Malafrena

by Ursula K. Le Guin

  He came in one night early in December. Rain had followed snow, the ground was boggy, the air heavy with a soft, chill mist. Despite his tireless activity he had found that he still got cold easily and suffered a good deal from it: as if he carried St Lazar with him in the marrow of his bones. He was very cold this evening, and headed for the hearth directly. It was a Saturday; Emanuel and Perneta were there, Count Orlant and Piera; even Auntie, now one hundred years old, was ensconced in a straight chair with a ball of red wool in her lap. Talking, they had let the night come in. It was dark except for the firelight. Sangiusto had been telling them something about his years in England—he was as good as any storybook to this audience—and Count Orlant summed up the subject: “A fine, enterprising race, the English. They’ve done wonders in astronomy.”

  Guide looked up as his son came by his chair in the firelit dusk of the room. “You’re here too, Itale?” he said.

  The dark room, four candles, the room where death was, and his father’s voice.

  “I’m here.” He sat down on the hearthseat near Guide’s chair, and put out his hands to the fire, repressing a tremor, feeling he would never get warm.

  “Itale dear,” said his mother in serene greeting. “Are you starved? Eva’s having trouble with the chicken. Old George. He’s taking hours and all he’s fit for is soup in the first place. And the mutton’s drying up. But there really is no use even trying to argue with Eva any longer, after all she’s run that kitchen thirty years, we must all just get old and cross together. Although it’s rather hard on you young ones. But your teeth are better…”

  “Is it still raining?” Count Orlant asked.

  “Aye. Harder.”

  The conversation sprang up again, he and Guide sitting silent.

  Piera too was silent, across the hearth from him. She spoke little when the families were together. Itale had seen her and Laura talking away a whole afternoon here by the hearth or down on the slope by the boat house, but she seemed to talk only to Laura. He glanced at her, thinking how Sangiusto had more than once remarked on her beauty. Sangiusto was rather given to finding women beautiful, but did he himself in this case, for some reason, merely persuade himself that she was plain? Her features certainly were good, her figure unexceptionable. But she was plain. No wonder, with her life spent between Malafrena and Portacheyka, two years in a convent school in Aisnar, a broken engagement to a widower in his forties, an aging household, filling up her time by trying to run the estate—no wonder she was dry and colorless, a withered branch. Life had defeated her before she had got fairly started. She was weak, and had been given no weapons with which to delay the inevitable, to fight back a while before she lost the hopeless struggle. It was not her fault.

  The hot, bright fire had begun to sting his face pleasantly and he felt the heat of it through his shirt. She had put up a hand to screen her face from it. She looked at him above that delicate, red-lit hand. “We haven’t seen you for several days,” he said, wanting to be kind.

  “No,” she said, “the weather’s been so bad. I have a book for you, I finally remembered to bring it along.”

  “A book?”

  “Yes. It’s yours, and I haven’t any more use for it.”

  Itale stared at her.

  “You’ve probably forgotten. It was a long time ago you lent it to me, five years ago. It’s called The New Life.”

  “I didn’t lend it to you, I gave it to you.”

  “I’m giving it back,” said Piera.

  Emanuel was watching the two of them, profiled against the fire. Itale looked floored. Evidently Piera had got tired of being overlooked. She would know how to make herself felt, once she put her mind to it; she had become formidable in her competence. Berke Gavrey, her obedient lieutenant, had told Emanuel that she had doubled the cash income of Valtorsa in two years, and was laying out the profit on improvements. Emanuel had seen her at estate business in Portacheyka, and had acted as her lawyer or legal adviser several times; he had found her both prudent and decisive, an excellent client, though he would have been happier with her qualities if they belonged to a young man. “She’s extremely strong-willed,” he had said to Perneta, who had replied, “And you would prefer her to be weak-minded?”—unfairly, he thought. But if she could shake Itale out of his silence, more power to her. To do that would require strength, and wits. It was easy to floor Itale, he was never on guard; but it was not easy to touch, or hold, or change him.

  “Piera,” Itale said, across the hearth, “I—”

  “I’ll write something in it, if you like, to make it more of a present.”

  “No—”

  “Here ends the new life. With affection, from Piera Valtorskar. Would that do? It’s right over there in my sewing bag on the chest.”

  “Piera, listen, it was—it was a long time ago, but—”

  “Times change.”

  “I won’t take it back. Burn it if you like!” Itale got up, strode off to the south windows, and stood there with his back to them all.

  Piera sat by the fire; her face half in shadow, half lit red by the flames, had turned to watch Itale. She did not move. Her hands lay clasped together in her lap.

  Dinner was announced at last. As Itale went in to the dining room with Perneta he watched his sister and Sangiusto, ahead of him. Laura and Francesco!—sonnets to fair ladies, it was too much. He had been a fool to bring the Italian here, and Sangiusto, a homeless, aimless man, should know better than to play at Petrarch while hiding from the Imperial police. What did he or Laura think could come of it? They were sleep-walking, play-acting. Yesterday Sangiusto had said to him, “I wish all my money was not bound up in our land, in the Piedmont, I think I could be a good farmer here,—fifty acres of orchard like that one—” Then he had laughed, and let his lively horse out, and cantered on ahead of Itale, singing, “Un soave non so che…”

  At table, serious now, he said across the mutton, “Itale, your sister has explained Karantay’s letter, perhaps.”

