Her Husband (11 page)

This was exactly what constituted the miracle of art, a miracle in which they participated this evening almost with trepidation. It did not seem to come from a writer’s premeditated concept, but from the uncertain, unpredictable action born minute by minute in the clash of savage passions, in the freedom of a life unhampered by laws or even by time, in the arbitrary choices of so many wills that overpowered each other in turn, of so many beings left to themselves who acted in the full independence of their nature, that is,
against
whatever end the author might have intended.

Many people, among those most excited and yet no less worried that their impression might not accord with the judgment of competent critics, searched the orchestra and boxes to read the faces of drama critics from the most widely circulated newspapers. Critics from other cities were pointed out and carefully scrutinized. Eyes were especially fixed on a box in the first tier: the box of Zeta, the terror of all actors and playwrights who came to face the judgment of the Roman audience.

Zeta was in animated conversation with two other critics, Devicis from Milan and Corica from Naples. Did he approve? Disapprove? And of what? The play or the actors’ interpretation? Another critic entered the box. Who was he? Oh, Fongia from Turin . . . How he was laughing! And then he was pretending to cry, leaning first on Corica’s chest and
then on Devicis’. Why? Zeta jumped to his feet with a furious gesture of indignation and shouted something that made the other three burst out laughing. In the nearby box, a gloomy, dark woman, with deeply circled green eyes and a very dignified, somber manner, got up and went to sit in the corner of the box. While in the back a gentleman with gray hair . . . ah, Gueli, Gueli! Maurizio Gueli! leaned out to look into the critics’ box.

“Pardon me, Maestro,” Zeta said to him, “and pardon me, Signora. But this is very unfortunate, Maestro! This is the ruin of that poor girl! If you are fond of Signora Roncella . . .”

“I? For heaven’s sake!” said Gueli, and his angry face drew back, looking into his lady friend’s eyes.

With the flicker of a cutting laugh on her dark lips, and narrowing her eyes almost as if to dim their green flashes, she bowed her head several times toward the journalist and said: “Oh, very . . . very fond …”

“Signora, with reason!” the other exclaimed. “Silvia Roncella is the true daughter of Maurizio Gueli! I say it, I have said it, and I will say it. This is a great thing, my dear lady! A great thing! Signora Roncella is great! But who will save her from her husband?”

Livia Frezzi smiled as before and said: “Don’t worry…. She’ll have help . . . paternal, of course.”

Shortly after this conversation between boxes and while the curtain was going up on the second act, Maurizio Gueli and Livia Frezzi left the theater as two people unable to restrain their clashing passions any further might leave to avoid making an obscene and scandalous spectacle of themselves. They were about to enter their carriage when another one arrived, and Attilio Raceni dismounted in a great flurry.

“Ah, Maestro, what misfortune!”

“What is it?” Gueli asked in a voice that he hoped appeared calm.

“She’s dying . . . she’s dying . . . she’s dying . . . Signora Roncella, perhaps right now. … I left her … to come get her husband. . . .”

And without a word to Signora Frezzi, Raceni dashed into the theater. Passing by the orchestra entrance he heard a high rumble of applause. In a twinkling he leaped on stage and found himself in the
midst of a ruckus. Giustino Boggiolo, now elated, in fact nearly crazed with joy, was being pulled along by the lapels of his jacket by the actors. He shouted and wriggled free so he could get to the footlights–he himself–in the place of his wife, to thank the audience that had still not tired of calling for the author.

4
AFTER THE TRIUMPH

A crowd was milling around the train station. The newspapers had spread the word that Silvia Roncella, miraculously escaping death at the precise moment of her supreme triumph, was at last in a condition to bear the stress of a long journey. Still convalescent, she was leaving that morning to recoup her strength and health in Piedmont, her husband’s native village. Journalists, literati, and admirers had run to the station to see and greet her. They were all jammed in front of the waiting room door, since her doctor, who would go with her as far as Turin, wouldn’t allow too many people to crowd around her.

“Cargiore? Where’s Cargiore?”

“Uhm! Near Turin, they say.”

“It will be cold there!”

“Of course!”

Those who went in to shake her hand and congratulate her anyway, in spite of her doctor’s protests and her husband’s entreaties, couldn’t make themselves move aside so others could come in. And even if they moved away a little from the bench where she was sitting between her mother-in-law and the nurse, they stayed in the room intently observing her every movement, expression, smile. Those outside tapped on the window, called out, made gestures of impatience and irritation: those inside pretended not to understand; in fact, some appeared to enjoy showing their impudence to the point of looking at that display of impatience and irritation with scornful, mocking smiles.

The reception of the play
The New Colony
, had really been extraordinary, a triumph. News of the author’s death had spread like wildfire through the theater that night, at the end of the second act, when the whole audience was enthralled, fascinated by the enormous and powerful originality of the play. That rumor had given rise to such a strange and solemn demonstration of both mourning and enthusiasm that even after two months, anyone who had had the good fortune to be there still felt a shiver of emotion. Affirming the triumph of life in that work of art, the raving, shouting, entreating, sobbing audience seemed that evening to want to defeat death itself. At the end of the performance, the excited audience had remained in the theater for a long time, almost as though waiting for death to release its sacred prey to glory and restore her to life. And when an exultant Laura Carmi had burst onto the stage to announce that the playwright was not yet dead, a delirious shout went up as though for a supernatural victory.

