He boasted of his eye for the Bourse due to his long intimacy. He interrupted himself to ask: “Who do you think is the better teacher, the University or the Bourse?”
His jaw dropped a little bit further, and the gap of irony was enlarged.
“Obviously, Bourse!” I said with conviction. This won me an affectionate handshake when he left.
So Guido was playing the stock market! If I had been more alert I could already have guessed as much, because when I presented him an exact account of the not insignificant sums we had earned with our latest transactions, he looked at it with a smile, but also with some scorn. He considered we had had to work too hard to earn that money. And, mind you, with a few dozen of those transactions, we could have made up the loss we had incurred the previous year! What was I to do now, I who only a few days before had written his praises?
A little later Guido came into the office, and I faithfully reported Nilini’s words to him. He listened with such anxiety that he didn’t even realize I had thus learned of his gambling; then he ran out.
That evening I spoke of it with Augusta, who felt we should leave Ada in peace, but should instead warn Signora Malfenti of the risks Guido was taking. She also asked me to do my best to restrain him from committing such follies.
I spent a long time preparing the words I would say to him. Finally I carried out my resolution of active goodness, and I kept the promise I had made to Ada. I knew how to grasp Guido and induce him to obey me. Anyone who plays the market—I would explain to him—is being foolish, especially a businessman with a balance sheet like his behind him.
The next day I began very well: “So you’re now playing the market?” I asked him sternly. I was prepared for a scene, and I was keeping in reserve a declaration that, because he was behaving in such a way as to jeopardize the firm, I would promptly abandon the office.
Guido was able to disarm me at once. He had kept the secret till now, but now, boyish and open, he told me every detail of those affairs of his. He was trading in mining stocks in some country or other, which had already produced a profit that was almost enough to cover the loss on our books. Now all risk was past, and he could tell me everything. If he were to run into bad luck and lose what he had gained, he would simply stop playing. If, on the other hand, luck continued to favor him, he would quickly put the accounts in order, as he still felt threatened by them.
I saw there was no use in being angry, and that, on the contrary, he should be congratulated. As for questions of bookkeeping, I told him he could now rest easy, because where cash was available it was very easy to adjust the most troublesome accounts. As soon as we had recorded Ada’s account properly and had at least begun to fill what I called the abyss of our firm, namely Guido’s own account, our books would be as clean as a whistle.
Then I suggested to him that we put the accounts in order at once and enter the Bourse operations into the firm’s books. He didn’t agree, luckily for me, otherwise I would have become the accountant of the gambler, and I would have incurred even greater responsibility. On the contrary, things still proceeded as if I didn’t exist. He rejected my suggestion with reasons that seemed valid to me. It was a bad idea to pay debts so quickly, and there is a widespread superstition at all gaming tables that other people’s money brings luck. I don’t believe it, but when I gamble, I, too, never neglect any precaution.
For a while I reproached myself for having accepted Guido’s communications without any protest. But then I saw Signora Malfenti behave in the same way, telling me how her husband had been capable of making good money on the market, and I even heard from Ada, who considered gambling just another form of business, so I understood that on this score no one could make any complaint against me. No protest of mine could arrest Guido on that precipitous slope unless I was supported by all the members of the family.
So it was that Guido continued gambling, and the whole family with him. I, too, was a party to it, and indeed I entered into a curious kind of friendship with Nilini. To be sure, I couldn’t bear him because I found him ignorant and presumptuous, but out of regard for Guido, who expected good tips from him, I was apparently so good at concealing my feelings that in the end he believed he had a devoted friend in me. I won’t deny that perhaps my politeness toward him was due also to the desire to avoid that illness his hostility had caused, largely because of that laughing irony on his ugly face. But I never showed him any courtesies other than that of giving him my hand and greeting him when he arrived and when he left. He, on the contrary, was extremely cordial, and I couldn’t fail to receive his courtesy with gratitude, which is truly the greatest kindness that one can display in this world. He procured contraband cigarettes and charged me only what they had cost him, namely very little. If I had found him more likable, he could have persuaded me to let him gamble for me; I never did, but only because, that way, I would have had to see him more often.
I saw him too much as it was! He spent hours in our office despite the fact—as it was easy to realize—that he was not in love with Carmen. He came specifically to keep me company. It seems he proposed to educate me in the field of politics, in which he was deeply versed thanks to the stock exchange. He introduced me to the Great Powers and explained how one day they shook hands and the next were knocking one another about. I don’t know if he divined the future, because, in my dislike, I never listened to him. I maintained a foolish, printed smile. Our misunderstanding no doubt derived from an erroneous interpretation of my smile, which to him must have seemed admiring. It’s not my fault.
I know only the things he repeated every day. I could divine that he was an Italian of suspect coloration because it seemed to him Trieste would be better off remaining Austrian.
He adored Germany and especially German railway cars, which arrived with such precision. He was a socialist in his own way, and would have liked any individual person to be forbidden to possess more than one hundred thousand crowns. I didn’t laugh when, one day, conversing with Guido, he admitted that he possessed exactly one hundred thousand crowns and not a penny more. I didn’t laugh, nor did I ask him whether, if he were to earn another penny, he would revise his theory. Ours was a truly strange association. I couldn’t laugh with him or at him.
