V
ON ONE OF THOSE EVENINGS Cornélie made the acquaintance of the Dutch family, next to whom the marchesa had first wanted to seat her: Mrs Van der Staal and her two daughters. They were also staying in Rome for the whole winter, they had friends there and went out. The conversation flowed easily, and Mrs Van der Staal invited Cornélie up to her sitting-room for a chat. The following day she went to the Vatican with her new friends, and heard that Mrs Van der Staal was expecting her son from Florence, who was to come to Rome to pursue his archaeological studies.
Cornélie was glad to find a Dutch element in the hotel that was not uncongenial. She enjoyed being able to speak Dutch and freely admitted it. In the space of a few days she was on intimate terms with Mrs Van der Staal and the two girls, and the first evening after the arrival of Mr Van der Staal Jr, she revealed more of herself than she had ever thought herself capable of doing to strangers whom she had known just a few days.
They were in the Van der Staals’ sitting-room, Cornélie in an easy chair, by the tall blazing wood fire, as it was a chilly evening.
She had talked about The Hague, about her divorce, and now she talked about Italy, about herself.
“I can’t see anything any more,” she confessed. “My head is spinning from Rome. I can’t see any more colours, any more shapes. I don’t recognise people any more. They swirl about me so. Sometimes I feel a need to sit alone for hours in my birdcage, upstairs, in order to recover. This morning in the Vatican, I can’t remember it, I didn’t retain a thing. Things are always dull and grey around me. Then the people in the pensione. The same faces every day. I see them and yet I don’t see them. I see … Mrs Von Rothkirch and her daughter, then the beautiful Urania, Rudyard and the English lady, Miss Taylor, who is always worn out with sightseeing, and finds everything ‘most exquisite’. But my memory is so bad that in my solitude I have to work it out: Mrs Von Rothkirch is tall, stately, with the smile of the German empress, whom she resembles slightly, talkative yet indifferent, as if her words were just falling indifferently from her lips …”
“You’re very observant …” said Van der Staal.
“Oh, don’t say that!” said Cornélie, almost annoyed. “I can’t see anything, can’t retain anything. I have no impressions. Everything around me is grey. I don’t really know why I travel … When I’m alone I think of the people I meet … I’ve got Mrs Von Rothkirch now and I’ve got Else. A round witty face with tall eyebrows, and always a witticism or a ‘punch line’: I sometimes find it tiring, it makes me laugh so much. But still, they are nice. Then there’s the beautiful Urania. She tells me everything: she is as communicative as I am at this moment. And Rudyard too, I can see him in front of me.”
“Rudyard!” smiled Mrs Van der Staal and the girls.
“What is he?” asked Cornélie, curious. “He’s always so polite, he recommended a wine to me; he’s always able to get tickets.”
“Don’t you know what Rudyard is?” asked Mrs Van der Staal.
“No, and neither does Mrs Von Rothkirch.”
“Then beware,” laughed the girls.
“Are you Catholic?” asked Mrs Van der Staal.
“No …”
“And nor is the beautiful Urania? Or the Von Rothkirchs?”
“No …”
“Well, that’s why ‘la Belloni’ put Rudyard on your table. Rudyard is a Jesuit. In every pensione in Rome there’s a Jesuit who has free board and lodging, if the owner is on good terms with the church, and with great charm tries to win souls …”
Cornélie found this hard to believe.
“Believe me,” Mrs Van der Staal went on. “In a pensione like this, an important, reputable pensione, a great deal of intrigue goes on …”
“‘La Belloni’ …?” asked Cornélie.
“Our marchesa is a born intriguer. Last winter three English sisters were converted.”
“By Rudyard?”
“No, by another priest. Rudyard came here this winter.”
“Rudyard walked along with me for quite a way this morning in the street,” said young Van der Staal. “I let him talk, and sounded him out.”
Cornélie fell back in her chair.
“I’m tired of people,” she said with the strange honesty that she had in her. “I’d like to sleep for a month without seeing anyone.” And after a little while she got up, said good night and went to bed, with her head swimming …
VI
SHE STAYED IN for a few days, and ate in her room. One morning, however, she went for a walk in the Borghese gardens and bumped into the young Van der Staal on his bicycle.
“You don’t cycle?” he asked, jumping off.
“No …”
“Why not?”
