Zeno's Conscience Part 17

"Forgive me!" she said, laughing through her tears, "I did it without thinking. But if you'll allow me, I'll give you yet another kiss."

Little Anna, now twelve, also wanted to kiss me. Alberta, who was about to abandon the nation's theater to become engaged, and who as a rule was a bit reserved with me, that day warmly gave me her hand. They all loved me because my wife was bursting with health, and in this way they demonstrated their dislike of Guido, whose wife was ill.

But just then I risked becoming a less good husband. I caused my wife a great sorrow, through no fault of mine, because of a dream I innocently told her.

Here is the dream: There were the three of us, Augusta, Ada, and I, leaning out of a window, specifically the smallest window there was among our three houses-mine, my mother-in-law's and Ada's. We were, in short, at the window of my mother-in-law's kitchen, which overlooks a small yard, though in the dream it was right on the Corso. There was so little s.p.a.ce on the sill that Ada, who was in the middle, holding our arms, was sticking close to me. I looked at her and I saw that her eye had again become cold and sharp and the lines of her face very pure all the way to the nape, which I saw was covered by her delicate curls, those curls that I had seen so often when Ada turned her back on me. Despite this coldness (as her health seemed to me), she remained pressed against me as I had believed she was that evening of my engagement around the speaking table. Jokingly, I said to Augusta (surely making an effort to pay attention also to her): "You see how she is cured? Where's Basedow now?" "Can't you see?" asked Augusta, the only one of us who managed to look into the street. With an effort we leaned out also and we could see a great crowd advancing, with threats and shouts. "But where is Basedow?" I asked once more. Then I saw him. It was he who was advancing, followed by that crowd: an old beggar wrapped in a huge cloak, tattered but of stiff brocade, his great head covered by disheveled white locks flying in the air, his eyes protruding from their sockets, anxiously looking forward with a gaze I had observed in fleeing animals, of fear and of menace. And the crowd was shouting: "Kill the disease-spreader!"

Then there was an interval of empty night. And then, immediately, Ada and I were alone on the steepest stair of our three houses, the one that leads to the attic of my villa. Ada was perched on some higher steps, but turned toward me, as I was about to climb up, though she seemed to want to come down. I was embracing her legs and she was bending toward me, whether out of weakness or the desire to be closer to me I don't know. For an instant she seemed to me disfigured by her sickness, but then, looking at her breathlessly, I could see her as she had appeared to me at the window, beautiful and healthy. She was saying to me in her solid voice: "Go ahead, I'll follow you at once!" I promptly turned to precede her, running, but not fast enough not to notice that the door of my attic was very slowly opening and Basedow's head, with its white mane and that face, half-afraid, half-menacing, emerged. I saw also his unsteady legs and the poor, wretched body that the cloak was unable to hide. I managed to run off, but I don't know whether it was to precede Ada or to escape her.

Now it seems that, gasping, I awoke in the night, and in my dozing state I told all or part of the dream to Augusta, before resuming my sleep, calmer and deeper. I believe that, in my semiconsciousness, I blindly followed my old desire to confess my misdeeds.

In the morning, on Augusta's face, there was the waxen pallor of major occasions. I remembered the dream perfectly, but not exactly how much of it I had reported to her. With an expression of pained resignation, she said: "You are unhappy because she's ill and has gone away, and so you dream about her."

I defended myself, laughing and teasing. It wasn't Ada who was important to me, but Basedow, and I told her of my studies and also of the applications I had envisaged. But I don't know if I succeeded in convincing her. When you are caught dreaming, it's hard to defend yourself. It's quite a different thing from returning to your wife, wide awake, immediately after having betrayed her. For that matter, in these jealousies of Augusta's, I had nothing to lose because she loved Ada so much, and for that reason her jealousy cast no shadow; as far as I was concerned, she treated me with even more affectionate respect and was all the more grateful to me for my slightest show of affection.

A few days later Guido returned from Bologna with the best of news. The director of the sanatorium guaranteed a definitive cure provided that, on her return, Ada found great serenity at home. Guido reported simply and fairly shamelessly the doctor's prognosis, not realizing that in the Malfenti family that verdict merely confirmed many suspicions regarding him.

