Zeno's Conscience Part 22

To collect my thoughts more readily, I spent the afternoon of my second solitary day on the sh.o.r.es of the Isonzo. Nothing is more conducive to meditation than watching the flow of water. You stand motionless, and the running water supplies the distraction needed, because it is never identical to itself, in its color and its pattern, not even for a moment.

It was a strange day. Certainly up above, a strong wind was blowing, because the clouds constantly changed shape; but below, the atmosphere was unmoving. It happened that from time to time, among the shifting clouds, the already-hot sun found an aperture through which to lavish its rays on this or that patch of hill or mountaintop, emphasizing the sweet green of May amid the shadow covering the landscape. The temperature was mild and there was also something springlike in that flight of clouds in the sky. There could be no doubt: our weather was regaining health!

Mine was genuine meditation, one of those rare instants that our miserly life bestows of true, great objectivity, when you finally stop believing and feeling yourself a victim. In the midst of all that green, emphasized so delightfully by those patches of sun, I could smile at my life and also at my sickness. Woman had an enormous importance in it. Perhaps in fragments: her little feet, her waist, or her mouth filled my days. And seeing my life again and also my sickness, I loved them, I understood them! How much more beautiful my life had been than that of the so-called healthy, those who beat or would have liked to beat their women every day, except at certain moments. I, on the contrary, had been accompanied always by love. When I hadn't thought of my woman for a while, I then called her to mind again, to win forgiveness for thinking of other women. Other men abandoned their women, disappointed and despairing of life. I had never stripped life of desire, and illusion was immediately, totally reborn after every shipwreck, in the dream of limbs, of voices, of more-perfect att.i.tudes.

At that moment I remembered that among the many lies I had dished out to that profound observer Dr. S., there was also the story that I had never again betrayed my wife after the departure of Ada. This lie, too, had helped him construct his theories. But there, on the bank of that river, suddenly and with fear, I remembered that it was true that, for a few days now, perhaps since I had given up the therapy, I hadn't sought the company of other women. Am I perhaps cured, as Dr. S. claims? Old as I am, for some time women have no longer looked at me. If I stop looking at them, then all ties between us are severed.

If a suspicion like this had come to me in Trieste, I could have resolved it at once. Out here, that is much more difficult.

A few days before, I had picked up the memoirs of Da Ponte, the adventurer, contemporary of Casanova. He, too, had surely pa.s.sed through Lucinico, and I dreamed of encountering those ladies of his, faces powdered, limbs concealed by crinolines. My G.o.d! How did those women manage to surrender so quickly and so frequently, defended as they were by all those rags?

It seemed to me that the thought of the crinoline, despite my therapy, was rather arousing. But my desire was fairly artificial, and it wasn't enough to rea.s.sure me.

The experience I sought came to me a little later, and it sufficed to rea.s.sure me, but only at great cost. To have that experience, I altered and spoiled the purest relationship I had had in my life.

I ran into Teresina, the older daughter of the tenant of a farm situated next to my villa. Her father had been left a widower two years ago, and his numerous brood had found a new mother in Teresina, a st.u.r.dy girl who got up every morning to work, and stopped only to go to bed and rest in order to be able to resume her work. That day she was leading the donkey habitually entrusted to the care of her little brother, and she was walking beside the cart loaded with fresh gra.s.s, because the far-from-large animal would have been unable to carry up the slight slope the added weight of the girl.

A year ago, Teresina had seemed to me still a child, and I had felt for her nothing but a smiling, paternal fondness. But even the day before, when I saw her again for the first time, despite the fact that I found her grown, her dark little face more serious, her slight shoulders broadened and the bosom rounder in the scant ripening of the overworked little body, I continued to regard her as an immature child in whom only her extraordinary activity could be loved, and the maternal instinct from which her little charges benefited. If it hadn't been for that accursed therapy and the necessity to verify immediately the state of my sickness, I could have left Lucinico once again without have disturbed such innocence.

She had no crinoline. And the round, smiling little face was ignorant of powder. Her feet were bare, and half of her legs were also visibly naked. The little face and the feet and the legs were unable to excite me. The face and the limbs that Teresina allowed to be seen were of the same color; they all belonged to the air, and there was nothing wrong in their being exposed to the air. Perhaps for this reason they were unable to stir me. But on feeling myself so cold, I was frightened. After the treatment, did I now require crinolines?

I began by stroking the donkey, for whom I had won a bit of respite. Then I tried to return to Teresina, and I put into her hand a ten-crown note. It was a first a.s.sault! The year before, with her and the other children, to express my paternal affection, I had pressed only a few pennies into their hands. But paternal affection, of course, is a different thing. Teresina was dumbfounded by the rich gift. Carefully she raised her little skirt to put the precious piece of paper into some concealed pocket or other. Thus I saw a further bit of leg, but it, too, was still tanned and chaste.

I returned to the donkey and gave him a kiss on the head. My affection provoked his. He stretched his muzzle and emitted his great cry of love, which I heard always with respect. How it crosses distances, and how significant it is, that initial cry that invokes and then is repeated, diminished, ending in a desperate lament. But, heard at such close range, it hurt my eardrum.

Teresina laughed, and her laughter encouraged me. I returned to her and promptly grasped her by the forearm, where my hand moved up, slowly, toward the shoulder, as I studied my sensations. Thank heaven I was not yet cured! I had given up the therapy in time.

But Teresina, hitting the donkey with a stick, made the animal move on, following him and leaving me behind.

Laughing heartily, because I remained happy even if the little peasant girl would have none of me, I said to her: "Do you have a boyfriend? You should. Too bad you don't have one already!"

Still moving away from me, she said: "If I do take one, he'll surely be younger than you!"

My happiness was not marred by this. I would have liked to give Teresina a little lesson, and I tried to remember from Boccaccio how "Maestro Alberto of Bologna virtuously shamed a woman who wanted to shame him, as he was in love with her." But Maestro Alberto's reasoning didn't have the desired effect, because Madonna Malgherida de' Ghisolieri said to him: "Your love is dear to me as that of a wise and worthy man should be; and therefore, save for my virtue, ask surely of me any pleasure, as if it were yours to demand."

I tried to do better: "When will you give old men some time, Teresina?" I shouted, to be heard by her who was already far away from me.

"When I'm old myself!" she cried, laughing wholeheartedly and without pausing.

"But then the old men will want nothing to do with you. Mind what I say! I know them!"

I was shouting, pleased with my wit, which came directly from my s.e.x.

At that moment, in some part of the sky, the clouds opened to release the sun's rays; they struck Teresina, who now was at least forty meters from me, and about ten or more higher than I. She was tanned, small, but luminous!

The sun didn't illuminate me! When you are old, you remain in shadow, even when you have wit.

26 June, 1915.

The war has overtaken me! I, who was listening to the stories of war as if it were a war of olden days, amusing to narrate, but foolish to worry about! I stumbled into its midst, bewildered and at the same time amazed at not having already realized that sooner or later I would have to be involved. I had lived, completely calm, in a building whose ground floor was on fire, and I hadn't foreseen that sooner or later the whole building, with me in it, would collapse in flames.

The war grabbed me, shook me like a rag, deprived me at one stroke of my whole family and also of my business manager. Overnight I was an entirely new man, or rather, to be more precise, all twenty-four of my hours were entirely new. Since yesterday I have been a bit calmer because finally, after waiting a month, I received the first news of my family. They are safe and sound in Turin, whereas I had given up all hope of ever seeing them again.

I have to spend the whole day in my office. I have nothing to do there, but the Olivis, as Italian citizens, have had to leave, and my few able employees have all gone off to fight on this side or that, and so I have to remain on guard at my post. In the evening I go home, burdened with the heavy keys of the warehouse. Today, feeling so much calmer, I brought with me to the office this ma.n.u.script, which might help me endure the long hours better. In fact, it has provided me with a wonderful quarter-hour in which I learned that there was in this world a period of peace and silence that allowed one to concern himself with such trivial matters.

It would also be beautiful if someone now seriously invited me to sink into a state of semiconsciousness so as to be able to relive even one hour of my previous life. I would laugh in his face. How can anyone abandon a present like this, to go hunting for things of no importance? It seems to me that I have only now definitively separated myself from my health and from my sickness. I walk through the streets of our wretched city, feeling privileged, not going to the war, finding each day what food I require. Compared with everyone else, I feel so happy-especially since I've had news of my family-that I would feel I was provoking the wrath of the G.o.ds themselves if I were also perfectly well.

The war and I met in a violent fashion, though now it seems a bit comical to me.

Augusta and I had gone back to Lucinico to spend Pentecost with the children. On 23 May, I got up early. I had to take my Karlsbad salts and also go for a walk before my coffee. It was during this cure at Lucinico that I became aware that the heart, when you are fasting, attends more actively to other repairs, spreading a great well-being through the whole organism. My theory was then to be perfected that very day, when it forced me to suffer the hunger that did me so much good.

Bidding me good morning, Augusta raised her head, now totally white, from her pillow and reminded me that I had promised my daughter to find her some roses. Our only rosebush had withered, and something therefore had to be done. My daughter has become a beautiful girl and resembles Ada. From one moment to the next, I had forgotten to play the gruff educator with her, and I had turned into the cavalier who respects womanhood even in his own daughter. She immediately became aware of her power, and to my great amus.e.m.e.nt and Augusta's, she abused it. She wanted roses, and roses had to be found.

I planned to walk for a couple of hours. There was a bright sun, and since my intention was to keep walking and not to stop until I had returned home, I didn't take even a jacket and hat. Luckily, I recalled that I would have to pay for the roses, and therefore I didn't leave my wallet behind with the jacket.

First of all I went to the nearby farm, to Teresina's father, to ask him to cut the roses, which I would collect on my way home. I entered the great yard girded by a dilapidated wall, and I found no one. I shouted the name of Teresina. From the house carne the smallest of the children; he must then have been about six. I put a few coins in his hand and he told me that the whole family had crossed the Isonzo early that morning for a day's work in a potato field, where the clods had to be broken up.

This news didn't displease me. I was acquainted with that field and I knew that it would take me about an hour to reach it. Since I had determined to walk for two hours, I liked the idea of being able to give my walk a specific purpose. Thus there was no danger of its being interrupted by a sudden fit of laziness. I set off across the plain, which is higher than the road, of which I could therefore see only the edge, and the crowns of a few flowering trees. I was really in great spirits: in my shirtsleeves as I was, and hatless, I felt very light. I breathed in that pure air and, as I often did at that time, while I walked I performed the Niemeyer pulmonary exercises, which a German friend had taught me, very useful for a man who leads a rather sedentary life.

Having reached that field, I saw Teresina working near the road. I went toward her and then noticed that, up ahead, her father and her two little brothers were working, boys of an age I couldn't have said precisely, between ten and fourteen. Working perhaps makes the old feel exhausted, but, thanks to the excitement that accompanies it, still younger than when they are not doing the work.

Laughing, I said to Teresina: "You're still in time, Teresina. Don't wait too long."

She didn't understand me, and I explained nothing to her. Since she didn't remember, it was possible to resume our former relations. I had already repeated the experiment, and with a favorable result. Addressing those few words to her, I had caressed her not just with my eyes alone.

I quickly made an arrangement with Teresina's father for the roses. He would allow me to cut as many as I wanted, and afterwards we would agree on the price. He wanted to go back to work at once, while I turned toward home, but then he changed his mind and ran after me. Overtaking me, in a very low voice he asked: "Didn't you hear something? They say the war's broken out."

"Yes! We all know that! About a year ago," I answered.

"I don't mean that one," he said, out of patience. "I'm talking about the one with - " And he nodded toward the other side of the nearby Italian border. "Do you know anything about it?" He looked at me, anxious to hear my reply.

"As you must realize..." I said with great confidence, "if I don't know anything, that means there isn't anything to know. I've come from Trieste, and the latest news I heard there was that the war has been averted for good. In Rome they've overthrown the Cabinet that wanted war, and now they have Giolitti."

He was immediately relieved. "That's why we're covering these potatoes, which are very promising and will be ours! The world is so full of big talkers!" With the sleeve of his shirt he wiped away the sweat trickling down his brow.

Seeing how happy he was, I tried to make him even happier. I love happy people, I honestly do. So I said some things I really don't like to recall. I declared that even if the war were to break out, it wouldn't be fought up here. First of all there was the sea, where it was high time they did some fighting; and besides, in Europe there was no lack of battlefields for anyone who wanted them. There was Flanders, there were various departments of France. I had also heard-I no longer remembered from whom-that in this world there was now such a need for potatoes that they carefully dug them up even on the battlefields. I spoke quite a while, looking steadily at Teresina; tiny, minute, she had crouched on the ground, to test its hardness before taking her hoe to it.