When he had rattled off some assertion of his, he would pull himself up in his chair so that his eyes would be directed at the ceiling, whereas I was left facing what I called the mandibular gap. And he could see through that gap! Sometimes I wished to take advantage of that position of his and think of something else, but he would recall my attention, abruptly asking: “Are you listening to me?”
After that friendly outburst of his, for a long time Guido didn’t talk to me about his affairs. At first Nilini told me a little of them, but then he also became a bit more reserved. From Ada herself I learned that Guido was continuing to make money.
When she returned, I found her quite ugly again. She was not just fatter: she was bloated. Her cheeks, restored, were once again misplaced and gave her an almost square countenance. Her eyes had continued to distend their sockets. My surprise was great, because from Guido and others who had gone to visit her, I had heard that with every passing day she gained new strength and health. But a woman’s health is, first of all, her beauty.
Ada also brought me other surprises. She greeted me affectionately, but no differently from the way she had greeted Augusta. There was no longer between us any secret, and certainly she no longer remembered having wept on recalling how she had made me suffer. So much the better! She was forgetting even her rights over me! I was her good brother-in-law, and she loved me only because she found unchanged my affectionate relations with my wife, which always remained the admiration of the Malfenti family.
One day I made a discovery that greatly surprised me. Ada believed she was still beautiful! Far away from home, at the lake, she had been courted, and obviously she had enjoyed her successes. Probably she exaggerated them, because it seemed to me excessive to claim she had h
ad to leave that resort to escape a suitor’s persecution. I admit there may have been an element of truth there, because she would no doubt seem less ugly to those who hadn’t known her before. But still, not that much less, with those eyes and that complexion and that deformed face! To us she seemed uglier because, remembering what she had been, we saw more clearly the devastation wrought by the illness.
One evening we invited her and Guido to our house. It was a pleasant gathering, just family. It seemed the continuation of that four-way betrothal of ours. But Ada’s hair was not illuminated by the glow of any light.
When we were separating, as I was helping her on with her cloak, I remained alone with her for a moment. I immediately had a slightly different feeling about our relations. We were left alone, and perhaps we could say to each other what we were unwilling to say in the presence of the others. As I was helping her, I reflected and finally I found what I had to say to her.
“You know he’s gambling now,” I said to her in a serious voice. I sometimes suspect that with those words I wanted to recall our last meeting, which I could not believe was so forgotten.
“Yes,” she said, smiling, “and very successfully. He’s become quite clever, from what they tell me.”
I laughed with her, a loud laugh. I felt relieved of all responsibility. As she went off, she murmured: “Is that Carmen still in your office?”
Before I could answer, she had run off. Between us there was no longer our past. There was, however, her jealousy. That was alive, as at our last meeting.
Now, thinking back, I find that I should have realized, long before I was precisely informed, that Guido had begun losing on the market. His face was no longer illuminated by that air of triumph and it showed again his great anxiety over that balance sheet, left in that state.
“Why are you worrying about it?” I asked him, in my innocence, “when you already have in your pocket enough to make those false entries completely real? When you have all that money, you don’t go to jail.” At that time, I later learned, he no longer had a cent in his pocket.
I was so firmly convinced he had fortune bound to his chariot that I paid no heed to the many clues that might have persuaded me otherwise.
One evening in August, he dragged me off fishing again. In the dazzling light of an almost full moon there was scant likelihood of catching anything on our hooks. But he insisted, saying that out on the water we would find some relief from the heat. In fact, that was all we found. After a single attempt, we didn’t even bait the hooks, and we allowed the lines to trail from the little boat as Luciano rowed out to sea. The moon’s rays must surely have reached the seabed, sharpening the sight of the big animals, making them aware of the trap, and even of the little animals capable of nibbling the bait, but not of taking the hook in their tiny mouths. Our bait was simply a gift to the minnows.
Guido lay down at the stern, and I at the prow. A little later he murmured: “How sad, all this light!”
Probably he said that because the light prevented him from sleeping, and I agreed, to please him, and also so as not to disturb with foolish argument the solemn peace in which we were proceeding. But Luciano protested, saying he liked that light very much. As Guido didn’t answer, I tried to silence the youth, saying the light was certainly sad because we could see all the things of this world. And besides, it spoiled the fishing. Luciano laughed and kept quiet.
We were silent for a long while. I yawned several times in the moon’s face. I regretted having let myself be induced to climb into that boat.
Guido suddenly asked me: “You’re a chemist, could you answer me this: which is more effective, pure veronal or sodium veronal?”
To tell the truth, I didn’t even know that a sodium veronal existed. You can’t expect a chemist to know the whole world by heart. I know enough chemistry to enable me to find any information promptly in my books, and further to be able to discuss—as is obvious in this case—the things I don’t know.
