The Triumph of Death

by Gabriele D'Annunzio

"What do you mean to insinuate? When will that viper of a mother of yours cease spitting her venom? When will she finish? Does she want me to close her mouth forever? Very well! I'll do it one of these days. Ah! what a woman! For fifteen years, yes, fifteen years, she has not given me one minute's peace. She has poisoned my life, she is killing me by slow fire. If I am ruined, it is her fault. Do you understand? It is her fault!"

"Be silent!" cried George, beside himself, unrecognizable, pale as death, trembling in all his limbs, seized by a fury like that which he had already felt against Diego. "Be silent! Do not speak her name! You are not worthy to kiss her feet. I came here to speak to you of her. I allowed myself to be played upon by your comedy. I permitted myself to be caught in a trap. What you wanted was a present for your ribald companion, and you succeeded. Oh! what shame! And you have the heart to insult my mother!"

His voice failed him; he choked; a veil covered his eyes; his knees shook beneath him as if all his strength was about to abandon him.

"Now, good-by! I am going. Act as you like. I am your son no longer. I never want to see you or know anything of you. I will take my mother away; I will take her away with me to some distant place. Farewell!"

He went out tottering, a shadow before his eyes. As he passed through the rooms to reach the terrace, he heard the frou-frou of skirts, and a door which closed, as if behind someone retiring in haste, in order not to be surprised.

As soon as he was in the open air, outside the railings, he felt a mad desire to weep, to cry, to run across the fields, to knock his head against a rock, to seek a precipice where all would end. His nerves trembled painfully in his head, and caused him cruel twinges as if they were being broken one after the other. And he thought, with a terror that the dying day rendered more atrocious: "Where shall I go? Shall I go back there this evening?" The house seemed to him to be moved back an infinite distance; the length of the road appeared impossible to traverse; all that was not immediate and absolute cessation of his frightful torture seemed to him inadmissible.

CHAPTER VIII.

The following morning, when he opened his eyes after a very restless night, the events of the previous evening seemed but a confused memory. The tragic deepening of the twilight on the silent country; the grave sound of the Angelus, which, prolonged in his ears by a hallucination of hearing, had seemed endless; the anguish which had come over him on approaching the house, at the sight of the lighted windows crossed at intervals by shadows; the feverish excitement which had seized him when, pressed with questions by his mother and sister, he had related the interview, exaggerating the violence of the invectives and the atrocity of the altercation; the almost delirious desire to keep on speaking, to add to the recital of the real facts the incoherence of his imagination; the ejaculations of contempt or of tenderness with which his mother had interrupted him, as he went on describing the brute's attitude and his own energy in reproaching him; then the sudden hoarseness, the rapid exasperation of the pain which hammered his temples, the spasmodic efforts at a bitter and non-coercible vomiting, the severe cold which had chilled him in bed, the horrible dreams which had caused him to start while in the first torpor of his enfeebled nerves—all this came back confusedly to his memory, augmented his painful physical stupor, from which, however, he would not have been willing to emerge but to enter into a state of complete extinction, into the insensibility of a corpse.

The necessity of death was still suspended over him with the same imminence; but it was unendurable for him to think that, in order to put his design into execution, he would have to shake off his inertia, accomplish a series of fatiguing acts, conquer the physical repugnance which discouraged him from all effort. Where could he kill himself? How? At the house? That same day? With a firearm? With poison? His mind had not yet conceived the precise and definite idea. Even the torpor that paralyzed him, and the bitterness of his mouth, suggested to him the idea of a narcotic. And, vaguely, without stopping to seek a practical means by which he could procure an efficacious dose, he imagined its effect. Little by little the images multiplied, became particularized, became more distinct; and their association formed a visible scene. What he tried to imagine was, not so much the sensations of his slow death-agony, as the circumstances which would lead to his mother, sister, and brother learning of the catastrophe. He tried to imagine the manifestations of their sorrow, their attitudes, their words, their gestures. Still following the same idea, his curious attention extended to all the survivors, not only his immediate relatives but to the entire family, to his friends, to Hippolyte, the far-distant Hippolyte, so distant that she had almost become as a stranger to him.

"George!"