“Why did she weep?” inquired Andrea, moved.
“Because she suffered. At school some considered her eccentric, some romantic, others fantastic. The doctor said she was ill, and ought to be taken away from there.”
She continued talking of her curious fancies; how “she ate no fruit on Tuesday, for the sake of the souls in Purgatory; and drank no wine on Thursday, because of Christ’s Passion. She ate many sweets and drank great glasses of water.”
“Even now she drinks them,” remarked Andrea, profoundly interested.
By degrees the narrator’s voice fell, the tale dragged, and he did not venture to rouse her. Caterina slept for a few moments, and then, in broken accents, began again. She ended by saying in her sleep, “Poor Lucia!”
“Poor Lucia!” repeated Andrea, mechanically.
Caterina reposed in sleep, but he remained awake, feverish from the tale he had heard, obliged to resist his longing to wake his wife and say to her, “Let us continue to talk of her.”
He had unconsciously adopted the same method with Alberto. When he went out walking with him he ingeniously led up to the subject of his wife. No sooner said than done. Alberto did not care to hear another word. As with Caterina, Lucia was his one idea, his favourite topic. He had so much to tell that Andrea never needed to question him: he sometimes interrupted him by an exclamation to prove that he was an interested listener. Alberto had enough to talk about for a century: how he had fallen in love, how Lucia spoke, what she wrote, how she dressed when she was a girl. He remembered certain phrases: The “Car of Juggernaut,” the “Drama of Life,” the “Love of the Imagination,” the “Silence of the Heart,” and he unconsciously repeated them, enjoying the remembrance of them. He recalled the minutest details—a date, the flower she had worn in her hair on a certain day, the gloves that came up to her elbow, the rustle of a silken shirt under her fur wraps. Alberto had forgotten nothing. One day he had found her in bed with the fever, with a white silk handkerchief, that made her look like a nun, bound round her head. Another day she had made the sign of the cross on his chest—an ascetic gesture—to avert evil from him. Another time she had told him that she was going to die, that she had a presentiment about it, that she had already made her will. She wished to be embalmed, for she dreaded the worms ... wrapped first in a batiste sheet and then in a large piece of black satin, perfumed with musk, pearls twisted in her hair, and a silver crucifix on her bosom.
“Enough to make one weep, Andrea mio” continued Alberto. “I could not keep her silent. She would tell me all, all. We ended by weeping together, in each other’s arms, as if we had been going to die on the spot.”
When Alberto Sanna’s confidences became too expansive, and the unhealthy flush of excitement dyed his cheeks, Andrea suffered the tortures of jealousy. Alberto grew enthusiastic over the delicate beauty of his wife, the sweetness of her kisses, and as he ran on his companion turned pale, bit his cigar, and knew not how he resisted the temptation to throw Alberto into a ditch. That invalid, whose breathing was oppressed even on level, whose breath whistled through his lungs on rising ground, that sickly homunculus discoursed of the joys of love as if he knew anything about them. Andrea looked him up and down, and decided that he was a wooden marionette in that winter overcoat, with the collar drawn up to his ears, and the hat drawn down over his eyes; so his anger was blended with contempt, and he threw his cigar violently against the trunk of a tree. There were no means of reducing Alberto to silence. His impudence was of the passionately shameless kind, so peculiar to those lovers who recount to the whole world how their mistress’s shoulder is turned, and that her limbs are whiter than her face—a placid immodesty that made it possible for him to tell Andrea that Lucia wore blue silk garters embroidered with heartsease, with the motto, “Honi soit qui mal y pense;” and smilingly he inquired: