The Nice Old Man and the Pretty Girl (3 page)

Perhaps the old man ate and drank too much. He was anxious to show off his strength.

I do not wish to imply that that is why the old man fell ill. Obviously an excessive number of years is more dangerous than an excess of wine, or of food or even of love. It may be that one of these excesses aggravated another, but it is not for me to assert even as much as that.

He had gone quietly to bed, as he did every evening, and especially on those evenings when the girl left him, after eating everything that had been put before her.

He soon fell asleep. He afterwards remembered that he had dreamed, but so confusedly that he did not recollect anything about it. A number of people were round him, shouting, arguing with him and with each other. Then they had all gone away, and, utterly exhausted, he had thrown himself upon a sofa to rest. Then, on a little table exactly on a level with the sofa, he saw a large rat looking at him with its small bright eyes. There was laughter, or rather mockery, in those eyes. Then the rat vanished, but to his horror he realized that it had forced its way into his left arm, and,
digging furiously, was making for his chest, causing him excruciating pain.

He woke up gasping, covered with perspiration. It had been a dream, but something real remained behind, the excruciating pain. The image of the object causing the pain changed immediately. It was no longer a rat, but a sword fixed in the upper part of the arm, the point of which reached his chest; curved, not cutting, but jagged and poisonous, because it caused pain wherever it touched. It prevented him from breathing or making any movement. It would have been possible to break the sword by wrenching it, if he had moved. He shouted and he knew it, because the effort of making himself heard hurt his throat, but he was not sure that he heard the sound he uttered. There was a great deal of noise in that empty room. Empty? In that room was death. A profound darkness drew towards him from the ceiling, a cloud which, when it reached him, would crush out of him the little breath that was still left, and would cut him off for ever from all light, driving him among things base and filthy. The darkness drew slowly nearer. When would it reach him? Without a doubt it might expand at any moment, wrap itself round him and strangle him in a second. Was this what death, which had been familiar to him from childhood, was like? So insidious and bringing with it so much pain? He felt the tears flowing from his eyes. He wept from fear and not in the hope of awakening pity, because he knew that
there was no pity. And the terror was so great that he seemed to himself to be without fault or sin. He was being strangled like this, he so good and gentle and merciful.

How long did the terror last? He could not have said, and he might have imagined that it lasted a whole night, if the night had not been so long. It seemed to him that first the threatening darkness left him and then the pain. Death had vanished, and the next day he would welcome the sun again. Then the pain shifted, and there was instant relief. It was driven higher up towards the throat, where it disappeared. He covered himself up with the blankets. His teeth chattered with cold, and a convulsive shivering prevented him from resting. But the return to life was complete. He did not call out again, and he was glad that his cry had not been heard. His housekeeper, nasty creature, would have thought that his illness was due to the visit of the girl on the previous evening. This is how he came to remember her, and suddenly he thought: “No more love-making for me!”

The doctor, who was called in in the morning, examined him, and thought the matter over, but did not at first attach much importance to the attack. The old man described the adventure of the previous evening, including the food and the champagne, and the doctor thought that the trouble was due to these excesses. He said he was sure the trouble would not return, provided the old man lived quietly, taking regularly every two hours a certain powder, and refrained from seeing the object of his passion or even from thinking of her.

The doctor, who was a contemporary and an old friend, treated him without any ceremony: “My dear fellow, you must not go to your lover until I allow you.”

The old man, however, who attached more importance to his health than the doctor, thought: “Even if you gave me permission, I would not go to her. I was so much better before I knew her.”

As soon as he was alone, he began to think of the girl, with the idea of freeing himself from her altogether. But he remembered that the girl loved him, and he therefore thought her capable of coming to see him after a time, even without being invited. The strength of love is well known. Then what sort of a figure would he cut, he who had determined not to see her even with the doctor’s permission? He wrote to her that he should have to leave town unexpectedly for a long time. He would let her know when he returned. He enclosed a sum of money which was meant to settle accounts with his own conscience. The letter also ended with a kiss, written after a moment’s hesitation. No. The kiss had not set his pulse beating.