And I said to Augusta: "Now I'm threatened with more kisses from your mother."

It seemed that Guido didn't feel quite comfortable in the house under Aunt Maria's management. Sometimes he paced up and down the office, murmuring: "Two babies... three wet nurses... no wife."

He also remained absent from the office more often because he released his ill humor in a rage against the poor animal victims of his hunting and fishing. But when, toward the end of the year, we received from Bologna the news that Ada was considered cured and was preparing to come home, he didn't seem all that happy to me. Had he become used to Aunt Maria, or did he see so little of her that it was easy and pleasant for him to tolerate her? With me, naturally, he showed no sign of his ill humor except perhaps in expressing the suspicion that Ada was in too much of a hurry to leave the sanatorium before she was a.s.sured there would be no relapse. In fact, a short time later, even before the end of that winter, when she had to return to Bologna, he said to me triumphantly: "What did I tell you?"

I don't, however, believe that there was any other joy in that triumph beyond his always keen pleasure in having successfully predicted something. He wasn't wishing Ada any ill, but he would have been glad to keep her in Bologna for a long time.

When Ada returned, Augusta was confined to bed for the birth of my little Alfio, and on that occasion she was truly moving. She insisted I go to the station with flowers and I was to tell Ada that she wanted to see her that same day. And if Ada couldn't come to her directly from the station, she begged me to return home at once so I could describe Ada to her and report whether Ada's beauty, of which the family was so proud, had been completely restored to her.

At the station there was Guido, me, and only Alberta, because Signora Malfenti spent most of every day with Augusta. On the platform, Guido tried to convince us of his immense joy over Ada's arrival, but Alberta, listening to him, made a great show of inattention in order-as she later told me-not to have to reply to him. As for me, simulation with Guido by now cost me little effort. I was accustomed to pretending not to notice his indulgence toward Carmen and I had never dared refer to his wrongs toward his wife. It was therefore not hard for me to a.s.sume an att.i.tude of attention as if I were admiring his joy at the return of his beloved wife.

On the stroke of noon, when the train entered the station, he ran ahead of us to reach his wife as she stepped down. He took her in his arms and kissed her affectionately. Seeing him from behind, as he bent in order to be able to kiss his wife, who was shorter than he, I thought: What a good actor!

Then he took Ada's hand and led her toward us. "Here she is, restored to our devotion!"

Then he revealed himself for what he was, namely false, a simulator, because if he had taken a closer look at the poor woman's face, he would have realized that, instead of our devotion, she was being delivered to our indifference. Ada's face was badly put together, because it had recovered the cheeks, but they were misplaced, as if the flesh, returning, had forgotten where it belonged and had settled too low. They looked therefore like swellings rather than cheeks. And her eyes were back in their sockets, but no one had been able to undo the damage done by their absence. Some precise and important lines had been shifted or destroyed. When we bade our good-byes outside the station, in the dazzling winter sun, I saw that all the color of that face was no longer what I had so loved. It had faded, and on the fleshy parts it was flushed, splotchy. Apparently health no longer belonged to that face, and they had succeeded only in putting a pretense of it there.

I immediately told Augusta that Ada was beautiful just as she had been as a girl, and Augusta was overjoyed. Then, after seeing Ada, to my surprise she confirmed several times my pitiful lies as if they had been obvious truths.

She said: "She's as beautiful as she was as a girl, and as my daughter will be!"

Obviously a sister's eye is not very sharp.

For a long time I didn't see Ada again. She had too many children, and so did we. Still, Ada and Augusta managed to meet several times each week, but always at hours when I was away from the house.

Inventory time was approaching, and I had a great deal to do. Indeed, it was the period of my life when I worked most. On some days I stayed at my desk for as much as ten hours. Guido offered to call in an accountant to help me, but I wouldn't hear of it. I had a.s.sumed an obligation, and I had to maintain it. I meant to compensate Guido for that month of grim absence, and I was happy also to show Carmen my diligence, which could only have been inspired by my fondness for Guido.

