ILLUSIONS
Yes, heart-rending was the sweetness of that November, smiling like
a sick person who has become free from suffering, knowing it is the
last, and tasting again the sweetness of life, which reveals to him new
charms when just about to leave him.
"Look at the Euganean hills below us, Foscarina; if the wind should
come they will rise and float in the air like gauzy veils, and pass
over our heads. I never have seen them so transparent. Some day I
should like to go with you to Arquà; the villages there are as pink as
the shells we find in myriads in the earth. When we arrive there, the
first drops of a sudden shower will be robbing the peach-blossoms of
their petals. We will wait under one of the arches of the Palladio to
avoid getting wet. Then, without inquiring the way of anyone, we will
look for the fountain of Petrarch. We will carry with us his poems in
the small edition of Misserini's, that little book you keep beside your
bed and cannot close any more because it is so full of pressed leaves
and grasses. Would you like to go to Arquà some spring day?"
She did not reply, but gazed silently at the lips that said these
graceful things; and, without hope, she simply took a fugitive
pleasure in their movement and accent. For her there was in his image
of the Spring the same enchantment as in a stanza of Petrarch's; but
she could lay a bookmark in the one and find it again, while the poetic
fancies must be lost with the passing hour.
She wished to say: "I will not drink at that fountain," but kept
silence, that she might still enjoy the caress.--Oh, yes, intoxicate me
with illusions! Play your own game; do with me as you will.--
"Here we are at San Giorgio in Alga. We shall reach Fusina in a few
minutes."
The little walled islet passed before them, with its marble Madonna,
perpetually admiring her reflection in the water, like a nymph.
"Why are you so sweet, my beloved? I never have seen you like this
before. I know not where I am with you to-day. I cannot find words to
tell you with what a sense of melody your presence inspires me. You
are here beside me, I can hold your hand, yet you are diffused in the
horizon, you yourself are the horizon, blended with the waters, with
the islands, with the hills. When I was speaking just now, it seemed
that each syllable created in you infinitely dilating circles, like
those round that leaf just fallen from the gold-leaved tree. Is it
true? Tell me that it is. Oh, look at me!"
He felt himself enveloped in this woman's love as by the air and the
light; he breathed in that soul as in a distinct element, receiving
from it an ineffable fulness of life as if a stream of mysterious
things were flowing from her and from the glory of the daylight at the
same time, and pouring itself into his heart. The desire to make some
return for the happiness she gave him lifted him to an almost religious
height of gratitude, and suggested to him words of thanks and of praise
which he would have spoken had he been kneeling before her in the
shadows. But the splendor of sky and sea around them was so great that
he could only be as silent as she. And for both this was a moment of
marvelous communion in the light; it was a journey brief yet immense,
in which both traversed the dizzy distances they had within themselves.
The boat reached the shore of Fusina. They roused themselves, and gazed
at each other with dazzled eyes.
--Does he love me, then?--
Hope and pain revived in the woman's heart. She did not doubt the
sincerity of her beloved, nor that his words expressed the ardor of
his heart. She knew how absolutely he abandoned himself to every wave
of emotion, how incapable he was of deception or of falsehood. More
than once she had heard him utter cruel truths with the same feline,
flexible grace that some men adopt when they wish to appear charming.
She knew well the direct, limpid gaze which sometimes became hard and
icy, but which never was otherwise than straight; but she knew also the
rapidity and marvelous diversity of emotion and thought that rendered
his spirit unseizable. There was always in him something flexible and
vigorous that suggested to the actress the double and diverse image
of flame and of water. And it was this man she wished to fix, to
captivate, to possess! There was always in him an unlimited ardor of
life, a sense of _euphoria_, or joy in existence, as if every second
were the supreme instant, and he were about to tear himself from the
pleasure and pain of living, as from the tears and embraces of a last
farewell. And it was for this insatiable avidity that she wished to
remain the only nourishment!
What was she to him, if not an aspect of that "life of the thousand
and thousand faces," toward which the poet's desire, according to one
of his own images, continually shook all its thyrsi? For him she was
a theme for visions and inventions, like the hills, the woods, the
storms. He absorbed mystery and beauty from her as from all forms of
the universe. Even now he had withdrawn his thoughts from her, and was
occupied with a new quest; his changeful, ingenuous eyes sought for
some miracle to marvel at and adore.
She looked at him, but he did not turn his face toward her; he was
studying the damp, foggy region through which they were driving slowly.
She sat beside him, feeling herself deprived of her strength, no longer
capable of living in and for herself, of breathing with her own breath,
of following a thought that was unknown to her beloved, hesitating even
in her enjoyment of natural objects that he had not pointed out.
Her life seemed to be alternately dissolving and condensing itself. An
instant of intensity would pass, and then she waited for the next, and
between them she was conscious of nothing save that time was flying,
the lamp was flickering, the body was fading, and that all things were
perishing, dying.
"My dear, my friend," said Stelio, suddenly turning and taking her
hand, impelled by an emotion that had overcome him, "why did we come to
these places? They seem very sweet, but they are full of terror."
He looked at her keenly.
"You suffer," he said, with a depth of pity in his tone that made the
woman turn pale. "Do you too feel this terror?"
She looked around with the anxiety of one pursued, and fancied she saw
a thousand ominous phantoms rising from the earth.
"Those statues!" said Stelio, in a tone that changed them in her eyes
into witnesses of her own wasting life.
The country around them was as deserted and silent as if its former
inhabitants had been gone for centuries, or were sleeping in graves
new-made the day before.
"Do you wish to return? The boat is still there."
She seemed not to hear.
"Speak, Foscarina!"
"Let us go--let us go on," she replied. "Wherever we may go our fate
will not change."
Her body swayed to the slow, lulling roll of the wheels, and she
feared to interrupt it; she shrank from the least effort, the smallest
fatigue, overcome by heavy inertia. Her face was like the delicate veil
of ash that covers a live coal, hiding its consumption.
"Dear, dear soul!" said Stelio, leaning toward her and lightly
touching the pale cheek with his lips. "Lean on me; give yourself
entirely to me; have confidence in me. Never will I fail you, never
will you fail me. We shall find it--we shall find the true secret on
which our love can rest forever, immovable. Do not be reserved with me.
Do not suffer alone, nor hide your sorrows from me. When your heart
swells with grief, speak to me. Let me believe that I can comfort you.
Let us not hide anything from each other. I shall venture to recall to
you a condition that you yourself made. Speak to me, and I will always
answer you truthfully. Let me help you--me, who have received from you
so much of good. Tell me that you do not fear to suffer. I believe your
soul capable of supporting all the sadness of the world. Do not let me
lose faith in that force of passion, whereby more than once you have
seemed to me divine. Tell me you do not fear suffering.... I don't
know.... I may be mistaken. But I have felt a shadow around you, like
a desperate wish to withdraw yourself, to leave me, to find some end.
Why? Why? And, just now, looking at all this terrible desolation that
smiles at us, a great fear suddenly filled my heart--I thought that
perhaps even your love might change like all things, and pass away into
nothingness. 'You will lose me.' Ah, those words were yours, Foscarina!
They fell from your own lips."
She did not answer. For the first time since she had loved him, his
words seemed vain, useless sounds, moving powerless through the air.
For the first time, he seemed to her a weak and anxious creature, bound
by inexorable laws. She pitied him as well as herself. He asked her to
be heroic, a compact of grief and of violence. At the moment when he
attempted to console and comfort her, he predicted a difficult test,
prepared her for torture. But what was courage worth, of what use was
any effort? What were all miserable human agitations worth, and why
think of the future, even of the uncertain morrow?
The Past reigned supreme around them, and they themselves were nothing,
and everything was nothing.--We are dying; both of us are dying. We
dream, and then we die.--
"Hush! Hush!" was all she said, softly, as if they were in a cemetery.
A slight smile touched her lips, and rested there as fixedly as the
smile on the lips of a portrait.
The wheels rolled on over the white road, along the shores of the
Brenta. The stream, sung and praised in the sonnets of the gallant
abbés in the days when gondolas laden with music and pleasure had
glided down its current, had now the humble aspect of a canal, where
the iris-necked ducks splashed in flocks. On the damp, low plain the
fields smoked, the bare trees showed plainly, their leaves rotting on
the damp earth. A slow, golden mist floated above an immense vegetable
decay that seemed to encroach even upon the walls, the stones, the
houses, seeking to destroy them like the leaves. The patrician
villas--where a pale life, delicately poisoned by cosmetics and
perfumes, had burned itself out in languid pastimes--were now in ruins,
silent and abandoned. Some had an aspect like a human ruin, with
empty spaces that suggested hollow orbits and toothless mouths; others
were crumbling, and looked as if ready to fall in powder, like a dead
woman's hair when her tomb is opened; and here, there, everywhere, rose
the still surviving statues. They seemed innumerable, like a scattered
people. Some were still white, others were gray or yellow with lichens,
or green and spotted with moss. They stood in all sorts of attitudes:
goddesses, heroes, nymphs, seasons, hours, with their bows and arrows,
their wreaths, cornucopias, and torches, with all the emblems of power,
riches and pleasure, exiled now from fountains, grottoes, labyrinths,
arbors, and porticoes: friends of the greenwood and the myrtle,
protectors of fleeting loves, witnesses of eternal vows, figures of a
dream far more ancient than the hands that had carved them, and the
eyes that had contemplated them in the ruined gardens. And, in the
sweet sunlight of the dying season, their shadows were like the shadows
of the irrevocable Past--all, all that loves no longer, laughs and
weeps no more, never will live, never will return. And the unspoken
word on their marble lips was the same that was expressed in the fixed
smile on the lips of the world-weary woman--NOTHING!