Sodium? Why, it’s a well-known fact that sodium compounds are those most easily assimilated. Also, in connection with sodium, I recalled—and I repeated more or less exactly—an encomium of that element expressed by a professor of mine in the only lecture of his I attended. Sodium is a vehicle on which the elements climb in order to move more rapidly. And the professor had recalled how sodium chloride passed from organism to organism, and how it collected simply as a result of gravity in the deepest pit of the earth, the sea. I’m not sure I reproduced my professor’s thought precisely, but at that moment, faced by that vast expanse of sodium chloride, I spoke of sodium with infinite respect.
After some hesitation, Guido asked further: “So someone who wants to die should take sodium veronal?”
“Yes,” I answered.
Then, remembering that there are cases in which a person may want to simulate a suicide and, not thinking just then that I might be reminding Guido of a painful episode in his life, I added: “And if the person doesn’t want to die, he should take the pure veronal.”
Guido’s study of veronal might have made me stop and think. Instead, I didn’t realize anything, concentrating on sodium as I was. Over the next few days I was able to bring Guido new evidence of the qualities I had attributed to sodium: to accelerate amalgams, which are simply intense embraces between two bodies, embraces that substitute combination or assimilation, some sodium was also added to mercury. Sodium was the mediator between gold and mercury. But Guido was no longer interested in veronal, and now I think that his visits to the Bourse had then taken a turn for the better.
In the course of a week, Ada came to the office all of three times. Only after the second visit did it occur to me that she wanted to talk with me.
The first time, she ran into Nilini, who had once again set himself to educating me. She waited a full hour for him to leave, but she made the mistake of chatting with him and he therefore believed he should stay. After having made the introductions, I heaved a sigh of relief, as Nilini’s mandibular gap was no longer directed at me. I didn’t participate in their conversation.
Nilini was actually witty and surprised Ada, telling her how there was as much wicked gossip in the Tergesteo as in a lady’s sitting room. Only, according to him; at the Bourse, as always, they were better informed than elsewhere. To Ada it seemed he was slandering women. She said she didn’t even know the meaning of the word gossip. At this point I spoke up, confirming that in all the long years I had known her, I had never heard from her lips a word that even remotely resembled gossip. I smiled while saying that, because I seemed to be reproaching her. She wasn’t a gossip because other people’s affairs didn’t interest her. Before, in perfect health, she had minded her own business, and when her sickness overcame her, she could maintain only one little space free, which was reserved for her jealousy. She was a true egoist, but she welcomed my testimony with gratitude.
Nilini pretended not to believe her or me. He said he had known me for many years and he believed I possessed a great ingenuousness. This amused me, and it amused Ada, too. I was very annoyed, on the other hand, when he - for the first time in the presence of a third party—proclaimed that I was one of his best friends and that therefore he knew me profoundly. I didn’t dare protest, but that shameless declaration offended my modesty, I was like a young woman publicly accused of fornication.
I was so ingenuous, Nilini said, that Ada, with her familiar female cleverness, could easily have uttered some slander in my presence without my being aware of it. It seemed to me that Ada continued to be amused by these dubious compliments, but I later learned that she was letting him talk in the hope that he would wear himself out and leave. She had quite a wait.
When Ada came back the second time, she found me with Guido. Then I read on her face an expression of impatience, and I guessed that it was actually me she was seeking. Until she returned, I toyed with my usual dreams. She wasn’t asking me for love, actually, but too frequently she wanted to be alone with me. For men it was difficult
to understand what women wanted because at times women themselves didn’t know.
But her words then inspired no new feeling. As soon as she could talk to me, her voice was choked with emotion, but not because it was me she was addressing. She wanted to know the reason why Carmen had not been discharged. I told her all I knew about it, including our attempt to procure her a position with Olivi.
She was immediately calmer because what I told her corresponded exactly to what she had been told by Guido. Then I learned that her fits of jealousy struck her at intervals. They arrived without apparent cause, and they were dispelled by any convincing word.
She asked me two more questions: if it was really all that difficult to find a position for an employee, and if Carmen’s family was in such straits that they depended on the girl’s earnings.
I explained to her that, in fact, in Trieste it was hard to find an office job for a woman. And as for the second question, I couldn’t answer, because I didn’t know any member of Carmen’s family.
“But Guido knows everyone in that house,” Ada murmured wrathfully, and tears bathed her cheeks again.
Then she pressed my hand to say good-bye, and thanked me. Smiling through her tears, she said she knew she could rely on me. I liked her smile because it was certainly not meant for a brother-in-law, but rather for one bound to her by secret ties. I tried to give her proof that I deserved that smile, and I murmured: “What makes me fear for Guido isn’t Carmen, but his gambling on the stock market!”
She shrugged. “That’s not important. I’ve talked about it with Mamma, too. Papà also played the stock market, and he made lots and lots of money!”
I was disconcerted by this answer, and I insisted: “I don’t like that Nilini. It’s not true that I’m his friend!”
She looked at me, surprised. “He seems a gentleman to me. Guido is also very fond of him. I believe, furthermore, that Guido is now paying great attention to business. “