Senso (And Other Stories)

by Camillo Boito

  Your Arethusa’

  I could not leave that same evening, since the last train for Vienna had already gone, but I told the maid to wake me very early the next day. At five o’clock I was in the railway carriage, looking straight into the sun, veiled in a light mist as it rose behind a thicket of trees, casting upon the meadows, hills and mountains the gentle warmth of its light. As the train sped along, I watched the sky, observing the rapid changes in its delicate, transparent colours, like those of a vast prism, in which every hue blended into the next with the softest of shadings not to be found in any palette.

  Carlotta’s letter had given me a rather disturbed night. I had the strangest nightmares, in which Karl Gulz kept reappearing in various, horribly fantastic guises. I did not sleep much. But when I got out of bed and opened the windows, all these ugly thoughts vanished. I reasoned to myself in the following manner: Like all men who spend most of the time alone, studying, Gulz needs to expound the ideas and feelings that accumulate inside him during those long hours of solitude – especially as he spends them with the dead. Inevitably, these ideas and feelings, maturing in an anatomist’s operating theatre, must have a tendency to be unwholesome, gruesome, inhuman. Moreover, anyone used to doing what he will with inanimate things is inclined to believe that he should also have his own way on those rare occasions when he deals with the living. Added to which, Gulz might have drunk a few more glasses than usual. So his absurd oath – absurd because even if Carlotta were to die in Vienna, he would not be able to gain possession of her body – should not be taken seriously. In any case, Carlotta was the very picture of health. And besides, had Carlotta properly understood what Gulz had said, or rather, had she not unintentionally twisted his words to match the fears already in her mind? In short, partly by virtue of this reasoning, partly because I was already accustomed to Carlotta’s innocent foibles, I was incapable of thinking of anything but the happiness of our forthcoming idyll in the white villa and shaded garden of Teufelsmühle.

  At Perchtoldsdorf station, the train I was travelling in met the one coming from Vienna, which was carrying the post and newspapers. A news-vendor began to shout at the top of his voice: ‘Wiener Zeitung, Presse, Wanderer, Ost-deutsche Post, Morgenpost, Vaterland, Glocke – all the morning papers, sirs, straight off the press!’ And he repeated the litany all over again. Some people bought this paper, and some bought that. I asked for the Glocke, because I knew that it was very prompt in reporting on the works on show in the Exhibition and I was, after all, very curious to know what impression my painting had made on the public over the last two days.

  Under the heading ‘Fine Arts’, I found an article in which the most fulsome praise was lavished on my artistic skill. The critic expounded in great detail on my brushstroke and palette, detecting in them all kinds of lofty, aesthetic, philosophical and moral qualities. He demonstrated that Arethusa’s body, being of such perfection that Nature could not have created the like, must have been composed as bees make honey from flowers, or as Zeusi used the five young maidens of Croton to paint his Helen. Then followed a dissertation on the Ideal. He compared me a little with Correggio, Veronese, and Rubens, and a great deal with Minerva who emerged from Jove’s brain fully armed. He concluded thus: ‘We must end this encomium with an expression of regret. After being exposed to the avid viewing of the public and of artists and critics for only two days, this excellent work was bought today, as the gallery closed, and removed from the Exhibition. We do not know the name of the happy purchaser, but we hope that he will satisfy an honest curiosity, and return the work to the Exhibition for a few days more. The fault lies entirely with the Society’s rules, which do not specify a minimum period for which a work must remain on show. This is not the first time that we have said this, but let us hope that this latest deplorable instance finally serves to open the eyes of the society’s honourable administrators.’

  The article was no masterpiece of criticism and style, but vanity is so eager to be flattered that I was very pleased. The trees along the route seemed to me extremely slow in passing, so impatient was I to show Carlotta the praises we had received, and to tell her that once we were in the country we would soon be working on another painting, ten times more beautiful than Arethusa. My thoughts went back to the ideas for paintings that had already occurred to me, while my hands turned the pages of the newspaper and my eyes strayed over the characters printed upon them. So, almost without taking anything in, I skimmed through some political news stories, then a few odd items reported lower down the page in the ‘Local News’ section. This was among them:

  ‘ACCIDENT. At about ten thirty this morning, the funeral of the Contessina von Bardach, who has died at the age of twenty, was marked by one those misadventures that unfortunately we are obliged to lament almost daily. The coffin was covered with a white pall and garlanded with fresh flowers. The Contessina’s young friends followed the hearse on foot, and behind them came the long line of carriages with relatives and family friends. The funeral procession, which had taken the road along the Danube to the Nussdorf cemetery, was just passing the Rossauer Lände, where the road narrows and the river has no parapet, when a woman, in her haste to step back, fell into the water and was carried a hundred metres downstream before she could be rescued. She was pulled unconscious from the river. And since no indication of her name or address were found, she was taken straight to the General Hospital. We have no further information. She is said to have been young and beautiful.’

