A Life (12 page)

“Yes,” exclaimed Annetta, “the novel is, but what about its
success
?”

Alfonso, who had some experience in this field, felt a vague intuition from Prarchi’s description that he had written nothing at all of the novel described and had actually got the first idea for it at that very moment.

Prarchi was sturdy without being fat. He was not good-looking, with a large almost bald head, and a small, too fair moustache on his broad face.

Alfonso should have found Fumigi more sympathetic,
particularly
because the latter addressed him most of that evening. That was only because Fumigi disliked speaking out loud and was rather quiet, his thin little body leaning over the back of his chair, listening attentively and putting in a rare word in a low voice to his neighbour. The hair on his head was grey, his moustache and beard still black.

Alfonso tried hard to get his own word into the general discussion, without succeeding. So far Annetta had only Macario’s recommendation on which to base her acceptance of him as a literary man. He had been unable to give any proof of it.

Just when he was on the point of saying goodbye, Francesca appeared. She was pale but calm. She shook Alfonso’s hand
effusively and asked him for news of his home. With a smile, which seemed sad to Alfonso, she alluded to the letter she had written to Signora Carolina. So she knew about Maller’s mediation.

Annetta spoke to her with the formal
lei
and Alfonso tried to remember whether he had not heard her treated with greater
familiarity
before.

On the stairs, at a question from Prarchi about what reason could have made Signorina Francesca want to leave the Maller home, Macario replied “Women!” with great contempt.

F
ROM THEN ON
Alfonso visited Annetta regularly every Wednesday. Macario had warned him that one Wednesday or another he might find Annetta with her opinions and tastes quite changed and literature abandoned, which would also mean the end of these meetings. Alfonso would go each time to Annetta’s house, fearing to find that Macario’s predictions had come true.

He set great store by these meetings, both for the pleasure of seeing Annetta and for the satisfaction of his own vanity. It was known in the office that he frequented the managing director’s house, and he was treated with greater respect by his superiors. Cellani’s behaviour was modified too. He could not become kinder, but he became more familiar.

Annetta did not seem at all close to fulfilling Macario’s
prophecy
and was more and more immersed in her new studies. Every week she had a story to tell of some artistic thought, some book she had read which, with a beginner’s exaggeration, she declared to be the most important of its kind or criticized capriciously, all in her usual competent tone, often with sharp or funny comments whose only defects were that they did not always suit the subject.

One evening came an unusual guest, Cellani. It was probably the first time he had ever appeared in that company, for Annetta had to introduce Spalati to him. He did not seem ill at ease, as far as Alfonso could judge. He listened with great attention but did not say a word. Once his opinion was asked during a
discussion
, and he refused to give it, smiling and asserting that he had none. He seemed to be on very friendly terms with Annetta. That evening she devoted herself to him with an attention that showed affectionate respect.

Prarchi appeared less often at these evenings, because he was very busy. Fumigi was rarely absent, but the most assiduous was Spalati. As Macario had said, Spalati was above all else a
handsome
man, a Herculean figure beside whom Alfonso, tall and quite well-proportioned as he was, seemed of no account. Alfonso did not like him. He criticized Spalati for pedantry but hated him out of jealousy. For this he had some reason. Spalati was the
furthest advanced in Annetta’s confidence. For nearly a year he had been giving her lessons in Italian literature and had reached the intimacy of a teacher without boring her with too much hard work. He let her talk, listened, approved or modified, content to be treated as an equal. Alfonso, feeling inferior with his
difficulty
in speaking out loud, would undergo violent fits of jealousy, storms in tea cups. Outwardly he showed nothing because of his habitual reserve in expressing his feelings, a reserve which became greater as the feelings grew.

One evening he went off early, saying he was unwell. He wanted to show his ill-humour and was exasperated that no one realized it, all believing in his illness. He wandered round the streets,
discontented
with the others and with himself. Being in the habit of talking to himself when agitated, he soon realized how
ridiculous
his ill-humour was. Even in the most abstract daydreams a word clearly pronounced can recall one to reality. He had reached the point of desiring, of loving, of being jealous of Annetta; she on the other hand scarcely knew the sound of his voice. Whom could he blame? What had offended him more than anything else was her farewell handshake, given so coldly, with eyes turned to Spalati, who went on talking! Would he have preferred her to brood on what had caused the sudden illness which he had used as an excuse? Nothing could be guessed about an illness, after all, when nothing had been said beforehand to explain it. Spalati, if that had happened to him, would have received nothing but good wishes for his health.

