After the Pardon

by Matilde Serao

“Whatever do you want with an idiot and a business nonentity like me? Let me go,” Emilio often said to his cousin, with a wan smile.

“Remain, remain,” Robert would say, without taking any notice of the protest.

So Emilio Guasco remains at his work. Sometimes he even asks himself what he would do if he were to leave the firm and had to spend his considerable income alone, and how he would dedicate his time so tiring and boresome. From youth he has always felt the natural sadness of his temperament. He has tried to counteract and drive away this sadness by giving himself to the sports held in honour in Rome for years, and to the new games introduced there recently by the foreign element. Emilio is an expert and daring rider, and few have a better seat. Every year he is a faithful rider to hounds. But to this brilliant and rather fashionable sport he prefers that other hunting, solitary and melancholy, among the large regions about Palidoro, Maccarese, and Pontegalera, where one goes dressed in thick fustian, exchanging a few words with the cow-boys to be met with on horseback, wrapped in brown mantles with a lining of green serge. Sometimes he is absent two or three days at these hunts, so much in keeping with his thoughtful and sad character, sleeping in a buffalo tent as in Africa. His friends tell him of the example of Prospero Ludovisi, a keen hunter, who took a most pernicious fever at Maccarese and died suddenly of it in thirty-six hours. The malaria is especially deadly in that vast and deserted region. Emilio only smiles. Among modern sports he prefers of all the English games, on foot or horse, by sea or land, Golf—Golf, which is the adoration of all spirits fond of the open air, of solitude and silence,—Golf which is the true symbol of the solitary man. At his club he seldom mixes with the many players of poker, but he is a silent and unwearying devotee of bridge.

Emilio Guasco, in his early youth, has had his love affairs. He has not, however, committed any of the follies of the pleasure-seekers, which in public opinion has classed him among the coldest of men to whom women have little or nothing to say. Some, the more spiteful, have accused him of avarice, since love in general, and under certain conditions, implies generosity of spirit and of purse.

He has never compromised any one, and his adventures have been discreet and somewhat mediocre. The heart which he brought when married to the lovely and fascinating Maria Simonetti was one very sane, without perversion and corruption, a sincere heart which gave itself not in mad transports but with seriousness and faith. If not exceedingly in love during his engagement, he was in love.

One could say that he married for love of the enchanting girl who brought him only a good name, but not a soldo of dowry. Nor was his love a smothered flame which alters in marriage, bursting forth as a conflagration of passion. He loved Maria moderately, with a just affection which afterwards had no diminution, but no increase. He had esteemed his fiancée deeply, and afterwards his wife, for her character and mettle, her pride and truth; he had even felt a little of her fascination, but not all of it. Especially, he had not experienced in the first year of his marriage that joy of life which causes the hearts of the newly married to vibrate, exalts their souls, and later on seems to make them accept an existence less joyful and less happy through the unforgettable beauty of their first recollections. Emilio did not recognise till later, much later, the immense delusion he had been as a husband to the passionate heart of Maria Simonetti; he became aware of it when there was no longer time and all was lost.

For a long time he believed he had done all he could for his lady, being fond of her, respecting, honouring, and never being false to her, but nothing more. He had not understood that Maria Simonetti’s life and happiness were in his two hands. Not having understood that, he had let Maria’s life languish in sentimental and moral misery; so that she sought elsewhere the way of magnifying all her faculties and sensations. When he understood it was too late: that was afterwards. It was afterwards that, intolerant of lies, inept at deception, Maria Guasco Simonetti had left her husband’s house and had fled with Marco Fiore.

Then Emilio Guasco had seen all the error of his existence, of his indifference, his want of any abandonment, of any enthusiasm. Alone, in a suddenly deserted house and dishonoured, he discovered his original sin, aridity, that grave sin which separates us from everything beautiful and everybody beloved; which makes those flee from us fatally whom we do not know how to love. The tragedy which that day had brought him in the flight of his wife with her lover had still more paralysed Emilio’s mind, which was incapable of efficacious fury, incapable of sustained impulse, and capable only of sorrow and a slow and pointless sadness.

He had not acted and rushed after Maria and Marco; but had remained at home to suffer in silence. A part of the society in which he lived called it an immense disgrace, because to all of them he was what is termed a perfect husband; a smaller part, more intelligent and original, had proclaimed that he deserved no better treatment, since he had not known how to love Maria worthily, and that, in fact, he had annoyed and exasperated her. Secretly, in the long examinations of conscience which every man makes with himself in the hours of moral crisis, Emilio thought those right who had indicted him as the first author of his wife’s funereal act. He saw, on one of his sleepless nights, with the eyes of his soul all that he ought to have been and had not been. Certain deep truths of the spirit and the heart, hitherto unknown to him, appeared to him in vivid light. As in all great revolutions which transform and remake the inner life of a being, many new habits were formed by him in the three years of solitude and abandonment, singular habits different and contradictory to each other.

While Maria’s flight with Marco had given him acute anguish, the moral figure of his wife appeared prouder and bolder in its act of liberation, and if the husband still carried with him all the pain of the offence, so as to feel the impression of a bleeding wound for three years, the man had admired in Maria her lofty contempt of every minor good to obtain the one supreme good. While Maria was far away, as if lost in the vast world, Emilio saw her again near him palpitating with beauty and life, and he began to love her in solitary silence, vainly and uselessly. He surprised himself into desiring and wanting her more than ever, and in his empty love and desire he ended by knowing that powerful and terrible instinct of love—jealousy.