The Signora remained standing despite my repeated invitations to her to sit down. Brusquely I told her I had come bearing some very bad news for Signorina Carla: Copier was dying.
The old woman’s arms dropped to her sides, and she immediately felt the need to sit.
“Oh, my goodness!” she murmured. “What will we do?”
Then she remembered that what lay ahead of Copier was worse than what was in store for her, and she added a lament: “Poor gentleman! Always so kind!”
Her face was already bathed in tears. Obviously she didn’t know that if the poor man hadn’t died at the right moment, she would have been thrown out of that house. This thought also reassured me. How surrounded I was by the utmost discretion!
I wanted to reassure her, and I told her that what Copier had done for them till now, I would continue doing. She protested that it ‘wasn’t for herself that she was crying, since she knew the two of them were surrounded by such good people, but for the fate of their great benefactor.
She wanted to know what illness he was dying of. Telling her how the catastrophe had been announced, I remembered that discussion I had had with Copier some time before on the utility of pain. So the nerves of his teeth had been agitated and had begun calling for help because, a meter away from them, his kidneys had ceased functioning. I was so indifferent to the fate of my friend, whose death-rattle I had heard only a short while before, that I was beginning to play with his ideas. If he had still been present to hear me, I would have told him that, after this, we could understand how, in the imaginary sick man, the nerves could legitimately ache for a sickness that had burst out at a distance of some kilometers.
Between the old woman and me there was very little left to talk about, and I agreed to go and wait for Carla in her study.
I picked up the Garcia and tried to read a few pages. But the art of singing had little effect on me.
The old woman joined me again. She was uneasy because she didn’t see Carla arriving. She told me that the girl had gone to buy some dishes that they urgently needed.
My patience was just about exhausted. Angrily I asked her: “Did you break some dishes? Couldn’t you be more careful?”
And so I rid myself of the old woman, who went off, muttering: “Only two … yes, I broke them …”
This procured me a moment of hilarity because I knew that all the crockery in the house had been destroyed, and not by the old woman, but by Carla herself. Later I learned that Carla was anything but gentle with her mother, who therefore was deathly afraid of talking too much about her daughter’s business with her protectors. It seems that once, naively, she had told Copier how Carla was irritated by the voice lessons. Copier became enraged with Carla, who then took it out on her mother.
And so, when my delightful mistress finally came to me, I loved her violently and angrily. Enchanted, she stammered: “And I was doubting your love! The whole day I was tormented by a wish to kill myself for having succumbed to a man who immediately afterwards treated me so badly!”
I explained to her that I was often gripped by severe headaches. I found myself in a state that, if I hadn’t bravely resisted, would have had me racing back to Augusta, so I spoke again of those pains, and thus I could control myself. I continued, constructing myself. Meanwhile, we mourned poor Copier together, really together!
For that matter, Carla wasn’t indifferent to the horrible end of her benefactor. As she spoke, she went pale: “I know what I’m like,” she said. “For a long time I’ll be afraid to be alone. Even when he was alive, he frightened me so!”
And, for the first time, shyly, she suggested I spend the whole night with her. I wasn’t even thinking about it, and I couldn’t have prolonged my stay in that room even for another half hour. But, always careful not to reveal to the poor girl my soul, of which I was the first to complain, I raised some objections, saying such a thing was impossible because in this house there was also her mother. With genuine disdain she pursed her lips. “We would bring the bed in here; Mamma wouldn’t dare spy on me.”
Then I told her about the wedding dinner awaiting me at home, but then I also felt obliged to tell her I would never be able to spend the night with her. Observing the vow to be kind that I had just made, I succeeded in controlling my every tone, so I sounded affectionate, but it seemed to me that any other concession I might grant her, or even lead her to hope for, would be the equivalent of a renewed betrayal of Augusta, which I didn’t want to commit.
At that moment I sensed what my strongest bonds to Carla were: my affectionate intentions and then the lies I told about my relations with Augusta, which gradually, as time went on, would have to be revised or rather expunged. Therefore I began the process that very evening, naturally with all due prudence because it was still too easy to recall the fruit that my falsehood had borne. I told her that I strongly felt my obligations toward my wife, who was such an admirable woman that she surely deserved to be loved better, and I would never want her to learn how I betrayed her.
Carla embraced me.
“This is how I love you: kind and sweet, the way I imagined you the first time. I will never try to do any harm to that poor thing.”
I didn’t like to hear Augusta called a poor thing, but I was grateful to poor Carla for her meekness. It was good that she didn’t hate my wife. I wanted to show her my gratitude, and I looked around for a sign of affection. In the end I found it. I gave her, too, a laundry: I permitted her not to recall the singing teacher.
Carla had a burst of affection, which rather annoyed me, but I bravely endured it. Then she told me that she would never give up singing. She sang all day long, but in her own way. In fact, she wanted me to hear a song of hers immediately. But I would have none of it and, like a coward, I ran off. So I think that she contemplated suicide also that night, but I didn’t give her time to tell me.