The next morning all the newspapers put out extra editions to describe that memorable evening. Immediately, the word spread throughout Italy, making every town impatient to see the play and to have more news of the writer and of the state of her health, as well as more information about her work.

It was enough to look at Giustino Boggiolo to get an idea of the magnitude of the event and of the feverish curiosity spreading like wildfire. It was he who seemed to have narrowly escaped the jaws of death, not his wife.

That evening it was Attilio Raceni who had tearfully dragged Boggiolo away from the stage to take him home. Raceni had to tear him from the arms of the actors, who had seized him by the chest, by the shoulders, by
his
lapels to keep him from taking a bow, to keep him from rushing to the footlights in the place of his wife, wildly intoxicated as he was by the thunderous applause that broke out at the beginning of the second act, at the moment of the landing of the new colony, just when the men of the first colony had stopped fighting at the sight of the women, leaving Currao on his own.

Why hadn’t he gone mad at the sight of the tragic turmoil there at
home, with those three doctors bent over his bleeding, shrieking wife, tormenting and butchering her exposed body?

Anyone else would have gone mad, bouncing like that from one violent, terrible emotion to its opposite, no less violent and terrible. Not he! Instead, soon after he entered the house, Giustino had been obliged to find, and had succeeded in finding, the superhuman strength to keep his head in the face of the cruel impudence of the journalists who had run from the theater as soon as the first news of her death had begun to circulate among the audience. And while his wife’s shrieks and long, horrendous howls came from the other room, he had been able to respond to all the questions asked of him (though those shrieks and howls tore at his heart), and to give out information and news, and even go rummaging through boxes to find a photograph of his wife to give to the editors of the more prestigious newspapers for use in the morning extra editions.

In the meantime, for good or ill, she was liberated from her burden: she had done what she had to do. There it was, that dear, pink, delicate little thing in the nurse’s arms, and Silvia was going off to rest and recover in peace and inactivity. While he . . . already, before everything else, certainly before that little thing there, had given birth to a giant! A giant that now, at once, wanted to start taking great strides through all Italy, through Europe, even through America, to reap laurels, to pile up money, and it was up to him to follow it with sack in hand; up to him, already exhausted, worn out by the pains of its gigantic birth.

For Giustino Boggiolo, in truth, the giant wasn’t the play written by his wife. The giant was the success of which he alone was the author. Of course! If it hadn’t been for him, if he hadn’t performed miracles over all those months of preparation, all these people wouldn’t be running here to the station now to pay their respects to his wife, to congratulate her, to wish her
buon viaggio!

“Please, please . . . Quiet down. Didn’t you hear the doctor? And besides, look at all the others waiting outside. Yes, thank you, thank you . . . Please, for heaven’s sake . . . Take turns, take turns, the doctor says. .. . Thank you, please, for heaven’s sake,” he turned here and
there, with his hands outstretched, in an attempt to keep them away from his wife as much as possible, to manage even this performance in such a laudable way that the evening papers would speak of it as another event. “Thank you, oh, please, for heaven’s sake .. . Oh, Signora Marchesa, how kind . . . Yes, yes, go on, thank you. . . . Come on in, come on, Zago. I’ll let you shake her hand and then be off, please. Make room, please, ladies and gentlemen…. Thank you, thank you … Oh, Signora Barmis, Signora Barmis, help me, for goodness sake…. Look, Raceni, if Senator Borghi comes … Make room, make room, please…. Yes, she’s leaving without seeing her play even once. . . . What did you say? Ah, yes . . . unfortunately, yes, not even once, not even a rehearsal … Oh, what can she do? She has to leave, because I … Thank you, Centanni! . . . She has to leave. . . . Ciao, Mola, ciao! And don’t forget, you know? . . . She has to leave, because . . . What did you say? Yes, indeed, that is Signora Carmi, the leading lady. . . . Played Spera, yes, indeed! Because I. . . never mind, just never mind. . . . Don’t talk about it, don’t talk about it, don’t talk about it…. In Naples, Bologna, Florence, Milan, Turin, Venice … I don’t know how to be everywhere at once . . . seven, seven companies on tour, yes, indeed . . .”

And so, a word to this or that person, to leave everyone happy. Glances and knowing smiles to the journalists, handing out all that information almost as though by chance, and saying this or that name loudly on purpose so the journalists would take note.

Ashen, with bloodless lips, dilated nostrils, enormous eyes, hair loose, Silvia Roncella looked small and miserable in the center of all that activity. More than dumbfounded, she looked lost. Her face was a study in uncertainty–nervous tics and grimaces that betrayed strenuous efforts of concentration, as though she didn’t always believe what she was seeing and was wondering what she was supposed to do, what they wanted from her, now that she was about to leave with her baby. As though all those people, all that confusion might harm her baby, just as they were upsetting her.