But as I went ahead ordering the accounts, I began to discover the heavy losses we had incurred in that first year of activity. Concerned, I said something about it privately to Guido, but he was preparing to go hunting and wouldn't stay to hear me out.

"You'll see: it won't be as bad as it looks. And anyway the year isn't over yet."

Then I confided in Augusta. At first all she could see in this matter was the damage I might suffer. That's how women are made, but Augusta was extraordinary, even for a woman, when she lamented her own harm. Wouldn't I-she asked me-also be held somewhat responsible finally for the losses suffered by Guido? She wanted to consult a lawyer at once. Meanwhile it was necessary to make a break with Guido and stop going to that office.

It wasn't easy for me to convince her that I couldn't be held responsible for anything, since I was no more than an employee of Guido's. She insisted that one who doesn't have a fixed salary cannot be considered an employee, but something similar to a co-owner. When she was thoroughly convinced, she naturally remained of her opinion because then she discovered I would lose nothing if I were to cease going to that office, where I would surely in the end win myself a bad reputation in the business world. Good heavens! My business reputation! I, too, agreed that it was important to save it, and though she may have been wrong in her arguments, in conclusion I should do as she wished. She allowed me to complete the ordering of the accounts, since I had begun it, but afterwards I would have to find a way of returning to my little study, where no money was earned, but none was lost, either.

I then learned something curious about myself. I was unable to abandon that activity of mine, even though I had decided to. I was amazed! To understand things properly, you have to work through images. I remembered then that once in England a sentence to forced labor was administered by suspending the condemned convict over a wheel turned by water, thus forcing the victim to move his legs at a certain rhythm to avoid their being crushed. When you are working, you always have the sensation of a similar constriction. It's true that when you don't work the position is the same, and I believe it correct to a.s.sert that I and Olivi were always equally dangling; only I was hung in such a way that I didn't have to move my legs. Our position therefore produced a different result, but now I know for certain that it deserved neither blame nor praise. In short, chance determines whether you're attached to a moving wheel or to one that is motionless. Freeing yourself is inevitably difficult.

For various days, after the accounts were closed, I continued going to the office, though I had resolved not to go there again. I left my house, uncertain. Uncertain, I headed in a direction that was almost always that of the office, and as I proceeded, that direction became clearer until I found myself seated in my usual chair opposite Guido. Luckily at a given moment I was asked not to leave my place, and I immediately agreed, since in the meantime I had realized I was nailed there.

For the fifteenth of January my books were closed. An out-and-out disaster! We closed with a loss of half our capital. Guido was reluctant to show it to young Olivi, fearing some indiscretion on his part, but I insisted, hoping that he, with his great experience, would find some error capable of changing the whole position. There could be some amount shifted from credit, when it belonged to debit, and with a rectification we would arrive at an important difference. Smiling, Olivi promised Guido the maximum discretion, and he then worked with me for a whole day. Unfortunately he found no mistake. I must say that, from this review carried out by the two of us together, I learned much, and now I would be able to face and handle balance sheets far more intimidating than that one.

"And what will you do now?" the bespectacled young man asked before leaving. I already knew what he would suggest. My father, who often had talked about business with me in my infancy, had already taught me. According to the laws of finance, given the loss of half of the capital, we should liquidate the firm and perhaps revive it immediately on a new basis. I allowed him to repeat this advice.

He added: "It's a formality." Then, smiling, he said: "But failure to do this can be very costly!"

That evening Guido also started looking over the accounts, which he still wasn't able to grasp. He did it without any method, checking this or that sum at random. I wanted to stop that useless work, and I transmitted Olivi's advice to go immediately into liquidation, but only as a formality.

Until then Guido's face had been contracted by the effort to find in those accounts the redeeming error. A frown complicated by the grimace of one who has a disgusting taste in his mouth. At my communication, he raised his face, which relaxed as he tried to pay attention. He didn't understand at once, but when he did understand, he burst immediately into hearty laughter. I interpreted the expression on his face in this fashion: harsh, acid, as long as he was confronting those figures that couldn't be altered; happy and resolute when the painful problem was thrust aside by a proposal that allowed him to recover the feeling of being master and judge.

