Pleasure (6 page)

—I came—she answered with a certain measured slowness, looking her lover in the eyes—I came because you asked me to. For the love we once had, for the way that love was interrupted, for the long, obscure silence of distance, I could not have refused that invitation without harshness. And then, I wanted to tell you what I have told you: that I am no longer yours, that I can never be yours again. I wanted to tell you this, in fairness, to spare you and me any painful deceit, any danger, any bitterness, in the future. Do you understand?

Andrea lowered his head almost onto her knees, in silence. She touched his hair, with a once-familiar gesture.

—And also—she continued, in a voice that gave him a shiver throughout every fiber—and also . . . I wanted to tell you that I love you, that I love you no less than I once did, that you are still the soul of my soul, and that I want to be your dearest sister, your sweetest friend. Do you understand?

Andrea did not move. Taking his temples between her hands, she lifted his forehead; she forced him to look her in the eyes.

—Have you understood? she repeated, her voice even more tender and soft.

Her eyes, in the shadow of her long lashes, seemed to be suffused with some pure and delicate oil. Her mouth, slightly open, had a light tremor in the upper lip.

—No; you did not love me, you do not love me! Andrea finally broke out, removing her hands from his temples and drawing back, because he already felt in his veins the insidious fire that those pupils exhaled even involuntarily, and he felt more piercingly the pain of having lost the material possession of the beautiful woman. —You did not love me! You,
then,
had the courage to kill your love, suddenly, almost treacherously, while it was giving you its greatest elation. You fled from me, you abandoned me, you left me alone, dismayed, aching all over, dispirited, while I was still blinded by your promises. You did not love me, you do not love me! After such a long absence, full of mystery, mute and inexorable; after such a long wait, in which I wasted the best part of my life nurturing a sadness that was dear to me because it came from you; after so much happiness and after so much hardship, lo and behold, you come back to a place where everything holds such an intense memory for us, and you say to me sweetly: “I am no longer yours. Good-bye.” Ah, you do not love me!

—Ingrate! Ingrate! exclaimed Elena, wounded by the young man's almost irate voice. —What do you know about what happened, about what I suffered? What do you know?

—I don't know anything; I don't want to know anything, Andrea answered harshly, looking at her with a somewhat troubled gaze, at the base of which his exasperated desires glittered. —I know that you were mine, once, all of you, with unrestricted abandon, with unlimited voluptuousness, as no other woman has ever been; and I know that neither my spirit nor my flesh will ever forget that exhilaration . . .

—Hush!

—What do I care about your sisterly pity? You, against your will, offer it to me with the eyes of a lover, touching me with unsure hands. Too many times have I seen your eyes close in ecstasy; too many times have your hands felt me shiver. I desire you.

Incited by his own words, he grasped her wrists tightly and brought his face so close to hers that she could feel his warm breath in her mouth.

—I desire you as I never have, he continued, trying to draw her to his kiss, enclosing her upper body with one arm. —Remember! Remember!

Elena stood up, pushing him away. She was trembling all over.

—I don't want to. Do you understand?

He did not understand. He came still closer, his arms stretched out to take her: extremely pale, resolute.

—Could you bear—she cried with her voice slightly choked, unable to stand the violence—could you bear to share my body with others?

She had uttered that cruel question without thinking. Now, with her eyes wide open, she looked at her lover, anxious and almost dismayed, like one who in self-defense has struck a blow without gauging its strength, and fears that one has wounded too deeply.

Andrea's ardor suddenly vanished. And on his face there appeared such deep pain that the woman felt a stab in her heart.

Andrea said, after an interval of silence:

—Farewell.

In that one word was the bitterness of all the other words he had choked back.

Elena answered gently:

—Farewell. Forgive me.

Both felt the need to conclude, for that evening, the dangerous conversation. The one assumed a form of external courtesy that was almost overstated. The other became even gentler, almost humble; and an incessant tremor shook her.

She picked up her mantle from the chair. Andrea helped her with a concerned air. When she could not find the sleeve with her arm, Andrea guided it, barely touching her; then he handed her her hat and veil.

—Do you wish to go into the other room, to the mirror?

—No, thank you.

She went toward the wall, next to the fireplace, where a small antique mirror hung, with an ornate frame sculpted with figures in such an agile and candid style that it appeared to have been formed from some malleable gold rather than from wood. It was an exceedingly light thing, made surely by the hands of a delicate fifteenth-century artist for a Mona Amorrosisca or for a Laldomine.
⁹
Very often during the happy times, Elena had put on her veil before that clouded, tarnished glass, which had the appearance of dark, slightly greenish water. This came to her mind again now.

