Her Husband (6 page)

Giustino Boggiolo was saddled with the bother of those albums: he wrote in them instead of his wife. No one would be the wiser because he knew how to imitate Silvia’s handwriting and signature exactly. He copied excerpts from her already published books; or rather, in order not to have to leaf through them every time to find one, he had copied some into a notebook, and had even inserted some thought of his own here and there. Yes, some thought of his own that could pass among the many … At times he was tempted to secretly make some tiny little change in the quotations from his wife’s work. Reading articles in the newspapers by refined writers (as, for example, Betti, who had found so much to laugh about in Silvia’s prose), he had noticed that (who knows why) they capitalized certain letters. And so he too found something capitalizable in Silvia’s thoughts every once in a while, such as
life, death
, etc. There, a nice
L
, a magnificent
D
! If you can make a better impression with such little effort . . .

He skimmed through the notebook and, with the help of Signora Ely, chose four thoughts.

“This one … Listen to this!
‘We always say: Do what you should! But our inner Duty often affects those around us. What is Duty for us can be harmful to others. Therefore do what you must, but know what you are doing
.’”

“Stupendous!” exclaimed Signora Ely.

“It’s mine,” said Giustino.

And he transcribed it into one of those albums following Signora Ely’s dictation. “Duty” with a capital letter, twice. He rubbed his hands and then looked at his watch. “Ugh, I have to be in the office in twenty minutes.
Lectio brevis
, this morning.”

They sat, teacher and student, at the desk.

“Why do I do all this?” Giustino sighed. “Tell me.”

He opened the English grammar and handed it to Signora Ely.

“Negative form,” he began to recite with his eyes closed. “Present tense:
I do not go, thou dost not go, he does not go
.”

Thus began Silvia Roncella’s school for greatness: head maestro, her husband; temporary assistant, Ely Faciolli.

She submitted to it with admirable resignation.

She had always shrunk from looking deep into her soul. On some rare occasions when she tried it for an instant she almost feared going insane.

Entering into herself meant stripping her soul of all the usual pretenses and seeing life in a dry, frightening nudity. Like seeing that dear, good Signora Ely Faciolli without her blond wig, without makeup, nude. God, no, poor Signora Ely!

Then was that truth? No, not even that. Truth: a mirror that by itself sees nothing, and in which each person looks at himself, as he believes he is, as he imagines himself to be.

Well, then, she had a horror of that mirror where the image of her own soul, stripped of every necessary pretense, must also necessarily appear to her deprived of every glimmer of reason.

Many times when she couldn’t sleep, and while her husband and maestro was sleeping peacefully beside her, she would be suddenly attacked in the silence by a strange, unexpected terror that cut her breathing short and made her heart pound! What was very clear in the context of her daily existence would be rent in a second, allowing her to glimpse a very different reality, deprived of sense and purpose, when suspended in the night and in the emptiness of her soul. It was a horrible reality in its impassive and mysterious rawness in which all the ordinary fictitious connections of feelings and images separated and disintegrated.

Right at that terrible moment she would feel she was dying. She would feel all the horror of death and with a supreme effort would try to reestablish the ordinary awareness of things, to reconnect ideas, to feel alive again. But she no longer had faith in that ordinary awareness,
in those reconnected ideas, in that usual feeling of life, since she now knew they were illusions to enable one to live, and that underneath there was something else that cannot be seen except at the expense of dying or going insane.

For many days everything seemed different; nothing stimulated her desire anymore. In fact, nothing in life seemed desirable anymore. Time stood before her empty, gloomy, and somber, and everything in it, as though dumbfounded, waited for decay and death.

Often, as she meditated, she would arbitrarily fix her gaze on an object and closely observe it in detail, as though that object were of particular interest to her. At first her observation was merely mechanical: her physical eyes stared and concentrated on that object alone, as if to ward off every distraction and to help her mental eye in the meditation. But gradually that object would begin to take over. It would begin to live by itself, as though suddenly becoming conscious of all the details she had discovered, and it would detach itself from all connection with her and with things around it.

For fear of being besieged again by that different, horrible reality that lived beyond ordinary sight, almost outside the pattern of human reason, perhaps without any suspicion of human self-deception or with a condescending sympathy for it, she would immediately avert her gaze, but without being able to focus on any other object. She felt the horror of the sight. It seemed to her that her eyes could pierce everything. She closed them and anxiously searched her heart for any kind of help in reassembling the shattered fiction. However, in that unfamiliar confusion her heart withered. Nothing like the machine Zio Ippolito spoke of! She was unable to draw any idea from that deep dark feeling: she didn’t know how to reflect, or rather, she had never allowed herself to do so.

