Malafrena

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  “Never saw a chap look out windows as much as you do,” said Enrike Paludeskar, entering the room after a feeble rap. “What do you see out of ’em, Sorde?—Roofs, trees, moon, nothing going on. Same view I’ve got. Are you ready?”

  “Yes,” said Itale, turning his forlorn look to Enrike’s heavy, well-shaven, goodnatured face.

  “How d’ye like my rig? English fashion. Everything has to be English. I don’t know why. Come on, Luisa’s waiting. What’s the time? These damn trousers are so tight I can’t get my watch out without performing a sort of dance. We mustn’t be late, the old lady’s a dragon.”

  Itale looked at his watch, which said two-thirty. It had stopped running several weeks ago, and he kept meaning to have it fixed. “Must be near six.”

  “We’d better drive, then.”

  Luisa smiled up at them from the foot of the broad staircase. “Don’t be silly, Harry, it’s only around the corner.”

  “Town’s all squeezed up together,” Enrike grumbled. “Hate arriving on foot.” But on foot they set off into the evening of early spring. The fountains sang, the budding branches of the plane-trees interlaced above the street, the wind was soft and cool, the moon poised bright above the roofs. All things were poised: in balance. All things here, Itale thought, were in harmony.

  They were to dine with one of the inmost circle of Aisnar society, the marchioness Feldeskar-Torm. Itale was well received. They knew who he was: a landowner’s son of Val Malafrena, one of the western domey; a house-guest of one of themselves; therefore, temporarily, one of themselves. Evidently they also knew what else he was, for after supper the marchioness, a small, plain, old woman, said pleasantly to him, “Well, Mr Sorde, are you bringing the revolution to Aisnar? I should have thought we were scarcely worth fomenting.”

  There seemed no point in hedging. “No, markesa,” he said. “I’m only trying to lure some of your young men away to Krasnoy.”

  “You city people always want the revolutions all to yourselves,” the old lady said with a ghostly laugh. “I’ve read many of your articles, Mr Sorde. They are interesting; eloquent.”

  He bowed in thanks.

  “They remind me sometimes of what our Valtura used to write for the old Aisnar Mercury, and of Kostant Veloy in the Krasnoy Review. Then I think Veloy has been dead for twenty years, Valtura has been in prison in Austria for ten—I suppose he is dead too. Four generations of radicals I’ve seen, Mr Sorde, but I haven’t seen the revolution.”

  The challenge was direct, and he answered it directly: “I believe you will see it, markesa.”

  “You keep trying. I grant you that. I see you’ve won over our handsome baroness.” She looked at Luisa, who was talking politics with Mr Belleynin and a Feldeskar-Torm great-nephew. “I doubt Valtura could have done that.”

  “If he’d had the chance…”

  “But he wouldn’t have had the chance,” she said, looking at him with shrewd, cold eyes.

  He left the pleasant dinner party somewhat depressed in spirit. The marchioness had placed several darts in him with exquisite accuracy. She had reminded him that his cause had been defeated time and time again; she had reminded him that the Paludeskars were very curious companions for a revolutionary; she had reminded him of the ambiguity of his own position. And yet she had done all this not, he admitted, in enmity to his cause, but in support of it. She had as good as asked, Where is our revolution? What are you doing about it?

  He walked restlessly about his room in the Arrioskar house, then went to the window that overlooked the garden, opened it, and leaned out. The fountain lilted in its stone basin, a thin silvery sound in the night. A fountain at the street crossing a few doors down interwove a faint counterpoint. The wind was down. It was profoundly still, the stillness of the long fields that stretched on from the city on every side. A few stars burned humidly bright in the sky washed blue with moonlight. Beauty, balance, harmony…Sick of himself, Itale tried to lose himself in the moonlight, the quiet, but could not; in this germinant darkness, this moment between March and April, between sleep and wakening, he found only anger, uncertainty, and fear.

