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Authors: Iris Murdoch

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BOOK: The Italian Girl
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‘No,’ I said, ‘and now –’ In fact I was interested in what he had said and extremely haunted by the tattered image of the poor deranged girl. I could indeed understand what might fascinate Otto here.

‘You see there are two kinds of Jews,’ Levkin went on, walking very close just behind me. ‘There are the Jews that suffer and the Jews that succeed, the dark Jews and the light Jews. She is a dark Jew. I am a light Jew. I will work, I will succeed. I will succeed in art, or else in business, perhaps in art business. I will earn enormous money. I will not remember. I will not remember anything. She is all memory – she remembers so much, she remembers the memories that are not her own. She thinks she is the other ones, the ones that suffer and die. So she will suffer, so she will die young, I do fear it. But I will leave all that. I will levitate myself in the world. I will live in the world of light.’

‘How long has this been going on, with my brother?’

‘Oh, long, months and months, since we are here.’

‘Does anyone know except you?’

‘Wait, wait, Mr Edmund. Do not walk so fast. No, no one knows, no one but me.’

‘Well, keep it so,’ I said. ‘Good day.’

We had now reached the edge of the garden and I turned from him quickly across the lawn. The sun had dried the dew. The worms were gone. I felt disturbed, exhilarated. I wanted to think about what had happened to me. Yet of course it was no business of mine. I did not belong here, I was going away soon, perhaps that very day – and with that I suddenly remembered Flora. I looked at my watch and could hardly believe my eyes. It was after ten o’clock. I began to run towards the house.

It was suddenly incomprehensible to me that I could have simply forgotten my rendezvous with the child. I had been, when I went to bed last night, so full of it, I could think of nothing else. Yet somehow the weird night scene, the crazy princess and the delinquent Levkin’s chatter had so seduced and absorbed my imagination that what was most important had gone quite out of my head. I ran into the house.

Flora’s room was my old room. I ran to it with pounding steps, shaking the place. Surely she must still be there waiting. I knocked quickly and opened the door.

The little desk-table was laid neatly for breakfast with two plates and several bowls of fruit: apples, bananas, oranges, apricots. There was also bread, butter, Swiss cherry jam, and a big jug of milk. Flora had laid it all out with loving care. But she herself was gone. I came in more slowly. There was a note propped up on the table.
I waited and you did not come. F.
I sat down heavily on the bed, utterly horrified with myself.

I looked up and saw someone looking at me. ‘Oh, Maggie – she’s gone. You say she looked for me everywhere? The bus, just before ten, of course.’

The Italian girl looked at me with the distant air of a servant and a familiar, with an unsmiling impersonal reticence. The grave undemanding face, the anonymous black dress, the trailing bun of hair: nothing could be more unlike the place where my imagination had just been roaming. She came forward and began to put Flora’s little breakfast on to the tray. I slunk from the room.

8. Otto Confesses

‘I dreamt last night,’ said Otto, ‘that there was a sort of big snake in the house. I could hear it slithering from room to room after me, and I was running to get to the telephone. I closed the last door against it, and tried to telephone the police. But the dial was full of insects, and wherever I put my finger there were quantities of beetles and woodlice and I couldn’t dial properly without crushing them. So I didn’t dial, and then this snake –’

‘Where’s Flora gone?’

‘I’ve no idea,’ said Otto. ‘Has she gone? I imagine she’s gone back to college. She’s so casual with us now, she just comes and goes as she pleases. You’d better ask Isabel. In my dream, the woodlice were the kind that roll up, and –’

‘Otto, last night –’

‘Yes, I know. David told me.’

I had searched for Flora in vain. I had taken the next bus to the railway station, I had telephoned the college, the hostel where she usually stayed, I had even asked for Mr Hopgood, but no one at the other end seemed to have heard of him. In fact, I had little hope of tracing her: she had run away, she would hide. She had said that she would do what I told her, she had asked me to look after her: and at the crucial moment I had allowed my mind to be too full of other things. It seemed to me that I had undergone some sort of dubious enchantment, I had been, almost as if purposely, captured by magicians. Yet I knew this was but a false excuse. If my heart and mind had been sufficiently full of Flora and her needs I could not possibly have forgotten to look at the time. I knew too that the scene in the summer-house had excited me extremely. I was affected by some old sense of the connexion of Otto’s life with mine, a sense of our being, though so dissimilar, identical. I but too perfectly understood the attraction to which my brother had succumbed. I felt pity, and yet I also felt myself degraded, tarnished.

