Her Husband (24 page)

But no: maybe she wouldn’t come, knowing that he could come to Turin from Cargiore, and … And if she came just for this? To make up with him? Oh, God, oh, God . .. How could he forgive her after such a scandal? How could he begin living with her again? No, no … He had no status anymore. He would be covered with shame, and everyone would think he got back with her just to live off her again, shamefully. No, no! Now it was no longer possible…. She would understand that.
But hadn’t he left her everything? That showed he wasn’t a contemptible exploiter. He had given everyone proof that he wasn’t capable of living with shame, with money that still was largely his, fruit of his work, his blood, and he had left it! Who could blame him?

This proud protest he dwelled on with growing satisfaction was the excuse with which, hemming and hawing, his conscience harbored the secret hope that Silvia might come to Turin to get him back.

But what if she was coming because she had to, as contracted with the Fresi Company? And maybe . . . who knows?. . . she wasn’t alone. Maybe someone would be with her, to assist her on that tiresome journey. . . .

No, no. He couldn’t, he mustn’t do anything. But he had to return to Turin in a few days to attend, in hiding, the opening of the play, to see her again from a distance one last time. . . .

Hidden! From a distance!

On that sweet May evening a river of people were flowing into the theater, bright with festive lights. Carriages thundered up to crowd around the doors in the confusion of lights and the hum of the excited crowd.

Hidden, from a distance, he watched that spectacle. Wasn’t that still his work, which had taken shape and now ran by itself, no longer concerned with him?

Yes, it was his work, the work that had absorbed, drained all his life to the point of leaving him like this, empty, spent. And it was up to him to see it through there, in that river of anxious people that he could not even go near or mingle with. Expelled, repelled, he himself who had moved that stream of people the first time, who first had put it together and guided it on that memorable evening at the Valle Theater in Rome!

Now he had to wait like this, hidden, from a distance, while that river invaded and filled the whole theater where he would be the last to plunge furtively and shamefully.

Tormented by this exile, so near and yet so infinitely far from his
own life, which lived here, outside of himself, in front of him, and left him an inert spectator of his own present unhappiness, of his nothingness, Giustino had a surge of pride and thought that–yes–his work would keep going on by itself. But how? Certainly not as if he were still the one directing it, overseeing it, controlling it, supporting it in every way! He would have liked to see firsthand how it took shape without him! What preparation could the play’s first night have had? Last night’s newspapers and that morning’s had barely mentioned it. Now if he had been there! Yes, people were still flowing in. But why were they? Because of the memory of
The New Colony
, of the success he made of it, and to see, to know the playwright, that timid, morose, inexperienced young woman from Taranto that he, by his effort, had made famous. He who stood there abandoned, hidden in the dark, while she stood in the light of glory, surrounded by admiration.

She certainly had to be backstage now. Who knows what she was like! What was she saying? Could she possibly think he wouldn’t come from Cargiore, so near, to attend the performance? Oh, God, oh, God … He trembled when he remembered his thoughts at learning she would be coming to Turin, that she might be coming just to get back with him, that she would be waiting, after the first applause, for him to erupt furiously upon the stage and passionately embrace her in front of all the astonished actors, and then, and then… Oh, God–he couldn’t stop shaking. There, in his mind’s eye, the curtain was opening, and both of them, he and she, hand in hand, were bowing, reconciled and happy before the delirious audience.

Madness! Madness! But, on the other hand, didn’t it go beyond the bounds of discretion for her to come to Turin, before his very eyes?

He was frantic to know, to see…. But how could he, from the back of that center box he had managed to get the day before? He had just now come into the box, hurriedly taking the steps two at a time. To keep from being seen he stayed far back. Above his head the gallery was making a racket; from below, from the orchestra seats came the din and ferment of grand evenings. The theater must be full and splendid.

Still breathless–more from emotion than from exertion–he looked
at the curtain and wished his eyes could bore through it. Ah, what he would have paid to hear the sound of her voice again! He didn’t think he could remember it any longer. How did she speak? How was she dressed? What was she saying?

He jumped at the prolonged ringing of the bell that was answering the growing din in the gallery. And now the curtain was rising!

In the sudden silence, he instinctively leaned forward, looking at the scene that simulated a newsroom. He knew the first and second act of the play, and he knew she hadn’t been happy with them. Maybe she had rewritten them, or perhaps, if the play had a moderate success, she left them just as they were, forced to put the work on stage because of financial difficulties.

The first scene, between Ersilia Arciani and the editor of the newspaper, Cesare D’Albis, was the same. But Signora Fresi did not play the part of Ersilia with the severity that Silvia had given her character. Perhaps she herself, Silvia, had softened that severity to make the character less hard and more sympathetic. But evidently it wasn’t enough. From the first lines a chill of disappointment spread over the theater.

Giustino noticed it, and he felt his head growing hot from that chill, making him perspire and wriggle restlessly. For Gods sake! To expose oneself like this to the terrible trial of a new play, after the clamorous success of the first one, without adequately preparing the press, without informing the public that this new play would be totally different from the first one, revealing a new aspect of Silvia Roncella’s talent. This was the result: the audience expected the savage poetry of
The New Colony
and expected to see strange costumes and unusual characters; instead it found itself facing ordinary, prosaic, everyday life and remained cold, disenchanted, unhappy.

He should be enjoying it, but he couldn’t! Because what was still alive in him was all involved in that work failing before his very eyes, and he felt it a shame he couldn’t get his hands on it, to prop it up, lift it up to make it into another triumph. A shame for the work and a ferocious cruelty to himself!

He jumped to his feet at a prolonged hissing that suddenly rose out
of the orchestra like a wind to shake the whole theater, and he shrank to the back of the box with his hands on his flaming face, almost as if he had been whipped.

Leonardo Arciani’s stubborn refusal to reason with his father-in-law had offended the spectators. But perhaps in the end Ersilia’s cry that explained that stubbornness–“Papa, he has a daughter, a daughter: he can’t reason anymore! ”–would save the act. Signora Fresi entered. Everyone grew silent. Guglielmo Groa and his son-in-law almost came to blows. The audience didn’t understand yet and became even more restless. Giustino wanted to shout from his box in the last row: “Idiots, he can’t reason! He has a daughter!”

But there, there, Signora Fresi shouted it. Brava! Loudly, with her whole soul, like a whip. The audience broke into a lengthy
aaahhh
. Why?. . . Didn’t they like it?.. . Wait. . . . Many were applauding. . . . There, the curtain fell during the applause, but it was scattered applause, many were hissing also…. Oh, God, a sharp, lacerating whistle from the gallery… damned, damned whistle! In reaction, the applause picked up in the boxes and orchestra seats. With his face bathed in tears, Giustino convulsively twisted his hands trying to applaud furiously, impeded by his anxious concentration on the stage. The actors came out…. No, she wasn’t there…. Silvia wasn’t there…. Another curtain call! Oh, God .. . Was she there?.. . The applause tapered off, and with the applause Giustino also fell on a chair in the box, worn out, gasping for breath as though he had been running for an hour. Large, tearlike drops of perspiration appeared on his burning forehead. He tried to relax his contracted muscles, his pounding heart, and a moan came out of his labored breathing as from intolerable suffering. But he couldn’t remain still an instant. He stood up, leaned on the box railing with his arms limp, handkerchief in hand, head dangling … he looked at the exit… brought the handkerchief to his mouth and tore it…. He was a prisoner there…. He couldn’t let himself be seen…. He would at least have liked to hear the comments about the first act, to go near the stage, to see those who were going there to comfort the writer. .. . Ah, at that moment she certainly was not thinking of him. He didn’t exist
for her: he was one of the crowd, mixed in with everyone else. No, no, no, not even that–he couldn’t even be part of the crowd. He couldn’t be and in fact he wasn’t: closed up, hidden there in a box that everyone had to think was empty, the only empty one, because someone wasn’t able to come.. .. What a temptation, now, to run to the stage, to push through the crowd as if he owned the place, to take his rightful position again, as the one who gave the orders! A heroic furor stirred him to do things unheard of and never before seen, to change the destiny of that evening point-blank, before the amazed eyes of the entire audience, to show that he was there, he who had staged the triumph of The
New Colony
. . . .

Now the bells rang for the second act. The battle began again. Oh, God, how could he watch, exhausted as he was?

The restless audience entered the theater noisily. If they didn’t like the first scene of the second act, between the father and daughter, the play would have failed completely.

The curtain rose.

