_May 3, 1915._
I have finished with psycho-analysis. After practising it assiduously
for six whole months I find I am worse than before. I have not yet told
the doctor, but nothing will make me change my mind. Yesterday I sent
to say that I was prevented from coming, and I shall let him expect me
for a few days. If I could be sure of laughing at him without getting
into a rage, I should not mind seeing him again. But I am afraid I
should end by assaulting him.
Since war broke out, this town has become more tedious than usual,
and to fill up the time which I used to give to my treatment, I have
returned to my beloved notebooks. I had not written a word for a year,
obeying the doctor in this as in everything else; for he asserted that
during the cure I must not examine myself except in his presence,
as any self-examination which was not controlled by him would only
strengthen my resistances, and prevent my being able to give myself up
completely. But now I am more unbalanced and in worse health than ever,
and I think that writing may help to work off the mischief that the
treatment has done me. Anyway I am certain that this is the only way to
give prominence to a past which it is no longer painful for me to dwell
on, and to banish the hateful present as quickly as possible.
I had abandoned myself to the doctor with such entire confidence that
when he told me I was cured I believed him absolutely, and gave no
credence to the pains which still continued to torment me. I said
to them: “You are not really there!” But now I can doubt no longer.
They really are there. The bones in my legs have turned into sharp
fish-bones which wound my muscles and my flesh.
But I should not mind that so much: that is not the reason I am
giving up the cure. If, during the hours of self-examination which I
spent with the doctor, I had continued to make new discoveries and to
experience fresh sensations, I would never have given it up, or at
least I would have waited till the end of the war which puts a stop to
all my other activities. But now that I have seen through it, and know
that it is nothing but a stupid illusion, a foolish trick which might
take in an hysterical old woman, how can I any longer endure to be in
the company of that ridiculous man, with his would-be penetrating eye,
and the intolerable conceit which allows him to group all the phenomena
in the world round his grand new theory? I am going to employ my free
time in writing as I please. And, to begin with, I shall write the
story of my cure. All sincerity had disappeared between me and the
doctor; now I breathe again. I am no longer under constraint. I have
no longer got to try to believe, nor to pretend to believe if I don’t.
I forced myself to be cringingly subservient to him just in order to
hide what I was really thinking, and that encouraged him to invent some
fresh monstrosity every day. I ought to be cured, for they have found
out what was the matter with me. The diagnosis is exactly the same as
the one which Sophocles drew up long ago for poor Œdipus: I was in love
with my mother and wanted to murder my father.
I did not even get angry. I listened enraptured. It was a disease
which exalted me to a place among the great ones of the earth; a
disease so dignified that it could trace back its pedigree even to the
mythological age! And I don’t feel angry, even now that I sit here
alone, pen in hand. I can laugh at it whole-heartedly. The surest proof
that I never had the disease is that I have not been cured of it. This
proof should surely convince the doctor himself. He need not worry; his
words have not been able to spoil the memories of my youth. I have but
to close my eyes and immediately there rises up before me my love for
my mother, and the great respect and affection I felt for my father.
And then the doctor attaches too much importance to those confessions
of mine, which he refuses to give back so that I may look at them
again. My God! He has only studied medicine, and so he has no idea what
writing in Italian means to us who talk dialect but cannot express
ourselves in writing. A written confession is always mendacious. We
lie with every word we speak in the Tuscan tongue! If only he knew how
we tend to talk about things for which we have the words all ready,
and how we avoid subjects which would oblige us to look up words in
the dictionary! That is the principle which guided me when it came to
putting down certain episodes in my life. Naturally it would take on
quite a different aspect if I told it in our own dialect.
The doctor confessed to me that during the whole of his long practice
he had never met with such violent emotion as I displayed before the
images which he believed himself to have suggested to me. That was why
he was in such a hurry to say I was cured.
And I did not simulate that emotion; it was really one of the strongest
I have ever felt in my life. I was bathed in perspiration whilst
creating the images, and in tears when I recognised them. The idea of
being able to live again one day of innocence and inexperience gave me
inexpressible delight. It supported me and gave me courage for months
and months beforehand. Was it not like the miracle of plucking in
October the roses of May? The doctor himself assured me that the image
in my memory would be clear and complete, so that it would be another
day added to my life. The roses would have all their fragrance, even
perhaps their thorns.
And by dint of pursuing these memory-pictures, I at last really
overtook them. I know now that I invented them. But invention is a
creative act, not merely a lie. My inventions were like the phantasies
of fever, which walk about the room so that one can survey them from
all sides and even touch them. They had the solidity, the colour and
the movement of living things. My desire created these images. They
existed only in my brain and in the space into which I projected them;
I felt the air, I saw the light that was in this space, and even its
hard corners, just as in any other space that I have ever walked
through.
When I fell into that dream-state which was to aid in creating the
illusion, and which was probably only a mingling of great energy with
extreme inertia, I thought my dream-pictures really were an actual
reproduction of the past. I might have suspected at once that they were
not, because directly they had vanished my memory of them was free
from any excitement or agitation. I remembered them as one remembers
an event one has been told by somebody who was not present at it. If
they had been actual reproductions, they would have continued to move
my tears or laughter as they had done when I first saw them. The doctor
noted everything down. He said:
“We have had this, we have had that,” though we had really had nothing
but graphic signs, mere skeletons of images.
I was persuaded into the belief that it was really my childhood I was
evoking, because the first picture placed me in a relatively recent
epoch, of which I still retained a pale memory that the image seemed to
confirm. There was one year in my life during which I was already going
to school, while my brother had not yet begun; and the hour I evoked
seemed to belong to that year. I saw myself coming out of the house one
sunny morning in spring, and walking through the garden on the way down
to the town, on and on, with my hand in that of our old servant Catina.
My brother did not appear at all in this dream-scene, but he was the
hero of it. I thought of him so happy and free at home, while I had to
go to school. I went there with a dragging step, and with anger in my
heart, and felt as if I wanted to cry. I only saw one of those walks
to school, but the bitterness in my heart told me that I should have
to go to school every day, and that every day my brother would stay at
home--for ever and ever. Whereas actually I believe that my brother,
who was only a year younger than me, soon after went to school too.
But at that moment the truth of my dream seemed to me indisputable. I
was condemned eternally to go to school, while my brother was allowed
to stay at home. As I trotted along beside Catina I counted up how
long my torture would last: Till midday! While _he_ is at home! And I
remembered that on other days, whenever I had been scolded at school,
or threatened with punishment, I had always thought, “They can’t touch
him.” It was an extraordinarily realistic vision. Catina, whom I knew
to have been short, seemed to me tall on that occasion, because I was
so little. She had always seemed immensely old; but then children
always think grown-up people are old. On the way to school I also saw
in my dream the curious little columns that used, at that time, to
border the pavements in our town. I was born early enough to have seen
those little columns even when I was quite grown up, in the centre of
the town, before they were removed. But in the street I walked along
that day with Catina there were none left almost before I had outgrown
my childhood.
My faith in the authenticity of these images was not shattered even
when, stimulated by the dream, my sober memory began to evoke other
details of that period; of which the chief was that my brother envied
me too, because I went to school. I was sure that I had been conscious
of this, but it was not at first enough to throw suspicion on the truth
of my dream. Later on it deprived it of every vestige of truth; there
certainly had been jealousy, but in my dream it had got attached to the
wrong person.
My second vision carried me back also to a comparatively recent date,
though earlier than the first. I saw a room in our house, but I don’t
know which, for it was larger than any that is there in reality. The
curious thing is that I saw myself shut up in that room, and was at
once aware of a fact which the vision alone could not have revealed to
me: the room was a long way off from another room in which my mother
and Catina used to sit. Also I had not yet begun going to school.
The room was quite white, indeed I had never seen such a white room,
nor one so entirely flooded with sunlight. Could it be that the sun was
really shining through the walls? It must have been high in the sky,
but I was still in bed with a cup in my hand from which I had drunk up
all the _caffelatte_; I was going round and round the empty cup with
my spoon, trying to get out the sugar. There came a point when I could
not get any more out with the spoon, and then I tried to reach the
bottom of the cup with my tongue. But I was unsuccessful. I ended by
sitting with the cup in one hand and the spoon in the other, watching
my brother who was in a bed next to mine, still busy drinking his
_caffelatte_, with his nose buried in the cup. When he at last raised
his head I saw his face all wrinkled up in the sun, which shone full on
it, while mine, for some reason or other, was in the shade. His face
was pale and slightly disfigured by a protruding jaw. He said:
“Will you lend me your spoon?”
Then I noticed for the first time that Catina had forgotten to give him
a spoon. I replied without the slightest hesitation:
“Yes, if you will give me a piece of your sugar in return.”
I held my spoon up, to enhance its value. But at once I heard Catina’s
voice in the room, saying:
“For shame! You little Jew!”
Fright and shame brought me back with a start to the present. I should
have liked to argue with Catina, but she, my brother and I--that tiny,
innocent little Jew--plunged together into the abyss and disappeared.
I was sorry to have felt so much ashamed as to have destroyed the image
I had built up so laboriously. It would have been much better if I had
quietly given my brother the spoon gratis, and not tried to discuss
that bad action which was probably the first I had ever committed.
Perhaps Catina would have called in my mother to punish me, and so I
should have seen her again at last.
I did see her a few days later, or imagined that I did. I ought to have
realised at once that it was an illusion, for the image of my mother,
as I had evoked it, bore too much resemblance to the portrait I have
over my bed. But I must confess that in that vision of her my mother
behaved like a living person.
The sun! the sun! dazzling sunlight! From the picture of what I thought
to be my youth, so much sun streamed out that it was hard for me not
to believe in it. Our dining-room in the afternoon. My father has come
home and is sitting on the sofa beside my mother, who is printing
initials in indelible ink on a lot of white linen scattered all over
the table at which she is sitting.
I am under the table playing with some marbles. I move nearer and
nearer to mamma. I probably want her to join in my game. Suddenly I
seize hold of the linen which is hanging down from the table, in order
to pull myself up by it; and now a disaster happens. The bottle of ink
falls on my head, soaking my face and my clothes and mamma’s skirt,
and leaving a slight stain on papa’s trousers. My father lifts his leg
to give me a kick....
But I got back in time from my long voyage and found myself safely
here, grown-up and old. I must confess that the threatened punishment
positively hurt me, and immediately afterwards I felt sorry to think
that I had not been there to see mamma’s protecting gesture, which I
know must have followed. But who can stop those pictures, once they
have taken flight through time, which never before had seemed so
much like space? At least I thought so while I still believed in the
authenticity of the pictures. Now alas, to my sorrow I believe in them
no longer, and know that it was not the pictures which fled, but my
eyes from which a veil was lifted, so that they looked out again on
real space where there is no room for spirits.
I will describe some visions which came to me another day, and which
the doctor regarded as so important that he declared I was cured.
In the state between sleep and waking into which I had sunk I had a
dream that was fixed and unmoving as a nightmare. I dreamt of myself
as a tiny child, only to see what a baby’s dreams are like. As it lay
there, its whole small being was filled with joy. Yet it was lying
there quite alone. But it could see and feel with a clearness with
which in dreams one sometimes perceives quite distant objects. The
baby, who was lying in a room in my house, saw, God knows how, that on
the roof there was a cage, built on solid foundations, without doors or
windows, but filled with a gentle light, and pure, perfumed air. And
the child knew that he alone could reach that cage, and that he need
not move to get there, for the cage would come to him. In it was only
one piece of furniture, an arm-chair on which was seated a beautiful
woman, perfect in shape and dressed in black. She had fair hair, great
blue eyes and exquisitely white hands; she wore patent leather shoes on
her feet, which shed a faint reflexion from under her skirt. She seemed
to me to be one indivisible whole in her black dress and patent leather
shoes. It was all part of her. And the child dreamed of possessing that
woman, but in the strangest manner; he was convinced that he would be
able to eat little bits off her at the top and the bottom!
Looking back on it now I am surprised that the doctor who professed to
have read my manuscript so attentively, was not reminded of another
dream I had had before going to see Carla for the first time. When I
thought of it some time later, the dream I have described seemed to me
exactly the same, with slight variations which made it more childish.
But the doctor took everything carefully down, and then said with a
rather sly air:
“Was your mother fair and good-looking?”
This question surprised me, and I replied that so was my grandmother
too. But from his point of view I was completely cured. I opened my
mouth wide to rejoice in his rejoicings, and listened meekly to his
prescription: no more self-examination, no more analysis, no more
meditation on the past, but a thorough and gradual re-education.
From thence onwards those sittings became a torture to me, and I went
on with them only because I have always found it as difficult to stop
once I am in motion, as to start when I am at rest. Occasionally, when
he said something altogether too wide of the mark, I ventured mildly
to object. It was by no means true, as he assumed, that every word
and every thought of mine were criminal. That made him stare. I was
cured, and I refused to admit it. It was sheer blindness! He had shown
me that I had wanted to carry off my father’s wife--my mother!--and I
would not allow that I was cured. It was unheard-of obstinacy. However
the doctor admitted that I should be more completely cured when I had
finished my re-education, and had accustomed myself to look on such
things as the desire to kill my father and possess my mother as the
most innocent things in the world, for which one need feel no remorse,
since they often cropped up in the best families. After all, what harm
could it do me? One day he told me I was like someone recovering from
an illness who has not yet got accustomed to doing without fever. Only
have patience! I should get used to it in time.
He felt that he had not won me completely, and besides re-educating me
he went back to the cure from time to time. He tried me with dreams
again, but I had no more authentic ones. Tired at last of waiting, I
ended by inventing one. I should never have done it if I could have
foreseen the difficulties attending my invention. It is not easy to
stammer a few words as if one were half-asleep, to be covered with
perspiration or grow pale, without betraying oneself; to go crimson
from the effort one has made, and not to blush! I talked as if I were
seeing the woman in the cage again, and as if I had persuaded her to
put one of her feet through a hole which had suddenly appeared in the
wall of her cell, so that I might suck it and eat it. “The left one,
the left one!” I murmured, adding a singular detail which should make
it more like the dreams that had gone before. I thereby showed that
I had grasped perfectly the disease which the doctor insisted on my
having. The infant Œdipus was just like that; he sucked his mother’s
left foot, leaving the right one to the father! In the imaginative
effort I made to deceive the doctor I almost succeeded (and this is no
contradiction) in deceiving myself too, so that I could actually taste
that foot. It made me feel quite sick.
The doctor could not have been more eager than I was myself, that I
should continue to see those pictures of my childhood, whether genuine
or not, which had come to me spontaneously, without my needing to
invent them. As they would no longer come when I was with the doctor, I
tried to evoke them away from him. There was a danger of my forgetting
them, as I was by myself, but then I was not hoping to be cured by
them! I wanted to see once more in December the roses of May. I had
seen them once; why should they not come again?
I found solitude sufficiently boring, but at last something came
which for a while took the place of my visions. I thought I had
made an important scientific discovery. I suddenly felt called to
complete the physiological theory of colour. My predecessors, Goethe
and Schopenhauer, had never dreamed how far one might go simply by a
skilful arrangement of the complementary colours.
I must tell you that I spent my time in my study, lying on a sofa
facing the window, from which I could see a stretch of the sea, and the
horizon. One evening, when the sun was setting and the sky was broken
by clouds, I lay there a long while watching a white cloud take on
a marvellous shade of pure tender green. The clouds in the west were
fringed with red, but a pale red, bleached by the white rays of the sun
shining directly upon it. The light dazzled me, and after a while I
closed my eyes. Then it was clear to me that all my attention and love
had been given to that shade of green, for its complementary colour was
produced on my retina, a brilliant red which had nothing to do with
the luminous, but pale red of the sky. I gazed in enchantment at the
colour which I had myself brought into being. My great surprise came
when I opened my eyes again, for then I saw that flaming red spread
over the whole sky and cover up my emerald green, so that for some
time I was unable to see it. So I had actually found a way of painting
nature! I naturally repeated the experiment several times. The strange
part was that I had actually endowed the colours with movement. When
I opened my eyes again, the sky would not at once take on the colour
from my retina. There was a moment’s hesitation during which I could
just detect the emerald green from which the red had sprung, and which
seemed to have been destroyed by it. It emerged now from within and
spread in all directions like a giant conflagration.
When I had convinced myself of the accuracy of my observations, I
carried them to the doctor, hoping to animate our tiresome sittings a
little. The doctor polished me off by saying that my retina had become
ultra-sensitive from so much nicotine. It was on the tip of my tongue
to reply that in that case the visions which we had regarded as a
reproduction of events of my childhood might also have been due to the
same poison. But that would have betrayed the fact that I was not yet
cured, and he would have tried to induce me to begin again from the
beginning.
But the idiot did not always treat me as if I was poisoned. That is
evident from the method of re-education adopted by him to cure me from
what he called my smoking-disease. This is what he said: smoking did
not hurt me at all, and if I only could persuade myself that it was
harmless it would really become so. Then he went on to say that now
that my relations with my father had been brought to light and judged
by my adult consciousness, I should be able to see that I had adopted
that vice merely in order to compete with my father, and had attributed
a poisonous effect to tobacco because of my secret conviction that he
would punish me for attempting to compete with him.
I left the doctor’s house that day smoking like a Turk. He wanted to
make an experiment, and I lent myself to it with enthusiasm. I smoked
without ceasing, all day long. This was followed by a sleepless night.
My chronic bronchitis had broken out again, of that there could be no
doubt; the spittoon bore witness.
Next day I told the doctor I had smoked a great deal and that it no
longer did me any harm. He regarded me with a complacent smile and
I could guess from his expression how proud he felt of himself. He
proceeded with my re-education in quiet confidence, and the certainty
that every sod he stepped on would eventually bear fruit.
I remember very little of that re-education. I submitted to it, and
every time I left his room, shook myself like a dog coming out of the
water. Like the dog I remained wet, but was never drenched.
But I remember my indignation on hearing my tutor state that Dr.
Coprossich was right in addressing to me the words that had so roused
my indignation. Was it true then that I deserved the blow which my
father aimed at me just before he died? I don’t know if that was one of
the things he said, but I distinctly remember him saying that I hated
old Malfenti, whom I had substituted for my father. There are so many
people who think it impossible to live in the world without a certain
amount of affection; but I, according to him, was quite lost without
a modicum of hatred. I wanted to marry one or other of his daughters,
it did not matter which, because all I needed was to see their father
in a position where I could reach him with my hatred. I did my best to
dishonour the family I had married into, so far as it lay in my power;
I was unfaithful to my wife, and, if I had been able, it was clear that
I would have seduced Ada and Alberta. Of course I am not attempting to
deny this, and it even made me laugh when the doctor, in saying it, put
on an air of Christopher Columbus discovering America. All the same
I think he must be the only person in the world who, hearing that I
wanted to go to bed with two lovely women, must rack his brain to try
and find a reason for it!
I found it still more difficult to bear what he felt it necessary to
say about my relations with Guido. He had heard from my own account
how much I disliked Guido on first making his acquaintance. According
to him I never ceased to do so, and Ada was quite right in regarding
my absence from his funeral as a final manifestation of my dislike. He
quite forgot that I was at that very moment engaged in my labour of
love to save Ada’s fortune, and I did not deign to remind him of it.
Apparently the doctor had made some inquiries about Guido on his own
account. He insisted that as Ada had chosen him it was impossible
he should have been what I had described. He discovered that an
enormous timber-yard, quite close to the house where he practised his
psycho-analysis, had belonged to the firm of Guido Speier & Co. Why had
I never mentioned it?
If I had mentioned it, it would have added a fresh complication to my
already very difficult statement. The fact that I omitted it is only
another proof that no confession made by me in Italian could ever
be complete or sincere. There are a vast number of different kinds
of wood, which in Trieste we call by various barbaric names, taken
from our own dialect, from Croatian, from German, and sometimes even
from French (_zapin_ for instance, which does not with us only mean
_sapin_). Who would have provided me with the necessary vocabulary? Was
I, at my age, to enter the employ of a Tuscan timber-merchant? Besides,
that timber-yard belonging to the firm of Guido Speier & Co. showed no
profits whatever. And then there was nothing for me to say about it,
because it was always in a stagnant condition, except when thieves came
and made the wood with barbaric names fly through the air as if it was
destined to be made into tables for experiments in psychic research.
I suggested to the doctor that he might get some information about
Guido from my wife, from Carmen and also from Luciano who has now
become a respected merchant. I know for a fact that he did not apply
to any of them, and can only suppose that he abstained from fear that
his whole edifice of false charges and suspicions would crumble, when
confronted with the facts. I wonder why he took such a violent dislike
to me. He is probably also a hysteric, who avenges himself for having
lusted after his mother, by tormenting innocent people.
In the end I felt quite worn out by this incessant duel with the doctor
whom I was paying. I don’t think those dreams were very good for me,
and the freedom to smoke when I liked gave me my final _coup de grâce_.
I had a happy idea: I paid a visit to Dr. Paoli.
