Senso (And Other Stories)

by Camillo Boito

  The drunken hussy hardly stirred. I shoved some cushions under her head and went to open the window. Freezing fog entered the room like dense smoke. There was nothing to be seen, not even the streetlights. But from the entrance to the inn came the sound of trunks being loaded onto the omnibus. I was seized with an urgent desire to leave. The servant I called told me that this omnibus was just about to depart for the station, to catch the train to Turin, but there was no time to lose. I put a 500-lire note into a sealed envelope, which I handed the servant, saying, ‘Give this letter to the lady when she wakes, and send her home in a carriage. Then pack my bags with all that you find on the tables and in the drawers. Here are the keys. Send everything to my address in Turin. But first post me the bill, which I haven’t time to wait for now.’

  I threw my coat over my shoulders and left.

  (Signor Giorgio’s manuscript ends here)

  These papers were entrusted to me by Signor Giorgio three days after he arrived back in Turin. He had returned from Milan all but cured of his serious stomach ailment, and more active, more lively than before. I felt relieved. He wrote for a good part of the day, and when I asked him, ‘What is it that you’re writing so furiously, Signor Giorgio?’, he replied, ‘I’m writing my ugly confessions and doing my penance.’ Then he added in a most sad and resigned tone of voice, ‘My dear Maria, it’s a terrible penance!’

  On the morning of the fourth day he was unable to get out of bed. He had a burning fever. After a long visit the doctor shook his head and as he left he said in my ear, ‘This is the end.’

  Signor Giorgio could no longer swallow anything, not even diluted milk. And his fever continued more violently than ever. He was so weak, he could hardly lift his arm. He raved almost the whole time. He talked to himself under his breath. I often heard the names of Giorgetta and Signora Emilia, and at such moments his face would take on a blissful expression of bliss that reduced me to tears. Then his face would darken again, and he would close his eyes, as though some fearful image was tormenting him.

  One evening, the seventh after Signor Giorgio’s return, a servant came to fetch me. My patient seemed to be asleep, and I dared to leave him alone just for a moment. There was a woman wanting to speak to him. She insisted, she shouted. What a woman! How vulgar she looked! How brazen in her speech and manners! Never had such a woman set foot in this house before. She claimed that Signor Giorgio owed her money, how much I don’t know, and that she had come from Milan specially to collect it. I tried to quieten her, and just so that she would go I promised to let her in the following morning. She seemed prepared to leave, but as I returned to the bedroom, she quietly followed behind me, and Signor Giorgio, who had woken up, saw her. I put my hands together and begged her not to move and not to speak.

  In the pale glow of the night-lamp, my poor sick Giorgio stared at that despicable woman. His face grew serene, and he beckoned her close with his hand. ‘Emilia!’ he murmured. It was a sweet delirium, and certainly full of many fond images that could be seen on the dying man’s face. He wanted to say something, but he kept repeating certain words in such a faint voice that even I could not understand him. At last I managed to grasp that he was asking for the pearl necklace – a magnificent thing, his last present to Emilia, given to her a few days before she died. I took it from the cabinet and handed it to him.

  He accepted it with both hands. And making an effort I would not have thought him capable of, and indicating to that dreadful woman to bend down, he very slowly placed it round her neck. He smiled with sublime tranquillity.

  Having avidly examined the precious necklace, the woman twisted her lips in a smile of such base joy that it was a horror to see. A black gap, right in the middle of those white teeth, made her look even more sinister. Signor Giorgio stared at her, screamed with fright, then turned away, burying his face in the bolster, and breathed his last.

  VADE RETRO, SATANA

  I

  The priest stood motionless as he stared out, with his elbows resting on the windowsill. It was the first time in ten years that from his presbytery, in the highest village in the Trentino, he had seen a snowstorm down below, while the sun – a pale, almost frightened sun – shone on the houses in the hamlet and on the surrounding mountain-peaks.

