Zeno's Conscience Part 21

After supper I had to go to Ada's alone, because an indisposition of our little girl prevented Augusta from accompanying me. I was received by Signora Malfenti, who told me she had to attend to something in the kitchen, and therefore she would have to leave me alone with Ada. Then she confessed to me that Ada had asked to be left alone with me because she wanted to say something to me that shouldn't be heard by others. Before leaving me in that sitting room where I had already been with Ada twice, Signora Malfenti said to me, smiling: "You know, she isn't yet ready to forgive your absence from Guido's funeral, but... almost!"

In that little room, my heart was again beating. Not, this time, out of fear of finding myself loved by one I didn't love. Only a few moments before, and only through Signora Malfenti's words, had I recognized that I had committed a grave breach of respect to poor Guido's memory. Ada herself, now aware that pardoning this error would bring her a fortune, still couldn't forgive me immediately. I sat down and looked at the portraits of Guido's parents. Old Cada Vez had a pleased expression that seemed to me due to my endeavor, whereas Guido's mother, a thin woman wearing a full-sleeved dress and a little hat perched on a mountain of hair, looked very severe. Of course! In front of the camera, everyone a.s.sumes another appearance, and I looked away, outraged with myself for studying those faces. The mother surely couldn't have foreseen that I wouldn't attend her son's burial!

But the way Ada spoke to me was a painful surprise. She must have rehea.r.s.ed at length what she wanted to say to me, and she actually took no notice of my explanations, my protests, and my rectifications, which she couldn't have foreseen and for which therefore she was not prepared. She raced along her track, like a frightened horse, to the very end.

She entered, dressed simply in a black house robe, her hair in great disorder, disheveled, and perhaps torn by hands, which insist on doing something when they cannot otherwise soothe. She reached the little table at which I was seated, and leaned forward, pressing both hands on the surface, to get a better look at me. Her little face was thin again, and freed from that strange health that swelled there discordantly. She was not beautiful, as when Guido had won her, but no one looking at her would have remembered the sickness. It was gone! In its place there was a sorrow so great that it completely mastered her. I understood it so well, that enormous sorrow, that I was unable to speak. As I looked at her, I thought: "What words could I say to her that would be the equivalent of taking her fraternally into my arms to comfort her and induce her to cry and unburden herself?" Then, when I heard myself being a.s.sailed, I tried to react, but too weakly, and she didn't hear me.

She spoke and spoke and spoke, and I can't repeat all her words. If I'm not mistaken, she began by thanking me soberly, but without warmth, for having done so much for her and for her children. Then immediately she reproached me: "Thanks to what you've done, he actually died for something that wasn't worth it!"

Then she lowered her voice as if she wanted to keep secret what she was saying to me, and in that voice there was greater warmth, a warmth caused by her affection for Guido and (or was this only an appearance?) also for me: "And I pardon you for not coming to the funeral. You couldn't, and I pardon you. He, too, would pardon you if he were still alive. What would you have done at his funeral, anyway! You, who didn't love him! Good as you are, you could have wept for me, but not for him, whom you ... hated! Poor Zeno! My brother!"

It was outrageous that such things could be said to me, altering the truth so. I protested, but she didn't hear me. I believe I shouted, or at least I felt that urge in my gullet: "But this is wrong, a lie, a slander. How can you believe such a thing?"

She continued, still in a low voice: "But neither was I able to love him. I never betrayed him, not even in my thoughts, but my feelings didn't allow me to protect him. I looked at your relations.h.i.+p with your wife and I envied it. It seemed better than what he offered me. I'm grateful to you for not having come to the funeral, because if you had, even now, I would have understood nothing. As it is, on the contrary, I see and understand everything. Also that I didn't love him: otherwise how could I have hated even his violin, the most complete expression of his great spirit?"

It was then that I lay my head on her arm and hid my face. The accusations she was making were so unjust that they couldn't even be debated, and their irrationality was so tempered by her affectionate tone that my reaction couldn't be as harsh as it should have been, in order to be victorious. Moreover, Augusta had already given me an example of considerate silence, not to offend and exacerbate such sorrow. When my eyes closed, however, in the darkness I saw that her words had created a new world, like all words that are not true. I seemed to realize, myself, that I had always hated Guido and had constantly been at his side, waiting for the opportunity to strike him. Like me, she, too, had coupled Guido with his violin. If I hadn't known that she was groping blindly in her sorrow and in her remorse, I could have believed that the violin had been brought in as part of Guido to convince my spirit of the accusation of hatred.

Then in the darkness I saw again Guido's corpse and, still imprinted on his face, the stupor of being there, robbed of life. Frightened, I raised my head. It was preferable to confront Ada's accusation, which I knew was unjust, than to stare into the darkness.