When she saw her image appear in those depths, it gave her a strange impression. A wave of sadness, heavier than before, passed through her spirit. But she did not speak.

Andrea was watching her with intent eyes.

When she was ready, she said:

—It must be very late.

—Not very. It must be around six, perhaps.

—I told my carriage to go, she added. —I would be very grateful if you could have a closed carriage called for me.

—Will you permit me to leave you alone here, for a moment? My manservant is out.

She nodded.

—Will you give the address to the coachman, please? Hotel Quirinale.

He went out, closing the door of the room behind him. She was left alone.

Rapidly, she cast her eyes about, encompassing the whole room with an indefinable gaze, and paused on the goblet of flowers. The walls seemed wider to her; the ceiling higher. Looking around, she had the sensation of the beginnings of dizziness. She no longer smelled the scent; but certainly the air had to be as warm and heavy as that of a greenhouse. The image of Andrea appeared to her in a kind of intermittent flash; in her ears some indistinct wave of his voice resounded. Was she about to faint? And yet, what a delight to close one's eyes and abandon oneself to that languor!

Shaking herself, she went toward the window, opened it, and breathed in the wind. Revived, she turned once again to the room. The dim flames of the candles oscillated, stirring delicate shadows on the walls. The fireplace no longer had any flames, but the embers partially illuminated the sacred figures in the fire screen, which was made of a fragment of ecclesiastical stained glass. The cup of tea had remained on the edge of the table, cold, untouched. The cushion on the armchair still retained the imprint of the body that had been pressed into it. All the things around her exhaled an indistinct melancholy that flowed into and crowded the woman's heart. The weight was increasing on that weak heart, becoming a harsh oppression, an unbearable anguish.

—My God! My God!

She would have liked to flee. A stronger gust of wind swelled the curtains, agitated the small candle flames, stirred up a rustling sound. She started, with a shiver; and almost involuntarily called:

—Andrea!

Her voice and that name, in the silence, gave her a strange jolt, as if her voice and that name had not come from her own mouth. Why was Andrea taking so long? She began to listen. Nothing came to her except for the dull, bleak, jumbled sound of urban life, on the eve of the New Year. No carriage was passing on the square of Trinità de' Monti. As the wind was blowing hard in gusts, she closed the window again: she glimpsed the peak of the obelisk, black against the starry sky.

Perhaps Andrea had not immediately found a covered carriage in Piazza Barberini. She waited, sitting on the couch, trying to still the mad agitation within her, avoiding any examination of her soul, forcing her attention to external things. The glassy figures of the fire screen caught her eyes, barely lit by the half-dead coals. Higher up, on the mantelpiece, from one of the goblets, petals were falling from a huge white rose
¹⁰
that was falling apart slowly, languidly, softly, with something almost feminine, almost fleshlike about it. The concave petals were poised delicately on the marble, like falling flakes of snow.

How sweet, then, did that scented snow seem to the fingers!
she thought.
All shredded, the roses were scattered over the carpets, the couches, the chairs; and she laughed, happy, amid the devastation; and her lover, happy, was at her feet.

But she heard a coach stop before the front door, in the street; and she stood up, shaking her poor head, as if to chase away that kind of dullness that enveloped it. Immediately after, Andrea returned, panting.

—Forgive me, he said. —But I could not find the doorman, so I went right down to Piazza di Spagna. The coach is below, waiting.

—Thank you, Elena said, looking at him timidly through the black veil.

He was serious and pale, but calm.

—Mumps is arriving tomorrow, perhaps, she added, in a soft voice. —I will send you a note to tell you when I can see you.

—Thanks! Andrea said.

—Good-bye, then, she continued, holding out her hand to him.

—Would you like me to accompany you down to the street? There is no one about.

—Yes, come down with me.

She looked about, slightly hesitant.

—Have you forgotten anything? Andrea asked.

She looked at the flowers. But she answered.

—Oh yes, my cardholder.

Andrea ran to pick it up from the tea table. Handing it out to her, he said:

—
A stranger hither!
¹¹

—
No, my dear. A friend
.

Elena uttered this reply with a very animated, vivacious voice. Then, suddenly, with a smile halfway between suppliant and flattering, of mingled fear and tenderness, above which trembled the edge of her veil, which reached her upper lip, leaving her whole mouth free:

—
Give me a rose
.

Andrea went to each vase; and removed all the roses, pressing them together into a great bunch that he could barely hold in his hands. Some fell, others fell apart.

—They were for you, all of them, he said, without looking at the woman he loved.

And Elena turned to go out, her head bent, in silence, followed by him.

They walked down the stairs still in silence. He saw the nape of her neck, so fresh and delicate, where below the knot of her veil the small black curls mingled with her ashen fur coat.

—Elena! he called, in a low voice, no longer able to conquer the consuming passion that was swelling his heart.

She turned, placing her index finger on her lips to indicate to him to be silent, with a suffering, imploring gesture, her eyes glittering. She quickened her pace, climbed up into the coach, and felt the roses being placed on her lap.

—Good-bye! Good-bye!

And as soon as the coach moved forward she lay back in the farthest corner, overcome, bursting into unrestrained tears, shredding the roses to pieces with her poor convulsed hands.

Beneath today's gray democratic flood, which wretchedly submerges so many beautiful and rare things, that special class of ancient Italic nobility in which from generation to generation a certain family tradition of elect culture, elegance, and art was kept alive is also slowly disappearing.

To this class, which I would call Arcadian because it rendered its greatest splendor in the sweet life of the eighteenth century, the Sperelli family belonged. Urbanity, elegant writing skills, a love of delicacy, a predilection for unusual studies, a mania for archaeology, refined gallantry, were all hereditary qualities of the house of Sperelli. A certain Alessandro Sperelli, in 1466, had carried to Federigo d'Aragona, the son of Ferdinando, King of Naples, and brother of Alfonso, Duke of Calabria, the codex in folio containing some “less coarse” poems of the old Tuscan writers, which Lorenzo de' Medici had promised in Pisa in '65; and that same Alessandro had written upon the death of the divine Simonetta,
¹
in chorus with the sages of the time, a Latin elegy, melancholic and forsaken, in imitation of Tibullus. Another Sperelli, Stefano, in the same century, had been in Flanders amid a life of pomp, of exquisite elegance, of unparalleled Burgundian splendor; and he remained there at the court of Charles le Téméraire, marrying into a Flemish family. One of his sons, Giusto, studied painting under the instruction of Jan Gossaert; and together with his teacher he came to Italy in the retinue of Philippe de Bourgogne, ambassador of Emperor Maximilian to Pope Julius II, in 1508. He took up residence in Florence, where the main branch of his line continued to flourish; and had as a second teacher Piero di Cosimo, that jocund and easygoing painter, a strong and harmonious colorist who brought pagan fables freely back to life with his paintbrush. This Giusto was not a common artist, but he consumed all his strength in futile efforts to reconcile his primitive Gothic education with the recent spirit of the Renaissance. Toward the second half of the seventeenth century, the house of Sperelli relocated to Naples. There, in 1679, a Bartolomeo Sperelli published an astrological treatise,
De Nativitatibus;
in 1720 a Giovanni Sperelli gave the theater a comic opera entitled
La Faustina
and then a lyrical tragedy entitled
Progne;
in 1756 a Carlo Sperelli printed a book of amateur verse in which many lascivious mottos of classical derivation were rhymed with the Horatian elegance then in mode. A better poet was Luigi, a man of exquisite gallantry, at the court of the Beggar King
²
and Queen Caroline. He wrote verses with a certain melancholic and courteous Epicureanism, with great limpidity; and he loved like a very fine lover, and had abundant affairs, some of them celebrated, like the one with the Marchioness of Bugnano, who out of jealousy poisoned herself, and the one with the Countess of Chesterfield, whom, when she died of consumption, he mourned in songs, odes, sonnets, and elegies that were extremely sweet, though somewhat florid.

Count Andrea Sperelli-Fieschi of Ugenta, the sole heir, continued the family tradition. He was, in truth, the ideal type of young Italian gentleman of the nineteenth century, the legitimate defender of a lineage of gentlemen and elegant artists, the last descendant of an intellectual race.

He was, as it were, completely impregnated with art. His adolescence, nurtured with varied and profound studies, seemed prodigious. He had alternated, until the age of twenty, lengthy bouts of study with lengthy travels with his father and had been able to complete his extraordinary aesthetic education under his father's guidance, without the restrictions or constrictions of pedagogues. It was indeed from his father that he had inherited his taste for objects of art, his passionate cult of beauty, his paradoxical scorn for prejudice, his avidity for pleasure.

