Her Husband (19 page)

Toward three in the afternoon, Silvia left her study exhausted and groggy and threw herself on her bed in the darkened room. Giustino ran to the desk to look: he was disappointed. What he found was a short story. A long short story. On the last page, under the signature, was written:
For Senator Borghi
. Without any pleasure he started reading
it, but after the first few lines he began to get interested. … So that’s what it’s about! Cargiore . . . Don Buti with his telescope . . . Signor Martino . . . Mamma’s history . . . the suicide of Prever’s brother . . . A strange short story, fantastical, full of bitterness and sweetness at the same time, pulsing with all the impressions that she had had during that unforgettable sojourn up there. She must have had the vision suddenly in the middle of the night. . . .

Never mind if it wasn’t the play! It was something, anyway. And now it was up to him! He would show her what could be done with what little he had in hand. The senator should pay at least five hundred lire for that short story: five hundred lire immediately or nothing.

That evening he went to see Borghi at the editorial office of Vita
Italiana
.

Perhaps Maurizio Gueli had been there earlier and had spoken ill of him to Romualdo Borghi. Giustino wasn’t bothered by the fastidious coldness of his reception. In fact he was pleased because this way, with all former debts of gratitude removed, he could be equally cold and clearly dictate the terms. Borghi could think whatever he pleased about him; his only interest was in showing his wife what she owed to him alone.

A few days after the publication of the short story in
Vita Italiana
, Silvia received a note of enthusiastic admiration and heartfelt congratulations from Gueli.

Victory! Victory! Victory! As soon as Giustino glanced at the note, frantic with joy, he ran to get his hat and cane: “I’m going to his home to thank him! You see? Self-invited.”

Silvia came up to him. “Where? When?” she fumed. “This is nothing but a note of congratulations. I forbid you to . . .”

“Good heavens!” he interrupted her. “Is it so hard to understand? After the scene he made, he writes you a note like this. . . . Let me do it, my dear! Let me do it! I understood that Baldani was a bother. I understood that, didn’t I? And you see I didn’t let him come again. But Gueli is something else! Gueli is a maestro, a real maestro! You will read him your play, you will follow his advice, you’ll both closet yourselves
here, you’ll work together. . . . Tomorrow I have to leave; let me leave in peace! A short story, all right; but I’m worried about the play, my dear! Right now we need a play, a play, a play! Leave this to me, please!”

And he took off for Gueli’s house.

Silvia didn’t try to detain him any longer. She screwed her face into a grimace of nausea and hate, wringing her hands.

Ah, he wanted a play? Well, then, after so much comedy, he would have his drama.

Maurizio Gueli was going through one of the cruelest moments of his miserable life. For the ninth or tenth time, at the end of his patience, he had found the strength in his desperation to wrench his head out of the halter. This animal comparison was of his own making, and he repeated it to himself with pleasure. For two weeks Livia Frezzi had been in the villa at Monteporzio, alone, and he in Rome, alone.

He said “alone,” but not free, knowing from sorry experience that the more strongly he insisted he was through with that woman forever, the sooner came the day of reconciliation. Because if it was true that he could no longer live with her, it was also true he couldn’t live without her.

Gueli had come from Genoa to Rome some twenty years ago at a judicious moment, right after the publication of his
Demented Socrates
, when his fame as a strange and profound writer was indisputably established in Italy and elsewhere. As a writer of inventive brilliance he juggled the most weighty ideas and erudite knowledge with the graceful agility of an acrobat. He had been welcomed into the home of his old friend Angelo Frezzi, a mediocre historian, who had recently married his second wife, Livia Maduri. At that time Gueli was thirty-five, and Livia little more than twenty.

However, Livia Frezzi had not fallen in love with Gueli’s fame, as so many believed. In fact, from the beginning she had shown herself to
be so coldly disdainful of his fame and his euphoria over it at that time that out of spite he immediately got it into his head to conquer her. This forced him to close his eyes to his obligations toward his friend and host with the same hardness with which she belligerently and openly faced her husband, without taking into account his old friendship for him, and without any regard for his hospitality.

In his defense, Maurizio Gueli remembered that in the beginning he had really tried to leave in order not to betray the friendship and hospitality. But by now his vexation with himself and everyone else, his disgust with his cowardice toward that woman, and the shame of his slavery had filled his soul with such bitterness, and had made him so cruelly merciless with himself, that he could no longer allow himself this hypocrisy. Even though he remembered his attempt to flee, deep down he knew it didn’t really count in his favor, because if he really had wanted to save himself and not betray his friend, he would undoubtedly have turned his back and left that hospitable house.

But instead . . . Of course! That farce involving the four or five or ten or twenty conflicting personalities that he believed each man harbors in himself, distinct and alterable, according to his own capacity, had played itself out in him for the thousandth time. With marvelous clarity he had always been able to pinpoint the varied, simultaneous play of characters going on inside himself and other people.

We assume one of those many personalities, often unconsciously, as a pretense suggested by the advantage or imposed by the spontaneous need of wanting to be one way instead of another, of appearing to ourselves to be different from what we are. And in pursuing this personality we accept the most favorable fictional interpretation of all our acts that, hidden from our consciousness, slyly works on the others. We tend to marry ourselves for a lifetime to one personality, the most comfortable, the one that brings as a dowry the characteristic most suited to attaining our goal. But outside the honest conjugal roof of our conscious mind we are apt to have affairs and encounters with the other rejected personalities, who give birth to bastard actions and thoughts that we quickly try to legitimize.

Didn’t his old friend Angelo Frezzi notice that it didn’t take much to persuade Gueli to stay, after he had expressed his wish to leave, a wish doubly and astutely fabricated, since he wanted to stay, and had disguised it as regret for being unable to please his wife? If Angelo Frezzi had noticed the fabrication, then why had he gone to such lengths to make him stay? No doubt he had performed a farce, too! Two personalities, the social and the moral: the first made him go around in a frock coat, putting his friendliest smile on his thick pale lips strung with saliva, while the second often made him lower his watery, anguished eyelids over his bluish, egg-shaped, veined, impudent eyes with languid dignity. The two had flaunted their virtue in him, maintaining with frowning firmness that his friend, come worthily into such fame, would never stoop to betray his friend and host. At the same time a third little character, shrewd and derisive, whispered to the old man so softly that he could very well pretend not to listen:

“Bravo, old boy, make him stay! You know very well how lucky you would be if he would take away this second wife, so wrong for you, so stuck up, bitter, hard, and stubborn–even against you, poor man, too old, oh, too old for her! Keep insisting, and the more you pretend to believe him incapable of betraying you, the more trusting you show yourself to be, the easier it will be to make a trifle into a scandal.”

In fact, Angelo Frezzi, although without the slightest reason, at least as far as his wife was concerned, had immediately made accusations of betrayal. A year had to pass before Livia, who had gone to live alone, gave herself to Gueli.

Over that year he became bound in such a way as never to be free again, capitulating entirely, committing himself to accepting and following her every thought and feeling without any compromise.

Now he pretended to believe that this bond was forged by the unshakable duty assumed toward this woman who had lost her status and reputation for him, driven out by her husband while still blameless. Without a doubt he felt this responsibility; yet deep down he knew that it was not the only reason for his enslavement. Then what was the real reason? Perhaps the pity that he, sound of mind, and with a clear conscience that he had never given her any reason for jealousy, had
to feel for that woman of doubtful mental stability? Oh, yes, the pity was real, just as the sense of duty was real. But more than a reason for his enslavement, wasn’t this pity perhaps an excuse, a noble excuse, to camouflage the burning need that dragged him back to that woman after a month or two of separation, during which time he had even pretended to believe that, at his age, after having given his best to her for so many years, he would no longer be able to take up life with any other woman? These considerations also were true, yes, very well founded, these considerations, but, weighing them on the scales buried in his innermost consciousness, he knew that his age and dignity were also excuses and not reasons. In fact, if another woman, unsought, had had the power to attract him, liberating him from his subjection to the one who had inspired such a deep and invincible loathing of every other embrace and had kept him in such a reclusive state that not only could he have no contact with another woman, but he couldn’t even think about it–then, yes, he certainly would have cared nothing about age, dignity, duty, pity, or anything else. So it came down to that–the real reason for his enslavement was this reclusive timidity brought about by Livia Frezzi’s bewitching power.

No one was able to understand how or why that woman had been able to exercise such a continuous, powerful fascination over Gueli, or rather such a fatal spell. Granted, Livia Frezzi was a beautiful woman, but her rigid bearing, her severe, hostile, incurious expression, her almost ostentatious disregard for any common courtesy, detracted from any natural grace and charm. It seemed, or rather it was obvious, that everything she did was calculated to displease. This was precisely the source of her fascination; and the only one who could understand it was the only one she wanted to please.

That which other beautiful women give to a man in private is so little compared to what they lavish on other men all day long, and this little is given with the same grace and pleasantries they shower on so many others; therefore these others, though not sharing in that intimacy, can easily imagine it. Thus, just by thinking about it, the joy of possessing those women vanishes.

Livia Frezzi had given Maurizio Gueli the joy of sole and total possession.
No one could know her or imagine her the way he knew and saw her in moments of abandon. She belonged entirely to one man–was unapproachable to all men except one.