But she was still speaking of me and of Guido. "And you, poor Zeno, without knowing it, went on living at his side, hating him. You did good things for him out of love for me. It was impossible! It had to end like this! I also thought once of being able to take advantage of the love I knew you still bore me, to increase the protection around him that could serve him. He could only be protected by someone who loved him, and among us, n.o.body loved him."

"What more could I have done for him?" I asked, weeping hot tears to make her-and myself- feel my innocence. Tears sometimes can subst.i.tute for a scream. I didn't want to scream, and I was even in doubt about whether I should speak. But I had to drown out her a.s.sertions and I wept.

"Save him, dear brother! I, or you-we should have saved him. Instead, I stayed with him and couldn't save him, because I lacked true affection, and you remained distant, absent, always absent, until he was buried. Then you appeared sure of yourself, armed with all your affection. But before, you cared nothing for him. And yet he was with you until evening. And you could have imagined, if you had been concerned for him, that something serious was about to happen."

My tears prevented me from speaking, but I blurted something intended to establish the fact that the previous night he had spent enjoying himself in the marsh, hunting, so no one in this world could have predicted the use to which he would put the night that followed.

"He needed his hunting! He needed it!" she cried, in loud reproach. And then, as if the effort of that cry had been excessive, all of a sudden she collapsed and fell senseless to the floor.

I remember that I hesitated for a moment before calling Signora Malfenti. It seemed to me that this swoon revealed something about what she had said.

Signora Malfenti and Alberta rushed in. Signora Malfenti, supporting Ada, asked me: "Did she talk with you about that wretched trading on the market?" Then: "This is her second fainting fit today!"

She begged me to step out for a moment, and I went into the pa.s.sage, where I waited to be told if I should go back into the room or leave the house. I was preparing myself for further explanations with Ada. She was forgetting that if things had been carried forward as I had suggested, the tragedy would surely have been averted. It would suffice to tell her this, and she would be convinced of her injustice toward me.

A little later, Signora Malfenti joined me and said Ada had come round and wanted to bid me good-bye. She was resting on the sofa where, until a short time before, I had been seated.

Seeing me, she started crying, and these were the first tears I saw her shed. She extended her little hand, moist with sweat: "Good-bye, dear Zeno! I beg you: remember! Remember always! Don't forget him!"

Signora Malfenti spoke up, asking what it was I should remember, and I told her Ada wanted Guido's position on the Bourse to be settled at once. I blushed at my lie and I also feared a denial on Ada's part. Instead of contradicting me, she started screaming: "Yes, yes! Everything must be cleared up! That horrible Bourse! I never want to hear it mentioned again!"

She grew pale once more, and Signora Malfenti, to calm her, a.s.sured her that what she desired would be done immediately.

Then Signora Malfenti accompanied me to the door and begged me not to rush things: I was to do whatever I thought was in Guido's best interests. But I replied that I had lost confidence. The risk was enormous and I no longer dared deal with another's interests in that way. I no longer believed in the Bourse and in playing it, or at least I had lost faith that my mental energies could control the market's movement. I therefore had to liquidate at once, quite happy that things had gone as they had.

I didn't repeat to Augusta what Ada had said. Why should I distress her? But those words, also because I repeated them to no one, continued to pound in my ear, and remained with me for long years. They still reecho in my soul. Again and again, even today, I a.n.a.lyze them. I can't say I loved Guido, but this is only because he was a strange man. But I stood by him like a brother and helped him as best I could. I don't deserve Ada's reproach.

I never again found myself alone with her. She didn't feel the need to say anything else to me, nor did I dare demand an explanation, perhaps to avoid renewing her sorrow.

At the Bourse the matter ended as I had foreseen, and Guido's father, after having been informed by the first dispatch that he had lost his entire fortune, was surely pleased to find half of it intact. All my doing, but I wasn't able to enjoy it as I had antic.i.p.ated.

Ada treated me affectionately always, until her departure for Buenos Aires, where she and the children went to live with her husband's family. She enjoyed seeing me and Augusta. I sometimes chose to imagine that her whole speech had been due to a genuinely mad outburst of pain, and that not even she remembered it. But then once when Guido was mentioned again in our presence, she repeated and confirmed in a few words everything she had said to me that day: "He wasn't loved by anybody, poor thing!"