This struggle plainly said: “Why? Why? So this triumph is true, really true?”

She seemed afraid to believe it was real, or perhaps she was suddenly
seized by the suspicion that everything had been orchestrated, a plot hatched by her husband, who bustled around so busily, a grandiose, overbearing act–that was it–for which she ought to feel more shame than abhorrence, as an affront to her maternity and the atrocious suffering it had cost her, an invasion, a violence to her quiet, modest ways. An intrusion not only tiresome but also uncalled for because she had done nothing to draw so many people there: she had to leave, and that was all there was to it, with the nurse and the little one and her mother-in-law, poor dear, confused old woman, and Uncle Ippolito, who was making such a sacrifice to move up there with her instead of her husband, and to keep her company in her mother-in-law’s house. This was just a little family trip, to be made with all the proper precautions, with consideration for her infirmity.

If the triumph was real, it only meant bother, oppression, nightmare for her at that moment. But maybe . . . yes, just maybe, later, as soon as she had recovered her strength … if it was true . . . who knows!

Something like an enormous, stinging ferocity rose from the depths of her soul, upsetting, disturbing, wrenching affections and feelings. It was the demon, that wild demon that she felt inside her, that had always frightened her. She had always struggled to keep it from grabbing and dragging her heavens knows where, far from the love and care in which she took comfort and felt secure.

Ah, her husband did everything, everything to fling her into its grasp! Did the idea never occur to him that if she .. . ?

No, no. In opposition to her demon, another more terrible specter reared up inside her now: the specter of death. It had touched her, so recently touched her; and she knew how it felt: icy, dark, and hard. That jarring impact! Ah, that jolt! Beneath her soft flesh, beneath the fervent flow of blood, that wallop against the bones of her skeleton, against her inner frame! Death had struck her with the little feet of her baby boy, who wanted to live by killing her. Her death and her baby’s life rose up to face the enticing demon of glory: a bloody, brutal, shameful foulness, and that rosy dawn wrapped in its blankets, that delicate and tender purity, flesh of her flesh, blood of her blood.

Buffeted like that in the exhaustion of convalescence, flung from one
emotion to another, Silvia Roncella turned to her baby between one greeting and another, then she gave the hands of the old woman sitting next to her a rapid, encouraging squeeze, and here and there she replied with a cold and almost hostile expression to the good wishes and congratulations of a journalist or writer, as if to say to them: “This is not very important to me, you know? I nearly died!” In response to some other words of congratulation or good wishes, her expression would clear, her eyes would shine and she would smile.

“She’s marvelous! Marvelous! Naive, unaffected, enchanting! Fresh as spring!” Signora Barmis couldn’t stop exclaiming to the cluster of actors who had come, along with so many others, to see and meet the playwright for the first time.

In order not to seem peevish, the actors nodded their heads. They had all come certain of a warm reception, a suitable reception, if not exactly as the main creators of such a success, at least as her most effective collaborators, not easy to replace or surpass! Instead, they had been greeted like all the others, and the high spirits they came with had immediately drooped and cooled.

“Yes, she doesn’t feel well,” Grimi observed, making faces with baritone gravity. “It’s obvious she’s suffering, just look at her! I tell you that poor little woman is suffering. . . .”

“What strength for such a little woman!” Signora Carmi said, biting her lip. “Who would have said? I imagined her quite different!”

“Really? Not me! No! No! She’s just as I thought,” declared Signora Barmis. “But if you look closely . . .”

“Yes, of course, in her eyes . . .” Signora Carmi assented at once. “There! There! There’s something in her eyes…. Certain flashes, yes, yes . . . Because the greatness of her art is … I don’t know … in flashes, isn’t it? Doesn’t it seem to you? Sudden, unexpected … in certain brusque intervals that shake and stun you. We are used to only one tone, that’s it. To those that tell us: life is this, this, and this; to others that tell us: it’s this other, this other, and this other. Isn’t that right? Signora Roncella paints one side, too, but then she suddenly switches and shows the other side. That’s the way it seems to me!”

Sucking her satisfaction like a piece of candy at having spoken so
well, Signora Carmi looked around as though to receive the applause of the entire room, or at the very least signs of unanimous agreement in order to avenge herself with true superiority for Roncella’s coldness and ingratitude. But she got no support even from her own group, because her stage companions realized as surely as Signora Barmis did that she had spoken to be heard by the others more than by them, and by Roncella most of all. Only two people hidden in a corner, Signora Ely Faciolli and Cosimo Zago leaning on his crutch, nodded approval. And Laura Carmi scornfully ignored them as though they had insulted her.

Suddenly a lively, curious commotion spread through the room. Removing their hats and bowing, many hurriedly stepped aside to let a man through. Evidently the unexpected presence of so many people had caused him, more than annoyance or embarrassment, a true and profound anxiety, almost a combination of anger, irritation, and shame, an anxiety everyone noticed and that could not be entirely explained by the obvious disdain that man showed upon finding himself grazing with the herd.