I had not seen him for a good many years. He had grown rather grey, but
his spare figure was as upright as ever, and he had not put on any fat.
He still looked at things with a caressing air. I suddenly realised why
he always makes that impression. I think it is that he enjoys observing
things, and he observes the beautiful and the ugly with the same
satisfaction with which he might caress someone he loved.
I went to him with the intention of asking him whether he thought
I ought to go on with psycho-analysis. But when I found his cold,
penetrating gaze fixed on me, my courage failed. Perhaps he would think
I was merely making a fool of myself, at my age, to be taken in by such
quackery. I hated keeping silent about it; it is true that it would
have simplified my position very much if Dr. Paoli had forbidden me to
go on with psycho-analysis, but I could not long have endured being
caressed by those great eyes of his.
I told him of my insomnia, my chronic bronchitis, the eruptions on my
face which were tormenting me just then; of the sharp stabbing pains in
my legs, and finally of my inexplicable lapses of memory.
Paoli analysed my urine in my presence. The mixture turned black
and Paoli looked grave. At last I was going to have a true analysis
after all this psycho-analysis. I felt quite touched as I remembered
the time, now long past, when I was myself a chemist and made true
analyses; I thought fondly of retorts and re-agents. The element which
is being analysed sleeps till it is summoned imperiously to life by the
re-agent. There is no resistance in the retort, at least it yields to
the smallest rise in temperature, and shamming is out of the question.
Nothing took place in that retort to remind me of my behaviour with
Dr. S., when, to please him, I invented fresh details of my childhood
in order to conform to Sophocles’ diagnosis. Here was only the truth.
The thing which had to be analysed was imprisoned in the phial and,
incapable of being false to itself, awaited the re-agent. When that
came it always responded in the same way. In psycho-analysis, on the
other hand, neither the same images nor the same words ever repeat
themselves. It ought to be called by another name: psychical adventure,
perhaps. Yes, that is just what it is. When one starts such an
analysis, it is like entering a wood, not knowing whether one is going
to meet a brigand or a friend. Nor is one quite sure which it has been,
after the adventure is over. In this respect psycho-analysis resembles
spiritualism.
But Paoli did not think that sugar was the trouble. He wanted to see me
again next day, after he had polarised the liquid.
I meanwhile went off triumphant, sure that I had got diabetes. I was
tempted to go at once to Dr. S. and ask him how he would propose to
analyse the psychical causes of that disease in order to cure it. But I
had had enough of that individual and felt I could not bear to see him
again, even to poke fun at him.
I must confess that the thought of diabetes was very sweet to me. I
spoke of it to Augusta, who listened to me with tears in her eyes.
“You have talked so much about diseases all your life,” she said, “that
you were bound to end by having one.” Then she tried to console me.
But I loved my disease. I thought with sympathy of poor Copler who
preferred real diseases to imaginary ones. I agreed with him now. A
real disease was so simple; you had only to let it work its will. And,
in fact, when I looked up the description of my sweet sickness in a
medical prescriber, I found a whole programme of life (not of death!)
drawn up for the various stages of the disease. Farewell resolutions!
Henceforth I should be free of them. Everything would pursue its own
course now, without any intervention.
I further discovered that my disease was always, or almost always, very
agreeable. The invalid eats and drinks a great deal, and suffers very
little so long as he is careful to avoid getting abscesses. Then he
sinks into a delightful state of coma and dies.
It was not long before I was called to the telephone by Paoli. He said
he could find no trace of sugar. I went to see him next day, and he
ordered me a diet which I only kept to for a few days, and a medicine
illegibly scribbled on a prescription, which did me good for a whole
month.
“That diabetes gave you a fright, I know!” he said smiling.
I denied this, but did not tell him that I felt very lonely now that I
was deserted by my diabetes. He would never have believed me.
It was about this time that Dr. Beard’s famous work on neurasthenia
fell into my hands. I followed his advice and changed my medicine every
week, according to the prescriptions which I copied clearly out of
his book. For a few months I thought the treatment was doing me good.
Not even Copler, in the whole course of his life, could have had such
consolation from drugs as I had then. My faith in them evaporated by
degrees, but I had had a certain respite from psycho-analysis, and kept
putting off my return from day to day.
One day I met Dr. S. by chance. He asked if I had decided to give up
treatment. He was most polite, much more so than when he had had me in
his clutches. He was evidently anxious to get hold of me again. I told
him I had a great deal of business to attend to, family affairs which
took up all my time and attention, but that directly I had settled them
and had some time to myself again, I should return to him. I wanted to
ask him to give me back my manuscript, but I did not dare; it would
have been as good as confessing that I wanted to have nothing more to
do with his treatment. I decided to put off asking him till another
time, when he should have realised that I had given up all idea of
returning to him, and become reconciled to it.
Before we parted, he said a few words with the obvious intention of
drawing me again into his net.
“If you examine your state of mind,” he said, “you will find a great
change in it. You’ll see that you will want to come back to me of
yourself, when you realise how much good I did you in a comparatively
short space of time.”
What I really think is that, with his help and by dint of studying my
psyche, I only infected myself with new diseases.
My one thought now is how to recover from his treatment. I avoid dreams
and memories, which produced such a state of confusion in my poor head
that it is hardly sure yet whether or not it is firmly fixed between
my shoulders. I am terribly absent-minded. Whilst I am talking to
someone I am all the time trying to remember what it was I said or did
a little while ago, and have quite forgotten. Or it may be a thought I
am trying to recapture, which I feel to be of enormous importance, as
much importance as those thoughts my father had a short while before he
died, and which he likewise failed to remember.
I must put a stop to all this folly, unless I want to end in a lunatic
asylum.
_May 15, 1915._
We have been spending the two feast-days in our villa at Lucinico. My
son Alfio is recovering from influenza, and is to stay on for several
weeks with his sister. We shall come back here for Whitsun.
I have succeeded at last in getting back again to my former good
resolutions, and I have given up smoking. I feel much better already,
since renouncing the liberty which that fool of a doctor forced on
me. To-day we have reached the middle of the month, and I am struck
by the obstacles which our calendar places in the way of carrying
out a straightforward, well-ordered resolution. All the months are a
different length. In order to demonstrate my resolution properly I
ought to stop smoking at the same time that something else comes to an
end--the month, for instance. But except for July and August, December
and January, there are no two successive months which have an equal
number of days. Time is really very ill-ordered!
In order to be able to concentrate better, I spent the afternoon of
the second day alone, on the banks of the Isonzo. Nothing helps one to
concentrate so well as gazing for a long time at running water. One
remains perfectly still oneself and all the necessary diversion is
provided by the water, which is never the same for a single instant,
either in colour or design.
It was a wonderful day. A strong wind must have been blowing in the
upper air, for the clouds were continually changing shape, but down
below there was no movement in the atmosphere. From time to time the
sun, which already gave some warmth, found a gap in the swiftly moving
clouds and streamed through, flooding with light some expanse of upland
or some mountain peak, and lifting the tender May green out of the
shadow which covered all the landscape. The air was warm, and there was
something spring-like even in that flight of clouds across the sky.
There could be no doubt the weather too was convalescent!
In my contemplative mood I enjoyed one of those moments which niggard
life so rarely grants, when one ceases to feel oneself a victim, and
can take a large, impersonal view of things. In the midst of all that
green, so exquisitely radiant under the fitful sunrays, I was able to
smile at life and at my malady. Women played a great part in both. Even
the details of a woman’s body--her feet, her waist, her mouth--were
enough to fill my days. And as I looked back over my life and my
malady, I felt that I loved and understood them both. How much better
my life had been than that of the so-called normal healthy man who,
except at certain moments, beats or would like to beat his mistress
every day. But I had always been accompanied by love. Even when I was
not thinking of my mistress, I still thought of her in the sense that I
craved her forgiveness for thinking of other women as well. Other men
leave their mistresses disillusioned and despairing of life. I have
never known life without desire, and illusions sprang up afresh for me
after every shipwreck of my hopes, for I was always dreaming of limbs,
of gestures, of a voice more perfect still.
I remembered that among the many lies I had imposed on that profound
observer, Dr. S., one was that I had never betrayed my wife after
Ada went away. He built up a whole theory on that lie. But on the
river-bank I suddenly realised with horror that for some days past,
perhaps since I had given up treatment, I had not run after any woman
except my wife. Was I really cured then, as Dr. S. pretended? I am
getting old and it is some time now since women ceased to take any
interest in me. If I were to lose interest in them, there would be an
end to all relationship between us.
