I didn’t want to show that he was interrupting me, so I said: “That’s precisely the problem.”
He pretended to understand, though even I didn’t know what exactly I had meant. (What problem?
Whose problem? Why?) He went, leaving behind him that air of assurance that always comes with a precise job (whereas mine was intangible and nonexistent), and ruining, with his passage, the atmosphere of a mausoleum that had reigned in my small room. Poor Pirandello stood there, imprisoned forever in his white, translated prison, while I, having been awakened by the departing bellboy from the torpor of reading, was only just discovering that Pirandello had written my story, all those years ago, but in reverse.
In his story, a Scandinavian sailor falls ill during a voyage and his companions take him off the ship to a village on the coast of Sicily. He is taken in by a fisherman who also plays the role of consul, since he had picked up some words of French during the Napoleonic wars. The Scandinavian sailor is tall and blond, like a Nordic deity. He is taken care of by the whole neighborhood, while the fisherman’s daughter begins, little by little, to fall in love with him. They get married. They have two children. But to the end, the blond god cannot adapt to the harshness of the sun, the rocks, the people.
One by one, I was discovering all the similarities.
In my short story, the Nordic woman would give me occasion to describe the habits and customs of southern Crete. In Pirandello, it is the Nordic man who makes him describe the habits and customs of southern Sicily. (And what a master of description! How full of intensity and life are his characters and dialogues!
From beneath the great Sicilian playwright an even greater novelist was revealed to me.) The same story, the same plot. I was shaken.
“You’re not going to start writing a novel of manners now, are you?” I asked myself. That style of prose is dead and buried. Nowadays, people are after other things. Nowadays, it’s space, and comets, like Haley’s, which is going to reappear, and (I had read all this recently and it came pouring back into my head) the Soviets were getting ready to welcome it by sending two sputniks equipped with ultramodern telescopes and computers, while the French were going to send a three-meter-long test tube with an investigative photoradar, which, if it was not destroyed by the dust of unclean snow that is said to make up the tail of the comet, would send us information about the chemical composition of the universe. Nowadays, everybody is waiting with mammoth telescopes for Haley’s comet, whereas when it had appeared in 1910, about the time that Pirandello’s short story was written, people were terrified and thought the end of the world was at hand.
Somehow, Haley’s comet, which reappears every seventy-six years, corresponded inside me with Pirandello and his short story, and I tried desperately to convince myself that between 1910 and 1986 the way we approach the same phenomenon changed. But it was no use. Perhaps it’s because man is not a comet but a fixed star that, though fixed, passes like a comet through life. Only life doesn’t change. Intellectual developments (psychoanalysis, sociology, and biophysics) do not help us in the least to understand the phenomenon of human existence. It is only the knowledge of the mechanics of the text, its translation so to speak, and the naïveté of the narrator in describing and analyzing his hero’s reactions, that undermines our confidence. That is why the idea of a transplant excited me. It was something modern.
Something that no Pirandello had ever touched because it simply did not exist in his day. Whereas the story of the Nordic goddess and the southern satyr, or, in his short story, the Nordic god and the southern siren, was outdated, and I was thankful to him for writing it so well as to rid me of my desire to write it.
Around half past one, not being able to hold out any longer, I called her. Rosa herself answered the phone. She had just gotten back from work, she said.
Would she like to see me? Of course she would! Did she want me to come over? Right away. She was staying in the Parioli quarter. She gave me the address.
I took a taxi and soon I was with her.
The Aldo Brandini residence was chic. As a rule, all people connected to fashion and clothes stayed here when visiting the city. In the foyer downstairs, I saw a crowd of models and photographers meeting for lunch.
An atmosphere of wealth and freshness. An air of well being, merriment, and sanitized sex, that’s how it seemed to me. I went up to her apartment. It was small but comfortable, with a tiny kitchen, a living room, and a bedroom. It looked out on the courtyard palm trees.
Rosa looked beautiful. I was enchanted.
She was a blend of youth and maturity, the Rosa of my love. It was the first time that this symbiosis of both ages in her had struck me so vividly. Now that it had been months since I had seen her, I had acquired the proper distance to see her thus. Her face had flashes of a youth not spent, or not well spent, which allowed her a reserve of wealth, while at the same time the weariness of a life she had not lived, or that had made her suffer, that had left its heavy seal on her.
Like most of the women I had been involved with, she regarded me, since I was a writer, a bit as a confessor.
I knew Rosa’s life, what she had been through before we met by chance at an art exhibition, and why she had attached herself to me with such a passion: she believed that she had finally met the man she had been looking for, the one who could understand as well as love her. And it had indeed been so in the beginning.
But, with time, other things count for more in a relationship: sexual habits suddenly become very important, and while two properly know that everything favors their splitting up, since their relationship is leading nowhere long-term (like living together, a necessary development after a certain point), still they are unable to split up, because meanwhile, their way of getting it on has become too powerful. If Rosa happens to read this passage, I know she will be indignant at the expression getting it on.
Because for her, our sexual intercourse had come to signify something momentous and multifaceted, far above the mediocrity she had known in her life previously. And it was indeed so. She wasn’t exaggerating, and neither am I, when I say that we had reached a degree of sexual identification that was very rare. That is precisely what brought on the problem and caused the difficulties of our separation that had cost her dearly, me somewhat less.
So then what was the meaning of her
reappearance in my life? What could she want from me, when I knew that in order to forget me she had gone as far as Tierra del Fuego? I knew from friends we had in common that she had suffered terribly after our split up, and everybody had urged me to help her by never appearing in her life again. As painful as it was, I had done it. However horribly I missed her presence, I never gave a sign of life. I only made sure I met with people who knew us both, so that I could keep up with her news and, through her news, relive the sweet warmth of the good times we had had together. Of course, this happened less and less often as time went by, which was why, when I received my publisher’s order to disappear into a foreign land, into a foreign city, in order to write, I accepted with pleasure: the torment of forcing myself not to see her became more bearable. If I was far away, she would be more free to circulate and perhaps to find someone else, while I would isolate myself and recover more easily. So I was very surprised that morning, when she appeared like a comet in my room. I was so happy to see her again that I didn’t worry over the details of her motives. It was only now that we were together in this foreign room, both of us a little embarrassed, that these thoughts began to eat at me.
In the bedroom, the large double bed with a foam mattress and two pillows gently touching each other was an invitation and a provocation to our old love.