The peasant, perfectly rea.s.sured, returned to his work. I, on the contrary, had transferred a part of my own serenity to him and was left with much less for myself. It was certainly true that at Lucinico we were too close to the border. I would discuss it with Augusta. It might be a good idea for us to return to Trieste and perhaps go on even farther in that direction or another. To be sure, Giolitti had returned to power, but there was no knowing if, arriving there, he would continue to see things the way he had seen them when that high position had been occupied by someone else.

I was made even more nervous by a casual encounter with a platoon of soldiers, marching along the road in the direction of Lucinico. They were not young soldiers, and were very badly outfitted. At their hip hung what we in Trieste call the durlindana, that long bayonet that, in the summer of 1915, the Austrians had had to take from the old storehouses.

For some time I walked behind them, anxious to be home quickly. Then I was irritated by a certain gamey odor that they emanated, and I slowed my pace. My uneasiness and my haste were foolish. It was also foolish to be uneasy just because I had observed the uneasiness of a peasant. Now I could see my villa in the distance, and the platoon was no longer on the road. I quickened my steps to arrive finally at my coffee and milk.

It was here that my adventure began. At a turn in the road I found myself halted by a sentinel, who shouted: "Zuruck," putting himself actually in the position to fire. I wanted to speak to him in German, since he had shouted in German, but that was the only German word he knew, so he repeated it, more and more menacingly.

I had to go zuruck, and, looking always over my shoulder in fear that the other man, to make his meaning clearer, might fire on me, I withdrew with a haste that remained with me even when I could no longer see the soldier.

But I hadn't yet given up the idea of reaching my villa promptly. I thought that by crossing the hill to my right, I could pa.s.s well behind the threatening sentinel.

The climb was not hard, especially as the tall gra.s.s had been trodden down by many people who must have pa.s.sed by there before me. They must surely have been driven by the prohibition against the use of the road. Walking, I regained my confidence, and I thought that on arriving at Lucinico, I would immediately go and complain to the mayor about the treatment to which I had been subjected. If he allowed vacationers to be treated like that, soon n.o.body would come to Lucinico anymore!

But, reaching the top of the hill, I had a nasty surprise, finding it occupied by that same platoon of soldiers with the gamey smell. Many soldiers were resting in the shade of a little peasant house I had known for a long time, at this hour completely empty; three of the men seemed to be on guard duty, but not facing the slope by which I had come; and some others were in a semicircle before an officer, who was giving them instructions, which he ill.u.s.trated with a map he held in his hand.

I didn't have even a hat, which could serve me for greeting. Bowing several times and with my best smile, I approached the officer, who, seeing me, stopped speaking to his soldiers and started looking at me. Also the five Mamelukes surrounding him bestowed all their attention on me. Under these stares and on the uneven terrain it was difficult to move.

The officer shouted: "Was will der dumme Kerl hier?" [What does this fool want?]

Amazed that, without the slightest provocation, he would offend me like this, I wanted to demonstrate, in a manly fashion, that I was offended, but still with appropriate discretion, I altered my path and tried to arrive at the slope that would lead me to Lucinico. The officer started shouting that if I took even one more step, he would have his men shoot me. I immediately became very polite, and from that day to this, as I write, I have remained always very polite. It was barbaric to be forced to deal with such an idiot, but at least there was the advantage that he spoke proper German. It was such an advantage that, remembering it, I found it easier to speak to him politely. Animal that he was, it would have been a disaster if he hadn't spoken German. I would have been lost.

Too bad I didn't speak that language more fluently, for in that case it would have been easy for me to make that surly gentleman laugh. I told him that at Lucinico my morning coffee was awaiting me, and I was separated from it only by his platoon.

He laughed, I swear he laughed. He laughed, still cursing, and without the patience to let me finish. He declared that the Lucinico coffee would be drunk by someone else, and when he heard that in addition to the coffee, my wife was also awaiting me, he yelled, "Auch Ihre Frau wird von anderen gegessen werden. " [Your wife, too, will be eaten by someone else.]

By now he was in a better humor than I. Then, apparently sorry he had said words to me that, underlined by the laughter of the five clods, could seem offensive, he turned serious and explained that I must give up hope of seeing Lucinico for some days, and in fact his friendly advice was not to ask to go there, because my mere asking could get me into trouble!

"Haben Sie verstanden?" [Have you understood?]

I had understood, but it wasn't all that easy to adjust to giving up my coffee when it was less than half a kilometer away. Only for this I hesitated to leave, because it was obvious that if I were to descend that bill, toward my villa, on that day I would not arrive. And, to gain time, I meekly asked the officer: "But to whom should I speak in order to be able to go back to Lucinico and collect at least my hat and my jacket?"

I should have realized that the officer was anxious to be left alone with his map and his men, but I hardly expected to provoke such fury.

He yelled, making my ears ring, that he had already told me I wasn't to ask. Then he ordered me to go wherever the devil might wish to take me (wo der Teufel Sie tragen will). The idea of being taken somewhere didn't displease me, because I was very tired, but still I hesitated. Meanwhile, however, with all his shouting, the officer became increasingly angry and, in a highly threatening tone, he called on one of the five men around him and, addressing him as Herr Kaporal, gave him orders to conduct me back to the bottom of the hill and to watch me until I had disappeared down the road to Gorizia, and to shoot me if I hesitated to obey.

Therefore I went down that hill fairly willingly: "Danke schon," I said, also with no intention of irony.

The corporal was a Slav who spoke rather decent Italian. He felt he had to be brutal in the officer's presence, and to encourage me to descend the hill, he shouted "Marsch!" at me, but when we were a bit distant he became gentle and friendly. He asked me if I had news of the war, and if it was true that Italian intervention was imminent. He looked at me anxiously, awaiting my reply.

So not even they, who were waging the war, knew if it existed or not! I wanted to make him as happy as possible, and I repeated to him the words with which I had calmed Teresina's father. Afterwards they weighed on my conscience. In the horrible storm that broke, all the people I had rea.s.sured were probably killed. Who knows what surprise there must have been on their faces, crystallized by death? My optimism was incoercible. Hadn't I heard the war in the officer's words and, even more, in their sound?

The corporal rejoiced, and to reward me, he also advised me not to attempt to reach Lucinico. Given my news, he believed the order preventing me from going home would be revoked the next day. But meanwhile he advised me to go to Trieste, to the Platzkommando, from which I could perhaps obtain a special pa.s.s.

"All the way to Trieste?" I asked, frightened. "To Trieste, without my jacket, without my hat, without my coffee?"

As far as the corporal knew, while we were talking, a heavy cordon of infantry was closing off all transit into Italy, creating a new and impa.s.sable frontier. With the smile of a superior person, he declared that, in his opinion, the shortest way to Lucinico was the one that pa.s.sed through Trieste.

Hearing this counsel repeated, I resigned myself and set off toward Gorizia, thinking to catch the noon train and go on to Trieste. I was agitated, but I must say I felt fine. I had smoked very little, and hadn't eaten at all. I felt a lightness that I had missed for a long time. I wasn't at all displeased to have to walk more. My legs ached slightly, but it seemed to me I could hold out till Gorizia, for my respiration was free and deep. Warming my legs with a brisk pace, the walking, in fact, did not tax me. And in my well-being, beating time as I walked, jolly because the tempo was unusually fast, I regained my optimism. Threats from this side, threats from that, but it wouldn't come to war. And thus, when I arrived at Gorizia, I hesitated, wondering if I shouldn't take a room in the hotel, spend the night, and return the next day to Lucinico to make my complaints to the mayor.

I rushed first to the post office to telephone Augusta. But at the villa there was no answer.

The clerk, a little man with a wispy beard, who, in his small, rigid person, seemed ridiculous and obstinate-the only thing I remember about him-hearing me curse angrily at the dumb telephone, approached me and said, "That's the fourth time today that Lucinico has failed to answer."

When I turned to him, in his eye a great, joyous malice gleamed (I misspoke! there's another thing I still remember!) and that gleaming eye of his sought mine, to see if I was really so surprised and angered. It took a good ten minutes for me to understand. Then there were no more doubts for me. Lucinico was, or a few minutes from now would be, in the line of fire. When I finally understood that eloquent look, I was on my way to the cafe, to have, antic.i.p.ating lunch, the cup of coffee that had been due me since morning. I immediately changed direction and headed for the station. I wanted to be closer to my family, and-following the suggestions of my corporal friend-I went to Trieste.

It was during that brief journey of mine that the war broke out.

Thinking to arrive so early in Trieste, though there would have been time at the Gorizia station, I didn't even have the cup of coffee I had so long been yearning for. I climbed into my carriage and, alone, addressed my thoughts to my loved ones, from whom I had been separated in such a strange way. The train proceeded normally until beyond Monfalcone.

It seemed the war had not reached there yet. I regained my serenity thinking that at Lucinico probably things 'would have taken more or less the same course as on this side of the border. At this hour, Augusta and my children would be traveling toward the interior of Italy. This serenity, together with my enormous, surprising hunger, procured me a long sleep.

It was probably that same hunger that woke me. My train had stopped in the midst of what is called the Saxony of Trieste. The sea wasn't visible, though it must have been very close, because a slight haze blocked any view into the distance. The Carso has a great sweetness in May, but it can be understood only by those not spoiled by the exuberantly colorful and lively springtimes in other regions. Here the stone crops out everywhere from a mild green that isn't humble because soon it becomes the predominant note of the landscape.

In other conditions I would have been hugely enraged not to be able to eat, suffering such hunger. But that day the grandeur of the historic event I had witnessed cowed me and led me to resignation. The conductor, to whom I gave some cigarettes, couldn't procure me even a crust of bread. I told no one about my experiences of the morning. I would talk about them in Trieste, with a few intimate friends. From the border, toward which I p.r.i.c.ked up my ear, no sound of fighting came. We had been stopped at that place to allow eight or nine trains to pa.s.s, storming down toward Italy. The gangrenous wound (as the Italian front was immediately called in Austria) had opened and needed materiel to nourish its purulence. And the poor men went there, snickering and singing. From all those trains came the same sounds of joy or drunkenness.

When I reached Trieste, night had already descended on the city.

The night was illuminated by the glow of many fires, and a friend who saw me heading home in my shirtsleeves shouted to me: "Did you take part in the looting?"

Finally I managed to eat something, and immediately went to bed.

A true, great weariness drove me to bed. I believe it was produced by the hopes and the doubts that were combating in my mind. I was still quite well, and in the brief period preceding the dream whose images my psychoa.n.a.lysis had enabled me to retain, I remembered that I concluded my day with a last, childish, optimistic idea: On the frontier no one had yet died, and therefore peace could be regained.

Now that I know my family is safe and sound, the life I lead doesn't displease me. I haven't much to do, but it can't be said I'm idle. No buying or selling is allowed. Trade will be reborn when we have peace. From Switzerland, Olivi had some advice transmitted to me. If he only knew how hollow his counsels sound in this atmosphere, which is totally changed! I, for the moment, do nothing.

24 March, 1916.

Since May of last year, I haven't again touched this little book. Now, from Switzerland, Dr. S. writes me, asking me to send him everything I have so far recorded. It's a curious request, but I have no objection to sending him also this notebook, from which he will clearly see what I think of him and of his therapy. Since he possesses all my confessions, let him keep also these few pages and a few more that I will gladly add for his edification. I haven't much time, because my business occupies my day. But with Doctor S., I still want to have my say. I have given it so much thought that now my ideas are clear.

Meanwhile he believes he will receive further confessions of sickness and weakness, and on the contrary he will receive the description of sound health, as perfect as my fairly advanced age will allow. I am cured! Not only do I not want to undergo psychoa.n.a.lysis, but also I don't need it! And my healthiness doesn't come only from the fact that I feel privileged in the midst of so much martyrdom. I do not feel healthy comparatively. I am healthy, absolutely. For a long time I knew that my health could reside only in my own conviction, and it was foolish nonsense, worthy of a hypnagogue dreamer, to try to reach it through treatment rather than persuasion. I suffer some pains, true, but they lack significance in the midst of my great health. I can put a sticking-plaster here or there, but the rest has to move and fight and never dawdle in immobility as the gangrenous do. Sorrow and love-life, in other words-cannot be considered a sickness because they hurt.

I admit that before I could be convinced of my health, my destiny had to change and warm my organism with struggle and above all with victory. It was business that healed me and I want Dr. S. to know it.

Stunned and inert, I contemplated the upheaval of the world until the beginning of August of last year. Then I began to buy. I underline this verb because it has a higher meaning now than it had before the war. On a businessman's lips, then, it meant he was prepared to acquire a given article. But when I said it, I meant that I was the buyer of any goods that might be offered me. Like all strong people, I had in my head a sole idea, and by that I lived and it made my fortune. Olivi wasn't in Trieste, but it is certain that he would never have allowed such risk and would have left it all for others. But for me it was no risk. I knew its happy outcome with complete certainty. First, following the age-old custom of wartime, I had set about converting all my wealth to gold, but there was a certain difficulty in buying and selling gold. Gold that might be called liquid, as it was more mobile, was merchandise, and I stocked up on it. From time to time I also do some selling, but always to a lesser extent than my buying. Because I began at the right moment, my buying and my selling have been so fortunate that the latter provided me with the great means I needed for the former.

With great pride, I remember that my first purchase was actually an apparent foolishness and was intended solely to put my new idea immediately into effect. A not-large stock of incense. To me the seller broached the possibility of using incense as a subst.i.tute for resin, which was already growing scarce, but, as a chemist, I knew with absolute certainty that incense could never replace resin, which was different toto genere. The way I looked at it, the world was going to reach such a state of poverty that they would have to accept incense as a surrogate for resin. And so I bought! A few days ago I sold a small part of it, and I received the amount I had had to pay out for the whole stock. At the moment I pocketed that money, my chest swelled, as I felt my strength and my health.

The doctor, when he has received this last part of my ma.n.u.script, should then give it all back to me. I would rewrite it with real clarity, for how could I understand my life before knowing this last period of it? Perhaps I lived all those years only to prepare myself for this!

Naturally I am not ingenuous, and I forgive the doctor for seeing life itself as a manifestation of sickness. Life does resemble sickness a bit, as it proceeds by crises and lyses, and has daily improvements and setbacks. Unlike other sicknesses, life is always fatal. It doesn't tolerate therapies. It would be like stopping the holes that we have in our bodies, believing them wounds. We would die of strangulation the moment we were treated.

Present-day life is polluted at the roots. Man has put himself in the place of trees and animals and has polluted the air, has blocked free s.p.a.ce. Worse can happen. The sad and active animal could discover other forces and press them into his service. There is a threat of this kind in the air. It will be followed by a great gain... in the number of humans. Every square meter will be occupied by a man. Who will cure us of the lack of air and of s.p.a.ce? Merely thinking of it, I am suffocated!

But it isn't this, not only this.

Any effort to give us health is vain. It can belong only to the animal who knows a sole progress, that of his own organism. When the swallow realized that for her no other life was possible except migration, she strengthened the muscle that moves her wings, and it then became the most substantial part of her organism. The mole buried herself, and her whole body adapted to her need. The horse grew and transformed his hoof. We don't know the process of some animals, but it must have occurred and it will never have undermined their health.

But bespectacled man, on the contrary, invents devices outside of his body, and if health and n.o.bility existed in the inventor, they are almost always lacking in the user. Devices are bought, sold, and stolen, and man becomes increasingly shrewd and weaker. His first devices seemed extensions of his arm and couldn't be effective without its strength; but, by now, the device no longer has any relation to the limb. And it is the device that creates sickness, abandoning the law that was, on all earth, the creator. The law of the strongest vanished, and we lost healthful selection. We would need much more than psychoa.n.a.lysis. Under the law established by the possessor of the greatest number of devices, sickness and the sick will flourish.

Perhaps, through an unheard-of catastrophe produced by devices, we will return to health. When poison gases no longer suffice, an ordinary man, in the secrecy of a room in this world, will invent an incomparable explosive, compared to which the explosives currently in existence will be considered harmless toys. And another man, also ordinary, but a bit sicker than others, will steal this explosive and will climb up at the center of the earth, to set it on the spot where it can have the maximum effect. There will be an enormous explosion that no one will hear, and the earth, once again a nebula, will wander through the heavens, freed of parasites and sickness.

__________.

William Weaver has translated novels by Italo Calvino, Giorgio Ba.s.sani, Umberto Eco, Elsa Morante, and Luigi Pirandello. He has been the recipient of the National Book Award for Translation, the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Prize (twice), the John Florio Prize (twice), and the Premio Malaparte. He also writes about theater and opera and teaches at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York.

Elizabeth HARDWICK is the author of four collections of essays, Sight-Readings, Bartleby in Manhattan, A View of My Own, Seduction and Betrayal, as well as the biography of Herman Melville. She has received the Lifetime Achievement Citation from the National Book Critics Circle and the Gold Medal for Belles-Lettres and Criticism from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in New York City.