If such a doubt had assailed me in Trieste I should at once have known
how to solve it. Here it was a little more difficult.
A few days before I had had in my hands the memoirs of Da Ponte, an
adventurer who was contemporary with Casanova. He too must certainly
have passed through Lucinico, and I dreamed of meeting one of his
powdered ladies, with her limbs hidden by a crinoline. Good Lord! How
did those women manage to give themselves so quickly and so often,
cased as they were in all those clothes?
I found the thought of a crinoline sufficiently exciting, in spite of
my cure. But it was rather an artificial desire which it aroused, and
it did not suffice to reassure me.
The proof I was in search of came to me soon after, and certainly
reassured me, though I paid dearly for it. In order to obtain it I
spoilt and destroyed the purest relationship I have ever had in my life.
I happened to meet Teresina, the eldest daughter of a peasant who had
settled on a plot of ground near to my villa. Her mother had died two
years before, and the large family of small brothers and sisters had
found a second mother in Teresina, a robust girl who rose early to
begin work, and went to bed directly the day’s work was over, to rest
before beginning again. That day she was leading the donkey which was
generally entrusted to her young brother, and she was walking beside
the cart laden with new hay, because so small a beast would not have
been able to carry the girl’s weight as well, going up the hill.
A year ago Teresina had seemed to me quite a child, and I had felt
nothing but a fatherly affection for her. Only the day before, when I
had seen her again for the first time, although I noticed that she had
grown, that her sunburnt face had become more serious, and her slender
shoulders had widened out above the swelling curve of her breasts, her
undeveloped, hard-worked little body made me look on her still as a
mere child, in whom I could only admire her extraordinary activity and
the maternal instinct which she lavished on her little brothers and
sisters. If it had not been for that odious cure, and the necessity
of verifying on the spot exactly what stage my malady had reached, I
should have left Lucinico this time too, without troubling her perfect
innocence.
She wore no crinoline, and her round, smiling little face was innocent
of powder. She was barefooted and I could see half-way up her naked
leg. Neither her face, feet nor legs sufficed to kindle my desire.
Her face and such limbs as I could see were all the same colour;
they belonged to the open air, and there was no harm in their being
abandoned thus to the air. Perhaps that was why they failed to excite
me. But I was shocked to find myself so cold. Could it be that after my
cure I needed a crinoline to stimulate my imagination?
I began by stroking the donkey, which was thus obliged to take a few
minutes’ rest. Then I turned my attention to Teresina, and put in her
hand no less than ten kronen. It was my first attempt on her virtue!
Last year I had given her and her brothers _centesimi_ only, as an
expression of my fatherly affection for them. But everyone knows that
fatherly affection is quite a different thing. Teresina was dumbfounded
by such a magnificent gift. She carefully lifted her skirt to put the
precious piece of paper away in her pocket, and as she did so I caught
a glimpse of her leg above the knee, but that was just as sunburnt and
chaste.
I returned to the donkey and kissed it on the head. My display of
affection aroused its own. It stretched out its neck and emitted that
impressive cry of love which I have always listened to with respect.
How far-reaching it is, and how significant, with that first cry which
it utters again and again like an invocation, growing feebler and
feebler till it ends in a despairing sob. But to listen to it at such
close quarters was positively painful.
Teresina laughed, and her laughter encouraged me. I turned again to her
and seized her suddenly by the forearm, moving slowly up it with my
hand towards the shoulder, and studying my sensations the while. Thank
Heaven I was not cured yet! I had stopped the treatment just in time.
But Teresina urged on the donkey with a stick. She evidently intended
to go on and leave me behind.
I could not help laughing heartily; I felt very happy, even if the
peasant girl would have none of me. I said:
“Have you a lover? You ought to have. It would be a pity if you hadn’t
got one yet.”
She answered, as she continued to move away from me:
“When I take one, he will certainly be younger than you!”
Even this could not obscure my happiness. I should have liked to read
Teresina a little lesson, and turned over in my mind that episode
in Boccaccio--“Maestro Alberto of Bologna virtuously shames a lady
who would have shamed him for falling in love with her.” But Maestro
Alberto’s reasoning took no effect, for Madonna Malgherida de’
Ghisolieri said to him: “Your love is precious to me, as that of a wise
and valiant man must always be, and therefore, _saving my honour_,
impose your will on me, as on all things that are yours.”