"And I have known other things."
It relieved her heart to speak like this; his humility gave her strength, as if she had accomplished some proud and daring deed. She never had felt conscious of her power and worldly glory in the presence of her beloved, but now the memory of her obscure martyrdom, her poverty and hunger, created in her heart a feeling of real superiority over him she believed invincible.
"But I have no fear of suffering," she said, remembering the words he had spoken once: "Tell me you do not fear to suffer.... I believe your soul capable of bearing all the sorrow of the world." And her hand stole up to his cheek and caressed it, and he understood that she had answered those words spoken long ago.
He was silent, as intoxicated as if she had presented to his lips the very essence of her heart pressed out into that crystal cup like the blood of the grape. He waited for her to go on.
They reached a crossroads where stood a miserable hut, falling into ruin. La Foscarina stopped to look at it. The rude, unhinged windows were held open by a stick laid across them. The low sun struck the smoked walls within, and revealed the furniture—a table, a bench, a cradle.
"Do you remember, Stelio," said La Foscarina, "that inn at Dolo where we waited for the train. Vampa's inn, I mean. A great fire burned on the hearth, the dishes glittered on the shelves, and slices of polenta were toasting on the gridiron. Twenty years ago everything was exactly the same—the same fire, the same dishes, the same polenta. My mother and I used to go in there after the performance, and sit on the bench before a table. I had wept, cried, raved, and had died of poison or by the sword, on the stage. I still heard in my ears the resonance of the verses I had uttered, in a voice that was not my own, and a strange will still possessed my soul, and I could not shake it off—it was as if another person, struggling with my inertness, persisted in performing over again those movements and actions. The simulation of an outside life remained in the muscles of my face, and some evenings I could not calm them. Already, even then, the mask, the sensation of the living mask, was beginning to grow. My eyes would remain fixed, and a chill crept at the roots of my hair. I had difficulty in recovering full consciousness of myself and my surroundings.
"The odors from the kitchen sickened me; the food on our plates seemed too coarse, heavy as a stone, impossible to swallow. My disgust at everything sprang from something indescribably delicate and precious, of which I was conscious under all my weariness—a vague feeling of nobility beneath my humiliation. I hardly know how to express it. Perhaps it was the obscure presence of that power which later developed in me, of that election, of that difference wherewith Nature has marked me. Sometimes the consciousness of that difference from others became so strong that it almost raised a barrier between my mother and myself—God forgive me!—almost separated me from her. A great loneliness possessed me; nothing around me had power to touch me any more. I was alone with my destiny. My mother, even though she was with me, gradually receded into an infinite distance. Ah, she was to die soon, and was already preparing to leave me, and perhaps this withdrawal was the forerunner. She used to urge me to eat, with the words only she knew how to say. I answered: 'Wait! Wait!' I could only drink; I had a great craving for cold water. At times, when I was more tired and trembling than usual, I smiled a long-continued smile. And even that dear woman herself, with her deep heart, could not understand whence came my smile!
"Incomparable hours, wherein it seemed that the bodily prison was being broken through by the soul that wandered to the extremest limits of life! What must your youth have been, Stelio! Who can imagine it? We have all felt the weight of sleep that descends upon us after fatigue or intoxication, heavy and sudden as a stroke from a hammer, and it seems to annihilate us. But the power of dreams sometimes seizes upon us in waking hours with the same force; it holds us and we cannot resist it, though the whole thread of our existence seems on the point of being destroyed. Ah, some of the beautiful things you said that night in Venice come back to my mind, when you spoke of her marvelous hands weaving her own lights and shadows in a continuous work of beauty. You alone know how to describe the indescribable.
"Well, ... on that bench, in front of that rustic table, in Vampa's inn at Dolo, where destiny led me again with you, I had the most extraordinary visions that dreams ever have called up in my brain. I saw that which is unforgettable; I saw the real forms around me obliterated by the dream-figures born of my instinct and my thoughts. Under my fixed eyes, dazzled and scorched by the smoky petroleum lamps of the improvised stage, the world of my expression began to throb with life. The first lines of my art were developed in that state of anguish, of weariness, fever, disgust, in which my sensibility became, so to speak, plastic, after the manner of the incandescent material we saw the workmen holding at the end of the tube. In it was a natural aspiration to be modeled, to receive breath, to fill a mold. On certain evenings, in that wall covered with copper utensils, I could see myself reflected as in a mirror, in attitudes of grief or rage; with an unrecognizable face; and, in order to escape from this hallucination, to break the fixity of my gaze, I opened and shut my eyes rapidly. My mother would say, over and over: 'Eat, my daughter, at least eat this.' But what were bread, wine, meat, fruits, all those heavy things, in comparison with what I had within me? I said to her: 'Wait!' and when we rose to go, I used to take only a large piece of bread with me. I liked to eat it in the country the next morning, under a tree, or sitting on the bank of the Brenta.... Oh, those statues! They did not recognize me the other day, Stelio, but I recognized them!
"It was in the month of March, I remember. I went out into the country very early with my bread. I walked at random, though I meant to go to the statues. I went from one to another, and stopped before every one, as if I were paying a visit. Some appeared very beautiful to me, and I tried to imitate their poses. But I remained longer with the mutilated ones, as if to console them. In the evening, on the stage, I remembered some of them while I was acting, and with so deep a feeling of their distance and their solitude that I felt as if I could not speak any more. The audience would grow impatient at these pauses too prolonged. At times, when I had to wait for my companion in the scene to finish his tirade, I used to stand in the attitude of one of those statues, and remain as motionless as if I had been made of stone. I was already beginning to carve my own destiny.