After the Pardon

by Matilde Serao

With scarcely perceptible motion, taking every care not to make the slightest noise, holding her breath, she turned back, palpitating and trembling, yet striving to restrain the palpitation and the trembling. At last she reached her room.

Throwing herself on the bed she hid her face in the pillow, even stopping her mouth with it, so that her sobs of bitterness, of fear, and terror may not be heard. Hers was all the shame of a woman, who suddenly was fated to tell herself the hard and cruel truth that she was still a young and beautiful woman, that the man she had sought was still young and her husband as well, that, although the night was late, he who loved her surely, since only he who loves pardons, had not come to look for her dressed as she was as if for a love tryst; but that she had been on the point of knocking at his door, as if not to beg merely a colloquy of sadness, of repentance, of tears—not a colloquy of two bruised souls which sought spiritual healing for their wounds—but a colloquy of love.

“No, no, no,” she kept on saying, scarcely breathing, with her mouth against the fine linen of the pillow, fighting against the unjust accusation of her conscience.

Unjust! She felt herself perfectly pure from such a transgression, one of those miserable and mean transgressions of the inner feminine life which lower and corrupt a woman even to despising herself. Maria had only had, as she said, one love and one lover only, Marco Fiore, had only lived with a complete and intense passion for the three years of separation from Casa Guasco, and at once, but for ever, her heart and her senses had become a heap of ashes. As she had never wished to divide her soul and her person between Emilio Guasco and Marco Fiore at the time of the height of her amorous delirium, as she had forgotten everything, thrown everything aside to belong to one only, and had burnt in a single flame all that life had conceded her of love for Marco Fiore, so she, on returning home, to live again with her husband, had not for a moment thought that her person ought to be offered and given again as a sensible and tangible pledge, as a holocaust to the new conjugal existence. The idea that her husband hearing her knock at that door, hearing the handle creak, and seeing her appear in her soft garment, with her look of former times, late at night when he had not sought her; the idea that he might have believed it a sensual offering, had aroused in her a tempestuous crisis of shuddering, of shame, and of fear. Ah, how the lover was finished, was dead in Maria Guasco, dead with a love which is measured and short, as short as human existence, far, far shorter than all short affairs of which life is composed and in which man, alas, desires to place his eternity! Love was over, the lover was dead, and Maria Guasco felt every glory of the senses extinguished within her. If her soul and fibres at Venice and Rome had proved the immeasurable and inconsolable sorrow of her own sentimental and sensual impotence for her delightful lover, never more could she have love and a lover—not even her husband, Emilio Guasco.

“God has nullified and calmed me,” she thought, soothing the anguish of her spirit little by little. “I can be faithful to the past since I have been touched by death, and I have entered into an extreme quiet.”

But the man who was breathing, moving, living his unknown but powerful life in a room not far from Maria’s, the man who was the first to clasp her, his legitimate spouse, who had kept for her, even during the betrayal, even during the abandonment, all his rights as a husband; the man of whom Maria knew only this absolute and irrefutable right, was he, too, finished with love and dead to the senses?

Had the years which were passed withdrawn him from the inebriating flatteries of passion? Had they withdrawn him from all the burning impulses of life in its fulness? Was he dead? And if he was not, if he was alive, of what was he thinking, what was he desiring, what was he wishing, what could he wish of Maria at the present moment, now so late?

“He used to love me—he did love me,” she said to herself, lifting herself from her pillow, absorbed in the intensity of her thoughts.

And even now Emilio ought to love her. A feminine instinct told the thoughtful woman this; a precise and clear presentiment repeated it to her, and every act in daily reality had confirmed it for her, and his very magnanimity bore testimony to it.

“Only he loves who pardons,” she thought, in a secret torture which kept penetrating her spirit. The singular torture, that is, of all those who do not love, who are unable to love, who could break their hearts, but who could not place love there, and who, instead, are loved with tenderness and enthusiasm; the torture, that is, which life inflicts on thousands and thousands of miserable men and women, inept to love, who must endure the love of another, endure it coldly, and measure all its greatness without participating in it, and, in fact, feel all its weight, all its annoyance, and all its execration!—an ineffable torture indeed, which up to a certain point sent a rush of fear through Maria’s excited and sensible fibres. Rising to her feet and gazing with scared eyes at the door, she feared lest Emilio should appear there, should come to her enamoured as of yore, even more enamoured, and burning with precipitous desire. Maria in all that spiritual fever which flowed through her acutest feelings, her sharpest sensations, retired to the door of her room and wrung her hands in desperation, not knowing where to fly from such a danger. And just as she had evoked and invoked that presence of a good and honourable man which she had rendered so unhappy, that presence from which she had desired to hear the voice repeat to her the words of pardon, to let herself pronounce afresh those words of humility and contrition, so that presence—not one of a brother, not one of a friend, not of a suffering soul to be consoled and healed—that presence of a man, of a husband, strong in his love, strong in his instincts, strong in his right, seemed to her an abyss of abjection, of perdition, into which she would have fallen with all her pride and all her womanly dignity.