So I thought: “It’s him.” And I thought: “Until he quiets down, it’s not prudent for me to go traveling.” And that morning, instead of making my way to the station, I made my way to my dentist.
My dentist is not only an excellent odontologist; he is also a man of culture and a first-rate musician. Two years ago, at his invitation, I took myself to his house one afternoon, this time to sit not in the articulated mechanical chair in his dental office, but on a more peaceful one in his drawing room, and hear a short but pithy concert: a sonata for cello and piano by Shostakovich, some lyrics by Mahler, and a very tender Ave Maria from the hand of the master of the house, which a Spanish baritone, brown as a young bull from Triana, the school of bullfighters, sang with a velvet voice.
But my dentist is not only an excellent odontologist, and a man of culture, and a musician; he is also a kindly soul. I’ll say more: he is Orpheus. His sure hand had just finished extracting “Him” from his socket, my right cheek was numb and prickly from the effects of Novocain (the strange condition of hemiplegics, who drag half of themselves behind them, reduced to a phantasm), and he invited me to go to the drawing room with him. Sitting on the bench of his Hammond organ, still in his white coat, he pulled out a few stops, pressed on a pedal, placed his right hand on the upper keyboard, which is that of the melody, and his left on the lower one, which is that of the accompaniment, and played a Lullaby of his own composition and of an infinite tenderness; and the hateful memory of “Him” gradually vanished into the harmonious heaven of Euterpe.
I, Daphne
FROM ROME, WHERE I LIVE, I OFTEN go to Milan, where I work. In Milan I have no house. Hence I take my meals and my repose in a café in the center which is at the same time a restaurant and a meeting-place. There is in this café and restaurant a cloakroom girl. She is very nice. Her eye is ringed by a halo of shadow and rests on a plump little cushion.
Besides which, as cloakroom girl and at the same time guardian of the most intimate places, she has that helpful and at the same time neutral air that midwives and nurses have. I am on the threshold of old age, but owing to my peculiar disposition, old age is mingled in me with as much infantility; not to be confused—may my friends forgive me—with what commonly goes under the name of second childhood; hence I now feel more need of assistance than when I was a child.
Many times over the course of the past winter I came to Milan. In the winter I usually wear an overcoat. And, dropping by my usual café three, or four, or even five or six times a day, before sitting at a table in the café or restaurant, I would go to deposit my overcoat in the cloakroom; and the cloakroom girl with the shaded and plump eye would take it from my back as if, like Saint Bartholomew, I were surrendering my covering of skin to her and was left in my bare muscles. Then, before leaving, I would return to the cloakroom, and the cloakroom girl with the shaded and plump eye would hold my skin out to me like a cross, which I, with my back to her, would slip on, with that studied haste, with that violated shame of someone being helped into his underwear.
Thus there were established between me and the cloakroom girl with the shaded and plump eye relations from which one would not venture to say that all tenderness was excluded. And I would put in the cloakroom girl’s hand each time that which the French and Germans call, with the same meaning, pourboire and Trinkgeld, and we, more vulgarly, a tip. But so much good had entered into the relations between me and the cloakroom girl that, already at the second donning of the coat in the same day, she would not want to accept the Trinkgeld, saying that I “had already given it to her the first time.” I would insist on giving it, she on refusing it; we arrived at a plastic, mimetic, choreographic form, at a ballet of giving and refusing. All we lacked was the music.
One day I went running out, having deposited the Trinkgeld on the cloakroom table; the cloakroom girl ran after me, trying to stuff the Trinkgeld back into my coat pocket.
Thus between us a little myth was born. The myth of Daphne and Apollo was reborn between us; in which version the roles were reversed, Apollo being the cloakroom girl and I Daphne.
However, I did not turn into a laurel. Something worse happened. I returned to Milan a few days ago. There was no more rain, nor mist (bruma in Italian; the beautiful word brumista, the Milanese cabbie, has unfortunately fallen into disuse by force of circumstances), nor cold. A magnificent sun and a soft warmth in the air.
