Matilde Serao

“ For a long moment Maria Guasco and Marco Fiore gaze at each other. In their eyes there is only one beautiful, simple, strong expression, sadness free from every ardour, sadness free of every desire; sadness without remorse or hope; a sadness which neither invokes nor offers help. It is an incomparable and immeasurable sadness, which can only be supported by lofty human strength in its humility and innocence. Thus they look at each other and are only sad for that which was and is no more, for that which can never return to them, since nothing which is dead in the soul rises again. ”

“ While Maria’s flight with Marco had given him acute anguish, the moral figure of his wife appeared prouder and bolder in its act of liberation, and if the husband still carried with him all the pain of the offence, so as to feel the impression of a bleeding wound for three years, the man had admired in Maria her lofty contempt of every minor good to obtain the one supreme good. While Maria was far away, as if lost in the vast world, Emilio saw her again near him palpitating with beauty and life, and he began to love her in solitary silence, vainly and uselessly. ”

“ How can I try again with Vittoria? Must I return and fall at the feet of my wife, simulating a passion I do not feel? Must I play a comedy, I who despise a lie? Could I ever take my wife in my arms like you? Oh, she knows, perhaps, and understands; at any rate she would soon understand, that I was lying and deceiving her. Do you know that I inspire her with repulsion? Do you know that she neither wants me as a husband, a companion, or a friend? Do you know that she wants me as a lover? Can I be the lover of Vittoria, Maria? ”

“ Bowing deeply Gianni Provana took his leave, while Maria, preceded by the servants, mounted the stairs very slowly. An inexorable agitation pressed deeply on the soul of the woman who, after the intense love rhapsody in which she had thrown all that was good and bad in her existence as upon a pyre, was retracing her steps and invoking the pardon of him whom she had fatally and unjustly injured. Ah, she would never have returned to the honest, faithful man unless she had seen the magnificent pyre of her passion extinguished, and her life rendered mute and deserted by love! ”

“ Maria, it was fate our meeting yesterday; our fate would be meeting to-morrow. A will which we are ignorant of, which is outside us, which acts on us while it is foreign to us, has reunited us yesterday, and would reunite us to-morrow. Let us accept it, Maria.”
“But what is this will, Marco?” she said, seized by a sudden fear.
“Maria,” he said gravely, “you know, you have known, that passion is outside the usual limits of life, you have known and seen that it forces souls and persons beyond all laws and duties, beyond all vows. You have seen and known that it exalts and multiplies life. ”

“ A horror, is it not? I cause you horror, my sainted mother, my angelic mother! See to what life has brought me. A great, powerful, and beautiful love has only lasted a short time with me, and has left my heart dead to every fresh ardour. Mother, no one will take the place of Maria Guasco in my existence; she has been all, and that all has descended into the tomb. Afterwards I tried to attach myself to an idea, to a sentiment, to a loving duty, but the creature herself for whom I wished to live, for whom I wished to fight my life, spurned me and fled from me. ”

“ You have given me all yourself, and I have known what exaltation a man can enjoy without dying of too much joy. And for this, my lady, gentle and proud, for all this that I owe you I cannot give you a sorrow which has not its equal, that of loving still when one is not loved. Swear that your desolation is only for the dream which has vanished in you as in me; that your tears are of an infinite bitterness for love and not for me; that I am as a brother in sorrow and not a fickle and forgetful lover; that you can think of me without a shock, but with sadness for things which are extinct ”

“ Marco, I am afraid of myself: I know myself. If the hand even of an enemy is stretched towards me with the impetus of unexpected sympathy, my soul at once trembles with emotion and opens its inviolate doors, and abandons itself with tenderness and enthusiasm. If a person who loves me ill-treats me or offends me it is impossible for me not to rebel; all my pride invests me wonderfully and magically with a steel cuirass, and I feel I love no longer, and I disdain the love of the other one who knows not how to love. ”

“ I am so lonely, Marco. When he is here he regards me with desire and anger. Both sentiments crucify and torture me, but I daren’t repress or combat either sentiment. I have become what I never was, a creature without will or object, a passive and resigned creature—I! I! think, Maria Guasco, a creature of resignation! Often he avoids me for days together, and I don’t know what to do with my dried-up and deserted existence. I do nothing, never, because I fear that all may be for the worse, even when he ignores me—ignores me! ”

“ Moreover, we preferred to give a single sorrow to others rather than inflict ridicule and humiliation on them every day, and we preferred to exile and isolate ourselves than drag deception and fraud from drawing-room to drawing-room, from home to home. We lived so impetuously and ardently in a fulness and richness of life, which, darling Maria, neither of us will ever find again, which ought not to be found again because certain destinies have but one existence. Ours is past and the dream is ended. Nothing remains for us except the enduring memory of its beauty and intensity. ”

“ Marco was sleeping heavily, with his head buried in the pillows just as if it was his last sleep, and all his face was decomposed in its fatigue and pallor, even the lips were white beneath the moustaches, and his forehead had a crease of weariness and bitterness. Too long, indeed, did she gaze at that sight, and drink in its poison with her soul and eyes. She felt her heart like a stone within her breast, and her soul wound her person like a sharp rock with a tremendous spasm. She felt, too, the floods of bitterness like a poison diffuse themselves through her being. ”

“ Be my will, you who are stronger than I. You have always been the stronger because you possess a virtue that is lacking in me, which is pride, that lofty and shining guide, which can be cruel yet is always lofty. You, Maria, know what is necessary, and you ought to impose it on me, after having imposed it on yourself. I shall be like matter in your hands and all will be well, since it will have been willed by you, and done by you, creature of strength, of goodness and beauty, sustained by your shining beacon, your pride. ”

“ Without love?” the woman cried, and such an utter hopeless bitterness was in the cry.
“Yes, without love,” he continued courageously; “the great light and flame of our passion is extinguished, it is true, but the tender reflections can still weakly illuminate the shadows where we have lived; even the rays of the heat, whose flame no longer exists, can rarefy the cold which is conquering us.”
“You don’t love me, Marco!” she cried.
“I don’t love you with passion, and I ought not to deceive you; neither of us will ever lie to the other. ”

“ After a terrible year, Marco, after a year of every experiment and attempt, in which I have consumed my will and weakened my energy, after a year in which I have seen all the good which was accumulated in my generous mind miserably dispersed, and day by day the sacred trust of doing good dissipated, I cry to you in my sadness and impotence, in my weariness and discouragement. I ask you whatever I shall do, Marco, with myself and my life, since it is of no further use but for evil? What shall I do with myself, inept for good, inept to give joy, and so involuntarily and fatally capable of evil? ”

“ She felt herself perfectly pure from such a transgression, one of those miserable and mean transgressions of the inner feminine life which lower and corrupt a woman even to despising herself. Maria had only had, as she said, one love and one lover only, Marco Fiore, had only lived with a complete and intense passion for the three years of separation from Casa Guasco, and at once, but for ever, her heart and her senses had become a heap of ashes. ”

“ We don’t marry, Vittoria, for the intoxication of a short time. It isn’t for this that the Lord calls us and chooses us in marriage blessed by Himself. If we reduce this sacrament to a profane pleasure, we violate a divine law.”
“It is horrible, it is horrible,” cried Vittoria, as if she felt herself suffocated.
“It isn’t so horrible,” cried the Duchess. “Be more Christian than woman in matrimony and more woman than sweetheart. Don’t commit the ugly sin and grave mistake of being your husband’s mistress! Vittoria, Vittoria, don’t degrade yourself in wishing to be like the other! ”

“ This was the sentiment of human and Christian pity for a miserable woman who had wanted and still wanted to give her life to her dream, who instead saw all her dream vanish before her in a time which seemed as short as a flash of lightning. Anger long repressed, sorrow long concealed, the offence which wounds without ever a wound appearing, love rendered more supreme and consuming in jealousy itself,—all in Emilio Guasco was sunk in this tender compassion for Maria. ”

“ It is a year since you married Vittoria, when, placing her little hand in yours, she will certainly have pardoned your long infidelity and desertion. Well, my friend, no one about me believes that I have ceased loving you with passion, not even those who know me well, such, for instance, as a faithful friend like Flaminia Colonna, not even a would-be lover like Gianni Provana, to give another instance. No one, and especially my husband, Emilio Guasco; he does not believe, can’t believe, never will believe that I have ceased to love you passionately. ”

“ It was afterwards that, intolerant of lies, inept at deception, Maria Guasco Simonetti had left her husband’s house and had fled with Marco Fiore.
Then Emilio Guasco had seen all the error of his existence, of his indifference, his want of any abandonment, of any enthusiasm. Alone, in a suddenly deserted house and dishonoured, he discovered his original sin, aridity, that grave sin which separates us from everything beautiful and everybody beloved; which makes those flee from us fatally whom we do not know how to love. ”

“ To accomplish what I had set myself for you, to accomplish all my vow of reparation I suffered so joyfully, but so bravely. At every fresh sting I did not bind the bleeding point, and from every new wound I let my blood gush forth, glad to suffer, glad to expiate, glad to be able by my secret and open sufferings to unfold and complete all my expiation, rejoicing to reach the goal of being a consolation to Emilio, of being, as of yore, the giver of his happiness. I have been intoxicated with the sacrifice, Marco, but now my intoxication has vanished. ”

“ Instead, all the inconsolable sadness of this moment comes from ourselves, from our dead souls, from our dead hearts and senses, where our love has lived, but from whence it has disappeared, leaving colourless ashes which the wind will carry away. Maria, how I should like to rise against myself, against my mortal weariness and indifference. I should like to galvanise my spirit, resuscitate this corpse, and I torture myself in vain, while tears of useless anger course my cheeks. Maria, I am dying through not loving you, but I cannot live to love you. ”

