The Virgins of the Rocks

by Gabriele D'Annunzio

“Happiness is forbidden me,” she said in a firm but sorrowful voice, keeping her eyes fixed on the garden of her agony, on the house of her martyrdom. “I, like Massimilla, am dedicated; and my vow also is irrevocable. And it is not only the action of my own will, Claudio. I feel now that the sacrifice is necessary, that I cannot escape from it. You heard the tone in my answer just now when you asked me to go up to the top with you. You saw how easy it was for me to climb with you, with the support of your hand. But now ... I have not been able to go any further; we did not reach the top. See: here I am, nailed to a rock. You make me an offer, the value of which you yourself cannot know as I know it; and here I am, weighed down by grief so heavy that I am afraid of being unable to bear it, I, who have never been afraid of suffering!”

I dared not interrupt her nor touch her. A sort of religious awe filled my soul. Overmastered by even stronger emotion than had overcome me on that solemn evening, I could feel, without turning round, the throbbing of something infinitely noble and mysterious at my side, something resembling the divine mysteries guarded under veils in the Holy of Holies in temples. Her voice was sounding close to my ear, yet it came from an infinite distance. Her words were simple, but they came from the summit of life, that pinnacle which the human soul can only reach when about to be transfigured into Ideal Beauty.

“Look, down there! Look at the house where from the first day we received you as a brother, where our father received you as a son, where you found the memory of your beloved dead kept fresh. Look how far away it seems! And yet I feel it bound to me by a thousand invisible ties stronger than any chain. I feel that even here my life mingles with the faint life suffering down there. Ah, perhaps you cannot understand! But think, Claudio, of the atrocity of the fate that hangs over us; think of that poor raving mother, of that broken-down feeble old man, of that victim always hovering on the border of madness, of that other, too, who is under the same sentence, and of the horror of contagion, and the solitude, and the grief.... Ah, you cannot understand! From the first day I feared to sadden you; I always tried to put myself between you and our misfortune. Very seldom, perhaps never, have you breathed the real sadness of our house. We met you in the open air, among the flowers which we learned, for your sake only, to love again; and in our neglected garden you have been able to bring some things to life.... But think of the hidden anguish! You cannot see; but I can see from here everything that goes on in there, as much as if the walls were made of glass, and I were touching them with my forehead. Life seems suspended; the father and son are shut up in one room and dare not go out, and dare not breathe; they listen to every sound, one increases the suffering of the other, and both are helplessly waiting for my return, and listening eagerly, hoping to catch the sound of my voice and my step. And she is raving, searching for me in all the passages, all the rooms, calling me aloud, stopping before a closed door and listening or knocking, and my two poor souls inside hear her breathing, and start at every knock, and can do nothing but look in each other’s eyes, my God!”

She pressed her hands to her temples with an instinctive movement, as if to force back some rebound of sorrow; and her whole body, leaving the support of the boulder, leant over towards the distant scene of her martyrdom. And for a few seconds, with the anguish she had communicated to me clutching at my throat, I bent over in the same attitude, I hung over the edge of the precipice, with my gaze fixed on the distant home where those souls were suffering.

“Think,” she continued, in a broken voice now, “think, Claudio, what would happen to them if I were not there, if I forsook them! Even when I leave them for a short time, I feel such regret, such remorse as I cannot describe to you. Every time I cross the threshold to go out, a gloomy presentiment weighs on my heart; and it seems to me as if on my return I should find the house full of shrieks and lamentations....”

An uncontrollable shudder was now shaking her whole figure, and her eyes were dilated as if some cruel vision were filling her with horror.

“Antonello,” she stammered; and for a few seconds she could not utter another word.

I looked at her with inexpressible anguish; and my soul suffered with hers in each contraction of her dear lips. And the vision in her eyes passed into mine; and I saw Antonello’s wasted, white face, and the rapid quiver of his eyelids, and his painful smile and disordered movements, and the waves of terror which used suddenly to sweep over his long thin body, shaking it like a fragile reed.

“Antonello ... tried to kill himself.... Only I know of it.... Nobody else knows it; not even Oddo. Alas!”

She trembled so much that she could not control herself as she leant against the rock. “One evening God warned me, God sent me.... His name be praised for ever!... I went into his room ... and I found him....”