As a child she had witnessed painful scenes between her father and her mother, who had been a saintly woman entirely devoted to religious practices. She remembered her mother’s look as she pressed her rosary to her heart when her husband ridiculed her for her faith in God and for her lengthy prayers. She remembered the spasmodic contortion
of her mother’s face, almost as if by shutting her eyes she could shut out her husband’s blasphemies. Poor Mamma! And with what effort and tears she would then stretch out her arms to her little girl and draw her to her breast and stop her ears. Then just as soon as her father’s back was turned, her mother would have her kneel with hands joined and repeat a prayer to God that He might pardon that man whose honesty and goodness were surely a sign that he had Him in His heart and just didn’t want to acknowledge it outwardly! Yes, those were her mother’s words. How many times after her mother’s death had she repeated them! To have God in her heart and not want to acknowledge it outwardly. As a child she had always gone to church with her mother, and after her death had continued to go alone every Sunday. But hadn’t the same thing happened to her that had happened to her father? Did she really acknowledge God outwardly? She followed religious practices externally, like so many others. But what did she have inside? Like her father, a deep and dark feeling, a dread, the same that both had discerned in the other’s eyes when they stood over her dying mother’s bed. Now, of course, she tried to believe. But wasn’t God perhaps a supreme fiction created by this deep, dark feeling to calm itself? Everything, absolutely everything, was a fictional contrivance that you mustn’t tear apart, which you had to believe–not out of hypocrisy, but out of necessity–if you didn’t want to die or go crazy. But how could you believe, knowing it a pretense? Alas, without a purpose what sense did life have? Animals lived just to exist, but human beings couldn’t and didn’t know how to. Human beings had to live, not just to exist but for something fictitious, illusory, that gave meaning and value to their lives.

Back in Taranto the look of ordinary things, familiar to her from birth and becoming part of her daily life almost unconsciously, had never disturbed her very much, although she had discovered so many marvelous things hidden from others, shadows and lights that the others had never noticed. She would have liked to stay down there near her sea, in the house where she was born and grew up, where she could still see (but with the strange impression that it was someone else) another
self
that she struggled to recognize. She seemed to see herself from such a distance with another’s eyes and perceive herself as . . . she didn’t know how to put it … different … curious. . . . And that girl down there wrote? She had been able to write so many things? How? Why? Who had taught her? How could those things have occurred to her? She had read only a few books, and in none of them had she ever found a passage, an idea that had the vaguest resemblance to anything that had come to her to write, spontaneously, out of the blue. Perhaps she shouldn’t have written such things? Was it a mistake to write about them like that? She, or rather the girl down there, didn’t know. It would never have occurred to her to publish them if her father hadn’t discovered them and ripped them from her hands. At first she had been ashamed. She was afraid of seeming strange when she wasn’t at all. She knew how to do all the other things well enough: to cook, sew, look after the house, and she spoke so sensibly, then. . . . Oh, like all the other girls in town . .. However, there was something inside her, a crazy sprite that didn’t appear, because she herself didn’t want to hear its voice or follow its pranks, except at some leisurely moment during the day or in the evening before going to bed.

More than satisfaction at seeing her first book favorably received and warmly praised, she had felt a great confusion, an anguish, a befuddling consternation. Would she know how to write as before? When no longer writing only for herself? The thought of praise occurred to her and disturbed her; it came between her and the things she wanted to describe or portray. For about a year she hadn’t touched her pen. Then … oh, how she had rediscovered that little demon of hers grown and how wicked, malicious, discontented it had become. It had become such a bad demon that it almost frightened her, because now it wanted to talk loudly when it shouldn’t, and laugh at certain things that she, like the others in the daily business of living, would like to consider serious. Her inner battle had begun at that time. Then she met Giustino.

It was clear that her husband didn’t understand her, or rather, didn’t understand that part of herself that, in order not to appear different
from others, she kept locked inside, that she herself didn’t want to investigate or penetrate in depth. If some day this part got the upper hand in her where would it drag her? At first, when Giustino (though without understanding) had begun to urge her and force her to work, enticed by an unexpected source of revenue, she had been pleased, but really more for him than for herself. However, she would have liked him to stop there, and above all–after the stir caused by her novel
House of Dwarves
–not to have schemed and planned to come to Rome.

When she left Taranto, she had the impression that she was lost, and that it would take a tremendous effort to find herself again in such a vastly different life. How would she do it? She didn’t understand herself yet, and didn’t want to. She would have to talk, to be on exhibit … to say what? She was ignorant of everything. What was deliberately provincial, primitive, homely in her had rebelled, especially when the first signs of pregnancy appeared. How she had suffered during that banquet, on display as if at a fair! She had appeared to herself like a badly assembled windup mechanism. For fear that she might go off any moment she held herself in with all her strength. But then the thought that inside this automaton the germ of a life was growing for which she would soon have such tremendous responsibility had given her sharp pangs of remorse and had made the spectacle of that fatuous and foolish vanity unbearable.

Once the bewilderment and confusion of the first days had passed she had begun to walk around Rome with Zio Ippolito. What nice conversations they had had! What delightful explanations her uncle had given her! It had been a great comfort having him in Rome with her.

It was enough merely to utter this name–Rome–for many to feel obligated to express their admiration and enthusiasm. Yes, she had also admired it, but with a constant feeling of sadness. She had admired the solitary villas guarded by cypresses, the silent gardens on the Celio and Aventino hills, the tragic solemnity of the ruins and of certain ancient roads like the Appian Way, the clear freshness of the Tiber. She had little interest in what men had done and said to shore up
their greatness in their own eyes. And Rome . . . yes, was also a large prison where the more exaggerated the prisoners’ talk and gestures, the smaller and clumsier they appeared.

She still sought refuge in the most humble occupations, applying herself to the most modest and simple, almost elemental, things. She knew she couldn’t say what she would wish, what she was thinking, because that same wish and thought often made no sense even to her, if she reflected a little.

To keep Giustino from sulking, she forced herself to be cheerful, to strike a certain attitude, to maintain a certain humor. She read, she read a lot, but among the many books only Gueli’s were able to interest her greatly. There was a man who must have an inner demon similar to hers but was much more learned!

It wasn’t enough for Giustino that she read. He also wanted her to feel comfortable speaking French and to practice it with Signora Ely Faciolli, who knew many languages, and to go to museums and galleries of ancient and modern art with her in order to be able to speak about such things if the occasion arose. He also wanted her to take more interest in her appearance and even to do her hair better, for goodness sake!

Sometimes she started laughing in front of the mirror. She was fascinated by her reflection. Oh, why did she have to be like this, with this face, this body? She would raise her hand unconsciously, and the gesture would remain there suspended in the air. It seemed strange that it was she who had performed that gesture.
She watched herself live
. With that suspended gesture she resembled a statue of an ancient orator she had seen (she didn’t know who he was) as she went up the steps of the Quirinal one day from Via Dataria. That orator, with a rolled parchment in one hand and the other hand outstretched in a solemn gesture, seemed astonished that he had remained there as stone for so many centuries, suspended in that attitude before all those people going up and down those steps. What a strange impression it had made on her! She had been in Rome only a few days. One February noon. Pale sun on the wet gray stones of the deserted Quirinal piazza. Only the sentry
and a carabiniere at the Royal Palace door. (Perhaps at that time of day the king was yawning inside his palace.) Under the obelisk, among the great prancing horses, the fountain murmured. And, as though the encircling silence had suddenly spread into the distance, she had the impression that the incessant roar was her own sea. She turned: on the cordon in front of the palace she saw a chipper sparrow hopping around on the stone pavement, shaking its little head. Did it also feel a strange emptiness in that silence, like a mysterious pause in time and life, and, looking on it in fear, want reassurance?

She was very familiar with this sudden and fortunately brief and silent sinking into the mysterious abyss. However, the impression of awful dizziness lasted a long time, in conflict with the stability of things (so misleading): ambitious and yet paltry appearances. The small, everyday life wandering among these appearances then seemed unreal to her, like a magic lantern show. Why give them importance? Why treat them with respect, that respect, that importance that Giustino wanted?

And yet, one has to live. . . . Yes, she realized that he, her husband, was basically right and she was wrong to be that way. She must now do as he did. And she decided to do as he wished and let herself be led, conquering her distaste and making herself appear to favor what he had done and was doing for her.

Poor Giustino! So economical and moderate. The expense of putting her on display didn’t even bother him…. That beautiful dress he had secretly bought and had altered for her! And now she had to go to Marchesa Lampugnani’s house against her will, squarely against her will? Yes, yes, she would go. Like a mannequin in that beautiful new dress: a mannequin not very presentable, not very … slender right now, but never mind! If he really believed it necessary, she was ready to go.