G.

1.

The father of the principal protagonist of this book was called Umberto. He was a merchant from the city of Livorno and he dealt in candied fruit. He was a short fat man who looked shorter because of the largeness of his head. To women not unduly frightened of gossip and public opinion, the unusual size of Umberto’s head may have been attractive. It suggested obstinacy, weight and passion. Most of the women of the merchant class in Livorno or Pisa were timid. Consequently he had gained among them the reputation of being monstrous. He was called ‘La Bestia’: a word nominally justified by his rudeness, his leering and his arrogance, but nevertheless retaining in their usage just sufficient of its rawer meaning to both feed and suppress the feelings of attraction they unconsciously felt. It was significant in this respect that they never called him ‘La Bestia’ in front of their husbands. The nickname was reserved for purely feminine conversations during the afternoon.

Umberto’s wife, Esther, was the daughter of a Jewish Livornese journalist, who had been a liberal. She married Umberto when she was twenty. Her father disapproved of the marriage because he considered Umberto coarse and uncultured but he refused to act against his liberal principles by forbidding it. When she was twenty-one her father died suddenly. The mystery of her own poor health began with his death and gradually established the foundations of a lifelong right: the right to be less than present, the right to withdraw. It seemed to Umberto that he had married a ghost. (All ghosts for him were connected with women and their supernatural tendencies.) It seemed to her that she had married a beast—although at that time she did not know how her women friends referred to her husband.

Esther led a full social life in the provincial city. Scarcely an afternoon passed without her visiting or being visited. Nobody refused an invitation to her dinner parties. Her secret—and it was partly the secret of her husband’s power in Livorno—lay in her appearance. She had a very pale skin, dark brown hair which she wore tightly drawn back from her face and slow-moving eyes with heavy shadows beneath them. Both her face and her body were exceedingly thin. Yet she did not look sickly. The sickly emphasize the unpredictability of the flesh: there is a kind of pathetic and grating sensuality about them. Esther looked delicate, fragile, as though she were made of some material other than flesh: a material which had been wrought and intricately finished so that there seemed to be no danger of it ever changing.

To her circle of friends and acquaintances in Livorno Esther’s physical character was a sign of unusual spirituality. It was she who understood what they aspired to. It was she who appreciated better than any of them Faith, Beauty, the Longings of the Soul, Forgiveness, Innocence, Filial Piety, Love. If a guest, when talking, wished to evoke the spirituality of his experience, he turned towards her for confirmation; one nod from her, even the slow lowering of her eyelids, was sufficient to make him feel that he had been understood and that therefore he was telling the truth.

When women were alone with her, they talked of themselves. In talking they tended to present themselves in as bad a light as possible, for the worse they made themselves out to be, the more licence they would have afterwards when she had approved of them. It was her approval they sought. They gained it as soon as they had finished talking. It then became clear to them (and each time it was a surprise) that since she had listened with interest and made no critical comment (which she never did), she must approve of what they had done or intended to do. She was like a father confessor who belonged to their own sex.

None of this would have been possible however without her husband. Had it not been for Umberto, she might have been suspected of being a saint, instead of just looking like one. And this would have been fatal for her social position. She might represent certain spiritual values, but she must first and foremost represent them, the bourgeoisie of Livorno. The fact that she was the wife of a successful candied-fruit manufacturer preserved her for them. More than that, she was the wife of a man notorious for hard bargaining, coarse manners and heavy appetites. Consequently they believed it was impossible that living with him had not to some degree corrupted her. And this corruption, which could never be entirely refuted, prevented her spirituality from ever appearing excessive or embarrassing.

Similarly, the fact that Esther was Umberto’s wife saved him from appearing too extreme. Without her, he might have been reckoned a profligate. With her, it was possible to believe that he had been tamed.

The mother of the principal protagonist was a woman of twenty-six, whose first name was Laura. Her mother was an American, her father, now dead, a general in the British army.

I see Laura and Esther, who never met, side by side as they must have appeared sometimes in Umberto’s mind. Laura is short with fairish hair and a slightly snub nose. Beside Esther she looks like a dumpy child. Yet her bearing is not altogether childish. She wears expensive clothes with skill—though not with Esther’s dignity. She talks a great deal in an insistent voice; Esther listens. Esther’s hands are tapered and sensitive; Laura’s are podgy and squat. Laura’s eyes are hazel-coloured and when she wants to give warning of her disagreement she opens them very wide. When Esther disagrees, she closes her eyes. If Esther were surprised whilst taking her bath, she would ‘freeze’ like certain wild animals and remain absolutely motionless; if Laura were so surprised, she would clap her hands over her breasts, huddle up her body and shout.

Each was jealous of the other: Laura because she believed, on the evidence of a photograph which she had persuaded Umberto to show her, that Esther had all the natural feminine qualities she lacked; Esther because she suspected that Umberto spent vast amounts of money on his American mistress.

Laura had been married in New York at the age of seventeen to a copper millionaire; after two years she left him and she came to Europe to join her mother in Paris. She had met Umberto, three years ago, on a passenger ship going to Genoa. Umberto courted her with a concentration and persistence such as she had never dreamt was possible. He made her feel, she wrote to her mother, like Cleopatra. (The ship had come from Egypt.) They immediately spent a month together in Venice.

He arranged for singers, she reported to her mother, to accompany us at night, either side of us, in gondolas. I will remember it always. He made funny jokes about his hands being like crabs. You would love him! Which is why I shan’t bring him to Paris yet! He has friends everywhere and there is a ball we should have gone to here. He wanted to order me a dress. But, believe it or not, I told him that I would prefer not to go. And so instead we went to the island of Murano.

During the next three years he met her in Milan, Nice, Geneva, Lugano, Como and other resorts, but he never allowed her to come near Livorno. When she was not with him, she returned to her mother’s rich American circle in Paris, where she never admitted that her Italian lover was a merchant in candied fruit. She took singing lessons (until she decided, despite her teacher’s protestations, that she had no talent) and she interested herself in the theories of Nietzsche.

Whenever Umberto arrived to meet her after a period of separation and she first saw him approaching, she was struck by the improbability of their relationship. His lack of subtlety and his provincial ostentation in matters of money offended her. In New York, she said to herself, he would have been a waiter in a restaurant whom she and her friends would not have deigned to notice. But after an hour or so of his company she could no longer see him critically. It was like entering a tower which she could not leave until he departed. Inside the tower she was both mistress and child. She played there, either gravely or frivolously, with whatever he gave her. She could look out from the tower but she could never see the tower from the outside. The tower was their love affair. During the months when she did not see him, she thought of him and his passion for her and her own feelings about him as though they were a place. She could visit and revisit it; she visited it, too, in her dreams; but nevertheless it was a place in which she never stayed for long.

Umberto, who as a young man had worked in New York for a firm that imported olive oil and Italian vermouth, speaks English fluently but with a strong Italian accent.

Ah! Laura, the grandeur of the mountains! And the lake so calm and peaceful. It is a beautiful thing the peace at the end of a day, but you are more beautiful, mia piccola. And it is only with you that I can share such peace … To think that I came under those mountains, the tunnel is fifteen kilometres long, fifteen. It is a marvel of science to make that—fifteen kilometres through a mountain. And on this side of the mountain, passeretta mia, you are waiting for me.

(The St Gothard tunnel was opened in 1882. Eight hundred men lost their lives in its construction.)

Umberto and his mistress are driving in a carriage from the station at Montreux to their hotel. Umberto has just arrived. Laura finds him more improbable than she has ever done. He puts his arms around her and tries to lick her ear. She pushes him away.

What do you think I am? she says.

My Laura, my Laura, he says, I think you are my Laura.

From the inside of his overcoat he pulls out a packet, tied with pale blue ribbon. He inclines his head and offers the packet to her on the palms of his hands, as though offering something on a tray. She accepts it. He lets his hands fall down on to her hips. She makes a point of looking at them there to discourage him from continually making such demonstrations in public. (They have argued about this before. He says the inside of a cab is like a private room in a restaurant. She has replied that you don’t make a public place private just by paying a little more!) The backs of his hands, covered with wiry black hair, are very familiar to her. His hands have authority; they arrange things the way he wishes. At the dinner table with his business colleagues in Livorno his hands construct in front of their eyes large invisible models of schemes with which they consider themselves fortunate to be associated. At the wholesale market his hands guarantee the quality of the fruit they touch approvingly and spoil the fruit which they reject. He leans back to watch her open the present.

Inside is black tissue paper and inside that a green velvet Juliet cap decorated with pearls. Laura gasps. Umberto takes this to be a sign of delighted surprise.

The pearls are the real ones, passeretta mia.

On this of all days, she thinks, a cap like this is for a girl of sixteen or seventeen, a kind of toy, a bauble. Her lover’s lack of judgement suddenly infuriates her. She equates it with his trying to bite her ear within two minutes of their meeting. Why is it, she asks, that he has always refused to notice her likes and dislikes, why has he never learned?

I couldn’t wear it, she says, I would look ridiculous in it, it’s for a young girl just out of convent school!

In the half-light of the cab it is difficult to make out the shape of the cap, but the three lines of pearls look like a necklace lying on her lap.

There’s no point in my pretending is there? You would only be disappointed because I couldn’t wear it.

We’ll buy you a necklace, he says.

It is her independence that he loves. She travels anywhere to meet him. She reads the history of the place before they arrive. She shows him chateaux and fountains and she always knows what she wants to do. Yet he has only to put his arms round her and she becomes as docile as a sparrow. That is why he calls her passeretta mia.

We will eat, he says, a banquet in our room with the Swiss white wine you told me was like a fish with a knife—do you remember?—and afterwards we will go to bed, passeretta mia, and tomorrow we will look for the necklace, and if we do not find one here which pleases you, we will go to Milano in a few days.

In bed Umberto has always found his mistress surprising. His impatience now is partly the result of his not being able to fully believe that he will once more be surprised. Upright, she is brisk, strong-willed, independent; lying beside him she has always been delicate and pliant and the touch of her hands has always been lighter than he could remember later.

She had sparse, unusually fine pubic hair as soft as silk thread; her nipples were small and pink and when he kissed them they became red; when her head was thrown back and she smiled, baring her teeth, her upper and lower teeth did not quite touch-between them the space for perhaps a grain of sand to pass. The delicacy and susceptibility of her body had never failed to surprise Umberto and to rouse him to violent passion.

I will keep the velvet cap, she says, and one day perhaps I will give it to my daughter!

She lays her hand on his arm.

Delighted, he says: Ah my little one, you are mad, quite quite matta.

Matta (mad) was the term of endearment he applied most often to her.

For Umberto madness is native to Livorno: he sees madness in the massive monolithic warehouses, eyeless and mute like deserted forts, in the four Moors chained cursing to the monument of Ferdinand I of Florence, in the conglomeration of stuffs with which the capacity of the city is overfilled, in the rectangular spaces of sky cut out by the massive regular buildings above the dark canals, in its shifting population, in the blankness of its walls, in the indeterminacy of its spaces, in its smell of poverty and superfluity, in its furtive opening to the sea.

Madness is native to the town, he believes, but it breaks out only spasmodically. Each time reminds him of the first time, in 1848 when he was ten.

The bridges, the indeterminate spaces, the quays, the Piazza San Michele by the four cursing Moors, the decks of the ships and the rigging of the masts which lined the furtive opening to the sea, all were filled with a crowd, a crowd vertically dwarfed by the massive geometric buildings, but horizontally extending without cease, despite ever tighter and tighter concentration: i teppisti!

Such a crowd is a solemn test of a man. It assembles as a witness to its common fate—within which personal differentiations have become unimportant. This fate has consisted, so far as its own memory is concerned, of continual deprivation and humiliation. Yet its appetites have not atrophied. A single pair of eyes, met in that crowd, are enough to reveal the extent of its possible demands. And most of these demands will be impossible to meet. Inevitably, the discrepancy will lead to violence: as inevitably as the crowd is inexorably there. It has assembled to demand the impossible. It has assembled to avenge the discrepancy. Its need is to overthrow the order which has defined and distinguished between the possible and the impossible at its expense, for generation after generation. In face of such a crowd there are only two ways in which a man, who is not already of it, can react. Either he sees in it the promise of mankind or else he fears it absolutely. The promise of mankind is not easy to see there. You are not of them. Only if you have previously prepared yourself, will you see the promise.

Umberto feared the crowd. He justified his fear by believing that they were mad.

Men ran with the crowd and harangued it. The summer heat of 1848 made the boy Umberto sweat even at night in bed. The faces of these men were swollen to apoplectic proportions and the sweat ran down their faces like tears.

Umberto considers that a sane man should always try to see himself as an exemption from the rest of the world: then he will be able to see what he can or cannot take from the world. According to him the madman demands all or nothing! Roma o Morte!