  I had read this item casually, but the last sentence arrested my attention. I reread it from the beginning. Every word seemed to blaze before me. My head felt as if it were on fire. I took Carlotta’s letter from my wallet. I compared the date of the letter with that of the ‘Local News’ story: they were the same. The paper reported that the incident had occurred around ten thirty in the morning, and the letter said: ‘It’s already almost ten in the morning, I want to go and post this letter, and then I want to go for a walk by myself, up along the Danube.’ And the incident had taken place along the Danube, upstream. And then there was her fear of death, her phobia, her invincible horror of funerals. And the victim’s youth. And beauty. Everything reinforced the terrible apprehension in my mind. In vain I sought and prayed for a reason that would free me of the dreadful certainty already wringing my heart and choking me. I begged the people who had bought other newspapers to let me glance through them for a moment. One gentleman was slow in giving me his; I snatched it from his hand. He said nothing – I think he thought I was mad. The Morgenpost merely reported the story in the same words as the Glocke. The others did not mention it at all. In the meantime, we had arrived at Liesing. I leapt out and implored the stationmaster to send at once, to Dr Herzfeld’s address, a telegram in which I told my friend to hurry to the South station to meet me. When I got back to my compartment, I found it empty. Apparently my travelling companions, not feeling too sure about me, had changed carriages. I do not know what I did. I only remember gripping on to the bars of the luggage rack, close to the ceiling, and straining my arms until I heard them crack.

  At last we arrived at the South station, where Herzfeld was waiting for me. I took him by the arm and, dragging him after me, rushed him out of the station.

  ‘Have you any news of Carlotta?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You haven’t see her today, or yesterday?’

  ‘No. I never have any occasion to see her. And you yourself told me that she has no liking for doctors.’

  ‘Do you know anything about a woman who fell into the Danube yesterday morning and was taken to the General Hospital?’

  ‘Nothing at all.’

  I reached the height of exasperation. I squeezed my friend’s wrist so hard that he broke free, shouting with annoyance, ‘Damn it, you’re hurting me. Have you gone mad?’ I apologized, and since we had meanwhile climbed into a two-horse carriage, which was taking us almost at a gallop to my lodgings on Franz-Josefs-Quai, I handed Herzfeld Carlotta’s lett
er, together with the newspaper, pointing out to him how the letter ended, the relevant article, and the date on both of them. I stared at him.

  He turned pale, but at once recovering himself, he said, ‘It’s a strange coincidence, but Carlotta is not the only young woman in Vienna, nor the only beautiful one, and she certainly isn’t the only one who walked along the Danube yesterday morning.’

  ‘But what about her dread of funerals?’

  ‘And how do you know that the poor woman stepped back in fear? And in any case, unconsciousness and death are two different things. And by now that woman is probably suffering no more than the memory of having got wet.’

  These words planted a seed of hope in me. Noticing this, and wanting to distract me, my friend went on, ‘Besides, I’ve some good news for you, and three thousand florins that come with it. Your painting …’

  ‘I know, it’s been bought.’ I cut him short with a gesture of annoyed indifference.

  ‘It’s been bought, and with no argument about the price. Yesterday evening the Director of the Society handed the money over to me, as your representative. I gave him a receipt for it. And here it is – three thousand florins, which I brought with me, thinking, when I received the telegram, that you might be in need of them.’

  ‘You keep them for now, please.’

  ‘No, no, take them.’

  And I did, stuffing the bundle of notes into the breast pocket of my suit.

  ‘Who bought the picture?’ I added.

  ‘No one knows.’

  ‘What do you mean, no one knows?’

  ‘That’s what the Director told me. The buyer didn’t leave his name, and he had the painting taken away by his own porters, without a moment’s delay.’

  As we approached Franz Josefs-Quai, I felt my fever of impatience growing. The carriage stopped outside my house.

  ‘Signora Carlotta?’ I asked the caretaker in a voice choked with fearful anxiety. A flicker of joy went through me at the sight of the man’s placid face.

  He replied calmly, ‘I haven’t seen her since yesterday morning. I assumed that the young lady had gone to join you in the country.’

  ‘To the General Hospital, quickly,’ I shouted to the coachman, ‘quickly, at full speed.’

  My friend tried to comfort me. But by now I was overcome with despair and no longer listening to him. However, he insisted that I promise to behave reasonably, to stay close to him, on no account to talk to anybody, and to leave everything to him, since he knew his way around the hospital and was no stranger to the doctors and nurses.

  V

  Eight or nine orderlies, in their pale-green, wax-canvas gowns, which came down to their ankles and were buttoned up to the chin, were seated in the lobby, chatting. The main entrance, at the far end of the lobby, was closed. We went up three steps, through a door to the left of the wooden gate, and as we opened it a bell rang, with a loud silvery sound that made me jump.

  My earlier state of overwrought despair had given way to a sinister, almost cynical calm. I observed myself as though I were another person. My mind focused with dispassionate attention on the most insignificant details: I remember that, while Herzfeld searched through the enormous hospital register, I stared at a patch of damp on the room’s bare wall, and somehow detecting in it the forms of fighting men, I was reminded of Leonardo da Vinci.

  Nevertheless, I heard Herzfeld remark to a doctor on duty, ‘I can’t find in the register under “Admissions” any mention of a young woman who was pulled out of the Danube yesterday and, according to the newspapers, brought to this hospital around eleven in the morning.’

  ‘It could be that the papers published a complete yarn,’ replied the doctor. ‘They publish so many! Have you looked under “Discharges”?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is she there?’

  ‘No, she isn’t.’

  ‘That certainly means, then, that if she came in, she hasn’t left, or at least that she didn’t leave the place alive. But anyway she might well be here. Sometimes, in urgent cases, the patients are taken straight to the wards, and that fool of a porter forgets to register them.’

  ‘Let’s go to the wards then,’ Herzfeld said to me.

  I followed him. We came into a huge quadrangle, with colonnades all the way round, planted with lots of fine trees. The tops of the trees stood out against the white rendering of the floor above. Lined up on one side were at least thirty stretchers, all folded away in their dingy blue testers with a white dove at one end. We entered a very long ward on the ground floor. The small high windows opening onto the arcade did not let in much light and must have been of little use for ventilation, because as we came through the door I felt my throat contract at the horrid stench.

  My friend said to me, ‘You must look carefully. The nurses, Sisters of Charity, and the doctors work in shifts; we can’t rely on their information.’

  Then began our sorry search. Herzfeld and I examined those patients’ faces one by one – thin, white faces, with dull, sunken eyes, and colourless lips. None complained. The facial convulsions of some betrayed their acute internal pain. Others seemed to suffer not so much bodily pain as mental anguish. And there were those, humming to themselves, who showed how tenacious hope can be. One woman was asleep: we went up to the top of the bed and, gently lifting the sheet, uncovered her gaunt face.

  And so we went through the second ward, the third, the fourth, and goodness knows how many others, until we emerged into the big quadrangle again, at the far end of another side of the portico, and came into a second, smaller courtyard, also planted with trees, then into a third, where we climbed up a wide staircase to the first-floor loggia. Herzfeld stopped frequently to talk to the attendants and doctors.

  I did not hear what they said, but I saw that they answered my friend’s questions with negative gestures or by shaking their heads, as though saying, ‘We know nothing about it.’ My heart-beat was regular, but when I put my hand to my forehead it was wet with perspiration.

  ‘Another thirty rooms to check,’ said Herzfeld. ‘We’ve already seen about five hundred patients,’ he added. ‘There are at least another seven hundred.’

  The wards on the first floor had higher ceilings, were airier and lighter; the beds seemed cleaner and the patients less sad. In the tubercular ward, there was hardly any coughing to be heard. The patients were nearly all young women, and nearly all of them beautiful. One looked like an angel. She was sitting in bed, covered up to her hips with a blanket. Her clean night-dress, buttoned at the collar and at the wrists, fell in small straight pleats over her thin chest; her arms lay on either side of her, and her hands, with their palms turned up, were white and shapely. Her brown hair was spread on the broad pillow, framing her extremely pale face – a face that Fra Angelico would have drawn with a sigh; and from that drawing Donatello would have modelled in pure alabaster those lovely, wan cheeks, that fine chin and clear brow, those thin lips and that somewhat aquiline nose. Her eyes were fixed, with a direct, level gaze, on something beyond the wall of the room, perhaps beyond this earth. A ray of sunshine, entering through the nearby window and falling on the sheets, cast a reflected light on that calm face, which seemed to me encircled with a halo. We had not noticed a man sitting beside the bed, with his face buried in his hands, and his head resting on the blanket. At the sound of our footsteps, he stood up. He was a white-haired, emaciated old fellow. Tears sprang from his eyes and his breathing was broken with sobs. As we passed by, he whispered to us in a tone of dreadful desperation, ‘She’s my daughter!’

  We went through that ward, then another, and yet another, and on and on. My body was exhausted, my limbs were trembling, but my mind, still alert, observed everything, noticed everything, with the kind of concentration, at once intense and abstracted, that sometimes follows or accompanies great emotional disturbances. Three times, at three beds where, you could tell, the long shape of what was already a corpse lay covered with a brown blanket, Herzfeld stopped to re
ad the cards with the patient’s details recorded on them.

  There remained only the patients in the surgical wards to visit – there my ears were assailed for the first time by high-pitched screams – and in the clinical wards, where the professors were just then giving instruction to students at the bedsides. Old Grun was standing beside one woman, pointing out to about a dozen young men goodness knows what notable scientific case. The poor woman had raised her arms and crossed them over her face to hide, while the professor’s slow voice droned on. A brief and unclear glimpse of the arms, shoulders and bosom of that woman, who had a splendid figure, suddenly made me see red. I was about to rush towards the bed in a fury, when the beautiful patient, startled by the touch of Grun’s hand, turned her head so that her long hair – black as a raven’s wing – came tumbling down on the side. I instantly calmed down. ‘Better dead,’ I thought.

  ‘We’re done with the living,’ Herzfeld said to me as we came out of that last ward. ‘Let’s go downstairs.’

  We went back through the loggia wards, then down the staircase we had ascended, across the courtyards, and along the porticos, making for another corner of the large quadrangle. We walked straight through the part of the building reserved for men and came to the Observation Room, situated at the back of that vast area. In a huge, well-lit room were perhaps twenty beds, only five or six of them occupied by corpses, which science had not yet entirely relinquished to death. Tied to their hands and feet were four pieces of string leading to the next room, where guards kept watch night and day over the numbered bells to which the string was attached. The corpses were all male.

  As we came into a final courtyard, which was low-built and deserted, Herzfeld said to me, ‘Wait for me here. I won’t be more than minutes.’ And he disappeared.

  I was left on my own. Walking down the side with the sun beating down on it, I saw lizards hiding among the nettles. I came to a door with a sign saying, ‘Mortuary’. I went inside. The door slammed shut behind me with a great bang. The place was dark and empty. It was like a long corridor and, closed, at the far end was a big, heavy door with space above it for the only, fan-shaped window. The damp, brown, stone walls glistened, reflecting the dim, distant light; the floor was wet. I went up to the door and tried unsuccessfully to open it. As I turned back, I thought I discerned some whitish patches on the floor in the corner, by the door through which I had entered. I went up to them and saw that they were corpses. As I grew accustomed to the dark, I gradually began to distinguish their shapes. Three children lay side by side, as though trying to keep warm. Next was a line of six men, all of them naked, purple, stripped of flesh, with their eyes open. Then came five white crosses. I looked closer: these crosses lay upon five black sheets that were covering something. Taking care where I put my feet, I lowered my face right down next to them and, holding my breath, lifted the top edge of the first blanket to reveal the face and shoulders of a naked woman. After I had similarly examined the second, third, fourth and last – ‘She’s not here,’ I cried with joy, ‘she’s not here.’ And I was about to make my escape. But having tried in vain to lift the big latch on the door that opened onto the courtyard, and seeing another door, over in the corner, which was open, I went out that way, into a corridor leading to a big room some yards further along.