Malafrena

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  She went back to the house presently, and sat alone by the fire in the living room. Her thoughts went on, calmer, less exalted, though sourced in that hour’s exaltation as a stream in a rising spring. She did not think now about Itale, yet he, the man in prison, the absent one, was the cause and center of this change. She thought of Laura, of Guide and Eleonora, and of her father; and of Aisnar, of Givan Koste, of herself.

  “I don’t belong there,” she thought, and presently, “What I have to do is here, here at home.” She could not have explained what it was she had to do. She was not carrying on a dialogue, not questioning and answering, but discovering.

  “I don’t want to go back to Aisnar. Papa’s getting old, he’s not well, he needs me. But I wouldn’t stay here, if that were all. He wouldn’t let me stay here, if that were all. He knows you have to send your children away. But I have no reason to go to Aisnar. I would just be safe and comfortable there. That’s Givan’s life, not mine. He has work to do there. I don’t. I’d keep his house, I’d be a good wife, I’d help bring up Battiste, I could do it. I could do it perfectly well. I’d be in jail. I’d be in prison for all my life. I can’t leave Malafrena. I have to do what I have to do, not other people’s work, I have to find my way, I have to wait, to wait…”

  She thought of Givan Koste, his dark, grave face, the turn of his head. She had not the least sense of disloyalty to him in her thoughts; that would come later, along with self-doubt and shame, when the social human world came back into the balance. At the moment she was still as far as Orion from all that. She was alone with herself trying to find out the truth, and nothing was in the balance but truth and lies. She had lied to Givan Koste, promising him what she could not give.

  “Givan!” she said his name aloud.

  The house was still; she could hear the cook and a maid talking back in the kitchens, a murmur of voices like a brook far off.

  If he would wait for her, until she had done here what she had to do But what had she to do here, but wait?

  There was nothing urgent. No one could not get on without her. No one needed her to stay. No one wanted her, perhaps, so much as Givan did. “But it’s me he wants,” she said, and now the inward dialogue began, and would go on for a long time. “And who am I? He doesn’t know, neither do I. I have to find out by myself, or else I never will. I have to wait. But he won’t understand…If he’d come here, I could make him understand, here. I’m not myself in Aisnar, I’m always what other people want me to be, there. Here is the only place I will ever understand…”

  Laura would understand her. Laura had understood Itale, when she had not. She had never until this night understood why he had left home; now it was perfectly clear to her. He had felt towards Malafrena as she felt towards Aisnar: it was a shelter, not part of the way. They had all known what to expect of him, here, and all they asked of him he could have done, easily, too easily. He had had to go off and try to find what it was that he and only he could do, what was necessary to him. So, in Aisnar, if she chose, she could avoid ever staking herself. She could do and be all they asked of her, and the reward was sure.

  It looked now as if Itale had staked himself, and lost.

  Piera thought of the stars she had seen flaring over the lake and mountains outside. In daylight, in summer, if you could see the stars, they would be those, the stars of the midwinter.

  What she had at stake, what she had to give and to lose, she thought, did not amount to much. She had no talents at all, no great intellect, and nothing special to undertake. All she had to do was, like all things women had to do, a matter of daily redoing, an endless reaffirmation, nothing ever finished and complete. It would never be done, and it had to be done. It was her life she wanted, the whole of it: not a reward. Such as it was it was hers to live, so long as she would take the risk; so long as, having received her inheritance, she would not let it become a prisonhouse; so long as she set freedom first.

  But it was very difficult. No one had ever spoken to her about what freedom is for a woman, what it might consist of and how it is to be won. Or not won, that seemed the wrong word for a woman’s freedom; worked at, perhaps.

  She heard her father moving about upstairs; he soon came down, and they went in for supper. The overseer Gavrey, just returned from Portacheyka, joined them. When he had reported his negotiations at the mill to Count Orlant, he asked Piera, in his low husky voice, “I hope it wasn’t bad news that took you and Miss Sorde home, contesina.”

  Piera let her father reply: “Aye, it was bad, Gavrey. Young Sorde has been put in prison in the east somewhere.”

  Gavrey looked taken aback, but said nothing, evidently feeling that he could not with propriety ask what a gentleman had done to get put in prison. Count Orlant stared gloomily at his plate. Piera spoke up: “He didn’t steal somebody’s watch, you know. He’s a political prisoner. I suppose the government doesn’t like something he printed in his journal. So they put him in jail for five years.”

  Gavrey winced. “I didn’t know they’d do that,” he said. “We’re a bit beside the way of all that, up here. It seems very hard.” And he added, surprising Piera, “This is hard for Miss Laura, she thinks the world of her brother, I guess.”

  “She’ll think the higher of him for this.”

  “She’ll need to.”

  She caught what he meant at once: the talk, the gossip around the lake, the speculation and commiseration, the gloating on disaster. “They don’t know what it means,” she said haughtily.

  “I don’t know what it means but shame, and waste, and pain, for the lad and his people,” her father said.

  “Itale did what he believed he ought to do, what he had to do. He’s freer than the man who put him in jail, he’s freer than any of us. Even if he died there it wouldn’t be wasteful, it wouldn’t be shameful!”

  “You may be right, daughter. I don’t know much about these things; neither do you. It seems a waste to me when a man of twenty-five is thrown away like that, locked up to do nothing. And how can Guide help but feel shame when they say to him where’s your son? And how is it for Eleonora who can do nothing for him, maybe not even write to him? All I can see in it is grief and long worry, and praying the good Lord to look after the lad, for he never meant harm to anyone, that’s clear.”

  Gavrey spoke: “Times I think a man’s lucky to work out his evils done here, where he did them, and so can go to dying without fear.”

  She looked curiously at him. What he said was not new to her, it was only a variant on the somber tenet of all her people, but there was in his voice a note of intense, suppressed emotion, echoing obscurely her own inward, dark exaltation. And the last word he spoke stayed with her. The builder of the prisonhouse, the sneakthief, the weakener, the enemy, was fear. There was no way to serve fear and be free.

  During the next weeks she saw Laura daily, for most of each day, their companionship of the old years regained, and more than regained. It had used to be onesided, Laura listening to Piera talking, Laura comforting Piera distressed; now Piera could give, and listen, and comfort. It was a joy to her to be of use to Laura; and thus to receive as it were a sign or confirmation of her change from girl to woman, her wealth, which she could give away, spend as she chose.

  One afternoon near the end of the month they were together. They had been silent for half an hour; outside, snow was falling again over the snow that whitened hills and fields. It was a hard winter, and this week was the cold heart of it. Guide was out in the cattle barns or the storehouses, Eleonora was lying down upstairs; she had not been very well. Laura and Piera sat sewing by the downstairs fire, looking now and then to the high south windows outside which the snow continued to fall thick and straight. “I have to write a difficult letter,” Piera said, a little while after the clock had struck three. Laura looked up, but did not ask to whom; to whom else could Piera consider writing?

  “I want to ask him to come here for a little while.”

  “But you’ll be back
in Aisnar in a few weeks.”

  “Well, I don’t know. That’s it, you see.”

  Laura rethreaded her needle, leaning forward to catch the tremulous, snow-thickened light of the windows.

  “You want to talk to him about it.”

  Piera nodded.

  “May I say something I’ve been thinking?”

  “Indeed not.”

  “You look like Auntie, you know, sometimes. I wonder if Auntie wasn’t very pretty, once.”

  “Papa says she was quite beautiful, but she never liked any of her suitors. Isn’t it strange…Poor Auntie, she hates cold weather. She hasn’t said anything but No all week.”

  “Does she need new yarn? I was thinking she might like this coral color.”

  “We can try. She hasn’t even wound yarn this week. It’s the rheumatism, or else she doesn’t care any more. Oh, Laura, I hope I die young, sometimes!”

  “I know…Well, it was just this. You haven’t talked about the wedding, and so on, at all, really. I wondered if you were feeling a…sense of duty, that you ought to stay here.”

  “No. That isn’t it. Do you know, I don’t think I believe in duty.”

  “It is an odd idea, when you think of it,” Laura said, thinking of it.

  “Like Miss Nina Bounnin in Portacheyka. Living and living and living with that awful mother of hers who goes on dying and dying and dying, she’s been dying ever since I was born, and poor old Lontse Abbre who was supposed to marry Nina, he must be sixty now, and still running errands for Advocate Ksenay—oh, no, not that kind of duty. That is just cowardice.”

  “Yes. Very well. But Count Orlant isn’t awful.”

  “No. No, he’s not. He is a very, very good man,” Piera said soberly.

  “Is that it?”

  “No. Because Givan Koste is a good man, too. I do love him.”

  “I know you do. Then what is it, Peri? It isn’t us, it isn’t me, you’re thinking of; you’re not that foolish.”

  “No. I’m not that generous, I’m not that useful to you. I’m selfish, Laura. I’m thinking only of myself. But I’m not clever enough to settle my own fate.”

  “Then let Mr Koste do it for you.”

  “I can’t,” Piera said. Then after a rather long pause, “I find I can’t, Laura. I don’t know why. In Aisnar I could. It’s all so simple down there, ready-made. But up here I seem to change. To have changed. I’m not the person who is to be married in Aisnar in March. And that can’t be! If I’m to marry I must marry with all my heart. Anything less would be wrong, a lie, an unforgivable lie.”

  “I believe that. But we may be wrong, Peri. Does love matter as much in marriage as the will to love? I don’t know. I keep watching people, trying to find out.—Is it simply that you’re away from him, that makes you feel you’ve changed?”

  “No. It’s that whenever I am with him or whenever I think of him, I’m indoors. Inside. In the light. And how can I turn my back on all the rest?”

  “The rest?”

  “The darkness,” Piera said, looking up from her work. “Air. Space. The wind, the night. I don’t know how to say it, Laura! The things you can’t trust, the things that are too big for you, that don’t care about you. I am just learning what that is and what I am, and I can’t leave it, give it up, not yet!”

  “Then you should ask him to wait,” Laura said slowly. “I don’t know if I understand you. But I think you have that right.”

  So that night Piera sat down to write the most difficult of all her difficult letters. Her spelling had improved at the Ursulines, but she still hated to write things down: on paper they became remote and trivial, humiliating.

  “Valtorsa, Val Malafrena, 24 January 1828.

  “Dear Givan:

  “We are all well here and I hope you and Miss Koste and Battiste are well. It is still snowing and is the heaviest winter since 1809, the year I was born, Papa says. All the bays of the lakeshore are frozen and on some of them the ice will bear for skating which is very unusual. But it does not last for long.

  “This is difficult to write and I hope you will understand if I ask if there is any possibility that if the roads clear you might come here to Valtorsa for a short visit some time in the next few weeks before I planned to come down to Aisnar. Are you very busy at the Customs? If so I shall certainly understand! It is hard to write and I hoped to talk to you if possible but if not do not worry, I will come as we planned. My father is not quite well yet from the laryngitis in December and it is partly that which I want to talk about with you, but I hope we can talk because it is so hard to write. But do not worry if you cannot come, I will come. My love to Battiste. I am as ever your very affectionate friend, Piera Givana Valtorskar.”

  The letter went down on the Aisnar Post on Monday, and back with the Montayna Diligence the following week came Koste’s reply, “I shall arrive on February 8.”—“Oh Lord,” Piera said to herself, “now I’ve made him come in the dead of winter, and wait to change coaches at Erreme, and leave his work”—Koste was head of the Secretariat of Customs Inspection and Regulation for the Western Marches—“and I’ve got to tell papa what I’ve done…”

  “Papa,” she said that night after supper, “you know I wrote Mr Koste last week.”

  “You always do, my dear,” Count Orlant said reassuringly. He was comparing astral maps, trying to decide how many Pleiades there were.

  She came to the table and looked over his shoulder for a while. “Is that one a Pleiadee?”

  “A Pleiad, my dear. One Pleiad, several Pleiades, it’s Greek. No, it’s a neighbor. D’you see, this map shows seven, it agrees with our peasants, who call the group the Seven Sisters. But most people can see only six. And the book says at least twelve can easily be seen with lenses. But this map shows eight. It’s very odd, I wonder if they eclipse from time to time.”

  “I wanted to tell you about the letter.”

  “Letter? Oh yes.” Count Orlant sat back in his chair and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

  “I asked him to come here.”

  “To come here!” said her father, looking scared, and also a little affronted.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t ask you first, papa. I was so…I felt so stupid about it. In case he couldn’t come anyway.”

  “What is wrong, Piera?”

  “I need to talk to him.”

  “But you’ll see him next month in Aisnar!”

  The count was really shocked, and Piera’s heart sank. “I want to talk with him, and with you, about putting off the wedding for a while.”

  “I see.”

  “I didn’t want to tell you before he answered my letter, in case he couldn’t come. Because I didn’t want to worry you. And I’m not really sure about anything. But he says he will come. On February eighth. So I wanted you to know,” she ended feebly.

  “He’ll stay here, of course,” Count Orlant said, also feebly.

  “I expect so.”

  “Yes, where else.” Count Orlant had met Koste only briefly, and was afraid of him. “But is it—are you regretting your engagement?”

  “No. But I want to wait.” It was the only formula she had, and the only explanation Count Orlant, and later Eleonora, could get out of her. She shook her head, knitted her broad, stubborn forehead, and said, “I have to wait…” Then she would say imploringly, “Don’t you think he’ll understand?” Count Orlant thought he would, but Eleonora said, “I think he’ll agree, dear, since he is a gentleman. But I’m not at all sure he’ll understand.”

  Givan Koste arrived in Portacheyka towards the end of the winter day. Piera and old Godin met him with the open buck-board, since the heavy horses that pulled the family carriage were not sharpshod and the road was icy. He was half-frozen from the coach journey, and almost completely frozen by the time they had driven down through the foothills in the still, bronze-colored, bitter cold mountain twilight to Valtorsa. He was so humanly grateful that even Count Orlant was unable to be afraid of him, and took pleasure in
reviving him with food, drink, fires, and early bed. And Piera, alert and silent, watched him. She had known him always in one setting: Aisnar, his house or the Belleynin house, afternoon or evening, among people he knew, dressed as he was dressed, speaking as he spoke. Now she had seen him out of place, on the snowy street of Portacheyka, wearing a fur-lined Russian overcoat, looking cold and tired and anxious; and this man, this stranger, attracted her powerfully.

  Next morning she came downstairs in her old red skirt and peasant blouse, and the cook scolded her. “Contesina, what sort of a way to dress is that when there’s a gentleman in the house?”

  “There’s always a gentleman in the house while my father’s here, and I dress to please him!” said Piera, and then, because the old woman was huffed, she made up to her again, hugging her and whispering, “O Mariya, Mariya, don’t scold me today…”

  The sun had come out brilliant on the snow; they spent a pleasant day, Count Orlant, Piera, and their visitor, walking down the shore to the Sordes’, receiving a visit from Cousin Betta and the Sorentay girls, and riding to St Anthony’s. On the second morning Piera and Koste walked down to the lake-shore alone in the bright wind of the thaw, and there came to the point. He spoke rather brusquely: “Piera, I hope that you know I want no explanation. I was very glad to come. It has troubled me sometimes that I had never been here, to meet your people.”

  “It was partly that. I wanted you to see me here, too. And I wanted to see you here.”

  “You’re no different here, or anywhere. Not to me, Piera.”

  His gentleness made her flinch. “I am different, here,” she said, hearing the cold, stubborn sound of her voice.