The next day he felt reassured by a quiet, though almost sleepless night. The terrible pain had not returned, whereas, in spite of the doctor’s assurances, he had dreaded being attacked by it every night in the dark. Next time he went to bed more calmly and recovered confidence, but not sleep. The rumbling of the guns reached him and the nice old man asked: “Why have they not managed to discover a way of killing each other without making so much noise
about it?” It was not very long since the day when the sound of the fighting had awakened generous impulses in him. But illness had taken from him the remnants of a feeling for his fellows which old age had failed to destroy in him.

During the next few days the doctor added some drops in the intervals between the powders. Then, to insure his sleeping at night, he came in the evening to give him injections. There was also special medicine for the appetite which he had to take at stated hours. There was plenty to do in the old man’s day. And the housekeeper, unnoticed in happier days, became very important. The old man, who could be grateful, might perhaps have grown fond of her, for sometimes she had even to get up in the night to give him his medicines. But she had a bad fault. She did not forgive him his transgressions and made frequent references to them. The first time she had to give him a small dose of champagne by way of medicine, she accompanied it with the remark: “It is some of that which was bought for a very different purpose.”

For a time the old man protested, trying to make her think that between him and the girl there had been nothing more than an affection of the utmost purity. Then, seeing that nothing could shake her conviction, he began to believe that she had long known it and had spied upon him. How could he tell when? He puzzled his brains for a long while to find out. He blushed especially for what the woman knew,
because the rest did not exist, but with that damned woman everything ended by existing, given those very vague allusions of hers, with the help of which it was possible to remember the whole adventure. The result was that he could no longer endure the woman and allowed her near him only when he needed her. It is true that he needed her also to gossip with, so that even this hatred, which might have been really vital, was ineffectual. It confined itself to his whispering to the doctor: “She is as ugly as sin.”

In the course of his struggle with this woman he remembered the girl, but without regretting her. All he regretted was his health, or rather what he regarded as his own youth. Youth had fled with the girl’s last visit, and regret for this persisted in his regret for her. Now, in all seriousness, he would find a job for the girl … if he recovered his health. Then he would return to his important and profitable work and not to sin. It was sin that injured health.

Summer passed. He was allowed to go for a drive on one of the last calm days. The doctor went with him. The result was far from unfavourable, for he enjoyed the change and his condition was no worse, but it was impossible to repeat the experiment in the bad weather that followed.

Thus his empty life went on. There was no change, except in the medicines. Each medicine was good for a time. Then the doses had to be increased to produce the same effect till it had to be replaced
by another drug. After a month or two, it is true, they began all over again.

However, a certain equilibrium was established in his system. If he was going to his death, the progress was imperceptible. It was no longer a question of the pain, heroic in its violence, on the night when death had uplifted its arm to give him the decisive blow. Far from it. Perhaps, as he was then, he was no longer worth striking. He thought he was getting better every day. He even believed that his appetite had returned. He took time to swallow his tasteless broths and really thought he was eating. There were still some tins of stimulating food in the house. The old man took one in his trembling hands: he read the name of the famous maker and put it down again. He meant to keep it for the day when he should be even better. For that day were also kept some bottles of champagne. It had been found that the wine was useless for his malady.

The most important part of the day was that which he spent by a window during the warmest hours. That window was a chink through which he looked out on life as it went on its way in the streets, even now that he had been exiled from it. If the woman of sin, as he called her, was at hand, he criticized to her the luxury that still appeared in the poor streets of Trieste or pitied in rather emphatic tones the poverty that went by in a stream. Opposite his house was a baker’s and there was often a queue of people drawn up at his
door, waiting for their crust of bread. The old man expressed pity for these people waiting so anxiously for a badly cooked loaf that filled him with disgust, but here his pity was pure hypocrisy. He envied those who moved freely about the streets. It was childish of him. On the whole he was comfortable in the shelter of his well-warmed room, but he would have liked to look even beyond that road. The passers-by who awakened his curiosity, because they were dressed either too well or too badly, turned round the corner and were lost to him.

