Pleasure (42 page)

On the evening of June 9, just about to leave Andrea, she was searching for a lost glove. While looking for it, she saw on a table the book by Percy Bysshe Shelley, the same volume that Andrea had lent her during the time at Schifanoja, the volume in which she had read the
Recollection
before the outing to Vicomìle, the dear, sad volume in which she had underlined two verses with her nail:

And forget me, for I can
never

Be thine!

She picked it up with visible emotion; she leafed through it and found the page, the imprint of her nail, the two verses.

—
Never!
she murmured, shaking her head. —Do you remember? And barely eight months have passed!

She remained slightly pensive; she leafed through the book again; and read a few other verses.

—He is our poet, she added. —How many times you have promised to take me to the English cemetery! Do you remember? We were going to take flowers to the grave . . . Do you want to go? Take me before I leave. It will be our last outing.

He said:

—We'll go tomorrow.

They left when the sun was already sinking. In the open carriage, she held a bunch of roses on her lap. They passed below the tree-lined Aventino. In the port of Ripa Grande, they glimpsed ships at anchor, laden with Sicilian wine.

In the vicinity of the cemetery they alighted; they walked for a stretch, as far as the gate, in silence. Maria felt deep in her heart that she was not going only to take flowers to the grave of a poet, but that she was going to grieve, in that place of death, for something of herself that was irreparably lost. Percy's fragment, read in the night in her insomnia, resounded at the base of her soul, while she observed the cypresses reaching high into the sky, on the other side of the whitewashed wall.

Death is here and death is there,

Death is busy everywhere,

All around, within, beneath,

Above is death—and we are death.

Death has set his mark and seal

On all we are and all we feel

On all we know and all we fear,

First our pleasures die—and then

Our hopes, and then our fears—and when

These are dead, the debt is due,

Dust claims dust—and we die too.

All things that we love and cherish,

Like ourselves must fade and perish;

Such is our rude mortal lot—

Love itself would, did they not.
³

Crossing over the threshold, she placed her arm beneath Andrea's, and a small shiver ran through her.

A sense of solitude pervaded the cemetery. Several gardeners were watering the plants against the wall, tilting the watering cans this way and that with constant and regular movements, in silence. The funereal cypresses rose up straight and immobile in the air: only their tips, tinted gold by the sun, had a slight tremor. Between the rigid, greenish trunks, like travertine stone, emerged white tombs, square gravestones, broken columns, urns, arches. A mysterious shadow, a sense of religious peace and almost human gentleness descended from the dark bulk of the cypresses, the way limpid, beneficent water trickles down from hard rock. That even regularity of the arboreal shapes and that modest candor of the sepulchral marble gave the soul a sense of grave and sweet repose. But in the midst of the trunks aligned like the pipes of an organ, and amid those gravestones, the oleanders undulated with grace, blushing red with fresh bunches of blooms; the roses were losing their petals at every gust of wind, shedding their scented snow on the grass; the eucalyptuses inclined their pale coiffures, which glinted silver here and there; the willows cascaded their soft tears over the crosses and the wreaths; cactuses here and there displayed their magnificent white clusters resembling sleeping flocks of butterflies or bunches of unusual feathers. The silence was interrupted now and then by the cry of some scattered bird.

Andrea said, pointing to the summit of the hill:

—The poet's tomb is up there, near the ruin, on the left, under the last tower.

Maria detached herself from him to walk up the narrow pathways, between the low myrtle hedges. She walked ahead and her lover followed. Her pace was somewhat tired; she stopped at frequent intervals; and at every interval she turned around to smile at her lover. She was wearing black; she wore a black veil over her face, which reached her top lip; and her faint smile trembled beneath the black edge, shaded as with a shadow of mourning. Her oval chin was whiter and purer than the roses she carried in her hand.

It happened that as she turned, a rose shed its petals. Andrea bent down to gather the petals from the path, before her feet. She looked at him. He knelt on the ground, saying:

—Beloved!