  Now and again the priest coughed. His bare neck was thin and white, and at that moment his lean, handsome face looked impassive. Yet anyone who had studied his features closely could have discerned the man within: he had two straight lines running from his nostrils to the corners of his pale lips; across his broad, open forehead was a deep furrow at odds with the gentle, almost childlike expression in his eyes, of an ultramarine blue, like the waters of Lake Garda. The artery in his neck pulsed strongly. His delicate hands were feverishly clenched. His fair hair, swept back by the wind, covered his tonsure. And meanwhile the stormclouds gathered, billowing like waves in some fantastic squall; like an inland sea, filling the whole wide valley, which crashed against the ring of mountains, as though trying to bring down rocks, woods, and glaciers, to engulf them all in its own depths that were darker than a tomb. Now and then, these depths came into view in places, depending on the eddying of the storm, when a gap opened in the surge of clouds. Then the eye penetrated down into the valley, where lightning flashed, whilst from above the banks of dense white cloud-vapour the flashes seemed no more than flickers. One of these dark holes revealed the village of Cogo. Then this chasm closed and another opened in the distance, momentarily revealing the tower of the castle at Sanna.

  And the priest watched, sighing, with his fists clenched all the while. He had left his breviary open on the sill, and the wind playfully rifled its pages. But old Menico, who for some time had been standing behind the curate, muttering, seized the book with a typically petulant gesture, closed it and placed it on the writing-table. Then, gathering up the papers the wind had scattered on the floor, he said out loud, ‘What’s the point of trying to catch a cold! With nothing on your head and no scarf round your neck.’ And slightly under his breath he added, ‘You’re crazy, completely crazy.’

  He left the room, slamming the door behind him; but a moment later he was back, and went and fetched his master’s skull-cap that was lying on the bed, and, standing on tiptoe, placed it over the cleric’s tonsure.

  The priest turned round in irritation and, seizing the cap, threw it to the ground in front of Menico, shouting, ‘I’m hot, leave me alone.’ Then he went back to watching the clouds, but within two minutes he turned round again, his eyes searching for Menico. He had gone. The priest went into the kitchen; no sign of him there. He went up to the next floor, a kind of attic half open to the rain and snow; Menico was not there either. He found him at the foot of the creaking, narrow, wooden staircase, an outside staircase, leading from the first floor of the building down to the churchyard, where five or six peasants discussing the novelty of the thunderstorm, continued to stare, wide-eyed, into the valley, where the thunder had stopped rolling and the lightning had ceased to flash and the clouds were clearing.

  The priest went up to the old man and, holding out his hand, he said to him so that the peasants could hear, ‘Menico, I’m sorry.’

  The old man averted his face, shrugging his shoulders and keeping his hands in his pockets. He was small, thin and gaunt; his beard, shaved the week before, and bristling like pins, was not so much grey as white, but the thick eyebrows over his tiny little eyes were still inky-black.

  The priest inclined his thin body and in a quiet, gentle voice humbly repeated, ‘Menico, please forgive me.’

  The peasants sniggered.

  All of a sudden the old man seized the priest’s hand, not giving him time to withdraw it, and kissed it several times. And those tiny little eyes were shining with tears.

  Back in his room, the priest picked up his breviary again. Having read scarcely two pages, following the text intently with his eyes and voicing every syllable under his breath, as the Church requires, he dejectedly closed the bo
ok. ‘I can’t,’ he murmured, ‘I can’t. The office should be recited with attention and devotion: Officium recitandum est attente et devote … Yet I feel in every limb a restlessness that I cannot explain, as though thousands of ants were crawling all over my body. I try to fix my mind on one thought or another, and my mind wanders where it will, delighting in a hundred strange and childish new images. It’s probably the atmosphere, so charged with electricity today. Perhaps my usual touch of feverishness is getting worse.’

  He went down on his knees before a gaunt crucifix, and remained there for several minutes, with his hands joined together, his head bowed, whispering prayers. Then abruptly standing up, he said, ‘Oratio sine attentione interna non est oratio.’

