The question arose after he died whether she was naturally ill formed in these ways or had learned her, her — the word was callousness—over a long marriage and might unlearn it. An intractable widow she knew, a muleteer’s wife, still treated herself and guests at lunch to raisin cake, for which she professed a passion while from her own piece she picked all the raisins; she disliked raisins; it was her Angelo who had liked the raisins. Those women were so stupid! But when Costanza Marini did the same things they did, she was no more forgiving than before, of them or herself. Where was her nerve? The ability to speak the truth to ourselves must have been the advantage that the adaptation called consciousness evolved to exploit. But the truth, over and over and over — that she was a sneerer and a scold, heartless, timid, fated to die alone — wasn’t only bleak, it was fatiguing. Where was her pride?
Four years into her widowhood, Satan visited her in her garden. She was on her knees, yanking the quack grass out of the spinach. Iridescent flies dappled the carcass of a bass in the furrow. “Egoist!” said the tempter. “Despair!” To despair is a sin. But, true enough, she had no hope. She could not remember having hoped. “Die!” said the devil. She was never to speak of this episode to another soul, but she really saw him there. He was dressed like Young Werther, in a blue jacket, yellow vest and pants, and tricorn hat, and he spoke with a German accent. Her transformation was in fact slow and continuous, but if she’d had to point to an emblematic moment, a swerve, it would have been that morning with Satan in her garden. For she had straightened up her back, quaking, as he tried to lay her low, and she surveyed him head to foot in his absurd outfit; her eyelids peeled back into her head; her chest jumped with a gush of air; the skin under her hackles itched piercingly — and she laughed at him. “Don’t laugh at me!” he snapped. But he was ridiculous. What he was saying was ridiculous. She herself was ridiculous. She was fifty-nine. Her health was sound. The hem of her skirt was in the mud. “I am a fool!” she said aloud, and tightened the laces of her shoe.
In conversation she became an interrupter. Her brows swelled. The wizening of her neck she emphasized with tight-fitting collars, the better to show the glazen skin of her cheeks, jaw, forehead, and nose. In a daguerreotype — of her husband and herself in the 1880s — that presided over her bedroom, her bones were already asserting their ownership of the face. The eyes were dull and recessed. (In fairness to the goose in the picture, her infant son, Alessio, had lately died; however, your pity did her no good; she would lay other eggs — except, as it happened, she would lay no other eggs at all.) Look at the eyes now! Black globes, protuberant, fat. There was another animal in the mask than before. Why, she wondered, do we always look to the eyes? Windows of the soul, she disregarded as fanciful. No, it’s the eyes themselves, to be exact, that look to the eyes. They are as competitive in their vanity as we are.
She read hysterical murder stories, and history, and the Bible itself, which in her youth was a sin to read, and English literature, untranslated, deep into the night, so that sometimes she slept until noon. Now, Nico had let her read. In fact, he bought her texts on diseases of the blood, anatomy, nutrition, tokology, and hygiene. And he used his acquaintance with the dean of laboratories at the university across the bridge to procure a seat for her in the back row of lecture halls, where ladies were invited to sit and take in, if not comprehend. It was hardly pure husbandly kindness for him to do all these things, since he profited from her industry as much as she did. Still, if she wasn’t in bed with her hair up and books closed by nine o’clock, he moped, and what a disgrace to see that, how it wounded her pride to watch her husband debase himself by entreating her. The surplus from her income he would not let her spend, so as not to call attention. But she spent it now, damn him, and his hoarded treasure, on cheese and the opera.
A gull encountering a fish on the beach, she considered, will first dig out its eyes, which are softest and easiest of access and provide a clean route to the brains, which are soft, too. Is that why we look to the eyes? If I look you in your eye and you flinch, do you suspect me of plotting where to aim my spoon?
It was akin to Protestant conversion, this swerve, seeing the light and so on, only in her case she saw the darkness. She did not say, I will die in hopes of being reborn. She said, I am dying! She was vain, and exaggerated, and let her arms swing around her while she talked, and was too up-to-date American to stay in her mourning clothes longer than four or five years (she’d graduated from peasant to petty bourgeois the first time she took money for her services), but by 1928, thirteen years after Nico died, she hadn’t changed them yet, and why should she? They were a becoming badge. She looked good in black. She was both the genuine article and a fake. A European wouldn’t understand how to pull that off. To a European you were either wearing the clothes that belonged on your body or the clothes that belonged on someone else’s. But an American — yes, she was an American now; you couldn’t touch her, not with your scruples or your history or your handwoven stockings — went to a masquerade ball wearing her own linsey-woolsey housecoat as a costume. You have not become an American until you have learned to impersonate yourself in a crowd.
Ice water did not curdle the juices of the stomach, she discovered, by drinking it nervily and waiting. Why, that was only a prejudice, common among those of her nationality and insisted on by Nico for all his days. To think that for centuries Aristotle had peddled the canard that women had fewer teeth than men — and they bought what he was selling! she was mad! — when anybody might have opened up and counted. Thus false doctrines were impaled by her and — even at this late date, for sixty-five, sixty-six, sixty-seven, were so old, were so much older than she’d planned to live, should have been deep into the intransigence of the downward slope — were trampled under her feet, along with false likes and dislikes, raisin cakes and their kind.
Honor is for those who hold themselves responsible to a kernel of unchanging self. Alas. None of that for her.
While dressing she considered her fattening but still meager breasts, which Nico had only half-playfully jeered. They were like what? Like miserable, withered medlars (yes, medlars; he’d missed out, good): a medlar, which is only a small, spotted, unlovely orb, yes, but is perhaps unique among fruits in that it is inedible until it starts to rot.
Soon, said Death. And she began to sum up, to tie contrary judgments together with a phrase and put them to one side. In this way she discarded old remorses and confusions and made way for last things. The phrases ranged from promulgation of a settled rule to abstraction, code, euphemism, sophistry, baby talk. As to sin: There is no such thing, and yet I will pay; alcohoclass="underline" whenever you please, but no liquor before five o’clock; how her dead would receive her in paradise: not bearing fruit baskets; the significance of the tower far in the distance, across an ocean of grain, that recurred in her dreams: Avert your eyes, look at the grass; her vanity: “ Ye have the poor always with you, but me ye have not always”; the past: Strictly speaking, it does not exist; her means of income: to the good, sweets, to the others, mutton. She needed one for the cause of the swerve. A phrase. All this had happened over ten years. And she was so grateful. Character wasn’t fate. No one else, in her experience, had demonstrated such a shift so late in life. She needed a phrase.