A Life

by Italo Svevo

  White, who entered at that moment, looked at Miceni with cool curiosity.

  The sight of someone more fortunate than himself made Miceni lose the little self-control that he still had. There was nothing to laugh about, he said, although White had not laughed; if he had enjoyed the protection that White did, things would have taken quite a different turn. White did not defend himself, and replied with a very cold smile that he knew he was protected and was sorry others were not. This made Miceni more furious than ever. He seemed to be trying to revenge himself for the attack which had left him so indifferent.

  “Try and embrace too much and you’ll have nothing left to squeeze,” said White.

  Then Miceni, from fury, broke down.

  “Did I want too much? Is justice too much? To be treated decently? Is that too much?”

  He did not actually cry, but his voice was tearful. White grew milder, but could not avoid loosing a last arrow.

  “You said you wanted to be independent.”

  This Miceni resolutely denied; he wanted, he explained, to be independent only if Sanneo did not learn to behave better. He was just realizing the difficulties of the role he had taken on and feeling ashamed of such a defeat.

  Later White explained to Alfonso how serious Miceni’s position now was. Miceni was being relegated to the cashier’s department. This was an inferior position because no practice as a correspondence clerk was any help to his being a good cashier.

  “And think of the boredom for someone used to more variety in work! He’ll have nothing to do all day long but sums, sums, and sums.”

  Ballina entered and congratulated Alfonso ironically; he had come from Sanneo’s room where he had heard that Alfonso was appointed as Miceni’s successor. Alfonso looked at him incredulously, terrified already; the thought of Miceni’s work alarmed him as being too difficult and too much, it would take away the little time he still had for reading. White tried to calm him; what he did not know he would be taught, and if he did not manage to do all the work, it did not mean the end of the world. Certainly this was a step-up in his career, and if he had any sense he should be grateful for it.

  “It’s only lately that Miceni has been giving himself this air of importance,” Ballina said to him. “He didn’t before, when Signor Sanneo had to explain every single thing from A to Z.”

  He also mentioned having seen Miceni with eyes starting out of his head at the difficulties of some transaction which was quite simple and clear to others.

  “Eyes starting out of his head?” asked Alfonso, who found the misfortune that had befallen his rival less enjoyable the more he thought of the suffering it might bring him.

  Ballina’s announcement received official confirmation only at three that afternoon. Sanneo sent for him when he had finished his NBs to other clerks. He told him in an off-hand way that Signor Miceni had left the correspondence department and that he had decided to entrust him with part of the Italian correspondence connected with banking; just ledger work in fact, he added contemptuously. Alfonso had intended to plead ignorance but had not the courage; he was ashamed to show any hesitation about accepting work that was so easy. In a few minutes Sanneo handed him fifteen letters with a few words of explanation for each. He spoke of transfers, deposits, and suspensions, all terms whose meaning was still vague to Alfonso.

  Two or three of the letters he wrote out easily: these were the last Sanneo had given him, so that he could still remember the instructions; the others he could not manage to answer without White’s help.

  “Who will he give the rest of Miceni’s work to?” asked White in surprise after giving Alfonso, with great kindness, a thorough lesson on banking terms. “The Stock Exchange letters aren’t included here, or the half-a-dozen controversial letters that come in to him every day. He’s capable of doing them all himself.”

  In fact when leaving the bank late that evening, Alfonso saw Sanneo’s room still alight, and reflected on the pavement was the shadow of the head of the correspondence department bent over his desk.

  White accompanied Alfonso to the cashier about a draft. It was a little room divided by a light wooden partition behind which, reading a newspaper at his desk, sat Signor Jassy, an old man with a face covered in spots and a few whitish hairs.

  Alfonso noted the debits of the draft on a lined sheet of paper proffered by White; then he passed it to Jassy who put it down beside his newspaper without a word.

  Just then a youth appeared at the hatch and presented a bill of exchange. Jassy took up a list, looked at him, looked at the bill of exchange, then still motionless called out in a complaining tone: “This is the right one; it’s just listed, but why didn’t you have it countersigned in time by Signor Cellani? Now there’s no one here who can leave the cash desk, and there are people waiting.”

  He flung down the piece of paper in front of White. The latter at once replied irritably: “I’ve not listed this draft, it doesn’t concern me; in any case drafts can’t be listed before getting a warning letter. Don’t you agree?”

  The old man turned towards Alfonso and said to him more gently: “Please show this draft to Signor Cellani, will you? D’you know where his room is?”

  “Come with me,” said White, and moved off.

  Alfonso followed him after stopping to look at Jassy. The latter was still talking to the youth who had come to cash the bill of exchange, while moving with a vacillating step towards the counter. His legs were flabby as if they were made of cloth, and he was holding out his hands in front of him as if afraid of falling.

  “Is that the cashier?” Alfonso asked White.

  “Yes, a poor old man who’d be better adding up sums or retired.”

  Signor Cellani was a man who had achieved his position by hard work, step by step; he seemed about fifty, but his thin figure and dry unlined skin made him look no more than thirty.

  “My best wishes!” he said very politely to Alfonso, who was coming to him for the first time on a matter of business. “Please be very careful how you lay out your letters. I wasn’t very pleased with Signor Miceni’s. You are intelligent and understand how important the form of a banking letter is.”

  He put his initial next to the total sum of the draft.

  Meanwhile, others had come to the cash desk and Giuseppe, Signor Cellani’s messenger, was helping Jassy as he moved slowly between cash box and counter, indecisive as ever, incapable even of getting help, perhaps from shyness. Alfonso, in his zeal aroused by Cellani’s kind words, wanted to hand over the chit to Jassy himself. The latter was moving towards the counter with bank notes in both hands; he gave Alfonso a sullen look and without stopping, shouted to Giuseppe: “Here, take that bit of paper out of his hand, will you!”

  Later Sanneo gave him another two or three letters to do, and as a last job he had to send off some bills of exchange. White helped him with these too because Alfonso was frightened of handling pieces of paper which were so precious.

  When his first zeal had died down, and he was copying big sums in a letter, Alfonso would calculate how the tiniest fraction of each sum would be enough for him to live a serene life in the country.

  VI

  BY NEXT DAY Alfonso’s work had already increased. Sanneo, who knew nothing of White’s help, found Alfonso’s letters quite satisfactory and felt he could give him more and more serious work. But that day from Paris arrived the settlement which White had to check over, and Alfonso was left to his own devices. By midday there was a first outburst from Sanneo, and by evening Sanneo was going around the bank saying that two days’ work had given Alfonso softening of the brain. He called him in and told him to re-do half the letters he had corrected, and Alfonso was forced to confess that he had been helped out by White on the days before. Sanneo calmed down, but grew more brusque from then on.

  Then Alfonso’s work became more unpleasant. He had been forbidden to ask help from White, with whom Sanneo was not on good terms; often, instead of giving instructions, Sanneo would point to
the date on which an identical letter had been written and tell him to find the right letter-file and copy it out. It was not easy to find a file in the Maller bank. With so many clerks using the files, he had to go to and fro between the accounts department and the cash-desk, more than once too, since no one helped; everyone concentrated on their own business, and he had to search through every drawer to make sure that what he sought was not there. At first Alfonso went round every room shouting: “Gentlemen, please, have you the letter-file for such-and-such a day?” But he soon stopped this because he found it was a waste of breath. No one answered, and one or two just smiled. By running from room to room Alfonso eventually found the file beside a clerk who could easily have told him and saved him the useless rush. Having laid hands on the file, there was still the labour of finding the letter he needed. If Sanneo had even mentioned who the writer was, it would have been a great help, for he would not have had to read it all through. Sanneo’s big handwriting filled a whole sheet of copying paper; Miceni’s was reproduced whole and clear as the original; White’s big wide pen-strokes developed blotches in the file-copy.

  Alfonso would go and greet Miceni in the accounts department and sometimes stop to exchange a few words with him. He forced himself to do this against his will because he felt Miceni resented him. Miceni’s new desk had already taken on the look of his old one; ink-pot, pen, pencil, big ledger set parallel to the edge of the desk. He would do his calculations on tiny bits of paper which he filled with microscopic figures.

  Alfonso found he got no enjoyment out of his advancement. It was a real advancement, for even though everyone went out of their way to remind him that he was very far from having Miceni’s position, he had stopped copying letters and offers: servile labour with a pen instead of a broom. But when in the evening Sanneo handed back half his letters with annotations, he felt desperate and longed to take the first train home and leave those letters to be re-done by Signor Maller himself. It was true, though, that if a moment later Sanneo gave a nod of approval when signing a letter, Alfonso, however tired he was, took up his work again with renewed zest.

  Tired? Nauseated, more. From day to day his work increased slowly, but changed little or nothing in kind. He only had to think up one or two paragraphs for himself in a day; but he also had to copy out endless figures, repeat the same phrase innumerable times. Towards evening his hand, the only part of his body really tired, would stop, and his attention would stray for lack of stimulus; sometimes he was forced to fling down his pen and abandon work from nausea, like someone who had eaten too much of one dish. He never quite mastered this work, and worry was now added to his malaise.

  White had told him that all contractual letters could be left for a few days or even weeks without a reply, and this had greatly eased his work in the first days; very soon, though, as pending letters increased, his work became more complicated because incoming letters joined others from the same client awaiting replies, and Alfonso, distracted and forgetful of names, did not remember which were which. In the evening the letters were sent back by Sanneo with an annotation. “What about the letter before this one? Signor Nitti NB. The poor culprit would go off to Sanneo and listen to a long sermon on disorder, which did nothing to improve the situation because he lacked not goodwill but capacity; his defect was fundamental.

  While urged along by zeal for his new job, he felt less bored. He needed to concentrate continuously to get through as many letters as possible in the least amount of time, but the very intensity of the work distracted and tired him more than something less mechanical. But this early zeal could only be re-ignited by circumstances independent of his will, and his work proceeded so slowly that a good part of his day was spent either reading letters that had just arrived to find out which he could put aside, and tidying papers left on his desk days before.

  Sanneo said he was surprised that a young man who showed such a wish to work could not get more done. He would come into Alfonso’s room unexpectedly, hoping to surprise him reading a newspaper or out chattering with other clerks; but he always found him at his place, pen in hand and eyes fixed on paper. He even lessened his work out of kindness, but the fifteen or twenty short letters which he gave him to do were never all done by evening, and his pending tray always stayed as high.

  Alfonso came to the conclusion that he felt generally out of sorts because his body needed something to tire itself out on, with which to exhaust itself. This body of his now became a plastic concept which he reshaped to every new sensation. In the evening, after a day spent on sums or rushing about the bank or sitting with pen and paper and thoughts elsewhere, he would imagine matter flowing fast through his body in pliable tubes, impossible to regulate or resist. Whenever he could, he took long walks, and his malaise vanished; his lungs expanded, he could feel his joints becoming more flexible, his body obeying more promptly; and he would imagine that flow of material as having been absorbed or regulated, and helping him now instead of impeding him. If he settled down to study, he would drop his book and feel that his chin was tired, and a strange sensation would come over his forehead as if the volume inside was trying to expand, to enlarge its content. He felt the same sort of calm as if he had tired himself out running; his brain was lucid and his daydreams either conscious or absent. Very soon even the time he had given to walking became taken up by study: it took less time to find calm in study than it did in walking. A single hour spent on some difficult work of criticism would soothe him for an entire day. He was growing ambitious, and study became a means to satisfy this. That blind obedience to Sanneo, the scenes he had to endure daily, disgusted him; study was his recreation. A well-written book gave him megalomaniac dreams, not due to the quality of his brain but to circumstances; finding himself at one extreme, he dreamt of another.

  Every second of his time outside the office—or even in the office where he kept a few books in a cupboard—he spent reading. Generally he read serious works of criticism and philosophy, which he found less tiring than poetry or art. He also wrote, but very little; his style was not formed, and he felt thwarted by inappropriate words which never quite hit the target. He thought study would improve this. He was in no hurry, and the little he did was in accordance with a timetable which he had laid down for his own work. After being tired out by work at the bank and library, he would jot down a few concepts or a romantic dialogue with himself which no one else would ever hear. The odd thing about these was that in them he seemed to be suffering from some universal disease: never a hint of his real sufferings, of the nostalgia still torturing him. These writings were in the nature of rudimentary jottings which he hoped to use in some distant future for major works; plays, novels, verse.

  He had never yet read an Italian classic all through, and had only a haphazard knowledge of literary history and criticism. Later he plunged into reading German works of philosophy translated into French.

  Then he discovered the city library, and all those centuries of culture at his free disposal saved him a great deal from his meagre budget. He tied himself down to the library at fixed hours, which gave his studies the regularity he needed. Another reason for going there often was that his room at the Lanuccis’ was not good for study. It was small, half of it occupied by the bed, very dark, it was rarely touched by sun, and he found thinking neither pleasant nor easy at a small round table whose four legs never touched the floor at the same time.

  When he had managed to get through a day of this routine, he would go to the bank the next day, still tired, and work worse than usual. Pending letters increased, and by evening he found himself facing a huge pile of correspondence from every town in Italy; the whole world seemed to be conspiring to impose this labour upon him.

  He made very few acquaintances in the library. He would enter the long reading-room filled with tables in parallel lines, take any seat and sit there for some time with his head in his hands, so absorbed in reading that he did not even see the people sitting beside him. After an hour at most this
concentrated reading began to repel him, but he still forced himself to go on for a time and stopped only when his mind could no longer grasp the words seen by his eyes; then he handed in his book at once and left. After an hour spent with the German idealists everything in the street seemed to be calling out to him.

  VII

  ALFONSO HAD COME to the city with a great contempt for its inhabitants; townspeople he considered bound to be physically weak and morally lax, and he despised what he considered to be their sexual habits, general womanizing and facile affairs. He could never be like them, he thought, and felt and, actually was, very different. Sensuality he had known only as an exalted emotion. To him a woman was man’s gentle companion born to be adored rather than embraced, and in the solitude of the country village where his body had grown to maturity he had vowed to keep himself pure until he could lay all of himself at the feet of some goddess. In the city this ideal had very soon lost any influence on his life, though it still remained a vague objective for which he felt no need to struggle.

  He held to it as a theory even after realizing that it seemed ridiculous to those to whom he explained it. He had no idea what to replace it with; its abandonment would have created a void in his life. But he no longer spoke of it, and Miceni was quite wrong in boasting of having converted him.

  At twenty-two his senses had the delicacy and weakness of an adolescent’s. He had desires which it was torture for him to repress. The sight or even the thought of a skirt, harsh mockery of his dream, was enough to provoke these desires; and they were strong enough to drag him suddenly from the reading he had settled into, and make him rush through the streets, prey to an agitation which would have seemed mysterious had he not known its origin. There was only one occupation that soothed this state—following some attractive girl for long stretches of the street, admiring her, timid and ashamed. The thought of going any further only came later. Till then he had waited for his ideal to come to him.