“In God’s sight we are all equal. If my strength permitted, I would make my own bed, but I am so delicate! If I stoop too much, I get palpitations,” she thought, as she tied on her black apron and tucked up the train of her Turkish dressing-gown.
But the greatest pleasure, the pleasure that thrilled her every nerve, to which she owed her most exquisite sensations, was derived from dawdling over each separate object that had become part of her existence. A charm, wherewith to recall the past, to measure the future, to pass from one dream to another, whereon to weave a fantastic web.
The cold frigid aspect of Lucia’s bedroom reminded her of her old dream of becoming a nun, of falling sick of mysticism, of dying in the ecstasy of the Cross. The room was uncarpeted, and the bare floor, with its red tiles, had an icy polish. The bed, whose wrought-iron supports Lucia rubbed so indefatigably, had no curtains. Under its plain cover, with its single, meagre little pillow, it was the typical bed of ascetic maidenhood. Next to the bed, in a frame draped in black crape, hung a Byzantine Madonna and Child, painted on a background of gilded wood. She wore an indigo dress, a red mantle, and her eyes were strangely dilated, while one hand clutched the Infant Jesus: a picture expressive of the first stammerings of the alphabet of art. Lucia always kissed it before she dusted it; the lugubrious drapery made her dream of the mother she had hardly known, and from whom the Madonna came to her. Her lips would seek the traces of maternal kisses on the narrow, diaphanous, waxen-hued hand of the Virgin.
By the side of the bed, under the Madonna, stood a wooden prie-Dieu of mediæval workmanship, which Lucia had bought of a second-hand dealer. The family arms were effaced from its wooden escutcheon. Lucia, instead of replacing them by the alte onde in tempesta, the polar star and the azure field of Casa Altimare, had had it graven with a death’s-head and the motto “Nihil,” which she had adopted for her own seal. She had to kneel down on its red velvet cushion to polish it, and then mechanically she would say another prayer. She could hardly tear herself away from it. When she did so, it was to pass the handkerchief over the tiny chest of drawers that she had taken with her to school. That brought back some of her past life to her, the books hidden in the folds of the linen, the little images from Lourdes mixed up with the ribbons, the sweets that she did not eat. On the top of this chest of drawers were a red silk pincushion, covered with finest lace—which had been given to her by Ginevra Avigliana, the most patient needlewoman of them all—and Thomas à Kempis’s “Imitation,” its margin finely annotated in ink red as blood. When she passed the handkerchief over the book, she read a few words in it.
Her mind would run in another channel when she found herself in front of the large mirror in her wardrobe, where she could see herself from head to foot. She looked at herself, perceiving that her gown wrinkled about the bodice, and reflecting that she must have become much thinner lately. She joined her fingers round her narrow waist, remarking inwardly that had she chosen she might have made it as slender as a reed.... Then she posed in profile, with her train pushed on one side, and her head a little inclined towards the right shoulder. She had once seen the fantastic portrait of a thin unknown woman in white, in this attitude.... Lucia liked to imagine that the unknown lady had suffered much, then died; and that afterwards the unknown atom had joined the Great Unknown. The same fancies followed her to the oval mirror on her dressing-table. A thin white covering hung over it from the night before, put there because it is unlucky to look into an uncovered mirror the last thing at night. She threw the large white handkerchief, now no longer white, into a corner and supplied herself with another, with which she slowly rubbed the glass. She was tired, and sat gazing at her image—her forehead, her eyes, and her lips—intently, as if seeking to discover something in them. Every now and then she took up a bottle of musk from the table and sniffed it, looking at herself to mark the intense pallor and the tears induced by the pungent odour. In the drawer there was a little box of rouge and a hare’s foot to lay it on with; but she did not use it. One morning she had slightly tinted one cheek, it had disgusted her. She preferred her pallor, the warm pallor of ivory, that “white heat of passion,” as a rapturous poet, of unrecognised merit, had described it. A butterfly was pinned to the frame of the looking-glass. His wings were expanded, for he was a cotillon butterfly of blue and silver gauze, a memento of the first ball her father had taken her to last year. Every morning a puff of her breath caused his wings to flutter, while his little body stuck fast to the mirror. That motionless, artificial butterfly reminded her of certain artificial lives, full of noble aspirations, but lacking the energy, the power to rise. Then she wondered if she were very interesting or very ugly, when she looked sad; and she postured before the mirror in her most melancholy manner, calculating the effect of the white brow, half hidden beneath the wealth of wavy hair, the depth of sadness in her eyes, the dark colouring of the underlid which accentuated their expression, the straight line of the profile, the angle drawn by the bitter smile that sharpened the curves of her lips. A sigh of satisfaction escaped her. In her sad mood, she might inspire interest, if not love. Love she did not want. What would be the good of it? The capacity for loving was denied her.
Then came the turn of the bottles on the toilet-table. They contained, for the most part, those fantastic remedies which a quasi-romantic science has voted sovereign against the most modern of maladies, mock nevrose. In one bottle, chloral for insomnia, chloral to produce a sleep full of exquisite and painful hallucinations, the very disease of fantasy. In another, digitalis, wherewith to calm palpitations of the heart. In another, a beautiful one, enamelled, with a golden stopper, “English” salts wherewith to recall the fainting spirit. And at last, in one, a white limpid fluid—morphine. “For sleep ... sleep,” murmured Lucia, while she reviewed her little pharmacy.