Umberto cannot leave his wife. Neither by way of his children (for he has none) nor by way of society can he find any sense of succession or continuity; he is alone, abandoned in time. To continue his business and gain concessions he is forced to be amiable, not once but a thousand times, to people whom he dislikes or even hates. He can never speak to anybody of more than one tenth of what is on his mind.

Ah my little one, you are mad, quite, quite mad.

What Umberto calls madness is what threatens him. Not what threatens him personally—another merchant, a thief, the man who will cuckold him—but what threatens the social structure in which he lives as a privileged being.

His privilege is more important to him than his life, not because he could not survive without his American mistress, four servants at home, a fountain in his garden, hand-made silk shirts, or his wife’s dinner parties, but because implicit in his privilege are the values and judgements by which he must make sense of his lived life. All values stem from his belief—that his privileges are deserved.

Yet the sense he makes of his life does not satisfy him. Why must liberty, he asks himself, always be retrospective, a quality already won and controlled? Why is there no liberty to pursue now?

Umberto terms madness that which threatens the social structure guaranteeing his privileges. I teppisti are the final embodiment of madness. Yet madness also represents freedom from the social structure which hems him in. And so he arrives at the conclusion that limited madness may grant him greater liberty within the structure.

He calls Laura mad in the hope that she will bring into his life a modicum of liberty.

Umberto, I am going to have a child, and perhaps it will be a girl. If it is a girl (Laura has seized upon the subject of the cap in the hope that it will make her announcement less stark. She is happy at the thought of being pregnant, she thinks continually of what her child will be like, but she finds the announcement humiliating). If it is a girl, I will give her your Juliet cap on her fifteenth birthday and she will look beautiful in it.

The cab has arrived at the hotel. A porter is holding the door open. Please shut the door, says Umberto. Then he instructs the driver to drive them slowly along the lake-side. The driver shrugs his shoulders. It is raining and it is getting dark and there is nothing to see of the lake.

Are you quite sure you are right? asks Umberto.

Quite sure.

Have you been to a doctor?

Yes.

How was he called, this doctor?

He was a doctor in Paris.

What did he say?

He said it was true.

He said it was true?

True.

The doctor said so?

Yes.

The word true echoes at last with the authority of the doctor and this authority offers Umberto the means of coming to terms with the news. He must demystify it, he must make it manageable and negotiable, he must give it a colour so that it can be handled, so that it loses its initial infinite, entirely abstract whiteness.

I am the father, says Umberto.

It is a statement, not a question; but Laura nods her head. She can see no advantage to either of them in his being the father.

Why didn’t you tell me when you wrote to me?

I thought I could explain better when I saw you.

Umberto’s head is teeming with calculations of what can and cannot be done in Livorno to accommodate his illegitimate son.

How long—he makes a counting gesture with his hand.

Three months.

We’ll call him Giovanni.

Why Giovanni? she asks.

Giovanni was the name of my father, his grandfather.

And supposing she is a girl?

Laura! he says. But it is not altogether clear whether he is suggesting this as a name or expressing surprise at his mistress’s suggestion that a child of his might be a girl.

How do you feel, my little one? he asks.

In the mornings I don’t feel so fine, but it passes, and in the afternoon I feel quite hungry, and I don’t know why we are driving up and down the lake-side like this, it is so dismal, and I would like to eat some cakes. They make a special sort of cake here which my mother is always talking about, of almond paste.

You know, I have never had a child, he says, and I was—how do you say it?—rassegnato.

He tries to put his arms round her. She struggles.

You are the mother of my child, he protests. It is not far from being a wife. If I could, I would make you my wife.

It might seem that in such a situation this was an honourable response. Yet far from satisfying Laura, it infuriated her. He is turning her, transforming her at this moment, she feels, into his wife in Livorno—into his wife to whom he has always wanted to say ‘You are the mother of my child’, but has never had the opportunity. She, Laura, is now the mother of the child of the pater-familias. And just as she has been transformed, so too, she fears, has his wife in Livorno: Esther will now represent all that is seductive and free and not inexorable. For two months she has been peaceful and happy at the thought of her child. But to bear a child for a man, and to be condemned to bearing it for him irrespective of her will—she starts to sob.