Looking into himself he thought how petty and tiresome he was with his disproportionate desires. He had actually dreamt of Annetta loving him!

He wanted to drop the whole game. It was the only way still open to him. He would pay no more of these visits. They were a waste, first of the time he spent at the Mallers, then of the time afterwards, because of the agitation into which those visits threw him. They were embittering. He had begun a struggle in which he was bound to succumb, he who was incapable of talking to please but only talked to make himself understood; he was bound to
succumb
also because of his own position in life, which was unlikely to attract such an ambitious woman as this. With some excuse or
other, in making which he would try not to sound too incredible, he would avoid ever setting foot in the Maller home again. It was those visits which had made him deviate from his determination to work continuously: without his realizing it the ambition born in him shortly before was changing into vanity, a desire to be thought more than he was.

He felt he had already taken up again the serious intentions he had had when he had been an assiduous frequenter of the public library. But his thoughts kept on going back to the house from which he had come, imagining scenes in which he was implored to return.

He returned without being asked, simply because on Wednesday morning Macario had called out in passing: “Till this evening, then.”

The week had seemed very long, an interval of time full of incident—though actually nothing had really happened. He kept thinking that he had already carried out his intention and imagined a thousand consequences resulting from his energetic action. He was free to turn back, or rather to stay where he was, which pleased him. That week reminded him of his adventure with Maria, but this time it was only chance that prevented him taking some ill-considered step which would have broken off his relations with Annetta. If he had broken them, what would he be? Just a humble little clerk at Mallers about whose ill-humour no one would bother.

He presented himself at Annetta’s half-an-hour before the usual time, and was rewarded for his resolution because for the first time he found her alone. Everyone had sent excuses except Macario, who was still expected. Annetta said that she supposed they did not want to renounce some public celebration on that day, and showed Alfonso her gratitude by saying to him sweetly that he was wrong to come and shut himself up in a dreary room.

“Dreary? No, not at all!” assured Alfonso, looking at her ardently.

If she had never known she was beautiful, Alfonso’s glance would have been enough to tell her so. He confessed frankly that it was the first time he had heard of any public celebration that day.

“Do you lead such a solitary life, then?” asked Annetta in surprise.

They were sitting on a sofa next to the window, the brightest lit place in the room. Through the heavy curtains the colours of sunset entered mutedly.

In the street parallel to Via dei Forni the town band was passing. Nothing could be heard but the accompaniment and the rumble of a big drum. They listened in silence.

“I wonder what they’re playing?” asked Annetta, and flung open the window. The breeze swelled the curtains, and the clear ring of a trumpet brought the tune which had been lacking. For an instant they also heard the murmur of the crowd behind the band. Laughing, Annetta raised her face to Alfonso, who was still leaning on the window-sill.

“I wonder if our serious friends are among those people too?”

From the light side, where she was standing, she could not make out Alfonso in the half-darkness admiring her without restraint.

Her half-mourning, her grey had vanished too. She was dressed in soft white wool with a black cord around the waist. Annetta’s figure in spite of its curves was chaste and virginal, with a straight back hollowed towards the neck, and a white face which appeared clever and alert.

She told him to come to the window too and breathe the breeze which had replaced the strong
bora
of the week before.

The avenue was almost deserted; only on the corner was a group looking towards the next street.

“It almost makes me want to go down, too,” said Annetta.

Alfonso was intent on sensing the contact of his arm with Annetta’s, stirring his desire. He risked a movement to increase the pressure, and the blood rushed to his head from his own ardour and not from contact with Annetta’s arm, which was as if it belonged to a lifeless body.

Annetta had probably not noticed his daring. At first they were both a little embarrassed, because they had been too seldom alone together to find with ease a subject that could interest them both equally. But when the subject was found, Alfonso’s voice echoed calmly and sonorously, for the first time in that room, and for the
first time Annetta heard complete phrases from him. If he did not know how to converse with numerous people, Alfonso at least knew how to talk alone with one.

