Senso (And Other Stories)

by Camillo Boito

  Her face was reminiscent of the head of that lovely Euterpe in the Berlin Museum: her nose ran in a straight line from her brow, with only the slightest curve; her elongated eyes, set a little higher towards the middle of her face, looked as though drawn with the arc of a compass; her closed lips were slightly down-turned at the corners of her mouth, with two barely perceptible lines running to her nostrils; while her chin and cheeks described the inverted curve of a perfect parabola. The statue of Euterpe has curly hair, presumably blonde. Carlotta’s hair was blonde and curly, and she wore it tied back, like that of the antique statue, with two heavy braids circling her brow and covering her ears. However, there was in Carlotta’s face none of that rather disdainful and solemn coldness almost always the characteristic of Greek faces. In her case, the Attic perfection of form bore the mark of a true, easy and candid gaiety. And light-blue eyes completed the portrait of this ingenuous creature.

  As for her colouring, Titian’s splendour and Van Dyck’s subtlety could not have captured it. Wonderful transitions, almost from blue to vermilion, registered upon that snowy-whiteness: beneath that smooth, fresh, transparent skin there was passionate life flowing. This woman was the embodiment of grace, vigour, and health. When I was out with Carlotta in Vienna, that city of beautiful women, people would turn in admiration. One morning, on the Graben, that strange fellow Raal, who was then painting the frescoes in the Arsenale, suddenly burst out with these words: ‘Ah, if only she could have been the model for my Germania!’ And he bowed to her, respectfully raising his hat.

  The Wurstel-Prater was full of opera-houses, playhouses, circuses, cabarets, cycloramas, magic lanterns, coffee-shops, concert halls, shooting booths, menageries, photographers’ galleries, street musicians, strolling players, acrobats, pedlars selling all kinds of things; and most of all of beer-houses. Thousands upon thousands of people wandered about, stopping here and there, some entering one booth, some another, buying this or that; jostling and crowding, and treading on each other’s feet, always with tolerant good-humour, with rough but fulsome courtesy. Laughter came as easily to those fleshy lips as beer went down those throats. The beer-houses were packed – some consisting of sumptuous rooms festooned and garlanded and adorned with silk and velvet, whilst others comprised a small wooden hut and a vast area marked out by a fence, with tables and chairs scattered all about. Anyone who could not find a seat settled down on the trampled grass. The slim, young serving-girls rushed to and fro non-stop, carrying glass mugs – ten at a time – brimful of silver-foaming, amber beer. A variety of lamps, torches, chandeliers, paper-lanterns of a hundred different colours and shapes illuminated that vast scene: in one area everything was bathed in light; a little way off everything was shrouded in virtual darkness. Looking up, you could see the dewy leaves on the big trees glistening and the heavenly heights twinkling. There was something mysterious about that Babel-like din, that infernal racket. Suddenly, amidst the welter of speech and guffaws of laughter from so many countless mouths, the harmonious strains of an orchestra reached the ear, or the raucous sound of the tightrope-walkers’ trumpet, or the sibilant note of a mouse-trainer’s pipe, or the roar of a lion in its cage, or the howling of a stray dog.

  The Wurstel-Prater was Carlotta’s supreme delight. She enjoyed everything. She laughed heartily at the antics of the clowns, stood open-mouthed in front of the puppets, and insisted on listening to the mountebanks’ patter from beginning to end. Once she made me climb into the narrow seat of a swing with her; then into a carriage on one of the carousels, and as we whirled round at top speed to the sound of a huge organ – I was almost beginning to feel dizzy – she playfully pointed out to me the two wooden dolphins that were supposed to be pulling us, and with childish glee she compared herself to Anphitrion and me to Neptune. The only thing she did not like were the wax-works.

  But that evening Carlotta was in a different mood. She seemed troubled by some vexing thought; her gaze was distracted, and she hardly smiled. Close to a circus, where I wanted to take her, knowing how much she liked horses, we heard several voices greeting us. It was the whole family – father, mother, five children, housemaid and cook – of the solemn clerk at the Census Office who rented us a part of his house: four rooms on Franz-Josefs-Quai, by the broad Danube Canal. They were on their way to catch the bus home, and Carlotta asked me to let her go back with them, saying that she felt a bit tired; that in an hour’s time I would find her more cheerful than ever, and (this she murmured with a divine smile) she would be even more loving than usual.

  I was left on my own in the midst of the throng.

  II

  I slowly made my way to a modest beer-house, away from the noise, where one of my dearest and closest friends, Dr Herzfeld, was in the habit of imbibing eight or nine mugs of beer at exactly this time of day. He was ten years older – or, to put it more kindly, less young – than me, and I was then aged twenty-four. He was short, fat, red-faced, with a pair of sparkling blue eyes.

  He practised medicine, and I was a painter. Between our respective fields of study, there was one area of common ground: anatomy – for which he had no inclination, and to which I felt an almost insuperable aversion. This repugnance had driven my old art-master to distraction, and made me the butt of my fellow students’ jokes. So, now and again, to prove my will-power and nerve, I had forced myself to tackle osteology, myology and other disciplines relating to the human body. Carlotta, to whom I never mentioned such unpleasant and depressing matters, had for the past four months been partly responsible for keeping me away completely from this gruesome research.

  Herzfeld was not alone. He was talking to another man. As soon as he caught sight of me, he leapt up and came rushing towards me. ‘It’s ages since we last saw each other,’ he said.

  ‘I’ve been very busy,’ I replied, ‘although I’ve been wanting to see you for some time.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ replied Herzfeld with one of his grimaces, which was intended to look sardonic, but was full of good-naturedness. ‘Yes, you’re busy being the happiest man on earth. I forgive you. Please God that you never have need of friends again, or of beer.’ And he gave me his glass, with the froth still foaming on it, which a rosy-cheeked young girl had just brought him. Then, presenting me to the gentleman who was with him, he told him my name, and introducing the gentleman to me, in a voice full of respect he uttered the single syllable, ‘Gulz.’

  ‘Karl Gulz?’

  Rising to his feet, the man gave a small, affirmative nod.

  ‘Karl Gulz, the anatomist?’

  He gave another nod, and sat down again, having waved at me to do likewise.

  There were two reasons for my amazement. Karl Gulz was already a famous name among German scientists and artists. His magnificent work on aesthetic anatomy had been published more than three years ago, and during one of my brief periods of arduous anatomical study I had read it from cover to cover. Now, whereas I expected him to be a man well advanced in age, the person I saw before me was a youth of almost childlike appearance. He was tall of stature, but extremely thin, like a boy grown too fast for his age. He wore glasses, and on closer inspection there were a few lines visible on his forehead, but he had extremely fair, wavy hair that came down over the collar of his black coat, and his chin was graced with nothing but a little yellow fuzz that looked like his first growth of beard. A sad, absorbed calmness was registered upon his countenance. Then I noticed that, when he spoke, his nose, which had a slight aquiline curve to it, gave his face a rather peculiar expression of rigid and almost sinister determination, an expression reinforced by the character of his voice, which had a soft sound, but came in bursts, with an impassioned edge to it.

  The second reason for my amazement lay in the vague similarity between Karl Gulz and the man whose features I had not been able to distinguish an hour ago in the shadows of twilight, and who had caused Carlotta to tremble and cry out. Had Carlotta known that he was an anatomist? Could that be why, being so squeamish, she had
been overcome with such fear? But was I not, perhaps, more likely deceived by a superficial likeness of stature, thinness, bearing, and dress?

  This amazement and these suspicions passed straight through my mind in a flash, and it cost me no effort to offer Gulz warm praise for his book, which, I said, had advanced both art and science.

  He replied with great simplicity, but with deep conviction. ‘That book, sir, is a youthful work, weak and inconclusive. My new theory required a great deal of evidence and very extensive development. I am now working on it, and with Nature’s assistance the work will be finished in seven years’ time.’

  ‘And meanwhile you live amongst corpses?’

  ‘A regular ten hours a day. In the nine years since I’ve been researching the beauty of the human body, I don’t remember having stolen even a few hours from my precious studies, except on a handful of occasions, and then through no fault of mine, I assure you. Time taken up during the day in search of live models, and in studying them, can be made up at night. But unfortunately, Fate isn’t often willing to favour me. Unfortunately, it very rarely happens that perfect models end up on my white marble slab!’

  ‘For nine years you’ve been studying the human body, Doctor! You must have been very young when you began your anatomical investigations.’

  ‘When I first began to work on the human body I was a little over twenty, but I had worked on other animals since I was a boy. I lived in the country and my father was a vet. I remember that as soon as lunch was over I would rush off to do my homework in a kind of stable all of my own that was full of birds, hens, and rabbits. Once I had finished yawning over my grammar and arithmetic, I would become engrossed in my childhood investigations and experiments. At about ten in the evening, my father used to come and fetch me by the ears, and drag me off to bed. Often I would wait until everyone was asleep, then get up again, and quietly tiptoe back to my stable, where sometimes the cry of one of my animals would betray me, and I would tearfully have to forgo the results of my experiment. Later, I moved on to dogs, cats, horses …’

  Herzfeld, who had been listening in silence until then, broke in, saying, ‘And you published an article in the Universal Review of Anatomy, entitled ‘An anatomical investigation into the moral disposition of domestic animals’.’

  ‘Quite so. I was sixteen when I wrote it.’

  ‘I know the article. It’s the work of an old man, not the work of a child. But anyone who wanted to deduce the individual character of a man from his bones and muscles …’

  ‘… would to some extent be doing what I myself am doing,’ said Gulz. ‘And I’m not the first, for there have been hundreds of others, before and since Gall and Lavater, who have undertaken the same research.’

  ‘But with what results, Doctor?’

  ‘Very limited, it’s true. Because their methods were inadequate. It’s not just the external form of the body or the shape of the skull that need to be examined, but the entire human machinery. Everything is connected, it’s all one and the same. That which most people call the mind is indistinguishable from what everyone is accustomed to call matter.’

  ‘Thought is matter! How do you prove that, Doctor?’ I asked, taking up the conversation.

  ‘And, if you’ll forgive me, how do you prove that thought is spirit? What is this spirit that you speak of, what is this mind? Man’s vanity has tried to create for itself some indefinable attribute, distinct from molecules and the forces of nature. The idea of such an attribute is abhorrent, because it breaks the laws of the universe, and it’s bound to seem puerile, because ultimately it’s meaningless and explains nothing. Doesn’t it seem to you more natural to believe that thoughts and feelings are nothing but the infinite and extremely rapid combinations, in every little brain-cell, of infinitely small atoms, which move, group together, break apart, reassemble, become dormant, and reawaken? It thus becomes easy to explain sleep, dreams, memory, sudden recollections, flights of fancy, the disciplined exercise of judgement, and so on.’

  ‘And death?’

  ‘Death is the putrefaction of thought-matter: the putrefaction of the mind.’

  ‘What about passion? What about Man’s genius?’

  ‘From just ninety numbers, more than forty-three million five-number sequences can be formed. Given there are billions and billions of thought-molecules, surely their various combinations can account for all human genius, knowledge and passions.’

  ‘What about the mother who weeps for her sick child, or the woman embracing her lover, and Goethe writing Faust, and Dante Alighieri dictating The Divine Comedy …’

  ‘Special complex crystallizations, so to speak; phenomena whose whys and wherefores have not yet been discovered. They will be.’

  ‘And, forgive me, Doctor, will we then be able to recreate, in a physics or chemistry or anatomy laboratory, the mental processes of a Goethe and a Dante, a mother’s tears, or a young bride’s smile?’

  ‘In small part – who knows? But admittedly, in very small part …’

  ‘I should think so, too.’

  ‘… because Man has infinitely lesser means at his disposal than lie within the power of Nature, and because Nature’s skill is infinitely superior to that which we command. For instance, we know of what substance the rose is made, how it germinates, nourishes itself, breathes, grows, flowers, and propagates. Yet, even though a rose does not think, are we able to recreate a rose for ourselves? Mind you, instruments are now becoming more sophisticated and Man’s eye more expert. Already, with a simple electric current, we know how to reproduce the expressions of life on the face of a corpse: a smile, a sneer, a look of contempt, of wounded pride, a severe frown, the grimace of someone catching a bad smell, or the serene radiance of a joyful face. The voltaic battery, the microscope, chemical reagents, surgical operations, medical observations – what marvellous advances have not contributed to the study of the human body? And has not greater advantage yet to be taken of magneticism and – who knows? – of some other fluid as yet overlooked? Who can say to science: this is the limit? Who would ever have guessed that with the aid of a small glass prism a man would be capable of discovering, as he did a few years ago, that some elements, previously unknown to him and to any other human being on earth, could be made to burn in the sunlight? The sun has enabled us to find rubidium, caesium, thallium, and indium. We conduct experiments with the sun – what more is there to be said! There’s just one master we ought to bow down and worship: and that is Science …’

  As he spoke, Karl Gulz’s face had assumed a solemn and mystical expression. His eyes shone and his brow seemed enormous. At the word ‘Science’, he had risen to his feet and, removing his hat, looked up to heaven. ‘There’s a priest in that man,’ I thought, and I bowed my head in respect.

  After a brief pause he went on. ‘I live for science. I’ve never loved, suffered, rejoiced for anything but science. In my hour of joy, I embrace it; in my hour of distress, I invoke it; in my hour of pride, I raise an altar to it. But the man who studies feels that his hands are tied. It’s true, we’re no longer in the days of Vesalius, who had to disinter half-putrefied cadavers by night, in the Cemetery of the Innocents, or remove from the gallows of Montfaucon bodies already devoured more or less by crows and vultures. And but for such sublime audacity on his part, mankind would not have that famous treatise by Notomia, published in Basle, in 1543 …’

  ‘With drawings by Calcar, I believe?’

  ‘Precisely. And Vesalius was sentenced by the Tribunal of the Inquisition to make a penitential pilgrimage to Jerusalem, just because he thought it necessary, in order to verify his hypothesis, to break open the ribcage of a man whose heart was still beating.’

  ‘It’s a horrifying thing to have done.’

  ‘Horrifying, why? I don’t suppose you’re horrified or that you cry shame and sacrilege when, through the wilfulness of a minister or prince, in order to conquer a piece of land that one nation steals from another, thousands upon thousands of m
en – who only a short while before were fine, honest, healthy young men – die in the most terrible anguish, out in the field with the sun beating down upon them, or in some pestilential hospital room. What is the benefit to humanity? What good will it do their grandchildren? So many wasted opportunities for experiments! You complain that doctors are ignorant, and you don’t allow them to study.

  ‘Who was the more human: the great Napoleon when he gave the orders for those glorious and pointless bloodbaths, or Ptolemy when he gave the physician Herophilus more than six hundred criminals, already condemned to death, to be dissected alive, so that science should derive some benefit from their bodies – a science that over the centuries has served the lives of millions of men. Cosimo de’ Medici, a refined Florentine, did the same for the physician Fallopius. And was Fallopius, who carried out live experiments solely for love of science, any more barbarous than you, Herzfeld, or me, who for a discourteous word would run a man through, without scruple?

  ‘You know,’ Gulz rushed on with feverish enthusiasm, still addressing me, ‘you know that in order to depict Prometheus being torn to pieces by the vulture, Parrhasius bought an old and venerable prisoner, then had him brought to his studio and proceeded to slash his liver with a sharp blade, and while the old man died in atrocious agony, the unruffled artist observed, studied and painted.’

  ‘I know. It’s a spine-chilling story that defies belief.’

  ‘It’s told by Seneca, who admittedly was not afraid of death, and he tells it as though it were something quite ordinary and completely natural. The fact is, those men of ancient times ranked the passion for truth above every other. For them, science had tremendous rights. Humanity counted for more than any man. In their understanding of the good they showed great courage and iron will, with no womanish sentimentality, or childish fears, or weak-minded scruples. They were men.’