Conjugal Love

15

I WAS almost sorry to see them disappear. The moon, between the two straw-stacks in shadow, was shining brilliantly on the empty threshing-floor, upon the spot where I had seen them pressed together in their dance, and for a moment I thought that it had not been my wife and the barber whom I had seen, but two nocturnal spirits conjured up by the splendour of the moonlight. I was overwhelmed by what I had witnessed, but I made a great effort to control myself and to take a detached view of it; in this my aesthetic sense came to my rescue, and for the first time I felt that it was being put to a supreme test. I remembered that, on the previous night, the moonlight on the threshing-floor had suggested to me the idea of a panic love, in the mild, silent night; and I saw that my thought and my desire had been right. Only, at the last moment, someone else had taken my place. I had divined, instinctively, the beauty of that embrace; but the embrace had taken place without me. There flashed upon me, however, a sudden suspicion that this effort to be objective was merely a device on the part of wounded pride; and I said to myself that I could reason and understand as much as I liked, but the fact remained: I had been cruelly deceived, my wife had betrayed me with a barber, and this betrayal stood between me and my wife. At this thought I felt a sharp pain; and I realized that, for the first time since I had seen Leda in Antonio's arms, I was assuming the role that had been forced upon me — that of the husband of an unfaithful wife. But at the same time I knew that I was neither willing nor able to accept that position. I had not hitherto been a husband like other husbands; our relations had been just as I had wished them to be and not as our married state might have prescribed; and so they must remain. I must continue to be reasonable and, above all, understanding. This was my vocation, and not even betrayal could justify my abandoning it. Even as I ran back towards the villa, I started feverishly reconstructing in my mind the exact course events had taken between myself, my wife and Antonio.

The man, it was certain, was a libertine, but it was possible that at the beginning there had been no deliberate intention on his part, and that the first contact with my wife had been merely accidental. In the same way she had been truly and sincerely indignant at what she had called 'want of respect' on the part of the barber — although the excess of this indignation concealed, even at that time, the beginnings of an unconscious excitement and attraction. Actually, in asking me to dismiss the barber, she had asked me to defend her, not so much against the barber as against herself; but I had not understood and, selfishly, had thought of nothing but my own immediate convenience. She had not discerned the selfishness in my behaviour, just as she had not understood the deeper motives of her own, and she had resigned herself, as she usually did, out of affection and goodwill. She had thus endured a situation in which the man who had insulted her, and towards whom she did not know she was so violently attracted, came to the house every day. Several days had passed in this way, in a disingenuous truce to our disagreements and our passions — a truce selfishly intended by me in order that I might bring my work to an end, and which had merely served to sharpen the disagreements and bring the passions to a head. After three weeks my work had been finished, but, during the same period, my wife had — perhaps without realizing it — reached the extreme limit of her confused, obscure desire. My expedition to the town had then been all that was needed to make her see the true nature of her first disdain for the barber.

Antonio had arrived, had failed to find me; somehow or other they had met, on the stairs or in the study; perhaps he had made violent advances to her, or perhaps she had taken the initiative. Anyhow, there had been an understanding, a sudden, complete, final understanding. From that moment onwards Leda's behaviour had been characterized by the inflexibility, the velocity, the weight, of a stone that plunges through space to the bottom of a deep ravine. With a cruelty that was perhaps not unconscious, she had made an appointment with Antonio at that same place at which, the night before, I had tried to make love to her. After Antonio had gone, she had acted with cold and brutal determination, without scruples either of delicacy, of caution, or even of ordinary good taste, just as an enemy might act, not a wife who still loves her husband. She had made sure that I should be working that night when she went to her appointment, and she had played with me like a cat with a mouse in telling me that tale of her adventure with the Alpini officer, obviously suggested by her meeting with Antonio that morning. When evening came she had taken care, in dressing, not to put on the American elastic belt, so as to be more expeditious, more naked, more tempting. While I was eating she had made no attempt to conceal her own harsh impatience, disdaining even to have recourse to the hypocrisy which, in such cases, implies a homage, if not to virtue, at least to good manners. It had needed all my blindness not to see that her lack of appetite was due to that other appetite, so far more masterful. But, fearing that I should take her pretended indisposition too seriously and might even wish to keep her company in her room, she had explained it, cynically, by letting me suppose it was her monthly disorder. While I shut myself up to write in my study, she had been sitting downstairs for three hours, smoking one cigarette after another, counting the minutes and the seconds. When the time came, she had run to her appointment; and that kind of dance, at which I had been a spectator, had been simply the final explosion of the powerful too-long-repressed mechanism of her lust.