I went back to Copier, because I had to take Augusta the latest news of the sick man, to make her believe I had spent all that time with him. Copier had died about two hours previously, almost immediately after I left him. Accompanied by the old pensioner, who had continued pacing up and down the little corridor, I entered the mortuary chamber. The corpse, already dressed, lay on the bed’s bare mattress. He held a crucifix in his hands. In a low voice the pensioner told me that all the formalities had been taken care of, and that a niece of the departed would come and stay through the night by the corpse.
I could go away then, knowing my poor friend was being given those few attentions he might need, but I remained for a moment to look at him. I would have liked to feel a sincere tear spring from my eyes, in mourning for the poor man who had struggled hard against his disease until he tried to come to an agreement with it. “It’s so sad!” I said. The disease for which so many medicines existed had brutally killed him. It seemed a mockery. But my tears were absent. Copier’s emaciated face had never seemed to me so strong as it did in the rigidity of death. It seemed fashioned by a chisel in a colored marble, and no one could foresee the imminent putrefaction looming over it. It was still a real life that his face displayed: it disapproved of me haughtily perhaps, or perhaps also of Carla, who didn’t want to sing. For a moment I started, when it seemed that the corpse’s death-rattle was recommencing. I immediately regained my critical calm as I realized that what had seemed a rattle to me was only the pensioner’s gasping, exacerbated by his emotion.
He then saw me to the door and begged me to recommend him if I found anyone who might need these lodgings: “As you have seen, even in a situation like this, I was able to do my duty, and even more, much more!”
For the first time he raised his voice in which there echoed a resentment, no doubt directed at poor Copier, who had left the rooms vacant without proper advance notice. I rushed off, promising everything he wanted.
At my father-in-law’s, I found the party had gone to the table at that moment. They asked me for news, and, rather than mar the gaiety of that feast, I said Copier was still al
ive and so there was still some hope.
It seemed to me the gathering was quite sad. Perhaps I formed this impression when I saw my father-in-law condemned to clear broth and a glass of milk, while around him the others were heaping their plates with the choicest foods. He had nothing but free time, and he spent it watching the mouths of the others. Seeing how Signor Francesco devoted himself actively to the antipasto, he murmured: “And to think, he’s two years older than me!”
Then, when Signor Francesco arrived at his third glass oi white wine, Giovanni grumbled in a low voice: “That makes three! I hope it turns to gall!”
The augury wouldn’t have bothered me if I, too, had not eaten and drunk at that table, and if I hadn’t known that the same metamorphosis would be wished for the wine that passed my lips. Therefore I started eating and drinking covertly. I exploited every moment when my father-in-law stuck his big nose into the cup of milk, or replied to some remark addressed to him, to swallow some great morsels or to gulp down huge glasses of wine. Alberta, simply out of a desire to make people laugh, warned Augusta that I was drinking too much. My wife, jokingly, wagged a threatening forefinger at me. This in itself wasn’t bad, but it was bad because now it was no longer worth the trouble to eat in secret. Giovanni, who until then had almost forgotten about me, peered over his eyeglasses at me with ä look of genuine hatred.
He said: “I’ve never overindulged in drinking or eating. Anyone who does isn’t a real man, he’s a—” and he repeated several times the last word, which was by no means a compliment.
Thanks to the effect of the wine, that offensive word, hailed by general laughter, kindled in my soul a truly unreasonable desire for revenge. I attacked my father-in-law at his weakest point: his sickness. I shouted that it wasn’t the drinker or eater who wasn’t a real man, it was the man who feebly obeyed the doctor’s orders. I, in his case, would have been independent, quite different. At my daughter’s wedding—out of love, if for no other reason—I wouldn’t have allowed anyone to prevent me from eating and drinking.
Enraged, Giovanni said: “I’d like to see you in my shoes!”
“Isn’t it enough to see me in my own? Have I given up smoking, by any chance?”
It was the first time I managed to boast of my weakness, and I immediately lit a cigarette to illustrate my words. They all laughed and told Signor Francesco how my life was full of last cigarettes. But that one wasn’t the last, and I felt strong and mettlesome. However, I immediately lost the others’ support when I poured some wine for Giovanni, into his large water glass. They were afraid Giovanni would drink and shouted to stop him, until Signora Malfenti managed to seize that glass and move it out of the way.
“You really would like to kill me?” Giovanni asked mildly, looking at me with curiosity. “Wine turns you nasty!” He hadn’t made the slightest move toward the wine I had offered him.
I felt really downcast and defeated. I would almost have flung myself at my father-in-law’s feet to beg his forgiveness. But that, too, seemed a gesture prompted by the wine, and I rejected it. In begging his forgiveness, I would have confessed my guilt, whereas the banquet was continuing and would still last long enough to afford me the opportunity to make amends for this first joke, which had come off so badly. In this world there’s time for everything. Not all drunks succumb immediately to wine’s every prompting. When I have drunk too much, I analyze my retching as when I am sober and probably with the same result. I went on observing myself, to understand how I had conceived that evil idea of harming my father-in-law. And I realized I was tired, mortally tired. If they knew the sort of day I’d been through, they would forgive me. I had possessed and violently abandoned a woman two separate times, and I had twice returned to my wife, only to betray her twice. It was my luck that, at this point, into my memory there intruded that corpse over which I had tried in vain to weep, and the thought of the two women vanished; otherwise I would have ended up talking about Carla. Didn’t I always have a yearning to confess, even when I hadn’t been made more magnanimous by the effect of wine? In the end I spoke about Copier. I wanted them all to know that I had lost my great friend that day. They would forgive my behavior.
I cried out that Copier was dead, really dead, and that I had kept silent about it till then, rather than sadden them. And lo and behold! Finally I felt tears come to my eyes, and I had to look away to conceal them.
The others all laughed because they didn’t believe me, so then I became stubborn, wine’s most obvious effect. I described the dead man: “He looked as if he’d been sculpted by Michelangelo: so hard, in the most enduring marble.”
There was a general silence, interrupted by Guido, who cried: “And now you no longer feel obliged not to sadden us?”
The observation was fair. I had failed to keep a vow that I remembered! Was there no way to make amends? I fell to laughing uproariously.
“Fooled you! He’s alive and getting better.”
They all looked at me, trying to get their bearings.
“He’s better,” I added seriously. “He recognized me and he even smiled at me.”
They all believed me, but there was general indignation. Giovanni asserted that if he weren’t afraid of hurting himself in making such an effort, he would have thrown a plate at my head. In fact, it was unforgivable of me to trouble the party with an invented piece of news like that. If it had been true, there would have been no blame. Wouldn’t it then be better for me to tell them the truth again? Copier was dead, and as soon as I was alone, I would find my tears ready to mourn him, spontaneous and abundant. I sought the words, but Signora Malfenti, with her grande dame gravity, interrupted me: “Let’s leave that poor sick man alone for the present. We’ll think about him tomorrow!”
I obeyed at once, even with my thoughts, which broke away from the dead man definitively: Good-bye! Wait for me! I’ll come back to you the moment this is over!
It was the time for toasts. Giovanni had obtained the doctor’s permission to sip a glass of champagne at this moment. Gravely he superintended the pouring of his wine, and he refused to raise the glass to his lips until it was brimming. After having expressed serious, straightforward wishes for Ada and Guido, he drained it slowly to the last drop. Glowering at me, he said he had dedicated that final sip to my health. To ward off this augury, which I knew was not benevolent, under the table I crossed my fingers, on both hands.
My recollection of the rest of the evening is a bit muddled. I know that a little later, prompted by Augusta, everyone around that table said all sorts of good things about me, holding me up as a model husband. I was forgiven everything, and even my father-in-law grew more mellow. He added, however, that he hoped Ada’s husband would prove good like me, but at the same time also a better businessman and, especially, one who … and he groped for the word. He couldn’t find it, and no one among us tried to supply it, not even Signor Francesco, who, having seen me for the first time that very morning, could know me only slightly. For my part I didn’t take offense. How the spirit is soothed by the knowledge that one has done great wrongs and must make up for them! I accepted all the insolences in a grateful spirit, provided that they were accompanied by affection, which I didn’t deserve. And in my mind, confused by weariness and wine, serene on every score, I cherished the picture of myself as the good husband, who never becomes less good for being adulterous. It was important to be good, very, very good, and nothing else mattered. With my hand I blew a kiss to Augusta, who received it with a grateful smile.
Then there were some at the table who wanted to take advantage of my drunkenness for a good laugh, and I was forced to propose a toast. I finally agreed because at that moment it seemed to me it would be a fine thing to be enabled to express thus in public my good intentions. Not that I had any self-doubt at that moment, because I felt myself to be exactly as described, but I would become even better were I to assert a resolution in front of so many people who, in a certain sense, would be underwriting it. And so it was that in
the toast I spoke only of myself and of Augusta. For the second time in those days I related the story of my marriage. I had falsified it for Carla, keeping silent about my being in love with my wife; here I falsified it differently because I didn’t mention the two people so important in the story of my marriage, namely Ada and Alberta. I told of my hesitation, for which I could never console myself, as it had robbed me of so much time for happiness. Then, out of gallantry, I attributed some hesitations also to Augusta. But she denied them, laughing merrily.
With some difficulty I recovered the thread of my speech. I narrated how at last we had gone on our honeymoon and how we had made love in all the museums of Italy. I was so totally immersed, up to my neck, in falsehood that I also added this lying detail that served no purpose. And yet they say that in wine there is truth.
Augusta interrupted me a second time to set things straight, and told how she had had to avoid museums because of the danger that the masterpieces were risking from me. She didn’t realize that in this way she was revealing the falsity of more than just that detail! If there had been an observer at the table, he would quickly have discovered the nature of that love I was portraying in a setting where it could not have taken place.
I resumed the long, drab speech, telling of the arrival at our house and how both ot us had begun perfecting it, adding this or that, even including a laundry.