After the toilet-table, she passed her handkerchief over the second wardrobe, the one containing her linen, and dusted the three chairs. Then having finished, she cast a look round, to assure herself that her cell, as she called it, had assumed the cold, spotless appearance she desired to give it. Her fantasy was assuaged; she addressed herself aloud to her room: “Peace, peace, sleep on, inert and inanimate, until to-night, when my tortured spirit will return to fill thy space with anguish.”
She passed into the sitting-room, her favourite resort, the room where her life was passed. The dark rosewood cabinet, containing five wide deep drawers, was her first stage. Her fancy transformed it into a bier. She delicately dusted the oxidised silver inkstand, representing a tiny boat, sinking in a lake of ink. Then the handkerchief was passed over the portrait frames with their hermetically sealed doors, so that no one might ever steal a glimpse of the portraits hidden within. In reality, they were empty, but the white cardboard backs, the void only known to herself, suggested an unknown lover, a mystic knight, that fair-haired Knight of the Holy Grail whom Elsa had not known how to love; whom she would have known how to keep by her side. Gently she brushed the dust off a small Egyptian idol with a tiny necklace of blue fragments: it was an upright copy of a mummy of the Cheops dynasty. It served as a talisman, for these Egyptian idols avert the evil of one’s destiny. Lucia touched the Bible, bound in black morocco, on whose fly-page she had inscribed certain memorable dates in her existence, with mysterious signs to denote the events to which they referred. With reverence she took up the diamond edition of Leopardi, on whose crimson binding was inscribed “Lucia,” in letters of silver. She read in both books, every day, kissing the Bible and Leopardi with equal fervour. The ivory penholder, with its gold pen; the sandal-wood paper-knife, on which was inscribed the Spanish word Nada; the agate seal, that bore the same motto as the prie-dieu; the letter-weight, upon which stood a porcelain child in its shift; the half-mourning pen-wiper of black cloth, embroidered in white; all the fantastic playthings she had accumulated on her writing-table, were objects of equal interest to her. She always spent half an hour at the writing-table, with fingers that dallied over their pastime, shoulders bent in contemplation, and an imagination that sped on wings to unknown heights.
Then, after the writing-table, came a photograph in a red frame, suspended against the wall, a portrait of Caterina. Underneath it hung a bénitier containing fresh flowers, which were changed every morning. Caterina contemplated her friend with kind serene eyes; the portrait had her own air of composure. Every morning, in passing the linen over the glass, Lucia greeted Caterina: “Blessed art thou, that dreamest not, blessed ... that will never dream.” Next came a small group in terra-cotta of Mephistopheles and Margaret. The guilty, enamoured girl was kneeling in a convulsed attitude, with rigid limbs. Her hands clasped the prayer-book that she could not open, her bosom heaved, her throat had sunk into her crouching shoulders, her face was contorted, her lips convulsed with the cry of horror that appeared to escape them. Mephistopheles, tall, meagre, diabolic, with a subtle, jeering smile, his hand in the act of making magnetic passes over her head, stood behind her; a great, splendid, crushing Mephistopheles. Whenever she looked at Margaret she felt herself blush with desire; whenever she looked at Mephistopheles, Lucia paled with fear: with vague indefinite desire of sin; with vague fear of punishment; a mysterious struggle that took place in the very depths of her being. It was Lucia’s hand that had carved in crooked, shaky characters, on the wooden pedestal, Et ne nos inducas in tentationem. When she came to the low table on which the albums stood, she sat down, for her fatigue grew upon her. She turned their leaves; there were a few portraits—girl friends, relations, three or four young men. Among the latter, by way of eccentricity, was a faded photograph of Petröfi Sandor, the Hungarian poet who fell in love with a dead maiden. Lucia never saw that portrait but through a haze of tears, when she pondered over a love so sad, so strange, and so funereal. Then she opened her book of “Confessions.” Its pages were scribbled over by Lucia herself, by the lady who taught her German, by the Professor of History, by Caterina, Giovanna Casacalenda, and others. There were in response to the wildest questions, the most irrelevant, silly, or eccentric answers. Giovanna’s was stupid, Lucia’s mad and fantastic, Caterina’s honest and collected, the Professor’s insane, the German teacher’s sentimental, Alberto Sanna’s fluctuating and uncertain. Lucia lingered here and there to read one of them. Then she put that album aside and opened another, her favourite, the dearest, the handsomest, the best beloved; a faded rose was gummed on the first page, underneath it was a line from Byron. On the next, a little wreath of violets; in their centre, a date and a line of notes of interrogation; farther on, the shadowy profile of a woman, barely sketched in, signed “Clara.” And pell-mell, dried flowers, verses, thoughts, landscapes, sketches, an American postage-stamp, a scarabæus crushed into the paper, two words written with gold ink.
She smiled, revelling in melancholy, as she turned these pages. Then she left the albums, and stroked the head of a bronze lizard that lay beside them on the table. She had a great fondness for lizards, snakes, and toads, thinking them beautiful and unfortunate.