As a painter, struck for the first time with a higher conception of his art, regards his “earlier” work with disparagement, I contemplated my Pazzarella de le Scala di Pietra critically. How could I have failed in such an academic manner? Such sticky technique! This mixture of quivering mucous and clammy flesh running with tears!
I seated myself beside her and began tracing with my forefinger the swelling festooned from the arch of her nose across her hot wet face, leaving her bloodshot eyes in a purple pit.
Pazzarella, quieting under my touch, sank into a state of coma, leaving me at liberty to investigate. I picked her up and carried her back to bed. Then I arranged myself in such a position as best to contemplate her.
After all, even if she loved me, she was still a human being. And in that propitious hour when she could neither talk nor cry nor appear so pitifully conscious of being inarticulate, I could consider her case at my leisure, impartially.
Set free by this state of coma, this female soul presented itself clearly, for closer observation, and with every star that vanished from the night the mysteries of her silence likewise vanished, one by one.
This female Buddha sensed my power over her better than I myself. This was the reason for her calm eye and her laisser aller. Her pardon before the act and her maternal irony. There was no possible doubt but that she had understood. She must have cogitated every possible means of escape — theories of the laws and harmonies of sex, the rights of women which, once having been won, leave woman as solitarily woman as before. Pazzarella had known all along what she was — woman aware of herself. This seductive creature who was so feminine, so tender, found herself stranded with the awful certainty that intellectual self-respect for a woman is a juggling with lies. She had nothing more to say to other women or to men, either. Intrepid pilgrim of enlightenment, she had found one truth, and this one sufficed to render her immune to all illusion.
To me, keeping company with her coma, it seemed as if, her spirit having come apart from her, I could hold it like an object in my hands. It had the translucent opacity of an oyster, and, on looking into it deeply, I saw a flux of nebulous matter stirred by internal currents and countercurrents. The vital rhythm was disjointed— Ideas, facts, form and sound advanced, receded, grew large, then small, bright or dim, louder or fainter.
Every now and then a spark engendered would for a flash illumine the whole inside of this soul with a crazy half-light without ever throwing anything particular into relief. For always, on the verge of definition, the contents confused, spun round and round at a flighty velocity to evaporate at last in a vortex of mist — in which my enemy disappeared.
In the divine manner, it was from this chaos I drew my inspiration. At once I grew enormous — omnipotent. After centuries of mystery, I had found the solution — a solution that lay in myself. The secret of woman is that she does not yet exist. Being a creator, I realized I can create woman. I decided to “create” Pazzarella.
Until now she had nothing but her breath and the everlasting attraction toward man, lacking an axis about which to revolve. I am man and I shall be her axis. All this while she had lain at my flank, weak for the want of “a life” I could make for her, waiting for me to impregnate her mind as I impregnate her body, to organize that revolving chaos which is the source of variety among the individuals begotten of it. For she being identified with “everything,” partakes of that universal “unity” sought by the mystic; with this paradoxical result that if man is promiscuous physically, woman is promiscuous spiritually.
But such reflections were powerless to deter me. I had found a fresh instrument for my intellect, a raw material with which to create; material so plastic in its untouched condition, that it offered untold possibilities of formation.
Stirred with a new enthusiasm, all the passion I had hitherto devoted to pen and paper welled up in my heart—
Manuscript long ago lost.
Pazzarella, arisen, her exhausted voice transformed for the future to the trill of a bird, is twittering to the dawn. To my surprise, like the hero of an ancient fable unexpectedly endowed with the understanding of the conversation of animals, I find no difficulty in interpreting the language of a creature so dissimilar to myself.
The End.
Note sent with M.S.S.
Sympathetic Enemy
One night I set to work and composed the gigantic opus for the vindication of feminine psychology with which I had threatened you. Whether it is that truth is more powerful than determination, or fantasy less fantastic than truth, or that woman, being incapable of thinking, reads the thoughts of others. However that may be, this is how it turned out.
Your affectionate
PIERO & ELIZA
Like a drop of arsenic falling upon clay, he appeared among the lethargic clients of the café, as they crouched at sundown over their cheap vermouth.
His face was painted a greenish white, a mask of experimental irony, on which he pushed his bands of black eye-brow upwards to an insolent interrogation, crushing his eyes to slits of quizzical survey. His mouth was an arrogant crimson blot, and he cherished an ebony cane with his white kid gloves.
“Gia,” said the camerieri, “he used to be a musician, but he is now a gentleman, for his uncle died and bequeathed to him his vineyards.”
For perhaps half a dozen evenings he pirouetted among the café tables, wriggling in his frock coat which tweaked his waist and spreading to broad lapels bore in the buttonhole a pistachio-coloured carnation.
And always as he left he would bestow upon the company an impenetrable glance of assumed evil.
He had returned from Paris, a solitary decadent having lost his ambiente.
Eliza Blane was a middle-aged English girl of middle-class morality, with a hankering after the arts as a social outlet.
Into her life he frolicked like a sinister kitten.
Every woman continues to want a man in her life, and after some decades of inhibition her desire seeks merely a living symbol of unproven curiosities. In old maidenhood she achieves a paralysis of the instincts, with the result, to put it simply, that should Eros approach her, “she wouldn’t know what to do.”
There was something in the arsenical Piero that wanted a mother; something in Eliza that wanted a lover — a lover who would open the flood-gates of her fantasy, and leave her body where it belonged — rigid under the ashes of her accustomed inhibitions.
Piero played to her his mincing music, and tended this platonic conquest with playful quirks and humouring caresses.
They became inseparable.
She warmed the blast of emptiness that swept her palazzo to a home atmosphere, where she fed Piero with zeal and performed the ceremony of darning his socks.
Eliza, in the Venetian moonlight, romanced to him of the purely spiritual obligations of love, which he accepted graciously as a hitherto unsuspected form of abstract vice.
Gradually they gathered round them a scattering of expatriated bachelors, deeply attached to their furniture, who always delighted to show Eliza a new solitaire, while Piero composed.
Piero was the youngest among the bachelors, and his achievement of a transcendental family life lent him a certain augustness among them.
While through them he acquired a modified aspect of self advertisement; for they taught him that he who treads tactfully, may keep one foot in society and one in Fairyland.