The Triumph of Death

by Gabriele D'Annunzio

To dry her hair, she had unfastened it; and the curls, made heavy by the water, fell over her shoulders, so dark that they almost appeared violet. Her erect and slender form, enveloped as in the folds of a dress, stood out half against the glaucous surface of the sea and half against the luminous transparency of the sky. Scarcely could one see, underneath the hair, the profile of her bent and pensive face. She was wholly absorbed in the alternate pleasures of putting her bare feet in the torrid sand and keeping them there as long as she could endure the heat, then in plunging them, all burning, into the caressing waves that licked the sand. This double sensation seemed to afford her infinite enjoyment, in which she lost herself. She tempered and fortified her soul by the contact with free and healthy things, by the complacent absorption of the salt water and the sunbeams. How, at the same time, could she be so ill and so well? How could she conciliate in her being so many contradictions, assume so many aspects in a single day, in a single hour? The taciturn and sad woman in whom epilepsy was breeding, the mistress, eager and convulsed, whose ardor was at times alarming, whose sensuality had at times the lugubrious appearance of agony—this same creature, standing at the edge of the sea, had senses capable of gathering and savoring all the natural delights shed over the surrounding things, of appearing similar to the images of the ancient Beauty leaning over the harmonious crystal of a Hellespont.

She had an evidently superior power of resistance. George viewed her with a vexation which, becoming gradually concentrated, ended by assuming the seriousness of rancor. The sentiment of his own weakness was disturbed by hatred in proportion as his perspicacity became more lucid and almost vindictive.

Those bare feet, which by turns she burnt in the sand and cooled in the water, were not beautiful; the toes were even deformed, plebeian, not at all delicate—they bore the impress of a lowly origin. George looked at them attentively, saw only them, with an extraordinary clearness of perception, as if the details of their shape had revealed a secret to him. And he thought:

"How many impure things are fermenting in that blood! All the hereditary instincts of her race persist in her, indestructible, ready to develop and arise against any restraint whatsoever. I shall never succeed in making her pure. I shall be able only to superpose her real individuality above the changing images of my dreams; and she will be able only to offer to my solitary intoxication the indispensable instrument of her organs."

But, while his intelligence reduced this woman to be but a simple motif for his imagination and despoiled of all value the palpable form, the very acuteness of the present perception made him feel that what attached him to her the most was precisely the real quality of that flesh; not only what there was most beautiful in her, but, above all, what was least beautiful in her. The discovery of defect did not loosen the tie, did not diminish the fascination. The most vulgar features had an irritating attraction for him. He knew well this phenomenon, which had often asserted itself. Often, with perfect clearness of vision, his eyes had seen the slightest defects of Hippolyte's person accentuated; and they had been for a long time subject to the attraction, they had been compelled to establish them, to examine them, to exaggerate them. And by his senses, in his mind, he had felt an indefinable disquietude, almost always followed by the sudden ardor of desire. That, certainly, was the most terrible indication of the great carnal obsession which a human creature exercises over another human creature. Such was the spell which was obeyed by the nameless lover who, in his mistress, loved above all the marks traced by the years on her white neck, the parting of the hair every day wider, the faded mouth on which the salty tears made the savor of the kisses more lasting.

He thought of the flight of years, of the chain riveted forever by custom, of the infinite sadness of the love become a weary vice. He saw himself, in the future, tied to this flesh like the slave to his iron collar, deprived of will and thought, stupefied and vacuous; he saw the concubine fade, grow old, abandon herself without resistance to the slow work of time, let fall from her inert hands the lacerated veil of illusions, but preserve, nevertheless, her fatal power; he saw the deserted house, desolate, silent, awaiting the supreme visitor, Death!

He recalled the shouts of the little bastards, heard on that distant afternoon in the paternal house. He thought:

"She is barren; her entrails have been visited by a curse. In it the germs perish as in a fiery furnace. She thus thwarts and betrays the most profound instinct of life."

The uselessness of his love appeared to him like a monstrous transgression of the supreme law. But since his love was an uneasy sensuality only, why had he, then, this character of ineluctable fatality? Was not the instinct of the perpetuation of the race the unique and true motive of all sexual love? Was not this blind and eternal instinct the source of desire, and should not desire have as its object, occult or manifest, the generation prescribed by Nature? How was it, then, that so strong a tie attached him to the barren woman? Why was the terrible "will" of the Species so obstinate in demanding, in exacting, the vital tribute of that organism ravaged by disease and incapable of generating? What was lacking in his love was the first reason of love—the affirmation and the development of life beyond the limits of individual existence. What was lacking in the woman he loved was the highest mystery of her sex—the suffering of her who gives birth. And what caused the misery of both was precisely that persistent monstrosity.

"Aren't you coming in the sun?" asked Hippolyte, suddenly turning towards him. "Look how I am standing it! I want to become really what you say—like an olive. Shall I?"