  Turned back upon himself he tried to face himself, demanding the source of the trouble. When had his work become, not an end, but a mere distraction from—or means toward?—some different and obscurer end? What necessity was he shirking, with what angel must he wrestle? In asking the questions, it seemed to him that the trouble lay in his presence here, now, in this house. All his uncertainties of the last months might clarify themselves if he could simply answer the question, What am I doing here?

  His mind veered at once from the question, replacing it with a different one, the question others might ask of him. Enrike, for instance; did he wonder occasionally why Itale was with him in Aisnar? If so he gave no sign of it. He had known Itale on and off for a year and a half now, at his own house and at the Helleskar house, and probably assumed that anyone he had known so long had to be a friend. Their brief warm flare of companionship on the coach was long forgotten, they had never had a conversation of any consequence whatever since; Enrike simply took Itale for granted. And his hosts here, the Arroiskars?…But this was no good. He came presented as the Paludeskars’ friend and a gentleman, and naturally they accepted him as such. Why not admit that he felt at home with them, in this comfortable, quiet house, as he never felt at home in his two cold rooms in Krasnoy, eating bread and cheese by himself, and listening to the endless thud of Kounney’s loom? But that was no good either. The matter of comfort was irrelevant, the question of his right to be here no question. The point was, what was he doing here? Was this one of the places to which he had to come, as Krasnoy was? Again his mind sheered off from the matter, asking with self-pity if he might not have a little comfort and good company now and then while he did what he had to do: but what it was he had to do, he did not know. Leaning out the window he gazed southward over the rooftops, straining his eyes as if he looked for something real and present beyond the moonlit wash of air; his mind was quite empty; he said aloud, “Why am I wasting my time?”

  He drew back thinking he had seen a movement, someone looking up, in the darkness under the trees.

  The air inside the room was close. He loosened his high stock, began to take off his coat, then shrugged it back on and with a cautious, decisive step left the room, went down the hall, down the stairs, through the music room and out the side door of the house into the garden. There all was luminous and cool. The fountain sang, stars gleamed through budding branches, rows of narcissus by the paths gleamed in the moonlight and the warmer glow of the few lighted windows of the house. Itale walked to the fountain and stood watching the play of the water, then sat down on a bench near it, his hands in his pockets, his eyes still on the slender jet of water that seemed to hang suspended over the basin, catching the moonlight, falling and renewing in one motion, constant change in changelessness, alive.

  “Itale?”

  He got up quickly.

  “It’s hot in the house, I can’t bear it…I can never sleep in spring.” Her voice was no louder than the sound of the fountain. She had thrown a shawl over her light dress, and in the broken light and shade of the garden nothing of her was clear but her face, simplified by that mixed light into simple beauty.

  “I’ve wanted to talk to you ever since you came. There’s never a moment…Are you content, Itale? Are you content with what you’re doing?”

  “I wouldn’t be doing anything else.”

  “But is your life what you want it to be?”

  “No,” he said, and moved restlessly, clasping his hands behind his back. Luisa sat down on the bench, drawing the shawl around her shoulders.

  “If you were free, no responsibilities, no duties, entirely free, what would you do?”

  “I can’t imagine freedom without responsibility.”

  “Oh, bah,” she said, “how stuffy you can be. And how it helps you evade answering. If you were free to do exactly what you wanted to do�
�what would you do?” In her voice was an impertinent tenderness, a note he had never heard before and that struck him as her true note, herself speaking without defense, nervous, mocking, intent.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I’d go home.”

  “Where is home?”

  “Malafrena.—But the fact is I am doing what I want to do. Your idea of freedom is a child’s idea, baronina.”

  “Probably. Women are all childlike, aren’t they? And spiritual, too, of course, Perhaps my idea of freedom is spiritual. A bit ghostly: choice without consequence. Well, I know what I would do if I were free, like a child, or a ghost…I would do very nearly what I do now.”

  “Then you are happy.”

  “Very nearly happy.”

  He had turned to face her, wanting to see her face, which was in shadow now.