At the moment of boarding s.h.i.+p, carrying one of her babies, slightly indisposed, in her arms, she kissed me. Then, in a moment when there was n.o.body near, she said to me: "Goodbye, Zeno, dear brother. I will always remember that I wasn't able to love him enough. You must know that! I am glad to be leaving my country. I feel as if I'm leaving my remorse behind! "

I scolded her for tormenting herself like that. i avowed she had been a good wife and I knew it and could bear witness to it. I don't know if I succeeded in convincing her. She no longer spoke, overcome with sobs. Then, a long time afterwards, I sensed that, in bidding me farewell, she had meant those words also to renew her reproaches of me. But I know she misjudged me. Surely, I don't have to reproach myself with not having loved Guido.

It was a dark, murky day. It was as if a sole cloud, outspread but not at all threatening, darkened the sky. From the port, a great fis.h.i.+ng vessel, its sails hanging limp from the masts, was trying to move out, rowed by the sailors. Only two men were at the oars, and despite repeated efforts, they managed barely to s.h.i.+ft the heavy vessel. Out at sea they would find a favoring breeze, perhaps.

Ada, from the deck of the liner, waved her handkerchief. Then she turned her back. Of course, she was looking toward Sant'Anna, where Guido lay at rest. Her trim little form became more perfect, the farther it moved off. My eyes were blurred with tears. Now she was abandoning us, and never more would I be able to prove my innocence to her.

PSYCHOa.n.a.lYSIS.

3 May, 1915.

I'm through with psychoa.n.a.lysis. After having practiced it faithfully for six whole months, I'm worse off than before. I still haven't discharged the doctor, but my decision is irrevocable. Yesterday, in any case, I sent him word that I was tied up, and for a few days I'll keep him waiting. If I were quite sure of being able to laugh at him and not lose my temper, I might even see him again. But I'm afraid I'd end up coming to blows.

In this city, after the outbreak of the war, we are more bored than ever, and, as a subst.i.tute for psychoa.n.a.lysis, I have returned to my beloved papers. For a year I hadn't written a word; in this, as in everything else, obeying the doctor, who commanded that during my therapy I was to reflect only when I was with him, because unsupervised reflection would reinforce the brakes that inhibited my sincerity, my relaxation. But now I find myself unbalanced and sicker than ever, and, through writing, I believe I will purge myself of the sickness more easily than through my therapy. At least I am sure that this is the true system for restoring importance to a past no longer painful, and the dispelling the dreary present more quickly.

I had put myself in the doctor's hands with such trust that when he told me I was cured, I believed him completely and, on the contrary, I didn't believe in my pains, which still afflicted me. I said to them: "You're not real, after all!" But now there can be no doubt! It's them, all right! The bones in my legs have been converted into vibrant scales that hurt the flesh and the muscles.

But this wouldn't matter all that much to me, and it isn't for this reason that I am giving up my therapy. If those hours of reflection at the doctor's had continued to be interesting bearers of surprises and emotions, I wouldn't have abandoned them, or before abandoning them, I would have waited until the end of the war, which makes all other activity impossible for me. But now that I know everything, namely that it was nothing but a foolish illusion, a trick designed to affect some hysterical old woman, how could I bear the company of that ridiculous man, with that eye of his, meant to be penetrating, and that presumption that allows him to collect all the phenomena of this world within his great new theory? I will spend my remaining free time writing. To begin with, I will write sincerely the story of my therapy. All sincerity between me and the doctor has vanished; now I can breathe. No stress is imposed on me any longer. I don't have to force myself to have faith, or to pretend I have it. The better to conceal my true thoughts, I believed I had to show him a supine obsequiousness, and he exploited that to invent something new every day. My therapy was supposedly finished because my sickness had been discovered. It was nothing but the one diagnosed, in his day, by the late Sophocles for poor Oedipus: I had loved my mother and I would have liked to kill my father.

And I didn't become angry! Spellbound, I lay there and listened. It was a sickness that elevated me to the highest n.o.ble company. An ill.u.s.trious sickness, whose ancestors dated back to the mythological era! And I'm not angry now, either, alone here with my pen in hand. I laugh at it wholeheartedly. The best proof that I never had that sickness is supplied by the fact that I am not cured of it. This proof would convince even the doctor. He should set his mind at rest: his words couldn't spoil the memory of my youth. I close my eyes and I see immediately, pure and childish and ingenuous, my love for my mother, my respect and my great fondness for my father.

The doctor puts too much faith also in those d.a.m.ned-confessions of mine, which he won't return to me so I can revise them. Good heavens! He studied only medicine and therefore doesn't know what it means to write in Italian for those of us who speak the dialect and can't write it. A confession in writing is always a lie. With our every Tuscan word, we lie! If he knew how, by predilection, we recount all the things for which we have the words at hand, and how we avoid those things that would oblige us to turn to the dictionary! This is exactly how we choose, from our life, the episodes to underline. Obviously our life would have an entirely different aspect if it were told in our dialect.