Smiling, Annetta asked him: “What about your homesickness? I’ve heard so much about it!”

“It has vanished” replied Alfonso.

His voice, to his surprise, was firm, calm. But that first phrase still remained truncated because he had wanted to pay a
compliment
and say that it did not exist at that precise moment. With all his ease he had not enough to make a risky remark—though he might possibly have got away with one.

One of Annetta’s affectations since she had taken to literature was to make a show of finding everything interesting and wanting to know its reasons. She asked him to explain what homesickness was.

“It’s difficult,” began Alfonso, “but I think I can explain partly.”

He described first of all how it was a physical illness, because the lungs suffered from change of air, the stomach from change of food, the feet from change to pavements. What he did not attempt to describe was the intensity of his longing to see again places he had left behind, a blank wall, a tortuous lane with a gutter in the middle of it, even an uncomfortable room which dripped in bad weather; without mentioning his loathing of the building in which he actually lived, he described his reaction to the bank, the big wide street, even the sea.

“And as for people … it’s the same there too.”

“Did you hate me so much”

“Hate you? No! But I felt I would like to be far away from you, far away at home, so as to be there, and not here.”

Fearing that what he described with such sincerity did not seem sufficiently in the past he added explanations. He hated all the people whom he felt obliged to treat with respect; he liked
freedom
, and he wanted to treat those who were not his equals as if they were.

Ah, how lovely it was to talk to Annetta as an equal! How sweet to confide in her as freely as if he were talking to himself! This sweetness flowed into his speech which, until then had been tongued-tied, careful and literary.

Annetta listened in surprise. So this young man could talk as well as study, could he?

She explained to him that when one wants something in life, one must know how to win it. Alfonso recognized this as a
dominating
idea of Macario’s.

“It’s not difficult to win my friendship. This is the first time you’ve talked to me. You may not have noticed it, but you’re nearly always dumb. I felt, though, that it was not up to me to make you talk.”

Annetta laughed, thereby taking from her words anything that might have been offensive. Alfonso himself also laughed, finding rather comic this idea of someone waiting to be made to talk.

It was those first thoughts that gave Annetta the idea of their writing a novel together. A character revealing itself so
ingeniously
seemed to her worth describing. She told him simply of the first idea which had suddenly come to her, and which was certainly better than any later modifications.

“Once upon a time a young man comes from country to town with some very odd ideas about city customs. He’s worried at
finding
them different from what he had imagined. Then we’ll put in a love affair. Have you ever been in love?”

“I …” and his heart beat more strongly, from fear.

He had been on the point of making a declaration.

Annetta called Santo to light the gas, and Alfonso was blinded by the light and made to realize how false the step was he had been about to take. Annetta was just the same; she was giving sharp orders to Santo who, surprisingly, carried them out in silence.

She made Alfonso sit down at the table.

“Now we need pen and ink … but I prefer to leave first ideas to memory. We’ll put black on white later. Now how would you develop this novel?”

“We must have a good think.”

“Is it so difficult? We’ll describe your life,” and here she was still at her first idea. “Of course instead of a clerk we’ll make you rich and noble, or rather just noble. The riches we’ll keep for the end of the book.”

With one light jump she had abandoned her first idea
altogether
.

“We must allow time for the imagination to work.”

“Ah yes!” said Annetta with the surprise of a young pupil reminded of a forgotten maxim. “D’you know what we’ll do? Each of us on our own, quite independently of the other, will put our own ideas on paper; then we’ll compare them and come to an agreement.”

Alfonso liked this suggestion immediately and said so with ingenuous expressions of joy that made Annetta smile with
pleasure
. Some good ideas for the novel were occurring to him, and he imagined what it would be like fitting them to Annetta’s. He was thinking only of minor details, not of the whole. About print and public he did not worry at all. For the moment his only aim was to cut a good figure with Annetta.

They spoke of the writing they had done till then. Annetta described a novel she said she had written about a woman married to a man unworthy of her. In time her artist’s soul affected her husband’s and changed him, and eventually the two really understood each other and lived together in perfect happiness for many a year.

Alfonso did not much like this theme, but Annetta stressed that she could not describe all she had written; for instance, in one place she had a careful description of a landscape, in another of a house—Alfonso ingenuously began admiring what did not exist.