  “I imagine that only moral people, like you, are very happy or unhappy,” she said. “I am always both, and most of all on spring nights when I can’t sleep, and have to walk in the garden wondering what on earth would ever make me happy without making me unhappy.”

  “There is no reason why you should be unhappy.”

  “None at all; I know. I am young, and rich, and very well dressed, and in any case I am a woman, and it takes very little to make a woman happy—a toy or two, a necklace or a fan.”

  “I did not mean that,” Itale said stiffly.

  “What did you mean?”

  He did not reply for a while; when he did his tone was low and unwilling, without warmth. “I meant I don’t want you to be unhappy.”

  “I know that. You want me to be happy; you want to think of me as happy, because it is so much pleasanter. And easier. If you think of me as unhappy then you have to do something about it, find a toy to amuse me…if you are my friend, of course.”

  “You know I am your friend, baronina.”

  “Don’t call me baronina, please. It’s a stupid title. I suppose you believe all titles are stupid. Ours certainly is. I wish my grandfather had had the courage to appear as what he was, the best of his class; I should be proud to be a haute bourgeoise, nothing more and nothing less. But he had to buy us into the nobility, and leave us clinging tooth and nail to the lowest rung of the rotten old ladder leading nowhere—pretending that it isn’t money that made us, and makes us, and will take us wherever we do go…” She looked up at Itale and laughed suddenly, a laugh of real amusement. “Oh, God, Itale, you are infectious! Lectures in the moonlight…”

  “Do I lecture?”

  “Almost continually.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said, chagrined.

  “I don’t mind. I like your lectures. At least they’re serious, at least you talk seriously to me—though whether you’re talking to me I often wonder; but at least you allow me to be present while you talk. Some day, perhaps, you will in fact talk to me.”

  “I don’t…”

  “No, I know you don’t. You never have.”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “I mean that under all the theories, the politics, the lectures, there is silence, a granite silence, unbroken. No, I take that back. I think you said something to me, just a minute ago, and it took me so by surprise that I almost missed it. You said that you loved—But no, you didn’t say it after all, now I think of it; I could simply hear in the way you said the name that you were finally talking about something to me, something real, not an idea, not a theory.”

  “What name?”

  “Malafrena.”

  He half turned away again towards the fountain, his hands deep in his pockets, and shrugged.

  “I miss it sometimes,” he said.

  She said nothing, watching him.

  “It isn’t far from here.” He looked up as if he wanted to say more, but he did not say any more. She continued to watch him, the tall hunched figure in front of her, the profile, big nose, mouth firmly closed, a portrait in charcoal, plain and strong. A few streets away the half hour struck on the bells of Aisnar cathedral. A faint wind had come up, moving the leaves, making the air feel chill. In the house, behind them, a light went off silently, leaving the path they were on and the flowers beside it cold white.

  “Though you don’t talk to me, you talk to yourself sometimes.”

  “When?”

  “At your window, a few minutes ago. You said, ‘Why am I wasting my time?’ That’s why I asked you if you were happy. Knowing that you weren’t.” She spoke very low, in the silence after the bells.

  “I don’t know what I meant.”

  “It’s almost frightening to hear someone say the very words you’re thinking, but not say them to you.”

  “I wasn’t talking about anything particular.”

  She stood up. “I hate to watch men lie,” she said, her voice a little more distinct. “I hate anything done clumsily. But if you’re not interested in the truth, why should I be?” She turned to go. Her shawl had slipped from her shoulders and lay in a pool of silken white on the path. He picked it up; she had stopped at his movement. He set the shawl on her shoulders; as he did so she turned towards him, and reached up taking his right hand, the delicate film of silk between their hands. They stood a moment motionless.

  “Luisa—”

  “Itale!” she mocked him, that discordant tenderness in her tone. He bent to kiss her mouth, the warm silk slipping beneath his hand, and she slipped away, broke from him, and turned to him again at a little distance. Her face was smooth as a bright mask; her eyes were exultant and terrified. “Good night,” she whispered, and slipped away into the shadow, into the open door, of the house.