The doctor confessed to me that in all his long practice, he had never witnessed emotion as strong as mine on discovering myself in the images that he thought he had been able to evoke from me. For this reason, too, he was so prompt to declare me cured.

And I didn't simulate that emotion. It was, indeed, one of the most profound I have felt in my whole life. Bathed in sweat when I created the image, in tears when I held it. I had already cherished the hope of being able to relive one day of innocence and naivete. For months and months that hope supported me and animated me. Didn't it mean producing, through vital memory, in full winter the roses of May? The doctor himself guaranteed that the memory would be vivid and complete, such that it would amount to an extra day in my life. The roses would have all their scent and perhaps also their thorns.

Thus, after pursuing those images, I overtook them. Now I know that I invented them. But inventing is a creation, not a lie. Mine were inventions like those of a fever, which walk around the room so that you can see them from every side, and then they touch you. They had the solidity, the color, the insolence of living things. Thanks to my desire, I projected the images, which were only in my brain, into the s.p.a.ce where I was looking, a s.p.a.ce whose air I could sense, and its light, and even the blunt corners that were never lacking in any s.p.a.ce through which I pa.s.sed.

When I achieved the drowsiness that should have facilitated illusion, though it seemed to me nothing but the a.s.sociation of a great effort with a great inertia, I believed those images were real reproductions of distant days. I might have suspected at once that they were not, because the moment they vanished, I remembered them again, but without any excitement or emotion. I remembered them the way you remember an event narrated by someone who was not present. If they had been true reproductions, I would have continued laughing and crying over them as when I had experienced them. And the doctor made notes. He said: "We have had this, we have had that." To tell the truth, we had had nothing more than graphic marks, skeletons of images.

I was led to believe this was an evocation of my childhood because the first of the images placed me in a relatively recent period of which I had retained, even previously, a pale memory that this image seemed to confirm. There was a year in my life when I went to school before my brother had begun there. I saw myself leave my house one sunny morning in spring, and cross our garden to descend into the city, down, down, with an old maidservant of ours, Catina, holding me by the hand. My brother, in this dream scene, didn't appear, but he was its hero. I sensed him in the house, free and happy, while I was going to school. I went off, choked with sobs, dragging my feet, an intense bitterness in my spirit. I visualized only one of those walks to school, but my rancor told me that I went to school every day, and every day my brother stayed home. To infinity, though in reality I believe that, after a fairly short time, my brother, only a year younger than I, also went to school. But then the dream's truth seemed to me beyond debate. I was condemned to go always to school while my brother was permitted to stay home. Walking at Catina's side, I calculated the duration of the torture. Until noon! While he's at home! Further, I recalled that, during the preceding days, I must have been upset at school by threats and scolding, and then, too, I had thought: They can't touch him. It had been a vision of enormous immediacy. Catina, whom I had known as a small woman, seemed to me huge, surely because I was so little. Even then she had seemed very old, but, as is well known, the very young always see older people as ancient. And along the streets I had to follow to reach school, I glimpsed also the strange little columns that in those days bordered the sidewalks of our city. True, I was born long enough ago to see still, as an adult, those little columns in our downtown streets. But the ones along the street I took that day with Catina were gone by the time I emerged from childhood.

My faith in the authenticity of those images persisted in my spirit even when, quite soon, stimulated by that dream, my cold memory discovered further details of that period. The chief one: my brother also envied me because I went to school. I was sure I had noticed it, but that did not immediately suffice to invalidate the truth of the dream. Later it despoiled the evocation of any semblance of truth: the jealousy had in reality existed, but in the dream it had been transferred.

The second vision also took me back to a recent time, though long before the first: a room in my house, but I don't know which, because it is vaster than any room actually there. It is strange that I saw myself closed in that room, and that I immediately knew a detail that the mere sight of it could not have provided: the room was far from the place where my mother and Catina then stayed. And another detail: I hadn't yet started attending school.

The room was all white and, indeed, I never saw a room so white or so completely illuminated by the sun. Did the sun then pa.s.s through the walls? It was certainly already high, but still I was in my bed, holding in my hand a cup from which I had drunk all the milky coffee and in which I continued to sc.r.a.pe the spoon, extracting the sugar. At a certain point the spoon could collect no more, and then I tried to reach the bottom of the cup with my tongue. But I failed. So, finally, I was holding the cup with one hand and the spoon with the other and I was watching my brother, lying in the bed beside mine, as, belatedly, he was still sipping his coffee, with his nose in the cup. When he finally raised his face, I saw it all somehow contracted in the rays of the sun, which struck it fully, whereas mine (G.o.d knows why) was in shadow. His face was pale and a bit disfigured by a slight prognathism.

He said: "Will you lend me your spoon?"

Only then did I realize that Catina had forgotten to bring him a spoon. Immediately, and without hesitation, I answered him: "Yes! If you'll give me a bit of your sugar in return."

I held up the spoon to underscore its value. But Catina's voice immediately resounded in the room: "Shame on you! Little shark!"

Fright and shame plunged me again into the present. I would have liked to argue with Catina, but she, my brother, and I-as I was then, small, innocent, and a usurer-disappeared, sinking into the abyss.

I regretted having felt that shame so strongly that it destroyed the image which I had achieved with such effort. It would have been so much better if, instead, I had offered the spoon, meekly, and gratis, and had not argued over that bad deed of mine, probably the first I committed. Perhaps Catina would have enlisted my mother's help to mete out a punishment to me, and finally I would have seen her again.

I saw her, however, a few days later, or thought I saw her. I might have realized at once it was an illusion, because the image of my mother, as I had evoked it, resembled too closely her portrait, which hangs over my bed. But I must confess that in the apparition my mother moved like a living person.

Great, immense sunlight, enough to blind you! From what I believed was my youth, there came so much of that sun that it was hard to believe this was not that time. Our dining nook in the afternoon hours. My father has come home and is sitting on a sofa beside Mamma, who is marking with a certain kind of indelible ink some initials on much linen spread over the table at which she sits. I find myself under the table, where I am playing with some marbles. I move closer and closer to Mamma. Probably I want her to join in my game. At a certain point, to stand on my feet between them, I clutch the linen cloth hanging from the table; a disaster occurs. The bottle of ink falls on my head and stains my face, my clothes, Mamma's skirt, and also produces a little spot on Papa's trousers. My father raises his leg to give me a kick.

But I had returned from my longjourney in time, and I was safe here, an adult, an old man. For an instant I suffered at the threatened punishment, and immediately afterwards I was sad that I couldn't witness the protective gesture that no doubt came from Mamma. But who can arrest those images when they start fleeing through that time, which had never before so resembled s.p.a.ce? This was my notion as long as I believed in the authenticity of those images! Now, unfortunately (oh! how it saddens me!), I believe no longer and I know that it wasn't the images that sped away, but my clear eyes that looked again into real s.p.a.ce, where there is no room for ghosts.

I will say more about the images of another day, to which the doctor attributed such great importance that he p.r.o.nounced me cured.

In the doze to which I abandoned myself, I had a dream, immobile as a nightmare. I dreamed of myself, a baby again, but seeing only that baby and how he also dreamed. He lay mute, overcome by a joy that pervaded his tiny organism. He seemed finally to have achieved his old desire. And yet he lay there alone and abandoned! But he could see and hear with the clarity that enables us to see and hear even distant things in dreams. The child, lying in a room of my house, saw (G.o.d knows how) that on its roof there was a cage, fixed in very solid foundations, without doors and windows, but illuminated with the most pleasing light and filled with pure and sweet-smelling air. And the child knew that only he could reach that cage, and without even going there, because the cage would come to him. In that cage there was just one piece of furniture, an easy chair, and in it sat a shapely woman, delightfully formed, dressed in black, a blonde with great blue eyes, snow-white hands, and little feet in patent-leather pumps from which, below her skirts, only a faint glow escaped. I must say that the woman seemed to me all one with her black dress and her patent-leather pumps. She was a whole! And the child dreamed of possessing that woman, but in the strangest way. He was sure, that is, that he could eat some little pieces at the top and at the base.

Now, thinking back, I am amazed that the doctor, who, according to what he says, has read my ma.n.u.script so carefully, didn't recall the dream I had before going to see Carla. To me, some time afterwards, as I thought it over, it seemed that this dream was simply the other one, slightly altered, made more childish.

But the doctor recorded everything carefully, then asked me with a somewhat syrupy att.i.tude: "Was your mother blond and shapely?"

I was amazed by the question, and answered that my grandmother also had been the same. But for him I was cured, quite cured. I opened my mouth to rejoice with him and I adjusted myself to what was to come next: namely, no more investigations, no research or meditations, but rather a genuine and diligent reeducation.

From then on, those sessions were downright torture, and I continued them only because it has always been so difficult for me to stop when I am moving or to move when I am still. On occasion, when he exaggerated, I would venture some objection. It wasn't really true-as he believed-that my every word, my every thought was criminal. He would then widen his eyes. I was cured, and I refused to realize it! This was true blindness: I learned that I had desired to steal my father's wife-my mother!-and yet I didn't feel cured? My stubbornness was unheard of. However, the doctor admitted that I would be even more cured when my reeducation was finished, after which I would be accustomed to considering those things (desire to kill father and to kiss mother) quite innocent matters for which there was no need to suffer remorse, because they occurred often in the best families. Basically, what did I have to lose? One day he told me that now I was like a convalescent who still wasn't accustomed to living without a fever. Well, I would wait until I was accustomed.

He felt that I was not yet entirely his, and, besides the reeducation, from time to time he returned also to the therapy. He tried dreams again, but we didn't have a single one that was authentic. Annoyed with all this waiting, in the end I made up one. I wouldn't have done so if I could have foreseen the difficulty of such simulation. It isn't all that easy to stammer as if we were immersed in a half-dream, or to cover ourselves with sweat or turn pale, not giving the game away, or perhaps turning scarlet from strain, and yet not blus.h.i.+ng. I spoke as if I had gone back to the woman in the cage and had persuaded her to extend, through a hole suddenly produced in the wall of the little room, her foot for me to suck and eat. "The left one! The left one!" I murmured, putting into the vision a curious detail that might make it resemble the previous dreams more closely. Thus I demonstrated that I had understood perfectly the sickness that the doctor demanded of me. The child Oedipus had in fact done just this: he had sucked his mother's left foot, leaving the right one for his father. In my effort to concoct a reality (far from a contradiction, this), I deceived also myself and could taste the flavor of that foot. I wanted to vomit.

Not only the doctor but I, too, would have liked to be revisited by those dear images of my youth, authentic or not, which I hadn't had to invent. Since, in the doctor's presence, they no longer came, I tried to summon them when I was away from him. By myself, I ran the risk of forgetting them, but I wasn't looking for therapy, after all! I wanted again May roses in December. I had had them once, why couldn't I have them again?

In solitude, too, I was fairly bored, but then, instead of the images, something else came and for a while replaced them. Simply, I believed I had made an important scientific discovery. I thought I had been called upon to complete the whole theory of physiological colors. My predecessors, Goethe and Schopenhauer, had never imagined what could be achieved by deftly handling complementary colors.

I should say that I spent my time sprawled on the sofa opposite my study window, from which I had a view of a stretch of sea and horizon. Now, one evening, as the sunset colored a sky jagged with clouds, I lingered at length to admire, along a limpid edge, a magnificent color, a pure and soft green. In the sky there was also a good deal of red, along the outlines of the clouds to the west, but it was a still-pale red, diluted by the white rays of the direct sun. Dazzled, after a certain time, I shut my eyes and it was obviously the green to which my attention had been directed, along with my affection, because on my retina now its complementary color was produced, a brilliant red that had nothing to do with the luminous but pale red of the sky. I looked, I caressed that color I had created. My great surprise came when, after I opened my eyes, I saw that dazzling red invade the whole sky and cover also the emerald green that for a long time I couldn't then find again. So I had discovered the way to color nature! Naturally, I repeated the experiment several times. The wonderful thing was that there was also movement within that coloration. When I reopened my eyes, the sky would not accept immediately the color of my retina. There was an instant of hesitation, during which I was still able to see the emerald green that had generated that red by which it would be destroyed. The latter rose from the background, unexpected, and spread like a frightful fire.

When I was convinced of the exactness of my observation, I took it to the doctor in the hope of enlivening our boring sessions. The doctor settled the question for me, saying that my retina was more sensitive because of nicotine. I was almost ready to say that, if so, then the images we had considered reproductions of events of my childhood could also have been generated through the effect of the same poison. But then I would have revealed to him that I wasn't cured, and he would have tried to persuade me to start the therapy all over again.

And yet that brute didn't always believe I was poisoned like that. This was clear also in the reeducation he undertook, to heal me of what he called my smoking sickness. These are his words: smoking wasn't bad for me, and if I were convinced it was harmless, it would really be so. And he went further: now that the relations.h.i.+p with my father had been revealed and subjected to my adult judgment, I could realize I had contracted that vice to compete with my father, and had attributed a poisonous effect to tobacco thanks to my unconscious moral feeling that wanted to punish me for my rivalry with him.

That day I left the doctor's house smoking like a chimney. A test was necessary, and I gladly subjected myself to it. That whole day I smoked uninterruptedly. Then a totally sleepless night followed. My chronic bronchitis returned, and there could be no doubt about that, because it was easy to discover the consequences in the spittoon.

The next day I told the doctor I had smoked a great deal and now it no longer mattered to me. The doctor looked at me, smiling, and I could sense his bosom swelling with pride. Calmly he resumed my reeducation! He proceeded with the confidence of one who sees flowers blossom from every clod on which he sets his foot.

I remember very little of that reeducation. I submitted to it, and when I emerged from that room I shook myself like a dog coming out of the water, and also like the dog remained damp but not soaked.

I remember, however, with indignation that my educator a.s.serted that Dr. Coprosich had rightly addressed to me the words that had so provoked my ill-feeling. But would I then have deserved as well the slap my father tried to give me, as he was dying? I don't know if the doctor also said this. But I do know for certain that he declared I had hated also old Malfenti, whom I had installed in my father's place. Many in this world believe they cannot live without a given affection; I, on the contrary, according to him, became unbalanced if I lacked a given hatred. I married one or another of the daughters, and it didn't matter which, because it was a question of putting their father in a place where my hatred could reach him. Then I defaced, as best I could, the house I had made mine. I betrayed my wife and, obviously, if I could have succeeded, I would have seduced Ada and also Alberta. Naturally I have no thought of denying this, and indeed the doctor made me laugh when, in telling it to me, he a.s.sumed the att.i.tude of Christopher Columbus arriving in America. I believe, however, that he is the only one in this world who, hearing I wanted to go to bed with two beautiful women, would ask himself: Now let's see why this man wants to go to bed with them.

It was even more difficult for me to tolerate what he thought himself ent.i.tled to say about my relations with Guido. From my own account he had learned of the dislike that had marked the beginning of my acquaintance with Guido. This dislike never ceased, according to the doctor, and Ada was right to see my absence from the funeral as its final manifestation. The doctor forgot how, at that moment, I was intent on my labor of love, saving Ada's fortune, nor did I deign to remind him.

It seems that, on the subject of Guido, the doctor had even made some inquiries. He a.s.serts that, having been chosen by Ada, Guido couldn't be the way I've described him. He has discovered that an important lumberyard, very close to the house where he practices psychoa.n.a.lysis, belonged to the finn of Guido Speier & Co. Why hadn't I mentioned it?

If I had mentioned it, it would have been an added difficulty in my already quite difficult exposition. This omission is simply the proof that a confession made by me in Italian could be neither complete nor sincere. In a lumberyard there are enormous varieties of lumber, which we in Trieste call by barbarous names derived from the dialect, from Croat, from German, and sometimes even from French(zapin, for example, which is by no means the equivalent of sapin). Who could have given me the appropriate vocabulary? Old as I am, should I have found myself a job with a lumber dealer from Tuscany? For that matter, the lumberyard belonging to the firm of Guido Speier & Co. produced only losses. So I had no call to mention it, as it remained always inactive, except when thieves broke in and made that barbarously named wood move, as if it were destined to make little tables for spiritualist seances.

I suggested to the doctor that he seek information on Guido from my wife, from Carmen, or from Luciano, who is now a well-known, successful merchant. To my knowledge, the doctor consulted none of them, and I must believe he refrained for fear of seeing, thanks to their information, the collapse of all his construction of accusations and suspicions. Who knows why he has been overcome by such hatred of me? He must be another hysteric who, having desired his mother in vain, takes it out on someone totally extraneous.

In the end I grew very tired of the struggle I had to sustain with the doctor, whom I was paying. I believe also that those dreams didn't do me any good, and then the freedom to smoke whenever I liked finally depressed me totally. I had a good idea: I went to Dr. Paoli.

I hadn't seen him for many years. He had gone rather white, but his grenadier figure had not yet been fattened by age, or bent. He still looked at things with a gaze that seemed a caress. This time I discovered why he seemed like that to me. Obviously he enjoys looking, and he looks at the beautiful and the ugly with the satisfaction that others derive from a caress.

I had gone up to see him with the intention of asking him if he believed I should continue my psychoa.n.a.lysis. But when I found myself facing that coldly investigative eye, my courage failed me. Perhaps I would make myself ridiculous, telling him that at my age I had let myself be taken in by such charlatanism. I was sorry to have to remain silent, because if Paoli had forbidden me psychoa.n.a.lysis, my position would have been greatly simplified, but I definitely would not have liked to see myself caressed at length by that great eye of his.

I told him about my insomnia, my chronic bronchitis, a rash on my cheeks that was tormenting me, about certain shooting pains in my legs, and finally about my strange memory gaps.

Paoli a.n.a.lyzed my urine in my presence. The mixture turned black, and Paoli became thoughtful. Here, finally, was a real a.n.a.lysis and not a psychoa.n.a.lysis. I remembered with affection and emotion my remote past as a chemist and some real a.n.a.lyses: me, a test tube, and a reagent! The other, the a.n.a.lyzed, sleeps until the reagent imperiously wakens him. Resistance in the test tube doesn't exist or else it succ.u.mbs to the slightest increase of temperature, and simulation is also completely absent. In that test tube, nothing happens that could recall my behavior when, to please Dr. S., I invented new details of my childhood, which then confirmed the diagnosis of Sophocles. Here, on the contrary, all was truth. The thing to be a.n.a.lyzed was imprisoned in the tube and, remaining always itself, it awaited the reagent. When it arrived, the thing always said the same word. In psychoa.n.a.lysis there is never repet.i.tion, neither of the same images nor of the same words.

It should be called something else. Let's call it psychic adventure. That's right: when you begin such an a.n.a.lysis, it's as if you were going into a wood, not knowing whether you will encounter an outlaw or a friend. And even when the adventure is over, you still don't know. In this, psychoa.n.a.lysis recalls spiritualism.

But Paoli didn't believe it was a question of sugar. He wanted to see me again the next day, after he had a.n.a.lyzed that liquid by polarization.

Meanwhile, I went off, basking in the glory of diabetes. I was about to go to Dr. S. to ask him how he would now a.n.a.lyze, in my bosom, the causes of such a disease in order to nullify them. But I had had enough of that individual, and I wouldn't see him again, not even to make fun of him.

I must confess that diabetes for me was infinitely sweet. I talked of it with Augusta, who immediately had tears in her eyes. "You've talkedso much about diseases allyour life, that you had to end up having one!" she said, then tried to console me.

I loved my illness. I fondly remembered poor Copler, who preferred real sickness to the imaginary. Now I agreed with him. Real sickness was so simple: you just let it have its way. In fact, when I read in a medical volume the description of my sweet sickness, I discovered a kind of program of life (not death!) in its various stages. Farewell, resolutions: at last I was free. Everything would take its course without any intervention on my part.

I also discovered that my sickness was always, or almost always, very sweet. The sick person eats and drinks a great deal, and there are no great sufferings if you are careful to avoid ulcers. Then you die in a very sweet coma.

A little later, Paoli called me on the telephone. He informed me that there was no trace of sugar. I went to him the next day and he prescribed a diet, which I followed only a few days, and a potion that he described in an illegible prescription, which did me good for a whole month.

"Did diabetes give you a great fright?" he asked me, smiling.

I protested, but I didn't tell him that since diabetes had abandoned me, I felt very much alone. He wouldn't have believed me.

In that period I happened upon Dr. Beard's famous work on neurasthenia. I followed his advice and changed medicines every week according to his prescriptions, which I copied out in a clear hand. For some months the treatment seemed to do me good. Not even Copier had had such an abundant consolation of medicines in his life as I did at that time. Then that faith also faded, but meanwhile I had postponed from day to day my return to psychoa.n.a.lysis.

I then ran into Dr. S. He asked me if I had decided to give up therapy. He was, however, very polite, far more so than when he had had me in his hands. Obviously he wanted to get me back. I told him I had some urgent business, family matters that occupied and preoccupied me, and that once I found peace again, I would return to him. I would have liked to ask him to give me back my ma.n.u.script, but I didn't dare; it would have been tantamount to confessing that I wanted nothing more to do with the treatment. I postponed such an attempt to another time, when he would have realized that I no longer gave therapy any thought, and he would have to resign himself.

Before leaving me, he said a few words, meant to win me back: "If you examine your consciousness, you will find it changed. As you will see, you will return to me only if you realize that I was able, in a relatively short time, to bring you close to health."

But, to tell the truth, I believe that, with his help, in studying my consciousness, I have introduced some new sicknesses into it.

I am bent on recovering from his therapy. I avoid dreams and memories. Thanks to them, my poor head has been so transformed that it doesn't feel secure on my neck. I have frightful distractions. I speak with people, and while I am saying one thing, I try involuntarily to recall something else that, just a moment before, I said or did and now no longer remember, or I even pursue a thought of mine that seems to me enormously important, with the importance my father attributed to those thoughts he had just before dying, which he, too, was unable to recall.

If I don't want to end up in the lunatic asylum, I must throw away these playthings.

15 May, I915.

We have spent a two-day holiday at Lucinico, in our villa there. My son, Alfio, has to recuperate from influenza and will remain in the villa with his sister for a few weeks. We'll come back here for Pentecost.

I have finally succeeded in returning to my sweet habits, and stopped smoking. I am already much better since I have been able to abolish the freedom that foolish doctor chose to grant me. Today, as we are in midmonth, I have been struck by the difficulty our calendar creates for regular and orderly resolutions. No one month is the same as another. To underline better one's inner resolve, one likes to end smoking together with the end of something else: for example, the month. But except for July and August, and then December and January, there are no two successive months that form a pair thanks to their equal number of days. Time involves true disorder!