A memory rose up in her mind, as clear as a vision.

—Do you remember—she said—
that morning,
at Schifanoja, when I threw a fistful of petals at you from the penultimate terrace? You knelt on the step while I descended . . . Those days, I don't know, they seem so near and so distant! It seems as if I lived through them yesterday, that I lived through them a century ago. But did I dream them, perhaps?

Walking through the low myrtle hedges, they reached the last tower on the left, where the tomb of the poet and of Trelawny was to be found. The jasmine that climbs over the ancient ruin was in flower, but of the violets nothing remained except their dense foliage. The tips of the cypresses reached the line of vision and trembled, illuminated more intensely by the extreme flush of the sun, setting behind the black cross on Monte Testaccio. A violet cloud edged with burning gold navigated on high, toward the Aventine.

“These are two friends whose lives were undivided. / So let their memory be now they have glided / Under the grave: let not their bones be parted / For their two hearts in life were single-hearted.”
⁴

Maria repeated the last verse. Then she said to Andrea, moved by a sensitive thought:

—Loosen my veil.

And she drew close to him, throwing her head back slightly so that he could untie the knot at the nape of her neck. His fingers touched her hair, that wonderful hair that, when it was loose, seemed to come alive like a forest, with a deep, sweet life of its own; in its shadow he had savored many times the voluptuousness of his deception, and many times he had evoked a perfidious image. She said:

—Thank you.

And she removed her veil from her face, looking at Andrea with eyes that were slightly dazzled. She appeared very beautiful. The circles around her eye sockets were darker and hollower, but her pupils shone with a fire that was more penetrating. The dense locks of her hair adhered to her temples, like clusters of dark, slightly violet hyacinths. The center of her forehead, uncovered and free, shone by contrast with a whiteness that was almost like that of the moon. All her features had become more refined, had lost something of their materiality in the assiduous flame of love and pain.

She wrapped her black veil around the rose stems and knotted the ends with great care; then she breathed in their scent, almost burying her face in the bunch. And then she deposited them on the simple stone where the name of the poet was inscribed. Her gesture contained an indefinable expression that Andrea could not comprehend.

They walked on, searching for the grave of John Keats, the poet of
Endymion.

Andrea asked her, stopping to look back toward the tower:

—Where did you get those roses?

She smiled at him again, but with damp eyes.

—They're yours, the ones from the night it snowed; they flowered again last night. Don't you believe me?

The evening wind was picking up; and the entire sky behind the hill was diffused with the color of gold, in the midst of which the cloud was dissolving as if consumed by a pyre. The cypresses standing in order on that field of light were more grandiose and more mystical, completely penetrated by rays, their sharp peaks vibrating. The statue of Psyche at the top of the middle avenue had taken on the pallor of flesh. The oleanders rose up in the background like mobile purple cupolas. The crescent moon rose above the Pyramid of Cestius, in a deep glaucous sky like the water of a calm gulf.

They descended along the middle avenue until they reached the gate. The gardeners were still watering the plants at the base of the wall, moving the watering cans from side to side with a constant, regular movement, in silence. Two other men, holding a velvet-and-silver funeral pall by the corners, were shaking it hard; and the dust glittered as it dispersed. The sound of bells reached them from the Aventine.

Maria pressed herself against her lover's arm, no longer able to bear the anguish, feeling the ground cede under her feet at every step, believing that she would be drained of all her blood on the way. And as soon as she was in the carriage, she burst into desperate tears, sobbing on her lover's shoulder.

—I'm dying.

But she was not dying. And it would have been better for her if she had died.

Two days later, Andrea was lunching together with Galeazzo Secìnaro at a table in the Caffè di Roma. It was a warm morning. The caffè was almost deserted, immersed in shade and tedium. The waiters dozed amid the buzzing of flies.

—So—recounted the bearded prince—knowing that she likes to give herself in extraordinary, bizarre circumstances, I dared to . . .