  Itale stood there a while and then walked under the trees, where he had seen her first. He came to the wall of the garden. He put his hands on it, then leaned against it, his forehead on his arm. For a minute he was intensely aware of himself, felt the rough brick against his palm, smelt the extreme sweetness of the narcissus blooming at his feet, saw the late, serene night around him; then it all slid away again, and again returned, as if he were swimming in an invisible sea, warm, tumultuous, silent, from which he broke free long enough to breathe, feel his heart pounding, see the stars, then he went under again. When the cathedral bell struck three he turned slowly round and made his way to the house; he lay down on his bed fully dressed, and immediately, as if knocked out, went to sleep.

  Next day he went about the business that had brought him to Aisnar—if it was business that had brought him to Aisnar. He did not consider the question. He considered nothing that was not directly under his nose. As soon as one conference or conversation was over he forgot it and went on to the next. He was if anything more decisive and efficient than usual, but at any given hour he could not have said without an effort of thought what he had been doing an hour earlier, or, perhaps, what he was doing now. One person he met broke through his insulation: an Italian, exiled for his part in the Piedmont revolt of 1820, who had spent a year in Aisnar and was about to set off for England. Something in this man reached Itale, and afterwards he recalled vividly Sangiusto’s long face, high forehead, curly hair, his cordial voice, as they sat at a cafe table in the leaf-dappled late sunlight on Fontarmana Street: “A liberal is a man who says the means justify the end,” he said, and the words too stayed with Itale.

  The light got lower, dustier, more golden down the tree-arched street, a few cartages rolled by slowly, the wind smelled of ploughed fields and the moon rose over the old houses. Itale went back to supper with his hosts. Luisa’s cousin was a cold, shy woman, and Arrioskar had little conversation in him; Enrike was dining elsewhere; Luisa, whose manners were as good as she wanted them to be, kept up just enough talk that no one felt awkward, to the evident gratitude of the Arrioskars. Coffee was served upstairs at ten and at ten-fifteen the evening ended. It was now Holy Week, there would be no more parties until Easter was past.

  Back in his room Itale did not open the window, or look out of it. He took off his coat, sat down at the escritoire, and began going through a pil
e of local and foreign pamphlets and manuscripts he had gathered in the course of the day. He read steadily, annotating occasionally, never raising his head. The room was bright with candles, but chilly, as he had let the little fire go out.

  The bell of the cathedral, a soft deliberate baritone, struck midnight. Itale hunched his shoulders and went on reading.

  “There must be no confusion,” said the pamphlet, “of such manifestations of radicalism as the secret societies of France, Italy, and the Germanies, nor such excesses of radical opinion as the revolutionary leagues of the last decade in England, with the liberal faction in our own country, which the Government of Orsinia not only tolerates but will indubitably come to favor as a benign and harmless indication of peaceful popular enlightenment. To forbid the publication of…” Itale went back and crossed out the word “faction,” crossed out “indubitably,” scowled and crossed out the entire sentence, then put the thing aside and put his head in his hands.

  He got up, went about the room putting out the candles, took up his coat, went downstairs and out.

  The air was colder tonight; the moon, a night past full, was veiled by a slight mist. The jet of the fountain blew astray now and again in the slight breeze. Itale stood by the stone bench, looking at the narcissus blooming at his feet. He heard the latch of the house door. Luisa came to him, a long dark scarf wrapped about her over her light dress. “I heard you,” she whispered with a laugh in her voice. “I was listening for you…”

  “Baronina—”

  “Dom Itaal!” she mocked.

  “I cannot call you Luisa.”

  She sat down on the stone bench, drawing the dark, voluminous scarf up about her neck, smoothing the fall of it across her skirt.

  “And what else can you not do?”

  “You are—unjust,” he said.

  “Am I? But then I’m only a woman. No one expects justice from a woman. As you can’t call me by my name, so I can’t treat you with justice.”