G. (4 page)

My dear, you are married.

Not to you I’m not.

One day I may be in a position to marry you.

You mean you will get a divorce?

In my country to make a divorce is almost impossible.

So you cannot marry me.

My wife is a sick woman.

I see. We shall wait in our jail until she dies. And then you will be gracious enough to make us respectable. How do you dare to make such a proposal?

I love you.

Love! What is it? It’s a word you use to get what you want. Like all men.

It is a word you have used too, Laura.

Yes, I was in love with you when we went to Venice three years ago. You were like no man I had ever heard of. You could have made whatever you liked of me. But you did nothing. A woman isn’t like money that you put in a bank and it will bring you interest without your doing anything about it. A woman is a person. How do you expect me to live ten months of the year, kicking my heels until you somehow contrive to make a little trip to see me? That is not a proper life.

All this I intend to change. You will live in Pisa or Florence and we will be together often and without interruption. The boy will see more of me than many boys see of their fathers. And I will make him my heir. Let us try to make a life together for all three of us.

Four!

Four?

You have forgotten you are married.

I have explained to you already.

You say you are proud. Me? I am ashamed. You make me ashamed for all of us. How could I look into the eyes of my child whilst waiting, day after day, year after year, for news of her death? Sit now,
passeretta mia
, and I will talk to you. I am older than you. I am nearer to the earth. If I compare us to most, we are fortunate. You do not know what their lives are filled with. Life is never as we want it. It is of no use to ask for everything. In the end you get nothing. Our life will not be a perfect one—that is for those who believe in the good God after they are dead. But it will be better, and I will make it better, than you believe possible. We have both been mistaken. I am older than you and I have been mistaken more. But not you either can begin life again like an innocent
fidanzata
of seventeen. With you I have the last chance of happiness. I know it. No chance will come again. You have come to me like an angel to deliver me. Angels come once only. I will spare nothing to make you happy.

Would you come and live here?

I can try. But how can I? It is too far.

Too far from your home?

From my business.

Your business comes before us?

My business is for my son. He will inherit it. He will not be poor.

You intend to disinherit your wife?

I have told you what will happen.

You are shameless.

No, I am not shameless. I see things for how they are. I want you and my son. Without both of you my life is over. All my life depends on this one chance. I love you as nobody else will love you. Not even a younger man. He will not be as faithful to you as me. I know what you are worth, believe me. Come to Pisa. Give me the opportunity to show you—

—Where I shall be in jail.

I will be a father to our son. If you knew what paternal feelings are filling me, if you knew how patient, how adoring, how proud I will be as a father! In him I will see you. He will have your impatience and your love of dreams.

And what will he have of you?

You know what they call me in Livorno behind my back, I have told you already, they call me
La Bestia
, That is because I am cunning and close to the earth. Perhaps he will have my realism.

You, realistic!

Yes. You will see. We have one chance now. There will be no more opportunity.

What do you mean?

For you to be the mother of your son. For me to be the father. For all three of us to be happy.

I intend to bring up my child as I choose, not as you choose. I will teach him myself. If he is a boy, he will begin life with the advantage of never having been told lies. If she is a girl, she will be loving and sincere and realistic. No child of mine is going to be satisfied with your half-measures. And to make sure of this, I will devote the next ten years of my life to my child.

You deny me the right to my own son?

You have none.

Laura!

It’s too late to call me now.

The sheets on the unmade bed, the carpets, the furniture, the wrought-iron balcony outside the window, the lake which is the colour of steel and lavender, the Alps—everything within their sight—is unaffected by the rapid beating of each heart.

The principal protagonist was conceived four years after Garibaldi’s death.

Garibaldi was hero.

Garibaldi defeated his country’s enemies. He inspired the nation to become itself: to anticipate its own identity.

Garibaldi was what every Italian wished to be. It is in this sense that one can call him the national genius. There was not an Italian
in Italy—not even among the loyal Bourbon troops of the Kingdom of Naples—who did not wish to be Garibaldi. A few hoped to become him by fighting him: some, like La Farina in Sicily, by betraying him. Cavour in Turin became him by using him. What stood between a man and his becoming Garibaldi was not his own identity but the wretched state of Italy: a wretchedness which each interpreted or suffered according to his own theories or position. For the peasant it was the impossibility of leaving his land: for the constitutionalist it was the inefficiency of conspiracy.

When men set eyes upon Garibaldi they amazed themselves: until that moment they had not known who they were. They met him as from within themselves.

He was poorly equipped and almost in rags; he had nothing but a sword and a pistol. ‘What induced you,’ I said, ‘to give up ease and luxury for this life of a dog, in a camp without commissariat, pay, or rations?’ ‘You may well ask,’ he said, ‘I tell you a fortnight ago I was in despair myself, and thought of giving up the whole thing. I was sitting on a hillock, as might be here. Garibaldi came by. He stopped, I don’t know why. I had never spoken to him. I am sure he did not know me, but he stopped. Perhaps I looked very dejected, and indeed I was. Well, he laid his hand on my shoulder and simply said, with that low, strange, smothered voice that seemed almost like a spirit speaking inside me, “Courage; courage! We are going to fight for our country.” Do you think I could ever turn back after that? The next day we fought the battle of the Volturno.’