He didn't understand. It seemed to him the advice of an enemy. I explained to him that Olivi's advice had its value, especially considering the danger obviously looming over the firm, of losing more money and going under. A possible bankruptcy would be criminal if, after this situation, by now recorded in our books, we didn't take the measures Olivi suggested.

And I added: "By our laws the mandatory punishment for fraudulent bankruptcy is prison!"

Guido's face turned so red that I feared he was on the verge of a stroke. He yelled: "In this case Olivi doesn't need to give me advice! If that should ever happen, I would take things into my own hands!"

His decision impressed me, and I had the feeling I had before me a person perfectly aware of his own responsibility. I lowered the tone of my voice. I threw myself entirely behind him and, forgetting that I had already defined Olivi's advice as worthy of being taken into consideration, I said: "That's what I said to Olivi, too. The responsibility lies with you, and we can have no part of any decision you may make concerning the fate of the firm that belongs to you and to your father."

Actually I had said this to my wife and not to Olivi, but it was true that I had said it to someone. Now, after having heard Guido's manly a.s.sertion, I would also have been capable of saying it to Olivi, because decision and courage have always conquered me. I already loved enormously even the mere nonchalance that can derive from those qualities, but also from other, far inferior ones.

Since I wanted to report all of his words to Augusta to rea.s.sure her, I insisted: "You know what they say about me-probably rightly-that I have no talent for business, I can carry out what you order me to do, but I can't a.s.sume responsibility for what you do."

He heartily agreed. He felt so comfortable in the role I attributed to him that he forgot his sorrow over the bad accounts. He declared: "I am solely responsible. Everything is in my name, and I would never allow anyone else to a.s.sume responsibilities, even if he wished."

That went beautifully as far as reporting to Augusta was concerned, but it was much more than I had asked. And you had to see the att.i.tude he a.s.sumed as he made that declaration: instead of a semi-failure, he seemed an apostle! He had comfortably adapted to his debit balance, and from that position he was becoming my lord and master. This time, like so many others in the course of our life in common, my impulse of affection for him "was stifled by his expressions revealing his disproportionate self-esteem. He struck a false note. Yes, it had to be said: That great musician was out of tune!

I asked him brusquely: "Do you want me to make a copy of the accounts tomorrow for your father?"

For a moment I had been on the verge of making a far more cruel declaration, telling him that immediately after the books were closed, I would stop coming to his office. I didn't do this, not knowing how I would spend all the free hours I would then have. But my question replaced almost perfectly the declaration I had repressed. For I had reminded him that, in that office, he wasn't the only master.

He looked surprised by my words because they didn't seem to be in line with what had been said thus far, and with my obvious a.s.sent. And in his previous tone he said: "I'll tell you how that copy must be made."

I protested, shouting. In all my life I have never shouted as much as I did with Guido, because sometimes he seemed to me deaf. I declared to him that in law there is a responsibility also for the bookkeeper, and I was not prepared to pa.s.s off invented clumps of figures as exact copies.

He blanched and admitted I was right, but, he added, he was ent.i.tled to order that no extracts from his books should be given out. On this point I was willing to admit he was right, and then, relieved, he declared that he himself would write to his father. It even seemed he wanted to start writing immediately, but then he changed his mind and suggested we go out for a breath of air. I chose to content him. I supposed he hadn't yet thoroughly digested the balance sheet, and wanted to move about, the better to swallow it.

Our walk reminded me of the one we took on the night of my engagement. The moon was absent, as there was a great deal of fog up above, but below it, the sky was the same, as we walked, confidently, through clear air. Guido also recalled that memorable evening.

"This is the first time we've taken a walk together since that night. Remember? That time, you explained to me how on the moon they kissed the same way we do on earth. Now, on the moon they continue that kiss eternally, I'm sure, even though we can't see them this evening. But down here..."

