Inevitable (4 page)

I
N THE HOTEL
, however, he talked politely to Cornélie as if there had been no edgy exchanges or petty tiff between them, and he even asked her quite naturally—since Mama and his sisters had a call to make that afternoon—if they could go to the Palatine together.

“I was there recently,” she said nonchalantly.

“And aren’t you going to visit the ruins?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“They don’t interest me. I just can’t see anything of the past in them. All I see are ruins.”

“But then why did you come to Rome?” he asked in annoyance.

She looked at him, and could have burst out sobbing.

“I don’t know,” she said humbly. “I could have gone elsewhere … But I had expected so much of Rome, and Rome is a disappointment.”

“How’s that?”

“I find Rome hard and relentless, and without feeling. I don’t know why, but that’s the impression I get. And at present I’m in the sort of mood where on the contrary I need something sensitive and soft.”

He smiled.

“Come on,” he said. “Come with me to the Palatine. I must show you Rome. Rome is so beautiful.”

She felt too sad to be alone, and she quickly dressed 
and left the hotel with him. Outside the coachmen cracked their whips. “
Vuole, vuole?
” they cried.

He chose one.

“This is Gaetano,” he said. “I always take him, he knows me, don’t you, Gaetano?”

“
Si, signorino. Cavallo di sangue, signorina!
” said Gaetano, pointing to his horse.

They set off.

“I’m always afraid of those coachmen,” said Cornélie.

“You don’t know them,” he replied, smiling. “I like them. I like ordinary people. They’re nice people.”

“You like everything about Rome.”

“And you are giving in unreservedly to a false impression.”

“Why false?”

“Because that initial impression of Rome, of hardness and insensitivity, is always the same and always wrong.”

“I find Rome difficult.”

“Oh yes. Look, we’re passing the Forum.”

“When I see it, I think of Miss Hope and her orange lining.”

He said nothing, angry.

“And here is the Palatine.”

They got out of the carriage and went through the entrance.

“This wooden staircase takes us to the palace of Tiberius. Above this palace, above these arches, is a garden, from where we have a view of the Forum.”

“Tell me about Tiberius. I know there were good and bad emperors. We learned that at school. Tiberius was a bad emperor, wasn’t he?”

“He was a morose monster. But why must I tell you about him?”

“Because otherwise I have no interest in those arches and chambers.”

“Then let’s go and sit upstairs, in the garden.”

And that was what they did.

“Can’t you feel Rome here?” he asked.

“Everywhere I feel myself,” she replied.

But he did not seem to hear her.

“It’s the atmosphere,” he went on. “You should forget our hotel for a change, Belloni and all our fellow-guests, and yourself. When someone first arrives, they have all the fuss of a hotel, rooms, restaurants, vaguely sympathetic or uncongenial people. That’s what you had. Forget it. And try to just feel the atmosphere of Rome. It’s as though the atmosphere has stayed the same here, despite the fact that the centuries are piled one on top of the other. Once the Middle Ages covered the antiquity of the Forum, and now it is hidden everywhere by our nineteenth-century mania for tourism. That is Miss Hope’s orange lining. But the atmosphere has remained the same throughout. Or am I imagining it? …”

She said nothing.

“Perhaps,” he continued. “But what do I care? Our life is imagination, and imagination is beautiful. The beauty of our imagination belongs to us, who are not people of substance, our life’s consolation. How marvellous to dream all one’s life, dream about what happened in the past. The past is what is beautiful. The present is not real, does not exist. And the future doesn’t interest me.”

“Don’t you think about modern issues then?” she asked.

“Feminism?” he asked. “Socialism? Peace?”

“For example.”

“No,” he smiled. “I think of them sometimes, but not about them.”

“What do you mean?”

“I can’t get on with them. That’s the way I am. My nature is to dream, and the Past is my great dream.”

“Don’t you dream about yourself?”

“No. About my soul? My innermost core? No. It doesn’t interest me much.”

“Have you ever suffered?”

“Suffered? Yes, no. I don’t know. I suffer about my complete uselessness as a human being, as a son, as a man, but when I dream, I’m happy.”

“How do you come to be speaking so frankly to me?”

He looked at her in astonishment.

“Why should I hide?” he asked. “I either don’t talk, or I talk as I am talking now. Perhaps it’s a bit peculiar.”

“So do you speak so confidentially to everyone?”

“No, to almost no one. I used to have a friend, but he’s dead. Tell me, I expect you find me a pathological case?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“It wouldn’t matter to me if you did. Oh, how beautiful it is here. Are you breathing in the spirit of Rome?”

“What Rome?”

