The Triumph of Death

by Gabriele D'Annunzio

He took a few steps, slowly. The heavy silence was disturbed at moments by little, mysterious noises, scarcely perceptible. The fresh air, the warmth of the day, contracted the fibres of the benumbed furniture, accustomed to the obscurity of the closed windows. The breath of heaven penetrated the pores of the wood, shook the particles of dust, swelled the folds of the hangings. In a ray of sunlight, myriads of atoms whirled about. The odor of the books was overcome gradually by the perfume of the flowers.

The things suggested to the survivor a crowd of recollections. From these things arose a light and murmuring chorus which enveloped him. From every side arose the emanations of the past. One would have said that the things emitted the odors of a spiritual substance which had impregnated them. "Do I exalt myself?" he asked himself, at the aspect of the images that succeeded one another in his mind with prodigious rapidity, clear as visions, not obscured by a funereal shadow, but living a superior life. And he remained perplexed, fascinated by the mystery, seized by a terrible anguish at the moment of venturing on the confines of that unknown world.

The curtains, which a rhythmic breath seemed to swell, undulated softly, giving glimpses of a noble and calm landscape. The slight noises made by the wainscoting, the papers, and the partitions continued. In the third room, severe and simple, the recollections were musical, and came from mute instruments. On a long, violet-wood piano, whose varnished surface reflected things like a mirror, a violin reposed in its box. On a chair a page of music rose and fell at the pleasure of the breeze, and almost in time with the curtains.

George picked it up. It was a page from a Mendelssohn motet: DOMENICA II POST PASCHA: Andante quasi allegretto. Surrexit pastor bonus— Farther on, on a table, there was a heap of parts for the violin and piano, Leipzig editions: Beethoven, Bach, Schubert, Rode, Tartini, Viotti. George opened the case, examined the fragile instrument that slept on olive-colored velvet, with its four strings still intact. A curiosity seized him to awaken them. He touched the treble string, which gave a plaintive moan that vibrated through the entire body. It was a violin made by Andrea Guarneri, dated 1680.

Demetrius reappeared, tall and slender, a little bent, his neck long and pale, his hair brushed back, and with the single white lock in the centre of his forehead. He held the violin. He passed one hand through his hair on the temple, near the ear, with his usual gesture. He tuned the instrument, rosined the bow, then attacked the sonata. His left hand, shrivelled and proud, ran up and down the neck; the tips of his thin fingers pressed the strings, and, beneath the skin, the play of his muscles was so visible as to be painful; his right hand, when drawing the bow, moved with a long, faultless motion. Sometimes he held the instrument tighter with his chin, his head inclined, his eyes half-closed, enjoying keenly his inner voluptuousness.

Sometimes he drew himself erect, looked fixedly before him, his eyes strangely brilliant; smiled a fugitive smile; and from his brow beamed an extraordinary purity.

Thus the violinist reappeared to the survivor. And George lived again the hours of life already lived; he lived them again, not in pictures only, but in actual and profound sensations. He lived again the long hours of close intimacy and forgetfulness, the time when Demetrius and himself, alone, in the warm room to which no noise could penetrate, executed the music of their favorite masters. How they used to forget their very existence! In what strange raptures this music, executed by their own hands, soon threw them! Often the fascination of a single melody held them prisoners an entire afternoon, without their being able to leave the magic circle in which they were enclosed. How often they had rehearsed that Song without Words of Mendelssohn, which had revealed to them both, at the bottom of their hearts, a sort of inconsolable hopelessness! How often they had rehearsed a Beethoven sonata which seemed to grasp their souls, to carry them away with a vertiginous rapidity across the infinity of space, and hover with them, during the flight, over every abyss!

The survivor went back in his recollections as far as the autumn of 188-, to that unforgetful autumn of melancholy and poetry, when Demetrius had scarcely emerged from convalescence. That was to be the last autumn! After a long period of enforced silence, Demetrius took up his violin again with strange disquietude, as if he feared having lost all his aptitude and all his mastery, all his knowledge of the instrument. Oh, what trembling of the enfeebled fingers on the strings and the incertitude of the bowing when he essayed the first tones! And those two tears that formed slowly in the cavity of his eyes, rolled down his cheeks, and were arrested in the threads of his beard, rather long and still untrimmed.

The survivor again saw the violinist about to improvise, while he himself accompanied him on the piano with an almost insupportable anguish, attentive in following him, in anticipating him, always fearing to break the measure, strike a false note, make a discord, or miss a note.

In his improvisations, Demetrius Aurispa was almost always inspired with poetry. George remembered the marvellous improvisation that, on a certain October day, the violinist had composed on a lyric poem by Alfred Tennyson, in The Princess. George himself had translated the verse so that Demetrius could understand it, and he had proposed it to him as a theme. Where was that page?