She allows herself to be comforted. Umberto is the cause of her distress, but he can alleviate it. Not by removing the cause—which is the fact of his being the father elect—but by temporarily surrounding her with his own physical presence so that her awareness of herself and her bitter destiny starts to dissolve, as the outlines of a gate dissolve in the dusk or the words of a letter become illegible in the gathering darkness of a room. In his arms she feels her interests receding, and her name, with the intonation it once had when she was a child, emerges from some remote repository inside her and surfaces everywhere through her childish, so easily irritated, skin.

When she touches the straying, grey, mane-like hair brushed back above the ears of his massive head, it is with the amazed inquisitive touch of a child.

When Laura was a small child she realized, through her own observation and by way of remarks made by her mother, that there were certain secret aspects of a woman’s body which might be prized above all others and which could equally well be more shameful than anything else in the world. As she grew up, she became convinced that in everything which related to these aspects she was peculiarly sensitive. She had only to be frightened (or so she believed) for her fear to bring on menstruation. If a man touched her in a certain way on her shoulder, she would feel a convulsion in her womb. Ordinary brassieres would chafe her nipples. She used to be ashamed of this sensitivity because it made her awkward and irritable. But she also used to be glad of it because she believed that one day she would be able to share her secret with a man who would become as infinitely curious about it as she was herself.

At the hotel they have dinner served in their own suite. Laura is still tearful and Umberto tries to distract and entertain her with outlandish stories about the intrigues of Livorno. When the meal is over, he takes off his jacket, undoes his collar and tie and says:

Come my little one with eyes green.

She appears reluctant.

If it is dangerous, my sweet, we will lie side by side and hold hands—no more—like children.

She has never for one moment doubted that she wanted to have the child. The child will be hers like nothing else in her life has been. She has no dread of the scandal it may provoke because she has her own fortune and can live wherever she likes, and also because she believes that the individual will should never bow to the demands of conventional morality. Indeed she will enjoy demonstrating her defiance as she did when she married against her family’s wishes at the age of seventeen, and as she did when, two years later, she told her husband in public to leave and never come back.

She lies in Umberto’s arms, content to be held but indifferent to his passion. If he lies still, she is pleased. She finds it acceptable for him to cherish her; she finds it absurd for him to desire her. She has never before been able to ignore Umberto’s advances because they have offered her an opportunity to show him the intricate sexuality of her body which has always seemed to her to be as unpredictable, as delicate and as pure as an almond hidden in its two shells. Her immunity now surprises her. Her child has already offered her the gift of self-sufficiency.

To the physical well-being of the mother of his son Umberto is prepared to make every concession. He lies quiet. Confusedly his mind returns again and again to the mechanics of the forthcoming event. Within them, he feels, is the solution to all problems.

He lies with his hand between her legs, a finger between the lips of her vagina. Warm mucus encloses his finger as closely as if it were a ninth skin. A little earlier he felt with his hand on her stomach, a little below the navel, a small lump.

Instead of his entering her, his son will come out of her. It occurs to him that the very form of the vagina, which he had always assumed was as it was in virtue of his function, has in fact evolved to meet the exigencies of the outward journey of a third person. He is reluctant to withdraw his finger. There is no change to be felt. He moves his finger to confirm this. Not since he first heard about it as a child has the phenomenon of birth seemed more surprising to him.

One minute in the life of the world is going by. Paint it as it is.

What has been conceived are the essentials of the character about whom I wish to write.

Umberto pulls her violently towards him, holding her far shoulder and rubbing his face against her hair. He realizes how violently they are now exposed to the world, bereft of every exception. He is ignorant of all the details of childbirth, but his premonition of the rough, violent outward journey of the small lump grown large and human forces him to recognize how similar they are to other couples.

In the last gesture of tenderness she will make towards him, she holds his head in her hands.

Lie still, she says, think of the child.

He remembers a morning when he visited a friend who deals in flowers and has a number of large greenhouses on the road to Pisa. The glass of these houses is painted over with a green wash (the turquoise colour of the sea) to diminish a little the power of the sunlight for the flowers inside. This wash is painted on the outside and any passer-by can draw with his finger on the glass because the wash when dry rubs off at the slightest touch. As Umberto walks past the greenhouses, away from the road, he notices the drawings. At first they depict lovers’ hearts with arrows through them and initials, then came crudely drawn naked figures standing upright, then a woman lying on her back, legs apart, slit visible. Finally, drawn larger and bolder than all the preceding ones, a cunt with hair above it and below it a cock with hanging balls. It is inconceivable that he himself would ever draw like that. But he recognizes that the two of them have become the subject for such a drawing.

Previously every part of her—like their liaison—has seemed to him to be secret and exclusively for the two of them: the secret has now been divulged: there is a third person involved, his son.

Donna mia! Donna mia! he cries into her hair.

I did not sleep well. What you told me, our news—you can say that? like what we read in the newspapers—this was beating in my heart all night. Laura, I want to make change in my life, I want to make space in my life for you and for our son.

Are you so sure the child will be a boy?

I have the feeling I have a son.

I have no feeling about it being a boy or a girl, but then for me it’s unimportant. I will be glad of either. I would not like to have a plain girl, for her sake not for mine. It is simpler for a boy. His looks don’t matter.

I am proud of you. I am proud of my son. I want to hide nothing.

You couldn’t hide us if you tried!

I wish to give you all you need.

We are not asking for anything.

Laura, I will tell you something. Perhaps something you have not understood. In all my life, always, I have been rich enough to do what I wish. When I was younger, my wishes were more modest. But now I am ambitious. Ambitious for you and for our son.

Why are you talking about money? Money has nothing to do with it, absolutely nothing. I never think about money.

I was speaking of the feelings in my heart and my plans. I want to tell you how proud I am.

What are your plans?

You, the two of you, must come and live in Italy where I can see you.

Come to Livorno, you mean?

Livorno is an unhappy mad city.

And your wife is there! That is why you call it mad.

She is not from Livorno.

She lives there. Waiting.

Waiting?

Waiting for you to come back.

Passeretta mia, you know I am married. You have known since three years.

So we mustn’t come to Livorno. So we must become your illegitimate wife and your illegitimate child. Do you know what we call that? Bastard. It’s your bastard. But it’s my child. And that’s why we can’t come to Livorno.

Do not be excited.

Why have you never let me come to Livorno? Because you were frightened we would be recognized.

I wanted all possible things to please you. I wanted the days we spent together to have no shadow on them. I feel that still. I want it. But now we have more than days together to share. I can hardly believe what has happened to us, to you and me, to me, Umberto, and to you, Laura. Everything is changed.

What will your wife say when you tell her that you have installed your mistress and your bastard child in the town?

She will say nothing.

You propose to tell her?

No.

And you imagine she will not know?

Naturally she will know, but she will say nothing.

And you say you are proud of us! You are not a father. You are a man with a weakness for a little American tart.

I beg you not to shout and say words like that. Passeretta mia, what has changed you?

This is what has changed me. (She thumps her stomach.)

Yes, he has changed everything. I want you to live in Pisa. I have seen a villa there, a beautiful villa with a magnificent English garden and tall rooms with painted ceilings. Once it belonged to a Conte. I want to buy it for you, Laura.

And we are to wait there for you to visit us. How many times a week? Every Tuesday and Friday?

Or you could live in Florence, in Fiesole above the Arno which is a corner of paradise.

When you have installed us, what do you propose we do? How can you be so stupid? Can you not see that we would be prisoners in a jail?

Jail! You would be free to go wherever you wished.

Who would we meet? Who would we talk to?

I would arrange Italian lessons for you.

That is why you want to call him Giovanni!

I would like him to speak several languages. Then he will be able to travel. I have not travelled enough in my life.

Umberto, I cannot believe you are being serious. You should know better than I what kind of country Italy is. Nobody would know us. We would be outcasts. A woman who is not married with an illegitimate child.

My dear, you are married.

Not to you I’m not.

One day I may be in a position to marry you.

You mean you will get a divorce?

In my country to make a divorce is almost impossible.

So you cannot marry me.

My wife is a sick woman.

I see. We shall wait in our jail until she dies. And then you will be gracious enough to make us respectable. How do you dare to make such a proposal?

I love you.

Love! What is it? It’s a word you use to get what you want. Like all men.

It is a word you have used too, Laura.

Yes, I was in love with you when we went to Venice three years ago. You were like no man I had ever heard of. You could have made whatever you liked of me. But you did nothing. A woman isn’t like money that you put in a bank and it will bring you interest without your doing anything about it. A woman is a person. How do you expect me to live ten months of the year, kicking my heels until you somehow contrive to make a little trip to see me? That is not a proper life.

All this I intend to change. You will live in Pisa or Florence and we will be together often and without interruption. The boy will see more of me than many boys see of their fathers. And I will make him my heir. Let us try to make a life together for all three of us.