I must state, at this point, that I recognized in the whole of Leda's behaviour the deceitful yet transitory resoluteness of actions that break suddenly out from the buried places of the consciousness and are then reabsorbed, like rivers in the desert. I recognized, in other words, in these actions the furious but short-lived impetus of the involuntary infraction of an acknowledged rule. All that had happened between her and Antonio had not affected in the slightest degree her relations with me. Her intrigue with the barber — which, in all probability, would not survive that night — and her ties with me, of a year's duration, were two different things, on two entirely different planes. I was sure that, if I said nothing, Leda would go on loving me as in the past, and perhaps more; and that she herself would take steps to get rid of Antonio next day, even if she had not already done so. But this thought, far from comforting me as it should have done, depressed me even more. It was one more proof of my incapacity, of my feebleness, my impotence. To me, both creative art and my wife were granted only through pity, through affection, benevolence, reasoned goodwill; the fruits of this concession would never be either love or poetry, but merely a process of forced, decorous composition, a tepid, chaste felicity. Not for me the true masterpiece, not for me the dance on the threshing-floor. I was relegated, for ever, to mediocrity.

Meanwhile, still carried along by my grief as though by a wind, I had crossed the park, I had entered the house, I had mounted the stairs, I had returned to my task. There I sat, pen in hand, in front of a sheet of paper at the top of which I had written: 'Dearest Leda.' It was the letter of final and absolute farewell to my wife. Then I realized that I was weeping.

I do not know how much I wept; I only know that I wept and wrote at the same time, and that, as I wrote, the tears fell upon the words and blotted them out. I wanted to tell her that all was over between us two and that it was better for us to part, but as I thought and wrote down these things, I felt a violent pain and, as it were, a refusal on the part of my whole body, which seemed to express itself in this uninterrupted flood of tears. I realized that I was closely tied to her, that it did not in the least matter to me that she had betrayed me, and that, in the long run, it did not matter to me even if she gave herself to others for love and reserved, for me, nothing but simple affection. I tried to imagine, at moments, what life would be like without her, and I knew that, after having for so many years thought of suicide, I should really kill myself this time. Nevertheless I went on writing and weeping. And so I finished the letter and signed it. But, when I started reading it over, I saw that it was all blotted out by tears and I knew I should never have the courage to send it.

At that moment I had an exact perception of the weakness of my own character, made up, as it was, of impotence and morbidity and selfishness; and I accepted it completely, all at once. I knew that, after that night, I should be a much more modest man, and that perhaps, if I so wished, I should be able, if not exactly to change, at least to correct, myself, since in that one single night I had learned more about myself than in all the other years of my life. This thought calmed me. I rose from the desk, went into my bedroom and bathed my red, swollen eyes. Then I went back into the study and stood at the window that looked out to the front of the house.

I stood there for about ten minutes, thinking of nothing and allowing the silence and serenity of the night to calm the tumult of my spirit. I was not thinking about Leda, and was surprised when I saw her suddenly appear at one corner of the open space and run towards the door. In order to move more speedily, she was holding up, with both hands, her long dress; and, seen like that from above, as she darted across the moonlit gravel, she made me think of some little wild animal, a fox or a weasel, which, furtive, innocent, its coat still stained with blood, scurries back to its lair after a raid on a chicken-run. This sensation was so strong that I almost seemed to see her transformed into an animal, and I was conscious, for one moment, of that look of innocence as of a physical quality — almost like some wild odour. And, in spite of myself, I could not help smiling affectionately. Then, still running, she raised her eyes towards me as I stood at the window. Her eyes met mine, and I thought I detected in hers a presentiment of an unpleasant scene. She lowered her head immediately and went into the house. Slowly I drew back from the window, and went and sat down on the sofa.