A Life

by Italo Svevo

  “You’ve never even found time to pay me a visit; not in a whole month!”

  He tried to excuse himself, but Mascotti interrupted him by brusquely ordering his daughter to go and prepare a bed for Alfonso. She obeyed, after saying she was surprised not to have been warned beforehand of the hospitality suddenly demanded of her. Alfonso would have left that house, overcoming his utter exhaustion, had she not made her remarks more polite by saying that as she had not been forewarned he would be very uncomfortable in the only room and bed which she could offer him.

  In fact, when left alone in a tiny room with one window, he felt wretched. He had to open the window at once because the air was damper than outside. A strong smell of must increased his misery. Everything around him seemed to be rotting. The room was on the ground floor, and the window gave on to the main street. When he drew back from the window, the smell of the room was as strong as if the air had not been let in. He nearly escaped by jumping out into the street, afraid of being unable to sleep that night even though he longed for the relief of sleep; he yearned to be free for an hour or two at least from the sadness which it seemed would never leave him again.

  If only he could sleep. He felt utterly weary; his head would no longer stay upright. Had he left that house he would never have reached his home but would have fallen asleep in the snow.

  In bed he felt wretched. The sheet was of coarse material, and what was more the bed seemed damp; immediately after he shut the window, the room began to stink strongly, the smell emanating from the walls, the old furniture. He did not feel the slow approach of restorative sleep. His misery, which he still attributed to the smell and lack of air, increased. Again he decided to get up and leave the house; so determined was he to do this that he began thinking up excuses for Mascotti next day. He seemed to have been on the point of putting his project into execution and had even raised the sash—but actually he could not remember lying down again and realized only that he was in the same bed, pressing his aching head against the pillow.

  Suddenly he felt better, more comfortable in bed, without pain. He lay motionless, fearing to lose his well-being. He was certainly not asleep but pleasantly resting.

  He never remembered how the change had taken place, but he suddenly saw himself in quite another place and in a very different state of mind.

  He was lying in bed, at home, in a big airy room with summer sun entering an open window. He was convalescing from a long illness and was so weak that he could not succeed in moving the covers oppressing his chest. But this was his only worry, for apart from that he felt happy. He stared at the sunbeam lighting up innumerable specks suspended in the air, a faint mist found by the sun in the purest of atmospheres. He was glad because he knew that in a few days he would be allowed to go out into the sun and fresh air, glad because in the kitchen next door he could hear his mother still young and humming as she worked for him. A monotonous thud reached him of his mother pounding meat with a knife, but there was another monotonous sound, a continuous gentle buzz in his ears which made him doze off.

  Someone must have entered the little passage because he could hear the sound of a light tread on the stone floor and the rustle of a dress. From just in front of the door came the gentle voice of a woman: “How is Alfonso?” Then that voice though gentle became disagreeable because it seemed to echo and resound in all the empty spaces of the big house. Whose was it—that it sounded so familiar? He compared it with all the women’s voices that he knew but it wasn’t familiar. “Ah yes, Francesca’s!” And a sense of deep discomfort swept over him and he thought: “If she’s settled in the village, she’ll destroy the quiet of all its inhabitants.”

  The door had opened, and at once the room was invaded by loud sounds of carts in the streets and prolonged shouts of carters. Instinctively he shut his eyes to isolate himself. It was his mother. Before she reached his bed, he saw her and her pleased smile at finding him so quiet. She bent down and kissed him, but on the cavity of his ear. He felt a sharp pain as if something inside had burst, and woke up.

  Light entering the window dazzled him. Was it day already? His surprise was the greater because he still felt tired as if he had slept at most an hour.

  By his bed stood Mascotti and Frontini; they did not seem to have noticed that he had opened his eyes.

  “How long can it last?” asked Mascotti, looking worried and stroking his nose with his forefinger.

  “Who can tell? Maybe a fortnight. It’s probably typhoid fever.”

  “Typhus?” asked Alfonso.

  “He understands, you see, so he must be feeling better,” cried Mascotti, pleased.

  “He has a temperature, but it’s low,” said Frontini turning to Alfonso, “and probably due to exhaustion and grief. I guarantee it’s nothing serious. He’s much better now, it seems.”

  So he was ill, and was surprised he’d not noticed it before. He had a fever which still sent shivers up his spine, made his body hot and dry, gave his lips an involuntary smile. It was not unpleasant, nor had the dreams it had given him been either.

  “So you’re better, eh?” asked Mascotti, and bent over him as if wanting Frontini not to hear. Alfonso never forgot either that dream or what he heard then. “I’d be quite willing to have you here, but there’s no one who can look after you as you need. Guiseppina can act as nurse as she’s trained.”

  “Yes, yes, home!” cried Alfonso, whose fever did not prevent him seeing this poor man’s fear of having to keep a sick man in his house.

  He heard Mascotti turn to Frontini and say that Alfonso himself wanted to return home.

  He dozed off again but did not fall fast asleep. He was struggling with fever and overcoming it every now and again. He heard his mother’s voice asking him how he was and soon after glimpsed the blond gleams of Frontini’s moustache. Frontini was very assiduous. Every time Alfonso opened his eyes he saw him by the bed taking his pulse or putting pieces of ice on his brow. He must be a good person, and Alfonso in his fever was touched by the poor man whom he had so hated.

  Then his fever increased again and with it came a violent headache. He gasped in agony.

  “Oh! Poor mother!” he thought, remembering that other panting he had watched and which must have been so much more agonizing than his own.

  He must have lost sense of time because on reopening his eyes he found it was dark. A night-light was glimmering next to the bed, and Giuseppina, half-asleep, was lying under the window on a sofa parallel to his bed. So they had called her rather than put him out of the house. Mascotti was a good person too.

  He felt very thirsty and put a foot out of bed to go and drink a bottle of water which he had noticed because it reflected the tiny night-light.

  “Now will you stay in bed?” cried Giuseppina, suddenly coming towards him threateningly.

  He drew his leg back in terror.

  “I only wanted some water!” he said in excuse.

  “Ah! He’s come round,” said Giuseppina, at her ease, thinking aloud. “Sorry,” she added, in her coarse man’s voice that was not used to apologizing. “They told me to be very careful with you!” She gave him as much water as he wanted.

  He must have spent many days in that state because often on opening his eyes he would be surprised to find daylight after shutting them in the dark.

  Once, on opening his eyes he was surprised to find himself in the street in front of Mascotti’s house, supported by Frontini and Giuseppina. Uncertain whether it was a dream, he showed no surprise and asked for no explanations. He was put into a cart, which moved off at once, slowly but not avoiding a shaking like whiplashes on irregular cobbles. He was glad to find this vision driven out by others, and when that journey came back to him during the night, it seemed the fruit of delirium.

  But in the morning, calm now as if after a long rest, with a mind quiet and somewhat torpid—his thoughts turned only to what had preceded his illness and he realized that journey had not been a vision. There was his room at home in
exact detail, its old furniture, the pendulum clock which was ticking and showing eight o’clock, two beds. There was his mother’s bed too. The body had been taken away, and it had been remade as if the person who had left it intended to lie down that night. The pillow was the same; he recognized it by a coffee mark made by the dead woman when she pushed away a cup offered her in a moment of intense suffering.

  That was enough to evoke in him all the terrible events at which he had been present during the last fortnight. Tears came to his eyes, sweet ones of compassion. It was not sorrow at feeling himself alone in the world that made him weep. He wept for the poor old woman who had died loving a life which she had long known was to abandon her. He himself was still living, and life was sweet, when he was not consciously aware of the flow of blood, the mechanism responsible for its regularity, and there was only the calm and certainty of living, the sense of lasting for ever.

  At seeing Giuseppina he began to laugh, because he remembered her already at work as a nurse.

  “So the old man put me out of his house, did he?”

  Giuseppina protested: “He had you brought here comfortably in a carriage.”

  From Giuseppina he learned that he had been taken away from Mascotti’s house because of the latter’s fear, which Frontini had been unable to destroy, that it was a case of typhus. The notary’s daughter had been the most insistent and vehement in demanding his departure, and one day, terrified by a headache she had had for some hours, she gave her father an ultimatum in front of Frontini.

  “Either he goes or I do.”

  Frontini had asked for two days’ grace; the third day on his arrival he found Alfonso already carried down the stairs, so he had been unable to do anything but help with the move and see it was done with care. Every detail which Alfonso had thought a dream was a reality. He had put up some weak resistance on the stairs, but after the first breath of fresh air had calmed down, looked round with an air of surprise and, without a word, let himself be laid in the cart, to the great joy of Mascotti who cried: “Why, he’s all right, he could even be taken as far as the city without danger!”

  “Swine!” muttered Alfonso in indignation, thinking that for over three years that person had indeed been his mother’s only protector.

  Shortly afterwards Frontini came and was much surprised to find him in his right mind and hear he had been so for some hours; though the doctor asserted shortly afterwards that it was a natural development and he had foreseen it. He was a doctor who must have been used to making mistakes because he did not seem surprised to find facts not agreeing with his opinions.

  But he had behaved well during his illness, and Alfonso thanked him with tears in his eyes, thankful too for the pleasure which he saw shining in the other’s face at his words.

  In the afternoon Mascotti came and seemed unwilling to speak of the journey which he had made Alfonso take during his illness. Alfonso tried to be distant, which Mascotti at once noticed because he had seen him angry and knew how he looked then. He explained that he had wanted him moved because that room in his home was in no way suitable for a sick man. Then, seeing that Alfonso’s expression did not change at all, Mascotti grew confused and said that it had really been Lina his daughter who had wanted him out of the house. Alfonso was still silent and eventually Mascotti became indignant.

  “We may be old,” he replied, “but we want to live another few years.”

  This remark was enough to make Alfonso gentle and friendly.

  Mascotti at once changed the subject. He talked of the sale of the house which was now necessary. Creglingi, Rosina’s future husband, was offering ten thousand francs including everything, even the furniture.

  “It doesn’t seem a bad offer to me,” said Mascotti. Shortly afterwards he left.

  Alone again for the first time Alfonso thought over that adventure of his in the city. Illness had rested his brain, and the thought of Annetta seemed almost new to him. He could not feel passionate about things that had happened so long before, although he considered himself almost responsible for them. Now he was a new man who knew what he wanted. The other person, the one who had seduced Annetta, was an ailing boy with whom he had nothing in common. It was not the first time he thought he had left boyhood behind.

  If on his return he found Annetta still loved him, he would marry her because he was aware of his duties. But he would warn her and try to show her what a huge mistake they would make by their union. He would say, “I’m like this, and you’re like that, but on becoming your legal husband and master I’ll use every means at my disposal to change you, your tastes and your habits.” And also: “Of course I love you but not enough to love and tolerate your defects. When I first knew you, I despised you for a long time, sometimes even when I was showing love.”

  He felt these thoughts stir his blood, making his forehead sweat and his sight dim. The struggle in which he was about to engage was serious, and coming immediately after that period of sweet fever which had made him live among dear ghosts of the past, he felt its harshness all the more.

  But if, on the other hand, Annetta no longer loved him and was already engaged to another, as Francesca had foreseen, then he would withdraw into solitude and live calmly and happily. The affair’s only consequences would be to take away his chances of promotion in the Maller bank. That was no great disaster because his pay was adequate as it was. Anyway, he had not enough aptitude for commerce to give him any right to much advancement, and he lost very little by destroying the chance of getting it for other reasons.

  He smiled at the ghost of his mother who seemed to approve his propositions. His conscience was calm. He was doing what was right according to a definite moral code, for on the one hand he declared himself ready to carry out his obligations towards Annetta, although he regretted having assumed them, and on the other he was renouncing riches because he did not want them if stolen and not freely given.

  If Annetta no longer loved him, he would opt out of life, lose all interest in it and, in the contemplative life to which he intended to dedicate himself, would have no need to flatter or pretend, and run no risk of one fine day finding himself involved in another love affair born of vanity or cupidity. He would live with desires that were simple, sincere and everlasting.

  That evening the doctor found he still had a slight temperature and expressed a fear that it might rise again. Alfonso was not afraid of this because he knew the causes of the worsening better than the doctor, and in fact, after a long dreamless sleep, he found his head clear and himself so much stronger that he could spend all day sitting up in bed.

  On the last day which he spent in bed he received a visit from Creglingi concerning the sale of the house. By chance Mascotti had come half-an-hour before to warn him hurriedly that Faldelli was making a better offer than Creglingi. Faldelli wanted to open another tavern in that house and use the upper rooms as granaries and the lower ones, two of which were very big, as cellars. He was offering twelve thousand francs. Creglingi’s visit was unexpected because Mascotti had promised to warn him that they were not prepared to sign a contract on the terms of his offer. But Alfonso would have been sorry to see his father’s house turned into a tavern and asked Mascotti to get Creglingi to increase his offer. On first seeing him he thought Creglingi was coming after a word with Mascotti, but instead found him surprised and angry to hear himself asked to increase his offer. Alfonso explained that Faldelli had offered more, and so he could not give him preference although he wanted to. He was quite sincere. Had he not feared Mascotti’s derision, he would have accepted Creglingi’s offer without more ado. He would have liked to hand his house over to pretty Rosina, and indeed what most induced him to favour Creglingi was the fear that the latter would think him an enemy because he was marrying an old love of Alfonso’s. The difference of two thousand francs seemed insignificant. When he mentioned his preference for him, an ironical smile passed over Creglingi’s face. Alfonso was deeply wounded.

  “Even if I want
ed to,” he shouted, “my trustee wouldn’t let me accept your offer.”

  “Maybe!” said Creglingi insolently, “but before deciding to increase my offer I want a word with Faldelli.”

  He did not even pretend he believed Alfonso.

  “Listen,” said Alfonso, whose weakness had made the blood rush violently to his head from anger, “once you leave this room I warn you I’ll consider all dealings between us at an end.”

  Creglingi lost his temper and said that he did not believe in personal considerations in business and would not give in to pressure.

  “Business matters can’t just be arranged like this on the spot!”

  Faldelli, who came alone too, found Alfonso still angry. Without reading the contract which Faldelli had brought, Alfonso signed it at once although he had not been asked to do so in such a hurry. Some clauses were to be filled in later, and finding the other so ready to accept the contract, Faldelli lowered his offer. The furniture was older than he had thought, he said.

  Although Creglingi had heard that the contract was already signed, he came to visit Alfonso once again, this time obviously to hurt him. He said two or three times that if he had been given time to reflect he would have paid very much more. This assertion left Alfonso calm, and he smiled contemptuously; but Creglingi interpreted this contempt in a way Alfonso had not intended.

  “Yes,” he muttered bitterly on seeing that the question of money did not affect Alfonso, “what you really care about is harming me.”

  Alfonso did not defend himself because he realized that however he behaved this man’s enmity would find some reason for increasing. They parted brusquely, never to see each other again.

  He did see Rosina again and felt a sense of repulsion as if he had met Creglingi himself. Alfonso made an effort to control himself; he did not want to identify her with her future husband, and gave her a smiling greeting, even raising his hat courteously. Rosina’s big black eyes widened with surprise, and she gave him a hesitant ‘good day’. Obviously Alfonso’s form of greeting would never become familiar in the village.