Four!

Four?

You have forgotten you are married.

I have explained to you already.

You say you are proud. Me? I am ashamed. You make me ashamed for all of us. How could I look into the eyes of my child whilst waiting, day after day, year after year, for news of her death? Sit now, passeretta mia, and I will talk to you. I am older than you. I am nearer to the earth. If I compare us to most, we are fortunate. You do not know what their lives are filled with. Life is never as we want it. It is of no use to ask for everything. In the end you get nothing. Our life will not be a perfect one—that is for those who believe in the good God after they are dead. But it will be better, and I will make it better, than you believe possible. We have both been mistaken. I am older than you and I have been mistaken more. But not you either can begin life again like an innocent fidanzata of seventeen. With you I have the last chance of happiness. I know it. No chance will come again. You have come to me like an angel to deliver me. Angels come once only. I will spare nothing to make you happy.

Would you come and live here?

I can try. But how can I? It is too far.

Too far from your home?

From my business.

Your business comes before us?

My business is for my son. He will inherit it. He will not be poor.

You intend to disinherit your wife?

I have told you what will happen.

You are shameless.

No, I am not shameless. I see things for how they are. I want you and my son. Without both of you my life is over. All my life depends on this one chance. I love you as nobody else will love you. Not even a younger man. He will not be as faithful to you as me. I know what you are worth, believe me. Come to Pisa. Give me the opportunity to show you—

—Where I shall be in jail.

I will be a father to our son. If you knew what paternal feelings are filling me, if you knew how patient, how adoring, how proud I will be as a father! In him I will see you. He will have your impatience and your love of dreams.

And what will he have of you?

You know what they call me in Livorno behind my back, I have told you already, they call me La Bestia, That is because I am cunning and close to the earth. Perhaps he will have my realism.

You, realistic!

Yes. You will see. We have one chance now. There will be no more opportunity.

What do you mean?

For you to be the mother of your son. For me to be the father. For all three of us to be happy.

I intend to bring up my child as I choose, not as you choose. I will teach him myself. If he is a boy, he will begin life with the advantage of never having been told lies. If she is a girl, she will be loving and sincere and realistic. No child of mine is going to be satisfied with your half-measures. And to make sure of this, I will devote the next ten years of my life to my child.

You deny me the right to my own son?

You have none.

Laura!

It’s too late to call me now.

The sheets on the unmade bed, the carpets, the furniture, the wrought-iron balcony outside the window, the lake which is the colour of steel and lavender, the Alps—everything within their sight—is unaffected by the rapid beating of each heart.

The principal protagonist was conceived four years after Garibaldi’s death.

Garibaldi was hero.

Garibaldi defeated his country’s enemies. He inspired the nation to become itself: to anticipate its own identity.

Garibaldi was what every Italian wished to be. It is in this sense that one can call him the national genius. There was not an Italian in Italy—not even among the loyal Bourbon troops of the Kingdom of Naples—who did not wish to be Garibaldi. A few hoped to become him by fighting him: some, like La Farina in Sicily, by betraying him. Cavour in Turin became him by using him. What stood between a man and his becoming Garibaldi was not his own identity but the wretched state of Italy: a wretchedness which each interpreted or suffered according to his own theories or position. For the peasant it was the impossibility of leaving his land: for the constitutionalist it was the inefficiency of conspiracy.

When men set eyes upon Garibaldi they amazed themselves: until that moment they had not known who they were. They met him as from within themselves.

He was poorly equipped and almost in rags; he had nothing but a sword and a pistol. ‘What induced you,’ I said, ‘to give up ease and luxury for this life of a dog, in a camp without commissariat, pay, or rations?’ ‘You may well ask,’ he said, ‘I tell you a fortnight ago I was in despair myself, and thought of giving up the whole thing. I was sitting on a hillock, as might be here. Garibaldi came by. He stopped, I don’t know why. I had never spoken to him. I am sure he did not know me, but he stopped. Perhaps I looked very dejected, and indeed I was. Well, he laid his hand on my shoulder and simply said, with that low, strange, smothered voice that seemed almost like a spirit speaking inside me, “Courage; courage! We are going to fight for our country.” Do you think I could ever turn back after that? The next day we fought the battle of the Volturno.’

On 7 September 1860 Garibaldi entered Naples.

