Zeno's Conscience Page 5

  I have never suffered from miserliness, and Giovanna immediately had her glass filled, to the brim. Before she could finish saying thanks, she had drained it, and she immediately cast her bright eyes on the bottle. So it was she herself who gave me the idea of getting her drunk. But that was no easy undertaking!

  I couldn’t repeat exactly everything she said to me, in her pure Triestine dialect, after she had drained all those glasses, but I had the profound impression of being with a person to whom, if I hadn’t been distracted by my own concerns, I could have listened with pleasure.

  First of all, she confided to me that this was precisely the way she liked to work. Everybody in this world should be entitled to spend a couple of hours every day in just such a comfortable chair, facing a bottle of good brandy, the kind that doesn’t cause any ill effects.

  I also tried to converse. I asked her if, when her husband was alive, her work had been organized in this same way.

  She burst out laughing. When her husband was alive he had given her more beatings than kisses and, compared with the way she had had to work for him, any job had seemed a rest, long before I arrived at this place for my cure.

  Then Giovanna became pensive and asked me if I believed that the dead could see what the living are up to. I nodded briefly. But she wanted to know if the dead, when they reach the other side, learned of everything that had happened back here during their lifetime.

  For a moment the question actually did distract me. It had been asked, moreover, in a much softer tone because, to avoid being overheard, Giovanna had lowered her voice.

  “So,” I said, “you were unfaithful to your husband.”

  She begged me not to shout, then confessed that she had been unfaithful to him, but only during the first months of their marriage. Then she had grown accustomed to his blows and had loved her man.

  To keep up the conversation, I asked: “So your older daughter owes her life to this other man?”

  Again in a low voice, she admitted to believing as much, also because of a certain resemblance. She was very sorry she had betrayed her husband. She said this, but was still laughing because these are things you laugh about even when they hurt. But that was only after his death, because, before, since he didn’t know about it, the matter couldn’t have any importance.

  Impelled by a certain fraternal friendliness, I tried to allay her sorrow; I told her I believed the dead do know everything, but certain things they don’t give a damn about.

  “Only the living suffer over them!” I cried, banging my fist on the table.

  I bruised my hand, and there is nothing better than physical pain to provoke new ideas. It occurred to me that while I was here tormenting myself with the thought of my wife’s taking advantage of my confinement in order to betray me, perhaps the doctor was still in the clinic, in which case I could recover my peace of mind. I asked Giovanna to go and see, saying that I felt a need to tell the doctor something, and promising her the whole bottle as a reward. Protesting that she wasn’t all that fond of drinking, she still complied at once and I heard her climb unsteadily up the wooden steps to the upper floor, to emerge from our cloister. Then she came down again, but she slipped, making a great racket and screaming.

  “The devil take you,” I murmured fervently. Had she broken her neck, my position would have been greatly simplified.

  Instead, she joined me, smiling, because she was in that state where pains aren’t so painful. She told me she had spoken with the attendant, who was just going to bed; though, even there, he remained at her disposal, in the event that I turned nasty. She raised her hand, index finger pointed, but she tempered those words and that threatening gesture with a smile. Then, more sharply, she added that the doctor had not returned after seeing my wife out. Not a sign! Indeed, for some hours, the attendant had hoped the doctor would return, because a patient needed to be looked at. Now the attendant had given up hope.

  I looked at her, studying the smile that contorted her face, to see if it was habitual or if it was totally new, inspired by the fact that the doctor was with my wife rather than with me, his patient. I was seized by a fury that made my head spin. I must confess that, as always, in my spirit two persons were combating, one of whom, the more reasonable, was saying to me: “Idiot! What makes you think your wife is unfaithful? She wouldn’t have to get you locked up to create the opportunity.” The other, and this was surely the one who wanted to smoke, also called me an idiot, but shouted: “Don’t you recall how easy things are when the husband is away? And with the doctor you are paying money to!”

  Giovanna, taking another drink, said: “I forgot to lock the door upstairs. But I don’t want to climb those steps again. Anyway, there are always people up there, and you’d look really foolish if you tried to run away.”

  “Yes,” I said, with that modicum of hypocrisy now necessary to deceive the poor creature. Then I, too, gulped down some cognac, and declared that with all this liquor now at my disposal, I didn’t give a damn about cigarettes. She believed me at once, and then I told her I actually wasn’t the one who wanted me to break the smoking habit. It was my wife. Because when I smoked as many as ten cigarettes a day, I became something terrible. Any woman who came within reach of me then was in danger.

  Giovanna began to laugh loudly, sinking back in the chair: “So it’s your wife who prevents you from smoking the ten cigarettes you need?”

  “That’s exactly how it was! At least she used to keep me from smoking.”

  Giovanna was no fool once she had all that cognac inside her. She was seized by a fit of laughter that almost made her fall out of the chair, but when she had recovered enough breath to gasp out a few words, she painted a magnificent scene suggested to her by my illness. “Ten cigarettes… half an hour… you set the alarm… then …”

  I corrected her. “For ten cigarettes I’d need an hour, more or less. Then, for the full effect, about another hour, give or take ten minutes…”

  Suddenly Giovanna became serious and rose almost effortlessly from her chair. She said she would go and lie down because she was feeling a slight headache. I invited her to take the bottle with her, because I had had enough of that strong liquor. Hypocritically, I said that the next day I wanted to be provided with some good wine.

  But she wasn’t thinking about wine. Before leaving, as she held the bottle under her arm, she looked me up and down, with a leer that frightened me.

  She left the door open, and a moment or two later a package landed in the center of the room. I picked it up immediately: it contained exactly eleven cigarettes. To make sure, poor Giovanna had chosen to be generous. Ordinary cigarettes, Hungarian. But the first one I lighted was very good. I felt enormously relieved. At once I thought, with smug pleasure, how I had outsmarted this place, fine for shutting up children, but not me. Then I realized I had outsmarted my wife too, and it seemed to me I had repaid her in her own coin. Why, otherwise, would my jealousy have been transformed into such acceptable curiosity? I remained in that room, calmly smoking those nauseating cigarettes.

  After about half an hour, I remembered I had to escape from that clinic, where Giovanna was awaiting her reward. I took off my shoes and went out into the corridor. The door of Giovanna’s room was ajar and, judging by her regular, noisy breathing, I imagined she was asleep. Cautiously I climbed up to the third story where, behind that door—Doctor Muli’s pride—I slipped on my shoes. I stepped out onto a landing and started down the other stairs, descending slowly so as not to arouse suspicion.

  I had reached the landing of the second floor when a young lady in a rather elegant nurse’s uniform came after me, to ask politely: “Are you looking for someone?”

  She was pretty, and I wouldn’t have minded smoking the ten cigarettes in her company. A bit aggressively, I smiled at her: “Dr. Muli isn’t in?”

  She opened her eyes wide. “He’s never here at this hour.”

  “Could you tell me where I might find him now? At my house there’s som
eone ill who needs him.”

  Kindly, she told me the doctor’s address, and I repeated it several times, to make her believe I wanted to memorize it. I wouldn’t have been in any hurry to leave, but, irritated, she turned her back on me. I was actually being thrown out of my prison.

  Downstairs, a woman was quick to open the door for me. I hadn’t a penny on me, and I murmured: “I’ll have to tip you some other time.”

  There’s no knowing the future. With me, things are often repeated: it was conceivable that I might turn up there again.

  The night was clear and warm. I took off my hat, the better to feel the breeze of freedom. I looked at the stars with wonder, as if I had only just conquered them. The next day, far from the clinic, I would give up smoking. Meanwhile, passing a café that was still open, I bought some good cigarettes, because it wouldn’t be possible to conclude my smoker’s career with one of poor Giovanna’s cigarettes. The man who waited on me knew who I was and gave me the pack on credit.

  Reaching my villa, I rang the bell furiously. First the maid came to the window, and then, after not such a short time, my wife. I waited for her, thinking, perfectly cool: Apparently Dr. Muli is here. But, recognizing me, my wife laughed, and her laughter, echoing in the deserted street, was so sincere that it would have sufficed to dispel all suspicion.

  Once inside, I postponed any inquisitorial action. When I had promised my wife to tell my adventures, which she thought she knew already, the next day, she asked me: “Why don’t you go to bed?”

  As an excuse, I said: “I believe you’ve taken advantage of my absence to move that armoire.”

  It’s true that, at home, I always believe things have been moved, and it’s also true that my wife very often does move them; but at that moment I was peering into every corner to see if the small, trim body of Dr. Muli was concealed somewhere.

  My wife gave me some good news. Returning from the clinic, she had run into Olivi’s son, who had told her the old man was much better, having taken a medicine prescribed by a new doctor.

  Falling asleep, I thought I had done the right thing in leaving the clinic, because I had plenty of time to cure myself slowly. And my son, sleeping in the next room, also was surely not preparing to judge me yet, or to imitate me. There was absolutely no hurry.

  MY FATHER’S DEATH

  THE DOCTOR has left town, and I really don’t know if a biography of my father is necessary. If I describe my father in over-scrupulous detail, it might turn out that, to achieve my own cure, it would have been necessary to analyze him first. I am going bravely ahead, because I know that if my father had needed such treatment it would have been for an illness quite different from mine. In any case, to waste no time, I will tell only as much about him as is necessary to stimulate my memory of myself.

  “15.4.1890. My father dies. L.C.” For those who do not know, those last two letters do not stand for Lower Case, but for Last Cigarette. This is an annotation I find in a volume by Ostwald on positivistic philosophy, with which, full of hope, I have spent many hours and never understood. No one would believe this, but, despite its brevity, that annotation records the most important event of my life.

  My mother died before I was fifteen. I wrote some poems dedicated to her—hardly the same as weeping—and, in my sorrow, I was accompanied always by the feeling that at this moment a serious, industrious life was to begin for me. My grief itself hinted at a more intense life. At that time a still-active religious feeling attenuated and softened the terrible misfortune. My mother continued to live, though far from me, and she would derive satisfaction from the successes for which I was preparing myself. Very convenient! I remember precisely my condition at that time. Thanks to my mother’s death and the salutary emotion it inspired, everything was going to improve for me.

  My father’s death, on the contrary, was a great, genuine catastrophe. Heaven no longer existed, and furthermore, at thirty, I was finished. This was the end for me, too! I realized for the first time that the most important, the decisive part of my life lay behind me, irretrievably. My grief was not merely egoistic, as these words might suggest. Not at all! I wept for him and myself together, and also for myself alone, because he was dead. Until then I had gone from one cigarette to another and from one university department to another, with an indestructible faith in my ability. And I believe that faith, which made my life so sweet, would have endured perhaps even till today, if my father had not died. With him dead, there was no longer a tomorrow to which I could address my determination.

  Time and again, when I think about it, I am amazed by the strange way this despair of myself and my future came into existence at my father’s death and not before. Generally speaking, these are recent events, and to recall my great sorrow and every detail of that catastrophe, I certainly have no need to dream, as the analysis gentlemen would like. Until his death, I did not live for my father. I made no effort to be close to him and, when it was possible to do so without hurting him, I kept out of his way. At the university, everyone knew him by the nickname I had given him: “Old Silva Moneybags.” It took his sickness to make me attached to him; the sickness that quickly became death, for it was very brief and the doctor gave him up for dead at once. When I was in Trieste, we saw each other perhaps an hour a day at most. We were never so close or so long together as in my time of mourning. If only I had taken more care of him and wept less! I would have been less sick myself. It was hard for us to be together, not least because intellectually we had nothing in common. Looking at each other, we both had the same pitying smile, his made more bitter by his keen paternal anxiety about my future, mine, on the contrary, all indulgence, convinced as I was that his weaknesses by now were inconsequential, as I attributed them in part to his age. He was the first to distrust my energy and—it seems to me—too soon. All the same, I suspect that even without the support of any scientific conviction, he distrusted me because he had made me, and that was all I needed—now with confident scientific conviction—to increase my distrust of him.

  He enjoyed, true, the reputation of being a clever businessman, but I knew that for many years his affairs had been handled by Olivi. Lack of talent for business was a point of resemblance between him and me, but there were no others; I can say that, of the two of us, I represented strength, and he weakness. What I have already recorded in these notebooks proves that I possess and always have possessed—perhaps my supreme misfortune—an impetuous drive toward the future. All my dreams of stability and strength can be defined only in those terms. My father knew nothing of all this. He lived in perfect harmony with the way he was made, and I must believe that he never exerted any effort to improve. He would smoke all day and, after Mamma’s death, when he could not sleep, also at night. He drank a fair amount, too, like a gentleman, in the evening, at supper, so that he could be sure of finding sleep readily the moment he laid his head on the pillow. But, to hear him, smoking and alcohol were good medicines.

  As for women, I learned from some relatives that my mother had had some cause for jealousy. Indeed, that mild woman apparently had sometimes to resort to violent measures to keep her husband in line. He allowed himself to be guided by her, whom he loved and respected, but apparently she never managed to wring any confession of infidelity from him, and thus she died in the conviction that she had been mistaken. Still, my good kinfolk tell how she caught her husband virtually in flagrante at her dressmaker’s. He excused himself on the pretext of absentmindedness and so firmly that he was believed. The only consequence was that my mother never returned to that dressmaker, nor did my father. I believe that in his shoes I would have ended up confessing, but I would not have been able to abandon the dressmaker afterwards, for where I stand, I put down roots.

  As a true paterfamilias, my father knew how to defend his peace and quiet. He possessed this peace and quiet both in his house and in his soul. The only books he read were bland and moral, not out of hypocrisy on his part, but from the most genuine conviction: I think he f
elt deeply the truth of those moralizing sermons, and his conscience was appeased by his sincere support of virtue. Now that I am growing old and turning into a kind of patriarch, I also feel that a preached immorality is more to be punished that an immoral action. You arrive at murder through love or through hate; you propagandize murder only through wickedness.

  We had so little in common, the two of us, that he confessed to me how, among the people in the world who made him uneasy, I was number one. My yearning for health had driven me to study the human body. He, on the contrary, had been able to dispel from his memory any thought of that frightful machine. For him the heart did not beat and there was no need to recall valves and veins and metabolism, to explain how his organism lived. Exercise? No, because experience told him that whatever moved eventually stopped. The earth itself was, for him, unmoving and firmly attached to its hinges. Naturally he never said this, but he suffered if anything was said to him that did not conform to this view. He interrupted me, revolted, one day when I mentioned the antipodes to him. The thought of those people with their heads upside down made him queasy.

  He reproached me for two other things: my absentminded-ness and my tendency to laugh at the most serious matters. When it came to absentmindedness, he differed from me because he kept a little notebook in which he jotted down everything he wanted to remember, reviewing its pages several times daily. In this way he thought he had overcome his ailment and didn’t suffer from it anymore. He imposed that notebook method also on me, but in mine I jotted down nothing except a few last cigarettes.

  As for my contempt for serious matters, I believe his great defect was to consider serious too many things in this world. Here is an example: When, after having transferred from the study of law to that of chemistry, I sought his permission to return to the former, he said to me amiably: “The fact remains that you are certifiably crazy.”