III.
Andrea, that overgrown child of nature, whose primitive elasticity of temperament enabled him to pass with ease from fury to tenderness, revolted against sorrow and rebelled against anguish. Why would they not let him love Lucia? Who dared to place themselves between him and the woman of his love? When Caterina was in the way, he could have screamed and stamped his foot, and sobbed like a child deprived of its toy; his inward convulsions were like the terrible nervous attacks of those obstinate infants who die in a fit of unsatisfied caprice. Lucia saw his eyes swollen with tears, and his face redden with the effort of repressing them; it made her turn pale with emotion. When the unfortunate Alberto was the obstacle, with his meagre little person, his hoarse voice, and his little fits of coughing, Andrea could hardly resist the impulse which prompted him to take him round the body and throw him down; to walk over him and crush him underfoot. When Lucia saw the breath of madness pass over Andrea’s face, she rushed forward at the first sign of it, to prevent a catastrophe. Then he took up his hat and went out on foot, round the fields, under the broiling sun, with hurried step, clenched teeth, and quivering nerves, bowing mechanically to the people he met, even smiling at them without seeing them. He returned home limp, bathed in perspiration, and fatigued; he slept, the good sleep of old times, for two hours, with clenched fists and head sunk in the pillows. On awaking, he had an instant of supreme felicity, a well-being derived from the rest he had enjoyed, the restored balance of his powers. But suddenly the worm began again to gnaw, and, like a whining child that awakes too early, he thought: “Oh, God! how unhappy I am! Why did I awake if I am to be so unhappy?”
He was in truth a very child in love, a child of no reasoning faculty, incapable of unhealthy sophistry or sensual melancholy. He loved Lucia, and desired her; that was his aim, clear, precise, and well-defined. He looked his own will in the face, straight as a sword-cut that finds its way to the heart. He knew that he did wrong, he knew that he was guilty of treachery; he looked his sin in the face without any mitigating sentimentalism. Not his were the terrors, the languors of an erring conscience, nor the mystifications of a depraved mind. He did wrong, not because he was impelled by faith or wrath divine, but because his imagination was wrought upon, and because he loved. He did not try to justify himself by the discovery of any imaginary defect in Caterina, nor wrongs nor shortcomings which would have made it excusable to bestow his love elsewhere. His conscience could not have endured the pretexts that might serve to lessen the consciousness of wrong-doing in a viler soul. They sinned and betrayed, because they loved elsewhere; that was all. Love is no fatality; love is itself, stronger than aught besides. So he suffered in not being free to love in the light of day, with the loyalty of a brave heart that has the courage of its errors. He could not understand obstacles; they were a physical irritation to him, as a cart across his path would have been. He would have liked to have pushed them aside, or ridden over them; he lamented the injustice of his fate, in that he could not surmount them. Sometimes, when they were all sitting together in the drawing-room, he felt tempted to take Lucia in his arms and carry her away. That was his right, the blind right of violence, suited to his temperament. Did she understand it? When he came too near to her, she shrank away with a slight gesture of repulsion. In proportion as his passion increased in intensity, so did the obstacles become more and more insurmountable. That consumptive creature never left his wife for a moment; drowsing, yawning, reading scraps by fits and starts, sucking tar lozenges, spitting in his handkerchief, grumbling, feeling his own pulse a hundred times a day, complaining of suffocation and cold sweats. Caterina, it is true, went to and fro on household avocations, and sometimes retired to write letters; but when her husband was at home she did her best to get her business done so that she could sit down to sew in the drawing-room. Alberto saw and inspected everything; and with the maudlin curiosity of a sick and indolent person, wanted to touch all that he saw. Caterina was more discreet, less curious, and of silent habit, yet she too saw everything. Impossible to speak to Lucia alone for a minute. Two or three times they had attempted this, almost oblivious of the others’ presence; but having stopped in time, had found each other mute, pale from weariness, their faces drawn by suppressed yawns. Caterina and Alberto had nothing to say to each other. After five minutes they subsided into an inevitable silence. Alberto considered Caterina an excellent woman, a notable housekeeper, but rather stupid, and in every way inferior to his wife. Caterina judged no man, but all that Alberto inspired her with was quiet, unemotional compassion. There was no spiritual sympathy between them, rather a physical repulsion. The impression produced by Caterina on Alberto was the negative one of absence of sex: she was neither beautiful nor ugly in his sight, nor a woman at all. In Caterina the instinct of health which recoils from disease, made him repellent to her. Then came the gloomy hours in which Lucia, in dumb despair, would betake herself to the sofa, where she would lie as rigid as the dead, her feet hidden under her skirts, her train hanging on the ground, with wreathed arms, and hands crossed behind her head, closed eyes and deathly pallor. She scarcely answered except in curt, harsh monosyllables, passing hours in the same attitude, without opening her eyes. Alberto wasted his breath in questioning her, she never made him any reply. Caterina, who since their school-days was accustomed to these acute attacks of melancholy, signed to him to be silent, to wait for the fit to pass over: and they kept silence until the gloom fell upon them all. Andrea started to his feet and prepared to go out, without so much as looking towards the sofa. Caterina was troubled at his manner of absenting himself, for she knew that her husband could not abide these extraordinary scenes. She ran after him to the top of the stairs, calling him back, whispering to him.
“Have patience, Andrea,” she said.
“But what is the matter with her?”
“I don’t know; she has strange ideas that unsettle her brain. She says they are visions, and the doctor calls them hallucinations. She sees things that we do not see.”
“What a singular creature!”
“Poor thing, she suffers a great deal, sai. If I could but tell you what she tells me, when neither of you are there. I fear we were to blame in advising her to marry Alberto....”
“What does she say to you? Tell me.”
“Are you going out?”
“Right you are: I am off. If any one wants me, say I am out on business. One can’t breathe in the drawing-room; it smells like a sick-room.”
“They will soon be leaving us, and then....”
“I don’t mean that; you’ll tell me the rest to-night. Au revoir.”
To make matters worse, sometimes in the evening, when Lucia chose to be most beautiful, she would gaze at him with a look of calm and persistent provocation that was torture to him. And he tortured himself, for he had neither the habit of patience nor the phlegmatic capacity for conquering obstacles. His was the haste of one who is accustomed to live well and quickly—who cares rather for a reality to enjoy day by day than for an ideal to live up to. What was this torment of having Lucia within reach—beautiful, desirable, desired—and yet not his? He would struggle on undaunted, clenching those fists that were ready to knock something down; and then he would fall back, wearied to exhaustion, no longer caring for life, with the eternal refrain in his mind: “that it would always be the same; that there was no way out of it; that life was not worth having.”
At night, it was no longer possible to pass an hour in the balcony. If the bed only creaked, Caterina awoke and inquired:
“Do you need anything?”
“No,” was the curt reply. Sometimes he did not answer at all. Then she fell asleep again, but her sleep was light. He knew that had he gone out on the balcony Caterina would soon have followed him, in her white wrapper—a tiny, faithful, loving shadow, ready to watch with him if he could not sleep. Oh! he knew her well, Caterina. He had taken the measure of the calm, deep, provident, almost maternal affection that welled over in the little heart. At times, when her head rested trustfully against his broad chest, as if it had been a haven of rest, an immense pity, a despairing tenderness for the little woman whom he no longer loved, stole upon him. All that was over. Finis had been written and the volume closed. But from this very pity and tenderness arose more potent his love for Lucia, who slept or watched two rooms away from him. Some nights he could have run his head against the walls to knock them down. He felt a seething in his brain that made him capable of anything. At last he lighted on the desperate remedy of talking to his wife of Lucia whenever they were alone. Caterina, who was desirous of awakening her husband’s interest in her friend, was fond of speaking of her. In a measure, Lucia’s personality modified Caterina’s temperament; her fantasy exercised a certain influence on her. Caterina proved this by her ingenuous employment of metaphor—she with whom it was unusual—when her talk ran on Lucia. To tell the truth, Andrea was rather unskilled in interrogatory, and in veiling a too acute curiosity; but Caterina was no expert in such matters. She talked on, in her quiet way, a gentle, continuous flow of words. It was at night, before going to sleep, that these conversations took place. She told him of Lucia’s mystico-religious mania; how she had turned the whole College topsy-turvy with her penances, her ecstasies, her tears during the sermons, her faintings at the Sacraments; she had even worn a hair-shift, but the Directress had taken it away from her because it made her ill. She told him of her strange answers, and of the fantastic compositions that excited the whole class; of the strange superstitions that tormented her. Sometimes, in the dead of the night, Lucia used to get out of bed and come and sit by hers (Caterina’s), and weep, weep silently.
