“You are really opposed to being saved?” asked Pazzarella, subsiding onto my knees.
“Try by all means, perhaps I can even assist you,” said I, declaiming as she had done. “Being unable to justify myself before my superiors to give any reason for my existence. Having no intellect I will save an intellect, to free myself of my annihilating sensation of emptiness and inutility.”
“Nonsense,” she rejoined, “it’s ever so much simpler than that. Can’t you imagine the vicious pleasure in being impertinent, for one who is frightening herself out of her wits?”
It was a long long time before I saw her again. When I did, it was evident my task was drawing to an end.
Pazzarella lay in a great bed where, among incredible flowering on the coverlid, a printed monkey climbed towards her heart, while the grey mist of empire mirrors reflected her waning life.
She was reading a little evangile of Saint John — too preciously bound.
“If only you could look at me once with the passionate glance you cast on books—” and no sooner had she said this than she spread her book open on her face under her eyes, and lay watching me. “There, you see, I have caught a look of adoration.” Then she opened her mouth to speak again. “Listen—” And the word crept round the room like a dumb crowd.
How often before she had clutched her hand to her heart trying to tear out of it the confidences of her eternal non-impartation — as if she suffered from something incommunicable, rent by a secret she imagined she had been called to life to share with me.
“In the long, long, lonely night I call to you; we make the supreme discovery together — only your bodily presence makes me mute. Nevertheless, my secret is so vital to the world’s destiny, it almost seems that the world would come to an end should I fail to confide it to you. It is so simple, a moment would suffice for the telling. So obvious— Quick, I am losing it again. Look in my eyes, perhaps you will discover it — feel the beat of my heart, that may convey it to you—”
As a matter of fact the heart was irregular.
“There it is, I see it again. Can’t you come over on my side to look at it? Geronimo, I could describe it to you only you are over there on the opposite side. You can see nothing of how it appears from over here. I am in possession of a secret truth. Fate commands me to reveal it to you. I will tell you. LISTEN! Geronimo— Woman—”
“The riddle is solved, my poor child,” I said, pressing her down by her shoulder. “I am your secret. Now lie in peace.”
She let her heavy head drop on the pillow. A shadow spread across her face, enhancing in beauty the last spark of a life I had extinguished with my negations. Of every instinct that flowered towards me I had snapped off the stem. Every fire that warmed her I had put out. What a facile success!
Needing to stretch my legs after sitting so long by that inarticulate deathbed, I took up a candle and moved about the room. Some unaccountable impulse stopped me before the mirror and I found myself staring, this time, into my own eyes. How queer, they returned my gaze without recognition. Those steely discs might have looked out of a stranger.
Wondering what had happened to them, I peered into their brightness for some time. At first I could make out nothing, but gradually I became aware of a putrefying mass, a turbid residuum lying at the bottom of their wells. Luminous sepulchres of vanquished emotions, of petrified humanity, such had been my eyes. But now, beneath their inflexible logic, the effrontery of their wile, lay the decaying remains of an embryonic spirit, an almost imperceptible reflection of Pazzarella’s dying. Had this wretched creature contaminated my very soul, insinuated her tenacious interrogation to the very stronghold of my wisdom?
Fuming, I returned to the bedside. “Creature! Are you not dead yet?”
“I don’t know—”
“What a way to answer a straight question. Even a lie would be too direct for you.”
“Very likely — for I who have been so confused in life, am not very clear about death.”
“Darling,” I exploded, “have you not often declared you loved me?”
“Yes.”
“More than your own self?”
“Surely.”
“Then, disappear now — at once. I command you!”
“I should be delighted.”
“Then what are you waiting for?”
“To put an end to my life.”
“There’s no need for you to wait.”
“But my life?”
“Yes, your life.”
“But my life? Where is it? You have confiscated it. Where can you have tucked it away?” Feverishly Pazzarella patted my clothes, searched under my curls — to fall back once more, extenuated upon the pillows. “Tell me what is there, what is there about you that so satisfies me when I touch you?”
“Maybe that is your life?”
“Therefore
Her pulse had become imperceptible — I admired the sensitive hollows under the cheek-bones, sculptured by the sophisticated compromises of my lips.
“If you really cared for me, you would tell me what it is sustains you in so miraculously remaining alive.”
And Pazzarella murmured this incredible word in my ear.
“Hope.”
“But my poor thing, what could you hope for? Even if I had not already completely spoiled you, you so fine, so fragile — you are not my type.”
“Really?”
“Hadn’t you realized it?”
“No. I thought it was just your way of amusing yourself.”
“There is also a little of that,” I laughed in answer to this gleam of intelligence. “But that alters nothing,” I went on decidedly.
“So be it,” and taking what I prayed should be her last look at me, she arose from where she lay, and all tottering, blindly left the room.
“What are you up to?” I called to her.
“Can’t you understand that I shall never be able to die as long as you are near me?” And so saying, she threw herself on the stone stairs as if seeking a refuge unquestionably kinder than my adamant embraces.
I settled down comfortably and lit a cigarette. What peace. The bed, scarcely disarranged by its lethargic occupant, was a razed plane, clear of all insoluble enigmas, and the primitive monkey seemed to look at me in quite brotherly fashion from the Javanese stuff.
But this peaceful interlude did not last long, for all at once, the silence, my obedient and compatible silence, so unlike the gravid, disquieting silence of woman, was broken by a supreme sob — an irruption of cardiac blood and boiling tears — it was Pazzarella. She was crying at last; for the first time, outside on the stairs whither she had retired to vomit her soul on sordid blocks of granite.
“I don’t care for that noise,” I cried.
“I don’t care for it myself,” she spluttered. “I feel like the heroine of a melodrama. Couldn’t you have found anything better to do with me? This business of dying is so extremely usual any charwoman goes through with it — it’s not at all as you litterateurs seem to believe, an agony reserved for their mistresses.”
I was thoroughly frightened. The contrariness of woman! Her voice was actually growing stronger — a shade of enmity was creeping into it. She could not die at my side, yet had she not once confessed to me that in my absence her love for me diminished? If she was to die of love, there was still some danger that she would not succeed even out there on the cold stairs. I was desperate, fearing that at a few yards’ distance I lost some of my power over her.
However, the crying continued, and every outburst seemed to blow up her being. What a catastrophic result of all my labors. Could there not exist a more aesthetic conception of “finishing off” a woman? Was there perhaps something wrong with my method, when it came to naught but a horrible noise?