This scene represented Leonardo Arciani’s study. It was daylight and the lamp still burned on the desk. Guglielmo Groa was sleeping in an armchair with a newspaper over his face. Ersilia entered, put out the lamp, woke her father, and told him her husband had not yet come home. At his stern, blunt questions, like a hammer pounding rocks, Ersilia’s hardness broke, and her repressed emotions began to flow. With a languid, sorrowful calmness she spoke in defense of her husband, who, having to choose between her and his daughter, had chosen his daughter: “
Home is where the children are!
”

Giustino, enthralled, fascinated by the profound beauty of that scene played admirably by Signora Fresi, didn’t notice that the audience had now become very attentive. At the end, when a warm, long, unanimous applause broke out, he felt his blood rush to his heart and then suddenly rise to his head. The battle was won, but he was lost. If Silvia had appeared with that applause to thank the audience, he wouldn’t have seen her: a veil had fallen over his eyes. No, no, thank goodness! The play went on. He, however, could no longer pay attention. The anxiety,
the heartache, the excitement grew as the act progressed, approaching the end, the marvelous scene between the husband and wife when Ersilia, pardoning Leonardo, sends him away: “
You can no longer stay here now. Two houses, no; I here and your daughter there, no. It’s not possible, go away! I know what you want!”
Oh, how Signora Fresi told him! Now Leonardo was going away. She breaks into tears of joy, and the curtain fell amid loud applause.

“Author! Author!”

With arms tightly crossed over his chest and his hands gripping his shoulders, almost as if to stop his heart from leaping out, Giustino groaned and waited for Silvia to appear at the footlights. The torture of waiting made his face look almost ferocious.

There she was! No. Those were actors. The applause continued to thunder.

“Author! We want the author!”

There she was! There she was! That one? Yes, there she was between two actors. But she was barely discernible from such a height: the distance was too great and too great the commotion clouding his vision! Now they were calling her out again. There she was, there she was again. The two actors stepped back and let her go to the footlights alone, exposed for such a long time to the powerful response of the audience, on its feet clapping. This time Giustino could see her better: standing straight, pale, and unsmiling. She barely bowed her head, with a dignity not cold but full of unconquerable sadness.

Giustino thought no more about hiding. As soon as she left the footlights he dashed out of the box like a madman, threw himself down the stairs along with the crowd leaving the theater and filling the hallways, pushed his way through with furious gestures, to the surprise of those he knocked out of the way. He heard shouts and laughter behind his back as he found the theater exit. In the murky dizziness filling his head, pierced by flashes of light, he felt nothing but the fire that devoured him and made his throat burn atrociously.

Like a beaten dog he took off down the first long, straight, deserted street that opened off the piazza. He kept going without knowing
where, eyes closed, scratching his head at both temples and repeating voicelessly, his mouth dry as cork:

“It’s over .. . it’s over . . . it’s over. . . .”

This certainty had penetrated his being at the sight of her and was fixed like an absolute conviction: everything was finished, because that was no longer Silvia. No, no, that was no longer Silvia. It was someone else he could never approach. Someone distant, unreachably distant, above him, above everyone because of that sadness enveloping her: isolated, elevated, so stiff and severe, as if she had survived a calamity. She was another person for whom he no longer existed.

Where was he going? Where had he gone? Lost, he looked around at the quiet, dark houses. He looked at the street lamps, watchful in the sad silence. He stopped, about to fall, and leaned against a wall with his eyes on a lamp, staring at the motionless light like an idiot, then down at the circle of light on the sidewalk. He looked farther down the street. But why try to sort it out if everything was finished? Where should he go? Home? Why? He had to go on living, didn’t he? Why? There in Cargiore, in a vacuum, in idleness, for years and years and years . . . What was left for him, what could give some sense, some value to his life? No affection that didn’t represent an intolerable duty: for his son, for his mother. He no longer felt the need for those affections. They, his son and his mother, needed him, but what could he do for them? Live, right? Live to keep his old mother from dying of sorrow . . . After he and his grandmother died, his son would have his mother and they would both be better off. With the boy she would have to think about him, the boy’s father, the man who had been her husband, and so he would go on existing for her, with her son, in her son.

How could he get back to Cargiore from Giaveno on foot, so exhausted? His mother was certainly waiting up for him, sad about his leaving. . . . For days he had behaved like a lunatic after learning that Silvia would be coming to Turin. His mother had found out through Prever, who had probably heard it in town. Perhaps Dr. Lais had read it in the newspaper. His mother had come to his room to beg him not to go to town at this time. Poor woman! Poor woman! What a spectacle
he had made of himself! He had begun to shout like a madman that he wanted to be left alone, that he didn’t need anyone’s protection, that he didn’t want to be smothered by all those concerns and fears, or done in by all that advice. For three days he didn’t even go down at mealtimes, staying in his room, not wanting to see anyone or to hear anything.