He was crudely recounting the extremely audacious way in which he had managed to conquer Lady Heathfield; he recounted without scruples and without reticence, not leaving out any details, praising the attributes of his acquisition to the connoisseur. He interrupted himself, every now and then, to plunge his knife into a piece of steaming, succulent, rare meat, or to empty a glass of red wine. Health and strength emanated from all his gestures.

Andrea Sperelli lit a cigarette. He was feeling the impulse to retch, and hence could not manage to swallow any food, or to overcome the revulsion of his stomach, which was in utter turmoil, beset by a horrible tremor. When Secìnaro poured wine for him, he drank it together with poison.

Secìnaro, at a certain point, although he was not at all insightful, began to have some doubts. He looked at Elena's ex-lover. The latter was not showing, other than a lack of appetite, any outer sign of anxiety; he was calmly exhaling smoke into the air, and smiling his usual smile, slightly ironic, at the cheerful narrator.

The prince said:

—Today she is coming to me for the first time.

—Today? To your house?

—Yes.

—This is an excellent month, in Rome, for love. Between three and six in the afternoon, every
buen retiro
hides a couple . . .

—In fact—interrupted Galeazzo—she is coming at three.

Both looked at their watches. Andrea asked:

—Shall we go?

—Let's go, replied Galeazzo, rising. —We'll walk along Via Condotti together. I'm going to Via del Babuino for flowers. Tell me, you know these things: what flowers does she prefer?

Andrea began to laugh; and an atrocious witticism came to his lips. But he said, carelessly:

—Roses, once.

They separated in front of the Barcaccia Fountain.

Piazza di Spagna already had a deserted summer air to it, at that hour. Several workmen were restoring a water pipe; and a pile of earth, dried out by the sun, was being lifted in eddies of dust by the hot gusts of wind. The staircase of the Trinità shone white and deserted.

Andrea climbed the stairs, very slowly, pausing at every two or three steps as if he were dragging an enormous burden. He entered his house and remained in his room, on his bed, until a quarter to three. At a quarter to three, he went out. He took Via Sistina, continued past the Four Fountains, and went past Palazzo Barberini; he stopped just a little farther on, in front of the racks of a vendor of old books, waiting for three o'clock. The vendor, a tiny man all wrinkled and hairy, like a decrepit tortoise, offered him books. He was choosing his best volumes, one by one, and placing them in front of Andrea, talking with an unbearably monotonous nasal voice. It was only a few minutes to three. Andrea looked at the titles of the books and kept watch over the gates of the building, hearing the bookseller's voice vaguely in the midst of the din caused by his veins.

A woman went out through the gates, walked down the sidewalk toward the square, mounted a public carriage, and disappeared down Via del Tritone.

Andrea walked down in the direction she had taken, once again took Via Sistina, and entered his house once again. He waited for Maria to arrive. He threw himself onto the bed and lay there so still it seemed he was no longer suffering.

Maria arrived at five.

She said, panting:

—Do you know what? I can stay with you, for the whole evening, and the whole night, until tomorrow morning.

She said:

—This will be our first and last night of love! I am leaving on Tuesday.

She sobbed on his mouth, trembling violently, pressing herself hard against his body:

—Let me not see tomorrow! Let me die!

Looking at his troubled face, she asked him:

—Are you suffering? Do you also . . . think we will never see each other again?

He had immense difficulty talking to her, answering her. His tongue was sluggish; he could not find words. He felt an instinctive need to hide his face, to escape from her gaze, to evade questions. He could not console her; he could not delude her. He answered in a choked, unrecognizable voice:

—Hush.

He crouched down at her feet; he remained for a long time with his head on her lap, without talking. She held her hands on his temples, feeling the pulsing of his arteries, irregular and violent, feeling him suffer. And she herself was no longer suffering her own pain, but was suffering his, only his.

He rose to his feet; he took her hands; he drew her into the other room. She obeyed.

In bed, bewildered, frightened, in the presence of his dark demented ardor, she shouted: