Kaputt (4 page)

I would have liked to answer, "He is losing his hair." But I only said, smiling, "He is at Anagni near Rome at the head of the troops defending Sicily."

He smiled, too, but not at my innocent malice,- then he asked whether it was long since I had seen the Prince. "I saw him in Rome, shortly before I left Italy," I replied. And I should have liked to tell him that my last meeting with Prince Umberto had left me with a feeling of sorrow and regret. A few years had sufficed to turn that proud and smiling young Prince into a poor, sad and humbled-looking man. Something in his face, in his eyes, revealed a cowed and restless conscience. Even his cordiality, once kindly and sincere, was no longer spontaneous; his smile looked humble and uncertain. I had already perceived this dejection one evening shortly before the war at supper at Zum Kater Hiddigeigei, in Capri, on the narrow glass-covered terrace facing the road. In the next room a crowd of young people led by Countess Ciano danced noisily amid the excitable and sweating throng of a Neapolitan Sunday crowd. The Prince of Piedmont watched with a dull gaze the table at which the Countess Ciano's youthful court was seated, and the small group gathered at the bar around Mona Williams, Noel Coward and Eddi Bismarck. The Prince rose from time to time and with a brief bow asked Elisabetta Moretti or Marita Guglielmi—a daughter of the President of the Senate, or Cyprienne Charles Roux—daughter of the French Ambassador to the Vatican, or Countess Eileen Branca or Countess Lola Caetani to dance. Between the dances he came back to our table and sat down, mopping up the perspiration with his handkerchief. He smiled but his smile was bored, almost frightened. He wore white linen trousers, short and tight fitting, and a blue woolen sweater in the style that Gabriella Robilant had made fashionable that year. He had taken off his jacket and hung it on the back of his chair. I had never seen him dressed so carelessly. I noticed with pained surprise the glaring bare patch on the top of his head. It looked like a kind of large tonsure. He appeared greatly aged. His voice also had aged; it had grown yellow, hoarse, quite throaty.

Softness, lassitude, boredom appeared in his every gesture, in his smile, in the look of his large black eyes,- and I felt a gentle pity for that young prince, so faded and downcast, aging so humbly with soft resignation. I thought that we all had prematurely aged in Italy, that the same softness, the same lassitude and boredom slackened the gestures and infected the smiles and the looks of all of us. There was nothing pure, nothing truly young any more in Italy. The wrinkled face of that young prince, his premature baldness and withered skin were almost a mark of vulgar destiny. I felt that a painful and humiliating thought was weighing on his mind, that the humiliation of slavery had corrupted him, that he was a slave, and I could have laughed thinking that he, too, was a slave.

He was no longer that azure prince who walked through the streets of Turin with a warm smile on his proud red lips, that Prince Charming who appeared on the threshold of friendly houses by the side of the Princess of Piedmont at dinners and dances tendered to the young couple by the aristocracy of Turin. They were then a truly charming pair and pleasant to see, the Prince rather bothered by too tight a wedding ring, his Princess rather cross and diffident, her clear gaze resting on the other young women with a jealous suspicion that her silent graciousness could not fully conceal.

The Princess of Piedmont also had looked sad and downcast the last time I had seen her. How different from the first time I had met her at a dance in Turin, all dressed in white, sweet and splendid. It was one of the first dances she attended in Italy after her wedding; she entered, and it seemed as if she penetrated our lives softly like a secret image. How different she was now from the person I used to meet in Florence or at Forte dei Marmi; whom I sometimes surprised in Capri on the rocks or in the grottos of the Marina Piccola toward the Faraglioni. Now there was something humiliated—even in her.

I had become aware of it a few years before on the Côte d'Azur. I was sitting one evening with some friends close to the swimming pool on the terrace of Monte Carlo Beach. On the stage of the open air theater rhythmically rose and fell a wavering fringe of bare legs of a famous troupe of New York chorus girls. It was a warm night, the sea stretched out on the rocks and slumbered. Toward midnight the Princess of Piedmont appeared. With her was a relative of the Royal family, Count Gregorio Calvi di Bergolo, and after a while she sent Calvi to invite us to her table. The Princess was silent. She watched the show with a strangely concentrated gaze; the orchestra played "Stormy Weather" and "Singing in the Rain." After a while she turned to me and asked when I would return to Turin. I replied that I would never return to Italy, unless things changed. She gave me a long, silent, sad look.

"Do you remember the other night at Vence?" she asked suddenly.

A few days earlier I had gone up to Vence to carry the greetings of Roger Cornaz, the French translator of D. H. Lawrence, to two young American girls who were famous at the time throughout the Côte d'Azur for certain "sacred dances" they performed. The two American girls lived alone in a small old house, extremely poor and apparently happy. The younger one resembled Renée Vivien. They told me that they were expecting the Princess of Piedmont that evening. While the younger one concealed behind a dusty curtain prepared for her dance, and her friend selected records and wound the gramophone, the Princess of Piedmont entered accompanied by Gregorio Calvi and several others. At first I did not discern any change in her, but gradually I became aware that something was withered, humiliated in her too. The young American who resembled Renée Vivien began dancing in that ill-lit room, low-vaulted like a grotto, on a tiny wooden stage decorated with cloth and paper. It was a pitiful dance, deliciously
démodée,
"inspired by a fragment of Sappho," her friend explained. At first the dancer appeared to be burning with a pure fire, a blue flame shone in her clear eyes, but after a while she appeared tired, bored. Her friend stared at her with a loving yet commanding look, while she talked softly to the Princess of Piedmont about sacred dances, Plato, and Aphrodite's statues. In the reddish light of two lamps with bell-like shades of purple satin, the dancer moved slowly about the tiny stage and raised and lowered first one leg, then the other, to the husky rhythm of the gramophone, at times lifting her arms and joining her hands over her head, at times letting them drop to her sides with a supreme gesture of abandon, until she stopped, bowed and, saying with childlike simplicity, "I am tired," sat down on a cushion. Her friend took her in her arms calling her
petite chérie.
She turned to the Princess of Piedmont saying, "Isn't she wonderful?"

"Do you know what I was thinking the other night while we watched that young American dancing?" the Princess asked me. "I was thinking that her gestures were not pure. I do not mean sensuous or lacking in modesty. I mean to say that they were proud. Not pure. I often ask myself why it is so hard to be pure today. Don't you think we ought to be more humble?"

"I believe," I replied, "that you are using the dances of that young American only as an excuse, that perhaps you are thinking of something else."

"Yes, perhaps I am thinking of something else." She was silent for a while and then repeated, "Don't you think we ought to be more humble?"

"We ought to have more dignity, more self-respect," I replied. "But perhaps you are right. Only humility can raise us from the humiliation into which we have sunk."

"Perhaps that is what I meant," said the Princess of Piedmont lowering her head. "We are ill with pride. And pride is not enough to raise us from humiliation. Our actions, our thoughts are not pure." She went on to say that a few months before, when she had Monteverde's
Orpheus
performed in the Royal Palace at Turin for a small audience of friends and connoisseurs, she had been overtaken at the last moment by a feeling of shame. She had felt as if her intention had not been pure. As if she were only making a proud gesture. I said: "I, too, was at the Royal Palace that day and I felt uneasy; I did not know why. Perhaps, now, in Italy, even Monteverde sounds false. But it is a pity that you should waste your feeling of shame on things that do honor to your taste and intelligence. There are many other things that should cause us all to blush; even you."

The Princess of Piedmont looked greatly taken aback at my words and I saw that she blushed slightly. I had already regretted having spoken to her in that way. I feared I had offended her. But after a few moments she said to me in a gentle voice that one morning, perhaps tomorrow, she would go to Vence to visit Lawrence's tomb
(Lady Chatterley's Lover
was much read and talked about in those days), and I spoke of my last visit there. Night had already fallen when I reached Vence. The cemetery was closed; the attendant was asleep and he refused to get up, saying that "cemeteries, at night, are intended for sleep." Pressing my head against the bars of the gate, I endeavored to make out in the silvery moonlight, the simple and humble tomb, and the coarse mosaic of colored pebbles portraying a phoenix, the immortal bird Lawrence wanted to have on his tombstone.

"Do you think Lawrence was a pure man?" asked the Princess of Piedmont.

"He was a free man," I replied.

Later, when she was saying good-by, the Princess said to me in a low voice and a sad tone that surprised me, "Why don't you go back to Italy? Don't take my words as a reproach. It is the advice of a friend."

I returned to Italy two years later. I was arrested, locked up in a cell at
Regina Coeli,
and sentenced to five years' imprisonment without a trial. While in prison, I was thinking that the Princess of Piedmont was already a prey to the deep sadness of the Italian people, that she was humiliated by the general slavery, and I was grateful to her for the sad, almost affectionate tone I had detected in her words.

My last meeting with her occurred some time ago in the station lobby in Naples just after an air raid. The wounded waiting for the ambulances lay on stretchers ranged under the shed. There was anguish in the deathly pale features of the Princess of Piedmont, and not anguish alone, but something deep and secret. She had grown thinner, there were dark circles under her eyes, and there was discernible a white, very faint tattoo of wrinkles on her temples. The pure splendor that had emanated from her when she first came to Turin, a few days after her wedding to Prince Umberto, was quenched by now. Her movements were slower, she had grown more serious, she seemed strangely faded. She recognized me and stopped to greet me, asking from which front I had arrived.

"From Finland," I replied.

She looked at me and said: "You will see, all will end well. Our people are marvelous."

I broke into a laugh and wanted to reply, "The war is already lost. We have all lost the war, you too." But I said nothing. I only said: "Our people are very unhappy," and she moved on among the crowd with her slow, rather uncertain step— This, all this I should have liked to say to Prince Eugene, but I held myself back and smiled, thinking of that young princely couple.

