“Now we come to it,” I cried, leaping to my feet, “A lot you care about the future! For you the child is a makeshift for the tame man.”
Sexual emotion in woman is of familial extent, the impulse of three generations — mother, wife, daughter — and as there is no relationship among women, the daughter responds to the maternal embrace only in the arms of a father, but a father who has not committed incest with her mother, therefore the lover, in whom woman takes root, flowers and finally disappears.
As I had not yet finished with her, I took her in my arms again and, rocking her, felt the entire abandonment of a being who has such radical aversion to reliance on herself.
Now in this atmosphere I had spread about us a receptive somnolence closed in upon her breath, and the Eucharistic eyes of Pazzarella glowed in the twilight. Probably she would still be waiting, if the cry of a newborn child from a house across the way, a shrill surprise, had not split up my promising silence, even dispersing the indolent pulsation of the falling dew.
My burden started with a shuddering ecstasy.
“Vampire!” I hissed, “In your terrified enjoyment of the first cry of that dolent life, you are so intent on drawing from one man to impose it upon another.”
But still she clung to me, not able to withdraw herself at once from her hallucination that a mystery was about to be conceived.
“It is the hour,” I concluded, liberating myself to bow to her ceremoniously, “for me to take leave of you Signora,” and I parted from all those empty circles — the tea cups — the woman.
Six months later I passed Pazzarella on the street. Without a greeting we both stopped for a while to observe each other reciprocally, and then pursued our ways without exchanging our impressions.
“Caro—don’t be discouraged if I don’t seem to have died. I have, really. Only the business of daily life necessitates the continued functioning of the mere machine— Excuse me!”
Such was the message I received the morning after our meeting. Another interview was imminent.
I entered. She had aged. Her eyes had grown dull, and her taut nerves distorted her face in a rigid resignation. She moved as she walked towards me with an angularity that must have irked her limbs. She looked so funny that I hugged her close to me, to stifle my titters while covering her with sarcastic little kisses, until I felt her tension relax.
“Oho,” I said, seeing her revive among the roses I had planted. “How goes love?”
“Not so badly, thanks to your having employed the wrong tactics.”
“— — — ?”
“All is clear to me— Because I irritate you, you wish to do away with me. That is natural — quite understandable. In your place I should feel the same. But you tried to destroy me through my pride, whereas I really loved you, and into love pride does not enter. If you are determined to succeed, there is only one way — you must make me die of love. Do you get me?” she enquired with a flicker of hope.
“Your game is pretty strong,” she continued. “The first stroke a whiz — and so on, increasingly. But entirely miscalculated. You should have duped me long enough to inspire my confidence, and then, after some days of intimacy, when my love should feel secure — ah, if you had left me then, who knows but that I really should have succumbed.
“Oh Geronimo,” she pleaded, enlacing my torso with the constriction of a serpent round a tree. “Try a little intimacy, I am practically certain you will succeed.”
“Indisputably you suffer from suicidal mania. In the beginning it astounded me that you made not the slightest effort to save yourself. Now you are even helping me. You are incomprehensible.”
“Dearest, you enjoy the secret distinction of being loved by the biggest imbecile in existence.”
“Obviously that is a lie. Nevertheless, I have not yet been able to make out why you take the line of action you do, or rather why you don’t take any line of action.”
“Am I not Passivity?”
“And that’s why you are odious to me.”
“It is to this your intellect condemns me.”
– — – — –
“I, falling in love with just a man, as any girl of the people has a crush on the barber’s assistant’s beautiful moustache, found I had bumped into an intellect, the male intellect that reduces me to absurdity. I weighed in advance my possible coquetteries, dignities, the fictitious value I could assume, the pretentious gestures I could make in the luckless position of being — what am I?
“There seemed nothing to be hoped for, nothing to be done. I could be unfaithful to you? A lot of impression that made on you. Enhance my beauty? You are short-sighted. Lie? You could do it better than I. Dishonestly hew myself a niche in your animal propensities? Not to be thought of — you have yourself so thoroughly in hand.
“You might suppose that I should have surrendered to total discouragement. But no. In spite of all, I existed for you. I, woman, irritated you for that very passivity you impose upon me. I irritated you to such a degree that you could not keep your hands off me! Have you not often confessed to me how utterly I irritate you; to the point of wanting to conquer me?
“But you did not guess that if there are difficult conquests that inflame a man, and conquests so easy they rattle a man — you did not guess, that I could imagine a conquest so easy that it staggers the intellect itself. Do I irritate you?” she inquired.
“Sufficiently,” I answered.
“Amore, caro,” burbled Pazzarella, “Can’t you see? If you had been an ordinary man, with no great intellect — that irritation you feel whenever I come near you would have been love! You would have loved me at night to return in the daytime to see if I was still on earth. You would have taken me by the hand and together we should have run against the blowing wind to show how beautiful and how young we are. But as you are only an intellect—”
“You think perhaps I have done the worst I can to you? But if I have shown you an outrage on elemental womanhood, there still remains the civilized woman, whose death-rattle lasts much longer in an agony infinitely more complicated. I can extend the scope of your sensibility until it comprises a universe, and this universe being myself, can disappear from one moment to another. I can animate your latent voluble wit, nourish your vanity, and, when growing ever more beautiful, more debonair, you are sure you have arrived at a state of security, can unexpectedly remove your animator. I can play any tricks upon you I please while you will rest assured they are the natural working out of Destiny — because I can give you what you want. In short, I will love you, if you feel equal to it?”
“I have only the strength of my longing for you.”
“Take warning. There will be moments when you will look into my eyes and see your salvation — moments in which my one preoccupation is to enjoy you, as you enjoy me — in which defence, irony, paradox, disdain, suspicion have vanished. We shall exchange the limpid glances of newborn seraphim in a celestial innocence of mutual possession. You will have the illusion of all barriers being overthrown, of the ‘unknown’ being revealed, inequalities being razed — in that sweet and absolute union which is