It was also now clear that I could not go away. I was a prisoner of the situation. Earlier in the day, wandering in a state of aimless lassitude, I had been sharply tempted to depart. Flora was gone, Isabel was lying down and would see no one, Otto was still immured in the summer-house. I felt awkward, alien, excluded. There was nothing I could do for these people. Yet, ardently as I desired to go, and even as I advised myself to return to my simple world before something worse should happen to me, I knew I could not. It was my duty to stay: that harsh word riveted me to the spot. But it was not only that. I realized with alarm that I
wanted
to stay. I was becoming myself a part of the machine.

It was then that I decided I must speak to Otto about last night. The brother and the sister would probably have told him of my apparition. But I felt that I must, if I was in any honesty to remain, have it out with him myself. I decided this in some trepidation, for I knew how sudden and how violent Otto’s rages could be. I had of course no intention of telling him anything about Flora. I could not even decide to speak of that to Isabel. I kept wandering about and visiting the workshop until Otto appeared there, very dishevelled, about five o’clock. I conjectured how he had spent the afternoon. I found that I could not help being curious, though I disliked the curiosity and hoped it would not be too evident to him.

I had come in to find Otto opening a bottle of whisky. He had filled a glass jug with water from the water butt and was gloomily inspecting the brownish liquid in which various small animals were swimming round. He carefully poured some of the water into a glass, trying to retain the animals in the jug. It was not easy. He then filled the glass up with whisky and sat down on a bale of packing straw. The bale sank abruptly in the middle, leaving Otto sitting almost on the ground, lying back cradled in the straw. He looked helpless, like an enormous baby. I sat down on some blocks of Westmorland slate.

‘Yes, David told me,’ said Otto thoughtfully, staring at his muddy drink. He sighed and drank some. ‘The trouble about becoming an alcoholic is that ordinary states of consciousness are simply a torment. I suppose that
is
being an alcoholic. You keep off it, Ed.’

‘I do.’ I decided to let him pursue the matter if he wanted to. I could see him debating, looking at me, looking back to his drink. The long woollen pants emerging from his trousers camouflaged his dusty boots. His dirty shirt was open at the neck, revealing the familiar vests. Isabel must long ago have ceased to interest herself in his wardrobe.

‘So you saw my
malin genie’
.

‘Yes.’ I could think of no comment on her. She had fascinated me. But there was little point in telling Otto that. I added, ‘Levkin said – no one knows.’

‘He exaggerates as usual,’ said Otto. ‘Isabel knows
something
is up, I suppose. I think Isabel just tries not to think about me. So she doesn’t bother about the details. And the Italian girl must know, she’s not an idiot. Flora doesn’t, of course, thank God, she’s been away.’

‘Did Lydia know?’ I suddenly could not imagine Lydia tolerating anything of the sort; and the curious pain which the discovery had given me changed into a mourning for her. She was gone indeed.

‘No –’ said Otto slowly. ‘You see,’ he said, ‘I did try very hard to stop. I can’t explain this thing to you Ed. You probably think I’m mad. But it’s like nothing I’ve ever known. I’ve never had a really complete absolutely perfect physical relation with a woman before. You may think I’m a poor fish for that, but it’s the truth.’

I had myself never had anything approaching a perfect physical relationship with a woman, but I was not going to tell Otto that. ‘And this is – very good?’

‘It’s a miracle. It’s completely changed me. My whole body. I know I look like the wreck of the Hesperus, but I feel radiant, as if I had an angelic body. While with Isabel – well, Isabel always made me feel I was disgusting. With her I
was
disgusting, I was a pig, I felt unclean. With Elsa – everything I am and do is beautiful. Oh, I can’t explain. But –’

‘But you feel guilt?’

‘I suppose that’s it,’ said Otto dubiously. ‘After all, we are puritans.’ He drank up the whisky and floundered in the straw trying to reach the bottle. I passed it to him. ‘Passion is its own excuse. At first there wasn’t any time for guilt, any place for such a thought. And I made her so happy. I was on my knees with gratitude every day. It seemed so good, so
human.
But then when Lydia got very ill –’

‘It was more painful to – deceive?’

