The Thibaults (89 page)

Presumably, Sybil was some girl whom Jacques had met and loved. Perhaps he was living with her now.

Down they ride through vineyards, lemon-groves. The beach. A herd driven by a bambino, sombre-eyed, bare shoulders peeping through the rags. He whistles, calling two white dogs to heel. The bell on the leader, clanging, clanging. Infinite space. Sunlight. Their Steps leave water-holes in the sand.

Wearied by the descriptive passages, Antoine skipped two pages. His eyes fell on an account of Sybil’s home.

Villa Lunadoro. A ramshackle old house, rose-beleaguered. A double garden, riotous with flowers.

Literature! Antoine turned the page; a sentence caught his attention.

The rose-garden, crimson drifts of blossom, low cloisters coved with roses, a fragrance so intense under the fires of noon that it is hardly to be borne—fragrance that seeps through the pores and permeates the blood, blurring the eyes, slowing or speeding up the heart-beats.

That rose-garden, of what did it remind him? Yes, it led straight to the cote where “white pigeons fluttered.” Maisons-Laffitte. And Sybil, the Protestant, could she be—? Wait, here was more about her!

In her riding-habit Sybil sinks onto a garden-seat, arms outspread, lips tight, eyes hard. Now she is alone, everything is clear again: life has been given her to one end only—to make Giuseppe happy. But it’s when he isn’t here I love him. On the days when I have waited most desperately for him to come, I’m certain to make him suffer. What futile, shameful cruelty! Ah, women who can cry are the lucky ones! My heart is frozen, indurated.

At “indurated” Antoine smiled. “A medical term, that. He must have picked it up from me.”

Can he read my feelings? Ah, how I wish he could! And the moment he seems to understand me, I .cannot, cannot bear it; I shrink away, I lie, I do anything, anything to elude him!

There followed a description of Sybil’s mother.

Mrs. Powell is coming down the terrace steps. Her hair is silver in the light. Shielding her eyes with her hand, she smiles before she speaks, before she has seen Sybil. “A letter from William,” she announces. “Such a nice letter. He’s just begun two sketches. He intends to stay some weeks more at Paestum.”

Sybil bites her lips. Despair. Should she await her brother’s return to solve the riddle of her heart, to understand herself?

Now Antoine had no doubts left. These were Mme. de Fontanin, Daniel, Jenny—figures mustered from the past. He turned hurriedly over to the next chapter, eager to find again the portrait of the father, Seregno.

Yes, here it was… . No, this was the Palazzo Seregno, an ancient mansion on the shore of the Bay.

… tall, arched windows set in frescoed foliage.

Descriptions followed of Vesuvius and the Bay.

Antoine skipped some pages, sampling a passage here and there, so as not to lose the thread.

Giuseppe was staying, it appeared, at his father’s country house, by himself except for the servants. Annetta, his “little sister,” was abroad. His mother was dead—naturally. His father, Judge Seregno, had to remain in Naples, where the court was in session, and came only on Sundays or, occasionally, on week-days, for a night. “Just as Father did at Maisons,” Antoine observed to himself.

He landed from the boat at dinner-time. After dinner, the digestive process. A cigar, a stroll up and down the courtyard. Rose early to admonish stable-boys and gardeners. Taciturn as ever, caught the first morning boat.

Then, the father’s character-sketch. Antoine felt a qualm of apprehension as he broached it.

Judge Seregno. A worldly success. Everything about him interlocks, fits in. Social standing, family, wealth, professional acumen, genius for organization. The majesty of office, consecrated, truculent. Adamantine probity. The steeliest virtues. And a physical appearance in keeping. Massive self-assurance. Violence at full pressure, always menacing, always under control. … A mighty caricature that inspires respect in all, and awe. Spiritual son of the Church, and model citizen. At the Vatican, as on the bench, in office and at home—everywhere lucid, commanding, exemplary, complacent, imperturbable. A force, or, rather, a dead weight to reckon with; the might of an inertia that does not move yet crushes. A well-built unity, four-square. A monument. And, ah, that small, secret, bitter laugh of his …!

For a moment the page grew blurred under Antoine’s eyes. How had Jacques ever dared to write such words? The ruthlessness of the boy’s revenge appalled him when he pictured the old man’s pitiful decline.