The Bourbon garrison of several thousand occupied the four castles which dominated the city. The king had fled. The castle cannons were trained upon the city. There was a rumour that Garibaldi would arrive—not with his troops and redshirts on horseback—but alone and by train. The streets were empty under the white glare of the sunlight and the muzzles of the cannons. Nobody knew whether to believe the rumour. Timidly everybody hid indoors. At 1.30 in the afternoon Garibaldi arrived at the station. Half a million people surged into the streets, on to the quays, climbing, pushing, running, shouting—regardless of the cannons and the consequences—to welcome him, to commemorate the moment at which they were living.

Garibaldi was not a military genius of the first order. Politically he was easily deceived. Yet he inspired a whole people. He inspired them, neither by authority nor by divine right, but by representing the simple and pure aspirations of their youth, and by persuading them, through his own example, that these aspirations could be realized in the national struggle for unity and independence. What the nation found sacred in him was its own innocence.

All his characteristics fitted him for such a role. His physical strength and courage. His virility. His long hair down to his shoulders, carefully combed after battle. The simplicity of his tastes and appetites. ‘When a patriot,’ he said, ‘has eaten his bowl of soup and when the affairs of the country are going well, what more can anyone want?’ The island to which he retired whenever there was no task for him to perform and on which he lived as a farmer with his sheep. His patriotism which confounded his theoretical principles. (A republican, he recognized the authority of Victor Emmanuel.) His amour propre. His sense of humour. The fact that he was eloquent by gesture rather than word. ‘I believe if he were not Garibaldi, he would be the greatest tragic actor known.’ (Because he did not talk, men of different or opposing opinions supported him and believed that he supported them.) His ignorance of motives in the world as it was. His impatience.

In what other kind of man could the nation of Italy find its better half in order to become united?

By way of what other kind of man—with his absolute personal integrity—could the majority of the nation be so successfully deceived?

The way in which Garibaldi inspired the nation led to moments of danger for the emergent ruling class. If Garibaldi was what every Italian wished to be, his wishes, so encouraged, might go further than the expulsion of the Austrians and the Bourbons. Garibaldi was a threat to order, not only because his methods were conspiratorial, but because he inspired.

The massing of the crowds in Naples under the mouths of the cannon became a saturnalia which lasted for three days.

Calabrian peasants believed that Garibaldi, like Christ, could perform miracles. When his redshirts were desperately short of water, he fired a cannon into a rock and water gushed from it.

Garibaldi honoured the memory of Carlo Pisacane, martyr of the Risorgimento, whose writings influenced the thinking of a generation of Italian socialist revolutionaries.

‘The propaganda of the idea is a chimera. Ideas result from deeds, not the latter from the former, and the people will not be free when they are educated, but will be educated when they are free. The only work a citizen can do for the good of the country is that of co-operating with the material revolution: therefore conspiracies, plots, assassinations, etc., are that series of deeds by which Italy proceeds towards her goal.’

Yet Garibaldi was effectively constrained by his alliance with the existing ruling classes. His gestures defied them: the political consequences of his victories confirmed them. The national genius was used to create the pre-conditions for a bourgeois state.

After Garibaldi’s death, there was scarcely an Italian city or town which did not have a street or piazza named after him. Throughout Italy his name was spoken or written thousands of times daily. Yet this name was as irrelevant to what now occurred in those streets and piazzas as the blue sky above.

In Paris Laura feeds the new-born child at her breast. It is as though the milk which flows from her is the quicksilver of an extraordinary mirror. In this mirror the child is part of her body, the number of all her parts is doubled: but equally, in this mirror she is part of the child, completing him as he desires. She can be object or image on either side of the mirror. She can do unto him or she can be done unto by herself. The two of them, so long as the nipple remains in the mouth, revert to being parts of an indispersible whole whose energy will lead to their being separate and distinct as soon as the child ceases to suck.

She asks: What need have I of anything more? The boy will grow, but by looking at him, I can again inhabit him.

Her nerves and sensibilities answer her own needs perfunctorily; they continuously strain across space and through his flesh to anticipate and answer his. Her feelings are distributed in his body like veins. When she touches him, she has the sensation of touching herself made innocent.

She wants to worship him because with her he seems to transcend the world as it is. She desires to be totally committed to him, so that this commitment amounts to a rejection of all other claims. She wants with her baby to start an alternative world, to propose from his new-born life a new way of living.