  At that moment the priest’s dog, a splendid hunting-dog, came bursting into the room, and began to bound around his beloved master, who patted him distractedly, and repeated to himself, while continuing to strike his aching breast with clenched fist, ‘A priest should always be serene, like the sun just a little while ago; he should contemplate the storm from above, calm, pure, and intangible.’

  The local doctor, who looked after the three villages in the Val Castra, entered without knocking. He was clean-shaven and smartly dressed.

  ‘Good morning, Father. Hurry up and take off that jacket, put on your collar and your best coat, and come with me. The devil summons you, Father – but what a charming devil! She was frantic, and what she said was this: “My dear Doctor” (she actually said that – “my dear Doctor”), “run over to the priest’s house at once. Tell him how unwell I am, and say that I need to hear the voice of heaven, that I’m a lost sheep ready to return to the fold.” And she kept saying, “I want the priest, I want Don Giuseppe.” ’

  The priest turned pale and solemn. ‘Is she in danger of dying?’ he asked.

  The doctor burst out laughing. ‘You want to bury us all, Father. It’s an attack of nerves: a lady of leisure’s ailment. I wasn’t even allowed to take her pulse. She sent me over without giving me time to draw breath. And, I’ll have you know, I’ve come straight from Ledizzo, on a donkey, with these stormclouds and lightning overhead. It’s lucky I had my umbrella and overcoat. Well, Don Giuseppe, are you coming or not?’

  ‘I’m not coming,’ replied the priest, whose brow and throat had turned fiery red. And raising his fists, he added, in a voice fit to make the walls tremble, ‘That woman and her protectors are an abomination, and they’ll be the ultimate ruin of this valley, God damn them!’

  The doctor was shocked, and looking the priest in the eye, he murmured, ‘Father, some Christian charity!’

  ‘Christian charity? I live on polenta and cheese, and a little pork occasionally, although my weak, emaciated body – which, as you know, doctor, is being consumed by a lingering but unsparing disease – ought to be better nourished. I live in the midst of this village’s squalor, sharing the misfortunes of these mountainfolk, to whom I have given the little left to me by my father and what little I have earned in the last ten years. In the evenings during the eight months of winter I take it upon myself to teach the youngsters in the village, and there’s not a boy or girl over the age of seven who doesn’t know how to read and write and to distinguish between good and evil. I told the bishop, who wanted to send me to a parish down on the plain, “Monsignor, I now love the loneliness and the snow, the hardships and the ingratitude.”

  ‘I really do love the grandeur of this wild landscape, where my body has remained pure and where I have lived until now in a precious state of spiritual poverty. A little while ago I had to forsake my keenest worldly pleasure – hunting – and give up my long solitary walks along the mountain-ridges. My skin, once so rough and brown’ – and the priest pitifully examined his own hands – ‘has become soft and white, like a leisured lady’s. They say that I look younger now that I’m so thin and pale. I’m thirty, and I pass for twenty. I’m turning into a boy again. Who’s giving me back my health and strength?’

  The doctor smiled, and the priest went on.

  ‘One day in Trento the Vicar-General said to me ironically, ‘You, Father, live in the mountains of Arcadia.’ All but a few of my parishioners look at me askance. Christian charity!

  ‘And then this village, the highest and poorest in the Trentino, where the men are hard-working, sober and honest, and the women have no other beauty but their virtue, is descended upon by a gang of swindlers and whores. They invent some story about mines. They proclaim from the rooftops that Nature has deposited riches of iron in our soil. The Tyrolese and German newspapers are full of advertisements and praise for the famous Valle di Castra Iron Company. Five thousand shares at five hundred lire each, with interest and dividends of at least one hundred per cent! They’ll find fools to buy them, they’ll pocket millions of lire, a considerable amount at least, and then clear out, leaving another two caves in our mountains – two empty holes. But meanwhile the head of the enterprise and his mistress take up residence here for a few weeks in a makeshift mansion, and there are servants, workmen and whores filling the village with scandal; taverns open, there’s dancing all night long, and drunkenness, and worse. At the mines, at the ironworks, they regard us as simpletons. Three families from the village have already sold their heifers in exchange for these wonderful mining-shares: others will follow their example. The material ruin can be remedied, but there’ll be no cure for the moral degradation. Two of the most innocent village-girls, one of eighteen, the other sixteen-year-old Giulia …’

  The priest’s thick, impassioned voice all of a sudden broke off after what had been a torrent of words. It had seemed that he would never stop; he had not even once coughed. Indignation had been simmering in that artless soul for some time, and now it had boiled over. But after what he had just said, Don Giuseppe became suddenly embarrassed and subdued. He studied the doctor’s face for any sign that he had been able to guess what was coming next. And he was a little comforted to see that the doctor had his head bowed, as though stunned by the passion of his long sermon. The priest’s eyes travelled to a corner of the room, and settled for a moment on the crucifix, which seemed to him even more blood-stained and sorrowful than usual, and he said a short but most fervent inward prayer. A deaf person, skilled at lip-reading, would have identified from the nervous movements of the priest’s lips, a few fragmentary phrases: Strictissima obligatio … inviolabiliter … sigillum confessionis.

  Meanwhile, the doctor was smiling, thinking of the priest’s lack of sophistication. He himself had completed his medical studies in no less a place than Vienna, and during those eight months he had seen some really pretty girls. He had even told his wife about them, in scarcely veiled terms. Yes, gentlemen, in order to broaden the mind and not allow oneself to be ensnared by foolish and sentimental ideas; to acquire experience of the world, and to learn good manners, it is necessary to live at least for a while in the capital. Only bears can be reared in the mountains. The furthest the priest had ever been, poor fellow, was to Trento!

  ‘Don Giuseppe, allow me to speak plainly: forgive me for saying so, but you seem to me somewhat pessimistic.’

  Having spoken these words to test the ground, as it were, the doctor paused, awaiting a response. The response did not come: Don Giuseppe had assumed a composed and tranquil expression.

  Plucking up courage, the doctor went on. ‘It may well be, I don’t deny it, that your expectations are well founded, and that some terrible catastrophe looms over this poor valley. But it could also turn out – who knows? – that things go smoothly. They’re working in the mines, they’ve taken samples – it’s not impossible that metal will be extracted, especially as there are vestiges of many old ironworks in our mountains. If the company were to do well, think of the wealth it would bring to all the places around here! Besides, once our noble banker has got his business going and his fancy for mountain life is satisfied, he’ll depart with his entourage, leaving behind the real workers, the honest toilers. And everything will return to normal, with
a bit more money and a few more amenities, which are certainly needed.’

  ‘God willing!’

  It was a ‘God willing’ interjected at that point just to change the subject. Indeed, without pausing, the priest went on to ask the doctor, ‘Tell me, now, how’s Signora Carlina today?’

  ‘Not too bad, thank you. She’s not eating much, almost nothing at all, although I make her come with me for the walk as much as possible.’

  ‘And in good spirits?’

  ‘So so. When I go out in the morning or after dinner on my medical rounds – what you might call my daily travels – she puts her arms around me and starts to cry. Sometimes, I confess, I rather lose patience.’

  ‘Bear with her, Doctor. She’s a child, and she loves you so much. I’ll go further and say: try to treat her with infinite indulgence, with every loving care and kindness. Treat her like a tender and delicate young sapling, transplanted only three months ago and in need of being watered – with affection.’

  ‘She’s not really ill. A few headaches, that’s all. But she’s not putting on any weight. And then she’s so unsophisticated: she would like to be on her own all the time, or with me. She hates meeting new people. In fact, to tell you the truth, Don Giuseppe, I’m embarrassed. The lovely Baroness is desperately keen to meet my wife. As soon as I enter the room, she cries, “And where’s the young bride?”