Malafrena

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  “Dear Itale: The old count writes that you are home. So am I. I was released on the 20th, got as far as Kolonnarmana, then sent back with an escort; released again after three interrogations, got across the street, was brought back and interrogated twice more. Have been home a week now but can’t say I count on it. K’s fiancée wrote; he had a severe concussion of the brain but is recovering well, and they are to be married in October. I expect you know that young V was not so lucky. Or in the end he may prove to have been luckier, who knows. I have called upon GF. He wears a corset, satin waistcoat, gold watch-chain, married, infant son, did not invite me to return. Do you have any word of Carlo? No one has heard from him since the party and he is on my mind. I am going to go on and study for the Bar examinations since journalism, I find, does not pay. Let me hear from you. Believe me yours in constant affection, Tomas.”

  “It’s from Mr Brelavay, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. You know his writing?”

  “He wrote us several times when you were in prison. It was he that wrote us you had been arrested. It must have been hard for him, he never had good news for us; but he sounded so kind.”

  “Here, read it.” He had to explain the initials to her. “K, that’s Karantay, you know, the novelist. He was hurt in Palazay Street when they fought the guards. V is Vernoy. A student. He was killed. Givan Frenin, he was our college friend. He went home three years ago, he’s a merchant in Solariy now. They proscribed him anyhow. Poor Brelavay! he must feel lonely there!”

  “Who is Carlo?”

  “Oh, Sangiusto. His English letters to the paper were signed Carlo Franceschi. Must be a middle name.”

  “You’ve known him quite a long time.”

  “Well, I met him in Aisnar in ’27. But I got to know him in July.”

  “He was with you in…the fighting.”

  He nodded. He glanced at her fine, rather pale face, her brown hair pulled back in a loose knot. She walked along stride for stride with him. In the four weeks he had been home he had taken great comfort from her presence, yet he had seldom spoken much with her about any but immediate concerns, Guide’s health, farm matters and accounts. She had learned to keep the books for her father, but when Itale had complimented her on the order and clarity of the accounts she had sighed and said, “I hate them. I do it because it’s all he’ll let me do. I keep them neat because I get lost at once if they’re not. I hate figures. I’d rather clean the stables, if I could.” Then she had laughed and made light of the matter. The great candor of her girlhood had become, in the woman, infinite reserve. Walking now beside her, brother and sister, Itale realised that he knew nothing of her life.

  “I try to imagine,” she said, “what you did, down there—what your life was. The revolution—”

  “The insurrection,” he said gently.

  “The insurrection. You say of the student, ‘He was killed.’ I know how Mr Sangiusto’s hand was hurt, by a soldier with a gun, hitting him. You spoke once about the fire. I know, in a way, what you did before that, before the prison; I read your paper. But I have never been able to understand, to imagine your life there. As if I lived in another world.”

  “The real one.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because there is nothing left of that life. It’s finished—gone, scattered. Overnight. There never was anything to it.”

  She walked on beside him.

  “Dreams of youth,” he said.

  “All that has given my life any meaning for five years has been my belief that you were free—that you were working for freedom, doing what I couldn’t do, for me—even when you were in jail—then most of all, Itale!”

  He stopped, staggered by the passionate and unexpected reproach; their eyes met for a moment. He saw that she knew what he could not say directly, that he had failed, that he was utterly defeated: that she knew it and yet it was not of overwhelming importance to her, she did not see him as a failure or a fool. If she had she would not have reproached him.

  “But you must not trust me, Laura!” he said desperately, all pretense of irony abandoned. “When I used to talk about freedom, I didn’t know what prison was. I talked about the good but I—I didn’t know evil—I am responsible for all the evil I saw, for the—For the deaths—There is nothing I can do about it. All I can do is be silent, not to say what I’m saying now. Let me be silent, I don’t want to do more harm!”

  “Life’s the harm,” Laura said quietly, drily.

  They walked on, coming in sight of the orchards above the Sorde house, the forested slopes above those.

  “If they lifted the ban,” Laura said, “would you go back to Krasnoy?”

  “I don’t know. It’s not likely any time soon. In any case, I’m more use here, while father’s ill.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Of course. But he…Some day he would fall ill; someday he will die; that was always true.”

  “But I didn’t believe it, then,” he said very low.

  “I know,” she said, and he saw to his wonder that she was smiling. “What I wanted to say was that you should not worry about that—about the estate. When the time comes to go. I’m nothing like Piera, but at least I can keep it going. I wanted you to be able to count on that.”

  “I just got home,” he said, “for God’s sake, are you trying to send me away again?”

  “I am trying to make you see that no matter what the stupid police say you are a free man,” she said, fierce. “Am I not allowed to work for freedom? You are my freedom, Itale.”

  He could make no answer.

  When they came into the house Guide called him into the library to discuss the grape harvest with him. Since the recurrence of his ailment Guide had grudgingly admitted that everybody else including the doctor had been right and he must go easy if he wanted to go on. Methodically, then, he rested at certain times, gave up certain labors and pursuits. He was visibly changed, his hair entirely grey, his hands and face less tanned, his spare figure looking both taller and frailer. Itale, entering the study, was struck by his resemblance to Laura, even in the tone of his voice.

  Laconic and amicable, they discussed the condition of the vines and the probable pace and order of the grape harvest if the temperate weather continued.

  “If it gets hot,” Guide said, bringing into their mutual view the frantic and relentless labor entailed by hot weather during grape harvest, and Itale’s relative inexperience, perhaps also his not yet fully recovered health “There’s Bron, though.”

  “Aye. Thank God. And Sangiusto.”

  “He’s all right with orchards. You listen to Bron.”

  Itale smiled. He had been waiting for his father to admit that he approved of Sangiusto. “He’s all right with orchards” was the admission.

  “Have you got the Sorentay wagons?”

  “Tomorrow morning.”

  “Who’s going?”

  “Karel.”

  Guide nodded.

  “He’s a steady man,” Itale said. “He needs training.”

  “What for?”

  “It’s time we had an overseer.”

  He spoke with an indifferent bluntness that was new in him, though not in Guide.

  Guide was much offended by the proposal, but he was caught. He could not pretend that he was able to carry on the work alone any longer if Itale left, nor could he admit that the idea of Itale’s going, implied in the suggestion, frightened him. He sat there on his couch under the windows, trying to think of an argument to defeat Itale’s suggestion; he scowled; but little by little, and with singular conviction, he understood that there was no argument. If he had had power of veto he would not even have sought an argument. He was not in control. Some time in these past few weeks he had, without even noticing it, abdicated; and his son, as unknowingly, had come into his inheritance.

  “Very well,” he said. “You think Karel’s the man?”

  Turning from the bookshelves to look at him Itale caught in his face a shadow of pleasure,
and did not understand. He had expected a battle on this subject. It alarmed him that Guide should give in easily and, giving in, smile. “Maybe I’m thinking ahead too far—”

  “Maybe,” Guide said. “There’s Payssy. Might do better than Karel. Go on, now, I’m supposed to lie here till suppertime.”

  Itale bowed and went out, and Guide lay back on the couch, obeying doctor’s orders. He felt a little empty, lightened; the way a woman might feel after childbirth, he thought: light, quiet, tired. A queer thing to be comparing himself to a woman, and a woman after childbirth. But there was Eleonora’s face, the morning of Itale’s birth: her smile then, the center of his life. Nothing of his own.

  There was a great red sunset over the lake, the weather was turning; the next day was hot, the next hotter.

  Itale was up at four, at the vineyards and the winery all day till dark. He saw nothing at all in the world beyond the vines, the grapes, the boxes, baskets, carts and wagons loaded with the grapes, the pressing tubs in a stone courtyard stained and reeking with must, the brief dark coolness of the storage cellars dug into the hillside, the swing of the sun across the hot September sky. Then that work was done; and other harvests from the fields and orchards were coming in. Silent and absorbed, irascible when pushed past the limit of his strength, otherwise patient, Itale got on with the work and never raised his eyes from it to look back or ahead. Most of his waking hours were spent outdoors, in the fields and orchards, and more of his time in the farm-buildings than in the house itself; he came in only to eat and sleep. When the work let up he went hunting several times with Bron’s grandson Payssy and Berke Gavrey, with whom he had struck up a taciturn kind of friendship, or with Sangiusto. He went in to Portacheyka as seldom as possible, and paid no calls. When Rodenne or the Sorentays or other neighbors came to call he often stood in for Guide, receiving them with stiff courtesy, seeing to it that hospitality was prompt and unlimited, and then sitting silent, unparticipating, while they talked.

  His mother watched him, and said nothing. So she had watched Guide for thirty years. Often at her housework or at night, lying awake in autumn darkness, she thought of the merry child, the awkward, gallant boy, and the man she had seen him—barely seen him—becoming. It had not been this man; this somber, restless, silent man, this second Guide—yet not like Guide as she had first known him, for Guide as a young man had rejoiced in his work, and had suffered no defeat. In Eleonora’s heart those October nights was the same bitter resentment against the world that offers so vast a chance to the young spirit and, when it comes to the point, gives so narrow a lot; the same scorn and resentment that her daughter had felt, that Piera had felt, and that she recognised in them, but with little hope for them and none for herself.

  Sangiusto worked along with Itale, made himself useful and pleasant in the house, went sailing in Falkone. Karantay’s fiancée had sent a necessarily cryptic warning: the government had Sangiusto’s name and description and were watching for him at the borders as a professional revolutionary. At this Sangiusto, as if accepting a challenge, announced that he would walk out, over the mountains, past Val Altesma, where there were no border stations. “What for?” Itale said. “Where to?”

  “To France.”

  “Don’t leave me in the lurch now.”

  “I’ll go when we have the pears done.”

  “You can’t cross the mountains in winter.”

  “Next spring,” Sangiusto said. And he stayed; so easy, steady, and cheerful a man that Itale, in his present mood, took him quite for granted, never questioning the character of their congeniality, scarcely remembering its origins. He forgot even that before their meeting lay a life of which he knew nothing. One day in late October, the first day of rain, he came by the pear orchards to pick up Sangiusto and could not find him. He tethered his horse and the one he had led, and hunted the orchard aisles for twenty minutes before he came on his friend standing with a peculiar expression under a tree. Off down an alley a garnet-red skirt and white blouse twinkled, vanished. The rain pattered softly, multitudinously, on leaf and grass. “I’ve been calling,” he accused, wet and annoyed.

  “Yes. I heard.” Sangiusto blinked, pushed off from the tree, came along beside him.

  “Was that Marta’s Annina?”

  “Yes.”

  Itale strode along through the wet grass for a while. “She’s barely fifteen.”

  “I know.”

  They mounted their horses, rode in silence. Suddenly Sangiusto began to laugh, and Itale flushed red.

  “I know, I know. But someone must talk to pretty girls, look at them, neh? What are they pretty for?”

  “I feel—”

  “Responsible, of course. I will not make her pregnant.”

  “I know that.”

  “Then why are you so angry?” Sangiusto said in a slightly different tone. “Angry with me? What do you want of me? You want dignity, abstinence, romantic passion? I have had all that. I would rather kiss pretty girls in an orchard. I am ten years older than you, sad to say. I have had the romantic passion. I was in love, betrothed to a young lady. That was in 1819. Oh, God, I was in love, I wrote poetry, I got thin. So also I got sent to prison and got still more thin, and she married, in Milan, she married an Austrian officer. I learnt it when I came out of prison. So. So there I am. Austria has taken my children from me before they were ever born…So I cross the mountains and become nobody, always in exile. But I have nothing more to do with that, ever again, with love, with young ladies. But if I meet Annina and she smiles? Gesumaria, Itale, what do you want?”

  Itale stammered, “Sorry, Francesco,” and was red, and silent. But as his shame began to cool he wondered a little at the strength, the circumstantiality, of Sangiusto’s disclaimer.

  The Italian meantime, placid as ever, made his young horse prance, lifted his face to the rain falling from the ragged, drifting clouds, and hummed; he burst out in a strong tenor, “Un soave non so che…Ha! that pig Rossini! You know he wrote an oratorio for Metternich, The Holy Alliance? Musicians are idiots, blessed idiots, God has exempted them from reason. Look there, your count has already picked his pippin apples. Maybe we start? That little countess is very wise with her orchards.”