I went into my usual café and restaurant and sat at a table. But bare of my overcoat. The cloakroom girl was standing on the threshold of the cloakroom. There were scarcely ten meters between us. Her glance carried much further. But this time Apollo did not run after Daphne, did not try to seize her: did not even look at her. Thus a change of season destroys a myth.
Can I deny a certain disappointment?
There are similar disappointments in clinics and hospitals. Freshly operated on, the sisters and nurses treated me like a fragile newborn. What care! What affection! There was nothing more precious than my health. As I recovered, the care waned; the solicitude waned; the affection of the sisters and nurses waned. No longer a fragile newborn: I was a solid adult.
I left the clinic amidst general indifference.
Is it bad to get better?
Solitude
EACH MORNING SIGNOR DIDO BEGINS the day by reading the newspaper. That is the first invasion that Signor Dido suffers. It would be easy for Signor Dido to fend off this invasion. He could simply not read the newspaper. But how can one renounce renewing one’s contact with the world each morning? Emerging from the fiction of dreams, Signor Dido feels the need to reenter reality. But are dreams really fiction? And is reality truly real?
Signor Dido looks at the newspaper each morning to find out the situation of the world, and whether some new fact, propitious or unpropitious, has intervened in it; but he looks at it above all in search of some thread of sympathy to which he could tie his own threads of sympathy.
Charles Darwin studied the relations between the individual and the environment, but he didn’t know a thing about psychology. He therefore did not notice that at the basis of the relations between the individual and the environment is the need for sympathy, even more necessary than the right temperature for our bodies. Signor Dido searches each morning for that necessary thread of sympathy. To help him live.
Vain search. Which becomes still more vain when Signor Dido goes on from news of a political, warlike, economic, or reportorial character to news of an intellectual character. Whose fault is it: his or the intellectuals’?
Even wars have lost their one-time frankness: either wholly sympathetic or wholly antipathetic. Today wars have an ambiguous character. Like everything today. That is, moreover, the misfortune of our time: not being able to opt fully for this or that principle, or for this or that man, or for this or that thing. The misfortune of our time, or the “private” misfortune of Signor Dido?
Having reached the bottom of the last page, and having found no trace of that sympathy he was searching for; forced, on the contrary, to drive back the columns of antipathy assaulting him from every side, Signor Dido withdraws into himself. He is a skein of which the tip of the thread hangs exhausted, hopeless.
Then Signor Dido’s “personal” day begins. The passage from the general world to the personal world is neither easy nor quick. Signor Dido cleans himself up. As if scraping from his back one by one the spatters which, on a rainy day, in a muddy street, an automobile had splashed on him passing by at high speed.
Meanwhile Signor Dido looks out the window. The contemplation of nature, according to ancient opinion, placates anguish and comforts the soul. Beyond the window, Signor Dido’s eye encounters as much of nature as the city allows: the trees lining the avenue, a corner of sky.
The house opposite is a colossal segment of concrete, which, like a wedge, meets Signor Dido’s gaze with its acute angle. In the windows of the fifth floor the sun sparkles. On a little third-floor balcony, a young housemaid is vigorously beating a carp
et. A crested and spherical nanny goes down the sidewalk pushing a baby carriage. Clouds trace a white alphabet in the sky.
Nature, like this, from a distance, has a calm—perhaps noble—aspect. But nature is also neutral; that there is no concealing. And neutralism is not what Signor Dido needs; he needs sympathy. What new disappointments would Signor Dido have, if he could hear close by, and in their own voices, in their own language, what such clear air, such a pure sky, such white clouds are saying and thinking? Maybe worse than those caused him by the words of men, the thoughts of men transcribed in the newspapers.
Little by little, Signor Dido manages to rid himself of foreign elements. He finally comes back to being all himself. Happiness begins. His happiness. The purest happiness. The only happiness.
But here the doorbell rings. They bring him the mail. Anticipation and hope. Hope for the unexpected. The thread of sympathy may come in an envelope.
No: two letters full of insults. Readers who have recently read something written by Signor Dido—and the moment has come to say it: Signor Dido is a writer by profession—and reacted like snakes whose tails have been stepped on. In one a curse is even accurately formulated! The third letter is addressed to Comm. Cencetti, the tenant on the third floor, and has been brought to Signor Dido by mistake. Of the payment that Signor Dido has been awaiting with increasing impatience for so many days, there is not the slightest trace.
An athlete in the struggle against disappointments, Signor Dido manages even this time to drive out of himself the effect of the two insulting letters, and reenters the ineffable sphere of his own happiness.
He writes. He takes wing again. Without leaps. Without jolts. In “his” sky.
But here he is standing up. A stimulus from the diencephalon, the hunger center, tears him from the desk, propels him down the corridor, carries him to the credenza, in which, usually, there lies, blackened, shriveled, some remnant of the evening meal: a scrap of prosciutto, a bit of cheese.
This morning the credenza is filled as always with plates, crockery, table linen, but empty of alimentary substances. Something catches Signor Dido’s eye in the semi-darkness. On top of a white stack of plates. Hope is kindled in Signor Dido’s soul. He reaches out a hand: it is a folded napkin trimmed with lace. But here is the soup tureen. In this tureen Signora Dido sometimes hides away a bit of parmesan. Destined to be grated and then sprinkled over the pasta or the broth. In this gesture of Signora Dido’s lies the “wisdom” of the mistress of the house; the accommodating intention of removing the surplus food from the devouring lusts of Signor Dido and hiding it away, without openly putting it under lock and key. Uncovered, the tureen proves to be as white, and smooth, and clean inside as it is white, and smooth, and clean outside.
And this other tureen? The credenza has two levels. On the lower level, Signor Dido makes out a tureen he doesn’t know. A pink tureen. He reaches out a hand: it is the crown of one of his wife’s hats. A straw hat. Pink.
Signor Dido slowly returns to his desk. Weighed down with an additional disappointment. Because the stimulus that propelled him to the credenza was not only hunger: it was also the need for sympathy; above all the need for sympathy. In brutes, eating is an act surrounded by darkness. In men like Signor Dido, eating is also a making ours, out of sympathy, of something we take from outside: meat, greens, milk products, fruit—nature. For Signor Dido, eating is an act of love.
In the afternoon, the vain search for sympathy becomes even more burdensome. It is six o’clock. The blinds are closed, the lights turned on: a barrier is placed between domestic life and the life of the city, of the world. The warm and gentle triumph of the family.
Signor Dido’s daughter bursts into her papa’s studio. Followed by young Silvio. Both excited. Trembling. Overflowing with things to say. They have come back from seeing a documentary on Burma. What a marvelous country! What temples! What sacred dances! . . . Signor Dido takes it. Puts up with it. He who has always had an insuperable aversion for the exotic, and now more than ever.
Signor Dido slips on his overcoat, goes out. The day before they had called him to come and hear some recorded music. Extraordinary!
He goes.
The drawing room is in semi-darkness, dotted with low lights, similar to flowers but more flimsy than flowers. Three men and two women, seated at some distance from one another, incline their heads, absorbed in contrapuntal harmonies. A radio-gramophone reels off the Brandenburg Concertos one after the other. Between concerto and concerto it emits a raucous gurgling, as if, having gulped down the piece of music, it were now digesting it.
Many of Signor Dido’s contemporaries, horrified by the “dispersion” of our time, take refuge in pre-Beethovenian music, as in a safe oasis. So architectonic! So devoid of doubts! So serene! Not Signor Dido. A profoundly romantic soul, Signor Dido not only does not shun dispersion, but loves it. He prefers being carried by this tempestuous and infinite sea to putting in at any port. Only even in this sweet and desperate shipwreck he would like sympathy, and to drag with him all men, all women: all humanity: all the universe.
The day is over. Signor Dido’s body is stretched out in bed. His bald head rests on the pillow. His hand, which has just abandoned Concetto Marchesi’s lucid history of Latin literature, will go up to the switch of the lamp. And Signor Dido will reenter his dreams.
Is this the sympathy he was seeking?
No. Even dreams are foreign to him. “Our” dreams. And antipathetic. Except for one. That dream of “himself” that Signor Dido would like to dream and always re-dream. That dream of himself into which all things enter, and blend, and become himself.
Diké
A FEW YEARS AGO, SIGNORA DIDO took into her service a housekeeper: Rosa Profumo.
In the Dido household, as in many other households besides, servant crises are renewed every six months, like the equinoxes. Of each new housekeeper that Signora Dido takes into her service, she says to Signor Dido: “This time we’ve done it. A pearl. Look at the kitchen! What order! What cleanliness! . . . Whereas that sloven . . . Greasy fingers. I didn’t say anything to you, because men don’t understand certain things. It takes patience like mine.”
At the end of a week, Signora Dido, returning to the conversation about the new housekeeper, confided to Signor Dido: “She’s grown fond of me. Even too much so. This one, you’ll see, even cannon fire won’t make her leave.”
Signor Dido thought: “It’s not we who send these housekeepers away: it’s they who suddenly show an unrestrainable need to quit our house.” But Signor Dido kept this thought to himself.
Several peaceful months followed, until, at the approach of the new equinox, ever more excited dialogues between Signora Dido and the housekeeper began to reach Signor Dido’s ears, through the door to the studio, and the corridor, and the door to the kitchen. Signor Dido thought: “The crisis has begun.”
At the table, hedging his words with caution, Signor Dido tried to find out the cause of the changed relations between Signora Dido and the housekeeper, but in vain. Signora Dido, after much rambling, replied: “Better not to speak of it.” And she gulped down mouthfuls with such force as if she were swallowing not alimentary substances softened by cooking, but stones.
Signor Dido ended by thinking that, after several months of continuous relations with the same housekeeper, a sort of psychic poisoning developed in Signora Dido, which she could be cured of only by sending the housekeeper away. The same thing, moreover, also happens between friends, between married couples, between lovers. One day perhaps chemistry will clarify this form of poisoning by cohabitation. The Greeks say paragnoristikamai: “We have overknown each other.”
The arrival of Rosa Profumo signaled a new era in the Dido household. Months went by, the cape of the first year was rounded, and Signora Dido went on saying that in the person of Rosa Profumo she had found the pearl of housekeepers.
Rosa Profumo was not only the pearl of housekeepers, but she was also young and beautiful
. She pleased the friends of the Dido household, almost all intellectuals. She especially pleased a friend of Signor Dido’s, a teacher of experimental psychology who, being at dinner one evening in the Dido household together with his own wife, found a way of passing a note to Rosa Profumo, arranging a meeting for the next day in a tearoom.
Autumn came; winter was at the door. One morning Signora Dido came into Signor Dido’s studio and with an unusually gentle voice said to him: “Poor thing, she wants a fur coat! . . . She’s found one, of blond lambskin, at a good price, and payable in installments; but they say her signature isn’t enough: they also want yours.”
The next day an austere gentleman in a dark suit presented himself in the Dido household, a leather briefcase in his hand. He did not want to confide in Signora Dido and said he had to speak with Signor Dido in person.
Shown into the studio and the door closed behind him, the austere gentleman proved affable and sympathetic. The “commendatore” wished to give a blond lambskin coat to Signorina Rosa Profumo? A magnificent “item.” And such a beautiful girl . . .
Signor Dido signed the promissory note.
Winter passed. Rosa Profumo, in a coat of blond lambskin, was seen in the most expensive cinemas and in the most elegant tearooms, accompanied by the teacher of experimental psychology, the friend of the Dido household. Spring came.
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