Did he mean to start speaking once more against Ada? Against the poor sick woman? I interrupted him, though mildly, as if agreeing with him (hadn't I come with him to help him forget?).

"True! Down here we can't always kiss! But up above, there is only the fixed image of the kiss. A kiss is, above all, movement."

I was trying to remove myself from all his concerns, namely the accounts and Ada; in fact, just in time I managed to suppress a phrase I was on the point of saying, namely that up above, a kiss did not generate twins. But, to rid himself of the debit, he could find nothing better to do than complain of his other misfortunes. As I had antic.i.p.ated, he complained about Ada. He began by regretting how disastrous that first year of marriage had been for him. He didn't speak of the twins, who were so dear and handsome, but of Ada's disease.

He thought that being ill made her irascible, jealous, and at the same time unaffectionate. He concluded with a disheartened exclamation: "Life is unfair and hard!"

I felt it was absolutely forbidden for me to utter a single word that suggested any judgment concerning him and Ada. But I also felt a duty to say something. He had ended by mentioning life and by applying two predicate adjectives to it, neither of them supremely original. I found something better precisely because I had set myself up as critic of what he said. Often we say things following the sound of the words as they are casually connected. Then, as soon as you look to see if what was said was worth the breath it consumed, you sometimes discover that the casual a.s.sociation generated an idea.

I said: "Life is neither ugly nor beautiful, but it's original!"

When I thought about it, it seemed to me I had said something important. Thus defined, life seemed to me so new that I stood there looking at it as if seeing it for the first time, with its gaseous, liquid, and solid bodies. If I were to narrate it to someone unfamiliar with it and therefore lacking our common knowledge, that listener would remain mute in the face of the enormous, aimless construction. He would ask me: "But how have you borne it?" And, having inquired into every single detail, from those celestial bodies suspended up above so that they can be seen and not touched, to the mystery that surrounds death, he would surely exclaim: "Very original!"

"Original? Life?" Guido said, laughing. "Where did you read that?"

I didn't bother to a.s.sure him I hadn't read it anywhere, because otherwise my words would have held less importance for him. But the more I thought about it, the more original I found life to be. And it wasn't at all necessary to come from outside in order to see how it was put together. Simply recalling everything we humans expected from life sufficed for us to see how strange it was, and to arrive at the conclusion that perhaps mankind is located in its midst by mistake and doesn't belong there.

Having made no agreement about the direction of our stroll, we ended up, as we had the last time, on the Via Belvedere. Finding the little wall where he had stretched out that night, Guido climbed onto it and lay down just like the other time. He was humming, perhaps still oppressed by his thoughts, and he was surely pondering the inevitable figures of his books. I, on the contrary, remembered how in this place I had wanted to kill him, and, comparing my feelings then with my present ones, I admired once again the incomparable originality of life. But suddenly I remembered that, a short while before, and because of an ambitious person's whim, I had inveighed against poor Guido, and on one of the worst days of his life. I devoted myself to an inquiry: I was witnessing with great pain the torture inflicted on Guido by the accounts I had kept with such care, and I felt a curious doubt and immediately an even more curious memory. The doubt: Was I good or bad? The memory, provoked suddenly by the doubt, which was not new to me: I saw myself as a child and dressed (of this I'm sure) still in short skirts, as I raised my face to ask my smiling mother: "Am I good or bad?" Then the doubt must have been generated in the child by the many people who had said he was good and by the many others who had called him bad. It was not surprising that the child was bewildered by that dilemma. Oh, incomparable originality of life! It was wonderful that the doubt it had already inflicted on the child in such a puerile form had not been resolved by the adult who had already pa.s.sed the midpoint of his life.

On that dark night, in the very place where once before I had desired to kill, that doubt tormented me profoundly. To be sure, the child, sensing that doubt stirring in his head, only recently freed from its baby bonnet, had not suffered much from it, because children are told that badness can be cured.