One night when he could not sleep he began to walk about the room and, in his desire to move and to find some distraction, he went to the window. The queue by the baker’s door was already there, so long that even at night it stained the pavement with black. Even then he did not really pity these people who were sleepy and could not go and sleep. He had a bed and could not sleep. Those waiting in the queue were certainly better off.

These were the days of Caporetto. His doctor gave him the first news of the disaster. He had come to weep in the company of his old friend, whom he (poor doctor!) believed to be capable of feeling as he did. Instead the old man could see nothing but good in what had happened: the war was moving away from Trieste and therefore from him. The doctor wailed: “We shan’t see even their aeroplanes any longer.” The old man muttered: “True, probably we shan’t
see them any more.” In his heart he rejoiced at the prospect of quiet nights, but he tried to copy the pain he saw in the doctor’s face in his own expression.

In the afternoon, when he felt up to it, he interviewed his confidential manager, an old clerk who enjoyed his complete confidence. In business the old man was still sufficiently energetic and clear-headed, and the clerk came to the conclusion that the old man’s illness was not very serious and that he would come back to work sooner or later. But his energy in business was of the same kind as that which he displayed in looking after his health. The slightest indisposition was sufficient to make him put off business to the next day. And for the sake of his health he managed to forget business the moment his clerk was gone. He sat down by the stove into which he liked to throw bits of coal and watch them burn. Then he shut his dazzled eyes and opened them to go on with the same game. This is how he passed the evenings of days which had been quite as empty.

But his life was not to end in this way. Some organisms are fated to leave nothing behind them for death, which merely succeeds in seizing an empty shell. All that he could burn, he burnt, and his last flame was the finest.

The old man was at his window, looking out on to the road. It was a dull afternoon. The sky was covered with a greyish mist, and the pavement wet, though it had not rained for two days. The queue of hungry customers was forming in front of the baker’s door.

As luck would have it, the girl went by at that very moment in front of the balcony he was occupying. She had no hat on, but the old man, who would not have known how to describe a single detail of her dress, thought her better dressed than in the days when he loved her. With her was a young man, fashionably dressed to the point of exaggeration. He wore gloves and carried a smart umbrella, which he raised two or three times with the arm with which he was
gesticulating in accompaniment to his talk, which was clearly lively. The girl, too, was laughing and chatting.

The old man looked and sighed. It was no longer the life of others that was passing along the street, it was his own. And the old man’s first instinct was one of jealousy. There was no question of love, only the most abject jealousy: “She is laughing and enjoying herself while I am ill.” They had done wrong together, and the resulting illness had come upon him; upon her, nothing. What was to be done? She was walking with her light step and would soon be at the corner, where she would disappear. That was why the old man sighed. There was not even time to disentangle his own thoughts, and he felt such a longing to speak to her and give her a moral lecture.

When the girl and her companion disappeared the old man tried to check his excitement, as it might be bad for him, and said: “All the better. She is alive and enjoying herself.” There were two lies in those few words, which implied first of all that the old man had worried what had happened to the girl during his illness, then that it gave him satisfaction to see her running about the streets in that way enjoying herself. Therefore he could not get her out of his mind. He remained by the window and looked in the direction where the girl had disappeared. If she had come back, he would have called to her from the window. It was not very cold, and he felt that he must see her. And a voice within him asked him suspiciously: “Why? Do
you want to begin all over again?” The old man began to laugh: “Desire? Not a thought of it!” Yet he continued looking in the same direction in an attitude of the most intense longing. “I should be quite happy,” he thought, convinced this time that he was speaking the truth, “if I knew that the young man loves her and means to marry her.”