  A second letter from Karantay had come that week, containing some news of mutual friends and recent events, and, towards the end, in the midst of a sentence about something else, a curious clause: “Now that I am no longer a writer of fiction.” They had discussed it at some length, as all letters, all outside news, always get discussed in winter in the Montayna, and had speculated on the implications of that clause, arriving at no explanation.

  “I wondered,” Laura said, “if he means that he hasn’t recovered from his injury—that he’s not well enough to write. It seems his marriage has been put off. And you said, when his first letter came, how much his handwriting had changed.”

  “What happened to him?” Perneta inquired.

  “A sabre cut, in the charge on Palazay Street. A head wound.”

  “Poor chap,” Count Orlant said.

  “I thought he meant—” Itale began, and stopped. Laura’s theory was sickeningly plausible. “It can’t be that,” he said.

  “He can get better,” Sangiusto said, calm as always, hopeful as always, but revealing for once, unknowing, perhaps to Itale’s eyes only, the foundation of his hopefulness and calmness, the intense unchanging sadness that was the condition of his life.

  “I enjoyed his book a good deal, in places,” Perneta said.

  “I loved it,” Eleonora said. “I wish you’d give it back, Perneta, you’ve had it three years, and I’ve been wanting to see it; when I got near the end it was so upsetting.”

  “You mean you never finished it, Lele?” Emanuel inquired, grinning.

  “I didn’t want to. I was afraid he was going to die. I know it’s silly to cry over books, but I always used to cry over the New Heloise, and there’s a great deal more to cry over in this one.”

  “It has a happy ending, mama,” Laura said, with her broad, sweet smile.

  “I kept thinking that the young man, what’s his name,” Perneta said, “—Liyve, was like Itale.”

  “Of course, that’s what made
me cry,” Eleonora said.

  “Karantay had the book planned out before he ever knew me,” Itale said with covert violence.

  “None the less it can be true to life,” Sangiusto remarked. “He writes about his generation.”

  “But it’s not true to life. It’s a great book but it’s in some ways a false one—Karantay himself is absolutely levelheaded and honest, but the book’s all heights and depths and exaggerations; people don’t behave like that.”

  “Why write a romance about unromantic people?” Emanuel inquired.

  “It’s a great book, of course, it’s the best we have, but he could have done—he could do much greater things!”

  “And will,” Sangiusto said, raising his wine glass as if in a private toast. “God willing.”

  The conversation drifted on, the good, heavy food came and was eaten, the plain, familial faces in the candle light brightened with conviviality. Itale, doubly shaken, avoided looking at Piera at all, and tried to avoid the thought of Karantay; he drank more wine than usual, but his unhappy self-consciousness continued. They were there, around him, his own people, but he was not one of them. They were at home, all of them but him. What have I done? he thought. Why have I no home?

  “You wrote about some man once, down there,” Guide said to him without preliminary, “that knew my father. Who was he?”

  Startled from his brooding, he tried to describe Count Helleskar. His description sounded inevitably like one of the characters in Karantay’s novel, and fascinated his hearers; they asked questions, leading him on to explain how he had met old Helleskar through his son, and to mention the Paludeskars, Enrike and Luisa.

  “Countess Luisa,” said Perneta. “She’s in the book!”

  “They’re not alike.”

  “The one in the book is very beautiful,” Laura said, not innocently.

  “So is the one in flesh and blood,” Emanuel said, soberly, almost with reproof.

  “Yes,” Piera said, “she is. I think the most beautiful woman I ever saw.”

  “Where did you see her?” Itale demanded, shocked into speech by the idea, incredible to him, of Luisa and Piera in the same room.

  “In Aisnar; at my fiancé’s house.”

  “I knew she was good,” Eleonora said, speaking soberly as Emanuel had done, “I’m glad she’s beautiful too.” She looked at Itale with a faint anxiety or query.

  “She’s to be married,” Laura said. “It’s in Mr Karantay’s letter.”

  “To George Helleskar. This spring,” Itale said.

  “I drink to her happiness,” said Emanuel; and they raised their glasses, and drank to her, and talked of other things.

  III

  The next day the weather was so foul that only Laura had the determination to set off for church. As she was waiting at the stable for Kass to hitch up the horse—the horse sidling ill-temperedly, trying to get his tail to the wind, and Kass swearing as he struggled with the harness—her brother appeared. “I’ll drive you over,” he said.

  “Don’t trouble, Itale.”

  Unheeding, he brought the horse around with a slap, hitched him, gave Laura a hand up; and they set off along the lake-shore road to San Larenz through the dripping, wind-twisted woods. To the left, between bare trees, the lake lay grey and flat.

  “When did you stop going to church?”

  “I’m going now,” he said.

  The horse plodded on through mud, branches dripped, now and then sleet cut and stung in a light shower.

  “In jail,” Laura said. “When you were in jail—”

  After a little while he answered, “I couldn’t think about much. My mind wouldn’t hold. It was always dark. The closest I could get to God was mathematics…It wasn’t much good. Do you know what worked? Not very often, but the only thing that ever did. I wouldn’t think of God’s love. I would think about the water inside the boat house in afternoon in summer, when the light comes from underneath. Or the plates—the dinner plates, the ones we used last night. If I could see them I was all right. So much for the things of the spirit…”

  “Except the Lord build the house,” Laura said, almost in a whisper, but with a smile.

  He did not know what she meant. Though it had been a relief to speak of St Lazar it had been a great effort also, and he drove on in silence.

  Several people of the Valtorsa household had come to St Anthony’s: Piera, Berke Gavrey, Mariya and a couple of maids, Godin the coachman. The little chapel was bitter cold, full to the roof with cold grey light. Itale sat, stood, knelt with the rest of them through the Mass. Only when Father Klement began, “Credo in unoom Deoom!” he wanted to laugh, but with sudden pleasure. He saw what Laura had meant. He saw why she had been able to say to him, “You are my freedom,” knowing what he had not known, that she was his freedom; that you cannot leave home unless there is a home to leave. Who builds the house, and for whom is it built, for whom kept?

  Father Klement, as usual, wanted to speak to Laura after the service. Itale waited for her in the porch of the chapel. Old Mariya and the Valtorsa maids were there, waiting for Godin and Gavrey to bring the buckboard around; Piera came out, retying her kerchief. She glanced at Itale, said hello in her polite way, and went on down the steps, into wind and rain. But there was nowhere to go. She stood down at the churchyard gate at the edge of a sea of mud, small and erect, her back turned.

  He followed her. “Why don’t you wait in the porch?”

  She did not answer or turn round.

  “Go back out of the rain. I’ll stay down here,” he said, softly, half teasing.

  She looked up at him with her clear eyes. She was in tears, or the wind had made her eyes water. “If you like,” she said, and went back up the steps. Gavrey drove up, the Valtorsa people climbed into the buckboard and rolled off under the pines.

  He turned back and stood with his hands on the gate, looking out at the lake and the dark mountains on the other side. The wind was in his eyes. A sky of grey clouds ran overhead, ceaseless, in rapid, silent tumult. He remembered the sky over the courtyard of St Lazar; so the clouds had run there all winter long, three winters long, indifferent, unattainable, beautiful. There was nothing to keep. Life ran like the clouds. One voyaged and the other stayed, yet they met on the way; and in their meeting was all the goal of voyaging, and all the substance of fidelity. The shape and motion of a cloud.

  A few yards from him across the gate of the churchyard lay the grave marked with his grandfather’s name, his name. He thought of the moment last night, the earliest and most terrible memory roused when his father had said, “You’re here too, Itale?” But it was no longer terrible. “I’m here,” he said into the wind.

  His sister was out in the chapel porch now, and he went round to bring up the trap. As they drove back, the wind was weaker and a fine, wintry, drifting rain whispered on the road and passed in dim masses over the forest and the lake. The mountains were full of the sound of the rain.

  The winter was endlessly wet but there was not much snow, and spring came early. By mid-March when the north wind cleared the sky, the forest rippled paler green, showing new growth at the tips of the dark branches, and the same light, clear green broke in the waves of the lake on windy mornings. Since it rained hard on the morning of the solstice, Laura and Itale put off the trip they had planned to Evalde until the next fair day. It rained almost daily well into April, and by that time Laura, without consulting her brother, had invited everybody else to come along, and Sangiusto and the Valtorskars had accepted. Itale was annoyed. He had anticipated the trip as he had in his boyhood, a solitary course, at dawn, in the little boat, the ceremony with which spring began. He had thought Laura understood that and felt the same way. This would be a mere pleasure-trip, a picnic over at the caverns, meaningless. And there would be all the constraint of being in Piera’s company. Ever since he had seen her drive off under the pines of San Larenz that winter day he had felt he must speak to her, but he was not certain, when it came to the
point, what he wanted to say; and in any case he was unable to, since she was unwilling to say anything to him at all.

  Falkone could not carry five, and they were planning to go in Mazeppa. That was the last straw. He would not sail across in that cow of a boat. He wanted his own boat under his own hand, and he said, autocratic, “I want to take Falkone.” So there he was on a morning of early April, his boat skimming over the water a quarter mile ahead of the other, with Piera sitting in the stern to steer.

  They went a mile before anything was said, except Itale’s orders concerning steering as he tried to catch the fresh, fitful wind. At last they were sailing steadily, the house on its peninsula grown small behind them under the great slope of San Givan. The sound of the cascade came faint and clear over the water in the silence of the midlake. Piera sat with her hand on the tiller, her dark head turned away from him. “I wish there was more wind,” she said, “and we could sail clear to Kiassafonte.”

  “Takes a good wind and all day,” Itale said.

  She watched him as he stood up, coatless, long-legged, to recoil a rope from the gear box. The sunlight of April poured down on his head, his back, his hands, the lake beyond him, the mountains above the lake. The wind blew his brown hair, grown out long again, across his eyes; he brushed it away with a gesture she remembered.