To be rid of this anguish I tried to believe that again, and I succeeded. If I hadn't succeeded, I would have had to weep for myself, for Guido, and for our terribly sad life. My resolve renewed the illusion! I resolved to remain at Guido's side and collaborate with him in the development of his business, on which his and his family's lives depended, and with no idea of profit for myself. I glimpsed the possibility of running, transacting, and investigating for him; and, to help him, I admitted the possibility of becoming a great, enterprising, brilliant trader. This is exactly what I was thinking on that dark night of this highly original life!

Guido meanwhile stopped thinking of the balance sheet. He left his place and he seemed resigned. As if he had come to a conclusion after some reasoning of which I was ignorant, he told me he would say nothing to his father because otherwise the poor old man would undertake that enormous voyage from his summer sun to our winter fog. He then said that at first sight the loss seemed huge, but it wasn't so much after all, if he didn't have to bear it alone. He would ask Ada to be responsible for half of it, and in return he would a.s.sign her a share in next year's profits. The other half of the loss he would a.s.sume himself.

I said nothing. I thought that I was also bound not to give advice, because otherwise I would end by doing what I absolutely did not want to do, setting myself up as judge between husband and wife. For that matter, at the moment, I was so filled with fine intentions that it seemed to me Ada would be making a good bargain, taking part in a venture under our direction.

I accompanied Guido to the door of his house, and I clasped his hand at length to renew silently my resolve to love him. Then I cast about for something nice to say to him, and I came up with this sentence: "May your twins have a good night and allow you also to sleep, because you certainly need rest."

Going off, I bit my lips regretting I hadn't hit on something better. But I knew that the twins, now that each had his own wet nurse and they slept a mile apart, couldn't trouble his sleep! In any event he understood the intention of my wish because he accepted it gratefully.

On reaching home, I found that Augusta had retired to the bedroom with our children. Alfio was clinging to her bosom while Antonia slept in the cot, turning her curly nape to us. I had to explain the reason for my tardiness, and so I told her also the method Guido had conceived to be free of his debit. To Augusta, Guido's proposal seemed outrageous.

"In Ada's place I'd refuse!" she exclaimed violently, though in a low voice, so as not to frighten the little one.

Led by my good intentions, I argued: "So if I happened to have the same difficulties as Guido, you wouldn't help me?"

She laughed. "It's quite a different thing! Between the two of us we'd see what was most advantageous for them!" - and she nodded toward the baby in her arms and toward Antonia-"And if we now advised Ada to contribute her money to continuing that business in which you will soon have no part, wouldn't we then be obliged to compensate her if she lost it?"

It was an ignorant idea, but in my new altruism I exclaimed: "And why not?"

"But can't you see we have two children to think about?"

Oh, I could see them! The question was a rhetorical figure, truly without meaning.

"And don't they also have two children?" I asked, victoriously.

She began laughing loudly, frightening Alfio, who stopped nursing immediately in order to cry. She tended him, but still laughing, and I accepted her laughter as if I had won it with my wit, whereas, in truth, at the moment I asked that question, I had felt stirring in my breast a great love for all parents of children and for the children of all parents. Having now been laughed at, the affection had completely vanished.

But my distress at knowing I was not essentially good diminished also. I seemed to have resolved the troubling problem. We were neither good nor bad, just as we were also not many other things. Goodness was the light that, in flashes and for moments, illuminated the dark human spirit. The flaming torch was necessary to give light (it had been in my spirit, and sooner or later it would also return), and in that brightness any thinking person could choose the direction in which to move through the ensuing darkness. We could therefore show ourselves to be good, very good, always good, and this was what mattered. When the light returned, it would not take us by surprise, it would not dazzle. I would blow on it to put it out first, since I had no need of it. Because I would know how to maintain the resolution, in other words, the direction.

The resolution to be good is calm and practical, and now I was calm and cold. Strange! The excess of goodness had made me excessive in estimating myself and my power. What could I do for Guido? True, in his office I stood head and shoulders above the others as, in my office, the senior Olivi stood above me. But this didn't prove much. And, to be quite practical: what advice would I give Guido the next day? Perhaps some hunch of mine? But you don't follow hunches, even at the gambling table, when you're gambling with the money of others! To keep a business firm going, you have to create everyday work for it, and this can be achieved by working every hour on organization. I wasn't the man who could do such a thing, nor did it seem right to me to sentence myself, because of my goodness, to a lifetime of boredom.

