"What shall I say to her? What will she say to me? What will be my attitude towards her?" All my prejudices, all my plans, were scattered. There remained to me only an intolerable anguish. Who could foresee the result of the meeting? I neither felt master of myself, nor of my words, nor of my acts. I only felt within me a fermentation of obscure thoughts that, at the slightest shock, would surge up. Never, as at that moment, had I had the clear and hopeless consciousness of the intestine discords that rent me, the perceptions of the irreconcilable elements that warred at the depths of my being, that overthrew one another, that destroyed each other by turns in a perpetual conflict, rebellious to all restraint. To the dejection of my mind was added a particular agitation of my feelings produced by the images which, on that day, had ceaselessly tortured me. I knew that agitation well, I knew it but too well; I knew it was more certain than any other thing to stir up the muddy depths in man. I knew but too well that base concupiscence from which nothing can save us—that dreadful sexual fever which, for months, had held me chained to a despised and odious woman, Teresa Raffo. And now, the sensations of goodness, of pity, and of strength, that were necessary to me to enable me to support a meeting with Juliana and to persist in my original project, died away in me like moving mists over a swamp of mire.
It lacked but little of midnight when I left my room to go to Juliana's. Every sound had ceased. The Badiola reposed in profound silence. I listened intently, and it seemed to me I heard the calm respiration of my mother, of my brother, of my daughters, those innocent and spotless beings. I thought I saw the face of Maria again sleeping, as I had seen it the night before; I imagined I saw the other faces, with an expression of repose, of peace, of goodness on each. A sudden tenderness seized me. The feeling of happiness, experienced but for a moment the evening before, and then eclipsed, threw a great light over my mind. If nothing had happened, if I had remained under the illusion, what a night that would have been! I would have gone to Juliana as to a divine being. And what could I have wished sweeter than that silence to envelop the inquietude of my love? I traversed the room in which, the evening before, I had received from my mother's mouth the unexpected revelation. Again I heard the ticking of the clock that had marked the hour, and, I do not know why, that tick, tack, so invariably equal, increased my anguish. I do not know why, but I imagined I felt Juliana's anguish respond to mine through the space that still separated us, and that the palpitations of our hearts were accelerated in unison. I walked straight before me, without further stopping, without seeking to muffle the sound of my footfalls. I did not knock at the door; I opened it and entered. Juliana was standing, supporting herself with one hand on the corner of a table, motionless, more rigid than a Hermes.
I can still see everything. Nothing at that hour escaped me; nothing eluded my attention. The actual world had vanished. There subsisted but a fictitious world in the midst of which I panted with anguish, with oppressed heart, incapable of articulating a syllable, and yet singularly lucid, as if I had been a spectator at a theatre. On the table burned a candle, which lent a sort of visible reality to this semblance of scenic fiction, because the little, flickering flame seemed to shed about it that vague horror which the actors in a drama diffuse in the ambient air with their great gestures of despair or menace.
The strange sensation disappeared when, finally, powerless to longer support that silence and Juliana's marble-like immobility, I spoke the first words. There was nothing in my voice of the sound that I believed it would have when I would open my lips. Without wishing it, I spoke in a gentle, trembling, almost timid voice.
"Were you waiting for me?"
She kept her eyes cast down. Without raising them she answered:
"Yes."
I looked at her arm, as motionless as marble, which seemed to become more and more rigid upon the hand placed on the corner of the table. I feared that that fragile support, on which she leaned her entire weight, would yield from one moment to another, and that she would fall.
"You know why I came?" I continued, with extreme slowness, plucking the words from my heart, one by one.
She remained silent.