This father who had grown up amid the extreme splendors of the Bourbon court knew how to live to the full; he had a deep knowledge of the voluptuous life and also a certain Byronesque inclination toward fanciful romanticism. His own marriage had taken place in almost tragic circumstances, after a furious passion. After that he had disturbed and tormented conjugal harmony in every possible way. In the end he had separated from his wife and had always kept his young son with him, traveling with him throughout Europe.

Andrea's education had hence been, so to say, through life itself, namely not based so much on books as derived from the presence of human reality. His spirit was corrupted not only by high culture but also by experience: and his curiosity became ever sharper as his knowledge grew. Right from the start he had been lavish with himself; because his gift, the power of great sensibility, never tired of providing resources for his prodigality. But the expansion of that power of his led to the destruction in him of another strength, that of
moral strength,
which his own father had not been averse to discouraging. And he did not realize that his life was the progressive reduction of his own faculties, of his hopes, of his pleasure, almost a progressive renunciation; and that the circle was growing ever tighter around him, a process that was inexorable though slow.

His father had given him, among others, this fundamental maxim: “One must
fashion
one's life, as one fashions a work of art. A man's life must be of his own making. This is where true superiority lies.”

Additionally, his father would warn him: “One must preserve, at every cost, one's liberty; keep it whole, to the point of exhilaration. The rule of a man of intellect is this:—
Habere, non haberi
.”
³

He also used to say: “Regret is the fruitless pasture of an idle mind. One must avoid regret above all things, always keeping the mind occupied with new sensations and new imaginings.”

But these
voluntary
maxims, which by their ambiguity could also be interpreted as high moral criteria, fell upon an
involuntary
nature, namely, in a man whose willpower was extremely weak.

Another paternal seed had perfidiously borne fruit in Andrea's soul: the seed of sophistry. “The sophism,” that incautious educator would say, “is at the base of every human pleasure and pain. To intensify and multiply sophisms is therefore equal to intensifying and multiplying one's pleasure or pain. Perhaps the knowledge of life is to be found in the obscuring of truth. The word is a profound thing, in which for the man of intellect inexhaustible richness is hidden. The Greeks, craftsmen of the word, are in fact the most exquisite hedonists of all antiquity. The sophists flourished in great number in the century of Pericles, in the golden age.”

Such a seed had found fertile ground in the morbid genius of the young man. Little by little, in Andrea falsehood had become not so much toward others as toward himself a habit so inherent to his conscience that he had reached a point where he could never be completely sincere, and could no longer regain his self-control.

After the premature death of his father, he found himself alone at the age of twenty-one, commanding a considerable fortune, distanced from his mother, under the sway of his passions and his tastes. He remained in England for fifteen months. His mother remarried to an old lover of hers. And he came to Rome, for which he had a predilection.

Rome was his great love: not the Rome of the Caesars but that of the popes; not the Rome of the arches, of the thermal baths, of the forums, but the Rome of the villas, of the fountains, of the churches. He would have given the entire Colosseum for Villa Medici, Campo Vaccino for Piazza di Spagna, the Arch of Titus for the Fontanella delle Tartarughe. The princely magnificence of the Colonnas, of the Dorias, of the Barberinis attracted him vastly more than the ruins of imperial grandeur. And his great dream was to possess a palace adorned by Michelangelo and embellished by the Caraccis, like Palazzo Farnese; a gallery full of paintings by Raphael, Titian, Domenichino, like the Galleria Borghese; a villa like that of Alessandro Albani where the deep box hedges, the red Oriental granite, the white Luni marble, the Grecian statues, the Renaissance paintings, the memories themselves of the place would cast a spell around one of his haughty lovers. At the home of his cousin the Marchioness of Ateleta, in an album of society confessions, alongside the question “What would you like to be?” he had written “Roman prince.”

When he arrived in Rome toward the end of September 1884, he established his abode in the Palazzo Zuccari at Trinità de' Monti, above that delightful Catholic tepidarium where the shadow of the obelisk of Pius VI marks the passage of Time. He spent the whole month of October absorbed in the decoration of his home; then, when the rooms were adorned and ready, he went through a few days of invincible sadness in his new house. It was an Indian summer, a springtime of the dead,
⁴
grave and sweet, in which Rome reclined, entirely golden like a city of the Far East, under an almost milky sky, as diaphanous as the heavens mirrored in the southern seas.