Then clinkety and clankety

Along the lanes we’ll go …

And suddenly the gulf between his brother and himself seemed to yawn wider.

Ah, that small, secret, bitter laugh of his, following a sneering silence! For twenty years Giuseppe has endured that laugh, those silences. Fostering vengeance.

Giuseppe’s youth, a forcing-bed of hatred and revolt. When he thinks of his boyhood, a thirst for revenge sears his throat. From his earliest days all his instincts, as they took form, urged him against his father. All, without exception. Idleness, disrespect, disorderliness, flaunted by way of reprisal. A wilful dunce, and heartily ashamed of it. But these were his best weapons of revolt against the hated system. An insatiable craving for the worst. Each act of disobedience with a sweet savour of revenge.

A heartless child, they said. Heartless he, whom the moan of a hurt animal, a street-musician’s fiddle, the smile of a signora met in a church porch, sent sobbing to his sleep of nights! A wasteland, loneliness, childhood of frustration. Giuseppe came to man’s estate without once having heard a gentle word spoken to him but by his little sister.

“What about me?” Antoine thought. A note of tenderness crept into the story when it spoke of the “little sister.”

Annetta, Annetta,
sorellina
. A miracle that such a flower could grow in that dry land! Sister of his childish despairs, revolts. Sole gleam of light, cool spring in a waste of arid gloom.

“What about me?” Ah, a little further on was something about an elder brother, Umberto.

Sometimes Giuseppe seemed to catch in his brother’s eyes a faint gleam of affection …

A faint gleam! What ingratitude!

… of affection, tainted with condescension. But between them lay nine years, an abyss of time. Umberto hid his true self from Giuseppe, who lied to Umberto.

Antoine stopped reading. His disagreeable first impression had passed; what did it matter if the subject of these pages touched him so nearly? After all, what real importance had Jacques’s opinions about people? For that matter, what he said about Umberto was substantially correct. What amazed him was the bitterness behind it all. After three years’ separation, three years by himself without news of the family— yes, Jacques must have loathed his past with a vengeance to write such words! One thing worried him: though he might find his brother again, could he find the way back to his brother’s heart?

He skimmed the remaining pages to see if there was more about Umberto, and found he was hardly mentioned. With a secret disappointment… .

Then his eyes lit on a passage, the tone of which whetted his curiosity.

Without friends, curled up into a ball against the blows of circumstance, watching his life fall to pieces …

That was Giuseppe’s life, alone in Rome; had that been Jacques’s life in some foreign city?

Some evenings. The air in his room unbreathable. The book falls. He blows out the lamp, goes forth into the night, like a young wolf. Messalina’s Rome, squalid districts, everywhere death-traps, lures. Furtive gleams between the provocatively drawn curtains. Crowded darkness, shadows offering themselves, cajoling: lasciviousness. He slips past walls honeycombed with lust. Is he fleeing from himself? What can quench the thirst consuming him? For hours, his mind a chaos of wild deeds undone, he drifts on, unheeding. His eyes are burning, hands fever-hot, throat parched. As foreign to himself as if he had bartered body and soul. Sweating with fear and lust, he moves in a circle. Slinks down alleys, skirting the same pitfalls again and again. Hour after hour… .

Too late. The lights are dying out behind the furtive curtains. Streets grow empty. He is alone now with his evil genius. Ripe for any lapse. Too late. Impotent, drained dry by the riot of imaginative lust.

Night is ending. Belated purity of silence, lonely hush of daybreak. Too late. Sick at heart, dead beat, unsatisfied, degraded, he drags himself to his room, slips between the sheets. Without remorse. Bewildered. And lies there till the sky pales, chewing the cud of bitterness; bitterness of not having dared… .

Why did Antoine find this such painful reading? It gave him no surprise that his young brother had taken his fill of life, had stooped to sordid adventures; indeed, he was quite prepared to laugh it off with a genial “Why not?” or even: “So much the better!” And yet …

Hastily he turned over some more pages. He could not bring himself to read methodically, and merely guessed, with more or less success, at the development of the story.

The Powells’ villa, on the shore of the Bay, was near the Palazzo Seregno. Thus Giuseppe and Sybil were neighbours during vacations. They went out for rides together, and boating in the Bay.

Giuseppe went daily to the Villa Lunadoro. Sybil never refused to see him. The mystery of Sybil. Giuseppe dangled round her, joylessly.

Antoine was getting bored by the descriptions of this love-affair; it held up the story. Still, he brought himself to read a portion of a rather long scene, following a seeming estrangement of the two young people.

Sundown. Giuseppe comes to the villa. Sybil. Drunk with the perfumes of sun-steeped flowers, the garden is sobering down as night comes on. Like a prince in the
Arabian Nights
, Giuseppe walks between two walls of flame, the pomegranates in flower fired by the sunset. Sybil! Sybil! No one answers. Closed windows, drawn blinds. He stops. Round him the swallows weave shrill, dizzying circles in the air. No one. Is she under the pergola, behind the house? With an effort he keeps from running.

At the corner of the house, an eddy of soft sounds. Sybil playing the piano. The bay-window is open. What is she playing? A murmur of heartrending sighs, a sad, unanswered plea rising on the calm evening air. An almost human tone, a phrase spoken yet incomprehensible, beyond translation into words. Listening, he comes nearer, steps onto the threshold. Sybil has not heard him. Her face, shamelessly naked. Fluttering eyelids, parted lips—all reticence gone. Shining through that face, the soul; no, her soul, her love, is there incarnate. In solitude revealed, a startled secret, love’s offering, stolen, ravished. She is playing; tendrils of light sound float up, entwining in a supreme ecstasy. A sob abruptly stifled, then a sad arpeggio that rises up and up, attenuated, rarefied, mysteriously hovering on the silence, before taking wing into the blue, like a sudden flight of birds.

Sybil has lifted her fingers from the keys. The piano is throbbing still; a hand pressed on the lid would feel the tumult of a pulsing heart. She thinks she is alone. ‘She turns her head. With a slowness, a grace unknown to him. And then …

Antoine was exasperated by this mania for short, jerky phrases. “Literature” run wild! Still—had Jacques really fallen in love with Jenny?

But his imagination was running ahead of the story; he came back to the text.

Again his eye was caught by the name Umberto. The passage described a brief scene at the Palazzo Seregno; one evening the Judge came back unexpectedly to dinner, accompanied by his elder son.

The vast dining-room. Three vaulted windows, opening on a pink sky ribboned by the smoke from Vesuvius. Stucco walls, green pilasters supporting a false dome painted on the ceiling.

Benedicite
. The Judge’s thick lips flutter. He crosses himself. The gesture sweeps across the room. Umberto follows suit, for appearance’ sake. Giuseppe obstinately refrains. They take their seats. Immaculate, austere, the huge white tablecloth. Three places laid, too far apart. Filippo, felt-shod, with the silver dishes …

Antoine skipped some paragraphs. Then:

In the father’s presence the Powells’ name is never uttered. He refused to know William. That foreigner. A painter, too. Poor Italy, the happy-hunting-ground of every vagabond! A year ago, he had put his foot down. “I forbid you to see those heretics.”

Does he suspect he is being disobeyed?

Impatiently Antoine turned some pages, and came on another reference to the elder brother.

Umberto puts in some innocent remarks. Then silence closes in again. A handsome forehead, Umberto’s. Proud, thoughtful eyes. Elsewhere, most likely, he is young, expansive. He has studied. A brilliant career lies before him. Giuseppe loves his brother. Not as a brother. Like an uncle who might become a friend. Were they together long enough, Giuseppe would speak out perhaps. But their talks are brief, are few and only on set occasions. No, intimacy with Umberto is ruled out.

“Obviously,” Antoine murmured, remembering the summer of 1910. “That was because of Rachel. My fault, of course.”

He stopped reading for a moment and let his head sink dejectedly against the chair-back. He was disappointed; all this high-flown verbiage led nowhere, left unsolved the mystery of Jacques’s disappearance.

The orchestra was playing the refrain of a Viennese waltz; people in the café were humming it in undertones, with here and there an unseen whistler joining in. The quiet couple near him had not moved. The woman had drunk her milk and now was smoking, with a bored expression. Now and again, resting her bare arm on her companion’s shoulder—he had just unfolded
The Rights of Man
—she absent-mindedly stroked the lobe of his ear, while yawning like a cat.