Pleasure (4 page)

As she straightened up, to the left and to the right ten or twelve scarlet-clothed horsemen passed at a rapid trot, returning from foxhunting. One of them, the Duke of Beffi, passing very close by, arched up to see inside the carriage window.

Andrea did not speak anymore. He now felt his entire being becoming faint, falling into an infinite depression. The puerile weakness of his nature, the initial upliftment having ebbed away, now brought him to the need for tears. He would have liked to bow down before her, humble himself, arouse the woman's pity with his tears. He had a confused, dull sensation of dizziness; and a sharp chill assaulted the nape of his neck and penetrated the roots of his hair.

—Farewell, Elena repeated.

The carriage was stopping under the archway of Porta Pia so that he could alight.

In this way, hence, while waiting, Andrea saw that far-off day once more in his mind's eye; he once more saw all the gestures, heard all the words. What had he done as soon as Elena's carriage had disappeared in the direction of the Four Fountains? Nothing extraordinary, in truth. Even then, as always, as soon as the immediate object from which his spirit drew that type of fatuous exaltation distanced itself, he had almost immediately regained his tranquillity, his everyday consciousness, his equilibrium. He had mounted a public carriage to return home; there he had put on a black suit, as usual, not omitting any elegant detail; and he had gone to lunch at his cousin's, as on every other Wednesday, at Palazzo Roccagiovine. Everything in his external existence exerted upon him a great power of oblivion, kept him occupied, aroused him to the swift enjoyment of worldly pleasures.

That evening, in fact, contemplation had come to him quite late, namely, when returning to his home he saw shining on a table the small tortoiseshell comb forgotten there by Elena two days before. Then, in compensation, he had suffered all night and with many tricks of the mind he had intensified his pain.

But the moment was nearing. The clock of Trinità de' Monti sounded three forty-five. He thought, with profound trepidation:
In a few minutes Elena will be here. What shall I do when receiving her? What words shall I say to her?

The anxiety in him was real, and love for that woman had truly reawoken in him; but the verbal and plastic expression of feelings in him was, as always, so artificial and so far from simplicity and sincerity that he resorted, by habit, to rehearsing even the most profound emotions of the soul.

He tried to imagine the scene; he composed some sentences; he looked around to choose the most propitious place for their talk. Then he even got up to see in a mirror if his face was pale; if it was appropriate to the circumstance. And his gaze in the mirror lingered at his temples, at his hairline, where Elena used to place a delicate kiss
then
. He opened his mouth to admire the perfect shine of his teeth and the freshness of his gums, remembering that once, Elena had liked in him, above all, his mouth. His vanity, which was that of a spoiled and effeminate youth, never neglected any effect of grace or form in a love affair. He knew, in the practice of love, how to draw from his beauty the greatest possible enjoyment. This felicitous aptitude of body and this keen search for pleasure indeed won him the hearts of women. He had in him aspects of Don Juan and of a cherub: he knew how to be both the man of a Herculean night and the shy, ingenuous, almost virginal lover. The basis of his power lay in this: that in the art of love, he had no repugnance for any pretense, for any falseness, for any lie. A great part of his strength lay in his hypocrisy.

What shall I do when I receive her? What words shall I say to her?
He became confused as the minutes fled past. He did not yet know in what kind of mood Elena would come to him.

He had encountered her the previous morning along Via de' Condotti, while she was looking at shopwindows. He had returned to Rome a few days earlier, after a long, obscure absence. The sudden encounter had provoked in both an intense emotion; but as they were out in public they were forced to be courteously reserved, ceremonial, almost cold. He had said to her, with a serious, slightly sad air, looking her in the eyes: —I have so many things to tell you, Elena. Will you come to me, tomorrow? Nothing has changed in the
buen retiro
.
²
She had answered simply: —Fine, I will come. You can expect me at about four. I also have something to tell you. Now leave me.

She had accepted the invitation immediately, with no hesitation whatsoever, without placing any conditions, without seeming to give any importance to the matter. Such readiness had at first aroused in Andrea a vague worry. Would she come as a friend or as a lover? Would she come to renew their love or to shatter every hope? In those two years, whatever had passed through her soul? Andrea did not know; but he still felt the sensation caused by her gaze, in the street, when he had bowed to greet her. It was still the same gaze as always, so sweet, so profound, so flattering, from beneath her infinitely long eyelashes.

There were still two or three minutes to go until the appointed hour. The anxiety of the waiting man grew to such a pitch that he thought he would suffocate. He went to the window again and looked toward the steps of the Trinità. Once, Elena used to climb those stairs to their assignations. Placing her foot on the last step, she would hesitate for a moment; then she would rapidly cross that section of the square in front of the Casteldelfino house. One would hear her slightly undulating footsteps resonate on the paving, if the square was silent.

The clock struck four. The sound of carriages could be heard from Piazza di Spagna and from the Pincian Hill.
³
Many people were walking beneath the trees in front of Villa Medici. Two women sat on the stone bench before the church, watching over some small children who were running around the obelisk. The obelisk was entirely crimson, struck by the setting sun, and it cast a long, oblique, slightly turquoise shadow. The air was growing icy cold, the more sunset approached. The city below was tinged with gold against a pale sky on which the Monte Mario cypresses were already traced in black.

Andrea gave a start of surprise. He saw a shadow appear at the top of the small flight of stairs that runs alongside the Casteldelfino house and descends to Piazzetta Mignanelli. It was not Elena, but a woman who turned into Via Gregoriana, walking slowly.

What if she doesn't come?
he mused doubtfully, drawing back from the window. And drawing back from the cold air, he felt that the tepid warmth of the room was softer, the aroma of the juniper and the roses more intense, the shadow of the drapes and the door curtains more mysterious. It seemed that in that moment the room was completely ready to welcome the desired woman. He thought about the sensation that Elena would feel upon entering. Certainly she would be won over by that sweetness, so full of memories; she would immediately lose every notion of reality, of time; she would believe herself to be back in one of their habitual trysts, never to have interrupted that sensual affair, still to be the Elena she had once been. If the theater of love was unchanged, why should love have changed? Certainly she would feel the profound seduction of the things that had once been beloved.

Now a new torture commenced in the waiting man. The senses, heightened by the habit of contemplative fantasy and of poetic dreaming, invest objects with a sensitive and changeable soul, like the human soul; and they perceive in everything, in shapes, in colors, in sounds, in perfumes, a transparent symbol, the emblem of a sentiment or a thought; and in every phenomenon, in every combination of phenomena, they believe they can conjecture a psychic state, a moral significance. Sometimes the vision is so clear that it produces a sense of anguish in those spirits: they feel they are suffocating from the fullness of life revealed to them, and they are alarmed by their own phantasms.

Andrea saw his own anxiety reflected in the appearance of the things around him; and as his desire dispersed uselessly in the wait and his nerves became weaker, so it appeared to him that the almost erotic essence of those things also vaporized and dissipated into futility. For him, all those objects among which he had so many times loved and taken pleasure and suffered had taken on something of his sensitivity. Not only were they witness to his loves, his pleasures, his moments of sadness, but they had participated in them. In his memory, every shape and every color harmonized with a feminine image, was a note in a chord of beauty, an element in an ecstasy of passion. By nature of his taste, he sought out multiple aspects of enjoyment in his love affairs: the complex delight of all the senses, intense intellectual emotion, abandons of sentiment, impulses of brutality. And because he sought out these things with skill, like an aesthete, he naturally drew from the world of objects a great part of his exhilaration. This delicate actor could not comprehend the comedy of love without the backdrops.

Therefore his house was the most perfect theater; and he was an extremely skillful set designer. But he almost always invested all of himself in this artifice; he lavishly spent in it the richness of his spirit; he would sink so far into oblivion within it, that not infrequently he would be deceived by his own insidiousness, wounded by his own weapons, like an enchanter trapped within the circle of his own spell.

Everything around him had taken on for him that inexpressible appearance of life that is acquired, for example, by sacred implements, the insignia of a religion, the instruments of a cult, every figure on which human meditation is accumulated, or from which human imagination rises toward some ideal height. Just as a vial still emits after many years the scent of the essence that was once contained in it, so, too, did certain objects still preserve even just an indistinct part of the love with which that fantasizing lover had illuminated and penetrated them. And such a strong stimulation came to him from these objects that he was disturbed by it at times, as by the presence of a supernatural power.

It truly seemed that he knew the latent aphrodisiacal potentiality of each of those objects, and that he felt it at certain times bursting forth and developing and palpitating around him. Then, if he was in the arms of his beloved, it gave his and her body and soul one of those supreme feasts, the memory of which alone is sufficient to illuminate an entire life. But if he was on his own, a deep anguish pressed down upon him, an inexpressible regret at the thought that that great and rare apparatus of love was going uselessly to waste.

Uselessly! In the tall Florentine goblets the roses, also waiting, exhaled all their intimate sweetness. On the couch, on the wall, the silvery verses dedicated to the glory of women and wine, which blended so harmoniously with the indefinable silken colors in the sixteenth-century Persian carpet, scintillated as they were struck by the light of the setting sun in a bare corner framed by the window, which rendered the nearby shadows more diaphanous and spread their glow to the cushions beneath. The shadow all around was diaphanous and rich, almost animated by the vague luminous palpitation found in dark sanctuaries that hold some occult treasure. The fire in the fireplace crackled; and each of its flames was, as in Percy Shelley's imagery, like a precious stone dissolved in ever-moving light.
⁴
It seemed to the lover that every shape, every color, every scent offered up the most delicate flower of its essence, in that moment. And
she
was not coming! And
she
was not coming!

Then there arose in his mind, for the first time, the thought of her husband.

Elena was no longer free. She had renounced the merry freedom of her widowhood, entering into a second marriage with an English gentleman, a certain Lord Humphrey Heathfield, some months after her sudden departure from Rome. Andrea indeed remembered having seen the announcement of the marriage in a social column, in October 1885; and having heard an infinite number of comments about the new Lady Helen Heathfield throughout all the holiday resorts in that Roman autumn. He also remembered having encountered that Lord Humphrey about ten times during the preceding winter at Princess Giustiniani-Bandini's home on Saturdays, and at public auctions. He was a man of forty, with ash-blond hair, bald at the temples, deadly pale; with light-colored sharp eyes and a great protruding forehead crisscrossed by veins. His name, Heathfield, was indeed that of the lieutenant general who had been the hero of the famous defense of Gibraltar (1779–83), also immortalized by Joshua Reynolds's paintbrush.

What part did that man play in Elena's life? By what ties, beyond those of marriage, was Elena bound to him? What transformations had the material and spiritual contact of her husband exerted upon her?

Enigmas arose all of a sudden in Andrea's mind, tumultuously. Amid this tumult, the image of the physical union of those two appeared to him, clear and precise; and the pain was so unbearable that he bounded up with the instinctive reflex of a man who has suddenly been wounded in a vital limb. He crossed the room, went out into the entrance hall, and listened at the door that he had left slightly open. It was almost a quarter to five.

After a while he heard footsteps coming up the stairs, a rustle of skirts, someone breathing heavily. Certainly, a woman was coming up. All his blood then surged with such vehemence that, unnerved by the long wait, he thought he would lose all his strength and collapse. But still he heard the sound of the feminine foot on the last steps, a longer breath being drawn, her tread on the landing, on the threshold. Elena entered.

—Oh, Elena! Finally.

In those words the expression of his protracted anguish was so profound that an indefinable smile appeared on the woman's lips, of compassion mixed with pleasure. He took her right hand, ungloved, pulling her toward the room. She was still panting; but a faint glow lit her entire face beneath the black veil.

—Forgive me, Andrea. But I couldn't get away until now. So many visits . . . so many calling cards to return . . . The days are tiring. I can't take it anymore. How hot it is here! What a scent!