On 7 September 1860 Garibaldi entered Naples.

Venù è Galubardo!

Venù è lu piu bel!

The Bourbon garrison of several thousand occupied the four castles which dominated the city. The king had fled. The castle cannons were trained upon the city. There was a rumour that Garibaldi would arrive—not with his troops and redshirts on horseback—but alone and by train. The streets were empty under the white glare of the sunlight and the muzzles of the cannons. Nobody knew whether to believe the rumour. Timidly everybody hid indoors. At 1.30 in the afternoon Garibaldi arrived at the station. Half a million people
surged into the streets, on to the quays, climbing, pushing, running, shouting—regardless of the cannons and the consequences—to welcome him, to commemorate the moment at which they were living.

Garibaldi was not a military genius of the first order. Politically he was easily deceived. Yet he inspired a whole people. He inspired them, neither by authority nor by divine right, but by representing the simple and pure aspirations of their youth, and by persuading them, through his own example, that these aspirations could be realized in the national struggle for unity and independence. What the nation found sacred in him was its own innocence.

All his characteristics fitted him for such a role. His physical strength and courage. His virility. His long hair down to his shoulders, carefully combed after battle. The simplicity of his tastes and appetites. ‘When a patriot,’ he said, ‘has eaten his bowl of soup and when the affairs of the country are going well, what more can anyone want?’ The island to which he retired whenever there was no task for him to perform and on which he lived as a farmer with his sheep. His patriotism which confounded his theoretical principles. (A republican, he recognized the authority of Victor Emmanuel.) His amour propre. His sense of humour. The fact that he was eloquent by gesture rather than word. ‘I believe if he were not Garibaldi, he would be the greatest tragic actor known.’ (Because he did not talk, men of different or opposing opinions supported him and believed that he supported them.) His ignorance of motives in the world as it was. His impatience.

In what other kind of man could the nation of Italy find its better half in order to become united?

By way of what other kind of man—with his absolute personal integrity—could the majority of the nation be so successfully deceived?

The way in which Garibaldi inspired the nation led to moments of danger for the emergent ruling class. If Garibaldi was what every Italian wished to be, his wishes, so encouraged, might go further than the expulsion of the Austrians and the Bourbons. Garibaldi
was a threat to order, not only because his methods were conspiratorial, but because he inspired.

The massing of the crowds in Naples under the mouths of the cannon became a saturnalia which lasted for three days.

Calabrian peasants believed that Garibaldi, like Christ, could perform miracles. When his redshirts were desperately short of water, he fired a cannon into a rock and water gushed from it.

Garibaldi honoured the memory of Carlo Pisacane, martyr of the Risorgimento, whose writings influenced the thinking of a generation of Italian socialist revolutionaries.

‘The propaganda of the idea is a chimera. Ideas result from deeds, not the latter from the former, and the people will not be free when they are educated, but will be educated when they are free. The only work a citizen can do for the good of the country is that of co-operating with the material revolution: therefore conspiracies, plots, assassinations, etc., are that series of deeds by which Italy proceeds towards her goal.’

Yet Garibaldi was effectively constrained by his alliance with the existing ruling classes. His gestures defied them: the political consequences of his victories confirmed them. The national genius was used to create the pre-conditions for a bourgeois state.

After Garibaldi’s death, there was scarcely an Italian city or town which did not have a street or piazza named after him. Throughout Italy his name was spoken or written thousands of times daily. Yet this name was as irrelevant to what now occurred in those streets and piazzas as the blue sky above.

In Paris Laura feeds the new-born child at her breast. It is as though the milk which flows from her is the quicksilver of an extraordinary mirror. In this mirror the child is part of her body, the number
of all her parts is doubled: but equally, in this mirror she is part of the child, completing him as he desires. She can be object or image on either side of the mirror. She can do unto him or she can be done unto by herself. The two of them, so long as the nipple remains in the mouth, revert to being parts of an indispersible whole whose energy will lead to their being separate and distinct as soon as the child ceases to suck.

She asks: What need have I of anything more? The boy will grow, but by looking at him, I can again inhabit him.

Her nerves and sensibilities answer her own needs perfunctorily; they continuously strain across space and through his flesh to anticipate and answer his. Her feelings are distributed in his body like veins. When she touches him, she has the sensation of touching herself made innocent.

She wants to worship him because with her he seems to transcend the world as it is. She desires to be totally committed to him, so that this commitment amounts to a rejection of all other claims. She wants with her baby to start an alternative world, to propose from his new-born life a new way of living.

Laura did not achieve the new way of living with her baby which she had wished. She had not reckoned with the sheer force of routine in a rich nineteenth-century household. Had she decided to live by herself with her illegitimate child—and this would have meant becoming a bohemian—she might have succeeded. As it was, in her mother’s house in Paris, her plans were defeated by nurse-maids, chambermaids, the housekeeper, her mother’s doctor. It was not possible for her to be with the child for more than a couple of hours a day. It was not possible for her to occupy herself with all the daily chores connected with looking after him—washing linen, ironing, cleaning the nursery, preparing his food, etc.; there were servants to do such jobs. The most that she could achieve was bathing him in the late afternoon under the eyes of the nurse and the maid who brought up the hot water.