“It’s a kind of movement that doesn’t agree with my kind of person,” replied Cornélie, annoyed at meeting someone who disturbed the solitude of her walk.
“May I walk with you?”
“Of course.”
He left his bicycle in the charge of the gateman, and walked along beside her, naturally, without saying much.
“It’s so beautiful here,” he said.
His words sounded simple and sincere. She looked at him closely, for the first time.
“You’re an archaeologist, aren’t you?” she asked.
“No,” he said defensively.
“What then?”
“Nothing. Mama says that to excuse me. I’m nothing and a quite useless member of society. And not even all that rich.”
“But you’re studying, aren’t you?”
“No. I read a bit here and there. My sisters call that studying.”
“Do you like going out, as your sisters do here?”
“No, I think it’s dreadful. I never go with them.”
“Don’t you enjoy meeting and studying people?”
“No. I like paintings, statues and trees.”
“Poet?”
“No. Nothing. Really, nothing.”
She looked at him more and more attentively. He was walking beside her as if it were the most natural thing in the world, a tall thin fellow of maybe twenty-six, still more a boy than a man in his build and his face, but on the other hand with a certainty and calm that made him older than his years. He was pale, he had dark, cool, almost accusing eyes, and there was something nonchalant about his tall, thin figure in his dishevelled cycling suit, as if he cared nothing about his arms and legs.
He said nothing more, but walked beside her, easily, companionably, without finding it necessary to talk. But Cornélie became nervous and did not know what to say.
“It’s so beautiful here,” she stammered.
“Oh, it’s very beautiful here,” he replied calmly, without seeing that she was nervous. “So green, so wide, so peaceful: those long avenues, those perspectives of avenues, an ancient arch over there, and there, look, so blue, so distant, St Peter’s, always St Peter’s. Shame about all those funny things further on; that cafeteria, that milk stand … They spoil everything these days … Let’s sit down here: it’s so beautiful …”
They sat down on a bench.
“It’s so marvellous when something is beautiful,” he went on. “People are never beautiful. Things are beautiful: statues, paintings. And so are trees, clouds!”
“Do you paint?”
“Sometimes,” he admitted reluctantly. “A bit. But actually everything’s already been painted, and I can’t really say I paint.”
“Do you write too perhaps?”
“Even more has been written than has been painted. Perhaps not everything has been painted yet, but everything has been written. Every new book that has no particular scholarly importance is superfluous. All poetry has been said and every novel has been written.”
“Don’t you read much?”
“Almost nothing. I sometimes leaf through ancient writers.”
“But what do you do then?” she asked suddenly, in irritation.
“Nothing,” he said calmly, and looked at h
er humbly. “I do nothing, I exist.”
“Do you think that a good approach to life?”
“No …”
“But why don’t you try a different one?”
“Like buying a new jacket, or a new bicycle?”
“You’re not being serious,” she said crossly.
“Why are you so angry with me?”
“Because you irritate me,” she said in annoyance.
He got up, took his leave very politely, and said:
“Then I’d rather go and cycle a bit.”
And he slowly walked off.
“Idiotic fellow!” she thought petulantly.
But she was upset at having squabbled with him, because of his mother and his sisters.
VII
IN THE HOTEL, however, he talked politely to Cornélie as if there had been no edgy exchanges or petty tiff between them, and he even asked her quite naturally—since Mama and his sisters had a call to make that afternoon—if they could go to the Palatine together.
“I was there recently,” she said nonchalantly.
“And aren’t you going to visit the ruins?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“They don’t interest me. I just can’t see anything of the past in them. All I see are ruins.”
“But then why did you come to Rome?” he asked in annoyance.
She looked at him, and could have burst out sobbing.
“I don’t know,” she said humbly. “I could have gone elsewhere … But I had expected so much of Rome, and Rome is a disappointment.”
“How’s that?”
“I find Rome hard and relentless, and without feeling. I don’t know why, but that’s the impression I get. And at present I’m in the sort of mood where on the contrary I need something sensitive and soft.”
He smiled.
“Come on,” he said. “Come with me to the Palatine. I must show you Rome. Rome is so beautiful.”
She felt too sad to be alone, and she quickly dressed and left the hotel with him. Outside the coachmen cracked their whips. “Vuole, vuole?” they cried.
He chose one.
“This is Gaetano,” he said. “I always take him, he knows me, don’t you, Gaetano?”
“Si, signorino. Cavallo di sangue, signorina!” said Gaetano, pointing to his horse.
They set off.
“I’m always afraid of those coachmen,” said Cornélie.
“You don’t know them,” he replied, smiling. “I like them. I like ordinary people. They’re nice people.”
“You like everything about Rome.”
“And you are giving in unreservedly to a false impression.”
“Why false?”
“Because that initial impression of Rome, of hardness and insensitivity, is always the same and always wrong.”
“I find Rome difficult.”
“Oh yes. Look, we’re passing the Forum.”
“When I see it, I think of Miss Hope and her orange lining.”
He said nothing, angry.
“And here is the Palatine.”
They got out of the carriage and went through the entrance.
“This wooden staircase takes us to the palace of Tiberius. Above this palace, above these arches, is a garden, from where we have a view of the Forum.”
“Tell me about Tiberius. I know there were good and bad emperors. We learned that at school. Tiberius was a bad emperor, wasn’t he?”
“He was a morose monster. But why must I tell you about him?”
“Because otherwise I have no interest in those arches and chambers.”
“Then let’s go and sit upstairs, in the garden.”
And that was what they did.
“Can’t you feel Rome here?” he asked.
“Everywhere I feel myself,” she replied.
But he did not seem to hear her.
“It’s the atmosphere,” he went on. “You should forget our hotel for a change, Belloni and all our fellow-guests, and yourself. When someone first arrives, they have all the fuss of a hotel, rooms, restaurants, vaguely sympathetic or uncongenial people. That’s what you had. Forget it. And try to just feel the atmosphere of Rome. It’s as though the atmosphere has stayed the same here, despite the fact that the centuries are piled one on top of the other. Once the Middle Ages covered the antiquity of the Forum, and now it is hidden everywhere by our nineteenth-century mania for tourism. That is Miss Hope’s orange lining. But the atmosphere has remained the same throughout. Or am I imagining it? …”
She said nothing.
“Perhaps,” he continued. “But what do I care? Our life is imagination, and imagination is beautiful. The beauty of our imagination belongs to us, who are not people of substance, our life’s consolation. How marvellous to dream all one’s life, dream about what happened in the past. The past is what is beautiful. The present is not real, does not exist. And the future doesn’t interest me.”
“Don’t you think about modern issues then?” she asked.
“Feminism?” he asked. “Socialism? Peace?”
“For example.”
“No,” he smiled. “I think of them sometimes, but not about them.”
“What do you mean?”
“I can’t get on with them. That’s the way I am. My nature is to dream, and the Past is my great dream.”
“Don’t you dream about yourself?”
“No. About my soul? My innermost core? No. It doesn’t interest me much.”
“Have you ever suffered?”
“Suffered? Yes, no. I don’t know. I suffer about my complete uselessness as a human being, as a son, as a man, but when I dream, I’m happy.”
“How do you come to be speaking so frankly to me?”
He looked at her in astonishment.
“Why should I hide?” he asked. “I either don’t talk, or I talk as I am talking now. Perhaps it’s a bit peculiar.”
“So do you speak so confidentially to everyone?”
“No, to almost no one. I used to have a friend, but he’s dead. Tell me, I expect you find me a pathological case?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“It wouldn’t matter to me if you did. Oh, how beautiful it is here. Are you breathing in the spirit of Rome?”
“What Rome?”
“The Rome of antiquity. Below us is the palace of Tiberius. I can see him walking along with his prying eyes—he was very strong, very morose, and he was a monster. He had no ideals. Further that way is the palace of Caligula, a brilliant madman. He built a bridge over the Forum to be able to speak to Jupiter on the Capitol.
You couldn’t do that today. He was brilliant and crazy. If you’re like that, you have much that is wonderful.”
“How can you find an age of emperors who were monsters and mad, wonderful?”
“Because I can see their age before me, in the past, as a dream.”
“How can you possibly not see the present before you, and the issues of this age, especially that of eternal poverty?”
He looked at her.
“Yes,” he said. “I know, that is the rottenness in me, the sin. The notion of eternal poverty doesn’t affect me.”
She looked at him, almost with contempt.
“You are not of your age,” she said coolly.
“No …”
“Have you ever been hungry?”
He laughed and shrugged his shoulders.
“Have you ever put yourself in the place of a worker, or factory girl, working till they’re exhausted, old, half dead for scarcely a crust of bread?”
Inevitable Page 3