I still felt the impression made on me by my access of goodness as a commitment I had made to Guido, and I couldn't get to sleep. I sighed several times profoundly, and once I even moaned, surely at the moment when I seemed to be bound to Guido's office as Olivi was to mine.

Half-waking, Augusta murmured: "What's wrong? Have you had another argument with Olivi?"

Here was the idea I'd been seeking! I would advise Guido to take on young Olivi as manager! So serious and hard-working, that youth, whom I was so unwilling to allow into in my own affairs-because he seemed to be preparing to succeed his father in their management and thus exclude me definitively-obviously belonged, to everyone's advantage, in Guido's office. Creating a position in the firm for him, Guido would save himself, and young Olivi would be more useful in that office than in mine.

The idea thrilled me, and I roused Augusta to inform her of it. She was also so enthusiastic that she woke up completely. It seemed to her that I could thus free myself more easily from the compromising affairs of Guido. I fell asleep with a clear conscience: I had found the way to save Guido, and I wouldn't doom myself. Far from it.

There is nothing more disgusting than to see your advice rejected, after it has been sincerely studied, with an effort that cost whole hours of sleep. In my case there had also been another effort: that of trying to rid myself of the illusion that I could be of help in Guido's affairs. An immense effort. I had first achieved true goodness, then absolute objectivity, and then I was told to go to h.e.l.l!

Guido rejected my advice with downright disdain. He didn't believe young Olivi capable, and anyway he didn't like the young man's old-man appearance, and even more he disliked those eyegla.s.ses that glistened so on the boy's insipid face. His arguments tended to make me believe that only one of them had any foundation: a desire to spite me. He ended up by telling me he would accept as his manager not the young Olivi, but the older one. But I didn't believe I could procure him the latter's collaboration, and besides, I didn't think I was ready to a.s.sume, on a moment's notice, the junior Olivi as manager of my affairs. I made the mistake of arguing, and I said to Guido that old Olivi wasn't worth much. I told him how much money Olivi's stubbornness had cost me, through his refusal to buy that dried fruit at the right moment.

"Well!" Guido cried. "If the old man's worth no more than that, how much can the young one be worth, since he's merely his father's disciple?"

Here, at last, was a sound argument, and all the more irksome to me, as I had supplied it myself through my foolish chatter.

A few days later, Augusta told me that Guido had proposed to Ada that she cover half of the losses on the books with her money. Ada refused, as she said to Augusta: "He's unfaithful to me and he wants my money as well!"

Augusta hadn't had the courage to advise her to give it to him, but she a.s.sured me she had done her best to make Ada reconsider her view of her husband's fidelity. Ada had replied in a way that suggested she knew far more on this score than we thought. And, with me, Augusta reasoned in these terms: "For a husband, a wife should be able to make any sacrifice." But did that axiom apply also to Guido?

In the days that followed, Guido's demeanor became truly extraordinary. He appeared in the office from time to time, but never stayed for more than half an hour. He would rush off like someone who's forgotten his handkerchief at home. I later learned that he went to confront Ada with new arguments, which seemed to him decisive, sure to make her do as he wished. He really looked like a man who has wept too much or shouted too much or who has actually fought, and even in our presence he was unable to control the emotion that choked him and brought tears to his eyes. I asked him what was wrong. He answered with a sad but friendly smile, to show he didn't hold anything against me. Then he collected himself so he could talk to me without becoming too agitated. Finally he said a few words. Ada was making him suffer with her jealousy.

He then told me that they quarreled over their personal matters, whereas I knew that there was also that question of debit and credit between them.

But apparently this had no importance. He told me so himself, and Ada said the same to Augusta, speaking of nothing but her jealousy. Also the violence of those arguments, which left such profound traces on Guido's face, suggested that they were all telling the truth.