“The Rome of antiquity. Below us is the palace of Tiberius. I can see him walking along with his prying eyes—he was very strong, very morose, and he was a monster. He had no ideals. Further that way is the palace of Caligula, a brilliant madman. He built a bridge over the Forum to be able to speak to Jupiter on the Capitol.

You couldn’t do that today. He was brilliant and crazy. If you’re like that, you have much that is wonderful.”

“How can you find an age of emperors who were monsters and mad, wonderful?”

“Because I can see their age before me, in the past, as a dream.”

“How can you possibly not see the present before you, and the issues of this age, especially that of eternal poverty?”

He looked at her.

“Yes,” he said. “I know, that is the rottenness in me, the sin. The notion of eternal poverty doesn’t affect me.”

She looked at him, almost with contempt.

“You are not of your age,” she said coolly.

“No …”

“Have you ever been hungry?”

He laughed and shrugged his shoulders.

“Have you ever put yourself in the place of a worker, or factory girl, working till they’re exhausted, old, half dead for scarcely a crust of bread?”

“Oh, those things are so gruesome and so ugly: don’t talk about them!” he begged.

Her eyes were cool, her lips pursed with disgust and she got up.

“Are you angry?” he asked meekly.

“No,” she said softly. “I’m not angry …”

“But do you despise me for being a useless creature full of aestheticism and daydreams?”

“No. Who am I to blame you for your uselessness?”

“Oh, if only we could find something!” he exclaimed, almost in rapture.

“What?”

“A goal. But mine would always remain beauty. And the past.”

“And if
I
had the strength to devote myself to a goal, then the main aim would be: bread for the future.”

“How awful that sounds!” he said, impolite in his honesty. “Why on earth didn’t you go to London or Manchester, or some black industrial hole?”

“Because I didn’t have the strength and think too much about myself, about the unhappiness I’ve just been through. And I thought I would find some distraction in Italy.”

“And that’s your disappointment … But perhaps you’ll gradually grow stronger, and you’ll devote yourself to your goal: bread for the Future. I shan’t envy you, though: Bread for the Future …”

She was silent, and he said coolly,

“It’s getting late. Let’s go home …”

D
UCO VAN DER
S
TAAL
had rented a large, cavernous studio in Via del Babuino, three flights up, north-facing and chilly. Here he painted, modelled, studied, here he gathered together everything beautiful and ancient he could find in the shops along the Tiber or in the Mercato dei Fiori. It was his passion: hunting through Rome for a portion of an old triptych or an ancient fragment of sculpture. In this way his studio had not remained the great, cold, echoing workplace that testifies to diligent and serious study, but had become a refuge for a vaguely coloured past and classical art, a museum for his dreamy spirit. Even as a child, as a boy, he had felt this passion for antiquity growing in himself, had nosed around in the shop of an old Jew, had learned to haggle when he was short of cash, and collected at first worthless trinkets, later, slowly, objects of artistic and financial value. He was a devotee: it was his only vice: he spent all his pocket money on it, and later, without reservations, the little he earned. Because sometimes, very occasionally, he completed something and sold it. But usually he was too dissatisfied with himself to finish things, and it was his humble idea that everything had already been created, and that
his
art was useless.

This idea sometimes paralysed him for months, without making him unhappy. As long as he had a little money to keep body and soul together—and his needs
were extremely few—he felt rich and was happy in his studio or wandered happily through Rome. His tall, nonchalant, sinewy and slim body would be dressed in his oldest suit, which, without affectation, revealed a slovenly sports shirt and a tie like a length of string; a hat of indeterminate colour and bedraggled shape was his favourite headgear.

His mother and sisters did not usually consider him presentable, but had given up trying to transform him into the elegant son and brother that they would have loved to take into the drawing-rooms of their Roman acquaintances. Happy to breathe in the atmosphere of Rome he wandered for hours among the ruins, and saw—a dazzling vision of dreamy columns—ethereal temples and palaces of marble rising transparently in a shimmering sunny twilight, and tourists following a trail taken from their Baedeker who passed this tall, skinny young man sitting nonchalantly on the foundations of the temple of Saturn would never have believed his illusions about architecture: harmoniously rising lines, crowned with a theory of sculpture of noble, divine gestures, high in the blue sky.

He saw them in front of him. He sent the shafts of the columns soaring upwards, he fluted the severe Doric column, he bent the soft Ionic capital around it, and made the Corinthian acanthus spread its leaves; and the temples shot upwards on their columns in a trice; the basilicas arched upwards as if by magic, the statues gestured white against the elusive depth of the sky, and the Via Sacra was alive. He found it beautiful, he was living in his dream, his Past. It was as if he had had a previous existence in
ancient Rome, and did not see the modern houses, the modern Capitol and all of them surrounding the grave of his Forum, before his eyes. He could sit like that for hours, or wander, or sit down again and be happy. In the intensity of his imagination he evoked history, it rose like a cloud from the past, at first like a fog, a magic mist, from which the figures soon emerged clearly, against the marble background of ancient Rome. The gigantic dramas were enacted before his dreaming eyes as if on an ideal stage, which extended from the Forum to the hazy sundrenched blues of the Campagna; with wings that were submerged in the depths of the sky. Roman life came alive in gestures, in the movement of an arm in a toga, a line of Horace, a sudden vision of the assassination of an emperor or a gladiatorial contest in the arena. And just as suddenly the image faded, and he saw the ruins, just the ruins, as the tangible shadow of his unreal illusion: he saw the ruins as they were, discoloured brown and grey, eaten away with age, crumbling, tortured, mutilated by sledgehammers, until only a few columns still stood shaking under the weight of a trembling architrave, and threatened to collapse. And the brown and grey was so richly gilded by streaks of sunlight, the ruins were so splendid as they crumbled, so melancholy in the unconscious randomness of their broken lines, cracked arches and defaced sculpture, that it was as if he himself, after his airy vision of radiant dream architecture, had tortured them with his artist’s hand, and caused them to crack, and shake and tremble, for the sake of the melancholy afterglow. Then his eyes would grow moist, his heart would overflow and he would walk away, under the arch of Titus past the Colosseum, on through
Constantine’s arch, and hurry past the Lateran to the Via Appia and the Campagna, and his stinging eyes would drink in the blue of the distant Alban hills, as if that could cure them of too much gazing and dreaming …

Neither in his mother nor in either of his sisters could he find any trace of sympathy for his eccentric inclinations, and after that one friend who had died, he had never found another and as if by predestination that never allowed him to encounter sympathy, he had borne an inner and outer solitude. But he had populated his solitude so densely with his dreams that he had never felt unhappy, and just as he enjoyed wandering alone among ruins and along byways, he also loved the intimacy of his solitary studio, with a multitude of silent silhouettes on an old fragment of triptych, on a tapestry or on the many sketches fixed to the wall close together, all around him, all with the charm of their lines and colours, all with the silent gesture of their movement and emotion, and merging with the gloom of crannies and the shade of ancient cabinets. And among these dwelt his porcelain and bronze and antique silver, and the tarnished gold braid of an ecclesiastical robe shone dully, and the leather bindings of old books stood in a cheerful row, books from which, opened in his hands, the many figures rose up in a mist, living out their love and pain in those muted browns and golds of the silent atmosphere of the studio. Such was his simple life, without much self-doubt, since he did not demand too much of himself, and without the melancholy of a modern artist, because he was happy in his reflections. He had never met many people, despite the hotel existence he shared with his mother and sisters—he slept and ate at Belloni—or
dealt with strangers, and by nature he was rather wary of tourists with Baedekers, of English ladies in short skirts, with their identical exclamations of identical admiration, and felt entirely out of place in the circle—half Italian, half cosmopolitan—of his quite worldly mother and elegant sisters, who danced and cycled with Italian princes and young dukes.

And now that he had met Cornélie de Retz he had to admit how little he knew about people and how he could never have conceived of the nature of such a woman—in a book perhaps, but not in reality. Her very appearance—her pallor, the fragile charm, her weariness—had astonished him, and what she said astonished him even more: the conviction and at the same time hesitancy, the artistic sensibility yet the striving to speak in a voice appropriate to her age: an age that he had not yet been able to see as an artist, infatuated as he was with Rome and the Past. And her words astonished him, with their congenial sound, and irritated though he often was by that often bitter, cutting, and then again dull and discouraged tone, until he thought about them again and again, until in his mind he heard them again from her own lips, until she joined the heads and torsos of his studio, and loomed up before him in the soft
lily-like
presence of her perceived reality, amid the
Pre-Raphaelite
stiffness of lines, and Byzantine golds of the angels and Madonnas, in canvases and tapestries.

His heart had never known love and he had always regarded it as imagination and poetry. In his life there had never been anything but the natural urge of his manhood and the usual affair with a model. And his ideas about
love wavered in too broad and too unreal an equilibrium, without transition or gradation, between a woman who would strip naked for a few lire and Laura; between the desire for a beautiful body and exultation over Beatrice, between flesh and dream. He had never thought of a meeting of soulmates; had never longed for affection, love in the full, burgeoning sense of the word and the concept. And he was not aware that he was now thinking, a great deal, about Cornélie de Retz. In the past he had thought for days, a week about a woman in a poem; never yet about a woman in real life.

And the fact that, though annoyed by some of her words, he nevertheless saw her image with its lily-like outline against his Byzantine triptychs, like a phantom in his dreamer’s solitude, almost frightened him, since it had deprived him of his peace of mind.