A Life (16 page)

Suddenly he realized he was soaked to the skin and far from home. Was it true then? He felt he would have been less agitated had he been in no doubt. He would have made up his mind how to behave, and maybe still get some satisfaction from his misfortune, carried his head high, repaid indifference by indifference, been hurt and hurt in his turn by showing himself unharmed. Annetta was capable of triumphing by the pain she brought him.

She was just as Macario had described her! Cold and vain, vain before all else. Was he not holding at that moment the proof of her vanity, that novel dictated by vanity in person, from its silly vacuous concepts to each of its emphatic phrases, attempts at flight by someone who did not know how to walk? No mere spirit of vengeance made him think of her like that now. Once fallen from the height in which his love had put her, he thought he saw her as she was.

On reaching home he found a note from Annetta asking him to call next day.

“Dear friend!” The opening alone should have been enough to change his mood and give him immense joy. Instead he read and reread it, trying to find what was not there—an assurance that he was wrong in fearing Fumigi and doubting Annetta’s love for
himself
. That note did not exclude disaster, or if it did momentarily, it was no destruction of the threat. He could not regain his calm
or even enjoy being much happier than he had been just before. Sorrow, particularly when over, has its attractions, and those with weak ambitions find a satisfaction in dressing up in it. Could he get happiness from this situation when chance had revealed the disaster that this very situation could be to him? He could always be thrown aside like a useless object; as soon as Annetta neglected him, he would again become a poor little clerk without even a right to show his suffering.

Not that it was suffering which had sent him wandering over the streets of the city shortly before, but the great emotion of self-pity. If Fumigi had been rejected, his relationship with Annetta would continue apparently unchanged; while in reality his jealousy, his fears, the threat of change, made it unendurable. There was only one way to get out of such a situation. He could withdraw first and, however painful such a renunciation, be able at least to think back over the whole adventure without blushing, without a
feeling
of offence. Even so, it would not be a pleasant memory. He would never be able to forget Annetta’s hardness and vanity,
discovered
, it seemed, that very moment. The experience he had been through was harsh and would serve him for the whole of his life. Now he wanted to return to his plain habits, to the ideal of work and solitude contested by no one. That was happiness. Habit and regularity would give it.

But when he was with Annetta, when she shook his hand with the same sweet smile with which she had bade him farewell a few days ago as if there were nothing in the meantime to disturb their good relations, he forgot his intentions. There was another way of dealing with that situation, he now understood, apart from giving up the whole thing. His only regret was that he could not blurt out all that he had suspected in the last few days so as to provoke an explanation which might lose him Annetta’s friendship, but could also reaffirm, re-awaken it as love. Meanwhile shyness allowed him only to express calm and cordiality.

They were in the living-room and alone because Francesca was unwell. Annetta talked about a chapter of the novel, made some suggestions; Alfonso approved these and without any effort was able to make a show of admiration. It was not a moment for agitated criticism. Annetta needed advice because she was finding
difficulty in making headway with a plot that was now tending to the absurd. Her hero and heroine were still passionately in love with each other and not saying so out of pride. This confession would end the novel, and Annetta’s little head was beginning to fail in ideas of what to do next.

Suddenly Alfonso became talkative. He needed to talk, and began holding forth about the novel and his admiration for Annetta’s ideas. When people shout, it does not matter what they say; the voice provides the outlet. Alfonso was soothed by the flow of his own words, and such pauses as he made were from
calculation
and from an idea that if he did not let Annetta talk, he would learn nothing about her. Eventually, and with a cold calculation which at once took him to his goal, Alfonso began animatedly describing his life every day, coming to the conclusion that his happy hours had added up to no more than a few days in one whole year, counting among these all the hours he had spent at the Mallers.

At his request Annetta described how she had spent the last week. When she began, Alfonso flushed and stared, as mere listening did not seem enough. He wanted to guess at what point in her account she would think of Fumigi, and to see her
expression
when she did.

That week she had been to the theatre twice. But she had also a number of dull evenings, on one of which she had been on the point of sending for him to raise her from her boredom with philosophical talk and work together on the novel.

“I’d have loved to come!” murmured Alfonso in a voice
suffocated
with emotion.

“Yes?” asked Annetta, also blushing. “Another time then, we’re agreed?”

This gave Alfonso a lion’s courage.

“Nothing else?” he murmured when she had finished
describing
her week.

“Nothing else!” replied Annetta in surprise, suddenly going pale.

“I’ve spent a horrid week,” said Alfonso in a deep voice.

He told her he had heard a disaster was hanging over him and had at first not believed this; then he kept on coming up against
indications confirming the threat, so that when he heard this had been avoided, he refused to believe it because he had so long
considered
it inevitable. Indeed he still doubted it. He described this succession of events so faithfully that, on remembering his pain, tears came to his eyes, and he had to stop talking.

It was his declaration; and when Alfonso thought it over later, he had to smile because it was certainly not love which had brought tears to his eyes, but, as always with him, self-pity. Although no longer speaking, tears were pouring down his cheeks, and he did not dry them because the gesture would show them to Annetta, who might not have noticed. This was the second time that he wept in front of her; the first time the results had not been very flattering.

“Tears!” exclaimed Annetta moved. “Am I the cause?”

Wanting to soothe him, she took him affectionately by the hand. The gesture, not the contact, not the pleasure of desire, made Alfonso happy. It destroyed his misery about the coldness of his relations with Annetta, and the change from his own idea of those relations to these real ones in which Annetta now acted as
consoler
was so sharp that he had to close his eyes. He kissed Annetta’s hand without moving it, bending his head until his lips reached it, careful this time to make the bold gesture respectful. He just grazed the hand with his lips; it was a sketch of a kiss, and he did not want to go any further. Till then they had advanced very little, and if they went no further than that kiss, they would be able to return to the almost ingenuous sweetness of their relationship.