“Why did she weep?” inquired Andrea, moved.
“Because she suffered. At school some considered her eccentric, some romantic, others fantastic. The doctor said she was ill, and ought to be taken away from there.”
She continued talking of her curious fancies; how “she ate no fruit on Tuesday, for the sake of the souls in Purgatory; and drank no wine on Thursday, because of Christ’s Passion. She ate many sweets and drank great glasses of water.”
“Even now she drinks them,” remarked Andrea, profoundly interested.
By degrees the narrator’s voice fell, the tale dragged, and he did not venture to rouse her. Caterina slept for a few moments, and then, in broken accents, began again. She ended by saying in her sleep, “Poor Lucia!”
“Poor Lucia!” repeated Andrea, mechanically.
Caterina reposed in sleep, but he remained awake, feverish from the tale he had heard, obliged to resist his longing to wake his wife and say to her, “Let us continue to talk of her.”
He had unconsciously adopted the same method with Alberto. When he went out walking with him he ingeniously led up to the subject of his wife. No sooner said than done. Alberto did not care to hear another word. As with Caterina, Lucia was his one idea, his favourite topic. He had so much to tell that Andrea never needed to question him: he sometimes interrupted him by an exclamation to prove that he was an interested listener. Alberto had enough to talk about for a century: how he had fallen in love, how Lucia spoke, what she wrote, how she dressed when she was a girl. He remembered certain phrases: The “Car of Juggernaut,” the “Drama of Life,” the “Love of the Imagination,” the “Silence of the Heart,” and he unconsciously repeated them, enjoying the remembrance of them. He recalled the minutest details—a date, the flower she had worn in her hair on a certain day, the gloves that came up to her elbow, the rustle of a silken shirt under her fur wraps. Alberto had forgotten nothing. One day he had found her in bed with the fever, with a white silk handkerchief, that made her look like a nun, bound round her head. Another day she had made the sign of the cross on his chest—an ascetic gesture—to avert evil from him. Another time she had told him that she was going to die, that she had a presentiment about it, that she had already made her will. She wished to be embalmed, for she dreaded the worms ... wrapped first in a batiste sheet and then in a large piece of black satin, perfumed with musk, pearls twisted in her hair, and a silver crucifix on her bosom.
“Enough to make one weep, Andrea mio” continued Alberto. “I could not keep her silent. She would tell me all, all. We ended by weeping together, in each other’s arms, as if we had been going to die on the spot.”
When Alberto Sanna’s confidences became too expansive, and the unhealthy flush of excitement dyed his cheeks, Andrea suffered the tortures of jealousy. Alberto grew enthusiastic over the delicate beauty of his wife, the sweetness of her kisses, and as he ran on his companion turned pale, bit his cigar, and knew not how he resisted the temptation to throw Alberto into a ditch. That invalid, whose breathing was oppressed even on level, whose breath whistled through his lungs on rising ground, that sickly homunculus discoursed of the joys of love as if he knew anything about them. Andrea looked him up and down, and decided that he was a wooden marionette in that winter overcoat, with the collar drawn up to his ears, and the hat drawn down over his eyes; so his anger was blended with contempt, and he threw his cigar violently against the trunk of a tree. There were no means of reducing Alberto to silence. His impudence was of the passionately shameless kind, so peculiar to those lovers who recount to the whole world how their mistress’s shoulder is turned, and that her limbs are whiter than her face—a placid immodesty that made it possible for him to tell Andrea that Lucia wore blue silk garters embroidered with heartsease, with the motto, “Honi soit qui mal y pense;” and smilingly he inquired:
“What do you think of it?—pretty, eh!”
The consolation turned to torture, the relief to anguish. Andrea grew grave and gloomy.