On the contrary, it turned out that husband and wife talked of nothing but the money question. Though she let herself be driven by her pa.s.sionate sufferings, Ada, out of pride, had never mentioned them, and Guido, perhaps through awareness of his guilt and although he sensed that womanly rage persisted in Ada, continued to discuss business affairs as if the rest didn't exist. He more and more desperately pursued that money, while she, who wasn't the least bit interested in financial matters, protested against Guido's proposal with a single argument: the money had to be kept for the children. And when he found other arguments-his peace, the benefits the children themselves would derive from his work, the security of being in compliance with the law-she dismissed them with a sharp "No!" This exasperated Guido and-as happens with children-also his desire. But both, when they spoke about it to others, believed they were truthful in a.s.serting they were suffering for love and jealousy.

It was a kind of misunderstanding that prevented me from acting at the right time to end the unfortunate debate about money. I could prove to Guido that it effectively lacked importance. As an accountant I am a bit slow, and I don't understand things until I have entered them in the books, in black and white, but it seems to me I quickly understood that the investment Guido demanded of Ada would not have changed things much. What, in fact, was the use of making her deposit a sum in cash? The loss, in that case, did not appear any smaller, unless Ada agreed actually to add her money to the balance sheet, and Guido was not asking this of her. The law would surely not be mollified by finding that after having lost so much, we wanted to risk even more, attracting new capital into the firm.

One morning Guido didn't show up in the office, which surprised us because we knew he hadn't left to go hunting the previous evening. At lunch I learned from a distressed and agitated Augusta that, the night before, Guido had attempted to take his own life. Now he was out of danger. I must confess that the news, which to Augusta seemed tragic, made me angry.

He had resorted to that drastic measure to overcome his wife's resistance! I learned, also immediately, that he had done so with every precaution, and before taking the morphine, he had made sure he was seen holding the unstoppered bottle in his hand. Thus, at the first signs of drowsiness, Ada called the doctor, and Guido was quickly out of danger. Ada had spent a horrible night because the doctor felt it was proper to express some uncertainty about the effect of the poisoning, and then her distress was prolonged by Guido, who, when he came to, perhaps not yet fully conscious, covered her with reproaches, calling her his enemy, his persecutor, an obstacle to the healthy work he was trying to undertake.

Ada immediately granted him the loan he was asking, but then, finally, with the intention of defending herself, she spoke openly and uttered all the reproaches she had repressed for so long. Thus they came to an understanding because he-so Augusta thought-had managed to dispel all Ada's doubts about his fidelity. He was vehement, and when she spoke to him of Carmen, he cried: "Are you jealous of her? All right, if you want, I'll discharge her this very day."

Ada hadn't replied, and she believed she had thus accepted his offer and he had committed himself.

I was amazed that Guido had been able to act like this while half asleep, and I came to believe he hadn't swallowed even the small dose of morphine that he claimed. I thought one of the effects of clouding the brain through drowsiness was to weaken the most hardened spirit, prompting the most ingenuous confessions. Hadn't I only recently experienced something of the sort? This increased my outrage and my scorn for Guido.

Augusta wept, telling me the condition in which she had found Ada. No! Ada was no longer beautiful, with those eyes that seemed widened in terror.

My wife and I then had a long argument about whether or not I should immediately visit Guido and Ada, or whether it wasn't better to feign ignorance and wait to see him next in the office. To me, that visit seemed an intolerable nuisance. Seeing him, how could I refrain from expressing my feelings? I would say: "It's an action unworthy of a man! I've no desire to kill myself, but there's no doubt that if I did decide to, I would succeed immediately!"

This is truly how I felt, and I wanted to say as much to Augusta. But I thought I was doing Guido too much honor in comparing him with myself.

"You don't have to be a chemist to know how to destroy this organism of ours, which is all too sensitive. Almost every week in our city, isn't there some seamstress who swallows a solution of phosphorus prepared secretly in her humble room, and then that rudimentary poison, despite every care, carries her off, her face still distorted by the physical pain and by the moral suffering of her innocent little soul?"