“ The man felt the shame mount to his face for having mistaken the impulse of a vulgar, fatuous, and virile affirmation of possession for a fresher and more vigorous desire of love’s happiness, and he experienced a great repentance for having surrendered to it their hope in a new future for their love. But more supreme was the woman’s shame for having fallen into the net of the senses, she so proud, so modest, and so chaste even in passion. Her sorrow was the more supreme for having ever believed that love can be reborn from its ashes. ”

“ The amorous fluid that thousands of lovers gathered wherever they lived, wherever they moved in Venice—that amorous fluid that emanates from her quiet waters, from the balconies of her palaces, from the veiled voices of those who sing in flowering gardens on quiet side canals, that emanates from the gloomy colour of her gondolas, from the whiteness of the marble which the water has left intact or obscured, which emanates from every lineament of the place and from every tint of the sky, enveloped Marco Fiore and Maria Guasco, and multiplied their flame into a precipitous tumult of their lives. ”

“ Youth, primal and fresh, proceeded from all the whiteness in which she walked, like one of those dense, soft, white clouds which give a sense of spiritual voluptuousness to the eyes. Her beauty was illuminated by it, and beneath the transparency of her complexion her blood coursed more lively, rendering more rosy her delicate and expressive countenance. Only her eyes contained a tinge of disturbance in their colour, undecided between grey and blue. Something proud and sad concealed them, sometimes even extinguishing their glance. Donna Maria’s mouth, too, had not a shadow of a smile. ”

“ Maria, my wife has smiled five or six times in one year of matrimony, and hasn’t laughed once. Ah, I have tried to tear the closely knit and invisible texture in which she is clothed even because of this, and I have asked her whatever she could wish from me beyond this certainty that I am no longer yours, whatever else she could expect from a man, a companion and a husband beyond this great and absolute dedication to her happiness which should be sufficient for any woman. She lowered her eyelids, closed her little mouth as usual, all her face became as marble. ”

“ Love doesn’t last for life. Life is so long, love is so short.”
“Oh, what sadness, Maria! what sadness! I shall never console myself.”
“I too shall never console myself, Marco, never.”
Again they were silent, desperate and bowed down beneath their fate, as if separated by an iron wall and divided in soul, incapable of passing over or breaking down that wall. They felt as well the weight of time which was falling on their heads, and the mortal tedium which was enveloping them in that so far profitless conversation. ”

“ In your house of love, lady mine, in that house where the magnificent flower of our passion sprouted and sent forth its celestial perfumes, in that house, which alone of the dream will remain uncancellable in our minds as the house of the most beautiful dream of our lives, I know you are weeping in despair because you no longer love me. I see you weeping about your barren heart, about your exhausted soul, your spent desire, about everything where love is dead. I see sighs swell your throat, and your head fall convulsively on your pillow. ”

“ Do you wish instead to stop in your home as a stranger and an enemy? Do you wish to live and give yourself to him, as a courtesan whom he pays and despises? Do you wish to live, if you refuse yourself to him, in an inferno? To-morrow he will hate you, and you will be forced either to fly again ridiculously or become the lover of Gianni Provana, and afterwards of another Gianni Provana, descending to every abyss to make something of your life. ”

“ All are right and all are wrong confronted with love, Maria.”
“And Vittoria? Vittoria? the unlucky Vittoria? What will become of her? What will she say of me? Marco, think, think, what a horrible business!”
“She will curse us justly,” resumed Marco, with deep sadness; “she will be right, like Emilio, to curse us, but confronted with love she will be wrong.”
“Who will console Vittoria, Marco?”
“I have tried to console her, but she despised my consolations. Like all exigent people who ask too much from life, Vittoria has only gathered delusion and bitterness.” ”

“ Formerly she did not care for the perfume of flowers in her bedroom, fearing its insidious poison; but the green of gardens and meadows, of fields and mountains, the healthy green of leaves and grasses pleased her simple open spirit, her sane and beautiful youth. The ink was fresh in the pen on the writing-table, just as if her last letter had been written an instant ago, and near by was a book in a dark-green binding, a book unfinished with the marker in its place—Salammbo, of Gustave Flaubert.
Thus Donna Maria had the feeling of the abolition of time. ”

“ This is the cross that I have been carrying for a year, at first with energy and Christian courage, sustained by a burning desire for expiation, by a burning desire to repair the horrible suffering inflicted on others, to heal all the deep evil inflicted on others, and in fact with the great and lofty hope of giving all the happiness possible to the man who deserved it. Marco, how happily I embraced my cross at first, and how I suffered with humility and simplicity, like a child that feels it deserves all its punishment, or some self-effacing creature who performs every deep act of contrition! ”