“The explanation is sufficient,” said Annetta with a smile, but in a voice broken with emotion, which surprised Alfonso. She withdrew her hand.

“Poor Fumigi!” exclaimed Alfonso, who could not manage to infuse his own voice with the emotion heard in Annetta’s.

“Not so poor!”

She said that he was a strong and energetic man who would soon recover from this little blow. She had felt honoured by his request and had not accepted because she did not wish to marry.

“It’s partly our artistic ideal that makes me prefer my liberty.” This phrase, with the first person plural, cancelled in Alfonso the impression of coldness given by the preceding one.

“Anyway, Fumigi remains a good friend of mine, he’s promised! And now let’s go back to our novel.”

But they did not go back to it. There was too big a break between that cold, forced thing and the passion which they were talking to hide. Alfonso saw that Annetta was now calm again, her voice steady and sure, her hand firm as it held the pen.

“Now what on earth does this fool of ours want?” asked Alfonso, alluding to their hero, who had been made to pass, in a dark
corridor
, his wife who loved him and from dignity was pretending not to see him. “Does such dignity exist?”

Speaking and acting with an air of spontaneity, which was really calculated audacity, he knelt down before Annetta and tried to take her hand again. She began to laugh but put her own head close to Alfonso’s dark one; neither could have said how they came to kiss each other on the lips for the first time. So little had he foreseen it that after the contact ceased, he thought he had not felt all the happiness he should and tried to make up for this by a second kiss. But she had drawn back her head and risen to her feet in alarm, apparently not feeling quite safe when sitting. But her cheeks were brightly flushed, her eyes glistening and splendid, and she gave him a glance which did not seem angry though it must have been intended to intimidate him. Like that she was really lovely.

“Enough, Signor Nitti!”

He got to his feet and, standing still, in a voice thick with emotion said, to calm her, that it was indeed enough, and he could live near her all his life and never ask for more.

Annetta smiled in thanks; she felt safe with this boy; it had been really this boyish quality which had taken him so far. What had she to fear from this personified shyness? She had been touched by the sweetness of his wordless love, by his shy silence even after his first daring had been unpunished. He had never hinted in any way at that stolen kiss on her hand, never betrayed impatience, and she had ingenuously believed that he would ask for nothing more, considering that because the little favour came from her, it would be enough.

They had now taken a huge step forward, and there was no way back. They had spoken, and what was more Alfonso had seen Annetta’s weakness, had suddenly discovered he was the stronger.

Annetta did not realize this and, with a smile intended to
attenuate
the despotism of her order, told him never to talk of love again. She was disobeyed at once. He asked if he could please talk about it just once more and then made a regular love declaration, mingling memories of novels he had read with phrases that had long been going round in his brain and which were only
awaiting
a chance to be addressed to Annetta. He had been longing to talk about his love to her and had thought of this as his first poem; love could be ennobled, elevated, by intelligent wording, he had thought, and this could help to make their difference in status forgotten. Now, though, he realized that desire is wordless. As he mouthed contrived sentimentalities as seemed his duty, he felt their bloodless and lifeless conventionality; this surprised him, as he did not know to what to attribute such coldness. Only when he spoke of his friendship with her did his voice fuse and tremble in an emotion which took his breath away. He had thought of this sweet intimacy ever since first being near Annetta, but now,
speaking
of it, a quite different desire was dressed out in the same words and made his head swim as it passed before him.

“I knew it,” said Annetta with sincerity, “but it would have been better not to tell me.”

She threatened him with a jesting finger, while a shadow of
seriousness
passed over her face. Anyway, his words of love seemed colder to her, just as they did to Alfonso himself, because of what had preceded and provoked them. She did not fear them; they were a mere satisfaction to her vanity. She interrupted him, saying with great sweetness, “Enough, enough!” so that, had he not been bored, Alfonso would have gone on.

This was enough for that evening, but not for the next. Until this point timid partly on purpose, Alfonso realized how much
happiness
he could derive from the step he had taken. She had pointed out to him with some clarity how far he could go, and he wanted to be at least always at that point if not beyond it. So every evening he said a word of love to Annetta; if he could not at first, he did it on leaving, when shaking hands in farewell.

Suddenly Francesca had become Annetta’s inseparable
companion
again. She was always present at their meetings and, now that they were working very little or not at all on the novel, took
an active part in their conversation. All strain in her relations with Annetta, first cold and then exaggeratedly friendly, had now
vanished
, and the two women chattered away of fashions, journeys, and people he did not know, leaving him silent and embarrassed. He remained mute even when they spoke of other things, because he did not feel like addressing banalities or critical remarks to Annetta. All that was too cold, null and aimless. Why, he thought, exchange words which he did not care to say or she to hear? Some did occur to him, but of the kind that needed some bold and
passionate
action immediately after being spoken. Anyway he did not care much. The kiss on Annetta’s hand had given him a need to talk, that on her lips had taken it away.

He was always received in the living-room because the stove was there, and every object in it reminded him of desires and joys obtained. Every single thing in that confusion of differing
furniture
, solid comfortable pieces, was indissolubly linked to his
sensations
, seemed part of Annetta, mirrors always reflecting her face. When once he had to wait for a long time in that room alone, these sensations lulled him, then became so strong, the closeness of Annetta so palpable, that if she had suddenly entered, he would have taken her in his arms and treated her as his own, with one word which he thought could explain and justify all. But Francesca came in first and found Alfonso confused, stumbling over words which he had prepared and must now keep to himself.