‘Not just that. I deceived everyone cheerfully at the start. No, it was deeper. I could not go on making love when Lydia was dying. I felt I wanted to disown my body. It was a dreadful sort of physical torment. Oh, Ed, you were lucky not to see Lydia dying. She didn’t want to, you know.’

I preferred not to think of this. ‘So you tried to break things off?’

‘With Elsa, yes. And it wasn’t only Lydia. Of course I was scared stiff of Flora finding out, it could do her such awful damage. But it was Isabel too in a funny way. I know Isabel and I ought never to have got married, we’re about as unsuited to each other as two people could possibly be. But Isabel’s stuck by me, in her way. She’s got a sort of – brave dignity. I don’t know if you understand me. Lydia was such hell to her. And this thing has become such a
mess
; and if one starts thinking in terms of the future, it has no future.’

‘You wouldn’t think of marrying Elsa?’

‘Good God no!’ said Otto violently. ‘I want with Elsa just
that.
And it’s not just lust, it’s good, it’s beautiful, for both of us, it’s something in the truth. I’d always really felt sex was wrong – but not with her. I feel I’m in that way, in the truth for the first time in my life. I married Isabel with a hundred lies in me, and it’s been worse since. This thing with Elsa was like a sort of redemption, a wonderful return to the beginning. But you see it’s no good, it’s doomed. There’s no place for it, I can’t go on living it, it’s not eternal, it has to have a beginning, a middle and an end. There isn’t anywhere for me to
go
with Elsa, there’s no road. And as soon as I realized
that
I felt I ought to stop it. I expect you think I’m simply justifying a piece of bestiality –’

I was far from thinking that. I thought I knew what Otto meant about being ‘in the truth’. I had never, in anything directly to do with sex, been anywhere near that truth myself. ‘No, no. But I can understand that once you clearly put it to yourself that it had no future – After all such things can’t last – ’ I felt very sorry for Otto and grateful to him for talking to me frankly.

‘And yet you see,’ said Otto, ‘how can I leave her, how
can
I? The thing is both essential and totally impossible. I tried to break things off in the spring, well I did break them off. But I never really explained anything to her. And she sort of accepted it because she thought it was temporary and just because of Lydia. But now – I can’t announce to her that she must go, I
can’t.
And now it’s all beginning to be poisoned. The innocent time is over. And yet it still gets stronger every day, the bond, the chain, the machine. I’m terrified that she’ll begin to feel, to be, my vice.’

‘The dreaming Eve of Gislebertus –’

‘Yes, I spoke of that, didn’t I. It was really her I meant, Elsa. I know she’s an innocent being, and I say that although I know what she did before she met me. I know she’s innocent, and yet she sometimes seems to me the incarnation of pure evil. I’m sorry, this sounds mad. I know it’s my own evil of course that I project out on to her. But I do see her as a demon. “But to the girdle do the gods inherit –” I know it’s something to do with my own horror of sex and my own real beastliness – but there are moments when I could positively kill her.’ Otto was shaking, his eyes goggling, his jaw trembling. His mouth pullulated in his face like a live animal. He struggled up to a sitting position in the straw, spilling the whisky over his jacket.

I felt nervous for him, of him. I was afraid he might even now break down in some alarming way. I was deliberately calm. ‘Is she really so deeply attached to you? When you say you
can’t
leave her –’

‘Oh yes, she loves me,’ said Otto. ‘I think I’m the first thing she has really loved. Perhaps she can only love a sort of Caliban. And I am father, brother, son, lover to her. But it isn’t only that. I pity her so much. I am so very sorry for her. And that somehow makes it impossible for me to abandon her. Whatever would she become? And I cannot bear her tears, they are intolerable. I pity in her the whole world’s sorrow, somehow.’

‘You could pity that in anyone,’ I said rather impatiently. ‘You pity her – and yet she is – your vice?’

‘These things are very closely connected you know,’ said Otto. ‘Desolation, dereliction, muddle, sin. I can’t reach her sort of despair because when I pity her I despise her. I suppose again it’s really something in myself. I feel myself victim, muddler, sinner all in one. Ah, if I could only separate these things. That’s what I meant about giving up drink.’

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