However, at the same time she wanted this one man to be everything for her: wrapped up in her forever, exclusively hers, not just sensually, but with his heart and mind–even his eyes. To look at another woman, even without the slightest ulterior motive, was almost a crime as far as she was concerned. She didn’t look at anyone, ever. Going beyond the bounds of the coolest courtesy was a crime.
Displiceas aliis, sic ego tutus ero
.
²

Jealousy? What jealousy! Seriousness of purpose demanded such behavior, just as honesty did. She was serious and honest, not jealous. Everyone should behave as she did.

To make her happy, he had to force himself to live only for her, excluding himself entirely from the company of others. And even this wasn’t enough: if the others, though ignored and unseen–or perhaps because of it–showed the slightest interest or curiosity in a life so set apart, for a demeanor so unfriendly and haughty, she would be critical just of him, as if it were his fault when other people paid any kind of attention to him.

Maurizio Gueli was helpless to prevent this. No matter what he did, he was so well known that he could not pass unnoticed. The most he could do was not look, but how could he keep others from looking at him? He received invitations, letters, tributes from everywhere. He could never accept any of those invitations, and he never responded to the letters and tributes; but he also had to give an accounting to her of everything he received.

She realized that all this interest and curiosity was due to his fame as a writer; however, it was at this fame and at literature itself that her anger was most fiercely aimed, armed with bristling mockery. She harbored the most morbid and bitter hatred for it.

Livia Frezzi was firmly convinced that the literary profession was not a serious or honest business; that it was indeed the most ridiculous and dishonest of professions, as it consisted of always being in the limelight, trading on one’s vanity, begging for fatuous gratifications, yearning for the praise and delight of others. According to the way she saw it, only a foolish woman could take pride in the fame of the man she lived with, or would feel happy thinking that with all the admired and desired women available this man belonged, or was said to belong, to her alone. How could this man belong to just one woman if he wanted to please all men and women, if day and night he knocked himself out to be praised and admired, mixing with people to get as much pleasure as he could, continually calling attention to himself so he would be pointed out and talked about? If he continually exposed himself to temptation? With that irresistible desire to please others, how could he possibly resist those temptations?

Many times–in vain–Gueli had tried to convince her that a true artist (as he was or at least thought himself to be) didn’t go looking for silly satisfactions, nor did he yearn to receive pleasure from others, that he was not a clown bent on entertaining people and being admired by women, and that he only enjoyed the praise of the select few he recognized as capable of understanding him. However, overcome with enthusiasm for his defense, he often lost his case by just one point. As, for example, if he happened to add, as a general consideration, that it was only human (and anyway, there was nothing wrong with it) for anyone–not just a writer–to feel a certain satisfaction when his work was well received and valued by other people, whatever it might be. Oh, yes, other people! Other people! Other people! She had never had such a thought! He saw nothing wrong with this? Well, just what was wrongdoing, according to him? Who could ever see clearly into a literary man’s conscience, a man whose profession was a continual game of make-believe? Pretending, always pretending, to give the appearance of reality to unreal things! And all that austerity was undoubtedly a facade, all that dignified honesty he affected. Who knows how many skipped heartbeats and inner quaking thrills, shivers of excitement
there were because of a mysterious glance, a tiny little laugh from a woman passing on the street! Age? Age has nothing to do with it! Does the heart of a literary man grow older? The older he gets, the more ridiculous he becomes.

At her incessant scorn and fierce denigration, Maurizio Gueli felt his guts twist and his heart turn over. Because at the same time he sensed the awful ridiculousness of his tragedy: to be the victim of a real madness, to suffer martyrdom for imaginary wrongs, for what were not wrongs at all and which, besides, he had been careful not to commit, even at the cost of seeming impolite, proud, and bad-tempered, in order not to arouse her slightest suspicion. Nevertheless it seemed that he committed them unknowingly, who knows when or where.

Obviously he was two people: one for himself, another for her. And this other person that she saw, slyly catching every look, every smile, every gesture, the sound of his voice itself, not just the meaning of his words, twisting and falsifying everything about him, in her own eyes this person came to life as a miserable phantom, the only one she knew. Gueli himself no longer existed. He existed only for the unworthy, inhuman torment of seeing himself living in that phantom, and only in it; he racked his brains without success for ways to destroy it. She no longer believed in him; she saw him only as that phantom and, as was reasonable, showed her hate and scorn for it.

So alive was this imaginary figure she had created, assuming such a solid, obvious substance in her sick imagination, that he could almost see it living his life, but undeservedly distorted. It had his thoughts, but they were twisted. It had his every expression, word, every gesture. It was so alive for him that he almost reached the point of doubting himself, of thinking perhaps he really was that man. And by now he was so conscious of the alteration that his slightest movement would have undergone immediate appropriation by that other self, so that he almost seemed to be living with two souls, to be thinking with two heads at the same time, in one sense for himself and in another sense for that other being.