Until then Guido’s face had been contracted by the effort to find in those accounts the redeeming error. A frown complicated by the grimace of one who has a disgusting taste in his mouth. At my communication, he raised his face, which relaxed as he tried to pay attention. He didn’t understand at once, but when he did understand, he burst immediately into hearty laughter. I interpreted the expression on his face in this fashion: harsh, acid, as long as he was confronting those figures that couldn’t be altered; happy and resolute when the painful problem was thrust aside by a proposal that allowed him to recover the feeling of being master and judge.
He didn’t understand. It seemed to him the advice of an enemy. I explained to him that Olivi’s advice had its value, especially considering the danger obviously looming over the firm, of losing more money and going under. A possible bankruptcy would be criminal if, after this situation, by now recorded in our books, we didn’t take the measures Olivi suggested.
And I added: “By our laws the mandatory punishment for fraudulent bankruptcy is prison!”
Guido’s face turned so red that I feared he was on the verge of a stroke. He yelled: “In this case Olivi doesn’t need to give me advice! If that should ever happen, I would take things into my own hands!”
His decision impressed me, and I had the feeling I had before me a person perfectly aware of his own responsibility. I lowered the tone of my voice. I threw myself entirely behind him and, forgetting that I had already defined Olivi’s advice as worthy of being taken into consideration, I said: “That’s what I said to Olivi, too. The responsibility lies with you, and we can have no part of any decision you may make concerning the fate of the firm that belongs to you and to your father.”
Actually I had said this to my wife and not to Olivi, but it was true that I had said it to someone. Now, after having heard Guido’s manly assertion, I would also have been capable of saying it to Olivi, because decision and courage have always conquered me. I already loved enormously even the mere nonchalance that can derive from those qualities, but also from other, far inferior ones.
Since I wanted to report all of his words to Augusta to reassure her, I insisted: “You know what they say about me—probably rightly—that I have no talent for business, I can carry out what you order me to do, but I can’t assume responsibility for what you do.”
He heartily agreed. He felt so comfortable in the role I attributed to him that he forgot his sorrow over the bad accounts. He declared: “I am solely responsible. Everything is in my name, and I would never allow anyone else to assume responsibilities, even if he wished.”
That went beautifully as far as reporting to Augusta was concerned, but it was much more than I had asked. And you had to see the attitude he assumed as he made that declaration: instead of a semi-failure, he seemed an apostle! He had comfortably adapted to his debit balance, and from that position he was becoming my lord and master. This time, like so many others in the course of our life in common, my impulse of affection for him “was stifled by his expressions revealing his disproportionate self-esteem. He struck a false note. Yes, it had to be said: That great musician was out of tune!
I asked him brusquely: “Do you want me to make a copy of the accounts tomorrow for your father?”
For a moment I had been on the verge of making a far more cruel declaration, telling him that immediately after the books were closed, I would stop coming to his office. I didn’t do this, not knowing how I would spend all the free hours I would then have. But my question replaced almost perfectly the declaration I had repressed. For I had reminded him that, in that office, he wasn’t the only master.
He looked surprised by my words because they didn’t seem to be in line with what had been said thus far, and with my obvious assent. And in his previous tone he said: “I’ll tell you how that copy must be made.”
I protested, shouting. In all my life I have never shouted as much as I did with Guido, because sometimes he seemed to me deaf. I declared to him that in law there is a responsibility also for the bookkeeper, and I was not prepared to pass off invented clumps of figures as exact copies.
He blanched and admitted I was right, but, he added, he was entitled to order that no extracts from his books should be given out. On this point I was willing to admit he was right, and then, relieved, he declared that he himself would write to his father. It even seemed he wanted to start writing immediately, but then he changed his mind and suggested we go out for a breath of air. I chose to content him. I supposed he hadn’t yet thoroughly digested the balance sheet, and wanted to move about, the better to swallow it.
Our walk reminded me of the one we took on the night of my engagement. The moon was absent, as there was a great deal of fog up above, but below it, the sky was the same, as we walked, confidently, through clear air. Guido also recalled that memorable evening.
“This is the first time we’ve taken a walk together since that night. Remember? That time, you explained to me how on the moon they kissed the same way we do on earth. Now, on the moon they continue that kiss eternally, I’m sure, even though we can’t see them this evening. But down here…”
Did he mean to start speaking once more against Ada? Against the poor sick woman? I interrupted him, though mildly, as if agreeing with him (hadn’t I come with him to help him forget?).
“True! Down here we can’t always kiss! But up above, there is only the fixed image of the kiss. A kiss is, above all, movement.”
I was trying to remove myself from all his concerns, namely the accounts and Ada; in fact, just in time I managed to suppress a phrase I was on the point of saying, namely that up above, a kiss did not generate twins. But, to rid himself of the debit, he could find nothing better to do than complain of his other misfortunes. As I had anticipated, he complained about Ada. He began by regretting how disastrous that first year of marriage had been for him. He didn’t speak of the twins, who were so dear and handsome, but of Ada’s disease.
He thought that being ill made her irascible, jealous, and at the same time unaffectionate. He concluded with a disheartened exclamation: “Life is unfair and hard!”
I felt it was absolutely forbidden for me to utter a single word that suggested any judgment concerning him and Ada. But I also felt a duty to say something. He had ended by mentioning life and by applying two predicate adjectives to it, neither of them supremely original. I found something better precisely because I had set myself up as critic of what he said. Often we say things following the sound of the words as they are casually connected. Then, as soon as you look to see if what was said was worth the breath it consumed, you sometimes discover that the casual association generated an idea.
I said: “Life is neither ugly nor beautiful, but it’s original!”
When I thought about it, it seemed to me I had said something important. Thus defined, life seemed to me so new that I stood there looking at it as if seeing it for the first time, with its gaseous, liquid, and solid bodies. If I were to narrate it to someone unfamiliar with it and therefore lacking our common knowledge, that listener would remain mute in the face of the enormous, aimless construction. He would ask me: “But how have you borne it?” And, having inquired into every single detail, from those celestial bodies suspended up above so that they can be seen and not touched, to the mystery that surrounds death, he would surely exclaim: “Very original!”
“Original? Life?” Guido said, laughing. “Where did you read that?”
I didn’t bother to assure him I hadn’t read it anywhere, because otherwise my words would have held less importance for him. But the more I thought about it, the more original I found life to be. And it wasn’t at all necessary to come from outside in order to see how it was put together. Simply recalling everything we humans expected from life sufficed for us to see how strange it was, and to arrive at the conclusion that perhaps mankind is located in its midst by mistake and doesn’t belong there.
Having made no agreement about the direction of our
stroll, we ended up, as we had the last time, on the Via Belvedere. Finding the little wall where he had stretched out that night, Guido climbed onto it and lay down just like the other time. He was humming, perhaps still oppressed by his thoughts, and he was surely pondering the inevitable figures of his books. I, on the contrary, remembered how in this place I had wanted to kill him, and, comparing my feelings then with my present ones, I admired once again the incomparable originality of life. But suddenly I remembered that, a short while before, and because of an ambitious person’s whim, I had inveighed against poor Guido, and on one of the worst days of his life. I devoted myself to an inquiry: I was witnessing with great pain the torture inflicted on Guido by the accounts I had kept with such care, and I felt a curious doubt and immediately an even more curious memory. The doubt: Was I good or bad? The memory, provoked suddenly by the doubt, which was not new to me: I saw myself as a child and dressed (of this I’m sure) still in short skirts, as I raised my face to ask my smiling mother: “Am I good or bad?” Then the doubt must have been generated in the child by the many people who had said he was good and by the many others who had called him bad. It was not surprising that the child was bewildered by that dilemma. Oh, incomparable originality of life! It was wonderful that the doubt it had already inflicted on the child in such a puerile form had not been resolved by the adult who had already passed the midpoint of his life.
On that dark night, in the very place where once before I had desired to kill, that doubt tormented me profoundly. To be sure, the child, sensing that doubt stirring in his head, only recently freed from its baby bonnet, had not suffered much from it, because children are told that badness can be cured.
To be rid of this anguish I tried to believe that again, and I succeeded. If I hadn’t succeeded, I would have had to weep for myself, for Guido, and for our terribly sad life. My resolve renewed the illusion! I resolved to remain at Guido’s side and collaborate with him in the development of his business, on which his and his family’s lives depended, and with no idea of profit for myself. I glimpsed the possibility of running, transacting, and investigating for him; and, to help him, I admitted the possibility of becoming a great, enterprising, brilliant trader. This is exactly what I was thinking on that dark night of this highly original life!
Guido meanwhile stopped thinking of the balance sheet. He left his place and he seemed resigned. As if he had come to a conclusion after some reasoning of which I was ignorant, he told me he would say nothing to his father because otherwise the poor old man would undertake that enormous voyage from his summer sun to our winter fog. He then said that at first sight the loss seemed huge, but it wasn’t so much after all, if he didn’t have to bear it alone. He would ask Ada to be responsible for half of it, and in return he would assign her a share in next year’s profits. The other half of the loss he would assume himself.
I said nothing. I thought that I was also bound not to give advice, because otherwise I would end by doing what I absolutely did not want to do, setting myself up as judge between husband and wife. For that matter, at the moment, I was so filled with fine intentions that it seemed to me Ada would be making a good bargain, taking part in a venture under our direction.
I accompanied Guido to the door of his house, and I clasped his hand at length to renew silently my resolve to love him. Then I cast about for something nice to say to him, and I came up with this sentence: “May your twins have a good night and allow you also to sleep, because you certainly need rest.”
Going off, I bit my lips regretting I hadn’t hit on something better. But I knew that the twins, now that each had his own wet nurse and they slept a mile apart, couldn’t trouble his sleep! In any event he understood the intention of my wish because he accepted it gratefully.
On reaching home, I found that Augusta had retired to the bedroom with our children. Alfio was clinging to her bosom while Antonia slept in the cot, turning her curly nape to us. I had to explain the reason for my tardiness, and so I told her also the method Guido had conceived to be free of his debit. To Augusta, Guido’s proposal seemed outrageous.
“In Ada’s place I’d refuse!” she exclaimed violently, though in a low voice, so as not to frighten the little one.
Led by my good intentions, I argued: “So if I happened to have the same difficulties as Guido, you wouldn’t help me?”
She laughed. “It’s quite a different thing! Between the two of us we’d see what was most advantageous for them!” — and she nodded toward the baby in her arms and toward Antonia—“And if we now advised Ada to contribute her money to continuing that business in which you will soon have no part, wouldn’t we then be obliged to compensate her if she lost it?”
It was an ignorant idea, but in my new altruism I exclaimed: “And why not?”
“But can’t you see we have two children to think about?”
Oh, I could see them! The question was a rhetorical figure, truly without meaning.
“And don’t they also have two children?” I asked, victoriously.
She began laughing loudly, frightening Alfio, who stopped nursing immediately in order to cry. She tended him, but still laughing, and I accepted her laughter as if I had won it with my wit, whereas, in truth, at the moment I asked that question, I had felt stirring in my breast a great love for all parents of children and for the children of all parents. Having now been laughed at, the affection had completely vanished.
But my distress at knowing I was not essentially good diminished also. I seemed to have resolved the troubling problem. We were neither good nor bad, just as we were also not many other things. Goodness was the light that, in flashes and for moments, illuminated the dark human spirit. The flaming torch was necessary to give light (it had been in my spirit, and sooner or later it would also return), and in that brightness any thinking person could choose the direction in which to move through the ensuing darkness. We could therefore show ourselves to be good, very good, always good, and this was what mattered. When the light returned, it would not take us by surprise, it would not dazzle. I would blow on it to put it out first, since I had no need of it. Because I would know how to maintain the resolution, in other words, the direction.
The resolution to be good is calm and practical, and now I was calm and cold. Strange! The excess of goodness had made me excessive in estimating myself and my power. What could I do for Guido? True, in his office I stood head and shoulders above the others as, in my office, the senior Olivi stood above me. But this didn’t prove much. And, to be quite practical: what advice would I give Guido the next day? Perhaps some hunch of mine? But you don’t follow hunches, even at the gambling table, when you’re gambling with the money of others! To keep a business firm going, you have to create everyday work for it, and this can be achieved by working every hour on organization. I wasn’t the man who could do such a thing, nor did it seem right to me to sentence myself, because of my goodness, to a lifetime of boredom.
I still felt the impression made on me by my access of goodness as a commitment I had made to Guido, and I couldn’t get to sleep. I sighed several times profoundly, and once I even moaned, surely at the moment when I seemed to be bound to Guido’s office as Olivi was to mine.
Half-waking, Augusta murmured: “What’s wrong? Have you had another argument with Olivi?”
Here was the idea I’d been seeking! I would advise Guido to take on young Olivi as manager! So serious and hard-working, that youth, whom I was so unwilling to allow into in my own affairs—because he seemed to be preparing to succeed his father in their management and thus exclude me definitively—obviously belonged, to everyone’s advantage, in Guido’s office. Creating a position in the firm for him, Guido would save himself, and young Olivi would be more useful in that office than in mine.
The idea thrilled me, and I roused Augusta to inform her of it. She was also so enthusiastic that she woke up completely. It seemed to her that I could thus free myself more easily from the compromising affairs of Guido. I f
ell asleep with a clear conscience: I had found the way to save Guido, and I wouldn’t doom myself. Far from it.
There is nothing more disgusting than to see your advice rejected, after it has been sincerely studied, with an effort that cost whole hours of sleep. In my case there had also been another effort: that of trying to rid myself of the illusion that I could be of help in Guido’s affairs. An immense effort. I had first achieved true goodness, then absolute objectivity, and then I was told to go to hell!
Guido rejected my advice with downright disdain. He didn’t believe young Olivi capable, and anyway he didn’t like the young man’s old-man appearance, and even more he disliked those eyeglasses that glistened so on the boy’s insipid face. His arguments tended to make me believe that only one of them had any foundation: a desire to spite me. He ended up by telling me he would accept as his manager not the young Olivi, but the older one. But I didn’t believe I could procure him the latter’s collaboration, and besides, I didn’t think I was ready to assume, on a moment’s notice, the junior Olivi as manager of my affairs. I made the mistake of arguing, and I said to Guido that old Olivi wasn’t worth much. I told him how much money Olivi’s stubbornness had cost me, through his refusal to buy that dried fruit at the right moment.
“Well!” Guido cried. “If the old man’s worth no more than that, how much can the young one be worth, since he’s merely his father’s disciple?”
Here, at last, was a sound argument, and all the more irksome to me, as I had supplied it myself through my foolish chatter.
A few days later, Augusta told me that Guido had proposed to Ada that she cover half of the losses on the books with her money. Ada refused, as she said to Augusta: “He’s unfaithful to me and he wants my money as well!”