  Itale made no answer. They trotted along through the rain, towards the house on the shore.

  Before he saw the Valtorskars on his second night home he had been nervous, but as soon as he saw them his apprehension and excitement had vanished. He had greeted Count Orlant with affection, grieved to see how the robust man had aged. Beside him was Piera, hardly changed, he thought, though she must be twenty-one or twenty-two now: still small, a round girlish face, a timid girlish manner, a smile and a few polite words. The vividness and vitality of her childhood were gone, leached away no doubt by this lonely life, replaced by no richer being, no opulence of womanhood. She was sterile, faded before flower. He saw this with a kind of luxuriation in the bitterness of being once again confirmed in the conviction that had come upon him first clearly in the wayside inn at Bara: the conviction that all he had worked for, that his whole understanding of freedom, had been delusion—moonshine, verbiage. Estenskar had seen it. This girl, in her way, had seen it. The Jew Moyshe knew it; and the girl in Bara, the girl with dull eyes and thick, chapped, dirty hands, knew nothing but her own wants which would never be filled and knew it better than them all: There is no freedom.

  Laura was in the garden behind the house, in a tentlike cape and shapeless hat, pruning the roses her grandfather had planted. The year’s last flowering was over, and the leaves looked rusty on the gnarled, rainwet stocks. She looked round as the two horsemen came down the road, and held up her pruning-shears in salute.

  “Ah, there—” said Sangiusto unexpectedly, made a sweeping gesture, and said nothing else.

  Laura came to the garden fence. “Drowned rats,” she said. “You prune back your roses too early!”

  “I’m just taking off dead wood and canes.”

  Itale consciousl
y held back his horse and watched them, the tall woman smiling, her fine, thin hands wet with rain, and the man handsome and vigorous on his horse, asking her something about mandevilia suaveolens.

  “Yes, by the front walk,” she said. “The only one in the valley. Grandfather planted it.”

  “Here, I take the horse around and come back.”

  “I’ll take him,” Itale said. Sangiusto gave Itale the reins, vaulted the fence, and went off with Laura through the wet autumnal garden.

  “Nothing more to do with that ever again, eh?” thought Itale, leading the grey horse to the stables, and his heart was confused between tenderness and rancor.

  October ended full of rain and mist, with a few last golden evenings; November came in cold; in midmonth Itale waking one morning saw from his window the Hunter whitened with snow against a dark grey sky. Work slackened, the farm was settling into its winter patience. Though the roads were foul there was much calling and visiting among the farms and households of Val Malafrena, every afternoon there were people in the front room, women’s voices, Eva trotting past with a tray of cakes and strawberry wine and cherry brandy, or else Kass was bringing out the gig to drive Eleonora and Laura to the Pannes’ or the Sorentays’. In the cold weather Guide seldom went out. He worked at small jobs, the kind of harness-mending, tool-sharpening, furniture-repairing that he had used to leave to servants or get done in a half hour before breakfast; he took his rest on the couch in the library dutifully, and then came to the front room, if there were no visitors, to sit down and work his way slowly and thoughtfully, with long pauses, through Virgil. His copy of the Aeneid had been his own in school, then Itale’s, and was full of schoolboy glosses. He held it off on his knees to read, being very farsighted. It was strange to Itale, who had never seen him read, to see him sit there perfectly still, the book a yard from his eyes, so that it appeared that he did not so much read as absorb by long silent watching the story in the scarred and scribbled book, the tenderness, heroism, and pain. If visitors came he greeted them but often returned to his solitude in the library; if it was Eleonora, Laura, Piera, he stayed with them. And Itale too, when he came in at dusk and took off his sheepskin coat, was content to be in the company of his family; then, not before. He was at the mercy of a driving restlessness, the same strained, unreasoning energy that had taken him back from the Sovena to Krasnoy, through the sixty hours of the August insurrection, on out of Krasnoy, to Bara, to Malafrena, through the vintage, through the autumn. Now that it was winter and there was less to do he made work, or walked, or hunted. Only when he was physically worn out could he turn home and be content to sit down by the fire, talk with Guide about the work, with Sangiusto about events in Greece and Belgium; with the women he found little to say.