in her mind without worrying much about their meaning. Alfonso, so as not to lose patience, would silently repeat maxims of goodness and tell himself that he must not offend someone of lesser intelligence.

“Lesser intelligence is something to be pitied,” he was shouting a week later. “But not lesser application!”

In fact the girl was no longer studying. With an immense effort her brain reached a certain point, then stopped because it was tired, almost saturated. When the lessons began, her mother, being used to school systems—in order to find her daughter enough time for this new occupation—had arranged a timetable by which an hour of the day was set aside for preparation. This hour the girl had regularly spent, not studying in her room, but with the rest of the family at table listening to her father’s stories. Then she would sit restlessly, nagged by her mother’s calls for more zeal, and by her own wish to make a good impression on Alfonso, and positively tortured by the fear he might shout at her if she stayed there! She did stay, from inertia, resigned to enduring Alfonso’s cutting observations and far preferring his blows, rather than
trying
to struggle by herself with concepts which he had explained only briefly. She could have learnt them by heart, but that was not enough; if she forgot one word, that was bound to be the essential one, according to Alfonso.

Alfonso was not a good teacher because he failed to appreciate any efforts by his pupil. He very rarely praised her and then only when sorry for some harsh word and hoping to avoid her tears, but never because of some answer that was nearly correct. He had deluded himself about a vocation for teaching, which he enjoyed not from any fondness for his pupil. Lucia’s progress was of little or no account to him. He was offended she did not learn more, and on irksome days, after having had to put up with others’ anger himself, he would have an outburst.

It was surprising Lucia did not lose patience and suspend those lessons, which caused her so much agony and were of such little use. She did not want to. In fact at the end of every lesson, when Alfonso, saying goodbye, became milder and treated her with his usual respect, she promised herself to study really hard so as to deserve such treatment during the lesson too. How lovely it would have been to spend that hour too as friends, admiring each other, which she could so easily do on her side. After that hour of forced effort, study seemed easier and more pleasant to her than it had before the lesson, which had helped to rub off the rust on her brain
formed during a day spent working at her sewing. She promised herself to get up earlier next morning to begin studying again; but night plunged her back into her usual lethargy.

No, she did not want the lessons suspended, but her dislike of them showed by the fact that she would snatch at any excuse to avoid one. On some evenings she had to visit a friend, and on many others, for lack of a better excuse, she felt unwell. One evening, Gustavo, seeing her pretending to be gloomy and listless since Alfonso’s entry, and not realizing the purpose of her
indisposition
, asked: “Been taken ill very sudden, haven’t you?”