"The Italian people are very fond of them, aren't they?" asked Prince Eugene, and before I could answer, "Yes, the people are very fond of them." (But I would have liked to answer him differently, and did not dare.) He went on saying that he possessed many letters from Umberto—he actually said "from Umberto"— that he was putting them in order because he intended to collect and publish them, and I was unable to gather whether he was talking of King Humbert or of the Prince of Piedmont. He asked me later whether in Italian, Umberto is written with an "
h
."

"Without the '
h
'" I replied. And I laughed thinking that the Prince of Piedmont was a slave himself, as we all were—a poor, crowned slave, his chest laden with medals and crosses. I thought that he too was a slave, and I laughed. I was ashamed of my laughter, and still I laughed.

I noticed after a while that Prince Eugene's gaze was slowly turning toward a canvas hanging on the wall of the room. It was the famous picture "Pa balkong"—"From the Balcony"—that he had painted in Paris during his early years, in about 1888. A young woman, Friherrina Celsing, leans from a balcony facing one of the avenues radiating from the Etoile. The brown skirt with its blue and green reflections, the warm blond hair tucked under a little hat such as Manet's and Renoir's women wore, stand out in the canvas against the transparent white lead, the gray-pink of the house fronts, and the damp green of the trees in the avenue. A carriage is passing below the balcony. It is a black cab and, seen from above, the horse looks as if it were made of wood: stiff and lean, it strikes a note of a childish play in that quaint and delicate Parisian street. The horses of the omnibus that is driving down from the Etoile appear to be freshly varnished with the same shiny enamel as that of the horse-chestnut leaves. They look like the wooden horses on a merry-go-round during a provincial fair in that delicate provincial hue of trees, of houses, of sky above the roofs of the avenue. The sky is still that of Verlaine and already that of Proust.

"Paris was very young then," said Prince Eugene approaching the canvas. He was gazing at Friherrina Celsing leaning from the balcony, and he spoke to me softly, almost reluctantly of that young Paris of his, of Puvis de Chavannes, of his painter friends, Zorn, Wahlberg, Cederström, Arsenius, Wenneberg and of those happy years. "Paris was very young then. It was the Paris of Madame de Morienval, Madame de Saint-Euvert, of the Duchess of Luxembourg (and also of Madame de Cambremer and of the young Marquess de Beausergent), and of those Proustian goddesses
la profondeur du parterre de feux inhumains, horizontaux et splendides
—whose glances enflamed the depths of the orchestra with inhuman, horizontal and splendid fires. Of the
blanches déités
—white goddesses, dressed in
fleurs blanches
—white flowers,
duvetées comme une aile
—downy as a wing,
à la fois plume et corolle
—at the same time feather and flower,
ainsi que certaines floraisons marines
—do well as certain marine vegetation, who spoke with the delicious refinement
d'une sécheresse voulue, à la Mérimée ou à la Meilhac, aux demi-dieux du Jockey Club—
of a studied brittleness, in the Mérimée or Meilhac manner, to the elect of the Jockey Club, in the atmosphere of Racine's
Phèdre.
It was the Paris of the Marquess de Palancy who passed through the transparent shadows of his box at the theater
comme un poisson derrière la cloison vitrée d'un aquarium
—like a fish behind the glass enclosure of an aquarium. And it was also the Paris of the
Place du Tertre,
of the earlier cafés of Montparnasse, of the
Cloiserie des Lilas,
of Toulouse-Lautrec, of the
Goulue
and of Jean le Désossé. I should have liked to interrupt Prince Eugene to ask him whether he had ever seen the Duke de Guermantes entering a box
et d'un geste commander de se rassoir aux monstres marins et sacrés flottant au fond de l'antre
—and with a gesture commanding those sacred marine monsters floating on the bottom of the grotto to be seated—in order to ask him to talk about the women,
belles et légères comme Diane
—beautiful and easy of virtue like Diana, of the smart people who used the
jargon ambigu
—strange lines—of Swann and Monsieur de Charlus. And I was just going to ask him the question that had been for some moments surging to my lips. I was just going to ask him with a tremor in my voice, "You have no doubt met Madame de Guermantes—" when the Prince turned, and offered his face to the tired light of sunset. He moved away from the canvas and seemed to step out of that warm and golden shadow of that
côté de Guermantes
in which he too appeared to conceal himself, emerging from behind the glass of an aquarium, himself like some
monstre marin et sacré
—sacred sea monster. Settling in an armchair at the end of the room that was farthest away from the balcony of Friherrina Celsing, he began talking about Paris, as if Paris in his painter's eyes were only a color—the memory and yearning for a color: those pinks, grays, greens, blues all faded. Perhaps for him Paris was only a mute color, a soundless color— his visual recollections, the pictures of his young Parisian years, stripped of any quality of sound, lived by themselves in his memory, moved, were lighted, flew away
comme les monstres ailés de la préhistoire
—like those prehistoric winged monsters. The mute pictures of that young, distant Paris of his crumbled noiselessly before his eyes, but not to a point when the destruction of that happy world of his youth would
ternisse, de la vulgarité d'aucun bruit, la chasteté de silence
—spoil the chastity of silence by the vulgarity of any noise.