That languor of air and light where all things appear almost to lose their reality and become immaterial gave the young man an infinite exhaustion, an inexpressible sense of discontent, discomfort, solitude, emptiness, nostalgia. This vague malaise came perhaps from the change in climate, in habits, in occupation. The soul converts ill-defined impressions of the organism into psychic phenomena, in the way that dreams convert, according to their nature, events that occur during sleep.

Certainly, he was entering into a new phase. Would he finally find the woman and the work capable of taking charge of his heart, and of becoming his
purpose
? He had inside himself neither the confidence of strength nor the expectation of glory or happiness. Completely permeated and saturated with art as he was, he had not yet produced any work of note. Avid for love and pleasure, he had not yet loved anyone completely nor taken innocent pleasure in anything. Tormented by an Ideal, he did not yet have its image well defined at the forefront of his thoughts. Detesting pain by nature and by education, he was vulnerable and accessible to pain in every part of himself.

In the tumult of his contradictory inclinations he had lost all will and all morality. In abdicating his will, he had ceded power to his instincts; his aesthetic sense had substituted his moral sense. But precisely this aesthetic sense, extremely keen and powerful and constantly active, maintained a certain equilibrium in his spirit; hence one could say that his life was a constant struggle between opposing forces enclosed within the limits of a certain equilibrium. Men of intellect, educated in the cult of Beauty, always preserve even in the basest depravities a type of order. The concept of Beauty is, one could say, the
axis
of their interior being, around which all their passions gravitate.

Atop his sadness, the memory of Costantia Landbrooke still floated vaguely, like a faded scent. Conny's love had been a very fine love; and she had been a very pleasant woman. She appeared to be a creation of Thomas Lawrence; she possessed all the particular feminine graces that are dear to that painter of furbelows, laces, velvets, shining eyes, semi-open mouths; she was a second incarnation of the little Countess of Shaftesbury. Vivacious, loquacious, extremely fickle, lavish with childish diminutives and pealing laughter, easily prone to sudden tenderness, instant melancholy, rapid ire, she brought to a love affair much movement, much variety, and many whims. Her most lovable quality was freshness, a tenacious, constant freshness, at all hours of the day. When she awoke after a night of pleasure, she was all fragrant and clean as if she had just emerged from the bathtub. Her figure indeed appeared to Andrea's memory in a particular pose: with her hair partially loose on her neck and gathered partially atop her head with a comb patterned with a Greek design in gold; her irises swimming in white, like a pale violet in milk; her mouth open, dewy, all lit up by her teeth shining in the rosy blood of her gums, in the shadow of the screens, which diffused a glow over the bed that was something between pale blue and silver, similar to the light of a sea cave.

But the melodious chirping of Conny Landbrooke had passed over Andrea's soul like one of those light musical pieces that leaves its refrain in the mind for some time. More than once she had said to him, in one of her evening depressions, with her eyes misted in tears:
“I know you love me not . . .”
⁵
In fact, he did not love her; he was not satisfied by her. His feminine ideal was less Nordic. Ideally, he felt attracted to one of those sixteenth-century courtesans who seem to wear some magic veil over their faces, a transparent enchanted mask, almost an obscure nocturnal charm, the divine horror of Night.

Meeting the Duchess of Scerni, Donna Elena Muti, he had thought:
Here
is
my
woman
. His entire being felt an upliftment of joy in the anticipation of possessing her.

The first encounter had been at the house of the Marchioness of Ateleta. The salons of this cousin of Andrea's, who lived in Palazzo Roccagiovine, were very well attended. Her attraction lay especially in her witty cheerfulness, the freedom of her movements, her indefatigable smile. The joyful features of her face recalled certain feminine profiles in the drawings of the young Moreau, or in Gravelot's vignettes. In her manner, in her tastes, in her dress style, there was something Pompadouresque, not without some affectation, because she did have a singular resemblance to Louis XV's favorite mistress.

Every Wednesday, Andrea Sperelli had a place at the marchioness's dining table. One Tuesday evening, in a box at the Valle Theater, the marchioness had laughingly said to him:

—Mind that you don't miss tomorrow, Andrea. We have among our guests an
interesting
person, or rather,
fatal
. Therefore, arm yourself against the spell . . . You are in a moment of weakness.

He had answered her, laughing: